Amazon has found pretty significant success with some of its original shows -- particularly the Golden Globe- and Emmy-winning Transparent -- and it seems the company's TV ambitions don't stop with on-demand programming. According to Bloomberg, Amazon is considering an online TV service that broadcasts live and includes programming from major players like CBS and NBC. It would be the latest service to directly challenge the dominance of traditional cable providers like Comcast and join competitive options like Sony's PlayStation Vue and Dish's Sling TV. Both of those services offer a host of live content that has been typically tied to those with a cable subscription.
If you're a fan of Barnes & Noble's Nook line of e-readers and tablets, there's a new option to tempt you this fall. The Galaxy Tab E Nook is a 9.6-inch slate that offers all of the perks of the bookseller's digital library in a Samsung package. While the front features a familiar-looking Galaxy design, the back is covered in "a non-slip fabric-like material" to ensure you're able to keep a good grip during long reads. Inside, there's 16GB of built-in storage that's expandable to 128GB via mircoSD to store your books and other items. Unfortunately, storage is about the only info on the gadget's internals the announcement reveals. Like previous Nook by Samsung releases, this one is more than just an e-reader, allowing you to watch movies, stream TV shows and browse the web with Android apps.
Pandora has been providing artists with tools to connect with fans and understand their audience for a while now, but the company is getting serious about event promotion, too. The internet radio service announced that it's purchasing Ticketfly, a company that offers ticketing and other marketing tools for live gigs. Ticketfly currently works with 1,200 venues and promoters to help folks like you and I find and purchase tickets to catch a live show. The acquisition means that Pandora will have a way for artists to sell tickets in addition to its AMP (Artist Marketing Platform) feature that provides audience info and Artist Audio Messages that help them directly connect with fans. It also recently purchased Next Big Sound to help with listener insights and trends. This deal for Ticketfly is worth around $450 million and it's said to be "a nearly equal mix" of cash and stock.
It looks like the FAA is getting serious on unauthorized UAV flying. The department's just slapped SkyPan, a Chicago-based aerial video company, with a record $1.9-million dollar fine for violating flying regulations in its home city, and New York. The FAA states that SkyPan engaged in a total of 65 "unauthorized operations" between March and December 2012 -- 43 of them in NYC's highly restriction airspace.
Suddenly, Lexus' hoverboard doesn't seem quite so impressive. The automaker has unveiled the Origami Car, a fully functional electric IS sedan whose main body, interior and wheels (!) are made out of cardboard. The designers laser-cut 1,700 based pieces based on the digital model of the regular car, and stuck them all together using wood glue -- that's not exactly a quick process (it took 3 months to put everything together), but this would have been virtually inconceivable in previous decades. You're not going to see this vehicle on the streets, of course. The instrument cluster is nothing more than a bunch of drawings, and cardboard simply isn't going to be comfortable or safe. However, the Origami Car is proof that modern assembly techniques can build just about everything out of seemingly anything.
The more we rely on our smartphones for every facet of our lives, the more risk there is of losing important data if your phone gets lost, stolen or destroyed. Android already has some backup services built in, but the massively popular chat client WhatsApp has just announced a partnership with Google to make sure its 900 million users don't lose anything important to them. Starting today, WhatsApp users on Android will have the option to back up their entire WhatsApp history right to Google Drive. The backup will include chat histories, voice messages, photos and video, and you'll be able to restore all of that data to a new phone when you set up WhatsApp.
Depending on how you feel about Star Wars, either you've had enough of the gimmicky merchandising tie-ins, or you intend to buy all the things until the new movie comes out on December 18th. For our part, we don't know whether to be amused or excited by this special edition Star Wars laptop from HP. On the one hand, a notebook covered in images of Stormtroopers and the X-wing Star Fighter Guidance System, with Aurebesh lettering replacing English, is even dorkier than your typical gaming rig (and that's saying a lot). On the other, the Star Wars notebook is so committed in its dorkiness that it's hard not to be impressed by HP and Disney's attention to detail.
Toyota believes that it can make human inputs largely unnecessary from highway drives in vehicles by 2020. To prove what the company can do, the Lexus GS Highway Teammate concept shows the tech in action right now.The race is on to get increasingly sophisticated forms of autonomous driving technology on the road, and brands like Tesla are bringing these solutions to some drivers now. But as one of the world's largest automakers, it's no surprise to see Toyota competing in the field, as well. By 2020, the company thinks a person could be largely unnecessary for freeway trips. With a suite of tech called the Highway Teammate, a modified Lexus GS is already showing what's possible.
Android Lollipop is enjoying its last, shining moment in the sun before Marshmallow arrives in earnest. Google's not-quite-current operating system now accounts for 23.5 percent of active Android users, a healthy 2.5-point boost from what you saw just one month ago. That's still trailing behind Jelly Bean (30.2 percent) and KitKat (38.9 percent), but it's clear that all those new devices and upgrades are starting to add up. The real question is whether or not that momentum will last. Marshmallow is arriving relatively quickly, and shouldn't suffer from the early performance and battery life woes that kept some people from upgrading last year. If the newer release catches on quickly, Lollipop might not reach the lofty adoption rates of its predecessors.
Twitch would be nothing without its broadcasters and viewers, and the livestreaming service is fiercely protective of both. So much so that to prevent its first-ever TwitchCon conference from transforming into a promotional event for exhibitors, rather than a meet-up for its community, the company was willing to turn down exhibitor support. The goal, as Matt DiPietro, Twitch's VP of marketing, explained it, was to keep the show laser focused on community so it doesn't turn into something like Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) and the Game Developers Conference (GDC) have: huge but at the expense of their initial focus. "What TwitchCon has to be about is the broadcasters and their fans," he said in an interview from the show. "Everything we do, we think about the broadcasters first because that's what brings the fans and creates the content."
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