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All the news you need to know from Day Two of E3 2015
Day Two at E3 2015 means there's finally some breathing room between briefings, press conferences and literal breathing to play some of these rather exciting games. This year's E3 has turned into a pretty good one, with strong games across all the major consoles and platforms. We've interviewed some of the most influential players in gaming, including Sony PlayStation's Shuhei Yoshida, games maestro Keiji Inafune and a few more. We explored space in an Oculus Rift-based spacesuit, think there's possibly a new king of the soccer games and took a deeper look at Xbox's new Elite games controller. One more day to go, so many games left to play. We'll sleep when we're dead. Check here for everything happening at E3 2015!
All the news you need to know from Day One of E3 2015
So many games. So much Mario. So much to cram into just three official days of E3 2015. We've already seen Sony and Microsoft's opening salvos from Day Zero, but today Nintendo and big-hitting game makers like Square Enix joined the fray. What do you need to know? All this. We'll be recapping each day, short and sweet... so we can play even more games. All things E3 can found right here. Don't worry, Slippy's here.
Twitter Highlights serves up the day's best tweets
Unless you're constantly checking Twitter, there's a very good chance you're going to miss something cool. To help keep you from missing those very important tweets, Twitter introduced Highlights for Android. The feature notifies you up to twice a day about tweets Twitter believes are relevant to your interests. Twitter curates Highlights by looking at the popular accounts and conversations among the people you follow, tweets from people close to you and what's trending nearby. Users can also see the day's important tweets by tapping the new icon above the timeline that resembles two stacked cards. To turn on Highlights, navigate to Settings>Account Handle>Mobile Notifications and check the Highlights box. The feature is Android only for now, but Twitter says it will consider bringing it to other platforms in the future.
Get your March Madness highlights and analysis on YouTube
While you'll want to venture over to CBS Sports to stream the March Madness live action, YouTube is gearing up for the Big Dance, too. The video library will provide highlights, pre/postgame shows and more on the March Madness channel during the postseason schedule. Of course, those who prefer to catch the action on live television can watch on CBS, TBS, TNT and truTV when the tournament begins on March 17th. NCAA tournament highlights will arrive on YouTube just weeks after Google and the NFL agreed to circulate pro football clips on the site. No matter how you plan on watching, though, it'll be interesting to see which team will be this year's Mercer. My money's on North Carolina Central.
The biggest announcements of MWC 2015 so far (part 1)
MWC technically starts today, but that didn't stop some of the industry's biggest players from trying to get a head start on the fun on Sunday. Besides the big launches, there were a couple of pre-show events for those offbeat things that didn't need an auditorium to themselves. This means the preceding Sunday is actually one of the busiest days for big announcements. Here's the pick of the bunch this year, just head to the gallery below.
Google mobile search highlights the freshest news stories
If you've performed a search with the Google box on your mobile device today, you might've noticed something a bit different in the results. When you make a query for a topic, now it'll populate results with a rotating carousel of the "freshest and most relevant content" from a single source according to Google's blog. In practice, it looks exactly like the GIF above. This'll even work for individual websites, too. For example, doing a search for "Engadget" brings up our recent stories, with a link to watch our JXE stream of Life is Strange in a YouTube section just below it.
Google and NFL deal puts football highlights on YouTube
It had to hurt when Facebook made a deal with the NFL to play video clips before YouTube, but Google has finally announced its own pact with the league just in time for the Super Bowl. There's now an NFL YouTube channel for official highlights, and Google will also show video, scores, broadcast times and other info in its search results. For instance, typing in "New England Patriots" now brings up the score and a recap of the team's AFC championship game against the Colts, along with a video preview for the Super Bowl. Re/Code reported that in exchange for access to in-game footage, Google will split ad revenue with the league.
Google wants more services to take advantage of Now and Inbox Highlights
Google has been making it easier for more and more third-party companies to take advantage of its products' features recently. For instance, it's now taking airlines, restaurants and event venues (among others) by the hand, showing them how to use the new Inbox app's Highlights feature to their advantage. Like its name implies, "Highlights" finds pertinent info or actionable items within an email and shows them right within the email list. So, if you're eating out or prepping for a flight, you can confirm your reservation or check in without having to access the email itself. Devs simply need to mark up the parts they want to surface to make that happen -- we doubt they'll have a tough time doing so, since Google even offers full sets of instructions and sample codes they can look at. Just recently, the tech giant also made it simpler for devs to add the "OK Google" voice command to their creations, letting you do queries within an app without lifting a finger.
Never miss an exciting ball game with Thuuz
I am sure you are like most sports fans and can tell horror stories about how you missed a last second shot, or a pitcher throwing a no-hitter, or a hail-mary to win the game because you weren't in front of a TV or were watching another game. Thuuz Sports, a free universal app, should help make sure that doesn't happen again. The app requires iOS 7.0. You can select your favorite teams or leagues from all the major American sports plus European soccer leagues, in addition to golf, tennis, and cricket. Once you have your favorites ready to go Thuuz Sports sets itself apart from the others. The app rates all the games and matches on a scale of 1-100 for excitement. This makes it easy in advance to see what games could be the ones to watch and the scale changes as the game proceeds so when it gets down to the final few moments and the score is tied or one team is driving for the winning field goal, the scale gets to its highest point. The excitement level is designated in a small circle in front of the game and the color changes as the game's excitement level rises. Users can set up an alert system in Thuuz Sports to get notifications of the start of the the game, scoring changes and if the excitement number goes up. You can set your interest at one of three levels from casual fan all the way up to fanatic. The number of excitement alerts you will receive is determined by your setting. That allows you to get lots of updates from your favorite teams and fewer from other teams in their division or league. Once you receive an update, the app includes a TV data base to tell you where to switch and see the game if you want. It will also help you locate the closest sports bar based on your current location. So no more reasons for you to miss the dramatic ending of games. Thuuz Sports also has other features. Users can check out a feed that includes comments from other users, links to highlights and game wrap-ups. It also offers a fantasy section. Users can enter their fantasy players and then set up alerts for each player to follow how they are doing or if they are injured. Other apps can do as well keeping you informed with scores and stats, but Thuuz Sports is the only one I have found that keeps you informed and helps you see the exciting finishes to games.
All things college athletics with the official NCAA app
Mention the NCAA around most sports fans and you can expect a litany of complaints about the organization that oversees college athletics. However the official NCAA app should satisfy most followers of collegiate sports. The free universal app runs on iOS 7.0 or later and covers a lot more than just football and basketball. Similar to other apps that cover college sports you can get the latest news updates on major sports such as football, basketball, both men and women's, and baseball. The NCAA app goes further with coverage of all the NCAA sports: Wrestling Volleyball Field Hockey Ice Hockey Cross Country Track & Field Lacrosse And about a dozen more. If you have someone involved in any of the athletic competitions taking place at NCAA member schools you can follow them with the NCAA app. Users can choose up to three favorite schools and the app pulls news, video, scores, and more from each of those schools so you can find it in a single location. No browsing through hundreds of stories or score to get your favorite's. And you can set up alerts for your favorite teams for news and or score updates. The hardest part of picking your favorite is finding the school on the huge list of colleges and universities included in the app. Every school that is an NCAA member is listed in alphabetical order from big universities like Notre Dame, Southern Cal, and Alabama to small schools like Agnes Scott College, College of St. Elizabeth, and Judson College and all the colleges and universities in between. Regardless of what your favorite college sport is, you will find stories and other features included in the app. Plus users can find out the latest rankings of teams in all the sports. So if you want to see how your college cross country team is doing, select cross country from the sports list then choose rankings and you will find Northern Arizona at the top of the Division 1 list followed by Oklahoma State and Colorado. The app provides numerous videos for users to watch both in the team pages and in the general news coverage. I checked several and all were preceded by a fifteen second commercial announcement and unfortunately it appears the same commercial appears before each video so be prepared to sit through the same ad time after time if you watch a lot of videos. Despite this failing, the official NCAA app is still worth having for those fans of some of the less popular and highly covered sports that take place on college campuses around the country.
Track college football playoffs with ESPN Championship Drive
Major college football entered a new era this fall with the end of the BCS and the launching of an actual playoff to determine college football's real champion. Now ESPN has launched an app that provides users with just about all the information they need to follow the long road to the championship game in early January. ESPN Championship Drive is a free universal app that require iOS 7.0 Users need to have an ESPN account, which is free, or you can sign up using your Facebook login. Once you sign in you can choose your favorite college team or teams. ESPN Championship Drive then compiles news, video, scores and other information about your favorites. The app offers information on more than 100 college teams including all the teams in the major conferences. Users can select the team page for their favorites and see news updates, video, scores, and the future schedule for their team. Users are also able to select news, video, and scores on a national basis so you can track what is taking place with teams in other conferences or other parts of the country. I think the app offers a wide perspective of the college football landscape. You will also find lots of videos that provide access to some of ESPN's regular contributors, such as Kirk Herbstreit, or discussions pulled from ESPN programming. Most of the videos are preceded by a short commercial announcement but not all. I looked at more than a dozen that did come with a commercial and they all ran the same one so that can get old in a hurry. ESPN Championship Drive allows users to set up alerts for their favorite teams or for general college football news. The list of alerts for your favorite school includes team news, the start of the game, score alerts at the end of each quarter and the game, for each scoring play, if the game is close, and a separate alert for just the final score. These are controlled through your device's notifications setting and can be especially helpful if you are stuck somewhere with your significant other on a Saturday and can't watch the big game but must know what is happening. Other apps are available that perform the same functions at ESPN Championship Drive but most mix college football information in with other major sports like the NFL, major league baseball, etc. By using this app, college football fans have a single place to go for all their updates and game information.
ESPN Sportscenter updates with new features and faster delivery
The four-letter network as it is known has launched the latest version of its ESPN Sportscenter app. The free universal app requires iOS 7.0 or later and comes with plenty of new features including one that is long overdue. You need to have an ESPN account and will be asked to sign in to the app or register if you don't already have an account. Your normal ESPN.com account works with the app and if you need an account there is no charge. ESPN Sportscenter offers scores, live scoring updates, news from your favorite sports or favorite team, video highlights, access to ESPN Radio programming, personalized alerts with numerous option, analysis, and access to live TV programming through the Watch ESPN app, more on that in a minute. Among the new features is one that allows you to designate your favorite teams in every sport and have those scores grouped at the top of Sportscenter Scores. This can be a valuable feature now with major league baseball in its pennant races, the start of the college and professional football season, soccer in full swing around the world, and golf and Nascar entering their final stages. It saves the user from having to look through dozens of scores to find the ones for his favorite teams. However this should have been available some time ago. I have been using the same feature in two other score and news apps for quite a while. But it is a welcome addition if you use this app. ESPN has improved its games pages for both the NFL and NCAA football games. The pages offer a complete breakdown of statistics, both team and individual players, scoring summaries, video highlights, and live drive charts so you can follow the game on your iPhone or iPad. The updated app gives the user access to live ESPN programming, both radio and television. Radio works with a simple click and if your speakers are turned up you are ready to go. To get live television programming, ESPN Sportscenter accesses programs through the Watch ESPN app, also a universal app and a free download. However to see live programming your home cable or satellite provider must have an agreement with ESPN. Bad news if you are a DirecTV subscriber, but most of the other major providers are included such as DISH Networks, Cox Cable, Time Warner, AT&T U-Verse, Charter, and Comcast along with hundreds of smaller cable operators. The programming choices are many with live tennis, college football, basketball, and auto racing. So just like the live broadcasts, ESPN Sportscenter, the app, covers sports from just about every angle with live updates and live programming too.
120 Sports launches its free internet sports news network today
Whether you're a cord-cutter looking for a way to keep up with sports news or just need an alternative to the cable sports networks, it's time to give 120 Sports a try. Launching today on the web and iOS (Android coming July 14th), it's promising eight hours of live sports coverage every day (from 6PM to 2AM ET today), broken into two-minute clips (also available as video on-demand), hence the name. The lights turned on at 6PM ET today with some live coverage of Tim Lincecum's attempt at a no-hitter, and you'll notice familiar faces like former SportsCenter host Michael Kim and former NBA player Antoine Walker in the mix. The best part? Trying it won't cost you anything except other than some time.
Facebook starts testing Highlights, a feed that shows only important life events
For some people, Facebook's latest iOS update doesn't only come with bug fixes in tow, it also replaces Requests with the experimental People section. According to TechCrunch, three tabs reside within the People section, including Highlights, which displays your friends' birthdays and important life events. It's the place to check if you want to know if someone just had a baby, for instance, without having to go through Candy Crush invites. Other than Highlights, there's also the Everyone tab, which lists your friends in alphabetical order, and History, which shows Messenger convos from the latest to the oldest. Of course, not everything Facebook tests becomes an official feature, so those hankering to test People out will just have pray for a second round.
Pocket 5.0 wants to make reading what you love even easier
Pocket founder Nate Weiner introduced the next phase of the app formerly known as Read It Later at the company's first-ever press event this afternoon. Pocket 5.0 puts the focus squarely on the user experience with intuitive features that know what you save most and how you're consuming it. Among the new additions is Highlights, an automated service that collects and surfaces your saved content based on your interests, sites you visit most, authors you follow and tags you've created within the app. According to Weiner, Pocket created Highlights to address the fact that while most users have saved more than 100 items to the app, many of those items after the 30th entry tend to go unopened. Pocket now marks items in your list with color-coded badges based on impact (Best Of), popularity (Trending) and length (Long Reads and Short Reads). In addition to knowing what you're reading, Pocket 5.0 also knows what you're reading it on and adapts appropriately. On mobile, the new app automatically pulls up five "Mobile Highlights" to make content discovery quicker. To that same end, the company's streamlined the app's navigation with a swipe menu that allows users to search multiple categories, including Highlights, My List, Videos, Favorites, Archive, and items Shared to Me, for those articles suggested by your friends. The update is available today on iOS and Android on November 20th with the web refresh scheduled for sometime in December. Weiner also announced a new dev tool called Pocket Preferences. Preferences allows third-party apps to easily recommend content to users based on the items that they save to Pocket. That service is now available on Zite, but will roll out to other apps "soon."
Twitter scores NFL deal to showcase Sunday's finest instant replay material
Following a similar deal in May with the NBA, Twitter's Amplify program has landed an envy-inducing arrangement with the National Football League. As part of the new advertising partnership, the NFL will leverage Twitter to "package in-game highlights and other video content" inside sponsored tweets, which can be distributed via a marketer during games. Both Twitter and the NFL will take a slice of the profits, though neither side is talking specific terms. As of now, it sounds as if Verizon will be the "premiere sponsor," which grants it "exclusive sponsorship rights for Amplify ads during the Super Bowl next February." The upside? Easily tweetable instant replays. The downside? It might make you a shill. Them's the breaks!
Twitter launches #FollowMe: highlight reels based on tweets, photos and Vines
It's common for Twitter regulars to get a stream of new followers, but it's not always clear why they should follow back -- how do you summarize a person's post history in a few seconds? Twitter wants to solve this by launching its #FollowMe tool. The service uses Vizify to build a short, HTML5-based highlight clip from a person's followers, photos, tweets and Vine videos. Most of the legwork is automatic; users only have to edit the clip if they want to fine-tune the results, and any tweet with the relevant link will show the animation in-line. The #FollowMe rollout won't guarantee any additional popularity in the Twittersphere, but it should at least make for a stronger sales pitch.
Google shows off Auto Enhance and Highlights photo-editing tools for Google+ (update: video)
Hot on the heels of folding photo storage in with Gmail and Google+, Google is showing off two photo-editing tools for G+ called Auto Enhance and Highlights. Starting with Auto Enhance, this is clearly the fruit of Google's eight-month-old Snapseed acquisition: with this feature you can do things like adjust for exposure, soften skin, minimize wrinkles, remove red-eye and reduce noise in low-light shots. Additionally, there's a bunch of so-called auto-awesome tools: collage, HDR, panorama and smile. A fifth auto-awesome feature, 'Motion,' creates GIFs when it detects a series of shots taken at the same place and time. And don't worry: you can easily switch back to the untouched original, so there's no need to worry about giving Google too much control. Highlights, meanwhile, takes the sting out of album creation by automatically selecting your best photos and setting aside your not-so-good ones. This means pruning for duplicates and blurry shots, while favoring ones with smiling faces and accurate exposure. You'll find some samples in the gallery below, but why settle for examples when you can play around using your own photos? Both features are rolling out to Google+ today, so fire up your browser if you feel like giving them a try. Oh, and while you can upload up to 15GB of full-size photos (per that new storage policy), downsized pics don't count toward that storage limit, so long as they're smaller than 2,048 pixels. Update: Google's posted a video overview of the new photo features, which we've embedded just past the break.%Gallery-188464%
YouTube now offers more MLB highlights and full archived games
YouTube just keeps adding quality content. Last week it was comedy, and this week it's bulking up on its sporting chops with a Major League Baseball partnership. Always among the most tech-savvy of major sports leagues, MLB has beefed up the offerings on its YouTube channel to include highlights from every game of 2013 (two days after they've occurred), and a vast archive of full games from as far back as 1952. Plus, should you reside outside the US, Canada, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, you'll get to watch two live games every day during the regular season for free. So, seamheads, head on over to the MLB.com YouTube channel -- your digital field of dreams awaits.
YouTube refines homepage feed, adds highlights option
If your channel subscriptions were starting to get a little unwieldy, you might want to tinker with several new feed options rolling out to the site now. Accompanying bigger thumbnails with more detail, users can now hide individual updates, limit them to new uploads or just unsubscribe directly from their feed. Anything that you've already watched on YouTube is grayed out to avoid unnecessary replays, while a new highlight view should ensure over-zealous videomakers don't squeeze out less prolific contributors -- and make some room for the next wave of (heavily-marketed) YouTube channels.
