Stewart Butterfield, known already for his part in building Flickr, a photo-sharing service acquired by Yahoo in 2005, decided to try his hand — again — at building a game. Flickr had been a failed attempt at a game called Game Neverending followed by a big pivot. This time, Butterfield would make it work.
To make his dreams a reality, he joined forces with Flickr’s original chief software architect Cal Henderson, as well as former Flickr employees Eric Costello and Serguei Mourachov, who like himself, had served some time at Yahoo after the acquisition. Together, they would build Tiny Speck, the company behind an artful, non-combat massively multiplayer online game.
Years later, Butterfield would pull off a pivot more massive than his last. Slack, born from the ashes of his fantastical game, would lead a shift toward online productivity tools that fundamentally change the way people work.
Glitch is born
In mid-2009, former TechCrunch reporter-turned-venture-capitalist M.G. Siegler wrote one of the first stories on Butterfield’s mysterious startup plans.
“So what is Tiny Speck all about?” Siegler wrote. “That is still not entirely clear. The word on the street has been that it’s some kind of new social gaming endeavor, but all they’ll say on the site is ‘we are working on something huge and fun and we need help.’”
Maybe I make a terrible boss, but at least I know it. Work with me: http://bit.ly/2VYR7rC
Siegler would go on to invest in Slack as a general partner at GV, the venture capital arm of Alphabet.
“Clearly this is a creative project,” Siegler added. “It almost sounds like they’re making an animated movie. As awesome as that would be, with people like Henderson on board, you can bet there’s impressive engineering going on to turn this all into a game of some sort (if that is in fact what this is all about).”
After months of speculation, Tiny Speck unveiled its project: Glitch, an online game set inside the brains of 11 giants. It would be free with in-game purchases available and eventually, a paid subscription for power users.
No, this review is not about some detachable Oppo lens as we are past the era of these crude workarounds - it's an actual phone and a proper flagship at that. But while this particular name isn't our cup of tea, the rest sounds beyond intriguing.
from GSMArena.com - Latest articles http://bit.ly/2KdouV9
Susan Fowler’s forthcoming memoir, titled “Whistleblower,” is scheduled to hit bookshelves March 3, 2020. The book will be available for pre-order beginning June 12.
In late 2017, Penguin Random House imprint Viking Books acquired the rights to the memoir, which chronicles the harassment and discrimination Fowler faced during her tenure as a site reliability engineer at Uber.
Her memoir “will expose the systemic flaws rampant in the startup culture,” with “previously unreported details of what happened after she went public with the harassment and discrimination she faced [at Uber],” according to Viking. Additionally, it will touch on themes such as women’s role in the American economy, navigating challenging work environments, with an “eye-popping depiction and broad indictment of a work culture where a woman can do absolutely everything right and still encounter tremendous obstacles.”
Twenty-eight-year-old Fowler is best known for her infamous blog post, “Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber,” published in 2017. The 3,000-word essay detailed the sexist bro-culture rampant at the fast-growing ride-hailing giant, as well as its human resources department’s negligence. Unintentionally, the writing made Fowler an overnight celebrity in the tech world, with leaders praising her for her bravery.
The blog post sparked a movement that ultimately led to the ouster of Uber’s founding chief executive officer, Travis Kalanick, and some 20 other Uber employees accused of sexual harassment or other inappropriate behavior. Kalanick was replaced by former Expedia chief Dara Khosrowshahi, who has since led the business’ highly anticipated initial public offering.
Exercising her writing chops, Fowler joined Stripe as the editor-in-chief of its quarterly publication, Increment, before getting scooped up by The New York Times, where she now works as an editor of the opinion section. Previously, she authored two books on computer programming.
In addition to “Whistleblower,” a movie documenting Fowler’s story is in the works. Oscar-nominated “Hidden Figures” screenwriter Allison Schroeder and former Disney executive and producer Kristin Burr have signed on to develop the film, titled “Disruptors.”
“The Disaster Artist” producer Erin Westerman is credited with landing the project for Good Universe, an independent film production company, and will oversee its production. Westerman told Deadline in late 2017 that the “project is an anthem for women and an important reminder of the power of one female voice.”
We've seen rumors that Samsung's upcoming Note10 line will feature at least two variants with a smaller SM-N970 and larger SM-N975. According to new reports, the smaller version will come with a 3,400 mAh battery. The discovery was made by the folks over at GalaxyClub.nl who came up on the actual battery model number which happens to correspond to the more affordable Note10e's model number. Last month a similar discovery found the Note10 Pro's battery to be a 4,500 mAh cell, which would be an upgrade over the Note9's 4,000 mAh battery. Previous reports suggest the smaller Galaxy...
from GSMArena.com - Latest articles http://bit.ly/2Xg6mOh
Disney has been cranking out live action remakes of its animated classics for the past few years — in fact, Guy Ritchie’s take on “Aladdin” is currently at the top of the box office.
But these distinctions get tricky with the growing reliance on computer generated visual effects. “The Jungle Book,” for example, mostly features a single live actor interacting with CGI animals. And “The Lion King” (scheduled for release on July 19) takes that approach even further: Everything you seen onscreen has been created on a computer.
I got a chance to visit the “Lion King” set in December 2017, where I participated in a group interview with Jon Favreau, who directed both “The Jungle Book” and this new film. When asked whether he considers this a live action or animated movie, he said, “It’s difficult, because it’s neither, really.”
“There’s no real animals and there’s no real cameras and there’s not even any performance that’s being captured,” Favreau acknowledged. “There’s underlying [performance] data that’s real, but everything is coming through the hands of artists.”
At the same time, he argued that it would be “misleading” to call this an animated film. For one thing, the visuals aren’t stylized in the way you’d expect in a cartoon. Instead, the aim was to create animals that look even more realistic than the ones in “The Jungle Book” — Favreau said the footage should feel like “a BBC documentary,” albeit one where the animals talk and sing.
“Between the quality of the rendering and the techniques we’re using, it starts to hopefully feel like you’re watching something that’s not a visual effects production, but something where you’re just looking into a world that’s very realistic,” he continued. “And emotionally, feels as realistic as if you’re watching live creatures. And that’s kind of the trick here, because I don’t think anybody wants to see another animated ‘Lion King,’ because it still holds up really, really well.”
To achieve this, Favreau said he wanted this to have “the feeling of a live action shoot,” including the way he shot with the actors (Donald Glover plays Simba, Beyoncé plays Nala and James Earl Jones returns as Mufasa). Given the goal of creating realistic animals, Favreau said the traditional motion capture approach didn’t make sense, but he still wanted the actors to “overlap and perform together and improvise and do whatever we want.”
So he brought them to a soundproofed stage, and they performed “standing up, almost like you would in a motion capture stage — except no tracking markers, no data, no metadata’s being recorded, it’s only long-lens video cameras to get their faces and performances.”
Favreau compared this to shooting with Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow on the original “Iron Man,” where he “tried to have multiple cameras and let Gwyneth and Robert improv when I could, because there’s so much of the movie you can’t change, because it’s visual effects.”
And even when he wasn’t working with actors, Favreau still “shot” the scenes with live action cinematographer Caleb Deschanel. That meant building a virtual world using the Unity game engine, then adding the digital equivalent of real-world production elements like lights and dolly tracks to block and film seen in that world. The filmmakers could use iPads to add, move and eliminate those elements, and could put on Vive VR headsets to explore the world.
“That’s the way I learned how to direct,” Favreau said. “It wasn’t sitting, looking over somebody’s shoulder [on a] computer. It was being in a real location. There’s something about being in a real 3D environment that makes it — I don’t know, just the parts of my brain are firing that fire on a real movie.”
To be clear, those virtual scenes aren’t what you’ll actually seen onscreen. Instead, they provide guidance for the animators to create far more detailed shots. Favreau said that in a sense, he was trying to resist the complete freedom that the computer generated approach can bring.
“I find that what the flexibility of digital production has done is given the opportunity for people to postpone being decisive,” he said. “It used to be if, you know, you built a big animatronic dinosaur, you had to make sure you got that shot right and framed right and it worked … And so, part of this experiment is to see if we really lock in early, as animated films do, and spend all of our time refining.”
As for why he’s going through all this effort to remake a film that, by his own admission, holds up really well, Favreau said he was inspired by the success of the stage play: “People will go see the stage show, and they’ll also see the movie, and you could love both of them and see them as two different things.” Similarly, he said his team set out to “create something that feels like a completely different medium than either of those two.”
Google today announced two major changes to how it expects Chrome extension developers to protect their users’ privacy. Starting this summer, extension developers are required to only request access to the data they need to implement their features — and nothing more. In addition, the company is expanding the number of extension developers who will have to post privacy policies.
In addition, the company is also announcing changes to how third-party developers can use the Google Drive API to provide their users access to files there.
Google announces new privacy requirements for Chrome extensions
All of this is part of Google’s Project Strobe, an effort the company launched last year to reconsider how third-party developers can access data in your Google account and on your Android devices. It was Project Strobe, for example, that detected the issues with Google+’s APIs that hastened the shutdown of the company’s failed social network. It also extends some of the work on Chrome extensions the company announced last October.
“Third-party apps and websites create services that millions of people use to get things done and customize their online experience,” Google Fellow and VP of Engineering Ben Smith writes in today’s announcement. “To make this ecosystem successful, people need to be confident their data is secure, and developers need clear rules of the road.”
With today’s announcements, Google aims to provide these rules. For extension developers, that means that if they need multiple permissions to implement a feature, they have to access the least amount of data possible, for example. Previously, that’s something the company recommended. Now, it’s required.
Previously, only developers who write extensions that handle personal or sensitive data had to post privacy policies. Going forward, this requirement will also include extensions that handle any user-provided content and personal communications. “Of course, extensions must continue to be transparent in how they handle user data, disclosing the collection, use and sharing of that data,” Smith adds.
As for the Drive API, Google is essentially locking down the service a bit more and limiting third-party access to specific files. Apps that need broader access, including backup services, will have to be verified by Google. The Drive API changes won’t go into effect until next year, though.
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