Apple A Threat To PCs In The Living Room, Says Gabe Newell

Valve president Gabe Newell spoke at the University of Texas’ LBJ School of Public Affairs and stated that the biggest threat to any Valve hardware is something that Apple will do in the living room. He expects that vendors will find a way to leverage PCs for the living room, though he doesn’t know exactly what that solution will be.

“The biggest challenge, I don’t think is from the consoles. I think the biggest challenge is that Apple moves on the living room before the PC industry sort of gets its act together,” Newell said. “The threat right now is that Apple has gained a huge amount of market share, and has a relatively obvious pathway towards entering the living room with their platform. I think that there’s a scenario where we see sort of a dumbed down living room platform emerging – I think Apple rolls the console guys really easily. The question is can we make enough progress in the PC space to establish ourselves there, and also figure out better ways of addressing mobile before Apple takes over the living room ”

“I think a whole bunch of hardware companies are going to be releasing products in the next 12 months – you’ll hear it referred to as Miracast, Shield from Nvidia, or lots of other people,” Newell said. “There are going to be a huge set of products that say, ‘If you want something that’s incredibly cheap, at a price point well below anything that consoles will be able to reach, you’re going to take advantage of the PC that’s running somewhere in your house. It’s like one of those things where afterwards it will seem like it was very simple, when beforehand, everyone sort of denied that it was possible.”

Source: Polygon

Google Veteran Joins PlayHaven

PlayHaven has announced that it has hired Charles Yim as its new chief operating officer. The former Google head of mobile application partnerships will oversee the company’s growth plans along with its advertiser and developer relations.

“We’re thrilled to add Charles to the PlayHaven team,” said Andy Yang, CEO of PlayHaven. “PlayHaven has experienced tremendous growth and we’re fortunate to gain the strategic leadership and experience Charles brings to the table. We look forward to seeing his shared vision for PlayHaven and operational expertise contribute to our growth and success at every level of the business.”

“I’m impressed with the strength of the team and product vision at PlayHaven,” said Yim. “It’s an exciting time for the mobile industry. Developers are building audiences and businesses at unprecedented speed; however this often comes with growing pains around scale and complexity. PlayHaven is uniquely positioned to help developers address these challenges. I look forward to working with the company and providing developers the tools to succeed in this dynamic and rapidly evolving market.”

Rock Out To The Sounds Of The Cold War

What did America sound like in the early 1980s Sample The Americans social playlist powered by Spotify for some of the most popular songs of the era.

The Americans is a drama about the marriage of two KGB spies posing as Americans in the 1980s. Explore the official Facebook timeline to learn more about their world. The arranged marriage of Soviet spies Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings, who have two children who know nothing about their parents’ true identity, is constantly tested by the escalation of the Cold War under President Ronald Reagan, and Phillip’s growing sense of affinity for the American way of life.

 

 

Facebook Plucks From Vine

Facebook is taking video sharing seriously now that Twitter seems to have scored big with its acquisition of Vine. A day after nipping the competition by disabling Vine search functionality on its network, Facebook updated its apps for iPhone and iPad to make recording and sharing videos more seamless.

Facebook users have always had the ability to send 60-second voice messages within Facebook Messenger. Now the functionality is available in the main Facebook app. Facebook says it also improved the relevancy of results that appear in the Nearby tab. Nearby allows users to share and connect with users who are close by, similar to Foursquare. The new functionalities are all available within Facebook’s new 5.4 version of its mobile app.

Additional updates include users now being able to quickly hide posts from their News Feeds, which was previously available only on the web. Now users simply tap a three dot icon on the top right of the post they want to hide and then select the option “Hide.” They can also report or mark a post as spam that way.

The update is available for free in the App Store.

With the ability to connect with friends, share videos and voice memos, and check out nearby places in Facebook’s mobile app, will you still use other apps like Foursquare and Vine We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

Source: TechCrunch

Eve Online: The Asakai Incident

Eve Online is one of few MMORPGs that actually has the universe permanently and significant affected by player actions. As evidence of that, what started as a minor conflict in the Asakai system mushroomed out as other factions came in to participate in the brawl.

Over 2,800 players ended up participating in the super fight that ended up slowing down the servers. Check out some highlight videos below.

 

Zynga Loses Chief Game Designer

Brian Reynolds, founder of Zynga East, has departed his role as chief game designer at Zynga. While at Zynga he helped develop Frontierville and CityVille 2 and previous to that he had been creative director at 38 Studios.

“Brian has a long history in the game industry and has been a great partner to the creative leaders at Zynga,” said Zynga president of games Steve Chiang. “I want to thank him for his leadership of the Zynga Baltimore studio in the design and development of FrontierVille, which brought many innovations to social gaming. We appreciate Brian’s contribution and we’re proud of the deep bench of creative leaders who are leading the next wave of game innovation at Zynga. We wish Brian the best in his next chapter.”

Source: Polygon

iPad 128GB Coming February 5

Apple has confirmed that it will launch a new 128GB iPad on February 5. The device will retail for $799 for Wi-Fi only and $929 for the version able to connect to a cellular network.

“With more than 120 million iPads sold, it’s clear that customers around the world love their iPads, and everyday they are finding more great reasons to work, learn and play on their iPads rather than their old PCs,” said senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Philip Schiller. “With twice the storage capacity and an unparalleled selection of over 300,000 native iPad apps, enterprises, educators and artists have even more reasons to use iPad for all their business and personal needs.”