Friday 7 August 2015

ARIANA GRANDE, SELENA GOMEZ AND DEMI LOVATO'S NEW SINGLE TITLES HAVE BEEN ANNOUNCED



We're still loving 'One Last Time', obsessed with 'Cool For The Summer' and gettin' down to 'Good For You'; but now Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez have announced the titles of their new singles at the iHeartMedia Music Summit ALL AT ONCE.
So, in potentially our laziest (or most time-efficient, whichever way you wanna look at it) move to date we've decided to tell you about 'em all at once, too. Why write three articles when you can write one, eh? It gives us more time to snack and Google 'Niall Horan cute and funny moments.'
#Lazyjournos.
GIF
So here's the deal - this iHeartMedia Music Summit thingy in California's basically an excuse for loads of labels and their artists to showcase what they've got coming up next. We've already seen Nick Jonas perform a bit of his never-before-heard new single 'Under You' at the fancy Universal Music event; and now Demi, Ari and Selena have announced details of their new tunes. Hooray.
Basically, Selena's following up her A$AP Rocky collab 'Good For You' with second Revival single 'Same Old Love' (ooh), while Demi's next track's apparently called 'Confident' (wit woo).
Meanwhile, it's being reported that the first single taken from Ariana's Moonlight album will be 'Focus On Me.' Remember, that title she teased as a big ol' hint on Instagram with this pic and the capiton 'by "focus" i meant "focus on me"' [sic] a month ago?
Yup, that one.

Selena Gomez announces new single 'Same Old Love'


Singer has made the formal announcement of the next single from her upcoming album "Revival". 

Her label Interscope Records revealed that the new song by 23-year-old singing star would be titled, "Same Old Love", reported Aceshowbiz. 

Charli XCX has reportedly penned the lyrics of the track co-produced by and Stargate. 

As of now, the official release date of the single is not decided but it will come as a follow-up to lead single "Good for You" that was released in June. 

"Revival" is due for October 9 release. The project is Gomez's first studio product after her 2013 album "Stars Dance". 

"I think that I am turning into a young woman, so this is the next phase in my life, and I think it is important for me to take control over it," Gomez recently said about her forthcoming album.

Airtel brings 4G services across 296 towns in India

Airtel brings 4G services across 296 towns in India

Bharti Airtel on Thursday announced the commercial launch of 4G services in 296 towns across India after testing the market in select cities. The telecom company launched the first 4G network in Kolkata in April 2012.
“Now, customers across the country will be able to experience high speed wireless broadband on Airtel 4G and get on to the digital superhighway to enjoy uninterrupted HD video streaming, superfast uploading and downloading of movies, music and images. Airtel 4G is available to customers across a range of smart devices including mobile phones, dongles, 4G hotspots and Wi-Fi dongles,” Airtel said in a statement.
Announcing the launch, Bharti Airtel (India and South Asia) managing director (MD) and chief executive officer (CEO) Gopal Vittal said: “…We have now built India’s first commercial 4G network that will make high speed mobile broadband a reality. The national roll-out today is another small step in our journey.” Airtel also announced the launch of a new carrier agnostic mobile app ‘Wynk Movies’ that offers a library of thousands of movies and other popular videos. This follows the successful launch of Wynk Music and establishes Airtel as the only mobile operator in India to offer OTT (Over-the-Top) mobile applications that work across carriers, Airtel said.
To opt for Airtel 4G, customers will have to switch to a 4G SIM. Airtel said it will offer 4G at 3G prices. “Airtel customers can enjoy 4G at 3G data prices with packs starting at Rs.25. In addition, with every 4G SIM swap, Airtel is offering six months of unlimited music streaming and downloads on ‘Wynk Music’ and five free movies per month for six months on the Eros Now channel of ‘Wynk Movies’,” the company said.

Microsoft open sources its tool for porting iOS apps to Windows

When Microsoft revealed its plans to port Android and iOS apps to Windows, it was a bombshell that few expected. Now Microsoft has taken an early build of its development environment for iOS, known as the Windows Bridge, and released it to open source.
Windows Bridge, also known as Project Islandwood, is scheduled to release this fall, in conjunction with new capabilities that Microsoft will release to its Visual Studio development environment. But for now, Microsoft is pushing the technology into the open-source community via GitHub.
Although the history of the personal computer is implicitly tied to Microsoft, the Windows app environment (outside of desktop PC games) has struggled as developers have turned to more successful mobile platforms, such as iOS and Android. Microsoft’s development efforts have been designed to make it easy for Android and iOS developers to take their apps and port them to the Windows platform.
Microsoft actually has a total of three versions of the Windows Bridge in development. “Project Astoria,” the development environment to port Android apps to Windows, is in an invitation-only technical preview and should be released in a public beta this fall. “Project Centennial,” a bid to port existing Win32 Windows apps to the Windows Store and Windows 10, will enter public testing next year.
The Project Islandwood iOS bridge supports both Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 apps built for x86 and x64 processor architectures. Soon, Microsoft will add compiler optimizations and support for ARM, which will add mobile support, Microsoft’s Kevin Gallo said in a blog post.
Why this matters: According to Statista, in July Android users were able to choose between 1.6 million apps in the Google Play Store. Apple’s App Store remained the second-largest app store with 1.5 million available apps. Microsoft hasn’t publicly disclosed how many apps it has in the Windows Store of late, but it’s almost sure to be fewer than 300,000. Granted, Microsoft needs to solve its app store problem by weeding out “crap apps” as well as increasing the overall number. Inviting leading Android and iOS developers to port over their more popular apps helps Microsoft tackle both challenges simultaneously. 

Microsoft's best mobile strategy is Azure, not Windows 10

Satya Nadella
With the release of Windows 10, some are pointing to a new era of relevance for Microsoft. Others believe that a revamped Office experience will do the trick.
Both visions are completely wrong.
It's not that Microsoft is doomed. As the world shifts to mobile, Microsoft's old business is absolutely, irretrievably doomed. But with its increasing strength in cloud, Microsoft's new business looks set to grow. Because cloud is really a mobile strategy. Does Microsoft realize this?

Office won't save you, crying won't do you no good

Mark Kaelin posits that Microsoft's big vision—its grand, winning strategy—is to double down on Office:
"Microsoft is a software company first and foremost, and that is what the company and all of its employees should be improving, innovating, and selling. Under this strategy, Office 365 is the flagship product and productivity is the essential service of Microsoft."
Lost in this assessment is what consumers actually think, and what they'll use. This is a glaring, fundamental mistake.
Because, as Andreessen Horowitz's Benedict Evans explains, Office (and Windows) don't resonate like they used to, and Windows 10 doesn't significantly improve that fact.
"In the past, leveraging Windows and Office was the key to Microsoft's success, but that didn't work this time. Windows had actually ceased to be the dominant development platform in the late 1990s with the rise of the web (though that mattered less at the time since you still needed to go online, and for almost everyone that meant a Windows PC). Hence, though a big part of Microsoft's mobile strategy has been to push towards common code across Windows on the desktop and on mobile, so that it's easy to write apps for both at the same time, in practice that's largely irrelevant. The apps that people want on smartphones are not being written for desktop Windows anyway."
Or, as he summarizes, "The rise of SaaS services and new productivity models on one hand and more and more capable mobile devices on the other means that Office, and hence desktop Windows in the enterprise, is also probably a declining model."
Microsoft has lost in mobile. Utterly. Completely. Microsoft is losing in "office productivity" too, because it can't help but approach the problem through an outdated lens.

Mobile makes things different

In a separate post, Evans highlights how mobile is changing the way we think about productivity. Instead of a "manilla envelope" filled with documents we've carefully assembled and now distribute around the office, content and the communication thereof get mashed together into things that start to look like Slack... or even email.
In this way, "PowerPoint gets killed by things that aren't presentations at all. The business need is met, but the mechanism changes."
I don't think there's anything sacred about Office. My children certainly don't see any reason to use it, and by the time they enter the corporate workforce, I don't believe Office will even exist (and they're actually not far off from that day).
No, something mobile will displace the thoroughly desktop-oriented Office.
Looking at how the rising generation uses smartphones, does anyone seriously believe this mobile trend can be stopped?
Fortunately for Microsoft, even if its old-school Office paradigm dies (and it will), Microsoft has a strong hand in shaping the future of mobile... from the cloud.

Azure is Microsoft's mobile strategy

Microsoft may or may not realize this—it's a smart company, so let's assume the answer is "yes"—but Azure is its best answer to mobile, not Windows 10.
Not that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is through pitching Windows as The Answer. Ashe told ZDnet, "You talk to somebody like Airbnb. It might be more attractive, given our 3% share on phone, for them to actually build something for the desktop and for the Xbox. And by the way, when we hook them on that, we have a phone app."
This idea of "hooking" developers on the ease of writing Windows apps that span device form factors is not going to work. See the Evans quote above. "Windows is not a point of leverage for Microsoft in mobile," he concludes, no matter how you gussy it up. It's just not.
But Azure (read: cloud) services? Definitely maybe.
We used to think of hardware as "the thing that runs my code." But then the web came along and largely rendered the operating system, and the hardware running it, obsolete. While we're not there yet in mobile—native apps are the rule of the day—we are definitely enmeshed in a world where native code matters far less than the cloud data feeding it.
On this score, as Eric Knorr points out, Microsoft "keeps adding features [to Azure] to make web and mobile development easier."
Microsoft seems to be looking to Windows 10 to revamp its desktop and mobile fortunes, which is a losing strategy. But Azure, precisely because it will help enterprises build compelling cloud services that can feed data to mobile (and desktop) devices, looks like a winner.

Stanford And Nvidia Team Up On More Realistic 'Light Field' VR Headset

LightFieldStereoscope_Prototype1
While virtual reality may not be mainstream, there are lots of promising devices on the horizon, and there’s still lots of work to do.
Researchers at Stanford University and Nvidia are making a contribution to the technology with a virtual reality prototype that uses light field technology — which describes how light flows through a single point in every direction — to mimic how each eye focuses on objects based on distance.
Typically, virtual reality headsets create the illusion of 3D using a “stereoscopic” technique that puts two separate images in your eyes with slightly different angles. But the images are flat and that can create strain on the user’s eyes.
“The way we perceive the natural world is much more complex than stereoscopic,” Gordon Wetzstein, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, said in an interview. ”Our eyes can focus at different distances. Even one eye can see in 3D. It does that by focusing the eye.”
What the Stanford and Nvidia’s prototype does is create a sense of depth in each eye and combines it with the stereoscopic technique of showing images at slightly different angles in each eye. The prototype uses two transparent LCD screens layered on top of each other that produce the light field affect. Each eye is shown a combination of 25 images through the layered LDC screens to give the sense of depth. It’s sort of like putting a hologram in front of each eye.
Schematic of how the prototype is assembled.

This technique allows the user to look around the virtual world and see depth.
The virtual reality prototype is attached to a desktop PC equipped with Nvidia’s Maxwell graphics card architecture. The algorithm used to compute all the images in the headset is based on Nvidia’s CUDA programming language.
The secretive startup Magic Leap — which is building an augmented reality headset, not virtual reality — also claims it uses some sort of light field technology to reproduce realistic digital objects, but the company hasn’t made any details public on how it accomplishes this.
But creating a sense of depth isn’t the only challenge for virtual reality devices. Headsets also need to have extremely high resolution and as little latency as possible between when someone moves their head and what shows up in the headset. Using mostly off-the-shelf hardware, Wetzstein’s virtual reality prototype isn’t able to provide very high resolution and low latency. With billions from Facebook, the latest versions of the Oculus Rift headset shown to the public reportedly have solved these problems around resolution and latency.
Wetzstein has been working on light field display technologies since 2010, but only started working on this prototype a year ago when he joined Stanford. Wetzstein will be presenting a paper and giving demonstrations of the prototype next week at the SIGGRAPH 2015 Emerging Technologies conference. The prototype the researchers will be presenting is a third generation version. “This is as good as we can make it from off-the-shelf components purchased on eBay EBAY +0.00% and 3D-printed housing,” Wetzstein said.

Fan grabs Taylor Swift during concert, tries to pull her off stage

No one can bring Taylor Swift down.
But an over-eager fan sure tried during her “1989” tour. Videos from the Swift’s Tuesday performance at Rexall Place in Alberta, Canada, show a fan grabbing at the singer’s leg and trying to pull her off stage during a rendition of “Bad Blood.”

A shocked Swift manages to shake off the fan’s grasp as she looks horrified for a moment before continuing her song. Swift then turns away and walks down the stage as other footage from the incident show security guards rushing to take the fan away.
Swift made no mention of the incident on her social media accounts. In fact, she posted a smiling snap from the show and wrote, “Thanks Edmonton-- tonight was insanely fun and I can't wait to be back on your stage tomorrow night!”

Taylor Swift's Pal Gigi Hadid Stars in Calvin Harris' Sexy New Video!

Did Taylor Swift have something to do with Gigi Hadid's new starring role?
The "Bad Blood" singer's pal is the leading lady in Calvin Harris' music video for "How Deep Is Your Love," and she's never looked sexier!
In the video, which premiered exclusively on Tidal, Hadid puts her modeling skills to good use. Harris captured every sexy moment -- including her emerging from the pool in a teeny bikini -- and shared them on Twitter. 
Joe Jonas' rumored 20-year-old girlfriend is also really good at whipping her hair back and forth. Look out, Willow Smith!
Hadid later does a little miming. Is she trying to get out of a box?
Another highlight from the video that Harris was eager to share was of the model dancing in a sexy midriff top.
While Swift didn't make mention of her 31-year-old boyfriend's music video release, she did call out Hadid's appearance in her own star-studded video for "Bad Blood" by sharing a behind-the-scenes clip on Tuesday. 
Even before Hadid was cast in Harris' video, it was obvious that the musician was getting along nicely with Swift's squad.
In celebration of her bestie Karlie Kloss' 23rd birthday on Monday, the 25-year-old "Blank Space" singer shared an Instagram pic of the model hanging out in the kitchen with Harris. "Some of my best times are with her, laughing in the kitchen," she wrote. "Happy Birthday to the ray of light that is @karliekloss!"

Ryan Adams Plans to Cover Every Song From Taylor Swift’s 1989

And Taylor's excited

Singer-songwriter Ryan Adams has revealed that he’ll be covering Taylor Swift’s record-breaking album 1989. All of it. Every single song.
When Swift caught wind of this plan on Twitter, she got very excited and said was going to“pass out.” Adams confirmed that it was really happening and told her her songs were “badass.” That’s when Swift really freaked out:
Soon enough, Adams shared a taste of what’s to come, posting a few snippets of “Welcome to New York.”
A video posted by Ryan Adams (@misterryanadams) on 
Keep an eye on Adams’ Instagram, where he’s been posting lyrics of the songs he’s recording.

Intel India Announces Plans to Open Maker Lab in Bengaluru

Intel India announced its plans to set up an innovation lab in its Bengaluru campus Wednesday, a platform for entrepreneurs to accelerate product and hardware design innovation for startups in India. The facilities will be officially unveiled on the August 27.
The firm will work with the country's startup ecosystem, including central/ state government incubation initiatives, academic institution-led incubators, corporate and commercial accelerators, an emailed statement said.
The Maker Lab will provide infrastructure like development kits, reference boards, hardware, and software tools, in addition to mentoring and business connections. The facility will help startups to bring their ideas to fruition, from proof of concept to prototypes, to market-ready products and solutions. Following successful prototype, startups will be connected to hardware ecosystem players like OEMs (original design manufacturers), ISVs (independent software vendors) and system integrators. Successful products will be showcased at the 'Intel India Maker Showcase', which will allow delegates and visitors to see, feel and experience the products and solutions from the lab. The Intel India Maker Lab and Maker Showcase are planned to be available before end of this quarter.
"With the Intel India Maker Lab, we are offering a strong platform to India's vibrant startup ecosystem, and encouraging young innovators to turn their ideas into exciting and relevant products for India," said Kumud Srinivasan, President, Intel India.
In a mailed response to NDTV Gadgets, Intel said that it will be announcing the details for the application process before the opening of the Intel India Maker Lab, and said that they will collaborate both with incubators and accelerators to help startups to reduce the time to market for hardware based products. On a case to case basis, startups that are part of Intel India Maker Lab will receive nominal financial support towards sustenance for a short period of time.
Intel presently has an incubator at IIM Ahmedabad's CIIE (Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship) on as a part of the Digital India vision, which aims to increase technology adoption in the country.