Hands on: Oculus Rift review

By: Unknown on 6:33 AM

Dev Kit 2 ships to developers with improved specs, but is it worth the price?

Our early verdict

"Intrepid developers are receiving Oculus Rift Dev Kit 2, which includes worthy upgrades like a 1080p virtual reality display and motion tracking. But it's still meant for early adopters and is not a consumer product."

For

• 1080p display
• Positional head-tracking
• Less motion blur
• More immersive than ever

Against

• Not yet a consumer product
• Still some lo-fi visuals

Update: Oculus Rift Dev Kit 2 is on its way to game makers and it's being used for by movie studios. We revised our hands-on review and added facts about its Galaxy Note 3 screen and Mac support.

As Oculus Rift Dev Kit 2 starts shipping to pre-order customers, we got more face time with the virtual reality headset at PAX Prime and Comic-Con.

Codenamed Crystal Cove, the updated Oculus Rift DK2 costs $350 (about £207, AU$373). That's $50 (about £30, AU$53) more than the first-generation developer kit.

However, the improved specs make it well worth the price bump if you're a developer with a passion for cutting-edge technology and the patience for beta hardware.

The face-worn display outfits developers with an HD screen that's 1080p or 960 x 1080 per eye. It finally meets our next-generation gaming needs.

Believe it or not, the Oculus Rift DK2 display actually uses the 5.7-inch Super AMOLED panel from the Samsung Galaxy Note 3. Behind its rubber casing is same exact front panel, "Samsung" logo and all.

This makes sense. Oculus was rumored to be working with Samsung on the South Korean electronics giant's own virtual reality headset. Whether or not that pans out remains to be seen.

Despite both the physical and theorized Samsung ties, Mac compatibilityhas been added to the Oculus Rift DK2, making good on the start-up company's promise to support Apple machines. All five OS X game developers are rejoicing right now.

Oculus Rift DK2 drops the first interation's control box in favor of integrating the guts into the headset itself. Only a single cable - HDMI and USB woven together - dangls from your face.

The new kit also comes with a motion-tracking camera, which allows for greater movement within the world of the Rift. It looks a bit like a webcam, and a lot like a PlayStation Eye camera from the PS3 days.

It features a blue "on" light and an Oculus logo, but its true power isn't visible to the naked eye. It uses forty infrared LEDs on the headset to track your head movements and integrate them into the game. These LEDs were visible on the version we tried at CES 2014, but not anymore.

The new Crystal Cove, looking less spotty than before

In the demos we saw at GDC 2014, this meant players could lean in for a closer look at in-game objects and characters. These were the same demos we saw at CES, with the exception of a new one by Epic Games, which integrated the player into the game a unique way.

The game was a one on one battle between two sword and shield wielding avatars. It takes place in a living room, where players can see representations of themselves seated in the room, controller in hand. To keep an eye on the fight we had to swivel our head and crane our neck.

Still no support for in-game limbs

The Rift was a surreal experience as always; when our opponent turned his head or leaned forward it gave his neck a stretched, snake-like appearance. And when one of the battling avatars leapt up onto your lap, you half expect to feel his little feet on your legs.

The camera is key to the Rift's head tracking

If you've used the previous Rift, know that Crystal Cove is a night and day difference. The higher resolution makes all the difference in the world; it's like going from Skyrim on a four-year-old PC to one from last year.

Finally, a wearable that tracks more than your heart rate

Note that we say last year; the Oculus Rift still isn't sporting visuals that you could call next gen. There are still jaggedly rendered objects, but the immersive nature of the experience trumps graphics any day, and is one you need to see to believe.

Step into the super mind of the X-Men's leader

Movies come to Oculus Rift at Comic-Con

Comic-Con 2014 provided a different sort of experience - with entertainment at the forefront - and maybe one we can expect more of now thatFacebook owns Oculus VR.

Both Twenty Century Fox and Warner Bros. were backing new Oculus Rift Dev Kit 2 units at the cosplay-filled San Diego convention with demos for their X-Men and Into the Storm films.

The X-Men Cerebro Experience provided the more surreal experience as attendees slipped into the wheelchair and saw through the eyes of mutant leader Professor Charles Xavier. He, fittingly, donned the just-as-snug brain amplifying mutant detector Cerebro on his own head.

The concept involved seeking the shapeshifting mutant Mystique by looking 360 degrees in any direction. She was hiding in a Comic-Con crowd that was fictitious and barren - it would have been cooler if it used augmented reality here.

The actual hunt was automated and fairly boring, but Professor X's replica wheelchair at the Fox booth provided developers with the opportunity to predict the location of our limbs and torso. It accurately overlayed his body onto our own.

Obviously, this demo didn't call for much movement and that worked to the movie studio's advantage. It could easily trick your mind into thinking that the Professor's subtle finger tap on the armrest was your own with a "Wait, I didn't just do that!"

Into the Storm featured 4D weather effects

Into the Storm upped the energy level with simulated tornado winds inside a small glass both built by Warner Bros. Through the first-person perspective, we saw three characters hunker down behind a gated sewer entrance, truck-sized debris smash against its ironclad bars and pipes burst with gushing water.

It didn't have the advantage of a stationary wheelchair-bound character to map our bodies and there was no interaction whatsoever, but Warner Bros did aptly demo its new disaster movie with this terrifying scene recreation. It also messed up our hair.

Both X-Men Cerebro Experience and Into the Storm also gave us insight into how big-name movie studios intend to use Oculus Rift to invent new ways of enjoying theatrical experiences. Video games were just the beginning.

Hands on CES 2014

Oculus Rift gets more impressive every time we see it, and the futuristic virtual reality headset's appearance at CES 2014 was definitely no exception.

Since E3 2013 Oculus VR has gained impressive talent and raised an extra $75 million in funding, and the result is the Oculus Rift Crystal Cove prototype (named for a state park in southern California). It's significantly easier on the eyes than older versions of the headset and, by extension, closer than ever to the Rift's final, fully functional, consumer-facing form.

The two game demos Oculus co-founder Nate Mitchell showed us in a private meeting room at CES were designed to showcase two new features: positional head-tracking and low persistence, both of which help make the virtual reality experience more immersive and address some users' complaints with the headset, including motion blur-induced nausea.

The head-tracking is the most obvious improvement. The new white studs on the Oculus Crystal Cove prototype's face are indicators that communicate your head's position to a new external camera, mounted near your monitor. As a result the full movements of your upper body, not just the sideways and up/down movements of your head, are detected and translated to the game world.

That means you can lean forward while playing CCP Games' extremely impressive 3D space-shooting game EVE: Valkyrie, bringing your in-game face closer to your space ship's various monitors and switches so you can better read their warnings and instructions. Since the very first demo Oculus Rift has inserted players into virtual worlds, and with this addition it's a more immersive experience than ever.

Get low, low, low, low

Second and more subtle is the low persistence, which makes the Oculus Rift's somewhat notorious motion blur a thing of the past. Now the graphics remain more clear and sharp even when you move your head around rapidly. There's still a tiny amount of blurring, but it's a massive improvement over the previous version of Oculus Rift.

To prove it Mitchell turned low persistence off and then on as we moved around, and although the image became darker with it on, it almost totally alleviated what was previously one of the Rift's biggest issues.

The tech behind the low persistence is somewhat complex, but Mitchell explained the gist of it. Essentially the new "Crystal Cove" Oculus Rift's OLED display has zero latency, so it takes the pixels no time at all to change color.

Even then, Mitchell said, there was some blurring, but Oculus alleviated it even further by programming the pixels to consistently but imperceptibly flicker on and off, only turning on when they have "good" data to display.

That new OLED display is also full HD 1080p, just like the prototype Oculus showed off behind closed doors at E3 2013. That of course helps as well.

Wizard Chess

We played EVE: Valkyrie at E3 2013 as well, though on the older, lower-resolution Oculus Rift. In 1080p, and with minimal motion blur and the new positional head-tracking, it was even more immersive now than it was back then - and that's saying something, because even that first time it was totally mind-blowing.

Piloting a space ship with an Xbox 360 controller while you look around the cockpit and target enemies with the motions of your head is one of the most impressive gaming experiences ever created. It feels like the first time you played Super Mario 64, or Halo, or Wolfenstein - completely fresh and like it has the potential to change the world of gaming. And right now it's only a demo.

The other software Oculus had at CES was a very basic defense game built by Epic Games in Unreal Engine 4. It's an evolution of one of the original Oculus Rift demos Oculus showed around - the one where users simply walked or floated around several beautiful but interaction-light Unreal Engine 4 environments, including a snowy mountain and the lava-filled lair of a scary-looking demon lord.

Now, that demon sits on his throne across from you, the player, he being your apparent opponent. Around you is his cavernous, fiery lair, and before you is something like a 3D board game with moving pieces. He sends tiny dwarves marching inexorably toward your goal, and you press buttons on the Xbox 360 controller to fire arrows, cannonballs and flamethrowers at them.

There are two views: one overhead and one from closer to the game's level, almost like you're leaning down toward it to put on your thinking cap. And thanks to that positional head-tracking you can actually lean forward to peer into the game and examine the little dwarves up close. You can look into their faces as they're pinned with arrows and crisped with fire.

The experience of playing a game inside a game world is not unique to Oculus Rift. This little game, though still very basic, could conceivably be a mini-game within some epic, sprawling RPG. But like with everything else, playing it on Oculus Rift makes you feel like you're really there.

Early Verdict

Mitchell said the camera that enables the positional tracking may be only a temporary solution. But whatever Oculus settles on to make sure the final version of Oculus Rift features full six-point head-tracking will be included with the unit, whether that means bundling a camera in or something else.

There's still no projected release date or final pricing for the consumer product that the Oculus Rift Crystal Cove prototype will eventually become, despite rumors of a Christmas 2014 goal that Mitchell would neither confirm nor deny. And the conspicuous indicator lights on the Crystal Cove's front aren't final either, Mitchell revealed, even if they do look kind of cool.

Mitchell and his colleagues at Oculus VR seem to think the Rift still has a long way to go. That may very well be true, but the fact is the Oculus Rift is the coolest product in the world right now, and it gets better every time we see it.

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Hands on: Apple Watch review

By: Unknown on 6:13 AM

Apple finally attacks the wrist

Our early verdict

"Probably one of the best smartwatches on the market - but still not enough to convince us this is a real category."

For

• Clever interface
• Multiple sizes

Against

• Slightly chunky
• Could be expensive at higher models

Most of us expected the Apple Watch to appear in 2015, but it's made a (semi) surprise launch with the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.

It sadly won't be seen until next year though, which means this is a deliberate ploy by Apple to make sure you're not buying a Samsung, LG or Moto 360option in the run up to Christmas.

But there's a pretty good reason for most to hang on – this is a very stylish wearable indeed.

Apple's clearly aiming this at the fashion market as much as the person who loves to be an early adopter – given the smartwatch market is still yet to take off, it makes sense to focus further afield in terms of consumer targeting.

It also packs NFC, allowing it to be used as part of the new Apple Pay system - something that's either going to be really helpful or a big turn off to some.

But essentially this is a product that defines a new chapter for Apple. Well, that's if it's any good, of course.

Design

The Apple Watch is coming in six different versions: there's the Apple Watch, the Apple Watch Sport and the Apple Watch Edition. And each of these comes in two sizes, for those that like a larger or smaller device for their wrist.

You can't call it a lady or man's watch, but there will be those that do, and it's opened Apple up to a new market in doing so.

While I expected it to be rounded, the fact is the Apple Watch looks like a small fusion between iPhone 6 and iPod Nano. It's not unattractive, but it is on the chunkier side of things.

It's rounded at the sides, which works in its favour, and the very-slightly curved back makes it feel nice, if a little heavy (depending on the band) on the wrist.

The Edition... edition is a properly heavy device on the wrist. It's one that will look great but feel like you've spent a thousand dollars on it. Actually, given we don't know the price of this 18 carat gold and sapphire watch, that might not be too far off.

The interface is curious, but I really think Apple has done better than most with the way it's approached interacting with a wrist-dwelling device.

The Digital Crown is essentially a scroll wheel that lets you zoom in and out of the interface, so for apps (with a fun new home screen that looks NOTHING like the iPhone's version, more a spherical look at all the apps available on the watch) it's a new way of doing things.

The spherical interface is going to take some getting used to. The demos I saw showed a slightly tricky method of hitting the right area to open the app you want, leading to needing to use the Digital Crown more often than not.

It's got a very smooth action, where I expected it to be a clicking feel (just because that's what you get with a watch). It will be interesting to see if this becomes embedded as a way of using the Watch, but anything that takes away from having to touch the screen will be a good thing.

Tapping the crown inwards sends you back to the home screen, but you can also use the touchscreen on the Watch to to interact with apps.

The button below the Digital Crown serves two functions: one to take you to your contacts, and the other to work as a way into activating the Watch as a payment vehicle.

The contacts app is interesting, as it allows you to send things through to your friends that go beyond the normal messaging paradigm.

That said, the Apple Watch is adept at doing the basic smartwatch things: you can make and receive calls from your wrist (with mic and speaker) and it will scan messages coming in to work out if it can generate an easy response for you to tap.

So if someone asks 'Fish or Chips for dinner?' the Watch will ask you to tap Fish or Chips as a reply. Although if it's really smart, it will offer both as an option.

Beyond that though, you can send some really weird things. For instance, you can draw pictures and send them over (although let's be honest, you're going to be getting lots of pictures of male genitalia from your friends sent to your wrist when you're presenting) or a vibration code that you've predefined with a pal.

Or you can even hit the screen with two fingers to send over a heart rate image, which vibrates on that person's arm. The graphic is kind of intense - but it doesn't explain why Apple has offered this.

The Apple Watch is neither a fitness band, watch or fashion accessory though, despite taking a bit from each of those camps. It's hard to define what it really is, which means that users may struggle to justify the purchase.

I think its greatest chance of success is in the health market, as Apple has made this a decent choice for people looking to get a little bit healthier.

Not just checking steps or heart rate once in a while, the watch will be able to help you be a bit less sedentary as well as noting when you run around and how hard the exertion is.

Of course, it needs an iPhone to work really effectively, but it works very well autonomously too in terms of tracking the above.

This partly explains why Samsung has teamed up with Nike to make the Gear S a running companion – but at least Apple has got its own internal system to allow for it.

As a smartwatch, the Apple Watch is a pretty nifty device too. Its discreet dimensions mean that while it's obvious when it lights up, most of the time most won't know you're wearing a smartwatch.

It's annoying needs to be flicked upwards to turn the screen on – unlike the Android Wear devices which are visible when in standby mode – and I wasn't able to test this function during my limited hands on time.

The Apple Watch will also come with the ability to pay for things with the aptly-named Apple Pay – however, this wasn't available for demo, and therefore I can't work out how the security aspect will be handled.

With the phone you'll need to hold the TouchID element to confirm it's you that's paying, and without that on the Watch it's hard to see how you'll manage it.

If you have to press it on your phone, it kind of makes it redundant as a mechanism on the watch.

Apple has confirmed that you'll need to charge this device every day, which is a bit of a shame - with the lack of GPS I was hoping that it would at least match the competition and only need to be plugged in every 48 hours.

At least the charger is attractive: it's an inductive option that clasps to the back of the Watch through magnets. It looks the business, although it doesn't look cheap to replace if it breaks, unlike a Lightning cable.

Early verdict

The Apple Watch is a device that many will want to own with the iPhone 6, as the stylings match really well, and let's be honest: people like buying wholeheartedly into the Apple ecosystem.

It's annoying we don't know the price or the exact release date then, as it's hard to say how successful the Apple Watch will be as a result. The battery life is a shame, but then again it's not unexpected.

One thing's for sure – now Apple has brought visibility of wearables to the wider market through the Apple Watch, everyone will benefit through higher consumer traction.

Will we see everyone wearing one? Probably not, but then again not everyone owned an iPad or iPhone at the start. This is phase one of a much longer product game – but the Apple Watch One is a quite good start.

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A New Yorker’s Take On Swarm

By: Unknown on 5:30 AM

When foursquare split its app into two and launched Swarm, I decided to take some time to get to know it before sharing some thoughts. As a New Yorker who has never been sold on social location apps, I’m pleasantly surprised by its ability to make me act, remember to use it, and to create the possibility for great experiences. That goes far beyond what any app like it has managed to do — for me at least.

But I have complaints, many of which are compounded by the fact that foursquare is our New York City champion. It’s the darling of Silicon Alley. You’re here in NYC, foursquare. So why is the app so confused by our great metropolis?

Let’s start with all the great things about the app.

Matthew Panzarino sees Swarm as a strong signifier of change in the mobile app landscape, where once attention-hungry products disappear into background, ambient services. And while Swarm’s background work is part of what makes it great, I hardly agree with Matthew when he says that it’s in a category of apps that either don’t want or deserve your active engagement.

Swarm, with its push notifications galore (more on that later) and almost constant promise ofsomething to do, has me opening the app all day. Not always with satisfaction, but I’m using the app nonetheless.

No longer do I hit that ugly old blue check mark whenever I’m offered a deal for a foursquare check-in, but I’m randomly opening the app throughout the day.

I’m not sure how things work outside of the city — I’ve been here for eight years now, which is the adult third of my life — but here plans are made on the fly, in many cases, and they’re based around a certain level of convenience. I live within a couple of square miles of almost all of my friends, and the rest are just barely further than that. The difference between friends who are five miles away and friends who are one mile away is a big one. To see the former, I probably need to get on a train, and maybe even venture from Brooklyn into Manhattan. It’s a whole thing. The latter I can probably walk to see, or even better, it’s close enough for them to come to a place near me.

Because Swarm doesn’t rely heavily on the check-in to give me this information, I’m actually morelikely to use the app regularly. No longer do I hit that ugly old blue check mark whenever I’m offered a deal for a foursquare check-in, but I’m randomly opening the app throughout the day, to see who’s nearby.

As long as your neighborhood locator is turned on, I can see how close you are whether you check in or not. Perhaps it sounds stalkerish, but I think we’re beyond that, and besides, everyone’s a stalker on the Internet.

And why does Swarm feel different from every other location social app before it, like Highlight?

Because foursquare. Foursquare knows better than to send me a push notification that a total stranger, who is also interested in “How I Met Your Mother” on Facebook, is just a few blocks away. What the hell am I supposed to do with that?

Continuing with gamification only turns most of their users into losers.

Foursquare has been around long enough to know (at least to a much greater degree than other startups) what we want to know and who we want to know about. We’ve handed over all of our friends, and all of our favorite restaurants, and in some cases, the path we take to work and back home.

Which is why gamification has been stripped right out of the app. This has many people upset, and if you’ve been fiercely competitive on foursquare for a long time, I understand your frustration. But think of it this way (and I’m sure this has been said before): Foursquare only relied on gamification to incentivize check-ins at a time before location data was as precise as it is today. Now they have that data, and continuing with gamification only turns most of their users into losers.

With Swarm, we all have the chance to be actual winners who go out and spend time with their friends. Who can turn seeing a check-in into actually hanging out.

I say this with conviction because I’ve been using Swarm for a few weeks and have had fun experiences with multiple people on different occasions so far, just from opening up the app. The balance of friends, serendipity and convenience is perfect for the way I spend time with friends. And I consider myself a pretty average twenty-something New Yorker.

“Push notifications have been tough,” Swarm product director Nick Burton told me. “We have people who have two different use cases for push notifications: when any regular friend is nearby, and then notifications about someone they really care about being anywhere. Balancing that, as well as the complexity of the settings within the UI, has been difficult.”But as such, I see multiple opportunities for improvement, mostly where push notifications are concerned.

I have a friend who lives less than a mile away named Sean. Sean and I both use Swarm pretty actively. More than once, the app has notified me that Sean is in Uptown Manhattan, which is at least a 30-minute trip for me. I don’t want to know that Sean is uptown. That does nothing for me.

Swarm has a “Plans” functionality that lets you post what you want to do, like “Drinks” or a “trip to Central Park” for later in the day. If, late Saturday morning, Swarm sent me a push notification telling me that Sean was planning to go uptown to Central Park that afternoon, I may very well have texted him and seen what was up. We could go together. But at 4 p.m., when I’m doing my own thing in Brooklyn, I don’t care that Sean is far away on a push notification level.

I’m much more interested in when he’s coming back to Williamsburg. I’m also interested when a friend who lives uptown is in Brooklyn, or near my office downtown, or even hanging out in an area that’s on my usual train line. I’m interested when a friend who lives in the Lower East Side is on my side of the bridge. These occurrences warrant a push.

My sister lives in Georgia, but I don’t mind seeing push notifications for everything she does. It’s nice to follow her along through the day, because I love her. I don’t feel the same about pretty much anyone else who is outside of my direct lower Manhattan/Brooklyn area.

Alongside the ability to turn off nearby notifications and check-in notifications, Swarm has tried to master this balancing act by giving users control over push notifications on a per-user basis. You can see all check-ins, check-ins in your city, or none at all.

Two problems here: if you have a lot of friends, it simply takes too much time and energy to turn off most of them.

“If you have a growing group of friends, the notifications can get pretty noisy, which is why we let you turn them off entirely if you want to,” said Burton.

The other problem is that foursquare considers “within my city” to be within 26 miles. The furthest that I ever go is the 15-mile trip to Newark Airport — in another state. New York is simply too condensed for 26 miles to be a good in-between designation for which push notifications I want and don’t want.

Social planning has been damn near impossible. I’ve heard pitches from dozens of companies about how they plan to get people hanging out together, using gamification and messaging and event ticketing and, of course, ambient location services. The problem is that none of them had the balance of structure and serendipity. Swarm risks losing that balance as well.

These apps need to have some rules — like who I’m seeing information about and how I can interact with them — as well as a running list of past data (such as check-ins). Beyond that, there need not be any rules. You can’t force people to make plans; you have to simply give them the opportunity.

I remember an app called TheWhoot that asked you to always post your plans for the night, into buckets like Hanging At Home, Going Out, Raging, and Working. Your friends were then supposed to propose places and times, and chat out the details within the app. And then everyone was supposed to show up.

That app is long dead.

Each push notification is weighed by the user: Would I have wanted to know this if I didn’t get a push about it? Each time the app gets it wrong, the effectiveness of the notification wanes.Swarm understands that we can’t be pushed into action, but rather given the tools to act ourselves. And the push notifications from Swarm are an effective method of reminding us to engage with it. But, as we all know, push notifications are hard.

Foursquare, more so than any company trying to do this, has a solid foundation from which to make these push-notification decisions. Years of experience with social apps and enough data about its users to know everything from their taste in pizza to their daily route to work should translate into an amazing push-notification experience.

But Swarm hasn’t quite figured that out.

Burton tells me that, internally, the team has been fiddling with two different features that may solve these problems. “Very nearby” tells you when anyone on your friends list is within 400 meters, as that’s literally just a few steps to connect to otherwise oblivious people. In my opinion, this is totally worth it. Ship that sucker.

The second feature is even better: “Unusually Nearby,” which is pretty much exactly what I’ve been asking for. It sends you a push notification whenever someone who isn’t usually hanging in your neck of the woods turns up nearby. According to Burton, these features are still in internal testing and haven’t exactly been tweaked to the point where they significantly increase engagement. In other words, these features have not been stamped to actually appear in the app at all, but here’s to hoping.

The Swarm alert flashes across the screen as a beacon of opportunity, and that’s a powerful feeling to get from a notification.

In speaking with Burton, it’s clear that a lot of time and attention goes into the user experience of Swarm, from the little emoticons on a check-in all the way to push notifications. If Swarm can get its push notifications right, maybe the app won’t need to rely on them as much. But he also admitted that the app does rely on them, to an extent, to get people engaged with the app. The beautiful thing about Swarm is that it doesn’t need many push notifications.

The ever-updating chart of people nearby and the will to check in every time I visit a new place are more than enough to keep me visiting the app. On Swarm, the outright declaration of what’s going on mixed with the more vague murmurings of my general proximity is a beautiful thing. There’s no need to depend on push notifications or the check-in any longer.

I will admit that when I first downloaded the app, the notifications were what reeled me in. They’re different from any other kind of notification I got. Rather than seeing action going down in the virtual world, as I do with an Instagram like, a Swarm notification means that people are on the move. Things are happening. And I could get in on it.

The Swarm notification flashes across the screen as a beacon of opportunity to spend time with someone you care about, or someone you haven’t seen for a long time, or someone you see every day. It’s a powerful feeling to get from a push notification.

But when the honeymoon phase is over, and the majority of my notifications are the same old check-ins from the same old people, those pushes stop being friendly reminders that “Swarm means opportunity” and start becoming really annoying. And then I get numb. And start missing actual notifications I care about.

I want to check in to Swarm. I want to open Swarm every once in a while, unprompted, to see who’s doing what. And each time I get a push notification that tells me Sean is within a few blocks instead of a mile away, I’m more and more likely to open the app on my own.

My hope is that foursquare thinks of this big leap into the future as a small step, one that can be improved upon greatly. It could go either way. As the app reaches critical mass, the usefulness will diminish. When everyone is around you then no one is around you. However, with a bit of curation and some sensible updates, I can see Swarm taking me places that foursquare never could.

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Intel’s new 18-core Haswell Xeon chips will try to preempt the ARM server onslaught

By: Unknown on 3:55 AM

Intel has released a new batch of Xeon chips — the Xeon E5 v3 range – and by all accounts it’s the most impressive set of server products the company has shipped in years. While these new chips are based on the now-familiar Haswell core, they aren’t just retreads of existing silicon — Intel has pushed core counts all the way up to 18 cores per socket, integrated sophisticated new Turbo mechanisms, added new forms of cache monitoring, moved its entire platform over to DDR4, and can individually gate each CPU core for maximum power savings.

With up to 45MB of L3 and a dual ring bus that uses multiple interfaces to maximize inter-chip bandwidth, the Xeon E5 v3 (Haswell-EP) lineup is a truly formidable slice of silicon. Tech Report reports (sorry) that Intel has even implemented a cluster-on-die option that gives users more fine-grained control over which domain threads execute within (Intel reports single-digit performance gains in some cases from fine-tuning the chip in such fashion).

Combine the new features and higher core counts, and the Haswell-EP family tears through its own predecessors, exceeding performance on Xeon parts just a year old by as much as 20%.

Image courtesy of Tech Report

The gains don’t apply in every scenario or situation — much as we saw with Haswell-E, there are cases where higher core clocks and smaller thread counts carry the day. What I find most interesting about the hardware, however, is the way that Intel is clearly moving to shore up its enterprise divisions against the oncoming ARM server push.

Locking up the high end

Calxeda may have collapsed but it’s not the only ARM server company looking to make a name for itself. AMD has its own ARM products set to deploy in 2015 with a custom ARM core following in 2016. The newcomer Cavium is prepping its ARM-based ThunderX core, and there are rumors that Google and Facebook might build custom servers of their own. AppliedMicro’s X-Gene is also finally set to start shipping on 28nm (40nm parts are already available).

None of these parts are a threat to Intel’s server business as it exists today — in fact, they all face substantial scaling challenges and a dire need for ecosystem development that will limit sales and shipments in the first few years. All the price/performance advantages in the world don’t mean much if a new CPU doesn’t support the full range of software that needs to run on it, and Intel is fully aware of it.

Just because ARM poses no serious threat in 2015-2016, however, doesn’t mean it couldn’t be facing a longer-term strategic competitor — and that’s one reason why Intel is migrating what used to be EX-class features and capabilities into the more mainstream EP segment. (The photo at the top of the story, incidentally, is 15-core Xeon E7 Ivy Bridge-EX chip.)

The new Haswell-EP ring bus design and core counts

The reason I think it’s fair to judge these new Haswell-EP parts as part of Intel’s opening gambit against an ARM threat is that the server market tends to move more slowly and deliberately than desktop or consumer spaces. Tablet market share can change in a matter of months if a particularly popular Android or iOS device launches, but workstation and enterprise server deployments tend to be long-term affairs. With its huge set of new SKUs and capabilities, Intel has launched a series of parts that dares up-and-coming players to try and match them.

It’s a daring move. Rather than simply retrenching and fighting on clock speed or core count, the Haswell-EP family is designed to stretch from low-power, high-efficiency cores to massive 18-core monsters — and all of this is on the midrange server platform.

If Intel’s strategy works, it won’t keep ARM products from gaining any market share at all — but it could end up confining them to the less profitable segments of the market — just as Chipzilla successfully confined AMD more than ten years ago.

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Russian Streaming Music Service Zvooq Closes $20 Million Series A

By: Unknown on 3:52 AM

Russia’s online music businesses march to the beat of their own drum. But they’re about to get one well-financed leader to call the tune as music streaming service Zvooq closes on $20 million in new funding.

One of the critical problems for music in Russia is online piracy. Indeed, last week, a group of record labels including Sony Music Russia, Universal Music Russia and Warner Music UK went to court to push the social networking site VKontakte to enforce the privacy laws already on Russia’s books.

According to the BBC report, companies with legal streaming music services like Yandex, Trava, iTunes and Deezer all suffer as a result of the widespread piracy throughout the country. Russia’s national market tracker for digital music, IFPI, noted that the average spend per day in the country is roughly 50 cents per capita, compared with $8.40 for the rest of Europe.

In a recent International Federation of the Phonographic Industry survey of Russia’s digital music scene, recorded revenue in Russia for the full year totaled 2.2 billion roubles (roughly $61 million), that’s a fraction of the money that could be spent online.

Enter Zvooq. The company’s name means “sound” in Russian, and its mission is to end the tyrannical sound of silent cash registers for Russian musicians with a tiered pricing structure making it easier for Russians to pay (at least a little) for the music they want to hear.

Unlike Spotify, or similar streaming services in the West, which have a one-size-fits-all approach to streaming music, Zvooq, and others like it, believe in a pay as you go model for music consumers.

Founded by serial entrepreneurs Victor Frumkin and Simon Dunlop, Zvooq began as an idea the two co-founders shared in 2010, according to Frumkin.

“We believed that a streaming service from the West wasn’t going to cut it,” Frumkin says. More than just a streaming service with over 15 million songs from over 500,000 artists, Zvooq is like a combination of Spotify and iTunes combined. Offering streaming services with ads, a subscription model, a la carte purchases, and curated playlists.

Each of the services is unbundled, allowing Zvooq to function as the legal streaming music engine for social networks, telecom companies, or any hardware manufacturer that might want to offer music as a feature, the company’s executives said.

Based in Moscow, Zvooq’s business plan was attractive enough to win over an investment from Ulmart, Russia’s online electronics retailer, and the Finnish private equity firm Essedel Oy.

The company is launching its services with two of the three main telecom operators in Russia and its app has already reached the top spot in the app store for iOS in Russia.

“We think we’re a game changer in this market,” says Frumkin.

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