Tech News Today for July 13, 2016
Tech News for July 13, 2016
If you thought Pokémon Go was a sanctuary of untainted enjoyment and exercise, pay attention. For now, all those neat places on the Pokémon map are merely “neat places” but sometime in the future, sponsored locations will begin to appear, bringing with it a new revenue stream for Niantic. John Hanke, CEO of Niantic said “pay us to be locations within the virtual game board — the premise being that it is an inducement that drives foot traffic.” Read more at ft.com.
Speaking of Pokémon Go, the game development platform used to create Pokémon Go is the Unity platform. Unity Technologies announced that it has raised $181 million dollars in Series C funding, with plans to use the funding to broaden and expand the platform’s capabilities in virtual reality and augmented reality. Unity is already an incredibly popular development platform with game creators, and has already been used for a number of games hitting the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, not to mention smartphones. Read more at venturebeat.com
Apple is working on a reality series and it's holding a casting call for the unscripted series. The series will be called Planet of the Apps, and will focus on the app economy. If you are an app creator with plans to “shape the future, solve real problems, and inspire change within our daily lives,” then you better let Apple know you exist. Then change said world with your awesome plans. Read more at 9to5mac.com.
Google acquires a new company every day, it seems. This time they’ve acquired Kifi, a startup involved with the search and collection of links that are being shared on social apps. Google says that the team will be put to work on its Spaces group chat app, though they wouldn’t confirm how many people were coming over in the deal. Read more at techcrunch.com
Amazon had high hopes for its second annual Prime Day event yesterday. Amazon says that it met those expectations becoming its biggest sales day ever. Worldwide orders rose upwards of 60 percent over last year’s Prime Day and US orders rose at least 50 percent. Read more at cnbc.com
Megan Morrone is out today, but Jason Howell will be joined by Ron Richards, cohost of All About Android at twit.tv/aaa. They'll be talking with Sam Abuelsamid Navigant Research to talk about where Tesla's engineers may have gone wrong when developing its AutoPilot system. Tech News Today streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. The show can be downloaded later at twit.tv/tnt.