breaking news – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Facebook announces Video on Instagram to take on Vine

With recent moves to add hashtag support, verified Pages , comments with inline photo embeds and more, it appears that Facebook is ready to take on competing social networks. It should come as no surprise to us, then, that it’s putting its acquisition of Instagram to good use by introducing a service — aptly called Video on Instagram –that rivals Vine , a similar service now owned by Twitter. Instagram’s version will be accessed by an icon on the bottom right corner of the app, and you’ll be able to record up to 15 seconds of video, using your choice of 13 new filters exclusively for the service. Contrary to its major competitor, this particular service (which will be available on iOS and Android versions from day one, and can be viewed on the web as well) won’t loop the video on an endless basis — rather, you’ll see it pop up in your feed and the video will run just once. In addition to filters, Instagram has introduced a stabilization feature called Cinema. Instagram’s blog post and video showing the new service can be found after the break, and the iOS version is already live on the App Store . Sadly, Instagram had no news about when we can expect to see the app on Windows Phone, but the team has been “talking with [Microsoft] and learning.” And folks, please promise you won’t go crazy on the cat videos. Update: Both iOS and Android apps are now available in their respective stores. Gallery: Facebook Instagram Video screenshots Filed under: Cellphones , Wireless , Mobile , Facebook Comments

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Facebook announces Video on Instagram to take on Vine

Apple announces new Mac Pro with cylindrical design, 12-core Intel Xeon E5 CPU, flash storage, Thunderbolt 2.0 and support for up to three 4K displays

It’s been brewing for a while, and now Apple has finally redesigned its flagship cheese grater pro desktop . The 2013-era Mac Pro has been totally redesigned with a new, cylindrical chassis and vastly upgraded internals that have been designed to last for “(another) 10 years.” At the center of the new Mac Pro is a 12-core, 256-bit Intel Xeon E5 processor with 1,866MHz DDR3 RAM capable of 60GB/s data transmission. Following the trend of the MacBooks, the new power tower uses PCIe-based flash storage, and so pro users will be relying upon four USB 3.0 and six Lightning 2.0 ports (that can take up to 6 devices per port with 20Gbps throughput) for expandability. Fortunately, for those of you who intend on placing the hardware beneath your desk, the expansion ports light up to help you find your connections in the gloom. Other connections include HDMI-out 1.4, dual gigabit Ethernet jacks, WiFi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.0 and the usual pair of 3.5mm audio in and out ports. This machine is also the first Mac that’ll ship with dual AMD FirePro GPUs as standard, which’ll support 4K displays. Of course, the most striking change is in the design, which occupies 1/8th the volume of the current Mac Pro and stands 9.9-inches tall and 6.6-inches wide. The chance is thanks to a new thermal core, a triangular air duct that runs through the center of the hardware — with one huge fan mounted at the top. Presumably, this new model has also been tweaked to conform to new regulations concerning electrical shielding, meaning that the hardware can finally return to European shores when it arrives later in the year — at a (probably high) price that’s still to be decided. Gallery: WWDC 2013: Mac Pro Update: You can now check out our eyes-on of the new machine here ! Follow our liveblog for all of the latest news from WWDC 2013. Filed under: Desktops , Apple Comments Source: Apple

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Apple announces new Mac Pro with cylindrical design, 12-core Intel Xeon E5 CPU, flash storage, Thunderbolt 2.0 and support for up to three 4K displays

Facebook Home official, replaces your app icons with social info (video)

Today Facebook finally took the wraps off Home , a suite of apps and a home screen replacement for Android phones. It’s not just a new UI for launching apps however; it replaces the lockscreen with Cover Feed and prioritizes updates from people instead of apps. There is a standard paginated launcher, that is always just a swipe away. But the focus is on the full-screen images that are your new welcome screen. These are status updates from friends that you can easily flip through and double tap to like when someone posts something exciting. Plain text status updates are placed over a user’s cover photo, to keep the appearance consistent with photo-centric posts. Notifications are presented as small cards, which Facebook applies an algorithm to, in order determine the updates that are most important to you. Just like with the standard Android UI you simply swipe notifications off screen to dismiss them. But, if you want to remove all of them in one shot, you long press a single notification and the rest will be drawn to it and you’ll be able to dismiss the entire stack. Gallery: Facebook’s Android event: Facebook Home Filed under: Software , Mobile , Facebook Comments

NVIDIA officially unveils Tegra 4: offers quad-core Cortex A15, 72 GPU cores, LTE support

One new SoC per year? That’s what NVIDIA pledged back in the fall of 2010 and today at its CES 2013 presser, it delivered with the Tegra 4’s official unveiling. The chip, which retains the same 4-plus-1 arrangement of its predecessor, arrives with a whopping 72 GeForce GPU cores — effectively offering six times the Tegra 3’s visual output and is based on the 28nm process. It also is the first quad-core processor with Cortex A15 cores on-board, and offers compatibility with LTE networks through an optional chip. NVIDIA claims this piece of silicon is the world’s fastest mobile processor, and showed a demonstration in which a Tegra 4 went head-to-head against a Nexus 10 in loading websites (you can guess which one won). The Tegra 4 also introduces new computational photography architecture, which adds a new engine to drive the image processing and significantly improve the amount of time it takes to calculate the necessary mathematics 10 times faster than current platforms. To show off its power, NVIDIA demonstrated HDR rendering on live video. The chip is also capable of implementing HDR in burst shots and with LED flash. The idea, NVIDIA says, is to eventually make our mobile cameras more powerful than DSLRs, and this is certainly a step in the right direction. Gallery: NVIDIA CES 2013 press event Joseph Volpe contributed to this report. Continue reading NVIDIA officially unveils Tegra 4: offers quad-core Cortex A15, 72 GPU cores, LTE support Filed under: Cellphones , Tablets , Wireless , Mobile , NVIDIA Comments

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NVIDIA officially unveils Tegra 4: offers quad-core Cortex A15, 72 GPU cores, LTE support