Tag: competition

Cinemark launches a monthly movie program to rival MoviePass

MoviePass, the $10-per-month movie theater subscription service, was so unexpectedly popular when it launched last August that the company struggled to meet demand. Its success hasn’t gone unnoticed, especially by the competition. Theater chain Cinemark is creating its own service, Movie Club, but with far less generous perks. For a $9 monthly subscription, it grants a single ticket (instead of one every day) but also gives 20 percent off concessions and cheaper bulk ticket rates. In short, it’s a compromise coming from within the movie theater establishment. Movie Club’s lone included ticket is only for 2D films (like MoviePass), the concession discount can be shared with friends and subscribers can buy additional tickets for a discounted $9 each. If you don’t see a film one month, that credit rolls over to the next. Plus, online buying fees are waived. And like MoviePass, there’s no contract, so you can cancel any time. You’ll still be limited to Cinemark’s 350 theaters, while MoviePass boasts over 4, 000 participating cinemas. But if you’re an industry loyalist or just want to build up sweet loyalty points, Movie Club could be for you. Via: Variety Source: Cinemark Movie Club

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Cinemark launches a monthly movie program to rival MoviePass

GM’s Cruise buys LIDAR company to drastically cut self-driving costs

GM has already said it has what it takes to get a fleet of autonomous vehicles on the road before anyone else, and that timeline might’ve sped up further. Cruise Automation , the company GM acquired a little over a year ago, has announced it’s made a purchase of its own: Strobe, which specializes in shrinking LIDAR arrays down to a single chip. The most immediate benefit here is cost. In a post on Medium , Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt writes that LIDAR-on-a-chip will drop the price “by 99 percent” versus other LIDAR systems. “Strobe, Cruise and GM engineers will work side by side along with our optics and fabrication experts at HRL (formerly Hughes Research Labs), the GM skunkworks-like division that invented the world’s first laser, ” Vogt wrote. The new LIDAR system can apparently deal with sun reflecting off rainy streets and help differentiate between someone clad in black jaywalking at night. Vogt wrote that when combined with RADAR and cameras, the LIDAR can handle pretty much every type of sensing needed for self-driving applications. If you were looking for proof that GM might beat the competition to market, well, this could be part of it. Via: TechCrunch Source: Medium

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GM’s Cruise buys LIDAR company to drastically cut self-driving costs

Boeing offers a $2 million prize for a working jetpack

It’s 2017, and as the refrain goes, where are the flying cars? Boeing is more interested in “personal flying devices” — aka, jetpacks — and is partnering with new organization GoFly to post a $2 million bounty for working designs. Kind of like an X Prize competition, the partners are giving teams two years to develop their tech before whomever impresses the judges at a “final fly-off” takes home money from the GoFly Prize pool. Boeing and other big names in aviation (along with DARPA) will lend their mentorship and technical expertise to the teams over the course of the contest. Winning is simple: The jetpack must carry a person 20 miles without refueling or recharging with vertical (or nearly vertical) take-off and landing. Teams will get technical guidelines — the competition is seeking a solution anyone can use that is ultra-compact, quiet and “urban-compatible” — but how they design or engineer their “personal flying device” is up to them. Competition prize money will be doled out in three phases: Ten teams with interesting written concepts will be given $20, 000 prizes, then four $50, 000 will be handed out for the best prototypes and revised technical specifications, before a winner at the “final fly-off” takes home $1 million. Even if they don’t win, teams may qualify for supplementary prizes at the last event, including $100, 000 for “disruptive advancement” of state-of-the-art aviation tech, $250, 000 for quietest entry and $250, 000 for the smallest. Teams can register for the first phase of competition now on the GoFly Prize site until April 4th, 2018. After that, teams must register for Phase II by December 8th, 2018. Source: GoFly Prize

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Boeing offers a $2 million prize for a working jetpack

Hyperloop Pod Competition winner hits over 200MPH

Adjacent to SpaceX headquarters, 25 teams gathered for another Hyperloop Pod Competition . This time the winner would be judged by how quickly they could go down the 1.25 kilometer (about .77 miles) track. On the final day of competition, three teams advanced to the finals and had the chance to push their pod to the limit. With a speed of just over 200 miles per-hour, the Warr (pronounced Varr) team from the Technical University of Munich handily beat the two other finalists with its small, but quick pod. Weighing just 80 kg (176 pounds) and powered by a 50kw motor, the vehicle was essentially a small electric car built specifically for winning the competition. Hyperloop pod run by team WARR pic.twitter.com/ntaMsoxkZE — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 28, 2017 The team is no stranger to the winner’s circle, it won the previous Hyperloop Pod Competition back in January for fastest pod. While Warr was the quickest down the tube, the other two teams either posted impressive speeds or broke new ground with their pods. Paradigm , a team made of students form Northeastern University and Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador used SpaceX’s pusher (a vehicle that literally pushes pods down the tube) to get the vehicle up to speed. It then counted on its air bearings and extensive lateral control to keep the pod centered and reduce friction. It hit a top speed of 101 kilometers an hour (about 60 miles per-hour) during its run. The second fastest inside the vacuum. Meanwhile, Swissloop from Switzerland’s ETH Zurich, used jet propulsion during its run. After an initial issue with losing connection with its pod just when it was about to do its run, it hit a respectable 40 kilometers an hour (about 25 miles per-hour) with a resounding whoosh as it took off. At the end of the competition, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk mused that there’s no reason why future pods in the competition couldn’t hit 500 to 600 miles per-hour on the 1.25 kilometer track. Of course that means that there will be another Hyperloop Pod Competition sometime next year and who knows, maybe we’ll see pods hitting the speeds that’ll make the mode of transportation truly rival air travel.

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Hyperloop Pod Competition winner hits over 200MPH

Pandora’s on-demand streaming service is available to everyone

It’s been just about a month since Pandora unveiled its attempt at building full-fledged, on-demand streaming music service. Aside from a handful of bugs, the big problem with Pandora Premium was that it was invite only. That’s changing today: Pandora Premium is now available for anyone to try. Like just about every other streaming music service, it’ll run you $9.99 per month and the app is available for Android and iOS (a web version of Pandora’s on-demand service is coming soon). If you didn’t catch the news in March, Pandora Premium has a few notable features that set it apart from the competition. If you put a few songs into a playlist, the app will use Pandora’s Music Genome Project to automatically add sonically similar tunes. If you’ve been using Pandora for a long time, it’ll draw on your listening history and “thumbs-up” songs to build you custom playlists and recommend new releases that are tailored specifically to your music history. And from a design perspective, Pandora is one of the simplest and best-looking streaming music services I’ve tried. There are a number of kinks that need to be worked out, but there’s enough good stuff going on in Pandora Premium that I’ll be keeping an eye on it to see how the service improves over time. Pandora’s also putting some cash and big names behind its new service to make sure it doesn’t get lost amidst Spotify, Apple Music and all the rest. The company’s “Sounds Like You” campaign will feature 18 different artists including Big Sean, Gorillaz , Questlove, 2 Chainz, Halsey, Keith Urban, Maggie Rogers, Pitbull, Ziggy Marley and a bunch more. That’s a lot of star power to throw behind its new service — here’s hoping that all the artists involved don’t pull their music from other streaming services. While an ad campaign isn’t generally all that exciting, Pandora did confirm that they’ll be hosting exclusive “mixtapes” from each of the 18 artists involved in the campaign that feature the songs that have inspired them the most over the years. So if you want to know what drove Gorillaz to get as weird as they are, you’ll want to tune in to these mixes. If you’re ready to give Pandora Premium a try, the company is offering either 30 or 60 days for free, depending on where you sign up. Signing up on Pandora’s site will net you the longer free trial and lower monthly price, as the company charges more when you sign up inside the app itself — thank Apple and its 30 percent cut from subscriptions for that. And if you’ve been paying for the $5 Pandora Plus service, you’ll get a whopping six months of Premium at that same price point. Considering how much more you get with Premium, doing that is basically a no-brainer. Pandora hasn’t tweaked anything else over the last month, but we should see the app get some tweaks and improvements in the coming months, as well.

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Pandora’s on-demand streaming service is available to everyone

NBC will finally air all of the Olympics live, across time zones

Today NBC announced that for the 2018 Winter Olympics, it will finally back off of its hated policy of tape delaying significant portions of the games. In 2016, it streamed much of the competition live, but segments like the Opening Ceremony and each day’s prime time programming got the tape delay treatment on TV. In a world connected in real time by phones, Facebook and Twitter, splitting up viewers makes less sense than ever, and NBC is finally acknowledging that instead of just pointing to the ratings or encouraging that viewers ” move back east .” Ratings for the 2016 Olympics dropped 18 percent from the 2012 London games, and going live everywhere could help turn that around. With the 2018 event occurring in PyeongChang, South Korea, big events that are scheduled to take place in the morning there will happen during the prime time window on the East Coast of the US. Rather than forcing viewers to jump on the internet to watch events live, going all live on TV could boost those ratings back up in the place where advertisers are paying the most money. NBC will kick off its evening lineup simultaneously at 8PM ET, 7PM CT, 6PM MT, and 5PM PT, with a break for local news and then the “Primetime Plus” package in all areas. The network has already signed up for Olympics broadcasts rights through 2032, however, exec Jim Bell would only tell the LA Times that it is “likely” to continue the all-live broadcasts for Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022. Source: NBC

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NBC will finally air all of the Olympics live, across time zones

Spotify now has 40 million paid subscribers

In the world of music streaming, numbers mean everything. Major players have come and go, but Spotify and Apple are the two companies who largely dominate the market. After Tim Cook kicked off last week’s iPhone 7 event with confirmation that Apple Music now has 17 million paying subscribers , Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has fired back with an impressive figure of his own: 40 million people are now paying to access his service. The last time Spotify updated us on its paid stats was back in March, when it eclipsed 30 million Premium users . The company hasn’t confirmed just how many total users it has today, but it did note that it had 100 million people on its books back in June . Signups may have been driven by Spotify’s decision to extend Family plans to six members , cutting the price to $15/£15 in the process. To lure in subscribers, Spotify operates a free tier, which many other streaming services have shied away from. Instead of requiring a monthly payment, the company attempts to recoup some of those streaming costs by dropping in adverts between tracks. The fact that it continues to convert users into paying customers is encouraging, especially given the competition, but the company still has a long way to go to prove that streaming music can be a decently profitable business . 40 is the new 30. Million.

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Spotify now has 40 million paid subscribers

Netflix Cloud Prize offers over $100,000 in rewards to cloud computing gurus

Netflix has a vested interest in fostering cloud computing — after all, that’s increasingly the company’s core business . Accordingly, it’s not going to just sit around and wait for a breakthrough. The subscription service is kicking off its Netflix Cloud Prize competition in the hopes that developers can move technology a little faster. Programmers who build upon Netflix’s open-source code before September 15th can win from a pool of $100,000 spread equally among 10 categories, ranging from performance improvements to what has to be our automatic favorite: “best new monkey .” Each winner also gets $5,000 in Amazon Web Services credit, flights to Las Vegas and a spot at Amazon’s user conference this November. The challenge won’t completely make up for the end to Netflix’s public API, but it does show that at least some tinkerers are welcome in the streaming video giant’s world. Filed under: Home Entertainment , Internet , HD Comments Source: Netflix (GitHub)

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Netflix Cloud Prize offers over $100,000 in rewards to cloud computing gurus