Microsoft Unveils Xbox One
Today at a press conference leading up to E3, Microsoft unveiled its next-gen games/entertainment console, the Xbox One. Their stated goal for the Xbox One is to have a single device provide "all of your entertainment." One of the big changes is increased support for voice and and gesture input. You can turn the console on by voice, and it will recognize you and automatically login. Swiping to the side with your hand will browse through menu pages, and saying "Watch TV" will bring up the TV app very quickly. The same with music, internet, and movies. The new console also supports multitasking — for example, while watching a movie, you can bring up your web browser in a side panel and surf the web at the same time. There is also a built-in TV listings app that responds to channel names — saying "Watch CBS" will switch to CBS without giving it an actual channel number. By this point, you're probably asking: does it play games? Yes. Hardware specs: 8-core CPU, 8GB RAM, a Blu-ray drive, ...
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Japan Pledges $2 Billion for African Projects
Japan is pledging $2 billion for energy and mineral projects in Africa, capping a conference with government resource officials from across the continent.
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Nations Pledge $4.22 Billion in Mali Aid
Countries attending a fundraising conference for Mali on Wednesday pledged €3.25 billion ($4.22 billion) to rebuild the war-torn African country.
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Google Maps API Gets A Visual Refresh, Available For Opt-In Today, Coming To Most Sites In August
At its I/O developer conference, Google today announced a new Maps API for mobile developers, updates to Maps for Android and iOS, as well as a completely refreshed Google Maps experience on the desktop. After the main keynote, however, Google also announced a major visual refresh for sites that use its Google Maps API. Currently, the company today announced, more than one million sites use the Maps API and all of them will get this visual refresh over the next few months. These sites reach about a billion users every week. The refreshed look, with new base map tiles, default markers and window style, will become the default in the Google Maps API experimental branch (which despite its name is actually the most-often used branch) on August 15. Developers can also opt in to use it today by just changing a single line of code. It will roll out to the release branch (which is used by most Maps for Business customers) in November. This is what it’ll look like: Google says it “carefully designed ...
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Google: Android Users Have Now Installed Over 48B Apps, Up 2.5x From A Year Ago
At its sixth annual I/O developer conference in San Francisco, Google today announced that Android users have now installed over 48 billion apps. Just in the last two months, users installed 2.5 billion apps. Android’s senior vice president for Android product management made this announcement at the outset of the I/O keynote, in which Google also announced that it has now reached over 900 million Android activations, up from the 400 million it announced last year. Just last September, Google announced that it had passed 25 billion app installs, so there is clearly a strong momentum here and Google is poised to overtake Apple’s 50 billion app installs in the next few months.
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