ZipCharge has launched a new type of charging product for EVs that might be able to convince people worried about range anxiety to switch from gas vehicles. The British startup has introduced a powerbank for EVs called ZipCharge Go at the Cop26 climate summit. It's about the size of a suitcase and weighs around 50 pounds — plus, it has wheels and a retractable handle, so users can put it in their trunk and easily take it out when they need to charge.
According to the company, the Go can provide up 20 miles of range after being plugged into the car for 30 minutes. A higher capacity version will be able to provide an EV up to 40 miles of range. The device works with any plug-in hybrid or EV with a Type 2 socket, and it can charge that vehicle to its full capacity between 30 minutes to an hour. Charging up the device itself is as easy as plugging it into any socket, and users will be able to control and monitor it through an app, where they can schedule future charges during off-peak hours for cheaper costs.
While range anxiety is becoming less of an issue these days, it's still keeping those on the fence from making the leap. A company called Gogoro developed hot-swappable battery technology for scooters to address the problem, but batteries in electric cars typically can't be swapped out. SparkCharge has a portable EV charging system called the Roadie, but it's not nearly as easy to carry around as the Go.
That said, the ZipCharge Go isn't available yet. According to InsideEVs, the startup plans to release a 4 kWh and an 8 kWh version, as well as to start deliveries in the fourth quarter of 2022. It can be leased for at least £49 (US$67) per month, though it will also be available for purchase to EV owners who don't mind paying for one and to businesses like hotels that don't have installed charging facilities. While ZipCharge has yet to reveal a price for it, The Sunday Times Driving section says the company aims to sell it for around the same cost as a 7.2kW home charging port installation.
Philips Hue lighting products can do some pretty cool things these days, like syncing with Spotify or helping you sleep. They're not exactly cheap, but luckily Amazon is offering significant discounts on Hue bulbs and kits as an early Black Friday sale, for today only. The deals includes a starter kit with Hue bulbs and buttons, a colored Hue bulb pack and a Smart Lightstrip Bundle, with discounts up to 41 percent.
A good way to get started would be with the Philips Hue White LED Smart Button Starter Kit, now on sale for $80 instead of $100 (20 percent off). That gets you three Hue White LED 60W bulbs that can fit in most lamps, overhead lights and recessed cans. It also comes with the Philips Hue hub that can reliably control up to 50 Hue lights without taxing your WiFi, along with one Smart Button that can be attached with magnets or tape — no hard-wiring required.
If you want some color on top of that, the above bundle together with a Bluetooth Smart Lightstrip Plus Bundle is also on sale for $144, a savings of 19 percent. The latter product connects with the Hue Hub, allowing you create a colored light experience across the entire six-foot strip for extra ambience around your home. You can also sync the Lightstrip with gaming, music or movies using the Hue Sync app.
Finally, if you want color and simplicity, the best Amazon deal is on the Philips Hue White and Color Ambience bulbs (above). Pick up a three-pack for just $80 ($26.66 each), for a savings of $55 or 41 percent. Up to ten of these bulbs can be controlled directly or by voice control with your smartphone using the Hue App. From there, you can program up to 16 million colors for parties or to set different moods in your house depending on the time of day.
Roughly a year since announcing it, McDonald’s is ready to test its first plant-based burger. Ahead of its trial launch in the US today, I tasted the collaboration between Beyond Meat and the Golden Arches; although the version here in the UK is entirely vegan, with pea-protein-based ‘cheese,’ a vegan sauce subbing in for mayo and even a vegan-friendly sesame-seed bun.
The US take uses a slice of American cheese and proper mayo — though you can customize your order to avoid these. The plant-based patty will also be cooked alongside meat-based products, making it not entirely vegan. Given the cheese included, however, McDonald’s USA is positioning it more like a substitute item for people looking to reduce their meat intake. But how does it taste? You’ll have to read on.
NVIDIA is tapping the potential of its own GPUs to do things beyond, well, graphics. Evolving from RTX Voice, which as the name implies, is a tool for upping your microphone skills, it quietly released Broadcast — a more comprehensive tool aimed squarely at streamers and content creators. Broadcast dabbles in both audio and video improvements, and James Trew has been testing it out. Expect to see his spin-off Twitch stream dedicated to the Atari Lynx very soon.
Activision Blizzard is once again delaying Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV. Following months of upheaval at its Blizzard Entertainment subsidiary, stemming from a sexual harassment lawsuit the State of California filed in July, the publisher announced during its recent third-quarter 2021 earnings call that it's pushing those games back to give the teams working on them more time.
"While we are still planning to deliver a substantial amount of content from Blizzard next year, we are now planning for a later launch for Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV than originally envisaged," the company said.
This announcement came alongside news that Jen Oneal has stepped down from her role as co-leader of Blizzard, leaving Mike Ybarra as the head of the studio. Oneal, the first woman in a president role since Activision's founding in 1979, will temporarily transition to a new position, but will leave Activision Blizzard at the end of the year.
Its creators may have made off with as much as $3.38 million.
A cryptocurrency inspired by Netflix hit Squid Game successfully enticed enough investors to see its value soar to over $2,800... before its creators cashed out and disappeared. The cryptocurrency called $SQUID launched in late October and rose up to 310,000 percent in value in just a few days. It was meant to be for playing for an upcoming online game based on the South Korean series.
Early Monday morning, however, the coin's value plummeted to $0, its website disappeared (you can view an archive here) and its Twitter account got blocked.
It makes the company's vision of collaborative work clearer.
Microsoft Loop, a new Office collaboration app announced today, takes the company's Fluid Framework vision one step further. You might remember the technology from Microsoft's recent developer events. Simply put, it should allow collaboration on specific chunks of content, say a table or chart, synchronized across multiple Office apps. A table you create in Outlook, for example, would instantly update if someone plugs it into a Word document and adds new information. Oh, and Microsoft is, naturally, working on the multiverse. MS Word in VR, baby!
Definitely not a plant-based burger. Traeger is expanding its range of supplies and gear to offer you literally everything you might need for a full meal, with all the dishes cooked directly on its grills. Traeger Provisions is a HelloFresh-like meal kit that includes the meat, sides, rubs, sauces and more.
At launch, the meat options are Wagyu beef brisket, Poulet Rouge chicken and Berkshire St. Louis pork ribs. Traeger says portion sizes for all three will accommodate 4 to 8 people, depending on the protein. For the brisket, the company also offers an option for 14 to 16 people (half brisket vs. whole brisket). Prices range from $150 to $180 for the smaller packages, while the larger whole brisket box is $250.
Back in October, Google Stadia introduced free trials with its Hello Engineer game. While the service lets users try any game they want with a $10-per-month Pro subscription, it was the first time free users were given the chance to test a game before purchase. Now, according to 9to5Google, Stadia is giving free users the opportunity to take two more games for a spin before they have to buy them. One of those games is Control: Ultimate Edition, which recently just came out for the platform.
Ultimate Edition contains the core Control game, along with the expansions that were released for it. Like Hello Engineer, players will be able to test it out for 30 minutes before they have to decide whether to pay $40 for a copy. The other game is Ubisoft's recently released Riders Republic, a massively multiplayer extreme sports game, where teams can battle each other on bikes, skis, snowboards and in flying wingsuits. Players will get the chance to try it out for two hours instead of just 30 minutes, perhaps because half an hour might barely be enough to cover tutorials when there are several extreme sports to choose from. Besides, Riders Republic isn't cheap and costs $60 to purchase.
With the addition of these two games, we can probably expect Google to make more titles available for free trial in the future. It could be an effective way to get people who'd rather own the titles they play interested in purchasing from Stadia instead of from other gaming platforms.
Apple got some of its MacBook sales mojo back last quarter thanks to discounts on the MacBook Air, according to the research firm Strategy Analytics. The company sold a record 6.5 million MacBooks in Q3 2021, up 10 percent over last year — no doubt contributing to its blockbuster Mac quarter. Meanwhile, Chromebook sales actually declined for the first time since the pandemic started, IDC reported.
Laptop sales in general were up eight percent over last year to 66.8 million units, due largely to commercial and educational sales. That was aided in part by "higher discounts on premium products like MacBook Air and gaming notebooks," according to Strategy Analytics.
Strategy Analytics
Sales could have been even higher if not for a shortage of components and higher freight costs that drove prices higher and caused some delays. Lenovo topped the sales list for the fourth quarter in a row with 15.3 million units shipped, with HP, Dell, Apple and ASUS rounding out the top five.
Chromebook and tablet sales didn't fare so well though, according to IDC. Chromebook sales tumbled by 29.8 percent year-over-year to 6.5 million units, thanks largely to "saturation" in the education market. "Many schools and governments blew out their budgets to provide devices for remote learning and even consumers aggressively purchased devices for learning in 2020," the firm wrote. Lenovo again topped the sales list for Chromebooks, followed by Acer, Dell, HP and Samsung.
Tablet sales slowed 9.4 percent to 42.3 million units, due to reduced demand and limited supply. The exception to that trend was Apple, which saw iPad sales grow 4.6 percent over last year to 14.7 million units. That dominated the category, as Samsung sold just over half that number (7.5 million), followed by Amazon, Lenovo and Huawei.
HBO Max has released the first teaser video and images for its adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel's post-apocalyptic novel, Station Eleven. In the short video, you'll get glimpses of Jeevan (Himesh Patel), Kirsten (Matilda Lawler as her younger version and Mackenzie Davis as her older version) and the other main characters of the story, as they face a pandemic that ravaged most of the planet.
The teaser trailer starts off with Jeevan and young Kirsten purchasing carts upon carts of food from a nearly empty supermarket, as well as a a lone cashier who didn't know where to go. From there, we see a montage of bleak landscapes, a ferris wheel and a building on fire, a theater performance (which is a central element to the story), a mysterious figure, people panicking and then trying to rebuild what they lost.
Mandel's novel is set in the Great Lakes region before and after a fictional swine flu pandemic killed most of the world's population. According to Polygon, it started shooting in Chicago in January 2020, but because of the real-life pandemic still affecting us right now, production had to be moved to Mississauga, Ontario and concluded in July. The 10-episode limited series was directed by Hiro Murai (Atlanta), while Patrick Somerville (Made for Love) served as writer and showrunner. It will be available to stream on HBO Max, starting on December 16th.
In the southeast of South Australia lie the Naracoorte Caves. The national park is an UNESCO World Heritage Site known for its stalactites, stalagmites and prehistoric fossils. Recently, a group of students from the University of Adelaide built a robot to complete a 3D scan of the site. The project, called CaveX, saw the group create 15 iterations of the model you see above before they settled on a final design. They went with a robot that walks on a set of six legs out of a fear that one with treads or wheels would damage the surface of the caves. The design also allowed it to traverse uneven terrain with a variety of different gaits.
Matthew King
As for the 3D scans, the hope is that they’ll lead to new discoveries at the site. "We're looking at the cave surface to find new cave entrances which will hopefully lead to new fossil deposits," Craig Williams, one of the PhD students who worked on the project, told ABC Australia. "That will help us enhance the range of knowledge on the fossils that are here." The team that worked on the project hopes a new generation of engineering students will continue to work on the robot. One day, they'd like to see it take advantage of technologies like computer vision AI to make it better at its job.
Jen Oneal has stepped down from her role as co-leader of Blizzard, leaving Mike Ybarra as the head of the studio known for making Overwatch, World of Warcraft and Diablo. Oneal will temporarily transition to a new position, but will leave Activision Blizzard (fine, and King) at the end of the year.
Activision Blizzard is facing a handful of lawsuits and investigations into reports of sexual harassment, gropings, and systemic gender discrimination at the studio, stemming from the leadership down. Oneal and Ybarra took over as co-leaders of Blizzard after president J. Allen Brack was named in the original California lawsuit, forcing him to leave that position. Oneal was the first woman in a president role since Activision's founding in 1979.
Oneal published an open letter to the Blizzard community, reading in part as follows:
I have made the decision to step away from co-leading Blizzard Entertainment and will transition to a new position before departing ABK at the end of the year. Effective immediately, Mike Ybarra will lead Blizzard. I am doing this not because I am without hope for Blizzard, quite the opposite — I’m inspired by the passion of everyone here, working towards meaningful, lasting change with their whole hearts. This energy has inspired me to step out and explore how I can do more to have games and diversity intersect, and hopefully make a broader industry impact that will benefit Blizzard (and other studios) as well. While I am not totally sure what form that will take, I am excited to embark on a new journey to find out.
After months of pressure from employees, shareholders and government agencies, Activision Blizzard ended its policy of forced arbitration in cases of sexual harassment and discrimination, and implemented a zero-tolerance approach to harassment at the studio. The original California lawsuit is ongoing.
Blizzard announced two big delays alongside news of Oneal's departure: Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV, neither of which was given a release window.
Activision Blizzard is once again delaying Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV. Following months of upheaval at its Blizzard Entertainment subsidiary stemming from a sexual harassment lawsuit the State of California filed in July, the publisher announced during its recent third-quarter 2021 earnings call that it's pushing those games back to give the teams working on them more time.
"While we are still planning to deliver a substantial amount of content from Blizzard next year, we are now planning for a later launch for Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV than originally envisaged," the company said.
It did not share a revised release date for either title. "These decisions will push will push the financial uplift that we had expected to see next year," Activision said. "But we are confident that is the right course of action for our people, our players, and the long-term successes of our franchises."
Blizzard unveiled Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV at Blizzcon 2019. At the time, the studio made it clear that both games were in early development, but the expectation was that it would release them sometime in 2021. Activision dashed those hopes at the start of the year when it said neither title would come out in 2021.
Most climate change misinformation comes from only a handful of sources. That’s according to a new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). The organization found that ten publishers are responsible for 69 percent of all interactions with climate change denial content on Facebook. Included in the group, which the CCDH titled “The Toxic Ten,” are Brietbart, Russia Today and Media Research Center, which has ties to the fossil fuel industry.
The findings broadly mirror that of another report the CCDH published earlier in the year, which found that as much as 73 percent of vaccine misinformation on Facebook can be linked to only 12 individuals dubbed the “disinformation dozen.” That study has been widely cited by US lawmakers who have called on social media platforms to do more to address the “urgent threat” misinformation represents to public health.
As it did with the earlier disinformation dozen report, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, disputed the methodology the CCDH used to compile its latest study. “The 700,000 interactions this report says were on climate denial represent 0.3 percent of the over 200 million interactions on English public climate change content from Pages and public groups over the same time period,” a spokesperson for the company said. It also pointed to the recently announced expansion of features like the Climate Change Information Center as evidence of its commitment to tackling misinformation on the topic.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the CCDH, said the organization looked at approximately 7,000 articles published between October 2020 and October 2021. He called the sample “robust” and said there was enough data “to derive representative finds of trends.”
Additionally, the report examined the financial incentives involved in publishing climate change denial content. The CCDH estimates eight of the companies included in the Toxic Ten made $5.3 million in Google ad revenue over the last six months, with $1.7 million going to the search giant. "We recently announced a new policy that explicitly prohibits publishers and YouTube Creators from monetizing content that promotes climate change denial. This policy will go into effect on November 8 and our enforcement will be as targeted as removing ads from individual pages with violating content," a spokesperson for Google told Engadget.
“When you put it all together, you’ve got these two industries, Big Oil and Big Tech, and they are the two industries that pose the greatest threat to the survival of our species,” Ahmed told The Post.
The timing of The Toxic Ten report comes as delegates from around the world meet at the UN’s COP26 climate summit in Scotland in what’s been described as “the world’s last best chance” to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Without dramatic reductions, the planet is currently on track for a “catastrophic” 2.7 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures. With every additional degree of warming beyond the 1.5-degree target put forward by the Paris Agreement, there’s a greater risk of the planet passing specific tipping points that could lead to even more dramatic changes to the climate.
