Light Start – Norway’s e-sports, SpaceX in the sea, Tinder rankings, and Apple Music’s numbers
Brett Venter
A high school in Norway has added e-sports to their extra-curricular offerings
Where were schools like this when we were growing up? Adding Quake II to the school’s offerings would have stopped us from installing it in the computer labs when no-one was looking. A school called Garnes Vidaregåande Skule in Bergen, Norway, will be offering e-sports for its students as from August this year, putting it on par with physical sports. Not bad for a standard high school. Students will have their e-sports time split between games training and physical training which will complement their gaming abilities. The games being supported by the program haven’t been finalised yet but Dota 2, LoL, CS: GO, and Starcraft II are all under consideration. Lucky buggers. Even if they have to provide their own keyboard and mouse.
SpaceX have not given up on that ocean barge landing
We should have guessed that this was going to happen. Following the Blue Origin rocket booster landing, SpaceX opted for a land-based rocket return. Which they nailed, by the way. So now they’re going to attempt their rocket landing on hard-mode once again by attempting to put a Falcon 9 onto a landing pad in the Pacific Ocean. They’re going to be using a slightly older model of Falcon 9 than the one that recently returned to Earth safely, probably because it’ll cost slightly less if things go pear-shaped. The attempt will be taking place later this month, on 17 January, as part of a launch which will put a new NASA satellite in orbit. Considering that each booster costs SpaceX around $61 million, being able to reuse them would be very good for the future of space travel.
It seems that Tinder is ranking users according to ‘desirability’, playing matchmaker
Do you use Tinder? Some of you might. In which case, are you aware that you’ve been given a secret ‘desirability’ score, known as an ‘Elo score’ (based on chess rankings) inside Tinder? The rating isn’t for public consumption but it does rank its users from highly desirable to… not so desired. A lot is being made of the score but it has been designed to better facilitate possible matches rather than to indicate how attractive you are. A lot of factors, including the information provided on a Tinder profile and how other users interact with that profile, go into creating that secret ranking. And, like the Fast Company writer who got to see his own ranking, you might not want to know what it is.
Apple Music reported to have passed the 10 million subscriber mark
Apple Music was a very late entry into an extremely competitive market and the service has been closely monitored to see how much traction it would get against Spotify and its ilk. We’re getting a clearer answer, with reports of Apple passing the 10 million subscriber barrier. That’s up from about 6.5 million paying subscribers in October last year, which would be a very positive increase for Apple. Unfortunately the figures aren’t coming from Apple direct. Instead the report comes by way of Financial Times, citing unnamed sources for the info. If correct the Apple’s streaming music ascent has been almost meteoric. Apple Music’s been around for about six months. Spotify took six years to hit ten million paying users. Just sayin’.
