Author: Brett Venter

YouTube, even more than Deezer, Tidal, and Spotify, is where much of the world goes to in order to find music. A streaming service from the Google-owned video giant would make sense, given how much musical content is already hosted on its servers. YouTube Music would also be a sensible name for it, so as not to dilute the brand. See where we’re going with this? YouTube has announced YouTube Music, a new desktop player (we’re not sure if this is browser-based or not, yet) and an app that will allow users to search and stream music. Loads of music.…

If you’ve been holding off on getting a decoder and satellite dish, or recently turfed yours in favour of a streaming service, then you’d better keep your eyes on DStv. They’re not done with you yet. In an interview with TechCentral earlier this week, DStv CEO Calvo Mawela revealed that the MultiChoice-owned company is working on bringing a streaming-only version of DStv to market. The timeline is… late to the party, with a 2018 launch being very unlikely and a 2019 release being the prime candidate — though Mawela wasn’t able to lock down a potential date when we might see…

Some of you might remember Rage (or RAGE), an iD Software-created post-apocalyptic title from 2010 that featured solid driving and shooting mechanics but had little else to commend it. We thought we’d seen the back of it but it seems Bethesda are issuing a sequel called, predictably, RAGE 2. Also predictably, RAGE 2 has undergone an overhaul. Gone are the drab colours and limited environments of the first game. According to the first gameplay trailer, the gameplay features a whole lot more to see, do, shoot, and jump over. We’ve even detected a few splashes of actual colour, which were…

We knew this day was coming but who knew it would be so soon. Robotics company Boston Dynamics is making their SpotMini robot, a headless dog-like quadruped, commercially available before the end of 2019. Initially though, you’re probably not going to be able to afford one. Most recently, we saw SpotMini navigating hallways all on its own and it’s that skill (and others) that will see the robotic dog wandering around homes and businesses in the near future. Boston Dynamics has said that the 30kg robot was originally designed to be “…something that could go in an office or accessible…

NASA is sending its first interplanetary helicopter to Mars in 2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOMQOqKRWjU Well this is an expensive piece of equipment to send to be destroyed on another planet. NASA’s 2020 Mars rover project is going to be sending Earth’s first interplanetary helicopter to the red planet, where it will be used to survey the planet from a pair of cameras — something that has never been done before. If, that is, it’s able to lift off. The tiny little autonomous craft has been made very light, to deal with the much thinner atmosphere found on Mars. If everything goes as…

Google may be making the technological brains of the future but it is companies like Boston Dynamics that are making the bodies of our future robot overlords. The robotics company is at it again, showing off some of the advances they’re seeing in robotic movement. Back in the spotlight? Atlas and SpotMini. SpotMini, last we checked in on it (him. Er… them), was able to work out how to open doors and let other robots through, thwarting our cunning plans to avoid the robot rebellion by simple going inside away from them. We would have hoped that SpotMini would have kept…

Steam is an amazing invention, a cloud-based library of games for us to all buy (on special, naturally) and then never install, play, or look at again. After all the saying does go: He who dies with the most unplayed Steam games wins. But some people must use the service for more than just playing DOTA 2 and Team Fortress 2 and those folks will be pleased with the changes coming to Steam Link. Steam Link, for those who don’t know, is an application that allows gamers to stream games from their home PC to a connected TV set, where…

If you haven’t seen and heard the jaw-dropping performance of Google’s Duplex natural language virtual assistant that took place at this year’s Google I/O, the first thing that you need to do is watch/listen to the Google Assistant AI system make a call — first to a hair salon and then to a restaurant (where the actual human being is a second-language speaker with a heavy accent). Check out the video below. After that, you need to either a) marvel at the future of technology or b) worry about the future of mankind. Or a combination of the two. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5VN56jQMWM…

Google’s already had a very impressive showing at their annual Google I/O event, including a jaw-dropping demonstration of AI-based natural language interactions with real human beings, but it’s the public beta of the new version of Android, Android P, which has caught our attention. That’s right, you can try out an Android OS so fresh that it doesn’t have a full code-name (like Nougat or Oreo) yet. Android… Pancake, maybe? Poptart? Android P is just Android P at the moment but that doesn’t mean that the incoming features are half-baked. Users will be able to explore the new A.I. deep-learning…

We can’t say that we didn’t know it was coming, it was just a question of when. Nintendo has outlined what’s going to be arriving when their paid-for Switch Online service launches a little later on this year. If you ask us, the (expansive) features justify the (fairly minimal) cost. That’s because Nintendo aren’t just giving subscribers access to online play — something that we now have for free (but this will be going away once the service launches). Players will also be able to back-up (some) save data in the cloud, a service that already exists for those paying…