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E3 2013 is in full swing. Microsoft kicked off the day with plenty of Xbox One news followed by several big developers showing off their upcoming flagship titles. But now it’s Sony’s turn and, thanks to gaming startup Twitch, you can watch the live stream right here.

The player above will work for all of Twitch’s content. The company’s full streaming schedule is here.

This marks Twitch’s second year at E3. Since launching in late 2011, the startup continues to roll out new features to their customers and recently ticked over 35 million users. Twitch raised a $15M Series B in September 2012.

Starting at 6:00pm PT/9:00pm ET Sony will take over the massive Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena to show off their latest. Expect plenty of game demos, PS Vita news, PlayStation 4 details and not-so-subtle digs at the Xbox One’s many shortcomings.

Sony is widely expected to finish revealing its PlayStation 4 console. The company teased the PS4 back in February, showing off a lot of demos and the new Dual Shock controller. But the console itself was curiously absent. Sony briefly talked about its X86 CPU and 8GB of memory, but stopped short of anything truly interesting.

All should be revealed today, officially kicking off the next round of console wars: Xbox One vs the PS4.

And just because it’s funny, here’s John Biggs at Sony’s 2011 E3 press conference. He likes cupcakes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Now leading the pack in gaming consoles, Microsoft’s future growth lies outside the gaming sphere. We’ll surely see tons of games at E3 in a few weeks, but at the big reveal of the Xbox One, the company chose to focus on non-gaming features, such as media streaming and Skype conversations.

But what makes streaming and entertainment a true upgrade on the Xbox One, which already has access to almost all streaming platforms? Instant Switching. It allows you to switch between inputs, games, menus, internet explorer, and almost anything else almost instantly. And what’s more, it lets you layer the power of Microsoft partnerships and information across live TV.

The Xbox responds to the voice; saying “Xbox On” turns on the console to the homescreen. The UI is familiar, and lets you see what you were doing last, along with trending content from friends, and other panels like games, tv, etc. But then you say “Xbox watch TV”, and live TV pops on. “Xbox show Guide”, and the guide pops up letting you see what’s available on Live TV. “Xbox watch ESPN”, and bloop, ESPN is on. Instant Switching at its best.

And here’s where it gets interesting:

“Xbox show Fantasy,” and instantly, along the right side of the screen showing a Knicks vs Celtics game you’ll see a run-down on your fantasy league, letting you access further information and even make alterations in real-time, right alongside the game itself.

The company also announced a new partnership with NFL which will offer exclusive content and access to Fantasy leagues in Snapmode in real-time.

This is thanks to a feature called Snapmode, which will offer new interactive experiences for Live TV. This includes social, applications, and more.

Because Xbox is now tapping into your live TV, it offers a more targeted and complete entertainment UI, with favorites showing all of your favorite content in a single destination.

And it’s all powered by your voice, should you like. What’s that? Is that the voice of Microsoft telling the hundreds of thousands of Xbox 360 owners out there, who proudly revel in their ownership of what’s considered the most popular gaming console out there, that they should maybe think about upgrading?

Of course, Microsoft wouldn’t upgrade software without hardware (which you can read more about here), and that includes the addition of a Blu-ray player.

Alongside announcing the Xbox One, Microsoft also announced a partnership with 343 Industries and Steven Spielberg to develop a live action TV show about Halo. They didn’t go into much detail, but how much you want to bet there’s some awesome Snapmode features and Xbox SmartGlass features?

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Microsoft is about to unveil the next Xbox home gaming console, and they’re broadcasting the entire event live for all to watch. There will be thrills! Spills! Chills! And maybe some actual hardware, unlike at Sony’s PlayStation 4 reveal. Check it out above, or if you’re in an environment where you can’t listen in, or just prefer glorious words written by Greg Kumparak over these newfangled moving pictures, check out our live blog.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We are updating this blog during the live congressional testimony of Apple CEO Tim Cook. More details will be added soon.

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook came out firing during his Congressional grilling, declaring, “we pay all of the taxes we owe, every single dollar”. A blistering senate investigation accused Apple of shady tax dodging, helping it avoid $13.8 billion in taxes.

In his opening testimony, Cook affirmed its position that “we don’t rely on tax gimmicks” to avoid paying any taxes (for a review of how Apple stashes cash oversees, see our previous post).

Cook had supporters on the panel, especially Senators Clare McCaskill and Rand Paul, a known libertarian who favors dramatically lowering the corporate tax rate.

Paul wigged out on his fellow senators, accused them of vilifying a great American company for fulfilling their responsibility to maximize shareholder value

[twitter https://twitter.com/SenRandPaul/status/336848667552145409%5D

[twitter https://twitter.com/SenRandPaul/status/336867611868536832%5D

McCaskill admonished Paul for his accusations against his senate colleagues, but made sure to note that “I. Love. Apple…I harassed my husband until he converted to a Macbook”

Cook, for his part, lobbied for a simpler U.S. tax code, which should “revenue neutral, eliminate all corporate tax expenditures. a reasonable tax rate on moving foreign cash back to the us. we make this recommendation with eyes open, knowing it would probably raise our own tax payouts.”

Cook admitted his gave his tax recommendation, “fully recognizing that this would result in an increase in Apple’s US taxes”.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

References to hashtags in Facebook’s code suggest the social network could be working on bringing the feature — popular on Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr — to its own platform.

Developer Tom Waddington from Cut Out + Keep, who has discovered a number of unreleased Facebook features in the past, today pointed us to a mention of the word “hashtag” in Facebook’s Javascript SDK. He says this likely for an XFBML hashtag plugin, similar to the hashtag tracking widget Twitter offers developers and publishers.

Another mention is in the live source code for Facebook.com. A reference to ”EntstreamHashtagOverlay” links hashtags to Facebook’s hovercard feature. This suggests users will be able to hover over a hashtag to get more information, similar to what they can do for people, apps and pages, as seen below.

Waddington also noticed that Facebook.com/hashtag redirects to Facebook.com, leading us to believe the company could be saving this page for an unreleased feature, otherwise it would lead to a 404 error page.

In March, anonymous sources told the Wall Street Journal, AllThingsD and TechCrunch that Facebook was working to integrate hashtags into its service to help users follow trending topics, search for news and contribute to conversations around a particular issue. That same month, Facebook added a job listing for a data editor to join the consumer communications team “responsible for amplifying the many exciting ways people are using Facebook and connecting with others during global events, holidays and other significant moments in time.”

Shortly after, the company added a multiple listings related to strategic partner development, such as roles focused on entertainment companies and public figures in Brazil and Asia, as well as musicians and athletes in the U.S.  In April, Facebook added a listing for a Public Content Partnerships Analyst to use “quantitative analysis, data mining and the presentation of data to communicate how our partners engage with our product.”

Facebook has not commented on the possibility of hashtags on the platform. Users can already include hashtags in their posts — and many do, often for stylistic reasons — but these do not generate links to more posts with the same hashtags. On other services, hashtags serve to label and group conversations. Although they are most associated with Twitter, they have roots in early Internet chat networks and have more recently taken off on Instagram, which Facebook now owns.

Hashtags could give Facebook users new ways to engage with people and content outside their network of friends. The feature could also lead to better ways of searching posts. With Graph Search, Facebook removed the ability to search public conversations. Hashtag search could replace that and improve Facebook’s existing photo search by letting users tag their contents as they do on Instagram.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Earlier this week we reported on how Backupify was closing down TweetBackup, a free service to back up your Twitter account that it acquired in 2010; now we have confirmed that, as we’d heard, this is part of a bigger plan at the company to phase out consumer services altogether, as Backupify focuses its efforts on paid services for enterprise customers. From today, it will stop accepting new sign-ups for its free tier of back-up services for personal files. It is also discontinuing by the end of this year support for certain sites, including Facebook personal profiles, Blogger, Picassa and Flickr.

It will continue to offer services to back up Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter and personal Gmail accounts, but it’s likely that these will be moved to all-paid services over time, as part of its personal backup products, which it will continue to support “for the foreseeable future” (even if only as paid, not free, products). Rob May, CEO of Backupify, tells us that the timescale for free support is around two more quarters.

The moves are a signal that some startups that began with consumer social media services in mind have found that market hard to monetize. On the other hand, as enterprises become increasingly social, they are proving to be willing paying customers for many of the same kinds of offerings.

Rob May, CEO of Backupify, tells us that this move has been a long time in the making — some two years in fact.

“We started Backupify as a consumer-facing business but we quickly realized there was money in SMB and enterprise, so when we raised money the intention was to use it to go after the B2B market. And this is now a bigger chunk of our revenue — over 90%,” he told TechCrunch. In a blog post on the news, May also notes that enterprise was only a small percentage of revenues three years ago.

The company is not revealing total user numbers currently but when it announced a Series C round of $9 million last year, it had 170,000 users, and didn’t break out how many of those were free or paid.

He notes that in fact there is nothing of TweetBackup getting left behind in the closure. Over time, as Twitter has changed its own APIs, the company had to rebuilt its product from the ground up. It’s that rebuilt technology that has also gone into Ditto, the Symantec service for backing up Twitter accounts, which turns out was co-developed with Backupify (one by-product of the strategic investment that Symantec made as part of that most recent $9 million round of fundraising).

In the meantime, Backupify is working on developing services to back up other platforms and sites. It’s currently in testing with Apptivo, Freshdesk, Mavenlink, Nimble and Pipeline Deals to provide backup services to their users, and with the increasing move to cloud-based enterprise services, you can see how and where something like that could develop further. May says it’s not currently working with Evernote — a company with an ethos of saving your data for the rest of your live and beyond — but that he would love to.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google took the lid off of its new version of Maps at I/O 2013 today, which is a dramatic redesign of the long-standing navigation and place-finding software across all platforms. We got a chance to go hands-on with the new Maps, which is still a beta product, with access only given out to a few select users so far. In the video above, you check it out in action as a Google rep gives us a walkthrough.

The new Google Maps takes a bunch of stuff that Google has been working on from Knowledge Graph to make, as it put it during the keynote, billions of apps for billions of people. That means you get a lot more personalization pulled into the experience, surfacing local landamrks that are likely important to you, as well as one-click directions from stored locations like your home address. Places frequented by your friends and acquaintances will also be pulled in to complete the picture.

The whole experience on a Chromebook Pixel was fast, responsive and remarkably intuitive. All the new touch controls seem perfectly designed for use with the Pixel’s touchscreen display, and reduce dramatically the number of steps required to do things like call up directions. The in-building panoramas and 360-degree images are very impressive, and truly do give you a sense of both the inside and outside of a location, but don’t expect the images to be all that comprehensive for most locations at launch.

Overall this looks like an awesome improvement to the Maps experience, and it’s hard to see any spots where the progress isn’t a good thing. But it’s very different, so expect some pushback when Google does eventually push this live to a wider audience.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google just launched an on-demand subscription music service at I/O called “Google Play Music All Access”. Its web and mobile interfaces feature millions of songs you can play instantly, recommendations, charts and playlists, and instant radio stations. The Spotify competitor launches today in the US for $9.99 a month, comes with a free trial month, and sign-ups before June 30th get it for $7.99.

All Access is just one of dozens of announcements Google launched today at its I/O conference in San Francisco. Follow along with our live blog for all the news and our commentary.

Everything from your Google Music locker is automatically pulled into Google Play Music All Access. Beneath the content you own, everything else an artist has ao All Access is automatically listed and plays at a tap. More countries will get Google Play Music All Access soon.

News that the service was coming was leaked yesterday by The Verge after it discovered Google had completed licensing deals with the major record labels. Google launched its music locker service two years ago, and later started selling music files from Play. Now Google Play users have a choice to stream rather than download.

Google’s Chris Yerga explained that with current music services, you might have a huge catalog to choose from, but getting that music organized and playing quickly is too hard. “Why is it that managing my queue feels like a chore? We set up to build a music services that doesn’t just give you access to great music but also guides you through it” said Google’s Chris Yerga.

Overall the app looks slick, with options for instantly queuing up songs. It’s also designed to get music playing as fast possible if you just want your ears filled.

All Access will have a tough road to traction, considering Spotify’s huge head start with 24 million active users and 6 million paying subscribers. However, the fact that All Access is located within the Android-ubiquitous Google Play store means Google could heavily promote it if it wants growth.

The logic behind launching an on-demand music service seems to be that it’s a critical part of any phone. Android is incomplete without it. Google Play Music All Access might never become a market leader, or even make Google much money directly, but it strengthens its presence on mobile. It could get people buying more Android phones, which lead to plenty of other revenue for Google.

Viewers are asking for more live streaming video, and surprisingly, broadcasters are willing to give it to them. Gone are the days where live events need to be watched on the TV, because I mean, who watches TV anymore? When I watch the game, I’m gonna do so on a seven-inch tablet in the privacy of my bathroom, because there’s nowhere else I can concentrate when the kids are watching Dora the Explorer on Netflix in the living room — or whatever it is the kids are watching these days.

Anyway, keenly aware of this trend, thePlatform — which already helps a number of broadcast and cable networks manage their on-demand libraries — is taking steps to make live event streaming easier for their customers. The company, which is a subsidiary of Comcast, is launching a new, SaaS-based platform which will allow networks to schedule and manage live events, with everything they need, like signal acquisition and encoding, dynamic ad insertion and metadata creation, and automatic archiving of programs when they’re done.

The new live video offering will integrate seamlessly both with thePlatform’s existing on-demand video management system, as well as with the encoders that broadcasters use to take analog signals and make them digital. To start, that integration will include Elemental encoders, although thePlatform’s VP of marketing, Marty Roberts, promises that other encoders will be added soon. But anyway, once your encoder is hooked up to thePlatform, you’re good to go!

After you’ve taken care of that, there’s all sorts of stuff you can do with it. Wanna hit each and every device your device-specific rights contract allows you to stream to? NO PROBLEM.

Let’s say that you can stream to the desktop and laptop, but not mobile phones because you’ve got some exclusive legacy contract with a mobile phone provider where only their subscribers get the game. thePlatform has you covered. It even gets extra bonus points for streaming to the iPad, which no one could have imagined when that contract was put in place and isn’t considered a mobile device. (Yeh, I don’t understand it either.)

How about making money? After all, you’re not gonna stream that football game for free now, are you? NO WORRIES! thePlatform has live ad insertion. You just tell those ads when to run and you’re golden. Cha-Ching!

Wanna add funny graphics or live info while viewers are watching? NOT A BIGGIE. In the same way you just ran an ad, you can also dynamically queue up pretty much any type of media, just like it’s an ad!

And once your live show is over, don’t you worry your little head about re-encoding it and putting it into some on-demand library for all the lamers who didn’t watch it live to come look at it later. thePlatform will auto-archive that shiz for you and feed it right into your on-demand library, with whatever rights management and ad rules and whatever else you want to apply to it.

That way, it doesn’t have to be lost to the ether when all the action is over — the content will have all the same ad cues, chapter breaks, and metadata that was associated with it while it was streaming live. But now viewers will be able to search for it, and find just the moments they want to watch.

So thePlatform has been working with a few different networks — like some of Fox’s regional sports nets and NBC Sports — and things have been all good on their live events. So now the live streaming offering will be generally available to other folks who want to try it. Got a network and wanna do it live! Call thePlatform!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

After a long decade of media destruction, no one in the industry was surprised to see “Reporter (Newspaper)” ranked as the worst job of 2013. But life is starting to look better for some online publications — like at Vox Media. Its SB Nation network of local sports sites has become a foundation for a national edition, tech-oriented news site The Verge, and most recently video gaming site Polygon.

On the business side, it has begun cracking the display advertising market.

The CEO who is behind its ongoing growth is Jim Bankoff, who you may also know as the guy who previously led Aol’s content businesses for many years. He’s going to have a couple of newsy things to say about Vox and the business of high-quality media today when I interview him Monday at Disrupt NY. If you’re interested in media, advertising, and startups trying to get into these industries, you’ll want to see this.

Tickets are available here.

He joins our list of Disrupt NY speakers that currently includes Nasty Gal’s Deborah Benton, investor Chamath Palihapitiya, and hardware creator Limor Fried, with more still to be announced.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.

Jim Bankoff
Chairman & CEO, Vox Media

Jim runs all aspects of Vox Media, one of the fastest growing online publishers, focused on the sports, personal technology and gaming categories. Vox is solving the problem of developing high-value digital journalism, storytelling and brand advertising at scale. Its audiences are among the most engaged and affluent on the web.

SB Nation, its sports brand, boasts over 30 million users per month across 300 individually branded, fan-centric sports communities, each covering a specific professional or college team, league or sport. In November 2011, Vox Media launched The Verge, which has quickly established itself as a category leader and the fastest growing site that covers technology. In October, Vox launched Polygon, a site dedicated to news and community for fans of gaming, anchored by an all-star roster of writers. All Vox Media sites are built upon, Chorus, its world-class proprietary publishing platform.

The company enjoys support from leading investors including Accel Partners, Comcast Interactive Capital, Khosla Ventures and Allen & Company.

A veteran of the online industry, Jim developed and led dozens of the most popular websites on the Internet including Aol, Mapquest, Moviefone, AOL Music and Engadget as an Executive Vice President at Aol. He co-founded TMZ.com and also oversaw Aol’s industry-leading instant messaging services, AIM and ICQ, and social networking and community applications including Blogsmith and Netscape.

His accomplishments have earned him wide recognition, most notably the first Emmy ever awarded to a webcast, for his role as Executive Producer of the Live 8 concerts online. Jim also serves as a Senior Advisor at Providence Equity Partners, the largest private equity firm focused on media and communications.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch