VEVO Relaunches Its Web And Mobile Sites To Streamline Music Video Search And Discovery

Music video powerhouse VEVO is launching a major redesign this week, after rebuilding its back end from the ground up. The online music video site has undergone a complete overhaul, which you can see here, designed to make it easier for users to browse and discover new content, while also streamlining the ability to search for the videos that they want to watch.

The new VEVO, which goes live Friday, is an extension of the company’s continued iteration on its web, mobile, and connected TV platforms. With this launch, the VEVO team has done a lot of work to actually simplify the user interface and strip out some of the clutter that had been in previous versions. At the same time, it’s setting the stage for VEVO to do some more interesting things around content discovery and personalization.

The new website is designed to be cleaner, faster, and dynamic, so viewers can tune in via desktop, smartphone, or tablet, and it automatically fits the screen. Now viewers who go to VEVO TV will have a simplified nav bar with just a few options: VEVO TV, Search, and Browse.

On the homepage, in addition to the carousel of videos, there’s also now a feed of regularly updated content that goes beyond its usual daily feed. By featuring new videos regularly, the hope is to draw the user in and get viewers watching videos more quickly.

“We wanted to simplify things to get people watching videos right away. As we started thinking about engagement, there’s now a sense of urgency… There’s always something new coming up,” SVP of Product & Technology Michael Cerda told me.

In addition to updating the homepage, VEVO has also expanded its VEVO TV live music feed. Launched in May, VEVO TV is designed to evoke the same feeling of that old “music television” — you know, from back when it actually played music. But it’s mean to be streamed rather than just delivered via cable.

Now instead of a single VEVO TV channel, VEVO will have three channels of videos. VEVO’s “Pop” channel will take over as the main feed, providing a live broadcast of all the most popular music videos today. It’s also introducing two new channels — Country and R&B/Rap — to provide viewers with access to continuous, linear programming of music from both of those genres.

While the most obvious changes might be on the VEVO homepage, the more important work went on under the hood. When it first launched, VEVO had been built on a Microsoft .NET stack. But according to Cerda, the team has quietly moved its backend to a Node.js framework.

It’s also refined and rebuilt its API, which will help VEVO extend its content to new partners, and also make it easier for the company to build experiences for new platforms.

Given all the changes behind the scenes, Cerda called it the most significant update that the company has ever done. The company started building the new experience in the late winter, rebuilding the backend from the ground up. The first step was building the web and mobile web sites, but the new backend will speed up its ability to reach new devices and update apps on existing platforms.

For instance, the company just rolled out a new experience on Samsung Smart TVs and is currently working on apps that work with Google’s $35 Chromecast streaming dongle. Once that’s done, viewers will have the AirPlay-like ability to send videos from its mobile apps for iOS and Android straight to their TV.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/Bf5jqWow5rI/
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Developers, Damon Wayans, dinner and drinks: It's the Samsung Developers Conference party!

SDKs and APIs are great and all — but it's really not a developers conference without a party, right? And on the close of the first day of the Samsung Developers Conference, attendees got their fill of food, drink and some gagdgety science at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

And, yes, that's special guest Damon Wayans! 

Check out our recap above, and be sure to swing by our complete SDC13 coverage to see everything you missed!

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/IJ50Itd7chI/story01.htm
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Victory! You Don't Have to Shut Off Your Electronics On Flights Anymore

After years of will they or won't they, the FAA has finally given permission for airlines to allow passengers to use personal electronics for the entirety of their flights. Translation: You don't have to shut down your phone anymore. Finally.

Read more...

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/9XcY_6Av9Rk/faa-personal-electronics-can-be-safely-used-in-all-pha-1455949764
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iMore show LIVE! 8am PT, 11am ET - Join us!

Join Peter, Richard, and me for the live version of our iPad Air and iPad mini buyers guide! We'll be talking through upgrading, which models to get, how they compare, choosing the right capacity, color, and carrier, and more!

• 8am PT, 11am ET - be here!

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/Na8Jp2YOKeQ/story01.htm
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Ingress beta for Android now open to all augmented reality fans

For the past year, the Ingress beta has been as much an exclusive club as it is an augmented reality game -- you've had to request an invitation to play. Google and Niantic Labs must want more of us to join the party, though, as they've quietly dropped the invitation requirement. Any Android user ...

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/7xNpiRn1wew/
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It Gets Better

When healthcare.gov launched with the fanfare and success of a North Korean missile, the president insisted that Obamacare was more than a website.

Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

During the public debate over health care in 2009 and 2010, no matter how tightly you may have shut your door, there was one piece of information it was impossible to avoid: the president's promise that if you liked your doctor and your health care plan you would be able to keep it. So it was a surprise to many people to get a letter like the one Independence Blue Cross sent its customers weeks ago. It said that as a result of the Affordable Care Act, "your current plan will be discontinued effective January 1, 2014, and you will need to select a new plan by the end of December to avoid any interruption in coverage." 

That wasn't what the president promised. But wait, the president can explain. It's not what we think. People won’t have the same insurance—they will have better insurance, administration officials assure. That's not the way some of the people receiving these letters see it. The president's original promise was so ironclad and repeated so often that any explanation now sounds like dissembling. 

When healthcare.gov launched with the fanfare and success of a North Korean missile, the president insisted that Obamacare was more than a website. The website might be a mess, but the underlying product was sound. Now, it's Republicans who are using this exact phrase. Like the president, GOP leaders want people to focus on the larger law. You can fix a website, they say, but you can't improve the law.

What started as a website debacle is growing into a relitigation of the underlying operation. The Affordable Care Act passed with cracks and inconsistencies that are now re-emerging in the context of the website's bad launch. In some cases that simply gives Republicans new lines of attack. In others, like this argument over keeping your old health care, the failure of the site is weakening the administration's ability to engage in those old debates. 

The matter at issue here only affects the 5 percent of the population that buys health care in the individual market, compared to the 80 percent who get health care through their companies. The president's press secretary, Jay Carney pointed this out several times in his daily briefing Tuesday to put the controversy in perspective. “You would think in some of the coverage over the last several days we were talking about 75 percent,” he said. Fair enough, but the president's claim about keeping coverage was always about more than a sliver of people signing up for Obamacare which is why it has the ability to resonate beyond the audience directly affected by it.

The president's original promise was so ironclad and repeated so often that any explanation now sounds like dissembling. 

Let's go back in time. During the debate over the law, the president had a difficult balancing act. He had to argue that the status quo in health care was a disaster while at the same time not threatening the status quo for those people who were happy with their health care or who feared it would get worse under his changes. A CBS poll at the time showed that people were quite afraid that whatever the president did, it would hurt their plans. Sixty-nine percent worried that the ACA would affect the quality of their care. Almost three-quarters thought it would limit their access. There was a lot of pressure on the president to send the message that nothing would change.

In the summer of 2009, the president began to tailor his message to assuage these very people. If you liked what you had, it wasn’t going to change. That was a broad and simplified claim and the press called him on it. The president could never make that promise. He didn't have the power to keep insurance companies from changing their policies in response to the law. Nevertheless, the president continued to make the claim in the desperate attempt to sell his unpopular plan.

This was a time bomb embedded in the legislation. It might have been mitigated if the website had worked. If it had been humming as administration officials so fervently hoped, there would be no broader context for debates about whether the president is living up to his promises. And in this specific instance, the flourishing of the site might have offered loads of examples of people in that individual market whose plans had only changed for the better. Of course, that’s not what happened.

The president's message about his signature law has always been: It gets better, I promise. That was always an uphill battle. The benefits of the law were strung out over time, making it harder for people to recognize a payoff. "Trust me" claims clash with people's mistrust of politicians and government programs. 

When the website doesn't work and the promises of 2009 and 2010 are revised, questions of credibility infect everything the administration says. This can lead to a death spiral as administration officials make bold assertions to distract from the current challenges. White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett tweeted Monday night: "FACT: Nothing in #Obamacare forces people out of their health plans. No change is required unless insurance companies change existing plans." Of course the insurance companies wouldn't have had to change plans if it hadn’t been for Obamacare. This is spinning—which is to be expected from a president's defender—but its legalistic dissembling that seems particularly weak in light of the president's initial promises. (It isn’t the only time the administration has claimed a FACT recently about health care that isn't one).

For congressional Republicans, these credibility challenges help obscure their recent flirtation with utter collapse. It's not just that Republicans benefit when the president’s signature legislation falters. This debate over his initial claim lends credibility to their longstanding opposition to the law. House Speaker John Boehner's office quickly provided reporters with a quotation from the GOP weekly radio address from September 2009, delivered by Rep. Tom Price: “On the stump, the president regularly tells Americans that ‘if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.’ But if you read the bill, that just isn’t so. For starters, within five years, every health care plan will have to meet a new federal definition for coverage—one that your current plan might not match, even if you like it.” A key critique of the Republican Party's recent attempt to defund Obamacare was that it was a strategy born of limited vision. They couldn’t see that it was doomed to fail spectacularly. Four years ago, with the Affordable Care Act, they saw this moment coming.

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/10/obamacare_and_republican_criticism_the_health_care_law_s_early_missteps.html
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Voters To Weigh In On Fracking In Colorado

Audio for this story from Morning Edition will be available at approximately 9:00 a.m. ET.

 

A contentious and costly battle is taking shape in Colorado around the practice of hydraulic fracturing. In November, four communities will vote on local ballot issues seeking to limit or ban fracking. A similar measure is on the ballot in Ohio. Proponents say they're worried about health and environmental effects of the practice.

Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=241786948&ft=1&f=3
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