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Microsoft has unveiled the new Xbox, and it’s called Xbox One. It’s Microsoft’s first new console in over seven years. Yes, we’ve had many expectations for this console, especially since Sony and Nintendo have already taken their first steps in the next-gen landscape. Here’s what you need to know that was announced at Microsoft’s event in Redmond.

The original Xbox debuted in the fall of 2005, which feels like a million years ago…even if it’s only seven and a half. It’s high time for a new console, even if some tech pundits are questioning the value of gaming hardware platforms in the current age.

The Xbox One is large, sleek, black, and looks like a piece of AV equipment. The controller and Kinect unit are redesigned, too. Xbox promises that this is a better-connected way of linking TV, games, and entertainment in one unit — something the Xbox 360 already does, but will do more via commands like “Xbox On.”

Home Entertainment

Microsoft promises that you’re “going to have a relationship with your TV.” The next Xbox tries to take on a living room that has become “too complex,” and make a system that knits games, TV and entertainment.

So, how will that happen?

There are universal gestures such as grab and pan and swipe up: watching live TV will involve maximizing and minimizing the screen in a top corner. Live TV will be part of the Xbox One experience, via HDMI-in. Yes, cable TV looks like part of the package.

The Xbox One knits together new voice commands to do some PC-like stuff: order movie tickets, for instance, engage in Skype, or pull up fantasy sports stats while watching a game.

Specs

Under the hood, details so far include: an 8-core processor, 8GB of RAM, Blu-ray, USB 3, HDMI in/out, and a 500GB hard drive. Besides all of this, Microsoft is promising a new operating system fusing Xbox and Windows.

Xbox One architecture has “three operating systems in one”: Xbox, a kernel of Windows (perhaps like Windows RT), and a multitasking interface. The idea seems to be that this console will be a multitasker at heart.

New Kinect

A new Kinect comes with the Xbox One, with improved accuracy. There’s a 1080p camera, Skype connectivity, and understanding of rotational movement in a structure like skeleton. Microsoft even claims the new Kinect can read your heartbeat. It can also recognize your controller, not just your hands–suggesting use cases that sound a little like the PlayStation Move’s wand.

New Controller

The Xbox controller’s gotten a revamp with an integrated battery, improved ergonomics, a better d-pad, and improved-response triggers. It looks similar but has gotten a bunch of gamer-oriented tweaks.

SmartGlass

The tablet-based SmartGlass experience will be around on Xbox One, and will work as before with a variety of phones and tablets.

Xbox Live

Built on the existing service and user names, the new Xbox Live promises 300,000 servers for Xbox One, a whopping number. Matchmaking services will work while doing other tasks like watching movies or web-browsing, and bigger, faster-connecting matches are promised, too.

Games

Microsoft plans 8 new franchises for the Xbox One in the first year, a hopeful sign for a platform that’s become too sequel-dependent. Of course, Forza 5 was shown off, but a new game called Quantum Break from the developers of Alan Wake looks like the sort of game we’re more used to seeing from PlayStation: a big-studio design and cinematic feel.

TV on Xbox

“Xbox is going to be the next water cooler.” That was said during the Xbox event to discuss the Xbox One’s role as a social TV platform. To that end, it sounds like Microsoft is developing TV shows and original programming for the Xbox One, making a greater leap into Netflix-like original programming. Steven Spielberg announced a new Halo TV series, and the NFL demonstrated some level of interaction with fantasy stats and Skyping with NFL broadcasts.

Availability

The Xbox One will be available “later this year,” so that means 2013 after all. Price and a specific date will have to wait…after all, E3 is just weeks away.

original article via: CNET

Yankees president Randy Levine (left), MLS commish Don Garber and MCFC CEO Ferran Soriano.

After years of very publicly planning and searching for a suitable ownership group to front a second MLS team in New York, the league has found it in a partnership between Manchester City owner Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi and the New York Yankees. The new team will be called New York City FC and will begin play in 2015 as the league’s 20th club. It also marks the resolution of a very public spat between MLS commissioner Don Garber and Yankees president Randy Levine.

According to Reuters, Sheikh Mansour, who has pumped hundreds of millions of pounds into Premier League club Man City since buying it in 2008, will be the “majority partner” in NYCFC while the Yankees will be an “active member of the ownership group.” The new MLS club required a record $100 million franchise fee.

The Yankees’ involvement is a bit surprising after Garber and Levine traded verbal barbs in 2009. While speaking to the Associated Press Sports Editors, Garber made mention of empty seats in the new Yankee Stadium and the Mets’ Citi Field. Levine shot back by saying, “Don Garber discussing Yankee attendance must be a joke. We draw more people in a year than his entire league does in a year. If he ever gets Major League Soccer into the same time zone as the Yankees, we might take him seriously. Hey Don, worry about Beckham, not the Yankees. Even he wants out of your league.” And now they’re partners on an MLS club.

MLS’s other New York club is owned by Austrian energy drink company Red Bull and play in a specially built three-year-old stadium in Harrison, NJ. The league has openly stated that they want to create a local rivalry for the New York Red Bulls with a new club based in one of New York City’s five boroughs. Though that is still the plan, the club has been created before a proper home has been found.

From MLSsoccer.com:

In order to begin play in 2015, NYCFC will arrange for an interim venue but will also seek a permanent home in New York. The club says it will continue the discussions already under way with the City of New York, local residents, community and business leaders, and soccer leagues about a possible new stadium in Flushing Meadows Corona Park (FMCP) in Queens, while also continuing to look at other potential sites.

“New York City FC will have a permanent home in the City in the great traditions of New York sports and world soccer — a home that must be a sports, commercial and civic success,” Soriano said. “But in considering any stadium site, we will listen first. This is what we have always done in Manchester and what we will do in New York. Only in this way, can the Club truly represent the City whose name it will carry.”

The reborn New York Cosmos, who begin play in the second-division NASL later this year, were thought to be favorites to become MLS’s second New York club for a while now. But when the combination of the Yankees’ name and Man City’s endless money came along, it blew the Cosmos out of the water.

There has been talk that Man City would use an MLS club as something of a feeder team for their Premier League squad — sending young players and older cast-offs to America to develop and/or wallow until Man City decide what to do with them. Whether this type of set-up and relationship with a Premier League club is good for MLS remains to be seen, but the league’s reputation as a developer of talent that can transition to the best leagues in the world has grown in recent years. But Man City have the resources to make NYCFC the biggest club in MLS (within its tight salary cap constraints, of course) and they say they plan on doing just that.

From MLSSoccer.com:

“Our first idea and our first objective is to bring to New York the best football club that we’re able to produce,” said Manchester City CEO Ferran Soriano. “And that means using all our expertise, our scouting network all over the world and also our players.”

Soriano said that the club will bring to bear all its resources to ensure the club is successful.

“Obviously we’re going to make extensive use of our resources and knowledge, not only in Manchester but globally,” Soriano said. “The teams are going to have synergies all over, from the sports point of view and commercial point of view. We’re lucky the name is very similar and the teams might look similar, but this is something we’ll be working on in the coming months.”

You can already find NYCFC on Twitter and the club also has a website that features that same design and light-blue color as Man City’s official website.

Surely by no coincidence, Man City are currently in New York, where they will a post-season friendly against Chelsea on Saturday at Yankee Stadium, of course.

original article via: YAHOO SPORTS

Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O) will buy blogging service Tumblr for $1.1 billion cash, giving the Internet pioneer a much-needed social media platform to reach a younger generation of users and breathe new life into its ailing brand.

The deal, announced on Monday, is a bold bet by Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer to revitalize the company by co-opting a Web property with strong visitor traffic but little revenue.

The combination of Yahoo and Tumblr creates an online powerhouse with roughly one billion users, which will draw in more advertisers and help Yahoo keep visitors on its properties for longer periods of time, Mayer told Reuters in an interview.

“Tumblr in terms of users and traffic is an immediate growth story for us,” she said.

Analysts say Yahoo appeared to be overpaying for a business that has never posted a profit, makes a fraction of Yahoo’s sales, and may not contribute significantly to revenue for years. But the company, rebuffed by the French government when it tried to pay $1 billion for video site Dailymotion earlier this year, had to do something to plug a hole in its social media efforts.

Yahoo made clear it was sensitive to concerns that it might damage Tumblr by making it less irreverent or more corporate.

“Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business,” Yahoo said in a statement.

The deal will make Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp, 26, a multimillionaire.

Tumblr is one of the Web’s most popular hubs of so-called user-generated content, drawing young people who use the platform to post pictures and text. It has more than 100 million blogs in its network, ranging from “White Men Wearing Google Glass” – a collection of photos poking fun at the early adopters of the wearable computing devices – to housing-focused “The Worst Room.”

Though Yahoo remains one of the Web’s most popular destinations, it has seen its revenue shrink in recent years as consumers and advertisers favor rivals such as Google Inc(GOOG.O) and Facebook Inc(FB.O). The deal is expected to increase Yahoo’s audience by 50 percent.

The acquisition, which will use up about a fifth of Yahoo’s $5.4 billion in cash and marketable securities, is the largest by far since Mayer took the reins in July with the goal of reversing a long decline in Yahoo’s business and Web traffic.

RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Mahaney called it a “long-shot/long-term investment” but one that fits into Mayer’s turnaround strategy.

“(Yahoo’s) fundamentals have been subpar for numerous years, in part because of the company’s missing presence in Social and Mobile. Tumblr may help (Yahoo) develop that presence,” Mahaney said in a note.

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Though most of the world is looking ahead to Microsoft’s next console, the firm isn’t quite done fiddling with the Xbox 360.

According to a new Verge report, Microsoft will be releasing a beta version of a new dashboard update for the Xbox 360 sometime in June or July of this year. This update will reportedly arrive in preparation for the firm’s next console, with changes including a new user interface more closely resembling what Microsoft has planned for Windows 8.1 as well as new aesthetics/color options.

The main goal of this update is to bring the existing Xbox 360 in line with Microsoft’s imminent future products. Once updated, your current console should be able to use the same Xbox Live features found in Microsoft’s next console, thus providing some level of interoperability between the two devices, and giving current Xbox 360 owners some assurance that their extant machine won’t become immediately obsolete once the Xbox 361 (or whatever it’s eventually called) hits store shelves.

Further, The Verge claims that Microsoft is planning to reveal “a smaller and denser Xbox console with newly designed controllers that are said to be ‘flattened’ in appearance.” While we don’t know for sure, we would expect this to be the Xbox Mini rumored in April. Concrete information is scarce, but according to reliable sources, the device will more or less be a smaller version of the Xbox 360 with an enhanced focus on streaming media and playing games directly from the gadget’s hard drive. It’s also reportedly designed to connect directly to the next Xbox, bypassing worries about the system’s backwards compatibility by wrapping that entire concept up in one major, likely costly “peripheral.”

As Microsoft has yet to officially confirm or deny this report, we urge you all to take the above with a grain of salt. Still, this new information jives with everything we think we know about Microsoft’s plans, so unless the company plans to swerve its prospective customers big time, it seems likely that the reality will be something close to what we’ve described here. Expect further information very soon.

original article via: Escapist Magazine