Mixer ends Ninja and Shroud contracts as Facebook partnership beckons
Microsoft is showing the door to its key Mixer streamers, but will its ballsy plot pay off in the long term? As we predicted back in January, 2020 is fast becoming the year for streaming services to really show their mettle. Whether it’s having a captive audience to target in...
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BLM protesters weaponising memes against police
The weaponisation of memes is nothing new, but taking on anti-racism has to be its biggest and most significant engagement to date. Digital natives Gen Z are constantly shifting the parameters of political demonstration and discourse to include online spaces. Now a part of our everyday vernacular, memes are used...
PS5 embraces the digital generation with discless console
Sony’s PS5 reveal delivered a host of new titles for fans to get excited about, but the big surprise came in the form of a new discless console dubbed the ‘Digital Edition’. For the most part, you’d have to call the PS5 reveal a resounding success for Sony. While one...
The apps empowering BLM protesters right now
Police brutality is the enemy, racial equality is the goal, and technology is becoming the vehicle for change. Many of you won’t be old enough to recall this with much clarity, but I remember the 2011 London Riots like they happened yesterday. A 29-year-old black man named Mark Duggan was...
Quibi fails to break into the mainstream during lockdown
Huge investment in both star power and content production has done little to establish Quibi among the streaming elite. But does the app have a future? Two months ago, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, veteran execs Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman boldly decided to launch a new mobile-centric...
Facebook’s ‘Deep Fake Detection Challenge’ returns worrying data
As the 2020 US presidential election looms, social media sites are having to prepare for the inevitable onslaught of political discourse, and detecting defamatory content is high on the agenda. If you keep up to date with Thred, then this definitely won’t be the first time you’ve heard of...
Social media is getting Gen Z to the voting booth
New data suggests that apps such as Snapchat are making a sizeable difference to voting turnouts, which in turn could dramatically shift election results moving forward. One of the biggest challenges in modern politics is getting young people to vote. Millennials and Gen Zers now make up more than a third of eligible voters in the US, yet actual turn out is nearly always lower than experts predict. Bernie Sanders’...
SpaceX and NASA successfully launch Dragon Capsule
It’s the first time NASA has launched astronauts since 2011, and could usher in a new age of commercial and government space innovation. Amidst all of the memes and baby names, I sometimes forget that Elon Musk is an actual billionaire with a huge, privately owned space tech company. He’s always floating at the top of Twitter’s trending page but it’s rarely for his SpaceX endeavours. Thankfully that wasn’t the...
Investors bet on permanence of lockdown gaming habits
Lockdown restrictions have meant that many of us are flocking to online video games to distract ourselves, and investors are hoping the trend continues well beyond the pandemic. I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that I’ve chucked more than a few extra hours into playing video games since lockdown began over three months ago. While nearly every other industry has struggled to cope with the unpredictable changes surrounding the...
Indie developers can now use Unreal Engine for free
Yesterday’s demo of the Unreal Engine 5 was certainly something wasn’t it? And small indie devs will get a taste of the new cutting-edge technology for free. Consider yourself an avid gamer? the chances are you’ve already played several titles developed using one of the constantly improving iterations of the Unreal Engine. Whether we’re talking Mass Effect, Bioshock, Borderlands, Mortal Kombat, or owners Epic Games’ in-house projects Fortnite and Gears of War, a hefty chunk of the most popular franchises...
