If I'm reading this correctly google is trying to push more into the yelp/urbanspoon market by co-opting users to become reviewers for their city ? It looks interesting, but couldn't they just use the existing users that have reviewed for those areas and convert them over to Local Guides?
To add on to that most of the voice enabled apps have trouble even recognizing speech when it comes to different dialects of English. For example, Southern dialect, "I am fixing to go to the bar, are you ready" would translate to "I am fixing the bar are you there yet?".
Plenty of technology exists for adaptation to speaker and/or dialect, it's just not considered particularly sexy. To phrase it in economic terms, you can spend your time doing algorithmic work to improve recognition slightly for your existing English users, or you could just deploy a new system for the 70 million or so affluent, tech-literate South Koreans or the maybe a half a billion or so upwardly mobile Hindi/Urdu speakers.
But, give it a little time and you can expect that authenticated users will be getting speaker adaptation.
PewDiePie, Smosh, Stampylonghead and many other creators use YT exclusively. By continuing to develop content networks and talent they seem to be competing quite admirably. I find the UX preferable to Twitch as well. And raw viewership numbers seem to be about 5-10x that of Twitch comparing the most popular channels side by side. Not to mention the extensive advertising partnerships YT already has.
It was used for the TI DOTA tournament to a lot of success. Many people using it claimed to prefer it over Twitch.
It's more responsive, the video quality is higher (1080p on Twitch looks bad, 1080p on YT Gaming looks good), and takes up less bandwidth (I don't have a citation or %'age of this, heard it from my coworker this morning as he had brought it up).
We also discussed YT allowing broader visibility, easier tie-ins to a YT channel (e.g. SivHD also monetizes his YT channel and it may be more beneficial to stream on YT Gaming than streaming on an entirely difference service over at Twitch).
Not sure how compelling the above is - but you asked for "why" so I did my best to answer with what I know.
E:
Forgot this one, and this one is kinda big for some people.
You're able to pause the video and resume playback from where you paused rather than being redirected to the live part of the livestream. You have to go back into the previous videos, load the videos, and miss out on the Twitch chat (some people/smaller stream communities care about that).
With Google I can pause the video, get the door for pizza, go back, and click "play". Can't do that on Twitch without missing gameplay, which for tournaments can be annoying.
There's also better notice for "streamer is now live" than on Twitch. Most people don't bother checking their email to see if a Twitch streamer is online. Many people are already browsing YT and can be notified. More notified users = more people watching your stream.
Very nice new features especially the menu customization and preview. Some of my current clients will be very happy that they can finally see what the menu looks like without flying blind. Hopefully this also works with content blocks in menus as well.
I too live in a college town and have felt the same impact of landlords charging insane rates. Right now I am currently living in one where if say some part of the property is damaged or needs replacing all tenants will pay. Even though I don't use it or it is not my fault, the landlord divides the repair bill among all tenets as a "overage fee". So a laundry machine breaks, not your fault but you'll pay regardless.
A lot of the paranoia is just that--paranoia. Still, there are a lot of people messing around on the wifi and some playing with cell stations, so some caution is justified.
If you're going on the company dime and thus have a rental car, the best thing to do is stay at a hotel somewhere else. I haven't gone since they changed venues, but I used to stay at a chain hotel on the other side of the Strip from the Rio. I'd use their hotel wifi but push all my communications over an ssh tunnel, which is what you should be doing anyway on ANY public wifi.
When I got to the conference, I tended to just put my phone in airplane mode and leave it like that. I'd bring a spare laptop and boot Linux off a USB stick so I could take notes; I sometimes turned on wifi but never signed in to anything online, just looked up wikipedia articles and such. You're probably not at such a great risk because security is a lot better these days (SSL and whatnot), but you'll pay more attention to the talks if you don't have your usual set of distractions available.
Go see the Strip, but after you've seen it once I've never felt much draw to go back. If you have a car, drive over and see Red Rock Canyon in the evening, it's just outside of town and very beautiful. Lots of good restaurants around, just pick what you're interested in. I had some pretty authentic and tasty Chinese food about a mile off the strip last time I went.
I still recommend a rental car if you can afford it; walking around in the August heat is awful. Go check out the strip after dark, when it's cool enough to walk a lot without getting heatstroke.
Not to plug but here is Vice News coverage of the el chapo escape along with a more detailed view of how they construct the tunnels. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kh3RHV5G1Fc
Thanks for that, it was interesting their coverage of the 'hoax' aspect of this escape (not that the escape was a hoax but that the events leading up to it were enabled by support from inside the Mexican government and prisons system.) I also hadn't realized that there hasn't been an independent confirmation of the full length of the tunnel. I would have thought that would be the first thing some news agency would do.
Thank you for that wonderful diorama of sights of Japan. Haven't looks at the other trips but if its anything like that one it will definitely be awesome.
