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Today, YouTube is unveiling 360-degree virtual reality videos and a virtual movie theater for all YouTube videos, available to anyone with a Google Cardboard headset. The goal is to “democratize virtual reality” and “bring VR to everybody

social network is now seeing 8 billion daily video views. Facebook itself recently debuted 360 video. And the social networking giant owns Oculus,

But Facebook, its biggest competitor, is rapidly encroaching on YouTube’s turf.

Still, most parenting wisdom continues to portray television as an evil mind-rotting demon. The fear of ‘screen time’ is so deeply ingrained in our collective imagination that an irrational opposition between outdoor play and media consumption is taken for granted. Many parents believe the choice is either/or: indoors or out.

most storytelling is interactive. We consume most of our media through internet connected devices. And technology is so adept at providing ‘adaptive feedback’ that it proves to be an exceptionally effective teaching tool. In fact, a recent SRI study shows that game based learning can boost cognitive learning for students sitting on the median by 12%.

Joint media engagement refers to spontaneous and designed experiences of people using media together, and can happen anywhere and at any time when there are multiple people interacting together with digital and traditional media.

As more people move into cities, natural resources decline, climate change heats up, and the "sharing economy" continues to pick up steam, our notions of family will continue to shift.

five different types of families of the future: the Multi-Gens, the Silver Linings, Ruralites, the Tandem Tribe, and Modular Movers. The firm also work out how different brands might service each family type

The Multi-Gens are exactly what they sound like--multiple generations of families living together.

that allows people to play games with each other in real time using their hands, even if they aren't in the same room.

and down to simulate completely different worlds — outer space, under water and so on."

The 12 year old used the internet to stop, rewind, and watch videos of the best dubstep music dancers in the world like Marquese Scott (youtube.com/user/WHZGUD2), something she admits a traditional dance class wouldn't allow her to do.

Adilyn Malcolm mastered dubstep dancing by just using YouTube as her teacher.

innovation is coming from private companies. These companies are starting to have better insights about how a city works compared to local governments.

Cities should be collecting all the data these companies are generating — Airbnb, Uber, drone delivery, Google self-driving cars. You can run analytics and look at the efficiency of the city

The startup is building a platform so that all the companies can send their data to this platform using an API approach.

Tesla is rolling out version 7.0 of its software, and with it new autopilot features that allow the car to stay in its lane, change lanes, and parallel park itself.

the new Autosteer feature. This is designed specifically for highway driving, and when engaged keeps the car in its lane. When you need to change lanes, you flip your turn signal and the car will move over on its own when it determines it’s safe to do so.

That "hands-on" detail is an important one. CEO Elon Musk emphasizes that the update is a public beta. "We say keep your hands on the wheel because it’s very important to exercise caution at this early stage,"

High-profile mobile money launches by Apple and Samsung may have caught the headlines

But it is the developments in payments systems in supposedly less developed nations in Africa and Asia that point the way to the probable future for wider mobile banking.

the reality remains that the mobile phone as a means of payment remains relatively niche even in developed markets.

Waverly Labs says they will soon release the Pilot, a pair of in-ear translators designed to let people who speak different languages understand each other in real-time

The technology makes use of an embedded app that does the translating, which is delivered to the earpiece that is shared by two people. The Pilot is also supposed to come with an additional earpiece for wireless streaming music and an app that allows people toggles between languages.

The company intends to develop support for European and Germanic languages first, but the Slavic Semitic, Hindi, and East Asian languages are not too far behind.

IMAX is going VR, so put on your headsets and hold on

Late last week, IMAX announced that it had “completed the first phase of a $50 million virtual reality fund between IMAX and other strategic investors to help finance the creation of at least 25 interactive VR content experiences over the next three years for use across all VR platforms including in IMAX VR centers.” That means that at some point in the near future, we’ll be able to enjoy higher-quality VR content on really, really giant screens.

Amazon is launching its new Amazon Video Direct service today to let video creators share any content and receive a cut of the revenue.

Amazon is offering a variety of ways for creators to earn money, including royalties through streaming by Prime members, and revenue sharing through rentals, purchases, subscriptions, and ad impressions.

Amazon has a variety of launch partners, including How Stuff Works, Mattel, The Guardian, and independent titles from Samuel Goldwyn Films.

A new browser plugin for Windows and Mac computers has turned The Pirate Bay into the world's biggest streaming site

plugin lets people stream torrents embedded in webpages without needing to use an external client or download the torrent itself

A new 'Stream it!' button has appeared alongside existing options to download, although the feature is still in beta with poor image quality and slow speeds the main issues.

says the move by Instagram is part of an ongoing initiative to add more e-commerce features to the platform, as well as more ways to display and interact with products

"Mobile commerce is definitely a space we are looking at closely.

Instagram has become increasingly more interested in advertising and has deployed a variety of new products and ad formats for advertisers.

Smart billboards will identify car models and target ads to drivers

Some day in the not-too-distant future ads you see on billboards will be there simply because of the make, model, and year of the vehicle you’re driving. Smart data storage company Cloudian and Japanese advertising company Dentsu are launching just such a program in Japan this fall, as reported by CNN Money.

Cloudian and Dentsu tested smart billboard vehicle recognition earlier this year with impressive results. Combining big data and deep learning, the test identified vehicles in traffic correctly 94 percent of the time.

Forget keywords — this new system lets you search with rudimentary sketches

They’ve taught a deep learning neural network — an incredibly powerful tool that mimics the way that the human brain works — to recognize hand-drawn sketches and use them to search for real-life products.

The network was “trained” to match sketches to photos based on a data set consisting of around 30,000 sketch-photo comparisons.

Amazon-owned Audible announced a new service called Channels today, one that differs from its typical audiobook business in offering more bite-size content from original content producers, as well as recordings of news stores from NYT, WSJ, The Washington Post and others. The original programming will be rolling out over time, covering comedy, investigatory journalism (think Serial) and talk shows – which is really Amazon applying the Netflix/Prime Originals model to audio content.

The potential Amazon and Audible sees in Channels is the same potential that many others have been picking up on in podcasts. Podcasts present a way to provide multi-genre, opt-in entertainment to consumers with relatively low cost of entry, and unlike most other types of media, it can be consumed concurrent with other activities.

Citizens of Kuwait must now register their DNA with the government or face hefty fines

In a bold and controversial move, Kuwait has just passed a new law that makes it mandatory to register your DNA with the government. Starting soon, the 1.3 million citizens and 2.9 million foreign residents of Kuwait will have to enter their individual DNA profiles into a government database.

Since the program is being mandated, the government of Kuwait will spend the equivalent of about $400 million to subsidize the DNA testing and management. Refusal to comply or DNA tampering could result in fines as high as $33,000, and even time in prison.

“Wait,” I asked, “so it’s supposed to delete my personal files from my internal hard drive without asking my permission?” “Yes,” she replied.

through the Apple Music subscription, which I had, Apple now deletes files from its users’ computers. When I signed up for Apple Music, iTunes evaluated my massive collection of Mp3s and WAV files, scanned Apple’s database for what it considered matches, then removed the original files from my internal hard drive. REMOVED them. Deleted. If Apple Music saw a file it didn’t recognize—which came up often, since I’m a freelance composer and have many music files that I created myself—it would then download it to Apple’s database, delete it from my hard drive, and serve it back to me when I wanted to listen, just like it would with my other music files it had deleted.

What Apple considers a “match” often isn’t. That rare, early version of Fountains of Wayne’s “I’ll Do The Driving,” labeled as such? Still had its same label, but was instead replaced by the later-released, more widely available version of the song. The piano demo of “Sister Jack” that I downloaded directly from Spoon’s website ten years ago? Replaced with the alternate, more common demo version of the song. What this means, then, is that Apple is engineering a future in which rare, or varying, mixes and versions of songs won’t exist unless Apple decides they do.

NEW EDUCATION MODELS

education will become an "on-demand service" where people "pull down a module of learning" when they need it.

"School kids will learn from short bite-sized modules, and gamification practices will be incorporated in schools