The Biden administration has formally started its $ 45 billion effort to bring affordable and reliable high-speed broadband internet access to everyone in the US by 2030. The Internet for All funding is part of the $ 65 billion earmarked for broadband in the $ 1 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Starting today, states and other entities can apply for funding from three Internet for All programs.
“In the 21st century, you simply cannot participate in the economy if you don’t have access to reliable, affordable high-speed internet,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who is overseeing the distribution of the funds, said. “Thanks to President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Americans across the country will no longer be held back by a lack of high-speed internet access. We are going to ensure every American will have access to technologies that allow them to attend class, start a small business, visit with their doctor and participate in the modern economy.”
States could use the funding to install fiber-optic cables, put more Wi-Fi networks in place or even offer some people free broadband internet access. The launch of the program follows news earlier this week that the Biden administration has teamed up with 20 providers to offer subsidized internet service to low-income households.
Most of the Internet for All funding will be available from the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program. States and other territories will need to file a letter of intent and a budget for planning funds. They'll then receive $ 5 million in planning funds to help them put together a five-year plan detailing how they'll provide comprehensive internet access to all residents.
Each state that takes part in the program will receive at least $ 100 million from the BEAD pot of $ 42.5 billion. After that, funding allocations will be decided in part based on updated broadband coverage maps that the Federal Communications Commission is expected to release this fall.
Under the $ 1 billion Enabling Middle Mile Broadband Infrastructure Program, funding will be allocated based on a "technology-neutral, competitive basis" to build, buy or improve infrastructure elements that carry "large amounts of data at high speeds over long distances." As for the $ 1.5 billion State Digital Equity Planning Grant Program, that's designed to bolster adoption and use of the internet with the help of digital literacy training.
PC gaming Giant Take-Two has announced that it's making a big move into mobile gaming with the acquisition of Zynga for a total price of approximately $ 12.7 billion. Take-Two already owns Rockstar Games, Codemasters and 2K, producing games like Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, Bioshock and others. Zynga, meanwhile, produces well-known mobile titles like CSR Racing, FarmVille, and Words with Friends.
Take-Two said that the deal will result in $ 6.1 billion worth of 12-month pro-forma net bookings, meaning it will become one of the largest gaming companies in the world. "This strategic combination brings together our best-in-class console and PC franchises, with a market-leading, diversified mobile publishing platform that has a rich history of innovation and creativity," said Take-Two Chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick. The deal will also help Take-Two save about $ 100 million annually after two years.
Zynga itself was on an acquisition streak of late, having acquired the studio behind Torchlight 3early last year. Zynga has sometimes relied on acquisitions to find the hottest games in the notoriously fickle mobile gaming market. Still, Take-Two said that the mobile industry booked $ 136 billion 2021 and is currently growing at over 8 percent, so the money is there to be had. Mobile will now account for half of its net bookings (net amount of products and services sold digitally or sold-in physically), the company said.
Boston Dynamics is now officially part of Hyundai Motor Group. The Korean conglomerate has struck a deal with Softbank to acquire a controlling interest — an 80 percent stake — in the robotics company for $ 1.1 billion. Softbank will retain a 20 perce…
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The US House of Representatives approved the Moving Forward Act this week, a $ 1.5 trillion infrastructure bill that puts $ 100 billion toward bringing high-speed broadband to underserved areas. The ambitious bill also allocates funds toward transporta…
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CERN has approved plans to build a $ 23 billion super-collider 100 km in circumference (62 miles) that would make the current 27 km 16 teraelectron volt (TeV) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) look tiny in comparison. The so-called Future Circular Collider…
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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced today he plans to contribute $ 10 billion toward fighting climate change through the creation of a new philanthropic project called the Bezos Earth Fund. "Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet," Bezos wrote…
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Despite being one of the first in the wearable game and buying up Pebble, Fitbit is going to fold under Alphabet’s wing. Google’s parent company was reportedly trying to buy them earlier this week, and that deal has now closed. It’s worth $ 2.1 billion, too, so some serious money was spent. What’s Google going to […]
Come comment on this article: Google’s Fitbit acquisition is official for $ 2.1 billion
VLC, the video player that'll crunch every format you've heard of, plus all the ones you haven't, is about to hit a huge milestone. Variety spotted an installation at VideoLan's CES booth that's counting ever-closer to the three billion download mark…
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Huawei isn’t the only one breaking records, as Google has officially crossed the 1 billion download threshold with their video calling app, Duo. It did it just in time for the end of 2018, too. Part of the reason why Duo has hit such high numbers is because it’s a pre-installed application for new Android […]
Come comment on this article: Google Duo hits a major milestone with 1 billion downloads from the Play Store
Three of Tinder's co-founders and several other current and former senior executives are suing the dating company's parent organizations, Match Group and IAC. According to a complaint published online, the lawsuit seeks billions of dollars in damages…
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On stage today at Radio City Music Hall, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki made a surprising revelation: the service gets 1.8 billion logged-in viewers every month. And that doesn't include people who aren't logged in — which means the actual number of peo…
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Richard Branson has gained a powerful and extremely wealthy ally that can make his space tourism dreams a reality: Saudi Arabia. The kingdom will invest $ 1 billion in the Virgin Group's space companies and might even add $ 480 million more in the futu…
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New features for YouTube were introduced alongside the announcement of a major milestone. Every month there are 1.5 billion logged in viewers on YouTube, which Google says is about 20% of the world’s population. These viewers are watching an hour per day on mobile devices alone. That should mean the 1 billion hours of video […]
Come comment on this article: YouTube hits 1.5 billion viewers per month, introduces new share and dynamic adapt features
A few years back, we made a big decision at YouTube. While everyone seemed focused on how many views a video got, we thought the amount of time someone spent watching a video was a better way to understand whether a viewer really enjoyed it. It wasn’t an easy call, but we thought it would help us make YouTube a more engaging place for creators and fans. And last year, we hit a big milestone on that journey: people around the world are now watching a billion hours of YouTube’s incredible content every single day!
Let’s put that in perspective. If you were to sit and watch a billion hours of YouTube, it would take you over 100,000 years. 100,000 years ago, our ancestors were crafting stone tools and migrating out of Africa while mammoths and mastodons roamed the Earth. If you spent 100,000 years traveling at the speed of light, you could travel from one end of the Milky Way to the other (and you wouldn’t age a day!). And if you searched for 100,000 years on YouTube, you’d find a really killer KISS track.
That’s the great thing about this milestone. It represents the enjoyment of the fantastically diverse videos that creative people make every single day. Around the world, people are spending a billion hours every day rewarding their curiosity, discovering great music, keeping up with the news, connecting with their favorite personalities, or catching up with the latest trend.
We’ve worked hard behind the scenes to make that billion-hour journey possible, but this isn’t just our milestone. It belongs to all of you, too—the global audience that tunes in every day and the creators whose videos have made YouTube the original, surprising and limitless source of entertainment it is. From all of us here at YouTube, please accept our heartfelt thanks.
Cristos Goodrow, VP of engineering at YouTube, recently watched “Secret Billionaire: The Chuck Feeney Story.”
A huge milestone for YouTube was just revealed. If you’re like any of us at Talk Android, you watch a lot of video on YouTube throughout the week. Millions of other people do as well. So it’s not surprising to find out that 1 billion hours of video are being watched on the service every […]
Come comment on this article: You’re watching 1 billion hours of video on YouTube daily
I envision a future where everything will be captioned, so the more than 300 million people who are deaf or hard of hearing like me will be able to enjoy videos like everyone else. When I was growing up in Costa Rica, there were no closed captions in my first language, and only English movies had Spanish subtitles. I felt I was missing out because I often had to guess at what was happening on the screen or make up my own version of the story in my head. That was where the dream of a system that could just automatically generate high quality captions for any video was born.
Today I am lucky to be making my dream a reality as part of a team at YouTube exploring innovative ways to make captions more available for everyone. Over the years we have made great strides both in terms of the numbers of videos with captions and also in the accuracy of those captions.
Google first launched video captions back in 2006. Three years later these efforts were taken to a whole new level with automated captions on YouTube. This was a big leap forward to help us keep up with YouTube’s growing scale. Fast forward to today, and the number of videos with automatic captions now exceeds a staggering 1 billion. Moreover, people watch video with automatic captions more than 15 million times per day.
One of the ways that we were able to scale the availability of captions was by combining Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions for videos. There were limitations with the technology that underscored the need to improve the captions themselves. Results were sometimes less than perfect, prompting some creators to have a little fun at our expense!
A major goal for the team has been improving the accuracy of automatic captions — something that is not easy to do for a platform of YouTube’s size and diversity of content. Key to the success of this endeavor was improving our speech recognition, machine learning algorithms, and expanding our training data. All together, those technological efforts have resulted in a 50 percent leap in accuracy for automatic captions in English, which is getting us closer and closer to human transcription error rates.
Automatic captions example from our previous model |
Automatic captions example from our current model |
Continuing to improve the accuracy of captions remains an important goal going forward, as does the need to keep growing beyond 1 billion automatic captions. We also want to extend that work to all of our ten supported languages. But we can’t do it alone. We count on the amazing YouTube community of creators and viewers everywhere. Ideally, every video would have an automatic caption track generated by our system and then reviewed and edited by the creator. With the improvements we’ve made to the automated speech recognition, this is now easier than ever.
I know from firsthand experience that if you build with accessibility as a guiding force, you make technology work for everyone.
Liat Kaver, product manager, recently watched “27 Things You Might Not Know about Star Wars – mental_floss List Show Ep. 450” with automatic caption track.
Facebook is under quite a bit of pressure of late. It's trying to fix the rise of fake news and clickbait on its News Feed and, more recently, it's had to deal with the Zenimax lawsuit against Oculus. But all of that hasn't eaten into Facebook's bott…
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LeEco expanded as quickly as possible over the past couple of years, but that created some problems for the company’s cash flow. After expanding into the US market with a slew of phones and a Vizio acquisition, LeEco is pretty close to being completely broke. Since they sell their phones very close to cost to […]
Come comment on this article: LeEco looking for a billion dollar investment deal
According to reports, Apple is in talks to invest $ 1 billion in the SoftBank Vision Fund — aimed at investing in emerging technologies. That could help Apple gain insight into recent tech innovations.
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Last year was a bright one for music—after several tough years of declining revenues, the industry started growing again, spurred in large part by the growth of music streaming subscriptions. This year, the industry has even more reasons to be optimistic. Even as music subscriptions have been growing faster than any other subscription type, advertising is another powerful driver of revenue. In fact, in the last 12 months, YouTube has paid out over $ 1 billion to the music industry from advertising alone, demonstrating that multiple experiences and models are succeeding alongside each other.
And this is just the beginning. As more advertising dollars shift from TV, radio and print to online services, the music industry will generate even more revenue from ads. In the future, the music business has an opportunity to look a lot like television, where subscriptions and advertising contribute roughly equal amounts of revenue, bolstered by digital and physical sales. To achieve this, there is a lot of work that must be done by YouTube and the industry as a whole, but we are excited to see the momentum.
At a time when there’s never been more competition for attention, fans can’t get enough good music. It is clear that this creative industry has two strong engines of growth — subscriptions and advertising — and we are honored to be a part of it.
Robert Kyncl, Chief Business Officer, recently watched “The Hamilton Mixtape Performance Live Stream.”
Samsung has been forced to slash its expected earnings for the previous three months by a third, due to the failure of the Galaxy Note 7, and resulting product recall. Added into a huge drop in shares, and the financial pain is beginning to show.
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Showing that even the most basic of smartphone functions can continue to benefit from innovation, Truecaller announced today that after just four months their users have reached a major milestone. On a monthly basis, Truecaller users are now making half a billion calls per month with the app. In recognition of the explosive growth for […]
Come comment on this article: Truecaller and Huawei reach deal to pre-install app as use eclipses half a billion calls
User numbers up, revenue up, profit up. Facebook reported yet another set of healthy performance figures on Wednesday, with the data showing that more than a billion mobile users now hit the site on a daily basis.
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Your clothes are about to get real smart. Thanks to a brand new partnership between Fortune 500 packaging company Avery Dennison and Internet of Things startup Evrythng, we’ll soon be inundated with connected clothing.
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Prepare to have a major crick in your neck. Pushing the boundaries of the sky are developers in Dubai, who plan to build a $ 1 billion skyscraper that will put the current tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa, to shame.
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Ahead of tonight's NBA All-Star Game, the league proclaimed it's the first pro sports association with over a billion combined likes and followers on social media. It's debatable how many people that figure actually represents, but it apparently come…
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WhatsApp has finally reached the billion-user milestone. While the Facebook-owned messaging app doesn’t generate any revenue, recently revealed plans suggest that could change by developing features within the app that help businesses connect with customers.
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Who'd have thought that we'd learn just how profitable Android is from Oracle's lawyer during a court proceeding against Google? According to Bloomberg, Oracle Atty. Annette Hurst has revealed that Google's mobile platform generated $ 31 billion in re…
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In a surprise move, the Republican-controlled Congress has promised to give NASA roughly $ 19.3 billion dollars next year as part of its 2016 omnibus spending bill. That's nearly a billion dollars beyond the $ 18.5 billion that the Obama administration…
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LG plans to open an OLED factory in 2018, spending $ 8.7 billion on the facility to build all types of displays. The factory might be the first to manufacture OLED displays for the iPhone, with Apple apparently looking for an OLED supplier.
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