Sky News

Sky News is a 24-hour international, multi-media news operation based in Britain. It provides non-stop rolling news on television, online, and on a range of mobile devices – as well as delivering a service of national and international radio news to commercial radio stations in the UK. The news service places emphasis on rolling news, including the latest breaking news. Having launched as a 24-hour television news channel in 1989, Sky News has also grown into a digital operation through its website and mobile apps. It is also a content provider for news services in the UK and around the world. John Ryley is the Head of Sky News, being in the role since June 2006.

As with other news channels it has been criticized on occasion for biased reports, many see it having a right-wing stance on reports and highlight it's biased towards the Conservative Party and being anti Labour Party, the producers deny this.

In addition to the domestic television channel, Sky News also hosts localised versions of the channel: Sky News Australia and Sky News Arabia, and previously operated Sky News Ireland. Sky News is also offered in an international version without the British adverts under the name Sky News International available in Europe, Africa, Asia and the United States. It operates Sky News Radio which provides news for many commercial radio stations in the UK, many of them as the news provider for Independent Radio News (IRN). Sky News also provides content for Yahoo! News, and is available on Apple TV and Roku.

YouTube

YouTube is a video-sharing website headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States. The service was created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005. In November 2006, it was bought by Google for US$1.65 billion. YouTube now operates as one of Google's subsidiaries. The site allows users to upload, view, rate, share and comment on videos, and it makes use of WebM, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, and Adobe Flash Video technology to display a wide variety of user-generated and corporate media video. Available content includes video clips, TV clips, music videos, movie trailers and other content such as video blogging, short original videos, and educational videos.

Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by individuals, but media corporations including CBS, the BBC, Vevo, Hulu, and other organizations offer some of their material via YouTube, as part of the YouTube partnership program. Unregistered users can watch videos, and registered users can upload videos to their channels. Videos considered to contain potentially offensive content are available only to registered users affirming themselves to be at least 18 years old.

Windows Phone

Windows Phone (WP) is a family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones as the replacement successor to Windows Mobile and Zune. Windows Phone features a new user interface derived from Metro design language. Unlike Windows Mobile, it is primarily aimed at the consumer market rather than the enterprise market. It was first launched in October 2010 with Windows Phone 7.Windows Phone 8.1 was the last public release of the operating system, released to manufacturing on April 14, 2014.

History

Development

Work on a major Windows Mobile update may have begun as early as 2004 under the codename "Photon", but work moved slowly and the project was ultimately cancelled. In 2008, Microsoft reorganized the Windows Mobile group and started work on a new mobile operating system. The product was to be released in 2009 as Windows Phone, but several delays prompted Microsoft to develop Windows Mobile 6.5 as an interim release.

Windows Phone was developed quickly. One result was that the new OS would not be compatible with Windows Mobile applications. Larry Lieberman, senior product manager for Microsoft's Mobile Developer Experience, told eWeek: "If we'd had more time and resources, we may have been able to do something in terms of backward compatibility." Lieberman said that Microsoft was attempting to look at the mobile phone market in a new way, with the end user in mind as well as the enterprise network.Terry Myerson, corporate VP of Windows Phone engineering, said, "With the move to capacitive touch screens, away from the stylus, and the moves to some of the hardware choices we made for the Windows Phone 7 experience, we had to break application compatibility with Windows Mobile 6.5."

Google Now

Google Now is an intelligent personal assistant developed by Google. Google Now is available within the Google Search mobile application for Android and iOS, as well as the Google Chrome web browser on personal computers. Google Now uses a natural language user interface to answer questions, make recommendations, and perform actions by delegating requests to a set of web services. Along with answering user-initiated queries, Google Now proactively delivers to users information that it predicts (based on their search habits) they may want. It was first included in Android 4.1 ("Jelly Bean"), which launched on July 9, 2012, and was first supported on the Galaxy Nexus smartphone. The service was made available for iOS on April 29, 2013 without most of its features. Google Now was released for Google Chrome on March 24, 2014. Popular Science named Google Now the "Innovation of the Year" for 2012. Google Now mainly competes against assistants such as Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana.

Us Now

Us Now is a documentary film project "about the power of mass collaboration, the government and the Internet" The New York Times describes it as a film which "paints a future in which every citizen is connected to the state as easily as to Facebook, choosing policies, questioning politicians, collaborating with neighbours."

The documentary weaves together the perceptions of leading thinkers on the power of the web, with the overriding suggestion that people gain a sense of satisfaction from active participation rather than symbolic representation in decision-making processes. (Rebecca Frankel, editor of Channel 4's FourDocs)

The project claims the founding principles of mass collaborative projects, including transparency, self-selection and open-participation are nearing mainstream social and political lives. Us Now describes this transition and confronts politicians George Osborne and Ed Miliband with the possibilities for collaborative government as described by Don Tapscott and Clay Shirky amongst others.