Verge Support | The Verge The Verge is about technology and how it makes us feel. Founded in 2011, we offer our audience everything from breaking news to reviews to award-winning features and investigations, on our site, in video, and in podcasts. 2015-04-20T11:30:02+00:00 https://www.theverge.com/authors/verge-support-5/rss https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/verge-rss-large_80b47e.png?w=150&h=150&crop=1 Rich McCormick Verge Support <![CDATA[Celebrating Star Wars from a city far, far away]]> https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/20/8455971/star-wars-celebration-periscope-first-click 2015-04-20T07:30:02-04:00 2015-04-20T07:30:02-04:00

I live in a small city in western Japan, but my heart was in Los Angeles over the weekend. In a sweltering convention center in Los Angeles, to be exact, alongside thousands of people dressed in robes or as robots. I was watching Star Wars Celebration — the biggest Star Wars convention of the year — from the comfort of my couch, living vicariously through The Verge‘s intrepid Bryan Bishop as he Periscoped his experiences live. I watched as he poked his way around the show’s prop exhibition, followed the progress of multiple elaborate tattoos across the weekend, and saw through his eyes as he soaked in the sheer Star Wars-iness of the whole thing.

I got to live the best bits of the convention experience through Twitter’s new livestreaming app, but — best of all — I didn’t have to be at the convention. Bryan had to stand in vast, snaking lines just to get something to eat; I could stand up and build myself an elaborate sandwich in the time it would take him to shuffle forward two steps. I didn’t have to wander the concrete halls in the center’s perma-gloom, looking for a cool booth — he was doing the work for me, choosing the best and sweeping his phone across the wares for sale. A strict no-phones policy meant I missed some the juiciest events, as Bryan had to go dark for the panels that detailed both The Force Awakens, and upcoming standalone movie, Rogue One. But I got immediate reactions delivered with visible excitement from a Periscope stream that started the second he left the panel’s auditorium.

Realistically, Periscope’s brand of personal livestreaming won’t replace actual attendance at events like Star Wars Celebration, but after Meerkat’s success at SXSW, this weekend has shown that people are finding interesting ways to document their experiences live. Speed is a particularly important weapon in the fight to get news and opinion out faster: Periscope allowed me to get informed thoughts, reactions, and the hottest of hot takes from people who’d sat in on the panels I wanted to see, faster than fan blogs had their pieces written and published. Faster, even, than Twitter could post news, dissect that news, and then start making cynical jokes about it. And, unlike poor Bryan, once the panels were done, the tattoos wiped off, and the R2-D2s ranked, I didn’t have to navigate a crowd of Sith lords to get back to my hotel — I could just close the app.

Five stories to start your day


  1. Star Wars: Rogue One will be a prequel to the original trilogy

    Fans here at Star Wars Celebration continue to get new nuggets of information, and today we got a glimpse of Gareth Edwards’ Rogue One and the first description of the plot. During a panel, Edwards stated that the film will take place between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, and will be about a group of rebels banding together to steal plans for the Death Star. Those plans are what allowed Luke Skywalker to destroy the battle station in the original film.

  2. Like Google Glass for cars: I tried Mini’s Augmented Vision concept

    Announced today at the Shanghai auto show, I got to try the Mini Augmented Vision system at the company’s lavishly appointed downtown San Francisco dealership last week and get a guided tour of how they might work in the real world. From a fashion perspective, the glasses aren’t exactly subtle — they closely resemble ski goggles, or old-timey aviation goggles, but with a camera mounted dead-center to let it see what you’re seeing.

  3. Sony announces the Xperia Z4 flagship smartphone in Japan

    Sony has announced the Xperia Z4, its latest flagship smartphone, in its home country of Japan. Like the Z4 Tablet announced at Mobile World Congress last month, the Z4 isn’t a dramatic departure from earlier Xperia devices like last fall’s Z3.

  4. In 2017, Norway will be first country to shut down FM radio

    Norway will shut down FM radio in the country beginning in 2017, Radio.no reports. The Norwegian Ministry of Culture finalized a shift date this week, making it the first country to do away with FM radio entirely. The country plans to transition to Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) as a national standard.

  5. 5 film techniques J.J. Abrams will use to showcase his Star Wars universe

    From the looks of the new Star Wars trailer, J.J. Abrams and his cinematographer, Dave Mindel, seem to be trading out the bad visual trademarks and replacing them with some of their own. Here are some examples of what we might be able to expect from Abrams’ visual take on the galaxy.

Ballmer of the day

]]> Rich McCormick Verge Support <![CDATA[Google+ officially splits into Photos and Streams]]> https://www.theverge.com/2015/3/2/8131639/google-officially-splits-into-photos-and-streams 2015-03-02T02:13:04-05:00 2015-03-02T02:13:04-05:00

Google is splitting Google+ apart, breaking the social network’s photo element away from what it’s now calling “Streams.” Bradley Horowitz, a longtime Google VP of product, announced that he had become the new lead for both new products, Google Photos and Streams, in a post on Google+ today. Horowitz steps into the role vacated by David Besbris, who took over the top job at Google+ less than a year ago.

Hangouts will continue on as a standalone product

Horowitz says that he’s now running Google’s Photos and Streams products — two new names for existing elements of Google+ that conspicuously don’t reference the social network. The name changes could possibly suggest that Google is planning to kill or significantly alter the brand, but the company has yet to make an announcement to confirm or deny this.

The future of Hangouts is less clear as rival communications services such as Snapchat and What’sApp have seen their stock rise. In December, Horowitz said that Hangouts had a particularly broad scope. “It’s texting, it’s telephony, it’s one-to-one, it’s many-to-many, it’s consumer, it’s enterprise,” he said at the time. “We’re trying to do something broader that helps people communicate wherever they are using whatever products they prefer.”

During an interview session at MWC today, Google’s Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of products, confirmed that Hangouts will live on as a standalone product as the company reorganizes around photos and communications. “For us Google+ was always two big things: one was building a stream, the second was a social layer, a common layer of identity; how sharing works across our products and services.” said Pichai. “The stream has a passionate community of users. But the second goal was in some ways an even more important goal for us. We’ve done both, but I think we’re at a stage where use cases like photos and communications are big standalone use cases so we’re going to think of this as a stream first, and then photos and communications as big new areas. So internally we’re organizing ourselves to support that. You’ll see us evolve all these three areas.”

“We’re going to think of this as a stream first, and then photos and communications as big new areas.”

Session moderator Brad Stone, then asked point blank: “What’s the future of Hangouts? Does it exist as an individual product?” To which Pichai responded, “That’s right. And we’re going to put more energy into it. We’re seeing good traction there and so we’ll work hard to get to the next stage.”

Pichai first suggested that Google was planning to split Google+ into pieces in an interview given to Forbes last week. “I think increasingly you’ll see us focus on communications, photos and the Google+ Stream as three important areas, rather than being thought of as one area,” Pichai said.

Details will likely be announced at Google I/O in May.

Update Mar 2nd, 11:07AM ET: Added detailed quotes from Sundar Pichai.

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