Magic Leap and Lucasfilm want to bring C-3PO into your living room

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It’s feels like a match made in heaven when you think about Lucasfilm and mixed-reality startup Magic Leap partnering, especially if you think about the technology the two companies can bring into the world. What took over a year of “courtship” has resulted in the two innovators working to bringing Star Wars content into our lives. Magic Leap is working closely with Lucasfilm’s forward-looking division, xLab, to do something both brands won’t elaborate on. But a video showed at WIRED Business Conference shows the possibility of having C-3PO in your living room interacting with you and sharing the issues from the Star Wars galaxy, making use of augmented reality and other “mixed reality” tech we’re sure is headed our way many years from now. What they could put forward could be a new medium to consume content or change the way we tell stories. It’s all pretty exciting, if you ask us.

Source: WIRED

Shazam brings auto listening to Android

Saying this feature has been a long time coming is an understatement. After about two and a half years, Shazam finally decided that Android users could enable its auto listening feature. What this feature does is it keeps the app on in the background to listen to whatever tunes are playing. You no longer need to whip out your phone when you want to quickly capture a song you discovered you like. This’ll come in handy at the next party you go to or while you drive and you hear a song you like on the radio. Of course, you have to be prepared for the battery drain. But you can opt to just turn it on in places where you think you’d be listening to good music.

Source: Engadget

Apple won’t really let you delete pre-installed apps

We reported a few days ago that Apple was letting you get rid of some of its native apps. But that isn’t the entire truth. You won’t actually be deleting the apps. According to Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, that what they mean by deleting is removing these apps from your home screen and getting rid of associated user data.  These apps won’t be deleted because they are baked into iOS so the application binary stays there. Federighi clarified these facts at The Talk Show Live hosted by Apple blogger John Gruber. According to Matthew Panzarino, TechCrunch’s editor-in-chief, these apps are “part of apples [sic] signed binary” and when you “redownload” they just add the associations back. From our understanding, it’s like hiding apps in Android that you don’t want to use but they’re still there, they’re just not visible to you.  

Source: TechCrunch

Meet Meerkat’s new video chat app

Meerkat started out strong when it launched its livestreaming app but has since fizzled and been left behind by the giants like Facebook and Twitter. It seems the company is taking a stab at video apps again with Houseparty. The twist, though, is they won’t confirm that they own the app but according to Recode, the app is “definitely theirs.”

Houseparty is a video chat app like FaceTime and Skype that’ll make you available for chatting once you open that app. So, you can jump in and talk to friends who are online or they can talk to you. If they’re already chatting, you can see who they’re talking to and join their conversation. So yes, like at a house party. According to a source close to Meerkat, Houseparty is supposedly already bigger than Meerkat ever was. So it seems this under-the-radar approach to debuting an app is working for them.

 Download: Apple App Store (Free) + Google Play Store (Free)