WHATSAPP FOR ANDROID NOW MAKES SURE YOU NEVER MISS A CONVERSATION

WhatsApp has been updated on Android with a few useful new features, including an option to mark conversations as unread, as spotted by Android Police.

Tap and hold on any conversation pane and you’ll spot the new feature at the bottom of the menu. It adds a green circle to your selected chat so it’s easier to spot — but it won’t affect the read status on messages within each conversation.

WhatsApp unread chat

The new version also lets you set custom notifications for contacts and groups. Open any contact’s details and you’ll be able to configure specific tones for calls and messages, and configure popup notification behavior as well.

There’s also an option to use less data for voice calls, which you can find in the ‘Chats and calls’ settings. In my testing, I found that the audio quality didn’t drop, but there was the occasional moment of lag.

WhatsApp doesn’t seem to have pushed its latest version to Google Play yet, but you can download it from the company’s site.

➤ WhatsApp [Android |iOS | Windows Phone | BlackBerry | Web]

Read next: WhatsApp starts rolling out voice calling on iOS

Read next: Don't know how much money to take on holiday? This iOS and Android app will tell you

ANDROID

APPS

• SHARE ON FACEBOOK (525)

• SHARE ON TWITTER (356)

Most popular

• 1Dear Elon Musk, delete your Twitter account

• 2Rolls-Royce unveils its concept for a hybrid flying taxi

• 3The web alienates non-English speakers — and we need to change that

• 4The car industry needs to embrace open source

• 5This device lets you grow weed while literally doing nothing

• Abhimanyu Ghoshal

• 1 day ago

• Vishwam Sankaran

• 1 day ago

• Mark Svancarek

• 1 day ago

• Rami Sass

• 1 day ago

• Callum Booth

• 19 hours ago

Never miss out

Stay tuned with our weekly recap of what’s hot & cool by our CEO Boris.

DO IT

Join over 260,000 subscribers!

Who's HiringAdd your company

Latest

• 1Kodak has quietly canceled its stupid (and very expensive) Bitcoin miner

• 2Virgin Orbit will launch the first-ever flights to space from British soil

• 3Cuba rolls out mobile internet at last

• 4Samsung Galaxy S10 will reportedly come in 3 sizes to trump the iPhone in 2019

• 5Jeff Bezos plans to charge upwards of $300,000 for a ticket to space

• David Canellis

• 20 minutes ago

• Vishwam Sankaran

• 1 hour ago

• Abhimanyu Ghoshal

• 2 hours ago

• Abhimanyu Ghoshal

• 4 hours ago

• Bryan Clark

• 8 hours ago

Review: The Lockdown brings Minority Report to your living room

by ANOUK VLEUGELS — 7 weeks ago in AUGMENTED REALITY

• 0

• 131SHARES

• 
  

• 
  

• 
  

• 
  

• 
  

• 
  

• 
  

• 
  

• 
  

Escape rooms are all the rage right now. All over the world, corporate employees are bonding over difficult puzzles. Tourists in Greece prefer breaking out of rooms in Athens over visiting the Acropolis. Even the Obama family reportedly loves to play them and busted out of a Hawaii location with only 12 seconds left.

All of these escape rooms do require one essential component, though: You have to be physically present.

A new AR-based app, named The Lockdown, offers the world’s first mobile escape room. In other words, you can play the game whenever, wherever, as long as you have a smartphone. Just like in other escape rooms, The Lockdown follows a somewhat dystopian narrative with puzzles that need solving. The app was commissioned by Dutch bank and developed by digital creative agency CODE D’AZUR.

Tyler Durden of crypto

The basic backstory of the game, which is given to you in a slick news montage video, is that in the year 2028, money as we know it no longer exists, and everyone uses the same virtual currency called Lantern.

One of Lantern’s developers went rogue and basically became the Tyler Durden of crypto, urging the world to free itself from materialism and consumerism. And obviously the masses won’t be convinced without a little push, so the hacker found a way to enforce his manifesto: He published a transaction that abuses an unknown vulnerability in the smart contract protocol. Once it gets added to the blockchain it will freeze all wallets, rendering the whole Lantern network void.

You, the player (and apparently, the world’s best hacker) need to overwrite the transaction before it gets included in the next block — for which you’ll need to find his private key. All of this is shared with you by special agent Green, the game’s very own version of M.

Minority Report

As mentioned, the app relies on AR for its look and feel. By using your smart phone’s camera, it turns your office (or living room, or bathroom, wherever you want to play it) into a Minority Report-like control room. All you need it a flat surface and a smartphone that supports ARKit or ARCore.

The game itself contains four main challenges and several sub-challenges. Solving these reveals new information about the hacker and his motives. The puzzles should be doable for anyone with an analytical mind, though having some basic knowledge of coding and blockchain will help you go through the puzzles at a faster pace. So programming skills are useful but not necessary, says Erik Rave, Technical Director at CODE D’AZUR.

It takes about two hours to complete the game. You can follow different ‘routes’ to the final level, which is the only challenge with a time limit. For those who hate puzzles in every shape or form, there’s a challenge that partly sets in the real world, too. Less code-cracking, more map-reading.

Not flawless

Although the integration with AR makes the game more immersive, it’s not without problems. The app requires your phone’s camera to be on at all times, which drains the battery pretty quickly. So keeping a charger close is advised.

Another issue has to do with (re)calibrating the tracking software. Specifically, when you point the app to a table top with limited texture, it has trouble recognizing the surface. Rave acknowledges the technology isn’t flawless. “Right now, AR technology is still developing. But once mobile hardware and AR software improve, the game will only perform better and better.”

Finding tech talent

With this app, ABN AMRO hopes to attract more tech talent. It’s not the first company to look into innovative ways to reach possible new hires; a direct result of the growing difficulty to hire high-quality IT people. Some debate exists as to why that is — is there really a shortage, as many CIOs claim, or are these companies just not investing enough in finding and obtaining tech talent — but one thing is certain: the perceived shortage sparked many creative hiring strategies.

Startup Quixey, for instance, came up with a 60-second programming puzzle. For a whole month, the company offered daily $100 prizes to lucky participants. Software company Red 5 Studios searched social media to find and select 100 ‘dream candidates,’ who then all received a personalized iPod with a message from their CEO. And Danish agency Uncle Grey set up sponsorship deals with top players of the online game Team Fortress 2, who in turn advertised their job openings to other players in the game.

Though the app was commissioned by ABN AMRO, the bank definitely showed restraint in terms of branding. A deliberate choice, explains Erna Lammers who’s the Marketing and Communications Manager at ABN AMRO. “Our first priority was to create an awesome experience, a game that people really love to play. Yet by incorporating themes like blockchain and infosecurity in a thrilling hacking narrative, we can also show that banking is about innovation. We believe that’s the best strategy to build a positive image for our brand and, in this particular case, attract potential hires.”

The Lockdown (free) can be downloaded here (iOS) and here (Android).

This post is brought to you by .

• SHARE ON FACEBOOK (100)

• SHARE ON TWITTER (28)

Most popular

• 1Dear Elon Musk, delete your Twitter account

• 2Rolls-Royce unveils its concept for a hybrid flying taxi

• 3The web alienates non-English speakers — and we need to change that

• 4The car industry needs to embrace open source

• 5This device lets you grow weed while literally doing nothing

• Abhimanyu Ghoshal

• 1 day ago

• Vishwam Sankaran

• 1 day ago

• Mark Svancarek

• 1 day ago

• Rami Sass

• 1 day ago

• Callum Booth

• 19 hours ago

Never miss out

Stay tuned with our weekly recap of what’s hot & cool by our CEO Boris.

DO IT

Join over 260,000 subscribers!

Who's HiringAdd your company

Latest

• 1Kodak has quietly canceled its stupid (and very expensive) Bitcoin miner

• 2Virgin Orbit will launch the first-ever flights to space from British soil

• 3Cuba rolls out mobile internet at last

• 4Samsung Galaxy S10 will reportedly come in 3 sizes to trump the iPhone in 2019

• 5Jeff Bezos plans to charge upwards of $300,000 for a ticket to space

• David Canellis

• 20 minutes ago

• Vishwam Sankaran

• 1 hour ago

• Abhimanyu Ghoshal

• 2 hours ago

• Abhimanyu Ghoshal

• 4 hours ago

• Bryan Clark

• 8 hours ago

Virgin Orbit will launch the first-ever flights to space from British soil

by VISHWAM SANKARAN — 1 hour ago in SPACE

Credit:

Virgin Orbit

• 0

• 17SHARES

• 
  

• 
  

• 
  

• 
  

• 
  

• 
  

• 
  

• 
  

• 
  

In a new partnership, Virgin Orbit and Cornwall Airport Newquay in South West England will be setting up a spaceport that offers rocket launches and passenger airline services side by side. This partnership could see Virgin Orbit launch its first ever rocket from a plane instead of a terrestrial launchpad in the UK.

Curious what a #LauncherOne mission from @SpaceCornwall would look like? Check out this clip:

• 105

• 49 people are talking about this

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Virgin Orbit, a company within Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, revealed its plans to conduct orbital launches from the spaceport by 2021. While rockets are usually associated with vertical launches, projects from the new port will involve an air-launch platform.

The company plans to use a Boeing 747-400 to carry its latest rocket, LauncherOne, to a high altitude and deploy the rocket into space. At specific intervals after ignition, the rocket will disengage its parts at different stages, and release its satellite payload into space.

Virgin Orbit also noted that by launching rockets in mid-air, it avoids heavy spending on infrastructure (like launchpads) and air traffic control that are required for launches from the ground. It claimed that this will allow for cheaper spaceflight, making it more affordable for space tourism in the future.

This could see the company compete more closely with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. According to a recent Reuters report, the Amazon CEO’s rocket company could be shuttling space tourists as early as next year at predicted costs of $200,000 to $300,000 per ticket.

With the new partnership with Cornwall Airport Newquay, Virgin Orbit has two places to launch from – the first being its site in Mojave, California.

This public-private partnership is also an advantage for the UK. The last time it launched a satellite with its own rocket was in 1971, and that too happened from a launchpad in Australia. If the planned spaceport becomes operational, it would allow the UK to become more independent in the modern space race.

Additionally, the UK has selected Sutherland, on the north coast of Scotland as the location for setting up a new launchpad. The government will be offering $3.3 millionto a local business development agency, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, to ensure that the necessary launching infrastructure is built for rocket launches planned in the early 2020s.