Given its success with Apple Music, which is set to overtake Spotify domestically in terms of paid subscribers this summer, many have wondered whether Apple could do for original video content what it did for music. Of course, Apple has long asserted that it wasn’t in the business of original video, but last year began a dramatic about face.

Check out my full analysis on The Diffussion Group’s website.

https://www.tdgresearch.com/sxsw-offers-clues-apples-original-content-strategy/

That said, what was presented at the press conference was certainly mouth-watering for both Note fans and non-fans alike. But is the incredible device enough to sway Apple fanboys (and girls) to make the switch? As many of my friends and associates know, I’m one of those fanboys who stood in line ten years ago to buy the very first iPhone, and have upgraded every since. In fact, my allegiance to mobile phones goes even farther back — as one of the first cell phone owners in the Los Angeles with service on L.A. Cellular.

Feature-Rich Phone

Samsung’s newest flagship device becomes one of the most feature-rich — not to mention most expensive — phones on the market at $929 (£869, about AU$1,499). Many of the incredible features that were part of the Note 7 are returning or improved upon. That ill-fated device underwent not one, but two major recalls, until it was finally pulled from shelves, which some predicted might have been the death of the Note line once and for all. Nothing could have been further from the truth as the company remained committed to the device with it’s newest iteration containing a smaller 3300mAh battery and protection features which rolled out on the Samsung Galaxy 8 series.

Its plethora of features make for an attention-getting device: a gorgeous 6.3-inch Quad HD+ Super AMOLED display, dual 12MP camera system, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor, 64GB of on board memory, with microSD expansion port, 6GB of RAM, and that signature S Pen, all running on Android 7.1.1 Nougat.

With such an incredible number of features, the device has piqued the interest of iPhone fans. It was not surprising that Samsung threw shade on Apple more than once during the unveiling — at first showcasing how its camera can capture clearer photos than the iPhone 7, but — in a side by side comparison — how shooting video is better than an iPhone 7 due to the Samsung’s optical image stabilization.

What may woo Apple fans are a number of features not yet available on an iPhone — among them, wireless charging, an almost bezel-less display, memory expansion port, countless software customization options, a 3.5mm headphone jack, dual SIM card support, and most importantly, that oh-so-clever S Pen.

Cleverly tucked inside the right side of the device, the stylus is used for everything from navigation, to note taking, to some pretty impressive works of art. A few feature this time around, offers 4096 layers of pressure sensitivity. Samsung also touted their PENUP community — a social space for sharing your phablet-inspired artwork — and some of the examples displayed were stunning. Nothing similar exists on the iPhone ecosystem.

Samsung also took the opportunity to showcase it’s DeX productivity slate. Start work on your Note 8, then upon arrival at an optional docking station, continue work on your desktop. iPhone’s Continuity feature is similar, but doesn’t have the app support that Samsung is rolling out.

Speaking of apps, Samsung also showcased it’s first of its kind app-pairing functionality, called Multi Window mode, allowing you to create a pairing shortcut, for example while driving. Pair your favorite navigation service with your favorite music service and both will appear, split-screen mode with just one touch.

We’re still not sure what Apple is planning to release this year — but rumors surround a refresh of the iPhone 7 and possibly a special edition iPhone 8 or iPhone Special Edition in commemoration of the ten-year anniversary of the device. Some media outlets are reporting that the September Apple event may happen September 12 — just three days before the street date of the Note 8.

It’s All About the Fans

Throughout the press conference, Samsung execs continued to stress that the reason the Note line was resurrected was due to the undying commitment of its fans. That was clearly showcased in a video during the event’s kickoff which took an unflinching look at the Note 7 fiasco and fans’ emotional reaction to the removal of the device from the marketplace. It was an elegant comeback story.

But is all this enough to convince iPhone users to make the switch especially with a sentimental ten year anniversary of the iPhone just weeks away? While many may argue that it depends on how tied you are to your current ecosystem, those arguments are becoming less convincing in 2017. Consider that all email can be accessed agnostically, and those who require enterprise style email on the Samsung will get that. Photo storage is also much better on the Note 8. Not only are you getting 64GB of onboard RAM, but expandable memory, capable of a whopping additional 256GB. Pair that with Google’s excellent (and free) Google Photos, and you’ll never see that dreaded pop up telling you that you’re out of room on your iPhone. Furthermore, the Note will come with much-loved Samsung Pay which can be used on almost any NFC capable terminal. Many of your favorite apps will be available on both devices; however, those with large number of paid apps installed on their iPhones may find it troublesome that they may need to repurchase Android versions of those applications.

Yes, there are still a few challenges one will contend with when moving to Android: text messaging (how much do you need those bubbles, really?), and lack of a solid pop up notifications that iPhones do so well and that many of us depend on when that VIP email arrives. No word on whether Android Oreo will solve those issues, although we do know that the new OS contains badge notifications.

As mentioned earlier, Samsung brought this phone to the market as a way to show its loyalty to its fan base. In fact, they are putting their money where their mouth is in a pretty respectable mea culpa: previous owners of the Note 7 will benefit from even more benefits: up to $425 off the cost of the phone (with trade-in), on top of a freebie package that is hard to pass up. All together, making it very difficult deal not to consider.

With the upcoming release of the new iPhones in September, the new Google Pixel 2 phones this October, and the recent release of the Essential phone, and Blackberry KEYone, the Samsung Note 8 indeed enters a very crowded marketplace.

The Samsung Note 8 will be available starting September 15 and is now available for pre-order.

The days leading up to the launch was not without controversy as Taylor Swift first chastised Apple for its policy on not paying artists during the 3-month free trial. In an unprecedented move, Apple relented and decided to indeed compensate artists during their trial period…and Swift agreed to let her album 1989 streamed on the service.

But this is not about the drama (or slick PR) around the launch, but the actual kick off set on their new live radio service served up courtesy of Beats 1. To hear these songs for free, you need to download the update and of course sign up for the trial.

Here are the songs:

“City” by Spring King

https://itun.es/us/ov-F5

@springkingband

“Dreams” by Beck

https://itun.es/us/-fSZ7

@beck

“Shutdown” by Skepta

https://itun.es/us/7I7h6

@skepta

“For Those About to Rock” by AC/DC

https://itun.es/us/tl2nI

@acdc

“Gosh” by Jaime xx

https://itun.es/us/w6ju6?i=978362268

@ jamie___xx

Originally published at patrickperez.tumblr.com.

Snapchat just raised an additional $537 million, according to a regulatory filing released on Friday.

The investment aligns with recent comments from Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, in which he shot down the possibility of a sale. Rather, as Spiegel told attendees at Re/code’s Code Conference on Tuesday, he is eying an IPO.

The additional funding — which values Snapchat at $16 billion, according to CNBC — adds to the roughly $800 million it has already taken from Alibaba, Fidelity, York Capital and Glade Brook Capital, among other investors.

Having officially shed its fad status, Snapchat is redefining the way young consumers communicate, and posting some serious usership figures.

Snapchat has 100 million users who watch an astonishing 2 billion videos per day, according to internal figures. That’s half the volume of videos viewed on Facebook, although the latter is far larger in size.

In addition, Snapchat now claims that 60% of smartphone users ages 13 to 34 are active on the service.

Snapchat’s business strategy remains high experimental. Indeed, the vanishing-message service only recently introduced ads to its platform, which also disappear after users view them or within 24 hours. Still, investors appear confidant that the social darling can turn its strong video viewership into dollars.

As part of its Discover service, Snapchat is preparing to sell 10-second ads for 2 cents per view, the company recently announced. The “Two Pennies” announcement was made during the Daily Mail and Elite Daily Digital Content NewFronts presentation, earlier this month.

“Snapchat ads are the most exciting ad product since YouTube TrueView,” Jon Steinberg, CEO of Daily Mail North America, tweeted on the heels of the presentation. “At $.02 [per view] a no brainer for any brand interested in 18–24s,” the former BuzzFeed president said.

The announced pricing was considerably less than previous estimates. Sources recently told Re/code that Snapchat was charging advertisers around $100 for every thousand views on Discover. At one point, Snapchat was also reportedly pressuring brands with a non-negotiable asking price of $750,000 for a day of disappearing ads?

Launched at the beginning of the year, Discover gives media partners their own channel on which they can feature content produced specifically for Snapchat’s young audience.

Publishing partners include National Geographic, Vice, Yahoo News, Comedy Central, Cosmopolitan, CNN, The Food Network and ESPN.

A Snapchat spokesperson did not return requests for additional comment by press time.

Originally published at www.mediapost.com.

Never one to conform, Avicii does it again with what some are calling the first-ever 360-degree music video. What could be the beginning of the new story-telling methods using the brave new world of VR, Avicii has shown that artists need to start thinking outside of the (square) box.

The video is a result of a collaboration between Google and GoPro and it’s the first of several projects coming during six-month exclusive deal beginning in July. The rig consists of 16 Hero4 cameras housed together as one and uploaded directly to YouTube.

See the entire video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edcJ_JNeyhg

Why didn’t a cab driver think of Uber? Why didn’t Barnes & Noble think of Amazon? Why didn’t Blockbuster think of Netflix? Why didn’t Marriott think of AirBnB?

The answer to all four, and the myriad other companies displaced by digital disruption, is that at some point, you established a cash cow — a product or service that generates the majority of your income and profits — and you spent years and even decades building a successful business around it designed to not only grow, but also to protect and defend it. The fact that most of us are all so busy and so focused, coupled with the ongoing need to meet or exceed your quarterly numbers will keep you from looking far enough outside of your business and industry to see the disruption ahead.

In order to thrive in this time of exponential change and rapid digital disruption, it is imperative to actively scan far outside of your industry looking for new ways to disrupt yourself, before others do it for you. When you do discover a new technology or technology-driven trend that could be used to disrupt you, it is important to separate what I call the Hard Trends that will happen from the Soft Trends that might happen.

When you can anticipate a disruption before it happens, you now have a powerful choice. You can either be the disrupter or the disrupted. You can use predictable Hard Trends to create the new cash cows that will disrupt your competitors and grow your future. It’s important to understand that disruption can either bring opportunity (if you get there early) — or disaster (if someone else does). I won’t spend time now covering how to separate these two types of trends in this blog because I have written extensively about this over the years as well as covering the methodology in my New York Times bestseller Flash Foresight.

A second reason so many companies fail to see the disruption that lies ahead is that when someone from the outside uses digital disruption to disrupt you, the strategy most often invoked is to protect and defend the status quo. It is amazing how much time and money organizations spent protecting and defending their current cash cows. In the past this was a valid strategy that did produce good results. But digital disruption is different. Because it tends to be game-changing with a very low cost of entry, it is not hard for a small startup to quickly disrupt not only a big business, but even an entire industry.

A key to success for an established company that’s facing the early stages of being disrupted is to adopt a strategy of embrace and extend. Kodak spent over a decade and millions of dollars protecting and defending their film based photography business. Unfortunately, Kodak, along with Polaroid and many others, saw digital photography as a Soft Trend that could be protected and defended against, but as I identified in the 1980s, and as we all know today, it was a Hard Trend that could not be stopped or defended against.

Two years before Amazon was founded, I was launching one of my books Technotrends at the American Booksellers Association National Book Expo where there were 10,000 bookstore owners including Borders and Barnes & Noble. In a speech I delivered at the convention, I said “In two years there will be a virtual bookstore.” I also said “Any of you could start a virtual bookstore today because the tools are there to do it, but I think it will be someone from the outside because you are all too busy selling books.” The rest is history. My point is that disruption is there to see when you identify the Hard Trends shaping the future — and not taking action on a future fact will impact your business regardless of your size.

Another key reason for missing digital disruption is assuming that it won’t happen to you and your business. Today, there are many industries that are ripe for digital disruption and when you take the time to look outside of your industry at the Hard Trends that are shaping the future, you will be amazed at what you can see.

A key to success at this point in time is to understand that digital disruption will happen to you if it has not already happened. And it will happen again and again as technology-driven exponential change provides new game-changing capabilities.

As you look at your business, are you looking outside of it as well? What are your blind spots? What fundamental assumptions about the “way things will always be” do you operate on? What are you doing to become your own disruptor, so you aren’t left in the dust?

What is a hotel? What is a taxi? What is a bookstore? Companies like Marriott and Barnes & Noble, not to mention government agencies like New York’s Taxi and Limousine Commission, thought they knew the answer to those questions.

It begs the question: What do you think you know about your industry?

Think about the enormous architecture of administrators and personnel that exist to put you in a hotel room. Marriott has to buy, build, and maintain its vast quantity of properties; it has to hire, train, and manage untold thousands of bellhops, maids, chefs, valets, and concierges; it needs to run security, clean pools, renovate, repair, and be on call 24 hours a day.

Now, thanks to having a multimedia computer in our pocket or purse, think about how much simpler it is, and more profitable for all parties, for consumers and providers to deal with each other directly. AirBnB and Uber used smartphones and mobile apps to provide the mediums for customers to conduct transactions in a very easy and convenient way.

Consider how fast the mobile web has changed how we all live, work, and play. The sudden instant, massive connectivity of the mobile web enabled the “sharing economy,” and the democratization of all commodities. You don’t have to be a hotel to be in the accommodations business; you just need a bed and a smartphone. The massive hotel chains had so much more than that, but they blew it because they were jealously guarding their cash cow, instead of using Hard Trends to create the next disruption.

When you let your ideas about consumers calcify and stop adapting much less anticipating, that’s when you start inadvertently digging your own grave. “Well nobody will ever want to buy a book without human contact, so let’s keep building stores,” said Borders, may it rest in peace. Borders could have survived and even thrived if they would have embraced the Hard Trends shaping the future and focused on reinventing the retail experience. Unfortunately, they focused on protecting and defending themselves out of business.

One of the biggest common threads between the businesses that have been disrupted is thinking that your business is immune to changing circumstances. The fundamental assumptions of so many businesses — people will always stay in hotels, people wouldn’t trust strangers to drive them around or lend them a place to stay — have turned out to be wrong.

Begin thinking about other emerging digital disruptions: the wearable web (smart watches and much more), the drivable web (smart semi-autonomous cars), the domestic web (smart homes), and so on. What does that do to your industry? If you think the answer is “nothing,” I encourage you to think twice.

You need to become your own disruptor, your own best competition. Don’t get comfortable. Disrupt yourself, or someone else will.

Originally published at www.huffingtonpost.com.

The Valley has a looming problem. In 2013, Facebook spent $2 billion on the virtual reality headset company Oculus VR, and suddenly, virtual reality — once just a glorified hobby with an unknown ship date — became a real thing with a real product attached, one that’s expected to hit shelves in 2016.

So what’s the problem? We know VR video games and sports broadcasts are a sure thing, but what about the $30 billion movie industry? Can the tech industry tap Hollywood’s talents to turn VR into a financial juggernaut? And can Hollywood still tell a story when the viewer is the director?

Google CardboardJoel Arbaje for Fast Company

It’s this very question that’s driving valley companies to hire Hollywood creators to pioneer the new medium, like Samsung, which founded its own production company and VR app store Milk Studios, to fund and coordinate the production of VR content. With hundreds of millions of Samsung smartphones on the market, Samsung sees an opportunity to turn their own customers into VR junkies, using a relatively simple adapter that glues a smartphone onto a viewer’s head.

“We’re a device company. We looked at VR as something that’s starting from 0 but has enormous growth potential. We saw we’d have an early device, and what we didn’t want to do is what we’d always do: put a device out that’s brand new and nobody has ever tried, and have no content on it,” explains Samsung Milk VR executive, Matt Apfel. “We don’t want this to be 3-D TV all over again, where the leap forward in consumer experience [i.e. normal old movies were just converted to or shot in 3-D] wasn’t great enough to justify the 3-D TV purchase.”

via Android Central

Overcoming the Technical Problems As Apfel puts it, Milk VR creates “arranged marriages” between companies working on the cutting edge of hardware, like 360-degree camera systems, and companies that are very good at telling stories, like Skybound Entertainment, producers of The Walking Dead. Skybound is producing a secretive new series for Samsung that will premier in 2016.

“Shooting a movie or TV show is incredibly tough under the best of circumstances,” explains Skybound producer David Alpert. “[With VR], the basic things you learned from your experience no longer apply from a technical perspective, and there’s not a body of work you can point to saying, ‘We want it to be like that or like that.’”

Samsung Gear 2

Justin Lin, who has directed four The Fast & The Furious movies, co-founded a production company, Bullitt. He was joined by the former COO of Caviar, an international production company, Todd Makurath, and with the Russo brothers, who co-directed Captain America: Winter Soldier and several upcoming Marvel films. Their mission statement is to be a branded entertainment production company. What that really means is that they’re creating content for advertisers of any sort — including a new, live action short that will debut this week at Google I/O. Can Hollywood still tell a story when the viewer is the director?

Last year, Google’s highly secretive ATAP division (Advanced Technology and Projects) invited Lin and Makurath into its Sunnydale lab to see demos of its latest hardware.

“We got hands on with these devices and were just posed the question, ‘What would you do with that?’” Makurath says. “It was at that moment, Justin looked at these animated films from Pixar and said, ‘These are amazing, but I don’t do animation. I film live action. I do big action movies with effects and energy. If I were to do something here, I’d love to do a big live action chase movie with a giant monster.’ We could see around the room that everyone was getting excited. They said, ‘That sounds amazing, can you do that?’ In that moment we realized, we were at the beginning of how to create content for these new technologies.”

Google hired Bullitt to produce the short, but Bullitt would need to engineer a way film a movie where the viewer could look around, building their own 360-degree VR camera and capture systems, post-production workflows, and playback. The finished master alone was impossibly large 8K x 4K resolution — about four times the resolution of a Hollywood film master. Its 8 terabytes of data would require 160 Blu-ray discs. “That’s a big concern of VR,” Marukath says. “You’re dealing with an exponential amount of increase in data required for any given moment of a film.”

Creating A New Cinematic Language As daunting as a 160-Blu-ray film sounds, most of the creators I spoke to agreed that the technical aspects of VR storytelling would work themselves out relatively quickly. The larger problem is equal parts practical and philosophical: How can you direct a story inside a medium where the viewers can look anywhere they like?

“When we’re telling a mystery, if I don’t want you to see a clue in the room, I just don’t point the camera that way. In VR, I don’t know which way the viewer is looking,” Alpert says. “I think that challenge is the essential, fundamental challenge of working in VR as opposed to linear narrative.”

Lostvia Oculus/Story Studio

Indeed, filmmakers have spent the better part of a century developing the language we effortlessly understand when watching a movie. Directors can aim the camera, sure, but they can also create themes through montage, transport the viewer across the world in a second by cutting in on a scene, or stretch one minute of a ticking bomb into 10 minutes of drama. In VR, these tricks don’t exist yet.

Saschka Unseld is a former artist, animator, and director at Pixar. He is now the creative director at Oculus StoryStudio, the Facebook-owned production studio, composed of ex-Hollywood creatives who are building virtual reality narratives inside a video game engine. The importance of this new cinematic language couldn’t be overstated, he said, but it could take 20 years before VR narrative reached the level of sophistication of the film industry.

“There are loads of stories out there saying, ‘It’s here! The future [of VR] is here and it’s now!’ And that sets people’s expectations up, seeing the first thing [in VR], and asking, ‘Where’s the Holodeck?’” Unseld says. “And that feels frustrating, because we’re saying it’s the first step, and we’ll take another step, and another step.”

Sony Morpheus

StoryStudio is slowly building a grammar for VR storytelling with each new project it releases. They realized, for instance, that viewers are inevitably distracted when they land into a new VR environment. So designers needed to pad time for viewers to explore the world before the story begins, and then they needed to create a signal for when the story is about to start.

The studio’s latest release was an interactive short called Lost, which beckoned viewers to follow a firefly on an adventure through a forest. TechCrunch complained that while it was beautiful and immersive, you could easily miss the story if you didn’t follow the firefly.

Indeed, we are in the early days of VR narratives, and the limited perspective of that firefly may prove to be a useful tool in the future. Many creators I talked to referred to VR’s potential in producing multiple storylines, even within a single live action video. “Someone will say, ‘Did you see when that monster jumped on that building?’ And they will say, ‘No, but did you see the cop and what they were doing with that girl?’ Marukath explains. “You might prey on the fact that they’re going to miss something if they look in one direction.” Bullitt is currently working on a live action VR espionage adventure, in which you know that a mole is in your midst, but you can’t possibly follow every conversation in the room at once.

To most of us used to watching movies and TV shows, these branching stories within stories may feel like foreign ideas. But elements of them already lurk inside many high-end productions, and VR could allow Hollywood the opportunity to take them even further. “When we work with the best production designers, everything on a set has meaning, and sometimes the camera doesn’t even look at it,” Alpert says. He points to his experience producing the pilot episode of The Walking Dead as evidence. “There’s a long stretch of highway with abandoned cars. Our production team was so talented and intense that every vignette had a story. Half of them didn’t even make it onto camera! But you’d see, like, there was a little suitcase, big suitcase, this is a family. I remember walking the set with them, and they were telling me who’s in this car. It wasn’t in the script. It’s something they brought to the table so there was a narrative coherence.”

Inevitable Confusion Of course, for the purposes of my own storytelling, I’ve glossed over a lot of details — like that there’s no one hardware standard for VR, nor is there any standard way to control it yet. In fact, production companies like Bullitt are making VR films to work across the gamut, so they can be watched by someone aiming his head in a VR headset, or someone on a more traditional tablet.

But there’s no guarantee that Hollywood is the solution to the Valley’s content problem. Traditional movie and TV types never took the video game world by storm. Maybe they’re not the visionaries who will prove the future of VR, either. Plus, with no rules or standards in place, how can companies explain this new field to a layperson who just wants to watch a new kind of movie? At what point is all this public experimentation actually a bad thing?

Oculus Rift

“There is a risk of consumer confusion, but getting folks to accept this, to adopt this consumer behavior, is the biggest issue. In the short run, we’ll take the tradeoff,” Apfel says of Samsung’s efforts.” There are 130 million people in America. Everyone over 13 has to try this device. You can’t just see it in a commercial.”

Originally published at www.fastcodesign.com on May 27, 2015.

Apple has acquired Metaio, a bootstrapped augmented reality startup that launched way back in 2003 as an offshoot of a project at Volkswagon. The company’s site said it suddenly stopped taking new customers, and now a legal document shows Apple has bought it. The document appears to show a transfer of shares of of the startup to Apple.

The company began showing signs that something was clearly amiss when it canceled its user conference in San Francisco earlier this month and later took down the company’s Twitter accounts. It also posted on its website a couple of days ago that it was ending purchase of products and subscriptions. Email tech support ends June 30th.

A source told TechCrunch that clients who use Metaio are “flipping out” after seeing the message on the website and not hearing a word from the company about what’s going on. This person says the company hasn’t so much as sent an email to its own customers about the situation.

As this source pointed out, Metaio hasn’t taken a dime of venture capital, meaning it’s all private, making it much easier to keep the story quiet.

The company is well established. Many impressive projects have been produced using its tools including this one of with Ferrari that gives a potential buyer an AR tour of the car (as though the actual car isn’t cool enough):

And this one for travelers in Berlin to see what the scene they are looking at would have looked like when the Berlin Wall was up. The program uses historical footage that you can see by pointing your smartphone or tablet at a particular place.

Metaio boasts a big community of developers with a 1000 customers and 150,000 users worldwide in 30 countries. All of them are wondering what’s up right now. The acquisition could help Apple bolster its virtual reality efforts.

Featured Image: YouTube/MetaioAR

Originally published at techcrunch.com on May 28, 2015.

The most striking part of the just released (on the web, iOS and Android) Google Photos is how familiar it feels if you’ve already been using Photos in Google+, or before that, Picasa. The biggest change I noticed early on is that by separating Photos from its attempt to launch yet another social network, Google is starting focus on stuff that both benefits its users, and that it does well: cloud storage and using information to narrow down searches. Now, it’s a perfect fit for how most people use cameras everyday, from the ones in their phones to point-and-shoots (but maybe not your DSLR). With unlimited storage and machine learning that can link photos by the people in them or where they were taken it’s ready to make sense of your massive image library.

The tagline is “organized by what matters” and it refers to Photos ability to pull together geotagging information (if available) or just look at your pictures and figure out where they were taken by the landmarks in them. Most importantly, this information is private — Photos is a private library where you can curate and edit your pictures, and then share as needed. That said, it is creepily good at identifying people (you can turn that off in the settings), even if it doesn’t know who they really are. With my photos, it tracked pictures of my nieces as they grew over several years and still identified them accurately. According to the FAQ, it uses “face models” to group similar photos together. Its ability to ID objects wasn’t quite as good — apparently many of my shoes register as cars or buildings, but it was mostly on point.

One element I liked was its ability to create a sharable link to a picture, which you can then go back and kill later without deleting the photo, or just track which links have been created. Of course, it’s also ready to share pictures directly to services like Twitter and Facebook (or Google+) without a problem. A Google Now-like “Assistant” feature tips you off when the app is ready to build out a new collection or collage, and even has the familiar cards setup.

Many of the features that were introduced on Google+ are here too, like Auto Awesome that quickly tweaks images to look their best and highlight faces, create animations from a series of successive shots or automatically create Stories from a place or event. By pulling these features out of Google+, it makes them more logical to use even if the friends you’ll be sharing them to are on a different service. The usual light photo editing tools are also included, like cropping or adjusting levels.

Upon loading the new Photos app, users have an option to stick with using their Google Drive storage, or moving over to the new service and its promise of unlimited backups. By choosing the bottomless option, you’ll be limited to pictures at a maximum size of 16MP, and videos at 1080p, but that should be fine for most. It also implements some compression on your stored pictures, and while I didn’t notice any differences, it’s worth considering for those more serious about their pictures. If you want full-res backups that stay as RAW or TIFF files, you can use the Google Drive options for more space, like a 1TB service that costs $10 per month. On the other hand, if you’re just running out of space on your phone, the app can identify which photos you have backed up to the cloud and offer to delete them locally.

This is hardly the only way to back up your pictures. Apple has its revamped iCloud Photos setup for iOS and Mac, and Flickr recently added machine recognition to its unlimited storage picture service. Others like VSCO Cam are also options for photo editing and organizing. From what I’ve seen so far, Google has a better mix of tools that’s easy to use even for people who are casual about their pictures and works cross platform — I tried the app on an iPad and it was almost identical to the version on my Android phone. That’s not much help if your platform of choice is something else like Windows Phone, but hopefully Google fixes that — this gets better if it’s available in more places.

Bradley Horowitz, Google’s VP of Streams, Photos and Sharing says the point is to make its abilities so transparent they sink into the background, and on that front it has succeeded. The new Google Photos isn’t just easy to use, it’s unobtrusive and most importantly private by default. In our (overly) public, complicated and multifaceted digital lives, that’s refreshing.

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Google’s Now on Tap makes Android M smartphones so much smarter

Originally published at www.engadget.com on May 28, 2015.