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Google launches brand new Chromecast, Chromecast Audio; priced at $35 each

Google announced a brand new Chromecast for TV along with an audio-oriented Chromecast Audio at the Nexus launch event in San Francisco today. Both these devices will be priced at $35 which was also the price of the original Chromecast (launched in 2013), and will start selling in around 17 countries soon.

The new Chromecast has been completely redesigned. Instead of the stick like design with the original Chromecast, the newer variant has a circular form factor with a bendable HDMI cable that comes integrated. Just like the older Chromecast, the new device also mirrors or casts content from your Chromecast mobile app to your TV. A lot more apps have added support for Chromecast now than we had first seen in 2013.

But the most important innovations on the new Chromecast are on the inside with improved connectivity, improved antenna system and support for Wi-fi 802.11ac (5GHz band). It will come with three distinct antennas for optimal streaming as opposed to just one that was seen on the original Chromecast.

Google has also revamped the Chromecast app. It comes with a ‘Fast Play’ feature that lets the Chromecast pre-fetch a video from an app and video content which it thinks you are most likely to watch even before you hit play. Not much details were spoken about Fast Play, but it seems to be working based on your history of Chromecast use, loading videos faster than without the feature activated.

Another feature called ‘What’s On’ will show you the top content from all the apps that you have installed on your phone. You can browse through the Chromecast dashboard on your phone, while the video being cast is playing on your TV.

The new Chromecast also supports Google Photos. Instead of mirroring, the Google Photos Chromecast support will let you decide which pictures you want to cast on your TV. So you can browse through photographs on your phone, while viewing pictures on your TV, and your browsing photo activity will not be mirrored on your TV.

Google also announced partnerships with new apps such as Showtime, Sling TV, NBA, NHL among others.

The other device unveiled was the Chromecast Audio, which has a similar round disc-shaped design as the new Chromecast, but instead of HDMI port, you will get a 3.5mm audio connector. It has support for RCA and optical inputs as well.

It helps you play back your audio content from your phone on your existing speaker sets, bluetooth speakers over wireless networks. Chromecast Audio will also support multi-room speaker syncing for audio-streaming. This feature will roll out later in the year and you will require separate Chromecast Audios for each of these speakers.

Chromecast Audio can be connected to your speakers and it will work with apps such as Spotify, Pandora, iHeartRadio, NPR as well as a host of other audio apps that support audio casting. Just like the Chromecast, the Chromecast Audio will also require an external power source.

The Chromecast Audio app also supports ‘guest mode’ which will let your friends add their music to your speakers if you are connected on the same network, even if they dont have your Wi-fi password.

Both these devices will be selling in around 17 countries, but there is no clarity if India is included in that list. We will update as soon as we learn about it

A migrant child leans out of a train window to collect food at the railway station in Tovarnik, Croatia on September 29.

Car-Lying: Carly Fiorina Lies Like a Boss

The surging GOP presidential contender’s meaningless specifics are a marketing ploy, not a policy.
The Central Intelligence Agency has some tips for spotting liars. Unfortunately, most of them also sound like stage directions for a GOP primary candidate: “Failing to answer.” “Attacking.” “Denial.” Even, “Bringing up religion.” One particular hint is unusually relevant these days: “Being too specific.”

Carly Fiorina’s continuing distortions about what she saw, or didn’t see, on the Planned Parenthood sting videos would set off alarms all over Quantico on all those counts, but it’s her level of primary-color, pointillist embroidery on the truth—in that and other instances—that truly sets her apart from the rest of the field.

Call it Car-lying. Describing things into reality is trademark of Fiorina’s, a style of mendacity that sets her apart from career politicians. Indeed, the reason she doesn’t come off as a politician is that she’s still in marketing.

At HP, employees said she “embellished” the company’s “future products, strategy and even history,” adding a fictitious personal visit from Walt Disney to the true story about Disney Studios being an early client. She was brought into HP to be brash and exciting, to “drive a stake through” the “community-minded” and “collaborative” “pocket-protector paradise” of cautious expansion that existed before she got there. And she did! The Compaq merger that defined her unsteady tenure was a function of her own salesmanship: “The moxie to risk shareholders’ money on a huge acquisition…exceeds the courage of most mortals,” as one more positive assessment put it. Or, put another way: “Fiorina had one significant weakness as chief executive: she just wasn’t very good at running the business.”

Perhaps the best example of Fiorina’s cynical hucksterism is her brief stint as a consultant to the very agency that might have seen through her: the CIA. Then-director Michael Hayden asked her to serve on a board charged with helping the agency navigate “demands for greater public accountability and openness.” Her advice? Don’t stop doing the stuff that make people want to hold you accountable—mass surveillance or torture—just make people think you’re being accountable. Or, as she recommended: “be very creative about [being] transparent.”

Indeed, exuberant chicanery may be the only cross-over skill Fiorina can bring to her campaign from the business world. She managed the business side of her last campaign about as successfully as she did HP, which is to say: Not only did she lose, but by paying off her self-funded loan to the campaign first, she got a golden parachute and her employees got the shaft.