Boot up: pay-to-play YouTube, iTunes Wallet, and a Google contact lens

People visit a Tesla showroom in Beijing on July 9, 2014. Photograph: WANG ZHAO/AFP/Getty Images

A quick burst of 7links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

What makes this case different is the involvement of Google's engineers, he said. "One of the biggest hurdles was miniaturization, and that's one of the biggest benefits that Google X brings," he said. "This is a set of engineers that are really doing incredible things with technology."

Smart contacts are really going to happen, eventually.

Despite being smaller, it will still be able to boast of a 200 mile (322 km) realistic range same as the Model S. But the Model 3 will also sell cheaper according to Musk, around ?30,000 or $35,000, thanks to cheaper batteries that will be produced in Tesla's upcoming Gigafactory.

£30,000 isn't exactly mass market, but the BMW 3 is one of the most popular family cars in the UK and costs not far off that.

BlackBerry, which has been struggling to hang onto customers in the tough smartphone market, is offering BlackBerry Assistant after Apple debuted its voice-assistant Siri in late 2011, followed by Google Now and Microsoft's Cortana. With those other voice assistants already available, BlackBerry Assistant is unlikely to be that must-have feature for the Canada-based company's phones.

Us too, we have a voice assistant too.

In total there will be over 600,000 titles and thousands of audiobooks to choose from. The pages showing off the new service appeared online before being quickly pulled down. But not before images were captured of the venture. All you can eat books.

Makes sense, but the publishers might not like it much.

John Bain received his first offer to create advertorial for his YouTube channel in 2010. "A video game publisher asked me to create a video about one of its titles," says Bain. "They agreed to pay for the coverage so long as I agreed to not say anything negative about the game." It was the first of a slew of such deals that Bain - better known to his 1.7 million YouTube channel subscribers as TotalBiscuit - has been offered, from posting a product link in a video's description through to elaborate ad campaigns. Bain was asked not to disclose the nature of the proposed sponsored content to his viewers. He refused the deal. "I don't know how I'd live with myself," he tells me. "It's taking your passion and selling it out for a small pay-cheque. It morally bankrupts you."

Is it OK for a critic to get a cut of sales in exchange for coverage of a product? What about simply running advertorial, unmarked? Or even being paid £10,000 to like a Facebook page? Do the answers to that change when the critics aren't traditional journalists, but are influential members of the YouTube Let's Play scene? Simon Parkin investigates.

Apple today has launched an interesting new service for iTunes Store, App Store, and iBookstore users in Japan with iPhones and iPod touches. The new service, called iTunes Pass (no, not that iTunes Pass), allows users to go to an Apple Store in Japan, purchase credit in-store for the iTunes Store, App Store, and iBookstore, and have that money immediately applied to the Apple ID account instead of needing to receive a gift card and enter a redemption code...

In Japan, you can now add credit to your iTunes account by using Passbook and cash at an Apple Store. A small change - but one that would be a necessary step to enable the creation of an iTunes wallet.

I had been wanting to make a podcast app for a while by late 2012, when I got two ideas that encouraged me to look more into it: Smart Speed shortens silences. Playing at faster speeds has always helped people make time to hear more podcasts, but it usually came at the expense of sound quality and intelligibility. Smart Speed is like getting another speed increment for free: it saves time without sounding weird. Voice Boost is a combination of dynamic compression and equalization that can make many shows more listenable and normalize volume across all shows. This makes amateur-produced podcasts (including many of my favorites) more listenable in loud environments, like cars, where you'd otherwise need to crank the volume so loudly to hear the quiet parts that you'd blow your ears out when the loudest person spoke.

Marco Arment's the creator of Instapaper, which created the category of "read it later" apps; he's the founder of The Magazine, the only good thing Apple's Newsstand ever had going for it; and he's employee number one of Tumblr, which you may have heard of. Overcast is his third major app, but the first time he's entered a crowded space: podcast apps.

You can follow Guardian Technology's linkbucket on Pinboard. To suggest a link, either add it below or tag it with @gdntech on the freeDelicious service.

View the original article here