Technology

Twitch wants more people to stream, so itgoing to begin teaching them how. The video game streaming site today announced the launch of Twitch Creator Camp, a new educational resource that helps newcomers learn the basics of streaming, as well as how to build up a channel, connect with fans, and earn rewards.

The launch of the how-to site comes about a week after an article by The Verge detailed the long tail of Twitch streamers, with a focus on those who spend years broadcasting to no one in the hopes of one day gaining a following.

The article raised the question that, in the age of live streaming, where every major social company & including Facebook, Instagram and YouTube & today offers easy streaming tools, there many not be enough of an audience for all the content creators are producing.

Twitch, apparently, believes the issue is one that can be addressed & at least in part & by training new streamers.

On Twitch Creator Camp, the company is bringing in successful creators to help educate the would-be streamers on a variety of often-discussed topics. These insights will be shared as articles, videos and live streams.

At launch, the site includes content focused on a variety of streaming best practices, including the basics of setting up a channel, building a brand, leveraging their stats, using Twitch features like emotes, badges and extensions, and more.

Streamers will also learn how to better network with others and engage their audience, as well as how to optimize their channel for monetization through subscriptions, merchandise, ads and sponsorships.

In addition, creators will begin live streaming on Creator Camp, starting on July 31 at 2 PM PT.

At this time, a number of Twitch Partners will answer general questions about streaming. A calendar of upcoming streams is also available on Twitchsite, as the company aims to host weekly sessions going forward.

&Hosting a good stream isn&t easy. We&ve heard from many of our creators that they spend a lot of time searching for advice on effective tools, features, and techniques in order to make their broadcasts more engaging and to grow their communities,& said Jessica Messinger, Creator Growth Marketing Manager at Twitch, in a statement.

&Twitch Creator Camp makes things simpler by centralizing the most relevant information to a creatorsuccess, all of which is provided by Twitch and many of our successful Partners. We want to help our creators succeed and this is just the beginning,& she added.

Twitch says the partners itworking with for Creator Camp are being compensated for their efforts. Currently, those participating include:Jericho, gassymexican, teawrex, JGhosty, pokket, firedragon, venalis, tominationtime, sypherpk, xmiramira, iamBrandon, DeejayKnight, Lobosjr, sacriel, PmsProxy, itmeJP, kaypealol, and Pokimane.

Twitch today has over 2.2 million broadcasters serving up streams on its site every month, which are consumed by 15 million daily active viewers who watch an average of 95 minutes of content daily. However, much of the on-site activity & just like on YouTube and elsewhere & is dominated by top creators.

Meanwhile, many of Twitchsmaller streamers may already understand the basics and tips that TwitchCreator Camp is offering. For them, the issue is not one of following all the steps being laid out, but rather one of discovery.

Twitch has been working to address its discovery issues, too, having last month detailed a number of projects itworking on across this front which are in various phases of development.

&We don&t believe Twitch should be a popularity contest& the company said at the time.

Twitch Creator Camp is open as of today, with the live streams starting at the end of the month.

The world of VR has had itups and downs and yet therestill plenty of activity from the worldlargest technology companies to build platforms that ultimately define the medium.

Supermedium, a recent Y Combinator graduate, wants a more open future for virtual reality, one thatbuilt on the web. The company launched earlier this year and now itraising some seed funding as it looks to keep things moving along.

The company just raised $1.1 million in seed funding from Y Combinator, General Catalyst, Boost VC, Anorak Ventures, Candela Partners, Social Starts, M Ventures, Seraph Group, Taimatsu, Outpost VC, Colopl Next, Shrug VC, Andrew Ogawa and Cantos VC.

Supermedium was founded by a couple of Mozilla alums that were behind some of the companyfoundational work on the WebVR standard. WebVR has been admittedly slow to catch-on as major stakeholders have largely been looking to direct nascent attention towards their sandboxed platforms and stores rather than to something so democratic as a browser that can work with all major headsets.

The process of getting up-and-running in desktop WebVR might just mean navigating to a particular URL and tossing your headset on. Itreally not much more difficult than that, and Mozilla has already introduced some early projects that show just how simple it is. As more and more momentum aligns behind standalone systems, the Supermedium browser exists as a bespoke solution for VR devices that is structured around VR controls in VR environments.

The startup sees the shift to WebVR as an inevitability, now the company says their challenge is staying lean and keeping their noses to the ground in a bid to gather an early passionate base of users that can grow exponentially as more substantial hardware comes to market.

Right now, Supermedium is focusing on higher-end systems like the Rift and HTC Vive that support positional tracking and hand controllers. This focus on the high-end admittedly dwindles down the market size even further as headsets like the Oculus Go and Gear VR are unsupported, but the team sees this focus on quality as something that will only be controversial in the near-term as headset-makers like Oculus and other begin progressing more steadily towards releasing standalone devices with tracked controllers.

More important than what devices they support is what experiences and utility they offer users. While Supermedium has been putting a lot of effort into building a hub for &snackable& VR experiences that brings WebVR games and journeys into a nice interface that users can blaze through, the company tells me that the biggest chunk of their usage is still coming from people trying to find an easy way to navigate VR-optimized adult content.Recently, the company also introduced Supercraft, a set of quick-and-dirty content creation tools that can allow users to build inside the browser and share their work with a URL.

Supermedium certainly has some tough challenges ahead as the startup looks to work its way into a tight niche and find ways to promote WebVR development, but the company has some key cross-platform strengths of the web moving with it which shouldn&t be underestimated.

Data sovereignty is a major issue for many major companies, especially in Europe. So far, GoogleG Suite, which includes products like Gmail, Google Docs and Sheets, didn&t give users any control over where their data was stored at rest, but thatchanging today. As the company announced at its Cloud Next conference in San Francisco, G Suite users can now choose whether their primary data for select G Suite apps: in the U.S. or in Europe.

These new data regions are now available to all G Suite Business and Enterprise customers at no additional cost.

&What this means is that for organizations with data- or geo-controlrequirements, G Suite will now let them choose where a copy of their data for G Suite apps like Gmail should be stored at rest,& said G Suite VP of product management David Thacker.

Google is also adding a tool that makes it easy to move data to another region as employees move between jobs and organizations.

&Given PwC is a global network with operations in 158 countries, I am very happy to see Google investing in data regions for G Suite and thrilled by how easy and intuitive it will be to set up and manage multi-region policies for our domain,& saidRob Tollerton, director of IT at PricewaterhouseCoopers International Limited, in a canned statement about this new feature.