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Google's media streaming offerings got a rather important bump in the form of the Chromecast with Google TV last year. Unlike its predecessors, the dongle is based on Android TV and has plenty of things going for it, including its remote and $50 price tag. Unfortunately, it's not all been smooth sailing. A lot of users have recently reported a bug that's randomly asking them to reset the device as "data may be corrupted."

The issue has been highlighted by affected users on various platforms, including Twitter, Reddit, and even on Google's own forums. It crops up randomly and renders the remote control useless, making it difficult for users to get around it.

There's no official word on what's causing the boot screen to pop up for users, but we suspect that a botched system update could've caused this. Since the device does automatic "seamless" updates, this can happen without any input from the user.

If you come across this error, the most natural thing to do is try to navigate the interface using the remote. However, that won't be possible since the device is in recovery mode, and you'll have to make use of the single button that's situated on the back of the dongle a herculean task if your TV is wall-mounted and the Chromecast is hidden behind it.

You can see the button in the image above.

A single press of this button lets you cycle through the options, whereas a long press will let you select one. It's recommended to click on "Try again" if you come across this error. This should reboot the device and solve the problem. But if this doesn't work out for you, you will have to resort to performing a factory data reset, which is the only other option on the screen.

While that reset trick works, it would be better if we weren't running into this problem in the first place and luckily for us, Google's on top of things. We reached out to try and learn a little bit more about this issue, and were told by a spokesperson that the company is not only aware of the issue, but has already developed a fix and is in the process of rolling it out.

Indeed, there's a new firmware update for the Chromecast with Google TV that has just appeared, promising (among other changes) fixes to not only make that scary-looking recovery screen appear a lot less frequently, but also to change the instructions it gives to help make things a little clearer for your average user.

Google says the update should hit users over the course of the next two days.

New firmware

Added Google's response and details on new firmware release.

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There's a fix arriving for Chromecast with Google TV's annoying boot error - Android Police

But what he did on Tuesday would have certainly made Akram proud as the Indian batting line-up, save Kohl, didn't have an idea as to how they could stop Anderson.

When he made his Test debut, Shubman Gill was in play-school and Rishabh Pant in nursery.

At 38 years 194 days and in his 158th Test match, Anderson became an example of why one should can never discount experience.

Ishant Sharma, on first two days, bowled a few spells of lively reverse swing. What Ishant did well, Anderson just did that way better.

Gill (50, 83 balls) once again looked dazzling till the time he was at the crease. The sinewy wrists were in play as he hit seven fours and a six, dealing with spinners comfortably.

Even Cheteshwar Pujara's (15 off 38 balls) dismissal off Jack Leach's "peach" didn't unfaze the young man from Punjab as he along with Kohli calmly went about their business.

It was the 27th over when Anderson first came into the attack and the second ball was a perfect reverse inswinger which had Gill in a daze as the off-stump went for a walk.

The way the shiny part on the inside tailed in was a sight to behold.

Rahane (0), for all the appreciation coming his way, was in very poor form for the better part of the Australia series, save a hundred at MCG where he was dropped thrice.

The first ball he faced on Tuesday was another one that came back a shade and it was hitting the middle of the middle stump with the Umpires' Call saving the vice-captain of what looked like a plumb leg before.

The wily Anderson realised that an out-of-form Rahane's feet are not moving.

The next time he just went a shade wide off the crease and delivered another reverse inswinger. Rahane knew that there was no comeback.

Pant (11) has had three great knocks but he was facing a bowler with supreme game awareness and immaculate understanding of conditions.

Against a left-hander, he predictably came round the wicket and angled a few in with a busy Pant hitting a boundary.

By then, Anderson had gauged that Pant could be hurried on the drive.

So the master changed his tactic and bowled a slower one enticing Pant to go for a drive.

Pant tried his best to check it but the bowler had asked his skipper Joe Root to specifically stand at short cover for that particular shot.

From 92 for 2, it was 110 for five and Kohli cut a lonely figure at the other end.

Washington Sundar (0) was then picked by Dom Bess with the one that turned away leaving India in complete tatters.

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Swing it like Jimmy: Andersons reverse swing deflates India, England win by 227 runs - National Herald

Shares of the happiest of exhibitors AMC Entertainment continued an upward trajectory Monday fueled by retail traders on Reddit chat rooms, even as a leading Wall Street analyst downgraded the stock to sell and valued it at $1.

In our view, the recent volatility and spike in the companys stock, thanks to the Reddit/WallStreetBets crowd, has decoupled AMCs share price and its valuation. Near term prospects of bankruptcy have been avoided thanks to $1.2bn of fresh capital being raised since mid-December. However, equity shareholders have been diluted by roughly 75% over the last couple months and there is still approximately $5.7bn of debt, a total which is growing each quarter due to deferred interest payments, writes Eric Handler of MKM Partners.

Dilution refers to millions of newly issued AMC shares, including to Silver Lake Partners, which last week swapped its AMC bonds for stock and subsequently cashed out in the midst of the #SaveAMC buying frenzy. Handler and others believe AMC is likely to explore an additional equity offering as a result of its elevated stock price and who could blame it?

GameStop and other Reddit-targeted stocks have also soared in a sudden upending of the traditional investment ecosystem by retail traders. (GameStops eroding business model and skyrocketing shares were derided on SNL Saturday.) The action, which targets stocks with heavy short positions, is mostly happening on e-trading platforms like Robin Hood, which caused a furor last week by limiting trades.

AMC is up nearly 6% at $14 in midday trading. GameStop whose shares had moved from $2.57 to a high of $483 is down 25% at $244.

Meanwhile, spooked commentators Monday attributed a sharp spike in the price of silver to the Reddit army, which, they said, is now expanding into commodities a move denied by some on Wall Street Bets.

Guys DO NOT listen to the poeple influencing you to buy silver . The media is litterly coordinating a situation to get us all distracted from GME$ and AMC %, said one WSB post, accusing mainstream media and investors of throwing out names that no one on Reddit is actually buying. Iv been reading stuff all weekend about how R/ WSB IS into this stock and into this and that atleast 5 different stocks there attempting to get us to chase and when you go on WSB not a single one is spoken of.

Others agreed, urging the Reddit community to focus on GameStop and AMC.

Theyre talking on CNBC as if people on Reddit are actually squeezing silver. Its f-cking absurd, theyre practically encouraging it, says another.

We are going to spread ourselves too thin, its important that we unite our strategy into one stock at a time. AMC is already on the verge of skyrocketing with 500M in volume, reads yet another (there are thousands). Focus on AMC guys, stop talking about all of these other stocks and stand together, if we want to screw these hedge investors its the only way to do it. Simply put the more of us that buy and hold AMC, the higher it will go this week.

This is being called a populist revolution on Wall Street but theres little clarity on the ultimate gains or losses that might be sustained by either individuals or institutions.

On AMC, Handler wrote, the emotion behind the #SaveAMC movement could carry the shares higher in the near-term, but we believe this valuation-be-damned momentum is not sustainable over the long term.

AMC theaters shuttered in March and have opened in fits and starts in the U.S. and around the world. The stock was pummeled as the pandemic lingered, key markets remained closed and studios postponed releases, fueling speculation of bankruptcy. Led by CEO Adam Aron, AMC announced a large financing package on Jan. 25 to see it through the year as moviegoing picked up. The stock responded, moving from a low of under two bucks to five or six before the Reddit frenzy wafted it skyward to over $20.

The convulsive Wall Street drama is morphing into Hollywood dramas plural. A Deadline scoop yesterday reported that MGM acquired in bidding a book proposal by Ben Mezrich about GameStop trading. Today, Deadline reported that Netflix is in talks to make an untitled film about the battle between day traders and Wall Street giants.

Link:
AMC Ent. Stock Rises More As Analyst Warns Its Worth A Buck; GameStop Dips, Reddit Furor Grows From Shares To Silver - Deadline

Events when they havent been cancelled altogether in the last 12 months due to the global health pandemic have gone virtual and online, and a wave of startups that are helping people create and participate in those experiences are seeing a surge of attention and funding.

In the latest development, New York video startup TouchCast which has developed a platform aimed at companies to produce lifelike, virtual conferences and other events without much technical heavy-lifting has picked up funding of $55 million, money that co-founder and CEO Edo Segal said the startup will use to build out its services and teams after being overrun by demand in the wake of COVID-19.

The funding is being led by a strategic investor, Accenture Ventures the investment arm of the systems integrator and consultancy behemoth with Alexander Capital Ventures, Saatchi Invest, Ronald Lauder and other unnamed investors also participating. The startup up to now has been largely self-funded, and while Segal isnt disclosing the valuation, he said it was definitely in the nine-figures (that is, somewhere in the large region of hundreds of millions of dollars).

Accenture has been using TouchCasts technology for its own events, but that is likely just one part of its interest: Accenture also has a lot of corporate customers that tap it to build and implement interactive services, so potentially this could lead to more customers in TouchCasts pipeline.

(Case in point: My interview with Segal, over Zoom, found me speaking to him in the middle of a vast aircraft hangar, with a 747 from one of the big airlines of the world I wont say which parked behind him. He said hed just come from a business pitch with the airline in question.)

A lot of what we have seen in virtual events, and in particular conferences, has to date been, effectively, a managed version of a group call on one of the established videoconferencing platforms like Zoom, Googles Hangout, Microsofts Teams, Webex and so on.

You get a screen with participants individual video streams presented to you in a grid more reminiscent of the opening credits of the Brady Bunch or Hollywood Squares than an actual stage or venue.

There are some, of course, that are taking a much different route. Witness Apples online events in the last year, productions that have elevated what a virtual event can mean, with more detail and information, and less awkwardness, than an actual live event.

The problem is that not every company is Apple, unable to afford much less execute Hollywood-level presentations.

The essence of what TouchCast has built, as Segal describes it, is a platform that combines computer vision, video streaming technology and natural language processing to let other organizations create experiences that are closer to that of the iPhone giants than they are to a game show.

We have created a platform so that all companies can create events like Apples, Segal said. Were taking them on a journey beyond people sitting in their home offices.

Yet home office remains the operative phrase. With TouchCast, people (the organizers and the onstage participants) still use basic videoconferencing solutions like Zoom and Teams in their homes, even to produce the action. But behind the scenes, TouchCast is taking those videos, using computer vision to trim out the people and place them into virtual venues so that they appear as if they are on stage in an actual conference.

These venues come from a selection of templates, or the organiser can arrange for a specific venue to be shot and used. And in addition to the actual event, TouchCast then also provides tools for audience members to participate with questions and to chat to each other. As the event is progressing, TouchCast also produces transcriptions and summaries of the key points for those who want them.

Segal said that TouchCast is not planning to make this a consumer-focused product, not even on the B2B2C side, but its preparing a feature so that when business conference organisers do want to hold a music segment with a special guest, those can be incorporated, too. (In all honesty, it seems like a small leap to use this for more consumer-focused events, too.)

TouchCasts growth into a startup serving an audience of hungry and anxious event planners has been an interesting pivot that is a reminder to founders (and investors) that the right opportunities might not be the ones you think they are.

You might recall that the company first came out of stealth back in 2013, with former TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld one of the co-founders.

Back then, the companys concept was to supercharge online video, by making it easier for creators to bring in interactive elements and media widgets into their work, to essentially make videos closer to the kind of interactivity and busy media mix that we find on web pages themselves.

All that might have been too clever by half. Or, it was simply not the right time for that technology. The service never made many waves, and one of my colleagues even assumed it had deadpooled at some point.

Not at all, it turns out. Segal (a serial entrepreneur who also used to work at AOL as VP of emerging platforms AOL being the company that acquired TechCrunch and eventually became a part of Verizon) notes that the technology that TouchCast is using for its conferencing solution is essentially the same as what it built for its original video product.

After launching an earlier, less feature-rich version of what it has on the market today, it took the company about six months to retool it, adding in more mixed reality customization via the use of Unreal Engine, to make it what it is now, and to meet the demand it started to see from customers, who approached the startup for their own events after attending conferences held by others using TouchCast.

It took us eight years to get to our overnight success story, Segal joked.

Figures from Grand View Research cited by TouchCast estimate that virtual events will be a $400 billion business by 2027, and that has made for a pretty large array of companies building out experiences that will make those events worth attending, and putting on.

They include the likes of Hopin and Bizzabo both of which have recently also raised big rounds but also more enhanced services from the big, established players in videoconferencing like Zoom, Google, Microsoft, Cisco and more.

Its no surprise to see Accenture throwing its hat into that ring as a backer of what it has decided is one of the more interesting technology players in that mix.

The reason is because many understand and now accept that similar to working life in general its very likely that even when we do return to live events, the virtual component, and the expectation that it will work well and be compelling enough to watch, is here to stay.

Digital disruption, distributed workforces, and customer experience are the driving forces behind the need for companies to transform how they do business and move toward the future of work, said Tom Lounibos, managing director, Accenture Ventures, in a statement. For organizations to harness the power of virtual experiences to deliver business impact, the pandemic has shown that quality interactions and insights are needed. Our investment in Touchcast demonstrates our commitment to identifying the latest technologies that help address our clients critical business needs.

More:
TouchCast raises $55M to grow its mixed reality-based virtual event platform - TechCrunch

The Los Angeles-based commerce and content platform StackCommerce has been acquired by Integrated Media Company, a holding company set up by the massive private equity fund TPG to acquire new media businesses.

StackCommerces affiliate buying platform has distributed more than $175 million on its platform by going directly to merchants. Through its platform, publishers can make between 15% to 20% of gross compared with 5% on an affiliate marketing site. StackCommerce takes 30% to 40% of the transaction, according to a person with knowledge of the companys operations.

As a part of Integrated Media, StackCommerce will join properties like Fandom and Goal.com. With the firepower of TPG behind the combined entity, Integrated Media could bolt on other media companies and then monetize them using the sales engine developed by StackCommerce.

Josh and the team at Stack have already built a large and important company in the e-commerce ecosystem with almost no outside investment, said Andy Doyle, Operations director at TPG. And yet were still in the early stages of the markets evolution. We feel fortunate to partner with a team that has such deep expertise in commerce and technology. We look forward to supporting Stacks rapid growth as it serves more publishers and influencers and provides an even better shopping experience for audiences.

Its a business thats been incredibly profitable for the Los Angeles company, which raised $1 million from the LA-based accelerator and incubator Amplify and a few angel investors. That $1 million round took the company to a business that employed around 90 people and was generating $80 million in revenue in 2020, according to a person familiar with the company.

StackCommerce has partnered with more than 1,000 publishers and 5,000 brands, including CNN, CNET, Verizon Media, Hearst, Mashable, NY Post, TMZ, MarketWatch and more, according to a statement.

We founded StackCommerce nearly a decade ago to reimagine affiliate commerce for publishers by enabling them to own the customer data and user experience top to bottom. Weve been pioneering the commerce and content space ever since, helping publishers to build and scale this new revenue stream at a higher rate and with access to content creation services, user acquisition, and more, said Josh Payne, the founder and chief executive of StackCommerce, in a statement. Today is not just an important day for Stack, but for the future of shoppable content. TPGs in-depth media expertise will make for a brighter future for our partners through further investment in our industry-leading commerce tools and services.

StackCommerce was advised by investment bank CG Petsky Prunier, part of the Canaccord Genuity Group. Cooley LLP acted as legal advisor to StackCommerce.

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After pulling in around $80 million last year in revenue, LAs StackCommerce is acquired by TPGs Integrated Media Company - TechCrunch