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How to find and use the new shopping cart in 'Fortnite: Battle Royale,' whether you're playing solo or with your friends

shopping carts, battle royale, fortnite

This week, the ever-changing world of "Fortnite: Battle Royale" got a new feature that is the first of its kind for the world's most popular video game: a shopping cart.

While several competing battle-royale games have allowed players to zip across the virtual islands with fast-moving vehicles like cars, motorcycles and even boats, in an effort to be the last man standing, the Fortnite developers have taken a unique approach with the shopping carts, which players can use to cross gaps, get away from enemies, and perform incredible stunts with the help of the game's ramp-building features.

Here's how to incorporate the new shopping carts into your eternal pursuit for that sweet, sweet Victory Royale:

SEE ALSO: A 'school shooter' video game has been removed from the biggest PC gaming platform, along with the person who made it

First, for those who haven't been keeping up with every update to the Fortnite map, players can now ride around the map in shopping carts. This is the first introduction of any type of fast-moving vehicle in the game.

Fortnite's lack of vehicles had previously helped set it apart from many other battle-royale games like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds or H1Z1, which allowed players to ride around in cars, boats or motorcycles.



The shopping carts seem to be scattered all throughout the map, but streamers and hardcore fans have found that they can most consistently be found on the race track, in the J-6 region of the map.

They've also been seen in Retail Row and Junk Junction.



To drive the shopping cart, simply walk up to the back of it and press equip, the same way you would if it were a weapon or other item. When you've equipped the cart, a list of controls will pop up on the left hand side of the screen.

The actual buttons used to switch positions, push, and abandon the cart will be different depending on what platform you're playing the game with (ie. Xbox, mobile, PC, etc.).



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The smartphone industry is slumping — and it may drag Apple and the iPhone down with it (AAPL)

tim cook blue

  • The smartphone market declined last year and research firm IDC expects it to slump again this year.
  • In a new report, Maxim Group analyst Nehal Chokshi argues the declining overall market will decrease demand for Apple's iPhones.
  • Thanks to falling iPhone sales, Apple's sales and earnings next year will fall far short of Wall Street's expectations, Chokshi forecast.


Depending on whom you ask, the next year or two could be the best of times for Apple — or the worst.

The company has been struggling over the last two years to grow unit sales of the iPhone. Optimists see that as a golden opportunity, because they think it means there will be lots of pent-up demand for new models. But pessimists think it's a prelude for what's to come.

Count Nehal Chokshi in the latter group. In a research note on Wednesday, the Maxim Group financial analyst warned that Apple's iPhone sales will likely decline in its next fiscal year, which starts in September, dragged down by the contraction of the overall smartphone market.

"We believe the smartphone market has now reached the stage of what the PC market reached in 2012 of consistent [year-over-year] declines," Chokshi said in the note, in which he reduced his rating on Apple's shares to a "hold" from a "buy." He continued: "We see risk that [Apple] will only maintain to lose modest share in [fiscal 2019] and as such, we are reducing our iPhone estimates."

Echoing some of Chokshi's pessimism, IDC put out its own forecast Wednesday for Apple and the smartphone industry. The market research firm expects overall smartphone shipments to decline by 0.2% this year after falling 0.3% last year. Despite that, IDC expects Apple's shipments to grow by about 2.6% this calendar year.

Although it was once known for its Mac computers, Apple is now basically a phone maker. iPhone sales accounted for about 64% of its overall revenue over the last 12 months and, quite likely, the vast majority of its profits.

Apple's has already been struggling to grow iPhone sales

But the company has been struggling for years to grow the business, a task made all the more important by the stagnation of its computer and iPad businesses and its inability to develop another hit product able to boost its revenue in a meaningful way. Apple's unit sales of iPhones grew by just 1% over the last 12 months, while its iPhone revenue grew by 10% over the same period.

Chokshi is forecasting that Apple's struggles will continue. Apple's smartphone sales are likely to be dragged down by the overall market, because the company doesn't have another hot product that will likely boost them, Chokshi said. 

When the PC market went into decline, Apple actually grew its Mac business. But its Mac sales benefitted from the iPhone. Apple was able to convince many of its customers who loved its phones to buy one of its computers also, a phenomenon often referred to as the "halo effect." Don't expect history to repeat itself, Chokshi said.

We "do not expect a halo effect to support the iPhone franchise," he said.

Accordingly, while he expects Apple to sell about 223 million iPhones this fiscal year — up about 2.9% from fiscal 2017 — he thinks that number will drop to 208 million in fiscal 2019.

As a result, he thinks the company's sales and earnings will be significantly below Wall Street's current consensus estimates. He expects Apple to post $12.62 a share in earnings next year on $258 billion in sales. On average, analysts are projecting earnings of $13.27 a share on $272 billion in sales.

Chokshi's forecast stands in stark contrast to that of Daniel Ives at GBH Insights. Ives has argued that all the iPhone owners who have held off on buying recent models will be lured in by the next generation of phones, which are expected this fall. That will lead to a "massive" wave of some 350 million iPhone sales over the next 12 to 18 months, he forecast.

SEE ALSO: Apple has a 'massive upgrade opportunity' in front of it with the next iPhones

SEE ALSO: Apple is having a tough time persuading fans to buy new iPhones. These charts help explain why.

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China is building a brand-new space station, and it may be the latest move in a new space race

soyuz space


China is building a new space station — the latest move in what some experts see as a brewing space race between China and the US.

China's UN ambassador, Shi Zhongjun, recently invited the whole world to participate in the new space station. 

"CSS belongs not only to China, but also to the world," Shi told Xinhua, a state news agency. "All countries, regardless of their size and level of development, can participate in the cooperation on an equal footing."

The new space station could become operational as soon as 2022, according to documents released by the UN's Office for Outer Space Affairs. 

The US has barred China's space agency from using the International Space Station (ISS) or sharing any technology over security concerns. 

But the ISS may come to an early end. President Donald Trump has said his administration is considering ending the US's involvement in the space station by 2025, which is three years ahead of the previously accepted schedule.

That change in plans is part of the Trump administration's larger push to privatize much of the US's space operations. 

International Space Station

NASA has already spent about $100 billion to keep the space station — which functions like an orbiting laboratory for astronauts and scientists — in top shape. The space agency pumps around $3-4 billion per year into the program, but those funds may dry up sooner than anticipated.

Meanwhile, many of the partners behind the ISS are already being courted to invest in China's new space station, according to hotel billionaire Robert Bigelow, who has his own plan to build an inflatable space station more than twice as big as the ISS. 

Europe's space agency, the ESA, has agreed to a partnership in which European astronauts would be able to use China's new station throughout the 2020s, reports Ars Technica

China hopes its future space station can be operational for around a decade and support up to six astronauts for 180-day stays, during which they would conduct research

Parts of the Chinese space station are already complete, including the core module, dubbed Tianhe-1 or "Harmony of the Heavens." That module is expected to be sent into orbit as early as 2020, with the rest of the station expected to be completed by 2022. 

China is planning to send a probe to study the dark side of the moon as well, in another move to expand its presence in space. The country is building a Mars simulation base deep in the Tibetan desert, too, where it hopes to train astronauts for a potential Mars mission.

China plans to launch a Mars probe in 2020.

SEE ALSO: Congress and Trump are running out of time to fix a $100-billion investment in the sky, NASA auditor says

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DIGITAL HEALTH BRIEFING: Best Buy sees opportunities in healthcare — Patients uneasy with precision medicine — UnitedHealthcare adds value-based care partnerships

Welcome to DIGITAL HEALTH BRIEFING, the newsletter providing the latest news, data, and insight on how digital technology is disrupting the healthcare ecosystem, produced by Business Insider Intelligence.

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Have feedback? We'd like to hear from you. Write me at: lbeaver@businessinsider.com


BEST BUY SEES OPPORTUNITIES IN HEALTHCARE: Best Buy is testing an in-home health monitoring service, Assured Living, as it explores healthcare as a growth opportunity and potential revenue channel, per CNBC. The Assured Living program helps caregivers and family members check on aging patients with remote patient monitoring (RPM) — mobile technology that enables individuals to track and share their personal health data — which can help the more than half of Americans suffering from chronic health conditions better manage their illnesses. As healthcare becomes increasingly digital, the electronics retailer sees health and wellness as a strategic area for opportunities moving forward, according to CEO Hubert Joly. Best Buy has expanded its Assured Living pilot in Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Minnesota since launching the program in January 2017, according to the StarTribune.  

Best Buy’s Assured Living could increase customer engagement with the health monitoring technology they purchase from the retailer. The program provides families with an in-home assessment performed by Assured Living Advisors who recommend the appropriate devices based on the seniors’ living conditions and health concerns, and Best Buy's Geek Squad workers install the systems. In addition to the up-front cost of the devices, customers pay Best Buy a $29.99 monthly fee for access to a smartphone app that helps seniors and family members monitor health data and activity. Assured Living's in-home installation service provided by the Geek Squad is a process consumers are already accustomed to — it's no different than installing a smart TV or connected speaker into a customer's home. This could help to normalize RPM technology.

The proliferation of RPMs will benefit tech companies and health organizations alike:

  • RPMs open up opportunities for consumer-facing companies to push into the health space. As consumers become more comfortable with self-monitoring their health through remote devices and smartphone apps, retail companies and tech giants are presented with an opportunity to leverage their existing consumer-facing products as health monitoring tools. This trend has been seen in Amazon's development of Alexa’s healthcare services, and Apple's re-positioning of its Watch as a health monitoring tool.
  • Access to more elderly patient data could help insurers and providers cut healthcare costs. Tracking vitals and lifestyle behaviors could help caregivers improve treatment and medication adherence. Providers and insurers are eager for tools that can help clamp down on the 80% of healthcare costs that come from chronic diseases, especially as the US healthcare system stares down an expanding aging population.

MOST AMERICANS ARE UNAWARE, CONCERNED ABOUT PRECISION MEDICINE: Two-thirds of Americans haven’t heard of personalized medicine or precision medicine, according to a new study commissioned by the Personalized Medicine Coalition and GenomeWeb. Precision medicine, which uses variations in patients’ genes, environment, and lifestyle to guide the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases, has the potential to drive down healthcare costs. For example, the Alzheimer's Association reports that earlier detection of Alzheimer’s can reduce the per-person cost of treatment by $64,000. But low rates of patient awareness as well as uneasiness around how precision medicine will be used are a significant hurdle to increased adoption by providers and insurers. Fifty-two percent of respondents said that the use of personalized medicine tests to deny coverage was a “major concern.” While it’s illegal for payers to use precision medicine tests to deny coverage, patient misinformation on the matter could prevent hospitals from successfully deploying precision medicine in a clinical setting.

At the same time, clinician understanding of precision medicine is lacking. Just 14% of providers would be comfortable interpreting genetic tests for their patients, according to Clinical Innovation+Technology. Still, health systems anticipate long-term savings from precision medicine. That’s why providers like John Hopkins University are developing clinical decision support tools that make it easier for clinicians to interpret genetic test data. If health systems are to realize the potential cost-savings from scalable adoption of precision medicine, they’ll need to improve their outreach efforts to assuage patient doubts and clinician familiarity.

bii global precision medicine forecast

UNITEDHEALTHCARE DOUBLES DOWN ON VALUE-BASED CARE WITH LAB PARTNERSHIPS: UnitedHealthcare signed contracts with LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics — two of the nation’s largest US diagnostic test companies — to bring value-based care (VBC) to laboratory tests, according to Forbes. LabCorp’s renewing its contract, while Quest’s contract makes it an in-network provider for all of UnitedHealthcare’s members.  The emergence of the VBC model, in which providers are paid based on positive patient outcomes rather than the number of services the patient uses, is good news for insurers — they get the benefit of healthier members at lower costs. And it makes sense for UnitedHealthcare to emphasize its VBC push in a lab setting — as much as $200 billion is wasted annually on excessive testing and treatment, according to Healthcare Finance News. For providers, the benefits of the VBC model are less clear-cut. In the current fee-for-service reimbursement model, health systems benefit from prescribing additional treatments and services. However, insurers such as UnitedHealthcare argue that the VBC model encourages a faster patient turnaround, which could lead to greater volumes of patients. UnitedHealthcare’s Spine and Joint Solution, for instance, reduced hospital readmission rates by 22%.

ALIBABA HEALTH SPENDS $1 BILLION IN LATEST HEALTHCARE EXPANSION: Alibaba Health Information Technology agreed to spend $1.4 billion to purchase several health-related categories on the online shopping platform of its parent company, Alibaba Group, according to TechCrunch. The deal gives Alibaba Health ownership of categories that include medical devices and services and other healthcare products, which generated over $3 billion in gross merchandise volume in the fiscal year ending in March 2018. The deal, which expands Alibaba Health product offerings and enables it to reach more consumers, comes soon after Alibaba Health announced plans to increase investments in AI for healthcare. Consolidating business-to-consumer products under Alibaba Health is the next logical step to shore up against the healthcare efforts of competing Chinese tech giants Baidu and Tencent.

IN OTHER NEWS:

  • The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a new AI-enabled diagnostic software from Imagen Technologies that analyzes X-ray images to detect wrist fractures, according to Health Data Management. The FDA announced an expansion of its pre-certification process to encourage the development of AI-enabled health tools in April 2018.
  • Uber launched an in-app 911 calling feature that makes it easier for users to contact emergency services, according to TechCrunch. Uber is piloting additional functionality in seven markets that would enable users to automatically share their location with 911 dispatchers.
  • A team of researchers from the US, Germany, and France developed an AI diagnostic tool that's nearly 10% more effective than dermatologists at using images of moles to detect melanoma, according to the Guardian. More accurate diagnostic tools could lead to faster disease detection and help mitigate unnecessary surgeries.
  • Georgia-based health system Emory Healthcare and personal health platform Sharecare announced they’re launching The Emory Healthcare Innovation Hub on September 1, 2018. With an eye toward value-based care, the Innovation Hub will combine Emory's clinical expertise with Sharecare's experience in patient engagement and personal health to develop digital health technologies that improve patient outcomes.

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CRYPTO INSIDER: Hospitals are now treating addiction to crypto trading

Satoshi Nakamoto was weird, paranoid, and bossy, says early bitcoin developer who exchanged hundreds of emails with the mysterious crypto creator

satoshi nakamoto

  • Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, evaporated from the web seven years ago.
  • Laszlo Hanyecz, a developer who worked on bitcoin early on, told Business Insider he exchanged hundreds of emails with the person or team known as Nakamoto in 2010.
  • The experience was mostly weird, Hanyecz said. 

Ten years after murmurs of the world's first cryptocurrency appeared online, there's still no definitive clue as to the identity of its creator, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto.

While Nakamoto vanished from the internet in April 2011, the cryptocurrency creator left behind a slender trail of breadcrumbs in the form of emails exchanged with early bitcoin developers, commentary in online forums, and bitcoin's original white paper.

While there's plenty of speculation regarding Nakamoto's identity, all the guesses hazarded thus far have led to inconclusive dead ends.

One bitcoin developer, Laszlo Hanyecz, best known for making the first real-world purchase in bitcoin for a pair of pizzas, told Business Insider he exchanged hundreds of emails with the bitcoin creator in 2010.

Their interaction began when Hanyecz, who had been mining bitcoins on his laptop, expressed interest in contributing to the cryptocurrency's development online. Nakamoto agreed, Hanyecz said, and over the course of the year, Nakamoto sent tasks for Hanyecz to complete.

Hanyecz said his interactions with Nakamoto were always "kind of weird."

bitcoin"I thought bitcoin was awesome, and I wanted to be involved, but I had a regular developing job," Hanyecz said. "Nakamoto would send me emails like 'Hey, can you fix this bug?' 'Hey, can you do this?'"

Hanyecz said that even though his work on bitcoin was a side project he worked on for free, Nakamoto treated him as if he were a full-time employee.

"He'd say, 'Hey, the west side's down,' or 'We have these bugs — we need to fix this.' I'd be like, we? We're not a team," Hanyecz said. "I thought that it was approval from him, that maybe he accepted me as a member. But I didn't want the responsibility. I didn't really understand all of the forces that were going on at the time."

Hanyecz said Nakamoto's demands occasionally rubbed him the wrong way.

"I'd say, 'Hey, you're not my boss,'" Hanyecz said. "I didn't take it too seriously though."

'I asked a few questions, but he always dodged them'

Nakamoto didn't seem too thrilled about Hanyecz's burgeoning mining pursuits either, Hanyecz said.

"He said, "Well, I'd rather not have you do the mining too much,'" Hanyecz said. "He was trying to grow the community and get more commerce use cases. He fully recognized that mining would become a thing where a few people would get wealthy."

Hanyecz said he would typically contact Nakamoto throughout the week with technical inquiries usually related to bitcoin's code. When Nakamoto chose to respond, the bitcoin creator would do so all at once, usually toward the end of the week.

"I just assumed he was busy working on other stuff," Hanyecz said.

Bitcoin, Members of Japan's idol group Though Hanyecz and Nakamoto were working on a strenuous, highly technical project together, Hanyecz said Nakamoto always maintained a veil of anonymity, to the point that it struck Hanyecz as distinctly odd.

"He or she or whoever it was never told me anything personal," Hanyecz said. "I asked a few questions, but he always dodged them. Those questions never got answered."

Because of Nakamoto's name, Hanyecz — like many others — assumed he was conferring with a slightly eccentric man of Asian descent.

And there were several emails in which Nakamoto struck Hanyecz as paranoid, he said.

"There were a few times when I got messages that seemed off-base," Hanyecz said. "I brushed them off because I was like, who cares if this guy tells me to go pound sand and go away? This wasn't my job or anything — it was a hobby. I was trying to be friends with him. He seemed very paranoid about people breaking the software. He kept calling it 'prerelease,' and I was helping him get it to release."

In retrospect, Hanyecz said, Nakamoto's paranoia was understandable.

"If anything had happened to the code early on, we wouldn't be having this conversation today," he said.

Hanyecz said that he was used to dealing with eccentric people over the internet but that his interactions with Nakamoto consistently gave him what he called "a weird feeling."

Ultimately, Hanyecz said he had deep respect for both Nakamoto's project and the person or team behind the name. Hanyecz believes bitcoin might not exist today if it weren't for its creator's decision to evade the public eye.

"It's exciting because people love a man of mystery, but I try to steer people towards the fact that it doesn't matter who made it; he could be a psycho killer," Hanyecz said. "People like to identify with heroes or villains, but in the cryptosphere, your code has to speak for itself. Charisma and being an interesting person only gets you so far when you're a developer. Ultimately, you'll be judged on the quality of your code and your idea."

SEE ALSO: A 27-year-old entrepreneur reveals how he snagged $500,000 from Mark Cuban over a 5-minute email exchange

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Sensor Tower: Mobile game publishers continue to reach $1M at high rates

Sensor Tower reports that many mobile game publishers are hitting the $1M earnings milestone in 2021 -- though not as many as in 2016. Rea...