Xbox One, Xbox 360, and Windows 10 gamers may have trouble booting up certain releases at the moment. Xbox Live isn’t working for everybody, and Microsoft has engineers working on the problems, according to the Xbox Live status site. Microsoft notes that this outage is causing pr … | Continue reading
Though lawsuits and government investigations against Apple over the iPhone battery debacle multiplied and went international in January, Canada’s government escalated its investigation today, bringing representatives of Canada’s Competition Bureau, Apple and Primate Labs — the T … | Continue reading
Ubisoft announced that Tom Clancy’s The Division has reached more than 20 million players on the second anniversary of the online shooter’s release. At about $60 per game, the retail sales of The Division probably add up to about $1.2 billion, not counting revenues from expansion … | Continue reading
Scavengers Studio announced today that its battle royale shooter Darwin Project is coming out for Steam Early Access and Xbox Game Preview on March 9 for $15. Battle royale games have become huge following PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds explosive debut last year, and other games ( … | Continue reading
VB LIVE: The hype surrounding AI has reached a fever pitch, but practical uses that are delivering concrete, practical business results are here, and it’s time to get real. Join this VB Live event hosted by Forrester Senior Analyst Brandon Purcell and Kayak Chief Scientist Matthi … | Continue reading
EXCLUSIVE: Just like World War I got a sequel, Battlefield 1 is getting Battlefield 2 later this year. And as you might expect from that name, Battlefield 2 will return the series to World War II in a main entry for the first time since 2009’s Battlefield 1943, GamesBeat has lear … | Continue reading
Closing out the heavily 5G-focused 2018 Mobile World Congress, ZTE today announced partnerships with major carriers MTN and Ooredoo to bring 5G wireless technology to Africa and the Middle East. The goal of both deals is to accelerate 5G deployment across large geographic areas w … | Continue reading
Microsoft’s AI assistant Cortana has a new boss, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat today. Javier Soltero, who previously controlled the Microsoft Office product group, will now be in charge of product for Cortana, an assistant available on 400 million devices. Now corporate … | Continue reading
Microsoft announced several improvements to its pre-built AI tools for companies today, focused on improving facial recognition, custom image classification, and understanding of important entities. The updates all come to the company’s suite of Cognitive Services — APIs that dev … | Continue reading
SPONSORED: Presented by Triggmine If you track world business trends, you’ve probably heard how AI is taking over jobs in almost every industry. Email marketing is no different, and the message for all involved is clear: Upskill to include AI in your repertoire, or change career … | Continue reading
Food delivery startup DoorDash has just gobbled down a gargantuan $535 million round of funding, spoonfed by Japan’s SoftBank, with participation from Sequoia Capital, GIC, and Wellcome Trust. DoorDash operates alongside a number of other tech-infused delivery and logistics start … | Continue reading
Jam City unveiled a new trailer for its Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery mobile game, showing new gameplay features and opening signups to download the game on Google Play. This represents a chance for Jam City to move further into the big time of mobile games, which has become a $ … | Continue reading
Messaging app company Viber has announced an interesting update to its chat platform today, one that creates a potentially limitless forum for publication conversation. While most messaging apps, including Viber, built their early business on one-to-one and (small) group chat fun … | Continue reading
Andreessen Horowitz is venturing into space with today’s announcement that it’s leading an $18 million round in Astranis. The San Francisco-based startup is launching out of stealth today with plans to build its first commercial telecommunications satellite. Y Combinator, Fifty Y … | Continue reading
Woebot, the startup behind an automated psychotherapy bot of the same name, announced today that it has closed an $8 million round of series A funding. The company’s bot is designed to help people cope with mental illnesses like depression through the application of cognitive beh … | Continue reading
(Reuters) – Sky, the European pay-TV group at the center of a fierce takeover battle, said it would add online video service Netflix to a new TV bundle, bringing drama like “The Crown” to its sport and entertainment offer for the first time. Netflix’s mix of original drama and mo … | Continue reading
GUEST: The Telugu “text bomb” bug sounds like an Apple user’s nightmare: you get a message containing a particular character from the Indian language of Telugu, and your iPhone’s messaging apps and WiFi functionality not only crash but “keep crashing forever” without drastic inte … | Continue reading
GUEST: Last May I pointed to WebVR games as one of the VR industry’s biggest potential sweet spots for generating widespread traction because the combination of VR, games, and the open web represents a giant industry intersection. The web is unparalleled in its capacity to get VR … | Continue reading
Into The Breach has this moment that happens over and over again where you realize that you’ve made a mistake, and you’ve just doomed your progress. But the turn-based mech strategy battler from developer Subset Games is brilliant because, if you just stop and think, you can rise … | Continue reading
GUEST: Thousands of years ago, oracles read the future through divine inspiration. Today, we’ve still got Oracle making predictions (along with many other forward-thinking tech firms), but it uses something a little more grounded. Artificial intelligence and its capacity to asses … | Continue reading
Chrono Trigger is out on Steam! Yay! But it’s a port of the mobile version. Boooo. Unlike some of Square Enix’s more questionable mobile ports (like Final Fantasy VI), Chrono Trigger at least didn’t get any ugly graphical overhauls (just some questionable filters) for PC. But the … | Continue reading
Salesforce announced today that the company is now delivering more than 1 billion AI-driven predictions to its customers every day. Those predictions are powered by the company’s Einstein-branded capabilities, which include sales and service forecasting. It’s a major milestone fo … | Continue reading
GUEST: My blockchain startup, Mobius, recently conducted a $39 million token sale. But, given that the rules for token sales in the U.S. are still in flux, we had to do a lot of legal research before launching our sale. And we ended up excluding would-be buyers in six states: Ala … | Continue reading
I’ve had a Tobii Eye Tracker sitting among a pile of PC peripherals that I want to cover or give away for a year now. I hate when this happens, but time and sanity is limited. But something came over me this week, and I finally did the work to plug in the eye-tracking device […] | Continue reading
German game developer and engine creator Crytek announced that Cevat Yerli will step down as CEO, and his brothers Avni and Faruk Yerli will take over as joint CEOs. Cevat Yerli will continue to serve as strategic shareholder. The change follows the launch last week of the Frankf … | Continue reading
Overwatch is getting another new character as the game continues to grow nearly two full years after its March 2016 debut. Brigitte, an engineer who decided to fight as a squire, is a new support character who provides both healing and armor to teammates. Brigitte is available fo … | Continue reading
The voice shopping market is expected to grow from $2 billion today to $40 billion by 2022, according to a new survey of 1,500 owners of smart speaker like Google Home and Amazon Echo in the United States. The survey was conducted by OC&C Strategy Consultants in December 2017 and … | Continue reading
Sony has announced its PlayStation Plus free games lineup for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, and Vita in March. Sony also revealed that starting on March 8, 2019, the service will only offer free games for PlayStation 4 and no longer offer these bonuses for PlayStation 3 and Vita. … | Continue reading
Final Fantasy and The Sims. Those aren’t two franchises you usually expect to see in the same sentence. But they’re coming together in an unusual way. Sqaure Enix announced today that the PC version of the role-playing game Final Fantasy XV will give players a special outfit base … | Continue reading
REVIEW: I was two hours into Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, and it felt like America had run out of happy stories. But the people were hungry for them, so I kept on searching. That’s your job in Dim Bulb Games’s debut effort: to travel the U.S., collect people’s tales, and sha … | Continue reading
EXCLUSIVE: Silicon Valley has been laser-focused on digitizing health care, be it through a credit card-sized heart monitor or an AI-powered gut test. But what about our four-legged friends? According to Piavita, today’s veterinary practices are outdated, expensive, and time-cons … | Continue reading
For the past two years, Facebook has worked to build a community of women within the gaming industry, and now it is formally launching its Women in Gaming initiative. It starts, of course, with a Facebook page for the group to gather and tell each other stories and build meaningf … | Continue reading
Apple announced today that the Apple Watch Series 3 can track skiing and snowboarding activity, thanks to software updates added to watchOS 4.2. The new feature requires the latest Apple Watch — the first to include a barometric altimeter — and one of several third-party apps, in … | Continue reading
Ever since Pokémon Go popularized augmented reality apps, developers have been trying to build the “next big thing.” The most popular free-to-use app using Apple’s ARKit right now, according to data from SensorTower, is Skrite, and today Skrite Labs has announced the addition of … | Continue reading
Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is what happens when a duck, a boar, and a human with stone skin walk into an apocalyptic wasteland. Publisher Funcom has teamed up with Swedish developer Bearded Ladies on what they’re calling a “tactical adventure” — a game that features explorati … | Continue reading
(Reuters) — Riding a wave of new users, improved advertising options and an embrace of video content by users and advertisers alike, Twitter Inc’s revenue has leaped in Japan, helping lead the company to its first quarterly profit. Earlier this month Twitter reported that sales i … | Continue reading
PRESS RELEASE: Switzerland's Economic Minister, Johann Schneider-Ammann, announced last month that the nation's focus on crypto should move beyond the Crypto Valley and should now refer to the entire country as a 'Crypto Nation'. This was a demonstration... | Continue reading
eBay has confirmed that it’s buying the Japanese arm of Giosis, a Singapore-based business that operates the Qoo10 ecommerce platform across a number of Asian markets including China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Japan. Giosis is actually a joint venture with eB … | Continue reading
GUEST: Why aren’t more brands using esports as a marketing platform? It reaches an attractive attractive millennial demographic. From the classical marketing viewpoint, the customer lifetime value of the esports millennial is significant for brands and worthy of meaningful market … | Continue reading
Microsoft today released a new Windows 10 preview for PCs with a few enterprise improvements. This build is from the RS4 branch, which represents the next Windows 10 update the company has yet to announce (but is likely to ship soon). There is no new build from the RS5 branch. Wi … | Continue reading
GUEST: Experiments with VR motion controllers show improving immersion increases the risk of VR sickness and that the ill effects are a varied and complex matter. One of the joys of working in the R&D Labs at Tapptic is the excuse to spend a week playing with new gadgets, but all … | Continue reading
Longtime Silicon Valley leader Dan’l Lewin was named president and CEO of The Computer History Museum. He will help develop a new strategy for the museum, which chronicles the decades of achievements of Silicon Valley’s leaders. The Mountain View, California museum has exhibits t … | Continue reading
Defiance was one of the most ambitious online games conceived by a startup. Trion Worlds launched the game to mixed reviews in 2013, and the SyFy television network aired a Defiance TV show in tandem with the game for three seasons. SyFy canceled the show in 2015, but the online … | Continue reading
ANALYSIS: The Entertainment Software Ratings Board revealed a new form of self-regulation for video games today. In the “near future,” the ESRB will assign a warning label that will inform customers that a product contains “in-game purchases.” This indicator will apply to games a … | Continue reading
What do you do if you’re a venture capital (VC) firm looking to make a name for yourself in a crowded space? You try to differentiate, even through true differentiation can be difficult. However, one relatively under-the-radar European VC firm does promise at least one real diffe … | Continue reading
It’s Tuesday evening in the United States, so engineers working at a secret facility in Redmond, Washington are applying strips of duct tape to computer servers. That’s right, the PC gaming platform Steam is offline at the moment for its regular maintenance. This temporary outage … | Continue reading
(Reuters) — Babies, dogs, and artificial intelligence. Alphabet’s Google is betting this combination proves irresistible with the Tuesday launch of Google Clips, a pocket-sized digital camera that decides on its own whether an image is interesting enough to shoot. The $249 device … | Continue reading
Amazon has acquired Ring, maker of smart home doorbells, cameras, and security systems, GeekWire reports. The company was acquired for more than $1 billion, according to Reuters. The acquisition may be announced later today and was likely made to fuel its fight for the emerging i … | Continue reading