Microsoft finally brings Cortana to iPad, promises 20% faster launches

More than two years after bringing its Cortana digital assistant to iPhones, Microsoft today debuted Cortana for iPad, including a new interface specifically optimized for 7.9-inch, 9.7-inch, 10.5-inch, and 12.9-inch screens. The app also boasts 20 percent faster launch times tha … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Downward Spiral: Horus Station is 3rd Eye Studios’ zero-gravity space VR game

Indie game studio 3rd Eye Studios is unveiling Download Spiral: Horus Station, a virtual reality sci-fi adventure game set in the zero gravity of outer space. The Helsinki, Finland-based company has tried to solve the tough technical problem of letting you enjoy the feeling of fl … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Gab raises $4.8 million for its extremist-friendly social network, claims 400,000 accounts

Amid ongoing disputes about free speech and hate speech, “alternative” social network Gab says it has raised $4.8 million and is planning a $10 million initial coin offering (ICO). Gab, which has become popular among extreme-right and ultra-conservative figures who have been bann … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Airbnb reportedly built an internal hedge fund that makes $5 million per month

A new report about executive turmoil at Airbnb includes a fascinating detail about how the company is generating its growing profits. According to a story from Bloomberg, former CFO Laurence Tosi, who had previously worked Blackstone Group as CFO, took Airbnb’s cash flow and crea … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

GM and ExxonMobil lead $13.7 million investment in on-demand car care startup Yoshi

To million of gamers the world over, Yoshi is an anthropomorphic dinosaur that serves as Mario and Luigi’s friendly sidekick. But to car-owners in a handful of U.S. cities, the famous name is taking on a completely different meaning. Founded in 2016, Palo Alto-based startup Yoshi … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Samsung to begin investing in second semiconductor chip line

(Reuters) – Samsung Electronics has decided to begin investment to build a second memory chip line at its Pyeongtaek production facilities in South Korea, Yonhap news agency reported on Wednesday. Chipmakers are investing heavily to meet booming demand for semiconductors and Sams … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

The Stellar Cloud Takes Off; Built for Today, Ready for Tomorrow

PRESS RELEASE: Rockwell Collins, a leader in aviation and high-integrity solutions for commercial and military customers around the world, and Silicon Valley aviation technology innovator Stellar Labs, Inc. ("Stellar") today announced the launch of... | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Razer Phone review — even better with HDR

REVIEW: After using the Razer Phone for the last 3 months, I’m comfortable calling it an amazing smart device. It is available now for $700, and it easily competes with other high-end phones in that price range with one glaring exception. What you’ll like Excellent media and gami … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

League of Lawyers: Esports is creating a new class of white-collar jobs

GUEST: Many old-school sports fans still might not take esports seriously. But the increased involvement of professional sports organizations such as the NBA, increased esports coverage on mainstream media, and increased regulation of leagues shows that esports is entering a new … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Snap shares soar over 20% following solid revenue and user growth

(Reuters) — Snap surprised Wall Street on Tuesday with a rebound in user growth for its Snapchat messaging app, showing resilience amid competition with Facebook’s Instagram and sending shares up nearly 30 percent. Paired with higher-than-expected revenue and improved margins, th … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

You should try to get into Rainbow Six: Siege this month

You just spent Valentine’s Day doing nice things for your partner or significant other, and I think you should spend the next day doing something for yourself … like finally checking out Rainbow Six: Siege. And Ubisoft wants to facilitate that process by offering up a trial of th … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

In Other Waters charts the wonders of an abstract alien ocean

In Other Waters is a narrative adventure that embraces the unknown. It invites you to explore an alien ocean in the distant future and fill in the gaps with your imagination, armed with nothing more than a radar screen and a diving suit with rudimentary artificial intelligence. I … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Holla acquires Monkey to expand video chat for dating and friend discovery

EXCLUSIVE: Video chat app Holla acquired competitor Monkey today. Holla acquired Monkey’s brand assets and now runs operations for both apps out of Holla offices in Beijing and Los Angeles. Monkey employees, including founders Ben Pasternak and Isaiah Turner, will not join Holla. … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Trove passes 15 million players and 10.2 billion blocks destroyed

Gamers can’t get enough of blocky games, like Minecraft, Roblox, and now Trove. Trion Worlds announced that its free-to-play voxel online game Trove has surpassed 15 million players worldwide. The massively multiplayer online game had a profitable 2017, launched in China via publ … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Apple releases iOS 11.3 beta 2 with battery health monitor, says latest iPhones have hardware fixes

Apple today released the second developer beta of iOS 11.3, notably adding previously promised battery health monitoring features, as first spotted by 9to5Mac. The new Battery Health screen apparently appears only for the specific iPhone models affected by the iPhone throttling d … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Puyo Puyo Tetris is Sega’s latest PC port

Sega is bringing another one of its recent console hits to the PC. This time it’s the competitive puzzle game Puyo Puyo Tetris. This mashup of Puyo Puyo (Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine) and Tetris mechanics hits Steam on February 27. It was previously available in North America … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Viz Media adds indies to its manga empire with publishing deal with Rose City Games

Viz Media has been orbiting video games for a while now, publishing manga adaptations of hits like Pokémon — and it’s now going to publish indie games. It has teamed up with studio Rose City Games, which will also be developing the first title it’s releasing: The World Next Door, … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Nyriad raises $8.5 million for GPU-based resilient storage arrays

Nyriad has raised $8.5 million in venture capital for its resilient storage systems that are accelerated using graphics processing units (GPUs). Those storage systems are built to handle problems such as the simultaneous removal or failure of 20 hard disks at the same time. The C … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Microsoft offers Box, Dropbox, and Google cloud customers free OneDrive for Business until their contracts expire

What do you do if you want more people to use your service when there are many other competing services out there already? Offer it to them for free, of course. And that is exactly what Microsoft is doing to encourage signups for its OneDrive for Business cloud storage service. M … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Canalys: Apple shipped 18 million Watches in 2017, up 54% over 2016

After a rough launch, the Apple Watch is officially in growth mode, as Canalys reports today that sales of the wearable exceeded 18 million units in 2017 — a jump of over 54 percent from 2016. The latest version of Apple’s increasingly popular wearable shipped over 9 million unit … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

SK Telecom demos 5G vehicle-to-everything network for self-driving cars, plans 2019 launch

If you thought a network of self-driving cars was years off, think again: South Korean and Spanish carriers today announced successful demonstrations of 5G “vehicle-to-everything” (V2X) communications technologies, and one carrier plans to roll connected self-driving cars onto pu … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Flo’s $500 cost for detecting leaky water pipes could save you from bigger plumber bills

If your home’s pipes spring a leak, the cost can be thousands of dollars. On top of that, you may not notice if there’s a problem at all. Flo Technologies is addressing that with an Internet of Things device, dubbed Flo, that can detect water leaks. The average house loses more t … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

GoDaddy’s DIY website builder GoCentral now integrates with Google My Business

Internet domain name registrar and web hosting giant GoDaddy has announced that it’s integrating its GoCentral DIY website builder with Google My Business. This marks the first third-party website builder to integrate directly with Google My Business, which is a free Google servi … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

How to watch SpaceX launch the Falcon Heavy that will throw a Tesla car into orbit around Mars

And to get an overall scope of the what Musk has in mind, check out this conceptual video:Never one to let us be bored for too long, Elon Musk is back today with his latest audacious bet on the future of transportation. At 1:30 p.m. EST, Musk’s SpaceX is scheduled to test launch … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Automation Survey Finds Network Engineers Need to Learn How to Code

PRESS RELEASE: Indeni, provider of the crowd-sourced network automation platform, in partnership with GNS3, the world's largest open source networking community and a subsidiary of SolarWinds, today announced the findings of its 2018 Network... | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

MonkeyMedia’s BodyNav lets you navigate VR without getting sick

Motion sickness is one of the challenges holding back virtual reality from reaching larger audiences. And MonkeyMedia, a small tech firm in Austin, Texas, believes it has solved the problem with BodyNav, a way to navigate VR in a natural way. BodyNav doesn’t rely on using a handh … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

8th Wall raises $8 million for AR platform that works across most smartphones

8th Wall said it has received $8 million in venture capital funding for its augmented reality developer platform. The funding will help the company with its goal of improving the number and quality of AR applications across a whole range of smartphones, not just the newest ones t … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Univfy raises $6 million to better predict IVF success rates using machine learning

EXCLUSIVE: About 10 percent of women in the U.S.(6.1 million) have difficulty getting pregnant or staying pregnant. Although in vitro fertilization (IVF) is widely recognized as the best treatment for infertility, many couples are deterred by the high costs involved (generally be … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Huawei launches the Honor 9 Lite quad-lens smartphone globally

Chinese smartphone giant Huawei has unveiled its first Honor-branded Lite smartphone for the global market. The Honor 9 Lite launched in India a few weeks ago, and today the company revealed that the device will now “be available globally,” including in Europe. But the company di … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Magic: The Gathering and Netmarble announce ‘Project M’ for mobile

It looks like 2018 is going to be a significant year for Magic: The Gathering in the video game sector. We already know that Magic: The Gathering — Arena collectible card game is in the works for PC, and tonight, Wizards of the Coast and South Korean mobile giant Netmarble announ … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Bitcoin drops below $7,000 amid a slew of concerns

(Reuters) — Digital currency Bitcoin fell more than 15 percent on Monday to a nearly three-month low amid a slew of concerns ranging from a global regulatory clampdown to a ban on using credit cards to buy bitcoin by British and U.S. banks. On the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchan … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Do game marketers hate the Super Bowl? GamesBeat Decides

ANALYSIS: On Sunday afternoon, a few hours before the Super Bowl, I went through my email in search of any reference to Super Bowl LII. I found some promotions about Papa John’s Pizza, Angry Birds, and Xbox — but nothing mentioned anything about a Super Bowl commercial. That was … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Why we should be afraid of quantum computing

GUEST: Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and others have been warning about the harm runaway artificial intelligence could do to humanity in the future. But another technology may pose a more imminent threat: quantum computing. Quantum computers are straight out of science fiction. Tak … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

7 tips for building the ultimate gaming PC

GUEST: Building a PC can be daunting. Where do you start? How much money should you spend? Are different parts better for certain builds? The list of questions is endless — but knowing where to start is half the  battle. My No. 1 tip? Have a designated purpose for your build. If … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

4 reasons Google Home deserves our respect

GUEST: Amazon’s Alexa made quite a splash in the media since her original release in November 2014. Following the debut of Amazon’s first Alexa-powered device, the original Amazon Echo, seven additional devices have become a part of Alexa’s ever-growing smart-tech family. And the … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

8Bitdo’s nostalgic Super Nintendo gamepads are a great way to play

REVIEW: You have a lot of options when it comes to getting an extra controller for your gaming devices, but the peripheral manufacturer 8Bitdo is quickly turning into my first choice. With the company’s SN30/SF30 and SN30/SF30 Pro gamepads, it has controllers that look and feel g … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Crossniq channels late ’90s puzzlers with a colorblind-friendly design

Crossniq is a slick puzzle game in which you slide tiles on its board to form crosses. Its design harkens back to the ’90s idea of science fiction, featuring pops of neon and futuristic silhouettes. It’s available for free on the web on the indie game site itch.io, but Cleveland- … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Android Oreo passes 1% adoption after 5 months, Nougat finally takes first place

Like Android Nougat before it, Android Oreo took five months to pass the 1 percent adoption mark. In other words, tracking the adoption rate of the latest Android version is still as excruciating as watching paint dry. Per Google’s Platform Versions page, the latest and greatest … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Dr DisRespect claims he ‘broke’ Twitch (update)

In December, Guy “Dr DisRespect” Beahm announced he was taking a break from livestreaming even though he was one of the biggest personalities on Twitch. Today, Dr DisRespect has returned, and the huge audience tuning in to watch him was too much for the site’s servers. As Dr DisR … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Paige.ai raises $25 million for cancer detection powered by computer vision

Health care startup Paige.ai today announced it has raised $25 million to continue its work in cancer diagnosis with help from computer vision trained with clinical imaging data. Datasets relating to treatment and genomics will also be included in the company’s deep learning mode … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Addressing pay inequality before it’s too late

SPONSORED: Presented by TriNet Keeping up with ongoing changes in federal, state, and local regulations is one of the toughest parts of running a young, fast-growing company. Navigating the complex framework of laws and guidelines isn’t high on any entrepreneur’s list. The specte … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Borderlands developer Gearbox uses the cloud to change how it makes games

When you imagine the kind of work a game developer does, you probably think about someone designing a level or programming movement and physics. But a huge part of modern development is live operations, in which studios build tools to connect a game to a variety of online platfor … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

HappyNumbers uses AI to augment math teachers, not replace them

EXCLUSIVE: There is one question that almost everyone asks when discussing artificial intelligence: Will it replace human beings, or augment them? The answer is not as black and white as you may think, especially when you apply AI to one of the most critical, formative careers of … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Why Renee James is challenging Intel with ARM-based server chips

I met Renee James more than a couple of decades ago, when she was the technical assistant to then Intel CEO Andy Grove, one of the legendary leaders of Silicon Valley. She kept notes on what she learned from Grove, and she rose through the ranks to become president of the world’s … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Broadcom increases Qualcomm bid to $121 billion in effort to force negotiations

Seeking to break a months-long stalemate, Broadcom today announced that it has significantly increased its offer to acquire Qualcomm, raising the bid to $121 billion. Under terms of the new offer, Broadcom would pay $82 per share. Qualcomm’s stock closed Friday at $66.07 per shar … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Amazon settles long-running tax dispute with France for undisclosed amount

(Reuters) — Amazon said on Monday it had settled a long-running dispute with French tax authorities, who have been seeking nearly 200 million euros ($249 million) from the online retail giant. Neither Amazon nor the French authorities would say what the settlement was worth. Amaz … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Optimizely’s decision to ditch its free plan suggests A/B website testing is dead

GUEST: On December 20, 2017 Optimizely, the leading A/B testing platform, informed its users that it is planning to sunset its free Starter plan on February 28, 2018. We estimate that this change will impact around 70,000 websites* which will soon be left without a tool that allo … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

AI could make trolls think twice before retweeting offensive content

Hate speech has existed in the United States since the founding of our country. Despite efforts to move toward becoming a more progressive, inclusive nation, it seems as though the rise of social media has made hateful keyboard warriors the poster children for modern-day America. … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago