Disney executive Kyle Laughlin announced today that the entertainment giant has hit reset on its game strategy and formed new relationships with four game development partners. Disney will work on future games with Ludia, Glu, Gameloft, and PerBlue. Those are all established mobi … | Continue reading
Between emails, social media accounts, calls, text messages, WhatsApp, and more, our smartphones have become ticking bombs, gradually turning us (and our children) into co-dependent, digital junkies. Media mogul Arianna Huffington is seeking a solution to this invasive addiction, … | Continue reading
New features have led to Facebook Messenger, an app used every month by 1.3 billion people, becoming too cluttered, said Messenger chief David Marcus today. Users should expect steps to be taken in 2018 to simplify the Messenger user experience. “Over the last two years, we built … | Continue reading
Veteran game publisher Brian Fargo and other game industry veterans hope to change the PC industry by creating a new cryptocurrency that serves as an alternative to the app stores. Fargo’s new company Robot Cache will create a digital PC games platform, just like Valve’s Steam di … | Continue reading
Lyft passengers spent $2 billion on local businesses and services in 2017, according to the results of the 2018 Lyft Economic Impact report. By contrast, Lyft riders had an economic impact of $750 million last year, according to the 2017 Lyft Economic Impact Report. The survey of … | Continue reading
To address a shortage of IT talent in the U.S., Google announced today that it is launching a Coursera training program for IT support professionals. The Google IT Support Professional Certificate is designed to help students with no prior IT training get the experience needed fo … | Continue reading
IBM and Danish transport conglomerate Maersk announced today they are launching a joint venture to redefine the global shipping industry for the blockchain age. The new company, which hasn’t yet been named, will focus on simplifying the complex process of moving goods across diff … | Continue reading
PRESS RELEASE: Bidgely announced today that it has closed a $27 million Series C round of financing - the largest round of investment to date for energy disaggregation technology. Georgian Partners, an investment fund known for its focus on high-growth... | Continue reading
Amazon has announced that its Alexa-powered Echo Spot is officially available to buy outside the U.S., as the company opens preorders in the U.K. and Germany. The ecommerce giant unveiled the latest Echo incarnation back in September when it launched the Echo Spot for $130. It’s … | Continue reading
(Reuters) — SoftBank Group said on Monday it was considering listing its Japanese wireless business – a move that could reportedly raise $18 billion and would accelerate the conglomerate’s transformation into one of the world’s biggest tech investors. A spin-off – potentially the … | Continue reading
Indiegogo made its name as a crowdfunding site where startups could get cash for their big dreams. But the San Francisco company is moving beyond that idea to helping startups with design for manufacturing and hardware distribution. In ten years, Indiegogo has raised $1.3 billion … | Continue reading
SPONSORED: Presented by LogMeIn We are amid a customer experience revolution. Gartner predicts that by 2022, approximately 65 percent of all customer service interactions will be digital or text-based versus phone. With today’s customers being much more demanding and much less br … | Continue reading
The Overwatch League had its opening day on January 10, hosting the new esports endeavor’s first three matches. At its peak, the Twitch stream topped out at 425,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch, according to Blizzard. But the Overwatch’s League debut wasn’t the largest event in e … | Continue reading
Sheng Fu founded Cheetah Mobile in 2010, and it found a business making security apps such as Security Master for smartphones. Now it is a publicly traded company valued at $2.2 billion, with revenues of $707 million in 2016. It is targeted almost $800 million for 2017 revenues, … | Continue reading
PREVIEW: The lootbox monetization model is coming under attack. The biggest beefs are coming from players disgruntled about in-game items in Star Wars: Battlefront II. But when it comes to games, this model goes all the way back to Magic: The Gathering (and if we go further in ti … | Continue reading
Everyone does it the first time they try VR. It doesn’t matter if it’s a static 360 image, a passive 360 video, an immersive VR experience, or a fast-paced VR game, everyone reaches out with their hands in an attempt to touch the virtual world. This happens a lot on the Samsung G … | Continue reading
Netmarble scored a huge hit in South Korea with its launch last year of Lineage 2: Revolution, a massively multiplayer online game on Android and iOS. But it was never clear if the beautiful medieval fantasy game would be a hit in the West. So, the company lined up press, adverti … | Continue reading
GUEST: In just a one month span between December 2017 and January 2018, two late-stage unicorns (privately held companies that have a valuation of over $1 billion) have submitted confidential registration filings with the SEC: Spotify and Dropbox. Others are expected to follow so … | Continue reading
For a week each January, Las Vegas becomes Las Betas. The VentureBeat crew checked out CES 2018, the big tech trade show last week, and we’ve come up with the top trends of the event. These trends are bigger than any single company, and they could change the landscape in the comi … | Continue reading
Linden Lab makes a lot of money with the sale of virtual goods in its Second Life virtual world. But this year it is adding Sansar, a collection of virtual reality spaces where users can create their own immersive experiences inside their own VR scenes. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich p … | Continue reading
Fancy ringside seats to the biggest matches in the WWE? They’re only a VR headset away. NextVR this week announced that it had formed a partnership with the wrestling brand to bring highlights from its biggest matches to its app later this year. As reported by Variety, six episod … | Continue reading
GUEST: Great expectations surrounded the dawn of the “chatbot revolution” less than a couple of years ago. Marketers and futurists fantasized of intelligent virtual autonomous agents that would understand us better than ourselves, pick up our desires from chunks of conversations, … | Continue reading
North Carolina is a good place for entrepreneurs of color to land — Durham is ranked a top city for black-owned businesses and plays host to the Black Wall Street Homecoming entrepreneurship conference, as well as Google for Entrepreneurs Exchange for Black Founders. Now a young … | Continue reading
Interaxon started out developing wearables like its Muse headband meditation tool, and it’s now applying its learnings to virtual reality. Its new Muse Virtual Reality aftermarket add-ons will attach to the HTC Vive and Samsung Gear VR headsets to pick up users’ brainwaves and co … | Continue reading
Amazon’s Alexa strategy is to be everywhere: ubiquitous, omnipresent, and all-knowing, like some AI god. In pursuit of that goal, the Seattle-based company certainly covered some ground at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The extension of the Home Skills API to … | Continue reading
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich announced this week that his company had created Intel Studios, a place where Hollywood creators could go to learn how to create immersive media, ranging from virtual reality games to non-VR sports entertainment. He showed a video of what it the next gene … | Continue reading
GUEST: PC gamers are nothing if not passionate. They’re often labeled as “enthusiasts” and even “hardcore,” but whatever label seems most fitting, PC gamers comprise a group of more than 1.2 billion individuals around the globe. This number is only growing, and its upward swing i … | Continue reading
Since the first announcement of Blizzard’s Overwatch League, I’ve tried to stay excited. After all, this is the first time that an esports organization was going to do some of the things I’ve always said I wanted: city-based teams, seasonal play, and base-pay for players. The pro … | Continue reading
GUEST: Ford drove the first automobile down the streets of Detroit in 1890. It would take another 30 years before the company streamlined production and made cars available to the mass market. The obvious lesson: Sometimes technology has a long gestation period before we can scal … | Continue reading
Every year, journalists start CES with faint optimism and conclude with disappointment; as the song goes, they thought the future would be cooler. At some point right as the show is ending, someone will typically float Apple — which officially skips CES every year — as either the … | Continue reading
The nostalgia wave was strong at CES 2018, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas this week. I got a taste of it when I saw Atari Table Pong, a mechanical and digital table game in which you spin foam paddles to play. It’s sort of like an air hockey table, with the action […] | Continue reading
Strange things are afoot in Ryme City, but Detective Pikachu is on the case. The spinoff of Nintendo’s popular Pokémon series will debut in the U.S. as a Nintendo 3DS exclusive on March 23. It arrives ahead of the movie adaptation, which is slated for 2019 and stars Deadpool acto … | Continue reading
OPINION: It’s difficult to gauge all the important trends at CES if you don’t roam the show floor (I leave that to my colleague Dean Takahashi). On the flip side, you better sit back and see the biggest trend, or put another way, whatever was overkill this particular year. For CE … | Continue reading
SPONSORED: Presented by Intel 2017 was an unusually strong year for video games, and some of them had nothing to do with the surplus of big-budget shooters and open-world adventures. In fact, a lot of those stellar experiences came from small, independent developers. To honor the … | Continue reading
(Reuters) — Shares of Facebook fell 4 percent on Friday after Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg announced changes to the platform’s centerpiece News Feed that he said would hit user engagement in the near term. Zuckerberg said on Thursday the company would change the filter for the … | Continue reading
Microsoft today released a new Windows 10 preview for PCs with localization, Edge, shell, settings, and input improvements, among other additions. This build is part of the RS4 branch, which represents the next Windows 10 update the company has yet to announce (but we already kno … | Continue reading
Facebook users can expect to see more posts from their friends and family in their News Feeds in the coming months, the company announced today. Posts that generate high levels of engagement will also be featured higher in the News Feed. Businesses and organizations with Facebook … | Continue reading
Unless you live under a rock, you probably saw headlines this week about a war between Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. So what’s the takeaway? Alexa in personal computers and AR glasses may be a bit surprising, but the CES … | Continue reading
Space Invaders is one of the most important games in the industry’s history. It debuted in 1978, and it’s turning 40. And Taito, the company that made the landmark game so many years ago, is releasing Degica Games’ 2008 Space Invaders Extreme on Steam in February. Extreme came ou … | Continue reading
There’s just one event where you can find Star Wars: Battlefront II’s star, the games industry’s first major congressional candidate, and one of the chief scouts for China’s biggest gaming company. We’ve got three new speakers for GamesBeat Summit 2018, which will take place at t … | Continue reading
EXCLUSIVE: Latin America has a lot to offer, but the region throws many challenges in the way of the budding entrepreneur. One reason for this is numerous weak points and complexities in the overall business landscape. On the World Bank’s ease of doing business index, Latin Ameri … | Continue reading
ANALYSIS: Amidst all the hullabaloo around modular smartwatches, virtual reality, autonomous cars, smart homes, digital assistants, and 5G (or lack thereof) at CES 2018, the future of mobility came a little more into focus. Two companies showcased their “flying car” smarts at the … | Continue reading
PRESS RELEASE: QuoteWizard, the nation's largest privately held insurance comparison marketplace, today announced that it has acquired Bantam Connect ("Bantam"), a pioneer in providing the insurance industry with warm call transfers. Bantam's innovative... | Continue reading
ANALYSIS: The Consumer Technology Association, which organizes the giant tech confab CES in Las Vegas every year, has released its first ever International Innovation Scorecard. Given the global influence of CTA and CES, naturally it’s getting a lot of attention. Finland is ranke … | Continue reading
Unbabel, a machine translation platform that uses humans to verify translated content, has raised $23 million in a series B round of funding from Microsoft Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Samsung Next, Scale Venture Partners, Notion Capital, Caixa Capital, and Funders Club. Founde … | Continue reading
(Reuters) — South Korea’s justice minister said on Thursday the government is preparing a bill to ban cryptocurrency trading, throwing the virtual coin market into turmoil as the nation’s police and tax authorities raided local exchanges on alleged tax evasion. The clampdown in S … | Continue reading
GUEST: People still view virtual reality as a glorified entertainment platform. But it’s more than just games: enterprise VR is a quietly successful segment of this emerging industry that doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Building a successful enterprise VR venture is a comp … | Continue reading
One of the best and most atmospheric role-playing games is making the leap from PC to Nintendo’s hybrid Switch handled/home console. Red Hook Studios made the announcement today and confirmed it will hit the system January 18 for $25. You can also get the expansions, The Crimson … | Continue reading