GUEST: The lack of diversity in tech has been front and center this past year. Large tech companies have publicly vowed to fix the problem. But how? One answer is recognizing, acknowledging, and eliminating unconscious bias from the hiring process. Three years ago, Cockroach Labs … | Continue reading
ANALYSIS: Apple wants to buy Shazam, we learned on Friday. The popular app can identify music, movies, TV shows, and even ads after listening to a short sample of the content in question using your device’s microphone. I suspect Apple wants to integrate this technology further in … | Continue reading
ANALYSIS: Amazon dropped something of a curve ball on Friday when it announced that its voice-enabled Amazon Echo smart speakers are now officially available to purchase in more than 80 new markets around the world. Up until now, you could only (officially) procure the speakers i … | Continue reading
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) safe harbors are a vital protection for websites and Internet services of all sizes. But thanks to a new Copyright Office rule, website owners could lose safe harbor protections if they don’t register online by December 31. And that’s n … | Continue reading
REVIEW: Reigns: Her Majesty shows that it’s not easy being queen — but it sure is fun. It’s developer Nerial and publisher Devolver Digital’s followup to the card-based kingship simulator from 2016, which tasked players with making decisions for the realm based purely on swiping … | Continue reading
Affectiva, one in a series of companies to come out of MIT’s Media Lab whose work revolves around affective computing, used to be best known for sensing emotion in videos. It recently expanded into emotion detection in audio with the Speech API for companies making robots and AI … | Continue reading
The Tigertron studio unveiled its debut game, Jupiter & Mars, at Sony’s PlayStation Experience event tonight. It’s a single-player virtual reality puzzler set in a future where humanity is now extinct — however, its influence is still felt in the world’s oceans. Tigertron develop … | Continue reading
Media Molecule’s Dreams for the PlayStation 4 will have a story mode that will combine three different universes. Sony made the announcement tonight at its PlayStation Experience event in Anaheim, California. Siobhan Reddy of Media Molecule said onstage that the story mode was cr … | Continue reading
GUEST: Five years ago, researchers made an abrupt and rather large leap in the accuracy of software that can interpret images. The artificial neural networks behind it underpin the recent boom we are now seeing in the AI industry. We are, however, still nowhere near achieving a r … | Continue reading
GUEST: Surrounded by darkness, the looming 20 foot skull is so close I can touch it. With the click of a mouse, the 3D model of the human head and neck pivots and I’m inside the eye socket examining this complex system from the inside out. It’s A viewpoint typically reserved for … | Continue reading
SCP-3008 is a Swedish furniture fever dream. It’s based off a horror story from the popular SCP Foundation website, one that describes how someone finds themselves in an endless Ikea. Inhuman creatures known as the “Staff” stalk you. It’s still in early development, but developer … | Continue reading
Canada has done a lot to facilitate the growth of its game-development industry, and that passion apparently goes all the way to the top. On Twitter today, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau posted a congratulations to Studio MDHR for winning two categories during The Game Aw … | Continue reading
Mag Interactive went public today at a market valuation of $137 million. It’s the Swedish company behind the hit puzzle word game Ruzzle. The company and its shareholders sold 11.3 million shares to the public and raised an estimated $21.6 million in net proceeds. The offering is … | Continue reading
Destiny 2’s Curse of Osiris brought a new gun when it launched on December 5 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. It’s the Prometheus Lens, and it’s incredibly broken. Most guns in Destiny 2 had strengths and weaknesses. Some might have a lot of power but low range, or a big dama … | Continue reading
OPINION: Microsoft announced massive Windows 10 news this week, arguably the biggest since the operating system debuted over two years ago: Windows 10 on ARM. Three big features come with that: the screen turns on “instantly” unlike existing PCs, LTE is built right in, and the ba … | Continue reading
Amazon Web Services quietly planted another stake in the workplace software-as-a-service market last night with the launch of a new single sign-on offering. It’s a free service that lets companies provide their employees with a single set of credentials for logging into a variety … | Continue reading
Cliff Bleszinski revealed on Twitter today that the other co-founder of Boss Key Productions, Arjan Brussee, is leaving the studio. Brussee was also the developer’s chief operating officer. It is with a heavy heart that I have to inform you that we've parted ways with @arjan … | Continue reading
Every founder, funder, and entrepreneurial support organization in the Midwest says the exact same thing: There just isn’t enough early-stage capital. Even a city with a relatively well-developed (by non-Silicon Valley standards) venture capital scene, like St. Louis, still faces … | Continue reading
Spotify and Chinese tech titan Tencent are to invest in each other’s music-streaming services, as part of what Tencent president Martin Lau calls a “strategic collaboration.” The reciprocal agreement between Spotify, Tencent, and its subsidiary Tencent Music Entertainment Group ( … | Continue reading
PRESS RELEASE: CyberMiles (CoinMarketCap: CMT), a new blockchain platform designed and optimized for commercial applications, has announced its first strategic partnership with leading peer-to-peer marketplace, 5miles. CyberMiles, which... | Continue reading
A little more than a year after launching in the U.S., Amazon has announced that its Amazon Music Unlimited on-demand music streaming service is arriving in 28 new markets from today. The ecommerce giant first introduced its Spotify competitor to its domestic market in October la … | Continue reading
(Reuters) — In a small village shop near the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, store owner Lu Qiwei uses his smartphone to place orders to refill stocks of instant noodles, rice and drinks. Lu, 61, says he didn’t own a phone two years ago, but he’s now one of 600,000 people using … | Continue reading
The innovative co-op game A Way Out is breaking out of prison on March 23, 2018. Developer Hazelight Studios will be launching it on Xbox One and PlayStation 4, as well as PC through Electronic Arts’s Origin platform. Players will also be able to download a “friend pass,” which a … | Continue reading
Bayonetta 3 will be coming soon as an exclusive title for the Nintendo Switch. Nintendo’s Reggie Fils-Aime teased the announcement and debuted the trailer for the game at The Game Awards. IT is being developed by Platinum Games, maker of the other Bayonetta games. They didn’t sho … | Continue reading
Link is a biker now, and I mean right now. Nintendo is releasing the second downloadable content add-on for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild tonight. The publisher announced the release during a presentation at The Game Awards, and it showed off a trailer of the new conten … | Continue reading
Developer Campo Santo announced its new game In the Valley of Gods at The Game Awards tonight. It’s slated for release in 2019, with platforms to be announced. It’s a single-player adventure game about seeking treasure in an ancient valley. The world premiere trailer showed two c … | Continue reading
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Earlier this year nearly 200 Internet engineers and computer scientists sent a letter to the FCC that explained facts about the structure, history, and evolving nature of the Internet. The reasons we laid out in that letter for writing it then still apply to the draft now: Based … | Continue reading
GUEST: There was a point when the term AI conjured thoughts of Terminator and murderbots that took over the world. Today, there’s a resurgence of the term, but times have changed. Now, for many people, the initial image is that of helpful appliances, friendly robots, self-driving … | Continue reading
SPONSORED: Presented by Intel With Quake Champions, Saber Interactive has set itself the task to make a modern Quake: frenetic and crazy as it ever was, but with larger-than-life champions, each with their own hooks and special abilities. It’s a fusion of the grim and gothic orig … | Continue reading
The tech industry continues to shape the American workforce in a number of ways. It’s not just that cities with a large tech industry are likely attracting more tech workers, but the concentration of tech jobs in a city may also be affecting how many other types of workers also m … | Continue reading
(Reuters) — The European Union is to make a submission to the U.S. Supreme Court in its hearing of the U.S. Department of Justice’s appeal against a ruling which prevented prosecutors from gaining access to emails held by Microsoft in Ireland. The case has attracted significant a … | Continue reading
If you ever dreamed that the technology economy was a magical world of startups disrupting this or that sector, then get ready for a dose of reality. Fresh evidence that technology is consolidating around a handful of large companies comes to us via a report looking at the vast a … | Continue reading
As machine learning-fueled tech touches every industry, new job titles are becoming more common. IPsoft has a chief cognitive officer, and Autodesk hires conversational engineers. But Tim Hwang has those beat: He’s director of the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence … | Continue reading
Google is launching its Change the Game program, a diversity initiative for starting a dialogue about women who play and make mobile games. It also partnered with market researcher Newzoo on a study about people’s behaviors when they play games on their phones. Change the Game wi … | Continue reading
Kubernetes 1.9 launched today, bringing customers of the open source container orchestration system stable tools for running important applications. This should make it more attractive for enterprises and other businesses that have been waiting for a guarantee of stability. In pa … | Continue reading
Xbox One owners and PC players are encountering connection errors with the Xbox Live service, according to a number of complaints on social media. Microsoft has also updated its Xbox Live status site to confirm problems for some of its Forza games, but the outage has also taken C … | Continue reading
Germany-based developer Goodgame Studios announced today that it will be publicly traded indirectly for the first time as it merges with Stillfront Group, a company of independent game makers and publishers. Stillfront Group is listed on the the Nasdaq First North Premier stock e … | Continue reading
GUEST: At Engine, we spend our days championing policies and initiatives that support startups. As we entered 2017 amid a new presidential administration and a flurry of media coverage over the economic distress of Middle America, we wanted to share the stories of the thriving st … | Continue reading
Amplifying New Voices is launching its third year of hands-on training and boot camp for diverse people in the gaming industry. The group has opened applications and nominations for its latest batch of trainees. The boot camp will take place March 18 at the Game Developers Confer … | Continue reading
ANALYSIS: When Carisa Miklusak launched AI-enabled staffing platform Tilr two years ago, she and her two cofounders decided on Cincinnati, Ohio as their company’s headquarters, thanks to the city’s large concentration of Fortune 500 companies. The decision was met with skepticism … | Continue reading
Microsoft announced today that it’s working with Heptio to back up multi-container clusters managed by its Azure Kubernetes Service. AKS will use Ark, Heptio’s open source utility for managing disaster recovery and backup of Kubernetes cluster resources. It’s a big win for Heptio … | Continue reading
For the last three years, Indian indie studio Studio Oleomingus has been crafting its first game, a post-modern fairy tale called Somewhere. It’s gifted the internet with occasional peeks into its magic realist world of stories within stories, notably with the interactive parable … | Continue reading
Sombra is Overwatch‘s resident hacker. She’s feisty and sarcastic, and she wields a fully automatic machine pistol. She also like to touch people’s noses and say “Boop.” Reddit community member SamuriFerret made a post on the Overwatch subreddit, sharing the above video and notin … | Continue reading
Modsy, a company that allows people to create 3D renderings of their home to visualize what it looks like with various kinds of furniture, has raised $23 million in a series B round of funding from Advance Venture Partners (AVP), Comcast Ventures, and Norwest Venture Partners. Fo … | Continue reading
The Call of Duty World League kicks off in Dallas this Friday with its first in-person tournament featuring Call of Duty: WWII. The event will feature more than 832 competitors across 208 teams competing for more than $200,000 in prize money. And Activision executive Kevin Flynn … | Continue reading
EXCLUSIVE: Much like AR and VR right now, AI is a field of walled gardens. As Andrew Ng, former chief scientist at Baidu, puts it, “among leading AI teams, many can likely replicate others’ software, but it is exceedingly difficult to get access to someone else’s data.” Enter Sin … | Continue reading
Facebook closed its Oculus Story Studio in May, and that seemed like the end for its effort to create virtual reality story experiences such as its award-winning Henry short film. But yesterday, one of those projects came back to life. That project, which Oculus funded, is Wolves … | Continue reading