The holiday shopping season is upon us, and I know that because I have eight games in my shopping cart on Steam. As we move into the big holiday shopping weekend here in the United States, Valve has kicked off its Autumn sale and Microsoft’s Windows store has a bunch of deals as … | Continue reading
The Xbox One is posed to have a strong holiday because the base model is selling for an all-time low of $180 and the Xbox One X is actually the most powerful console ever. I’ve reached a point where if I’m going to play a game on a console, I want to do it on […] | Continue reading
Rhythm Doctor‘s catchy riffs and clever one-button gameplay have mesmerized a few notable indie game events this year. It was an official nominee at IndieCade and earned a spot at Double Fine’s Day of the Devs festival. It also won the award for best audio at the Indie Prize Show … | Continue reading
Online translation tools have gotten pretty good at converting words between languages and, if not always perfect, can usually be relied on for a decent approximation of the original message. With that in mind, Google has now enlisted Swedish indie band Vita Bergen to demonstrate … | Continue reading
The Nintendo Switch is going to be a popular gift this holiday season. But you don’t need to buy a console just to make someone happy. Heck, you don’t even need to spend the money on an entire game. If you know someone who owns a Switch already, a lot of accessories and other ite … | Continue reading
Hopefully, if you’re reading this, you are full of Thanksgiving food and glad that you’re not a Detroit Lions fans (like I am). If your mind is now drifting to thoughts of spending money on gifts for yourself or the PC gamer in your life, I’m here to help with a guide to some of … | Continue reading
Google has announced that it’s opening a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) region in Hong Kong. Launching sometime in 2018, it will be Google’s sixth Asia-Pacific (APAC) region after Singapore, Sydney, Taiwan, Tokyo, and the recently announced Mumbai region. Hong Kong represents a nota … | Continue reading
Almost two months after its IPO, Angry Birds maker Rovio Entertainment today learned a painful lesson about life as a public company when investors battered its stock following an earnings report that failed to meet expectations. Rovio missed on both profits and sales, and, as a … | Continue reading
(Reuters) — Amazon.com’s Australian arm began an order-taking trial on Thursday, giving life to the hype which has preceded its arrival in the world’s No. 12 economy and weighed on the shares of the brick-and-mortar retail sector. The trial kicked off at 3 p.m. (0400 GMT) with th … | Continue reading
Microsoft today released a new Windows 10 preview for PCs with Edge, shell, and input improvements. This build is part of the RS4 branch, which represents the next Windows 10 update the company has yet to announce. Windows 10 is a service, meaning it was built in a very different … | Continue reading
GUEST: With the recent cancellation of Visceral’s single-player Star Wars game, shifting focus of big publishers on multiplayer games and more than stellar success of cooperative multiplayer games like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, gamers are starting to ask questions. Are singl … | Continue reading
GUEST: As long as there are power imbalances, insecurities, and competition among humans, so too will there be bullies. Name a decade, a century, and a place, and an era-equivalent to the toilet swirlie doubtless occurred. The digital age amplified this dynamic to the extreme, em … | Continue reading
The World of Warcraft is going back to its roots: war. Blizzard Entertainment announced earlier this month at BlizzCon that its next expansion, Battle for Azeroth, is coming out in 2018. The massively multiplayer online role-playing game’s seventh expansion focuses on the war bet … | Continue reading
Amazon Web Services wants to make it easier for people to get the most out of machine learning in the cloud, and it just unveiled a new consulting program that’s aimed at helping folks get off the ground. Called the Amazon ML Solutions Lab, the program will provide customers with … | Continue reading
GUEST: It’s fascinating to recall the development of artificial intelligence over the past decade, but the best is yet to come. As we prepare to move into 2018, there are lots of exciting developments coming down the pipeline, especially for AI-enhanced video surveillance. Resear … | Continue reading
GUEST: Deep learning is fueling breakthroughs in everything from consumer mobile apps to image recognition. Yet running deep learning-based AI models poses many challenges. One of the most difficult roadblocks is the time it takes to train the models. The need to crunch lots of d … | Continue reading
GUEST: On November 13, Albuquerque mayor Richard J. Berry (R) awarded local nonprofit WESST a $75,000 Mayor’s Entrepreneurship Prize for the organization’s La Escalera program, which is specifically designed to aid immigrant entrepreneurs. As he gave the award to WESST, which pro … | Continue reading
EXCLUSIVE: Samsung is planning to show off its next-generation Galaxy S handsets a bit earlier than usual, according to someone briefed on the company’s plans, with the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ scheduled to make their first public appearance at January’s Consumer Electronics Show … | Continue reading
The Infinity Blade trilogy was one of the best-selling mobile gaming series on the iPhone, but its last installment came out in 2013. Now fans can express their love for the franchise with a new emoji sticker pack based on Infinity Blade characters. Pundit, a sticker technology p … | Continue reading
Facebook is taking steps to help people understand how they may have been influenced by Russian propaganda profiles and pages across its properties. The social networking company today announced that it plans to launch a portal where anyone can go to find out which pages and Inst … | Continue reading
SPONSORED: Presented by Shopify The NFL’s Super Bowl is the biggest night of the year for football. For retailers, the big game looks a bit different — it lasts for four days, kicks off immediately after Thanksgiving and the ends on Cyber Monday. The retail Super Bowl means that … | Continue reading
OPINION: Rarely a week goes by without news of a new feature for AI assistants like Alexa, Bixby, or Siri. It’s a fast-moving competition between tech giants like Amazon, Samsung, and Apple, but despite billions of investment in AI and everyone from Softbank to Will.I.Am entering … | Continue reading
Most Sonic fans agree that Sega’s hedgehog mascot had his early peak during the Genesis days in the mid 1990s. But 1996’s Sonic 3D Blast does not receive the same love as its 2D predecessors. Many of Sonic 3D Blast’s problems had nothing to do with the actual game. It was one of … | Continue reading
ANALYSIS: Chicago medical ad startup Outcome Health has been hit with a string of potentially company-crushing headlines this past month: First, it was the subject of a Wall Street Journal investigation claiming that Outcome Health provided clients with inflated ad performance da … | Continue reading
It may sound a little nuts, but Handy Games has gone crazy for the Nintendo Switch. The German company is developing 11 games for Nintendo’s hot platform, which has become the fastest-selling game console in 2017. This week, Handy Games launched Aces of the Luftwaffe Squadron, a … | Continue reading
PRESS RELEASE: CyberMiles, a new blockchain platform designed and optimized for commercial applications, has completed the crowd-funding phase of its initial coin offering in less than one day-among the fastest-moving ICOs in history. Empowering... | Continue reading
Buildup, a task management and collaboration platform aimed at the construction industry, has raised $7 million in a series A round of funding from Tel Aviv-based TLV Partners, UpWest Labs, 01Ventures, Abstract Ventures, and Check founders Guy Goldstein and Ahikam Kaufman. Found … | Continue reading
(Reuters) — Samsung Electronics said on Wednesday it would create an artificial intelligence (AI) research center and strengthen an executive role to look for new business areas for all its three major business groups. The minor changes to the tech giant’s business structure were … | Continue reading
OPINION: While no Silicon Valley company is without sin, Uber seems to have plumbed new depths of corporate depravity. There is so much fundamentally rotten at the company’s core that it’s nearly impossible to imagine that new-ish CEO Dara Khosrowshahi can disinfect and rehabilit … | Continue reading
Seedcamp, an investment fund aimed at early-stage European startups, has announced the first close of its fourth seed fund at £41 million ($54 million). Founded in 2007 by around 30 European investors, Seedcamp has often been compared to Y Combinator in the U.S., and has invested … | Continue reading
The Facebook Communities Summit (FCS), a Facebook-led event that brings group and page admins together under one roof, is coming to Europe. Facebook announced the first FCS back in April, with the inaugural event taking place in Chicago a couple of months later. Now the social ne … | Continue reading
(Reuters) — Research by Apple computer scientists on how self-driving cars can better spot cyclists and pedestrians while using fewer sensors has been posted online, in what appears to be the company’s first publicly disclosed paper on autonomous vehicles. The paper by Yin Zhou a … | Continue reading
It’s just like everyone always says in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds: China No. 1. Internet megacorp Tencent has revealed that it will have the exclusive rights to PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds in its home market of China. It will run the servers, and it will focus on complying w … | Continue reading
Belgium’s Gaming Commission has determined that loot boxes in gaming are gambling, according to a report from the news website VTM (first reported by PC Gamer). And the country’s minister of justice Koen Geens says he will try to ban the process of blind, randomized loot boxes co … | Continue reading
Amazon Web Services announced a series of updates to its Recognition service, which provides machine learning-based computer vision capabilities to cloud customers. The system will now be able to detect and recognize text in images, so customers can feed in signs and documents an … | Continue reading
GUEST: My game “Everything is going to be OK” was included in Double Fine’s Day of the Devs. Yay! I’m happy to get publicity for my game, and Double Fine’s public event for indie developers in San Francisco looked like a great place for that. This is probably the first time, outs … | Continue reading
Salesforce promoted Quip CEO Bret Taylor to serve as its president and chief product officer, putting him in charge of global product vision, go-to-market strategy, design and development. He replaces Alex Dayon, who has gone on to become the tech giant’s president and chief stra … | Continue reading
GUEST: Voice had a big year in 2017. Amazon Alexa passed 10 million unit sales, and there are over 24,000 skills in the store. Google is right up there with Amazon in terms of innovation. The addition of the Google Mini, to go along with the original Google Home, made waves in th … | Continue reading
Everything seemed to be going well for mobile marketing firm AppLovin at the end of last year. The company agreed to be sold to private equity firm Orient Hontai in September 2016 for $1.4 billion, but more than a year later, the deal is no longer on the table. So while AppLovin … | Continue reading
(Reuters) — Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co said on Tuesday that Meg Whitman was stepping down as chief executive officer early next year, sending its shares down 7.4 percent in trading after the bell. Whitman will be succeeded by current president Antonio Neri who takes over from … | Continue reading
Recently installed Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi revealed today that in late 2016 hackers accessed personal data of approximately 57 million Uber riders and drivers — a hack that previously went undisclosed. In a blog post, Khosrowshahi wrote that “two individuals outside the compan … | Continue reading
Microsoft opened up its wireless technology to peripheral manufacturers in September, and that means we’re getting a wave of new gaming headsets for the Xbox One. Turtle Beach is one of the first companies jumping in, and I’ve spent some time with its Stealth 600 and 700 devices … | Continue reading
Many of us will take on a turkey this week, and while Amazon’s Alexa is by no means a sous chef, here are a few helpful Alexa skills that could be handy this Thanksgiving, selected from the more than 25,000 skills now available in the Alexa Skill Store. Food Network Perhaps more … | Continue reading
REVIEW: The fan service is strong with Square Enix’s Monster of the Deep: Final Fantasy XV. I’m convinced that the studio had trouble deciding whether they wanted to make a Noctis dating simulator or a fishing game, so it said, “Why not both?” I played it on PlayStation VR, and w … | Continue reading
Microsoft is gunning for VMware and AWS with the announcement of two new services today that are designed to let enterprises bring more workloads to Azure. The company announced a beta service for its customers today that runs VMware’s virtualization technology on top of Microsof … | Continue reading
GUEST: Over the past few years, AI has dominated news cycles and captured the imagination of entrepreneurs, investors, and consumers alike. We can see the potential: self-driving transportation on-demand, robotic assistants in the home, and Amazon Echo version 14.0 to do things t … | Continue reading
Star Wars: Battlefront II has emotes and win poses, just as Overwatch does. But while Blizzard Entertainment’s hit team shooter has plenty of costumes for your characters, Battlefront II does not. While different outfits — often called skins — seem like a great fit for this take … | Continue reading
St. Louis’ current position as a global leader in plant science and biotech didn’t happen overnight. Instead, careful planning over the course of two decades laid the foundation for the booming startup ecosystem in St. Louis that we all enjoy today. EQ got a chance to catch up wi … | Continue reading