Blockchain could ‘change everything’ for real estate

GUEST: “This changes everything.” That’s how Apple introduced the original iPhone in 2007. But it could just as easily apply here and now to the blockchain and its potential to enable transformative innovation in a variety of industries. The most mature proposals for blockchain-l … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Google Blocks and Unreal helped an artist make a game in two weeks

Artist Jarlan Perez recently worked with Google to test out a VR-first creation process. Perez built a fully interactive game in two weeks that started in intuitive VR creation tool Blocks, with another week spent polishing and squashing bugs. You can now download the short puzzl … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Star Wars Jedi Challenges hands-on — wielding a lightsaber in augmented reality

Disney wants you to be immersed in Star Wars this fall as The Last Jedi film comes out in December. And one of the ways it is doing that is with Star Wars: Jedi Challenges, an augmented reality headset that makes you feel like a Jedi. I tried it out in a hands-on demo, and […] | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

How Bethesda brought The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to VR

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR is available now for PSVR and PC. With hundreds of hours of gameplay between the core campaign, side content, and three expansions players will be able to lose themselves once again in the frosted wastelands of Skyrim. When Skyrim originally release … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Metroid Prime turns 15 as the franchise finally becomes relevant again

One of Nintendo’s greatest games is celebrating its 15th anniversary. Metroid Prime came out for the GameCube on this day in 2002. Metroid Prime is one of the most critically acclaimed games ever and spawned two sequels. A new entry, Metroid Prime 4, is coming out for the Switch … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

PlayStation Network servers are down for many

PlayStation 4 owners are having trouble getting connected to Sony Interactive Entertainment’s online service. The company has not confirmed any issues on its status site, but a significant number of fans are complaining about the outage on social media. | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

5 reasons businesses are struggling with large-scale AI integration

GUEST: Artificial intelligence is an important vehicle for companies looking to automate processes, reduce the cost of operation, or fuel innovation. Despite the positive influence AI-supported activities have on business, a successful implementation won’t happen overnight. First … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

The Quest Giver puts you in an unorthodox RPG role

In most role-playing games, side quests appear out of nowhere on town boards that act like fantasy versions of Craigslist. The Quest Giver puts you behind the scenes as you head up your own guild and hire adventurers. The guild simulator is the second game from German indie studi … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Kauffman Foundation launches microlending program for underserved founders

Amid a swarm of 160 events as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation announced a new microlending program to spur investment in underserved entrepreneurs. In partnership with four microfinance lenders, the foundation issued a series of grants t … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Apple delays HomePod until 2018, surrendering the smart speaker holiday market to Amazon and Google

Apple today announced that the HomePod smart speaker will no longer be made available this year, but rather in early 2018. Missing the holidays could be a major setback for the smart speaker, which will compete with Amazon’s Echo series, Google’s Home series, and other several ot … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Octorock gives some of Zelda’s best songs a metal twist

The Legend of Zelda has some of the best music in gaming. It’s melodic, epic, and memorable. It also works pretty well when translated to heavy metal. Octorock: The Zelda Metal EP rearranges four classic Zelda songs with a metal flavor. It is available on iTunes and Spotify. It i … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Okta Named a Leader in Identity-as-a-Service

PRESS RELEASE: Okta, Inc. (NASDAQ:OKTA), the leading independent provider of identity for the enterprise, today announced that the company has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Identity-As-A-Service, Q4 2017,* a report published... | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Vaulting in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds feels unnatural

The PUBG Corporation is testing its 1.0 update for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds this week, and it’s weird. I’ve spent so many hours with this incredible, janky battle royale shooter that I’ve grown accustomed to its mechanical idiosyncrasies. But now that I can easily and effect … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Belong partners with American Cancer Society to help beat cancer with AI

EXCLUSIVE: In the battle against cancer, access to high-quality information, data, and assistance are invaluable. Today, Belong: Beating Cancer Together — whose app connects patients to public and private chats with doctors and professionals — has announced a partnership with the … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

The DeanBeat: The tragedy of the Star Wars: Battlefront II loot crates

Electronic Arts made a great game in Star Wars: Battlefront II. But it stepped in a pile of controversy by adding an unpopular monetization system known as loot crates. Those crates appear in a lot of games, mostly free-to-play titles where you pay real money for the crates and a … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Small businesses reap the benefit of AI and QuickBooks’ far-reaching product vision

SPONSORED: Presented by Intuit Major advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning have dominated headlines over the past year. It is obvious why large corporations, with their huge customer bases and vast data warehouses, are excited. It’s been less clear how this tec … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Sioux Falls Startup Weekend highlights the city’s tiny but growing tech sector

Sioux Falls Startup Weekend (SFSW) brought over 40 participants out to the Zeal Center for Entrepreneurship to take part in a 54-hour business building competition. But SFSW is more than just a fun weekend for aspiring business owners to test the entrepreneurial waters. It’s also … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Spotify acquires Swedish collaborative audio recording startup Soundtrap

Spotify has acquired fellow Swedish startup Soundtrap, a company that makes a collaborative online music and audio recording studio. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded in 2012, Soundtrap had raised around $8.5 million to target amateur musicians with a cloud-based reco … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Garmin Pay contactless payments go live on the Vívoactive 3 smartwatch

Garmin’s recently announced contactless payments service, Garmin Pay, is now live on the company’s new Vívoactive 3 smartwatch. Garmin is synonymous with sports wearables and GPS navigation devices, and the company joins a growing throng of companies that have introduced their ow … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Platform9 expands support for hybrid cloud Kubernetes deployments

Platform9 announced expanded support for on-premises deployments of its Managed Kubernetes service today, making it easier for customers to launch the popular container orchestration software on infrastructure that’s managed using VMware vSphere, Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Zynga lets you show off your CSR 2 race cars with augmented reality

CSR Racing 2 has been popular as a mobile game because it offers car racing fans the fantasy of collecting and owning their own cars. And now game publisher Zynga is announcing an augmented reality feature that allows players to bring those cars to life in the real world. Using A … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Livible Announces Acquisition of Boston’s Fetch Storage, Readies for Years of Disruption to Self-Storage

PRESS RELEASE: Livible, a leading provider of full service storage and storage technology, today announced the acquisition of Fetch Storage. Founded in 2010, Fetch was the leading provider of full service storage in the Greater Boston market. All their... | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Facebook removes ‘delete post’ option from the desktop web version

Facebook has a long tradition of tweaking and changing its interface, testing new features with a small selection of users to see what works, and rolling things back when things don’t work out. But surely it wouldn’t prevent its users from deleting their posts from the social net … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Slack expands into Japanese, its fifth language

Slack has announced that its popular team collaboration software is now localized for the Japanese market. The news comes just a few months after the San Francisco-based company expanded beyond English and into Spanish, French, and German, while it also revealed at the time that … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Tesla unveils electric truck and $200,000 sports car

(Reuters) — Tesla upstaged its own debut of an electric heavy duty truck on Thursday when a red Roadster pulled out of the big rig’s trailer and Chief Executive Elon Musk said the new $200,000 sports car would be the fastest production car ever. The showmanship wowed the crowd al … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Switch, Super NES Classic lead to 19% growth in U.S. spending on consoles

Nintendo’s resurgence has made 2017 a huge year for console sales. In October alone, the Switch and Super NES Classic Edition along with PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and 3DS generated $238 million in spending. That’s up 10 percent year-over-year, which is a trend for 2017. “Year to d … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

PressCoin is a cryptocurrency for investigative journalists and their readers

EXCLUSIVE: A coalition of news organizations and journalists in various parts of the world have banded together to create a cryptocurrency to sustain funding for investigative journalism. Called PressCoin, the digital currency was made to get rid of the advertising revenue model, … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Microsoft releases new Windows 10 preview with settings and input improvements

Microsoft today released a new Windows 10 preview for PCs with settings 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 way … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Qualcomm teams up with ZTE and China Mobile on 5G networks

Qualcomm Technologies, ZTE, and China Mobile have created a data testing system for 5G networking, which promises to provide wireless data at multiple gigabits per second. It’s one more step in a years-long process to get us all faster mobile broadband and more reliable calls. Th … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Trocafone raises $15 million to provide emerging markets with affordable refurbished phones

It’s easy for many of us in the United States to get a new smartphone each year — just look at how many people didn’t bat an eye at the $1,000-plus price tag for the Samsung Galaxy Note8 or the iPhone X. But when it comes to emerging markets, it’s a whole different story. People  … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Star Wars: Battlefront II microtransactions go offline until EA can ‘make changes’

Earlier today, Electronic Arts chief executive officer Andrew Wilson had a phone call with The Walt Disney Company chief executive Bob Iger about Star Wars: Battlefront II. A few hours after that call, and players are finding that the option to purchase the premium crystals curre … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus and The Evil Within 2 start slow at U.S. retailers

Bethesda Softworks is one of the last remaining third-party publishers that is still dedicated to building lots of single-player games. In October, it released The Evil Within 2 and Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, and both didn’t crack the top 10 best-selling games in the U.S., … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus and The Evil Within 2 fizzle at U.S. retailers

Bethesda Softworks is one of the last remaining third-party publishers that is still dedicated to building lots of single-player games. In October, it released The Evil Within 2 and Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, and both failed to crack the top 10 best-selling games in the U.S … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

It’s an open, open, open, open world as Assassin’s Creed and Middle-earth dominate

Middle-earth: Shadow of War stood tallest in a month of big games, according to industry-tracking firm The NPD Group. Assassin’s Creed: Origins was just behind it. Shadow of War, the open-world fantasy adventure, debuted September 28, and it went on to dominate physical and digit … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

October 2017 NPD: Middle-earth: Shadow of War emerges with the One Ring (of top sales)

Middle-earth and ancient Egypt were popular destinations last month as Monolith Productions’ Middle-earth: Shadow of War and Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Origins reached No. 1 and 2 respectively on the best sellers chart. However, video game spending overall was down 11 percent ye … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

NCSoft will shut servers for MXM MOBA in January, just months after June launch

NCSoft created MXM (Master X Master) as a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game to take on Riot Games’ League of Legends. And it looks like League of Legends won. NCSoft announced today that it will be shutting down servers for the game on January 31. As of today, it’s disa … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

While gamers ask for loot-box regulation, Trump’s FCC plans to deregulate net neutrality

According to the discourse surrounding the core gaming scene right now, loot boxes and similar business models are the greatest threat to interactive entertainment. But while fans shout down publisher Electronic Arts over the progression in Star Wars: Battlefront II, the Federal … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

The problem with trusting AI to diagnose sleep disorders

GUEST: About 70 million people report problems with their sleep. And more than ever, they are turning to technology to help them with this plight. Wearable fitness devices are cornering the market, and AI-enabled devices are leading the pack. With flashy terms like machine learni … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Heartland startup funding in 2017 shows a North-South divide

ANALYSIS: While Silicon Valley is known as the heart of tech and home to the world’s top tier venture capital firms, other states and cities in the U.S. are beginning to show flourishing startup scenes — and VCs are noticing. Entrepreneurs in states like Texas, Colorado, Utah, an … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Vivendi says it won’t make hostile takeover bid for Ubisoft in near-term

Media conglomerate Vivendi spent perhaps $683 million acquiring about a quarter of the stock of French video game publisher Ubisoft over the past year or so. But Vivendi said Thursday that it has no plans to make a hostile takeover of Ubisoft, maker of games such as Assassin’s Cr … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Nintendo Switch outsold PlayStation 4, Xbox One last month in the U.S.

It’s Mario time, and Mario time means Nintendo is going to sell some consoles. The company revealed today that its hybrid home/handheld Switch was the top-selling gaming hardware for October, according to industry-tracking firm The NPD Group. That puts it ahead of the Xbox One an … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

7 tactics to recruit AI talent in a market dominated by tech giants

GUEST: Artificial intelligence and machine learning is a growing field. The amount of talent in the pipeline is not nearly enough to meet the demand as more and more companies turn to AI solutions. Universities are now developing curricula to meet these needs, but at present, exp … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Facebook releases tools and tips for livestream creators

Facebook is gunning to be the social network for gamers and other passionate communities, and it is releasing a couple of new tools that will help those creators and their videos get noticed more easily. The Facebook Creator App helps creators manage their presence on Facebook, a … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Overwatch’s new healer Moira is now live

Overwatch’s 26th character, Moira, is now live. Overwatch has over 35 million players on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. The team-based shooter adds new heroes and maps at a steady rate for free to keep its players engaged. Overwatch monetizes with cosmetic loot boxes that playe … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

CardLinx Launches Collaboration Forums on Data Driven Commerce and Artificial Intelligence

PRESS RELEASE: The CardLinx Association ("CardLinx"), the leading, global organization driving online-to-offline (O2O) commerce through card-linking, loyalty and digital marketing, today announced three, exclusive forums focusing on data-driven commerce... | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Ubisoft Berlin will open in early 2018 and help on Far Cry series

Ubisoft Entertainment is opening a new studio in Berlin in early 2018. Its first project will be to collaborate on the Far Cry series, the latest installment of which will be out on February 27. The studio will report to Ubisoft Blue Byte, which has offices in Düsseldorf and Main … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Google’s Chatbase bot analytics platform opens to all

Google’s chatbot analytics platform is now open to everyone, more than six months after its quiet debut during the company’s I/O developer conference. Called Chatbase, it’s intended to help developers better analyze and optimize their bots so they can improve conversion rates and … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago

Teslagrad followup World to the West is journeying to Switch

Rain Games announced today that it is bringing it indie action-adventure game World to the West to the Switch on January 28. Last week, the studio announced that it is bringing its 2D indie hit Teslagrad to Nintendo’s portable/home console hybrid on December 7. World to the West … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 7 years ago