GUEST: As the footprint of esports continues to expand, people from outside the esports industry are bringing their knowledge and expertise to help grow the sport. I sat down with three experts who have moved into the esports industry recently to get their take on the challenges … | Continue reading
EXCLUSIVE: Tokyo-based gaming giant Nexon is expected to announce tonight that it is acquiring Pixelberry Studios, an acclaimed game studio that created the social-mobile game High School Story, GamesBeat has learned. It’s a happy outcome for a studio that says it specializes in … | Continue reading
Battle Chef Brigade is like next-level farm-to-table cooking. You play a chef in a culinary competition where you slay monsters, hack them up for ingredients, and solve puzzles in the kitchen to create succulent dishes. Part puzzler and part action-platformer, it’s the third titl … | Continue reading
It’s no secret that AI is being applied to virtually everything, but this was a big week for enterprise conversational AI. Salesforce’s Einstein debuted a platform for businesses to deploy bots on apps and websites, Facebook Messenger is coming to the web, and Microsoft Word now … | Continue reading
Wandersong wants to save the world through music. It’s a joyful side-scrolling adventure starring a bard and all the colors of the rainbow. After developer Dumb and Fat Games raised funds on Kickstarter, it planned to release it on PC and Mac. It’s now partnered with Humble Bundl … | Continue reading
Unity Technologies is bringing in some of the talent that worked on Ratchet & Clank and Sunset Overdrive to help beef up the optimization and performance of the Unity game-development engine. The company announced today that it has hired Mike Acton and Anreas Fredriksson, who bot … | Continue reading
Nintendo Switch is getting Doom this week, and that has a lot of people curious about how the technical wonder runs on the hybrid home/handheld console. The answer to that has two sides. In docked mode on a TV, Doom is rough. But if you take the same shooter and play it in handhe … | Continue reading
GUEST: We are on the cusp of a technological revolution whereby increasingly sophisticated tasks can be handed over from humans to machines. Organizations are embracing advancements in artificial intelligence, robotics, and natural language technology to adopt platforms that can … | Continue reading
GUEST: Augmented reality is poised to radically improve manufacturing, logistics, and skilled trades. AR can superimpose holographic images and instructions onto the real world, which is immensely valuable for educating workers on how to use large machinery or specialized devices … | Continue reading
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in an analyst conference call that self-driving cars will be on the roads and highways within three years. The Santa Clara, California company reported better-than-expected earnings today on the strength of its position making graphics chips for both … | Continue reading
Today, Kenzie Academy, a tech apprenticeship school, announced that it has raised a $1.6 million seed round from investors including 500 Startups, as well as edtech venture capital firms RethinkEducation and LearnStart. Kenzie Academy was launched earlier this year by Chok Ooi, t … | Continue reading
GUEST: The turnover rate for call center support agents is high. According to the 2016 U.S. Contact Center Decision Makers’ Guide, the average term for a customer service representative is 3.3 years. Additionally, 60 percent of the turnover rate is from agents quitting. The highe … | Continue reading
Respawn Entertainment is now a part of Electronic Arts. The $455 million dollar deal is the latest development in a studio that started amid controversy. In early 2010, it seemed that Infinity Ward was on top of the gaming world. Its Call of Duty franchise, especially the Modern … | Continue reading
Electronic Arts announced it will acquire Titanfall maker Respawn Entertainment for $315 million in cash and stock, plus a possible bonus of $140 million. The deal could bring a new long-term franchise into the fold for the big third-party publisher of video games, giving EA an e … | Continue reading
Nvidia reported earnings that beat expectations and showed that the company’s focus on artificial intelligence is still paying off. For the past decade, Nvidia has been rising above graphics chips for gamers, expanding to parallel processing in data centers and lately to artifici … | Continue reading
GUEST: AI-powered surveillance might sound like the plot of a Spielberg film, but the technology is no longer science fiction. Machine learning is used to improve facial recognition algorithms, allowing law enforcement and first responders to quickly and accurately obtain informa … | Continue reading
The last month has bombarded us with huge games like Super Mario Odyssey, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, Assassin’s Creed: Origins, and Call of Duty: WWII. But away from all the internet buzz, triple-A budgets, and million-dollar TV spots, there are tons of worthwhile projects … | Continue reading
At Web Summit this week in Lisbon, Portugal, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman talked about the site’s upcoming redesign. Reddit launched in June 2005, and its look and feel has changed little over the past decade — certainly not at all in the past four or five years. We sat down with Huf … | Continue reading
As CEO Mark Zuckerberg prepares to wrap up his personal tour of the U.S., Facebook announced today that the company will be launching its own 30-city U.S. tour in 2018 to visit with business owners and other Facebook users. Called Facebook Community Boost, Facebook plans to brin … | Continue reading
PayPal today launched a new service called Money Pools that allows users to set a group fundraising goal, then share that goal with a group. Money Pools could be used for a surprise party or vacation with family and friends, but it can also be used for dinner last week when I pic … | Continue reading
GUEST: Greylock executive in residence (EIR) Wade Chambers and partner Josh McFarland on cultivating and coaching engineering leaders. In the latest Greymatter episode, we welcome back Twitter’s former head of revenue engineering, now Greylock executive in residence, Wade Chamber … | Continue reading
Microsoft-owned mobile keyboard app SwiftKey is rolling out a new feature today that lets users personalize their keyboard using their own photos. Starting today on Android and iOS in beta, SwiftKey users can upload any image to use as the backdrop for their keyboard. The company … | Continue reading
Kakao Games, which publishes the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Black Desert Online in North America and Europe, announced today that it will bring Bluehole‘s new PC MMO, Ascent: Infinite Realm, to Western markets. Bluehole is the studio behind the Battle Royale h … | Continue reading
SPONSORED: Presented by Intuit As Intuit builds up momentum heading toward the fourth annual QuickBooks Connect conference, they’ve announced two major new products: the new QuickBooks Capital loan offering, which is tailor-made for new small businesses, and a new payment strateg … | Continue reading
PRESS RELEASE: Autopilot, the simple and visual marketing automation software, today announced the easiest way to automate SMS communications using a visual drag and drop builder. The expanded functionality powered by Twilio allows anyone to automate... | Continue reading
Tarsier Studios’ Little Nightmares is a grim puzzle-platformer full of gruesome monsters and implied cannibalism, but it has one bright spot: the Nomes. These little critters are in the trenches with you, scurrying away and hiding from danger. They lead to one of the biggest emot … | Continue reading
Rockstar Games is hoping for a revival for one of its classics, L.A. Noire, a 2011 detective game that is being relaunched on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and the HTC Vive virtual reality headset. I had a look at it on the Switch and the HTC Vive, and it brought b … | Continue reading
I spend more time in Discord than I do in Steam these days, and that social platform has introduced a new tool for game developers to better serve players like me. The company’s “Rich Presence” SDK enables game studios to hook their games into Discord to provide player status inf … | Continue reading
Glu Mobile released Design Home a year ago, and the mobile game publisher said the title has generated 30 million downloads and $71.5 million in bookings through the end of the third quarter ended September 30. In honor of the anniversary, San Francisco-based Glu dug out some mor … | Continue reading
It’s no secret that while Silicon Valley is gaining jobs, rural America is losing them. A September report from the Economic Innovation Group found that nearly 90 percent of the ZIP codes in the U.S. that qualify as “economically distressed” have fewer than 50,000 people. There h … | Continue reading
Earlier this week, news emerged that Google was in the early stages of testing a new app called Files Go. The app, according to reports, is all about helping you free up space on your phone and packs features like an offline file-sharing tool and a file-management facility. The a … | Continue reading
(Reuters) — Uber and some smaller technology companies are launching campaigns to publicize Obamacare enrollment among their contract workers after the Trump administration slashed government marketing for the health program by 90 percent. Freelance and contract workers are an im … | Continue reading
SPONSORED: Presented by Intel “We didn’t want to go through that emotional distress again.” In 2011, Alex Nichiporchik was working with Flash games, when he stumbled across No Time To Explain. It was a simple, five-minute joke game, as Nichiporchik describes it, designed by a UK … | Continue reading
PRESS RELEASE: ScaleFactor, the smart finance and accounting platform that enables businesses to operate in real-time, today announced a $2.5M seed round with Next Coast Ventures, Techstars Ventures, Firebrand Ventures, Matchstick ... | Continue reading
Travel search giant Skyscanner has acquired Twizoo, a U.K.-based platform that identifies user-generated content on Twitter for companies to use as part of promotional campaigns on their websites. The deal represents Skyscanner’s sixth known acquisition of all time, and its first … | Continue reading
Say this for the French: They manage to keep their sense of humor in the face of crisis. First, a massive butter shortage has swept the country this fall. Now much of the country wakes up to find itself with the internet thanks to a power outage that has kneecapped the country’s … | Continue reading
A few months ago, Natural Cycles began marketing itself as a certified contraceptive app. That’s right, no condoms or pills, just an algorithm that accurately tracks a woman’s ovulation cycle. Today, the Stockholm, Sweden-based startup announced that it has secured $30 million to … | Continue reading
Spain’s Digital Legends and South Korea’s Gamevil teamed up to release the realistic mobile shooter Afterpulse in 2015. The game got more than 10 million downloads and won various awards. The previous game was shut down by Gamevil in October. But now Digital Legends, the develope … | Continue reading
It’s now been one year since the 2016 election, which, if you believe the steady drumbeat of news articles in the months that followed, served as a “wake-up call” for Silicon Valley that it was failing to connect with the rest of the country. In that year, Silicon Valley hasn’t m … | Continue reading
Little-known public blockchain Waves debuted an upgraded protocol today that it’s billing as the fastest in the world. Waves-NG, a “next generation” update of the Waves blockchain that first launched back in 2016, is currently running a stress test to reinforce that claim. The Mo … | Continue reading
Ayo: A Rain Tale is a quest for water and survival in sub-Saharan Africa. It’s the debut from Lebanese indie studio Inkline Games, who wants to shine a light on an ongoing humanitarian crisis that affects millions of people. It will be available for PC and Mac on November 9. A la … | Continue reading
Microsoft today released a new Windows 10 preview for PCs with new features as well as improvements across settings, keyboard, and handwriting. 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 servi … | Continue reading
GUEST: According to the World Health Organization, 800,000 people lose their lives to suicide each year. This number has remained fairly consistent year over year, but innovations in artificial intelligence and machine learning could help change this. AI researchers have had a bi … | Continue reading
Netgear is adding to its Arlo brand of security products with a new smart outdoor security light that can be triggered by motion. Lights might not seem like a much of a high-tech product, but they’re part of a larger opportunity for Netgear. The company grew up making switches an … | Continue reading
GUEST: 2017 hasn’t been a great year for advertising. A series of budget cuts, legal action and mounting suspicion about the metrics that form the bedrock of digital models have served to reduce confidence in the industry as a whole. However, this doesn’t need to be the case in t … | Continue reading
Former AMD graphics chief Raja Koduri was responsible for helping turn around the company’s position in graphics chips. He resigned last week during a leave of absence and has now been hired as the chief architect at Intel. This change of jobs is the kind that will raise some eye … | Continue reading
Warner Bros. has one of the deepest stables of popular brands in the world, and it now has big plans for one of them. Today, the publisher revealed Portkey Games, a new WB Interactive publishing label for making Harry Potter games. WB has had the license to author J.K. Rowling’s … | Continue reading
GUEST: One day, artificially intelligent robots will replace human beings as the Earth’s dominant form of life, or so says Stephen Hawking (and Elon Musk). However, for all the impressive progress AIs and robots have made in recent years, the most urgent and real danger they pose … | Continue reading