Apple 2018 iPad review: OK for schools, great for everyone else

REVIEW: Let’s start this quick review with some harsh truth: Apple’s 2018 9.7-inch iPad is a “press release” product, not an “Apple Keynote” product. Despite Apple’s decision to unveil its latest tablet in a high school auditorium, this isn’t a brand new, made-for-education “ePad … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Trump to target Chinese tech products for import tariffs

(Reuters) — The Trump administration this week will unveil the list of Chinese imports targeted for U.S. tariffs to punish Beijing over technology transfer policies, a move expected to intensify trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies. The list of $50 billion to … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Tasting tomorrow: How food and beverage companies use AI

GUEST: People have become picky eaters. Our ancestors ate whatever they could forage, but modern day Homo Sapiens expect gourmet meals at street food prices on demand. Consumers prefer fast, affordable, healthy, and delicious. To meet fickle consumer tastes, food and beverage (F& … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Hearthstone’s design team has an obsession: top hats

One of my favorite cards in Hearthstone has nothing to do with its ability but rather its art. And it involves a top hat. Cat Trick shows a picture of an adorable kitty sitting in a top hat. But once the Hunter Secret fires off, it creates a Cat in the Hat minion on your board. [ … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Blockchain’s big potential in Africa

GUEST: At the beginning of March, some of the brightest minds from the blockchain world joined representatives from the financial, legal, and global technology industries to discuss widespread blockchain adoption. But the event wasn’t held in fintech hub London, or startup mecca … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Blockchains aren’t just tech, they’re new economic systems

GUEST: Forget for a moment about the value of the cryptocurrencies that you may or may not own. Instead of thinking of blockchains as investment bets or just cool technology, think of them as entirely new, and previously impossible, economic systems. Because that’s what they are. … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Keywords acquired 11 game services firms in 2017 as external development grows

You may not have heard about Keywords before, but it has become a big player behind the scenes in external game development. Headed by CEO Andrew Day, the company acquired 11 game development services companies in 2017. It has amassed more than 5,000 employees Keywords was founde … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Life after data regulation: What a post-Facebook world might look like

GUEST: Let’s fast forward to 2020. A combination of class action lawsuits and tough regulation across the globe following the Cambridge Analytica scandal has led to the break-up or collapse of the digital behemoths. The remaining digital brands are constrained by stringent region … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

PC Building Simulator is dumb and good

The statistics all tell me that I’m not too old for video games, but these days I sometimes lack an enthusiasm for big games that I once had in an ample supply. Ubisoft’s recent Far Cry 5 is well made — I recognize that — but I don’t have a passion for it. And that […] | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

How Jagex turned RuneScape into a ‘living game’

Jagex launched its RuneScape massively multiplayer online role-playing game in 2001, and 17 years later, the free-to-play fantasy game is still going strong. The game has been played by more than 250 million people, and it has undergone two major upgrades. In 2013, it release Old … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

VR’s killer app is wish fulfillment — for me, that’s Wipeout

OPINION: Last week, I told the story of how experiencing archery using a virtual reality headset made me a VR believer. Admittedly, I’m a classic early adopter: I owned a Sega Genesis well before Sonic the Hedgehog, picked up a Nintendo GameCube the day of release (in Japan!), an … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Cloudflare launches consumer DNS service to speed up the internet

Cloudflare today announced its first consumer service product, which is aimed at making web browsing more private. The company launched a new public Domain Name System (DNS) resolver service that’s supposed to protect users from spying while speeding up their experience on the we … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Nier: Automata’s Yoko Taro and Takahisa Taura on sentencing characters and turning 2B into a bug

Nier: Automata was one of the most-talked about games of 2017. The action role-playing game sold over 2.5 million copies after its February 2017 debut and has attracted a following that’s fallen in love with its unique, postapocalyptic world (and, to be honest, sexy androids). Th … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Oculus patents for VR haptic gloves appear

It looks like a patent detailing the VR glove that we saw Mark Zuckerberg wearing last year has now surfaced online. While the VR industry gathered at GDC last week, not one but two Oculus patents, originally filed back in 2016, were published online. Both describe haptic feedbac … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

‘Citizen AI’: Teaching artificial intelligence to act responsibly

GUEST: Researchers at Mt. Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine in New York at have a unique collaborator in the hospital: Their in-house artificial intelligence system, known as Deep Patient. The researchers taught Deep Patient to predict risk factors for 78 different diseases by fee … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Star Trek: Bridge Crew is keeping IBM’s Watson on its duty roster

After hearing swirlings that the IBM Watson-powered voice recognition features for Star Trek: Bridge Crew would be deactivated, we reached out to Ubisoft for confirmation. As a result, it looks like that isn’t the case after all. “Star Trek has always been about pushing technolog … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

AI Weekly: Watson, Einstein, and Sensei must die

What do Einstein, Watson, and Sensei have in common? They’re all brands that are supposed to encompass major tech companies’ AI features, and they all need to go away. It’s easy to see why a company would want to have a megabrand to represent their AI efforts — it allows them to … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

All of Google’s jokes for April Fools’ Day 2018

April Fools’ Day is upon us, and like every year, Google is doing its best to outdo itself. The company releases all sorts of jokes, ranging from the ridiculously lame to the very clever, spanning the simple blog post or video to the elaborate gag or new feature. It’s a very Goog … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Blockchain will make AI smarter by feeding it better data

GUEST: We’ve heard — probably too much — about how cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin shift financial power away from governments and big banks to individuals. Blockchain technology is also democratizing artificial intelligence (AI). Businesses of any size will soon be able to offer t … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Can agile work for marketing?

GUEST: Given that my company sells an agile platform and has more than 5,000 engineers using agile practices, you’d think we would have adopted agile marketing as a no-brainer, right? After all, agile isn’t about code, it’s about how you approach a problem. And marketers share ma … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

This guppy is more than an AR Tamagotchi — it eats your feelings, too

My cat isn’t interested in much beyond naps and Fancy Feast chicken pâté — but that’s not the case with your little animal pal in TendAR. The augmented reality mobile game is the latest from indie studio Tender Claws, and it stars an adorable guppy that eats your feelings and cra … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

6 tips for a successful initial coin offering

GUEST: The increase in initial coin offering (ICO) scams has caused an increase in distrust and skepticism in many recent campaigns. These doubts are justified, with so many seemingly legitimate projects acting as fronts for quick money-making schemes. However, there also continu … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Why London startups are immune to the EU brain drain to the U.S.

GUEST: Earlier this month, I detailed how the EU is currently losing its best and brightest in a startup brain drain to the U.S. As I explained, EU startups are finding it necessary to look to U.S.-based venture funds for investments but often have to “flip” into subsidiaries of … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

After 40 mobile games, David Reichelt hit gold with Color Switch

David Reichelt has been through a hell of a lot in his life. He was both a music major and a theater major. He was a professional magician. He was a medic in the military and served in Iraq. He had to save lives, and was nearly blown up a couple of times in his […] | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

HyperX Alloy Elite’s RGB update means LED lovers have a new option

I reviewed the HyperX Alloy Elite mechanical gaming keyboard in July, and now Kingston’s gaming brand has released an updated version of the device with RGB LED lighting. This is the first HyperX product to implement programmable LEDs and the first to support its NGenuity softwar … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Inside the making of The Church in the Darkness

If your nephew became an acolyte of a cult in 1970s South America, what would you do to get him out. That’s the story behind The Church in the Darkness, a new game coming from director Richard Rouse III, who led the development on The Suffering and worked on titles like State of … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Is VR in No Man Sky’s future?

We’ve been asking for VR support for No Man’s Sky, Hello Games’ enormous space simulator, for as long as the game’s been around. But, after a series of updates this week, fans think that support may actually be about to happen, and there’s a lot of evidence to support them. If yo … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

PUBG ‘Savage’ test codes giveaway is live now

The PUBG Corporation is going to start testing the smaller map for its last-player-standing shooter, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, on Monday, and we’ve got some codes to giveaway. If you want a chance to win one, tune into our PUBG Family Dinner stream live right now on Twitch: … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

PUBG Corp. preps test of smaller map — here’s how to get in

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is going back into a testing phase as The PUBG Corporation invites fans to try out a smaller, unfinished map codenamed “Savage.” This new level is a quarter the size of Erangel or Miramar, which are the two existing maps that are live on the servers … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Corsair channels its inner Sarah McLachlan for its #GPURescue campaign

PC component manufacturer Corsair is standing up to those who would abuse graphics cards by using them to mine Bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies … or at least it is pretending to do that for an April Fool’s Day joke. On Corsair’s YouTube page, the company has uploaded a video titled … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

NASCAR, the NBA, and NCAA hoops see a future in esports

GUEST: Traditional sports have their eye on esports. Leagues like the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, and NASCAR see esports as a path to generating younger viewership. We’ve seen traditional sports invest in esports teams, and now we are beginning to see professional teams/leagues and colle … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Pelda Pro is Nintendo Switch’s first HDMI-friendly battery case

The Nintendo Switch is the fastest-selling console in the United States through the first 12 months of its life , and that has led to a wave of third-party peripherals. This includes a bustling segment of external-battery cases that extend the life of the Switch as a handheld mac … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Amazon’s Alexa can now record shows on DirecTV and TiVo

Amazon today announced updates to Alexa’s Video Skills API, which will allow users of TiVo, DirectTV, DISH, and Verizon television services to record their favorite shows using their voice on an Alexa-enabled device. Now a user can say “Alexa, record the Warriors game” to start a … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

AI-powered ambient computing is just getting started

GUEST: It’s hard to believe that not even 75 years have passed since ENIAC, that room-sized, 30-ton calculating machine, was the number-crunching hero of World War II. Since then, technology has evolved and converged into myriad applications — including the internet; internet of … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Apple is aggressively hiring Siri engineers after widespread criticisms

Following stinging criticisms of its poorly performing digital assistant, Apple has recently ramped up hiring for its Siri division, the data analysts at Thinknum discovered. Siri-specific hiring is currently said to be at an “all-time high,” with 161 open job listings — a jump o … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Idle Champions adds Strix, Dice, Camera, Action’s beloved trash witch

EXCLUSIVE: Dungeons & Dragons continues to grow on the digital domains of places such as Twitch and Steam, two of the most trafficked destinations for gamers in the online world. And now these personalities from games such as Critical Role and Dice, Camera, Action (two of the lea … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

ProBeat: Windows is dead. Long live Windows.

OPINION: Terry Myerson is out. Microsoft lists his full title as “executive vice president and the former leader of the of the Windows and Devices Group (WDG).” Yes, Microsoft needs shorter titles. In short, the chief of Windows is leaving the company after 21 years. And he’s not … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Twitch cuts jobs as it plans ‘aggressive growth strategy’

Amazon’s livestreaming platform Twitch has confirmed to GamesBeat that it has laid off a number of employees. Twitch reportedly cut more than 25 people from its Twitch Studios and marketing teams, according to esports-industry insider Rod “Slasher” Breslau — although the company … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Google’s TensorFlow AI framework adds Swift and JavaScript support

Google unveiled a slew of updates to its popular TensorFlow machine learning framework today, aimed at making it useful for a wider variety of developers and providing data scientists with new ways to get started building AI models. TensorFlow is one of the most popular programmi … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Jade Raymond and Ken Moss of EA to speak about the future of games and tech at GamesBeat Summit

We’re getting a double-dose of Electronic Arts’ top leaders as our latest speakers for GamesBeat 2018, which will examine the future triple-A games and the technology required to make them and deliver them to consumers. Jade Raymond, the senior vice president and group general ma … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

How Utah’s startups are attracting tech talent from other states

FEATURE: When Brad Ferguson left his home state of Utah to pursue a PhD in statistics at North Carolina State University in 2011, he figured he wouldn’t return. Not because he didn’t want to live in the state — but as a statistician, he didn’t think there were as many career oppo … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

The DeanBeat: The joys and perils of gaming in 2018

The game industry is booming, with global revenues expected to hit $125.4 billion in 2018, according to market researcher Newzoo. But if you look under the surface, not everything is great. We can see winners and losers in various markets, regions, platforms, and game categories. … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Crunchyroll launches Memoria Freese, its first anime-based mobile game

Anime streaming site Crunchyroll is publishing its first mobile game, Memoria Freese. It’s based on the popular anime series Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, otherwise known as “Dan-Machi,” which is an abbreviation of the Japanese title. The original Memoria Fre … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

GamesBeat Summit 2018: Don’t miss our emcee, Andrea Rene of What’s Good Games

VB EVENT: GamesBeat 2018 is almost here, and we’re thrilled to announce that the fabulous Andrea Rene will be our emcee this go around! You can also catch her chatting with Janina Gavankar, from Star Wars Battlefront II, about the future of performance, games and Hollywood. We’ve … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

China busts smugglers whose drones snuck $79.8 million worth of iPhones to mainland

(Reuters) — Customs officers in southern China’s technology hub Shenzhen busted a group of criminals using drones to smuggle 500 million yuan ($79.8 million) worth of smartphones from Hong Kong to Shenzhen, the official Legal Daily reported on Friday. Authorities arrested 26 susp … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

SuperData — Fortnite: Battle Royale reigns over February’s digital game charts

Free-to-play console games led the digital games market’s growth in February — in particular, Epic Games’ standout hit Fortnite: Battle Royale. The market grew 6 percent globally year-over-year last month, and free-to-play console games grew a whopping 359 percent year-over-year, … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Apple seeks VR patent to bring zombie attacks and talk shows into self-driving cars

In recent weeks, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has published Apple patent applications for several fascinating virtual reality concepts, but the latest one takes the cake: Apple has applied to patent a VR system for autonomous cars that radically transforms the car’s inter … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago

Huawei P20 launch highlights the risks of U.S. paranoia over Chinese security

ANALYSIS: Standing in Paris’ picturesque Grand Palais, Huawei’s Richard Yu didn’t seem like a man worried about the storm of controversy his company was facing in the U.S. The CEO of the Chinese giant’s consumer business instead appeared confident and ready to show consumers just … | Continue reading


@venturebeat.com | 6 years ago