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"IOST Launches Blockchain Testnet to the Public | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/business/iost-launches-blockchain-testnet-to-the-public"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Press Release IOST Launches Blockchain Testnet to the Public Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn The enterprise-grade blockchain infrastructure boasts one of the highest transaction per second speeds in the industry SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–June 29, 2018– IOST , an enterprise-grade blockchain infrastructure for online services, officially launched its testnet to the public today. Its Testnet v0.5 ‘Everest’ achieves one of the highest transaction per second speeds in the blockchain industry and includes a range of functionality for developers to build upon.
Backed by $40 million from world-class investors, including Sequoia China and Matrix, and led by a team of repeat founders, IOST is laying the foundation for an ultra-high TPS network that meets the security and scalability needs of a decentralized economy. Its mission is to be the underlying architecture for the future of online service providers globally.
“We have been hard at work for the past year laying the foundation for a next-generation blockchain infrastructure. Testnet launches are a key point when a blockchain project can be experienced as a functional prototype of a ‘final product’ – where it crosses over from theory to function.” – Terrence Wang, CTO The Everest Test Network is deployed in a real-world environment and runs on multiple nodes deployed in Tokyo, London, Singapore, Mumbai, Frankfurt, Seoul, and Montreal.
Features of Everest v0.5: IOST consensus mechanism: Proof of Believability (PoB) running in a real network environment Average throughput between 7,000-8,000 transactions per second Smart contracts system featuring key-value pair storage, inter-contract API calls, and multiple signatures API-oriented smart contracts to quickly write and deploy code Blockchain Explorer to display transactions and blocks ‘Playground’ to test smart contracts locally Ability to build private IOST test networks Ability to run IOST testnet nodes IOST has been aggressively expanding its ecosystem over the last three months and recently launched two separate organizations with strong institutional backing to develop the IOST ecosystem: Bluehill : a blockchain incubator and accelerator that recently raised $50 million. Bluehill provides crucial backing for IOST industry partnerships and projects built within the IOST ecosystem.
Theseus is an IOST-incubated R&D team dedicated to pushing the envelope in blockchain technology and paving the way for the IOST developer community.
IOST will implement two more testnet releases before launching its mainnet by end of 2018.
The original IOST announcement can be found here: https://medium.com/iost/public-testnet-launch-iost-everest-v0-5-b9b2ad9fb209 View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180629005681/en/ IOST Ben Waters, 628-213-9924 [email protected] VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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5,014 | 2,018 |
"Industry Ventures Raises Oversubscribed $335 Million Hybrid Fund of Funds | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/business/industry-ventures-raises-oversubscribed-335-million-hybrid-fund-of-funds"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Press Release Industry Ventures Raises Oversubscribed $335 Million Hybrid Fund of Funds Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–June 29, 2018– Industry Ventures, a leading investment firm focused on venture capital, today announced the closing of its fifth hybrid fund of funds, Industry Ventures Partnership Holdings V, L.P. (“the Fund”), with total commitments of $335 million. The Fund will continue the same successful strategy of primary commitments and early secondary purchases in smaller, early-stage venture capital funds as well as direct co-investments alongside these small funds. The new fund brings the firm’s total institutional committed capital under management to $3.4 billion, with $1.1 billion dedicated to our hybrid fund of funds and direct co-investment strategies.
“We are grateful for the strong support the Fund received from both existing and new investors,” said Hans Swildens, CEO and Founder of Industry Ventures. “The addition of the Fund allows us to continue to strengthen our venture capital platform offering GPs capital support throughout the lifecycle of a fund and offering limited partners a single manager relationship with exposure to all stages of venture capital.” Roland Reynolds, Managing Director of the hybrid fund strategy, commented that “as a pioneer in the seed fund and emerging manager categories, we have been working with leading next generation managers for more than 12 years, and we remain active in identifying the next wave of top small fund managers. We are grateful that leading institutional investors and consultants have recognized the attractive return opportunity in this segment.” The Fund’s investor base includes leading institutions representing government and corporate pension funds, endowments, foundations, high net worth family offices and the firm’s Managing Directors.
“Partnership Holdings V enables our team to continue our successful strategy of deep collaboration with some of the top small funds and entrepreneurs in the venture capital business,” said Ken Wallace, Managing Director of the hybrid fund strategy. The hybrid fund program has investments in over 120 small venture capital partnerships, 20 co-investment funds and 35 direct co-investments in the technology sector.
For more on the firm’s Partnership Holdings investment strategy, click here.
About Industry Ventures LLC Industry Ventures is a leading investment firm that focuses on venture capital. The firm has three investment strategies: secondary investments, hybrid fund of funds investments and direct co-investments. Founded in 2000, the firm manages $3.4 billion of institutional committed capital and is headquartered in San Francisco with an office in Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit www.industryventures.com.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180629005563/en/ Industry Ventures Lena McNulty Mom, 415-273-4229 [email protected] VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
Discover our Briefings.
VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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5,015 | 2,018 |
"How VCs can protect key startup employees from immigration action | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/business/how-vcs-can-protect-key-startup-employees-from-immigration-action"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest How VCs can protect key startup employees from immigration action Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn In the past year, my company, Phone2Action, has received two “requests for evidence” (RFEs) from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) asking us to justify our foreign employees. We have two team members working here on H-1B visas and two in Optional Practical Training (OPT), an employment authorization for foreign students on F-1 visas. As a Chilean who immigrated to the U.S., I find the RFEs disheartening. They stress out talented employees, consume resources, and scare STEM professionals away from U.S. startups.
I believe venture capital investors could play an important role in protecting immigrant founders and employees. They certainly have an incentive. The Kauffman Foundation reported in 2016 that more than half of America’s “unicorn” companies have an immigrant cofounder. And 43 percent of 2017’s Fortune 500 companies were founded by an immigrant or child of an immigrant, according to the Center for American Entrepreneurship.
The U.S. tech ecosystem depends on immigrants whose divergent experiences and ideas have revitalized U.S. innovation for centuries. An every-startup-for-itself approach to foreign talent will not work in the current climate. We need to build networks of talent to mitigate risks, and no one is better positioned to do this than VCs.
An H-1B crash course OPT and H-1B are among the most important pipelines for bringing foreign STEM talent to the United States. OPT enables foreign students in the U.S. to work for up to one year after graduation and extend their employment authorization for 24 months if they studied in a STEM field. H-1B enables a total of 85,000 foreign nationals to work in the U.S.
H-1B visa holders can work in the U.S. for up to six years, during which time their employer typically sponsors them for permanent residency. Those on OPT need to have their employers petition for H-1B during the annual lottery, because that’s their only realistic shot at staying in the U.S. long term.
Essentially, in the annual lottery, our immigration system blindly selects about one-third of the foreign professionals that apply for H-1B. Those who are lucky to get through the lottery still risk a denial of the H-1B petition by USCIS if their company responds insufficiently to an RFE. Thus, startups with foreign founders and staff are exposed to an unpredictable immigration system. VCs have incentives to mitigate the risks.
Portfolio defense Uncertainty in the H-1B system has scared off applicants. However, VCs can take a networked approach to addressing RFEs, validating job positions, and hiring foreign talent.
I must thank Greg McCall, Phone2Action’s counsel at Perkins Coie LLP, for helping us think through the tactics outlined below. His wise counsel has helped Phone2Action’s team navigate the lottery and RFE minefield. I hope it can serve you too.
Crowd-source RFE data.
The most valuable protection VCs can offer to H-1B employees (besides an immigration lawyer) is the collective experience of their portfolio. If an approach to responding to an RFE was successful for one startup, it may well work for others.
For example, USCIS decided it will no longer accept “computer programmer” as a profession requiring a specialized degree, which is a requirement of H-1B. Thus, USCIS could send an RFE to a company with an H-1B working as a programmer and deny the visa.
Companies have reclassified such employees as “engineers,” who command a higher minimum wage in H1-B’s tiered salary system. While this can work, companies must be mindful about the experience level of the employee. To USCIS, a junior engineer requires supervision, the absence of which is grounds to deny a visa.
Responding to RFEs is complicated, which is why crowdsourcing experiences is a smart idea. Very simply, if a company receives an RFE, the VC should contact other portfolio companies to see if a) they have received similar RFEs, which are made with a template), b) how they responded, and c) whether the response succeeded, and if not, why.
They’re doing it too.
One way to counter an RFE is to show that the position under question is common. For example, let’s say USCIS sends an RFE questioning the need for a “marketing technologist,” an emerging role. The startup might defend its employee by showing that other startups have marketing technologists too. The VC can help find those companies within their portfolio or a network of investors.
Even better, the VC might use her position to help startups name and describe H-1B roles in such a way that if an RFE comes in, the firms effectively can say, “Every company like us has hired someone like this.
Multiple petition approaches.
USCIS prohibits multiple petitions by affiliated companies for the same person and prohibits collaboration to “game the system” to increase chances of success in the H-1B lottery. However, there are things short of real collaboration that VCs can do to help their portfolio companies have a higher chance of success.
According to McCall, if Company A wants to hire someone that Companies B, C, and D would happily hire too, if successful in the lottery, there is no prohibition on all four petitioning for the same person (four lottery tickets are better than one). Each must have a bona fide opening and hire the person if selected.
Once someone is through the lottery, there is no prohibition on changing employers. While companies cannot plan this together, a VC could encourage four portfolio companies to sponsor the same employee, assuming there is a bona fide position to be assumed.
Plan B Despite a VC’s best efforts, a startup may lose a founder or valuable employee due to the immigration process. If ultimately getting that person back into the U.S. is critical, employers may look to Canada as a viable plan B.
Obtaining work authorization in Canada is much easier than in the U.S. system, and foreign workers can gain Canadian citizenship relatively quickly, which opens other options for working in the U.S., such as the TN visa (as long as the White House doesn’t blow up NAFTA).
A longer-term plan B is to build an ecosystem that welcomes talent to the U.S. If USCIS raised the H-1B cap, gave startups preference over IT outsourcing firms, and weighed applicants based on company needs and talent shortages, maybe H-1B would serve American entrepreneurship rather than strangle it.
Such a transformation would require collaboration in the tech community. VCs must work in concert to overcome an immigration system that puts bureaucracy and ideology over innovation and economic vitality.
Ximena Hartsock is cofounder and President of Phone2Action , a civic technology platform focused on digital activism. She was previously a member of the executive cabinet of former Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty and the Deputy Chief for Teaching and Learning at Washington DC Public Schools.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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5,016 | 2,018 |
"Fluence is using blockchain technology to build a secure internet | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/business/fluence-is-using-blockchain-technology-to-build-a-secure-internet"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Fluence is using blockchain technology to build a secure internet Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
Learn more.
One of the topics discussed during the recent Cyber Week in Tel Aviv was the potential of blockchain technology to help solve issues like DDoS attacks, data breaches, and other security loopholes, as well as removing the ability for country-level service blocking, such as those we’ve seen targeted against messaging and social apps like Telegram and Twitter.
Blockchain-based database provider Fluence today announced it is using the blockchain to create a decentralized data organization layer, with the ultimate goal of building a decentralized internet.
That’s significant because in addition to the inherent features a database platform provides, such as storage, processing, and computations, it aims to eradicate data breaches and hacks.
“Imagine you put some of your content in a bank safe,” Fluence cofounder and CEO Evgeny Ponomarev told me. “The bank has a ledger where they have your name, associated account, and safe number. That’s DNS. It says ‘This content can be found in the safe number X’. But what guarantees that your money or possessions are in the safe and nowhere else is the bank service.” VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! That’s a problem if the bank hasn’t done its homework and its data is breached.
“Decentralized DNS solves only the ‘content addressing’ problem, in order to create censorship proof network (for example, if any government decides to ban a web service), but does not guarantee data safety or availability by itself,” Ponomarev said. “Basically, it makes sure that a user’s address in the web is reachable, but it is not responsible for any actual data that could be found there.” Fluence believes that to adequately secure the internet, decentralizing storage and database platforms provides an attractive solution.
“Decentralized storage and database solutions take this further and distribute high volumes of data across the network, keeping it online even if a part of the network is disabled or unavailable due to some malfunction or governmental restriction,” Ponomarev said. “These solutions ensure that there’s always a copy of your data online and reachable.” In other words, with its decentralized database platform, Fluence seeks to ensure that data privacy and ownership, storage and collection, and valuable information won’t accumulate in the hands of a few big companies, as it has with current cloud database providers and social networks.
“In a regular database, the data is controlled by a single entity or, usually, held in one place on some company server,” Ponomarev said. “That makes it easier for an attacker to compromise just one server and dump everything stored there. In a decentralized network, the data is spread across many independent nodes. Since the data is not stored in one place, there is no single point from which you could scrape it easily. All personal data is encrypted in a browser and distributed across the network. The hacker would have to do an unbelievable amount of work to compromise each node of the network because, in decentralized storage, they wouldn’t even know which node has the data they’re looking for.” The open source platform lets any developer use the code to build their own decentralized database network. The platform includes an API that provides developers of decentralized apps (dApps) all they need to access the network of independent nodes, which are connected and kept operating by the Fluence protocol.
So what is next for Fluence, and when can developers start using it with their dApps? “A public test network release and updated research papers are coming soon,” Ponomarev said. “In the meantime, we’re building a strong community of software developers, hardware providers, and users. Fluence aims to provide a shared data infrastructure for blockchain developers that will enable them to build scalable and secure decentralized applications.” VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
Discover our Briefings.
The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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5,017 | 2,018 |
"Understanding the practical applications of business AI | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/understanding-the-practical-applications-of-business-ai"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest Understanding the practical applications of business AI Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
More is written about artificial intelligence today than ever before. We read about milestones the technology has passed, like DeepMind’s AlphaGo beating the world’s best Go player or Facebook’s facial recognition performing better than humans at tagging photos. And to be fair, coverage is starting to focus on the technological advancements without sensationalist intrusions, but many are still wondering how AI is actually applicable to their work.
For most of us, figuring out how AI fits into our workplace begins with defining a problem that needs to be solved. (You don’t want to start with machine learning and make up a business problem to suit.) Only after you have clearly outlined the problem can you start to look at what solutions AI might offer.
Cognitively simple tasks Take a look at the picture and tweet below. Can you tell what’s in the picture? Can you determine the sentiment behind the tweet? These are tasks that humans can do pretty easily, but we can use AI to do them at scale and with great success. This enables us to offload basic cognitive tasks and focus on the harder, more creative parts of the problem.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Cognitively complex tasks AI can also help with complex cognitive tasks. Suppose we want to predict the selling price of a house, given some information about it (number of rooms, location, and more). We can’t solve the problem by looking at descriptive tables or graphs because the task requires complex cognition. An experienced realtor might be able to process this information and estimate the price, but this approach has two limitations. First, you need relevant experience in order to use this information accurately. Second, even if you did have the experience, you can’t scale the process.
With the right data, machine learning models can understand patterns in the data and give you good predictions. You can easily scale this to predict the price of millions of houses in seconds.
With the right data and training, AI can also be used to handle cognitively simple tasks (like seeing things in an image) in more complex scenarios — for example, using computer vision to find malignant tumor sites or language processing for translation.
Customized customer experience When it comes to applying these capabilities in a business setting, the first example is always personalized customer experience. You can use a customer’s actions and interests to tailor their experience while they are using your product. For example, Netflix uses movies you previously watched, along with other data, to recommend movies. It also uses this information to decide what new content to create.
We absolutely need machine learning for this kind of service, because it’s very difficult to customize recommendations for each of your different users, with their varied interests, backgrounds, and so on, and doing this at scale is substantially more difficult. But don’t just offer recommendations because you can. Ask yourself what customization would actually be of value to your users, while respecting their privacy.
Optimize internal processes Another avenue for applying AI is to optimize internal processes. This can assume many different forms, but look at what your teams are doing day-to-day. What are some of the tedious, repetitive tasks using data from Excel or images, text, or audio? These tasks typically don’t involve creativity or complex problem-solving, but they are time-consuming for your team.
Going back to our housing price example, let’s say your team of realtors is inundated with requests from customers who want to know the selling price of their house. You can use the data you are collecting to build a machine learning model to solve this problem.
This approach offers several advantages. First, you free up valuable time for your team to work on other things, like actually selling properties. Second, with the right data, AI can make great predictions for a variety of different inputs. Let’s say that for each house we have hundreds of pieces of information; this would be a very difficult task for even an experienced realtor to process, but it is relatively easy for AI to incorporate such data. Third, this solution allows you to respond to customers in seconds instead of making them wait for your human team to come up with a response.
Aid in decision-making So far, we have seen examples where AI is responsible for the entire decision, but AI can also aid in the decision-making process.
For example, let’s say you are figuring out your company budget for the next year. You can use machine learning to forecast expenses, instead of just making an estimate off of last year’s values. Or let’s say you want to know whether to invest in a new market. You can use models to process tweets about that market and analyze public sentiment. This one signal alone won’t determine your decision, and it shouldn’t, but it can help get you there.
Applying AI in this way is particularly useful when the decision is very sensitive or complex. Going back to our tumor detection model, doctors shouldn’t trust the AI to report directly to their patients. But they can use the model’s results in their diagnosis, especially when it picks up things they’ve missed.
Virtually every business can benefit from these types of applications; however, there are few things to keep in mind. First, you should always start with the business problem and never find yourself saying things like “We need to put our data to good use.” Don’t predict something just because you can. Ask yourself if you can solve your problem using simpler methods (tables, graphs, simple code, etc.) and if not, then think about using AI.
Goku Mohandas is an AI researcher in Silicon Valley with a focus on using deep learning for natural language processing. He also works on democratizing practical AI for business and strategizing scalable machine learning solutions at ExposeAI.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
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5,018 | 2,018 |
"This helper robot is blasting off to the International Space Station | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/this-helper-robot-is-blasting-off-to-the-international-space-station"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages This helper robot is blasting off to the International Space Station Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Astronaut assistant robot CIMON Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
A SpaceX Dragon rocket leaving Cape Canaveral today will deliver 5,900 pounds of research supplies to the International Space Station (ISS). Included in the payload will be the space station’s very first AI-powered assistant.
Named Crew Interactive Mobile Companion (or CIMON for short), the floating orb is a little larger than a basketball and will use an air propulsion system to slowly move around the ISS. Commissioned by the German Aerospace Center, CIMON has been in development for two years and was made by Airbus and IBM.
Like in the Stars Wars series, Interstellar , and basically any space movie ever made that includes a robot that doesn’t go rogue and try to kill the humans, CIMON will act as both helper and companion, and is made especially to work with Commander Alexander Gerst.
CIMON will deploy a range of IBM Watson artificial intelligence, including computer vision and various forms of natural language processing.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Using microphones, cameras, and a battery of other sensors, the AI will be used to help Gerst carry out experiments to explore how the crystallization of materials differs in space compared to Earth, an IBM spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.
CIMON was trained with astronaut lingo and instructional data to walk Gerst through dozens of steps related to his research project either by showing him videos, talking him through the process, or recommending tools.
Interaction between astronauts on the Horizons mission aboard the ISS will be used by Airbus and IBM to continue to improve how CIMON operates and assists humans in space.
So while CIMON was made to help Gerst carry out research, it’s also the beginning of the study of human-machine conversational AI interaction in space.
In the aforementioned science fiction movies, robots were able to provide humans help in scientific endeavors and accomplishing mundane tasks, but they also provided a cure to loneliness and isolation, a friend to confide in while traveling through the void of space.
Makers of AI assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Xiaoice, and even the chatbot for Alaska Airlines have talked about conversational AI providing humans respite to loneliness not as some distant goal but as something they observe people doing today with casual conversation or chit-chat.
“For us, this is a piece of the future of human spaceflight. I mean, if you go out to the moon or to Mars, you cannot take all mankind and engineers with you, but with an artificial intelligence you have instantly all the knowledge of mankind,” said German Aerospace Center CIMON project lead Christian Karrasch in the video below.
The name CIMON (pronounced “Simon”) is derived from the character Professor Simon from Captain Future , a science fiction comic book in the 1940s and ’50s made into a Japanese cartoon in the 1970s that was translated into German.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
Discover our Briefings.
The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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5,019 | 2,018 |
"The 4 principles for building AI that benefits consumers | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/the-4-principles-for-building-ai-that-benefits-consumers"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest The 4 principles for building AI that benefits consumers Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Earlier this month , Google CEO Sundar Pichai published an excellent set of AI principles intended to guide the company’s AI research. The pronouncement was prompted at least in part by Google’s controversial work on Project Maven and a general call for more accountability within the AI industry. Each of the seven points listed by Pichai serves as an excellent reference for companies working across a broad spectrum of AI technologies.
But what about AI’s direct impact on the individual — or how individualized AI will affect people and their behavior? Not all of it will be good; there is already concern that our overreliance on AI is diminishing human interactions, eroding civility , and decimating personal privacy. But it doesn’t have to be that way. As companies continue to work on both industry and consumer-facing AI technologies, it behooves developers and researchers to establish principles for maximizing the benefit of AI for the individual.
1. AI should build stronger human connections We start with the broadest in scope. At the end of the day, AI technology should not result in people sitting alone in their rooms interacting in virtual reality or with a robot butler as their only companion. Every AI solution should be met with the question: Does it serve as an opportunity to bring people together, or does it risk serving as a mode of self-alienation? Those that serve the former purpose should be pushed forward.
For example, with an AI that learns an individual user’s tastes in clothing and can serve as a personal shopper, the key point isn’t to eliminate window shopping in Paris or taking your child to buy a prom dress — it’s to free up time spent shopping for work clothes or school uniforms in order to make time for these human moments. Since time is the most precious of commodities, an AI’s role is to create more opportunities for people to do what they enjoy, like spending time with friends and family and building meaningful human connections.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! 2. AI should facilitate opportunities, not diminish them Across industries like retail, manufacturing, and even HR and stock trading, companies are automating more work using AI-based software. In fact, a report by McKinsey in 2017 found 50 percent of current work activities can be automated by 2030 with technology that has already been tested and proven to be effective. It’s clear that the job market is changing, and soon we will have to contend with how people will navigate this new, automated economic landscape. One solution is for AI developers to create opportunities for people to learn skills that will benefit this brave new world.
Companies and educational institutions can and should roll out AI-based courses to give nearly everyone access to knowledge that will prepare them for more technology-oriented roles. Another solution is for AI developers to cut users a larger piece of the profit pie by fairly compensating them for the data they use to power AI algorithms.
Jaron Lanier famously mapped out such an economic model in his 2013 book Who Owns the Future? Since AI is heavily reliant on the data everyday users produce, just by using products like smartphones or apps, letting them monetize the data would introduce what Lanier refers to as a “humanistic information economy” that would sustain them and provide new economic opportunity in a world of AI automation.
3. AI developers should be mindful of personal data control In its AI principles, Google promises to incorporate privacy design principles into its AI products — a good standard for anyone working with large amounts of personal user data. As people become more aware of the potential misuse of their data, AI developers should take a proactive step in returning data control to the individual user and be more mindful of asking for informed consent and permission for data use. But data governance and provenance is no easy feat. Fortunately, the recent explosion of blockchain technology can serve as a remedy.
More developers are looking to blockchain technology as a way to return data control back to the user with an immutable record that can track the provenance of nearly any piece of data. The goal is to allow users to control their own data, and grant specific permission for the use of their data without worrying that the institution they grant permission to may then sell that data to another party. It’s a technological way to achieve what the recently enacted GDPR laws hope to do via traditional governance. The addition of smart contracts, which serve as a blockchain’s governing laws, can be an automated way to ensure the rules agreed upon between AI developer and individual data contributor is enforced.
4. AI should maximize our access to resources Fully personalized AI is on the horizon, and soon we will have AI that looks, talks, and even acts like us. Developers of this technology should begin pondering how and where we will use this new breed of AI. This type of AI could provide much-needed resources to impoverished people and regions in the world. For example, the U.S. is facing a potential shortage of up to 120,000 physicians by 2030, according to a recent report by the Association of American Medical Colleges. We could alleviate some of that shortage by having doctors send their AI to attend to basic intake and triaging duties, freeing the human experts to lend their expertise on more challenging issues of diagnosis and care.
Teachers, another profession where shortage disadvantages millions around the world, can potentially create personal AI that will allow the best among them to reach more children. It is critical for AI developers to look for ways to augment precious human resources, serving as a reminder that AI should not supplant humans, but augment them.
Though we can use many of the same guiding principles to dictate how developers proceed with both commercial and consumer AI technology, as AI becomes more ubiquitous in nearly every aspect of our lives, developers and companies need to constantly evaluate the potential impact of AI on individuals and their immediate communities. With advancements showing no signs of abating, it’s important to establish principles that will lead to AI that help us be better, more connected people in an increasingly digitized world.
Nikhil Jain is the CEO and cofounder of Los Angeles-based Oben , a company that develops AI-driven speech/singing, computer vision, and natural language processing for virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality experiences.
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"RippleMatch uses AI to help students line up work after college | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/ripplematch-uses-ai-to-help-students-line-up-work-after-college"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages RippleMatch uses AI to help students line up work after college Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
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For most young adults, finding work out of school isn’t exactly a walk in the park. Two-thirds of recent college graduates struggle to launch their careers in the first few years, according to There Is Life After College author Jeffrey Selingo, and as many as 49 percent of them don’t land a job related to their field of study.
That’s why Yale graduates Eric Ho and Andrew Myers created RippleMatch , a machine learning-powered recruitment tool for college students. It recently raised $3 million in a funding round led by Accomplice and Bullpen Capital.
RippleMatch was borne out of frustration with what Ho and Myers described as a “broken” system.
“We thought there had to be a better way than standing in a line outside of career services or a job fair or applying to a million listings on Indeed ,” Myers said. “You get tons of rejections, and it’s a frustrating experience.” VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Above: Setting up a RippleMatch candidate profile.
Their end-to-end solution connects employers with vetted, highly qualified college seniors who might not have years of job experience under their belts, but who share values, beliefs, and core competencies with candidate profiles hiring managers define.
“The companies see who the students are as people,” Myers said. “They see not just what they’ve done, but where they want to move after.” Here’s how it works: Students complete a 10-minute signup process during which they enter their class year, school, major, job skills, personal values, and other information. They’re then asked to supply standardized test scores, a CV, and a list of internships they’ve had and clubs and sports in which they’ve participated.
Once they’ve filled out a profile, they can follow updates from companies and visit their RippleMatch pages, which include brief backgrounds about the company, photos of offices, and links to social media profiles.
On the hiring side of the equation, recruiters narrow down candidate results by filtering for schools and locations. They can also choose to emphasize certain factors like GPA, work experience, and test scores over others.
Above: A RippleMatch company profile.
Myers and Ho, taking cues from the competition, focused on making the onboarding process as quick and painless as possible. Over 80 percent of students who sign up complete the entire survey flow, Myers told me.
“The experience is good enough that it keeps them engaged,” he said.
As applications come in, recruiters see a list of top candidates ordered by Fit Score, a number determined by the information they’ve uploaded to their profile and the recruiter’s hiring preferences. Playful, colorful badges denote standout would-be employees with high GPAs and relevant internships.
Myers and Ho took a grassroots approach to building out RippleMatch, targeting the top clubs and organizations on over 100 college campuses including Yale, Harvard, and Stanford. “We wanted to strongest, most diverse selection of candidates,” Myers said.
They claim that a quarter of Ivy League seniors are using RippleMatch to find a job, and that 60 percent of candidates are selected for a first-round interview.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"IBM researchers design a fast, power-efficient chip for AI training | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/ibm-researchers-design-a-fast-power-efficient-chip-for-ai-training"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages IBM researchers design a fast, power-efficient chip for AI training Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn A diagram of crossbar arrays of non-volatile memory.
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Thanks to powerful graphics chips and advances in distributed computing, optimizing the algorithms at the core of artificial intelligence is easier than ever before. But it’s not particularly efficient on current-day hardware — even powerful GPUs can take days or weeks to train a neural network.
That catalyzed researchers at IBM to develop a new chip tailor-made for AI training. In a paper published in the journal Nature titled “Equivalent-accuracy accelerated neural-network training using analog memory,” they describe a system of transistors and capacitors that can train neural networks quickly, precisely, and highly energy-efficiently.
Neural networks consist of interconnected units called neurons or nodes (a collection of nodes is called a layer), which receive numerical inputs. In a basic network, individual neurons multiply those inputs by a value — a weight — and pass them along to an activation function, which defines the output of the node. Through a strategy known as backpropagation, the weights are adjusted over time, improving the accuracy of the outputs.
GPUs are well-suited for these because unlike traditional processor, which crunch through numbers sequentially, they’re able to perform lots of computations in parallel. But because the processor and memory in graphics chips sit a considerable distance apart from one another on the motherboard, delays are introduced as data shuttles back and forth between them.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! “Conventional computers [consume] consume an enormous amount of energy,” Stefano Ambrogio, a postdoctoral researcher at IBM who led the project, told VentureBeat in an interview, “and there’s a lot of waiting involved.” The scientists’ solution consists of analog memory and traditional electronic components. Individual cells made up of a pair of phase change memory (PCM) units and a combination of a capacitor and three transistors correspond to individual neurons in the network. The PCMs store weight data in memory, which is represented in the transistors and capacitors as an electrical charge.
As the network trains, the capacitor updates the weights, transferring them to the PCM after thousands of cycles.
The capacitor can’t retain values for more than a few milliseconds, but it can be programmed quickly. And the PCM, which is a form of non-volatile memory, doesn’t need an external power source to retain data.
The researches used a mix of hardware PCMs and software-simulated components to benchmark the design, and the results are promising. The chip performed 100 times more calculations per square millimeter than a GPU while using 280 times less power. Even more impressive, it matched the speed and accuracy of Google’s TensorFlow machine learning framework on a variety of computer vision tasks.
“We can do [the calculations] in a very accurate way, at the same accuracy as software,” Ambrogio said.
The researchers’ chip design isn’t without a significant caveat: It’s not optimized for neural networks that aren’t fully connected, such as the long short term memory (LSTM) networks used in cutting-edge speech recognition apps. But the researchers plan to tackle that next.
Ambrogio is confident they’ll be able to build physical chips at scale in the future. He sees them being used for training neural networks in smartphones and other devices that currently lack the necessary computing resources.
“It would be nice to be able to directly process AI where it’s needed,” Ambrogio said. “When you’re able to train a model, you don’t need to send the information [to the cloud] or have [the device] communicate with something else, and it can react instantly to something.” VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"How AI could improve the quality of end-of-life care | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/how-ai-could-improve-the-quality-of-end-of-life-care"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest How AI could improve the quality of end-of-life care Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
The means to predict mortality using artificial intelligence could be a transformative factor in the future of palliative health care.
While this topic may seem a bit morbid, AI has the potential to help medical care providers and doctors significantly improve the delivery of patient care in hospice situations.
Getting the right kind of treatment at the end-of-life stage is more important than many assume. Not enough treatment — or even inaccurate treatment — can provide a painful experience for patients, and overcare may result in hundreds of thousands of dollars in unnecessary medical bills, even if the patient is covered by insurance.
While it’s crucial to select the proper medical coverage that includes hospice care regardless of the situation — especially for people over 65 or older, because there are specific plans for specific purposes to help with these medical costs — AI advances may help patients and physicians determine illness sooner to prepare for end-of-life costs and treatments before it’s too late.
A recent study in the journal NPJ Digital Medicine shows that technology will soon allow physicians to improve the timing and delivery of patient care. Researchers used AI to scan electronic health records (EHR) and notes doctors left in patient records to detect potential clinical problems and health risks. The AI system predicted patient mortality rate and final diagnoses more accurately and quickly than physicians. So how does it work? Using deep learning for patient insight In the NPJ study, researchers fed almost 48 billion data points (including doctors’ patient notes, patient demographics, procedures, medications, lab results, and vital signs) into a deep learning model. This model analyzed the data and predicted, with 90 percent accuracy, medical issues like mortality rates, longer hospital stay lengths, unplanned readmissions, and patients’ final diagnoses. When compared to traditional predictive models, the deep learning model was more accurate and scalable.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! For example, a woman in the final stages of breast cancer came to a city hospital with fluid already in her lungs. Two doctors reviewed her case, and she received a radiology scan. The hospital’s traditional predictive model reviewed her chart and estimated there was a 9.3 percent chance she would die in-hospital. A new type of algorithm (created by Google) reviewed the woman’s chart — about 175,639 data points — and estimated her death risk at an actual 19.9 percent. The patient passed away in a matter of days, proving the algorithm model to be more accurate.
Compared to the traditional method, the deep learning model was 10 percent more accurate. The system’s ability to sift through data that was previously unavailable helped it provide a more accurate mortality estimation. Rather than looking at a few risk factors, the model looks at the patient’s entire electronic health record (EHR), including notes buried deep in PDFs or scribbled on old charts. Using this process, in the future, may enable doctors to save lives and provide better patient care.
Saving lives and money So what can we do with this information? With more accurate predictions of a patient’s mortality, hospitals and doctors can use better estimations to adjust treatment plans, prioritize patient care, and predict negative outcomes before they occur. In addition to this, health care workers wouldn’t have to spend as much time manipulating patient data into a standardized, legible format.
For example, a report by Futurism notes that Ultromics , an AI diagnostics system developed in England, can diagnose heart disease more accurately than doctors. The same report notes that a startup bot called Optellum is working on an AI system that can diagnose lung cancer by analyzing clumps of cells found in scans. This bot shows promise to diagnose 4,000 additional lung cancer cases per year and at an earlier rate than doctors are currently capable of diagnosing.
Not only can these AI diagnostics systems save lives, but they can also help hospitals save money. In an interview for Futurism ‘s report, Timor Kadir, Optellum’s chief science and technology officer, stated that the AI system could cut health care industry costs by $13.5 billion. Sir John Bell, chair of the U.K.’s Office for Strategic Coordination of Health Research, added, “There is about $2.97 billion spent on pathology services in the National Health Service. You may be able to reduce that by 50 percent.” Predicting death for better care Current research shows that less than half of the eight percent of patients who need palliative care actually receive it. There are times when doctors make inaccurate or overly optimistic prognoses about a patient. Dr. Kenneth Jung, a research scientist at Stanford University School of Medicine, told NBC , “Doctors may not make the referral [for palliative care] simply because they’re so focused on managing their patients’ health issues that palliative care doesn’t cross their minds.” Failing to identify patients who need palliative care can have devastating consequences. If the patient’s health suddenly declines, they may spend their final days receiving aggressive medical treatments in hopes of extending their lives by a few weeks. However, studies have shown that approximately 80 percent of Americans would prefer to die at home, rather than in a hospital. Sadly, the report also notes that 60 percent of these people die in acute care hospitals.
It’s in these cases that AI can help identify patients who are critically ill and might benefit from end-of-life care. Early identification of these patients can help them get the treatment they need sooner. And it may allow patients to remain at home, instead of in the hospital, during their final days.
While some may wonder about the future of AI in health care, the purpose of AI systems is to play a supporting role in the health care industry. These systems will serve as a powerful tool that will help physicians and other health care professionals provide higher quality care and offer palliative treatments in a timely manner.
Scott Bay is a writer who covers AI and Internet of Things for PC Mag , Wired , and Men’s Health.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"Google Home's language expansion leaves Alexa behind | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/google-homes-language-expansion-leaves-alexa-behind"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest Google Home’s language expansion leaves Alexa behind Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
With the recent launch of Spanish language integration for Google Home, Google is poised to gain even more ground against Amazon’s Alexa-powered devices. The addition of Spanish language functionality expands Google’s share in the U.S. digital assistant market and into Mexico and Spain. Alexa currently supports only three languages, including English, German, and Japanese, while Google Home is set to offer over 30 languages before 2019.
As Alexa falls behind, many wonder why it has taken so long to make digital assistants multilingual.
Lost in translation “No hay pedo” is Mexican slang that means “there’s no problem,” but it translates to English as “there’s no fart.” Doesn’t quite work, does it? Language encompasses so many nuances that are specific to one region and dialect. English, too, has many variations, depending on where you’re from. For a digital assistant, knowing and speaking a language is different from just translating.
“How do you address a friend versus an acquaintance? When is an appropriate time for dinner? What jokes are appropriate? What jokes are funny?” asked Kelly Davis, head of machine learning at Mozilla, in an email interview. “The list is endless and not only language-specific but culture-specific. Jokes that work in Spain may be offensive in Mexico.” Accounting for these differences takes an immense amount of time and effort. Companies must perform extensive research to understand these nuances and render them into code. This means even the largest companies in the world, like Amazon, have to invest several years into localizing their assistants. Amazon has even made moves to crowdsource learning with Cleo , a language tool powered by Alexa that learns from its users.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! “You will need thousands of hours of this data from tens of thousands of people, and this must be done for each language and for each accent of that language you want to recognize. This is painstaking work, and there are no silver bullets,” said Davis.
Missed opportunities Although we’re finally seeing tech behemoths like Google expand their offerings to include a wider variety of languages, companies that create digital assistants will always prioritize majority languages and cash markets. So while Amazon is covering the markets it deems most profitable, it’s leaving out many Spanish-speaking countries around the world, along with a large portion of the U.S.
population that speaks Spanish.
An example of one of Alexa’s major fails this summer is its inability to answer queries about the World Cup in one of the most common languages among soccer fans. There are over 20 Spanish language channels and networks offered in the U.S. alone, which means Amazon is missing out on household DVR integrations and common inquiries like “Alexa, ¿a qué hora es el partido de la Copa Mundial?” (Alexa, what time is the World Cup on?). Such integrations will give Google Home an advantage until Alexa devices support more languages.
But the potential impact of adding multi-language support to digital assistants stretches far beyond scheduling meetings, changing the channel, and controlling a smart home.
“Think about how speech recognition could be used by minority language speakers to enable more people to have access to technology and the services the internet can provide, even if they never learned how to read?” said Davis. “Regular market forces will not help reach these people.” The world of digital assistants is expanding. These huge advances in technology are appearing in more households than ever, and with the added pressure of increased language offerings from Google Home, we can only hope Amazon will catch up by making it possible for us to say “Hola Alexa” soon.
Cassie Tolhurst is a writer who contributes to Geek Girl and Stanford College Puzzle.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"AI Weekly: Hearings on AI show Congress has no answers, either | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/ai-weekly-congress-hearings-on-ai-show-it-has-no-answers-either"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages AI Weekly: Hearings on AI show Congress has no answers, either Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
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On Tuesday this week, the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittees on Research and Technology and Energy invited prominent academics, tech executives, and scientists to talk about the “game-changing” potential and implications of AI, as the hearing charter put it.
It touched on a number of topics.
Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-VA) sought suggestions from the panel on ways institutions and government might collaborate on AI systems development. Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) opined on the ethical dilemmas facing AI. And Rep. Marc Veasey (D-TX) asked earnestly about the potential for “doomsday” scenarios. “To what extent do you think [is it] something we should be concerned about?” he said.
The answers to some of those questions lie in transcripts from past hearings.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! During a House Subcommittee on Information Technology hearing in April, Jack Clark, the director of OpenAI, suggested AI competitions as a way to bring government agencies and AI researchers closer together.
“Every single agency has … problems it’s going to encounter, and it has competitions that it can create to spur innovation, so it’s not one single moonshot, it’s a whole bunch of them,” he told lawmakers in attendance. “I think every part of government can contribute here.” And in 2016, during one of the very first congressional hearing on AI , OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman said that cracking the AI ethics code — tackling, among other challenges, the doctrine of war and black box algorithms — would take a collective effort.
“[S]afety, security, [and] ethics. I think that’s going to take everyone,” he said. “And I think that we all need to work together.” Cyclical discussions about AI are a product, it would seem, of today’s bombastic, no-holds-barred news cycle. It’s not easy to step back and think critically when protesters are denouncing the sale of Amazon’s Rekognition system to local law enforcement and employees are resigning over Google’s drone contract with the Pentagon , much less when accidents involving self-driving cars hit the newswire.
These prompt gut reactions. We can’t help ourselves.
There’s another reason, though, that topics like AI in government, AI ethics, and “doomsday scenarios” come up time and time again, not just among politicians, but within the machine learning community itself: The questions don’t yet have satisfactory answers.
Certainly, governments — most recently the European Union , France , and Canada — have made great strides in establishing helpful legal and social frameworks. And companies like Microsoft and Facebook continue to work toward minimally biased datasets and algorithms.
But others have yet to make inroads on either front.
Before we can move past the questions that have been asked about AI for decades, we need to develop the right vocabulary and understanding that’ll advance the discourse.
As Jean-François Gagné of Element AI said during a panel discussion at C2 summit in Montréal this year: “Seek to understand. Dig. Don’t stay at the surface level. It’s the only way we’re going to be able to engage in a productive conversation and use AI for the best.” For AI coverage, send news tips to Khari Johnson and Kyle Wiggers , and guest post submissions to Cosette Jarrett.
Thanks for reading, Kyle Wiggers P.S. Enjoy this video of an AI algorithm defeating teams of amateur Dota 2 players: From VB Google’s computer vision model tracks objects and colorizes videos Researchers at Google have created a machine learning system that not only adds color to black and white videos, but that can constrain colors to particular objects, people, and pets in any given frame.
Read the full story Google Duplex demo reveals fresh details about how the AI-powered calling service will work Google today shared a new demo of Duplex, its conversational AI that makes phone calls on behalf of Google Assistant users, and revealed more details about how the AI will work when speaking to businesses and customers. Initial use cases will involve making hair salon appointments and restaurant reservations. Tests of the experimental Duplex service […] Read the full story Amazon levels up its Alexa iOS app by adding … Alexa Amazon today announced that Alexa is coming to the Alexa iOS app for iPhone and iPad users. You’d think an app made to help users control the AI assistant and interact with information it serves up would come with Alexa inside, but that wasn’t the case until this year. Though Echo speakers have been available since […] Read the full story AI Guardsman uses computer vision to spot shoplifters Japanese telecom company NTT East teamed up with Earth Eyes, a Japan-based tech startup, to create AI Guardsman, a machine learning system that attempts to catch shoplifters in the act.
Read the full story Techstars: AI startups must be wary of ‘move fast and break things’ mantra This fall, Techstars will open its first AI startup accelerator in Montreal, a city known for its AI sector. The first cohort of 10 startups will be selected next month to begin in September. VentureBeat spoke with managing director Bruno Morency to explore what it means to be an AI startup.
Read the full story OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman on the transformative potential of artificial general intelligence Greg Blockmark, cofounder of OpenAI, spoke to VentureBeat about recent advances in deep learning, the need for discussion and debate about AI, and ways researchers and policymakers might solve the “AI bias problem.” Read the full story Beyond VB The man who was fired by a machine So began a sequence of events that saw Ibrahim Diallo fired from his job, not by his manager but by a machine. (via BBC) Read the full story Artificial Consciousness: How To Give A Robot A Soul The Terminator was written to frighten us; WALL-E was written to make us cry. Robots can’t do the terrifying or heartbreaking things we see in movies, but still the question lingers: What if they could? (via Futurism) Read the full story Artificial Intelligence May Make Traffic Congestion a Thing of the Past If you drive a car, you’ve probably found yourself waiting at a red light while the intersection sits empty. Artificial intelligence could make that — and other frustrating inefficiencies of city traffic — a thing of the past. (via The Wall Street Journal) Read the full story The case against teaching kids to be polite to Alexa When parents tell kids to respect AI assistants, what kind of future are we preparing them for? (via Fast Company) Read the full story VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"3 steps to building more useful computer vision | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/3-steps-to-building-more-useful-computer-vision"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest 3 steps to building more useful computer vision Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Sundar Pichai, Chief Executive Officer of Google, described Google Lens and computer vision at Google I/O 2017.
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“Computer vision” has a decidedly sci-fi ring, so it’s no surprise the idea of smart devices becoming all-seeing tools has captured people’s imaginations. Yet the true potential of the tech is held back by a widespread misunderstanding of what great applications look like and what they can achieve.
Where did computer vision come from? It’s the product of a proliferation of cheap, high-quality cameras, which has expanded the scope for imagery captured in public, private, and commercial domains. At the same time, advances in machine learning and deep learning technology are allowing us to transform those images into digital signals that support a wide range of actions. To start with, visual inspection tasks have included things like tracking stock levels or monitoring a production line. But the future of computer vision goes far beyond these basic applications.
1. Seeing across time and space While current automation functions continue to be useful, new algorithms give us the chance to think of computer vision as diverse and adaptable, even more so than a human eye. Increasing clarity of vision backed up by the power of a brain to interpret and parse sight into action could enhance our ability to tackle complex problems.
The tech’s potential is expanding massively in three key areas.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Seeing the imperceptible is about seeing and interpreting more than our brain alone will allow. Researchers at MIT have been working on detecting a person’s pulse from standard video footage of their face. Computer vision measures very subtle changes in the tone and color of the skin, and the derived signal allows users to take a pulse without being near the person — let alone needing to touch them. Users can apply this signal to distort the video image in real time and literally make the pulse visible. This has huge potential for ambient sensing, monitoring, and diagnosis in health care.
Seeing at scale is the ability to monitor and process enormous volumes of visual content. People who inspect flagged content for deletion are responsible for today’s social media moderation, but this approach is reactive and very limited in scale. It also puts those moderators at risk of psychological stress.
Seeing across space and time allows us to capture footage and observe features that would otherwise be impossible. Ecological surveys of wildlife typically cost a fortune and are time-consuming and difficult to complete. Computer vision is making it all easier, as practitioners use the technology to map deforestation and biomass reduction using aerial and satellite imagery. Remote camera traps are also helping count wildlife populations in very isolated locations. In industry, companies like Reconstruct Inc.
monitor progress on their large building sites by combining autonomously captured footage with building information management systems. The insights can automatically generate progress plans and detect deviations or irregularities in the construction process or design.
2. Size up the data What these examples indicate is how broad and mature the technology already is. But it may still feel like opportunities are limited to big tech companies, due to the sheer amount of data needed to make it work. Data is the fuel that feeds computer vision algorithms, so of course social media and web platform giants have a natural advantage when it comes to training their computer vision.
However, this shouldn’t stop others from getting started.
Many organizations fail to leverage the image data they already own. For instance, retailers sit on masses of CCTV footage that they usually only inspect after a security incident. If we apply computer vision to that footage, we could understand when queues start to build at checkouts, see when customers appear lost in the store, detect a missing child, or inform the redesign of store layouts.
If companies don’t have the benefit of existing image data, they can start to experiment with user-generated content. Google’s Quick Draw is a game-like experience that tries to guess what you’re sketching on your phone. In just a few months, the program generated 50 million doodles that Google can now harness to automatically interpret people’s hand-drawn scribbles.
Online fashion retailer Asos launched its “ As seen on me ” campaign that encourages users to upload fashion photos of themselves. While the initial motivation was customer engagement and loyalty, its potential for mass personalization through computer vision is clear.
These transitional data-generating services can play a key role in defining a product strategy that utilizes computer vision. For example, Google has now transformed the quick draw knowledge base into a tool that interprets and enhances your hand-drawn scribbles in real time.
Even without existing or user-generated data, off-the-shelf solutions are available that let you add computer vision to products and services.
3. Put human needs first Issues around data collection only re-enforce the importance of putting the customer first. As users grow increasingly concerned about the ways companies are using their data, we cannot implement a powerful new technology like computer vision without a very clear understanding of the problem it is meant to solve.
The answer is to apply service design principles that address human needs first and that tap into technology’s great potential for good. It all starts with identifying pain points, patterns of behavior, and unmet needs to establish the context for introducing new digital tools into people’s lives.
Applications using this approach have turned computer vision into a tool to let gardeners identify flowers , allow homeowners to visualize the impact of daylight , and help all of us navigate in the dark.
Computer vision is a genuinely exciting technology, and we’re only just beginning to discover its potential for the digital products and services that could fuel our future.
So, what’s your vision? Connor Upton is a data design director for Fjord, design & innovation from Accenture Interactive.
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"Waymo orders 62,000 Fiat Chrysler minivans for its upcoming autonomous taxi service | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/transportation/waymo-orders-62000-fiat-chrysler-minivans-for-its-upcoming-autonomous-taxi-service"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Waymo orders 62,000 Fiat Chrysler minivans for its upcoming autonomous taxi service Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
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(Reuters) — Fiat Chrysler will add up to 62,000 more cars to Alphabet’s autonomous driving unit Waymo, the companies said on Thursday, as part of Waymo’s plan to roll out a robotaxi service in the U.S. later this year.
The announcement comes on the day when Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp said it would invest $2.25 billion in General Motors Co’s self-driving unit.
Large tech companies, established automakers and well-funded startups including Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] and Tesla Inc are all stepping up efforts to gain pole position in the self-driving cars market, which is expected to carry the automobiles industry into the next era.
“We’re excited to deepen our relationship with FCA that will support the launch of our driverless service and explore future products that support Waymo’s mission,” Waymo Chief Executive Officer John Krafcik said in a statement.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Fiat Chrysler (FCA), which already has a partnership with Waymo, will add Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans to Waymo’s existing fleet, the companies said on Thursday. Delivery of the cars is expected to begin in late 2018.
The companies are also in early discussions about using Waymo’s technology in FCA cars to be sold in retail.
Alphabet’s self-driving unit said in March it will also add up to 20,000 Jaguar Land Rover Automotive Plc [TAMOJL.UL] electric vehicles to its upcoming autonomous fleet.
Waymo, which says it has self-driven 6 million miles on public roads, said on Thursday it was on track to launch the world’s first self-driving transportation service later this year, which will allow passengers to use Waymo’s app to request a vehicle.
The company has plans to roll out a ride service for the public in the Phoenix, Arizona area in coming months , with plans to later launch it more widely.
FCA, which has delivered 600 Pacifica Hybrid minivans to Waymo till date, first announced its partnership with the company in May 2016.
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"Uber CEO confirms discussions of self-driving partnership with Google's Waymo | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/transportation/uber-ceo-confirms-discussions-of-self-driving-partnership-with-googles-waymo"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Uber CEO confirms discussions of self-driving partnership with Google’s Waymo Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
(Reuters) – Uber Technologies is talking with Alphabet’s autonomous driving unit Waymo about using its technology on Uber’s ride-hailing app, Uber Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi said on Wednesday, signaling a possible thaw in relations between the firms.
Khosrowshahi said on stage at the Code Conference that Uber’s relationship with Waymo was “getting better” since Uber in February agreed to pay Waymo $245 million in shares to settle a legal dispute over trade secrets.
“We’re having discussions with Waymo. If something happens, great. If not, we can live with that, too,” Khosrowshahi said.
Waymo is an “incredible technology provider” and having it on Uber’s network would be a good thing, he added.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Waymo declined to comment. It has, though, proceeded with plans to operate without Uber’s help, developing a fleet of cars that it said has self-driven 6 million miles on public roads.
In a lawsuit filed last year, Waymo said that one of its former engineers who became chief of Uber’s self-driving car project took with him thousands of confidential documents. The lawsuit cost Uber both time and money in its self-driving car development.
Khosrowshahi said he believes the technology behind autonomous driving will be shared, and that any company such as Waymo that wants to lead the sector will need to partner with Uber because of Uber’s network of smartphone users.
Waymo plans to roll out an app-based service this year offering rides to passengers in a fully self-driving Waymo car with no driver. It also has a partnership with Lyft Inc, a rival of Uber.
Uber plans to restart its own self-driving car operation in the coming months, Khosrowshahi said. The company shut down testing in Arizona this month after a fatal crash involving one of its vehicles.
“We will get back on the road over the summer,” he said, adding that the fatal episode eventually “is going to make us a better company”.
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"Facebook edged out of top 3 social networks by U.S. teens | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/social/facebook-edged-out-of-top-3-social-networks-by-u-s-teens"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Facebook edged out of top 3 social networks by U.S. teens Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
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Facebook is losing ground among U.S. teenagers ages 13-17. According to a Pew Research Report released today, Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube are now more popular than Facebook, a social network with more than two billion monthly active users worldwide.
Among teens that took part in the survey, 85 percent say they use YouTube, followed by 72 percent for Instagram, 69 percent for Snapchat, and 51 percent for Facebook.
Though the Facebook app was edged out of the top 3 among teens, Facebook Inc. is Instagram’s parent company.
Only 10 percent of teenagers who took part in the survey said they use Facebook more than any other social media app.
Numbers released today stand in sharp contrast to the last time Pew conducted the poll.
In 2015, Facebook was still most popular among teens, garnering 71 percent of the 13-17 audience, more than any other social network. Back then, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter were the most popular social media apps among teenagers.
The survey of 743 U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 was conducted between March 7 and April 10, according to Pew.
Smartphone penetration has intensified since the last time Pew conducted its poll, with 95 percent of teens today reporting that they have a smartphone, compared to nearly 75 percent in 2015.
Forty-five percent of teens say they’re online on a near-constant basis, compared to 24 percent in 2015, but teens aren’t the only ones consuming large amounts of digital content. The Internet Trends Report from Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker released yesterday found that average time spent using social media has increased from 90 minutes in 2012 to 135 minutes in 2017.
The amount of time adults spend on digital media per day has grown from 2.7 hours in 2008 to 5.9 hours in 2017.
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"Telegram says Apple blocked global updates after Russian ban (Updated) | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/security/telegram-says-apple-blocked-global-updates-after-russian-ban"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Telegram says Apple blocked global updates after Russian ban (Updated) Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn The Telegram logo is seen on a screen of a smartphone in this picture illustration taken April 13, 2018.
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(Reuters) — Apple has prevented the Telegram messaging service from updating globally ever since Russia ordered Apple to remove the service from its stores, Telegram’s CEO and founder said on Thursday.
Two protest rallies were organised in Russia’s capital this month, with the demonstrators chanting anti-government slogans and carrying signs against what they called internet censorship, following Moscow’s decision to block the popular messaging service.
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has said it needs to guard against security threats such as terrorist attacks. Telegram is challenging the block in Russian courts.
“Russia banned Telegram on its territory in April because we refused to provide decryption keys for all our users’ communications to Russia’s security agencies. We believe we did the only possible thing, preserving the right of our users to privacy in a troubled country,” Pavel Durov, a pioneer of Russian social media, said on his official Telegram Channel.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! While Russia makes up only 7 percent of Telegram’s user base, Apple is restricting updates for all Telegram users around the world, Durov said.
“As a result, we’ve also been unable to fully comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for our EU-users by the deadline of May 25, 2018. We are continuing our efforts to resolve the situation,” he said.
Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
GDPR is the European Union regulation on data protection and privacy for all individuals within EU, also addressing the export of personal data outside the EU.
Update on June 1 at 1:55 p.m.: Telegram announced via a tweet that version 4.8.2 has been released for iOS, including new privacy settings and iOS 11.4-specific fixes.
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"Data encryption startup Virtru raises $37.5 million to target enterprise security | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/security/data-encryption-startup-virtru-raises-37-5-million-to-target-enterprise-security"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Data encryption startup Virtru raises $37.5 million to target enterprise security Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Virtru CTO Will Ackerly (left) and CEO John . Ackerly (right).
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Virtru , a provider of email encryption and data protection solutions, announced today that it has raised a $37.5 million round of funding. Iconiq Capital led the round and was joined by existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Samsung, Blue Delta Capital, and Soros Capital.
Founded in 2011 by former NSA engineer Will Ackerly and his brother John, Virtru has developed a form of encryption called the Trusted Data Format. Essentially, it encloses each piece of content in its own “protective wrapper,” which encrypts the information. One of the benefits of Virtru, according to CEO John Ackerly, is that it integrates with email providers like Gmail and Microsoft Outlook through a browser extension and application, so it’s not a standalone service like Proton Mail. In March, the company also released its own API , called the Virtru Data Protection Platform, so that organizations can embed Virtru encryption onto any platform.
Accounts for individual users are free, while accounts for businesses cost $60 per user. According to the company, roughly 8,000 organizations use Virtru’s services, up from 4,000 almost two years ago. Customers include universities, corporations, and law enforcement agencies. Virtru also said in its press release that its revenue has tripled over the past year, but John Ackerly declined to give further information.
With the new round of capital, Virtru is interested in working more with corporations looking to protect other types of enterprise content, like shared files in Dropbox and Google Drive, as well as data stored in the cloud. “We started with email because it was ubiquitous, and it’s been such a hard problem to solve,” John Ackerly told VentureBeat in a phone interview.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Virtru has 75 employees, and this new round of funding brings its total raised to roughly $70 million.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"Warhammer: Vermintide 2 gives you more monsters to kill and fancy hats | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/warhammer-vermintide-2-gives-you-more-monsters-to-kill-and-fancy-hats"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Warhammer: Vermintide 2 gives you more monsters to kill and fancy hats Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
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One of the breakout hits in the first half 2018 is Warhammer: Vermintide 2 , selling more than 1 million copies. Now, developer Fatshark is rewarding fans with an update that will introduce more reasons to come back to the cooperative multiplayer shooter set in the fantasy Warhammer universe.
This patch is going out today, and it introduces a handful of new elements. Highlights here include quests and challenges that refresh every day. Fatshark is also introducing dozens of new hats and skins for players to customize the look of their characters.
“Vermintide 2 already challenges the players, but now we amp it up with daily challenges and quests.” Fatshark designer Mats Andersson said. “The Content Update will bring exclusive skins, portrait frames and cosmetics for heroes who rise to the challenge.” Vermintide 2 is out now on Steam , and it is coming to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One soon as well. Fatshark is also prepping Vermintide 2 to integrate with user mods and Steam Workshop support.
It published a blog today about using mods, which describes the process of subscribing (the term for installing a mod) through the Workshop.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Mod creators can download the official development kit for the game right now, though. It is available under the Tools tab when you right click on Vermintide 2 in your Steam library. This kit includes tutorials and other instructions for creating content for the game and releasing it through the Workshop.
Fatshark is trying to turn Vermintide 2 into a game that people will want to return to for months or even years. Having mods along with regular content updates could help it accomplish just that.
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"Unreal Engine*: Blueprint CPU Optimizations for Cloth Simulations | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/unreal-engine-blueprint-cpu-optimizations-for-cloth-simulations"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Sponsored Unreal Engine*: Blueprint CPU Optimizations for Cloth Simulations Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
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The contents of this guide work for version 4.19 of the Unreal Engine.
Cloth Simulations Realistic cloth movement can bring a great amount of visual immersion into a game. Using PhysX Clothing is one way to do this without the need of hand animating. Incorporating these simulations into Unreal Engine* 4 is easy, but, as it is a taxing process on the CPU, it’s good to understand their performance characteristics and how to optimize them.
Disabling cloth simulation Cloth simulations in Unreal* are in the level they will be simulated, whether they can be seen or not. Optimization can prevent this risk. Do not rely on the Disable Cloth setting for optimizing simulated cloth, as this only works in the construction, and has no effect while the game is in play.
Unreal* Physics Stats To get a better understanding of cloth simulation and its effect on a game and system, we can use a console command, Stat PHYSICS, in Unreal.
After entering Stat PHYSICS at the command line, the physics table overlay appears (Figure 1). To remove it, just enter the same command into the console.Figure 1. Physics overlay table.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! While there is a lot of information available, we need only worry about the first two (Cloth Total and Cloth Sim) for the purposes of this paper.
Cloth Total represents the total number of cloth draws within the scene, and Cloth Sim (simulation) represents the number of active cloth meshes currently simulated. Keeping these two numbers within a reasonable level to your target platform helps prevent a loss of frame rate due to the CPU being loaded down with processing cloth. By adding an increasing number of cloth meshes to the level, the number of simulations the CPU can handle at once becomes apparent.
Suspending Cloth Simulation Added to the Unreal Engine Blueprint system is the ability to suspend and resume the cloth simulations on a skeletal mesh. These added nodes solve the previous issue of the cloth simulation being reset every time with the level of detail method of cloth optimization.Figure 2. Resume and suspend on a was recently rendered function switch.
For the purpose of this document all of the methods discussed below in the Level of Detail section still apply, but now you can exchange the Set Min LOD nodes with the Resume and Suspend Clothing Simulation nodes.
Time delay switch With cloth simulation suspension, we are able to be more dynamic with cloth while still being able to optimize performance. However, using only an occlusion switch can lead to a dropping banner problem; wherein a cloth simulation has dynamic movement, and the player turns away (which pauses the cloth simulation), and then after some time turns back to see the cloth simulation hovering in mid-air before continuing its movement.
To solve this issue, we can use an occlusion switch and add a Boolean check to our suspension; in this way a delay before suspending the simulation can be used, giving the cloth enough time to finish its movement before coming to a final rest and remaining suspended.
Level of Detail When creating a skeletal mesh and attaching an apex cloth file to it, that cloth simulation will always be tied to the zero value of the level of detail (LOD) of that mesh. If the mesh is ever switched off of LOD 0, the cloth simulation will no longer take place. Using this to our advantage, we can create an LOD 1 that is the same in every way as our LOD 0 (minus the cloth apex file), and use it as a switch whenever we want to use the cloth simulation (Figure 4).
Boolean switch Now that we have a switch we can set up a simple blueprint to control it. By creating an event (or function), we can branch using a Boolean switch between simulating the cloth (LOD 0) and not simulating the cloth (LOD 1). This event could be called on a trigger entered to begin simulating the cloth meshes in the next area, and again when the player leaves that area to stop those simulations or any number of methods, depending on the game level.
Occlusion culling switch If a more automated approach is desired, occlusion culling can be used as the switching variable. To do this, call the Was Recently Rendered function, and attach its return to the switch branch (Figure 6). This will stop the cloth simulation when the actor is no longer rendered.
The problem with this method comes from the simulation reset that occurs when the simulation is switched back on. If the cloth mesh is drastically different when it is simulated, the player will always see this transition. To mitigate the chance of this happening, the bounds of the mesh can be increased with import settings. However, this also means intentionally rendering objects that cannot be seen by the player, so make sure it is worthwhile in terms of the game’s rendering demands.
A level design approach to solving this issue would include making sure all dynamically capable cloth meshes (such as flags) are placed in the same direction as the wind.
It may be possible to program a method in C++ that will save the position data of every vertex of the cloth simulation and translate the mesh back into that position when the simulation in turned back on. That could be a very taxing method, depending on the data structure used and the amount of cloth simulations in the level.
Combination/Set Piece Switch If the level happens to have a very dynamic set piece that is important enough to always look its best, an additional branch that uses a Boolean switch can be attached to the actor; in figure 9 we call it Optimize Cloth? With this new switch, importance can be given to certain cloth meshes that should always be simulated by switching their Optimize Cloth? value to false.
Using a set piece switch In figure 10 below, three cloth meshes are flags that turn away and point backwards, relative to their starting position. It takes a few seconds for this to look natural, but because they really sell the fact that they are not hand animated, I set them to be set pieces ( Optimize Cloth? false ), so they are always being simulated.
GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
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"Orphan Age shows a dystopia where children have been left behind | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/orphan-age-shows-a-dystopia-where-children-have-been-left-behind"
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Orphan Age is a simulator game where the children have inherited the earth — but unfortunately, it’s been ravaged by war. French indie developer Studio Black Flag is launching a Kickstarter campaign for it today, and a playable alpha demo is available now. The team is aiming for a release on PC this December.
Much like 11 Bit Studios’ excellent survival sim game, This War of Mine , Orphan Age is all about the civilian casualties of conflict. Players are responsible for a ragtag group of children, each of whom has different skills. They must gather resources, build, and attempt to eke out a living in a bombed-out city as war rages around them. Theirs is a futuristic dystopian world, and players will determine if they become looters or hackers, all in the name of survival.
“Orphan Age is an extremely personal project for me, that I’ve been working on it on and off for around nine years now. It really is a passion project for me and I can’t wait finally be able to share more about it,” said Studio Black Flag founder Adrien Forestier in a statement.
Like This War of Mine and 11 Bit’s recent successful icy steampunk game Frostpunk , Studio Black Flag seems like it wants the player to deliberate over the morality of their decisions. Some interesting choices could arise, especially since the game centers on a group of children. Though Orphan Age seems grim, hopefully it won’t devolve into an all-out The Lord of the Flies situation.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! “The game has a strong message that we’re not shying away from,” said Forestier. “We wanted to turn the often idyllic backdrop of the life-sim genre on its head, and ask the question what will the future we have made be like for our children to grow up in.” GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
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"Kartridge brings Double Fine and Versus Evil to its PC game store | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/kartridge-brings-double-fine-and-versus-evil-to-its-pc-game-store"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Kartridge brings Double Fine and Versus Evil to its PC game store Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
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Web and mobile gaming portal Kongregate is adding new games to its PC games marketplace, Kartridge.
The platform is in closed beta, but it will arrive in open beta this summer with a raft of indie titles from developers such as Double Fine and Ninja Kiwi as well as publisher Versus Evil (which recently released Obsidian Entertainment’s Pillars of Eternity II ).
Kartridge has partnered with almost 50 developers to build a portfolio of games, with titles like Terrible Toybox’s point-and-click adventure Thimbleweed Park and Asymmetric Publications’ snarky cowboy role-playing game West of Loathing.
Today’s announcement heralds the arrival of games like Double Fine ‘s Psychonauts and the remastered Day of the Tentacle, along with Ninja Kiwi’s Bloons series. Publisher Versus Evil will offer titles like Stoic’s The Banner Saga series and Gambrinous’s Guild of Dungeoneering.
Kongregate is still looking for developers who would like to port their titles, and in April, it shared some details about what the revenue share would look like for potential partners. The games it has helped ship as a publisher will also be on the platform.
Kartridge is the latest online marketplace to tackle the problem of indie game discoverability. It’s more similar to sites like Itch.io where people can download games to play, while other platforms like Jump are trying out a monthly subscription model that enables folks to stream games. Similarly, the game streaming platform Utomik recently launched out of a two-year open beta period with over 600 titles and a few first-day exclusives.
GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
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"Insomniac teases its next game -- a new VR experience | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/insomniac-teases-its-next-game"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Insomniac teases its next game — a new VR experience Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Spider-Man lived up to its billing.
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Insomniac is a busy studio.
It is preparing to release Spider-Man for PlayStation 4 , which is one of the most anticipated games of the second half of this year. But while one Insomniac team getting the webslinger suited up for a September release, another is chipping away at something new — and the developer is teasing that in a video today.
The new game is Insomniac’s latest release for virtual reality. The studio is one of the most well-known names working in the VR space, and it explained in the video that it has learned a lot from its previous games. Those include Edge of Nowhere and The Unspoken.
Edge of Nowhere is a console-style, third-person action adventure , and The Unspoken is a multiplayer wizard-dueling simulator.
Both are available for the Oculus Rift through the Oculus Store.
Now, the company is taking those lessons and applying them to something new. It didn’t go into details, but you can get a glimpse at some artwork and other key teases at the end of this video.
Reclaim Your World – June 7, 2018 @OculusRift #ReclaimYourWorld pic.twitter.com/3F0FLOJpBg — Insomniac Games (@insomniacgames) May 31, 2018 Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Insomniac has told GamesBeat that it will have more to show of its next game as we march ever closer to the upcoming Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show in Los Angeles in two weeks. We’ll stay on top of this news, and we’ll try to break it to you gently when the studio confirms it’s not making a Sunset Overdrive 2.
GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
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"Cultist Simulator review -- shuffling your way onto another plane of reality | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/cultist-simulator-review-shuffling-your-way-onto-another-plane-of-reality"
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Cultist Simulator ‘s straightforward no-nonsense title belies the enigmatic journey it takes you on as you seek arcane truths and perform blasphemous rituals. It’s a digital card game that shows you glimpses of the world through snippets of rich, literary text, all while tasking you with collecting abstract concepts like passion and reason and using them like currency.
Ostensibly, Cultist Simulator is about gathering disciples to your cause as you strive for your purpose, be that enlightenment or the worship of chaos. But it’s no surprise that it’s much more than that. After all, it comes from the labyrinthian imagination of Failbetter Games founder Alexis Kennedy, who developed games like Fallen London and Sunless Sea. It’s the debut title from indie studio Weather Factory, which Kennedy founded alongside Failbetter producer Lottie Bevan, and it’s out today on PC.
Check out our Reviews Vault for past game reviews.
What you’ll like An intertextual tale full of secrets Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Above: The Detective recalls grim reminders of a physician who succumbed to the occult.
You begin Cultist Simulator as the Aspirant, a penniless student who is alone in a callous city. You ask yourself, “What now? Could I become something more?” To answer that question, you soon find that you have to delve into the supernatural. You dream about a house without walls and an eerie forest all around it. Strange, powerful beings beckon to you, each mysterious in their own way. Wherever you turn, you find references in books to the imagery that haunts you — lantern light, moths, and silent winter.
Cultist Simulator is about trial and error while gathering the resources you need to continue your journey. You’ll need reason, passion, health, and wages to survive, but that isn’t all. You’ll spend most of your paycheck on books from an inscrutable shop that’s stocked with esoteric books in Greek, Latin, and Aramaic. Once you latch onto a founding principle for your cult, you’ll need to recruit followers and find ways to turn them into believers to help you perform rituals and reach the goal you’ve set for yourself. You’ll send them out on quests to ransack old castles and trek through the mire to find treasure. And all the while, you’ll have to escape the suspicion of the sinister Suppression Bureau, which hunts down those who practice the so-called “invisible arts.” The most fascinating thing about Cultist Simulator is how it slowly builds out its world. As the Aspirant, you’re hunted by an inspector who notices that you’ve been whispering about the occult in smoky parlors. But once you die — and you will die, because death is part of the cycle — you’ll have the option to play as different characters, one of whom is a Detective for the same organization.
Each character you play will call back to previous lives you’ve explored. As the Detective, you’re drawn to the sealed case file of a former occultist. When you become the Bright Young Thing, you’ll hear rumors about your last character. As the Physician, you recall a troubled patient who rambled on about the same dreams you’ve been having.
The dreams keep recurring — the Bright Young Thing notes that their father was plagued by them as well. It’s as though some kind of madness is contagious in Cultist Simulator, tormenting people across cultures and times with visions of something beyond. These repeated references to the Hours, the Mansus, the various terrifying gods keep appearing everywhere you look. Some books refer to others as well, and you occasionally see mention of the authors feuding or in love. In-game lore also alludes to real-world mythology, adding yet another layer of meaning. And as you play different characters, it’s actually exciting to find the same texts once again because it feels like the same glittering, elusive thread runs through all their stories.
The coolest thing is when you finally make it into the Mansus, which appears as a brief dream and overtakes the whole screen. It appears as a map with many spokes and paths to enigmatically named locations — if that’s what they are. It shows you that so much more is left to be discovered — like the Lodge of the Sage Knight and The Red Church and The Chamber of Ways.
The atmosphere is dark and full of terrors Above: Random events like the Dry Soul Curse will plague your run.
Most of your time will be spent in a shadowy room, poring over a table where all your machinations are laid out before you in the form of playing cards. Some of these represent people, the believers whom you’ve managed to convince to join you in your otherworldly quest. It’s easy to think of them as simply resources, and you perform a cold calculus when you decide whether or not to sacrifice this disciple versus that one. But like in Kennedy’s previous games, everything is described with tantalizing detail, and every so often, you’ll find yourself struck by the feeling that these are lives you’re playing with in a world filled with real dangers.
Cultist Simulator has terrific atmosphere and it deftly strums your emotions as you uncover more of its secrets, alternately thrumming with inspiration as things start making sense and slumping with defeat when you can’t figure out what you need to create a human crucible. Accompanying you on this dark task is an eerie soundscape that occasionally segues into devious minor-key arpeggios that imply that what you’re doing is forbidden and unthinkable. Whispers emerge and fade away when you begin courting pawns to bring into your cult’s fold. Sometimes the soundtrack makes you feel like you’re in a haunted great hall, the music reverberating off the upper clerestory or perhaps reaching you from a far-off underwater cavern.
The sound design is fantastic, punctuating your quest with the ominous ticking of the clock running down. Some cards have timers on them, and when they expire, they burn up into ash before you, glimmering notions escaping your brain before you’ve fully grasped their meaning.
What you won’t like A busy workspace Above: Lots of paperwork involved with running a cult.
As you dive deeper into Cultist Simulator’s lore, you might soon find yourself overwhelmed with cards. Even when I started out with a gameplan — I’ll keep my books over in this corner and my artifacts over in that one — it’s easy to lose track of everything you’ve collected. When an action is finished, it will often yield multiple cards. Sending your disciples out to investigate the swampy Gladwyn Lake, for instance, might have them returning with over 10 cards. And when you click “Collect all,” they will spill out randomly.
This can get a bit frustrating, though you can pause while playing to reorganize. But I still wish that the designers offered a way of keeping things neater, something like cards snapping to a grid or perhaps designating parts of the table where certain card types will land when you collect them.
People who are used to having a zillion screenshots on their desktop will probably be OK with how cluttered the table can get in Cultist Simulator. Others will likely cringe at how the cards don’t line up just so.
The extraordinary as the mundane I’m torn on this one. I waffle between enjoying how major discoveries feel simply like small pieces of a grander puzzle and wishing that the game gave me a bigger sense of accomplishment. Even after you’ve made it to the Mansus for the first time, you’re plunged right back into your daily grind of brainwashing — or, more tactfully, “persuading” — people to join your cult and buying obscure books. When you discover a rare artifact, you might get a bit of text saying that it might be important in a ritual, but more often than not, it’s treated like any other item. It doesn’t hint at what certain cards may do in combination with others, and it doesn’t celebrate when you discover those combinations either.
This is a double-edged sword. It contributes to the illusion that you’re plunging into twisted intricate lore, and like in real life, it’s tough to distinguish between what will ultimately be useful and what’s just chaff. It also lends itself to the open nature of the game. You can choose what your cult will be about and you can decide on what rituals to perform.
Cult Simulator has many endings, so it’s true that perhaps that artifact isn’t too important to you if you’ve decided to go in a direction that doesn’t need it. And when you do tease out how things work, you do get a sense of satisfaction that your experimentation has paid off. At the same time, it would be nice to get a little more feedback.
Conclusion Cultist Simulator feels like a spiral into madness, but it doesn’t have to be. Kennedy has said that you can just ignore all the occult happenings and focus on your day job at Glover and Glover. You’ll go on to retire peacefully after a series of modest promotions; let some other poor wretch chase phantoms and dreams.
That’s the real beauty of Weather Factor’s debut title — the world feels so large and full of possibilities, even though everything is mainly told through small snippets of text. It’s filled with poetry, like descriptions of a vial of Greydawn Oil that’s “the precise color of the hours when one cannot sleep,” and it makes you want to explore and unravel its mysteries. And it makes you work for it, reading between the lines and imagining a realm unseen.
Though I have some minor quibbles about the game’s interface, I find myself returning to its world again and again.
Score: 90/100 Cultist Simulator is out today on PC. Weather Factory sent us a digital code for this review.
GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
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"Assassin's Creed: Odyssey heads to Greece (update: Ubisoft confirms) | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/assassins-creed-odyssey-takes-ubisoft-to-greece-if-we-believe-this-keychain"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey heads to Greece (update: Ubisoft confirms) Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Welcome to Sparta, Bayek! Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
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Guessing the setting of the next Assassin’s Creed adventure is a honored tradition for fans at this point, and it looks like the winners this time around are anyone who put their bets on Greece — that is, if we can believe merchandise that is appearing online today.
French website Jeux Video Live has uncovered a key chain with the name Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey that features the head of a spartan warrior. Jeux Video claims it received the image of the key chain from a source that says Odyssey will follow Bayek, hero in Assassin’s Creed: Origins, as he travels to ancient Greece — although that is unconfirmed.
Ubisoft confirmed the name in a Tweet this evening that references the Hollywood action film 300 that tells the story of a group of Spartans fighting off an invasion.
See you at E3! pic.twitter.com/03NTPhCkCf — Assassin's Creed (@assassinscreed) May 31, 2018 As always, Assassin’s Creed is the subject of a lot of rumors. Details of the last several games have leaked before their official reveal, and Odyssey may not buck that tradition. The rumors for this entry in the open-world action adventure series is that Ubisoft wants to stick with Bayek for multiple games, as it did with Ezio in Assassin’s Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Other rumors, Kotaku reports , claim that Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey will not take a full year off, like the break between Syndicate and Origins. Instead, it should launch before the end of the publisher’s current fiscal year, which wraps up March 31, 2019. Ubisoft is also considering how it can continue to grow the series after the successful adoption of more role-playing elements in Origins. That could manifest as dialogue trees and more control over who you play.
It’s worth pointing out that reports are conflicting about whether you play as Bayek, his wife, Aya, or new characters altogether.
Ubisoft previously promised surprises for E3, and this is likely one of those. So expect more from the game when the Electronic Entertainment Expo pre-show media briefings get under way in less than two weeks.
Updated at 4:37 p.m. Pacific time with the tweet from the Assassin’s Creed account.
GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
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"Apple will likely debut Digital Health and ARKit 2.0 at WWDC, but no hardware | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/mobile/apple-will-likely-debut-digital-health-and-arkit-2-0-at-wwdc-but-no-hardware"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Apple will likely debut Digital Health and ARKit 2.0 at WWDC, but no hardware Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
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Apple’s plans for the 2018 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote next week include a new “Digital Health” initiative and a major update to its ARKit augmented reality software, but no new hardware, Bloomberg reports today. As noted in January , the company decided to hold back on larger updates to its operating systems this year to focus on bug fixes and performance improvements, resulting in a fairly tame-sounding slate of WWDC announcements.
According to the new report, Apple will address recent concerns over device addiction with Digital Health, a collection of settings and usage monitoring tools that will help users reduce device and specific app usage. Several months ago, the company publicly committed to improving iOS’ parental controls , as well, which will likely tie into the Digital Health initiative.
The company also plans to show version 2.0 of its ARKit augmented reality tools , the report says, including features that can save and share the locations of both users and augmented reality objects — ideal for multi-player gaming. Google recently unveiled similar AR object-saving functionality under the name Cloud Anchors at its I/O developers’ conference, sweetening its offering by including both Android and iOS compatibility.
On the Mac front, Bloomberg says that “the focus this year will be on integrating more deeply with iOS,” potentially including the debut of Marzipan , a previously reported initiative to let iOS apps run on Macs. A separate report has claimed that the Mac App Store will be redesigned to resemble the iOS version, including an editorial-style presentation of featured content.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Other OS-level improvements are said to be fairly minor, including unspecified updates to FaceTime, the Stocks app, and Animojis, as well as the ability to temporarily hide (or “snooze”) notifications. Similarly ambiguous are Apple’s plans for Siri, which are said to include “more predictive” features this year, with “more significant changes” planned for the future. Similarly, Apple is said to be holding a redesigned Home Screen, AI assistance for Photos, and more iPad file management tools for 2019.
Said to be missing at WWDC this year: new hardware. While rumors of new MacBooks, MacBook Pros, iPad Pros, and possibly MacBook Airs have circulated for months, none are expected to debut next week. Nor is the Apple Watch Series 4, which is predicted to arrive in the fall retaining prior models’ sizes, shapes, and band compatibility while increasing screen real estate. However, Apple is reportedly planning to unlock a new rainbow-colored “Pride” watch face (shown above) for current Watches during the event, as discovered by 9to5Mac.
A store with additional watch faces could be a major draw for the platform, but it has not been rumored ahead of the event.
Traditionally, Apple makes new versions of its operating systems available to developers shortly after the WWDC keynote speech concludes. The company released beta versions of minor, bug-fixing updates to iOS 11.4, tvOS 11.4, and watchOS 4.3 yesterday, alongside an unexpected beta of macOS 10.13.6. It is expected to debut early betas of iOS 12, macOS 10.14, tvOS 12, and watchOS 5 at WWDC.
GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
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"App Annie: 2,857 iOS apps make over $1 million a year | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/mobile/app-annie-2857-ios-apps-make-over-1-million-a-year"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages App Annie: 2,857 iOS apps make over $1 million a year Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
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Ten years after Apple launched the App Store, the exclusive iOS software shop is continuing to grow at a rapid clip, app analytics and market intelligence firm App Annie reports today. Larger numbers of apps are hitting the $1 million and over $10 million consumer spending thresholds, and “there’s plenty more to come,” the firm predicts.
Summarizing the first decade of App Store data, App Annie says there have been over 170 billion downloads, representing over $130 billion in consumer spending through December 2017. Nearly 10,000 apps have individually generated over $1 million in consumer spending since 2010, with 2,293 in the $1 million to $10 million range during 2017 alone, plus 564 making over $10 million apiece.
As of today, users in many countries keep around 100 apps installed on their iOS devices, actively using roughly 40 every month. Users in France, Indonesia, and South Korea have the highest numbers of apps installed — upwards of 112 — though the number of apps actually used is fairly steady, hitting the upper 30s even in countries with smaller average collections.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Across the globe, iOS consumer spending is actually growing faster than the rate of app downloads, generating nearly twice as much money as the Google Play Store in 2017 despite having only 30 percent of worldwide download share. iOS App Store spending is predicted to grow by 80 percent over the next five years, racing from $42.5 billion in 2017 to a forecasted $75.7 billion in 2022.
Games are continuing to fuel the App Store’s spending growth. Although games accounted for only 31 percent of all downloads in 2017, they represented 75 percent of consumer spending, with particular spending strength on iPhones in the Asia-Pacific region. Over 4.5 million apps have been released in the App Store — 77 percent of them games — though only two million still remain available after thinnings of the herd by Apple and developers.
In recent years, the greatest growth has come from the Asia-Pacific region. While the United States remains the world’s top country for both downloads (40.1 billion) and consumer spending ($36 billion), China is now a close second with 39.9 billion downloads and $27.7 billion in revenue. Amazingly, Japan is No. 3, with $25.2 billion in revenue despite only 9.5 billion downloads.
Asia-Pacific countries have seen their aggregate percentage of downloads steadily climb to 49 percent of the global total, with consumer spending at 59 percent — numbers that spiked after the October 2014 release of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus in China. Customers in the Europe/Middle East/Africa (EMEA) region and the Americas each account for 26 percent of downloads, but EMEA countries contribute only 14 percent to spending versus the Americas’ 27 percent.
In-app subscriptions have led to dramatic spending growth. While audio apps such as Pandora Radio and Spotify topped the revenue charts for years, three video apps — Netflix, Tencent Video, and iQiyi — were in 2017’s top five, alongside the dating app Tinder. App Annie’s tracking doesn’t appear to include revenues from Apple Music, which likely siphoned off much of the subscription revenue from rival music apps after its launch, leaving video services to become a new prime target.
GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
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"ConDati raises $4.75 million for digital marketing analytics | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/marketing/condati-raises-4-75-million-for-digital-marketing-analytics"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages ConDati raises $4.75 million for digital marketing analytics Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn ConDati has a new kind of analytics.
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ConDati has raised $4.75 million in funding for its next-generation analytics for digital marketing. The Palo Alto, California-based company is also announcing its flagship service, ConDati Marketing Analytics.
ConDati said it wants to deliver a holistic view of digital marketing performance. The company leverages the economics of the cloud to give even small and mid-sized companies access to on-demand, affordable, and actionable data science.
“We’re moving marketing out of incomplete and antiquated spreadsheets into a whole new way to monitor, understand and manage the business,” said Ken Gardner, CEO of ConDati, in a statement. “We’re delivering immediate and actionable insights that help CMOs determine the most effective operational and strategic way forward, improving marketing-driven business outcomes across search, email and social marketing.” ConDati Focusing a high-powered team Gardner founded ConDati to apply next-generation technology and data science to the “big data” problem in marketing caused by the proliferation of cloud-based marketing technologies. He has a track record of five successful exits, including one just last year: He was founder and chairman of Soasta, which was sold to Akamai in 2017.
Among ConDati’s other cofounders is Dan Bartow, vice president of product design and engineering. He holds multiple patents in data science, analytics, and user interfaces. He served as Soasta’s vice president of products and principal product designer until the company’s acquisition by Akamai.
The ConDati executive team also includes John Zicker, chief data scientist, a five-time entrepreneur and three-time CEO who began his career at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC).
“His work at SLAC with Big Data set new standards for what was possible,” Gardner said.
Above: ConDati is a data beast.
Analyzing big data for business use Measurement and analytics have not kept pace with the proliferation of martech and platforms, ConDati said.
Almost every business in the world has a website, and digital marketing has evolved into a sophisticated set of tools, applications, systems, and platforms that make up the martech stack. The stack typically includes standalone cloud-based systems that manage keywords, organic search, pay-per-click advertising, and search engine optimization (SEO), as well as email and social marketing.
At a minimum, most companies have five to eight martech systems in place, and some ecommerce companies use dozens. One recent analysis shows nearly 7,000 cloud-based martech systems on the market. ConDati Marketing Analytics addresses this problem by aggregating marketing data in real time and delivering it to marketing leaders via visualizations that show the financial performance of online marketing campaigns, including rolling up revenue, other goal conversions, and costs from multiple sources.
ConDati collects data from the areas of greatest digital marketing spend and activity, including Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Google Adwords, DoubleClick, and Facebook Ads — as well as marketing automation systems including Salesforce Pardot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud — to deliver complete visibility into revenue and costs for digital campaigns. Once the data is combined from the disparate systems, ConDati applies machine learning algorithms to build predictive models that enable statistically valid forecasting and anomaly detection.
Above: ConDati gives you dashboard for your data.
Predictive analytics provides statistically meaningful forecasts of future campaign performance and enables anomaly detection and operational-level alerts. ConDati also forecasts long-term revenue trends that give executives visibility into the need for potential strategic changes months in advance.
Future releases of the ConDati Marketing Analytics service will include expanded data sources to address the thousands of current cloud-based martech systems. The company will also add prescriptive analytics that enable marketing pros to run what-if scenarios, optimize their programs, and improve marketing ROI.
Investors include Jeff Webber, managing director of The Entrepreneurs’ Fund.
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"Nintendo Switch gets Arena of Valor closed beta test this summer | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/games/nintendo-switch-gets-arena-of-valor-closed-beta-test-this-summer"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Nintendo Switch gets Arena of Valor closed beta test this summer Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Arena of Valor in action.
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Tencent still hasn’t announced when its hit mobile game Arena of Valor will arrive on the Nintendo Switch, but it will be hosting a closed beta test this summer for players in North America and Europe. It will last two weeks starting on a to-be-determined date, and players can enter a raffle for a key by filling out a survey.
This is the second closed beta for the immensely popular multiplayer online battle arena, which ran a one-day session in January for European players. Arena of Valor, known as Honor of Kings in Asia, arrived in North and South America in December on iOS and Android devices. The game is a global juggernaut, boasting over 160 million registered users and generating $1.9 billion in 2017.
Tencent already has a foot in the esports world. It owns a big chunk of Riot Games, developer of League of Legends , and Epic Games, which recently announced a $100 million prize pool for upcoming competitions for its battle royale sensation Fortnite. And it seems like Arena of Valor is getting the same treatment; in February, the Chinese tech giant announced that it’s launching the Arena of Valor World Cup tournament in North America. It already got a big vote of confidence from the esports team Immortals, which has launched a team to play the MOBA competitively.
Arena of Valor has already found extraordinary success on mobile, and arriving on a console will help it reach even more players.
GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
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VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"Withings cofounder Éric Carreel finalizes deal to regain control from Nokia | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/entrepreneur/withings-cofounder-eric-carreel-finalizes-deal-to-regain-control-from-nokia"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Withings cofounder Éric Carreel finalizes deal to regain control from Nokia Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Connected health care startup Withings is a French company once again. Cofounder Éric Carreel announced today that he has closed a deal to buy Withings back from Finland’s Nokia.
“I am delighted to start working again with the brilliant teams that made the brand such a great success,” said Carreel in a statement. “We have an exciting challenge ahead of us as we continue to push the boundaries of connected health.” The conclusion of the deal ends what turned out to be a short and doomed relationship. Nokia, seeking ways to enter consumer tech markets again, acquired Withings back in 2016 for $192 million.
Another cofounder, Cedric Hutchings, was put in charge of a new Silicon Valley digital health business for Nokia, which later killed the Withings brand.
But things went sideways from there. Nokia eventually wrote off the cost of the acquisition, signalling that it felt Withings had no value. In February, Nokia announced plans to exit the digital health business, and a few weeks ago the company said it had entered into talks with Carreel to sell the business back to him.
Those negotiations are over, though Carreel did not disclose how much he paid. However, he did say the company would again be based in Paris, that it would be “dedicated to developing innovative connected health products focused on preventive health,” and that he hopes to relaunch the Withings brand sometime later this year.
“We are still only just starting to discover what connected health can really bring to people,” he said in the press release. “From now on, we must concentrate our efforts on developing tools capable of advanced measurements and the associated services that can help prevent chronic health conditions. Today’s technologies allow us to imagine solutions that have the potential to benefit the lives of millions of people, and our ambition is to ensure that we, as Withings, lead the way with technological advances and intuitive designs.” VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"France's Klaxoon raises $50 million for international expansion of its teamwork platform | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/entrepreneur/frances-klaxoon-raises-50-million-for-international-expansion-of-its-teamwork-platform"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages France’s Klaxoon raises $50 million for international expansion of its teamwork platform Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn A Klaxoon brainstorm session.
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Klaxoon today announced a $50 million round of funding, which the French company hopes will allow it to capitalize on the rapid word-of-mouth growth it has seen over the past two years.
Based in the northwestern city of Rennes, Klaxoon officially launched its employee collaboration product in 2015. It now has customers in 120 countries and boasts 1 million monthly active users, and it has garnered this growth without much in the way of marketing. This new funding signals a shift in strategy as the company pursues further expansion.
“We’re really going to be able to the expand the Klaxoon ecosystem,” said CEO Matthieu Beucher. “We really want to find partners who will help build a long-term vision.” Klaxoon is designed to make meetings more efficient while encouraging greater participation from all employees. It offers a $19 monthly subscription plan for its SaaS meeting service that works across just about any device and includes features like timekeeping, brainstorming tools, and an interactive white board. The company also sells what it calls the Klaxoon Box, which creates a closed Wi-Fi network that allows meeting attendees to tap into the service when there is no internet connection.
The latest round of funding was led by Idinvest Partners and included funding from previous investors, such as BPI, Sofiouest, Arkea, and White Star Capital Fund.
In addition to ramping up its marketing efforts, particularly in the U.S. — where Klaxoon is opening a New York City office — the company will use the money to boost R&D and product development, Beucher said. Klaxoon currently has 150 employees and plans to hire another 100 employees this year.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"A better way to fund SaaS companies | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/entrepreneur/a-better-way-to-fund-saas-companies"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest A better way to fund SaaS companies Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
My company, Pingboard, announced a $5 million round of funding today. We now have more than 1,000 customers globally, including companies like GoFundMe, Popsugar, Udemy, Sequoia Capital, WPEngine, and the Linux Foundation. You probably hear about startups raising this type of funding all the time in the tech press, but under the surface, these rounds are not always what they seem.
For example, our latest raise was $2.5 million, not $5 million. It appears in our SEC filing as $5 million because we had $2.5 million in convertible notes from our prior round that converted into equity alongside the new $2.5 million round.
This was actually our third $2.5 million round.
In 2014 we raised $2.5 million from friends and family, led by Silverton, to get started (our “Seed”) In 2016 we raised $2.5 million from a broader set of angels once we had found our niche (our “Seed 1”) And now we’ve raised a $2.5 million round to grow a little faster (our “Seed 2”) This is important for other SaaS company founders and VCs to understand, since a $2.5 million raise is a very different kind of round from a $5 million raise.
How SaaS companies should be funded As a repeat founder and occasionally an angel investor, I’ve realized that “seed” is no longer a round of funding, but rather a phase that startups go through.
Our investor, Active Capital is a new fund based in Texas, led by Pat Matthews and Pat Condon. Pat Matthews and I founded Webmail.us together back in 1999 in Blacksburg, Virginia and sold it to Rackspace in 2007. Pat Condon founded Rackspace and was our colleague there for almost 7 years.
Our latest round also represents a sort of soft-launch of Pat and Pat’s new fund, which is designed specifically to support smaller iterative rounds. Of course I know Pat and Pat super well, but we chose them from amongst several bigger names because they understand and agree wholeheartedly with the funding strategy I’m about to lay out below.
It is my hope that with this post I can start a dialogue around how to fund early-stage SaaS companies and reorient both VCs and entrepreneurs to this reality. Once you start thinking of Seed as a phase instead of a round, everyone benefits.
As Hunter Walk at Homebrew points out in a great post about this , companies in mature markets like SaaS must, during their seed phase, “build not just product-market fit, but a real company.” SaaS companies in the seed phase are building a flywheel, not a rocketship. Rocketships stow an incredible amount of fuel onboard and burn it as quickly as possible in order to escape gravitational forces. Flywheels use human effort and gravity to their advantage, storing energy for later use.
Rocketships are incredibly exciting to watch but incredibly inefficient. Flywheels are all about mechanical prowess and smoothing inputs and outputs for optimal efficiency.
Earlier this year I considered raising a traditional Silicon Valley-style series A. I met with partners at about two dozen top tier VCs to pitch them on Pingboard.
It was clear right away that Silicon Valley VCs all are looking to invest in rocketships. A rocketship will either get you to the moon or crash, and that is exactly what many traditional investors want to put their money behind. The Power Law of venture capital mandates that investors categorize you as either a 1 or a 0 as quickly as possible.
Unfortunately, this approach is not ideal for companies like mine. SaaS companies’ capital requirements and trajectory require a different approach. We may become rocketships, but our gestation cycle is longer and has more subtle contours.
The upside of course, is that our capital requirements are lower because we must focus on revenue from day one. But recurring revenue — and as such, bills that a company will pay long before any other payable or lien — isn’t built overnight. MRR and ARR require elbow grease and constant iteration over a time period longer than the runway a typical VC round funds.
To continue with the flywheel metaphor, you can make a flywheel spin faster and faster the harder you push on it, and while it may slow down temporarily when things don’t go as planned, it won’t crash — flywheels keep spinning. I like to use that analogy when I describe how we run our company. It’s all about building up a head of steam.
SaaS companies like ours do not require large amounts of capital all at one time in order to fund expensive upfront R&D and brand marketing or to hire giant sales teams. Instead, we require small amounts of capital over an extended period of time in order to experiment and continuously push harder and harder on the things that work.
This is why most SaaS companies today ought to raise several smaller rounds of funding during the seed phase before going out to raise a series A. This is almost always the right thing to do.
As such, the best funding source for a SaaS company is closer to an IV drip than it is to a shot of adrenaline to the heart. We need more funding sources that understand this reality and are as iterative with their checks as their portfolio companies are with their product, sales and marketing.
“But Bill,” you might say, “it sucks to raise funding in tranches. I’d rather raise it all in one fell swoop and get back to doing what I do best: building my business.” I completely understand that objection, but here’s my retort: Raising a big round like you are imagining actually takes more time and energy than what I’m proposing, not less. And worse, you end up pricing the round or putting a cap on the note based on a leap of faith, or an emotional high, which introduces the risk of down-rounds later. Terms are set the way they are set because of power dynamics, not business merit.
Too often we look at raising one, two, or three seed rounds as a sign that a company couldn’t raise a Series A. We need to start looking at the Series A as the construct it is, calibrated to how we used to build software a decade ago. What if funding was as agile as our operations? Why is venture funding still using a waterfall model of development and deployment? To be clear, I’m not anti-Series A. What I’m against is the idea that venture rounds are these monolithic events that happen every two years or so.
Yes, raising money in the way I’m describing makes the entrepreneur more accountable, but that’s a good thing. You should be valued according to what you have done as well as what you are going to do. This new, more agile way makes VCs more accountable, too. The whole system grows more taut.
The touch zero operating model There’s also a personal side to choosing a funding model that we don’t often discuss.
If you’ve built a rocketship and you’re confident you’ve made all the right calculations to get to the moon, grab ahold and don’t let go! Still, you will probably crash eventually, and traditional venture capitalists will tell you that it is okay.
They will tell you that by “failing fast” you will get more “at bats” starting more companies and increasing your chances of eventually finding your rocketship.
While this math is true for VCs, it has real dissonance for most entrepreneurs. Most entrepreneurs put their entire life into their company, sacrificing money, health, family, friends — and then when they fail, they walk away smarter with battle scars, but they’re also burnt out, broke, and questioning everything. All this happens while their VC has a dozen more companies just like them in their portfolio, needing just one to reach the moon.
There are other ways to build a very large company.
One way is to treat each round of funding as if it’s your last and operate in a manner where you will get to profitability before you run out of money. The companies I’ve personally built have never had a “fume date.” A fume date is the date at which the bank account goes below $0 and you either go out of business or have to raise more money.
Instead we have a “touch zero date” — this is the basis of my whole operations strategy, and something I’ll blog a lot more about in the future.
A touch zero date is the date at which we reach $0 in the bank account and at that same exact moment reach profitability (meaning we don’t go out of business or need to raise more money). We are always in full control of our own destiny.
We use a “Touch Zero Operating Plan” to manage our business. At a high level, we measure everything and use data to model how we plan to scale our growth investments and revenue so that we touch $0 and reach profitability at the same time.
Why do we want to “touch $0”? Why should it be a goal to run out of money and reach profitability at the same time? If we operate on a plan that has more of a cash buffer, we’d be effectively sitting on cash and growing slower than we otherwise could. And if we operate on a plan that has us dipping below $0, we die. It’s as simple as that. We tune this model weekly as we try new things and get more data.
If things go well, we may raise more money and reset the plan, pushing back the touch $0 date, as we did this week. If things don’t go as planned or we grow slower than expected, we’ll conserve cash and make sure we reach profitability while we fix things.
While fundraising, I did not feel aligned with most VCs when I told them about my Touch Zero plan. In fact, most emphatically said they would not want me to run the company this way if they were to invest.
They wanted me to invest more money at a faster pace and aim for certain milestones that, if reached, in theory would earn us the opportunity to raise another round of funding, and then we’d repeat that cycle over and over again. This looked to me an awful lot like a treadmill.
As an investor myself , I’ve seen too many startups not reach those milestones and get themselves into a tight financial situation where they have to raise cash on terrible terms in order to survive.
When this happens, VCs end up owning way more of the company than the founders ever expected. Most VCs aren’t taking unfair advantage of the situation (although some do), they are just doing their job. Founders have to understand the risks (although most don’t) if they choose to get on the VC treadmill.
Next steps I’m going to keep writing about alternative ways to build a very large company and power it responsibly with external investment. I hope you’ll help me by sending ideas and giving me lots of tough-love feedback. Please do.
To those reading, I encourage you to figure out what type of company you want to build and do it your way. You don’t have to play by someone else’s rules. Entrepreneurs get to write and rewrite the rules. That’s our job and our responsibility.
We rewrote how to build software, and we rewrote how to grow companies. We can rewrite the rules of financing too.
I predict we’ll see new investing models over the next few years in full acknowledgement that company stage and phase no longer align with the fundraising round idioms we’re accustomed too.
Bill Boebel is CEO of Pingboard.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"Where’s the next Pokémon Go? Here’s what’s holding augmented reality back | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/business/wheres-the-next-pokemon-go-heres-whats-holding-augmented-reality-back"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest Where’s the next Pokémon Go? Here’s what’s holding augmented reality back Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Pokemon Go is the reigning king of mainstream AR.
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Learn more.
For most people, augmented reality became real with the explosion of Pokémon Go.
People who hadn’t taken a leisurely walk outside in years were walking around the streets bumping into new friends (and sign posts) while collecting cute animated characters that appeared on the sidewalk. For millions of people, the experience opened a new layer of science fiction, where they could interact with fantasy. The promise of augmented reality, at its best, is a new category of creativity.
That was two years ago. Given Pokémon Go’s popularity, why haven’t any other augmented reality experiences grown to similarly massive levels? The YouTube model Augmented reality is in a similar state to where online video was twenty years ago. If you are old enough to remember someone trying to send you a video through email, you’ll recall you either had to wait an eternity to download an attachment (assuming the file wasn’t large enough to be rejected by your email provider), or you had to download a separate video player that you likely only used once or twice.
Along came YouTube and created a play button that just worked; no waiting, no downloads. YouTube raised $3.5 million in September of 2004. By the summer of 2005 — only nine months later — Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion. Today, YouTube is on every screen in the world. When you click play on a YouTube video, it just works. YouTube handles all the work on the backend to make that possible. This is the first hurdle for augmented reality: a single place where people can publish, share, and discover augmented reality experiences.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! What I mean by “augmented reality experiences” are things that are often not as built out as an entire app, but that provide entertainment value or functionality that can be used as quickly as a YouTube video might be used. Most YouTube videos are only 3-6 minutes long, which obviously isn’t as long as a full feature length film.
User-generated content The second hurdle is establishing a way for anyone to create augmented reality experiences. Currently, there is no standard method to make or experience augmented reality. Developers can choose from Unity, Amazon Sumerian, or several other tools, and they can experience it on HoloLens, iOS, Android, Magic Leap, etc. Once they build an augmented reality experience for one device, they must build it again and again if they want their content available on other platforms. It’s a cumbersome process.
There will continue to be a place for premium augmented reality experiences, but just as YouTube has launched a tidal wave of creation, creativity, and unforeseen uses of video, augmented reality is crying out for “user generated content.” Just as most YouTube content is created with mobile phones, when augmented reality can be created with similar ease, we will see an explosion of new mediums and use cases we can’t imagine today.
Picture a catalog of experiences as big as YouTube where you can interact with the content and step into the action. With phones now in a state where virtually everyone has an AR viewing device in their pocket, the world is ready for an influx in content. Imagine what will happen when we put the tools for creation of layering fiction, animation and special effects onto the already incredible reality around us.
The platforms of the future But launching a platform-agnostic augmented reality ecosystem that parallels YouTube is not easy. I know, because I am building one right now, called Seek.
With online video, creators can make a video with many tools available to them, and once they upload it to YouTube, virtually anyone with a screen can watch. With augmented reality, you must support many different formats. Each platform, from iOS’ ARKit to Android’s ARCore, has a different set of protocols for the interactive actions that a user can take. For example, if you develop using HoloLens, your user employs hand gestures as minute as pinching their fingers to take an action. The same action will be deployed differently on an iPhone.
A developer that wants to reach users on all platforms must re-build the augmented reality experience for each platform. If we can build an ecosystem that manages these different protocols, creators can focus on their content, not on transcribing their content for a variety of platforms.
Currently if you deploy an augmented reality app in the Apple App Store, for example, it can take up to a month to get approved all the scripts that allow for user interactions. If you make a mistake, it can take another week or more to issue an update. A creator-optimized AR ecosystem needs to have scripts that are pre-approved by Apple and other platforms so creators can upload content immediately. The system also needs to allow creators to have their AR experiences distributed across all platforms, automatically detecting and deploying the proper protocol for their viewing device.
Trying to solve the problem Before YouTube became the winner, there were several players — Dailymotion, Vimeo, even Google — trying to solve the online video-sharing problem in different ways. Augmented reality is still in that kind of Wild West phase. Some people are working on full-blown solutions, while others are working on specific elements hoping their technology gets used inside everything else that gets built. Though in some ways we are competing, we are all in this together. We are all pushing for the same thing: for augmented reality to succeed.
It may sound obvious, but the primary thing that helps content networks grow is content. In the same way that YouTube content exploded alongside the ubiquity of powerful smartphone video cameras, once augmented reality creation tools are on your phone, this new form of content will flourish as well. Just as early viral videos spurred creators to outdo each other, there is about to be a similar race with augmented reality.
I’m not talking about highly skilled developers creating the most elaborate AR experiences imaginable. I am talking about creators of all stripes building audiences which will allow them to monetize through ad revenue sharing, brand sponsorship, and more.
In our case, AR experiences are kind of like small apps that all run within Seek. Seek allows creators to publish experiences that are as simple as just playing with a model of a heart to as complex as designing a new house. In the end, all of these experiences will be accessed through one app.
While we at Seek are building what we hope will be the YouTube of augmented reality, we are not the only ones trying to help this new form of content become more accessible to everyone. A company called 8th Wall has developed an SDK (Software Development Kit) that AR creators can use to make their applications compatible across iOS and Android even with older phones that don’t support ARKit or ARCore.
Ubiquity6 is working on a platform for multi-player AR gaming experiences where you and I can play together in an AR environment across a long distance, but with avatars that make it seem like we are in the same place. Facebook and Snapchat are building out augmented reality capabilities and distribution specific to their respective applications.
The tools of creation for augmented reality are about to land in the hands of the masses. The flood of AR content and creativity is almost here. Get ready to build your audience and save your spot.
Jon Cheney is the CEO and co-founder of Seek, an augmented reality app where anyone can upload and share AR experiences.
GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
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VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"Tinyclues Marketing Campaign Intelligence Solution Adopted by Camaieu | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/business/tinyclues-marketing-campaign-intelligence-solution-adopted-by-camaieu"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Press Release Tinyclues Marketing Campaign Intelligence Solution Adopted by Camaieu Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn NEW YORK & LONDON & PARIS–(BUSINESS WIRE)–May 31, 2018– Camaieu , a leading women’s ready-to-wear brand, has chosen Tinyclues , provider of a leading Marketing Campaign Intelligence solution, to optimize its marketing campaigns. With Tinyclues, Camaieu aims to improve customer experience for its more than 10 million loyal customers in 650 stores across France and on its website.
For Emmanuelle Bach Donnard, Marketing & Digital Director of Camaieu, this solution will bring the brand closer than ever to its customers: “ Today, our challenge is to have the most relevant communication possible with each customer, who have the choice from extensive and frequently renewed collections. With Tinyclues, we will offer each customer a personalized selection of pieces that best cater to their wants and expectations.
” Tinyclues offers a unique targeting and planning experience for marketing campaigns. The solution uses artificial intelligence to allow B2C marketers to simply target, with unparalleled precision, future buyers for any product promoted in a campaign. Tinyclues also orchestrates campaign planning by detecting performance conflicts between campaigns and by using deep learning to manage customer fatigue, maximizing the overall campaign impact while improving each customer’s experience.
“Our campaign intelligence solution has proven itself in retail and fashion by optimizing increasingly complex campaign planning, managing fatigue, and targeting the future buyers, with an average increase in campaign revenue of 49% ,” said Matthieu Chouard, Senior Vice President of Sales EMEA at Tinyclues.
“We’re excited to be working with such an important and innovative player in the fashion world, who shares the same ideas when it comes to being close to customers and putting message relevancy at the center of their strategy.” About Tinyclues Tinyclues is the leading AI-first Marketing Campaign Intelligence solution enabling companies to generate additional revenue through intelligent campaign targeting and planning. Tinyclues’ solution uses Deep Artificial Intelligence to identify future buyers for any promoted item, even in the absence of recent intent.
Companies like Brandalley, Cdiscount, Club Med, Corsair, Fnac, Global Hotel Alliance, Lacoste, La Redoute, Manor, Rue du Commerce, Vente-privee, Sarenza, Vestiaire Collective, Voyages-sncf.com and more are using Tinyclues to optimize and orchestrate more than 600 million messages per month across channels such as email, mobile push notifications, direct mail, call centers and Facebook to generate quantified and sustainable additional revenue. Tinyclues has been listed as a Vendor to Watch in Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Analytics and as a Cool Vendor in Gartner’s 2018 Cool Vendor in Multichannel Marketing report.
For more information, visit http://www.tinyclues.com Twitter: @tinyclues View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180531005788/en/ Tinyclues Caroline Tailleferd, Tel: +33 6 11 64 87 37 E-mail: [email protected] VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"Microsoft releases new Windows 10 preview with Sets, wireless projection, Edge, and setup improvements | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/business/microsoft-releases-new-windows-10-preview-with-sets-wireless-projection-edge-and-setup-improvements"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Microsoft releases new Windows 10 preview with Sets, wireless projection, Edge, and setup improvements Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Windows 10 Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
Learn more.
Microsoft today released a new preview for PCs with improvements to Sets, wireless projection, Edge, RSAT, and the setup experience. This build is from the RS5 branch, which represents the Windows 10 update the company plans to release later this year.
Windows 10 is being developed as a service , meaning it receives new features on a regular basis. Microsoft has released five major updates so far: November Update , Anniversary Update , Creators Update , Fall Creators Update , and April 2018 Update.
Microsoft continues to tweak Sets, its new tabbed windows interface. The new tab page makes it more obvious you can launch apps — When you click the plus button in a Sets window, you will now see apps included in your frequent destinations list and the all apps list.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Just like remote desktop, wireless projection now shows a control banner at the top of your screen when you’re in a session. You can use the banner to check the state of your connection, disconnect, reconnect to the same sink, and tune the connection based on what you are doing. This tuning is done via the settings gear, which optimizes the screen to screen latency based on one of three scenarios: Game mode minimizes the screen to screen latency, video mode increases screen to screen latency for smooth playback, and productivity mode (the default) strikes a good balance between the two.
Edge now includes unprefixed support for the new Web Authentication API. The API lets users log into their online accounts using a single device, like a YubiKey, eliminating the need for passwords.
Firefox 60 got support first earlier this month, followed by Chrome 67 this week.
Windows 10 no longer requires manually downloading RSAT every time you upgrade. You can now just pick the ones you want, and the next time you upgrade, Windows will automatically ensure those components persist (Settings => Manage optional features => Add a feature => pick the RSAT components you want).
After you upgrade, you may be given the option to go through the setup questions since you first got your device. Microsoft says the conditions for showing this page are cloud programmable and “may change over time.” This desktop build also includes the following general bug fixes and improvements: Fixed the issue for Windows Insider Program for Business folks where PCs using AAD accounts to receive new flights (via Settings > Update & Security > Windows Insider Program) where they would see a “Fix me” option presented and couldn’t to receive the latest flights.
Experimenting with adding tips and suggestions to the Settings homepage. If you see one of these, you can choose to opt out by clicking the “…” in the top corner.
Fixed an issue resulting in some apps missing pinned and recent items when you right-clicked their icons in the taskbar.
Fixed an issue resulting in File Explorer showing blank/generic icons for any file type associated with a UWP app.
Fixed an issue where Alt + Tab would sometimes unexpectedly have duplicate entries for app windows in recent flights.
Fixed a crash when asking Cortana to play any music in recent flights. This issue also impacted the ability to launch apps using voice commands.
Fixed an issue where if the taskbar jump list didn’t show (for example if you clicked away before it finished launching), the next time you watched a video full screen the taskbar would unexpectedly appear on top of the video.
Fixed an issue where you couldn’t scroll to the end of the clipboard items list (WIN + V) using mouse wheel/touchpad.
Fixed an issue where the wallpaper and app preview thumbnails were unexpectedly flipped when using Task View in Arabic or other bidirectional display languages.
Screen snipping (WIN + Shift + S, or other entry points) will now default to rectangular snipping. Your most recent mode selection (rectangular or freeform) is preserved across invocations, so you may not notice a change if you have already been using this experience.
Fixed an issue resulting in the “Add a feature” page in Settings not finding any features in the last few builds.
Fixed an issue where text written using OTF fonts wouldn’t show up when printed.
Fixed an issue resulting in some apps failing to launch recently with application error 0xc0000005 when certain antivirus software programs were installed.
Fixed an issue impacting certain touch-capable devices where all Bluetooth accessories would periodically stop working until the screen was touched.
Fixed an issue resulting in some explorer.exe hangs when using Remote Desktop, projecting your screen, or having multiple monitors in recent flights. This issue may also have led to Microsoft Edge hangs.
Fixed an issue resulting in multiple Win32 apps and system components becoming unresponsive after waking from sleep in the last two flights.
Today’s update bumps the Windows 10 build number for the RS5 branch from 17677 (made available to testers on May 24) to build 17682.
This build has 12 known issues: For the dark theme in File Explorer and the Common File Dialog , you may see some unexpectedly light colors in these surfaces when in dark mode.
After updating to this build, Mixed Reality Portal will reinstall the Mixed Reality Software and environment settings will not be preserved. If you need your Mixed Reality home experience to persist, we recommend skipping this build until these issues are fixed.
Some Insiders may find increased reliability and performance issues when launching Start on this build.
Some Insiders may experience some bugchecks (GSOD) on this build with “Critical Process Died” error.
If you have a Surface Studio, it will fail to update to this build with a “Your PC hardware is not supported on this version of Windows 10” error.
Sets UX for Office Win32 desktop apps is not final. The experience will be refined over time based on feedback.
The top of some Win32 desktop app windows may appear slightly underneath the tab bar when created maximized. To work around the issue, restore and re-maximize the window.
Closing one tab may sometimes minimize the entire set.
Tiling and cascading windows, including features like “View Side by Side” in Word, will not work for inactive tabs.
The Office Visual Basic Editor window will currently be tabbed but is not intended to be in the future.
Opening an Office document while the same app has an existing document open may cause an unintended switch to the last active document. This will also happen when closing a sheet in Excel while other sheets remain open.
Local files or non-Microsoft cloud files will not be automatically restored, and no error message will be provided to alert the user to that fact.
As always, don’t install this on your production machine.
GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
Discover our Briefings.
The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"In healthtech, people are just as important as product | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/business/in-healthtech-people-are-just-as-important-as-product"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Sponsored In healthtech, people are just as important as product Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Presented by Providence Ventures As a company founder of a health care startup, you likely spend a majority of your time developing your product. If you are successful in demonstrating product-market fit, you think your product should speak for itself. It solves an important problem in a large market, and has a solid business model around it. What more do you need? People.
Veterans of early-stage companies know that nothing is certain for a startup, and you can expect a great degree of learning and pivoting. Health care in particular is a minefield of day-to-day challenges, surprises, and shifts that could upend many professionals who might expect smoother sailing when their product proves alignment with a particular business need.
As an early-stage company starts to build and demo its products in the health care ecosystem, leaders should not dismiss the importance of hiring key people who can survive and thrive in this unique environment. What follows are some of the critical characteristics of successful people in health care startups.
1. Intense curiosity, understanding details that matter, and a desire for learning Solving critical problems in health care requires a deep understanding of the problems below the most obvious ones on the surface. People who probe for those causal problems, not just the symptoms of a problem, will better understand what the solution needs to do and when they are on the right track.
For example, many potential technology solutions have been introduced to meet the problem of medication adherence. The simple problem statement is that patients forget to take their medications when they are supposed to, or, on a deeper level, they get confused by having to take multiple medications at different times each day.
Yet, solutions that solve only for these problems will get little meaningful traction in the marketplace because they are not solving the problem in its entirety. Conversations with our leaders at Providence St. Joseph Health (PSJH) have helped us learn that there are a multitude of factors that challenge medication adherence.
These include affordability, side effects, barriers to achieving proper dosing, lack of belief that the medication is important, transportation and communication restraints that impact refill requests or prescription pickup, theft of drugs if delivered to the home, confusion over multiple prescriptions — and sometimes, forgetfulness.
People with the inherent curiosity and desire to dig into the problem more deeply will likely discover a lot more than what’s assumed.
2. Adaptability (aka grit) The regulatory environment that governs health care can be astounding to entrepreneurs new to the industry. Solutions that seem to make perfect sense for better patient care can sometimes be at minimum, restricted and at worst, illegal.
For example, one would assume that a reasonable method to reduce overcrowding at Emergency Departments might be to re-direct patients who are not in need of ER-level care to lower-acuity facilities nearby. However, the practices of advertising another facility or referring a patient to another practice are highly regulated by both federal and local laws.
While good intentions direct many of the rules of health care, discovering these surprising road blocks can be enough to make an entrepreneur and their team used to developing new products in less-regulated industries increasingly frustrated. Thus, teams will need to be adaptable to new learnings and incredibly creative to develop products that can be used within the health care environment.
Those with the grit to face each newly discovered challenge with creative persistence will differentiate themselves through the wide funnel of new companies and talent trying to fix health care.
3. Self-awareness, humility, and authenticity Very few, if any, individuals understand everything there is to know about the complex world of health care. While it’s possible to “fake it till you make it” to a degree when developing and pitching new products and services for health care, it can be disastrous to go too far in professing outcomes that haven’t yet been proven or product features that have yet to be built, destroying trust that took much effort to build. There are many famous examples of this in the industry…Theranos as one example.
Health care leaders are squarely focused on delivering high quality care every single day in an environment that is incredibly complex, highly regulated, and in which profit margins are increasingly slim. These professionals have little time to try out a new product in the context of their busy days or read an email about a new technology platform. Making an honest effort to understand their challenges, admitting to yourself where your weaknesses exist, and hiring people to fill the gaps shows that you truly are working to add value.
Implementing a product in health care is a long game; the relationships you develop and maintain will be critical to your solution being tested and fully integrated in a health care system. If you’re not easy or pleasant to work with, a product of high value won’t be enough to get it done.
Overall, seek out people who do their homework by seeking depth of understanding, are adaptable and creative in the face of what might seem like unnecessarily burdensome challenges, and bring their authentic selves towards deepening relationships with potential customers and end users. Your fantastic product will receive a warm reception with the right people behind it.
Christiana DelloRusso is Partner at Providence Ventures.
Sponsored posts are content produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. Content produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact [email protected].
The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"Arm beefs up processors and graphics for Windows laptops | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/business/arm-beefs-up-processors-and-graphics-for-windows-laptops"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Arm beefs up processors and graphics for Windows laptops Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Rene Haas, EVP and president of the IP Products Group at Arm.
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Chip maker Arm is announcing a series of graphics and processor improvements to its central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) for Windows laptops.
Rene Haas , president of the IP Products Group division at the Cambridge, England-based company, said in a blog post that the new Arm Cortex-A76 CPU will have 35 percent better performance from a year ago for productivity applications.
The new Arm Mali-G76 GPU, he wrote, will enable untethered gaming and on-device machine learning (ML) with 30 percent higher efficiency and performance over previous generations.
Above: Arm’s going for the full spectrum of computing.
And the Arm Mali-V76 VPU will enable UltraHD 8K viewing experiences across more devices.
“Over the last five years, we’ve seen CPU performance on smartphones increase an average of 20-plus percent every year without compromising battery life,” Haas wrote. “However, the same cannot be said for laptops reliant on other architectures, which have struggled to adapt to a slowing Moore’s Law over the last few years, delivering annual performance gains averaging only single-digit percentages while failing to enable any significant increases in battery life.” He added, “This cadence of significant smartphone performance efficiency increases enabled by Arm did not go unnoticed by the Windows laptop ecosystem which now have integrated Arm-based SoCs from Qualcomm into their initial Always-Connected PC offerings. These Arm-based laptops are already paying off with an unprecedented 20-plus hours of battery life and steadily improving performance thanks to ongoing OS and application optimizations.” Arm’s new designs will help close any perceived gap between its processor designs and the incumbents (Intel and Advanced Micro Devices), Haas said.
“Our new client IP platform solution for 2019 has generated a level of excitement within our ecosystem which I have never seen during my 5-plus years at Arm thanks to the possibilities it offers for increased productivity, immersive AR/VR and gaming, AI/ML, and UHD 8K viewing experiences on more devices,” Haas wrote.
Above: Arm is making its chips faster for Windows laptops.
The new Arm Cortex-A76 CPU, based on DynamIQ technology, delivers laptop-class performance while maintaining the power efficiency of a smartphone, he wrote.
“We’ve already seen the success of the recently launched Arm-based Windows 10 PCs, delivering unimaginable 20-plus hours of battery life, a true LTE connected PC, and a trusted Windows app ecosystem,” Haas said. “Building on that momentum, the new Cortex-A76 CPU brings choice and flexibility to consumers from a trusted architecture, delivering the 35 percent year-over-year performance gain along with 40 percent improved efficiency.” VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"Ardica Technologies Completes $15M Series D Financing | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/business/ardica-technologies-completes-15m-series-d-financing"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Press Release Ardica Technologies Completes $15M Series D Financing Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Solid Hydrogen energy provider meets key fundraising goal to expand fuel production capacity and address growing demand SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–May 31, 2018– Ardica Technologies, a leader in powerful, lightweight mobile energy solutions, has successfully completed its $15M Series D financing.
For more than a decade, Ardica and its commercial and government partners have worked tirelessly to produce scalable, cost-effective alane (aluminum hydride or AlH 3 ), a solid powder composed of hydrogen and aluminum.
This latest financing round was funded by a select group of Ardica’s existing investors, including one of the largest family trusts in the United States, a private energy firm and several high-net worth individuals.
“We are increasingly dependent on an electrified world, yet our options for powering those devices hasn’t meaningfully improved in decades,” said Kristopher J. Lichter, Chief Executive Officer of Ardica. “For example, today’s military personnel are increasingly equipped with critical electronics that until now required large, heavy batteries that impacted the success of their missions. Soldiers need safe, reliable power on-demand, and they shouldn’t pay a weight penalty to have it. Alane is the answer.” With its outstanding energy density, stability and safety, alane provides clean, flexible and exceptionally lightweight power when run through Ardica’s innovative fuel cell systems. This makes Ardica’s solutions ideal for a wide range of commercial and government applications. The company’s first power solutions are intended for the U.S. military, with commercial products also in development.
Ardica initiated the Series D financing to address its rapidly expanding engineering and manufacturing opportunities. With that financing’s successful conclusion, the company will accelerate its alane fuel synthesis and mass production efforts, invest in a broader number of commercial and military applications, and add key business and technical personnel to the team.
“We are extremely pleased to have reached this important financing and operations milestone,” Lichter said. “Our investors are deep believers in the potential for alane fuel and alane-based power generation to change the world, and are committed to ensuring Ardica has the growth capital it requires to commercialize these offerings.” “Alane enables a whole new class of flexible power solutions to serve the world’s growing and demanding energy needs,” Lichter added.
About Ardica Technologies Founded in 2004, Ardica Technologies is focused on creating novel, lightweight power solutions that dramatically extend the usage and utility of electric devices. The company employs a patented hydrogen-based fuel that is safe, clean and energy-rich, and can be used in any application, geography or environment. Ardica is based in San Francisco, CA.
For more information, please visit Ardica.com.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180531005062/en/ Ardica Technologies Marisa Shumway, 415-225-0904 VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"Apple reportedly poaches senior Intel staffers for secret Oregon hardware lab | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/business/apple-reportedly-poaches-senior-intel-staffers-for-secret-oregon-hardware-lab"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Apple reportedly poaches senior Intel staffers for secret Oregon hardware lab Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Apple's new hardware lab is said to be between Beaverton and Hillsboro, near Portland.
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Apple has reportedly opened a “secret” hardware engineering lab in Washington County, Oregon and hired employees who previously held senior research and engineering positions at Intel. According to the Oregonian , the facility is at least the fourth to be opened by Apple in the state, though the lab’s exact location and purpose are presently unknown.
Despite online job postings mentioning nearby Portland, the report indicates that the lab is actually “near the border between Beaverton and Hillsboro,” a part of Oregon known more for hardware development than software or cloud companies. Hiring has apparently been ongoing since last November and has included “raiding” of Intel and other Oregon tech employers. Apple is specifically said to be looking for design verification expertise, referring to the process of validating mass-produced hardware’s conformance to specifications.
In April, Apple reportedly decided to begin transitioning its Mac computers from Intel processors to internally developed chips, a multi-step process that was projected to begin in 2020. Though Apple already maintains chip development labs in multiple cities, and uses self-developed CPU/GPU chips in mobile devices, the company is expected to need considerably more powerful processors for its desktop machines. Bringing on senior Intel personnel could assist in that effort.
Apple has previously opened offices throughout the Pacific Northwest to add talent from AI/machine learning and cloud companies.
The new office is not expected to be related to Apple’s plan to open a fourth major U.S. campus, which recent rumors suggest will most likely to be located in North Carolina or Virginia.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"AdAction Celebrates 5th Anniversary with 200 Million Installs | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/business/adaction-celebrates-5th-anniversary-with-200-million-installs"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Press Release AdAction Celebrates 5th Anniversary with 200 Million Installs Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn LAKEWOOD, Colo.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–May 31, 2018– AdAction successfully marked its fifth anniversary this week on Tuesday, May 29.
The performance-based ad platform has seen exponential growth since its foundation in May 2013 with over 200 million installs across 180 countries. Working closely with elite agencies and Fortune 100 companies throughout the years, AdAction maintains one of the highest client retention rates in the industry and is trusted by more than 80 percent of the world’s top-grossing apps.
“It’s our dedication to the clients we continue to serve that has helped us to reach such a monumental accomplishment as five years in business,” said AdAction Founder and CEO Brian Fox. “We strive to constantly improve and evolve our products and technology so that we are always offering our clients the best, most effective marketing solutions to maximize their ROI.” AdAction is ranked a top ad network in the industry’s leading reports, including Singular’s ROI Index that named AdAction one of the best ad networks in 2016 and 2017. Most recently, AdAction was recognized for the fourth consecutive time as a top-15 media source in AppsFlyer’s biannual Performance Index. AdAction is one of only 15 media sources, among competitors like Facebook and Google AdWords, to appear successively in these reports since early 2016.
AdAction is also an active proponent in the fight against ad fraud and was one of the first ad platforms to actively survey and globally monitor for fraudulent traffic. Singular identified AdAction as one of the 20 most secure ad networks, capable of driving clean traffic at high volume. Last year, AdAction joined the Coalition Against Ad Fraud (CAAF) with attribution and analytics partner, Adjust. As a coalition member, AdAction works alongside other like-minded ad networks and platforms to develop intelligent technology that prevents advertisers from being afflicted by fraud.
To learn more about AdAction, visit adaction.mobi.
About AdAction Interactive AdAction leads the mobile app industry with custom, performance-based marketing solutions and data-driven technology, optimizing acquisition campaigns to drive quality installs and downstream engagement for maximum ROI. AdAction is the premier, full-service ad platform that delivers over 8 million monthly installs for elite agencies and Fortune 100 companies, leveraging exclusive partnerships with top publishers to reach target users in more than 180 countries worldwide.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180531006053/en/ AdAction Interactive Miranda Moore Senior Marketing & Public Relations Manager [email protected] VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"University of Toronto researchers develop AI that can defeat facial recognition systems | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/university-of-toronto-researchers-develop-ai-that-can-defeat-facial-recognition-systems"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages University of Toronto researchers develop AI that can defeat facial recognition systems Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Facial recognition systems are controversial, to say the least. Amazon made headlines last week over supplying law enforcement agencies with face-scanning tech. Schools in China are using facial recognition cameras to monitor students.
And studies show that some facial recognition algorithms have built-in biases against certain ethnicities.
Concerns about encroaching AI-powered surveillance systems motivated researchers in Toronto to develop a shield against them. Parham Aarabi, a professor at the University of Toronto, and Avishek Bose, a graduate student, created an algorithm that can disrupt facial recognition systems dynamically, on the fly, by applying light transformations to images.
“Personal privacy is a real issue as facial recognition becomes better and better,” Aarabi said in a statement. “This is one way in which beneficial anti-facial-recognition systems can combat that ability.” Products and software that purport to defeat facial recognition are nothing new. In a November 2016 study, researchers at Carnegie Mellon designed spectacle frames that could trick systems into misidentifying people. And in November 2017, experts at MIT and Kyushu University fooled an algorithm into labeling a picture of a 3D-printed turtle as a rifle by altering a single pixel.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Above: The researchers’ anti-facial recognition system in action.
But this is one of the first solutions that uses AI, according to Bose and Aarabi.
Their algorithm, which was trained on a dataset of 600 faces, spits out a real-time filter that can be applied to any picture. Because it targets highly specific, individual pixels in the image, it’s almost imperceptible to the human eye.
The two researchers employed adversarial training, a form of AI that comprises two neural networks — a “generator” that produces outputs from data and a “discriminator” that detects fake data fabricated by the generator — to train the network. Aarabi and Bose’s system uses the generator to identify faces and the discriminator to disrupt the facial recognition.
In the research paper, which is due to be published at the 2018 IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing, Bose and Aarabi claim that their algorithm reduces the proportion of detected faces in facial recognition systems to 0.5 percent.
They hope to make the neural network available in an app or website.
“Ten years ago these algorithms would have to be human-defined, but now neural nets learn by themselves — you don’t need to supply them anything except training data,” says Aarabi. “In the end they can do some really amazing things. It’s a fascinating time in the field, there’s enormous potential.” VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"Qure.ai can identify 15 types of chest x-ray abnormalities with 90% accuracy | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/qure-ai-can-identify-15-different-forms-of-tuberculosis-with-90-accuracy"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Qure.ai can identify 15 types of chest x-ray abnormalities with 90% accuracy Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
More than 10.4 million people were infected with tuberculosis in 2016, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Of those, 1.7 million died from resulting complications, many in developing regions of the world with limited access to radiology departments.
That’s why Qure.ai , an AI health care startup headquartered in Mumbai, developed qXR, a chest x-ray product that can identify 15 of the most common chest x-ray abnormalities. On Thursday, qXR received CE certification from the European Medical Device Directives, clearing the way for commercialization in 32 European countries.
The company plans to apply for U.S. FDA approval in the next six to 12 months.
The neural network at the heart of qXR takes just “milliseconds” to process x-rays, according to CEO Prashant Warier. “A process that can take three to four days in remote regions of the world can be done in a day,” he told VentureBeat in a phone interview.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Clinics have two choices when it comes to installation: a cloud-hosted setup in which radiologists digitize and upload scans to Qure.ai’s servers for analysis, or a locally hosted, on-premise solution that uses off-the-shelf hardware. “It’s mostly an automated process,” Warier said. “We’ve already deployed it in settings without … health care professionals.” Above: A screenshot of the qXR dashboard.
Training the machine learning algorithm wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, Warier said. Achieving accuracy comparable to that of human radiologists required data — lots of data. Qure.ai sourced anonymized x-ray scans of tuberculosis patients from about 15 institutions, slowly building a gallery of millions of images.
That was the easy part. The images were upwards of 4000 x 4000 pixels in resolution, which pre-trained neural network models running on conventional computer hardware can’t process very efficiently. “We had to do a lot of development and research to [develop a] model that would perform well on medical data,” Warier said.
The results speak for themselves. In a preliminary study, qXR was more than 90 percent accurate in correctly diagnosing tuberculosis.
Warier isn’t advocating that qXR replace human caregivers just yet, though. Instead, he sees qXR reducing the number of tough-to-spot tuberculosis cases that fall through the cracks. “If [the algorithm] diagnoses tuberculosis, then patients can get multiple tests that will confirm it,” Warier said.
But he isn’t shy about sharing his ambitions. “Maybe [qXR] can replace a radiologist three to four years down the line,” he said.
The launch of qXR follows hard on the heels of Qure.ai’s second-newest product, an AI-powered CT algorithm that identifies hemorrhaging in the brain and bone fractures. The startup receives funding from Fractal Analytics, which has plans to invest up to $30 million over the next few years.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"Pymetrics open-sources Audit AI, an algorithm bias detection tool | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/pymetrics-open-sources-audit-ai-an-algorithm-bias-detection-tool"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Pymetrics open-sources Audit AI, an algorithm bias detection tool Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn The Pymetrics team outside company offices in New York City Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
AI startup Pymetrics today announced it has open-sourced its tool for detecting bias in algorithms. Available for download on GitHub , Audit AI is designed to determine whether a specific statistic or trait fed into an algorithm is being favored or disadvantaged at a statistically significant, systematic rate, leading to adverse impact on people underrepresented in the data set.
The new tool can audit a variety of algorithms, including those made to predict whether a person will pay back a loan or to assign a credit score to people with no banking history.
“We’ve crafted it so it can take the output of virtually any machine learning technique,” Pymetrics lead data scientist Lewis Baker told VentureBeat in an interview. “If you can copy a repo [on GitHub], you can use Audit AI.” Audit AI is designed to detect bias, but removal of any imbalance in an algorithm is up to the creator.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Audit AI was first built for internal use by Pymetrics to identify bias in custom-built algorithms the company creates for customers to determine whether a person is a good fit for a job.
To create those algorithms, Pymetrics invites the top performers in a specific role at a company to play a series of games to measure roughly 90 different behavioral, emotional, and cognitive traits such as a person’s willingness to take risks, solve challenges, multitask, or keep focused amid distractions.
Once that algorithm is created, it can be used to compare the performance of job applicants with top performers within a company. But in the course of its work, Pymetrics found that top performers at some companies can be overly represented by a single, homogeneous demographic group.
Pymetrics, whose customers include more than 60 companies like Accenture, LinkedIn, Tesla, and Unilever, creates cognitive games for job applicants to play because asking questions like “Do you take risks?” can be answered differently by men and women.
“We look at what traits make that population [top performers] unique, and sometimes those traits might be predictive not of job performance but the homogeneity of the people who went through it,” Baker said. “And so we use Audit AI to make sure that we don’t overweight any traits that are actually more predictive of a certain demographic group.” Pymetrics chose to open-source Audit AI, product lead Priyanka Jain told VentureBeat, to help others using machine learning and algorithms.
“As creators of technology, we feel really strongly it’s our responsibility to build AI that is creating a future that we all want to live in, and if we have a way to help other creators of technology continue to build that feature as well, it’s our responsibility to share it,” she said.
The release of Audit AI follows Microsoft’s announcement last week that it’s working on a tool for bias detection in algorithms.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"Google expected to rake in $250 million from AI drone research | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/google-expected-to-rake-in-250-million-from-ai-drone-research"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Google expected to rake in $250 million from AI drone research Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Google logo on display at the Made by Google event held in October 2017 in San Francisco.
Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Google’s involvement in the Pentagon’s controversial Project Maven kicked up a storm within the company in recent months, prompting more than 3,000 employees to sign a letter in opposition and more than a dozen to resign. Despite the protests, internal emails obtained by the Intercept show that the Mountain View company planned to ramp up artificial intelligence research for military drones.
One September exchange between Google AI chief Fei-Fei Li, two members of Google’s defense and intelligence sales team, and members of the communications team, notes that Project Maven alone would net $15 million over the next 18 months, and as much as $250 million in the coming years. They also show that Google competed with Amazon to secure a vaunted slot on Project Maven and that the contract was “directly related” to a cloud computing contract worth billions of dollars.
The Intercept speculates that the computing contract is the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), a 10-year, $10 billion initiative that seeks to migrate much of the U.S. military’s data to a commercial cloud provider. The exchanges reveal that the Pentagon was “fast-tracking” Google’s cloud clearance and that work was expected to progress fairly rapidly.
Internally, Google executives downplayed the impact of the Defense Department contract on the company’s bottom line. Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene told employees during an all-hands meeting that Project Maven was for “only” $9 million.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! The conflicting narrative adds yet another wrinkle to Google’s ongoing struggle over ethical uses of AI.
Jeff Dean, who oversees Google’s AI research, signed a letter opposing the use of machine learning for autonomous weapons. Google cofounder Sergey Brin has spoken at length about the subject with Larry Page, CEO of Google’s holding company, Alphabet, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, according to the New York Times.
And executives at London-based Google subsidiary DeepMind have expressed concerns about the company’s direction. On Wednesday, Google said it is developing an ethics policy that will explicitly ban the use of artificial intelligence in weaponry.
“I don’t know what would happen if the media starts picking up a theme that Google is secretly building AI weapons or AI technologies to enable weapons for the Defense industry,” Li wrote. “Google Cloud has been building our theme on Democratizing AI in 2017, and Diane and I have been talking about Humanistic AI for enterprise. I’d be super careful to protect these very positive images.” VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"Alexa is learning to recommend voice apps based on what you want to do | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/alexa-is-learning-to-recommend-voice-apps-based-on-what-you-want-to-do"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Alexa is learning to recommend voice apps based on what you want to do Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Amazon Echo Dot Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Amazon is introducing a feature that will allow Alexa to suggest voice apps when you don’t know what app to ask for. Instead, you will be able to simply tell Alexa what you want to accomplish to receive recommendations of skills to help you achieve that goal.
Now in beta , the CanFulfillIntentRequest interface can be used by the creators of Alexa skills in the U.S. to alert Amazon to the kinds of questions their skill may be able to answer or queries the skill is able to fulfill. Amazon’s Alexa Skill Store now has more than 30,000 voice apps, and getting users’ attention can be something of a challenge. The intent request introduced today should help users discover more voice apps and connect developers making skills with a larger audience.
Since in-skill purchasing was introduced earlier this month , the feature added today could help drive commerce for businesses and the makers of skills who — until recently — haven’t had many ways of getting paid for a voice app, beyond subscriptions , making skills for businesses, or Amazon’s payment program for highly engaging skills.
The discovery of apps for devices with no screen — like most smart speakers — has been a longstanding challenge for the makers of AI assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Amazon has been working to extend this type of discovery feature to users for some time now. Last year, Alexa began to answer requests like “Alexa, I need a ride” with Uber or Lyft skill recommendations. Today, if you say “Alexa, help me cook dinner” you will receive recommendations for Allrecipes or Food Network, but once you’ve heard those suggestions, the speaker stops talking.
The addition of CanFulfillIntentRequest opens recommendations to a much wider selection of skills.
Though the new feature may allow users to find skills in a more natural way and facilitate discovery of skills developers’ work, a conversational UI, like any other form of search, has its limits.
For example, today if you say “Alexa, help me relax,” you will receive recommendations for Headspace’s meditation skill, as well as several skills for ambient sounds, but after hearing about five or six different skills you may begin to lose interest.
A machine learning model is also used to determine which skill is best suited to fulfill a user’s request. Factors considered in which skill Alexa shares include engagement level, rating, and confidence in match. Amazon will continue to experiment with its Alexa’s skills recommendation system during the CanFulfillIntentRequest interface beta, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.
Updated 4:44 p.m. Pacific, May 31 with comments from an Amazon spokesperson.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
Discover our Briefings.
The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"AI is surfacing B2B sales opportunities in every interaction (VB Live) | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/ai-is-surfacing-b2b-sales-opportunities-in-every-interaction-vb-live"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages VB Live AI is surfacing B2B sales opportunities in every interaction (VB Live) Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Artificial intelligence has evolved to the point where any B2B sales organization that leverages AI will see measurable improvements in customer engagement, LTV, and overall sales. Learn more about how to seamlessly integrate AI into your workflows and hear about real-world results from leading brands in this VB Live event! Register here for free.
“For us, sales is customer operations and customer success,” says Ksenia Kouchnirenko, head of business systems at SurveyMonkey.
“AI plays a crucial role in that front line, because we want to make sure that each interaction with the customer is the best interaction possible.” Data is the most essential part of powering any strategy, Kouchnirenko says, and AI lets you cast as wide a net at the infinite variety of metrics as possible. You’re not overwhelmed with a flood of data anymore — you’ve got the tools and the computing power to take a deep dive into that information and surface up insights not just on how well you did, but what you can do better with every customer interaction you enter into.
“It’s truly changing how organizations think about their customers, about their employees, and what they can do with that data,” she adds. For sales, she says, “AI is literally everything and the kitchen sink.” It has also opened up a whole new world of leads, Kouchnirenko says.
“We’re of the belief that sales come from anywhere, and great leads come from many different places,” she explains. “We want to make sure we don’t miss the customer operation opportunities like customer support or engagement.” Every interaction is logged, potential leads flagged and passed on to sales, and the interaction in the moment is shaped by AI tools that ensure that the customer service experience is handled by the right person, and the customer’s problems or questions are addressed.
“As you can imagine,” she says, “that’s not a single set of tools.” The mythical System X, where every sales need is addressed with an AI solution and everything works perfectly, does not exist yet, Kouchnirenko says. And implementing AI tools can still be a challenge if your company isn’t yet AI-ready, able to integrate these tools smoothly into the sales cycle.
“You can collect this amazing data, but how do you help everyone make sense of it in the right way?” she says.
But the wealth of data that can actually be put to real-world-results makes the challenge worth it — and means that getting AI-ready is a competitive imperative. To learn more about the advantages AI-powered sales tools are offering, what it means to be AI-ready, how to get there, and more, don’t miss this VB Live event.
Don’t miss out! Register here for free.
Attend this webinar and learn: AI fact versus fiction when it comes to sales How to build a data- and AI-friendly sales organization How leading brands build real results and how they do it Which AI tools actually bring results and which are still in development What’s next for AI and sales? Speakers: Rick Winslow , VP, Head of Digital Innovation & Transformation, Capital One Commercial Banking Jenny Lin , Data Scientist, Yelp Ksenia Kouchnirenko , Head of Business Systems, SurveyMonkey Marlene Jia , COO & CoFounder, TopBots Rachael Brownell , Moderator, VentureBeat Sponsored by Drift The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"WhatsApp cofounder Jan Koum is leaving Facebook | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/social/whatsapp-cofounder-jan-koum-is-leaving-facebook"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages WhatsApp cofounder Jan Koum is leaving Facebook Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
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WhatsApp cofounder Jan Koum, currently a member of Facebook’s board of directors, is preparing to leave the company. Koum confirmed his plans to leave in a Facebook post, less than an hour after the Washington Post reported that he was planning on leaving.
“I’m leaving at a time when people are using WhatsApp in more ways than I could have imagined. The team is stronger than ever and it’ll continue to do amazing things,” Koum wrote. “I’m taking some time off to do things I enjoy outside of technology, such as collecting rare air-cooled Porsches, working on my cars and playing ultimate frisbee.” Koum did not say when his departure date would be.
WhatsApp currently has roughly 1.5 billion monthly active users. Koum cofounded the company with Brian Acton in 2009. Acton and Koum sold the company to Facebook in 2014 , at which point it had roughly 500 million users. Facebook acquired WhatsApp for more than $16 billion.
Acton left Facebook in September. In mid-March, he urged users to delete Facebook in wake of the news that Facebook had suspended data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, employed by President Donald Trump’s campaign during the 2016 presidential election. British news outlet The Guardian reported that Cambridge Analytica improperly obtained the personal data of more than 50 million Facebook users and used it to create “psychological profiles” of U.S. voters. The number of affected users was later revised to up to 87 million by Facebook.
Since Facebook acquired WhatsApp, it has made changes to the app that are antithetical to Koum and Acton’s original vision. The original WhatsApp had a 99 cents per year subscription, which Facebook scrapped after the acquisition. The founders pledged when announcing the acquisition that “WhatsApp will remain autonomous and operate independently” — but that changed in 2016 when WhatsApp agreed to share a limited amount of WhatsApp user data, including phone numbers, with Facebook.
Koum and Acton also called online advertising — which is a central component of Facebook’s business model — a “disruption to aesthetics, an insult to your intelligence, and the interruption of your train of thought.” Facebook generated nearly $11.8 billion in revenue from advertising during the first quarter of 2018.
The Post reported that Koum was ultimately “worn down by the differences in [his and Facebook’s] approach.” News of Koum’s departure comes just a day before Facebook’s annual F8 conference for developers, where the company is likely to reveal more plans to monetize its messaging apps like WhatsApp. In January, Facebook launched WhatsApp Business, a separate version of the WhatsApp chat app for businesses. The company said on its most recent earnings call that WhatsApp Business now has more than 3 million users.
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The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"Disney wants to make shows exclusively for Twitter | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/social/disney-wants-to-make-shows-exclusively-for-twitter"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Disney wants to make shows exclusively for Twitter Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
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( Reuters ) — Walt Disney will create live sports, news and entertainment programming specifically for Twitter’s social network, a move to attract online viewers and advertising revenue through digital video.
Comcastnetworks including NBC and MSNBC, Viacom’s Comedy Central, MTV and BET, and others also are developing content for the social network, according to a statement on Monday from Twitter announcing more than 30 deals for live and original programming.
Disney’s ESPN network plans a Twitter version of its flagship “SportsCenter” TV show with breaking news and analysis, the statement said. Twitter also will live stream ESPN’s “Fantasy Focus Live” podcast.
The deals will expand Twitter’s streaming video offerings and help Disney and others reach audiences online while traditional television viewing wanes. Video views on Twitter have doubled in the past year, the company said.
Under the agreement, Disney’s ABC broadcast network, the Disney Channels, Freeform and the company’s movie studio also will produce live programming for Twitter, the statement said.
Shares of Twitter jumped 4.5 percent to $30.31 after the deal with Disney was announced. Disney shares rose 1.1 percent to $100.33 following the record-setting debut of “Avengers: Infinity War.” Other companies that will provide video for Twitter include Hearst Magazines Digital Media, Will Packer Media and BuzzFeed News, plus sports leagues including Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer.
Twitter announced the deals in New York at the Digital Content Newfronts, where companies promote upcoming programming to advertisers.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"Cambridge Analytica says it did not receive Twitter data from researcher | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/social/cambridge-analytica-says-it-did-not-receive-twitter-data-from-researcher"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Cambridge Analytica says it did not receive Twitter data from researcher Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
After a report over the weekend revealed that the researcher accused of giving analytics firm Cambridge Analytica improper access to Facebook user data also had access to data from Twitter’s API, Cambridge Analytica is denying that it worked with the researcher on data obtained from Twitter.
Cambridge Analytica tweeted this morning that the firm “has never received Twitter data from GSR [Global Science Research] or Aleksandr Kogan, and has never done any work with GSR on Twitter data. GSR was only ever a contractor to Cambridge Analytica and we understand it did work for many other companies.” Twitter confirmed to British news outlet The Telegraph on Saturday that it sold Kogan — the creator of the app “This Is Your Digital Life” — and his firm, Global Science Research, one-day access in 2015 to data from Twitter’s API. Kogan told The Telegraph that he did not use the data in any way that violated Twitter’s policies.
Kogan and GSR had access to “a random sample of public tweets from a five-month period from December 2014 to April 2015,” according to a statement from Twitter provided to Bloomberg. Twitter said that Kogan and GSR did not have access to any private data.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! A Twitter spokesperson also told VentureBeat that the company has removed Cambridge Analytica as an advertiser, and that “this decision is based on our determination that Cambridge Analytica operates using a business model that inherently conflicts with acceptable Twitter Ads business practices.” Cambridge Analytica, however, is still allowed to have a Twitter account.
Since the British news outlet The Guardian reported in mid-March that Cambridge Analytica improperly gained access to the personal data of up to 50 million Facebook users from Kogan, lawmakers in both the U.S. and the U.K. have been pushing Facebook for more details on what third parties the company knows of that may have improperly gained access to large amounts of user data. The number of users that Cambridge Analytica may have obtained data on was later revised to up to 87 million people by Facebook.
Anger over how Cambridge Analytica accessed the data prompted Facebook to announce that it would be auditing all apps that were given access to large amounts of data before the company made changes to the amount of data third-party apps could collect in 2014, as well as those that exhibited any “suspicious behavior.” In an interview with Buzzfeed last week , Kogan said that he spent a week as a paid consultant to Facebook in November 2015, and gave several talks at the company’s Menlo Park campus in 2013. Facebook hired Kogan’s GSR cofounder, Joseph Chancellor, in late 2015, and according to Facebook’s website, Chancellor still works there.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"Meteorites incoming: Fortnite is down overnight for Season 4 update | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/meteorites-incoming-fortnite-is-down-overnight-for-season-4-update"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Meteorites incoming: Fortnite is down overnight for Season 4 update Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn I'm going to get in. I've got a good feeling! Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
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A meteor is about to fall from the sky and crash into Fortnite: Battle Royale — a moderately successful last-player-standing shooter — and it is going to bring Season 4 with it. Epic Games confirmed today that Season 4 of its Fortnite add-on content begins May 1, and that means Fortnite will have to go offline for a period overnight.
Epic is beginning maintenance on Fortnite’s servers at 4 a.m. Eastern. It did not say how long the update process would take, but if you are having troubles getting connected in the morning, that is probably why.
https://twitter.com/FortniteGame/status/991013165885509633 The beginning of Season 4 should also mark the end of the meteor saga for Fortnite. Last month, a comet-like object began appearing in the skies over the map. Players quickly started to speculate that Epic was planning to demolish the central town of Tilted Towers using an asteroid collision. That may not come to pass, but it seems inevitable now that a meteorite is going to change the game in some way.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Last week, tiny meteorites began smashing into the map and causing explosions during matches. At the same time, Epic began teasing Season 4 with artwork that suggested aliens or superheroes. Now, that teasing has reached its zenith.
Brace for impact! Witness Season 4 tomorrow.
pic.twitter.com/LVG3mO6vmK — Fortnite (@FortniteGame) April 30, 2018 In the latest promotional image for Season 4, Epic has a crew standing on craggy rock. It’s difficult to see if they are wearing anything new, but the image is definitely suggesting that the meteorite impact could introduce a lot of new items into the game.
As for the fate of Tilted Towers, we still don’t know. Garlic Jim, my local purveyor of pizza pies, is already mourning its loss. But we’ll just have to see where the big space rock lands.
Me: Let's get away from games for a bit. Let's get out of the house. Walk to Starbucks or something.
Also me: God dammit.
pic.twitter.com/oumX8C0bxG — Jeffrey Grubb (@JeffGrubb) April 27, 2018 As you have probably guessed, the imminent release of Season 4 means that today, April 30, is the last day of Season 3. So if you were only a few objectives away from finishing a challenge or two, you still have time. But you better get into the battle royale before those servers go offline.
GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
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Join the GamesBeat community! Enjoy access to special events, private newsletters and more.
VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"Games and politics mix at ESA-sponsored White House Correspondents' Dinner parties | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/games-and-politics-mix-at-esa-sponsored-white-house-correspondents-dinner-parties"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Games and politics mix at ESA-sponsored White House Correspondents’ Dinner parties Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn CNN's Political Hangover brunch on Sunday.
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The Washington political scene just finished a long weekend of partying following the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, and the Entertainment Software Association trade group was an active participant in many of the events surrounding the WHCD. It’s the ESA’s job to build relationships with policymakers, and it did that by providing some interactive entertainment for guests at two different parties.
On Thursday, the ESA co-hosted the Great American White House Correspondents’ Dinner Party with Tucker Carlson’s conservative news blog The Daily Caller, the Conservative Partnership Institute, and other trade groups. On Sunday morning, the ESA had a hand in throwing CNN’s Political Hangover brunch as well.
The ESA had game stations set up at both events, according to Washington news blog The Hill.
At the CNN event, the trade group even handed out “classic Mario games” and set up a virtual reality station for attendees.
I reached out to the ESA for an official comment on these events, and it declined to make a statement.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Above: Chris Cillizza pulling a donut from the foundation of a donut pyramid at CNN’s brunch party.
Attendees at the CNN event included a number of broadcast personalities from the network including anchor Jake Tapper and commentator Chris Cillizza. Also in the crowd was Michael Avenatti, lawyer for porn star Stormy Daniels, and Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi.
It’s important to know that the ESA has done these kinds of Washington-insider parties for years. In 2014, it sponsored a party for news magazine Capitol File.
So this isn’t a new trend.
Above: Actor Robin Wright at the 2014 Capitol File/ESA WCHD party.
But this is a demonstration of ESA’s mission in action. The trade group’s members include Activision, Electronic Arts, Sony, and Nintendo, and these companies don’t want sudden regulations to pop up that could eat into their revenues or profits. By showing up for WHCD parties, the ESA leadership could ensure that it can give the right information to the right people to protect the interests of its industry.
GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
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VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"T-Mobile's and Sprint's 5G merger is necessary for them, and good for us | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/mobile/t-mobiles-and-sprints-5g-merger-is-necessary-for-them-and-good-for-us"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Analysis T-Mobile’s and Sprint’s 5G merger is necessary for them, and good for us Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
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Most reports on T-Mobile’s acquisition of Sprint have focused on the size of the $26 billion deal and the fact that two smaller, weaker rivals will finally combine to become a viable Verizon/AT&T challenger. But as VentureBeat’s 5G expert, this deal has struck me for months as virtually necessary for the companies. Despite their blustery promises , I haven’t been convinced that T-Mobile or Sprint was fully ready for the coming battle over 5G. Based on what I’ve heard over the past day, though, I think the merged company and its customers are going to be in great shape.
At the same time as headlines have been dominated by international “race to 5G” excitement, the past several months have revealed widespread questions over the realities of 5G network building. Carriers throughout Europe and Asia have openly questioned whether they can initially afford to build 5G networks or commercialize new services to justify the investments. The governments of China, South Korea, Canada, and Australia have become involved in coordinating 5G network buildouts to cut waste and speed deployments for carriers. It’s clear that rolling out 5G is not going to be easy for smaller players, and even some big ones.
5G realities Neither T-Mobile nor Sprint was in an untenable position to move forward, but despite their individual claims that they would offer true nationwide 5G networks before AT&T and Verizon, they had a lot left to execute on.
Prior to the merger announcement, each company shared plans to go in a different direction on 5G from the broader industry. T-Mobile chose to focus on a low-frequency 600MHz 5G network, while Sprint said it would build a midband 2.5GHz 5G network, because the companies already owned the necessary U.S. radio spectra to start there. Now the companies plan to move forward with 5G on both 600MHz and 2.5GHz bands, while rivals — and carriers around the world — are planning 5G services primarily on high-frequency 28GHz millimeter wave and midband 3.5-3.9GHz ranges.
It’s unclear how this will play out with 5G hardware manufacturers, but the antennas inside T-Mobile and Sprint 5G devices may be very different from the ones in AT&T and Verizon 5G devices. This could go very well if millimeter wave proves problematic, or very badly if handset manufacturers don’t want to waste 5G engineering resources catering to T-Mobile’s particular needs. The major incentive to participate is the new T-Mobile’s size: 127 million customers, versus AT&T’s 141 million and Verizon’s estimated 150 million. That’s enough customers for major manufacturers to care about, and it’s certainly easier than making two separate phones for two separate networks.
Under the best circumstances, the 5G service offered by T-Mobile and Sprint is expected to be slower than their rivals, but also more widely available, particularly in historically underserved areas. It may also do better indoors than 5G based upon millimeter wave.
For engineers and customers alike, it’s not just supported radio frequencies that are important to 5G — it’s their ubiquity. Right now, AT&T and Verizon have each committed to early 5G rollouts in only handfuls of cities, leaving most of their customers to fall back on 4G networks until 5G becomes available in 2019 or 2020. If a particular new service depends on 5G, such as connected autonomous cars, it won’t be available to a carrier’s customers in a given market until a carrier specifically built 5G towers there… which could be a problem for something as mobile as a car. If T-Mobile and Sprint hadn’t agreed to merge, their limited individual abilities to reach thousands of cities would have really inhibited their “national” 5G rollouts, and thus the viability of 5G-dependent mobile services.
Legacy 4G/3G realities Integrating the companies’ legacy networks also could be challenging, because they’re not entirely compatible with one another. Sprint has built a mediocre 4G network backed by unpopular CDMA technology. T-Mobile has built a pretty good 4G network backed by GSM technology, but with significant coverage gaps that customers have to fill with in-home signal boosters and personal cell units.
In an ideal world, T-Mobile and Sprint would be able to combine their existing networks together with a flip of one switch, giving customers access to whichever towers they happen to be near. But between radio frequency differences, CDMA and GSM differences, and various network engineering and device testing challenges, the reality of bringing their resources together is a lot harder than that.
The only possible good news is that these companies have been talking about merging for so long that their executives and engineers have surely been contemplating integration for a while. Perhaps they have some measures ready to go if and when the merger is completed. But based on past history, I’d be willing to bet that T-Mobile is strongly considering just weaning Sprint customers off of their CDMA devices in favor of more broadly compatible GSM hardware. That will leave only Verizon to fly the CDMA flag in the U.S., a situation pretty much no one will cry about.
The competition outlook Like every company planning a potentially contentious merger that will require government approval, T-Mobile is framing its acquisition of Sprint as great for competition. “Existing T-Mobile and Sprint customers will benefit from increased speeds, coverage, and performance as the two companies’ networks combine,” the company said. “This isn’t a case of going from 4 to 3 wireless companies. There are now at least 7 or 8 big competitors in this converging market.” It also claims that the merger will create, rather than eliminate, jobs.
Although I normally see these sorts of post-merger promises as unlikely to prove accurate, I generally think T-Mobile is correct here. Sprint has been a weak competitor for a long time now, and its overall contribution to the U.S. cellular industry has been at best a small tug in the direction of lower prices. But given the mediocrity of its 4G network, all of its bigger rivals knew that they didn’t really need to match Sprint’s offers because they were providing superior customer experiences. Sprint all but had to give away 4G service to retain customers, and when the company contemplated 5G, it openly said that it would need to raise prices to its competitors’ current levels.
With Sprint gone, its performance-conscious customers are likely to be equally or better serviced by T-Mobile, which has exerted meaningful price and network pressure on larger rivals. Its most price-conscious customers will still have entirely viable options like Cricket and Virgin Mobile. The T-Mobile and Sprint retail locations worth preserving will likely see an uptick in customers and, based on T-Mobile’s generally good network and customer service track records, greater overall satisfaction.
I’m excited about this merger, which seems long overdue and hopefully won’t be held up unduly by regulators. Given the massive transformations 5G is about to unleash on the connected world, shoring up the U.S. cellular industry with three equally strong and viable competitors could hardly come at a better time. We’ll be keeping our eyes on every major development as the T-Mobile/Sprint merger process continues.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"T-Mobile agrees to acquire Sprint for $26 billion | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/mobile/t-mobile-agrees-to-acquire-sprint-for-26-billion"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages T-Mobile agrees to acquire Sprint for $26 billion Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
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( Reuters ) — T-Mobile agreed on Sunday to acquire peer Sprint, in a $26 billion all-stock deal that will combine the third and fourth largest U.S. wireless carriers and is expected to attract regulatory scrutiny over its impact on consumers.
The agreement caps four years of on- and off- talks between the companies , setting the stage for the creation of a carrier with 127 million customers that will be a more formidable competitor to the No.1 and No.2 wireless players, Verizon and AT&T.
U.S. regulators, which have challenged in court AT&T’s $85 billion deal to buy U.S. media company Time Warner, are expected to grill Sprint and T-Mobile on how they will price their combined wireless offerings.
The merger will create the highest capacity network in the United States, lower prices, create jobs and improve service in rural areas, said John Legere, the current chief executive of T-Mobile and the new head of the proposed combined company.
T-Mobile and Sprint said they expected to complete their deal no later than the first half of 2019, an ambitious goal given the intense U.S. regulatory scrutiny it will be subjected to. T-Mobile will not be liable to pay Sprint a breakup fee should regulators block the deal, according to sources who asked not to be identified because that detail in their contract has not yet been made public.
The companies said they expect U.S. regulators would see the benefits of the deal.
“This isn’t a case of going from four to three wireless companies – there are now at least seven or eight big competitors in this converging market,” Legere said in a statement. Other companies also would be forced to accelerate their investments in the face of a combined T-Mobile-Sprint, the companies added.
A spokeswoman for Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai declined to comment on Sunday on the proposed merger. The FCC will decide whether to grant the deal regulatory approval and if deal is in the “public interest.” Deal Breakthrough The breakthrough in the companies’ negotiations, first reported by Reuters on Thursday, came after T-Mobile majority-owner Deutsche Telekom AG and Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp, which controls Sprint, agreed on a structure that will allow Deutsche Telekom to continue to consolidate the combined company, which will have a market value of over $80 billion, on its books.
Deutsche Telekom will own 42 percent of the combined company, and will control the board of the combined company, nominating nine of the 14 directors. Legere will also serve as a director.
The implied equity valuation for Sprint is $6.62 per share based on T-Mobile’s closing share price on Friday. Sprint shares closed Friday at $6.50.
The all-stock transaction is at a fixed exchange ratio of 0.10256 T-Mobile shares for each Sprint share, or the equivalent of 9.75 Sprint shares for each T-Mobile US share.
Sprint’s and T-Mobile’s first round of merger talks ended unsuccessfully in 2014 after U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration expressed antitrust concerns about the deal.
Under U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, regulators have continued to fret about consumer prices. The U.S. government has opened a probe into alleged coordination by AT&T, Verizon Communications and a telecommunications standards organization to hinder consumers from easily switching wireless carriers, a person briefed on the matter said earlier this month.
The second round of talks between Sprint and T-Mobile ended in November over valuation disagreements, although Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Hoettges, left the door open at the time, saying: “You always meet twice in life.” Since then, Sprint’s shares lost about a fifth of their value amid questions about how the company can compete effectively under the weight of its long-term debt of more than $32 billion.
Softbank has been looking to trim its own debt as well, which reached 15.8 trillion yen ($147 billion) as of the end of December. It has said it is planning to raise cash by taking its Japanese mobile phone unit public this year.
Failure to clinch a deal last November left SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, a dealmaker who raised close to $100 billion for his Vision Fund to invest in technology companies, in search of other options for Sprint.
Investing in 5G technology Even though Sprint’s customer base has expanded under CEO Marcelo Claure, growth has been driven by discounting. Analysts say that, without T-Mobile, Sprint lacks the scale needed to invest in its network and to compete in a saturated market.
T-Mobile has fared better than Sprint, even if it remains a distant third to Verizon and AT&T. It has managed to score sustained market share gains, as innovative offerings, improving network performance and good customer service attract new customers, according to Moody’s Investors Service Inc.
T-Mobile became the first major U.S. carrier to eliminate two-year contracts, a shift quickly embraced by consumers and copied by competitors. The company has also badgered rivals with its unlimited data plans.
Both Sprint and T-Mobile are far behind Verizon and AT&T in upgrading their network to accommodate next generation 5G wireless technology. Even after their merger, the combined company’s budget to invest in 5G will be smaller than Verizon or AT&T’s.
However, Sprint and T-Mobile hope the deal will give them more firepower to participate in auction for spectrum to develop 5G. They plan to participate in a spectrum auction in late fall.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"Mozilla is bringing sponsored stories from Pocket to new tabs in Firefox 60 | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/marketing/mozilla-is-bringing-sponsored-stories-from-pocket-to-new-tabs-in-firefox-60"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Mozilla is bringing sponsored stories from Pocket to new tabs in Firefox 60 Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Firefox : Sponsored stories Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
Learn more.
Mozilla has confirmed plans to introduce sponsored content to new tabs in the upcoming Firefox 60 release.
The news comes just a few months after the company revealed it would begin experimenting with “an occasional sponsored story” within the Pocket recommendations section of new browser tabs in Firefox Beta. Following the trial, which was only made available to a “small portion of U.S.” users, the feature is just about ready to hit prime time via the version of the Firefox browser scheduled to roll out next week.
Above: Firefox: Sponsored story By way of a quick recap, Pocket is the popular web-clipping service that lets users save all manner of content from the internet to read or watch later across multiple devices. Mozilla had supported Pocket natively for a while anyway, but last February Mozilla went all-in by buying Pocket outright.
With the launch of the new upgraded Firefox Quantum browser in November, Mozilla announced a number of deeper integrations with Pocket, including showing story recommendations in new tabs based on trending stories, though this remains limited to the U.S., Canada, and Germany for now.
Above: Pocket in Firefox Mozilla also revealed that it was testing out personalized recommendations, sending out a list of “related” websites to the main trending recommendations. The company said that if a user were to click on one of those links, that action would be treated as a signal of interest — but only if it correlated with the user’s browsing history elsewhere.
Sponsored stories represent another piece of the puzzle, though Mozilla is quick to stress that privacy and quality are underlying tenets of its new Pocket-integrated tabs.
“Neither Mozilla nor Pocket receives a copy of your browser history,” Pocket’s FAQ section reads.
“The entire process of sorting and filtering which stories you should see happens locally in your copy of Firefox.” Ultimately, what Mozilla wants is to avoid all those poor click-bait type stories that plague social platforms such as Facebook. It wants to offer both privacy and personalization, and it now wants to monetize that directly through sponsored stories. Crucial to Mozilla’s narrative here is one feature in particular: the ability to disable sponsored stories via your new tab preferences.
Above: Firefox: Disable sponsored stories A common theme seems to be now emanating from Mozilla in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal that continues to blight Facebook, with Mozilla pitching Firefox as the good guy that’s looking to protect your privacy.
Just last month, Mozilla l aunched a Facebook Container add-on to isolate your web browsing activity from Facebook. Now Mozilla — unlike Facebook, which doesn’t allow you to disable ads and sponsored content — is touting its ability to give users more control over sponsored content. Sure, it will activate sponsored stories by default, but it’s confident that with its promise of privacy and quality, users won’t go hunting for the option to deactivate.
“The balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical to the health of the internet, which is central to our mission at Mozilla,” the company said in a statement. “Our work in this area is critical in order to help create change.” Sponsored stories will be launching in the U.S. only at first, and Mozilla has given no timeline for when the feature may roll out internationally. “We are starting in the US first,” Pocket CEO Nate Weiner told VentureBeat. “We want to get it right here first then expand.” VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"Wolfenstein II, Echo lead Nordic Game Awards 2018 finalists | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/games/wolfenstein-ii-echo-lead-nordic-game-awards-2018-finalists"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Wolfenstein II, Echo lead Nordic Game Awards 2018 finalists Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
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MachineGames’ Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus and Danish studio Ultra Ultra’s Echo show the range of blockbusters and indies earning nominations from the Nordic Game Awards. The event has revealed its list of finalists, and it will announce the winners during the Nordic Game Conference from May 23 to May 25 Malmö, Sweden. It’s the 15th year the event has celebrated developers from that region.
Wolfenstein II is up awards in five categories and Echo is up for six — and they’re both jockeying for the bragging rights of Nordic Game of the Year. Other big titles like EA Dice’s Star Wars Battlefront 2 stand to win awards, but the list is mainly comprised of independent titles. The voxel flyer Fugl from Team Fugl, Tarsier Studios’ creepy platformer Little Nightmares , and Flamebait Games’ quirky painting game Passpartout: The Starving Artist all make multiple appearances.
Despite their reputation for icy climes, the Nordic countries have been a hotbed for games innovation. It features mobile chart-toppers like Rovio , Supercell , and King , alongside studios like Mojang, developer of the cultural phenomenon Minecraft.
Smaller indie darlings have also emerged from the region, like Starbreeze Studios’ Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and Arvi Teikari’s Baba Is You , which took home two awards at the Independent Games Festival earlier this year.
Here is the full list of nominees for the 15th annual Nordic Game Awards: Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Nordic Game of the Year A Hat in Time, developed by Gears for Breakfast, Denmark ECHO, developed by Ultra Ultra, Denmark Little Nightmares, developed by Tarsier Studios, Sweden Nex Machina, developed by Housemarque, Finland SteamWorld Dig 2, developed by Image & Form, Sweden Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, developed by MachineGames, Sweden Nordic Game of the Year: Small Screen Milkmaid of the Milky Way, developed by Machineboy, Norway OCMO, developed by Team OCMO, Finland Pako 2, developed by Tree men games, Finland Returner 77, developed by Fantastic, Yes!, Denmark SteamWorld Dig 2, developed by Image & Form, Sweden Best Art ECHO, developed by Ultra Ultra, Denmark Little Nightmares, developed by Tarsier Studios, Sweden Milkmaid of the Milky Way, developed by Machineboy, Norway Nex Machina, developed by Housemarque, Finland Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, developed by MachineGames, Sweden Best Game Design A Hat in Time, developed by Gears for Breakfast, Denmark ECHO, developed by Ultra Ultra, Denmark Little Nightmares, developed by Tarsier Studios, Sweden SteamWorld Dig 2, developed by Image & Form, Sweden Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, developed by MachineGames, Sweden World to the West, developed by Rain AS, Norway Best Technology ECHO, developed by Ultra Ultra, Denmark Fugl, developed by Muunluun, Norway Sparc, developed by CCP, Iceland Star Wars Battlefront 2, developed by EA DICE, Sweden Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, developed by MachineGames, Sweden Best Audio ECHO, developed by Ultra Ultra, Denmark Figment, developed by Bedtime Digital Games, Denmark Little Nightmares, developed by Tarsier Studios, Sweden Nex Machina, developed by Housemarque, Finland Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, developed by MachineGames, Sweden Best Fun for Everyone A Hat in Time, developed by Gears for Breakfast, Denmark Fugl, developed by Muunluun, Norway Little Police, developed by Filimundus, Sweden OCMO, developed by Team OCMO, Finland Passpartout: The Starving Artist, developed by Flamebait Games, Sweden Best Debut A Hat in Time, developed by Gears for Breakfast, Denmark ECHO, developed by Ultra Ultra, Denmark Milkmaid of the Milky Way, developed by Machineboy, Norway OCMO, developed by Team OCMO, Finland Passpartout: The Starving Artist, developed by Flamebait Games, Sweden GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
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VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"Why some VCs are investing in hardware startups | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/entrepreneur/why-some-vcs-are-investing-in-hardware-startups"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Why some VCs are investing in hardware startups Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Hardware manufacturing Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Hardware has made a comeback in Silicon Valley, as evidenced by the crowded Maker Faire events (coming up in San Mateo, California from May 18 to May 20) to the recent HardwareCon event in San Jose.
Conductive Ventures recently raised $100 million to invest in enterprise hardware and software. One reason is that hardware giants have been acquiring innovative startups when those larger companies aren’t able to invent something in-house, which makes hardware startups a good investment.
I moderated a panel on hardware’s resurgence at HardwareCon. My panel included Jennifer Gill Roberts, cofounder of Grit Labs; Mike Edelhart, managing partner at Social Starts; Ashish Aggarwal, principal at Grishin Robotics; and Ephraim Lindenbaum, managing director of Advance Ventures.
Our focus was on hardware’s resurgence, how to do pitches, and how to elevate a startup beyond the Maker stage to get real funding and traction.
Here’s an edited transcript of our panel.
Above: (left to right) Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat; Jennifer Gill Roberts, cofounder Grit Labs; Mike Edelhart, managing partner, Social Starts; Ashish Aggarwal, principal at Grishin Robotics; and Ephraim Lindenbaum, managing director, Advance Ventures.
VentureBeat: I moved to Silicon Valley in 1994, and I remember when I arrived that people said that hardware startups were done. That was obviously wrong. We’ll get into that, but first please introduce yourselves.
Jennifer Gill Roberts: I’ve been in Silicon Valley my entire life. I grew up here. I went to Stanford and worked at Sun and HP as a hardware engineer. After business school I went into venture. In the ‘90s I was funding optical and wireless equipment, up and down the stack. That was very capital-intensive. Some of those companies raised hundreds of millions of dollars and had only a handful of customers. Today actually seems a lot easier.
When I look at businesses now, to me they have some of the same elements: finding customer and market fit, trying to get launched on a reasonable amount of capital. I’m excited to talk about that.
Mike Edelhart: I’m a managing partner of two sets of very early stage venture funds. One is Social Starts, which tracks the impact of social mobile technology. That’s been active since 2012. The other is Joyance Partners, focused on the technological vectors of happiness. I look at both hardware and software. I was the founding editor of pretty much all the Ziff-Davis computer magazines, like PC Magazine and PC Link , the labs and benchmarks and things like that behind them. We tested every product, hardware and software, on the PC.
Ashish Aggarwal: I’m part of Grishin Robotics. We’re a $100 million VC fund, primarily investing in early stage companies, in hardware robotics and consumer.
Ephraim Lindenbaum: I’m managing director of Advance Ventures. I’m a recovering entrepreneur. I’ve actually sat in your chair before. I started in Silicon Valley as well, growing companies all through the ‘90s, not to date myself. Exited in the first dot-com boom. I came back to Silicon Valley after some time as a chief strategic officer. It’s pretty binary when you get back to Silicon Valley. You’re either starting a company or becoming an investor. I didn’t have any great ideas, so I became an investor.
We spun up Advance Ventures in 1999 and we’ve now invested through three successive funds. We invest in information technology, mobility, IOT, and what we call sustainability, which is pretty much agriculture and food technology. We’ve been involved in the connected device and hardware space since the ‘90s. With our entrepreneurs we built the first connected gas pump for Chevron, the first connected terminals in airports. Like Jennifer we were in telco and moved into hardware. Today about 20 percent of our portfolio is hardware-component. We just closed a deal this morning, a hardware-connected diagnostic device company. We’re quite happy in the hardware space.
VentureBeat: We have all the big companies – Intel, Cisco, Seagate. Why should there be hardware startups at all now? At the same time, we also have so many makers out there, people working in their garages and going to the Maker Faires. What seems to be going on, from your perspective, as far as why the hardware startups still exist? Roberts: With every technology wave, you create new market leaders. It’s not in the DNA of the prior market leaders. I’m not saying these companies won’t be dominant for some time to come, but certainly we saw companies emerge in the PC wave, in the telecom wave, in the mobile social wave. I’m excited about the power of robotics. I think we’ll see completely different DNA.
The companies we’re funding through Grit Labs are coming to us with deep domain knowledge, with deep tech backgrounds. They’re recent PhDs. We’re not seeing as many companies iterate out of the dominant companies you mentioned. To me it’s that new DNA and new technology that drives new market leaders.
Edelhart: It’s always the best time to start new technology and it’s always the worst time to start new technology. There are always enormous entrenched players who look like they have infinite advantage and can’t be displaced. And they’re always displaced. Human behavior changes. Technology changes. When you put those two together, there are requirements for new capabilities that the existing companies aren’t set up to understand, respond to, or provide. There’s always a need for the new, and the old order will always change.
Aggarwal: The fundamental theory—when you think about it, what is robotics made of? Math, physics, all of these fundamental technologies. A lot of research has been going on for the past few decades, and in the past decade, a lot of technologies have started to come together, things that weren’t available 10 or 15 years ago. What AWS makes possible today—I used to manage hardware data centers for Yahoo. It used to take almost a year of planning to spin up a hardware data center. Today it’s so easy.
Similarly, the amount of data people can capture from devices—15 years ago, none of us used to have—how many connected devices did you carry around with yourself? Today everyone has at least one or two, all the time. Fundamentally, a lot of things have changed that allow new types of problems to be solved and new data sets to be captured. That has led to new types of advances and allowed new realms of technology to come together for people to build and create new types of robotics. New AI and machine learning are being applied to these larger problems in ways that weren’t possible before.
Lindenbaum: If this was Jeopardy, this would be the daily double. The most valuable company in the world is a hardware company. It’s Apple. It all starts there in terms of that conversation. To Jennifer’s point, hardware has been out of favor in the venture space for a while. That creates a drought. It creates the opportunity to innovate in particular categories.
The back office ecosystem of technology has come around to the point where these pieces work. Robotics without great machine vision isn’t great robotics. Robotics without great AI isn’t great robotics. The biggest challenge we see in this space is solutions looking for problems. Being able to drive into that, we’ve seen some wins in hardware in the venture world, companies like Tesla that have been successful, which spurs us to look back into that space.
A question in the green room was, with the Intels of the world out there, why are you all doing this? Innovation is value. It started to happen at the big companies, in the late ‘80s and through the ‘90s. It became an M&A process very quickly. These big companies couldn’t innovate purely on their own. M&A became a huge part of the R&D strategy at all of these companies, and it still is today. Look at Salesforce. Look at Apple. Look at everybody. They’re buyers. That gives you, as an entrepreneur, a clear trajectory to grow these businesses.
The next piece of the story is, there are great sectors where hardware is super meaningful. We’re a big player in food and agriculture. These are huge areas. There was a very meaningful robotics exit earlier this year in the space. In the food space there’s a ton of traction. If you look at some of what we call frontier markets, like cannabis, there’s tremendous movement in cannabis in hardware.
VentureBeat: How many cannabis investors do we have in the audience? We have one! Lindenbaum: The reason why you want to look at that is adoption curves. When you have industries that have huge margins and incremental improvements translating into huge movement, you get high-speed of adoption. When you’re moving into the retail market where you have perhaps a three percent margin, getting any kind of technology adoption in rapid fashion is very challenging.
We’re investors, for example, in financial technology, where there’s a lot of retail movement. We’re investors in health tech, which is a huge IOT and connected device category. Food and agriculture are very meaningful at this point.
Above: These investors aren’t afraid of hardware.
VentureBeat: You’ve already partially answered my second question, then, which is: What are the interesting categories you’re looking at? Do you want to talk more about what you like and what you might not do anymore? Edelhart: We’re investors at the very beginning. We tend to see these trends when they emerge. Some of the things we’re seeing related to hardware—things like throwaway hardware, where the hardware is a smaller component of the overall solution. It used to be the hardware was the biggest, heaviest, most expensive part. Now a sensor is very inexpensive. It can be part of accumulating data sets that can then be exploited in other places. IOT sensors are one example.
We have one in agriculture where the whole system is taking advantage of the sensors that are already present on farm equipment. The sensors are there, the equipment is there, and the system is taking new advantage of what’s already there. Or taking advantage of capabilities in the phone and things like that, where the new hardware is an incremental element.
The other thing we’re seeing in hardware is hardware as a service. If the data sets are changing, or the usages are changing–the traditional hardware just does what it does. It does it the same way forever. It’s becoming a bit outmoded to the use. Hardware needs to become more flexible. The interaction between hardware and software needs to be more flexible. The whole system has to interact with the person more flexibly. We’re starting to see hardware less as the big piece of steak in the middle of the plate and more as a part of a mixed stew.
Roberts: We like verticals that are getting disrupted. Someone already mentioned agriculture. If you look at logistics, transportation, and construction, you can see that many Fortune 500 businesses are at risk. What’s going to happen to UPS? What has already happened to U.S. automakers? You’ve probably all seen them arrive in Silicon Valley and set up their venture arms and innovation centers. They’re starting to be very acquisitive. I like that these verticals are not only ripe for innovation, but also for acquisition.
I love robotics as a service because you can lower the barrier to entry, to getting it deployed. You can constantly upgrade it. You can delight the customer. You have a better lock. Our companies are very capital-efficient because it doesn’t need to be perfect and pretty like a consumer product. We’re looking for this intersection of things that lead us to believe that these companies are a prospect for a nice multiple or have the opportunity to be independent in these verticals.
Aggarwal: Among the things we look at, food tech is one of the big things, where you start seeing innovation happening in how food is prepared, how food is delivered, how producers are meeting demand. There’s a lot happening, mostly on the back side rather than front side. You see a lot of places where people are thinking about automation, like Eatsa is doing in downtown San Francisco. We see a lot of innovations where you’re trying to take the human factor out of how food is prepared.
A lot of stuff is happening on the agricultural tech side. Because of labor shortages and what’s happening with climate, people are looking at different ways of getting access to labor to pick different types of stuff – apples, other kinds of produce. People are trying to figure out ways to solve that problem.
There’s a whole bunch of things we see around self-driving. Everyone knows about Uber and Waymo and all these other companies building different stacks of software, both for getting people and getting goods from point A to point B. There are competing applications in almost any space: security, smart homes, transportation, logistics. All of these have big applications for computer vision.
We’re seeing companies try to build Amazon Go-style stores for almost every other retailer. Every retailer is feeling pressure from Amazon in terms of trying to improve their margins. They have to think about reducing costs as well as increasing revenue. Everybody’s trying to figure out things like inventory management at scale that can help reduce the cost of labor. That’s becoming a lot more prevalent.
On the consumer side, we’re focused on how people spend time. You cook, clean, drive, sleep. Companies are looking at how to automate some aspect of life. One of the first companies in the space was iRobot, because cleaning needs to happen in a constrained environment and it’s easy to build a robot to do that. Today we’re seeing robots for more complex applications in the home, like taking care of the elderly.
On the enterprise side, we’ve started seeing companies that are focused on either increasing revenue or decreasing cost. On the industrial side, the focus is primarily on understanding how to take humans out of hazardous environments, like using drones for the surveying of critical structures. That’s very difficult for humans to do.
1 2 3 View All The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"Microsoft Ventures rebrands as M12 to avoid 'confusion' about its purpose | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/entrepreneur/microsoft-ventures-rebrands-as-m12-to-avoid-confusion-about-its-purpose"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Microsoft Ventures rebrands as M12 to avoid ‘confusion’ about its purpose Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Microsoft Ventures Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
Learn more.
Microsoft has changed the name of its venture capital (VC) fund from Microsoft Ventures to M12, two years after its official launch.
The Microsoft Ventures name actually predates the VC arm by a few years, and it was used as an overarching term for Microsoft’s accelerator programs, which did include some seed-funding initiatives. That part of the company was renamed Microsoft ScaleUp when Microsoft Ventures was spun out into a venture funding firm, and it appears this has caused some confusion over the years. Indeed, Microsoft Ventures — as with most VC firms — takes equity in startups that it invests in, whereas Microsoft’s accelerator programs don’t.
It’s difficult to imagine too many startups being confused about the nature of Microsoft Ventures’ investments, as the clue is sort of in its name — and it seems unlikely that many startups would confuse the Microsoft Ventures of today with the accelerator program that existed several years ago. But apparently confusion still exits.
“Entrepreneurs still face confusion on the appropriate interface at Microsoft for their unique needs, whether that is equity funding, platform support, or a myriad of other important items,” noted Nagraj Kashyap, corporate VP at M12. “Our name change gives us an opportunity to be clear about how we work with startups — we invest in them in exchange for equity.” VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! So what’s the story behind the new M12 name? Well, the “M” stands for Microsoft and the “12” represents the number of letters in the word “entrepreneur.” “Our name change highlights our ongoing commitment to the innovators and entrepreneurs whose companies we’re so proud to support,” added Kashyap.
Microsoft Ventures has invested in more than 50 startups over the past couple of years, with artificial intelligence a particular area of focus in recent times. Microsoft Ventures also launched a $3.5 million AI contest for startups last year.
In addition to alleviating any long-standing confusion, the name change could give Microsoft’s VC subsidiary a punchier and edgier sound while eliminating any obvious reference to the dusty old corporation that makes Windows, Word, and PowerPoint. This is something of a trend, too — Google’s parent company Alphabet rebranded Google Ventures a few years back, removing the “Google” and making it simply “GV.” And late last year Nokia Growth Partners — a standalone investment vehicle that’s funded by Nokia — changed its name to NGP Capital.
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"3 black female founders share how they got funded in the Midwest | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/entrepreneur/3-black-female-founders-share-how-they-got-funded-in-the-midwest"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest 3 black female founders share how they got funded in the Midwest Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Star Cunningham, founder and CEO of 4D Healthware.
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Female founders are underfunded and underrepresented, but black female founders bear a disproportionate share of the burden. While female founders overall receive 2.7 percent of all venture funding relative to their male counterparts, black female founders receive 0.2 percent.
That’s an astonishingly low number, but it’s especially staggering because black women are the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in the nation. In fact, 60 percent of all black businesses are owned by women.
Yet, on average, black female founders raise $36,000 compared to the average $1.3 million raised by failed startups , according to Digitalundivided.
The nonprofit formed a research initiative called #ProjectDiane to gather more data on tech founders who are women of color.
It turns out in the Midwest, some black female founders are raising significantly more than that $36,000 average, paving the way for greater successes in the future.
Recently, Chicago’s Star Cunningham, founder and CEO of health care startup 4D Healthware , was identified by Vanity Fair as one of 26 black female entrepreneurs who raised $1 million or more in fundraising as of mid-November.
4D Healthware has raised $2.2 million, but as Cunningham noted, not from venture capital firms. The company sought outside funding to power its virtual health management technology, which connects patients with clinical care outside of face-to-face interaction. Despite meeting with venture capitalists in the Midwest and across the nation, securing venture capital proved to be difficult.
Eventually, 4D Healthware secured funding from notable private investors, like health care expert Esther Dyson, which opened the doors to more capital.
“Once we raised the pre-seed round and did very well with those investment dollars, you begin to build a track record. And then when you’re able to secure customers and generate revenue, it becomes something that everyone is much more interested in,” said Cunningham.
For Patrice Darby, founder and CEO of GoNanny , a tech platform for childcare solutions, access to venture capital was also a challenge.
Above: Patrice Darby, founder and CEO of GoNanny “It was very hard to get a meeting [with VCs], challenging to get emails opened. Here in Chicago, it’s not about what your company is doing but who can speak on your behalf. Who can give a recommendation so someone takes time to review who emails them,” said Darby.
Getting someone to speak on her behalf was no easy task.
For starters, Digitalundivided’s research found that there are just five black female venture partners, compared with 1,630 white male venture partners. And even these black female decision-makers are not always receiving the backing from their LPs to invest in more minority-led companies , especially in companies they may be uniquely poised to understand because of the markets they serve.
Darby says she did not know any investors, and those in her network didn’t either. Yet she had to commit to the fundraising grind.
After pouring her savings into GoNanny, and even selling off all the belongings in her apartment, she still did not have enough capital to support demand for the platform.
Finally, she secured her first investment from Pipeline Angels , which invests in women and non-binary femme entrepreneurs. According to Darby, Pipeline Angels is made up of the type of “smart capital” that understands the childcare market. Now that the investment door has been opened, Darby said GoNanny is undergoing due diligence with an undisclosed VC firm.
Dawn Dickson, founder and CEO of the Columbus-based retail technology company PopCom , built her credibility with investors through another venture-backed company, Flat Out Heels.
PopCom earned a spot in Techstars LA and raised venture capital despite struggling to find investors who understood the industry.
“The self-service retail space is not trendy or popular, and I have yet to meet one investor who had experience in the industry. Because I am a black female and did not attend an Ivy League university, that does have a direct correlation to why many investors did not already know me. I was not in their network initially , but I worked my way in. Once the investors got to know me better and my story, they invested in me because they invest in people, not ideas,” said Dickson.
Above: Dawn Dickson, founder and CEO of PopCom Though Dickson has raised venture capital, she is careful to note she did so to support the development of an expensive-to-build proprietary tech solution. Otherwise, she encourages entrepreneurs of all stripes to focus on customers and sales first.
“Not every company is ideal for venture funding, but every company can grow and become wildly successful. I would rather see more black women building companies with $1 million in revenue than raising $1 million. I believe founders of all colors and genders should raise what they need to scale … and focus on owning as much of their companies as possible when they exit,” said Dickson.
It’s these exits, according to Dickson, as well as Cunningham and Darby, that will help increase the number of successful black female founders who can secure venture capital, because they will validate that black women can make investors money. And those entrepreneurs will be able to invest money, too.
But Cunningham says that VC firms also need to do a better job today of giving more black female founders a chance.
“It’s not rocket science. You have to invest [in us] more. You have to hire people who look like the 26 women [featured in Vanity Fair ]. You have to stop attempting to excuse yourself by saying the pipeline isn’t there, the people aren’t there. That’s how you change the number.” Alida Miranda-Wolff is the founder and CEO of Ethos, a talent strategy firm for tech companies. With a focus on diversity, hiring practices, vision and values, and career pathing, she partners with tech leaders to make possibilities and aspirations concrete realities. Alida previously served as director of platform at Hyde Park Angels, where she was one of only two dozen Latinx women in venture capital.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"How ecommerce startups can win against Amazon | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/commerce/how-ecommerce-startups-can-win-against-amazon"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest How ecommerce startups can win against Amazon Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
In 2016, U.S. consumers spent $360 billion at online retailers, with Amazon accounting for a whopping $150 billion of that. In other words, almost 50 cents of every ecommerce dollar goes to Amazon.
Amazon is hard to beat on price, selection, and convenience. So what ecommerce opportunities are left for startups? This is a question my fund looks at very carefully, since we’ve been focused on high-potential ecommerce plays. Here are a few takeaways from our playbook: Where Amazon wins — and where it doesn’t Amazon wins when you already know the specific SKU you want to buy. But half the shopping experience happens when you don’t know exactly what you want. In those times, you’re shopping for entertainment, discovery, self-expression, artisanal, and custom goods.
A search for “red shoes” or “standing desk” on Amazon produces hundreds of pages of results to sift through. In those situations, many people prefer a more curated experience with just a few precise, new, or different offerings that are tailored for them. Many of the most appealing direct-to-consumer brands aren’t even sold on Amazon.
The future of commerce is going to be a really interesting hybrid of different models. It won’t be purely online or offline. These mixed models might incorporate some in-person retail demos, workshops, or events. It could be showrooming, it could be a personalized fitting, or even an assessment and onboarding meeting with a personal buyer or concierge. There are even more post-consumption models such as rental, share, or try before you buy. Startups are creating a personalized and community-based approach to shopping that Amazon doesn’t offer, and this is where startups can innovate.
The playbook It’s difficult for startup companies to compete with Amazon and other large ecommerce retailers like Alibaba by only selling third-party products. You’re in a price war, which usually results in low margins. This results in low-quality revenue that doesn’t lead to a healthy business.
We’re seeing newer startups design original first-party products that they own, design, maintain, and source. Instead of just selling third-party products that consumers could also find on Amazon, these startups sell a mix of curated third-party products and original flagship products.
These first-party products can differentiate a startup’s offerings from Amazon, while the third party products capture more of the wallet and increase average order value. A 50/50 blend between first- and third-party goods tends to lead to healthy revenue, with the first-party products having higher margins. If you only have third-party products like Amazon, your margins won’t be healthy enough to compete and keep growing viably long-term; but if you only have a limited selection of first-party products, you may be capturing a tiny portion of the consumer’s spend in that category.
I look for these three Cs in next-generation commerce companies: Curation.
The company offers excellent curation, including content around product selection and what the hot new products are.
Community.
There is a company-run forum where customers and users to discuss the products. Users can show off how they use the product or share their personal stories in addition to sharing their wishlists and reviews.
Commerce.
The marketplace should offer convenient and unique ways to buy the products, not just big discounts or free shipping and returns.
The first generation of commerce companies focused on one of these three Cs. But today, we’re seeing more companies combine two or even all three of these.
Online fashion marketplace Poshmark, which my fund chose to invest in, is an example of a company that got this right. Poshmark worked hard to really empower the sellers on its platform, building a community that’s there for far more than the transactions. Customers see that and get excited, which leads to commerce.
Other startups like Houzz, GOAT, Watchgang, and Reverb.com have also combined these three C’s in some compelling ways, and I believe any passion product vertical is well suited for a similar strategy.
Additionally, there are four new, emerging Cs that we’re seeing ecommerce head towards with new mechanics.
Crowdsourcing.
Companies let enthusiastic customers act as the merchandiser, the buyer, and even the designer of the products they want to buy. Not only are top customers avid fans and high frequency purchasers (or even collectors), but they often know more about the products than the manufacturers and marketers themselves. They’re providing direct feedback on how to tweak or launch new products that they’ll readily buy and even sign up to purchase in advance.
Crowdfunding.
When a new product is about to drop, companies will get customers to pre-fund or pre-order the incoming product. This is a great way to show and aggregate demand ahead of launching — and ahead of investing in new product developments.
C2C marketplaces.
An example is passionate customers that want to buy, sell, or trade their own items with each other.
Cryptocurrency.
This particular trend is still very nascent, but blockchain and cryptocurrencies could revolutionize the back-end of commerce, including supply chain, logistics, and working capital. There’s also potentially the opportunity to have virtual currencies on the front-end, tying into next-generation loyalty programs and the ability to earn and spend tokens.
Metrics that matter now Many entrepreneurs ask me about the metrics that make a next-gen commerce company compelling. Here’s a breakdown of some of the key metrics that my fund looks for when evaluating new ecommerce startups: Quality of revenue.
In prior years, many startups would focus their pitches solely on fast-growing and large GMV top-line revenue from gross sales. Now, it’s the quality of the revenue that matters. We base that revenue quality on the gross profit rates and the contribution margins at play.
Effective payback period versus cost of acquisition (CAC).
The threshold we’re looking for is CAC payback on a contribution-margin basis within six months or less.
Time to double the CAC investment.
In other words, how long does it take to make back 2x on your CAC on a contribution margin basis? Top performers usually take 12 months.
Recurring revenue models.
Companies with these models have customers who order on a recurring basis, including subscriptions. This leads to more predictability and generates a nice accretive effect.
Source of traffic.
Is there a healthy proportion of organic traffic, meaning companies are doing 50 percent or more of their traffic organically via word of mouth or referrals instead of relying on paid acquisition? Diversified paid acquisition.
We like to see the acquisition coming through multiple platforms. We’re really impressed when companies can find non-Facebook paid acquisition channels: e.g. influencer marketing, channels like Reddit, and user-generated content. We’ve seen many commerce startups get to a $50 million — even a $100 million — gross merchandise volume, but then, as they try to break through to that half billion or billion dollar revenue threshold, the model starts to fall apart as reliance on Facebook or Google starts to get costlier and costlier with diminishing returns.
Customer engagement mechanics.
This could be personal buyers, concierges, or communicating with customers directly via messaging platforms, text message, or chat, not just email blasts of coupons and promotional material.
Hopefully, this explains our excitement and why we’re making more bets in these areas with founders that get these three Cs, with the additional four Cs. We’re looking at new models that can stay well ahead and differentiated from the Amazons and Alibabas of the world.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"Andra Capital launches blockchain-based fund via Silicon Valley Coin | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/commerce/andra-capital-launches-blockchain-based-fund-via-silicon-valley-coin"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Andra Capital launches blockchain-based fund via Silicon Valley Coin Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Despite the massive growth of blockchain technology projects and associated cryptocurrencies, venture funding has primarily remained traditional. We’ve seen some examples of blockchain use within conventional VC firms, such as Spice VC , but otherwise, the industry hasn’t embrace tokenization.
To buck that trend, Andra Capital today announced the launch of its late-stage technology growth fund. The Andra Fund is tokenized and uses blockchain technology to enable broader access to investors around the globe.
“Leveraging blockchain technology is a very important part of our disruptive fund structure and business model,” managing partner Dr. Hermann Liu told me. “Our Silicon Valley Coin, based on blockchain technology, represents an ownership interest in the Andra Capital Fund. By being on the blockchain, Andra provides global investors access to the best technology companies in Silicon Valley — opportunities that are traditionally limited to affluent top-tier VCs in Silicon Valley, capable of writing significant check sizes.” The company has already secured more than $500 million in investment commitments and is well on its way to raising $1 billion. Commitments have come from traditional investors (such as institutions, hedge funds, family offices, and individuals), as well as token holders.
Providing access to the fund via a token solves the liquidity issue.
“On the blockchain, we’re able to securitize traditional illiquid assets into tradable security tokens,” managing partner Haydar Haba told me. “Rather than issue paper certificates to our investors, ownership in our fund is unitized and digitized through seamless smart contracts, which are embedded with legal structures, regulatory requirements, and ownership transfer conditions. Investors benefit from the option to hold our asset-backed security token, Silicon Valley Coin, like a stock or trade it at its current market value without having to wait 10 years for liquidity, as with traditional VCs.” Andra Capital is offering investment opportunities in its fund through its regulatory-compliant Silicon Valley Coin (SVC). SVC is open to permitted U.S. and global investors and gives each investor an ownership stake in the fund. SVC is a security token backed by real, legally registered securities in private, late-stage technology companies.
Many blockchain technology projects that have a security token are choosing to headquarter outside of the U.S. to limit regulation by the SEC, but that approach also restricts access to U.S. investors. Andra Capital is taking a different approach.
“We’re headquartered in San Francisco,” Liu said. “By strategic design, our fund is conservative and treated as a traditional security offering, so we remain compliant with U.S. regulatory requirements and are exempt from registration under Reg D requirements. The fund only accepts qualified investors in the U.S. and permitted investors globally. All investors are required to undergo KYC/AML and investor verification.” Andra Capital is further protecting itself via strategic alignments.
“To assure professional management, oversight, and transparency, we’re working with world-class partners, such as DLA Piper as our legal counsel, Deloitte as the fund auditor, and Duff & Phelps as the fund compliance and valuation partner,” Liu said. “We’re committed, confident, and obligated to stay on the right side of regulation.” So what types of startup will benefit from this fund, and how will the funds be allocated? “The majority of the fund — 80 percent — will be invested in high-growth, late-stage technology companies, often with an exit (either an IPO or acquisition) on the horizon,” Haba said. “Our investment candidates are companies that are backed by top-tier VCs, leaders in the industry and entering hyper-growth mode. We generally participate after Series B. Our late-stage investment thesis aims to generate consistent returns with a mitigated exposure to risk. At the same time, we allocate 20 percent of the fund to early-stage companies that are in the area of our domain expertise. This early and late-stage mix gives investors a balanced strategy and risk-return profile.” What’s next for SVC? “We are currently in our private, pre-sale round and are officially announcing our impact-innovation fund today,” Liu said. “Our security token offering is set for Summer 2018, where our Silicon Valley Coin will be listed in several security exchanges. We hope to open access and connect global investors with opportunities in Silicon Valley — everyone can be a Silicon Valley investor no matter where in the world they live. In our mind, Silicon Valley is not just a geographic location; it is also a mentality.” VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"The 7 stages of GDPR grief | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/business/the-7-stages-of-gdpr-grief"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest The 7 stages of GDPR grief Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Remember Y2K and the horror that hit the tech community when January 1, 2000 was approaching and everyone realized their 2-digit year data fields would revert to 1900? There was a mad scramble to update all systems in time. Well, May 25, 2018 represents another date of horror for the tech community. All of the systems we’ve built around handling personal data will need to be re-engineered to handle the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules that go into effect that day. That’s a lot to accomplish, with very little time left.
While the eve of the GDPR deadline may not start parties like we had back on New Year’s Eve 1999 — when people counted down to “the end of the world” — stakeholders in organizations across the globe will be experiencing a range of emotions as they make their way through the seven stages of GDPR grief at varying speeds.
Like Y2K, May 25 could come and go without repercussion if people work behind the scenes to make their organizations compliant. Unfortunately, most companies are in the earliest stage of grief – denial – believing that GDPR does not apply to them (if they even know what it is ). Denial rarely serves companies well. And in the case of GDPR non-compliance, it could cost them fines of up to 20 million euros ($24 million) or four percent of global annual turnover, whichever value is greater.
Luckily, there are sure-tell signs for each grief stage and advice to help individuals and their employers move through each (and fast): 1. Shock and denial If marketers close their eyes, GDPR enforcers can still see them, but companies in the shock-and-denial stage are being coy with GDPR. They are ignoring it, actively dismissing it, or even claiming they are unaware of the legislation.
This is the most dangerous stage, as it indicates no movement toward compliance, so company stakeholders need to educate themselves about GDPR, understand their responsibilities, and put processes in place to comply with consumers’ data requests and their right to be forgotten as well as other requirements.
2. Pain and guilt Organizations know the pain-and-guilt stage is affecting them if they are seeing GDPR as an unnecessary hassle on businesses. Pain-and-guilt dwellers are aware of GDPR but are hoping it goes away on its own. Word to the wise: It won’t.
GDPR is a multi-year effort to modernize and unify privacy laws to give consumers control over the data many organizations have collected without oversight, permission, and security for decades. Since the May deadline marks the end of a two-year post-adoption grace period (and several years of preparation before that), enforcement agencies will be ready to enforce from day one and no amount of internal pain and guilt within an organization will mitigate external penalties.
3. Anger and bargaining In this stage, conversations are starting to happen internally about bare-minimum effort. What if we just did this? Would it make us compliant? Those in the bargaining stage of GDPR grief are looking for the minimum they can get away with, like addressing server location but nothing else. GDPR does take a tiered approach to fines (e.g., a company can be fined two percent for not having their records in order), but disregard to any areas of compliance will result in continued trouble for a company.
4. Depression, reflection, and loneliness Stakeholders have reached the fourth stage when they know they need to do something to become GDPR compliant but do not fully understand what is required of them and where to turn for guidance. There is also likely a person or two within the company whose loneliness has set in as they try to make their colleagues aware of GDPR but are unsuccessful at helping them understand the magnitude of the legislation. These advocates of GDPR compliance may find themselves in countries outside of the EU where awareness is low and action is dismal. To help, these advocates should share with their teams that GDPR makes applicability very clear : “ it will apply to the processing of personal data by controllers and processors in the EU, regardless of whether the processing takes place in the EU or not.” In other words, if a company in the U.S., UK, China, Japan, or any other economy that is collecting and leveraging data on EU citizens, they must be compliant with GDPR for those EU consumers.
5. Upward turn Here, companies start to see progress since they have found the answers they are looking for but still have a murky path to compliance. They have visited eugdpr.org often, they have read all the industry blogs, and they have consulted those they do business with, but they still need to figure out actual steps toward compliance. This fifth stage is where many EU companies likely find themselves, as awareness is higher in these countries but action is still so-so. Rather than expecting to be fully compliant by May 25, 2018, for instance, 62 percent of surveyed companies are opting for a risk-based defensible position.
6. Reconstruction and working through In the second-to-last stage of GDPR grief, companies have their processes defined and are on offense (versus defense) when it comes to compliance. If required, for example, they have appointed a data protection officer (DPO) and are ready for the impending deadlines. Even in this stage, however, organizations may have lack of ownership over programs and inconsistencies in programs, but they are further ahead than most.
7. Acceptance and hope According to Deloitte, 61 percent of companies see further benefits of remediation activities beyond compliance, which supports the view that GDPR offers the ideal opportunity to view privacy as a business enabler. In this final stage of GDPR grief, companies have realized that a greater level of transparency between company and consumer will lead to a greater level of opt-in from those truly interested in a brand’s offerings and messaging. In this stage, companies are not afraid of empowered consumers; instead, they welcome the chance to speak to them through expressed – versus implied – intent.
The deadline for GDPR compliance is fast approaching, and it’s very likely that, in the early days of enforcement, large enterprises engaging in annoying and ruthless data marketing will be made an example of. Since individuals will have a clear and easy way to file a complaint, however, every organization needs to heed GDPR warnings and move through these grief stages quickly. It is the responsibility of employees, employers, and the businesses they work with to get on board with GDPR – like it’s 1999.
Chris Purcell is a Product Marketer for Episerver.
He’s on a mission to help businesses stop playing around with digital transformation and see real tangible ROI.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"SiOnyx Has Massive Kickstarter Success For World's First Day/Night Action Camera For Consumer Market, Turns Night Into Full-Color Daylight – Nearly 4X Goal in First 4 Days | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/business/sionyx-has-massive-kickstarter-success-for-worlds-first-day-night-action-camera-for-consumer-market-turns-night-into-full-color-daylight-nearly-4x-goal-in-first-4-days"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Press Release SiOnyx Has Massive Kickstarter Success For World’s First Day/Night Action Camera For Consumer Market, Turns Night Into Full-Color Daylight – Nearly 4X Goal in First 4 Days Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn In less than 3.5 hours, SiOnyx Passed Its $50K Goal; Aurora Features OLED Display, Ip67-Grade Waterproofing; Compass, GPS & WiFi Built-In + iOS / Android Liveview Apps BEVERLY, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–April 30, 2018– SiOnyx™ – a leader in infrared imaging technology – today announced that the Kickstarter™ launch for the SiOnyx Aurora, the only HD action video camera with true day and night color imaging, has blown past its $50k goal to achieve a monumental 3X past its target in just the first 4 days of its public debut.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180430006284/en/ Aurora Day/Night Vision Camera (Photo: Business Wire) The project is now at nearly $200k with 24 days to go. Other details: In less than 3.5 hours, SiOnyx passed its $50K goal In less than 48 hours, SiOnyx exceeded 200% of goal In less than 72 hours, Aurora became the #2 ranked product under the Design and Tech Category/Camera Category In less than 72 hours, Aurora became the #46 project overall, out of more than 3700 ongoing projects More than 400 backers and growing, from all over the world Available in Q3 of 2018 at a retail price of $799, Aurora is based on the SiOnyx Ultra Low Light technology that is protected by more than 40 patents and until now was only available in the highest-end night vision optics costing tens of thousands of dollars. This identical technology has now been cost-reduced for use in Aurora and other upcoming devices from SiOnyx and its partners.
SiOnyx has developed a new semiconductor process that dramatically enhances the infrared sensitivity of silicon-based imaging. Its ultra low light technology enables richly-defined color images and video during the day and twilight, combined with unmatched high-resolution viewing in near total darkness. Sample videos may be found at www.sionyx.com.
The SiOnyx Aurora is just under 8 ounces and sized to fit comfortably in one hand for easy operation.
Through the free companion apps on iOS™ and Android®, you can review your experiences in real-time or control the Aurora directly from your phone. Designed for an active outdoor lifestyle, Aurora is also fully certified with an IP67 waterproof rating – it is fully protected from dust and can also withstand being submerged in 1m (about 3.3 feet) of static water for up to 30 minutes.
Aurora offers transformative night video for a wide range of uses including hunting, fishing, boating, nature watching, emergency response and other activities where clear night-vision is of importance. A removable neck strap allows you to keep it accessible on any adventure. Aurora uses GPS combined with an accelerometer and compass to accurately guide your way, day or night.
Full specifications and pre-order information for Aurora may be found at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/189168434/aurora-worlds-1st-day-night-camera-with-true-night?ref=481014&token=eacfc7a1.
“We are both humbled and extremely excited by the incredible response Aurora has received in just the first few days of its Kickstarter,” said Stephen Saylor, President and CEO of SiOnyx. “Aurora is tapping into the massively under-served market for action cameras with real night vision at consumer prices and we are grateful to our current and future backers as we continue this journey together.” About SiOnyx : Founded in 2006 by Professor Eric Mazur and Dr. James Carey of Harvard University, SiOnyx™ has commercialized a patented semiconductor process that dramatically enhances the sensitivity of silicon-based photonics. SiOnyx’s platform represents a significant breakthrough in the development of smaller, lower cost, high-performing photonic devices in applications ranging from simple light detection to advanced digital imaging and more. The company markets its low-light technology under the XQE™ family of CMOS images sensors and has also entered the consumer electronics market with the launch of the Aurora day/night action camera.
SiOnyx is a trademark of SiOnyx, Inc. All other trademarks and registered trademarks previously cited are hereby recognized and acknowledged.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180430006284/en/ For SiOnyx Jonathan Hirshon [email protected] VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"Minim Raises $2.5M Seed Round to Secure the Internet of Things | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/business/minim-raises-2-5m-seed-round-to-secure-the-internet-of-things"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Press Release Minim Raises $2.5M Seed Round to Secure the Internet of Things Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Funding by Flybridge Capital Partners and Founder Collective enables new network management and security solutions for connected homes and ISPs BOSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–April 30, 2018– Minim , an IoT platform whose technology protects connected devices and assures fast WiFi in homes, today announced a $2.5M seed round of funding, led by Flybridge Capital Partners and Founder Collective.
Minim was established last year by Jeremy Hitchcock, former co-founder and CEO of Dyn (ACQ: Oracle), in response to the massive Mirai DDoS attack that took down Dyn, and several major internet services with it, in October 2016. The company will use the funding to develop its WiFi management and IoT security platform.
“As billions of IoT devices enter homes, consumers are sold on the expectations that their smart TVs can stream 4K video and their webcam isn’t spying on them,” said Hitchcock. “Unfortunately, reality can be very different. Meanwhile, as ISPs compete on WiFi quality, support, and service, they are wasting an estimated $1.2 billion on sending trucks and care reps to homes because they lack proper remote network visibility. Network care providers need more sophisticated applications to manage complex home networks and offer security solutions. This is what we are developing at Minim.” With this funding announcement, Minim is officially launching its connected home management and security solutions, which now include: a mobile app for consumers (available in the iTunes Store and Google Play Store), the Minim Care Portal for ISPs, and the Minim router agent. Minim’s core technology automatically fingerprints connected devices on home networks and dynamically develops a behavioral model of communications, enabling real-time performance optimization and security threat detection. The company is piloting solutions with ISPs and channel partners.
“We have been working with Minim for the past year and are excited about their approach to helping us better manage and secure home networks,” said Stephen Barraclough, General Manager of Burlington Telecom, a leading local Internet Service Provider in Vermont. “Minim understands the unique challenges service providers face supporting our customers’ increasingly complex home networks. Their tools are improving our interactions with customers and reducing truck rolls.” Headquartered in Manchester, New Hampshire, the team is made up of: founder/CEO Jeremy Hitchcock (formerly founder/CEO of Dyn); founder/COO Brian Kline (formerly VP of product at Time Warner Cable); founder/CMO Nicole Hayward (formerly CMO of Antidote and OnSIP); and VP Engineering Alec Rooney (formerly VP Engineering at Adored and Elbrys Networks (ACQ:Cisco)).
“While the consumer IoT market is exploding, issues and frustration with device and WiFi performance are mounting,” said David Aronoff, general partner, Flybridge Capital Partners. “You could not ask for a better team to address the challenges of this massive market. With proven track records in building scalable network and security platforms and delivering user-friendly applications in the internet sector, the Minim founding team is a rock star group. We believe in Minim’s vision of what to build, who to partner with, and how to tackle the complex IoT security and performance challenges ahead.” Minim’s launch coincides with several new developments in the IoT security space. Gartner has recently estimated that IoT security spending will reach $1.5B worldwide in 2018 and IoT connected devices will exceed 20 billion by 2020, doubling every two years. Just last month, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) cited that approximately 90% of consumers surveyed have deep concerns about the security and privacy of their information in their report, What the Internet of Things Means for Consumer Privacy.
“As everything from our televisions to toasters connects to the web, we believe that next-generation home security solutions like Minim are a must,” says David Frankel, Managing Partner at Founder Collective , an early stage venture capital firm with investments in Uber, SeatGeek, and BuzzFeed. “At Founder Collective, we partner with teams who are building something important and collaborative. We have found both qualities in the team at Minim, and we’re thrilled to have them join our collective community of founders.” To learn more about Minim, visit www.minim.co.
About Minim Minim is an IoT platform that enables and secures a better connected home. In a world where connected devices have outnumbered people, Minim’s self-learning platform employs Quantum Fingerprinting TM and behavioral models to detect threats before they become problems. Founded in 2017, Minim offers apps with usable security for consumers and their care providers to protect connected devices and optimize WiFi performance, leading to higher customer satisfaction. The company is now partnering with ISPs, care providers, router manufacturers, software developers, and IoT device manufacturers who want to help make home connectivity as safe as drinking water. To learn more, visit www.minim.co.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180430005106/en/ For Minim Nicole Hayward, 908-337-2481 [email protected] VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"Mercku launches M2 to support dozens of devices on home Wi-Fi | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/business/mercku-launches-m2-hive-to-your-whole-home-wi-fi-connectivity"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Mercku launches M2 to support dozens of devices on home Wi-Fi Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Our homes are expected to get loaded up with internet of things (IoT) devices in the coming years. So Mercku is launching a Wi-Fi router and accessories to be able to handle the connectivity for dozens of these devices.
The Waterloo, Canada-based company sees more households installing voice assistants, smart thermostats, and other devices aimed at making our lives simpler. But together they can cause an internet logjam. The M2 Wi-Fi router and M2 Hive Wi-Fi system are aimed at giving those devices the speed, control, and range they need across the whole home.
The company has begun selling its products on Indiegogo.
“Too many households try to get by with slow, spotty Wi-Fi. If you try to upgrade, you’re met with routers that are cobbled together to maximize specs rather than actual performance,” said Mercku CEO Alex Qi, in a statement. “From its design to its simplicity to its reliable performance, the M2 Hive offers the best Wi-Fi connectivity you can get. It’s built on superior, patented technology, including our antenna and transceiver, which reduces noise and improves transmission to power the smart home without the lag and dead spots of other systems.” Each M2 performs 10 percent to 20 percent better than the current best in class models, and twice as fast as the industry average, the company claims. It also supports up to 60 devices.
The device is designed so it doesn’t have to be hidden in a corner, and it’s simple to set up. Mercku said it is plug-and-play, and it covers up to 3,000 square feet of space, depending on the layout. It can also cover more areas of a house through mesh and hive configurations.
For large homes or for consumers with particular needs, coverage can be augemented by adding a few small nodes. The M2 Hive includes an M2 and four Bee nodes, a system that can cover up to 5,000 square feet and goes around walls, offering connection speeds that support 8K streaming throughout a house. Each node is light and portable and plugs into outlets throughout the home to form a strong mesh network and eliminate dead spots.
Above: M2 Hive and Bee Mercku said you can use the app to help pinpoint bottlenecks and manage users. You can limit bandwidth for specific devices, so a child can’t watch streaming TV and movies at night, for example. You can also block devices as needed if one is using too much bandwidth.
The app makes possible parental controls and leverages the super elliptical security algorithm — used by the most secure smartphones and approved by the NSA — for security. Updates are made automatically over the air to keep the M2 up to date in both its features and security.
“We have completely rethought the Wi-Fi router from start to finish and created a complete system from the ground up, engineering the most important components ourselves to ensure they work in harmony to perform better than anything else on the market,” said Qi.
The M2 will be available on Indiegogo starting at $99, and the M2 Hive (1 x M2 and 4 Bees) starting at $249. The campaign will run from April 30 to June 30. Initial backers can expect to receive their M2 unit in early July.
Mercku said it has sold more than 5 million units through telecom providers in Asia.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"How to force Windows 10 to download the April 2018 Update | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/business/how-to-force-windows-10-to-download-the-april-2018-update"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages How to force Windows 10 to download the April 2018 Update Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
Learn more.
Microsoft today started to push out the free Windows 10 April 2018 Update.
As always, this will be a gradual rollout, meaning not everyone will get the latest and greatest Windows 10 update on day one. Microsoft will slowly ramp up the release via Windows Update starting next week, but there’s no guarantee about the timing of when you will get it. If you don’t want to wait, you can get the latest and greatest update today.
The best way to do so is to use the Windows 10 Update Assistant. Otherwise, you will have to wait for Windows Update to serve the April 2018 Update to you. That’s the safe way — and the method Microsoft recommends — but if you’re OK disregarding this advice, fire up the Windows 10 computer you want to update. Next, head to microsoft.com/software-download/windows10 and click the blue “Update Now” button as pictured above. This will download the Windows 10 Update Assistant.
After opening the downloaded file (hit “Yes” if prompted to make changes to your device), you should see a screen like the one below. Click on the “Update Now” button on the bottom right.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! The assistant will perform basic checks on your hardware and start the download process after 10 seconds if everything looks good (it should be if you already have Windows 10 installed).
You can keep using your computer while the update downloads, choose when to actually update, and roll it back if you do not like the April 2018 Update.
After verifying the download, the assistant will start preparing the update process automatically.
The assistant will automatically restart your computer after a 30-minute countdown. The actual installation can take up to 90 minutes. Click the “Restart now” button in the bottom right or the “Restart later” in the bottom left to delay it.
After your computer restarts (a few times), Windows 10 will go through the final steps to finish installing the update.
Finally, Edge will open up and greet you with a “Welcome to the April update” message. Installing major Windows 10 updates is a long process, but Microsoft has had quite a bit of practice now, and for most users it goes rather smoothly.
Given that the update is free, there is no reason for you not to get it as soon as possible. If you have trouble getting it manually, however, just wait until it is offered to you via Windows Update.
GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
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The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"Google develops cheap, AI-assisted controller tracking for VR headsets | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/arvr/google-develops-cheap-ai-assisted-controller-tracking-for-vr-headsets"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Google develops cheap, AI-assisted controller tracking for VR headsets Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Google trains a VR headset to do 6DOF position sensing with AI assistance.
Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Though it’s currently available in tethered VR headsets using position-tracking sensors for controllers, six degrees of freedom (6DOF) controller tracking is a holy grail of sorts for standalone VR headsets. As discovered by Adobe’s Dimitri Diakopoulos and noticed by RoadtoVR , Google has come up with an inexpensive AI-assisted way to add 6DOF controller tracking capabilities to a standalone headset — full details of which are included in a recent Google research paper.
The trick begins by using the same two fisheye cameras already found in the standalone VR headset to additionally track the positions of the user’s hands and arms. On the software side, it relies on a neural network trained with hand, arm, and controller positions to estimate the real-world controller’s unknown location within the user’s known grasp. A dataset of 547,000 stereo image pairs was used to train the network, compiled from 20 users doing 13 movements in varied lighting.
“Our key observation is that users’ hands and arms provide excellent context for where the controller is in the image,” wrote the Google researchers, “and are robust cues even when the controller itself might be occluded. To simplify the system, we use the same cameras for headset 6-DoF pose tracking on mobile HMDs as our input. In our experiments, they are a pair of stereo monochrome fisheye cameras. We do not require additional markers or hardware beyond a standard IMU based controller.” Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! At the moment, Google is able to determine the controller’s position within a mean 33.5 millimeter error rate — only 1.32 inches — when it knows hand and arm positions. Presently, the system runs at 30FPS on a single mobile CPU core and doesn’t require any object to be glowing to track its location properly. But the company believes it can optimize the system for faster and more accurate tracking, as well as to expand it to controller-less hand tracking. Google is expected to have more to say on this at its I/O developer conference, which starts on May 8.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"Will machine learning be the death of content A/B testing? | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/will-machine-learning-be-the-death-of-content-a-b-testing"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Sponsored Will machine learning be the death of content A/B testing? Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Presented by Marketo Machine learning is changing the content marketing game. With the democratization of artificial intelligence tools — meaning you don’t need a data science degree to implement machine learning technology — you have at your fingertips a whole new world of content optimization, customization, personalization and relevance, at scale, whatever industry you’re in.
That means you’re able to deliver more engaging and meaningful content for your customers, with carefully crafted content style and beguiling calls to action at the right time and with the right cadence.
You’ve already got a vast volume of data about your customers and your market at hand; even more data is being produced and for sale every day. Machine learning is the tool that unlocks the underlying insights that data leads to, allowing you to map data and content to the right audiences.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! And once people engage with your content, machine learning can help you make sense of the data you gather, revealing what’s working, what’s not — and how to turn that into insight that optimizes your campaign and turn setbacks into leaps forward for not just your current campaigns, but future ones, allowing you to deliver truly personalized experiences at scale.
Unified theory of content marketing Machine learning offers a huge leap forward in content marketing, which in most organizations tends to be strictly siloed — social marketers might be coordinating with the research team and the content marketing team, but marketers running each channel have a different — sometimes significantly different — view of who their customer is and what they want, across each of their individual campaigns. And that can lead to dissonance for your customers.
And then there’s machine learning, which gathers together all the data your marketing campaigns and research uncovers, in every channel, from email to social, search, discovery, promotion, and more. Better yet, it breaks down the silos between all these channels, giving you a unified view of your entire customer base. Machine learning can link the propensity and behaviors of your customers at all points of contact, allowing you to develop a truly comprehensive view of what your marketing target audience is.
Eliminating the guesswork Getting ready to launch a new campaign? Machine learning offers you a perspective on and insight into customer engagement: a factual, data-driven view, in one place, of what worked in each and every one of these channels. From there, you’re not only able to tailor your campaigns based on your gut instincts, but work with the insights and feedback that your machine learning solution offers, from statistical significance to actual feedback and suggestions for future campaigns.
Companies like Marketo are now deeply invested in machine learning in the marketing space, working with customers to uncover everything that a machine learned algorithm can offer a marketer, says Arun Anantharaman, chief product officer at the company. Marketers are particularly eager to replace hunches with data. As Anantharaman explains, “One of our corporate marketing customers said AI is taking the guesswork out of determining what content will resonate for each person that interacts with their brand.” Companies are now moving beyond A/B testing — up till now the primary way to understand the impact of content — to a place where data-fed algorithms are achieving significant results for something called Content AI.
“Just tell me what customer you’re going after, what the demographic and firmographic is, and then we’ll recommend, as a starting place, the 15 pieces that will perform the best of the thousand pieces of content in your repository,” Anantharaman says. “That eliminates two months of guesswork for marketers, testing what pieces from that huge repository of data would actually work.” From there, machine learning adds an automation piece, enabling a campaign to cycle through those 15 content focus areas for those campaigns. One client saw a 75 percent direct lead conversion for things like form submissions, Anantharaman says.
Getting started Machine learning works when you have a lot of data and a lot of content, which means it’s not the perfect solution for every company. For smaller organizations just starting out, machine learning may not be the right solution. Their repository of data and content may simply not be enough.
And it’s also a tool that needs to be integrated fully into your marketing strategy. Machine learning insights aren’t one-and-done; they’re meant to continuously learn from ongoing data, offering smarter insights every time.
And that can often mean creating a whole new role within your company: putting the right people in place. It requires marketers who understand what needs to happen around personalization, around the notion of specific audience hyper-segmentation. They need to focus on mapping audiences to content to get outcomes you couldn’t have previously achieved.
But embedding machine learning and AI within your existing workflows doesn’t mean you need a data scientist on staff. Advances in machine learning technology mean that solutions can be tailored to specific companies, capabilities pre-filtered to capture what a marketer actually wants: data about open clicks, email activities, behavioral data, website actions, ad network engagement across the web, Facebook lead ads, LinkedIn lead generation ads, event engagement, and more. All of it presented to you in an easy to read format.
Then creating seamless integration with your own content, so that activating machine learning insights — a), what’s the right piece of content for my audience, and b), what’s the right audience? — can be literally as easy as clicking a checkbox.
What’s next? Anantharaman says after Content AI, the next step is Audience AI — meaning that the marketer gains leverage to drive campaigns and identify audiences that have converted and had success in the past. The machine learning would scour your database for lookalike targets in real time, saving the marketer hours, days, and even months of time. With AI, that means producing a list of people that have a high chance of converting from a database in the hundreds of thousands, or maybe even the millions. With machine learning, you’ll be able to understand the success you had with previous campaigns, map that success to the attributes you want for a particular profile, and then generate the audiences that you need for the next campaign, in seconds. Something that could never be done manually.
For more on how Marketo is using Artificial Intelligence in Marketing, visit https://www.marketo.com/ai Sponsored posts are content produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. Content produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact [email protected].
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
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"The Hive raises $26.5 million fund for enterprise AI startups | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/the-hive-raises-26-5-million-fund-for-enterprise-ai-startups"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages The Hive raises $26.5 million fund for enterprise AI startups Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
The Hive , a venture-backed accelerator for early-stage startups, today announced it has raised a $26.5 million fund to launch enterprise AI startups.
The round will be used to fund seven or more companies with up to $2 million in seed funding, cofounder and managing director T. M. Ravi told VentureBeat in a phone interview.
The Hive differentiates itself from other venture capital-backed startup accelerators by acting as co-creators with startups from day zero, Ravi said.
“We see AI driving the autonomous enterprise, and so all of our companies are thematically aligned with that big vision,” Ravi said. “ As AI grows in maturity, our opportunity is to create startups that drive business process automation [and] business process transformation, leverage chatbots to automate interaction with people, and [drive] overall cognitive enterprise applications. The time is right for this change in the enterprise.” VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Capital raised for the fund comes from Verizon Ventures, GE, Rockwell Automation, and March Capital Partners, among other participants. Investors in the fund will also a play a role in the co-creation of startups.
“I think they have all come around to the point of view that if they don’t innovate they’re going to die, and so corporations are collaborating with us at every phase; they’re co-creating companies with us,” he said.
With $30 million raised to date, this is The Hive’s third fund for startups since the company first began in 2012. Among 24 investments, six led to acquisitions, including Nurego and Perspica, ML analytics companies acquired last year by GE Digital and Cisco, respectively.
The Hive has nine employees and is based in Palo Alto, California.
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"Starship Technologies launches autonomous robot delivery services for campuses | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/starship-technologies-launches-autonomous-robot-delivery-services-for-campuses"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Starship Technologies launches autonomous robot delivery services for campuses Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
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Starship Technologies , a robotics startup created by Skype’s cofounders , has launched a large-scale commercial autonomous delivery service aimed at corporate and academic campuses in Europe and the U.S.
Founded out of Estonia, Starship Technologies has initiated myriad autonomous delivery trials over the past few years, covering food and other small packages, in more than 100 cities. Though the robots are autonomous, they can also be monitored and controlled remotely by humans if the situation requires it. The company was created by Skype’s Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis in 2014, and it has raised around $17 million in venture capital funding.
The latest program could become one of the largest autonomous delivery services globally, with little armies of robots deployed across campus in a range of situations, including delivering food or transferring goods. The company said it plans to launch around 1,000 robots by the end of this year on a number of as-yet-undisclosed campuses.
Above: Starship Technologies robot on Intuit’s Mount View campus The launch is an extension of an existing pilot Starship has been running in conjunction with food service giant Compass Group on Intuit’s Mountain View premises. Indeed, workers there have been able to order food through Starship’s mobile app , which is handy, given that the campus covers around 4.3 acres — a long distance to traverse for a quick bite.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Some might worry that such a service gives workers one less reason to move from their desks, and that is certainly a potential outcome here: Why waste 30 minutes traveling to and from the canteen and waiting in line when your meal can be delivered more or less to your desk? On the flip side, others will argue that this system gives workers more time to do enjoyable activities on their breaks. Plus, it may give employees who would otherwise be inclined to skip meals in order to finish their work an opportunity to actually eat something. Indeed, according to Intuit, one of the most popular delivery items so far has been breakfast sandwiches. “I normally miss breakfast because I’m in a rush on the way to work, but this service has allowed me to have breakfast again, by bringing it to me,” noted Intuit life cycle marketing manager Ha Ly.
Plus, the purpose of Starship’s robots isn’t exclusively food, meaning some campuses may use them purely for delivering supplies.
“The rollout of Starship’s campus offering represents a major milestone in the development of delivery robots,” said Starship CEO Ahti Heinla. “Today’s announcement signals the next step in Starship’s journey. By providing campuses with our platform, we are leading the deployment of autonomous delivery at scale worldwide.” Other players in the burgeoning robotic last-mile delivery space include Marble, which recently raised a fresh $10 million in funding from big names such as Tencent. Nuro, which launched out of stealth back in January with $92 million in funding, is building road-faring machines more akin to cars.
In addition to its main engineering base in Tallinn, Estonia, Starship Technologies counts offices in London (U.K.), Redwood City (U.S.), Washington D.C. (U.S.), and Hamburg (Germany).
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"PwC: Lack of trust in AI assistants like Alexa could hinder adoption | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/pwc-lack-of-trust-in-ai-assistants-like-alexa-could-hinder-adoption"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages PwC: Lack of trust in AI assistants like Alexa could hinder adoption Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Tech leaders like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella argue that voice and conversational AI represent a new age of computing, but a survey and report released today by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) found that poor understanding of what AI assistants can do and a general lack of trust could hamper growth of assistants like Alexa and Siri.
“The adoption numbers, the percentage of folks who have bought a voice device in the last year — I think in some ways it will speed up faster than we expect. But until the education gap is closed, until folks trust it, and until they’re consistently delivering in a reliable way, I don’t think it’s going to happen overnight,” PwC director CJ Bangah told VentureBeat in a phone interview.
Results showed a generally positive trajectory for virtual assistants.
General knowledge of the existence of digital assistants is high, according to the survey conducted in February of 1,000 U.S. residents. Seventy-two percent of respondents said they have used digital assistants like Apple’s Siri or Samsung’s Bixby.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Awareness of devices that allow users to interact with a virtual assistant remains highest on smartphones, followed by tablets, personal computers, and smart speakers.
The majority of respondents 18 to 64 said they use virtual assistants on a daily basis and plan to increase the amount of voice computing they do in the future. This would square with other surveys that say there will be a smart speaker in the majority of U.S. households by 2022.
Among users who interact with an AI assistant at least once a day, 59 percent ages 18 to 24 said they use AI assistants daily, while 65 percent ages 25 to 49 said the same.
“I expected to see greater demographic differences in our data, and we didn’t, so we really saw that even though younger consumers influence voice devices and assistants being in the homes, when you look at the frequency of use, it’s actually pretty similar across age groups,” Bangah said.
However, three out of four respondents said they only use voice assistance at home, citing a lack of privacy in public. That’s part of the reason Google Assistant and Siri both began to allow users to type queries last year.
Among the 18 percent of survey respondents who said they don’t own a device with a digital assistant, more than half said they were concerned about their privacy.
Amazon, Google, and others may be investing heavily in attracting developers to build third-party ecosystems, but the survey found that day-to-day usage is still highest for performing fairly basic tasks.
Roughly one in three respondents said they use voice assistants daily to play music, check the news or weather, or carry out queries they would have typed into a search engine. Alarms and timers are also regularly set with AI assistants.
Usage and adoption of more complex features could increase, Bangah said, by building trust with more consistent user experiences for existing assistant users.
“I think there’s kind of a parallel path of yes, there’s an opportunity to unlock additional users, but I actually think the bigger opportunity is in getting those that are using it to use it more, and that’s where trust comes in,” Bangah said.
In voice shopping, a form of commerce estimated to grow to $40 billion by 2022 , 3 of 4 consumers said they have or would consider voice shopping in the future. Among those who have made orders with their voice, transactions are most likely for delivery or takeout food, groceries, and books.
Of the 25 percent who have no plans to shop with their voice in the future, more than 90 percent said a lack of trust was a factor.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"How Canada's AI community can build on its current momentum | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/how-canadas-ai-community-can-build-on-its-current-momentum"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest How Canada’s AI community can build on its current momentum Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Toronto’s status as a burgeoning tech and artificial intelligence hub recently received a huge stamp of validation. The community made the final list of 20 cities in the running for Amazon’s HQ2, earning that distinction without offering Amazon any tax breaks or financial incentives.
Being a tech torch bearer is nothing new for Canada. In the early 2000s, BlackBerry and Nortel held sizable market shares in smartphones and telecom, respectively. Not long after that, though, an inability to gain a competitive advantage closed the door on each brand’s chance to dominate the marketplace.
AI presents an opportunity for Canada to strengthen its standing in the global tech sector, but the country must learn from past mistakes. To elevate Canada’s AI profile and continue to attract the Fortune 500s of the world, Canadian tech entrepreneurs must think globally, invest in their natural talent resources, and fight the complacency that plagued the BlackBerrys and Nortels of the past.
How the north can keep moving up The Amazon HQ2 news is just one part of Canada’s promising tech trajectory. An International Data Corp. report recognized five Canadian AI vendors for their technological innovation and promising new business models, while The Vector Institute, a program of the University of Toronto, recently received a $5 million contribution from Google.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Backed by a federal government that supports advanced AI interdisciplinary frameworks, Canada should approach its technological renaissance from a creative perspective, rather than a purely algorithmic one. Here are four ways the ecosystem of Canadian tech leaders can build on the current momentum to establish the country’s international tech footprint: 1. Think globally Canadian entrepreneurs don’t have the funding or the risk tolerance of American companies, which puts them in a more local mindset. Now that the ecosystem of AI and data innovation is more global, Canadian entrepreneurs should expand that local mentality and use global partnerships to scale quicker.
The U.S., for example, is Canada’s top trading partner and closest neighbor and is currently enjoying a data science boom.
A partnership with the U.S. could help Canada leverage its own AI strengths and present a united front against global competitors such as China that invest more in the industry.
Partnerships with U.S. companies give Canadian AI outlets the chance to get out of their own backyards. These unions should shine a global light on the resources and potential the Canadian AI community has at its disposal.
2. Strike fast You may remember when Corel started what appeared to be a very successful Linux project. In the end, however — in spite of a desktop publishing system that was ahead of Adobe — the company was unable to execute as quickly as its American counterparts.
Corel’s missed chance reads similarly to BlackBerry’s and should serve as a warning to Canadian AI leaders about the dangers of procrastination.
Canadian companies need to realize that their opportunities often come with expiration dates, and they should strive to meet these deadlines by acting quickly and developing a more advanced product mindset to keep Canada’s tech businesses and ecosystem at the forefront.
3. Proactively train talent The best resource on-the-rise entrepreneurial communities possess is talent. The STEM talent coming out of Canada’s university and research fields is second to none internationally, yet graduates tend to migrate elsewhere to make their mark.
It’s imperative that leaders recruit, train, and incentivize these potential assets if they want to retain them. To do this, leaders should give talent opportunities to demonstrate their tech and AI research and quickly deploy it to wider audiences. This isn’t just a chance for talent to learn how to commercialize their findings, it also shows them that their ideas can grow within Canada’s tech ecosystem.
I teach a class at Toronto’s Ryerson University called Super Course, which partners tech-focused students with peers from digital media, new media, media production, and computer science. Students build functioning prototypes, then work within their teams to learn how to market said prototype to its fullest potential. Avenues like this give students access to real-world experiences and data and connect them with a startup community that could inspire them to set some professional roots locally.
4. Encourage healthy domestic competition Though the estimated $260 million raised by Canadian AI startups in 2017 suggests that Canada’s AI scene is on an upward trajectory, it’s no time to get complacent. In fact, now is the perfect time to take advantage of that momentum.
That starts with building healthy AI competition throughout all of Canada’s universities and research institutes. This sense of competition — present at Stanford, Columbia, MIT, and other U.S. universities — doesn’t really exist among Canada’s higher education institutions at this time.
With AI still in its infancy, the Canadian government can cultivate a culture that breeds different AI philosophies through competition and innovation. The country can also create an environment in which institutions like Ryerson University and the University of Toronto use grants, fellowships, and other benchmarks to incentivize research talent. This approach would allow universities to establish distinctive identities, put out better work, and continue to establish the country’s relevance in the global AI landscape.
Canada has the resources and the momentum to build on its profile as an emerging AI hub. However, cities must think globally, nurture talent, and encourage competitive growth to fulfill that promise.
Hossein Rahnama is a recognized figure in ubiquitous computing and is the founder and CEO of Flybits , a cloud-based, context-as-a-service solution with offices in Toronto, Redwood City, and London.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"Bots are not a cure-all for hate speech on social media | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/bots-are-not-a-cure-all-for-hate-speech-on-social-media"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest Bots are not a cure-all for hate speech on social media Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Facebook’s recent struggles with data and user privacy come at a terrible time for them. While the privacy of their users should be of utmost importance, they’ve also had to work on new technology that addresses concerns around brand and user safety when it comes to hateful content.
In fact, the E.U. has already considered measures and legislation to crack down on hate speech on online platforms and communities such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. This raises an important question: How do you police a platform with over two billion users who generate 510,000 comments every 60 seconds? During his congressional testimony, Mark Zuckerberg offered this simple answer to the question of how Facebook would regulate hateful content: bots. His comment suggested a challenge AI and machine learning engineers have been trying to tackle — using AI to crack down on problems around hate speech. But as we look toward the limits of technology, how realistic is that? A primer on neural networks Designing a neural net for filtering hate speech is not hard in principle. As an engineer, I would go about this by first showing the AI examples of hate speech and non-hate speech during training, then let it get to work. This attempt to teach the AI would only work in the domain I trained it in, so as new political and social issues came up, the hate-speech filter would start to fall short.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! The other option would be to use unsupervised learning techniques. With this approach, the bot would learn to find and censor hate speech based on users’ reactions online. An important thing to note is that this avenue would be vulnerable to coordinated attacks. For example, if you and your friends started tagging articles and comments about healthy eating as “hate speech,” then an unsupervised AI would start learning to filter out any mention of vegetables as “hateful.” We watched this scenario play out with Microsoft’s experimental bot, Tay, which started spouting racist and offensive dialogue as a result of many users feeding her offensive source material.
Virtual whack-a-mole A confounding factor in designing hate-speech-filtering bots is humans themselves. As a platform starts to filter certain types of messages, people find ways to get around them and new avenues for hate speech appear. This is similar to how Google PageRank changed the way we write content online and bred its own field called search engine optimization, or SEO. Broad and general filters across social media will cause creators of hate speech to change their messaging to sidestep these filters.
By now, you may be asking, “Can’t AI overcome that?” Maybe, someday. This is a possibility we’re exploring by using adversarial neural networks — exposing bots to an AI-powered “adversary.” It’s a promising field of research, but it still has a long way to go, especially in the field of language and sentiment detection. It’s quite interesting to see how we can fool neural nets because they fail in ways humans just don’t understand.
In many ways, the metrics Facebook uses to determine if something is hateful or not will come to define the behaviors of people using the platform. Peddlers of hate will appropriate new words and language to convey their messages and bypass the filters. We need to remain true to a set definition of hate speech as we work through implementing bots to curb it on social platforms. There’s a very human element to this that we cannot ignore.
When Zuckerberg says we’ll have much better bots to deal with this problem in 5-10 years, he isn’t wrong. Technology is changing and evolving very quickly and researchers will make advances during that timeline. The problem is, we don’t know how good our technology will be at doing these things in five years. We especially don’t know how the problem of hate speech will change as we apply these filters to social media.
Bots and AI will provide a huge leg up on detecting and filtering hate speech online in the future, but they’re not a silver-bullet solution. Even without AI, humans haven’t done a great job at defining what hate speech is and what it isn’t. Assuming that AI will answer these philosophical questions for us is naive. Bots won’t be able to clearly define the boundaries between hate speech and free speech until we humans can as well.
Eric Moller is the CTO of Atomic X , a Toronto-based firm that offers AI consulting and custom development.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"AI entrepreneurs: 3 things to check before you pursue a customer | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/ai-entrepreneurs-3-things-to-check-before-you-pursue-a-customer"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest AI entrepreneurs: 3 things to check before you pursue a customer Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Not all applications are ready for AI, despite recent major advances in the field and enabling infrastructure. Anxiety over the prospect of being disrupted is prompting leaders in all industries to experiment with AI-powered solutions. This makes it difficult for aspiring entrepreneurs to distinguish C-suite curiosity from a long-term intention to buy.
If AI startups want to move their work beyond the pilot stage toward sustainable, long-term growth, they should avoid chasing opportunities where the stakeholders are not culturally ready for AI, or where more effective technology could be applied. Before you even start working with a potential customer’s data, you need to understand the ABCs of AI-readiness: Acceptance, Better Solutions, and Costs.
1. Is there societal acceptance of your AI? AI technologies able to unlock significant value have already been around for decades, but few companies have adopted it. This is because adopting AI depends on both trust and risk. The more closely AI affects vital outcomes such as a revenue or human health and safety, the more previous exposure to AI end users will need in order to be receptive to the tech.
Gradual exposure to successful AI applications in daily life, or as part of trivial workflows, builds trust. For example, AI algorithms encourage us to revisit abandoned online shopping carts every day, so adopting AI-based software to make our jobs in enterprise sales and marketing easier seems like a natural extension. A nuclear engineer, however, has a wider mental gulf to bridge in imagining how the tech behind her glitchy Nest thermostat could safely automate procedures in her nuclear power plant without extremely close supervision.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Above: The AI risk curve Acceptance of AI follows the AI risk curve, which tracks AI acceptance as it graduates from low-risk consumer applications to the enterprise over time. Early successful applications of AI in enterprise packaged the AI as an enhancement layer over familiar workflow tools; if the AI failed to perform, the user would still have a functioning tool. As enterprises become more familiar with AI over time, it will become more central to their solutions. Eventually, enterprises will accept new applications that are only possible with AI. If AI companies can demonstrate proven results over and over on the same application in the same vertical, they move potential customers further along the risk curve.
Also, try to define an accepted entry point. For example, one AI startup I’ve tracked found that hospitals were not comfortable today buying their AI-based product that predicts whether patients will need surgery, but one hospital was interested in using that same technology to make sure a doctor sees those patients sooner. After repackaging their algorithm, the startup was able to convert several pilots into paying customers. If the target customer is not ready for the initlal application of your technology, decide if you can extract enough value in the near term to have a viable business model until societal acceptance improves for the other use cases of your model.
Beyond an enterprise’s overall readiness to trust AI, startups face another cultural risk: hard-coded inefficiencies. As much as engineers would like to think otherwise, not all inefficiencies are operational or logistical. Many inefficiencies may persist for political reasons, even when it’s obvious that getting rid of the efficiency would bring cost savings. Procurement is one area where those inefficiencies are common.
A couple of startups I’m tracking that are applying AI to optimize hospital supply chains are particularly vulnerable to this dynamic: A hospital might stock the same scalpel from five different brands at varying price points because each surgeon prefers a different brand. Even though hospital CFOs know that simplifying inventory would enable bulk order savings, they accommodate each surgeon’s preferences for fear of losing them to another hospital. If the cost savings achieved from gauzes, sponges, and other less polarizing supplies are not sufficiently large, the startups will have trouble finding customers. Similar dynamics may also exist in other industries where a star engineer or salesperson may insist the organization buy a suboptimal product because that is what he or she prefers to use. In order to retain these high performers, the organization may turn a blind eye to the inefficiency.
In the process of exploring product-market fit, AI startups should make sure they understand the motivations of other decision-makers beyond the immediate end user of the product. Beyond understanding who makes purchasing decisions, it is also important to know the underlying reasons these decisions are made and why any inefficiency persists.
2. Are non-AI solutions better? Not all problems are most effectively solved with AI. Despite increasing democratization of cutting-edge algorithms, AI systems remain expensive to build. Depending on the use case, the AI model might require a significant volume of training data before it reaches the minimum algorithmic performance (MAP) required to deploy with early customers, which will delay the startup’s go-to-market.
Implementing AI-powered software isn’t as simple as running an installation package. It requires thorough data preparation, intensive algorithm performance monitoring, and, for many use cases, significant customization before it can deliver value to its users. In many use cases, humans or a simple rules-based automation system can deliver value faster than AI.
These tradeoffs are particularly true for multiple startups applying AI to customer support: AIs can answer as much as 90 percent of questions, but it is still more efficient to send the remaining long tail of infrequent questions and edge cases to human agents. The startups end up frustrating their customers because much fewer support tickets are automatically resolved than the startup suggested when they made the sale. The flowchart below offers a framework for finding AI-appropriate opportunities.
As frequently as AI may be referenced on earnings calls, enterprise adoption of any solution ultimately depends on the ROI it delivers to its customers. While many business users are willing to experiment with AI today, the solutions that deliver meaningful value quickly will be the ones to stick once the AI hype has waned.
3. Will the rollout costs kill your startup? Models trained on data that is correlated with, instead of predictive of, the desired outcome can bring expensive and disappointing surprises to aspiring AI entrepreneurs. Depending on how tightly correlated the input is to the outcome, controlling the input may have no effect on the outcome at all. The more complex a system is, the more AI is vulnerable to confounding factors.
Healthcare applications of AI, especially AI-powered diagnostic decision support tools, are one category particularly vulnerable to confounding factors. Many companies in this space have found incredible experimental gains in patient survival rates by monitoring patients weekly using scans or biopsies and applying AI to track the subtle changes in the disease over time. These tests are often expensive, invasive, and not always conclusive, so doctors currently order them at quarterly intervals or even less. Is the additional expense and discomfort to the patient caused by this close monitoring worth the increased chances of survival? A potential confounding factor in that AI system comes from the fact that patients who are undergoing these weekly evaluations are also having their health status recorded in non-invasive ways, such as blood pressure, weight, and basic blood tests, all of which may also hold subtle clues about disease progression. All of that additional data is used in the algorithm. Could the AI be trained just as effectively on these less invasive data points, for much less cost and stress inflicted on the patient? To tease out confounding correlations from truly predictive inputs, entrepreneurs must run experiments early on to examining the performance of the AI model with and without the input in question. In extreme cases, AI systems built around a correlative relationship might be more expensive, and achieve lower margins, than AI systems built around the actually predictive inputs.
On the data integration front, startups face another cost issue. Many sectors have only recently begun to digitize, and valuable historic and current data might be in difficult-to-extract formats such as handwritten scribbles, unstructured observation logs, or PDFs. In order to capture this data, startups may have to spend significant manpower on low-margin data preparation services before AI systems can be deployed.
The more complex a model is, the more sources of data it may draw from. Depending on how the data is captured and organized, the AI engineer may have to spend a significant amount of time building each integration before the model can be fully functional. Some industries are built around monolithic and idiosyncratic tech stacks, making integrations difficult to reuse across customers. If integration service providers are not available, the AI startup may find itself mired in building custom integrations for every new customer before it can deploy its AI system. The way data is structured might also vary from one customer to the next, requiring AI engineers to spend additional hours normalizing the data or converting it to a standardized schema so the AI model can be applied.
Looking ahead AI powered software holds the tantalizing potential to unlock new heights of performance for all industries. As history shows, however, technological performance alone does not drive adoption. Even if the technology can return significant value to the end user, organizational culture, the flexibility of human workers, and costs-to-deploy all affect whether that technology has long-term viability in any given application. We can expect to see these limitations evolve as AI applications evolve, society becomes more comfortable with the technology, and the tech itself improves. For AI startups, finding the right positioning given these ABCs is imperative to an effective go-to-market strategy.
Ivy Nguyen is an investor at Zetta Venture Partners.
Mark Gorenberg is Managing Director at Zetta Venture Partners.
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"4 ways AI could revamp the role of the kitchen | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/4-ways-ai-could-revamp-the-role-of-the-kitchen"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest 4 ways AI could revamp the role of the kitchen Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Think about how much time you spend in your home. Then consider how much of that time you are in the kitchen: cooking, eating, entertaining, and so on.
Artificial intelligence has made its way into the kitchen to tackle tasks from serving up recipes to reordering groceries, and new technologies are being developed at a rapid pace. Staying up to date on the latest developments in kitchen AI will enable you to experience the shift firsthand.
1. Innovation follows the money A kitchen remodel can return anywhere from 70 to 120 percent at resale of the home. Thus, when homeowners invest in a kitchen, they often aren’t afraid to spend.
This gives companies the freedom to invest in kitchen technology without worrying too much about price. Since innovation follows money, you can expect to see exciting new advancements in the coming years.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! 2. Growth of smart kitchen appliances Smart appliances and devices are the most tangible applications of AI in the kitchen, as major tech companies like Samsung and KitchenAid continue to develop smart refrigerators, ovens, dishwashers, etc.
But we’re also seeing interesting standalone devices from smaller companies, such as Hello Egg.
This company works in collaboration with the Eggspert app to help users plan meals and organize their lives in the kitchen using AI-powered solutions.
As virtual assistants like the Amazon Echo and Google Home grab ever larger shares of the market, we can likely expect a proliferation of connected kitchen devices.
3. Personalized dining experiences It’s also worth noting that AI will play an active role in commercial kitchens and restaurants. As industries focus on personalizing product offerings for customers, restaurants may be interested in using CRM applications that provide relevant recommendations and customized menus.
As developer Andrew Brust writes , “Menus could also be customized according to prior knowledge of customers’ food allergies — which would alleviate a lot of the stress some families encounter when dining out and, in so doing, likely enhance sales.” Though we probably won’t see this in all restaurants, it could well be something that sets particular luxury dining establishments apart from their competition.
4. Smarter supply chains Restaurants and commercial kitchens that find ways to implement AI strategically may also benefit from smarter supply chains. When ERP systems integrate with cloud-based inventory management solutions and POS systems, it’s possible for companies to predict future demand and plan accordingly.
This is something Westville, a chain of six restaurants in New York City, is already doing. “The big thing for us was to consolidate our ordering, and now we are exploring the other benefits of reporting and setting up alerts,” says Shawn Peled , director of operations at Westville.
“We can compare different months using graphs to see how purchasing changed and can check over-ordering and waste, which is a big issue for most restaurants.” As ERP, inventory, and POS solutions improve over time, we can expect to see more restaurants adopt similar strategies to lower costs and minimize food waste. This will allow them to focus on serving the food customers want, which will lead to greater customer satisfaction and profitability.
Larry Alton is a contributing writer at VentureBeat covering artificial intelligence.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"Uber's next battleground: Latin America | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/transportation/ubers-next-battleground-latin-america"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Analysis Uber’s next battleground: Latin America Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Office sign at Uber's San Francisco headquarters.
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Another chapter in Uber’s global ambitions closed this week with the news that the ride-hailing giant was folding its Southeast Asia business into Grab, retaining a 27.5 percent stake in the new business that spans Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Myanmar.
Singapore’s competition watchdog i s scrutinizing the merger , but the move illustrates a broader trend as Uber focuses on fights it can win and forms alliances when it can’t. In 2016, the San Francisco-based company sold its Chinese arm to local etaxi giant Didi Chuxing in a $35 billion deal. Rumors emerged this week that Uber is looking at further consolidation in India, where Ola currently leads the ride-hailing market.
Family affair A common thread permeates these stories. Japanese technology giant SoftBank, now a venture capital powerhouse in its own right , has invested in all the aforementioned companies — including Uber.
SoftBank was said to have played a pivotal role in pushing for the merger between Uber and Grab.
Uber has raised more than $20 billion in funding since its inception as it has worked to bring its service to nearly every market on Earth. But an inability to scale and localize quickly enough in certain markets has left more than enough room for local players to gain traction and fend off Uber’s advances. That is why the company has elected to consolidate in problematic markets — evidenced again last year when Uber joined forces with Yandex.taxi in Eastern Europe.
We’re seeing a similar pattern emerge in Latin America. SoftBank invested in Brazil-based ride-hailing app 99 last year before China’s Didi — which, remember, counts SoftBank as an investor — bought 99 outright.
For context, Uber is the leading ride-hailing app in Brazil, with São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro Uber’s two biggest cities globally in terms of number of rides.
Some 4,000 miles north, Mexico is another of Uber’s most profitable markets and one in which it claims a near monopoly on ride-sharing. However, those pesky deep-pocketed spoilsports at Didi are planning to mix things up a little with plans to launch Didi’s first international service out of Mexico City this year. Didi raised $4 billion in December , just eight months after raising $5.5 billion and a year after a $7.3 billion raise from some big-name backers, including Apple.
Didi has raised around $20 billion in funding, which offers some indication of its clout.
Last February, German automobile giant Daimler — via its MyTaxi ride-hailing offshoot — acquired Greece’s Taxibeat, primarily to challenge Uber in Europe. Taxibeat also currently operates in Peru, and Daimler’s MyTaxi told VentureBeat last year that it plans to invest in expanding that operation across Latin America, though at the time of writing that expansion appears to be limited to Chile. Related to this, Daimler and fellow German car giant BMW announced plans to merge their ride-hailing units earlier this week in a bid to challenge Uber and similar services globally.
Put simply, a lot of big companies are becoming increasingly invested in technology-based urban mobility services.
Next battleground Uber faces challengers in most of its markets, including the U.S. and Europe. The gloves are also coming off in the Middle East and Africa, with Didi already invested in Dubai-based Careem — which operates across more than a dozen markets — as part of a broader strategic partnership. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that Latin America will be the next big battleground for Uber.
The company gained a lot of early traction through first-mover advantage, but where SoftBank and Didi’s dollars exist, Uber can expect a tough time not only expanding its service but retaining its existing hold.
With that in mind, Central and South America seem like the next obvious regions for Uber’s consolidation efforts. But speaking about Uber’s recent merger with Grab, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi suggested that the company’s future growth will be organic rather than through M&A.
“It is fair to ask whether consolidation is now the strategy of the day, given this is the third deal of its kind, from China to Russia and now Southeast Asia,” he said in an email to employees.
“The answer is no.” “While M&A will always be an important value-creation tool for our company, going forward we will be focused on organic growth — growth that comes from building the best products, services, and technology in the world and re-building our brand into the mobility brand that riders, cities, and drivers want to support and partner with,” he added.
The bottom line is that Uber is facing a major battle in at least two of core markets with a combined population of more than 300 million people. Didi is already reportedly poaching management staff from Uber in Mexico, and Didi’s money will go a long way toward testing Uber’s resolve there, in Brazil, and likely elsewhere too.
As a side point, São Paulo-based Easy Taxi operates across a number of Latin American markets, including Argentina, Mexico, Bolivia, Panama, Brazil, Peru, and Chile, in addition to a handful of markets elsewhere. Easy Taxi has yet to garner the attentions of SoftBank, Didi, or Uber, but it has raised nearly $80 million in funds, and as the ride-hailing battle heats up, it will be a likely investment or M&A target for one of the three.
Let battle commence.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"Uber's merger with Grab is under scrutiny from Singapore's competition watchdog | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/transportation/ubers-merger-with-grab-is-under-scrutiny-from-singapores-competition-watchdog"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Uber’s merger with Grab is under scrutiny from Singapore’s competition watchdog Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn A Grab vehicle is pictured in Singapore March 26, 2018.
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( Reuters ) — Singapore’s competition watchdog said it had reasonable grounds to suspect competition had been infringed by Uber’s deal to sell its Southeast Asia operations to rival ride-hailing firm Grab.
In a rare move, the Competition Commission of Singapore (CCS) has commenced an investigation into the deal and proposed interim measures that will require Uber and Grab to maintain their pre-transaction independent pricing, the watchdog said in a statement on Friday.
It is the first time the commission has issued interim measures on any business in the country.
Uber and Grab announced the deal on Monday , marking the U.S. company’s second retreat from an Asian market.
Under the deal, Uber will take a 27.5 percent stake in Grab, which is valued at around $6 billion, and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi will join the Singapore-based company’s board.
CCS proposals, effective immediately, also require both Grab and Uber not to obtain from each other any confidential information including pricing, customers and drivers.
The measures will be effective until the completion of its investigation.
The two firms will be given an opportunity to make written representations to the CCS upon receipt of the proposed interim measures, it said.
Singapore has a voluntary merger notification regime, and CCS has yet to receive the notification from Uber and Grab as of Friday, although the companies have indicated their intention to file a formal merger notification, CCS said.
Grab and Uber were not immediately available for comment.
( Reporting By Miyoung Kim, additional reporting by Fathin Ungku; Editing by Himani Sarkar ) VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"Under Armour admits 150 million MyFitnessPal accounts were hacked | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/security/under-armour-admits-150-million-myfitnesspal-accounts-were-hacked"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Under Armour admits 150 million MyFitnessPal accounts were hacked Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
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( Reuters ) — Under Armour said on Thursday that data from some 150 million MyFitnessPal diet and fitness app accounts was compromised in February, in one of the biggest hacks in history, sending shares of the athletic apparel maker down 3 percent in after-hours trade.
The stolen data includes account user names, email addresses and scrambled passwords for the popular MyFitnessPal mobile app and website, Under Armour said in a statement. Social Security numbers, driver license numbers and payment card data were not compromised, it said.
It is the largest data breach this year and one of the top five to date, based on the number of records compromised, according to SecurityScorecard.
Larger hacks include 3 billion Yahoo accounts compromised in a 2013 incident and credentials for more than 412 million users of adult websites run by California-based FriendFinder Networks Inc in 2016, according to breach notification website LeakedSource.com.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Under Armour said it is working with data security firms and law enforcement, but did not provide details on how the hackers got into its network or pulled out the data without getting caught in the act.
While the breach did not include financial data, large troves of stolen email addresses can be valuable to cyber criminals.
Email addresses retrieved in a 2014 attack that compromised data on some 83 million JPMorgan Chase customers was later used in pump-and-dump schemes to boost stock prices, according to U.S. federal indictments in the case in 2015.
Under Armor said in an alert on its website that it will require MyFitnessPal users to change their passwords, and it urged users to do so immediately.
“We continue to monitor for suspicious activity and to coordinate with law enforcement authorities,” the company said, adding that it was bolstering systems that detect and prevent unauthorized access to user information.
Under Armour said it started notifying users of the breach on Thursday, four days after it first learned of the incident.
Under Armour bought MyFitnessPal in 2015 for $475 million. It is part of the company’s connected fitness division, whose revenue last year accounted for 1.8 percent of Under Armour’s $5 billion in total sales.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"Twitch cuts jobs as it plans 'aggressive growth strategy' | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/twitch-cuts-jobs-as-it-plans-aggressive-growth-strategy"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Twitch cuts jobs as it plans ‘aggressive growth strategy’ Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Twitch is growing fast, but it wants to focus on that growth.
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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 did not confirm that figure.
A Twitch spokesperson explained in a statement provided to GamesBeat that the layoffs are a result of the company shifting resources to prioritize segments that livestreamers and viewers care about the most.
Here’s the Twitch spokesperson’s full statement: “Coming off the record-setting numbers shared in our 2017 Retrospective, Twitch is continuing to grow and advance with success stories from Overwatch League to Fortnite’s milestone-setting streams. In order to maintain this momentum, we have an aggressive growth strategy for 2018 with plans to increase our headcount by approximately 30 percent. While we’ve conducted team adjustments in some departments, our focus is on prioritizing areas most important for the community.” So Twitch plans to continue hiring, and a source told me the company currently has 1,500 employees. But it may not put more people into certain groups within Twitch. In a tweet, Slasher said that the company told its staff that it had “overhired.” And Twitch’s comment echoes that sentiment.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Twitch laid off more than 25 people from the Twitch Studios and Community/Marketing teams yesterday, including several high-profile employees who have been with the company since Twitch began, sources said. People were told that Twitch had 'overhired', and this was to re-adjust.
— Rod Breslau (@Slasher) March 30, 2018 Twitch is amid a growth spurt in terms of viewers.
The Fortnite: Battle Royale phenomenon led to record audiences for certain streamers including a particular broadcast where the rapper Drake played the game live on the site.
This has people showing up in huge numbers, and it has also turned into big paydays for streamers. Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, who played with Drake, makes $500,000 a month from more than 200,000 subscribers.
Each of those $5 subscriptions nets $2.50 for Twitch and $2.50 for Ninja.
Many people, however, don’t pay anything extra at all. Instead, they use the Twitch Prime service that gives each person who connects an Amazon Prime account a single subscription to use on any Twitch channel. Most of the $500,000 that Ninja generates each month comes from Twitch Prime subscriptions, and Amazon has to pay the $2.50 to streamers.
While this model is creating massive incentives for creators to use Twitch, the company may see increased spending on its other products. Once a person subscribes with a Twitch Prime account, maybe they then spend real money on a standard $5-plus sub. Or maybe people will put money toward Twitch’s Bits tipping system that it also takes a cut of.
But as Twitch continues to experiment with its business model, it has less of a need to produce and market its own content. The company’s streams are nowhere near as popular as people like Ninja. And Twitch seems most concerned with growing those community creators more than anything else.
GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
Discover our Briefings.
Join the GamesBeat community! Enjoy access to special events, private newsletters and more.
VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"PUBG 'Savage' test codes giveaway is live now | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/pubg-savage-test-codes-giveaway-is-live-now"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages PUBG ‘Savage’ test codes giveaway is live now Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn PUBG on mobile is free-to-play, so it has a lot more cosmetics to buy.
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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 give away.
If you want a chance to win one, tune into our PUBG Family Dinner stream live right now on Twitch: Join us for some custom games if you want, but stick around for how to win a code as well! GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
Discover our Briefings.
Join the GamesBeat community! Enjoy access to special events, private newsletters and more.
VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"Inside the making of The Church in the Darkness | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/inside-the-making-of-the-church-in-the-darkness"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Inside the making of The Church in the Darkness Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn The Church in the Darkness Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
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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 Decay, Quantum Break, Sunset Overdrive, and Rainbow 6.
I met Rouse as the organizer of the Brain Dump developer talks at the MIGS game event in Montreal. Now he’s getting ready to launch a top-down action-infiltration game where you have to infiltrate Freedom Town, a cult in the South American jungle. You learn the psychology of why people join cults and entrust themselves to charismatic leaders with ulterior motives. I interviewed him about The Church in the Darkness, which explores how far you are willing to go in uncovering the truth and saving the cultists.
Rouse studied real world cults from the 1970s and made a realistic game filled with choices and consequences. He said the game is designed to be replayable, as the narrative changes dynamically and you can shift your gameplay strategies to match the circumstances.
I played the demo, and tried going around the numerous guards in search of my nephew. But I got caught and had to face the music in a cage with cult leader Isaac Walker. I was given leniency, escaped again, and got caught and killed a second time.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! The game is coming out this year on Steam, the PlayStation 4, and the Xbox One.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
Above: Richard Rouse III of Paranoid Productions at GDC 2018.
GamesBeat: What’s the status of Church in the Darkness? Richard Rouse III: We’ve been working on it for three years and a bit. We’re working hard to finish up this year. It’s definitely a micro-indie in terms of team size. It’s not any kind of triple-I game. We don’t have a studio per se. Everyone works at home. There are probably 15 people in the credits, but as far as people currently working on it there are only five or six. Most of us aren’t full time on it, although I am.
GamesBeat: Where did the impetus for all of this come from? Rouse: You’ve probably heard the story a hundred times from different people. I’d been doing triple-A for many years. I found that there were certain games you could do in that space, and certain games that would get you in trouble in that space. I understand why that is, because when you’re trying to sell 8 million copies of something you don’t want to risk upsetting half the country. I just found that people wanted to avoid certain topics. That was part of the impetus, just being able to do a game without having to worry quite so much about that sort of reaction from people. And then just also having worked on the giant projects and enjoyed doing that.
The last job I had before this was at Microsoft as a designer in their publishing organization. State of Decay was probably the one I spent the most time on, and then also worked on things like Sunset Overdrive and Quantum Break. But when you’re in that publishing world you’re doing a very different job than when you’re on a team. You’re coaching and consulting and advising, but not doing the actual development yourself. I missed that.
GamesBeat: When did you leave Microsoft? Rouse: It was almost four years ago now. I had thought about going indie before, but there were other reasons that the Microsoft job sounded too interesting. It got us back into the U.S. I’d been in Montreal before, at Ubisoft. I’m in Seattle now, or in Redmond to be exact. I’m still right next to the Microsoft campus.
GamesBeat: This particular story idea, doing something around a cult, where did that originate? Rouse: A few places. I’d been fascinated by cults as these alternate societies that live by their own rules and view the world differently than everyone else does. Within them they can have a lot of members who all feel like they’re doing the right thing, but we all might look at them as outsiders and think they’re crazy. When you’re in the group it feels like it’s what you have to do and everyone else is crazy. I found that, the way they form their own little societies, really fascinating.
As I studied cults, finding out just that—you don’t think you’re in a cult. No one sets out to join a cult. You join a religious movement, or a new political endeavor, or a self-help group. Something you think that is going to help you in some way, or help other people, or that just feels like the right thing to do. Somewhere along the way you may realize things are getting weird, but now you’re in it. Everyone you know, all your friends, maybe your family are in it. Often you’ve given them your money. It becomes difficult to decide that you don’t want to do this anymore. Then people create self-justifying—well, it’s not as bad as they say. There are some beatings, but it’s needed for the good of the group, whatever it may be. I found that fascinating.
For a game, it was fascinating in a couple of ways. In a game, it’s cool to go to a place that’s like the real world but a little bit different. It’s a little enclosed ecosystem. It felt like a cult group that had moved itself to the jungle in South America is a perfect isolated place to build a game system.
1 2 3 View All Join the GamesBeat community! Enjoy access to special events, private newsletters and more.
VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"Idle Champions adds Strix, Dice, Camera, Action's beloved trash witch | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/idle-champions-adds-strix-dice-camera-actions-beloved-trash-witch"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Exclusive Idle Champions adds Strix, Dice, Camera, Action’s beloved trash witch Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
Learn more.
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 leading D&D online shows) are getting their digital counterparts in video games.
Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms ‘ latest character is Strix, the Tiefling Sorcerer that cosplayer Holly Conrad portrays on Dice, Camera, Action.
Idle Champions is a clicker game, one where you send a party of adventurers out on quests and kill-click the hell out of hobgoblins, gnolls, and other foes.
The addition shows the impact D&D ‘s streaming presence is having across the long-lived role-playing game. Characters such as actor Joe Manganiello’s Arkhan (a Dragonborn Barbarian/Paladin) have appeared in Idle Champions before, and heck, even D&D lead story designer Chris Perkins is essentially playing himself in the online RPG Neverwinter’s Portobello’s Campaign.
Idle Champions studio Codename Entertainment has been teasing Strix’s addition for a couple of weeks now. When the Canadian group approaches adding a new character from a show like Dice, Camera, Action , it’s found that it’s working not just with the license holder, Wizards of the Coast, but the actor, too.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! “[It] was an interesting thing to work with Wizards, us, and then—there’s this whole vibrant community of people who are playing tabletop D&D , creating characters that people get really invested in, including someone like Holly, who deeply loves Strix,” said Eric Jordan, the head of Codename Entertainment. “Chatting with them and saying we’d love to put Strix into our next event.” Strix — and her actor, Conrad — has become a beloved member of the D&D community, a bit of a mascot at this point. She’s embracing becoming the first person from Dice, Camera, Action to be in a video game.
“I think it’s awesome. It’s funny they bring me in first; I’m a self-proclaimed trash witch. That’s her title,” Conrad said.
I had to ask: Why do you call your character a … trash witch ? “She collects things, her robes, lived in the city of Sigil in The Hive. She just picks up anything she can find,” Conrad said, noting how Strix’s costume has little pieces of this and that she’s picked up from living in the slums near the heart of the multiverse. “One of her items is pile of garbage.” “Strix is definitely certain aspects of Holly personified in a way that I think players really respond to and build a relationship to. We thought it was really exciting,” Jordan said. “When we’re adding characters we have this complex spreadsheet. We want gender balance. We really strive to have 50 percent male, 50 percent female at all points.” Turns out this gender parity goal comes from Wizards of the Coast.
“When we launched, we launched with 12 characters. It was absolutely 50/50. That was very much—Wizards was very clear: ‘Thou shalt launch this way.’ And we thought that was great, so it wasn’t an issue between us. But both parties felt very committed to that,” Jordan said. “And we’re also looking for balances across classes, what those roles for those classes will be, and then the different races in D&D.
There’s a whole bunch of permutations to what we’re looking for.
“Our lead designer, Justin [Stocks] was like, OK, I want to have a woman Tiefling Sorcerer. And I’d been working on this idea of working with external influencers and having their characters come into the game, but there are a bunch of pieces to work through with Wizards about that. And I’m like, oh, Holly would be perfect, Strix would be a perfect character. We teased it yesterday. I’m not quite sure where in the broadcast today they’ll do it. Tuesdays is Dice, Camera, Action day.” Turns out that bringing in a character from the streaming world isn’t the same as adapting someone from D&D ‘s four decades of lore.
“It’s different. It’s very different, I guess I would say? The folks at Wizards that are responsible for D&D and hence the people we interact with around Bruenor or Drizzt or someone like that, they deeply love D&D.
And so there’s absolutely a reverence with it. But none of them are Bruenor,” Jordan said. “When we’re chatting with Holly, that character is really personal to Holly. And Holly comes from being a cosplayer, and so as I was mentioning earlier, we have like six slots of gear. We’re working with Holly to figure out what items, of all the gear the character has, we’re going to use for those six slots. We worked through and chatted with Holly about that. And then once we had it, she said–as a cosplay person, she had built every one of those pieces of character sheet items as physical items in her costume, which she then gave us reference art for, for our artists to then do our digital takes on those pieces.
“There’s a level of specificity—and obviously Holly and Strix are not the same thing, but there’s a level of connection where it’s almost as if you’re talking to Strix.” Conrad said it took three iterations of creative people to bring Strix and her collection of … garbage … to life. As a cosplayer, she had a costume for Codename’s artists to look over. She made it for the Acquisitions, Inc., stage show (another D&D stream from Penny Arcade) at Pax West in 2017.
I asked if this bond is like an actor’s connection with a character.
“I think it’s more personal. Just because of the nature of what D&D is. It’s structured improv, right?” said Jordan. “Holly or anyone who’s playing … you know the connection you get with your character. It’s deeply personal. How would I respond here? How would I respond there? I’m not a professional actor, and I have limited visibility into that world, but it seems somewhat different from someone handing you a script and being like, your character is now going to do this jerky thing. Within D&D you have complete autonomy, within the rule set and what the DM says, to build that character. It’s a very personal relationship.” Shows such as Critical Role and Dice, Camera, Action are helping bring legions of new players to D&D , and some might argue it’s even more popular and successful now than in its 1980s heyday. And Conrad’s proud to be part of it.
“I think it’s awesome, all the new people, all of them introduced to D&D by watching streamers,” she said. “I think that’s amazing.” And soon they’ll be able to click on her little trash witch and watch as her baubles, tiny owlbear doll, and other doodads come to life in Idle Champions.
GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
Discover our Briefings.
Join the GamesBeat community! Enjoy access to special events, private newsletters and more.
VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"PUBG Corp. preps test of smaller map -- here's how to get in | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/how-to-get-free-pubg-savage-key"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages PUBG Corp. preps test of smaller map — here’s how to get in Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn That's Savage.
Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
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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 right now. To ensure that Savage is as good as possible when it goes live, PUBG Corp. is asking for your feedback on how it plays.
To get that feedback, the studio is going to hold a closed testing phase that starts April 2 at 7 p.m. Pacific time and ends April 5 at 4 a.m. Pacific.
To get in, you’ll need a code to get access to the experimental build of PUBG. And it just so happens that I worked out a deal with some of the folks at PUBG Corp. to give a handful of keys to some of my closest friends and family — that means you.
How to get a key for the PUBG Savage test You have three ways to get a key from us at GamesBeat.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Method 1 We’ll hand out keys across some of our social channels, so follow us on these platforms for a chance to get one: GamesBeat on Twitter VentureBeat on Facebook Method 2 A better way to get a key is to show up tonight to watch the PUBG Family Dinner on Twitch.
On most Friday nights, I play PUBG with a community of killers and wily survivors. During the stream tonight, you will have a chance to win a key by following my Twitch channel and watching live. Here are the details: Follow the Twitch home of the PUBG Family Dinner The Family Dinner starts at 8 p.m. Pacific time.
Pay attention for instructions, which will involve sending a special word or keyphrase in for a chance to win a key Method 3 Finally, if you miss out on a key in our social feeds or you don’t watch the PUBG Family Dinner, you should tune into the live recording of the GamesBeat Decides podcast on Monday. Here are the details.
Follow the GamesBeat Decides podcast on Twitch or follow it on YouTube Click the toggle to get notifications for when we go live on Twitch and YouTube Watch the episode live on Monday, April 2 at approximately 5 p.m. Pacific time I’ll give instructions early in that episode on how to enter for a chance to win a key GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
Discover our Briefings.
Join the GamesBeat community! Enjoy access to special events, private newsletters and more.
VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
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5,095 | 2,018 |
"Corsair channels its inner Sarah McLachlan for its #GPURescue campaign | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/corsair-channels-its-inner-sarah-mclachlan-for-its-gpurescue-campaign"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Corsair channels its inner Sarah McLachlan for its #GPURescue campaign Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
Learn more.
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 “Stop GPU Abuse! #GPURESCUE.” This is a reference to ads for charity organizations like the ASPCA or the “Save the Ethiopian Children Campaign.” In those TV spots, musician Sarah McLachlan would explain just how bad things are for certain animals or actress Sally Struthers would walk along a street in Ethiopia.
Corsair’s 70-second clip echoes that style with the stark text that highlights bleak facts and a somber backing soundtrack.
“Over 3 million graphics cards are sold to cryptocurrency miners every year,” the video explains in its intro. “Graphics cards that should be gaming are abused in the cryptocurrency mines.” Corsair claims that if you donate, you can help be an angel who saves a video card from a cryptocurrency mining rig. With your help, the card will end up inside a gaming PC, just like god intended. You’ll even get a picture of the GPU that you adopted.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! The video ends with the methods by which you can give money, which include major credit cards, Paypal, and … Bitcoin.
Of course, this is all a gag. Crypto-mining is a serious problem that has driven up the cost of GPUs for the last year with no signs of stopping, but Corsair is not going to take your money to buy them back.
GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
Discover our Briefings.
Join the GamesBeat community! Enjoy access to special events, private newsletters and more.
VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
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5,096 | 2,018 |
"HyperX Alloy Elite's RGB update means LED lovers have a new option | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/__trashed-26"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages HyperX Alloy Elite’s RGB update means LED lovers have a new option Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn HyperX Alloy Elite with RGB lighting.
Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
Learn more.
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 software. After trying out the Alloy Elite RGB for a couple of weeks, and seeing that HyperX is integrating RGB LEDs into its other products, I think you have another real alternative to Logitech, Razer, or Sound BlasterX when it comes to your PC lighting.
The trend toward including programmable RGB LEDs in every PC product including keyboards, mice, speakers, headsets, and even monitors has an obvious motive: players wants all of their hardware to match and sync, so they may tend to buy all of their devices from the same company.
HyperX has done just fine so far selling its headsets and keyboards on the merits of their performance and engineering.
They are well made and a great value , but building a PC is like building anything else. When you’re done, you might want to show your pretty rig off to everyone. RGB can help add a visual oomph to a system that is hiding its most expensive components in a metal-and-glass case.
So now HyperX is getting into this space, and that means the vane among us can jump onto its lighting platform with the Alloy Elite RGB and then add in the mice and other products as they roll out.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! And the Alloy Elite is still a great keyboard. It has Cherry MX switches, media controls and a nice volume bar, and HyperX’s build quality. You can read my full review here.
The difference with this updated model is that if you want to use it, it doesn’t have to stick out from the rest of your devices.
GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
Discover our Briefings.
Join the GamesBeat community! Enjoy access to special events, private newsletters and more.
VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
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5,097 | 2,018 |
"6 tips for a successful initial coin offering | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/6-tips-for-a-successful-initial-coin-offering"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest 6 tips for a successful initial coin offering Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
Learn more.
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 continues to be a huge number of genuine and trustworthy ICOs being launched. In late 2017, we successfully completed our ICO campaign, raising over $10.5 million in the process. This was the result of a lot of hard team work and careful planning.
Using this experience, we have put together the following tips for potential entrepreneurs who are looking to stand out from the crowded ICO area to generate interest and excitement around their business.
Treat your ICO like raising capital via traditional routes Before launching an ICO, you must meet certain requirements and standards, such as the publication of a white paper.
Here is ours , which attracted really good interest. However, these rules aren’t set in stone. The key here is recognizing that if you are trying to attract investment in an ICO, act as you would via more traditional means such as a private or public capital raise.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Ensure you have provided as much information as you possibly can in order to be transparent – and therefore trustworthy. It is also worth being aware that the average ICO white paper runs to around 20 pages — a stock market investment prospectus can be hundreds of pages long.
Clearly identify what problem you’re solving If you are able to clearly present a problem in a given industry, and then demonstrate clearly how you intend to solve that problem, you will attract participants. A long list of companies claim that their innovation or solution is set to transform any given industry. You can see a lot of them in ICO calendars and schedules like this one.
But the winners will be those offering the best solution and those who are first to market.
To ensure your proposed ICO is attractive to potential participants, you need to clearly demonstrate the value you are adding with your service, and by consequence, the size of the opportunity for potential contributors.
Demonstrate your value and how blockchain is the best solution The hype for blockchain technology and the solutions it will provide are worth the hype. However, in your proposed offering it is important you explain how and why a blockchain solution is the best course of action for the problem you are trying to solve or improve, as this Coindesk article explains.
Often, it is due to an existing, or developing network of participants that can really benefit from the introduction of a blockchain network and tokenization to improve the product or service. It is important to be able to explain how you are going to attract people to the network you are creating and how it can be monetized.
Have strong corporate governance Potential contributors to your business will always research and explore the team behind your idea or company. Be sure to clearly display and demonstrate the experience you have behind you — the more you can prove that your idea has been analyzed and developed the better. On top of this, you should outline a corporate governance structure that is sound and in line with existing structures.
Prepare for a long road to secure investment There are ways and means of advertising your ICO campaign — beyond the need for Google and social media ads, which have recently been banned.
Make sure that you are using every tool at your disposal to generate exposure. Have a presence across crypto calendar websites, news websites, and other information portals, podcasts, and crypto apps.
There are agencies and advisers specializing in ICOs that can help, but choose wisely before you start using budget on additional support. Ensure your diary is full of meetings, webinars, meet-ups, conferences, etc. It is a long and hard slog to get your name out there, but it is imperative that you are everywhere. Lastly, bringing on a well-know investment entity will also determine the success or failure of your ICO, so if you have joy in persuading those in the crypto space to put their weight behind your ICO, you should make a success of it.
Transparency is key The ease with which potential participants can access information, the token sale progress, the white paper, etc., is important. It shows that you have nothing to hide. A genuine ICO is trackable by the token sale address, whereas a fraudulent ICO will try and hide how the sale progress is growing via multiple individual contribution addresses. This not only disguises how long the live sale of the ICO has to go, but also the exact amount raised so far. If either of these factors are hard to find, it could well be a sign that something is wrong — and potential participants will look elsewhere! Egor Gurjev is a serial entrepreneur, co-founder and CEO of Playkey, a leading online cloud-based gaming platform.
GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
Discover our Briefings.
The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
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5,098 | 2,018 |
"All of Google's jokes for April Fools' Day 2018 | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/offbeat/all-of-googles-jokes-for-april-fools-day-2018"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages All of Google’s jokes for April Fools’ Day 2018 Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
Learn more.
April Fools’ Day is upon us, and as happens 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 Google-specific tradition — even other Alphabet companies don’t really participate in the celebration.
In fact, Google’s various divisions create more practical and impractical jokes for the holiday than any other tech firm, and it’s simply hard to keep track of them all. As such, we have put together our annual roundup — here are all of Google’s April Fools jokes for 2018.
Where’s Waldo? In Google Maps The Google Maps team tends to have the more intricate jokes — usually playable games — and this year it’s a Where’s Waldo? integration. Waldo is traveling the world with his friends Wenda, Woof, Wizard Whitebeard, and Odlaw. To travel with him, all you have to do is find him. The April Fools’ feature will be available all week on Android, iOS, and desktop (make sure you have the latest app version or visit google.com/maps on your computer). To start, press play when you see Waldo waving at you from the side of your screen, or ask “Hey Google, Where’s Waldo?” via Google Assistant on your phone, Chromebook, or Home device.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Google Cloud Hummus API There are so many different types of hummus. And not everyone likes the same hummus. This is a serious problem. Google wants to organize the world’s information, and hummus is no exception. What better way than to have a Hummus API? It analyzes your taste using Google’s “advance artificial intelligence algorithm,” “a hummus big data warehouse” stored in the Google Cloud, “a machine learning model,” vision intelligence, and a taste stick.
Gboard Hardware Keyboard For those tired of having to memorize where the keys are on a keyboard, Google Japan created a “physical handwriting version” of the Gboard virtual keyboard app. The device lets you swipe over hardware keyboards, just like you do on software keyboards. The physical version of Gboard collects “a ton of scribble data” and uses machine learning to match it with the correct letters. The team somehow ended up with 100,000 data points! It works for all ages and not only do you no longer have to remember where all the letters are, manufacturers don’t even need to print the letters on the keys anymore.
Bad Joke Detector The Files Go team has decided it wants to do more to help you free up space on your phone. Instead of just removing junk files and old apps, Files Go will now delete any bad jokes you inadvertently receive from friends and family. The Bad Joke Detector uses “a custom-built deep neural network” to identify the bad jokes on your phone and lets you delete them with a single tap.
Googz Google Australia has really embraced its job of adapting the company’s services to fit Down Under — culminating with the rebrand of Google to “Googz.” The decision comes as a result of analyzing the evolving local dialect — people are already referring to Google as Googz, so why not just run with it? In partnership with leading Australian designer Jazza, Google went to great lengths to design a new logo, brand identity, and even some swag to go along with the whole overhaul. In fact, to verify the change, just ask Google Assistant “Ok Google, What’s your name?” on your Google Home, Chromebook, or smartphone to make sure you get the pronunciation down pat.
Renewable Energy Chromebooks The Chrome OS team is investing in renewable energy. Chromebooks may have decent battery life, but like any laptop, they unfortunately still need to be charged. As such, Chromebook owners now have three new ways to power their devices: wind power, solar power, and compost power. For wind power, all you have to do is visit the nearest wind tunnel or wind farm. For solar power, just place your Chromebook in direct sunlight — 10 minutes should get you five hours of battery life. And for compost power, simply take your Chromebook charger with you when you’re tending to the garden.
When it comes to April Fools’ Day, Google seems to have a bottomless pit for a marketing budget. We will update this post as the company launches more jokes.
GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
Discover our Briefings.
The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
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5,099 | 2,018 |
"Huawei tries to send message to U.S. consumers with P20 launch: Look what you're missing! | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/mobile/huawei-p20-launch-highlights-the-cost-of-u-s-paranoia-over-chinese-security"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Analysis Huawei tries to send message to U.S. consumers with P20 launch: Look what you’re missing! Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Huawei consumer business Richard Yu speaking in Paris.
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Standing in the picturesque Grand Palais in Paris, Huawei’s Richard Yu didn’t seem like a man worried about the storm of controversy his company is facing in the U.S. The CEO of the Chinese giant’s consumer business instead appeared confident and ready to show consumers just what they’re missing as a result of political pressure to block Huawei’s products in the country.
He noted that Huawei is now ranked sixth in the world on R&D spending, just ahead of Apple and just behind Intel, having spent $12.8 billion (€10.4 billion). The goal is to increase that figure by 20 percent annually, he said. The company is also the world’s No. 3 seller of handsets, despite being shut out of the U.S. market.
Huawei doubled the number of “experience shops” around the world to 3,220 last year, including a gorgeous new store in Milan. And its gadgets are sold in 227,056 retail stores around the planet.
Yu then played a video called “Trust in our global partners” that offered gushing testimonials from executives at European carriers such as France’s Orange, U.K.’s Vodafone, Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, and Spain’s Telefonica. They praised Huawei as being a “leading innovator.” Trust. It seems everyone trusts Huawei. Except the U.S. and Australia, which banned the company from its National Broadband Network. The U.S. that has been sounding the alarm against the company for several years now. Yet throughout that campaign, Huawei has only grown more successful and more financially sound.
In its annual report released after the Paris event, the company reported that overall revenue jumped 15.7 percent year-over-year while profits increased 28.1 percent. Its carrier business was basically flat, but sales of networking gear to businesses increase 35.1 percent, and its consumer business increased 31.9 percent. More money and more profits equals more investment in R&D and marketing.
Huawei has muscled its way into becoming the world’s largest seller of communications gear, passing Nokia and Ericsson. And is has made aggressive investments in 5G technology, hoping to widen that lead with the next generation of wireless technology.
But the U.S. government is determined to makes sure none of Huawei’s networking and telecom gear lands on American soil. Dating back to Congressional investigations several years ago, politicians have raised concerns over a lack of clarity in Huawei’s relationship with its country’s Communist government. The fear is that Huawei gear will contain undetectable backdoors that allow China to spy on U.S. citizens.
In July 2013, General Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA and NSA, claimed Huawei had “shared with the Chinese state intimate and extensive knowledge of foreign telecommunications systems it is involved with.” The company has also been accused of bribery and of helping China’s military unit. However, as the bill to ban Huawei from the U.S. market from Sen. Tom Cotton shows, much of this remains conjecture and speculation.
To the extent that proof exists, it hasn’t deterred most other countries from embracing Huawei’s products. If Huawei leads the pack with 5G, U.S. carriers will have to settle for working with the also-rans. And as Huawei’s lead increases, the company will attract more customers, more engineers, and more developers who want to work at the leading edge.
5G remains a critical but longer-term issue. Government pressure appears to have caused AT&T to cancel its deal to sell Huawei handsets, and now Best Buy has backed out as well. Those moves come as Huawei unveiled its new MateBook X laptop at Barcelona Mobile Congress and now its new flagship handsets.
I’ve been playing with both devices at home now. And while I don’t claim to be the world’s leading gadget expert, both are remarkable, certainly among the best in class for their relative categories. DxOMark, a noted analyst of image quality products, said the three-camera setup on the Huawei P20 Pro was “arguably the most innovative device we’ve seen in quite some time.” DxOMark gave the P20 Pro camera system its highest rating ever, surpassing Apple’s iPhone X and Samsung’s Galaxy 9.
“With an overall score of 109 points, the Huawei P20 Pro sets a new benchmark for smartphone cameras on DxOMark.com, outscoring all of its closest rivals, such as the Apple iPhone X, the Google Pixel 2, and the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus by a margin that is close to or higher than 10 points,” reviewers wrote.
For the moment, U.S. consumers can buy unlocked versions of Huawei phones online at full price. But they won’t find them in carriers’ stores, which will no doubt limit sales. Still, Huawei remains the world’s third-largest seller of handsets, behind Apple and Samsung. And in Europe, where the company only entered the market a couple of years ago, it now has about a 13 percent market share, placing it just behind second-place Apple.
With Huawei unlikely to crack the U.S. market anytime soon, it will have to settle for the rest of the world. That may be plenty for the Chinese giant. U.S. consumers, however, will have to hope this doesn’t relegate them to second-class status when its comes to accessing the best consumer electronics and wireless networks.
That’s a risk U.S. politicians seem more than willing to take.
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"China busts smugglers whose drones snuck $79.8 million worth of iPhones to mainland | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/mobile/china-busts-smugglers-whose-drones-snuck-79-8-million-worth-of-iphones-to-mainland"
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(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 suspects who used drones to fly two 200-meter (660-feet) cables between Hong Kong and the mainland to transport refurbished iPhones with a total value of 500 million yuan, the paper said in a report on the crackdown by Shenzhen and Hong Kong customs.
“It’s the first case found in China that drones were being used in cross-border smuggling crimes,” the Legal Daily reported, citing a news conference held by Shenzhen customs on Thursday.
The smugglers usually operated after midnight and only needed seconds to transport small bags holding more than 10 iPhones using the drones, the report quoted customs as saying. The gang could smuggle as many as 15,000 phones across the border in one night, it said.
Regulating the use of drones has become an important task for China, the world’s largest manufacturer of consumer drones.
China published strict rules last year to tackle incidents of drones straying into aircraft flight paths, including requiring owners of civilian drones to register craft up to a certain weight under their real names.
Shenzhen customs was quoted by the Legal Daily as saying it would closely monitor new types of smuggling with high-tech devices and enhance their capability with technical equipment, including drones and high-resolution monitors, to detect smuggling activity.
(Reporting by Lusha Zhang and Se Young Lee; Editing by Paul Tait) VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"Can agile work for marketing? | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/marketing/can-agile-work-for-marketing"
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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 many of the same goals as developers: We want to be faster to market, have more business impact, and build a more engaged team. So why wouldn’t agile work for marketing? As leader of the CA Technologies product marketing organization, I had my concerns about going agile. Many development teams are small and co-located, making it easy to stay zeroed in on a compact, well-defined deliverable. But our marketing staff is large, dispersed, and conditioned to long-duration initiatives. I wasn’t sure agile marketing could work at scale.
Turns out, it can. I say that after a few years of trial. Has it been a straight shot? Definitely not. On our journey we’ve run many experiments, not all intentional. We’ve had our share of ups and downs — our own “hype cycle” — building our expectations only to enter a period of disillusionment before eventually leveling out on a road of productivity. But it’s been worth it.
We didn’t rush headlong into agile marketing. We moved slowly, answering a key question in each phase.
Question 1: Can agile work for marketing? In 2013, I joined a business unit to run strategy, marketing, and business development. It was all-in on agile, across all functions. I took a SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) course and started applying a few of the principles to our strategy and product marketing, but I knew we were just playing at the fringes.
We continued to “dabble” in agile until an important catalyst in 2015: the acquisition of Rally Software, a leading provider of agile development software and services. Pre-acquisition, Rally’s 20 or so marketers had been applying agile methodologies for about two quarters. During the integration process, I observed that their marketing team seemed very engaged. It intrigued me enough to give agile more of a try.
About six months after the Rally acquisition, we started small, with a 35-person delivery group to support our Agile Management business unit, intentionally merging legacy CA marketers with no agile experience and Rally marketers. The team divided into smaller, project-based teams and began to break projects down into two weeks sprints. We began hosting quarterly “Big Room Planning” with stakeholders from across the business, initiated 2-3 standup meetings per week for individual teams, and had bi-weekly sprint planning and “demos” to inform and get input from stakeholders from sales and business. While not large, our experiment tested a range of team and product variables typically encountered in a larger marketing organization, such as co-located vs. distributed teams, SaaS vs. on-premises products, and products that spanned from early concept to mature.
The experiment went well. The teams figured out how to work in a more distributed environment, and agile marketing was showing it could scale to a larger number of diverse products. Our teams were happier too, with our CA marketers more engaged, feeling appropriately involved in decisions affecting their work, and feeling valued as an employee — significant increases compared to the prior year and compared to CA overall.
Question 2: Agile is good for the team, but is it good for the business? With an overall marketing team of nearly 350 marketers, I still needed to measure the impact of agile marketing on the business before I was willing to scale it beyond our sample team of 35 individuals. An opportunity presented itself to see the agile marketing team vs. a traditional marketing team working side by side – literally – as two groups conducted planning sessions across the hall from each other. My job was to run back and forth across the hall to stay informed and steer the teams when necessary.
At the outset, the meetings appeared to be very similar and totally agile. Both rooms housed smart people and a certified agile coach to facilitate. They had the materials necessary for an agile meeting: post-it notes, pipe cleaners, and Play-Doh for restless hands. The meeting agendas were clear and time-boxed. The agile jargon was flowing freely.
After a few roundtrips across the hall, though, the contrast was unmistakable. The agile delivery group developed a shared vision, defined business objectives, and included a cross-functional team (product and field marketing, web, digital sales, etc.) – everyone necessary to make decisions and commitments was in the room. When they adjourned the meeting, they were ready and committed to act immediately on their plan and start their first sprint.
In the other room, I watched the dependency list grow and business commitments shrink. They couldn’t commit to deliverables that would have measurable business impact, since the other dependent functions and their decision makers were not there.
After the meetings, I came to understand what true agile could mean to marketing: higher velocity of decision making, improved alignment across functions, and commitments to business impact.
Question 3: Agile is good for the business, but can it scale across marketing? Despite witnessing the benefits, it took one more in-my-face moment to give me the confidence to scale it across our whole marketing organization.
In August 2016, management tasked seven product line marketing teams – one agile , six traditional — with building a competitive campaign. After the campaign elements were in market, we gathered the teams for a retrospective and mapped a timeline of their activities along with each participant’s relevant work, engagement, visibility into progress across the team, and their feelings (expressed with smiley faces) on how it went.
The agile delivery group sailed into first place even though they started with the least amount of competitive research. They were easily twice as fast getting their campaign into market. Their strengths were common ownership, accountability, and collective prioritization of this task against their other work. They knew who was doing what when and stayed aligned via the agile ceremonies. They even pivoted twice because of real-time stakeholder input. Even with the heavy workload there were no reported frowny faces.
The six non-agile teams did not fare well. Without clarity on ownership and accountability, they took ages to get started and had difficulty juggling this priority against other departmental objectives. They reported poor visibility into what other team members were doing and were often surprised when a dependent task was completed and tossed over the wall to them. There were lots of frowny faces.
I saw that agile marketing made a difference in engagement, velocity, and quality. It was time for us to further scale it up.
Where we are now Today we have six business unit-aligned Delivery Groups, each consisting of all the marketers that actively support the business activities of that business unit. Our agile marketing reach is now over 100 people within CA, with about 60 practicing every day as part of our core agile delivery teams. The others are specialists in communications, data science, and regional marketing, who support the core teams when needed, as well as active stakeholders, such as digital sales, who meet with our teams regularly to provide critical feedback.
What we’ve learned We are still learning – this is a journey, not a destination — but we have some lessons to share: Marketing and app development teams really are different.
Marketing teams need more vision and context to develop solid messaging and campaigns. We addressed this by investing in quarterly “big room planning” and more time to set the vision, align the strategy, and plan initiatives. Standups and weekly metrics keep us directed.
The nature of some marketing work is hard to deliver in two-week sprints.
We developed persistent teams to handle ongoing, demand campaigns and temporary or initiative-based teams to handle specific events, such as a product launch or CA World. We flexibly staff the temporary teams based on need.
Traditional agile terminology isn’t a great fit for agile marketing, so we use terms that resonate with marketers. For example: “features” become “initiatives”, “release train” becomes “delivery group,” and “release train engineer” becomes “coach.” Our departmental managers had the hardest adjustment.
They no longer could add work to an employee of “theirs” who is part of an agile team. They had to shift gears from directing to coaching; they had to learn “servant leadership.” We underestimated the coaching they needed, and sometimes we outright forgot to include them in the initial ceremonies.
Watch out for “Agile Theater,” groups with the jargon and paraphernalia, but who lack the cross-functional representation, empowerment, and goal alignment that drive true agile marketing.
Commitment from the top down is essential.
This is too big a shift in the way things are done for a sneak attack. Get support, get a coach, and get ready to experiment and learn.
Agile marketing works at scale Our teams are more engaged, our campaign delivery times have decreased, our marketing-sourced pipeline has increased, and the win rate of marketing-sourced opportunities has increased.
So if you think agile is only for small, colocated marketing teams, I urge you to reconsider. But know it won’t be a quick fix and the journey may be bumpy at times.
Cameron van Orman is SVP of Product Solution Marketing at CA Technologies.
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"SuperData -- Fortnite: Battle Royale reigns over February's digital game charts | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/games/superdata-fortnite-battle-royale-reigns-over-februarys-digital-game-charts"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages SuperData — Fortnite: Battle Royale reigns over February’s digital game charts Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Fortnite is one of the first major games to get a Battle Royale mode.
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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, according to industry-tracking firm SuperData Research.
Fortnite now has more monthly active players than Rockstar Games’ perennial top-10 title Grand Theft Auto V. Though Epic’s last-player-standing game doesn’t cost anything up front, it does successfully tempt its players with in-game purchases. The only game where players spent more money was Sledgehammer Games’s Call of Duty: WWII, which is still the top-grossing game on consoles.
PUBG Corp.’s rival battle royale game, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, sold over 2.5 million copies. SuperData reports that sales on PC are continuing to dip for that title, but it’s still selling steadily on Xbox One. It launched on that console on December 12 and sold over 3 million copies in its first month.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Digital spending in the U.S. grew 21 percent year-over-year last month, which SuperData attributes to triple-A titles like Monster Hunter: World and Fortnite. Earlier this month, Capcom revealed that Monster Hunter: World had sold over 7.5 million copies since its January launch.
Free-to-play console games showed the biggest year-over-year growth, but paid console games also increased 34 percent, premium PC sales grew 33 percent, and mobile increased 4 percent. In the mobile world, Tencent’s Honor of Kings (relaunched as Arena of Valor in the West) still reigns supreme, but the massively popular multiplayer online battle arena has a hot contender on its heels — QQ Speed, which is also from Tencent. The Chinese publisher’s new racing title jumped up to the No. 2 spot after launching in late December.
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"Jam City moves to consolidate mobile games, rather than be consolidated | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/games/jam-city-moves-to-consolidate-mobile-games-rather-than-be-consolidated"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Jam City moves to consolidate mobile games, rather than be consolidated Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn World War Doh Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
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Jam City has grown to more than 500 people, rising to become one of the most successful mobile game companies. It scored big with titles like Cookie Jam, and it is working on a highly anticipated Harry Potter game. But it made a big move a little while ago by acquiring the assets of Brainz , a Bogota, Colombia-based mobile game developer and maker of the upcoming action strategy game, World War Doh.
Josh Yguado, president and chief operating officer, told me that it’s better to be big because those companies are getting biggest slice of the pie in the $50 billion mobile game industry. And getting your unfair share of pie is a lot better than being eaten. But Jam City’s ambitions are about more than just gobbling up rivals in mobile games.
“I think we want to go from being just a mobile games company to being more of a mobile entertainment company,” said Yguado, in an interview at the recent Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. “To us that means launching games and franchises that don’t just live as mobile games, but could lend themselves to becoming TV series or web stories or comic books. We want them to be able to stand on their own, narratively.” Yguado is also going to speak on making intellectual property games work in mobile at our upcoming GamesBeat Summit 2018 event on April 9-10 in Mill Valley.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
Above: Josh Yguado is president and chief operating officer of Jam City.
GamesBeat: Do you approach GDC with a certain feeling this year? Josh Yguado: I’d say the space is consolidating pretty quickly. The biggest leaders seem to be getting more and more share. We’re looking to be one of the consolidators. You may have heard we did the Brainz acquisition a week ago. It’s a little one, but we’re looking to do more. We’re spending a lot of our GDC talking to studios about investments and acquisitions.
GamesBeat: They had an interesting game there.
Yguado: People seem to like it. Apple gave World War Doh a big award for 2017. Casual Connect USA, they won I think best in show, the audience award. It’s a great game. We’re probably going to release it Q3-ish. We’re excited.
GamesBeat: It seems like following the contests and awards is a good strategy. Keeping an eye out.
Yguado: Honestly, we were talking with them already, even before they’d won anything. We loved the team. We thought the game was super fun. As you know, it’s not easy to get to fun. Some of the best-laid plans don’t result in fun. The fact that they had a base game — it wasn’t done. It was probably only about 50 percent complete. But it was already so great and fun to play. That was a really good sign. That’s what got us interested in the beginning.
GamesBeat: It looked like you caught them at a good stage. They weren’t already famous. They were on the cusp of big things.
Yguado: Knock on wood, but that’s what we believe. We’re really excited for the title. It probably adds a bit more risk to get them at such an early stage, but we have a great feeling about them.
GamesBeat: This contest that Unity announced last night, along with Universal , it seems like a smart way to try to get some of those indies matched up with brands or movie titles. They don’t always have that opportunity.
Yguado: It’s a great concept. I’m excited to see what comes out of it. I will say, though, that historically, these contest-based jam initiatives often don’t come up with great games. I don’t know why that is. Maybe it’s because sometimes it takes a lot longer than six months or a year to come up with a truly great game. These contests tend to be pretty restrictive from a timing perspective. But we’ll see. It should be interesting.
GamesBeat: How do you look at your road map going forward? How are you going to do that consolidating? Yguado: Even taking a step back from that, I’d say we’ve had an absolutely killer 2017. We’re at all-time highs across the board — record revenue, record EBITDA. We have these enduring franchises that keep performing at the same level or growing slowly. We also have a bunch of new games that came on line in 2016 and 2017 that are contributing more and more. Everything is stacking up and resulting in overall growth.
In 2017 we were one of the top 10 publishers, and I think we’re one of the few where no game represents more than a third of our revenue. We’re pretty well diversified. We’re going into 2018 in a good position, where we have about 500 employees. We have six studios now, with the Bogota studio. We think about two-thirds of our titles will be organic, and about one-third of our new titles will be from acquisition. We want to do one to two acquisitions a year and release three to four games a year. That’s our plan for the next three years.
For 2018 in particular I think we have the best slate we’ve ever had before. We have Harry Potter. The hype around it is like nothing we’ve ever seen for a game before. We have approximately 2 million pre-registrations across both Google and iOS. We have more than 100,000 user-generated videos on YouTube. The excitement around the game in the first three days of release in soft launch—there were more side-loaded downloads of the game in other territories, people who were crazy to get the game and figuring out how to get it, than actual legal downloads in the soft launch territories. We feel really good about that title. We think it has the potential to be one of our biggest ever, if not our biggest ever.
GamesBeat: Is that using what Google just announced, the Google Maps games API? Yguado: No. Niantic is also working on a Harry Potter game, which is going to come out, from what we’ve heard, quite a bit after ours. I don’t want to speak for their game, but it would make more sense for them. For us it’s more of a story-based game with a lot of RPG elements. You actually have the opportunity to be a student at Hogwarts. I can show you a build at some point if you’re interested. But it’s your chance to live the life that Harry Potter lived. There’s a whole drama that unfolds. You have to solve problems and team up with your friends. Learn spells, go to classes, duel, play Quidditch. It all comes together in the game. It’s a lot of fun.
We have three big titles this year, including Harry Potter. We have World War Doh, best of 2017 from Apple for tech and innovation in Latin America. It’s a super talented team and a really fun game. And then we have what we think is our best puzzle builder game ever, a culmination of everything we’ve learned over the past five years. Early testing is off the charts. The innovation scores are higher than we’ve ever seen on a puzzle game before. The KPIs look amazing. That’s Wild Things. We’re really excited about that title. These three, we think, will set a new standard for Jam City’s success.
GamesBeat: What do you think you add to World War Doh that it wouldn’t have otherwise? Yguado: Number one, in terms of live game management and event management, we’re pros at not only launching games, but having them grow and sustain over time. That comes from having a regular content cadence, regular events, teasing and marketing those events in a big way. They’ve created a base game that’s a lot of fun, but I think we’ll be able to work with them in a really good way to help the game sustain.
I’d say number two, over the years we’ve gotten really good at working with IP, both third-party and internally generated IP. The IP for this game has the potential to live beyond the mobile game world. This could be an entertainment franchise. Someday the Doh, the World War Doh world — we’re going to create videos around the universe. We’re going to do a lot of partnerships and promotions. We’re going to build out the backstory of the characters. We’ll be able to help contribute to the team.
Last is the usual stuff: analytics, machine learning, and user acquisition. It’s not so sexy, but it’s a requirement to scale a game in this day and age. We’ve invested a lot in that over the years and we’ll be able to give them a lot of help.
GamesBeat: I saw you guys did some things with influencers on Cookie Jam. Would this game be good for making use of influencers as well, getting the word out? Yguado: All three games could be really great. Harry Potter, obviously, has a really big fan base and influencer base. We’re going to be creative about how we work with influencers with Harry Potter.
Above: You can choose your house in Jam City’s Harry Potter game.
GamesBeat: Reaching Harry Potter fans that aren’t gamers? Yguado: Or that are gamers. There are so many Potter fans and sites and blogs and worlds that people have created. There are lots of folks to work with. Obviously the Wizarding World continues to exist with Fantastic Beasts. But Harry Potter itself is not a narrative that people can continue to enjoy. The fact that people can go to this place and get new stories from Hogwarts in the Harry Potter world is something people really want. A lot of the super fans and influencers will not just be willing, but really excited to help out with the launch of that game.
Wild Things is super cute, cuddly characters. We’re also doing a light video series around that. This is one where fans are going to get really excited about it. We’re doing some influencer voice-over in the videos. They’ll be involved in the creation of a lot of the assets, and they’ll also help with the promotion of the game. And then World War Doh — we’ve seen with a lot of funny mid-core strategy games that influencers are excited to get into larger PvP battles and events. We’re going to pull out all the stops and do something fun for the launch.
GamesBeat: It seems like influencers are becoming part of the normal game plan.
Yguado: World War Doh has a lot in common with Clash Royale in that it’s synchronous multiplayer arena-style gameplay. It lends itself well to live PvP with influencers.
Above: Dueling animation in Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery.
GamesBeat: How do you want to see yourselves in this next stage? What sort of company do you want to be? Yguado: I think we want to go from being just a mobile games company to being more of a mobile entertainment company. To us that means launching games and franchises that don’t just live as mobile games, but could lend themselves to becoming TV series or web stories or comic books. We want them to be able to stand on their own, narratively.
With our legacy games, Cookie Jam and Panda Pop, they’re great games, but they don’t lend themselves as well to this world-building I’m talking about. I think with the new franchises we’re putting out, it’s going to be on a new level from an entertainment and franchise perspective.
GamesBeat: Would you say you’re growing up from games with strong gameplay, but that don’t necessarily last a long time, to games that are more ongoing, deeply engaging services? I can imagine Harry Potter lasting a lot longer than, say, a puzzle game.
Yguado: Longevity is a tough one to measure by, because a lot of these puzzle games are some of the — I mean, look at Candy Crush. Cookie Jam and Panda Pop continue to be top performers. I actually think that these puzzle games, without a very deep narrative or character development, can be really long-lived. But it’s hard for them to expand beyond just being a mobile game.
It’s important for us to have games that are the future Scrabbles and Monopolys of the world, games that stand the test of time, games that people will play 50 years from now. That’s absolutely important. But it’s more than that. It’s also creating narrative worlds that can live beyond just being a game.
GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
Discover our Briefings.
Join the GamesBeat community! Enjoy access to special events, private newsletters and more.
VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"Jade Raymond and Ken Moss of EA to speak about the future of games and tech at GamesBeat Summit | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/games/jade-raymond-and-ken-moss-of-ea-to-speak-about-the-future-of-games-and-tech-at-gamesbeat-summit"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Jade Raymond and Ken Moss of EA to speak about the future of games and tech at GamesBeat Summit Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Ken Moss and Jade Raymond of Electronic Arts are our latest speakers.
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Learn more.
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 manager at Electronic Arts, will speak with GamesBeat lead writer Dean Takahashi in a fireside chat about building triple-A game studios and her experience building long-lasting franchises such as Assassin’s Creed, Watch Dogs at Ubisoft and Star Wars: Battlefront for EA.
Ken Moss , the chief technology officer of EA, will speak in a separate fireside chat on “How will we power the games of the future?” Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors, will moderate the session with Moss.
We’ve switched venues to the secluded The Seminary at Strawberry in Mill Valley, California, north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Our dates and agenda are still the same at April 9 and April 10. Our conference is all about making games better and improving the business, and our speakers should give us a window into the future of game technologies.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! You can get your tickets here at 30 percent off our rate using the code DEAN.
We’ve also got a new $500 code for indie game developers, IndieVIP, on this link.
Above: Four human players play as heroes and take on four villains in Star Wars: Battlefront II’s Heroes vs. Villains multiplayer mode.
Jade Raymond runs EA’s PopCap Vancouver and Motive Studios in Montréal. She founded Motive when she joined EA in 2015. Raymond is also responsible for the HD Star Wars portfolio across EA. She is best known for helping create the Assassin’s Creed and Watch Dogs franchises, and for founding Ubisoft’s Toronto studio, which developed blockbusters like Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist while under her direction.
Raymond has been passionate about games since her childhood in Montréal. She joined the industry as a programmer and has since been focused on bringing innovation and new mechanics and gameplay to action-adventure and online multiplayer games. The worlds she has helped create have inspired novels and major motion pictures. In addition to serving on AIAS’ board of directors, she currently sits on C2 Montréal’s board of directors.
As chief technology officer of EA, Moss leads the strategy and vision behind EA’s Digital Platform, Frostbite Engine and Information Technology organizations. In this role, he oversees mechanisms to ensure the most seamless experience for players, including Identity & Fraud, Security, Data, Games Services, Infrastructure, Mobile Platform and the Frostbite Engine to drive the future of the gameplay experience.
Prior to joining EA in 2014, Moss led the global marketplace technology, science and data organization at eBay where he ran the global end-to-end services platform that powers eBay across all devices. Before his time at eBay, Ken spent 20 years at Microsoft, where he founded and led the engineering and product teams on Search and held roles with MSN and Microsoft Excel.
Moss holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and is a lifelong gamer.
Above: Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors, founded Frank N. Magid Associates’ internet practice in 1995 and gaming practice in 2001. He is a leading analyst and adviser in the gaming and digital spaces. He also leads Magid’s practice advising investment firms on media and technology assets.
Previous to Magid, Vorhaus worked in technology transfer/corporate fundraising at Caltech for seven years and then spent eight years working at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as University of California Santa Barbara, where he was assistant vice chancellor.
Vorhaus has been a columnist in Ad Age and is quoted in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Reuters, etc. regularly and has appeared on CNBC and Bloomberg numerous times. Mike is a Director of Perion. Mike is also a director of Maestro.io, a livecasting and Esports infrastructure company that is venture-funded.
Mike graduated from Wesleyan University in 1979 with a B.A. in Sociology/Psychology, cum laude. Mike served as a United States Capitol Page from 1973 to 1975. He later served as a part-time Advance Man for the Carter and Clinton White Houses. He has moderated numerous sessions in the past for GamesBeat events.
Our speakers fit within our theme of The Future of Games: Better games, better business.
If you could see the future of games before it happens, that would give your business a competitive advantage. Our event will let the hottest game developers, publishers, and investors talk with their peers and business executives about their insights into the future of games.
GamesBeat Summit 2018 is the destination conference for networking, inspiration, and intelligent interaction. With the right people in the room to make great deals happen, our flagship industry event attracts the best game and tech developers and publishers, executives, marketers and venture capitalists. This event is intended for VP-level executives and the hottest game developers and publishers.
We’ll delve into the strategies of the future for gaming, and how to drive excitement, growth, and new startups. Our talks will feature augmented reality, virtual reality, esports, influencers, mobile games, core games, indies, new game technologies, and the connection between games, tech, and science fiction. We want to expose you to ideas like The Leisure Economy , where everyone in the future will be able to make a living playing games.
Games have changed as they’ve reached a billion people and $116 billion in yearly revenues, reaching the mainstream like they never have before. Can we still apply the lessons from the past to the current and future marketplace? And what type of innovations and companies will draw the blueprint of what’s to come? So much of the industry’s internal narrative has been about it being cutting-edge. How can we imagine a broader set of drivers other than technology that will shape the industry? Our previously announced speakers include: show host and Spiketrap cofounder Adam Sessler science fiction writer Eliot Peper John Hanke, CEO of Niantic Labs Andrea Rene, game host Aaron Loeb, president of FoxNext Games Studios Philip Rosedale, CEO of High Fidelity Janina Gavankar, lead actress of Star Wars: Battlefront II congressional candidate Brianna Wu Tencent’s Dan Brody, vice president of business development at Tencent Rand Miller, co-creator of Myst and Riven John Underkoffler, CEO of Oblong Industries and science adviser for the influential sci-fi film Minority Report ; Amit Kumar of Accel, a venture investor Jon “ Neverdie ” Jacobs, CEO of Neverdie Studios Josh Yguado, president and chief operating officer of Jam City Matt McCloskey, vice president of commerce at Twitch Joost van Dreunen, CEO of SuperData Research Nick Earl, CEO of Glu Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors Michael Metzger, Drake Star Chris Heatherly, head of NBCUniversal’s new game business Debbie Bestwick, CEO of Team17 Perrin Kaplan, principal at Zebra Partners Stephanie Chan, writer at GamesBeat Bill Roper, chief creative officer at Improbable and Paul Bettner, CEO of Playful, the creator of the VR titles Lucky’s Tale Advisory board Nicole Lazzaro, CEO of XEO Design Noah Falstein, chief game designer at Google James Zhang, CEO of Concept Art House Joost van Dreunen, CEO of SuperData Research Peter Levin, president of Lionsgate Interactive Jamil Moledina, Google Play Michael Metzger, senior vice president at Houlihan Lokey Mihir Shah, CEO of Immersv Gordon Bellamy, visiting scholar at USC Kate Edwards, former executive director at IGDA Tom Sanocki, CEO of Limitless Phil Sanderson, managing director at Ridge Ventures Perrin Kaplan, principal at Zebra Partners Sibel Sunar, CEO of Fortyseven Communications David Edery, CEO of Spry Fox Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors Topics will include: Intersection of sci-fi, games, and tech Platforms: Where to place your bets? AR, VR, & more Creating a culture of inspiration and creativity Emerging markets for games Monetization: How to acquire and retain users Esports and building the community Deals: Follow the money Diversity and the expanding ecosystem Early Access as a business model How mods can launch new game genres What game engine should you use? Sponsors include : Intel, Worldpay, Appodeal, Unreal Engine, Accel, Universal, Google, Streamlabs, Yomob, Altered Ventures, Mindmaze, Consul General of Canada, Pearl Abyss, Leyou, Jam City, Scalefast, Gfycat, AppOnboard and Mobcrush.
GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
Discover our Briefings.
Join the GamesBeat community! Enjoy access to special events, private newsletters and more.
VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"GamesBeat Summit 2018: Don't miss our emcee, Andrea Rene of What's Good Games | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/games/gamesbeat-summit-2018-dont-miss-our-emcee-andrea-rene-of-whats-good-games"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages VB Event GamesBeat Summit 2018: Don’t miss our emcee, Andrea Rene of What’s Good Games Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn What's Good Games founders. Andrea Rene is on the left.
Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
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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 also switched venues to a secluded placed called The Seminary at Strawberry in Mill Valley, California, north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Our dates and agenda are still the same at April 9 and April 10. Our conference is all about making games better and improving the business, and our speakers should give us a window into the future of game technologies.
You can get your tickets here at 30 percent off our rate using the code DEAN. We’ve also got a new $500 code for indie game developers, IndieVIP, at this link.
Andrea Rene, On-Camera Host, Producer & Writer for “What’s Good Games” Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Above: What’s Good Games crew Andrea Rene is the brains behind the wildly popular “What’s Good Games,” serving as producer, writer, and on-camera host. She’s been working in video games media as a host and producer for nearly a decade. As a co-founder of “What’s Good Games,” you can watch and listen to her video game commentary on the weekly show. She also co-hosts the daily video game news show “Kinda Funny Games Daily.” She was recently nominated for “Trending Gamer” at The Game Awards 2017 and has hosted for Facebook Live, VICE, IGN, Gamespot, and many more.
Our speakers fit within our theme of The Future of Games: Better games, better business.
If you could see the future of games before it happens, that would give your business a competitive advantage. Our event will let the hottest game developers, publishers, and investors talk with their peers and business executives about their insights into the future of games.
GamesBeat Summit 2018 is the destination conference for networking, inspiration, and intelligent interaction. With the right people in the room to make great deals happen, our flagship industry event attracts the best game and tech developers and publishers, executives, marketers and venture capitalists. This event is intended for VP-level executives and the hottest game developers and publishers.
We’ll delve into the strategies of the future for gaming, and how to drive excitement, growth, and new startups. Our talks will feature augmented reality, virtual reality, esports, influencers, mobile games, core games, indies, new game technologies, and the connection between games, tech, and science fiction. We want to expose you to ideas like The Leisure Economy , where everyone in the future will be able to make a living playing games.
Games have changed as they’ve reached a billion people and $116 billion in yearly revenues, reaching the mainstream like they never have before. Can we still apply the lessons from the past to the current and future marketplace? And what type of innovations and companies will draw the blueprint of what’s to come? So much of the industry’s internal narrative has been about it being cutting-edge. How can we imagine a broader set of drivers other than technology that will shape the industry? Our previously announced speakers include: show host and Spiketrap cofounder Adam Sessler science fiction writer Eliot Peper John Hanke, CEO of Niantic Labs Andrea Rene, game host Aaron Loeb, president of FoxNext Games Studios Philip Rosedale, CEO of High Fidelity Janina Gavankar, lead actress of Star Wars: Battlefront II congressional candidate Brianna Wu Tencent’s Dan Brody, vice president of business development at Tencent Rand Miller, co-creator of Myst and Riven John Underkoffler, CEO of Oblong Industries and science adviser for the influential sci-fi film Minority Report ; Amit Kumar of Accel, a venture investor Jon “ Neverdie ” Jacobs, CEO of Neverdie Studios Josh Yguado, president and chief operating officer of Jam City Matt McCloskey, vice president of commerce at Twitch Joost van Dreunen, CEO of SuperData Research Nick Earl, CEO of Glu Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors Michael Metzger, Drake Star Chris Heatherly, head of NBCUniversal’s new game business Debbie Bestwick, CEO of Team17 Perrin Kaplan, principal at Zebra Partners Stephanie Chan, writer at GamesBeat Bill Roper, chief creative officer at Improbable and Paul Bettner, CEO of Playful, the creator of the VR titles Lucky’s Tale Advisory board Nicole Lazzaro, CEO of XEO Design Noah Falstein, chief game designer at Google James Zhang, CEO of Concept Art House Joost van Dreunen, CEO of SuperData Research Peter Levin, president of Lionsgate Interactive Jamil Moledina, Google Play Michael Metzger, senior vice president at Houlihan Lokey Mihir Shah, CEO of Immersv Gordon Bellamy, visiting scholar at USC Kate Edwards, former executive director at IGDA Tom Sanocki, CEO of Limitless Phil Sanderson, managing director at Ridge Ventures Perrin Kaplan, principal at Zebra Partners Sibel Sunar, CEO of Fortyseven Communications David Edery, CEO of Spry Fox Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors Topics will include: Intersection of sci-fi, games, and tech Platforms: Where to place your bets? AR, VR, & more Creating a culture of inspiration and creativity Emerging markets for games Monetization: How to acquire and retain users Esports and building the community Deals: Follow the money Diversity and the expanding ecosystem Early Access as a business model How mods can launch new game genres What game engine should you use? Sponsors include : Intel, Worldpay, Appodeal, Unreal Engine, Accel, Universal, Google, Streamlabs, Yomob, Altered Ventures, Mindmaze, Consul General of Canada, Pearl Abyss, Leyou, Jam City, Scalefast, Gfycat, AppOnboard and Mobcrush.
GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
Discover our Briefings.
Join the GamesBeat community! Enjoy access to special events, private newsletters and more.
VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
"
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"Crunchyroll launches Memoria Freese, its first anime-based mobile game | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/games/crunchyroll-launches-memoria-freese-its-first-anime-based-mobile-game"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Crunchyroll launches Memoria Freese, its first anime-based mobile game Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
Learn more.
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 Freese debuted in Japan in 2017, and Crunchyroll has teamed up with developer Gree to localize and distribute it in English. Starting today, it’s available to play on iOS and Android devices for free.
Dan-Machi started out as an illustrated novel series by author Fujino Ōmori and illustrator Suzuhito Yasuda. It follows teenaged protagonist Bell Cranel as he goes on adventures and searches for treasure in dungeons in a fantasy world. It takes its cue from fantasy role-playing games, as its characters level up within the story and gain new skills.
The books have been adapted into manga and anime series, which proved to be popular. And the Japanese version of the mobile game Memoria Freese (which fans refer to as “Dan-Memo”) sold over three million copies in the first month, according to Gree.
The game is an RPG that features turn-based combat, and players can choose to play as one of four characters.
Joellen Ferrer is the vice president of communications at Ellation, Crunchyroll’s parent company. She says that it’s been interested in exploring games for a while, and one reason it decided to take on Memoria Freese as its first project is because a new season of the anime is coming out soon. Another reason is because of the Crunchyroll audience.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! “The other part, you may have heard this already, but 90 percent of our community — this is about 35 million registered users and more than a million subscribers — 90 percent of them self-identify as gamers,” said Ferrer in a phone call with GamesBeat.
Crunchyroll has flirted with the gaming community in other ways before. It has teamed up with the broadcasting platform Twitch for anime marathons , and it also livestreamed its annual anime awards show on that site.
“It’s an ongoing conversation and an audience we think is definitely ripe for anime,” said Ferrer. “It’s a natural fit. It’s something we’re continuing to work together — not only with Twitch, but to figure out other ways to try to reach the gaming audience and see, A, if they already are fans they may want a bit of nudging into some of our content; but B, if there’s also a way for us to introduce them to new shows they may realize they love and can’t live without.” It’s not the only anime-focused company that’s experimenting with games. Manga publisher Viz Media announced last month that it will begin publishing indie games.
It inked a deal with developer What Pumpkin Games for Hiveswap , which is inspired by the cult hit webcomic Homestuck.
And it’s partnered with developer Rose City Games to publish the studio’s next three games, including its upcoming title The World Next Door.
Crunchyroll isn’t sharing any details about what’s next, and it sounds like it hasn’t committed yet to a “full blown Crunchyroll games unit.” Depending on how Memoria Freese’s launch goes, though, it has a few avenues it could explore, whether that’s localizing more games into English or perhaps working with developers on original IP. The latter is something that will become “a bigger part of [its] content mix” in the future, at least in terms of the shows it offers on its site.
“As part of that we recently hired a new head of studio based out in Los Angeles to be thinking about what kind of content, what types of things we want to be able to create moving forward,” said Ferrer. “I think that’s very much of a conversation to be continued, but I think that will start to evolve as we start to produce some of these original shows.” GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
Discover our Briefings.
Join the GamesBeat community! Enjoy access to special events, private newsletters and more.
VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
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"Apple seeks VR patent to bring zombie attacks and talk shows into self-driving cars | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/games/apple-seeks-vr-patent-to-bring-zombie-attacks-and-talk-shows-into-self-driving-cars"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Apple seeks VR patent to bring zombie attacks and talk shows into self-driving cars Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
Learn more.
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 interior and exterior environments, making the ride more fun for passengers.
Though the patent is framed as a way to mitigate motion sickness, Patently Apple notes that it offers a staggering glimpse into Apple’s visions for both VR and self-driving cars. Apple suggests that future cars could lack windows, instead using interior screens and VR headsets to display real or artificial surroundings. For instance, a tiny car could be made to look spacious or transformed into a completely different type of vehicle. The VR view would be coordinated with an “active seat” and motion sensors, enabling real-world car movements to be incorporated into the visual experience.
Passengers may choose to have relaxing virtual experiences … such as floating down a river or soaring over the landscape in a hang glider, or exciting virtual experiences such as a car chase or driving through a post-apocalyptic wasteland with zombies attacking … if the vehicle stops at a red light or for some other reason when fleeing zombies … the virtual experience may cause the vehicle to appear to stall and not allow the car to be restarted until the light turns green to build suspense.
Apple offers other examples, including using VR to have an author to read a book to you, livestreaming coworkers for virtual meetings, or enacting scenes from car races or movies. As the car would handle the driving itself, passengers could replace their actual surroundings with street-level views of real cities, such as London, or fictional cities, to make their trips more interesting.
Back in 2015, Apple was reported to be working on its own car under the codename Project Titan , an effort later vaguely confirmed by various executives. While work apparently shifted from a full electric car to autonomous systems, the company has continued to test self-driving vehicles and work on associated technologies. Until now, VR was not known to be a component of the company’s plans.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Apple’s VR car patent application was filed in September 2017 and published yesterday , joining several interesting Apple VR-related patents published this month. Most notably, Apple has applied to patent the use of VR to replicate a word processor or document editor — replicating a conventional computer screen in VR while the user types and scrolls with a physical accessory — a suggestion that Apple sees self-contained VR headsets as potential replacements for Macs and iPads. Though these patents might never be used in actual products, they demonstrate that Apple is actively considering multiple exciting VR applications while it publicly focuses attention on its AR initiatives.
GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it.
Discover our Briefings.
The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
All rights reserved.
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"NASCAR, the NBA, and NCAA hoops see a future in esports | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/esports/nascar-the-nba-and-ncaa-hoops-see-a-future-in-esports"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest NASCAR, the NBA, and NCAA hoops see a future in esports Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn The well-inked Damian Lillard in NBA2K.
Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship.
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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 collegiate programs attempt to integrate esports elements into their own business models.
Integrations have ranged from fan experiences, to interactive contests, or simple ticket sales gimmicks designed to bring in a younger audience to aging sports. But just because a property or sport integrates esports doesn’t mean they are all doing it at the same level of success or with the same overall intention.
So, who’s doing it well and making it fit organically, and who is just looking to leverage esports to drive ticket sales? Let’s take a look.
NASCAR NASCAR partnered with 704Games and Esports Arena Drive to bring NASCAR Heat Champions to Daytona International Speedway during the Daytona 500 race weekend.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! All fans in attendance got a chance to win prizes playing NASCAR Heat 2. While this had an independent activation feel and more of a showcase for a new mobile arena than a NASCAR-run program, the interest in esports makes sense. NASCAR has an older fan base , averaging around 58 years old for television viewers.
The esports tournament extended multiple days enticing fans to attend practice days and not just race day. The best part of this setup was the integration of live streaming of the finals on Twitch complete with announcers. You can get a feel for the integration in this recap video.
The one thing that this activation has to continue to make sure it provides is that competitive esports feel. It’s important to appear as being part of the esports space instead of just another video game promotion.
This activation is off to a good start, but it also appears that for NASCAR this has the benefit of some additional ticket sales on non-race days while allowing them to tap into a younger audience that they are desperately trying to attract.
College basketball Two different NCAA basketball conferences – the Horizon League and the Mountain West Conference – jumped into the esports add-on world, tying their championships to events.
The Horizon League partnered with 313 Presents and Gamer Saloon to create the Motor City Madness Esports Championships.
This integration broke into two different parts playing NBA2K. The first was an online qualification stage to determine 16 finalists to compete in the second part of the competitions which occurred in person on Day 1 of the Horizon League tournament.
The major issue with this integration was that it was not designed to integrate the actual fan bases or students from schools within the Horizon League itself. It featured over 200 NBA2K players from around the country and each of those registrants received a Day 1 ticket to the Horizon League tournament, helping boost attendance numbers.
The Mountain West Conference took a more natural entrance into esports. During its conference tournament, it showcased two of its partner schools esports teams. Boise State and UNLV played three different games — League of Legends, Rocket League, and Overwatch. The event was also streamed live on Twitch on the Mountain West Conference esports page.
If you compare the two events, the Mountain West esports event feels much more of an organic addition to its basketball tournament by focusing on its partner schools participating and naturally adding their respective esports teams.
The Horizon League event comes off as more of a kick-in event and a chance to brand yourself as entering esports without giving much thought on how to integrate your core audience (your schools) already attending the core event.
Mountain West Commissioner Craig Thompson hammered home this idea when he was quoted in an ESPN story saying, “Globally, esports is enjoying a boom in popularity – particularly among young people who are in the same age bracket as the students on our campuses. We are also seeing universities add esports programming, technology and business to their curriculum offerings.” Tournaments like this one will go a long way to add validity to the many college programs being formed at universities, especially the ones still primarily being run by students.
The NBA The relationship between the NBA and NBA 2K League is one of the biggest questions in esports.
There are clear tie-ins with NBA teams providing the infrastructure for each esports team. However, there is one clear separation when it comes to the NBA and the NBA 2K League — but it is subtle to catch. Most assume when they see Bucks Gaming or Celtics Gaming that they are talking about the Boston Celtics or the Milwaukee Bucks. However, it appears that there will be a difference between those entities.
Take a look at the full team list for the league.
You never see the city name brought up in any of the promotion of the NBA 2K League suggesting a less regional approach to the promotion of the league may be looming. This will create a very interesting dynamic as the league grows.
The easy pickings for initial fans for this league will be to promote it to your local audience with tie-ins and integrations of current NBA players for promotions and storylines. NBA players meeting their 2K League counterparts for the same organization is a great story, right? Potentially, but the flip side is if you tie a primarily streamed and online esport to its corresponding city-based team, you are regionalizing your potential fan base thus limiting the potential reach and revenue.
The alternative side of the argument is that by integrating a player from, let’s say, Mavs Gaming into the Dallas Mavericks basketball machine you are creating an opportunity to build the brand of the esports athlete to a potentially whole new audience.
It will be important for the NBA 2K League to integrate those who watch the NBA and currently play NBA 2k into loyal esports fans. Figuring out how to transition fans into the esports arena will be key for the NBA moving forward and it will require cross-integration of the NBA and NBA 2K teams.
The success and failure of the NBA 2K League will go a long way in establishing future leagues around other gaming titles such as Madden and FIFA.
Whether they are chasing a new younger audience like NASCAR or trying to tap into a new segment of their existing fans like the NBA, the key will be to do so organically, while making sure they are not alienating those who already support them. It will also be key to not miss out on the easy integrations like integrating your partner schools as a collegiate conference.
At the end of the day, traditional sports will continue to integrate esports at a rapid rate so long as they feel they can add value to their fan bases and their wallets at the same time.
Chris Myers is the director of sales and marketing for sports marketing agency CHARGE , and has worked with brands large and small to move their business forward.
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"Why London startups are immune to the EU brain drain to the U.S. | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/entrepreneur/why-london-startups-are-immune-to-the-eu-brain-drain-to-the-u-s"
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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 U.S.-based parent companies as a condition of the deal, resulting in a mass migration of EU innovators to the U.S.
Europe faces the real danger of blowing its startup moment.
But if the EU acts quickly, it can counter that threat by engaging with U.S.-based venture funds that are open and willing to invest in foreign startups without requiring them to flip.
What I didn’t detail in that earlier story is that the UK is proving to be an exception to the brain drain trend. Last year the UK’s tech sector hit an all-time high of VC investment, attracting almost double ($4.2 billion) the total amount of venture capital invested in UK firms in 2016 ($2.3 billion). The lion’s share of that activity happened in London, which has been on a rapid ascent during the past several years. Indeed, it stands now as Europe’s startup and tech capital and serves as a total outlier to the rest of the region.
Daniel Glazer, Partner at Silicon Valley-based law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, which advises non-U.S. tech companies through their U.S. life cycle, recently told me, “The concentration of capital, talent, industries, and promising companies at all stages of growth [in the UK] – particularly in London – is unmatched in Europe, even in a post-Referendum environment.” London’s venture profile soared from $100 million in VC investment in 2010 to $3.3 billion in 2017.
The city currently boasts 4,300-5,900 active startups , which is the fourth highest startup output in the world. As a matter of fact, London now ranks third among global startup ecosystem, trailing only Silicon Valley and New York. Its tech startup landscape has evolved in the span of just a decade from a Silicon Joke to a self-sustaining ecosystem that can fully support the needs of its community.
The fact that London has a homegrown concentration of VCs and angels that have the mindset, means, and muscle to back their local ecosystem is a particular boon for its early-stage startups, because only startups at their seed and Series A rounds are typically vulnerable to being flipped into “Americanized” companies. As a startup approaches its growth stage (Series B or later), the pressure to uproot to the U.S. due to funding-related requirements generally fades.
This trend has “evolved particularly significantly since the launch of the SEIS scheme in 2012,” Glazer said. “Anecdotally, the number of early-stage London companies we meet who say they are looking to leave London and move to the States due to lack of funding has fallen markedly over the past several years.” He pointed me to a couple of resources indicating that London’s early-stage funding ecosystem is in good health, with plenty of active seed and Series A investors.
Now, U.S.-based investors have some good (or fair) reasons for pushing for a Delaware flip, but some of them — options like convertible debt and employee equity benefits (both popular vehicles stateside, but not outside) — are much less critical for growth-stage startups. For growth-stage startups, then, the question of whether or not to flip has less to do with funding and more to do with the company’s long-term strategy.
And a UK-based parent company can be a more compelling proposition than a U.S. one in that context.
“London is a much better place on paper than anywhere in the U.S. Lower corporate tax, no need to pay for healthcare, clean employment laws, and simple company law. There are even good tax breaks for investment,” Ben Gamble, CTO at UK startup Quincus , told me. “You even have access to a much bigger talent pool (the whole of the EU) which don’t require visas. It’s just the nature of investors that needs to change.” Until recently, you could have argued it was smarter to have the parent company remain UK-based since the U.S. corporate tax used to tally as high as 40 percent (that’s federal plus state taxes) versus the UK’s steady 19 percent. UK-based investments certainly made for an alluring opportunity for the trillions in “trapped cash” some major U.S. corporations were holding overseas. However, the recent reduction in the U.S. federal corp tax rate to 21 percent has significantly tapered off the tax-angle argument. What you are left with now are the UK’s strong market fundamentals.
“In general, investors have been attracted to the idea of doing business in the UK because the English legal system tends to be seen as commercially focused, robust, and reliable,” Jamie Kerr, Head of External Affairs at the Institute of Directors , told me. He said UK policy has been on a positive trajectory in helping early stage companies get funding by creating favourable tax breaks for investors.
The general compatibility of the UK framework with that of the U.S. makes for an ideal pairing of the two markets, and the UK’s exceptionalism in supporting home-grown companies through their early stages means startups don’t need to flip unless they’re intent on U.S. expansion.
“If the early-stage London startup already has established a strong U.S. story (U.S. customer/user growth, revenue, team, etc.), it may make good sense for them to seek out U.S. investors. Indeed, in those instances early-stage U.S. investors may proactively seek out the London startup,” Glazer told me. “In other words, there’s a difference between seeking out early-stage U.S. investors because there’s insufficient local risk capital and seeking out early-stage U.S. investors because it’s a smart strategic play for both company and investor.” The fact is that, when it comes to funding startups, London is now a competitive peer to Silicon Valley, and going by recent developments like SoftBank’s arrival in the city and the goliath investments that have accompanied it, we can expect to see the bargaining power of UK-based startups and London’s position as a premiere startup hub continue to rise.
Amir Bozorgzadeh is cofounder and CEO at Virtuleap, the host of the Global WebXR Hackathon and the startup powering up the Gaze-At-Ratio (GAR) XR metric.
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"How Utah's startups are attracting tech talent from other states | VentureBeat"
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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 opportunities in Utah as there were in places like Boston, Silicon Valley, and the North Carolina Research Triangle.
At 31, Ferguson is back in Utah, working as a data scientist for Domo, a seven-year-old analytics company valued at $2.3 billion as of its last funding round. The reason he finally decided to move back home? “If Domo didn’t work out for whatever reason, [I felt] I could find another job really quickly and easily, with all these new businesses coming up,” Ferguson told VentureBeat.
Utah serves as an example to other aspiring tech hubs of what a healthy “talent pipeline” truly looks like. This is an increasingly important piece of the ecosystem puzzle as tech giants like Google and Amazon look outside the Bay Area to meet large hiring goals.
Yes, the number of computer science graduates is important. But if you talk to the executives of various Utah tech startups, you’ll also hear about the need to attract talent from outside the state. And while your city or state might have a few startup success stories — Utah is now home to four startups valued at more than $1 billion — it doesn’t mean that hiring challenges will disappear overnight.
“If we hired every engineer every year that all of the universities in the state put out, which we’re obviously not going to do … that still wouldn’t be enough. And we’re just one company,” Mike Maughan, who heads up Provo, Utah-based Qualtrics’ global insights team, told VentureBeat in a phone interview.
How the Silicon Slopes took shape Most Utah entrepreneurs, investors, and tech organizations VentureBeat spoke with agreed on one thing — it’s become easier in recent years to recruit talent from outside the state.
Jonathan Rye, who moved to Utah from the Bay Area to work for Domo as its VP of sales operations in November, said he was simply reassured about the area’s prospects by seeing the physical presence of tech companies along Utah’s 1-15 corridor. The highway connects the cities of Provo and Salt Lake City, which make up the area referred to as the Silicon Slopes — home to the highest concentration of tech companies in the state.
Above: Domo employees at the company’s offices in American Fork, Utah “You pass all of these tech companies — Proofpoint, Oracle — and I don’t have the feeling that it’s very much just a sprinkling [of tech companies]. There’s a density and critical mass,” Rye told VentureBeat.
Utah produced some successful companies during the dot-com era, including Omniture and Overstock.com. But up until the late 2000s, that wasn’t enough to convince most potential talent that Utah had a thriving tech scene.
Omniture cofounder Josh James started his second company, Domo, in 2011 , armed with an influx of cash from the $1.8 billion sale of Omniture to Adobe. Two years later, Qualtrics raised $70 million from investors that included Accel and Sequoia Capital — becoming one of the few Utah companies at the time to attract a Silicon Valley-sized first round of funding.
With that capital from prominent investors, Qualtrics, which develops what it calls “experience management” software, has been able to raise its profile with both entry-level applicants and more experienced executives. In 2016, the company recruited 150 people to Utah, according to Maughan. Among the top universities that Qualtrics now recruits from — in addition to those located in Utah — are places like Princeton University, Northwestern, and University of Michigan.
“What happened is … as people who were recruited came here … they recruited their friends, and they’ve recruited their friends,” Maughan said. “It’s become this sort of easy hub where once people are moving out here they say, ‘Oh I heard there’s a really strong crew of Michigan alum [there]’, in addition to Qualtrics being a great company,” Maughan said.
Qualtrics, which has 1,600 employees, about half of whom are in Utah, has also been able to snag some seasoned executives as it reportedly prepares for an IPO. Those hires include longtime Microsoft executive Julie Larson-Green , who was named chief experience officer in December, and newly appointed chief financial officer David Faugno , who guided Barracuda Networks through its IPO.
Change takes time As is true in any tech ecosystem, younger startups in Utah feel more of a hiring pinch than older, more established companies like Qualtrics. Eric Rea, the cofounder and CEO of four-year-old startup Podium, said his company relied on remote engineers for the first year and a half.
“When you’re starting out, if you’re in a state that doesn’t have a lot of tech talent, you have so many things against you — number one, you’re a tiny little company, and you’re probably not getting a lot of people to take bets on you,” Rea said. “And on top of that, there’s a shortage. You probably can’t pay as much as the bigger companies around you when you’re first starting out, and sometimes you have to just figure out ways to get around.” Utah did see the highest percent increase of any state in the number of tech workers from 2016 to 2017, according to an annual report from CompTIA.
The number of computer science degrees awarded by its public universities has increased by 130 percent between 2000 and 2015 , and 8.6 percent of its state workforce works in tech , compared to 9.1 percent in California.
But with 3 million residents, compared to California’s 39 million, Utah’s talent pool will never match the scale and density of the Bay Area. And large percentage increases in the number of skilled workers or graduates don’t look as impressive when translated into numerical increases. The total number of computer science degrees awarded by Utah’s public universities, for example, only jumped from 513 to 1,181 between 2000 and 2015.
Podium got a huge assist in the hiring department when the company was selected for Y Combinator’s 2016 winter session. Rea says that Podium has seen a significant uptick in out-of-state resumes since then, but finding enough engineers is still challenging, especially with the company in high-growth mode. Podium currently has 264 employees in Utah, and it hopes to grow its headcount to 400 by year’s end.
What can be done Not every Utah startup can count on a nationally regarded program like Y Combinator to ease their hiring challenges. The question, then, becomes: What should Utah do to get more talent in the state? The answer you get depends on which group you talk to in Utah’s tech community.
Ginger Chinn, managing director for the Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Development, touted the state’s “pathway” programs in a phone conversation with VentureBeat. The programs — including a recently announced IT program — connect the private sector with schools and universities looking to align their curriculum with the skills companies need.
CEOs of Utah’s unicorn companies believe the most important thing they can do is work together to make the state more attractive to tech workers. So once a quarter, top Utah CEOs — Domo’s Josh James, Qualtrics’ Ryan Smith, and Aaron Skonnard, the CEO of another Utah unicorn, Pluralsight — meet to discuss ways to boost the state’s profile.
“We’re trying to build this state to accommodate the next phase of [our] growth so that we can try to do as much of it here as possible,” Smith told VentureBeat. “All of us have the option to go and grow wherever we want to grow.” Qualtrics, Domo, and Pluralsight now have 1,600, 800, and 940 employees, respectively. In Qualtrics’ case, a little more than half of its employees are located in the state, while just over 700 of Domo’s employees work out of its office in American Fork, Utah.
Younger workers want to know that Utah is a fun place to live. So Qualtrics’ website, for example, features a “ Why Utah ” section that shows employees snowshoeing, rock climbing, cycling, and visiting one of Utah’s national parks and claims that yes, a state that’s 63 percent Mormon has a lively nightlife.
There’s also the challenge of trying to convince tech workers looking for a diverse place to live and work that a state that’s 82 percent white fits the bill. Doing more to recruit female and minority tech employees is a priority, especially for the bigger startups. In September, leading Utah tech companies, including Qualtrics, Domo, and Pluralsight signed a Parity Pledge , promising to interview at least one female candidate for any opening for vice president or above.
If there’s a lesson other states aspiring to build a stronger tech community can take from Utah, it’s that there’s no “magic bullet” when it comes to building a strong talent pool — success requires a multi-pronged approach and consistent backing from the whole community.
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"Blockchain will make AI smarter by feeding it better data | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/commerce/blockchain-will-make-ai-smarter-by-feeding-it-better-data"
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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 the sort of personalized recommendations that are currently the province of giant retailers like Amazon.
Imagine walking into a neighborhood shop for the first time and the sales associate immediately shows you the products that match your tastes, in your size, and that you don’t already own.
That’s the sort of intuitive experience that AI promises. The current challenge to smaller businesses isn’t the cost of AI systems — they’re increasingly more affordable and accessible. The barrier is gaining access to enough high quality data about customers to adequately power those systems. Few retailers can recognize their customers across multiple channels and devices, and they often rely on third-party, behavioral data that doesn’t give them a complete understanding of what products customers want to buy. Moreover, most retailers handle only a small slice of each of their customer’s purchases, hardly enough to make these AI systems work well.
That’s why blockchain technology is so transformative. Its key innovation is to create a database that is open and decentralized, yet with strict controls over privacy. Shoppers could authorize all the stores they patronize to contribute data about their purchases to a blockchain ledger that protects the privacy of both consumers and retailers.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! A neighborhood shop, say a shoe boutique with a few stores and an e-commerce site, is never going to have the volume to offer the biggest selection at the lowest prices, but it can win over a group of discerning customers that value its stylish merchandise sourced from smaller, high-quality manufacturers.
Even today, it’s hard for boutique retailers to stay competitive when AI systems for companies like Amazon pounce on customers with recommendations like, “Now that you’ve bought that black cocktail dress, don’t you need some red pumps?” (There are also lot more subtle uses for this personalization technology that are harder to spot.) If a blockchain ledger recorded all of the shopper’s purchases, the shoe boutique could send an email suggesting matching pumps, even if the dress was purchased at a different store. And in the physical store, the sales associate could scan a mobile app and see images of the customers’ existing outfits to suggest products that best complement them.
Nifty. But after everything we are hearing about how all sorts of data may have been sucked out of Facebook for nefarious uses, why would anyone trust a giant database listing everything we’ve bought? Because blockchain reverses the balance of power, putting consumers — not businesses — in control.
Each shopper would authorize the addition of their purchase data to the chain. And each shopper would control access to the digital key that lets others view that data. Actually, retailers would never be able to directly access the data, but their AI engines could gain temporary access to shoppers’ profile and purchase history data — and then marry this data with a retailer’s inventory to provide better product recommendations and rewards in real time. When you’re willing to trade access to your data for more personalized recommendations, you can do so. Otherwise, your data is private.
This shift from fragmented databases collected by individual retailers to comprehensive databases maintained by consumers should increase the amount of data available to recommendation engines and other predictive marketing systems by at least an order of magnitude. And that should lead to a measurable improvement in accuracy.
This sort of consumer-centric system could also create another data stream that improves machine-learning systems: the ultimate feedback loop. Shoppers get an easy way to indicate if the recommendations provided are valuable, creating signals that feed back into the model to improve its accuracy. Of course, individual retailer systems currently ask for feedback, but the blockchain approach allows for a more complete data set.
There’s one more subtle benefit of using blockchain databases for AI applications. Blockchains are immutable. That means AI models can access and trust the provenance of each data element. If it turns out that one source of data is unreliable, all of the data from that source can be tracked down and removed.
With blockchain, we are entering a new age of vastly more useful AI systems. The industry will give way to an explosion of AI systems that make our lives richer, safer, and more convenient.
Eran Eyal is CEO of Shopin.
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"ProBeat: Windows is dead. Long live Windows | VentureBeat"
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Terry Myerson is out. Microsoft lists his full title as “executive vice president and the former leader 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 being replaced.
You can read CEO Satya Nadella’s email about the changes on Microsoft’s website and Terry Myerson’s exit memo on LinkedIn.
Microsoft reorganizes ahead of almost every fiscal year. But this time is different.
This time, the product that screams Microsoft is being reevaluated. Microsoft executives are coming out in droves to thank Myerson for his work and to reminisce about their time with him.
Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Even Bill Gates weighed in: Thank you, @tmyerson , for your leadership and your contributions. You’ve made a lasting impact on Microsoft. I look forward to sharing many more Diet Cokes with you in the future.
https://t.co/mi4yMwma6f — Bill Gates (@BillGates) March 29, 2018 Instead of replacing Myerson, Nadella has carved up his division and issued four “leadership changes.” Microsoft devices chief Panos Panay is now Microsoft’s chief product officer. Kudo Tsunoda is still focused on “high-valued experiences,” and Brad Anderson is still in charge of Windows Enterprise deployment.
The rest of the announcement is all about Microsoft’s cloud and AI efforts, which is nothing new for anyone who follows the company, even from afar. The former is where Microsoft’s growth is currently coming from — just look at any of the company’s recent earnings reports — and the latter is where the company is betting future growth will go.
Windows 10’s role But where does that leave Windows? The fourth leadership change that doesn’t talk about the cloud or AI involves Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s operating systems group. And interestingly, it gets the most detail from Nadella: Joe Belfiore will continue leading our Windows experiences and will drive Windows innovation in partnership with the PC and device ecosystem. The future of Windows is bright as we continue to innovate across new scenarios and device form factors, and more deeply connect to our Microsoft 365 offerings. Joe will share more about the Windows roadmap at Build.
(Build 2018 is happening May 7 to May 9 in Seattle.
) So how does this tie in with Myerson’s departure? Microsoft is both downplaying the importance of Windows and making a point of continuing to invest in Windows.
Office 365 and Azure — Microsoft’s latest success stories — would be nothing without Windows. But they’re the future of Microsoft, at least until the company thinks of a different strategy. Because Windows holds not just those two, but all of Microsoft together, it stays.
Actually, it doesn’t just stay. It’s going to keep getting better. Windows 10 is already receiving two major free updates every year. Four have been released so far, the fifth is coming next month , the sixth is already in development , and more are in the pipeline.
Microsoft is well aware that Windows by itself is not enough. It’s been relegated to just a piece of the larger puzzle. But that piece still matters, at least in Microsoft’s eyes.
With Belfiore in charge, expect a lot more initiatives like Continue on PC, which lets you send a task from your Android or iOS device to your Windows 10 computer. Windows 10 is going to play a role, but it won’t be the main attraction.
Windows as we’ve known it for the past three decades is dead. But Windows isn’t dead. It’s just not the future.
ProBeat is a column in which Emil rants about whatever crosses him that week.
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Wired Articles Filtered
Retrieves up to 100 entries from the train dataset where the URL contains 'wired' but the text does not contain 'Menu', providing basic filtering of the data.