The Finns have withdrawn from Vietnam. This is not a geopolitical event. Rather, Helsinki-based Supercell said that earlier this month it decided to pull its mobile games from iOS and Android in the Southeast Asian country. Supercell cited “local regulatory issues” as the reason for this action. Last week, Vietnamese media VNExpress reported that 142 […]
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Antstream Arcade, a London startup that makes a streaming platform for retro games, said it received a round of funding led by Chinese gaming and social giant Tencent. London-based venture firm Hambro Perks also participated in the Series A funding. The funding amount wasn’t disclosed. Antstream Arcade offers a monthly subscription service to more than […]
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Somebody is taking the joy out of Joy-Con. Lawyers have filed a class-action suit against Nintendo for an alleged “drift” flaw in the Joy-Con controllers for the Nintendo Switch hybrid game console. The lawsuit, filed Friday in the U.S. District Court in Washington by the law offices of Chimicles, Schwartz Kriner & Donaldson-Smith (CSK&D), alleges that […]
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Chinese internet and entertainment giant Tencent announced that it is working with The Pokémon Company to develop games. The release didn’t say anything about which platforms or any other details about the games. Tencent is the mobile giant behind Honour of Kings and PUBG Mobile (now called Game of Peace) and other big PC titles […]
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I use a lot of internet. My household typically has one or two dozen connected devices at a time, and I have never taken the time to think about the way each device passively and actively consumes data. But I want to change that … because of Comcast Xfinity’s data cap. After a brief flirtation […]
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The United Nations’ educational agency, UNESCO, is sponsoring a conference in India to promote social and emotional learning in children and how to use digital technologies — such as video games — to build more peaceful and sustainable societies. As part of that effort, the UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable […]
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Possessions are going out of fashion. An endless stream of media reports claim millennials – that amorphous mass of people born in the 1980s and 1990s who have grown up with the internet and digital technology – are in favor of accessing rather than owning stuff. And yet my research shows that owning possessions is […]
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NetEase, one of China’s big internet and online game publishers, has launched a new video game studio in Montreal as part of a global expansion. The company, which publishes Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft in China, plans to hire local and international talent for this R&D-focused studio in North America. The new studio is one […]
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Slack today announced it’s deploying an under-the-hood upgrade for its desktop app to boost performance for companies and teams using the app for workplace collaboration. The latest version of Slack for desktop and internet browsers is due out in the coming weeks and promises a 33% faster launch time, 10 times faster launch of VoIP […]
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In keeping with my new tradition of reviewing cars, I took a spin with the Nissan Leaf SL Plus, a variant of the world’s bestselling electric vehicle. I’m not much of a professional car reviewer. But I have driven a lot of tech-ladened electric cars in the past year, including the Jaguar I-Pace, the BMW i3s, […]
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The information retrieval models underpinning search engines require reams of manually annotated data, if they’re trained using machine learning. That’s because they must handle not only a range of queries, but any and all data tangential to these queries. Fortunately, an approach (“Content-Based Weak Supervision for Ad-Hoc Re-Ranking”) detailed by scientists at Amazon’s Alexa division […]
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The first batch of companies have begun trading on China’s new STAR Market today. Billed as China‘s version of Nasdaq, it’s overseen by the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE). Previously called the Science and Technology Innovation Board, the STAR Market mainly targets homegrown technology firms, and is modeled after a US-like IPO system. The move marks […]
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Microsoft today announced that it would invest $1 billion in OpenAI, the San Francisco-based AI research firm cofounded by CTO Greg Brockman, chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, and others, with backing from luminaries like LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and former Y Combinator president Sam Altman. In a blog post, Brockman said the investment will […]
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Equifax will pay at least $575 million in a settlement for a mammoth 2017 data breach that impacted more than 140 million people. According to an announcement by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), this penalty could rise to as much as $700 million. The Atlanta-headquartered consumer credit reporting company hit the spotlight back in September […]
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Sennder, a platform and marketplace that connects commercial shippers with smaller freight carriers, has raised $70 million in a series C round of funding led by Lakestar, with participation from Accel, HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, Project A, Siemens’ Next47, H14, and Scania Growth Capital. Founded out of Berlin in 2016, Sennder touts itself as a “digital road […]
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Since Fortnite: Battle Royale’s inception in September 2017, battle royale has become one of the dominant genres in gaming. While this gamestyle isn’t new — H1Z1 (January 2015) was an early example of a game in this space — these types of multiplayer online shooters have gotten more sophisticated. In order to understand the impact […]
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VentureBeat is seeking a leader to curate content for our expanding events focused on artificial intelligence. This Head of Events Content will report directly to the CEO and will oversee speaker recruitment and content planning for VentureBeat’s portfolio of events, most notably Transform — the leading event for business executives seeing to understand and implement […]
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Running a free-to-play mobile game isn’t easy. Lots of fans download the game, and sometimes they make a lot of demands. Scopely has learned that, as it is facing another fan spending boycott and protest in its four-year-old mobile game The Walking Dead: Road to Survival. It’s not the first time this has happened in […]
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I am starting to wonder if choosing a blockchain or a Web 3.0 approach is as much a lifestyle choice as a technological choice. Leaving aside the naming challenge (are we calling this blockchain, crypto, or Web 3.0?), I think it represents a movement of people who want to live with intention, self-discipline, and personal […]
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Nintendo blows other companies out of the water when it comes to the gaming industry’s recent TV ad impressions, with 86% of all impressions for the June 16-July 15 measurement period. PlayStation takes second place with 11.1% of industry impressions. GamesBeat has partnered with iSpot.tv, the always-on TV ad measurement and attribution company, to bring […]
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