(Reuters) — Online payments company PayPal plans to invest $500 million in Uber Technologies Inc as the ride-hailing firm readies to unveil terms for its initial public offering on Friday, Refinitiv IFR reported. PayPal will invest in Uber through a concurrent private placement at the IPO price, IFR reported on Thursday, citing sources. A financial […]
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(Reuters) — Amazon.com plans to deliver packages to members of its loyalty club Prime in just one day, instead of two days, part of a spending ramp-up that may curb near-term profits and will up the ante for retail rivals such as Walmart. Shares rose as much as 2 percent in after-hours trade on Thursday […]
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NBCUniversal and Endless Entertainment launched a new interactive storytelling mobile game today: Series: Your Story Universe. Universal Games and Digital Platforms, is tapping NBCUniversal’s rich set of entertainment intellectual property to fuel storytelling experiences for players, who can make decisions and choose narrative paths that are based on their favorite TV shows and movies. It […]
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Apple settled its international patent licensing disputes with Qualcomm so it could guarantee a 5G iPhone in 2020, but its iPad tablets could be stuck with 4G until later — potentially after 2021. That’s the word from leading Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo (via Economic Daily News) today, who expects that Apple will preserve the 11-inch and 12.9-inch […]
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Musical AI is fast evolving. In March, Google released an algorithmic Google Doodle that let users create melodic homages to Bach. And late last year, Project Magenta, a Google Brain effort “exploring the role of machine learning as a tool in the creative process,” presented Musical Transformer, a model capable of generating songs with recognizable […]
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It’s easy to find multiple 2D images of virtually any product you might want to buy online, but 3D representations are another story — relatively few retailers offer 3D models of their furniture or clothing. That could change in the near future, as OpenXR standard developer Khronos has announced that it’s working with a significant […]
Read MoreBattle royale is everywhere. Game investor and former Microsoft gaming bigwig Eric Fries joked Wednesday during our GamesBeat Summit that he got through the Game Developers Conference without a single battle royale pitch. But we haven’t seen many sci-fi takes on PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds or Fortnite. NetEase could see Cyber Hunter stand out with its futuristic […]
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With the advent of sophisticated natural language processing, text-to-speech (TTS) systems — software programs designed to verbalize text — have become increasingly efficient. Take Google’s Tacotron 2, for instance, which can build voice models based on spectrograms alone. There’s a drawback in these “neural TTS” approaches in that they require more data than traditional methods, […]
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Have you heard? This Saturday is Tell a Story Day in the U.S., Scotland, and U.K., an unofficial holiday dedicated to conjuring up tales and reading books together with friends, family, and loved ones of all ages. To help get folks in the spirit, Google’s bringing Tell Me a Story, a Google Home smart speaker […]
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Hover, a startup developing AI-imbued apps that create customizable 3D models of homes from smartphone photos, today announced that it’s raised $25 million in series C funding from Menlo Ventures, with participation from previous investors including GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Standard Industries. It brings the company’s total venture capital raised to $87 million and […]
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Apple has just announced a rare recall, and it’s not the most obvious of items — MacBooks with problematic keyboards and display cables — but rather wall plug adapters designed for use in Hong Kong, Singapore, and the United Kingdom. The company says it’s aware of six incidents where users have been shocked by the old […]
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Google has announced a handful of updates to the Google Earth Timelapse tool — including its long-overdue arrival on mobile phones. By way of a quick recap, Google announced a partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), NASA, and TIME back in 2013 to show satellite imagery of Earth’s changes over a nearly 30-year period. […]
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Verizon today officially set the first U.S. release date for Samsung’s Galaxy S10 5G phone — May 16, 2019 — and named 20 additional 5G cities, while also announcing changes to its 5G data plans. The standout change: there are now only two 5G plans, down from three before, and the least expensive option is […]
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SoftBank subsidiary HapsMobile, a joint venture established in 2017 by SoftBank and U.S. aerospace company Aerovironment, has announced a partnership with Loon, an Alphabet unit that’s developing a network of balloons that beam internet access to remote areas. HapsMobile will invest $125 million in Loon as part of what is touted as a “long-term strategic partnership,” […]
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(Reuters) — Facebook on Wednesday blew away Wall Street profit estimates in the first quarter as it kept a lid on the costs of making its social networks safer, and set aside $3 billion to cover a settlement with U.S. regulators, calming investors who had worried about the outcome of a months-long federal probe. Shares […]
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Microsoft today reported earnings for its third fiscal quarter of 2019, including revenue of $30.6 billion, net income of $8.8 billion, and earnings per share of $1.14 (compared to revenue of $26.8 billion, net income of $7.4 billion, and earnings per share of $0.95 in Q3 2018). All three of the company’s operating groups saw […]
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Apple filed a billion-dollar lawsuit against Qualcomm in early 2017, but recently released documents suggest it spent years quietly undermining its partner and “creating evidence” to hurt it in court, Qualcomm lawyers told a court in San Diego. “They were plotting it for two years,” Qualcomm attorney Evan Chesler said of Apple’s strategy to undermine Qualcomm’s patent […]
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Chris Taylor, a game developer known for the titles Total Annihilation, Dungeon Siege, and Supreme Commander, announced today that he has been developing a new cloud-based gaming platform, Kanoogi, and a new real-time strategy game, Intergalactic Space Empire. Taylor unveiled the game, which will run on any modern web browser, at the GamesBeat Summit 2019 […]
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AI in commerce is a fast-growing — and highly lucrative — industry. A recent report published by Juniper Research predicts that global retail spending on AI and machine learning will reach $7.3 billion per year by 2022, up from an estimated $2 billion in 2018. Stores with and without brick-and-mortar presences cite cost savings, increased […]
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Brave today rolled out Brave Ads, its digital advertising model, to desktop users in Canada, France, Germany, the U.K., and the U.S. That’s right — the ad-blocking browser is getting ads. Brave users can now earn its cryptocurrency Basic Attention Tokens (BAT) for viewing the browser’s built-in ads. To get the new feature, you’ll have […]
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