“Pokémon Duel lacks Pokémon Go’s big draw: simplicity” plus 29 more VentureBeat |
- Pokémon Duel lacks Pokémon Go’s big draw: simplicity
- Doctolib raises $28 million to be the top doctor-booking platform in Europe
- Hi-Rez Studios partners with Uproar to get players to keep playing Paladins
- Why bots are not weird anymore
- Amazon’s latest version of Lumberyard game engine targets accessibility
- Millions of veteran health care records are being used to train this startup’s artificial intelligence
- Facebook starts testing more ads in Messenger home screen
- ASO or GTFO: App store optimization FTW (VB Live)
- How Ubisoft built Ghost Recon Wildlands as a huge open world where you can do anything
- Google I/O 2017 dates announced: May 17-19, in Mountain View (again)
- Facebook stops personalizing trending topics to your interests, adds publisher headlines
- Rogue One special effects team to speak at Game Developers Conference
- Lyft now lets commuters use pretax dollars for Line rides to and from work
- Pokémon Sun and Moon now work with the 3DS’s Pokémon Bank storage app
- Square Enix teases ‘exciting announcement’
- Apocalypse Now is finally going to get a video game
- Ghost Recon Wildlands could take forever to finish
- Lyft to launch in 40 new cities this week, targeting 100 in 2017
- Solving the Problem of Student Spills or Accidents That Kill Laptops, Parents’ Pocketbooks
- Activision’s King quietly acquires analytics firm Omniata
- Heroes of the Dorm ditches ESPN for Facebook
- Video site Rooster Teeth launches its own game publishing business
- Prey will bring you more aliens to slaughter on May 5
- Trump administration tells environment agency to cut climate change page from website
- Kony Helps KMC Controls Launch New Mobile App with Innovative IoT Technology
- Connected doorbell startup Ring raises $109 million from DFJ, Goldman Sachs, Qualcomm, others
- GoDaddy launches GoCentral, a new mobile-friendly DIY website builder
- Here’s how China’s ‘big 4’ smartphone firms are fighting for customers globally
- Cybersecurity startup SentinelOne raises $70 million
- Conan Exiles is a brutal survival world debuting January 31
| Pokémon Duel lacks Pokémon Go’s big draw: simplicity Posted: 25 Jan 2017 01:40 PM PST  The latest Pokémon game for mobile is fun, but it’ll have a hard time reaching as large an audience as Pokémon Go has. Pokémon Go was a big success largely because it’s so accessible, meaning that it’s easy for most people to pick up and play with little instruction. It generated revenues of $950 million in 2016. You could show it to anyone and they would understood how it worked. If you showed someone a screenshot of Pokémon Duel, they’d probably have a lot questions about how the game actually works. Just look at the picture to the right:  Above: A battle in Pokémon Duel. Image Credit: GamesBeat It’s hard to understand what exactly is going on here without a lot of tutorials and practice. Pokémon Duel is a strategy game that came out on January 24 for iOS and mobile. It’s a different experience compared to Pokémon Go’s location-based gameplay, which had players walking around the real world. Instead, the free-to-play Pokémon Duel is all about fighting computer opponents or other players in a board game-like setting, using figurines to represent the pocket monsters. It still has a lot of the elements that make Pokémon games popular — specifically, the desire to “catch ’em all.” You can collect more creatures either as rewards or by buying them with in-game or real money (via “boosters,” which give you random Pokémon figures).  Above: Hooray, a new one! Image Credit: GamesBeat It’s is also fun. You move figures around the board with the goal of reaching your opponent’s side. The first player to get a figure on the other person’s home space wins. You can try to block their progress by using your own Pokémon, and you can engage in battles if two figurines are next to each other. The losing Pokémon is removed from the board. And, really, there’s a lot more going on than that. Pokémon can level up, evolve, surround other figurines to remove them from the board immediately, cause status effects like “poison” and “sleep,” and more. And that might be part of Pokémon Duel’s problem. It’s complex and sometimes confusing. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, just look at the game’s main menu in the picture on the right.  Above: Pokémon Duel’s main menu. Image Credit: GamesBeat That is a lot of buttons, and a lot of them open up more menus. Pokémon Go is a master class in accessibility. Anyone could understand how play it, largely because the actual game part was so simple. You walked around and caught Pokémon by flicking a ball at them. Even battles, which weren’t necessary to enjoy the game, mostly involved tapping your screen repeatedly. Some criticized Pokémon Go for not actually having any depth, but that accessibility made it one of the biggest hits in mobile history. Pokémon Duel has the complexity that a lot of fans of the franchise are looking for. After all, this series did get start off as a role-playing game, which are famous for their abundance of menus. But that complexity could shut out more casual Pokémon fans who aren’t used to strategy games. Not that every mobile game needs to be as simple as possible. Plenty of popular mobile games, like Clash Royale, involve strategy. Still, don’t expect Pokémon Duel to become a Go-level success. As far as accessibility goes, it’s on the other end of the mobile spectrum from Pokémon Go. |
| Doctolib raises $28 million to be the top doctor-booking platform in Europe Posted: 25 Jan 2017 01:00 PM PST  Doctolib, an online booking app and management software for doctors in Europe, has raised €26 million ($28 million) in a series C round led by French public investment bank Bpifrance, with participation from existing investors Accel, PriceMinister cofounder Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet, and BlaBlaCar cofounder Nicolas Brusson. Founded out of Paris in 2013, Doctolib offers a range of software services to enable doctors to manage bookings and communicate with patients online. The subscription-based model caters to a range of medical clients, from single-GP practices to entire hospitals, while it also serves to help patients find nearby doctors, make bookings, and track appointments around the clock. The company says it has 300 employees across 35 cities in France and Germany. Prior to now, the company had raised around $26 million in funding, the last tranche arriving via a $20.5 million round back in 2015, and it says it will use its newfound wealth to “consolidate the platform’s leadership position in France and Germany,” as well as push to grow across Europe in the longer term. It currently plans to recruit 150 new employees throughout 2017. “Behind the success of Doctolib lies a profound need to improve the care path of patients and the working conditions of healthcare professionals,” said Doctolib CEO Stanislas Niox-Chateau. “This funding will help us pursue our mission to provide the best daily for doctors and patients.” An obvious competitor in the space is New York-based ZocDoc, which has raised more than $220 million, including a $130 million tranche in 2015 that valued the company at $1.8 billion. ZocDoc mainly operates in the U.S., however, and Doctolib hasn’t given any indication that it plans to enter the U.S. market in the foreseeable future. Elsewhere in Europe, a number of doctor-booking services have cropped up in recent times. Luxembourg-based Doctena recently acquired German rival Doxter, while Poland’s DocPlanner closed a $20 million round last summer, taking its total funding to $34 million. So while there is consolidation and VC funding happening, Doctolib is setting out to become the number one brand across the continent. “We continue to be impressed by the momentum of Doctolib in France and Germany and we’re delighted to continue to support their ambition to transform healthcare in Europe,” added Accel partner Philippe Botteri. Sign up for Funding Daily: Get the latest news in your inbox every weekday. |
| Hi-Rez Studios partners with Uproar to get players to keep playing Paladins Posted: 25 Jan 2017 12:40 PM PST  Want a little more reward than a well-played match the next time you boot up Paladins? Hi-Rez Studios has partnered with Uproar to offer rewards to players of the publisher’s team shooter. League of Legends, Smite (another Hi-Rez game), and Halo 5 already use Uproar, and the idea here is that Paladins will be able to tap into its service to help retain players as it battles for mind share with Overwatch, Blizzard’s market-leading team shooter. The integration is live now for Paladins on PC. “Hi-Rez is a community-focused organization. They really care about their customers and product, which makes them the perfect fit for Uproar,” said chief operating officer Todd Harris in an email interview. “We have also had some fun playing the game! We are excited to work with the studio and community.” Players register with Uproar and earn points for completing in-game objectives or taking part in the Uproar community. They can use the points to buy in-game items like skins and currency or gear like peripherals from Razer and SteelSeries. Uproar answered my question about how many people use its service, saying that “our user growth has risen 140 percent in the last 17 days.” When I asked about the monetary relationship between Uproar and Hi-Rez (and other companies it partners with), Harris said, “No relationship will be identical, as the needs of every game and community are different. When we commit to integrating a new title to the Uproar platform it does cost time and money. Our job is to make users feel more engaged to go the extra mile for the games they love, which keeps them playing for longer and subsequently improving the lifetime value which puts money into the publisher pockets.” |
| Why bots are not weird anymore Posted: 25 Jan 2017 12:10 PM PST  GUEST: 2016 is over, and there’s no argument that big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning — terms often used interchangeably these days — have made their way into our daily lives. Whether it’s opening Google Maps for directions, shopping on Amazon, or watching movies on Netflix, 2016 was the year that bots truly hit mainstream. This seismic development — which has critical implications for businesses, consumers, and, indeed, humankind — is the result of three developments that came to a head in 2016: First, an unprecedented capacity to analyze data; second, a backlash (limited though it was) to protect what data can be analyzed; and third, a welcoming of automation into our lives that we couldn’t have fathomed even a few years ago. At this moment, we have more data than ever before. We’re creating information at a bewildering pace — approximately 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily, which is enough to fill 57.5 billion iPads (at 32 gigabytes apiece). Big data is now a given, affecting every industry and function. This data is gleaned from our smartphones (carried by more than 50 percent of the U.S. population), emails (294 billion daily), social media activities (hundreds of millions of posts), and more. As 2016 draws to a close, the next herculean task is not only to make order of this information, but to leverage it to help us become more efficient. All the data in the world is useless, unless you can turn it into actionable insights. Based on the sheer volume and unstructured nature of so much of that data, predictive analytics and machine learning have come to prominence in 2016 as the only way to truly put data to work. For years, consumers freely gave up their data to advertisers, social networks, and the government for the sake of convenience or free services. That started to change in 2016, a direct result of more frequent cybersecurity breaches and counter-terrorism investigations that pose a threat to privacy rights. People and institutions are now increasingly interested in holding on to their data, but only if they can do so without substantially changing their habits. Broadband companies like AT&T and Comcast need permission to collect private data. The European Union codified in law that the IP address coded in your computer is protected and personal. Apple continues to push the argument that “encryption is inherently great.” On that last point, some tech companies are not only securing their data from the government, they’re also storing less of it so they won’t be compelled to share it. A premium is being placed not just on data itself, but also the security and liability concerns that data creates. When viewed together with the growth of big data, this means that artificial intelligence is increasingly widely available, but the most valuable data is and will continue to be controlled by far fewer entities. Entities in regulated industries — financial institutions, health care organizations, education — encounter the opposite: They are required to collect and archive data. That presents an often-overlooked opportunity to tap into existing data sets that are too often simply stored for compliance purposes. This makes regulated industries particularly ripe for AI applications that put that data to work to responsibly disrupt entrenched operations and counteract rising costs. As AI becomes increasingly commonplace, its novelty is starting to wear off. Siri, at one point revolutionary and the first consumer-grade application of AI, has almost taken a backseat to Alexa, Cortana, and Google Assistant. Voice recognition software is now mainstream; 39 percent of smartphone owners use it. Robot butlers — and bots — are no longer just in your phone, either; they’re in your home. And they’re going to start coming to work with you more and more. Education (imagine a teacher with unlimited patience), retail (Amazon has 30,000 robots), and marketing are just three examples of where we saw predictive automation take hold over the course of 2016. All of this pales in comparison to the AI applications that will turn the world as we know it upside down: autonomous cars, health care diagnostics, fully autonomous drones, and more. These bots may seem like an addition to our brains, but they’re really more of a natural extension of them. It’s vital to remember that AI applications and the algorithms that power them are only as good as the human minds that program them. This point was re-emphasized recently as voters in the U.S. election saw highly editorialized or outright inaccurate information in their Facebook newsfeeds. Bots aren’t entirely weird because they contain our biases and faults — something to keep in mind as the ethics debate of machine learning evolves. If there can be three certain things in life, instead of two, it might be death, taxes, and data. The question for 2017 is who will have that data and how it will be secured. Culling, controlling, and channeling the 1s and 0s in the right direction is the next step. AI is going to be our greatest ally in making sense of the chaos, whether you’re a sales rep, a taxi driver, or a CEO. |
| Amazon’s latest version of Lumberyard game engine targets accessibility Posted: 25 Jan 2017 12:00 PM PST  Amazon is unveiling its latest update for its video game creation engine, Lumberyard Beta 1.7, which includes more than 403 new features, improvements, and fixes. J.C. Connors, senior leader of Amazon Lumberyard, said in a blog post that customer engagement with Lumberyard — which is based on a license from Crytek and its CryEngine — has exceeded the company’s expectations. Amazon gives Lumberyard away for free and charges for things such as web services. “We are getting continuous feedback from game developers of all types, including some of the industry’s most ambitious developers, like Cloud Imperium, who are building incredible connected worlds,” Connors said. The updates make Lumberyard easier to use and more accessible to professional game developers. Developers can now get an asset, such as art, into the engine and iterate on the details more easily. “As our team thinks about accessibility, we also want to make sure that our choices never block you from achieving your vision, no matter its sophistication or quality, or the size and makeup of your team,” Connors said. Connors said a new Asset Processor get assets into the engine nearly instantly. You simply save a file (for example, from Maya or Photoshop) into a folder, and the Asset Processor automatically processes that file from source art into game-ready assets. You can also browse the assets and use them quickly. Amazon also revamped the layout and information architecture of the Lumberyard Editor itself. There are hundreds of features accessed through the Lumberyard Editor, and Amazon simplified the user interface. Amazon’s emphasis with the engine is creating community-driven games, as the engine has built-in hooks for Amazon’s Twitch livestreaming technology. “As the industry evolves, more people play, and fans demand even higher quality content, we’ll continue to improve your ability to work fast, achieve your most ambitious vision, and build a game your fans will love, regardless of whether you are an engineer, artist, game designer, or a new role that hasn’t been invented yet,” Connors said. |
| Posted: 25 Jan 2017 11:39 AM PST  Last spring the startup Flow Health began a five-year contract with the Department of Veteran Affairs to examine all historic and ongoing medical records. The startup will use information obtained from those records to train artificial intelligence to, among other things, fight illness and predict disease for the more than eight million people cared for by the Department of Veteran Affairs. Advice and predictions from Flow Health will be presented to health care professionals through Vista, the DoD’s open source system for electronic medical records. Doctors can then choose to apply or ignore the advice drawn from the VA’s vast storage of medical records. “When a veteran comes in and presents certain clinical symptoms, we can better understand and make predictions about ‘What is the likely diagnosis? What is the best diagnostic test? What's the best care pathway?’ and so forth,” CEO Alex Meshkin told VentureBeat in a Skype interview. Data gathered by Flow Health will track a patient’s personal, family, and possibly even genetic history. The aggregate of that data will continuously improve the Flow Health knowledge graph and its ability to predict the illness of a veteran patient. “The essence of it is that the VA supplies all its historical data, historical and ongoing,” he said. “The graph is built around the co-frequency or co-occurrence of relationships and all the unstructured and structured data — clinical notes, medical images, even molecular diagnostics like genetics and of course traditional lab tests and so forth.” Although Flow Health will receive data from a public institution, the private company stands to gain from access to millions of veterans’ health records. Anyone who wants to benefit from the publicly obtained data will have to pay Flow Health for the privilege. “Everything we develop with the VA, we own the intellectual property and can make available to any other hospital within the U.S. or abroad, and that’s kind of the goal here of the collaboration, to create really powerful tools and machine intelligence that can impact health care for everyone,” Meshkin said. In addition to its partnership with the Department of Veteran Affairs, Flow Health works with academic medical centers and one of the largest health care providers in the country to provide similar predictive insights to health care professionals. Health care centers provide episodic data that may come from a doctor or a few specialists, but VA health care data is unique, Meshkin said, and offers far more complete records. “They [private health care centers] don’t have the complete picture, and that’s what’s unique about the VA. It’s the largest integrated health care organization in the country, so they have your primary care, your specialty care, your hospital care, all your medications,” he said. “So we’re able to better understand what are their earlier symptoms that present before a diagnosis is made, and that can mean all the difference in the world of saving lives at the VA.” The sharing of public health data with private entities focused on machine learning has sparked controversy in the past. Earlier this year, Google was criticized when details of a collaboration with the National Health Service in the United Kingdom were discovered. Initially the deal was thought to only collect data to make a predictive app that helps doctors treat patients with kidney disease. Later the program was found to be more extensive and to include more than one million retinal eye scans. Google says DeepMind’s computer vision could greatly reduce the risk of blindness for people with diabetes, and the program has gained the backing of sight-related charities and organizations. But critics are upset that their data was shared with a private company who stands to benefit financially as a result, and that their personal data, though anonymized, will be shared without their consent. The difference between Flow Health and Google, Meshkin said, is that Flow Health is both a business associate and research partner with the Department of Veteran Affairs. “I think the key thing is we’re very focused on, just like other organizations that work with the VA, helping veterans, and without access to the data, we’re not going to be able to build machine learning that’s going to be accurate, so it benefits everyone by making the data available,” he said. Multiple requests were made for comment by the Department of Veteran Affairs. No response was received at the time this story was published. During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump told NBC’s Chuck Todd that veterans’ issues will be a priority, and a part of his first State of the Union address to Congress. Trump has committed to allowing veterans to seek health care from providers outside the VA should they feel they aren’t getting access to health care in a timely fashion. A more robust voucher program could affect Flow Health’s ability to provide predictive analytics or customized health care plans, Meshkin said. “If veterans get care from non-VA health care providers, there will still be some data flowing back to the VA (and thus to Flow Health). However, most likely, it will be less rich, and subsequently, not as complete than the data generated from within the VA,” he said. |
| Facebook starts testing more ads in Messenger home screen Posted: 25 Jan 2017 11:33 AM PST  Your Facebook Messenger experience may start to change soon. The social networking company said that it will begin testing ads in the chat app with a group of people in Thailand and Australia “in the coming weeks.” But these marketing placements won’t be intrusive — at least Facebook hopes not — because they’ll be limited to just the Messenger home screen. This means as you’re having a conversation with friends, an ad won’t pop up related to your discussion.  Above: How ads will appear within Facebook Messenger. Image Credit: Facebook It shouldn’t be surprising that Facebook is beginning to look at ways to further monetize this app that now counts more than 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook Messenger has achieved a critical mass of people, and now it’s time to further build out the next stage of its evolution, the Messenger platform. Ads will be featured in an area of the app below your recent conversations, similar to how Facebook displays birthday notifications and where you can find if a friend is active or not. Facebook believes its Messenger ads test reflects “a lightweight, relevant, and useful approach to helping people and businesses connect on Messenger.” The company emphasized that those in the test had “complete control” of their experience and can hide or report specific ads through a dropdown menu in the app. Advertisers won’t initiate conversations with users, and any unsolicited chatter will be blocked. It’s still too soon to know when this capability will be arriving on Messenger to the public — Facebook has only begun testing it. And it’s unclear how people are being targeted for these ads, whether it’s through your conversations or leveraging the same targeting that exists within Facebook’s Audience Network or core ad platform. This isn’t the first set of ads to have reached Messenger. In April, Facebook revealed that it was testing sponsored ads. Now the company is doubling down to bring more ways for businesses to reach audiences in more areas besides Instagram and Facebook. Could WhatsApp’s time for monetization also be drawing near? Because of Facebook’s bet on businesses using Messenger as the next medium to communicate with their customers, these ads could provide another link between the chat app and the social network. Based on who you might engage with the most in chat, such as if you talk to a bunch of airlines or use a related chatbot from the likes of KLM, a rival brand (say, United) could target you with an ad to attract you to their business instead. |
| ASO or GTFO: App store optimization FTW (VB Live) Posted: 25 Jan 2017 11:30 AM PST  VB LIVE: Want to easily double — or even triple — your organic downloads with ASO? Our latest in-depth VB Insight report has the secret. For a deep dive into the insights our analysts have uncovered, key takeaways and answers to your questions, join our latest interactive VB Live event! App store optimization (ASO) boosts organic downloads by 20 percent. But really effective ASO — the kind that can double or triple that download rate — has evolved. Not only do you have to keep track of all the puzzle pieces involved in an app store listing — titles, descriptions, icons, screenshots, videos — but you need to stay on top of constantly changing mechanics and components. There’s the unending avalanche of apps that bury your own apps as fast as you develop them; a fatally flawed app search mechanic that is clearly not designed for the developer’s needs; and algorithms, both Apple- and Google-owned, that never stop getting tweaked or outright overhauled. Even if you’ve got the basics of ASO under your belt, achieving visibility for your app, no matter how relevant, groundbreaking, or potentially viral you think it is, ain’t no easy task. There’s one constant to count on: the work it takes to bring real business value out of ASO. And our survey shows that when you look at the the business impact of ASO, efforts made are already yielding massive benefit: the average lift you can count on is an impressive 87 percent. To uncover exactly what it takes to compete now, VB analysts dove into the market for insight from the best of the best. 475 marketers were interrogated about their app management priorities and challenges. 522 consumers revealed their app download habits. And leading app store optimization companies and experts delivered insight into best practices, how developers can bust through the biggest challenges, and how to stay ahead of the competition, even as it gets fiercer and the crowd grows larger. The key takeaway: App developers need to approach ASO as a fundamental part of their marketing routine — one that requires a big-picture approach to all the elements that define and drive the marketing funnel. ASO is morphing into app marketing optimization (AMO), growing to encompass not just your A/B test focus in the store but expanding in scope to cover every aspect of this field, and the tool you’ll need to leverage at every stage of your app’s lifecycle. That’s the challenge to beat for app developers and companies — particularly indies just beginning to grasp how ASO will impact, well, everything. To learn how to make it happen and to get your questions answered, join our latest VB Live interactive event. Analyst Stewart Rogers will take you for an in-depth ride through our ASO megalith report series, and reveal a horde of valuable new and need-to-know data for the app developer who has to stand out (by which we mean everyone). Don’t miss out! In this webinar you’ll:
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| How Ubisoft built Ghost Recon Wildlands as a huge open world where you can do anything Posted: 25 Jan 2017 11:00 AM PST  In Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands, everything in the vast wilds of Bolivia will be playable. If you can see a mountain in the distance, you will be able to go to the top of it and snipe at drug cartel members below. Ubisoft’s open world tactical shooter game will debut on March 7 on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and the Windows PC. As the 10th installment in the series, the game will move away from the futuristic setting of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, and it will focus on a four-soldier team whose job is to disrupt the drug cartels in Bolivia. And while your force is small, you have stealth on your side. Ubisoft designed the game so that you could accomplish the goal of taking down the Santa Blanca drug cartel and its leader El Sueno any way you want, said Dominic Butler, lead game designer, in an interview with GamesBeat at a Ubisoft preview event. There are 21 provinces and 26 bosses in the vast world, but you can take them down in the way that makes the most sense to you. You can also just get lost in the open world. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.  Above: Dominic Butler, Ubisoft’s lead game designer on Ghost Recon Wildlands. Image Credit: Dean Takahashi GB: How long have you been working on Wildlands? Dominic Butler: It's been in production nearly five years now. It's the team that made Future Soldier. Personally, I've been on the team about two and a half years. GB: Did you come in at a particular milestone? Butler: I came in because I'd moved for family reasons. I used to work with the team in Montreal on Assassin's Creed. GB: It's a massive game. Butler: Yeah, it's a big one. The scale of the world is huge. It's the largest one we've done in an action-adventure game. There are lots of systems going on in the world, too, which is where the complexity comes from. GB: I saw Tommy Francois give that talk at DICE about world-building. It seems like you applied a lot of that here. Butler: Tommy's team was involved at an early stage, helping bring some of our dev team to Bolivia and meet with them and build a more complete view of the place than what you'd see in a tour guide or on the news or in a simple documentary. We wanted to meet the people on the ground, take hours of footage, take lots of photos, and get a sense of what it feels like. What's the air quality like? How does life in general go on?  Above: Every location in Ghost Recon Wildlands is playable. Image Credit: Ubisoft GB: How closely did you model this after any particular combat engagements there? Butler: That's where we get into the Tom Clancy what-if part of it. We were in Bolivia for the world itself and the people there, bringing that environment to life. When you get to the cartels, though, that's when we deal with journalists, reporters, any kind of media we can get our hands on to try and understand—we've seen a lot more about this in the last couple of years, both on the news and in popular culture, in things like Breaking Bad or Sicario. People have some idea of what the cartels are. But we wanted to see more of the people behind the cartels. We didn't just want bad guys wearing a particular uniform. What drives these people to do these things, to become a multi-billion-dollar industry? How does that get going? There's more than raw savagery to it. It's also intelligent business. It's building a structured organization that can maintain this kind of operation. GB: Are they as militarized as they seem in the game? Butler: The real cartels? Yeah, absolutely. They hire ex-military people. They'll fly people in to train their sicarios. It's an unfortunate reality, but they have so much money and so much access to resources that really it's protecting their investment. But yes, there are no expenses spared. GB: Within that world, how do you come up with missions that are fun to play, that stay concentrated and focused? Butler: When we're building missions in a world like this, where it's so big and so open, where freedom of choice is core to the player experience, we have to rethink the way we build mission structure traditionally. It's not just about relating a narrative, telling a story, but also from a gameplay point of view. If we have a target to extract, previously we'd tell you, "Go get a vehicle, take out the guys at this front gate, blow up this generator, grab the guy, get him back to the vehicle." We'd go step by step and give you lots of clear objectives. Because of the nature of this game and the idea of letting you play how you want and where you want, approaching it in lots of different ways, we've instead built a story around—we have a strong narrative arc, but in as far as objectives for the player, we keep those very simple. The missions are very goal-oriented. Maybe you need to find information about a specific thing. Where it is, how you get access to the information, that's all up to you. If you need to extract a target and get them to a rally point—do you load up on certain weapons? Do you bring certain tools? Do you upgrade your drone? Do you call in friends? All these decisions will be part of your personal narrative about how you extracted him. But the extraction itself is a clear goal that you paint your story around.  Above: Ghost Recon Wildlands has lots of different kind of terrain. Image Credit: Ubisoft GB: In single-player and in some of the co-op, there were times when we just drove right into the compound with a jeep. It was about as brute-force as it gets. If you're trying to be more stealthy, can you drop some of the soldiers around the compound and approach from different directions? Butler: You can do things in a couple of different ways. When you're playing solo, you'll have three AI teammates. You can give very simple orders to those guys and they'll react as a group. You can say, "Hold this position," or "Regroup on me," or "Attack this position." You're not micromanaging where they go. But you can give them simple objectives. We didn't want you to have to stop all the time and reorganize them. They'll follow your play style and match what you do, whether you're playing aggressively or playing quietly and doing a lot of recon. They'll support how you play. If you're playing with your friends in co-op mode, from the outset we said that there can't be any kind of leash, any artificial way of keeping everybody together. It was a big technical challenge, but we knew we wanted that from the start. We worked on it for a long time. In co-op, there's no reason that you have to stay within so many meters of each other or anything like that. At any point, you can break off and do completely different things. Now, that might not make a lot of sense a lot of the time. If you go down you're going to need your buddies to revive you. But when it comes to gameplay and making decisions in the field, each of you can do things the way you want. GB: At one point I was seven kilometers away from the other players. Is that a big memory management problem? How do you maintain such a large space? Continue Reading ... |
| Google I/O 2017 dates announced: May 17-19, in Mountain View (again) Posted: 25 Jan 2017 10:58 AM PST  Google today confirmed the date and location of its 2017 I/O developer conference: May 17-19 at the Shoreline Amphitheatre venue in Mountain View, California. That’s the same place where I/O was held last year, following a long run of Google hosting the event at the prominent Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco. This time around, Google yesterday provided developers with a treasure hunt to guess the date and location of I/O 2017 through the website savethedate.foo.
A Google spokesperson today confirmed that the information that people collectively figured out — which was subsequently reported by several media outlets — was correct. Google traditionally announces many new products and features at I/O. Last year, for instance, Google introduced Google Assistant, Google Home, the Allo messaging app, the Duo video calling app, and the Google Daydream high-end mobile virtual reality platform. At previous I/O shows, Google introduced Google Cardboard, Google Fit, Google Now, Google Photos, and Google Wave, among other things. It does not appear that Google has started accepting registrations for I/O 2017 yet. The company will do that in the next few months. The event will inevitably be livestreamed for those who can’t make it. We’ll provide coverage on site, so stay tuned. |
| Facebook stops personalizing trending topics to your interests, adds publisher headlines Posted: 25 Jan 2017 10:34 AM PST  Facebook has begun rolling out new updates to its trending topics, which the social networking company hopes will improve the experience, one that has been fraught with confusion and controversy. Claiming that it has been “listening to people’s feedback,” Facebook tweaked its product to feature publisher headlines below each topic name, while also improving how topics are identified as trending. Lastly, it’s done away with personalization, opting instead to show everyone in the same region the same topics. Launched in 2014, Trending was a response to efforts on other social media networks that surfaced popular topics relevant to users. “It was designed to help people discover interesting and relevant topics being discussed on Facebook,” the company explained in a Frequently Asked Questions section. But it became a lightning bolt for controversy when accusations were levied at the company over human editors censoring conservative pundits and sites, a claim that Facebook and its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg denied. After an investigation, the company declared there was no “systematic political bias” but ultimately removed human editors from the process.
Today’s three changes should be a means to restore some relevance to Trending. Previously, when you viewed these topics, it was difficult to ascertain why it was relevant. And in an era where the specter of fake news has become ever-present, Facebook has to show that it’s surfacing actual news and not hoaxes and made-up content. It acknowledges that this update “may help…because the updated system identifies groups of articles shared on Facebook instead of relying solely on mentions of a topic.” This is why now topics shown will include a headline from a publisher’s article. Facebook said that this was the “most requested feature addition” right now. It’s said that headlines won’t be rewritten. The company learned its lesson — it’s going to show the same headline that appears on the actual article. But how is a headline chosen? Facebook stated that it’ll be automatically selected based on factors like the engagement both around the article and publisher, and whether other articles are linking to it. Similar to Techmeme, perhaps? A problem some people have had surrounds why some topics are shown versus others. During this past weekend’s Women’s March, Twitter showed the event as a trending topic, but it was nowhere to be seen on Facebook. The company has yet to respond to inquiries from VentureBeat about why it wasn’t featured. Facebook explained that “previously, topics may have trended due to high engagement … around a single post or article.” That changes today, when the company said it’ll look at the number of publishers that are posting articles on the social network around the same topic, along with the engagement in the articles. “This should surface trending topics quicker, be more effective at capturing a broader range of news and events from around the world and also help ensure that trending topics reflect real world events being covered by multiple news outlets,” Facebook claimed. With the social graph, the service boasts the ability for personalized experience. Whether it’s the News Feed or any other product, Facebook has strived to provide users with what it hopes is data and information relevant to the individual. But with Trending Topics, that all changes. Now the list of topics that are shown will be for a larger audience, bucking interests in favor of geography. Now everyone in the same region will see the same topics. Trending Topics is still currently only available in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, and India on both the web and mobile. The aforementioned changes will be rolling out today in the U.S. |
| Rogue One special effects team to speak at Game Developers Conference Posted: 25 Jan 2017 10:00 AM PST  The special effects creators for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story will give a talk about their visual effects methods at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in late February. The GDC, which draws about 27,000 game developers each year, might seem like a strange place for filmmakers to give a talk. But there’s a lot of kinship in digital entertainment, and filmmakers often lead the way for video game developers in terms of cinematic tools. The session will include Industrial Light & Magic's visual effects supervisor John Knoll (Academy Award winner for his work on Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest), alongside ILMxLAB's digital production supervisor Roger Cordes, and Lucasfilm ADG's principal engineer and architect Naty Hoffman. The trio will discuss how they used a groundbreaking method to render visual effects and even an entire character in real-time for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The team will discuss the challenges, lessons learned and the benefits of an entirely new method of creating digital effects for one of the most popular movies of the 2016. Of course, one of the big subjects for discussion will be the creation of a computer-generated human (spoiler alert) Grand Moff Tarkin, the evil Imperial leader of the Death Star in the original movie. Peter Cushing, the actor who played Tarkin, died in appear in 1994. But the Rogue One filmmakers created a CGI version of Cushing to insert his character into the movie. |
| Lyft now lets commuters use pretax dollars for Line rides to and from work Posted: 25 Jan 2017 10:00 AM PST  Lyft has launched a program that allows workers to use their pretax dollars toward daily commutes with Lyft Line rides. To qualify, employers must use Zenefits, Benefits Resource, WageWorks, Edenred, or Navia. Employees can use up to $225 per month. Support for commuter benefits comes nearly five months after Uber launched its own program, but the real winners could ultimately be employees who are tired of taking public transit to and from work. Employees wishing to participate in this program need only add their commuter benefits prepaid card as a payment method within Lyft’s app. Prior to requesting a ride, select the Line mode and the aforementioned card. You’ll be then be matched with a car that can fit up to six passengers, which means there’s a likelihood of multiple stops.  Above: Lyft now lets you use commuter benefits to pay for Line rides. Image Credit: Lyft Since the program just launched, Lyft is limiting it to commuters in New York City, Boston, Seattle, and Miami. Senior emerging businesses manager Erin Gray told VentureBeat that while there are plans to expand commuter benefits to all Line markets, there is no definitive timeline for such a rollout. The company boasts that riders could save up to 40 percent on their daily commute with this program. As stated earlier, only those whose employers use Zenefits, Benefits Resources, WageWorks, Edenred, and Navia are eligible. It’s worth noting that Uber has also partnered with many of these providers, with the exception of Zenefits, and that those tie-ins are in effect in New York City; Boston; Washington, D.C.; San Francisco; Philadelphia; Las Vegas; Denver; Atlanta; Miami; and New Jersey. This is Lyft’s latest effort to appeal to those in the workplace. The private on-demand ride hailing service has previously introduced business profiles to make it easier to expense rides and the ability to customize pertinent reports. |
| Pokémon Sun and Moon now work with the 3DS’s Pokémon Bank storage app Posted: 25 Jan 2017 09:38 AM PST  Your friend’s from older Pokémon games can now join your newest adventures. The Pokémon Company International and Nintendo announced today that the Pokémon Bank app for the 3DS now works with the latest entries in the series, Sun and Moon. Pokémon Bank stores up to 3,000 Pokémon for an annual charge of $5 a year. Sun and Moon launched in November, and they had the biggest debut in the franchise’s history. The series’ popularity saw a spike earlier in 2016 thanks to the hit mobile game Pokémon Go. The Bank is not a game itself, instead it’s just for storing and transferring Pokémon. It came out in 2014 after the release of the X an Y versions of the series. Along with the new support for Sun and Moon, you can use the Bank to keep pocket monsters from the following games:
You can now upload those stored Pokémon to your Sun and Moon adventures. However, once you bring one of the creatures to Sun and Moon, you can no longer transfer them to Pokémon X, Pokémon Y, Pokémon Omega Ruby, or Pokémon Alpha Sapphire. The Bank is also getting a couple of new features. The Pokédex allows players to see information on the Pokémon they’ve collected in each game, while Adventure Records will show stats on things like “Pokémon caught.” Players who use the Pokémon Bank from now until Mewnium Z, an item that allows the rare Pokémon Mew which knows the move Psychic to use the powerful ability Genesis Supernova. |
| Square Enix teases ‘exciting announcement’ Posted: 25 Jan 2017 09:10 AM PST  The Final Fantasy and Tomb Raider publisher is teasing something on Twitter. Square Enix has revealed on its Twitter account that it is debuting an “exciting announcement” tomorrow. We don’t know what it’ll be about, but Square Enix is one of the biggest publishers in the gaming world, creating software for console, PC, and mobile. The mobile side includes a partnership with Mobile Strike and Game of War maker MZ, which Square Enix has tapped to make a massively multiplayer online mobile game based on Final Fantasy XV. We haven’t heard much about that project since Square Enix announced it last November.
Square Enix is the publisher behind popular Japanese role-playing series like Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, and Dragon Quest. Last year’s Final Fantasy XV was the 10th best-selling game of 2016 in the U.S., according to The NPD Group, despite coming out late in the year. Square Enix also publishes many Western series that it picked up after purchasing Eidos in 2009, including the Tomb Raider, Hitman, and Deus Ex franchises. The company has also expanded efforts on mobile, making games based on its properties like Deus Ex Go and Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius. |
| Apocalypse Now is finally going to get a video game Posted: 25 Jan 2017 09:01 AM PST  After a 38-year wait, fans of Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now will finally get a video game. Coppola’s American Zoetrope film studio has teamed with game industry veterans to develop a psychological horror role-playing game based on the 1979 film. The idea for the game has been years in the making, and the developers are launching a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to solicit feedback from fans on how to proceed with the game. Coppola hopes that the film — famous for lines such as “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” and “Terminate with extreme prejudice” — will influence younger generations who may have never heard about it. Los Angeles-based American Zoetrope is inviting fans of the film, which is loosely based on the Joseph Conrad novel Heart of Darkness, and gamers to contribute to the budget for the game, which Coppola wants to be an independent project so that the team can preserve its creative vision and artistic integrity. "Forty years ago, I set out to make a personal art picture that could hopefully influence generations of viewers for years to come,” Coppola said in a statement. “Today, I'm joined by new daredevils, a team who want to make an interactive version of Apocalypse Now, where you are Captain Benjamin Willard amidst the harsh backdrop of the Vietnam War. I've been watching video games grow into a meaningful way to tell stories, and I'm excited to explore the possibilities for Apocalypse Now for a new platform and a new generation.”  Above: Art from the Apocalypse Now game. Image Credit: American Zoetrope The Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign will be the first step in a three-year journey to give life to an interactive Apocalypse Now experience that accurately captures the tone, themes, and characters of the original motion picture, said Lawrence Liberty, one of the game developers on the project and the former executive producer of Fallout: New Vegas, The Witcher, and DC Universe Online. Liberty said in an interview with GamesBeat that the game won’t be a Call of Duty style first-person shooter, though it will be told from a first-person point of view. Rather, as a RPG with horror elements, the cinematic narrative game will take the player on the same journey that Captain Willard followed in the film, on a secret mission to assassinate the renegade Colonel Kurtz. “We are not going to make a Call of Duty kind of game,” Liberty said. “A lot of people may not know the movie, but I think it had an impact on popular culture. Many people have probably heard about lines like ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning,'” a phrase uttered by Colonel Kilgore (played by actor Robert Duvall in the film) after a devastating helicopter attack that is also one of the signature scenes from the film. Throughout the course of the game, players will have the ability to make their own decisions independent of the original narrative. As players navigate the unspeakable horrors of the Vietnam War, their reactions to each situation will result in consequences that will alter their journey as the story unfolds. Every decision matters, and each player will tell their own story, the developers said.  Above: Scene from the Apocalypse Now video game. Image Credit: American Zoetrope “We will create a game that challenges what an interactive experience can be; just as the original motion picture challenged the concept of cinema,” said Montgomery Markland, game director, in a statement. “We are making a game that we are excited to play. We will deliver a greater variety of experience and interaction than is currently available within the relatively static industry.” Apocalypse Now is being developed by a new team of game industry leaders, in conjunction with American Zoetrope. Besides Liberty, the team includes Rob Auten, a lead writer on multiple billion-dollar gaming franchises including Gears of War, Battlefield, and Far Cry; Markland, who was the lead producer on two of the most successful crowdfunding titles of all time: Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera; and in a special advisory capacity, Obsidian Entertainment's Design Director Josh Sawyer, who directed Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity. American Zoetrope will deliver a lot of material for early backers of the project, from unique game options to props from the actual motion picture, such as the Lt. Col. Wm. Kilgore’s "Airmobile" surfboard and Col. Kilgore's death cards, "not a jack in the whole bunch."  Above: The church scene in Apocalypse Now brought forth a lot of apocalyptic religious imagery. Image Credit: American Zoetrope Among the rewards is early access to pre-release versions of the game, limited edition Apocalypse Now-themed merchandise, and play sessions with the development team. A select tier of backers will have the opportunity to give critical feedback directly to the development team, and even take a journey on one of the Family Coppola Hideaway Adventure packages, along with a few surprise rewards that will be announced later. Apocalypse Now is estimated to launch in 2020, with early access coming in 2019 to correspond with the 40th anniversary of the motion picture's original release. Liberty said his involvement goes as far back as 2010. But Coppola explored working with a partner in the game industry as far back as 2008. The game project gathered steam, with Markland and Liberty forming a studio in 2009 for the purpose. They made an early prototype using the Crytek CryEngine. But after 2011, the game went into “stasis,” Liberty said. Coppola still wanted to the game to happen, and then Markland help revitalize in 2013. Liberty rejoined the project in 2015. They settled upon an indie approach, rather than working with a big publisher on a big budget game, for reasons of creative freedom.  Above: The river patrol boat from Apocalypse Now Image Credit: American Zoetrope “It has been a very long labor of love,” Liberty said. “Rob Austin and Monty were major Apocalypse Now fans. I’m a Coppola fan and appreciated it. It was one of my top 10 movies of all time. I liken it to a dark Wizard of Oz.” Liberty believes that an RPG fits because the game will follow Willard’s odyssey through a large geographic area in Vietnam and Cambodia. Over time, a character can progress. But as envisioned, Liberty doesn’t see a lot of fast-paced first-person shooter action. He wants the game to be respectful of the message that Coppola had, and that’s where some of the horror theme comes in. If there is action, Liberty said it will probably be more realistic, with high lethality. The game may be more slow-paced, like a Resident Evil game, where you go from scene to scene. In each scene, the player would have to make life-or-death choices and conserve resources, such as ammunition. “The RPG seemed the best way to approach the adaptation,” Liberty said. The game will follow the narrative of the film, but it will have areas, like in the jungle, with procedural animation where players can get off the narrative and explore. All of the film’s major set pieces will likely be reproduced, Liberty said, including the helicopter attack scene.  Above: Apocalypse Now the game will come out in 2020. Image Credit: American Zoetrope So far, the team hasn’t approached Martin Sheen, the actor who played Captain Willard in the film. “I would love to have his involvement, but he does not come cheap,” Liberty said. Right now, the studio is small and the company has a working prototype based on the Unreal Engine. The game will like have as realistic art style as possible, but that will depend on the ultimate budget. Liberty said that “this is a game that I would not want to rush.” He added, “This property is the crown jewel. Francis believes we are at the point in the craft of game making and the development of the technology that we can do something that we can tackle this. I would rather take our time and iterate and involve the community.” I want to make sure he does it right too, as I saw the film when it first came out and wrote part of my honors thesis in English about the film when I went to school at the University of California at Berkeley. I think there’s a lot of people like me out there who have studied the film and would love to see the video game done right. But 40 years is a long time to wait for a video game. I said that Liberty should explain the film’s enigmatic ending to the gamers. He replied, “Your ending is likely going to be different. We want to give people tremendous freedom.” |
| Ghost Recon Wildlands could take forever to finish Posted: 25 Jan 2017 09:00 AM PST  PREVIEW: In Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands, you are in charge of four American soldiers, or ghosts, who are fighting behind enemy lines. Your job is to take over the entire country of Bolivia and clear it of the Santa Blanca drug cartel. This is a task that could take the rest of your life. Over the past five years, Ubisoft has created a vast open world, reproducing the wild lands of Bolivia and 10 different ecosystems, including deserts, jungles, rivers, mountains, villages, and cities. You’ll explore 21 provinces, each with its own boss. As you take out the underbosses, you uncover the bosses higher in the cartel’s hierarchy. Ultimately, you’ll get to El Sueno, the boss of bosses, who moved his cartel from Mexico to Bolivia in order to create a narco state. Your ghosts are in hostile territory. While their mission seems impossible at the outset, they have stealth on their side, and you can proceed one mission at a time. I played for a few hours, both in single-player mode and with four-player cooperative play. During that time, I made a little headway in one province. I captured a lot of the video and you can see it below. As you look out at the distant terrain, you can see that the draw distances are huge. You can see forever, and everything under the sun that you see is playable territory. That’s simply amazing. How Ubisoft designed the vast game Above: Nouredine Abboud, senior product of Ghost Recon Wildlands. Image Credit: Dean Takahashi Ubisoft is OK with this. The French game publisher got the memo a five years ago when it appeared that half of the games in the top 10 were open world games. Ubisoft has been popping out the open worlds one after another, including Watch Dogs 2, Steep, Far Cry Primal, and Tom Clancy’s The Division. In this case, the company’s Ubisoft Paris studio set to work on the vast open world, married with a military shooter and four-player co-op. “If you look the three basic elements here — a military shooter, a massive open world, and four-player co-op — there's no other game on the market that has those at the same time,” said Nouredine Abboud, senior producer at Ubisoft in an interview with GamesBeat. “Being able to play a tactical shooter in a big open world where you can move from mission to mission and play the whole story in co-op, or switching back and forth between co-op and single-player, that's never been done before. ” If your friends want to join you can, they can hop right in. Above: Ghost Recon Wildlands has lots of different kind of terrain. Image Credit: Ubisoft “Now, imagine that you only have an hour to play, so you begin to play solo. A friend of your shows up online and asks to join your game,” Abboud said. “They can come into your mission right away, seamlessly, and you'll play co-op for as long as you want to. If you have some more time, you can go into the public matchmaking and find two other guys to join you. If someone wants to log out and go to sleep, the rest of you can keep playing.” Ubisoft designed the game so that you could accomplish the goal of taking down the Santa Blanca drug cartel and El Sueno any way you want, said Dominic Butler, lead game designer, in an interview with GamesBeat at a Ubisoft preview event. In fact, you can start a mission, then decide you need more firepower. So you can start that other mission, acquire the firepower such as a helicopter, and then go back to rejoin the other mission in mid-course. “When we're building missions in a world like this, where it's so big and so open, where freedom of choice is core to the player experience, we have to rethink the way we build mission structure traditionally. It's not just about relating a narrative, telling a story, but also from a gameplay point of view. If we have a target to extract, previously we'd tell you, "Go get a vehicle, take out the guys at this front gate, blow up this generator, grab the guy, get him back to the vehicle." We'd go step by step and give you lots of clear objectives.” You have to start somewhere Above: So begins your four-soldier war against the Santa Blanca cartel in Ghost Recon Wildlands. Image Credit: Ubisoft At the beginning, I crafted my own soldier. I made an Asian character with a mustache, and went into action. The customization opportunities were endless, and you could make characters of either sex. Then I dove into the mountainous Montuyoc region, where Santa Blanca was trying to train an elite army. My team’s job was to stop them. In my preview session, I started out on a mountain. My first mission was to rescue a man who had some information that I needed. But when I clicked on the marker, I found the target was a few kilometers away on top of another mountain. So the first thing I had to do was drive my jeep on the narrow mountain roads and head up the mountain. I seriously thought that Ubisoft could have made this beginning a little more exciting, but I went along. While I was driving, I listened to the radio station in the car. The DJ was a mouthpiece for the Santa Blanca cartel, and I sensed just how much of this country was against me. I accidentally ran over a pedestrian who wouldn’t get out of the way. And then I received the warning that killing civilians could turn the population against me, and that could have grave consequences later in the game. I arrived at the compound and did minimal recon. I could have thrown my drone into the air and then identified each one of the guards and mapped them out. I didn’t bother. I went in shooting, ambushing the first guard I could see. That wasn’t the wisest of moves, but I was testing the system. I learned that I had to duck into cover or get shot. The nine guards there weren’t a match for me and my three comrades. But I managed to get too close to the guards and got shot once. I had to be revived by a friendly. We took out the guards, freed the captive, and then delivered him to an extraction point. It was a relatively easy, self-contained mission. Then I moved on to the mission below. Once again, I went in fairly blind and started shooting. If you want, you can put silencers on your gun and then your comrades will copy you. If you go in with guns blazing, they will do so as well. I completed another mission quickly, taking out guards, getting the intel, and then escaping before reinforcements came. Contact with the rebelsI could have kept doing that, but I received a radio call from the rebel leader. The rebels are a constant nuisance to the Santa Blanca cartel and the country’s military, the Unidad. The cartel and the military are usually in cahoots, but you can play them off against each other. For instance, if both factions are nearby, you can shoot one of them and then hide. The soldiers on both sides will draw their guns and shoot at each other. During that time, you can get your mission done. In any case, the rebel leader wanted me to hijack some trucks and bring him some supplies. In some provinces, the rebels are weak. In others, they are strong. If you help them out, they will grow stronger and they will help you as well. So I went after some convoys and captured supplies for the rebels. That job proved rather easy. I simply drove up next to the Unidad convoy. My soldiers shot and blew up the accompanying cars, and then shot the convoy truck until the guards gave up. I got the supplies and the rebels were happy. I was expecting a protracted chase, but the convoy truck couldn’t take much damage. As I completed missions, I picked up skills and applied them to my soldier so I could upgrade my weapons and other capabilities. At first, the rebel leader was disappointed I only had four soldiers. But my leader informed him that was all we needed, as the ghosts were badasses. Chipping away at the cartelAs I returned to the main story, I found it easy to find out what I needed to do next by looking at the map. I drove to a farm and finally used a drone. It didn’t have much range, but it was able to identify some bad guys. For some reason, it wasn’t guarded well. So I rushed in, got the Intel, and moved on. Then I got shot again and had to be revived. I found from the Intel that I could uncover a number of targets such as rebel operations, supply dumps, and skill point locations. By completing missions in those locations, I could gather strength. Or I could simply move on to the next main mission. During the mission briefings, I received instructions from my overseer. But the game had no elaborate cinematics that introduced each new mission. That allowed me to proceed quickly through multiple missions in a relatively short time. On the other hand, I sort of lost interest in the story, or lack of it. In a way, I kind of missed having extended cinematics, rather than just voice overs, between missions. One of the things I liked is listening to the propaganda on the radio. I also enjoyed the banter between my fellow soldiers. Once in a while, it got serious, like when one soldier disclosed that he was getting a divorce because his wife never knew where he was. It didn’t feel like it at first, but every mission against the Santa Blanca cartel was weakening their influence in the region. If I got far enough in that task, I would be able to gather intelligence on the region’s boss, and then take that boss out. Then I could go on to liberate another of the 21 regions. Like I said. It’s an endless mission to take over the country, but the good thing about it is that each of the tiny missions that you perform along the way are compelling. The graphics look awesome, even for an open world, and that was cool. Soon enough, I got a little braver and tried to fly a helicopter. It wasn’t easy to fly, like you find in a Battlefield game. Rather, you have to learn how to do it right. I could raise or lower the aircraft with one trigger, and then tilt the nose until it started moving toward the direction it was pointing. If I got the angle just right, I would move along. But it took getting used to. Abboud at Ubisoft said they wanted to make the game challenging and make sure that travel didn’t get boring. So they made the helicopter flying harder and more realistic. I thought that was tough on early users, but it made sense for the long run, given how long the game is. Hopefully, by the time I finish the game, I’ll learn how to fly a helicopter. I finished my play session in a couple of hours. I didn’t get too far into the missions of a single region. i have no idea how long it will take to finish the whole game. And since the basic gameplay is fun, that’s a good thing, as fans will have no end to their enjoyment.
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| Lyft to launch in 40 new cities this week, targeting 100 in 2017 Posted: 25 Jan 2017 08:49 AM PST  Lyft is getting ready for a major expansion in order to remain competitive in the private on-demand ride-hailing sector. The company announced that starting on Thursday, it will be launching in 40 new cities across the U.S., with a goal of 100 additional markets reached by the end of this year. “We are building on the momentum of an awesome 2016 and will accelerate our launch pace over the next several months,” said Jaime Raczka, head of early stage markets and expansion. “There is a lot of excitement from both passengers and drivers as Lyft expands into these new markets.” The rapid acceleration of growth didn’t really start this week, but in the second half of last year when Lyft added 40 new markets. Did the company hit a switch that caused it to enter a new phase? A spokesperson claimed that 2016 was a “strong” year in which 162.5 million rides were given, triple what it was in 2015. She boasted that part of the success Lyft has was its ability to “differentiate and win people over through its brand, friendly in-car experience and safety.” The new markets are in states like California, Tennessee, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Louisiana, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, South Carolina, Indiana, Kansas, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Montana, and Idaho. Here is the complete list of cities being added starting tomorrow: California:
Tennessee:
Delaware:
Pennsylvania:
Virginia:
Louisiana:
Arizona:
New Mexico:
Utah:
North Carolina:
South Carolina:
Montana:
Indiana:
Kansas:
New Hampshire:
Kentucky:
Idaho:
Additional cities will be announced later this year. Lyft said that this is just the first wave of its expansion, and by the end of 2017, it’ll be in 300 cities, which will cover 231 million people, up from 177 million people today. |
| Solving the Problem of Student Spills or Accidents That Kill Laptops, Parents’ Pocketbooks Posted: 25 Jan 2017 08:36 AM PST  PRESS RELEASE: Sector 5 E1 Rugged Chromebook with a Handle Survives Day to Day Abuse ALEXANDRIA, Va.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–January 25, 2017– The following was issued by Sector 5, Inc. (OTCQB: SFIV): This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170125005845/en/  Sector 5 Rugged E1 Chromebooks (Photo: Business Wire) Students can oftentimes be hard on their technological toys. They drop their smart phones on the ground or into toilets or they spill juice or water on their laptops. The end result is lost productivity and learning, not to mention a drain on the family or school budget because many of these devices cost hundreds of dollars to fix or replace. Sector 5 has a solution with its E1 Chromebook that has a built-in handle that makes the device not only easy to carry, but its case can survive unexpected drops and liquid spills. The E1 Chromebook has been used by students and schools since 2015 and has been receiving outstanding grades from parents and teachers and sales have been growing rapidly. Roger McKeague, Sector 5 CEO stated, “On Amazon alone, Sector Five, previously as a private company, and now, Sector 5, Inc. as a public company, has over $300,000 in sales since 2015 which has led to hundreds of schools purchasing our Chromebooks over Dell and Lenovo, and now moving us into the largest districts in the country with our wireless charging solution.” To read more about the E1 Chromebook click here. For testimonials from parents and educators, click here. About Sector 5 Sector 5, Inc. (OTCQB: SFIV), is a Proud American Corporation, that sells, manufactures and develops new innovative consumer electronics under Sector 5 and other brands. The Company markets its partnership with Google approved Chromebooks to educational organizations, other B2B and B2C sales channels, with retail sales on Amazon. It is in development of several new products to serve the educational, business and retail markets. Follow the company on www.twitter.com/sectorfiveinc and www.facebook.com/sect5 and find further information at www.sector-five.com. For Sector 5’s Forward Looking Statements, click here. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170125005845/en/ Sector 5, Inc. |
| Activision’s King quietly acquires analytics firm Omniata Posted: 25 Jan 2017 08:30 AM PST  EXCLUSIVE: Activision Blizzard’s King mobile game division has acquired analytics and engagement firm Omniata, GamesBeat has learned. No purchase price was disclosed. The deal is consistent with King’s practice of using internal analytics and marketing as much as possible to promote its games, such as Candy Crush Saga. Those games have been played by billions of people, but King needs a constant flow of data to figure out how to best acquire new users. In a statement, a spokesperson for King said in response to a query, “We can confirm we have acquired Omniata. It's a great team and a proven platform that will add to King's analytical and technology capabilities." Once it has the users, King needs to figure out which players are likely to make purchases in its free-to-play games, where only a small percentage usually pays. Then it targets those who pay or don’t pay with different kinds of incentives to encourage them to spend more. Omniata is one of the companies that helps game companies figure that out. The company was founded by Alex Arias, CEO. Back in 2014, when the company came out of stealth mode, he announced that the company was processing 190 billion events per month for game and app developers, helping companies understand their users and why they were playing or dropping out. In 2014, Omniata disclosed it had raised $6.8 million. The investors included Nordic venture capital firm Creandum, which was the first institutional investor in Spotify, and Sigma West. |
| Heroes of the Dorm ditches ESPN for Facebook Posted: 25 Jan 2017 08:00 AM PST  It looks like ESPN 2 will have more room for bowling. Blizzard announced today that its third Heroes of the Dorm event — a tournament of its Heroes of the Storm multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) featuring teams from different colleges — is coming back. This time, however, it will broadcast on Facebook Live. ESPN 2 aired the previous two events. Heroes of the Storm launched for PC in 2015, and Blizzard has worked hard to help bolster its popularity among competitive gamers with events like Heroes of the Dorm. Blizzard has also launched the Heroes Global Championship, an esports league for Heroes of the Storm that features professional esports players. Those matches stream on Twitch. The first Heroes of the Dorm earned a 0.1 Nielsen rating. In 2015, ESPN told GamesBeat that “the event met our strategic objectives to experiment with new formats and programming and engage new fans.” While other esports have since made it to cable, notably Counter-Strike: Global Offensive via Eleague, Blizzard is taking Heroes of the Dorm back to online streaming, a world more familiar with fans of competitive gaming. “We were very happy with the quality and reception of Heroes of the Dorm when we partnered with ESPN,” Adam Rosen, college esports lead at Blizzard, told GamesBeat. “They are a great partner and helped put on a terrific show the last couple of years. With Heroes of the Dorm 2017, social media users around the world will be able to watch live streamed collegiate esports matches exclusively on Facebook, beginning with the regular season and continuing all the way through the National Championship. We're excited to bring a new level of engagement to Heroes of the Dorm — through Facebook, people around the globe will be able to interact with each other in the moment, easily keep on top of the action on the go, and share their passion with friends. This year’s tournament will give out more than $500,000 in scholarships and prizes. The season starts on February 15 and ends with the National Championship on April 8. If you’re a college gamer looking to get into the tournament, you can sign up here. "Heroes of the Dorm has featured some of the most dramatic college esports action of the past two years, and with more prizes for more teams up for grabs this year, we're looking forward to a whole new level of competition," said Mike Morhaime, chief executive officer and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment, in a press release sent to GamesBeat. "We're also excited to be working with Facebook this year to bring more live Heroes of the Dorm play to more viewers around the world than ever before." |
| Video site Rooster Teeth launches its own game publishing business Posted: 25 Jan 2017 08:00 AM PST  Rooster Teeth, the video site that made the online series Red vs. Blue, is launching its own video game publishing division, Rooster Teeth Games. The Austin, Texas-based studio will publish Battlesloths 2025: The Great Pizza Wars. And the division will focus on bridging the gap between independent game developers and the worldwide community of gamers. Developed by Invisible Collective, Battlesloths 2025: The Great Pizza Wars will be available on Steam in March 2017. Rooster Teeth Games recently developed and published mega hit RWBY: Grimm Eclipse. The game, based on Rooster Teeth's global hit anime series RWBY. The game was a best-seller during its initial release on Steam in Summer 2016 and then debuted on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in January 2017 and is currently a top-10 selling game on both platforms.  Above: Battlesloths 2025: The Great Pizza Wars Image Credit: Rooster Teeth Studios Rooster Teeth Games offers independent developers the opportunity to tap into, leverage, and gain exposure within Rooster Teeth's pervasive and influential community. The company has a massive global footprint of more than 30 million subscribers to its YouTube Network and more than 5 million unique monthly visitors to its RoosterTeeth.com hub. "Rooster Teeth services the community of people who grew up on game consoles instead of cable boxes," said Michael Hadwin, director of Rooster Teeth Games, in a statement. "With Rooster Teeth Games, we will bring a wide array of engaging and entertaining video games on all platforms to this community and in turn introduce the indie developer to this thriving demographic." In addition to first-party relations, marketing, distribution, and legal services, Rooster Teeth Games will provide indie developer partners with e-commerce merchandising and promotion. "We invite the aspiring, stellar, creative indie developers around the world to contact Rooster Teeth Games and pitch their best content and games to us," said Hadwin. "We are eager to share access to the vast potential audiences within the Rooster Teeth community and to publish and deliver new and exciting content to gamers worldwide, starting with Battlesloths."  Above: Screenshot of Battlesloths 2025 Image Credit: Rooster Teeth Battlesloths 2025: The Great Pizza Wars is a fast-paced, local multiplayer, competitive twin-stick shooter. In it, players train to become the ultimate gun-toting, hoverboarding, pizza-eating sloth. Up to four players can compete against A.I. sloths using myriad weaponry, each with their own strategies, to destroy enemies in a quest to collect the most pizza. Battlesloths 2025: The Great Pizza Wars features 20 unique weapons, 4 game modes, and customizable battle settings. Randy Greenback, executive producer for Invisible Collective, said in a statement, "It's easy to see that Rooster Teeth embodies the spirit of the game in all they do. Their approach to entertainment, paired with their awareness of the current market, makes them the ideal publisher for Battlesloths." Rooster Teeth Games is headed by Hadwin and Rooster Teeth's senior vice president of business development Alan Abdine. With more than 20 years experience in the games industry, Hadwin has worked with a number of video game and entertainment companies. He brings strategic, business, and operating leadership, as well as keen insight and industry connections to establish the new division's foothold in the industry. |
| Prey will bring you more aliens to slaughter on May 5 Posted: 25 Jan 2017 07:00 AM PST  Pretty soon, it’s going to be time to clear out another alien infestation. Bethesda Softworks announced Prey will debut on May 5 on the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and the Windows PC. Bethesda, a division of ZeniMax Media, said that the next game from Arkane Studios will feature sci-fi combat aboard Talos I, an immense space station orbiting the moon in the year 2032. As main character Morgan Yu (yes, an Asian American character), you are the subject of an experiment that was supposed to alter humanity forever. But it has gone terribly wrong. The space station has been overrun by hostile aliens (who look like dark smoke rings), and they are now hunting you. As you dig into the dark secrets of Talos I and your own past, you must survive using the tools found on the station, your wits, weapons, and mind-bending abilities to defeat the Typhon alien threat. Fans who pre-order Prey will receive the exclusive Cosmonaut Shotgun Pack. The pre-order bonus consists of Morgan Yu's family heirloom Margrave shotgun and tools to fight threats aboard Talos I including: three neuromods players can spend to acquire new abilities, two medkits, a fabrication plan to create shotgun ammo, a starter kit for building tools and weapons, and a unique upgrade to help players preserve their limited resources. |
| Trump administration tells environment agency to cut climate change page from website Posted: 25 Jan 2017 06:32 AM PST  (Reuters) — U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the climate change page from its website, two agency employees told Reuters, the latest move by the newly minted leadership to erase ex-President Barack Obama’s climate change initiatives. The employees were notified by EPA officials on Tuesday that the administration had instructed EPA’s communications team to remove the website’s climate change page, which contains links to scientific global warming research, as well as detailed data on emissions. The page could go down as early as Wednesday, the sources said. “If the website goes dark, years of work we have done on climate change will disappear,” one of the EPA staffers told Reuters, who added some employees were scrambling to save some of the information housed on the website, or convince the Trump administration to preserve parts of it. The sources asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak to the media. A Trump administration official did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The order comes as Trump’s administration has moved to curb the flow of information from several government agencies who oversee environmental issues since last week, in actions that appeared designed to tighten control and discourage dissenting views. The moves have reinforced concerns that Trump, a climate change doubter, could seek to sideline scientific research showing that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels contributes to global warming, as well as the career staffers at the agencies that conduct much of this research. Myron Ebell, who helped guide the EPA’s transition after Trump was elected in November until he was sworn in last week, said the move was not surprising. “My guess is the web pages will be taken down, but the links and information will be available,” he said. The page includes links to the EPA’s inventory of greenhouse gas emissions, which contains emissions data from individual industrial facilities as well as the multiagency Climate Change Indicators report, which describes trends related to the causes and effects of climate change. The Trump administration’s recently appointed team to guide the post-Obama transition has drawn heavily from the energy industry lobby and pro-drilling think tanks, according to a list of the newly introduced 10-member team. Trump appointed Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a longtime foe of the EPA who has led 14 lawsuits against it, as the agency’s administrator. The Senate environment committee held a tense seven-hour confirmation hearing for Pruitt last week. No vote on his nomination has been scheduled yet. (Reporting by Valerie Volcovici; Editing by Richard Valdmanis and Lisa Shumaker) |
| Kony Helps KMC Controls Launch New Mobile App with Innovative IoT Technology Posted: 25 Jan 2017 05:35 AM PST PRESS RELEASE: Leading Global Building Automation Manufacturer Delivers New KMC Connect Lite App Built on Kony’s Platform to Accelerate its System Configuration & Setup Time by 75 Percent AUSTIN, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–January 25, 2017– Kony, Inc., the leading enterprise mobility company, today announced it has helped KMC Controls develop an innovative KMC Connect Lite mobile application that speeds the pre-commissioning process of its KMC Conquest controllers by simplifying field configuration and installation. The KMC Connect Lite app is the first in a series of mobile applications and Internet of Things (IoT) solutions that KMC Controls plans to develop using Kony’s cloud-based Platform. By using the KMC Connect Lite mobile app, customers can reduce the system installation setup time by up to 75 percent. This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170125005362/en/ KMC Controls is an independent U.S.-based manufacturer that provides building automation and IoT solutions to help facilities reduce energy consumption and operating costs, while also increasing the comfort and safety for building occupants. Based in New Paris, Indiana, KMC Controls provides its building automation solutions to system integrators, distributors, OEM partners and IT providers worldwide. “For over 50 years, our goal at KMC Controls has been to help customers minimize energy use, maximize building efficiency, and ensure the comfort and safety of their occupants. To continue our leadership in manufacturing, we’re building an ecosystem optimized to deliver IoT solutions that deliver genius buildings and facilities,” said Richard Newberry, chief executive officer, KMC Controls. “We chose Kony to be part of this ecosystem because of their world-class expertise and market-leading platform. With Kony, we can develop mobile applications that can revolutionize building automation.” KMC Controls selected the Kony Platform because of its open architecture enabling them to develop for both iOS and Android with a single code base. With Kony MobileFabric, KMC Controls can develop back-end micro-services for the KMC Commander system, apply analytics, incorporate features and functions suggested by customers, and integrate them with its mobile app. And using data enabled by the Kony Platform and saved on the Kony Cloud, KMC Controls can gain insight into how and where its mobile application is being used, what functions are proving most popular, and how much time is being spent on each screen. KMC Controls first collaborated with Kony to deliver the KMC Connect Lite mobile application. Using Near Field Communication (NFC), the KMC Connect Lite mobile app enables field service technicians to configure, customize, and commission controller devices without powering the controller or even opening the box. With the KMC Connect Lite mobile app, a field installer places their mobile device on the controller box and can write the controller settings through NFC. “The KMC Connect Lite mobile application that Kony helped us build is a game changer for our customers,” continued Newberry. “KMC Controls is focused on providing innovative and intuitive solutions and our mobile app saves an enormous amount of time, improves margins, and helps our customers gain competitive advantage. What used to take customers 4 days to configure and install a system is now down to just a few hours.” Building on this success, KMC Controls plans to leverage the power of the Kony Platform to develop future mobile applications and IoT solutions. “IoT is disrupting every industry. At Kony, we provide a cross-platform architecture that enables organizations to harness the power of mobility and leverage IoT technology that can transform their business processes and create new capabilities,” said Dave Shirk, president of Products, Strategy and Marketing, Kony, Inc. “Kony is excited to partner with KMC Controls on their digital journey as they continue to provide innovative mobile apps and IoT solutions that deliver value and exceptional experiences to their customers.” To showcase their latest products and solutions, KMC Controls is participating in the AHR Expo from January 30 – February 1 in Las Vegas, Nevada. For more information on KMC Control’s mobile innovation: Video: KMC Controls Kony is recognized as a Leader for the fourth consecutive year in the Gartner June 2016 Magic Quadrant for Mobile App Development Platforms (MADP) report. In addition, Kony was named a “Leader” and earned the highest score in the current offering category in Mobile Infrastructure Services by independent research firm Forrester Research, Inc., according to The Forrester Wave™: Mobile Infrastructure Services report and The Forrester Wave™: Mobile Development Platforms report. About KMC Controls Founded in 1969, KMC Controls is an American manufacturer of open, secure, and scalable building automation and IoT solutions. From secure hardware devices to smart and connected software, KMC delivers embedded intelligence and optimized control. KMC is committed to providing industry-leading Internet of Things-enabled automation solutions with leading tech suppliers to increase comfort, convenience and help reduce energy usage. About Kony Inc. Kony is the fastest growing, cloud-based enterprise mobility solutions company and an industry leader among mobile application development platform (MADP) providers. Kony empowers organizations to compete in mobile time by rapidly delivering pre-built, omni-channel mobile apps across the broadest array of devices and systems, today and in the future, with a lower total cost of ownership. Kony’s cross-platform solution helps organizations design, build, configure and manage mobile apps to empower and better engage with customers, partners and employees. Kony was named the first place winner in CTIA’s MobITs/E-Tech Awards for the last three consecutive years in categories recognizing mobile application development platforms, and was included on the Inc. 500|5000 list of fastest growing private companies in America. Connect with Kony on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170125005362/en/ Kony, Inc. |
| Connected doorbell startup Ring raises $109 million from DFJ, Goldman Sachs, Qualcomm, others Posted: 25 Jan 2017 05:00 AM PST  From beds to fridges and beyond, the so-called Internet of Things took a giant leap forward in 2016, with consumers the world over encouraged to connect the most random of household items to the internet. The new year is setting off on a similar footing, with connected doorbell startup Ring announcing a fresh $109 million investment: a series D round led by DFJ Growth, Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, and Qualcomm Ventures, with participation from entrepreneur Richard Branson, American Family Insurance, Shea Ventures, and True Ventures, among others. The funding round also includes a debt element from Silicon Valley Bank. We first covered Ring in 2013 when it was known as Doorbot. At the time, the startup essentially offered a doorbell equipped with a Wi-Fi-connected camera, but following a rebrand it has boosted its offering with new products and features including Ring Chime, motion-detection technology, solar panels, standalone security cameras, and a cloud video-storage service. Who’s there?The premise of Ring’s technology remains the same as it has always been. When someone turns up at your house and rings your doorbell, Ring calls your phone so you can see instantly who’s there — this is useful if you’re in the back garden, in bed, or on the other side of the world. You can talk directly to the visitor through your phone, and see them through the installed camera. It’s also useful to help thwart the age-old technique used by criminals, who “check” to see if someone’s home by ringing the doorbell. With Ring, there’s always someone in.  Above: Ring Camera The fresh cash injection comes less than ten months after the Santa Monica, California-based company closed another chunky $61.2 million round, which in turn followed shortly after a $28 million round led by Richard Branson. This latest round takes the startup’s total funding to $209 million. Ring now claims around 1,000 employees in eight countries and, with another $109 million in its coffers, the company says it will continue on its “mission of reducing crime in neighborhoods around the world,” according to a company statement. Ring says that its products are now on sale in 100 countries, and can be bought in 15,000 retail locations. The company also partnered with the L.A. Police Department last year to install Ring video doorbells in 10 percent of homes in the Wilshire Park neighborhood. “Ring is one of the fastest growing consumer hardware companies, which in itself is an impressive feat, but we see a much larger opportunity to deliver a full suite of home security products and services,” said Christopher Dawe, co-head of the venture capital and growth equity team at Goldman Sachs Investment Partners. “This is a true market expansion story. Ring is building a next generation home security platform at an accessible price point.” Sign up for Funding Daily: Get the latest news in your inbox every weekday. |
| GoDaddy launches GoCentral, a new mobile-friendly DIY website builder Posted: 25 Jan 2017 04:55 AM PST  Internet domain name registrar and web hosting giant GoDaddy has announced a new all-in-one platform that merges a “mobile-friendly” website builder with a suite of ecommerce and marketing tools. While GoDaddy already offers a website builder, with its new GoCentral platform the company is embarking on what it calls a “paradigm shift” away from traditional DIY website building tools — including its own. GoCentral promises to simplify the process of creating a website, which can be done in under an hour, and the website builder can even be used on touchscreen mobile devices so that business owners can tweak the layout and content on the move. The new tool supports around 1,500 business ideas and industries (compared to 300 in its current website builder), so that when you first tell it what the “topic” of your website is, it automatically creates a “near-complete” website on the spot, including pre-filled sections and stock images. All sites are also fully responsive, meaning they adapt to the platform on which they’re being viewed, be it PC, tablet, or smartphone.  Above: Setting up  Above: Edit But the website builder goes beyond design and launch; it also lets businesses improve their presence on search engines with SEO tools, as well as direct integration with Facebook to create a new Page. Additionally, customers who log in will see engagement and activity updates instantly, with recommendations on how they could improve traffic.  Above: GoCentral There is, of course, no shortage of DIY website builders out there already. Last summer, Wix launched an automated web design service, which sounds like something similar to what GoDaddy is striving for here, insofar as it helps noobs create industry-specific websites in a ridiculously short period of time. But such tools are generally scoffed at by professional designers, given that they’re generic template-based solutions (with some smarts, admittedly) rather than human creations. But as with all such things, it really depends on what a website is for — many small businesses and one-man firms won’t need feature-rich websites that are “on-brand.” “Traditional DIY site builders got it wrong by forcing people to focus their time on tweaking page layout instead of generating results," said GoDaddy general manager and senior vice president Lauren Antonoff. “Many small businesses struggle to attract visitors to their sites, and the little traffic they do get is largely coming from mobile devices. We're fundamentally changing the approach by creating a mobile-friendly experience that lets customers focus on achieving their goals, rather than worrying about site designs.” GoDaddy has been pushing to corner the small-to-medium sized business market for some time with a number of add-on services. For example, GoDaddy offers a bookkeeping service, the result of its 2012 acquisition of Outright, and it later snapped up Ronin to add invoicing to the mix. And last summer, the company launched Flare, a community app for sharing and rating business ideas. Today’s launch also comes almost two months after GoDaddy acquired European hosting giant Host Europe Group in a $1.8 billion deal, giving GoDaddy a direct artery into millions more small businesses across Europe. A company spokesperson told VentureBeat that the existing website builder will be gradually phased out, but there is no firm timeline for this at the moment. The company will look at how those users can be ported over to GoCentral in the future. In terms of pricing, GoCentral will be pretty much the same as the existing DIY tool, meaning it ranges from $6 to $30 per month, depending on what features you want. |
| Here’s how China’s ‘big 4’ smartphone firms are fighting for customers globally Posted: 25 Jan 2017 04:43 AM PST  Worldwide, Apple and Samsung dominate pricey smartphone sales, accounting for about a third of the market. But the next several names on the global bestseller list include four lower-cost Chinese competitors that collectively sell almost as many handsets as the big two. In China’s smartphone market, the world’s largest, the four companies have been closely matched competitors over the last few years, taking turns at the number-one spot. (The figures in the chart below are from the third quarter of 2016, via research firm IDC.) Being No. 1 in China isn’t necessarily very profitable, however, as there are always new competitors willing to lose piles of money to build market share. In recent years Huawei has broken out of the pack, becoming the No. 3 smartphone maker in the world and the first Chinese phone maker with a substantial global footprint. In a new feature article, Fortune shows how Huawei’s decades of experience making and selling telecom networking equipment helped it build better phones and establish relationships in markets worldwide—with the conspicuous exception of the U.S. — boosting its profile and its profit margins. Fortune looks at Huawei’s advantages and its obstacles to handicap its chances of catching Apple and Samsung globally. Here’s a quick field guide to Huawei and its main Chinese competitors.
OppoOppo, owned by billionaire Duan Yong Ping, made its name selling cheaper phones in rural China (where it has 200,000 retail locations) and Southeast Asia. Its R9S looks like an exact copy of an iPhone 7 — a winning formula in China. VivoMarketing for Oppo’s sister brand Vivo, also owned by Duan, focuses on its smartphones’ camera, a major selling point in selfie-obsessed China. Celebrity endorsements and its sponsorship of the NBA in China have propelled the brand. HuaweiThe network-equipment giant sold an estimated $26.5 billion worth of phones in 2016, or 140 million handsets. It’s the only Chinese phonemaker whose devices are generally seen as being on par with Samsung’s in quality — which helps explain its strong recent growth in Europe. XiaomiXiaomi’s phones, all the rage in 2014, are falling out of favor almost as quickly as they became hits, hurt by mediocre reviews and a lack of retail distribution. The formerly online-sales-only company is making a big push to open retail stores. A version of this article appears in the February 1, 2017 issue of Fortune as part of the feature titled “Is the World Big Enough for Huawei?” This story originally appeared on Fortune.com. Copyright 2017 |
| Cybersecurity startup SentinelOne raises $70 million Posted: 25 Jan 2017 04:30 AM PST  As devices become increasingly connected, vulnerability to hacks is a growing concern. Cybersecurity startup SentinelOne announced today a funding round of $70 million to tackle this issue. Based in Palo Alto, California, the startup has developed antivirus software that’s programmed to be proactive rather than reactive with regard to endpoint security. "Incumbents like Symantec, McAfee, and Trend Micro have not been able to improve their offering or offer any meaningful protection for their customers against evolving threats," SentinelOne cofounder and chief executive Tomer Weingarten said in an interview with VentureBeat. He explained that static antiviruses will scan for anomalies that are known and blacklisted. However, once hackers understood this, they began creating variations and alterations that scans would dismiss, as they weren't on the blacklist. The SentinelOne software is able to prevent an attack using a system that detects intrinsic behaviors by looking at the traits of specific files and processes. "Ransomware has 50-60 different families out there and a million new variations every day," said Weingarten. "But if you think about the actual behavior of ransomware across all the families and variants, it's always pretty much the same." And cybersecurity isn’t only a threat to standard targets like government agencies and banks. Jeremiah Grossman, chief of security strategy at SentinelOne, told VentureBeat that ransomware is starting to hold down hospitals and interrupt patient care. "We're no longer in the area of stealing money anymore," he said. "Lives are at risk now." Grossman has made it his mission to call out vendors on social media who are making “outlandish claims about their security software”:
According to him, there are very few vendors that offer a warranty for guaranteed security. This is why Grossman has worked with the team to create a ransomware warranty, whereby customers are guaranteed 99 percent endpoint protection over a given year. If the software still has a ransomware infection, the startup will pay the ransom, up to $1,000 per endpoint and up to $1 million in total coverage per customer. The startup hasn't received any claims since it began offering the warranty last summer. "If we can do it, everyone else can do it," Grossman said. The startup plans to increase its warranty and offer more coverage over time. In terms of customers, Weingarten didn't want to go into any details, but he did mention that they are working with a number of governmental agencies. The startup's roots in the Israeli security and counter-intelligence community certainly adds to its credibility. Many of its developers, who are from the 8200 unit of the Israeli Defense Forces, are currently working at SentinelOne's research and development (R&D) base in Tel Aviv. One customer the startup was willing to disclose is Time Inc. The software is supported on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and can be installed on any device (servers, desktops, laptops…). Weingarten wouldn’t talk about pricing information but mentioned that the software is available as an annual subscription. New investor Redpoint Ventures led this round. Even though the firm has started to invest more heavily in security over the past 3-4 years, Redpoint Ventures partner Tom Dyal told VentureBeat that they don’t have a specific fund dedicated to security. Another new investor is Sound Ventures (founded by Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary). Existing investors Third Point Ventures, Data Collective, Granite Hill Capital Partners, Westly Group, and SineWave Ventures also participated in the round, bringing the total investment in SentinelOne to more than $110 million, to date. Unlike the previous rounds that were heavily geared toward R&D, the majority of the new money will go to marketing and global expansion. The startup was founded in 2013 and has around 200 employees. Sign up for Funding Daily: Get the latest news in your inbox every weekday. |
| Conan Exiles is a brutal survival world debuting January 31 Posted: 25 Jan 2017 04:00 AM PST  Get ready to let your inner barbarian free. Conan Exiles debuts on January 31 on Steam Early Access, and developer Funcom just revealed its cinematic trailer and special edition. Olso, Norway-based Funcom said the standard edition for the game will cost $30 while the new Barbarian edition will be $50. Bläck Studios produced the trailer, which sets the tone for the savage and barbaric open world that players have to survive, build, and dominate in. Funcom also revealed the Conan Exiles – Barbarian Edition. The edition includes the Custom Conan Exiles digital comic book, exclusive Conan Exiles t-shirt, six digital Conan the Avenger comic books from Dark Horse Comics, digital Conan Pen & Paper RPG Core Book, The Coming of Conan eBook, the award-winning soundtracks from Age of Conan and Rise of the Godslayer, plus the brand new Conan Exiles soundtracks, in-game items for the Age of Conan MMO including a Savage Rhino mount, and The Art of Conan Exiles digital art book. "One of the really great things about working with Conan the Barbarian is that there is this huge pop cultural universe surrounding him," says Funcom CEO Rui Casais, in a statement. "Being able to team up with Dark Horse Comics, Modiphius, and other Conan creators has allowed us to build a special edition that speaks to both fans and those discovering Conan for the first time." Conan Exiles is an open-world survival game set in the brutal lands of Conan the Barbarian, the world’s greatest fantasy hero. The game can be played on private and public servers, either in multiplayer or local single-player. In the world of Conan Exiles, survival is more than tracking down food and water. You can journey through a vast, seamless world filled with the ruins of ancient civilizations, uncovering its dark history and buried secrets as you seek to conquer and dominate the exiled lands. Conan Exiles will hit the Xbox One Game Preview Program in Spring 2017. The game will also make its way to PlayStation 4 at a later date. |
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