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“Making sense of recent 5G news, or, why we can’t just skip 4.5G” plus 29 more VentureBeat

“Making sense of recent 5G news, or, why we can’t just skip 4.5G” plus 29 more VentureBeat


Making sense of recent 5G news, or, why we can’t just skip 4.5G

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 01:51 PM PST


Even if you’re a daily smartphone user, you might not have heard that the big carriers are launching next-generation “5G” cellular networks this year, or that the last two months have been packed with “5G” and “4.5G” news. I cover these topics for VentureBeat, and as we’re less than two weeks away from the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, this struck me as the right time to provide a big picture explanation of what you can expect over the next year or two.

Why should you care about 5G?

One year from now, your smartphone is going to get faster in one of three ways: You’re either going to upgrade to a 5G phone, upgrade to a 4.5G phone, or keep using a 4G phone on a network shared with fewer users. If you buy a 5G phone, expect peak speeds nearing 5 Gigabits per second — enough to download a 4K movie in under four minutes — versus 1-2Gbps on newly-purchased 4.5G phones, and 0.1Gbps on current 4G phones, the latter only because old 4G networks will free up and get faster as people switch to 5G phones.

Above: Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon announces that 19 manufacturers and 18 carriers will be using X50 modems to roll out 5G devices to customers in 2019.

Image Credit: Jeremy Horwitz/VentureBeat

But 5G is about a lot more than phones. In the foreseeable future, your car will have its own 5G connection, both to provide entertainment and to communicate with local traffic systems. Your workplace will have 5G to let remote operators and computers control as much as possible. And your city will use 5G for everything from parking sensors to security systems. Public utilities, farms, and health care providers will all rely heavily on cellular networks, too. Seriously, 5G will be everywhere.

Doesn’t that make 5G potentially dangerous?

Yes. Imagine what could happen if a foreign country wanted to wage war, and could remotely seize control of cars, factories, cities, and communications devices? That’s the threat the U.S. government is combatting by freezing out Chinese wireless companies Huawei and ZTE: 5G offers increased security, unless the companies making the hardware compromise it with government-accessible backdoors.

Above: Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon explains some of the many new industries that 5G networks will touch, on Feb. 7, 2018.

Image Credit: Jeremy Horwitz/VentureBeat

Another potential concern — but one that science thus far suggests is harmless — is radiation. 5G is based upon various types of radio waves, all of which are believed to be “non-ionizing,” or not harmful to human life. But concerns about radiation convinced the European capital Brussels to restrict cellular emissions a decade ago, and continue to fuel restriction-minded folks in California, as well. Most scientists and engineers consider cellular safety to be a fairly settled issue, but like 4G before it, the world has never seen anything close to the increased quantity of radio activity 5G is expected to bring, so questions will remain.

When is 5G coming to my country?

Originally, 5G was expected to begin rolling out in 2020, but that changed two months ago when 3GPP — the global cellular standards group — approved the first 5G standard six months ahead of schedule. Now 5G is on the fast track in several countries: Super-early, limited U.S. rollouts are expected later in 2018, while many other countries are planning at least limited rollouts in 2019.

Above: FILE PHOTO – A video promotes the 5G mobile wireless standard at the Qualcomm booth during the 2017 CES in Las Vegas, Nevada January 6, 2017.

Image Credit: REUTERS/Steve Marcus

Europe remains on track to have one 5G city per country by 2020, Australia will start to have 5G by early 2019, and several countries in Asia have offered dates ranging from 2018 to 2020. Little has been said about African or South American 5G rollouts. However, luck and other factors may lead your city to be earlier rather than later to the party. Individual cities in the U.S., Canada, Spain, and South Korea have already been selected as live 5G testbeds, and carriers are already testing 5G services in certain homes and businesses there. Many more are likely to be announced at or after MWC.

Why can’t we just skip 4.5G?

The short answer is that 4.5G is a simple way of describing late-stage 4G technologies. Carriers are building those technologies into their latest cell towers and hardware for two reasons: First, so that there’s a faster 4G network for early 5G phones to fall back on, and second, so people who want to keep using 4G devices can continue to see speed improvements.

Above: A prototype device containing Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X24 modem is shown on Feb. 7, 2018.

Image Credit: Jeremy Horwitz/VentureBeat

You can skip buying a 4.5G phone if you want. But it may turn out that late 4.5G phones offer a better combination of “great speed and solid battery life” than early 5G phones, which may ship with “insane speed and so-so battery life.” We’ll know when the first 4.5G and 5G phones begin to ship what the compromises are.

How should I plan my purchasing around 5G?

If you’re thinking of upgrading phones or tablets with cellular connections, you could either buy in right away or hold off for a while, depending on your needs. Unless you’re in one of the lucky early cities, there mightn’t be a 5G network where you live for a couple of years, so upgrading now to something great will keep you happy until your neighborhood gets 5G coverage. If you can hold off for a full year, and you’re not an Apple fan, you’ll probably be able to choose between early 5G phones and very late 4.5G phones using recently demonstrated Qualcomm chips. Nineteen manufacturers are already working on phones using Qualcomm’s X50 5G chips, with releases planned for 2019.

Above: Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X50 5G is the first 5G modem for consumer mobile devices, shown here in oversized prototype form on Feb. 7, 2018.

Image Credit: Jeremy Horwitz/VentureBeat

Apple users could be in for a longer wait. The company reportedly is only sourcing modems for late 2018 iPhones from Intel, which isn’t expected to have its first 5G modems available until mid-2019. This could change, but it seems unlikely to move significantly, and dealing exclusively with Intel could push Apple’s rollout of 5G devices into late 2019 or 2020.

What about 5G cars and workplaces? Don’t expect them until 2020 at the earliest, but quite possibly later than that. If you want a portable 5G wireless hotspot to use for work purposes, however, AT&T plans to make them available in the U.S. later this year. You might even be able to replace your home broadband service with Verizon 5G by year’s end. Keep your eyes on our 5G news coverage for announcements of city-, country-, and carrier-specific rollouts.

Roguemance turns monster-slaying into a date

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 01:40 PM PST


In Roguemance, love is a procedurally generated battlefield. The romance-themed roguelike (though you can turn off permadeath) places equal emphasis on the creatures you fight as well as the bonds you form with your party members. It’s indie developer Lucas Molina’s latest game, and it’s out now on PC.

As players traverse the colorful pixel realm of Heartipelago, they have the option to pick up sidekicks, select and buy new skills, and face off against hostile creatures. Before every battle, you pick who will accompany you in combat, and each fight acts as a date.

You’re equipped with four moves — such as attack, defend, and jump — and you must use all of them at least once before they cool down. Your date and enemies, on the other hand, go through their moves sequentially. In order to successfully hit the monsters and avoid attacking your love interest, you have to plan accordingly. Once your date likes you enough, you can control them and execute both of your moves simultaneously, which adds complexity to your strategy. It’s a fresh take on turn-based combat.

Roguemance also tasks you with balancing how everyone feels about your decisions. Some of the folks you add to your party may want to choose one path over another on the map, others ask you to spare your enemies after combat. You also have to take into consideration how the decisions affect your character.

Molina says that his relationships inspired the premise of the game, particularly when he started seeing patterns surface time and again when he was dating.

“Roguemance, at its core, is about compromise,” said Molina. “How much can I give before losing myself in this relationship? Should I do what you want, or what my partner wants? Is this person right for me? Do I take the hit for my partner? All of these questions and decisions are subtly thrown at the player all the time.”

Couching the game in terms of romance actually made me view some of the nonplayable characters differently. I was on a “date” with an NPC named Ufo who kept trashtalking me the whole time. They kept telling me they didn’t need me and they were fine on their own, which I found offensive since I felt like I was doing most of the work in battle.

I stopped at the first pub I saw and picked up a new sidekick straight away.

Molina developed Roguemance over a period of a year-and-a-half, and he plans on adding more content. He says he’s made a lot of changes based on player feedback during the game’s beta, so he’s interested in seeing what features the community asks for now that it’s fully released.

It’s undoubtedly difficult to create games as a solo dev, but Molina says that his biggest challenge is a condition called tension myositis syndrome (TMS).

“I have terrible back pain, so sitting down to make the game daily is a big challenge. Furthermore, this back pain is induced by stress rather than physical injury (it’s called TMS), so that means I’m not only suffering physically, but mentally above all,” said Molina. “I’ve been in a long journey to love myself more and not put so much pressure in myself. That’s the key to ease the pain and my mind. It helps that I’m making a game about love that I’m passionate about, but making games is hard. I’m slowly figuring out how to stay productive without suffering.”

Molina’s other games have tackled various ideas, and notably reflected his love of art. Painters Guild, for instance, is a simulation game that delves into the economics of being a Renaissance artist. Avante-Garde, which is in alpha, lets players make paintings and meet famous artists like Claude Monet.

Rocket League’s in-game tournament mode goes into testing February 21

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 12:20 PM PST


Psyonix is about to make it easier for you to compete against your friends in its vehicular soccer hit Rocket League. The studio is launching its Tournaments mode into a short beta test on Steam next week. This trial begins February 21, and it runs through February 23.

Rocket League debuted in 2015, and it is now one a regular among the top 10 most played games on Steam. The competitive gameplay is a huge reason it is so popular, but running a tournament with a large number of competitors has required a third-party system like Challonge. The addition of Tournaments addresses that need and builds a platform right into Rocket League.

Tournaments will hit Rocket League across all platforms sometime in March or April, but PC players can mess around with it before the end of this month.

“The beta is purpose-built to help us test functionality and the new UI we have created for the Tournaments system,” Psyonix developer Devin Connors wrote in a blog post.

To get into the beta, you’ll need a copy of the game on Steam. You then need to follow this procedure:

  1. Right-click on Rocket League in your Steam library
  2. Select “Properties” from the menu
  3. Click “Betas” in the tabs at the top.
  4. Click on the drop-down box, and select “Tournaments Beta”

Now, you can close the menu and wait for Steam to update Rocket League to the beta fork. After the beta ends, Steam should automatically return you to the default stable build.

I’m pretty excited about Tournaments. I tried running a competition a long time ago, and it was a logistical nightmare. Sure, a big part of that was trying to herd cats game-industry professionals, but something like this would’ve helped.

How Facebook users show their love for chatbots, by the numbers

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 12:10 PM PST


In honor of Valentine’s Day, the team at Dashbot took a closer look at how men and women show their love for Facebook Messenger bots. Our team processes more than three billion messages a month; we used January’s data for our analysis.

Here’s a holiday-themed look at how users interact with Facebook chatbots.

Women’s usage is on the rise

In general, there are more men using Facebook chatbots than women. On average, about 59 percent of chatbot users are men, whereas 37 percent are women and 4 percent didn’t specify.

Men tend to interact with chatbots for longer as well, with session times about 16 percent longer than women, although the number of messages tends to be about the same — men apparently type more slowly. Men have higher engagement as well, with 27 percent more sessions per user than women.

About 15 percent of both men and women use more than one bot a month.

Women’s usage has risen over the past year, though. In our report last year, on average only 28 percent of a bot’s users were women. Men’s engagement, as measured by sessions per user, was 50 percent higher than women’s at the time, as opposed to 27 percent now. Similarly, last year only 10.6 percent of women used multiple bots. This number has increased.

What are men and women saying?

The top messages for men and women are about the same. Although it’s interesting to see “ok” higher up than “hi” and “hello” for women, as those and the thumbs up tend to be the top three overall regardless of gender when we looked at this in the past.

The ‘romance’ languages

We looked at a few “romantic” words to see how men and women chat. For the most part, the top 10 messages were fairly similar between genders. However, the top messages for Portuguese women were pretty interesting — they tend to send more welcoming messages like “good morning,” “good afternoon,” and “good night” (“bom dia,” “boa tarde,” and “boa noite,” respectively). Another interesting message was “cc” in French, which is slang for “coucou,” equivalent to “hey” or “hello” in English.

Love stickers together

As we have mentioned in previous reports, users communicate in more than just words — they use images, stickers, audio, video, and more.

We looked at the use of stickers among men and women. Fairly equal percentages of men and women use stickers in chats — it’s only about a 1 percent difference more for men.

The top 10 most common stickers, based on the number of bots, are about the same for both. However, the next 10 is where differences start to become more apparent.


In the next 10, we see more variety in the stickers and the relative frequency of use.

What about love?

As it is Valentine’s Day, we wanted to see where all the love is. While both men’s and women’s average sentiment across bots are positive, hovering slightly over neutral, women’s sentiment is almost double that of men. Who says “love” more, though? Or “luv,” “I luv u,” “I love you” …

While a higher percentage of messages containing “love” come from women, men tend to send the messages at a higher frequency. About 51 percent of messages containing the word “love” come from women, as compared to 44 percent from men and 5 percent from users who didn’t specify their gender. However, men tend to send double the number of messages per user containing a variation of the word love than women. Fewer men may say it, but when they do, they say it more frequently.

We’re big fans of chatbots and love the data and insights that can be gleaned from them. It’s all unstructured data — users can say, or write, whatever they like — telling bots exactly what they want, and what they think of the results after.

Arte Merritt is the CEO and cofounder of Dashbot, a bot analytics platform for Facebook, Alexa, Google Home, Slack, Twitter, Kik, and other conversational interfaces.

All Walls Must Fall launches its time-traveling tech-noir February 23

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 11:37 AM PST


All Walls Must Fall takes to the dance floor to stop nuclear devastation. It’s a tactics game starring time-traveling agents in a future where the Cold War never ended. The title is Berlin-based indie studio Inbetweengames’s second effort, and it’s exiting Steam Early Access February 23 on PC for $10.

Inbetweengames describes All Walls Must Fall as “tech noir,” and its hardboiled sci-fi aesthetics reflect this. Much of the game takes place in gay clubs saturated in techno beats and pulsing lights, and you must find the right strategy to navigate the throngs of revelers and deadly guards.

You can rewind and slow down time to execute your maneuvers, all for the sake of stopping a deadly nuclear attack that happens sometime in the future. The maps are procedurally generated and permadeath is a real risk as well, so you must plan carefully.

All Walls Must Fall spent two and a half years in development, and the studio ran a successful Kickstarter campaign last March. For the last six months, it’s been in Early Access. It’s not Inbetweengames’s first rodeo; the team is comprised of former Yager developers who left that studio when it split with publisher Deep Silver on Dead Island 2. Inbetweengames also previously developed and released the game jam title The Mammoth: A Cave Painting as its first game as a team.

Google launches Intel Skylake-backed cloud instances with 96 vCPUs

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 11:11 AM PST


Google Cloud customers running high-performance applications can now launch compute instances with up to 96 virtual CPUs, thanks to an update released today. The new 96 vCPU instances can support up to 624GB of RAM, making them good candidates for applications that scale up to take advantage of additional compute capacity on a single node.

That’s important for customers running applications like in-memory databases and satellite image analysis. Descartes Labs, a startup that processes tons of imagery shot from above the earth, saw a 38 percent improvement in performance of their compression operations using the new machine types, according to Google’s blog post.

This move is part of a broader struggle among cloud providers to offer their customers high-performance computing environments. Tons of computing power comes with a matching price tag, which translates into major revenue for Google and its competitors, each of which is trying to grow its business as workloads shift to the cloud.

The new machine types are powered by Intel Xeon processors based on the company’s Skylake architecture. Google is providing customers with a set of Intel Performance libraries for building software that’s optimized to run on top of the more powerful chips, so they can get more out of the added compute capacity.

World map showing Google Cloud Platform regions with Intel Skylake 96 vCPU support

Above: A map shows which Google Cloud regions support the new 96 vCPU instance types.

Image Credit: Google

Right now, the new machine types are available through Google’s cloud regions in Oregon, Iowa, South Carolina, Montreal, Belgium, the Netherlands, Mumbai, Singapore, and Taiwan. The company plans to make them available more broadly across its global infrastructure in the future.

Remote work offers the Heartland an opportunity to transcend geographic constraints

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 10:45 AM PST


Two years ago at Davos, the world’s economic and political elite gathered to focus on “disflationary pressures.” But populist, anti-immigrant uprisings in Europe and Donald Trump’s election changed the conversation quickly: Struggling with disinflation, or weak price growth, was out. Understanding populism, migration, and automation were in.

This year at Davos, those themes remained. However, aided by a new World Economic Forum (WEF) research report called “Eight Futures of Work: Scenarios and Their Implications,” there was a shift from predicting a fear of inevitable, automated doom and gloom to planning for potential positive futures of work.

That should give the Heartland hope.

To be sure, the Midwest is beholden to geography in a world where it still matters a lot. The shifting economy has gutted its towns and stunted its growth.

But the growth of the knowledge economy and the technology to enable remote work offer Middle America — and all fractured pieces of our global economy — a chance to transcend the problem of place and, by doing so, move beyond current uncertainty toward a more prosperous future.

Geography, the most overlooked variable

Yes, we have lightning-fast software tools that you’d think would render place irrelevant. In some ways, it has; but in a lot of others, geography still matters.

Case in point: the Midwest.

While families living in every other region of the country have seen their real incomes rise since 2000, the average Midwest family in 2016 made roughly 86 percent of what it made 16 years before.

Those are the employed. The poor in in industrial Midwest towns aren’t just worse off than their fellow Midwesterners, they’re worse off than other poor people in America, says the WEF, which finds they live shorter lives. No wonder many in the Midwest fear what the next decades of “progress” will bring.

Its pain also raises the pressing question: What do we do about it?

The old, ironic history of American place-making

America has a long history of trying to make a place — using transportation and housing policies to engineer an economy where there was none, or to restart a dead one.

That history actually begins with George Washington and the Heartland. Washington “contemplated a canal that would connect the Potomac River to the Ohio River valley and the western states,” according to a report from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

But debt killed off George Washington’s “great waterway to the west” in the 1820s, before it was ever finished, and the report warns that his failed attempt to open the Midwest’s farms to the mid-Atlantic is a valuable lesson for the next 200 years of American place-making.

Evaluating a range of experiments such as the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Appalachian Regional Commission, the economists who author the report conclude, “Most large-scale place-oriented policies have had little discernible impact.”

What will determine the future of work

If the results of past place-making experiments are ambiguous, it certainly makes sense to stop repeating the same approaches.

Building more canals, bridges, highways, tunnels, etc. might have sufficed as infrastructure in pre-industrial and industrial eras. However, “Eight Futures of Work” highlights why prosperity in the 21st century economy requires additional infrastructure that will hopefully lead to different, more positive results.

The report examines possible future job markets, based on combinations of three factors:

  1. technological change
  2. the skills of the workforce and
  3. their mobility.

Technology, the report says, could render ever-larger segments of the population skill-less and effectively unemployable — or create large pools of migrants in search of jobs. Alternatively, new barriers to migration and restrictive immigration policies, while temporarily insulating a low-skilled labor force, could sap economic growth and have significant ripple effects on other countries’ labor markets and internal politics.

The report admits the future is highly unpredictable. There is no silver bullet, and the possibilities outlined therein are a fraction of the possible permutations. But the role of human capital, and its transformation as part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, is the best hedge we have to build towards positive outcomes.

“The extent to which the working population … acquires the right skills to carry out the tasks required of them in the workplace is one of the most impactful and uncertain variables for the future of work,” the report states.

The focus on human capital isn’t misplaced; however, I would argue that we must be equally as focused on overcoming the geographical determinants of success and prosperity. After all, what’s the value of a skilled workforce if businesses can’t reach them?

Freeing the workforce from place

In 2017, 57.3 million Americans freelanced. That’s the highest number ever. According to the study “Freelancing in America” — a joint report from Upwork and the Freelancers Union — the freelance workforce grew approximately three times faster than the overall U.S. workforce between 2014 and 2017. By 2027, based on current growth rates, the study predicts the majority of the U.S. workforce will be freelancers.

The ascent of the knowledge economy helps explain why: Creating intangible products can be done from anywhere.

The 2017 “Future Workforce Report” found that only one in 10 hiring managers believe physical presence in an office is important to a new hire’s success. The report also found that 60 percent of hiring managers anticipate using freelancers more in the future. The growing numbers of workers unshackled from an office — whether freelancers or remote employees (aka telecommuters) — has also made them an increasingly important part of their local economies. According to “Freelancing in America,” U.S. workers earned approximately $1.4 trillion from freelancing last year.

Making the labor market more fluid

Freelancers can live anywhere — but they don’t. They’re not equally distributed across the country. For example, the Midwest has a disproportionately lower percentage of them.

It’s not just freelancers. According to a January report, the region’s states are among those with the lowest percentage of full-time telecommuters, who like freelancers can work remotely but are employees.

Luring more remote workers from overpriced, undersupplied coastal tech hubs offers the Midwest future opportunities to reverse the region’s shrinking workforce. Bringing more remote and independent work opportunities to current Midwest residents also offers potential economic benefits.

In a Harvard Business Review article this month, economists James Manyika and Michael Spence write, “We should take another look at making the labor market more fluid, including by more active use of digital technologies for job matching and for stimulating the rise of independent work.”

Instead of losing more of their populations to coastal urban enclaves, state and local governments in the Midwest can reverse the trend by incentivizing large companies to hire remote workers in their locale. That means smart, targeted tax incentives. That means building coworking spaces that allow workers in places like the Midwest to meet in a nearby office when it’s required. And, of course, it means investing in training workers with new digital skills. Large companies should also make it a priority to source talent from areas like the Midwest — not because it’s the right thing to do to help our economy, but because it gives them access to a broader pool of quality talent.

All we know for certain is that the future of work will bring major change to our society. We can choose to lead that transformation, placing calculated bets on how we educate, motivate, and locate our workforce. Or we can be transformed by passively continuing down our current path.

Stephane Kasriel is the chief executive of Upwork, a global freelancing website, where he built and led a distributed team of more than 300 engineers located around the world as SVP of engineering before becoming CEO. He holds an MBA from INSEAD, an MSc in computer science from Stanford, and a BS from École Polytechnique in France.

Monster Prom’s multiplayer dating sim dances to an April 27 release date

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 10:00 AM PST


Monster Prom channels cheeky high school fun in a multiplayer choose-your-own adventure about finding a date to the yearly dance. Barcelona-based indie studio Beautiful Glitch has teamed up with publisher Those Awesome Guys to release its debut title April 27 for PC.

Up to four players can get down with Monster Prom at the same time through local multiplayer, and you can opt to play cooperatively or competitively. You have a set number of days to woo the classmate of your choice, and your decisions will level up your stats (like charm), change your relationships with characters around you, and get you closer or farther from your goal. Beautiful Glitch has noted that more than 300 unique events can occur in the game, and each has four potential outcomes.

Monster Prom raised funds on Kickstarter in 2016 and hit all its stretch goals. After it launches on April 27, the studio begins work on DLC to add two new love interests to the six that will ship with the release. The successful campaign has also enabled it to add more non-playable characters, create secret endings, and include plot lines designed by its backers.

A big draw for backers is the game’s lighthearted sense of humor. Some of the characters have pun-tastic names, like Polly Geist, and Beautiful Glitch has included lots of personality in the fashion and items players can pick and find. The game also enables anyone to court anyone else, and pokes fun at modern conundrums like risqué photos on dating sites.

Microsoft promises to help startups sell their products…if they’re on Azure

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 09:38 AM PST


Microsoft announced today that it's ditching many of its massive giveaways of cloud credits in exchange for helping startups sell their products through the company’s sales team, in partnership with accelerators and venture capitalists around the globe. It’s part of the Microsoft for Startups program, the latest iteration of the tech giant’s work with up-and-coming companies.

The tech titan’s BizSpark program, which offered thousands of dollars in free cloud credits, along with free access to Office 365 and Microsoft’s Visual Studio developer tools, is no longer accepting new applications, and the company will be eliminating it once the benefits expire for companies already in the program.

Instead, Microsoft is focused on working with companies in its freshly rebranded ScaleUp accelerators and partner organizations like Y Combinator to promote their services through its sales team and partner network. Access to Microsoft’s more than 40,000 salespeople, along with that team’s set of existing relationships with businesses, could drive significant sales for startups that are selling to other companies. (Members of those programs also get access to up to $120,000 in Azure credits.)

But Microsoft also stands to benefit. Startups that want to take advantage of the co-selling support will need to build their products on Microsoft Azure, not one of the company’s competitors, like AWS, which currently holds the lead in the cloud market. Companies don’t need to run exclusively on Microsoft’s cloud, however.

Microsoft previously offered access to co-selling opportunities to companies backed by its corporate venture arm. Expanding that offer to ScaleUp participants brings in more teams, beyond those who are right for an equity deal. The more teams Microsoft can get on board with the co-selling program, the more teams it can get building on top of Azure. As companies grow, their use of Microsoft’s cloud should grow with them.

Last year, Microsoft Ventures chief Nagraj Kashyap told VentureBeat that the overwhelming majority of startups the company invests in are using clouds that compete with Azure at the time of the deal, and the tech titan doesn’t force a change. However, the promise of co-selling was a carrot that the team could dangle in front of companies to encourage a migration from one cloud to another.

Microsoft won’t just throw startups in the deep end. Its program is designed to help companies make sure their product and go-to-market team is ready to work with the company’s sales organization, so that it’s a beneficial experience. That said, Microsoft will still have to prove that the co-selling benefit is worth switching platforms, or building an application on top of Azure from a company’s first line of code.

Overall, Microsoft is committing $500 million (roughly 1.7 percent of its revenue last quarter) over the next two years to help startups as part of the program, through joint sales engagements, free software, and expanded Microsoft Reactor community spaces.

THQ Nordic gets Deep Silver, Saints Row, and Metro in Koch Media acquisition

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 09:27 AM PST


Swedish publisher THQ Nordic has acquired European entertainment company Koch Media for an undisclosed sum. The deal means that THQ Nordic is acquiring Koch’s Deep Silver gaming division, which is responsible for the open-world crime series Saints Row and the postapocalyptic shooter franchise Metro. This brings Saints Row back under the THQ name after Nordic Games acquired the brand and Koch acquired the game and its developer Volition following the original THQ’s bankruptcy and dissolution.

For THQ Nordic, this move isn’t just about getting the old band back together — chief executive officer Lars Wingefors sees this as a chance to make his company into a major publisher and to strengthen its appeal as a publicly traded corporation. The CEO sees Saints Row, Metro, and the zombie action adventure Dead Island as huge opportunities to create global hits.

"Koch Media is ideally suited to foster our ambitions for growth with its profitability based on its employees and its longstanding business partners,” said Wingefors. “Deep Silver has four triple-A games in development that will generate further growth for the coming years. With Koch Media business partners, we plan to remain the leading European publishing partner for the years to come."

But while Koch is coming in under the THQ Nordic umbrella, the company will continue to operate as a separate entity. Wingefors doesn’t plan any restructuring or layoffs, Deep Silver will keep its own name, and Koch media cofounder Dr. Klemens Kundratitz will remain as that division’s CEO.

"Due to the great strategic fit of the two businesses, I believe that this is a superb strategic opportunity for Koch Media/Deep Silver and THQ Nordic,” said Kundratitz. “Our plan is to continue to develop and grow all parts of our business. Now, that Koch Media is part of a stock listed company we aim to accelerate growth."

Facebook brings Messenger Kids to Android

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 09:16 AM PST


Facebook today announced that Android smartphones and tablets can now download Messenger Kids in the Google Play Store. The app for chat and video calls first launched in December 2017 for kids ages 6 to 12 to connect with parents and other parent-approved contacts. Messenger Kids was first made available for iOS and Android Fire tablet users. At launch, Messenger Kids on Android devices is only available in the United States.

The launch comes the same day as Wired reports that the majority of experts who vetted Messenger Kids before its launch last year were given money by Facebook. Two weeks ago, about 100 kids’ health advocates mounted a campaign to lobby Facebook to kill Messenger Kids because they believe the app could undermine healthy development.

In a post announcing the launch of Messenger Kids, Facebook said it spoke with thousands of parents and “over a dozen expert advisors” like the National PTA to build Messenger Kids.

The Messenger Kids app rolls out at a time when companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon are attempting to attract more young users — and as questions emerge about the impact of digital devices on young people. In response to complaints about the addictive qualities of iPhones, last month Apple announced plans to add parental controls to its iOS devices.

The launch of Messenger Kids today is no surprise. Alongside New Year’s Day and Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day is one of the busiest days of the year for the 1.3 billion monthly active users of Messenger app for users 13 and older.

Niantic plans 48 real-world events for Ingress across the globe

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 09:15 AM PST


Niantic revealed today plans for 48 real-world events that will take place in 2018 and 2019 for its augmented reality mobile game Ingress.

Before Pokémon Go launched in 2016, Niantic’s big game was Ingress. It has players travel the real world in order to play and progress, ideas that carried over to Pokémon Go. Ingress has never been the giant hit that its successor became. Pokémon Go has generated an estimated $1.2 billion and 752 million downloads as of June. Ingress has over 14 million downloads.

Ingress has hosted over 2,000 real world events so far, which encourage players to congregate together to complete special tasks. The social aspect of the game is a big part of its draw. You can find a list of the upcoming Ingress events here.

Niantic is working an updated version of Ingress, Ingress Prime, that will launch later this year. Niantic has also raised a $200 million venture capital funding round as it prepares a new Harry Potter AR game for 2018.

Machinima rebrands as it takes gamer culture videos to new video platforms

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 09:00 AM PST


Warner Bros. bought digital video site Machinima in 2016, and today the division is announcing a rebranding with the goal of turning it into a bigger content producer that focuses on the intersection of gamer culture and entertainment.

Machinima is all about transforming gamer culture from a niche into mass entertainment, and it doesn’t hurt that games have become a $116 billion industry, according to market researcher Newzoo.

Russell Arons, general manager of Machinima, said in an interview with GamesBeat that the company is shifting away from being a traditional multichannel network on YouTube to a cross-platform service with substantial scale and more than 140 million subscribers for shows such as Mortal Kombat: Legacy and Street Fighter: Assassin's Fist. With that change, Arons said the company will show changes in its visual look and its branding as a stand-alone entity within Warner Bros.

“We have always been about influencers. We are evolving around the platforms that our influencers are reaching,” Arons said. “Machinima from its early foundation was a YouTube company. We have evolved to Facebook, and now we have a lot of programming on Twitch.”

Machinima, a division of Warner Bros. Digital Networks, boasts one of the largest and most targeted millennial audiences in the entertainment industry. Arons said the company now delivers content everywhere the gamer community consumes media.

Above: Russell Arons is general manager of Machinima.

Image Credit: Machinima

"Machinima is building on a solid foundation that is resonating with its growing audience while celebrating the best fandoms and gamer content," said Craig Hunegs, president of Warner Bros. Digital Networks, in a statement. "This rebranding highlights Machinima as one of the most unique and successful platforms in the industry."

Machinima now reaches the immense gamer community through cross-platform distribution through YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and other networks.

As Warner Bros. integrated Machinima, it was careful to analyze the “cautionary tale” of how Disney integrated Maker Studios into its businesses — and then ultimately shut Maker Studios down, Arons said. Machinima will retain its identity and return benefits back to Warner Bros., Arons said.

Above: Machinima’s rebranded look

Image Credit: Machinima

Machinima has also integrated Warner Bros. content with its millennial gaming audience, launching influencer-driven content with Warner Bros. movies and games. At E3 2017, Machinima reached 8 million fans through 15 hours of content.

“We are programming our content at all major gaming events,” Arons said. “And you’ll see Machinima supporting every Warner Bros. division.”

Machinima launched its first original series for Facebook Watch, the reality gamer dating series Co-op Connection. The company will be launching its next two Facebook series, Gaming Rap Battles and Win, Mine or Die, this spring.

With shows like Chasing the Cup and Transformers: Titans Return, Machinima has also become a  programming launch partner for go90 (Verizon), Amazon Prime Direct, Xumo, VRV, Comcast Watchable, and Playstation Vue.

It delivers content through overseas partners including AMC Networks Iberia in Spain, Portugal, and Mexico; Studio+ in multiple international markets; and Sohu, which provides Machinima with a  presence in the enormous Chinese market.

Above: Machinima’s Facebook page

Image Credit: Machinima

Machinima has a social presence with its fans daily across social platforms Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Twitch, and Snapchat.

Arons said Machinima is expanding its brand by creating new live event-based programming that enable influencers to engage with fans and games they love.

This new slate of programming includes Machinima: Game On, which features exclusive gamer fan programs and tournaments at events like PAX South, PAX East, E3, PAX West, and TwitchCon — which will be streamed globally.

Another show is Body Count Fighting, which brings the best players to battle in fighting games Injustice 2, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, and Tekken. These live esports tournaments, which occur at Machinima's studio and at select esports/gamer tournaments, occur about every six to eight weeks. Arons said it sees fighting-game fans as an under-served audience.

In VR Power Hour, Machinima enables influencers and fans to get hands-on with the latest technology in virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality.

Apple confirms HomePod leaves white rings on wood surfaces (Updated)

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 08:22 AM PST


If tepid reviews for Apple’s new HomePod smart speaker weren’t bad enough, the company has a new issue to deal with: furniture damage. Two publications have found that the HomePod can leave persistent white rings on some wooden furniture, a problem apparently traceable to interactions between the speaker’s silicone base and treated wood. An Apple spokesperson has confirmed the issue and suggsted a partial remedy.

According to Pocket-Lint, twenty minutes of HomePod use on a “solid oak kitchen worktop treated with Danish oil” was enough to cause a white ring-shaped discoloration that has faded somewhat over time but not disappeared. The New York TimesWirecutter similarly reported a “defined white ring in the surface” of an oiled butcher-block countertop and a wooden side table, pointing to a Twitter post suggesting similar problems.

Apple confirmed the issue to Wirecutter, saying that "the marks can improve over several days after the speaker is removed from the wood surface." If they don’t disappear, Apple suggests to "try cleaning the surface with the manufacturer's suggested oiling method." It’s unclear at this point whether the issue is limited to oiled wood surfaces, and whether the interaction between the speaker and surface will also lead to damage in the HomePod’s rubber base.

Pocket-Lint mentioned that wax finishes might also be affected: "When questioned, Apple told us it was 'not unusual' for a speaker with a silicone base to leave a 'mild mark' when placed on certain oil or wax based wood finished surfaces, suggesting the marks are caused by oils diffusing between the silicone base and the table surface."

The marking issue manifested within days of HomePod's release, despite a reported six years of development time and special testing in everything from Apple employee homes to soundproofed chambers. HomePod notably includes an upward-firing woofer that may be rubbing the center of the base into greater contact with the surface below with each pulse of low-frequency music. The white ring interestingly appears on wood even when the HomePod is space gray with a gray rubber base, rather than white.

Updated at 12:42 PM Pacific: Apple has released a support document for the HomePod called Cleaning and taking care of HomePod, including the following details:

It is not unusual for any speaker with a vibration-dampening silicone base to leave mild marks when placed on some wooden surfaces. The marks can be caused by oils diffusing between the silicone base and the table surface, and will often go away after several days when the speaker is removed from the wooden surface. If not, wiping the surface gently with a soft damp or dry cloth may remove the marks. If marks persist, clean the surface with the furniture manufacturer’s recommended cleaning process. If you're concerned about this, we recommend placing your HomePod on a different surface.

The document also provides tips such as keeping HomePod away from abrasives, solvents, flames, and liquids — all of which would be closer to “common sense” than avoiding wooden surfaces.

Supercell 2017 results: $810 million in profit, $2 billion in revenue — without a new game

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 08:15 AM PST


Supercell announced that it earned a profit of $810 million on revenues of $2.029 billion in 2017. That’s an enviable financial accomplishment for a company that didn’t release a game globally in 2017 — and has only released four games in its seven-year life.

Helsinki-based Supercell said the numbers were lower than in 2016, when the company had $1 billion in earnings before income taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) and $2.3 billion in revenues. The numbers help shed light on the larger $48.3 billion mobile games market (based on Sensor Tower market data).

"2017 was another good year in our journey. Our first two games, Clash of Clans and Hay Day, both celebrated their fifth anniversaries, and it's an amazing milestone in an industry as fast-moving as mobile games that millions of people still play them every day,” said CEO Ilkka Paananen in a statement. “Clash Royale held one of the biggest esports tournaments ever with 27.4 million players participating, and we released Brawl Stars, the first game of its kind on mobile, into beta.”

Above: Brawl Stars from Supercell.

Image Credit: Supercell

Paananen added, “Our headline numbers for the year are not as high as last year, as we did not release a new game globally. Our vision is to create games for as many people as possible that are played for years and remembered forever. That is obviously an insanely high bar to reach, and I'm proud that our teams don't compromise on that and only release games that are the very best for our players. This is how we continue to build Supercell for the long term.”

Supercell paid a dividend of $615 million (€523 million). Its owner, Tencent, will be happy about that. The Chinese social networking and gaming giant led a consortium in 2016 to acquire the bulk of Supercell at a $10.2 billion valuation. In 2016, Supercell paid a dividend of $1 billion.

Above: Ilkka Paananen, co-founder and CEO of Supercell

Image Credit: Supercell

Supercell’s newest game, Brawl Stars, is in beta testing in Canada. Supercell remains small at 241 employees, but it has begun making external investments in game companies, including Space Ape Games (London), Frogmind (Helsinki), and Shipyard Games (Helsinki). In 2018, it also invested $4.2 million in Trailmix.

The company noted that each of its four games has spent a significant amount of time in the U.S. top 10 highest-grossing game chart. Hay Day has been in the top ten for 884 days, Clash of Clans for 1,960 days, Boom Beach for 616 days, and Clash Royale for 701 days.

Paananen founded the company in 2010 with about $6 million from Tekes, the Finnish government's funding agency. Supercell paid $140 million in taxes to Finland in 2017. That's a good payoff for Finland.

Icons: Combat Arena aims to usher in a new era of platform fighters

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 07:50 AM PST


 Presented by Intel 


For Wavedash CEO Matt Fairchild and creative director Jason Rice, building a new platform fighter makes more than just business sense: it's their way of giving back to the games and communities that brought them together.

"I literally owe my entire life — my career, my friends — to this genre. … I owe so much, and I have seen the transformative power that this genre has and its ability to draw in people from across the board and get them into a competitive community and build relationships there," said Fairchild.

"I have friends all over the world who — growing up as this east-coast, middle-class, white Protestant boy — I would not have made friends with if I had stayed in my little bubble, if gaming hadn’t pulled me out of that and made me more open to new stuff. … But the platform fighting community is where my home was, where my people were at," Rice added.

The two friends first met more than a decade ago when Rice, who was working at Major League Gaming at the time, hired Fairchild to host Super Smash Bros. tournaments in Texas. Those early experiences were invaluable to them, and now they're leveraging that expertise for Icons: Combat Arena.

Icons's gameplay is similar to Super Smash Bros. Players can choose from a number of different characters to fight with, and the goal is to deplete your opponents' lives by knocking them off the stage. One big difference from Nintendo's juggernaut series, however, is that Icons will be free-to-play when it comes out on PC (it's currently in an invite-only closed beta), which will enable it to grow and evolve alongside its players.

It's the kind of game Wavedash's founders wish existed 10 years ago. But it wasn't until a series of industry-wide changes — including the rise of esports, online streaming, and Amazon's $970 million acquisition of Twitch — that Fairchild and Rice finally decided to make their dream a reality.

They recruited other like-minded developers. The team is a mix of triple-A veterans (some coming from big studios like Riot Games and Blizzard) and talented amateurs from the Super Smash Bros. modding community.

"So when we looked at all of these things converging together, we saw an opportunity to take the things that Riot did with League of Legends, the things that Blizzard did with Hearthstone, and more recently, the things that Bluehole has done with PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds — to take a genre that's supported by passionate players and make it accessible and exciting to watch, and then take it to new audiences," said Rice.

The developers believe that fighting games haven't had its "League of Legends moment" yet, where a game breaks through the noise to reach mainstream-levels of awareness and success. And they hope Icons can fill that gap. But Wavedash faces several challenges, not the least of which is how do you create a new platform fighter that's accessible for casual players, yet
deep enough for hardcore fans?

Getting out of Smash's shadow

One way that the Oakland, California-based studio is wrestling with that question is through Icons's design philosophy. It involves three main goals: make the game easy to learn, hard to master, and an endlessly watchable experience. With the first part, Wavedash is staying true to the pick-up-and-play nature that made platform fighters so popular in the first place. You don't need to master complicated move sets to start having fun in Icons.

But if you do want to dive deeper, the company is planning on adding a series of tutorials that'll help beginners get comfortable with the more nuanced strategies in the game.

Seasoned platform fighting players will also feel at home in Icons's world. It has familiar character archetypes or roles, like Kidd the Space Goat (the swift "space animal" archetype) and the empress Zhurong (the beefy "sword fighter" archetype). Wavedash cited Super Smash Bros. Melee as an inspiration for the kind of gameplay depth it wants Icons to have: players are still trying to master the GameCube fighter more than 16 years after its release.

The last goal is perhaps the most difficult one to engineer. The developer won't really know how Icons fares as a spectator sport until it's out in the wild. However, the team has seen some positive signs, like the time Fairchild took his fiancée, who hadn't played a platform fighter before, to an Icons tournament.

Toward the end of the competition, she grew more excited about the matches, and she even started to pick out players to root for based on their play style.

"Building a game that is inherently watchable makes it not only more fun to play, but it also means that it’s super digestible as content for a platform like Twitch or YouTube. And it makes it something that is 'esports ready,'" said Rice. "Now, we don’t get to decide if our game is an esport or not in the end. The players will. You can host the tournaments, but they have to show up and support you."

While similarities do exist between Icons and other platform fighters, the team hopes that a mix of new and familiar features will give the game its own identity. One example of bringing something new to the genre is the elemental duo Afi and Galu. They represent what Rice called a duo archetype, where players can switch between them at any time (the inactive partner stays on the stage as a statue).

Both of them share the same basic moves. But they also have their own special attacks: Afi has fire powers and Galu can manipulate water. From private playtesting sessions, Wavedash found that players quickly grew fond of Afi and Galu, not only because of their strategic potential, but also because of their quirky personalities.

"I’m most proud of the work that Jason and the design team — Adam Oliver and Wes Ruttle — did on taking a familiar idea and making it new, and we’re seeing that in the feedback with people that have gotten to beta test Afi and Galu. They say, ‘This is what I wanted from a duo character. This is familiar and yet it’s also unlike any duo character I’ve ever played,'" said
Fairchild.

Enlisting the help of the community

Gathering community feedback so early in the development process has always been a part of the developers' plans. Those responses help them identify problems they should work on, as well as which aspects of the Icons' roster need improvement. Wavedash regularly travels to different gaming events and tournaments — like TwitchCon, EVO (the Evolution Championship Series), and CEO (Community Effort Orlando) — to collect even more data by asking players to fill out surveys (some of who compete in fighting games for a living).

"Ultimately, Wavedash is a small team that’s punching above its weight class. And we’ve only been able to do that because we’ve taken this kind of unorthodox approach to game development. But our players have helped us shape who these characters should be and what the game should feel like," said Rice.

Of course, the studio can't react to every individual piece of feedback; it still has a vision it wants to maintain. Rice and his colleagues have to carefully sift through comments (whether good or bad) to see if any of them actually helps reinforce the original design goals.

"Something Jason says a lot is we are in this business to create joy. Our job is to get people together playing games, having fun, and to always be that uniquely positive force in their lives. So as long as we’re going towards that and people are invested in the outcome, then we’re in good shape," said Fairchild.


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Tinyclues Welcomes Katy Bennett to Drive Growth in the UK and Ireland

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 07:25 AM PST


LONDON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–February 14, 2018–

Tinyclues, provider of a leading AI-first marketing campaign intelligence solution, today announced the appointment of Katy Bennett as sales director, UK and Ireland. Bennett’s primary role will be to lead and strengthen the regional sales team and to continue the company’s truly exciting record of global growth. Tinyclues doubled its annual revenue in 2017, as brands embraced the company’s AI-first marketing campaign solution to win new sources of revenue and improve customer experience.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180214005852/en/

Katy Bennett, Tinyclues (Photo: Business Wire)

Katy Bennett, Tinyclues (Photo: Business Wire)

Bennett is a seasoned sales leader of great passion. She brings to Tinyclues her 18 years’ experience working with organizations to understand their customers and implement automated, data-driven customer engagement solutions. She has deep knowledge of the UK marketing industry and of the challenges faced by marketers in often crowded consumer markets. She joins Tinyclues from Mapp Digital, where she led the UK sales team. Previous appointments also include sales and management roles with Teradata, Webtrends and eCircle.

“Every day, consumers are bombarded by brand communications,” said Bennett. “Campaign marketers are finding it ever harder to reach people and drive up campaign revenues, while simultaneously respecting and seeking to elevate customer experience.”

Commenting on her appointment, she continued: “The Tinyclues AI-first solution offers brands the campaign intelligence layer they need to identify future buyers for any campaign with incredible accuracy. Marketers can target offers that hook customer interest, while also orchestrating campaign sets to optimize results. There’s real energy and spirit at Tinyclues and I’m very excited to be joining the team!”

Bennett has worked with clients from the largest global enterprises to the most agile of start-ups, from a broad spectrum of sectors, most notably retail and financial services. She has a reputation for being dedicated to customer satisfaction and long term client relationships.

Brands are showing huge interest in AI-first marketing solutions to improve their revenues and customer experience ratings and we are delighted to have Katy join our amazing team here at Tinyclues to help us capitalize on this opportunity and continue our fantastic growth story,” said Matthieu Chouard, SVP sales, EMEA at Tinyclues. “Katy’s clear successes in driving revenue for digital marketing businesses, her experience at leading sales teams and her passion for digital marketing give me great confidence in her ability to help drive us forward in the UK and Ireland.

Bennett has a degree in English from the University of Sheffield. She is an excellent artist and gifted illustrator.

About Tinyclues
Tinyclues is the leading AI-first Marketing Campaign Intelligence solution enabling companies to generate additional revenue through intelligent campaign targeting and planning. Tinyclues’ solution uses Deep Artificial Intelligence to identify future buyers for any promoted item, even in the absence of recent intent. Companies like Brandalley, Cdiscount, Club Med, Corsair, Fnac, Lacoste, La Redoute, Manor, Rue du Commerce, Vente-privee, Sarenza, Vestiaire Collective, Voyages-sncf.com and more are using Tinyclues to optimize and orchestrate more than 600 million messages per month across channels such as email, mobile push notifications, direct mail, call centers or Facebook to generate quantified and sustainable additional revenue. Tinyclues has been listed as a Vendor to Watch in Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Analytics.

For more information, visit http://www.tinyclues.com
Twitter: @tinyclues

Tinyclues
Caroline Tailleferd, Tel: +33 6 11 64 87 37
E-mail: caroline.tailleferd@tinyclues.com

Snapchat gives creators new audience analytics, including views, engagement, and demographics

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 07:14 AM PST


Snapchat creators are being given audience analytics from today, including story views, engagement, and demographics.

The move represents part of Snap’s push to “separate the social from the media” within its flagship app, which includes an interface redesign that makes a clearer distinction between your Snapchat friends and professional content creators such as brands and celebrities.

Part of this shift involves giving verified Snapchatters and other creators who have “cultivated a large audience” access to new data points. For example, they will be able to see the total number of story views in the past year, month, or week, and they can also dig deeper and see how much time was spent viewing stories.

Additionally, Snapchat will now display daily reach and engagement figures, such as the number of unique viewers and the average time they spent watching. Notably, creators will now also be able to see a breakdown of their audience demographics by gender, age, geography, and interests.

Above: Snapchat data

Needless to say, this update has been a long time coming for Snapchat. It means creators will have greater insights into who is actually following them on Snapchat so they can tailor their content accordingly and, ultimately, make more money.

Snap is riding high following its Q4 2017 results last week. Indeed, the company announced that its daily active users grew from 178 million to 187 million in the last quarter, while its revenue jumped 72 percent to $285.7 million.

Advertising is key to Snap’s continued growth, and it needs to lure more creators onto the service, which will, in turn, make the platform stickier for users. Yesterday, Snap announced that its Marketing API is now available to all developers, meaning any third-party company can now leverage Snapchat's targeted advertising smarts.

Huawei and Telus test fixed 5G in homes, paving way for Canadian rollout

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 07:05 AM PST


Facing restrictions in the United States due to national security concerns, China’s leading smartphone maker Huawei announced today that Canadian carrier Telus is live-testing Huawei 5G equipment in Vancouver homes. The companies’ in-home testing is said to be the first of its kind in North America, bringing 5G from the “lab to the living room” and setting the stage for a future commercial launch of fixed 5G service in Canada.

According to Huawei, the tests are based on new wireless Customer Premise Equipment (CPE), giving users a “fiber-like experience with their home network.” The CPE relies on 28GHz mmWave frequency broadcasting, next-generation signaling technologies, and Massive MIMO antennas to deliver over 2Gbps speeds. Huawei expects that mmWave technology will enable cost-effective 5G coverage in neighborhoods and small communities, increasing accessibility for urban and suburban customers.

The race to quickly deploy “fixed 5G” — in-home or in-business wireless service as a replacement for wired broadband — is now a two-country competition in North America. Verizon has announced plans to bring fixed 5G service to several U.S. cities this year, beginning with proprietary, non-standards compliant 5G hardware. By comparison, Huawei says its CPE hardware complies with 3GPP’s global 5G standard, though its footprint is currently limited to Telus employees and is not on the same city-wide scale as Verizon’s 2018 rollout. Telus has previously said that it expects 5G to be commercially available in 2020, with Vancouver residents getting “early access” to some 5G technologies.

Huawei’s announcement comes as U.S. carriers and consumers are being actively warned by government agencies to avoid using Huawei cellular hardware based on security fears. Last month, members of Congress pushed carriers, including AT&T, to cut business ties with Huawei, and yesterday six U.S. intelligence agencies told citizens not to use Huawei or ZTE phones. Each of the Chinese manufacturers is said to have covert ties to China’s government, allegedly putting the security of data transmitted through their mobile devices and networking gear at risk. As 5G is expected to be used in everything from autonomous cars and traffic systems to manufacturing plants and city infrastructures, the security threats posed by foreign governments could quickly go from abstract to tangible and major.

Unity ratchets up its marketing to game developers — without a GDC booth

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 07:00 AM PST


Unity Technologies is spending more time and money delivering its message to game developers during the upcoming Game Developers Conference, but it will do so without a booth at GDC.

The GDC is expected to draw more than 26,000 attendees, and Unity says it continues to support the event as a platinum sponsor and seven talks on the agenda. But Unity — which powers more than 50 percent of all games with its game development engine — wants to make more noise and engage with developers in a more intimate way, said Clive Downie, chief marketing officer at Unity, in an interview with GamesBeat.

Downie said that games and experiences made with Unity reached more than 3 billion devices worldwide in 2017 and were installed more than 20 billion times in the last 12 months, but he said many people in game development aren’t aware of that.

“Making games isn’t getting easier, and that’s understandable, as it is a creative pursuit,” Downie said. “We’re building technology for anyone making games, from the hobbyist venturing out for the first time to Triple-A titles. We are evolving how we are reaching those people.”

It’s a scrappy marketing plan that will drive up Unity’s marketing budget in 2018, compared to 2017. But it also runs the risk of annoying those who want the GDC to be the center of attention.

Above: Unity’s plans for GDC

Image Credit: Unity

“We are not going to have a booth in the expo,” Downie said. “We will make it as easy as possible for as many developers attending to experience everything we are doing, depending on how they want to experience it. Some developers can’t afford the price of the GDC. We respect the GDC. We are a platinum sponsor. We are not moving away from supporting the show. We have talks at GDC. We want people to be able to engage with us outside of the noise of GDC.”

Unity will hold a week-long series of events with more than 100 sessions at various locations, including its own multistory headquarters, which is just a block and a half from the Moscone Center, where GDC will be held in San Francisco. Downie said Unity will open its headquarters to developers, including those who can’t afford a $2,000 all-access GDC pass. Visitors will have to register, but they do not need a GDC pass to attend the events at most of Unity’s venues.

The idea is to get the staff at the headquarters — including hundreds who work on the company’s flagship game engine — to network, share knowledge, and engage with game developers who are the primary users of the tools.

As for not having a booth, Downie said, “It’s not an economical decision. This plan is costing lots of money. Our principle is to have a greater connection with more people. They will leave GDC with more knowledge of what we are doing.”

Above: Unity’s headquarters will host hundreds of sessions during GDC.

Image Credit: Unity

Downie said the company will participate in GDC as a big sponsor, through both regular and sponsored talks. It will also have a lounge inside the GDC where attendees with badges can go to relax and watch streamed talks. But Unity will also have a presence outside the GDC to get its message across.

It will hold a keynote speech hosted by Unity CEO John Riccitiello at The Village venue on March 19 at 630 p.m. Unity will emphasize how its tools are being used by industry artists to create some of the best-quality games in the industry, Downie said.

At the company’s headquarters, Unity will hold lots of sessions — big and small — on various aspects of game development. Many of those sessions will be hosted by Unity’s 500-person engineering team. It will host a mixer for Women in Gaming. Sign-ups for sessions will start on March 1.

Unity will also operate a lounge at the Hotel Zetta, a short walk from the GDC, where developers with or without badges can unwind with colleagues and Unity employees.

Downie said that some of Unity’s top evangelists will also hit the streets and show demos to developers as they traverse the area around the GDC. And Unity will hold a party for around 2,000 people at The Village, with a special announcement pending. Unity is also going to stream everything it is doing so that those who are not going to the GDC can also enjoy it. It’s all about “democratizing game development,” Downie said.

As for Unity’s headquarters, Downie said, “We’ll trick the building out, where you can see demos and talk with small groups.”

OpenText acquires file-sharing service Hightail, formerly YouSendIt

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 06:42 AM PST


File-sharing startup Hightail has been acquired by enterprise information management (EIM) company OpenText. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Campbell, California-based Hightail was founded in 2004 as YouSendIt, which served as a platform for sending large file attachments that were too big to be sent by email. It amassed more than 40 million users at its peak, but with the cloud storage landscape evolving to include Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive, YouSendIt rebranded as Hightail in 2013 and refocused its efforts.

Hightail had raised around $92 million in funding, the last tranche coming via a $34 million cash injection back in November 2013. As of today, Hightail claims around 5.5. million customers globally.

Founded in 1991, OpenText is regarded as one of Canada’s biggest software companies, helping large organizations manage and make sense of all their content and unstructured data. The company acquired Dell EMC’s enterprise content division in a deal worth $1.6 billion last year.

In terms of what OpenText has in store for its new acquisition, it seems Hightail will be kept going as a standalone company, though OpenText said that it plans to integrate Hightail into a number of its products, including OpenText Content Suite, Documentum (formerly a Dell EMC product), and Core.

“The acquisition of Hightail underscores our commitment to delivering differentiated content solutions in the cloud that enable marketers and creative professionals to share, produce, and securely collaborate on digital content,” said OpenText CEO, CTO, and vice chair Mark J. Barrenechea. “We are pleased to welcome Hightail customers and employees to OpenText today.”

VR on Valentine’s Day: The technological evolution of love, connection, and intimacy

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 06:37 AM PST


Connection is difficult. With more distractions, demands on our time, and mediated communications like texting and social media, making time for intimacy and love can be challenging. Holidays such as Valentine's Day can serve to reinforce this realization, further isolating singles and those who choose alternative lifestyles. There are some who feel technology is an obstacle to intimacy and love, but other experts believe virtual reality can actually help foster connecting in new and exciting ways.

"Absolutely. Virtual reality can help bring us closer together and foster love and intimacy," said Dr. Holly Richmond, a Ph.D Sex Therapist and author of the soon to be published Next Sex: Mating, relating and masturbating in the new age of technology. Richmond sees VR and other emerging technologies as having immense potential to help break down the barriers to love and intimacy in the digital age.

According to Richmond there are several applications where VR can play a role in healthier relationships and closer connections. VR therapies are already being used successfully to treat disorders such as PTSD and common phobias, Richmond believes this treatment can extend to sexual health issues such as erectile dysfunction, low libido and performance anxiety. "VR therapy can help common disorders — pain disorders, low libido, and erectile dysfunction. By helping people understand arousal and taking the pathology out of ‘not doing it right,’ VR can provide positive solutions in a safe and comfortable environment." Richmond is currently exploring using immersive VR environments to help treat these common issues among her patients.

She also believes there would be huge value in using VR to help teach anatomy and human sexuality in schools. Using a 3D model to explore female and male anatomy would enable students to better understand their own bodies and the bodies of potential partners. Immersive VR educational videos would also act as great tool to help explore human sexuality in a safe and nurturing environment.

Why VR?

Beyond therapy and education, Richmond also believes VR has the power to help normalize sexual expression and empower users to better understand and meet their own needs. In her practice, she outlines three elements that are vital for healthy, intimate connections. These “Three E's” are Empathy, Empowerment, and Embodiment. VR's immersive elements, such as having a first-person point of view (POV), enable the user to experience and feel these elements instead of just talking about them.

Above: Dr. Holly Richmond is currently working on using VR to help treat her patients

Image Credit: Katarina Kojic

"VR is great place to learn and practice. It gives users an experiential component. Better than just watching, we can feel our way into things. It also gives us choice — choosing your POV, for example — gives us more control and can be very empowering. VR also allows for a mind and body connection. We can actually feel it — it’s an integrated experience. Used in education, learning outcomes are dramatically improved when someone can experience something instead of just watching."

The love-tech landscape

Above: Holly Richmond on the set of Badoink's “Virtual Sexology” series.

Individuals and couples can now use a few immersive tools to help enhance intimacy.  VR films, primarily focused in the adult entertainment sector, are beginning to take more of an educational approach. For example, Badoink's “Virtual Sexology” series, which Richmond co-authors, is positioned as a sex therapy program. It primarily consists of 360 degree videos shot from the first-person perspective. The viewer can choose man or woman’s POV, and the scene immerses them as a participant. The voice-over includes tactics like sensate focus and applied behavior applications such as positive reinforcement. While this type of immersion may be a step above traditional 2D video, it still doesn't enable the viewer to feel what's happening on film.

Enter Kiiroo, a growing tech company based in Amsterdam. It’s developing a solution to this problem.

Kiiroo is the leading producer of remote-controlled smart teledildonics for couples. Since 2013, this company has used technology to help couples feel more connected and intimate when they’re not together — especially when they are hundreds if miles apart. Through the use of the Kiiroo app and the devices, both male and female, couples can have an interactive experience, controlling each other's pleasure, despite being a continent away. Couples can see each other in real-time via a 2D webcam or other similar device (like a smartphone), but according to Kiiroo’s Maurice Op de Beek, couples can now use a 360 degree camera and enjoy the VR version. "VR is so real and immersive, but historically, you couldn't feel it. You needed touch. We have created the illusion of touch and are solving this problem."

Above: Kiroo’s Fleshlight Launch and Onyx 2

Op de Beek is extremely optimistic about the potential of creating more and more realistic experiences with the help of VR. When asked if we would see hyper-real sexual experiences in our lifetime, his immediate response was "Definitely! We already have this with our Launch device. It’s very real and the developments are going so fast we are about 10-20 year out from hyper-real simulated sexual experiences." Kiiroo's most immersive product, the Fleshlight Launch, enables male stimulation synchronized with a VR film experience. The device exactly mimics the actions onscreen, reeling the viewer into the action and providing for a new level of embodiment. The market has about 1,500 VR-enabled films that are synced to devices, with more in production.

Above: Kiiroo Chief Technology Officer Maurice Op de Beek, believes we will experience hyper-real immersive encounters in our lifetime.

Kiiroo is also enabling devices for women to sync with VR films, partnering with WeVibe and OhMiBod. Op de Beek has approached many of the leading device manufacturers and proposed adding Kiiroo's smart technology to their products. Eventually there will be hundreds of thousands of these smart devices all over the globe, allowing for couples and singles to remotely connect like never before.

Richmond feels leveraging the immersion of VR can be a valuable tool for these devices: "The newest VR-enabled, remote control devices are some of the best that I’ve seen. They force couples to communicate, taking some of the guess work out of meeting each other's needs. It has facilitated conversations about what people like and what they don’t like. Sex tech can help women be empowered and connect with their own bodies and then share this with a partner."

On addiction

Given the reality of achieving hyper-real sexual experiences in our lifetime, some fear that these experiences will be addicting and act as a replacement for real, human interactions. Headlines such as this one from a recent ABC post, "Virtual reality addiction threat prompts cautious approach as VR nears ‘smartphone-like’ take-off,” work to propagate these concerns. Richmond doesn't believe VR will increase addiction and argues that technology is only working to enhance human connection, not replace it.

"The idea of addiction — I just don’t buy it. There’s no such thing as sex or Internet addiction. There will always be people who abuse technology. The VR component won’t make it that much more addictive. From print magazines like Playboy, to online adult entertainment, and now VR and teledildonics — the technology will keep progressing. We, as human beings, need to learn how to keep up with it."

The future is bright

Both Op de Beek and Richmond are extremely optimistic about what the future holds for VR and making a love connection. As technology improves, so will the ways we leverage this technology to learn more about ourselves and our partners. VR is creating new communication channels, new ways to feel and empathize with one another and ultimately allow for a full range of intimate self-expression. Richmond sums it up: "My mission in life is to stop the pathologization of any kind of sexual expression that isn’t within the 'normal' box. And thankfully, that box is opening — we’ve got pansexual, demi-sexual, bisexual, and now digisexual.

“We’ve still got this inherent desire, especially in the US, to pathologize difference. Immersive technology, like VR, can enable us to embrace, even celebrate, these differences, and allow us to safely explore and experience ourselves in new ways. This is what I see as the biggest potential for VR."

Lisa Peyton is an immersive media strategist and media psychologist focusing on the business applications of new technologies.

FMO Commits to Invest US$25 Million in JCM Power

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 06:25 AM PST


TORONTO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–February 14, 2018–

JCM Power Corporation (JCM Power) announced today that FMO – the Dutch development bank – has committed to invest up to US$25 million in JCM Power.

JCM Power is a Canadian-based renewable energy independent power producer developing and operating renewable energy projects in Africa, Latin America and South Asia. JCM Power aims to establish long-term partnerships with local communities, governments and financial institutions to build and operate clean energy projects in markets where economies are growing rapidly and electricity is currently scarce, but sun and wind are abundant.

“We are thrilled to build on our successful relationship with FMO, who has been a supportive partner in several JCM Power projects to date. Our shared values and passion for bringing renewable energy to growth markets were the driving factors that made this investment possible,” said Christian Wray, CEO of JCM Power.

“This milestone investment in an entrepreneurial and ambitious renewable energy platform that aims to build high impact projects in emerging markets globally makes us proud. The first investment in Pakistan demonstrates an excellent start of the high impact potential of the platform”, said Linda Broekhuizen, CIO of FMO.

The investment agreements, which were signed in December 2017, allow JCM Power to draw down on FMO’s commitment as needed to fund construction equity and the acquisition of additional project interests, with a portion available for development and corporate costs. FMO receives convertible preferred shares of JCM Power for the amounts invested.

About JCM Power
JCM Power is an independent power producer (IPP) dedicated to accelerating social, economic and environmental sustainability in growth markets through the development, construction and operation of renewable energy infrastructure. Our driving vision is to advance the clean energy age.

www.jcmpower.ca

About FMO
FMO is the Dutch development bank. As a leading impact investor, FMO supports sustainable private sector growth in developing countries and emerging markets by investing in ambitious projects and entrepreneurs. FMO believes that a strong private sector leads to economic and social development, and has a more than 45-year proven track record of empowering people to employ their skills and improve their quality of life. FMO focuses on three sectors that have high development impact: financial institutions, energy, and agribusiness, food & water. With a committed portfolio of EUR 9.8 billion spanning over 92 countries, FMO is one of the larger bilateral private sector developments banks globally. For more information: please visit www.fmo.nl

FMO
Press contact:
Paul Hartogsveld, +31 70 314 9928
Senior Corporate Communications
M: +31 6 11589127
p.hartogsveld@fmo.nl
or
JCM Power Corporation
Media Contact:
Iva Lucic
ilucic@jcmpower.ca

Singular: Snapchat and Twitter show better returns for mobile marketers

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 06:02 AM PST


Singular has created its second annual index of the best return-on-investment (ROI) for mobile ads, and it has a few surprises. Snapchat showed up in a big way on the index, as marketers increased their mobile ad spending on the social network and got solid results. Twitter also showed growth on both iOS and Android among non-gaming marketers.

This year, San Francisco-based Singular’s ROI Index sliced the data more finely, offering ROI results for gaming or non-gaming ads, as well as regional performance. The study ranks the top-performing mobile media sources on iOS and Android by 30-day ROI, or how much profit is generated by through advertising spending.

Singular chief operating officer Susan Kuo said in an interview with VentureBeat that previous attempts to measure ROI have measured ad network performance using metrics like retention and revenue per install. But they have neglected to take into account the actual cost associated with driving such engagement. Drawing on both conversion and cost data, the Singular ROI Index uses data from both sides of the industry — ad networks and attribution providers — to rank networks based on the most important metric for mobile marketing teams: ROI.

Singular analyzed data from 1,700 apps with $1 billion in revenue and 315 million installs spread across 1,200 mobile media sources. The ranking considers quality​ (based on ROI or revenue divided by cost), scale  (total ad spend), and fraud (the penalty based on the percentage of fraudulent installs driven by a media source).

“Snapchat didn’t surface in 2016, but in 2017, it saw impressive results with non-gaming marketers,” Kuo said. “And across the board, Twitter jumped from eighteenth to seventh.”

Above: Singular’s rankings of the best ROI for mobile ads.

Image Credit: Singular

Singular is positioned to evaluate ROI as a mobile attribution and campaign analytics platform. Its customers include top marketers at Lyft, Yelp, Rovio, Postmates, Airbnb, and Blizzard.

Among the index’s findings: iOS held its lead in the gaming category, but Android made significant headway in closing the gap. Additionally, iOS drove 1.2 times higher ROI in the game category, while Android showed 8 percent annual growth in ROI.

Singular also found that after not showing up in the rankings in 2016, Snapchat moved to No. 6 for the highest ROI for the non-gaming category and fifteenth-highest ROI across all media.

Above: The top media platforms across gaming and non-gaming ads.

Image Credit: Singular

Twitter delivered the second-highest ROI across both Android and iOS in the non-gaming category. Apple Search Ads moved into the top five, as Apple captured a larger share of digital marketing budgets, rising from No. 23 (2016) to No. 6 (2017) in the list of highest-volume media sources.

Meanwhile, Google’s AdWords reclaimed the top spot on Android from Facebook in 2017. Facebook, however, edged out AdWords in Europe and the Middle East. AdWords held the top spot in the Americas and Asia-Pacific.

Kuo also said that video media sources — Vungle, Unity Ads, and AdColony — climbed into the top five on Android and iOS. As for fraud, Kuo said, “We can see the fraudulent data and apply that as a penalty in the results.”

RealWear raises $17 million for wearable AR device for industrial workers

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 06:01 AM PST


RealWear has raised $17 million for its AR wearable device aimed at workers in construction and other heavy industries.

Vancouver-based RealWear is already shipping its hands-free HMT-1, which is mounted via a band that goes around your head or safety helmet. It’s a wearable device, but RealWear CEO Andy Lowery calls it a “head-mounted tablet,” since it lets you view the equivalent of a seven-inch Android tablet while you’re working.

The funding will help the company ship more of the devices to customers around the world whose workers toil in extreme environments. Columbia Ventures led the round, with participation from Realmax.

"We have targeted this for industrial use," said Lowery, in an interview with VentureBeat. "We have architected a wearable computer that fits into different protective equipment, like snapping into a hard helmet. It’s similar to [the now-discontinued Google] Glass, but designed for outdoor usage."

You can arrange the HMT-1 so that you can view it with your dominant eye. You adjust the viewing pod so that it is just below your line of sight, which allows you to see everything in front of you with both eyes. In contrast to glasses, you only look at the display with one eye, and you can control the device with voice commands.

Above: RealWear’s AR wearable device. Helmet not included.

Image Credit: Realwear

The company is targeting workers in oil and gas, energy, telecommunications, utilities, manufacturing, and transportation. Workers in these sectors are often at construction sites or refineries where traditional computing devices or even smartphones are not usable. The wearable serves as a “third hand” for someone who has to go through a complicated repair process, Lowery said.

The HMT-1 offers remote mentor video calling, document navigation, guided workflow, mobile forms, and industrial internet of things data visualization, and it currently operates in 10 languages. It allows workers to operate other tools needed for the job, even if climbing a scaffold or tower, in noisy, dusty, or even dangerous environments. Allowing the worker to maintain full situational awareness, HMT-1 is faster, safer, and smarter than either a tablet or smart glasses, Lowery said.

“You can use voice commands to dial your mentor and show them what you are looking at,” he explained.

Lowery was the former president of Daqri, another maker of AR glasses, where he worked from 2014 to 2016. But he left that company and started RealWear in August 2016.

"After seeing the HMT-1 device at work in industrial facilities, it was clear that it is the only device which delivers on the AR and wearable promise for industry today," said Columbia Ventures CEO Ken Peterson, in a statement. "RealWear's vision is compelling to us, with the potential to transform how work gets done in industry, empowering industrial knowledge workers with real-time information, without encumbering their hands. RealWear has proven that it has the experience and ambition to make AR and wearable solutions function in actual industrial use cases, and an unlimited number of other uses to explore."

RealWear began shipping a beta version of the device in early 2017, just eight months after its founding, and then it moved to mass production six months after that. So far, it has shipped thousands of units to more than 200 customers, and it is now making about 1,000 devices a week.

The device can be clipped to any kind of headgear or wrapped around your head. It has a 12-hour battery, with stronger processing power and memory than many other devices that you would wear as glasses or head-mounted displays.

Besides Lowery, who worked for many years at Raytheon, the company’s leaders include Sanjay Jhawar, chief product officer; Chris Parkinson, chief technology officer; Brian Hamilton, chief revenue officer; and Stephen Pombo, vice president of industrial design and human factors.

Above: RealWear is like having a 7-inch Android tablet in front of your eye.

Image Credit: Realwear

The company has raised $17 million to date and will likely add $3 million more in the next few months. It has 70 employees.

While the product may remind some of the much-maligned Google Glass, it isn’t supposed to look beautiful. If you want that, you’ll probably favor AR glasses, such the kind Lowery’s former company, Daqri, is building. But RealWear is focused on safety, which is why it designed the device as a head-mounted wearable.

“It doesn’t need to look pretty because it goes on an ugly helmet,” Lowery said.

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Pinterest now lets you archive your boards and rearrange pins

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 06:00 AM PST


Pinterest has announced a slew of new tools designed to help users organize their pins and boards.

First up, a new archiving option lets you file a board away for posterity. This feature serves a number of purposes — for example, you may wish to revisit an old board you’ve created if it pertains to a meaningful life event, such as a birth or a wedding, but you don’t want it cluttering up your main dashboard.

At the same time, you might get tired of Pinterest recommending items related to the board, such as flowers or dresses. So archiving a board effectively kills two birds with one stone: You can now focus on relevant boards without being inundated with irrelevant alerts and notifications.

Above: Archiving a board

You may also remember that Pinterest launched a new “sections” feature back in November that allows you to divide a board into, well, sections based on distinct themes. Now Pinterest will let users switch those sections around. Additionally, Pinterest is expanding this functionality to Pins, which you can now move around the board.

Pinterest said that this last feature was among its most-requested and was one that presented its engineers with some notable technical challenges.

Above: Rearranging Pins

Finally, Pinterest has revealed that you will now be able to sort boards by more criteria, including alphabetically or by creation date or most recently saved to.

Above: Board sorting

Pinterest announced it had 200 million users back in September, having maintained a growth rate of roughly 50 million new users per year. As with other tech companies, Pinterest has been doubling down on its artificial intelligence efforts, including adding computer vision search tools, Facebook Messenger bots, and deep learning to recommend related Pins. These latest updates feed into Pinterest’s broader AI push, given that it uses the content of boards as one of its main sources for making recommendations.

By affording users new ways to tailor and customize their boards, Pinterest should be able to garner more juicy data to feed back into its machine learning algorithms.

The features are rolling out from tomorrow on Android, iOS, and Pinterest’s web interface.

Norwest Venture Partners closes new $1.5 billion fund, adds managing partner

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 04:30 AM PST


Norwest Venture Partners announced today that it has closed a new $1.5 billion fund, called NVP XIV. This is the firm's largest fund to date, bringing its total capital commitments to more than $7.5 billion, according to a statement. NVP XIV follows NVP XIII, a $1.2 billion fund that closed in January 2016.

The Bay Area-based firm initially began investing in enterprise startups within the U.S. but has expanded over the years across sector, geography, and stage. Today, the firm also invests in consumer and health care and has offices in Israel and India to source deals locally. Stage-wise, the partners added a growth equity team nine years ago to make minority and controlling investments in rapidly growing businesses.

Jon Kossow, who spearheads the growth equity team, has been promoted to managing partner, the firm announced today. He joins managing partners Jeff Crowe and Promod Haque.

When we last covered Norwest, the third managing partner was Matthew Howard. We asked Norwest about this transition, and the firm provided the following statement:

Matthew Howard continues to lead the enterprise practice as a general partner and is a valued member of the team, having served in the role of managing partner for many years. The new managing partner structure is a reflection of the diversification strategy we embarked on 10 years ago. Promoting Jon Kossow to managing partner was a natural evolution within that strategy, as we wanted growth equity to be represented on the management team.

Norwest also announced the promotion of Lisa Wu to partner on the venture capital team. She joined the firm in 2012 and focuses on consumer internet, digital commerce, and marketplaces. Wu sourced Jet.com, which was acquired by Walmart.com, and is also an investor in Ritual, a women's health brand. She is Norwest's second female partner (Sonya Brown is a general partner on the growth equity team).

Above: Managing partner Jon Kossow and partner Lisa Wu

Image Credit: Norwest Venture Partners

On whether Norwest will be looking to invest in cryptocurrencies and blockchain with its new fund, managing partner Jeff Crowe told VentureBeat:

“We are not investors in cryptocurrencies and initial coin offering (ICOs). We view those as far too speculative. However, we certainly think that blockchain could solve many problems across many different technologies.”

Founded in 1961, Norwest counts Lending Club, Opendoor, Prosperworks, Spotify, and Uber among its portfolio companies.

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Qualcomm shows Snapdragon X24 2Gbps LTE modem, 5G-enabled cars, and industrial IoT technologies

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 04:30 AM PST


Following Qualcomm’s announcement that 37 manufacturing and carrier partners are working to bring 5G wireless devices to market in 2019, the San Diego-based company today announced Snapdragon X24, the world’s first 2Gb per second 4G/LTE modem, and a series of successful tests demonstrating 5G’s power in automotive, industrial, and office environments. Confidential until today, the X24 and 5G demonstrations were shown to VentureBeat last week and are planned for public display at the upcoming Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Above: A prototype device containing Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X24 modem is shown on Feb. 7, 2018.

Image Credit: Jeremy Horwitz/VentureBeat

Qualcomm touts the Snapdragon X24 as a bridge between 4G and 5G standards, enabling higher transfer speeds than any prior LTE modem — a way for carriers to offer gigabit-plus speeds over existing LTE networks as a backup during 5G network deployment. X24 is the world’s first-announced Category 20 modem, as well as the first-announced chip built on a 7-nanometer process, supporting up to 2Gb per second “fiber-like” download speeds. That’s twice as fast as Qualcomm’s original Gigabit LTE modem, leveraging 7 times carrier aggregation and 4×4 MIMO on up to five LTE carriers for a total of 20 concurrent spatial LTE streams. These features enable the X24 to use all licensed and unlicensed spectrum a mobile operator has available. It will be demonstrated live with Ericsson, Telstra, and Netgear at the Mobile World Congress.

Car enthusiasts will be interested in the 5G Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) test, which demonstrates how upcoming 5G-connected autonomous cars will communicate with each other and traffic control centers. Featuring a car and an ambulance, the demonstration showed how a car discovering an accident scene could share video and location data with an ambulance, then automatically pull aside as the ambulance arrived. At the same time, the ambulance calculated and followed the best route to the accident, requested an emergency green light from the traffic signal, and sent warnings to other cars as it approached the scene.

A separate demonstration highlighted how 5G will enable cars to avoid accidents at busy intersections. Qualcomm noted that traditional vehicles cannot communicate with each other, which forces drivers to make difficult judgment calls when crossing multiple lanes to make left turns. In the near future, an autonomous 5G-connected car will know the directions, rates of speed, and next-move “intent” of all of the nearby cars so it can automatically find a safe path through traffic.

5G is also expected to have a major impact in industrial settings, thanks to the wireless technology’s speed when coordinating internet of things (IoT) devices. In a synchronization test, Qualcomm demonstrated how low latency 5G wireless enabled millisecond-accurate control of multiple high-precision machines at once, which will soon allow factories to replace cabled ethernet systems with private 5G wireless networks. While the 5G implication might not be immediately obvious, low latency wireless links will let factories dynamically reconfigure their machines so they can move anywhere they’re needed at a given moment, rather than being tethered to wires.

Another Qualcomm test showed off new 5G spectrum sharing technologies, using Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) and Spatial Domain Multiplexing (SDM) broadcasting to dramatically increase network performance. For this test, a Qualcomm warehouse was set up as a large workspace with four base stations that would normally generate interference and compete for broadcasting time. Using CoMP, all four base stations were able to work together, rather than competing, thus reducing interference and doubling their bandwidth. SDM allows multiple 5G signals to be broadcast on different frequencies at once using highly directional antennas. Between the two 5G technologies, the workspace’s bandwidth tripled from 670Mb to 2Gb per second.

Today, the company also announced Qualcomm Wireless Edge Services (QWES) and a new cellular IoT SDK, collectively designed to lay the groundwork for increased use of IoT devices ahead of 5G’s rollout, particularly in industrial settings. Forecasts suggest that billions of IoT devices will be joining cellular networks over the next decade, using very little bandwidth to maintain as-needed internet access for everything from sensors to wearables. A Qualcomm demo showed that 3 million IoT devices could join a 1-square-mile network without having any noticeable impact on the 55,680 devices using LTE there.

Together, QWES and the IoT SDK are meant to give manufacturers greater confidence and flexibility in deploying third-party hardware that contains Qualcomm chips, knowing that the chips will continue to be supported — and, through firmware unlocks, upgradeable with additional features — over the potential 15-year lifespan of the industrial hardware. QWES will roll out in the second half of 2018, and the SDK is expected in the first half of this year.

Qualcomm’s latest 4G and 5G announcements come only two days after Verizon trumpeted completion of the first voice call over 5G using Qualcomm and Nokia hardware. This followed Verizon’s completion of the first announced video call over 5G using Samsung hardware at the Super Bowl. These initiatives demonstrate the rapid pace at which 5G milestones are being completed as companies race to bring the new wireless technology to consumers and businesses across the world.

Qualcomm paid for travel to report on its 5G initiatives. Our coverage remains objective.

Steve Case’s Rise of the Rest fund makes first investments, adds investors Reid Hoffman, Megan Smith

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 04:30 AM PST


Steve Case-led venture capital firm Revolution continues to advance its Rise of the Rest seed fund, announcing nine of the fund’s first investments and adding more big names as investors, including prominent entrepreneurs Michael Bloomberg and Reid Hoffman.

The moves come just two months after Case announced the $150 million seed fund, which aims to invest in startups outside of Silicon Valley, New York, and Boston. The fund’s limited partners already include an array of notable Silicon Valley investors and other tech executives.

The first batch of investments sheds more light on just how Case and his team plan to contribute as what they call “catalytic capital.”

The nine startups are:

  • AppHarvest (Pikeville, Kentucky)
  • Catalyte (Baltimore, Maryland)
  • Cotopaxi (Salt Lake City, Utah) 
  • EngageTalent (Charleston, South Carolina)
  • Losant (Cincinnati, Ohio)
  • SafeChain Inc. (Columbus, Ohio)
  • ZenBusiness (Austin, Texas)
  • Zylo (Indianapolis, Indiana)
  • Seeva (Seattle, Washington)

Revolution announced Tuesday that Megan Smith, a former CTO of the United States, would also join Bloomberg, founder of the giant media company, and LinkedIn founder Hoffman as new investors of the seed fund. Together with the existing investors, which include names like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the new investors make Rise of the Rest one of the highest-profile investment funds in the country.

The nine startups represent a wide variety of sectors, from A.I. to SaaS to blockchain. Additionally, as Case stated when the fund was first announced, Rise of the Rest is not serving as the lead investor on any of the rounds — rather, Case says the fund’s main purpose is to connect startups with investors in other parts of the country, and vice versa.


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“Some of the benefits in places like Silicon Valley is the network density that doesn’t exist to the same degree in other parts of the country,” Case told VentureBeat in a phone interview.

A number of the startups in this batch are ones that Case and his team met during four years’ worth of Rise of the Rest tours across the country. Joe Hanna, founder and CEO of AI-powered recruiting platform EngageTalent, first met Case and his team when they visited Charleston in 2015.

Hanna told VentureBeat that Rise of the Rest also connected him with two of the other venture capital funds participating in EngageTalent’s $3 million funding round: Refinery Ventures in Ohio, and Grand Ventures in Michigan. IoT enterprise startup Losant, meanwhile, got connected to Rise of the Rest through managing partner J.D. Vance, who works out of Columbus, Ohio.

However, the idea is that Rise of the Rest won’t always make all of the connections directly, and regional venture capitalists will also connect the fund to potential investments. Diane Lansinger, cofounder of mobility startup Seeva, told VentureBeat that another one of the company’s investors connected them to Revolution.

“I’m a former recruiter, so I’m always thinking about the team that I’m pulling together,” Lansinger told VentureBeat. “I got up to the Revolution VC website and was looking more into the Rise of the Rest fund and the size of it … and I thought ‘Well, this is an amazing group of brains to have behind us and have their networks behind us’.”

The remaining question is whether Case and his team have built a strong enough network — for all of its name recognition — to result in good returns, and in the wide variety of sectors that Rise of the Rest is targeting. Since Rise of the Rest won’t be leading the rounds or taking a board seat on the company, in a sense the firm is betting not just on startups, but also on collecting the right set of regional venture capitalists.

“The whole approach — including having a bench of big investors in the wings to potentially sustain further growth — has the benefit of placing a dedicated and knowledgeable team in the middle of the information flow and dealmaking in these regions,” Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told VentureBeat in an email.

In order to deepen that big bench of investors, more Silicon Valley firms will have to “get off the sidelines,” as Case put it. Case told VentureBeat that more Silicon Valley investors have expressed interest in backing companies in Rise of the Rest’s target cities since the $150 million seed fund was announced, but there’s still more work to be done. Hanna, for example, told VentureBeat that EngageTalent had some advanced discussions with Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York firms who passed on investing in the company because they were still skeptical about investing in a startup based in Charleston.

Bessemer Ventures is one of the most notable Menlo Park firms investing in this first crop of startups, having led Zylo’s $9.3 million series A, which was announced several weeks ago.

Case said that while he’s “bullish” on Silicon Valley, he thinks the hard-charging culture there will end up pushing more investors to look at startups elsewhere.

“Silicon Valley has become more of a free agent, almost mercenary culture, where people don't typically stay at one company for very long. It makes it hard to build durable, sustainable, companies,” Case said.

Wine discovery app Vivino raises $20 million as its ecommerce business takes off

Posted: 14 Feb 2018 04:00 AM PST


While Vivino has been known for its wine discovery service for a while, the company is now being transformed by its wine marketplace, whose rapid growth has helped it attract a new $20 million round of funding.

“We are on a mission to enable all of our users to discover and easily purchase any wine available on the market,” Vivino founder and CEO Heini Zachariassen said in a statement.

The latest funding comes about two years after the company raised $25 million in a round led by SCP Neptune International, the investment arm of former Moet Hennessy CEO Christophe Navarre. The new round was again led by SCP Neptune International and brings Vivino to a total of $57 million raised. Other VCs participating in the new round include Balderton Capital, Creandum, SEED Capital Denmark, and Iconical.

Founded in Denmark in 2010, Vivino now lists its headquarters as San Francisco. Its app allows people to track wines they’ve tried, scan labels, and rate and comment on the wine. Vivino then uses those reviews to build profiles and recommend wines to users.

Over the past two years, Vivino has seen its user base grow from 13 million to 29 million. As part of that growth, the company last year launched a wine marketplace that allowed users to purchase many of the wines for delivery via its platform.

The company says it now offers more than 130,000 wines for purchase and that its marketplace sales have increased by four times since the launch.

Vivino plans to use the new investment capital to further develop its service and expand its team. It also hopes to launch soon in Hong Kong and is betting it can reach $1 billion in wine sales by 2020.

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