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“Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Edition is more time behind the same ol’ wheel” plus 18 more VentureBeat

“Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Edition is more time behind the same ol’ wheel” plus 18 more VentureBeat


Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Edition is more time behind the same ol’ wheel

Posted: 14 Jan 2017 02:02 PM PST

nintendoswitch_mariokart8deluxe_presentation2017_scrn07

Mario Kart 8 is back for another race around the track. By reviving the Wii U era game with minimum additions, it seems Nintendo thinks that it was the Wii U console — not its software — that caused the system to sell so poorly, and it’s trying to bring the nearly 3-year-old game to what it hopes is a wider audience on its $300 hybrid console.

Initially released in 2014 for the Nintendo Wii U, Mario Kart 8 is being re-released on Nintendo Switch as Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Edition, just missing the $300 console’s March 3 launch date and coming out on April 28. An updated version of the original title, the Deluxe Edition is adding some new features, but doesn’t seem to be bringing that much more to the racetrack.

It is, however getting one thing right: Dry Bones, the skeletal turtle-like Koopa Troopa (and my go-to racer in the series), is back as a playable character.

His bony awesomeness isn’t the only new addition. The Deluxe Edition includes all of the original Wii U game’s content — yes, even the DLC — as well as new characters (the Inklings from Splatoon), returning Mario-universe denizens (the giant ghost King Boo, Bowser Jr.), and a tweaked Battle Mode.

Switching things up

It has a sprinkling of other new features: Racers can now hold two items at the same time; it has two new Battle Mode courses (Urchin Underpass, again from Splatoon, and Battle Stadium) and returning courses (Luigi’s Mansion from the GameCube and SNES Battle Course 1); three new vehicles; and a Smart steering feature that assists drivers. But even added together, it’s not a ton of new content, especially if it ends up that there aren’t any new racing tracks proper, just battle ones.

Just by nature of being on the Switch console, it will have other differences inherit to the system. My demo had the Switch in tabletop mode, using the tablet portion as the screen without a TV. The new Joy-Con controllers do offer a unique way to play — players can remove both the left and the right Joy-Con from the Switch screen and immediately have two controllers for multiplayer on the go. I was worried about the smaller size of the Joy-Con controllers, but it seems to work, though I’m still not quite sure if it’s a way I’d want to play Mario Kart for long periods of time.

Being a motion control Mario Kart aficionado, I’m happy that the Joy-Con retain motion controls for steering. It also uses the new HD rumble, though in a weird and anemic — not really the deep rumble players might be used to — way, with it almost feeling like their were little balls inside of the controller itself. Either way, new rumble features aren’t a reason to go rushing out and pick up a game by any stretch of the imagination.

New kart just like the old kart

Now, Mario Kart 8 is far from my favorite Mario Kart game, but bringing it back — instead of developing a new entry in the series, as Nintendo traditionally does for new consoles — means that Wii U-owning Nintendo fans have already played the majority of what it has to offer already. The new additions are mostly superficial, and they might not be enough to convince players who purchased the original title to double dip. The flip side is that, especially given the Wii U’s poor sales numbers, customers who skipped the Wii U but pick up a Switch have a Mario Kart entry sooner than later in the new system’s lifecycle. It’s a trade-off that Nintendo has decided is worth it, but it still has to convince fans to buy it.

Even with the play-on-the-go mentality that being on the Switch brings, I’m just not sure if portability in and of itself is enough of a draw, especially on a title that’s already been released. I’m on the fence about whether or not I’ll even end up double dipping on it, and my disdain for the original release combined with the lack of new features may end up trumping the fact that there’s a Mario Kart game out I don’t have … even one with Dry Bones. And especially at $60, I think it might be a tough sell for others as well.

But, hey, at least there’s Dry Bones.

Why I’m NOT a ‘B2B SaaS’ investor

Posted: 14 Jan 2017 01:15 PM PST

2017

People often categorize me as a 'B2B SaaS' investor, when in actuality I haven't invested in a single SaaS company in years.

Why? Because I think it's really hard for a traditional SaaS company to be successful in today's market.

Given the level of transparency and competition in the enterprise software market (and the VC activity willing to fund enterprise software companies), traditional SaaS businesses often don't present significant enough moats to prevent competitors from replicating/underpricing their solution and competing away their profits. As a result, we’re seeing a plethora of niche SaaS applications that unfortunately aren't that interesting.

But there is still hope for enterprise software founders — and possibly more opportunity than ever before. As the next evolution of the software landscape evolves, we are seeing a pivotal factor unfold as one of the largest determinants of startup success: Distribution.

In v1 of the enterprise software landscape, bigger was better. Large installed sales team pushed behemoth corporations down the sales funnel and retained integration consultants to plug the product into an existing system. For a product to be credible enough for enterprise, it had to come from a BIG provider. For a sales professional to get a meeting, they needed to come from a BIG company. If you were a startup, it was incredibly difficult to break into enterprise. If you were a BIG company, you bought the startup so you could sell their products across your entrenched and largely captive network of customers. Quality of product wasn't the defining factor for a software company's success, it was the quality and scale of your distribution network.

In v2 of the enterprise software landscape (aka the world of SaaS), software became infinitely more accessible. This made the audience significantly larger and opened the door for companies to circumnavigate the incumbent distribution networks of players like Oracle, SAP, and IBM. The advent of cloud-based SaaS delivery was the first crack in these legacy distribution networks as sales activity migrated from a sales funnel to customer lifecycle management where transactions are made continuously. Making software easier to deliver with other solutions was a major blow to these incumbents and the service providers living off integrating and customizing legacy on-prem applications (Villi Itchev from August Capital postulates that we're actually seeing M&A volume come down now since the distribution synergies are no longer as valuable). Leaders in this class of companies have centralized data management (e.g. Workday, Salesforce), quality products, and customer success.

Now, though, we’re entering v3. New delivery methods are taking form as enterprise business models evolve. For businesses to succeed, they need to be more than just an improved digital interface. They truly need to entrap a customer to withstand the test of time. This is a scary and exciting opportunity for startups and investors alike – "better mousetraps" simply aren't good enough.

v3 of the enterprise software evolution is about capturing data and its associated network effects, enabling products to grow smarter and more capable than they would otherwise. This can mean better quality, lower costs of service, or proprietary offerings available only to that platform (especially for B2B marketplaces), ultimately giving the vendor immense and often insurmountable advantages over competitors. The stakes are higher than ever before as these network effects tend to result in "winner take all" monopolies, where players have the chance to dominate an entire category (for those who haven't read Zero to One, monopolies are incredibly lucrative businesses, which is why winning the market becomes the only thing that matters). However, as Matt Turck of FirstMark Capital noted, "data network effects are now becoming a possibility for a much broader group of companies, earlier in their development, as a result of the democratization of Big Data tools". As these tools become more available, the defining factor for winning the market becomes increasingly more about acquiring data than your startup's ability to crunch it.

For these software companies, distribution is not only a customer acquisition strategy; its a method of acquiring data and its associated network effects. In a competitive market where fast followers are readily funded, "winning" the data war is a matter of speed and efficacy. Companies that figure out distribution best can seize the network effects necessary to gain market share rapidly and own the market.

To advance their distribution footprint as fast as possible, these v3 software companies often go to market very differently than traditional SaaS businesses. In general, they attempt to remove friction from the market for early customers by subsidizing a component of their offering (or giving it away entirely). They also tend to focus on product quality in order to drive engagement and the associated data from that engagement. As a result, these businesses often require significantly fewer sales resources then a traditional SaaS business at scale and rely heavily on customer acquisition through organic and/or referral channels (further amplifying the relevance of product quality and customer success). These companies may deliver through API/SDKs, marketplaces, transactional/usage frameworks, or networked solutions, but in virtually all scenarios their models are centered on attaining network effects through a streamlined means of distribution.

I find these businesses compelling for the same reason network-effect driven businesses are powerful in the consumer realm: At scale, they experience incredible defensibility, pricing power, and customer acquisition efficiency. Yes, this means they can be lucrative companies, but these business can also unleash massive quantities of value for customers. Because they spend their resources on the platform rather than customer acquisition, they can develop product capabilities and data insights beyond what may have been possible otherwise.

We see the immense power of these data-driven network effects not only in large consumer companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter, but in the B2B realm as well. When leveraged appropriately, these dynamics can help solve some of the most daunting challenges facing society, maybe even cure cancer. That's exciting whether you're an investor or not.

Determining how to evaluate and build these businesses creates new sets of challenges, but I couldn't be more excited for the future opportunities this latest evolution in the enterprise software landscape will open up. There will be exceptions to the rule — with great founders able to carve out attractive market opportunities with traditional B2B SaaS offerings (and I am certainly tracking a few) — but the shift toward networked enterprise business is one that founders and investors alike need to account for.

NOTE: Thanks to Ezra Galston of Chicago Ventures, Farooq Abbasi of Mosaic Ventures, and Ali Afridi of Lightbank for their feedback on this post.

Rick Zullo leads enterprise tech investments for Lightbank, a $200 million early-stage venture fund and studio based in Chicago.

 

The most common passwords of 2016

Posted: 14 Jan 2017 11:05 AM PST

passwords

Looking at the list of 2016's most common passwords, I can’t stop shaking my head. Nearly 17 percent of users are safeguarding their accounts with "123456." What really perplexes me is that so many website operators are not enforcing password security best practices.

My firm, Keeper Security, scoured 10 million passwords that became public through data breaches that happened in 2016. A few things jumped out at us:

  • The list of most-frequently used passwords has changed little over the past few years. That means user education has limits. While it's important for users to be aware of risks, a sizable minority are never going to take the time or effort to protect themselves. IT administrators and website operators must do the job for them.
  • Four of the top 10 passwords on the list – and seven of the top 15 – are six characters or shorter. This is stunning in light of the fact that today's brute-force cracking software and hardware can unscramble those passwords in seconds. Website operators need to stop prioritizing convenience over security.
  • The presence of passwords like "1q2w3e4r" and "123qwe" indicates that some users attempt to use unpredictable patterns to secure passwords, but their efforts are weak at best. Dictionary-based password crackers know to look for sequential key variations. At best, it sets them back only a few seconds.
  • Email providers don't appear to be working all that hard to prevent the use of their services for spam. Security expert Graham Cluley believes that the presence of seemingly random passwords such as "18atcskd2w" and "3rjs1la7qe" on the list indicates that bots use these codes over and over when they set up dummy accounts on public email services for spam and phishing attacks. Email providers could do everyone a favor by flagging this kind of repetition and reporting the guilty parties.

We can criticize the chronic failure of users to employ strong passwords all we want. After all, it's in the user's best interests to do so. But the bigger responsibility lies with website owners who fail to enforce the most basic password complexity policies. It isn't hard to do, but the list makes it clear that many still don't bother.

Without further ado, here are last year’s top 25 most common passwords:

common-password-list

[A version of this story originally appeared on the Keeper Security blog.]

Darren Guccione is CEO of Keeper Security. He has extensive experience in product design, engineering, and development and leads product vision, global strategy, customer experience, and business development at Keeper.

SpaceX launches first Falcon 9 since explosion and lands rocket stage on ocean platform

Posted: 14 Jan 2017 10:52 AM PST

SpaceX Falcon rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, U.S., January 14, 2017.

A SpaceX Falcon rocket blasted off from California on Saturday, returning the company to flight for the first time since a fiery launchpad explosion in September.

The launch of the 230-foot (70-meter) rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base at 9:54 a.m. PST (1754 GMT) aimed to deliver 10 satellites into orbit for Iridium Communications Inc.

SpaceX’s founder and entrepreneur Elon Musk’s ambitious flight plans had been grounded since the Sept. 1 explosion during fueling ahead of a pre-flight test in Florida.

About 10 minutes after Saturday’s launch, the first stage of the rocket, which had separated from the rest of craft, successfully touched down on a platform in the Pacific Ocean, a feat previously accomplished by four other returning Falcon rockets. SpaceXintends to reuse its rockets to cut costs.

The mission will test changes implemented by Space Exploration Technologies Corp, known as SpaceX, since the launchpad explosion.

Accident investigators determined that a canister of helium burst inside the rocket’s second-stage liquid oxygen tank, triggering the explosion. The canister is being redesigned, but until then SpaceX is addressing the issue by modifying its fueling procedures.

The explosion destroyed a $62 million SpaceX booster and a $200 million Israeli communications satellite that it was to put into orbit two days later.

The accident clouded the company’s aggressive agenda, which includes beginning to ferry U.S. astronauts into space next year, when it also plans to make its first voyage to Mars.

Saturday’s flight begins to clear a logjam of more than 70 missions, worth more than $10 billion, awaiting flights on SpaceX Falcon rockets, which last flew in August, SpaceXsaid.

The launch is the first in a seven-flight contract with Iridium worth $468.1 million, company spokeswoman Diane Hockenberry said.

SpaceX aims to launch 27 rockets in 2017, more than triple the eight flights the privately held firm managed in 2016, according to a report on Friday in the Wall Street Journal.

In addition to its dozens of commercial customers, SpaceX is one of two companies hired by NASA to fly cargo to the International Space Station, a $100 billion research laboratory that flies 250 miles (400 km) above Earth.

The company’s 2017 agenda includes the debut launch of a heavy-lift booster, flying its first reused rocket and repairing the Florida launchpad damaged in the explosion.

(Reporting by Irene Klotz; Editing by Daniel Trotta and Tom Brown)

Panasonic envisions autonomous cars with bubble-like cabins

Posted: 14 Jan 2017 10:25 AM PST

The Panasonic driverless concept car.

Panasonic showed its concept car of the future at its CES 2017 press event. Since the cars will be autonomous, they won’t need to look or function like today’s vehicles. Instead, Panasonic believes the future car will be like a spacious cabin, where passengers sit inside a round bubble.

The idea is not so different from Google’s prototype for a self-driving car. You no longer need to have the driver facing the front all of the time, holding a steering wheel and operating a brake pedal and gas pedal. Now you can regain a lot of space in the car, purely for comfort or adding more passengers.

One of the cool parts of the vision is that the car’s windows will have augmented reality capability, so that you can see screens and other images on the glass. There’s a 4K tablet screen in the middle of the cabin.

Panasonic concept car at CES 2017.

Above: Panasonic concept car at CES 2017.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

The company is creating a connected highway in Denver. In Japan, it is creating smart highways and taking some of those technologies to Colorado to enable more self-driving cars. Over 35,000 Americans died in car crashes last year, and Panasonic said it wants to put an end to that.

It’s going to take quite a while before I could be comfortable riding in a car like this one. I don’t see how the human driver could recover in an emergency and take control of the car. In electronics we trust.

Interior of Panasonic's concept car for autonomous driving.

Above: Interior of Panasonic’s concept car for autonomous driving.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi
CES2017

How to watch today’s SpaceX launch — and why it matters

Posted: 14 Jan 2017 09:34 AM PST

An explosion on the launch site of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is shown in this still image from video in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S. September 1, 2016.

Today SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 rocket, for the first time since the September 1st accident that destroyed another vehicle during a test firing. After months of investigation, SpaceX finally said it had found the cause of that accident earlier this month, and was then given permission to resume launches.

The launch, at California's Vandenburg Air Force Base, is expected at 12:54 p.m. EST, and SpaceX will stream it live here starting a little before that.

The rocket's payload will be 10 satellites to be deployed for the communications firm Iridium. But there will be a lot more riding on the launch than that—the future of the company, and, without too much hyperbole, the human race.

Here's why. Obviously, halting services for more than four months is no good for any business. A report Friday from the Wall Street Journal claimed that a previous accident and fleet grounding in 2015 led to a quarter-billion dollar annual loss that year.

The numbers for 2016 are probably just as bad, since, according to the Journal, the September accident pushed half of the company's planned 2016 launches off its schedule. SpaceX has removed claims that it is "profitable and cash-flow positive" from its website.

SpaceX officials told the Journal that the company has more than $1 billion cash on hand and no debt, as well as a long line of customers waiting for future launches.

But we've already seen that accidents can push away customers. Britain's Inmarsat pulled one launch order in early December. Inmarsat officials said it was more an issue of scheduling than any mistrust of SpaceX's reliability, though, and the company still has another launch order with SpaceX for the middle of this year.

The September accident also put the brakes on one of SpaceX's most important long-term strategic goals—proving that it can re-use its rockets. The first launch of a recovered rocket booster was previously scheduled for late 2016, but that never happened. SpaceX has to get re-using rockets back on the agenda soon—while its launches are already a bargain compared to competing space services’, reusing its rockets would push those prices down even further, giving it a massive edge for the long term.

Any signs of trouble today, then, would have huge consequences both for the company’s fundamentals, and the feasibility of Elon Musk’s most aggressive goal—colonizing Mars. Musk wants to get humans to the Red Planet by 2024, and to do that, the company needs to generate consistent profits to fund development of its next generation of rockets.

Another revelation from WSJ's Friday report was that even winning the satellite-launch market might not be enough. The company plans to derive a much more of its future revenue—and, in turn, development funds—from a satellite internet service.

But reliable, affordable rockets would still be the company’s most fundamental asset. Today’s launch has to prove SpaceX can provide them.

This story originally appeared on Fortune.com. Copyright 2017

Enterprise IT trends for 2017: ‘Fog’ computing, Internet sensors, the second coming of silicon …

Posted: 14 Jan 2017 09:10 AM PST

iot

With Snap's IPO reportedly imminent and the giant Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas now wrapped up, many in the tech world have been focused on innovations in consumer technology lately. But I think the coming year also will be marked by lesser-noticed tectonic shifts in enterprise-IT: Trends related to cloud computing, big data, and even basic computer chips, which are getting a makeover thanks to the new demands placed on them by the deluge of data and analytics now swamping many organizations.

These trends may not be as sexy as chat apps or talking robots. But here are my predictions for seven B2B, enterprise-IT trends to watch in 2017 — trends that will drive billions in corporate IT spending and could eventually create billions in market value.

1. Cloud computing moves from the "core" into the "fog." Amazon's meteoric ascent to the top of the hot cloud-computing market was driven by its ability to cheaply and effectively move core IT functions — including basic computing, networking, and storage — out of company datacenters into the public "cloud." With cloud computing, customers pay as they go for computing power, much as homeowners pay utilities for the electricity they consume each month. In 2017, however, I predict we'll see the rise of "fog", or "edge" computing, through which data thrown off by billions of smart, Web-enabled devices at the edge of computer networks (where they actually touch people) drives interesting applications. Think of self-driving Teslas, Nest-controlled smart homes, or robots powering smart manufacturing and oil-drilling. The migration of $300 billion in datacenter spend to the core cloud is clearly a big deal, but the emergence of edge clouds driving new revenues in industries previously untouched by advanced cloud technologies may be a significantly larger opportunity, and I expect to see early signs of this in 2017.

2. Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud — better late than never! Despite stealing all the headlines, Amazon Web Services' (AWS’s) $13 billion cloud business is barely scratching the surface of the total market for IT datacenter spending. In 2016 we witnessed a watershed moment when #1 enterprise player VMware essentially threw in the towel and agreed to partner, instead of compete, with AWS. (The deal will allow customers to use their existing VMware software to run some computing in Amazon's cloud.) The deal will actually encourage cautious CIOs to go all-in with public-private cloud combos as opposed to continuing to funnel IT spending into datacenters. This should help Microsoft Azure, another big cloud-computing player, since the company already has a big enterprise presence and a cloud program that CIOs can tap into. Clouds run by Google and China's Alibaba could similarly benefit. I think by 2017, we'll see a sort of oligopoly of four or five big cloud providers, similar to the market for US wireless carriers.

3. Data gone wild. Corporations today are awash in data, from the billions of sensors proliferating in smart homes and buildings to President-elect Trump tweeting on matters big and small. Organizations have changed their attitude by making data the core of their digital transformations rather than simply a by-product of running operations. I believe 2017 could be the year of the "Chief Data Officer" as more and more organizations create C-level positions to manage this crucial information and figure out how to use it to their competitive advantage. A recent Forrester survey of more than 3,000 executives focused on data and analytics found that 45 percent of the respondents' companies already have a CDO, up from only a handful two years ago. As the office of the CDO grows in prominence, 2017 will witness increased adoption of critical "data middleware" – governance, cataloging, prep, and discovery software – that rides on top of multiple clouds and databases and feeds into a plethora of analytics tools.

4. The second coming of silicon. The exponential growth in corporate data, deeper analytics on complex image and voice data, and the expansion of edge computing are all stressing IT infrastructure to the extreme. Large increases in performance and decreases in cost cannot be accomplished by simple software-tuning, nor has Moore's Law kept up with the gains needed for new applications. As semiconductor behemoths ranging from Broadcom, Avago, Altera, and others are busy merging and cutting costs, AWS, Google, and others have taken matters into their own hands in terms of semiconductor innovation — as have a few startups like Innovium, Barefoot, and Fungible. While funding silicon companies is not for the faint of heart, because of the high costs, the companies that succeed in raising cash and delivering building blocks for this secular cloud/application shift will be rewarded handily, and some will becomes the next generation silicon powerhouses.

5. Cybersecurity becomes key component of international relations. We thought it was bad when the North Koreans hacked Sony to try to stop the release of a lighthearted movie about Kim Jong-Il. In 2016, if you believe the CIA and the FBI, we saw the Russians hack DNC emails to try to disrupt the American presidential election. Clearly, cybersecurity is only becoming more critical to organizations as they try to guard against increasingly common and more sophisticated attacks, from state and non-state actors. This will drive increasing investment in security startups by venture capitalists. This year, as a result of the Russia/US election episode, I think we'll also see cyber-warfare become a bigger issue in international relations and driving more geopolitical tension, which will further highlight cybersecurity as an area big and small companies need to be concerned about, driving more spending on security tools.

6. High-end immigration headaches. On the topic of politics: One big headache for tech companies in 2017 could be increasing restrictions on immigration if Trump carries through on his campaign promises. These policies, if applied to high-skilled workers, threaten to worsen the existing dearth of US tech talent in areas like data science and software development/operations. That said, the rise of free, "open source" software and new workplace-collaboration tools mean that it's easier for people to work together on tech projects from different locations, including overseas. 2017 will witness a larger number of companies deploying these types of highly distributed workforces and leveraging freely available, open-source building blocks contributed by developers worldwide. An unintended, but welcome, side effect may be a cooling of the housing and rental market in the San Francisco Bay Area!

7. Cashing in. The moribund IPO market showed signs of life in late 2016, with 21 technology companies ultimately debuting on US exchanges last year. I predict we'll see more IPO activity this year, both with high-profile, consumer "unicorn" tech companies like Uber and Airbnb and wonkier enterprise names. Those enterprise companies could include open-source juggernauts like data-management company Cloudera, database providers MongoDB and Datastax, and data-analytics company Elastic. (While serious, I don't think the recent news about the cyberattacks targeting MongoDB databases will have lasting long-term consequences.) Open source, to me, represents the de-facto delivery method of enterprise computing, and I think Wall Street will start to look beyond first-generation, open-source companies to newer models that can work.

Dharmesh Thakker is a General Partner at Battery Ventures.

Synaptics CEO believes the human-machine interface isn’t perfected yet

Posted: 14 Jan 2017 08:02 AM PST

Synaptics makes technologies for touch devices.

Synaptics likes to stay in touch with the way that people interact with devices. The company makes touchscreen, touchpad, display components, and fingerprint identification technologies.

Synaptics is a big maker of touchpads for laptops.

Above: Synaptics is a big maker of touchpads for laptops.

Image Credit: Synaptics

Because of that, it likes to stay on the leading edge of thinking around how humans interact with machines. For instance, Synaptics just announced the ability to recognize a fingerprint and authenticate it, even when viewed through touchscreen glass.

That means that we might no longer need a home button on our smartphones. Is that a good idea? There might be an outcry if we take away the security of the home button. Rick Bergman, CEO of Synaptics, and his engineers have to think about these kinds of challenges. You could invent a new user interface technology, but if people don’t like it, or they don’t want to learn it, then it won’t fly.

We talked about technology and the human-machine interface at the recent CES 2017 event, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas last week.

Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

Rick Bergman is CEO of Synaptics, the maker of touchscreen modules and other interface sensors.

Above: Rick Bergman is CEO of Synaptics, the maker of touchscreen modules and other interface sensors.

VB: It looks like there's still a lot of innovation in this space, a lot of things happening.

Rick Bergman: There are three areas: touch, display drivers, and fingerprint. The market isn't sitting still. We continue to find ways to innovate and add value. OLED screens, which I'm sure you saw, is a big trend. Authentication technologies — if you think about phones, just three years ago, virtually no phone shipped with that. This year, there could be 700 or 800 million phones with fingerprint readers.

VB: You guys announced fingerprint identification through glass. Other startups (Vkansee) did as well. I wonder if this is a competitive space, one where startups are trying to get into it.

Bergman: Fingerprint itself, everyone saw the market trend. There's been a rush of companies to get into the space. Now, specifically under glass solutions, that's a different requirement than the solutions we've had to date. Right now, no one's introduced an equivalent solution, at least to my knowledge. A company in Florida called Sonavation is the only startup I'm aware of that's trying to do fingerprint under glass.

VB: It's interesting, because then it enables a new kind of device. We all got used to having that one Home button, holding it down to see if it recognizes something. Now you can get rid of the button and have the whole glass be able to recognize a fingerprint.

Bergman: Certainly that's the goal. Samsung has gone edge-to-edge on the two vertical edges. Every square millimeter of your phone becomes capable of displaying. That's where people want to be. If you get rid of the home button, that takes away entries for moisture or dust. It reduces costs from a system-level perspective. You have the visual benefits of a complete display.

Synaptics senses pressure, so you can write thin lines or thick lines.

Above: Synaptics senses pressure, so you can write thin lines or thick lines.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

VB: Are there are still ways to introduce new things and get people to adapt to them? It almost seems like there might be an outcry if you get rid of the home button. People have gotten used to it, even if it wasn't that great an idea in the first place.

Bergman: It's a safety button for a lot of people. Samsung and Apple have the two iconic home buttons out there. We may not actually get rid of it, though. As a physical button it may go away, but you could still keep it there electronically. It'll feel the same if you use haptics appropriately. It just isn't a button anymore. A home spot, something like that.

Synaptics touchscreen module.

Above: Synaptics touchscreen module.

Image Credit: Synaptics

VB: There's the facial recognition and fingerprint combination, and car fingerprints as well. It seems like two-factor authentication is important for some applications.

Bergman: Yesterday we announced two-factor authentication. It can be for convenience, or for security. The obvious thing is you're skiing in Tahoe, and you really don't want to take off your gloves to fingerprint, so you turn the facial mode on as an alternative to read your email or texts. Two-factor is for security. Many of the banking applications are already asking for that.

VB: For a car, does there appear to be a reason to use fingerprint instead of a key?

Bergman: We haven't seen it as a substitute for a key yet. We're seeing interest in two areas, and I'm sure it will grow. The first big picture is people are getting comfortable with using fingerprints, because of the iPhone and other phones. It's becoming very natural. It could be something as simple as driver settings. You or your spouse or whatever can have separate settings that it'll recognize. Also, as vehicles become rolling commerce interfaces — you go through the McDonald's drive-through and approve the transaction right from your vehicle.

VB: In the car, is there going to be something new that people would see as a fingerprint button?

Bergman: Different OEMs have different visions. There could be something close to the steering wheel, or something on the center console. More and more people want their vehicles to have all the capabilities of a phone. If you pay $50,000 for a vehicle, you don't want it to have old, lagging consumer technologies. They want state of the art. It's good for us, because being a leader on the consumer side is opening the door for us on the automotive side.

Synaptics

Above: Synaptics believes you can use your fingerprint to start your car, or verify that it’s you driving.

Image Credit: Synaptics

VB: What do you think of the combination of haptic and touch? Is that still something somebody wants, generally speaking?

Bergman: Almost all phones use some level of haptics. It's usually just one actuator, though, on your home button. You feel like you're depressing a button, but you're really not, as one example. That click isn't really there.

VB: With some of these other things coming, like virtual reality, people are saying they want the sense of touch to come in somewhere. I don't know if that's something you guys have put thought into as well. It may be farther afield from where you are.

Bergman: No, AR and VR is an area of high interest to us. Not so much related to touch opportunities. Something like Gear VR has lower-end touch, where we don't play very much. What's of interest in VR is the displays. As you saw from our demos, we do high-res displays. In VR you have two of them, which presents a lot of interesting opportunities for us to focus on.

VB: The fingers in the VR world — they're getting represented in a lot of the sensing that's happening now. Oculus Touch represents your fingers and shows what they're doing, but you don't really touch anything. You never get any real feedback. I've seen some guys doing ultrasound touch feedback, blowing sound back at your finger with a lot of little speakers.

Bergman: You can use ultrasound, or you can actually use IR and visible light to look at the fingers and get a third dimension. There are a number of companies doing 3D gestures out there. But to date we haven't done anything in that area. We don't directly do haptics ourselves, but we do work with guys like Immersion in that space. We do reference designs to improve the touch experience. It's always a potential area for growth, but we don't have immediate plans to do haptics technologies.

VB: Is force an area of potential further innovation?

Bergman: We've offered force for several years now. We're starting to see phones introduced with it. What held it back for a while was the higher cost of implementation. We don't quite get it for free now, but it doesn't require a separate chip or separate sensors now. We've seen adoption by guys like Xiaomi and others.

Continue Reading ...

Early layoffs and closures in 2017 suggest a rocky year ahead for tech industry

Posted: 14 Jan 2017 06:02 AM PST

Postcard: Greetings from Silicon Valley

From Microsoft, IBM, and Twitter through Zenefits, Intel, and Autodesk, the year 2016 ushered in some notable “downsizing initiatives” across the technology industry. Throw into the mix heavily VC-funded startups selling for peanuts and high-profile companies closing and selling assets to competitors, and “wild” assertions that the big tech bubble is about to burst may not seem so “wild” after all.

Of course, dotcom-bubble-burst v.2.0 has been predicted pretty much since the big boom-and-bust at the turn of the century, which saw a swathe of vastly overvalued startups go belly-up, bringing an entire industry to its knees. But the doom-monger express chugs on, with many analysts, VCs, and experts predicting rocky roads ahead.

New year, new dawn?

Just two weeks into the New Year, and we’re already seeing signs of what could be to come throughout 2017 and beyond. On January 12 alone, Twitter-like social network App.net announced it was shutting shop, while publicly traded music-streaming company Pandora revealed it was cutting 7 percent of its workforce, as rumors continue to circulate that it will soon be acquired. And a day earlier, three-year-old drone startup Lily, with $15 million in funding, announced it was closing down after failing to secure more funds.

But App.net, Pandora, and Lily are just the latest in a series of closures and downsizing announcements from across the technology industry in the first two weeks of 2017.

Less than a week into the new year, troubled cloud storage startup Bitcasa, funded to the tune of $21 million, posted a goodbye message to its website announcing that the company was no more. Official confirmation of what’s coming next for the people and platform has yet to emerge, but we heard that it may have been acquired by Intel.

Despite recently revealing grand plans to monetize and become a publishing powerhouse, growing its traffic 140 percent to 60 million monthly visitors, Medium laid off 50 employees, equating to a third of its workforce. It’s also closing its New York and Washington, D.C. offices. Founder and CEO Ev Williams explained the company’s pivot, blaming a broken advertising system:

It simply doesn’t serve people. In fact, it’s not designed to. The vast majority of articles, videos, and other ‘content’ we all consume on a daily basis is paid for — directly or indirectly — by corporations who are funding it in order to advance their goals. And it is measured, amplified, and rewarded based on its ability to do that. Period. As a result, we get … well, what we get. And it’s getting worse.

Elsewhere, Instagram-competing camera app company VSCO, with $70 million in VC money since its 2011 launch, revealed it was shuttering its New York office and laying off all the staff, though it wasn’t clear how many that amounted to. And San Francisco culinary startup Zesty, founded in 2012 and with $10 million in VC funding, reportedly terminated a $20,000 monthly lease on a Mission District hub late last year, and in the first week of 2017 laid off 13 members of staff.

Then there’s blood-testing company Theranos, which laid off 43 percent of its staff in October, amounting to 340 employees, and followed it up last week with another 41 percent cut, or 155 workers. But that debacle is less to do with the state of its industry than longstanding controversy around the company’s flawed working practices. Still, the Palo Alto company is a major figure in the Silicon Valley startup scene, having nabbed more than $600 million in equity financing since its inception in 2003. Incidentally, the very same day, fellow medical-testing company Counsyl, with more than $150 million in VC funding, revealed it was cutting 5 percent of its workforce, equating to 24 people.

With almost $80 million in VC funding to its name, San Francisco-based events app maker DoubleDutch revealed it was cutting around 70 positions, or 40 percent of its workforce. This came six months after it announced another major staff cull.

Closures and cuts in 2017 haven’t been limited to U.S. companies. Earlier this week, London-based smartwatch maker Vector Watch announced it was closing down, with Fitbit snapping up the team and technology — a move that followed a month after the exact same thing happened with Pebble.

So what does this all mean for the year ahead? Doom and gloom, or hope?

Predictions

A few weeks back, we asked a number of Silicon Valley VCs what they expected to see in 2017 — including whether they anticipated a major bubble burst. “You mean as it was predicted to in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016?,” said M.G. Siegler, general partner at GV. “No, I do not.”

Jerry Chen, partner at Greylock Partners, was equally dismissive of such suggestions, saying:

I don’t think we will see a burst, but interest rate hikes combined with investors who start to weigh risk better will lead to a new normal.

We experienced a significant market correction earlier this year, and the market will no longer tolerate growth at all costs and companies with high burn rates. But the market will reward companies who build competitive moats, using cash strategically, and execute an effective go-to-market business model.

Late last year, veteran stock market strategist Ned Riley — who apparently foresaw the original dotcom bust of the early 21st century — said that he doesn’t see a particularly bad year ahead for the tech industry.

“I look at 2017 as an exciting year,” said Riley. “Secular growth for this sector is particularly strong for the next three to five years.” He added that he doesn’t foresee the same “irrational exuberance” that he saw back in 1999 and 2000.

It’s clear there will be more upheaval across the technology industry this year, with Twitter still in trouble and SoundCloud urgently seeking a buyer. But it’s easy to look at a handful of examples and extrapolate any number of conclusions.

The flurry of closures and layoffs we’ve seen so far in 2017 could easily be a result of companies delaying announcements until after the Christmas break. Or it could be indicative of a major trend we’ll continue to see throughout the year. We’ll have to wait and see.

Syrian refugee sues Facebook for ‘defamatory’ posts after selfie with Angela Merkel

Posted: 14 Jan 2017 03:03 AM PST

A migrant takes a selfie with German Chancellor Angela Merkel outside a refugee camp near the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees after registration at Berlin's Spandau district, Germany September 10, 2015.

(Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A Syrian refugee whose selfie with German Chancellor Angela Merkel went viral is suing Facebook for defamation, his lawyer said, after the social networking site failed to take down a series of posts accusing him of being a militant and criminal.

Anas Modamani, a 19-year-old refugee from Damascus, was pictured in September 2015 taking a selfie with Merkel during her visit to a refugee shelter in Berlin’s Spandau district.

The image came to define Germany’s response to the refugee crisis, when Merkel opened the country’s borders to hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers.

But in the following months Modamani’s image was shared on Facebook on a series of anonymous accounts, alongside posts claiming he was responsible for militant attacks and murder, including the Brussels Airport bombing of March 2016.

Facebook has repeatedly refused to take the posts down, saying they do not violate the company’s rules, Modamani’s lawyer said.

“Whenever something happens in the news related to refugees, his picture reappears,” Modamani’s lawyer, Chan-jo Jun, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

Facebook could not be reached immediately for comment by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

A Facebook spokesperson told Britain’s Guardian newspaper they had received a takedown request from Jun “alleging that a specific item of content on our platform violates Mr Modamani’s right of personality”.

“Access to that reported content was quickly disabled, so we do not believe there is any basis for him to seek an injunction,” the spokesperson said.

One post falsely linked Modamani to an incident in Berlin last month, when a group set fire to a sleeping homeless man on a train station platform, Jun said.

The post was shared 500 times and was likely to have been seen by at least 25,000 people, he said.

Jun filed a preliminary injunction against Facebook Europe in December, and a court hearing is scheduled for Feb. 6 in Wurzburg, southern Germany, he said.

The case comes as Germany’s justice ministry considers new policies to crack down on fake news by making Facebook and other social media companies criminally liable for failing to remove hate speech.

Facebook should be treated as a media company rather than a technology company, the justice minister said in November.

Modamani now works in a fast-food restaurant in Berlin, his lawyer said.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, announced a series of measures in November to stem a flood of “fake news” articles in the wake of the U.S. presidential election. He said Facebook would make it easier for users to report fake news, and more difficult for fake news providers to make money through its advertising system.

(Reporting by Luke Mintz; editing by Ros Russell; the Thomson Reuters Foundation is the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience.)

These were the 10 biggest European tech stories this week

Posted: 13 Jan 2017 11:44 PM PST

Euros - Funding in Europe European currencies

This week, Tech.eu tracked 8 technology M&A transactions and 71 tech funding deals totalling €503.6 million (about $536 million) in Europe, Turkey and Israel.

Here's an overview of the 10 biggest European tech news items for this week:

1) UK-based lending platform Funding Circle has raised $100 million (£82 million) in a fresh funding round led by Accel along with several other investors.

Investors in the round include Baillie Gifford, DST Global, Index Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Rocket Internet, Sands Capital Ventures, Temasek, and Union Square Ventures – all previous investors.

2) Karhoo — a failed on-demand offering that aggregated drivers and ride options from hundreds of existing fleets of car services in an Uber-like app — has been brought out of administration by RCI Bank and Services, the financial services division of the car giant Renault.

3) Members of the European Parliament have called for the adoption of comprehensive rules for how humans will interact with artificial intelligence and robots.

4) Starship Technologies, a London company that's building autonomous robots for deliveries, has raised $17.2 million (€16.5 million) in a seed round led by automotive giant Daimler.

5) Messaging services such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Gmail will face tough new rules on the tracking of users under a revision to the ePrivacy Directive proposed by the European Commission on Tuesday.

6) Snap, the company behind the messaging app Snapchat, has established international headquarters in London.

7) Swedish fintech company iZettle has raised €60 million in new funding and appointed Maria Hedengren as its new CFO.

8) Smartphone users in Russia can no longer download the LinkedIn app on iPhone or Android devices, weeks after a court blocked the professional networking service for flouting local laws.

9) UK-based Vector Watch has been acquired by Fitbit, a San Francisco-based company specializing in fitness wearables. The amount of the deal has not been disclosed.

10) Israeli cybersecurity startup builder Team8 gains $23 million and new investors in Microsoft and Qualcomm.

Bonus link: Language learning app busuu has announced a partnership with Uber to offer free English language lessons for its drivers in London.

This post originally appeared on Tech.eu

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Europe prepares cyber defenses to protect elections from Russian interference

Posted: 13 Jan 2017 09:33 PM PST

A general view shows the Spasskaya Tower and the Kremlin wall in central Moscow, Russia, May 5, 2016.

Nations in Europe, where Germany and France this year hold elections, are erecting defenses to counter possible Russian cyber attacks and disinformation to sway Western politics, but intelligence experts say this might be too little and too late.

The issue of Russian “influence operations” has taken on new urgency after U.S. intelligence agencies released a non-classified assessment that President Vladimir Putin ordered a campaign to move the U.S. election in favor of Donald Trump.

European nations and NATO are setting up centers to identify “fake news”, bolsteringcyber defenses and tracking use of social media which target Russian-speaking communities, far-right groups, political parties, voters and decision-makers.

Russia denies cyber warfare and Internet campaigns targeting Western governments. Kremlin watchers say affecting the U.S. election could bring reward for Moscow, while stakes would not be so high in German and French elections.

German intelligence officials, however, say there has been Russian support for euroskeptic, anti-immigrant parties in Germany and across the EU. Chancellor Angela Merkel said she could not rule out Russia interfering in this year’s election.

“We can't exclude that operations of the same nature seen in the United States aim to disturb the French electoral system,” France’s Defence Minister Jean-Yves le Drian said in a recent interview. “I urge everyone to install the greatest vigilance.”

One senior European Union official, who declined to be named, said there was no doubt Moscow would bolster far-right and populist parties in elections across Europe in 2017. The official cited the triggering of a resounding “No” given to the EU planned association treaty with Ukraine in a Dutch vote.

“We see disinformation attacks before every vote that is of interest for the Kremlin,” a second EU source said. “Very often the vote that follows … turns out in favor of the Kremlin.”

State-sponsored television station Russia Today, active and expanding across Europe, plays a key role, but Moscow uses a range of avenues, including social media, as well as backing for non-governmental groups, Western intelligence experts say.

Off guard, mix of methods

Stefan Meister of the German Council on Foreign Relations said German intelligence agencies had been caught off guard.

“We have a whole mix of activities that neither the intelligence services nor the politicians can completely understand and categorize,” he said. “They're just starting to understand it and find solutions.”

The EU foreign service is slated to expand a 30-person strategic communications office set up in March 2015 to counter what it sees as fake news and Russian campaigns for influence.

The second EU source said the effort was “a badly under-funded, tiny team with close to no support”, and added Brussels did not see Russian intervention as a priority.

Individual members are now setting up their own offices to monitor and respond to disinformation, including the Czech Republic, which set up a 20-member team on Jan. 1.

Berlin is considering an office to evaluate fake news, but that effort has already run into political concerns that the government is setting up a “truth ministry” that would limit free speech or influence national elections.

German intelligence cited the high-profile case of a German-Russian girl who Russian media said was kidnapped and raped by migrants in Berlin, a claim later refuted by German authorities. The case underscored mutual suspicion between Moscow and Berlin.

Some other countries banned Russian-language television from broadcasting for spreading disinformation or inciting hatred. Lithuania, Latvia, Britain, Estonia and Denmark have also urged the EU to create news sources for Russian speakers.

In Latvia, facing municipal elections in June, officials cite a barrage of propaganda aimed at 500,000 Russian speakers and a cooperation agreement between the pro-Russian opposition party Harmony with Putin’s United Russia party.

Lithuania this week said it had barred construction of a data center for cloud computer operations last year over concerns it could be infiltrated by Russian intelligence once it was connected by fiber-optic cable to Russia.

Solvita Aboltina, head of the national security committee in the Latvian parliament and a key national security adviser to the Latvian president, said the threat of cyber attacks was far greater than the risk of a military invasion.

“This a very important and urgent question on the agenda,” she said. “The American election is clear proof of that.”

NATO worries

Outside the political arena, there are worries in defense circles about the activities of hackers loyal to Putin, himself a former spy chief. NATO says it has seen a five-fold increase in suspicious events on its networks in the past three years.

German officials say a hack in December of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) used methods seen in a 2015 hack of the German parliament that was linked to APT28, a Russian hacker group, blamed for U.S. election hacks.

“We are already at war, and for many years,” Darius Jauniskis, head of Lithuania’s counter-intelligence State Security Department told Reuters in an interview.

Cyber security is a pressing concern for NATO, whose ambassadors discussed specific fears raised by Germany about Russian election interference in December, two diplomats said.

France and Germany recently set up cyber warfare units, and NATO officials have told Reuters they suspect Russia sponsors attacks against their networks before key summits.

(Reporting by Andrius Sytas in Vilnius, Gederts Gelzis in Riga, Jan Lopatka and Robert Muller in Prague, Radu Marinas in Sofia, Aleksandar Vasovic in Belgrade, Tatiana Jancarikova in Bratislava, Thomas Escritt in Amsterdam, Jussi Rosendahl in Finland, John Irish in Paris, Christian Lowe in Moscow, Francesco Guarascio and Robin Emmott in Brussels, Krisztina Than and Marton Dunai in Budapest, David Mardiste in Tallinn, and Andrea Shalal and Andreas Rinke in Berlin, editing by Peter Millership)

What is Nintendo Switch? Everything you need to know about the new console

Posted: 13 Jan 2017 06:00 PM PST

Share the joy, and play Mario Kart 8 with a friend anywhere you go.

Nintendo has unveiled its new gaming system, and we can now answer many of your questions.

The publisher held a pair of events on Thursday and Friday to detail the Nintendo Switch and its games. It’s coming out in less than 50 days, and it will cost you about the same as PlayStation 4 or Xbox One. But we’ve gathered up all of that information and more for you below. Here’s everything you need to know about the Switch.

The basics

Nintendo Switch is a hybrid home/handheld console that enables you to play games on the television or on the unit itself using its built-in display. You can also remove the edge controllers of the system, called Joy-Cons, and use those as two individual gamepads along with the screen set up on its kickstand. These three modes of play all run the same games with only minor differences.

Here’s a rundown of basic info about the Switch:

Price: $300
Release date: March 3, 2017
Where to buy: Up for preorder now at stores like Amazon, Best Buy, Target, and more.
Game prices: $60 for a new game
Online service: Nintendo Switch Online is required for online mutliplayer. The service will launch in full this fall, and it will require an unspecified monthly fee.
Backward compatibility: Your Wii U games will not work on the Switch.

Specs

Display: 720p 6.2 inches
Battery life: 2.5 to six hours depending on the game (Zelda will drain the battery after three hours)
Processor: Nvidia Tegra system-on-a-chip
Media: Game cards
Storage: 32GB built-in, expandable up to 256GB using SD cards.
In the box: Tablet, dock, left Joy-Con, right Joy-Con, Joy-Con grip, charging cable, HDMI cable, and two Joy-Con strap accessories.
Pack-in game: The $300 Switch configuration will not include a game.
Motion controls: The Joy-Cons include sensors for tracking motion and infrared sensors for sensing shapes. For example, it can detect when your hand is making a paper, rock, or scissors gesture.

How powerful is it?

Nintendo still hasn’t shared specifics about the processing capabilities of the Switch. But it can’t stop us from looking at the games and judging for ourselves. The verdict so far? Nintendo Switch is at least marginally more powerful than a Wii U.

We don’t have a lot of footage or experience to go on. Real-world tests cannot begin until we at least get a review unit in. But based on what Nintendo has shown so far, we already know that Mario Kart 8 Deluxe — an updated version of the Wii U game — will run at a higher resolution on Switch than it did on Wii U when it is in docked mode.

When you undock and play Mario Kart 8 Deluxe in handheld mode, the system underclocks its processor to save battery life and renders the game at 720p. That’s equivalent to how the game ran on Wii U. This likely means the system isn’t as powerful as an Xbox One or PlayStation 4, but 2K Games is still going to bring its visually impressive NBA 2K series to the system starting with NBA 2K18 later this year.

The games

We’ve already collected all of the trailers and game announcements from Nintendo’s Switch presentation, but let’s cover some highlights here. It’s looking like a light first year … unless you like Nintendo games.

If you want a Switch to play Zelda and Mario, then this system may have you covered.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

When the Switch launches March 3, the next entry in the Zelda franchise will accompany it. Breath of the Wild is an open-world adventure that looks more alive and dynamic than any Zelda before it. This game will also hit the Wii U, and playing it on that platform is a viable option. But a new Zelda is also a great way to justify spending $300 on a new console. Or, at least, I hope it is.

Super Mario Odyssey

After Zelda, Nintendo will launch Mario Kart 8 Deluxe in April and then Splatoon 2 in the summer, but Super Mario Odyssey was the only game that could match Zelda in terms of fan anticipation at the Switch reveal.

This game is going to give players Mario 64-style sandbox levels to explore. You’ll visit a realistic metropolis called New Donk City, a Latin American town, and more while fighting a version of Bowser who is decked out in a white tuxedo and top hat. Yes, it’s as incredible as it sounds.

Dictators are always fashionable.

Above: Dictators are always fashionable.

Image Credit: Nintendo

1-2 Switch

Finally, at least for this roundup, Nintendo is going to launch with 1-2 Switch. This is a minigame collection that takes advantage of the system’s motion controls. Unlike Wii Sports or other Wii games, 1-2 Switch players look at each other (and listen for audio cues) instead of looking at the screen. The publisher is positioning this as a party game, but we’ll see if it can re-create the magic of those early Wii hits.

Should you buy Nintendo Switch?

At $300, the Switch isn’t an impulse purchase. And you should wait and see if games like Zelda, 1-2 Switch, and others live up to the their potential before committing to a purchase.

At the same time, it’s likely that the Switch will sell out through those first few days. So if you’re on the fence, you may not have a choice to purchase one for a while. But even with that in mind, I think you should probably wait.

That said, every single member of the GamesBeat team has preordered one. Some of us likely are doing that for work, but I know that I’d get one even if I were an orthodontist. Take that for whatever you think it’s worth.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on Nintendo Switch runs at 1080p and 60 FPS on TV; 720p/60 FPS in handheld mode

Posted: 13 Jan 2017 05:45 PM PST

Mario Kart 8

Mario Kart 8 is coming to Nintendo’s next console with a revamped version that includes a lot of new features, and it should look better than ever.

When Mario Kart 8 Deluxe launches for the Switch on April 28, it will come with slightly upgraded visuals. Unlike the original on Wii U (read the review), which had a resolution of 720 horizontal lines of pixels (720p), Deluxe will have a native resolution of 1,080 horizontal lines (1080p) when it is running in console mode. When you undock the Switch to use it as a handheld, Mario Kart 8 will drop back down to 720p, which is the same resolution as the console’s built-in display. No matter how you play the game, however, it will always run at 60 frames per second.

At the very least, this seems to confirm that the Switch is at least somewhat more powerful than the Wii U. That means that Nintendo should have no trouble delivering its gorgeous visuals that rely more heavily on artistry than brute-force graphical horsepower. After all, Mario Kart 8 looked gorgeous on the Wii U at 720p.

Mario Kart is one of Nintendo’s most important franchises. The series is regularly the top-selling release on any of the company’s platform, and it is one of the reasons that slightly more casual gamers buy Nintendo systems. With that in mind, updating Mario Kart 8 is a smart move because Wii U sold so poorly that it’s likely that many people who will get this game on Switch have never played it before.

In addition to the visuals, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is bringing back a battle mode where players use items to take one another out in various arenas. The game will also include new racers, like the Inkling kids from Nintendo’s awesome shooter Splatoon.

Bots are not killing apps — bad apps are killing apps

Posted: 13 Jan 2017 04:10 PM PST

If the app industry fails, bad apps are to blame.

According to bot evangelists, today’s apps are going to be replaced by bots, so why bother with fanciness? Goodbye, delicious Uber UI animations. So long, stickers and filters on Snapchat. Farewell, swiping on Tinder. Will the last app standing be Facebook Messenger? This vision of bots taking over, first painted by Mark Zuckerberg, then co-opted by Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella and many others, has created quite the stir in the app community. I have heard both sides of the argument, and I’d like to quickly recap the current state of discussions on this topic.

One side says the death of apps is imminent with this so-called invasion of bots. “Just as websites replaced client applications then, messaging bots will replace mobile apps now,” TechCrunch reported in 2015. Combine that with slowing growth rates of app downloads, and the bot evangelists appear to have a fair point.

The other side says these reports are greatly exaggerated, claiming that app store growth is accelerating and citing Apple’s growing payouts to developers as evidence.

1-graph

App developers also point out that bots and conversational UIs are among the most overhyped technologies of 2016.

So who’s right? Could bots really cause the world of apps to go belly up? Unfortunately, these are the wrong questions to ask, and they are leading to fundamentally flawed conversations.

Here’s why: Bots are a red herring. It makes no sense to pit bots against apps. Bots can’t solve today’s app woes or vice versa. The truth is, download rates are declining due to “crap app” burnout.

What everybody wants is something that’s going to solve a problem, to make their lives easier, to seamlessly access a service, or even to enrich their lives in some delightful way. What they typically experience is disappointment or annoyance, which leads to fewer app downloads.

People are obsessed with the wrong metric

We need to look beyond downloads to Mobile Engagement metrics, not simply app downloads. Are people even engaged on mobile devices? According to Dscout, absolutely. People touch their phones an average of 2,617 times daily. We yearn to go deeper and deeper into the experience. Gartner even predicts these new digital experiences will draw people into nonstop virtual reactions, through AR/VR/MR.

Looking at Comscore’s 2016 report, we see that mobile apps clearly continue to outpace the mobile web by a 7:1 margin in time spent, a ratio that has been consistent for the past two years. According to Flurry, it’s closer to 10:1.

That’s 90 percent of their mobile screen time inside of apps.

But perhaps most importantly, mobile users spend a really high percentage of their time on their No. 1 most used app, and about 9 out of 10 minutes within their Top 5.

So if users are spending more time on fewer apps, how can new apps break through and engage them?

Bad apps are poison

There’s always talk of creating a “killer app,” but people say there’s no recipe for it. Well, there is: It’s creating a killer user experience.

Let me give you an example. Today there are over 600 task managers for the iPhone alone, with a new one popping up every other week. Managing tasks in a world of infinite distractions is a great problem to solve.

Today all of these apps are flawed, yet in invisible ways. They each lack a focus on creating killer UX. The designer-developer team who pays attention to every little detail — and I mean every micro interaction — is going to win.

2-tubik-ux-animated

Above: UX-focused design through great UI and animation by Tubik Studio.

According to Don Norman, best-selling author of The Design of Everyday Things, UX “encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the product.”

It may sound absurd, but this level of UX mindfulness is crucial. Uber and Snapchat understand this implicitly because UX obsession is in their DNA.

Unfortunately, like so many tech buzzwords, people have completely misused and overused the term UX, as well as mixing it up with the term UI (user interface), adding further to the problem.

Let me try to separate the two:

Imagine sitting in a beautifully designed car. The magnificent interior is all around you, covered in expensive materials. Now imagine that the hand-stitched leather steering wheel is on the ceiling and you push the gorgeous carbon fiber pedals with your hands. This car would be impossible to drive.

The beautiful interior is the user interface in this analogy. Ensuring that the interface is in places that make sense and that the car is not only possible, but also pleasurable, to drive is the user experience.

App makers need to step up their UX game. They need to iterate quickly and include user feedback throughout the process until the experience is rock solid. Sloppy apps hurt the mobile ecosystem. In a time where an app store rating of 4.5 overshadows a similar app with a 4.3, the margins are small and the stakes are incredibly high.

3-tubik-2-ux-pizza-animated

Above: Experience is everything. Another great example from Tubik Studio.

Good bots and apps are like peanut butter and chocolate

Apps and bots are better together. Let’s go back to the false choice of bots or apps: rushing either bad apps or pointless bots to market is bad for the customer.

Bot-makers are dangerously repeating the same mistakes that app-makers have already made and moved on from.

There are already thousands of bots that are completely useless. Just because something can be made doesn’t mean it should be. When the Google Play Store touts that it has passed 2.4 million apps or when Facebook says there's already more than 30,000 bots in Messenger, these are simply the wrong bragging points.

The world doesn’t need another flashlight app, and it certainly doesn’t need another celebrity chat bot. It’s not too late to save bots from a total UX crisis.

Bot and app creators must work more closely together so that history does not repeat itself. As more and more technologies are introduced, we must start thinking more holistically about a single and unified brand experience for the user. That will help determine what thing to build for what purpose, and when to integrate, before the bot stores of the future (as with the app stores of the past few years) are overrun with junk.

Bots and apps both have the potential to be engagement tools for the same user, and should not be viewed as competing but rather complementary technologies. There is a harmonious space for both killer apps and useful bots on each of our devices. Going forward these two technologies can and must work side by side, filling in gaps in each other's experience.

It’s not enough that we build products that function, that are understandable and usable, we also need to build products that bring joy and excitement, pleasure and fun, and yes, beauty to people’s lives.

Don Norman

Brands and enterprises need to embrace quality UX

The demand for mobile apps for the enterprise has increased for years and is about to skyrocket. Custom apps in large corporations are used by tens of thousands of employees and partners daily, and proper UX in this space is more important than ever.

Enterprise users now have the same expectations for their enterprise apps as they have for their consumer apps regarding quality and overall experience. These types of apps are largely ignored when measuring app store traffic and engagement.

Despite today’s false choice between bots and apps, brands must stay in charge of their own destiny to engage users in a cohesive, seamless experience.

4-air-asia-ux-animated

Above: Air Asia Travel app by Johny vino.

The world desperately wants better apps and better tools to make them. We are entering an exciting era where a clear focus on mobile engagement through experience is essential. To get there, we need an increased focus on non-trivial details that will be invisible to most, but that delight us all. Finally, there is a happy place for both high-quality bots and killer apps. As Brian Solis said in his book X: The Experience when Business Meets Design, “The future is in experiences.”

See you in the trenches, and may the best UX win.

Google graduates ‘Show fewer ads’ feature out of AdSense Labs

Posted: 13 Jan 2017 03:56 PM PST

An AdSense ad on WikiHow.

Google today announced an update to its AdSense service for showing ads on websites: The “Show fewer ads” feature, which lowers the number of ads on a given website, is no longer tucked away in the “AdSense Labs” tab that’s accessible from the “Optimizations” tab. Now it’s visible to all publishers, under the “My ads” tab. And now the feature goes by a new name, “Ad balance.”

This marks the first time that Google is moving a feature out of AdSense Labs since it launched in June.

Cutting down on the number of ads on a given website might seem counter-intuitive, because, you know, ads generate revenue, for both publishers and Google. But it’s more complex than that. As Google software engineers Spandana Raj Babbula, Rikard Lundmark, and Dongcai Shen put it in a blog post:

By only showing your best-performing ads, you may see a minimal drop in your earnings. However, these changes may result in an overall earnings increase, since an improvement of the user experience often leads to users staying longer on your site and engaging with more of your content.

The feature lets customers figure out how changes in the number of ads will impact revenue, they wrote.

Ads still bring in the majority of revenue and profit at Google, and also its parent company, Alphabet. Presumably, Google has given much thought to the upside of allowing people to emphasize quality over quantity when it comes to web advertising. But then again, last year Google started showing as many as four paid ads at the top of search results for some queries.

AdSense customers who enabled “Show fewer ads” now have “Ad balance” turned on, Babbula, Lundmark, and Shen wrote.

Can social dueling game 1-2 Switch be the Nintendo Switch’s Wii Sports?

Posted: 13 Jan 2017 03:01 PM PST

1-2 Switch is a social dueling game for the Nintendo Switch.

The more I see of 1-2 Switch, the more it reminds me of Nintendo’s hugely successful Wii Sports game for the Nintendo Wii. It’s a game that will get players off the couch and engaged with each other. But it remains to be seen if it will have the magic of Wii Sports.

1-2 Switch is a social dueling game that takes advantage of the unique sensors in the Nintendo Switch game console, which goes on sale worldwide for $300 on March 3. Nintendo demonstrated the game on its Nintendo Treehouse Live broadcast.

1-2 Switch is a social dueling game for the Nintendo Switch.

Above: 1-2 Switch is a social dueling game for the Nintendo Switch.

Image Credit: Nintendo

You could argue that it’s more like Nintendoland (which was included in the Wii U) with a wider variety of games, and it might not be as fun as Wii Sports.

But this collection of mini games for the Nintendo Switch is an attempt to get people off the couch and engaged with each other in a social duel. As such, it has the potential to become a party game that gets people talking about the Switch, which is important for reaching the mass market.

Ping pong in 1-2 Switch.

Above: Ping pong in 1-2 Switch.

Image Credit: Nintendo

Wii Sports was able to bring a lot of non-gamers into gaming because it also made people laugh and want to join in the fun, with activities like swinging a baseball bat or bowling by using the physical motion of rolling a ball with your arm.

Nintendo is trying to recapture some of that magic with the controllers for the Nintendo Switch. Those games used the accelerometer and gyro in the Wii controller. The Switch’s Joy-Con controller also has those sensors, as well as an infrared camera that can capture images within a short range.

Milking the cow in 1-2 Switch.

Above: Milking the cow in 1-2 Switch.

Image Credit: Nintendo

1-2 Switch has mini games such as a gunslinger dueling game. Instead of facing the TV, you face another person holding a mini Joy-Con controller. You look them in the eye and wait for the signal to draw your weapon. You hold the Joy-Con at your side. Then you bring it up fast and pull the trigger. If you are the first one to draw, and if you have raised your gun to the right elevation, then you win the duel.

At the end of the duel, you wait for the TV images to show you who won and who lost, and how many seconds it took for each person to draw, down to the 1/100th of a second. That seems like it’s pretty accurate motion capture.

You can also engage in other kinds of duels. In a ping pong game, you have to get the timing of your swing just right to send the ball back to the other side. A cow milking minigame has you pulling down on the Joy-Con to simulate pulling on a cow’s udder. Whoever milks the most milk from the cow wins.

1-2 Switch eating contest

Above: 1-2 Switch eating contest

Image Credit: Nintendo

And then you can fight with samurai swords fighting game or engage in an eating contest. In the eating contest, you point the controller with the infrared camera at your mouth. Then you perform eating motions as fast as you can to win the eating contest.

The time is now to appoint an AI czar

Posted: 13 Jan 2017 02:10 PM PST

Appoint one now.

Just because the constant acceleration of technology advancement has become cliché doesn’t mean you’re prepared.

You may think that’s OK because everyone is in the same boat, right? Wrong. Some big companies are already way ahead. And the gap between you and the leaders is getting bigger every day. Moor Insights and Strategy analyst Karl Freund put it most succinctly in a Forbes post last week: “While the big social media and internet commerce companies now think of Machine Learning as an essential foundational tool, most enterprises still have no clue where to begin in their quest to get on board and use AI.”

Here’s a tiny sample of what you should have read last week.

“Personal assistants and intelligent agents” was the most searched marketing term on Bing in 2016, and “artificial intelligence” itself was No. 4. So it’s on everybody’s mind; expect it to grow faster still.

At CES in Las Vegas, Marla Skiko talked about marketers’ need to re-understand just what a consumer is — a person or a machine, and how to approach each differently — in a post where she wrote, “While AI is still in the early stages and can’t yet fully divine intent, technological advances and machine learning that are evolving daily will lead to blurrier lines between human and device.” Keywords: evolving daily.

Here's what Cindy Gustafson had to say about the evolving power of AI that will understand and respond to customer emotion: “When we talk about machine learning and automation, usually the conversation revolves around function. … But it’s important to consider the emotional perspective as well. … Synced up to your calendar, your device knows that you’ve got a wedding to attend in two weeks. You may not need a new dress, but it’d make you happy to buy one. And if there’s a special sale or promo happening at a nearby clothing shop or department store, how perfect would that be if your device suggested it?" Echoes of Frederik Pohl’s “Einstein” and “Sigfrid von Shrink” from my “Chatbots Rising” post.

And then there was the announcement of Mattel’s Aristotle, a kind of Amazon Echo for kids and their parents, powered by Microsoft’s Cortana technology.

If this is happening faster than you expected — well, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. There are two core reasons for this. First, new technology often stands on the shoulders of existing tech, and in this case much of the infrastructure necessary to exploit AI and machine learning is the same mobile-social-cloud and big-data stuff that was built over the past two decades. So there’s no waiting for an infrastructure build-out, as in the early days of ecommerce (which, don’t forget, emerged during the dial-up era).

Second is that the big guns behind all that mobile-social-cloud and big-data technology — Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, Facebook, Microsoft (now new-and-improved with LinkedIn!) — have been engaged in an AI arms race for way longer than they let on. What they’re offering now are platforms anyone can use to lever themselves into the AI game, and many are doing exactly that — from Mattel to Ford.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, “AI is like oxygen” for LinkedIn, whose vice president of engineering and “head of AI and relevance,” Deepak Agarwal, says, “We use machine learning for almost all our products.” He says that when they recently revamped job-matching algorithms with machine learning, performance rose 50 percent.

So, uh, what have you done in AI lately?

If you’re an agency of any size or a marketer in anything bigger than a small business, it’s past time to get serious about AI. To catch up, appoint an AI czar who, as Freund writes in the Forbes post cited above, “is accountable for identifying and realizing the low-hanging fruit where AI can quickly provide a high ROI.”

Yes, you’ll make mistakes. Some will be embarrassing. Accept those mistakes as the price of survival, because as 2017 opens, AI and machine learning have emerged as existential issues not only for marketers but for the clients and businesses they serve.

And remember F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” In other words, accepting that you’ll make mistakes does not mean that you ever cease striving for the perfectly delightful experiences customers want and demand.

For my final exhortation to act on this AI czar idea, let’s turn to the oft-quoted couplet attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it; Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”

This article appeared originally at MediaPost.com.

Salesforce’s Quip acquires Unity&Variety, a startup founded by Facebook veterans

Posted: 13 Jan 2017 02:05 PM PST

Quip

Salesforce has acquired the software company Unity&Variety in a move designed to improve the design chops at its productivity app service Quip. Financial terms of the deal were not immediately disclosed.

Unity&Variety was founded in 2015 by Facebook veterans Drew Hamlin, Joey Flynn, and Andy Chung and had released at least one app publicly: Pinchworm. The game received high ratings in the App Store, but since then, the company claimed that it was “cranking on some new productivity tools.”

When reached for comment, Quip CEO Bret Taylor declined to cite what was next on the product roadmap, but did say that his time working with Hamlin and Flynn at Facebook and their creative thinking greatly impacted his decision to acquire their company. Unity&Variety’s design resume appears to be impressive in that the team was responsible for the experiences with Facebook Home, News Feed, and a bevy of other features on the social network.

It’s this thinking and design possibilities that Taylor thinks will be beneficial to Quip. If you’ve never used Quip, it’s a single app where you can produce documents and spreadsheets a la Google Docs and Sheets, but with a minimalist style. The main part of the service is a News Feed-like offering, which will likely get a boost through the Unity&Variety team.

“They are some of the most amazing product designers I worked with,” Taylor remarked. He went on to say that the team will work on Quip and bring their design expertise in-house to work on not only the core product, but also additional offerings. “I hope this brings a new design sensibility to our product.”

In a way, today’s acquisition is designed to shake up the design process at Quip. Taylor admitted that he hopes Hamlin and Flynn will reinvigorate the creative passions in the company to not only impact the tools, but his company, resulting in a transformed Quip experience. While Taylor declined to share details about the latest developments at Quip, he revealed that some updates were going to be announced next month.

This is the first announced acquisition by Salesforce this year, continuing a spree started last year that included the purchase of Taylor’s company in August.

 

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