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“Moss’s PSVR fairy-tale adventure launches February 27” plus 11 more VentureBeat

“Moss’s PSVR fairy-tale adventure launches February 27” plus 11 more VentureBeat


Moss’s PSVR fairy-tale adventure launches February 27

Posted: 19 Feb 2018 11:15 AM PST


Polyarc is ready to put its virtual reality storybook to print. The studio originally intended to release its adorable VR adventure game Moss during the holidays last year, but pushed the launch date back. It’s now debuting on February 27 as a PlayStation VR exclusive.

The studio first announced Moss at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) last summer, introducing its mouse heroine Quill. As the Reader, players guide Quill through puzzles and battles, fighting mechanical beetles and changing around the environment to help her get to the next area. The game features clever design, unfolding before the player like a miniature fairy-tale diorama.

Moss is Polyarc’s first game, though much of the team has industry experience from working at Bungie. During the delay, the studio worked mainly on keeping the controls intuitive and maintaining an emotional connection between the player and Quill. To do the former, it developed a kind of “aim assist” for interacting with the environment, similar to the feature found in first-person shooters. The emotional bond with Quill relied mainly on the story, but also how Quill interacts with the player. She makes eye contact and responds to the player, and the player can pick her up and feel her heartbeat.

Moss is the second major PSVR exclusive this year, after Supermassive Games’s horror title The Inpatient launched in January.

After Twitter kills Mac app, third-party developers drop prices

Posted: 19 Feb 2018 10:20 AM PST


Twitter’s unexpected discontinuation of its free eponymous Mac client late last Friday hasn’t gone over well with Mac users, even though it rated an abysmal 1.7 out of 5 stars before it disappeared from the Mac App Store. Amid concerns that Twitter’s other long-neglected Mac app, TweetDeck, might soon disappear, third-party clients are adjusting their prices, hoping to win over disgruntled Mac Twitter users.

Twitter’s Apple platform apps have been criticized for years, despite starting strong as upgraded versions of Loren Brichter’s popular Tweetie apps for iOS and Mac. Brichter left Twitter less than a year after Tweetie’s January 2011 acquisition, and Twitter subsequently struggled to maintain the apps, stumbling on everything from iPad layouts to Retina displays to 240-character tweets. Once the official Twitter app introduced timeline-disrupting ads, some users left for paid third-party clients, but Twitter’s free clients remained popular because of their price.

Unlike Twitter’s official Mac client, Tapbots’ Tweetbot (above) has been steadily improved ever since its 2012 release, evolving to embrace almost all of Twitter’s new features — except ads — while offering compact windows for viewing and composing tweets. From a layout standpoint, Tweetbot is the easiest transition from Twitter for Mac, given its similar use of vertically arranged tabs. It has dropped from its originally steep $20 price point to $10.

By comparison, The Iconfactory’s Twitterrific (above) has had a spottier history on the Mac, dropping off the map for years until a Kickstarter campaign brought it back in October 2017. Current version 5 has a horizontal tab layout that’s somewhat like Twitter’s desktop web view, but with superior font and theme customization, all inside Tweetbot-like compact windows. Normally $20, it’s currently available for $8, undercutting Tweetbot’s price.

Twitter’s current alternatives for Mac users aren’t great. Its discontinuation notice for the Mac app pointed users to the Twitter web site “for the full Twitter experience on Mac,” which many users will find challenging due to the tremendous amount of real estate required by Twitter’s web pages.

Additionally, Twitter’s TweetDeck (above) remains available for free download from the Mac App Store, though it has a mediocre 2.5/5-star rating and hasn’t been updated since July 2015. Power users with multiple Twitter accounts still appreciate TweetDeck’s unique multi-pane layout and post scheduling features, which made it a standout even before Twitter acquired it in May 2011. That said, if you’re considering becoming a TweetDeck user, note that Twitter pulled its older brother from the App Store without any advance warning, and is discontinuing support in less than 30 days, which might well happen with TweetDeck as well.

A Japanese-developed alternative to TweetDeck called Janetter (above) comes in free and Pro versions, the latter currently $5 after debuting at $7. The free version supports up to three simultaneous Twitter accounts, versus seven in the Pro version. Note that neither has been updated by developer Jane, Inc. since May 2017.

As for what’s next, it’s unclear whether Twitter is planning an improved universal client or just hoping to push more users to its web pages. The company has said only that it’s “focusing our efforts on a great Twitter experience that’s consistent across platforms.” Twitter for iPhones and iPads remains available for free download from the iOS App Store.

Twitch Prime rolls out new indie game program

Posted: 19 Feb 2018 10:13 AM PST


Twitch is launching its new Indie Amplifier program to signal boost indie games on its livestreaming platform. Twitch Prime members will be able to pick an indie game and get it for free. The platform has also partnered with the broadcasting company N3rdfusion to host a talk show interviewing the chosen game’s developers, and selected streamers will be broadcasting gameplay from that title for a month.

Prime members can choose from a list of indie titles, and voting closes on March 11. They’ll then receive a free copy of the top pick on March 15, which is when the talk show and streaming will begin. Twitch broadcasters SimCopter1 and DizzyKitten will be showcasing gameplay from the selected title, while N3rdfusion streamers Giantwaffle and Bacon_Donut will interview the developers on the Twitch Prime channel. The developers of the top three games will also share a $175,000 prize pool.

The initiative is pushing for more screen time for indie games. Most of the top viewed titles on Twitch are usually blockbusters: League of Legends, Fortnite: Battle Royale, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The indies that have snuck on there, like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, are massive successes.

The titles that Twitch Prime members will be choosing from are:

  1. Tales from Candlekeep: Tomb of Annihilation (BKOM Studios)
  2. Tumblestone (The Quantum Astrophysicists Guild)
  3. Treadnauts (Topstitch Games)
  4. High Hell (Terri Vellmann)
  5. I, Hope (Arconyx Studios)
  6. Shadow Tactics (Mimimi Productions)
  7. Kingsway (Andrew Morrish)
  8. SteamWorld Dig 2 (Image & Form)

SK Telecom will demo 5G social VR, self-driving cars, and hologram AI at MWC 2018

Posted: 19 Feb 2018 08:05 AM PST


South Korea’s largest mobile provider — SK Telecom — announced today that it will debut “social virtual reality” and multiple 5G demonstrations, including “hologram AI,” at its 2018 Mobile World Congress booth next week. The demos will run from February 26 to March 1 in Barcelona, Spain.

Illustrating the gulf between 4G and 5G speeds, SK Telecom will show how virtual reality improvements will evolve its existing Oksusu service, which lets Korean users chat while watching videos together. Oksusu Social VR will use Samsung’s Gear VR and Google Daydream to display 80-inch-equivalent 1080p TV screens alongside virtual avatars of users and their friends and will include body movements and facial expressions. Users of the 4G VR service will be able to watch and comment upon movies, League of Legends games, concerts, and sports as if they’re watching the content together on a TV.

By comparison, the 5G version of Oksusu Social VR will include 8K videos with 16 times as much detail as the 4G version, as well as the ability to be instantaneously streamed live from far-off cities, making users feel as if they’re actually visiting foreign destinations and attending live concerts. SK Telecom explains that this sort of real-time VR is not feasible over 4G because of the limited speeds of existing networks, but will be possible over 5G.

The carrier will also show off real-time 5G data streaming, 4G and 5G simultaneous streaming over separate radio frequency bands, and autonomous 5G car tests revealed earlier this month — 3D HD mapping, cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) communications, and a 5G self-driving car.

Intriguingly, SK Telecom also promises Mobile World Congress visitors “a glimpse of the future of AI” in the form of “hologram AI.” Without providing specifics, the carrier claims that hologram AI offers the opportunity for “mankind to have a completely new mobile communications experience.”

Last April, rival carrier KT and Verizon conducted the world’s “first 5G live hologram call,” wherein a Verizon employee appeared as a hologram on a monitor at KT headquarters. KT said at the time that commercial 5G networks will enable life-sized real-time holographic meetings between people, and SK Telecom has similarly suggested that holograms will be a major new benefit of 5G.

Newzoo: Nintendo could reap billions from subscriptions, digital sales, and mobile

Posted: 19 Feb 2018 08:00 AM PST


Nintendo had spectacular growth in 2017, with revenues growing 172 percent to $9.2 billion from a year earlier. That’s good enough to push the Japanese publisher and hardware maker into the top 10 gaming companies by software revenues after a three-year absence from the list, according to market researcher Newzoo.

But Newzoo estimates that Nintendo has a $2.5 billion opportunity to grow revenue via subscriptions, in-game console transactions, and mobile games. Nintendo is pursuing those options, but the percentage of revenue it gets from them is much smaller than its peers.

The Nintendo Switch was the main driver of success in 2017, as hardware accounted for 60 percent of Nintendo’s revenues. By contrast, Sony generated 34 percent of its sales from hardware while Microsoft generated just 26 percent of its revenue from hardware.

“Most remarkable is that Nintendo generated these revenues with hardware and full-game sales only,” Newzoo said in a press release. “The contribution to revenue from its smart-device business (responsible for Nintendo’s mobile games) is negligible at 3 percent of all gaming revenues while subscription revenues and revenue from in-game transactions are almost non-existent.”

Nintendo has never had much luck in the online games business. In this sense, Nintendo remains a traditional gaming company in an industry that is rapidly changing, not in the least by adopting the games-as-a-service model, Newzoo said.

Subscription revenues have been very strong for Sony and Microsoft while in-game transactions are the main growth driver for dominant Western publishers, such as Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, Take Two Interactive, and Ubisoft. In Japan, Konami, Bandai Namco, and Square Enix are shifting focus to mobile games, which are hugely popular (and profitable) in their domestic market.

Above: Nintendo makes a higher percentage of revenue from hardware than its peers.

Image Credit: Newzoo

The share of Nintendo revenues from digital products and channels is only 16 percent, far lower than most of its peers. The industry average share of digital revenues for console game software in 2017 was 66 percent, up from 58 percent in 2016. The future for Nintendo surely is also digital, and therefore, there are three obvious areas to focus on, Newzoo said.

Now that the Switch has successfully launched, 2018 could well be the year that Nintendo succeeds in making serious progress in the untapped areas of subscriptions, in-game revenue, and mobile, Newzoo said.

The upcoming Mario Kart Tour for mobile devices and announced launch of Nintendo Switch Online in September 2018, make it clear that Nintendo wants to grow this business.

In 2017, Nintendo's hardware revenues grew by 266 percent from a year earlier, hitting $5.5 billion, and 48 percent of these revenues were earned in Q4 2017. This is more than both Microsoft and Sony, who earned $2.billion and $5.1 billion respectively, with hardware.

Nintendo has a higher ratio of hardware revenue in part because of the stage of the hardware cycle: Nintendo launched a new console in 2017 while Sony and Microsoft launched upgraded versions of their current generations. And the Switch is hot.

Software sales typically follow hardware sales in the early phase of the console cycle. Nintendo's software revenues in 2018 will therefore likely grow strongly as console owners buy additional games for their brand-new consoles.

This year, the Switch also has a strong lineup of new game releases — and not just games published by Nintendo itself. The Switch's success has caught the attention of third-party publishers, who are eager to port their games to the console, Newzoo said. Finally, if Nintendo were to release the confirmed Pokémon game for Switch in 2018, it would be the first core Pokémon game ever released on Nintendo’s TV console with a very high chance of becoming another blockbuster hit.

In mobile, both Super Mario Run and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp were among the most downloaded games in Q4 2017, but revenues from both titles were low. In its latest reports, Nintendo confirmed that player retention — and thus monetization — were the key challenge for its mobile games.

Above: Nintendo’s percentage of revenue from hardware has grown.

Image Credit: Newzoo

It is clear that Nintendo is still figuring out its mobile gaming strategy. For example, Super Mario Run was not intended to receive any updates, yet updates have come out, and downloads spiked when that happened. Regularly updating games and adding content is key to player retention for highly successful mobile franchises, such as Candy Crush and Clash of Clans.

Nintendo has also been hesitant to embrace free-to-play games with in-game transactions, the dominant business model for most successful mobile games. However, the fact that Nintendo's least-marketed game on mobile, Fire Emblem: Heroes, was responsible for 80 percent of all Nintendo gaming revenues using in-game transactions will surely not be lost on Nintendo executives, Newzoo said.

Nintendo is the last of the three console companies to offer paid online gaming. Online multiplayer is currently free for a selection of Switch games, but that is expected to change once Nintendo Switch Online launches in September 2018. The PlayStation Store and PlayStation Plus as well as the Microsoft Store and Xbox Live are hugely profitable for both Sony and Microsoft.

Similar to its mobile strategy, however, Nintendo seems reluctant to fully embrace the subscription model. The announced price for its online gaming service is far lower than its competitors. Nintendo will charge $20 for a full year, compared to $50–$60 per year for both Sony and Microsoft.

The key challenge for Nintendo is that successfully moving from a traditional approach to development and marketing to running games as a service will require organizational change. That is exactly why it took traditional publishers like EA and Activision years to catch up with the new business model and marketing tactics pioneered by more nimble mobile and PC gaming companies.

Hashtag creator launches Molly to make a personal bot from your social media footprint

Posted: 19 Feb 2018 08:00 AM PST


Hashtag creator Chris Messina today launched Molly, a service that allows people to ask questions about you and glean information from your various social media profiles.

Molly skims your posts on platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Medium to learn about you and formulate natural language questions. When someone asks something Molly can’t answer, that question is sent to the Molly app for you to answer yourself.

In addition to following your social media activity, the Molly app asks you to answer questions about yourself, like “Do you own an Amazon Echo?” or “Do you have a sweet tooth or a savory tooth?”

Above: Molly app screenshot

The more you swipe through the questions, the more Molly learns about you, and the more you learn about how your friends have answered similar questions.

Early Molly adopters include cofounders of companies like Imgur, Stripe, Product Hunt, and others, as well as a number of well-known startup investors and tech journalists. Profile requests can be made at molly.com.

In addition to launching Molly, the company today announced that it will participate in the Winter 2018 batch at the Y Combinator startup accelerator.

While there is no shortage of social media platforms to choose from, this service was created to aggregate knowledge that’s currently spread across your many social media accounts and create a unified profile.

"Essentially, the premise behind the whole concept is to try to make social media work for us," Messina told VentureBeat in a phone interview.

Everyone began to silo their online creative expression because of restrictions placed on them by platforms that only allow photos, like Instagram, or 280 characters, like Twitter. Molly wants to put all those pieces back together again with a more human-centric approach.

Between things like an inability to share a photo between Twitter and Instagram and the angst surrounding mega platforms like Facebook, some users have started to feel that social media platforms are antagonistic, Messina said.

"Having worked at Google Plus and seen how big companies tend to struggle with social, it seems like going out and building a startup in this space was the best way to try to get ahead and take advantage of this shift in consumer behavior. To try to build a social platform that understands people, how they ask questions, and the types of answers they're looking for allows us to build up ideally a very useful and valuable dataset that we make available to our users to give them something back for all the content they've contributed to the social web over time."

In addition to his history as an early Twitter user, Messina has worked with developer communities at companies like Uber and played roles in the bot and AI communities for some time now. He has acted as moderator for Bots Facebook group and is an original organizer of Botness, a gathering of developers, investors, and platforms from companies like Microsoft, Slack, Twilio, and Facebook.

In 2015 and 2016, Messina was one of the most recognizable names in the field of conversational commerce, the opening of third-party platforms on chat apps, and the emergence of Alexa and other AI assistants that Messina calls "god bots."

To read more of Messina's thoughts on the state of conversational AI today, see this recently published VentureBeat interview.

Molly is a continuation of Olabot, a startup created by Esther Crawford and Ethan Sutin. In 2016, Olabot took part in Botcamp, an accelerator created by Betaworks for the makers of conversational experiences. Olabot’s early projects included the invention of personal bots for people like Redfoo from LMFAO, as well as Messina and Crawford.

Tangelo Games is targeting social casino games at Spanish-speaking players

Posted: 19 Feb 2018 06:15 AM PST


We wrote about Vicenç Martí back in 2012 when he won the Who’s Got Game competition at our GamesBeat 2012 conference. He was running Akamon, a company that made social casino games for Latin America and Southern Europe. He sold his company two years ago and then merged it with an Israeli social casino game maker.

Now, Martí serves as the head of Tangelo Games, which targets the Spanish-speaking audience for social casino games. It’s a relatively small niche, with just more than a million monthly players at the moment. Social casino games have become a $4 billion industry, though the market is maturing, and growth isn’t as high as it used to be, according to analyst firm Eilers & Krejcik. That has prompted consolidation, and the sector had more than $4 billion in mergers and acquisitions in 2017 alone, Eilers & Krejcik said.

I caught up with Martí to discuss being a small fish in a big pond. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

Above: Vicenç Martí, CEO of Tangelo Games.

Image Credit: Tangelo Games

GamesBeat: Where are you now?

Vicenç Martí: I'm in Vegas. I have a series of meetings here with more traditional gaming companies. They've become very interested in social casino, and we have relationships with several of them. It's become very frequent for us to come to Vegas and explore ways of collaborating with land-based casino companies. Hopefully, in the next few weeks, I'll come up with something interesting.

Our studio is permanently based in Barcelona, though. There are 48 people working there. Our second studio is in Tel Aviv. That's where Diwip used to be. We have another 20 people working there. I'm the one that moves around and does the discussions with more established casino companies. We also have a corporate headquarters in Toronto because we're publicly traded.

GamesBeat: How did that part happen? Was it through a reverse merger?

Martí: Almost like that, yes. You may remember another social casino company called Diwip. Diwip was acquired by a Canadian public company before Akamon was. Then, when that Canadian company acquired Diwip, they understood how challenging social casino was becoming in English-speaking markets. They looked for another asset with which they could leverage their existing assets, and they ended up choosing to buy Akamon. This was two years ago in November 2015. Since then, Akamon and Diwip merged to become Tangelo Games, and I run both companies.

GamesBeat: What sort of games do you have out there now?

Martí: You can divide them into two different suites. There's a traditional social casino suite, targeted at U.S.-facing customers. This is the former Diwip. You can think of that as mostly slots for high-revenue players, very loyal cohorts. It's more difficult to grow because social casino in the U.S. has had trouble growing. The other set of games we have is the former Akamon, which is more dynamic. It's facing Latin America and southern Europe. It has many more monthly active users (MAU), and it's growing faster because the opportunity for social casino in Spanish-speaking countries continues to be very strong.

GamesBeat: What kind of overall number are you talking about?

Martí: I don't have our latest public statement, but we're around [$27 million to $28 million] in revenue. Our operating earnings before income taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) is very healthy, north of $8 million.

GamesBeat: What about users?

Martí: We're around [1.4 million to 1.5 million] MAU combined. But it's very skewed toward the Latin American and southern European players. Those grow much faster.

Above: Tangelo Games makes Spanish-language poker games.

Image Credit: Tangelo

GamesBeat: How are you able to subsist or survive on a smaller base than a lot of other social casino companies?

Martí: First, we're the most geographically diversified social casino company in the world. If you look at Eilers Research, it's become the de facto research tool for the industry. We've always been there. We've never lost our position in the top 20 web and Facebook casino companies. Right now, we're number nine in the world if you look at web plus Facebook.

Diversifying from a geographic perspective, it's true, gives you a new set of challenges that other companies don't have. For example, it's much more difficult to monetize at a high level with a Brazilian or Spanish or Italian player. But from a competition point of view and an acquisition-cost point of view, we have an advantage. We know the space, and we know the industry.

One of the things that I remember us discussing back in 2012, when you have to deal with low-return players, you really need to beef up your analytics. You need to understand who's going to be profitable against their acquisition cost. You don't have the luxury of $100-a-month whales. They just don't exist in southern Europe. You need to understand your cohort analysis very well. I think that has been a core competency at the company for a long time.

GamesBeat: Where have you been growing and adding new markets?

Martí: France is working very well for us. It's an overlooked country. It has high average revenue per paying user (ARPPU) and loyal customers. Most people don't pay attention to it, maybe because it's sitting next to an English-speaking country like the U.K. France has been a success story for us. In Latin America, what I call the eternal promise, which is Brazil, seems to be back on track now.

GamesBeat: What competition looks most similar to you? Is it the bigger companies, or are there smaller companies with a similar strategy?

Martí: There are some smaller ones like Playspace or Piggyback Studios in Brazil that have focused on the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking players, but they're much smaller than us. To be honest, I think we're in a middle that's both comfortable and uncomfortable. We're in the rankings. We have a decent size. You've seen our profitability and our revenues. But we're still far away from the very large players in the industry, the top four.

It's all about renewing our commitment to non-English speaking areas as a growth strategy. We'll be launching a new mobile suite for Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking players within the quarter. I also think — this is no secret to anyone in the industry, but the mergers and acquistion (M&A) dance isn't over yet. I see a lot of discussions around consolidating many players.

Above: A Spanish-language bingo game from Tangelo Games.

Image Credit: Tangelo Games

GamesBeat: Are you going to be for sale, or do you want to buy someone?

Martí: I'd love to answer that question more specifically, but to be honest, we've had discussions on both sides. Our margins are very attractive. We have a solid management team with a lot of experience in the industry. There have been no changes in our management team since 2012. We have a unique position in promising markets. It's true that we're not as big as others, so we could be interesting for a larger company, but also, we can be a catalyst or a driver of consolidation for smaller players.

GamesBeat: Are you doing some investing as well?

Martí: Yes, the company is definitely investing in new mobile platforms. We're also investing in a couple of new verticals, which we'll be announcing soon. We're looking at things that are adjacent to social casino but perhaps not exactly under that definition. That includes new platforms that might, in the future, be an ideal new territory for social casino. We might also be looking at some advertisers.

GamesBeat: What do you think about using brands in your games?

Martí: That's been a challenge for us. We have, right now, a standing agreement with the real-money gambling bingo company Zest, which now belongs to IGT. They have an interesting approach to video bingo, which is a very popular game in South America. We have a licensing and co-distribution agreement with them. But we haven't found a proper license like a celebrity or a football player to date. That doesn't mean we won't in the future.

GamesBeat: Is social casino still growing well?

Martí: Right. According to industry figures, it's growing between 6 and 9 percent. We're looking at our last few quarters, and they're very much on pace with the industry. It has become a much tougher industry compared to when it started. Without sounding bad, I think I can say that I was one of the first ones there when we founded the company back in 2011. Obviously, we're not doing the same things. But it's still a very healthy industry.

GamesBeat: Have some of the big companies had success with Spanish-language games? Most of them seem to translate into many languages.

Martí: They do but that's a key question. Translation is only one part of the recipe. You need to think about local affiliation, local distribution, local payment systems, and local customer service. I think the majority of the big companies put in a very small effort.

Above: Tangelo Games makes games for the web and Facebook.

Image Credit: Tangelo Games

GamesBeat: Are you looking at anything new as far as new kinds of systems out there, things like blockchain and cryptocurrency? Any of these alternative app stores that are becoming available?

Martí: We've been very attentive to the blockchain space. I have to have a relationship there. Within the framework of Tangelo, it's much more about launching the new mobile suite geared towards new markets. We're exploring new platforms like instant games that show a lot of promise. Eventually, at the end of Q2 or Q3, when we know what's going to happen with all of these corporate movements, we'll make a decision regarding any new development.

GamesBeat: It seems like it's taken you quite a while to get to mobile. Why is that?

Martí: We have mobile on the English side. We had separate apps on the Spanish side. What's taken us a long time is taking our full suite, Mundijuegos, which is the more popular app, to mobile. That's taken a while. The reason for that, as you probably know, South America specifically was not very mature in terms of payment systems, especially on Android, until very recently. Now, we believe this is a time that the continent is mature.

GamesBeat: Is there a strategy to help take market share while you're late to the mobile market there?

Martí: If you look at the absolute numbers on mobile social casino in Latin America, they're not very big. The first thing we need to do is make sure that the very large number of players we have in Mundijuegos on web and Facebook understand the new suite. Then, we need to do a decent job of promoting the brand in the local app stores. But I'm confident that we can get a large market share there because there aren't many competitors there that have done the whole cycle of localization. They've only translated, basically.

GamesBeat: Are you expecting to have to hire a lot more people in that process?

Martí: If some of the discussions we're having around acquisitions and integrations happen, yes. I also think that at some point, we'll renew our commitment to have a physical presence in Latin America.

GamesBeat: As far as what's going to affect or change the social casino market, what do you foresee?

Martí: The fact that the acquisition funnel for social casino almost exclusively started on Facebook and the fact that this has driven acquisition prices so high, especially in English-speaking markets — I think what will happen is that people will find alternative ways of serving the social casino player. Not necessarily going through the entire Facebook ad funnel to app installs and all the rest. It may be some of the precursors will be — how close can we get to offering a social casino experience to a player that's playing instant games?

GamesBeat: Are instant games going to be monetized through ads or some other way?

Martí: We're going to have to ask Facebook about that, as you know. Right now, ads are what we can count on. But I'm sure if they see the MAU and DAU growing exponentially, as they seem to be, I'm sure they'll give us opportunities to monetize that somehow.

Above: A character in a social casino game.

Image Credit: Tangelo Games

GamesBeat: As far as relations with land-based casinos, they expanded into the territory of social casino games, but then, some of them have divested. What do people think of that whole theory about the funnel into gambling?

Martí: You need to take those cases one by one. We've met with several of these companies, and I think that several of them are super happy with the social casino positions they've made. It's profitable on its own, and it's allowed them to have a digital presence and a digital team. Some of the others — let's not forget that some of them divested because they had complicated balance sheets where they needed a high multiple sale to help them become more healthy in their core business.

If you're talking about the land-based casino companies that made significant acquisitions in social casino, I haven't found a single one that says, "No, this business is not working, and that's why I'm selling." The people that sold did it because they needed the money to improve their balance sheets.

GamesBeat: Is it viewed as a single chain of customers or totally separate customers between real money gambling and social casino games?

Martí: I think there's a stat — I don't have the source right in front of me, but I believe it says that 50 percent of land-based casino customers in the U.S. have played at least one social casino app. So, in terms of being the same sort of customers, every demographic indication is that they're very similar. That would not be the case with the more hardcore online RNG casino customer, but that's someone different.

However, I think there are enormous benefits for land-based casino companies in owning a social casino asset because of the improvement it applies in customer relationship management (CRM) techniques and data analysis techniques. Social casino is an industry built on data. These companies benefit tremendously from having a social casino business unit within them.

GamesBeat: Does it make sense for you to get to know all the Spanish-speaking gambling companies, then?

Martí: I used to manage a large one myself [laughs]. I spent six years of my life as one of the managing directors at Cirsa, which is a $2.5 billion land-based casino company in Spain. The other large Spanish casino company is Codere, and I know everyone there as well. I speak to them frequently to see what synergies there could be with Tangelo.

GamesBeat: But you don't have any partnerships in place at the moment?

Martí: Not at the moment. Sometimes, it's tougher to reach a commercial agreement with people that you know compared to people that you don't know.

Auctus is bringing blockchain tech to the $36 trillion retirement plan market

Posted: 19 Feb 2018 06:00 AM PST


Retirement planning is not the sexiest topic in the world, but we all have to think about it at some point. And it is a significant business. Depending on which research firm you quote, we’re talking about a $36 trillion to $50 trillion global market.

The problem with retirement plans is that investments are primarily controlled by third parties with little to no transparency, and it is often unclear how you’ll benefit when it comes time to collect the payouts from your plan.

Today Auctus — a smart contract-powered retirement planning platform — announced that it is looking to change all that by bringing blockchain technology to the industry.

Auctus combines traditional and cryptocurrency assets, using smart contracts to eliminate intermediaries in the retirement planning process, thus reducing or even eradicating fees.

“After having entered personal data (such as age, wage, personal circumstances, etc.), as well as having chosen a risk profile based on the user’s investment experience, the user can make various decisions,” Actus CTO Daniel Duarte told me. “These include a choice of template portfolio versus individual portfolios. Template portfolios are standardized portfolios with similar risk metrics to traditional retirement plans and only a low amount of cryptocurrencies. Individual portfolios are very flexible and have higher risk. This is more suitable for experienced savers, or savers with cryptocurrency experience. Some cryptocurrency investors have never held traditional assets.”

By using distributed ledger technology, Auctus provides transparency across the entire investment process, which allows it to be owned and managed by its community. As it is built on Ethereum, financial products and services can be traded using its token.

On the one side, you’ll get access to financial experts who are paid in AUC tokens for their advice — if it turns out to be sound. When the expert provides portfolio suggestions and predictions, users pay only when those predictions are correct.

In that sense, the token is designed to incentivize and reward good performance and good behavior on the platform and give users greater peace of mind.

But how does Auctus guard against users (who may have little knowledge of financial matters) making the wrong long-term decisions?

“By creating an initial personal risk profile when the user registers, we classify users according to their experience,” Duarte said. “Certain features (such as high volatility portfolios) are disabled for inexperienced users. We have the analytic tools needed to recognize risk metrics in an easy to understand way, as well as robo-advisory to choose the appropriate portfolio. Once the portfolio is set up, our platform advises users to hold a passive long-term strategy with high diversification (including cryptocurrencies) and stay away from day-to-day emotions. We believe low fees, the power of compounding, diversification, and exposure to cryptocurrencies, with automated (passive) portfolio rebalancing is an ideal way to reach long-term targets.”

Retirement savers on the Auctus platform can use a combination of community advice and automation to build their own plan. The system provides robo-advisory solutions and a full analytics platform to help make effective decisions. The blockchain offers a permanent track record of portfolio allocation suggestions and robo-advisor predictions, and it lets users compare expected versus actual returns.

Bond portfolios, stocks, and cryptocurrency investments can be optimized through the platform, which means Auctus users can trade both cryptocurrency and any tokenized traditional assets from a single interface. In this way, Auctus allows retirement planners to virtually upload their existing retirement plan, such as their 401k/IRA plan.

So what’s next for Auctus?

“The next steps for Auctus are the release of the alpha version of the platform in February 2018 and the token generation event in March 2018,” Duarte said. “Later this year, the beta platform will be released. We are also working on establishing more strategic partnerships, which include traditional companies from the retirement industry, as well as other cryptocurrency projects.”

Auctus’ token sale (AUC tokens) starts on March 27, 2018 and is open to global users, excluding those in the U.S. and Singapore (residents, green card holders, and citizens) and residents of Gibraltar, Kuwait, South Korea, and the People’s Republic of China.

Alibaba and Tencent wage $10 billion battle for retailers

Posted: 19 Feb 2018 02:56 AM PST


(Reuters) — China’s tech giants Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings, worth a combined $1 trillion, are on a retail investment binge, forcing merchants to choose sides amid a battle for shoppers’ digital wallets.

Since the start of last year, the two companies have between them spent more than $10 billion on retail-focused deals, boosting their reach online and in brick-and-mortar stores.

The aggressive drive, supported by large cash piles and soaring share prices, is part of a battle to win over consumers and store operators to the two firms’ competing payment, logistics, social media and big data services.

The result: fewer and fewer retailers left without allegiance to either Tencent or Alibaba.

“All of the retailers in the brick-and-mortar world are very worried. They have to take a side,” said Jason Yu, Shanghai-based General Manager of market research firm Kantar Worldpanel.

“Otherwise they are afraid they will be eaten alive in the future.”

Alibaba is China’s top e-commerce player and its affiliate Ant Financial leads in mobile payments. Tencent’s strengths lie in social media, digital payment and gaming. It also has a major stake in the second-largest online retailer, JD.Com.

Tencent and JD.com have a growing range of allies, including French grocer Carrefour, which has announced a potential investment from Tencent, and U.S. retail giant Walmart, which has a stake in JD.com.

Tencent also bought a stake in Yonghui Superstores, apparel retailers Vipshop Holdings and Heilan Home, mall operator Wanda Commercial, and this month snagged a strategic tie-up with grocer Bubugao.

In the other corner is Alibaba, which has invested even more heavily in Suning.com, Intime Retail, Sanjiang Shopping Club, Lianhua Supermarket, Wanda Film and IKEA-like home improvement store Easyhome.

Key to the battle is China’s nearly $13 trillion mobile payment market, where Alibaba and Tencent are going head-to-head. Alibaba took a 33 percent stake in its payment affiliate Ant Financial this month ahead of an expected mega IPO.

Ant operates China’s top mobile payment platform, Alipay, while Tencent’s payment system on its hugely popular Weixin chat app is catching up fast. Both firms are also making a big push in cloud computing and data.

“I think for payment (the retail push) is a very critical part because it’s almost a gateway,” said Yu. Brick-and-mortar stores in China account for about 85 percent of retail sales, creating a huge lure for tech giants.

“That’s the pot that Alibaba, JD.com and even Tencent want a slice of,” Yu added. “That’s the majority of the business where they can actually look for future growth.”

In return, the physical stores get access to payment systems, logistics networks and other services — not to mention the reams of data on consumers that the tech firms control.

Alibaba invested $486 million this month in a retail-focused big data firm, saying the deal meant it could better “help brick-and-mortar retailers succeed in the digital age.”

Why AI has yet to solidify its role in health care

Posted: 18 Feb 2018 10:19 PM PST


If you're searching for an industry that's defined by innovation and technological progression, look no further than health care. Despite heavy regulations and high barriers to entry, this sector continues to see major breakthroughs on a regular basis.

So is the health care industry ready for a breakthrough when it comes to artificial intelligence? The building blocks are in place and opportunities certainly exist, but there are still significant challenges to overcome.

Rise of AI

"I have no doubt that sophisticated learning and AI algorithms will find a place in health care over the coming years," says Andy Schuetz, a senior data scientist at Sutter Health. "I don't know if it's two years or 10 — but it's coming."

Indeed, the innovation happening behind closed doors is astounding. However, technological, psychological, and regulatory limitations are holding the industry back.

As we consider the state of AI in health care (and when the next breakthrough will occur), it's helpful to identify some of the key opportunities and challenges in the present environment.

Significant technological limitations

The term "artificial intelligence" is often used to refer to a variety of machine learning methods. In order for AI to really make a significant difference, it's important that we reach artificial narrow intelligence (ANI).

ANI does more than complete basic tasks, it can actually defeat humans in fairly complex scenarios. IBM Watson’s Jeopardy victory is a great example of this. When researchers can realistically introduce ANI into health care, the pieces will start to fall into place.

Convenience and savings will drive innovation

For AI to truly transform health care, innovation needs to be centered on two key factors: cost and convenience. Both doctors and patients want to see costs go down and convenience go up. Technologists and companies that can provide both will thrive.

iCliniq is a good example of a company that's using AI to lower costs and increase convenience in the health care space. Labeled a "virtual hospital," iCliniq gives users access to doctors, medical advice, and second opinions from licensed health care professionals all over the world. It uses AI to help doctors answer patients’ queries faster, which brings down the cost of consultations and makes health care more affordable and readily available.

As more entrepreneurs and tech companies focus on cost and convenience, we'll see greater acceptance in the marketplace. In turn, this will open new doors and increase pressure on those in leadership positions to make room for AI.

Money isn't the real problem

While there are certainly smaller companies and less-connected innovators who are having trouble funding their ideas, a lack of money isn’t AI’s biggest problem. Tech giants like IBM, Alphabet, Philips, and a variety of pharmaceutical companies are pouring billions of dollars into startups and products. According to estimates from Frost & Sullivan, the market for AI in health care and life sciences is expected to grow by 40 percent per year to reach $6.6 billion by 2021.

Early applications emphasize diagnoses

AI can go in dozens of different directions, but when you look at the present landscape, a few trends stand out.

"To date, the sweet spot in health care AI has been pairing algorithms with structured exercises in reading patient data and medical images to train machines to detect abnormalities. This training is called 'deep learning’," health care consultant Brian Scogland explains. "In the same way, algorithms are being used to sift through vast amounts of medical literature to inform treatment decisions where it would be too onerous a task to have a human read through the same journals."

MedyMatch is a great example of a company that's finding success in this space. The company’s goal is to "[Bring] accuracy to physicians and capacity to health care to prevent chronic conditions and improve patient outcomes with the right treatment at the right time."

It does this by creating AI-driven diagnostic tools that leverage 3D imaging, patient-specific data, and machine learning to deliver precise advice that medical teams can use to improve care.

A future in which AI and health care work together to provide exceptional, reliable, and cost-effective care isn't far off. Competition in this space is heated as companies race to see who can deliver the most accurate and consistent results first. As soon as the industry removes some of the major challenges and roadblocks, growth will quickly follow.

Larry Alton is a contributing writer at VentureBeat covering artificial intelligence.

Dreamscape’s Alien Zoo VR experience embraces the human desire to explore and learn

Posted: 18 Feb 2018 10:19 PM PST


When I arrive at the upscale Westfield Century City mall in Los Angeles, I only know the broad background of Dreamscape Immersive. It is a startup funded partly by Steven Spielberg and partly by AMC, with plans to open up VR centers in theaters and other locations around the world. I also know they are using full-body tracking tech developed in Switzerland for an increased sense of immersion.

I've been impressed by similar experiences from The VOID with Ghostbusters and Star Wars, so Dreamscape has some high standards to meet. And at $20 per ticket, they are faced with the same questions as The VOID. Can they draw enough people at that price to make a business out of VR attractions? Is a 10-20 minute VR experience enhanced with environmental effects good enough to keep people coming?

I don't know those answers. But with 14 showings per day and six people per showing each paying $20, Alien Zoo is now sold out through March 2. The company will add five more days to the calendar soon so there's still a chance to get tickets as of this writing.

When I leave the Alien Zoo after about 20 minutes, I find myself in a different mindset as compared with Star Wars or Ghostbusters.

Hands-on with Alien Zoo

The VOID's experiences invite you to fight.

With Ghostbusters and Star Wars, you're either fighting ghosts or you're fighting stormtroopers. Those are certainly engaging foes, but The VOID's locations around the world currently are inviting people to interact with characters made famous in movies by fighting them in a way that feels a lot like a shooter video game. This invites comparisons to those other forms of entertainment.

Star Wars Battlefront II is $40 to $60 and offers hours upon hours of entertainment. A ticket to the movies can be upward of $20 in some places for two solid hours of entertainment. If you're making those mental comparisons, a $20 ticket to a 15-minute experience in VR doesn't look great.

Alien Zoo defies those comparisons though.

Dreamscape's initial experience is an original story, so it doesn't overtly stack up against an existing movie or game. And the way Alien Zoo's creators invite you to interact with its world unlocks a different combination of feelings.

It starts the moment I step through the door.

Dreamscape Immersive is set up next to the Tesla store. Only the words "Alien Zoo" on the side really give an indication what's inside.

The waiting room is covered with artifacts and information about various alien creatures. I find myself instantly drawn into this world. The realization sets in pretty quickly. A zoo. An alien zoo. I'm going to visit an actual alien zoo.

My mind fills with visions of collecting Pokemon when I see the cards on the walls. Each card is a colorful drawing of a strange creature accompanied by text describing it. They look like something you might find at a National Park describing the wildlife. I'm directed to one of the tablets to sign a waiver and select my avatar.

I shuffle into a loading area that looks vaguely familiar — six backpack PCs with Oculus Rifts attached. I spotted Oculus Rifts being used by The VOID too, but those are buried inside a big helmet meant to keep you safe if you should bump into a wall. The Rifts used by Dreamscape are more exposed. Like The VOID, the backpacks are conveniently hanging so I step up and put my arms through the straps. Two lightweight sensors are attached to the top of my feet and two gloves put another pair of sensors on the back of my hands.

The headset fogs up a little when I first put it on but that goes away quickly. They ask myself and the five others to step forward. Almost as if a switch is flipped, what was mostly an empty virtual space is suddenly occupied by six people looking at themselves in the mirror for the first time. I'm pretty impressed by the quality of the body tracking, lifting up my feet from the floor and crossing my arms. As a demonstration, they have us shake hands with one another and do high fives. It works great. There's no finger tracking, but the overall sense of body ownership is incredible.

Then we walk a few steps into a loading area and start to learn about the Alien Zoo. Spoilers ahead.

We are on a large circular hovering platform with a solid railing on which to hold. I look down at the rail as my hand grips it. The avatar's hand isn't in the exact same position as mine, but it isn't so inaccurate as to be uncomfortable. Music is produced by Hans Zimmer, and as the hovercraft starts to rumble to life (the ground is shaking) we move out into the zoo. I completely forget the outside world.

A pair of moments in the Jurassic Park films capture an incredible sense of wonder and awe. The first is when Dr. Ellie Sattler sees the dinosaurs for the first time in the original 1993 movie, and the second is in the 2015 sequel when we see the completed Jurassic World from the kid's hotel room.

I feel that sense of awe. Not the sense of awe you get watching dinosaurs on the big screen. This is something closer to Dr. Sattler's sense of awe seeing real live dinosaurs for the first time. My mind is telling me this is actually happening to me.

The tour through the zoo progresses with up close encounters of various alien creatures. I don't want to spoil too much more, but Dreamscape fills the experience with a number of sensory enhancements including liquid, scents, wind and even a magical moment where you can actually touch an alien.

Alien Zoo is just a test run by Dreamscape and everything from its equipment to the experiences offered at their locations is likely to change as they evolve. Dreamscape set a lower age limit of 10 to visit the Alien Zoo, for instance, though it is possible that might change. I note a few moments where the frame rate seems to drop slightly but it isn't enough to be uncomfortable. Near the end, the story feels a bit heavy-handed and its environment a little stiff, like cardboard, but as we return to the Westfield Century City mall I can't help but smile.

My trip to the Alien Zoo was a lot of fun.

Comparison to The VOID

Aside from the differences in tone between this initial experience from Dreamscape and those offered worldwide by The VOID, Dreamscape also seems to use less space to tell its story.

The VOID sends you from room to room in tight corridors while Dreamscape keeps you on that hovering platform most of the time. Walking so much in the VOID makes bumping into other people a real concern. Dreamscape's full-body tracking and the wide circular area in which you spend most of your time offers a sense of security that ensures you aren't accidentally bumping into your fellow zoo visitors all the time. Instead of being worried about bumping into these people, at one point during my visit to the Alien Zoo I handed a flashlight to one of the other participants so he could point it around us in the dark. It all felt so natural.

Conclusion

I don't know whether Dreamscape solved the equation, any more than The VOID, that'll make location-based VR profitable. Both companies provide incredible experiences though. Neither is perfect, but it is still early days and the bugs in these systems don't interfere with the experience enough to make it disappointing.

Disappointment only seems to come when you start comparing the cost of this form of entertainment to others. I don't think those comparisons are necessarily fair. You could argue paintball or laser tag or a trip to the actual zoo is a cost comparison that's more fitting. Regardless, because Alien Zoo embraces the human desire to explore and learn, rather than shooting bad things from movies, it seems harder to make those comparisons.

Brass Tactics hands-on: Scaled-down VR strategy game remains challenging

Posted: 18 Feb 2018 07:17 PM PST


Brass Tactics Arena, the free-to-play spin-off of Brass Tactics, has launched on Oculus Home for the Oculus Rift with Touch, and UploadVR got the chance to go hands-on with it prior to its release for some updated thoughts. We've tried Brass Tactics in the past a few times and got to learn how the team at Hidden Path Entertainment channeled their history with Age of Empires into this new made-for-VR RTS, but this was our first experience with the abbreviated Arena edition.

In the video below you can watch in wonder as I, UploadVR's Games Editor, absolutely destroy Ian Hamilton, our Senior Editor. Things were close for a bit at the start as I settled on a strategy and fumbled with the Scout units, but I eventually overran him. He didn't stand a chance.

Finally, I got my revenge from my humiliating public defeat at GDC 2017.

For the match Ian was rolling with the standard "Balanced" loadout, but I picked the "Aggressive" one to try and catch him off-guard. My strategy seemed to work.

The flow of a match in Brass Tactics is generally split into two phases that repeat: preparation and conquest (I just made up both of those terms just now, so let me know what you think).

The objective is simple: Wipe out your enemy. So during the preparation phase each player is occupied back at their base building towers that can spawn units, summoning defense turrets, and planning out their approach. Then you set out on your course (the conquest phase) and start capturing other towers to summon more units and collect more resources.

Brass Tactics is unique in that to move around the map you simply grab it using the grip buttons and pull or push yourself along the surface. You can even raise or lower the war table to get a better view of the action.

You'll start out with your standard three unit types, such as Archers, Warriors, and Scout units, before eventually unlocking Rocketeers, Tanks, Dragons, and more. The flow of a match then bounces back and forth between preparation and conquest as the maps evolve and you push down the different lanes of action.

In the video above you can see where I drastically over-calculated the effectiveness of Scouts and suffered a lot of early losses, but was able to bounce back by doubling down on my towers farther away from my main base.

Not having to have an HQ anchoring all of my unit spawns like a lot of more traditional RTS games make you do was refreshing and it expanded the theaters of war by a great deal. One of my other favorite features is that you can visibly see what each user is looking at and doing at any given time. If Ian slid his avatar to my side of the map I knew he was looking at my base, trying to decide his next move. You can't hide behind a floating camera angle any longer.

One thing I learned from playing Brass Tactics Arena is that the game is deceptively complex, even in this semi-demo version. Arena packs an unlimited amount of competitive, co-op, and single player action on the one single map you see above. A free demo that includes multiplayer is certainly a boon for the VR market.

When the full game releases next week on February 22, there will be a "six-hour" long campaign, dozens of units to upgrade and customize, over 20 maps, and more difficulty options. Naturally, it's a greatly expanded game.

Until then, Brass Tactics Arena will just have to do. You can check it out for free over on Oculus Home and here's the official website with more details.

This story originally appeared on Uploadvr.com. Copyright 2018

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