“Rainbow Six Siege Operation Chimera hands-on — 25 million players get new ways to die” plus 12 more VentureBeat
“Rainbow Six Siege Operation Chimera hands-on — 25 million players get new ways to die” plus 12 more VentureBeat |
- Rainbow Six Siege Operation Chimera hands-on — 25 million players get new ways to die
- 10 tips for acing your market-size slide
- Investing in cryptocurrencies? Understand how to diversify your portfolio
- OrbusVR shows the promise of MMOs in VR
- How Machinima plotted its strategic rebranding across platforms
- Chris Messina: Alexa leads the ‘god bot’ wars because Amazon gets the most interest from developers
- Bigscreen’s new update adds support for 12 players
- How a love for Minecraft can blossom into a love for reading
- GamesBeat Decides 71: That Pavlovian Stuff
- AI Weekly: Get ready for AI chips everywhere
- Brazil’s Independent Games Festival is ready for your cool games
- Nippon Marathon parodies Japanese game shows with its wacky foot racing
- HomePod listening tests reveal the grimy truth about audio reviews
| Rainbow Six Siege Operation Chimera hands-on — 25 million players get new ways to die Posted: 17 Feb 2018 01:30 PM PST  Ubisoft is taking the wraps off of its Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege expansion, dubbed Operation Chimera. That could very well get the game’s 25 million fans re-engaged with the 5-versus-5 tactical shooter multiplayer game. I got a good look at Operation Chimera this week at a preview event, and Ubisoft is showing it off at the global tournament Rainbow Six Siege Invitational in Montreal this weekend. Chimera will be available on March 6, and it is the latest thing to keep Siege growing in popularity in its third year. In the game, a team of five operators attacks a stronghold such as a home or a building, while the other defends by putting up traps and obstacles. The attacking team has to find a way in and defuse a bomb, kill all the defenders, or perform some other task. The combat isn’t at all like Call of Duty, as it is realistic. One bullet can take you out, and it pays to use stealth and caution, rather than running and gunning. Chimera includes two new attack operators, or playable soldiers, with biohazard skills. The operator Lion from France has a drone dubbed the EE-One-D, which surveys hot zones and maintains quarantine protocols. Lion has a V308 submachine gun with .308 rounds. He has a claymore and stun grenades. The other new operator is Finka, a Russian operator who has a nanobot shot that boosts health, speed, and recoil control. Both operators are part of the Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear (CBRN) Threat Unit. In 2018, Ubisoft plans to release eight new operators over four seasons.  Above: Lion in Operation Chimera Image Credit: Ubisoft Finka can buff the health of teammates. She can do that by delivering a nanobot shot to fellow operators before a round starts. During the round, she can activate the nanobots to revive or otherwise assist the teammates who get into trouble. If you’re shot and bleeding on the ground, Finka can revive you. She has a Spear .308 rifle, SASG-12 shotgun, and a 6P41 light machine gun. And she has breaching charges and stun grenades. Each character has a back story. Finka was affected by radiation in Chernobyl, and she had a degenerative muscle disease. She became a scientist, developed a cure, and joined the army.  Above: Finka is a new operator in Rainbow Six Siege Operation Chimera. Image Credit: Ubisoft Ubisoft has a free weekend event for Rainbow Six Siege, allowing players on PS4, Xbox One, and PC to play the full game for free. Hands-on with Operation ChimeraThis title is clearly not my game, as I am a noob at it. I got shot all of the time from all sorts of directions. I didn’t realize I had to set my phone to silent when the enemies buzzed my phones to find my location. I shot my friendly players a couple of times. And I accidentally sealed my teammates inside rooms a couple of times. But I enjoyed my time playing alongside some skillful players. In each round, there’s a prep phase when the defenders can set up obstacles such as metal door barriers, wall reinforcements, and barbed wire. Meanwhile, the attackers send their radio-controlled cars into the building to try to locate the objective, such as a biohazard box. In the video, we played on maps such as Theme Park, where you assault a big two-story building from a variety of entry points. When we defended, we had to be careful about Lion’s drone. When he launches it, he can see all of the players and entities in the map. When the drone sends out a pulse, everyone hears it. If you’re moving, you’ll be tracked. If you stay still, the drone won’t find you. We played a few rounds before we figured this out, and we were wondering why we were being picked off so easily. In another map called Favela, we were preparing to assault a three-story building. I took a wrong turn and fell off the building, severely injuring myself so I could only crawl around. Finka activated her nanobot, and I was back on my feet. It was great for bad players like me. On defense, I liked playing an operator named Kapkan. In addition to being able to build barricades, he could also put up booby traps alongside doors. I put those up to try to be more useful to my team. And I learned to stay back and watch my better-experienced colleagues take the point in the attacks or in pushing back the attackers. It was fascinating to see some of the good players through their cameras, as they were able to shoot players behind doors with the narrowest sight lines. Playing Operation Chimera for a few hours gave me a good idea of the skill involved in being an operator, and I’m not surprised that the game keeps growing and holds the attention of 25 million people. |
| 10 tips for acing your market-size slide Posted: 17 Feb 2018 12:10 PM PST  GUEST: The most controversial slide in every pitch deck is often the market size slide. It can set the stage for the future of the company, but too often it is overly exaggerated and not efficiently backed up. Why is this slide so important? Investors care about market size because it allows them to estimate what success could look like — they're betting on the future market potential for a product or service. For example, an early stage investor may seek returns in excess of 20x their initial investment. So, if the initial investment is valued at $10 million, the market needs to be large enough to support a business worth $200 million in the future. We know that SaaS businesses trade at a median 5x revenue multiple, so in order to be worth $200 million, the business would have to generate $40 million in revenue. If the market size is only $50 million, that would be hard to achieve, presuming some competition and opportunity for growth. As you can imagine, the higher the valuation at investment or desired return, the greater the market size needs to be to suit that investor. Knowing this, and reviewing the thousands of pitch decks we see each year, I've gathered my top 10 tips to consider when putting together your market size analysis. 1. Don't rely on third party researchThe most frequent mistake entrepreneurs make is relying on third-party analysts to do their homework. The number is invariably huge and therefore likely inaccurate and not convincing. More importantly, a number is not helpful to investors if they can’t also see the inputs and calculations. Entrepreneurs go through extensive thought processes to determine their technology stack, pricing and sales models, and dozens of other data points, so why do they rely on inaccurate, canned market sizing data? 2. Top down is goodThe best place to start a market-sizing exercise is with a top-down analysis. It's quick and easy but still delivers valuable insights. Simply put, a top-down market sizing calculates the total size of the market and then estimates your share of that market, following this equation: Just remember that the global enterprise software market is $354 billion, so whatever subset you choose, keep that relative market share in mind. 3. Bottoms up is betterThe flaw with top-down market sizing is you have to rely on third-party research (see rule number one) or tangential markets for the total market size estimate. So a bottoms-up approach is better and more thorough. At its core, a bottoms-up analysis determines the individual spend-level of a customer or a group of customers, determines how many of those potential customers there are, and multiplies the two for a market sizing. This formula may sound as simple as the top-down approach, but the devil is in the details. The best bottoms-up analyses have multiple groups of customers and varying spend levels for each group of customers. The level of granularity can create large spreadsheets that incorporate various customer demographics, competition, advanced pricing, and existing spend levels. 4. Use the CensusThe best resource for market data is the U.S. Census, a fantastic and generally undisputable source. While not the easiest to navigate, it has extensive data sets on the number of companies in the U.S. by industry, subdivided by revenue and employee count. Since most SaaS businesses focus on a set of verticals and customers of a certain size, this is an incredibly powerful resource with which to build a bottoms-up analysis. It also helps avoid frequent citation mistakes, such as 28 million business in the United States (of which 22 million have no employees, which makes selling anything to them tough). 5. Greenfield estimates have more variance than replacement marketsIt is much easier to do market sizing analyses for replacement products. You can look at the existing spend in customers to assess their propensity for spend as well as incumbents' revenues in aggregate as a quick sizing of the market. Replacement markets therefore will naturally have smaller variances in market size estimates. A customer that is spending $10,000 annually for on-premise accounting software today is unlikely to spend $50,000 annually to switch to the cloud version unless it provides significant additionally functionality. Estimating greenfield opportunities, on the other hand, has more uncertainty and therefore more variance. Since few or no customers have ever bought a similar product, you have to make an estimate on the propensity to buy. Likewise, there is probably limited data on what a buyer is willing to pay for the new product or service. As data becomes more sparse, it becomes increasingly important to understand what is being spent on tangential and complementary solutions. 6. Monopolies, even market majorities, are rareVery few companies have more than 90 percent market share, and those are usually monopolies. Microsoft Windows, which got prosecuted for anti-trust, only has 85 percent market share. Salesforce, whose name is synonymous with CRM, only has about 20 percent market share. You can propose single-digit percentage market share and still be successful. 7. Lily pads are okayEvery so often an entrepreneur pitches a market knowing that dominance in that market is not significant but will allow the company to hop via "lily pad" to the next market. Peter Thiel provides immense support for this strategy in his book, Zero to One. He cites Facebook as an example, which leaped from the more modest college market to, basically, the rest of the world. Rather than trying to hide the restricted size of the initial market, an entrepreneur should use the market sizing exercise to raise awareness of this constraint and communicate about additional markets. 8. Know your comparablesThe quickest way to lose credibility is to exaggerate a market. Is your new startup reinventing the software stack for dog shelters, which you estimate to be a $50 billion opportunity? An investor is inclined to question your credibility, especially since the total CRM market is only $35 billion. While this example is a bit silly, know what tangential markets your software will cause an investor to think about and the scope of those opportunities relative to your estimates. 9. Match your pitch with your market sizeMore frequently than one would think, an entrepreneur creates a bottoms-up market size. This analysis may suggest that the majority of the market opportunity exists in serving large enterprises. However, the rest of the pitch discusses the go-to-market and opportunity in serving small and medium sized businesses. This disconnect is perplexing to an investor and is usually cause for pausing the pursuit of an opportunity. 10. Share your backupThis may be nerve wracking, but it is a great trick for establishing trust and controlling the message. Investors are frequently covering many markets quickly and don't have the in-depth knowledge of an everyday operator. A thorough bottoms-up spreadsheet is a fantastic tool for sharing and will allow an entrepreneur to guide an investor to their conclusions versus letting an investor wander to their own conclusions. Small moments can be pivotal in pitches. Entrepreneurs tend to dismiss the market size slide when it can actually be one of the most crucial pieces of the pitch. By preparing both tops-down and bottoms-up approaches in advance, you will be armed with valuable insights and credibility that can mean the difference between getting funded or getting a polite pass. Alexander Niehenke is a Partner at Scale Venture Partners. |
| Investing in cryptocurrencies? Understand how to diversify your portfolio Posted: 17 Feb 2018 10:25 AM PST  GUEST: Most investors will tell you about the importance of a well-diversified portfolio and how you should never go all in on any single asset. This is good advice for most of us and makes even more sense in the unregulated cryptocurrency market, where volatility is high and most of the current projects are believed to have a short lifespan. While investing in nascent technologies like blockchain will always carry great risk, there are a couple of measures you can take to help reduce the gambling aspect of it and better manage risk within your crypto portfolio. When I first started investing in cryptocurrencies, I decided to go all in on Ether, the native currency of the Ethereum blockchain. It made sense to me at the time as it was the technology I had been following the closest and that seemed to have the most going for it. There were big name companies joining the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance, and it had the most developers and the largest user community out there. And when taking into account that almost every ICO out there was building their project on top of Ethereum, the upside seemed massive. What I didn't realize at the time was that I had also fallen into the trap of becoming a part of the Ethereum community on Reddit and Twitter myself, adding to my already strong confirmation bias. The concept of fat protocolsI then came across Joel Monegro's (now with Placeholder, back then with Union Square Ventures) article about Fat Protocols, which really resonated with me in explaining how the blockchain tech stack encourages innovation at the protocol layer to a much larger extent than was the case with the Internet. Monegro explained how investing in the few shared Internet protocols like TCP/IP and HTTP had never made a lot of people rich; it was the applications built on top of them that created most of the wealth. However, he said that with blockchain-based protocols, the value of the protocol will always grow faster than the combined value of the applications built on top of it. The basic idea is that investing in a decentralized application (dapp) token can be compared to investing in a startup company. The chance of failure is high, even more so in the blockchain space, with its many inexperienced, post-ICO, newly rich teams and entrepreneurs. Investing in a protocol token, on the other hand, means you diversify across all applications that will be built on the protocol, drastically increasing your winning chances. This has made it a popular strategy among risk averse crypto investors, myself included, once I realized I was becoming an Ethereum fanboy. We can use Ethereum to illustrate the concept of fat protocols. There are more than a thousand dapps being built on top of Ethereum right now, and many of them raise funds through an ICO and issue their own token. However, a dapp built on Ethereum has to spend Ether (calculated in Gas), to function at all. So, following Monegro's thesis, and using Metcalfe's Law, the demand for Ether is set to increase as more dapps get built and gain real world adoption, appreciating Ether's value accordingly, while at the same time presenting it as a relatively low risk investment vehicle. Currently the second largest currency by market cap, many expect Ether to dethrone Bitcoin (whose market dominance is at an all-time low right now) during 2018. It's also worth noting that, at the time of writing, Ether's market cap is at around $92 billion, while the combined market cap of all tokens built on top of Ethereum, is roughly $30 billion, so this certainly seems to support the theory of fat protocols. The term fat protocols was coined (no pun intended) back in 2016 though, and with a complex blockchain technology stack in constant change, betting on protocol tokens alone doesn't guarantee you great returns anymore. Because, what is a protocol, really? While most will agree on the definition of the word — being a data exchange standard, a set of rules that defines how unrelated objects can communicate with each other (in our case, nodes on the network) — what decides whether what you're building is technically a dapp or a protocol? In his article from October last year, Jake Brukhman, cofounder of CoinFund, states that in many cases, it can be both. Where does a protocol begin and where does it end?Brukhman makes a comparison to the Internet architecture, where HTTP sits above TCP/IP, making HTTP an application of TCP/IP, while at the same time being a protocol for websites and applications built on top of it. Similarly, on a blockchain like Ethereum, we have Ethereum itself as the base protocol. Then there's an increasing number of other protocols, each serving a different, usually quite specific, purpose. A few examples are IPFS for file storage, Whisper for communication between dapps, and 0x for decentralized token trading. If we look at 0x, it serves as an application of Ethereum while also being a protocol for other dapps and platforms, like MelonPort and Augur among others, which are building (parts of) their service on 0x.  Above: A small selection of the Ethereum stack. Credit goes to Jake Brukhman; I simply adapted one of his images to make it relevant for my example. How many protocols before the tech stack gets too fragmented?A result of the protocol fatness is that everyone wants to extract as much of the value creation as they can. So we have gotten ourselves a currency war, with hundreds of cryptocurrencies and tokens competing for world (or at least industry or vertical) dominance. Many of these small, often open-source, teams are building what they hope will become base protocols, the building blocks that are going to form the new back end of the Internet. Common for all of these teams is the belief that their technology is superior and what everyone else should be building on. You may prefer to invest in protocols that sit lower in the stack, often referred to as infrastructure projects, or in front-end dapps with a more specific and limited use case. Perhaps you prefer to diversify vertically, in various dapps and protocols living on the same blockchain. Or you may be of the opinion that real diversification only happens when investing horizontally, in different base protocols. The fact is, it’s possible most of these protocols and their blockchains are going to fail, leaving us with a one-blockchain-to-rule-them-all scenario. It’s also possible multiple efforts will succeed and we’ll have a myriad of interoperable chains and protocols (which seems most likely when looking at the current landscape). Both approaches are likely equally risky from an investor point of view. To add to the uncertainty, you run the risk of investing in a project that seems to fit perfectly within your diversification strategy, only to have it announce, after the ICO, that it's moving to another blockchain, like Kik is planning to do with its Kin token, moving it from Ethereum to Stellar. One of the smartest things we can do in this unclear market is step up our own due diligence and base investments on solid project fundamentals. This will put us in a better position to pick the emerging winners than most crypto investors. Note: None of the above should be considered as investment advice. I own small amounts of various cryptocurrencies, but I'm neither a financial advisor nor an investment professional. I am just a simple holder, hoping that one day, some of the coins in my possession will head for the moon and take me with them. Trond Vidar Bjorøy is a consultant and advisor to the travel industry and blockchain startups. He became interested in blockchain due to its applications in the travel industry but now tracks ICOs and emerging blockchain projects across a variety of industries. |
| OrbusVR shows the promise of MMOs in VR Posted: 17 Feb 2018 09:03 AM PST  As someone that grew up playing MMOs like EverQuest, Minions of Mirth (an obscure indie one), Runescape, Guild Wars, and more, a high-quality VR MMO is one of my ultimate dream games. Anime like .hack//sign and Sword Art Online have done their part to instill the excitement around the concept and now with consumer VR finally here, it feels like the prospect is finally within reach. Having played (and loved) Skyrim VR, it seems we're closer than ever to that ultimate fantasy-themed VR MMO that I've always wanted. While it'd be a drastic overstatement to say that OrbusVR is that game, it's certainly one of the first steps on a path toward that game. We wouldn't have Zelda or Diablo without Atari's Adventure preceding them. Someone's got to be first, so OrbusVR is here to lay the groundwork for realizing the future of VR MMOs. Visually, OrbusVR is far from impressive. After spending a few hours inside its jagged, flat, and unattractive world the art style never really grew on me at all, but it's something you get used to. It might look off-putting at first, but I'd encourage you to look past that if at all possible. What I found beneath the surface is a mostly bare bones MMO that would have been unremarkable had it been released outside of VR, but that's the whole point. This game wouldn't exist without VR and it's clearly built from the ground-up with that in mind. That design philosophy is evident across the entire gamut of the game's experiences. For example, to speak with an NPC you physically wave at them using your hand. You can grab a compass on your chest to find the direction of party members and points of interest. You open buildings by grabbing and pulling on door knobs. You gather crafting materials by leaning over and hitting them with your pickaxe. You fight enemies by aiming your gun, knocking your arrow, drawing runes to cast spells, or slashing with your sword. Each and every facet of the game is designed to foster a high degree of kinetic player interaction to eliminate the barrier between you and the game. The new player tutorial does enough to get you started and explain the basics of the three main classes (Warrior, Archer, and Musketeer) before you set out on your own. However, a lack of voice acting and reliance on using on-screen text subtitles was disappointing but understandable given the small team and tiny budget.
In OrbusVR I gravitated toward playing as a Warrior, which defies convention by being one of the more difficult classes to play in this game. I reach behind my head to grab my sword and shield from my back and then combat plays out just like you'd think — lots of arm swinging. The trick though is that the developers didn't want you to just mindlessly waggle your arm around with little rhyme or reason, so the Warrior has a series of "combos" to master. So I'd do things like slash to the left, then upwards, then to left and back to the right all in rapid succession. If done correctly, an enemy might start bleeding slightly and will take a big chunk of damage at the end of the combo. There was a combo to provoke enemies and keep their attention on me as well, plus a handful of others I could cycle through during combat. Remembering them all isn't easy, but it was extremely satisfying to pull them off correctly in the moment. Archers work just like you'd think — nocking and loosing arrows feels as great here as it does in any other VR game. Differernt abilities are assigned to different arrow types this time. You equip them to your bow directly and select them by looking down at your waist and grabbing the special one you want. My favorite rained down fire in a big circle after a shot. You can also charge up your standard arrow for big damage — as long as you hit. There is no targeting system in OrbusVR, so you can't just mindlessly slaughter enemies without thinking like you do in most other MMOs. The Musketeer is probably the easiest class to play as you just point and shoot a gun. Similar to the Archer you equip special abilities to the weapon, but this time they're floating orbs. Some will heal your allies, some will damage enemies, and some do special things like pop up shields. It's very much the "support" class of the game, with Warriors functioning as tanks, and Archers functioning as ranged DPS.
The wild card is the Wizard, which isn't unlocked at the very start like the others. Instead, you've got to go on a special quest to uncover the secrets of using magic in the world of OrbusVR. Even if you don't plan on being a Wizard as your primary combat class, it's absolutely worth unlocking just for the useful functionality of opening up portals to teleport across the game world. There's a lot of stuff to take in with any MMO and OrbusVR is no different. Zones are much larger than you'd think and people are scattered across the world liberally. I tried playing in the evenings on week days and weekends, as well as midday on both as well and never went more than a minute or two without seeing someone — even in the middle of large forests. The main starting town was always full of people. OrbusVR uses proximity-based voice chat like many other VR apps, but in the context of an MMO it's really satisfying. As I'm walking around town, talking to NPCs, turning in quests, and just exploring I can overhear actual conversations like people are really around me. One man is talking to his party members about where they should go next. Two young kids are competing to see who can cast certain spells faster. One woman is trying to help a friend learn Warrior combos. Other groups are discussing their plans for the weekend — which dungeons they'll tackle together — and reminiscing about past adventures. Seeing all of those discussions in other MMOs means looking at scrolling words in a chat box, but in OrbusVR it feels like a real community. Thousands of people are playing OrbusVR and it's incredibly involved for such a seemingly "small" game — the Discord server is always active, for example. According to SteamSpy at least 10,000 people own the game on Steam, which doesn't account for any Oculus Home owners either. They raised over $30,000 early last year on Kickstarter and then in a matter of a few months managed to surpass that number in straight sales. Steam Charts says the all-time peak is a little over 300 players with right around 50-100 going strong at any given time, but again, that doesn't count Oculus Home at all. Anecdotally I can verify that, like I said, I never had trouble finding someone to talk to if I wanted. A lot of the game can be played solo if you desire, but this is very much a social game. Before long you're going to have to group up with other players. The "holy trinity" is in full force here and you'll absolutely need a group of at least three for much of the mid-game and late-game content. Luckily there are plenty of active guilds and a more than friendly Discord server to help you out. As someone that has a background in playing and writing about MMOs a lot over my life, OrbusVR checks all of the "must-have" boxes for any basic MMO at this stage of a new platforms' (VR) lifecycle. Combat works great. There are decently written quests with objectives and completable tasks. You can add friends, have guilds, and chat/hang out together. There's a level-based progression system, multiple zones, and end-game focused high-level content. There are even four distinct classes to play. There's PvP too, but I didn't get to try that yet.
While it will never be as functional as social VR apps such as Bigscreen or as creatively flexible as the likes of VRChat, OrbusVR is here to deliver a true-to-form MMORPG (with an emphasis on the 'game' or 'G') experience for all VR gamers and its laying the groundwork for VR's bold and ambitious future. OrbusVR is now currently available in Early Access on both Steam and Oculus Home for $39.99. It's technically playable and mostly complete without any future character wipes planned, but the team is still working on some harder difficulty settings and end-game raids. And of course there are still some bugs as well. A full release is expected by this summer. This story originally appeared on Uploadvr.com. Copyright 2018 |
| How Machinima plotted its strategic rebranding across platforms Posted: 17 Feb 2018 08:02 AM PST  Warner Bros.’s digital video site Machinima rebranded this week as it makes a bigger push to expand beyond its YouTube roots to all the new platforms where gamers celebrate their culture. Since Warner Bros. bought Machinima in 2016, the division has shifted away from its traditional network and grown to more than 140 million subscribers for its various shows like Mortal Kombat: Legacy. But competition from influencers of all types has been growing as well. I talked with Russell Arons, general manager of Machinima, about those trends in an interview this week. “We have always been about influencers. We are evolving around the platforms that our influencers are reaching,” Arons said. “Machinima from its early foundation was a YouTube company. We have evolved to Facebook, and now we have a lot of programming on Twitch.” Machinima is all about transforming gamer culture from a niche into mass entertainment, and it doesn’t hurt that games have become a $116 billion industry, according to market researcher Newzoo. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.  Above: Russell Arons is general manager of Machinima. Image Credit: Machinima GamesBeat: How is the life at Machinima? Russell Arons: It's great. It's something familiar and something really new, which is kind of the theme of this discussion about a re-brand. We took what people know, which is the name, and we put a new twist on it. GamesBeat: Tell me more about that. Arons: It's the resolution of a couple of things. One is taking the opportunity to look at Machinima's future path and tighten our focus, message our forward direction, but also to celebrate the integration of Machinima into Warner Bros., which happened about a year ago. The company was officially acquired last January. All the good stuff that's come as we've brought Machinima's expertise in social media to the amazing heritage of Warner Bros. in entertainment. GamesBeat: You're realizing the benefits of the acquisition now? Arons: Exactly. Warner Bros., when they first acquired Machinima, I think there was an awareness along the lines of, "We don't know what we don't know in the landscape of digital media." The team has done a great job of becoming a partner to different divisions across the company, whether it's been working with Warner Bros. Pictures or other groups. We're providing them with services and kind of really fast and flexible content production that they didn't have before. We've also done quite lot of projects with gaming as well. GamesBeat: Is there a way of figuring out what percentage of your business at Machinima is games now, versus other things? Arons: One of the re-prioritizations we've gone through is we're very focused on the gamer audience. In the time from 2013 to 2016, the company had come to be more generally about fandom, but coming from my background at WB Games, my thinking was that the gaming audience was a great one to be focused on. More than ever, we're reaching out to the top game publishers and game IP holders to secure the rights to take their game stories, characters, and environments and put them into digital content series, whether it's animation or live action or machinima. GamesBeat: How do you think you fit in this new world of influencers, all these YouTube stars and other people making a living on video and live streaming? Arons: We sort of invented that game. Machinima was the first large-scale organization around influencers, to help them monetize and reach bigger audiences. We've always been hip to the influencer thing. What we're evolving is around the platforms our influences are reaching. Machinima, from its foundation, was a YouTube platform company by and large. Over the years we've evolved toward Facebook, and most recently we now have a lot of programming on Twitch. As a matter of fact, we're one of 10 selected partners that Twitch reached out to to launch a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week channel. We're going to all the platforms that are relevant to gamers, bringing both our own content and our influencers' content as well. GamesBeat: What else is interesting about tomorrow's presentation? Arons: It's kind of a multi-tiered announcement and re-branding. First, you'll see Machinima's visual identity change across all of our channels. That's how we're reaching out to our fans. The way we're reaching out to your talent network and our influencers, we've selected some of our top influencers to get a bit of counter-programming to Valentine's Day. We think gamers need love, so we're sending them giant boxes of chocolates with the new Machinima branding. We're hoping they'll be talking about that with their fans. This is also about us really stepping out within Warner Bros. for a bit of an internal celebration. If you came and saw the studio, you'd see that Machinima will now be on one of the giant billboards on Olive Avenue, right next to Dunkirk and Ellen DeGeneres. We're definitely now a part of the Warner Bros. family. Our brand is contributing as its own stand-alone entity.  Above: Machinima’s rebranded look Image Credit: Machinima GamesBeat: What represents your goal here? How would you define success a year from now? Arons: One thing is, you can look at some things as a cautionary tale. We certainly took the Maker integration into Disney and analyzed what worked and what didn't there. We want to be sure that Machinima both retains its identity and provides value to Warner Bros. in a more beneficial end state for both companies. What I hope you'll see a year from now is the Machinima brand feeling refreshed and rejuvenated, not just because we have a new logo and a new color, but because we have continued to partner with brands and advertisers who want to reach gamers, and because we've re-established ourselves with our fans because we're now programming our content at all major gaming events, bringing our influencers to the big gaming shows and creating our own programming, so that we've re-connected with our fanbase. Also, more and more you'll see Machinima supporting Warner Bros., not just in the digital networks business, but in every division, whether it's creating social media content for them or helping them launch onto new platforms. We've learned the best way for you to, say, get on Twitch or launch a new channel on YouTube. GamesBeat: If you look at what's going to be big this year, is WBIE going to use you guys in a very particular way? Will you be a big part of E3 or other events? Arons: Naturally, we want to support their slate, which is a fabulous breadth of everything from Lego games to a game like Shadow of War, not to mention their expansion into mobile. You've heard their announcements around the partnership with Niantic and Wizards Unite. We want to help WBIE reach their audience through custom content and programming in any way we can. We're just in the planning phases of that right now. The other thing I want to say, lest it sound like we're only in service to other Warner Bros. divisions, we also want to be agnostic in terms of our gaming partners. We're very much in discussion with all sorts of game IP and game publishers. It's not just exclusive to WBIE.  Above: Machinima’s new logo Image Credit: Machinima GamesBeat: Is E3 your biggest thing of the year, or are there other things that could be bigger? Arons: The definition of "bigger" is interesting. We're focusing around the fighting game community, because we see that as an underserved audience with so many great games. Obviously you have WBIE's own Mortal Kombat and Injustice, but also Dragon Ball Z and Tekken and Street Fighter. We're excited about the program we're doing around our Body Count Fighting franchise, our live streamed—it's taking a nod from what's been done successfully in boxing and WWE. We create a fight card and grudges and matches between the people our fans want to see play each other and we bring them to the Machinima studio. We do it in another location with a boxing ring. It feels a bit more accessible and inviting as an esports format than MOBAs and first-person shooters can be for a general audience. That's a new direction in programming for us that's different than just appearing at an E3 or a PAX event and having our programming streamed from there. The essence of what we're doing is an evolution. It's not throwing out what Machinima has been. It's honing our focus. It's providing that value to Warner Bros. and taking our own value from what the company can bring us. Tomorrow is just the coming-out for all of that. |
| Chris Messina: Alexa leads the ‘god bot’ wars because Amazon gets the most interest from developers Posted: 17 Feb 2018 07:15 AM PST  A little over two years ago, before Facebook Messenger or iMessage opened to third-party bots, and before the arrival of Google Assistant, conversational AI champion Chris Messina helped coin the term “conversational commerce.” Messina, who is perhaps best known as the creator of the hashtag, has since 2015 examined trends like chat apps surpassing social media in monthly active users, buzz among developers and investors, and unanswered questions, like how experiences created by third-party developers can attract attention in a conversational world. Last year, Messina left his job as developer experience lead at Uber to explore opportunities in conversational AI. Next week, he launches Molly, a service that skims your social media accounts to create a bot that answers questions the world wants to know about you. Messina spoke with VentureBeat about the state of conversational AI, his new startup’s ambition to reimagine the value people derive from social media, and who's winning the chat wars between Alexa, Siri, and the like, which he calls "god bots." This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. VentureBeat: It's been a while since you first started talking about the idea of conversational commerce. Has anything you've seen since then surprised you about this conversational AI and conversational computing space? Messina: I think the insight I was trying to help people see was less about the interface and more about the programmatic technique of putting software behind the interface. In other words, the notion of conversation as an interface would become normal, as opposed to everything being button-based, and I think that continues to be true. It's just like Jeff Bezos was saying: We're at the very, very early innings of this. And I still believe we're at the very beginning of this shift, and that this shift will be a lot harder than getting the graphic user interface (GUI) because the GUI is something you can show someone and they can learn from watching and you have a fast iteration cycle of improvements. The next wave of software is deeply personal, [requiring] enormous amounts of personalization and pattern recognition and matching the way a system responds to an individual. But things that surprise me — some of the things, like the primacy of the “god bots,” is very clear. Talking to Siri, talking to Google Home, talking to Alexa, they have not figured out yet how to do an elegant handoff to third-party services. So the lack of addressability relative to the home screen grid of icons on a GUI interface is still a huge barrier to third-party developers succeeding on these platforms. I do think it's interesting and not too surprising that games seems to be the thing that Amazon is pointing to as a way of showing engagement, as a way of promoting these devices and saying "Here's something that's kind of new and different and a little bit easier than other games that you might have played with your family on a TV or something." It's hard for me to say I'm surprised because these things are always so slow and people are always so skeptical. Unless they have something super incredible or amazing, it’s very hard to motivate people to change their behavior, so what we're seeing instead is a slow, gradual saturation of the market with voice-enabled devices, but then the real question is whether or not third-party developers are going to have some sort of toehold. In this context, platforms need to figure out or overcome the memory problem, which is: How do I remember to use this skill? How do I remember what my device can do? That to me is where conversational brands are completely necessary in this new world, which is — How do you sort of stay top of mind? How do you nest yourself in someone's brain so that they know to think of you, and then how do you deliver constant value? So I guess I haven't been too surprised, but I think we have several generations or years before this stuff becomes the dominant paradigm. I see AR and VR being complemented in a conversational world, because so much of the interactions in that world are not about typing but about verbal expression and voice commands, so I think what Facebook might be doing with their VR play and with Portal suggests to me a way of thinking about this that could be somewhat interesting and emergent, but I just don't know. VentureBeat: You mentioned the sort of god bot, the ubiquitous AI-powered assistant I can speak to anywhere; it's in my light switch, it's in my car, it's in my workplace. Who's winning? Messina: I think Amazon's winning. However, I've been surprised about some of the stats around Google. I just feel like Google says they have all these Google Home devices that they've sold and stuff, and I suppose maybe that’s true from an international standpoint or other markets, but if you count everything Google Assistant does (Android smartphones, Android tablets, Home speakers, and Android Auto, to name a few), they might be overwhelming Alexa devices in some way, again depending on how you count. But to my mind, Amazon has the lion's share of developer attention and developer interest. Apple seems to have very little, if any. Sort of like their iMessage Business Chat stuff — I don't have a sense that people are excited about it. I mean they're excited about it because it's a huge channel with a lot of reach, but they're tightly controlled channels, and when Apple opens up they tend to be really reluctant and slow. Their playbook is a little different than Facebook. Facebook has a very clear playbook where it's — Grow to a billion users, and then we figure out how to monetize and, you know, we may have to open up APIs along the way, whatever it takes to get there, we're going to get there. Apple's like, Whatever, fuck it. We've got years and years worth of selling hardware. We're going to take the slow, determined approach. We'll see what works; maybe we'll open up a few APIs here and there for complementary things or things we can use as our showcase piece to tell a story, but ultimately they don't allow developers to control too much of the experience except for the experiences they really want to support and monetize, whereas Amazon is kind of like, Look, just build shit and we'll figure out how to monetize; you guys are using all of our other developer services, and it seems like building on Alexa seems pretty straightforward and people seem pretty able to do it relative to the other platforms. What was your take on the Super Bowl ad? VentureBeat: I mean, it was smart to build some suspense and stuff like that, but I half wanted them to drop a new feature for people to test out Super Bowl Sunday, a day when you've got all your friends and family in your house. Seemed like a good time to give people an excuse to interact with their Echo for a wow moment or to have a good time with it. Seemed like they set it up for the celebrities to knock them down, but they could have made it a lot more key to their business if they actually did something new, like give Alexa a male voice, for example. Messina: It was super weird that they had people wearing these strange headsets. VentureBeat: Seriously. Messina: What the hell is that about? No one's going to wear those. I mean you basically put two Echo Dots on people's heads, and I'm like, This is why you're not Apple. VentureBeat: Well, I mean, the mobile accessory kit — there are no headphones made by Amazon with Alexa inside available today, and the mobile accessory kit was launched about a month ago before CES. That would make anyone who's been paying attention to Alexa say, Hey, wait a minute, but I guess that's not part of it. Whatever. Messina: What's your take on who you think is winning? VentureBeat: I think it goes back to what you were saying — like with Google, how you gauge the math on all this. There was this snippet of a sentence that Cheddar did on Portal about a month ago where they were saying Mark Zuckerberg doesn't care at all about making money from Portal. The idea is to change user behavior as it relates to Facebook, so maybe Stories is a bigger part of what you do and your News Feed is less important to what you do perhaps and Watch is a bigger part of what you do, and streaming content from these things and maybe AR Spaces and all of that stuff blended in and available in one place, and you can do all sorts of stuff with facial recognition — understand user response to advertising or prove that you're actually making your users happier. Messina: Wow, that's crazy. I hadn't thought about that idea where the screen or whatever is the way of conveying visual images, and you bring facial recognition or facial detection into a space and Facebook shows you an ad and, based on your face reaction, if it falls into one of the five reaction types, advertisers get that data and get a sense for emotive quality that someone is actually having about your ad. VentureBeat: Yeah, you're making a lot of females ages 23-29 smile [for example]. Messina: Haha, right, yeah. VentureBeat: So I think this user behavior idea sort of determines how each of the different companies will decide whether or not it's successful, and Amazon isn't necessarily trying to get into the mobile operating system, but that's where Google has its dominance and so at least on that front there's a lot of people that can use Google Assistant. But Amazon's user behavior paradigm shift may be that they want to make it normal to shop with your voice, and apparently that's true for some people. I was talking to Adobe recently and they were talking about 22 percent of people who own a smart speaker find it to be a normal thing to shop with your voice. When you think about the amount of time it took for people to go from getting a smartphone to being willing to shop with a smartphone, this seems a lot faster than that to me. Messina: Also think all the people who have done QVC or voice catalog ordering. It's actually a known behavior — saying it out loud, of course. Now on the end of a phone line might be the difference, but in a way it's kind of the behavior that's already been there. VentureBeat: Totally, but I'm impressed by what Google has done so far. They haven't just stayed neck to neck with Amazon, they seem to have made up some ground. What Facebook does later this year, what Samsung does later this year, how people respond to HomePod, that will all play into how this space looks in a while. Messina: Apple Music is the linchpin in that relationship. I mean you have all your music there, and it's super sticky. Like, clearly the fact that HomePod doesn't work with any other service, it means that they're being very cautious about what goes into it. I listened to the ReCode podcast with the CEO of Sonos because I've been wondering what the hell Sonos is going to do. I guess later this year they're adding AirPlay 2 support to Sonos devices, so there's an interesting A-B test, if you will, with Sonos to see what happens when there's a platform that is totally open and platform-agnostic relative to the HomePod, which is an expensive first-gen speaker. Even if it sounds amazing, which I'm sure it does, it still has to compete with content access. It appears as if Apple is placing a bet that as long as they have the best-sounding speaker at the relative right price point, then that's actually going to get people to come back into the Apple fold and stay there. VentureBeat: I just think of buying, especially knowing what the sound quality is on a Home Mini, buying two Home Minis and a Home being much cheaper than one HomePod seems like a pretty good sell (especially with multi-room music and intercom features). Messina: Yeah I'm kind of like, What is Apple really playing at here? VentureBeat: So what's Molly? Messina: So Molly ingests a lot of the social media content you produce across different platforms — like Twitter, Medium, and Instagram — to create a kind of personal search engine for stuff you've previously written to allow people to ask natural language questions of that content. In a case where we don't have the right answer or don't know what the right answer might be, we actually send that on to you, and then you get a notification from the app which you can answer. My question is, Is there a way to build social media that is more about rewarding human connection and relationship and deepening the awareness and knowledge that we have about each other through this type of serendipitous type of discovery of a person's background? The hope is that we build a conversational agent that learns about people over time and is able to answer questions about them over time to try to build a social platform that understands people, how they ask questions, the types of answers they're looking for, and allows us to build up ideally a very useful and valuable dataset that we make available to our users and give them something back for all the content they've contributed to the social web over time. VentureBeat: And why the name Molly? Messina: One of the big problems with a lot of these voice skills and apps is recall, recollection of their name, so we wanted a name we could develop a kind of persona around. While the Olabot brand was timely, I don't think it necessarily stuck in your mind the same way a person's name might. Another part was that I just happen to know a woman, Molly Holzschlag, who is a web pioneer and owner of the molly.com domain. Then, of course, there's the more counterculture element to it, which I can leave to your imagination. This product is about connecting people to digital media. There's a connotation there that might not be terribly negative, but happens to be a happenstance. |
| Bigscreen’s new update adds support for 12 players Posted: 17 Feb 2018 03:34 AM PST  It's time for another Bigscreen update, and this latest edition makes the social VR app even, well, bigger. The Big Room Update, as it's called, includes some key new features. Perhaps the best addition is support for up to 12 users in three new expanded environments, all based off of pre-existing scenes. Previously the app had supported up to four people in a room in the smaller rooms. In these larger spaces, only the host is able to stream content to the virtual display and they'll need an internet connection of 10Mbps upload or better to do it. As for the environments, there's 'Big' versions of the Campfire, Cinema and Balcony to explore. Finally, Bigscreen's developers have added some huge performance improvements. This was done by rebuilding environments to be better optimized and reducing the amount of CPU power adding new people to a room would take. You can get Bigscreen for free in Beta form right now on both Steam and Oculus Home. A post on Reddit announcing the update also noted that more big news is on the way in the next two weeks concerning movie nights and finally bringing the app to mobile VR headsets. This story originally appeared on Uploadvr.com. Copyright 2018 |
| How a love for Minecraft can blossom into a love for reading Posted: 16 Feb 2018 05:30 PM PST  GUEST: Millions of kids around the world play Minecraft, and it didn't take long for adults to notice something: It has educational value. With Microsoft's MinecraftEdu leading the way, more schools are using Minecraft in classrooms, having their kids experiment with science and math on the screen, or encouraging them to build historical settings or scenes from books. But there is one aspect of Minecraft education that I think can be discussed more: Minecraft and literacy. Tech writer Clive Thompson wrote in Wired, "Games, it seems, can motivate kids to read—and to read way above their level. This is what Constance Steinkuehler, a games researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, discovered. She asked middle and high school students who were struggling readers (one 11th-grade student read at a 6th-grade level) to choose a game topic they were interested in, and then she picked texts from game sites for them to read—some as difficult as first-year-college language. The kids devoured them with no help and nearly perfect accuracy." Minecraft doesn’t have a lot of reading in it (unless you mod the game to make it that way), but the internet and bookstores show a booming display of Minecraft-related websites and books. Kids can look up how to brew a potion online or get these details from a nonfiction how-to book. At the same time, novels and comic books star Minecraft characters or take place within the game. My experience as an authorI write adventure novels for children 7-12 that take place as if Minecraft is real, and I've seen the way it lights up kids who usually would rather be in front of the console than have a book under their nose. I talk with schools or libraries, either in person or through Skype, showing them how I started writing at a young age and how I turned that into my career. The first thing I say to a classroom is usually, "Who here likes Minecraft?" Nearly all the hands go up. When I tell them I write books about an 11-year-old boy who lives in Minecraft, they want to read it. They demand to read it. I hear from parents all the time who say, "My child doesn't like to read, but they can't put your books down." The Minecraft angle is what grabs them in the first place, and then in my books they'll find fast-paced action/adventure, chapter cliffhangers, plot twists, and characters who discuss real issues, like the fear of going to a new school or of being cyberbullied. I see the power of literacy when we can get kids excited about reading. And I remember being a kid and being told what books to read by teachers and other well-wishing adults, and I remember quite a few of those pre-selected books did not interest me, even though I loved to read. The issue is that sometimes the kids are being told what they'd like to read, rather than asking them what they like and then finding books to fit that. I see kids who find a book that clicks with them, and they think, "This is reading? But this is fun!" They'll move on to more books, maybe even the books the adults originally recommended, but then it's in the kids' hands and they feel empowered by their reading ability and feel connected with certain characters and stories. Indeed, it was a love of stories that made me good at spelling, not spelling tests – I learned to spell better from reading and writing than I did from any quizzes. It was a love of reading and writing that helped me through hard times, that let me know I wasn't alone. A love of reading can bridge communities, can help in education, can help in careers, can help in just general passion for life. The power of MinecraftI'm not the only author making books for Minecrafters, nor is Minecraft the only video game out there with books. For kids who are into video games but hesitate about books, this can be a way to reach them, if we can find their interests. Beyond video games, whatever their interest is, there will be books to match up with them. So when I hear about teachers using Minecraft in the classroom, I like to talk to them about going beyond math and science and using literacy as another angle to gaming education. I also remember being in elementary school and getting writing assignments, and how the more specific the assignment, the less well I did in it. I would go home and write, but in school, I often froze up. But if teachers encourage kids to write about what interests them (again, Minecraft or whatever else) they might find their students opening up. So many of them are already creating worlds on the screen, so why not create some worlds on the page as well? Because Minecraft encourages imagination, education around it ought to encourage imagination too. It's by thinking outside the box (no pun intended for this boxy video game world) that people make new discoveries and come up with new, better ideas. Why not use Minecraft however it can be used to encourage this? Danica Davidson is the author of Escape from the Overworld and several other books, all of which star 11-year-old Stevie, a boy from Minecraft. |
| GamesBeat Decides 71: That Pavlovian Stuff Posted: 16 Feb 2018 04:25 PM PST  On this week’s GamesBeat Decides podcast, hosts Mike Minotti and Jeffrey Grubb talk about some recent releases and some that are not quite as recent. The duo also examine the pending loot-box regulation in Hawaii. Here’s a full rundown of what we talk about this week:
Talk to you next time, kiddos. |
| AI Weekly: Get ready for AI chips everywhere Posted: 16 Feb 2018 04:21 PM PST  This has been a big week for specialized chips aimed at performing machine learning tasks. Google announced the open beta of its second generation Tensor Processing Unit, Amazon is reportedly working on a dedicated AI chip for its Echo smart speaker, and ARM announced its own AI hardware. It’s easy to see why that’s happening: The math needed to run machine learning algorithms is incredibly computationally intense. Chips optimized for the task do that faster and more efficiently than general processors. What's more, data scientists keep trying to push the envelope of accuracy by creating ever more complex models, which in turn require more power. Specialized silicon can increase the efficiency, making it easier to run complex models on beefy machines as well as devices with less power, though the particular hardware can differ between applications. AI-optimized silicon is popping up everywhere. It’s already in your phone, or will be within a few years. Meanwhile, the three major cloud players all have their own versions of dedicated AI hardware, with chipmakers building their own capabilities as well. Then there’s a conga line of startups that all have their own takes on how to tackle the same problem. I expect that hardware-based AI accelerators will be as common as — if not more common than — dedicated signal processors for video decoding, networking hardware, and other purpose-built silicon that already makes its way into our computers, smartphones, tablets, and other electronics today. But as all that comes to pass, chipmakers and consumers will have to consider the lifecycle of AI hardware in addition to the traditional replacement cycle of the items that they have. One of the things Google’s original TPU paper showed is that the company’s hardware was optimized for particular types of neural networks and not others, which could be a problem as machine learning techniques evolve but the hardware deployed in edge locations stays the same. Of course, software optimization is another frontier that AI companies are exploring as well. Brodmann17 is working on providing faster object detection algorithms through optimized software, not hardware, and the company is working with several significant clients already. The growth of AI chips mirrors the use of AI itself, since we'll always want quick access to intelligent results. As it becomes more normal to have machine learning applied to different facets of our life, the chips needed to make it a reality will be more normal to see, too. For AI coverage, send news tips to Blair Hanley Frank and Khari Johnson, and guest post submissions to Cosette Jarrett — and be sure to bookmark our AI Channel. Thanks for reading, Blair Hanley Frank AI Staff Writer P.S. Enjoy this conversation about issues facing AI as a field featuring OpenAI CTO Greg Brockman and Partnership on Artificial Intelligence executive director Terah Lyons: FROM THE AI CHANNELX.ai brings its scheduling bot to SlackX.ai's meeting assistant bot is now available on Slack. Plans to bring the bot that automates meeting scheduling to communication platforms were first shared with VentureBeat last August following the closure of a $10 million funding round. The bot, which can be named Amy or Andrew, will be able to do the same thing on […] eBay hires Jan Pedersen from Twitter to spearhead its AI effortseBay has announced a major new hire in its push to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) across its ecommerce platform. The company announced that it has lured Jan Pedersen from Twitter as its new VP and chief scientist for AI, and he will soon lead the company's strategy across natural language processing, machine learning, and computer vision. He […] AI, cloud, and IoT will drive 2018 growth, say chip makersArtificial intelligence, cloud computing, and the internet of things (IoT) will have bigger impacts on the revenues of chip makers in 2018, according to accounting firm KPMG's survey of 150 semiconductor industry leaders. Two-thirds of the leaders cited IoT as one of the top revenue drivers, up from 56 percent in last year's survey. Cloud computing […] ARM unveils mobile machine learning processor Project TrilliumARM is unveiling its ambitious new machine learning processor platform, dubbed Project Trillium. The platform includes processors and sensors for improving artificial intelligence operations in mobile devices at the edge of networks, rather than in data centers. ARM has created a high-end processor to handle machine learning calculations, or those that enable computers to learn […] 4 likely Google Assistant improvements we can't wait to seeAndroid P, a new version of Google's mobile operating system, is due out later this year and will include a deeper Google Assistant integration, a source familiar with the matter told Bloomberg today. It's just the latest in a series of new features for Google Assistant rumored about in recent days and weeks based on APK […] Google's AI chips are now open for public useGoogle's Cloud Tensor Processing Units are now available in public beta for anyone to try, providing customers of the tech titan's cloud platform with specialized hardware that massively accelerates the training and execution of AI models. The Cloud TPUs, which Google first announced last year, work by providing customers with specialized circuits solely for the […] BEYOND VBAs China marches forward on AI, the White House is silentLast summer, China unveiled a plan to become the world's leader in artificial intelligence, challenging the longtime role of the United States. (via The New York Times) Candy Heart messages written by a neural networkAround Valentine's Day in the US and UK, these things called candy hearts (or conversation hearts or sweethearts) appear: small and sugary, bearing a simple, short Valentine's message. There are only room for a few characters, so they read something like "LOVE YOU" or "CALL ME" or "BE MINE". (via AI Weirdness) "We're in a diversity crisis": cofounder of Black in AI on what's poisoning algorithms in our livesTimnit Gebru looks around the AI world and sees almost no one who looks like her. That's a problem for all of us. (via MIT Technology Review) Sky-high salaries are the weapons in the AI talent warIf you want to command a multiyear, seven-figure salary, you used to have only four career options: chief executive officer, banker, celebrity entertainer, or pro athlete. Now there's a fifth—artificial intelligence expert. One reason: No one can quite agree on how many there are. (via Bloomberg) Can we keep our biases from creeping into AI?Eminent industry leaders worry that the biggest risk tied to artificial intelligence is the militaristic downfall of humanity. But there's a smaller community of people committed to addressing two more tangible risks: AI created with harmful biases built into its core, and AI that does not reflect the diversity of the users it serves. I am proud to be part of the second group of concerned practitioners. And I would argue that not addressing the issues of bias and diversity could lead to a different kind of weaponized AI. (via Harvard Business Review) |
| Brazil’s Independent Games Festival is ready for your cool games Posted: 16 Feb 2018 03:25 PM PST  Brazil’s Independent Games (BIG) Festival is now taking submissions for its sixth annual event. It celebrates indie games from Latin America and abroad, and this year will be held in both São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro from June 23 and July 1. Developers have until April 13 to submit their games to be nominated for an award at the festival. Brazil is the largest games market in Latin America, and it’s positioned to hit $1.5 billion in revenue this year, according to market researcher Newzoo. Last year’s BIG Festival drew a crowd of over 20,000 people with its free panels and game demos. The event also features networking events to help connect developers with business opportunities. Toward the end of the festival, an awards show doles out accolades for categories like Best Educational or Social Impact Game and Best Brazilian Game. In 2017, Ghost Town Games’s popular culinary co-op title Overcooked took home the Best Game and Best Gameplay awards. In previous years, the BIG Festival operated out of São Paulo, but this year BIG Rio will bring some limited offerings to the second biggest city in Brazil. Folks in Rio de Janeiro will be able to play games, and on June 29 and 30, the event will host panels with a focus on social impact. Social issues and industry knowledge is a central part of BIG Festival. It showcases excellent indie games in an effort to elevate visibility of local developers from Brazil and other Latin American countries. And it’s keen on inviting international companies and publishers to come speak with its developers. BIG reports that last year, 3,200 industry professionals attended for the purpose of networking and business. “We realized that even with a small games scene [in Brazil] at the time, most companies were developing their games in English," said BIG’s executive director Eliana Russi in an interview with GamesBeat at last year’s event. "They were already considering self-publishing internationally. We started to invite buyers, investors, publishers, mentors to come to Brazil and meet with our developers." |
| Nippon Marathon parodies Japanese game shows with its wacky foot racing Posted: 16 Feb 2018 02:01 PM PST  Nippon Marathon has entered Early Access on Steam, and the full game will be coming out for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC later this year. Nippon Marathon has one to four players racing through Japan in ridiculous outfits as they dodge Shiba Inu dogs, bicycles, and other weird obstacles. You can also impede your opponents by doing things like throwing fruit at them. The Early Access version will normally cost $10, but it’s on sale for $8.50. This is the first game from independent studio Onion Soup Interactive. The developer is based in Birmingham. |
| HomePod listening tests reveal the grimy truth about audio reviews Posted: 16 Feb 2018 01:33 PM PST  ANALYSIS: As Apple’s HomePod has been out for a week, most of the news, reviews, and early problems have already been discussed ad nauseum. But you might have missed two unusual articles from Yahoo’s David Pogue, whose real world HomePod listening test last Saturday created enough controversy to merit a “readers weigh in” follow-up today. After having praised HomePod’s audio in his initial review, Pogue discovered that a panel of listeners preferred the Sonos One or Google Home Max instead. When he published that finding, some of his readers freaked out, leading him to dive deeper into his testing methodology — and other testers’ results, as well. My review of the HomePod was pretty straightforward on audio quality: It’s an overly bass-heavy, monaural speaker with recessed mids, ultimately not worthy of its steep asking price. Some real-world reviewers agree with my take, and some don’t. That’s fine — like pocketbooks, audio preferences are somewhat personal. Even before the review was published, my advice was to audition HomePod for yourself. But it’s worth exploring why there’s been so much difference between the early, universally positive HomePod sonic reviews and the less enthusiastic ones that have followed from members of the public. Specifically, I’d like to fill you in on some details that will help explain why something as simple as a speaker can generate such polarized opinions between “expert” reviewers, “audiophiles,” and regular people. If you don’t like knowing how review sausage is made, stop reading here, because this is going to get a little messy. How they tested, or should have testedOver the course of his articles, Pogue first hinted and then fully explained that Apple required early reviewers to attend a special listening session comparing the HomePod against three competing speakers. Apple selected the tracks, and in an important detail most reviewers probably didn’t realize, played them over different audio connections ranging from Wi-Fi to Bluetooth, Ethernet, and audio line-in. As Pogue notes, reviewers typically left Apple’s listening sessions feeling that HomePod had outperformed its rivals — no shock, given that two were around half or less of HomePod’s price. But after Pogue disclosed Apple’s speaker shootout, readers questioned it, leading him to run a more controlled comparison of his own. He took the four speakers, picked five revealing songs, assembled a fairly representative panel of listeners, and made sure the input source and volume were kept constant across all the speakers. Contrary to Pogue’s initial assumptions, and his early review’s conclusions, the panel rated HomePod’s overall sonic performance below the Sonos One and Google Home Max.
Because the internet has its fair share of self-proclaimed audiophiles, the second and more neutral round of test results didn’t sit well with some of Pogue’s readers, either. There were questions over the thin curtain that masked the speakers’ identities, suggestions of bias due to listeners’ physical positions relative to the speakers, and complaints that Spotify was the audio source for all the speakers. Pogue was called “grandpaw,” asked to use more randomized methodologies, and told to retest in either sonically silent or visually neutral rooms. The list of reader comments reads much like a series of high school excuses for failing to turn in homework — except nastier. Here’s how review sausage is madeAlthough I don’t agree with Pogue’s original claims that “HomePod sounds really, really great” or “amazing,” I applaud him for the courage it took to publicly re-examine the comparison process that led to his initial conclusions. His all-important first impressions were created using a skewed test, and a more neutral methodology would have yielded different results, as his panel’s experiences demonstrated. Why was there such a difference between the “expert” reviewers’ opinions and Pogue’s real world panel? I’m going to fill you in on a critically important piece of background information that will help you understand the reality behind speaker reviews: Most journalists know very little about speakers, or audio in general. Here’s one more key point: Many journalists, including even legitimate audio experts, have damaged their hearing, or aged past their ears’ sonic prime. Apple knew this, and it knew that (some of) the people it picked to review the HomePod might feel compelled to disclose their lack of audio experience. That’s why it set up a four-speaker testing room — a step it literally never took with competitors to the Apple TV, Apple Watch, iPad, or iPhone — and walked reviewers through the tests. Apple spared writers the need to do their own comparisons and helped them reach a positive conclusion about HomePod’s audio, presenting it in the best possible light. These details should help you understand why some of the first HomePod reviewers said that they could have stopped writing about the speaker after a paragraph or so, but felt obliged to write more. Normally, most of these people don’t write about the nitty-gritty of audio products, and they don’t feel comfortable discussing the technical nuances of “great sound.” But in this case, they were being given early access to a new Apple product, knew they had to write full reviews, and did the best jobs they could under the circumstances. That might seem like a somewhat charitable interpretation given how over-the-top some early reviewers were in praising HomePod, but in my experience, it’s largely accurate. An alternative: Don’t trust (most) audio reviewsIf you care about audio — and you certainly should, for $349 per speaker — one option would be to seek out opinions from people who have actual audio expertise. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of noise on the internet these days, and true expert opinions are surprisingly hard to find. Assuming you can’t decide for yourself, the best alternative is to find someone with a public track record of audio reviews that match your preferences and experiences, or alternately, someone whose opinions are reliably the opposite of yours. One thing you shouldn’t do is put faith in people who appear out of nowhere armed with audio graphs purporting to show that a given speaker has “perfect, audiophile-quality sound,” or reviewers who write effusively about the magical melodies produced by every piece of audio gear they test. Reviews that focus heavily on specs or poetic descriptions of sound are usually full of crap — regrettably, many readers confuse pages of numbers and words with genuine expertise. It takes a lot more courage for a writer to produce brief, blunt, and accurate conclusions about a speaker than to convince you it’s going to deliver sonic heaven every time you turn it on. Unlike his first HomePod review, Pogue’s last article doesn’t attempt to be authoritative on the speaker’s sound. While raising an eyebrow at certain conclusions, it acknowledges a diversity of opinions from everyone, from his panel of listeners to various readers to professional testers at Consumer Reports. That’s a reasonable approach: If you can’t find a great single reviewer whose tastes mirror yours, considering a variety of different opinions is probably the second healthiest way to approach audio purchases. The best option? Try the product for yourself, and return it if you don’t like it. You’re the best judge of whether something sounds (and works, and looks) great enough to be worthy of your hard-earned cash. Happy listening! |
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