Latest News - Page 2152

The short-lived Pokemon GO phenomenon saw millions of players getting out into the real-world for a while, but the game also caused hundreds of accidents and even deaths because people weren't looking where they were going.

According to a new study titled 'Death by Pokemon GO' by Purdue University economists Mara Faccio and John McConnell, the AR-based game resulted in somewhere between $2 billion and $7.3 billion of vehicular damage alone, in its first 148 days post-release. The researchers collected the data from crash reports in Tippecanoe, Indiana during the first five months of Pokemon GO's release.

They discovered that there were not just two deaths, but between $5.2 million and $25.5 million in additional damages caused from events related to Pokemon GO. After that, they scaled the numbers up adjusting for the entire US population to have an average of 100,000 accidents.

Fortnite has been updated for the Xbox One X, with developer Epic Games increasing the visual quality of the game up to something that's said to be comparable to the PC running on "Epic" quality.

Epic Games' new v1.9.1 update for Fortnite also bumps the resolution to 4K on the Xbox One X, but it's not being rendered in native 4K. Instead, Fortnite is rendered at 80% of 4K resolution, and then upscaled to 4K using a high-quality software upsampler. But don't worry, Fortnite's UI is rendered in native 4K, hooray.

The improved "Epic" graphics quality setting will give Fortnite better looking reflections, greater draw distances, higher resolution textures and shadows, and higher quality post processes like motion blur, anti-aliasing, and depth of field.

It was only earlier this year that Microsoft boasted that there were over 500 million devices powered by Windows 10, but six months later the Redmond-based giant has added another 100 million users bringing the total to a whopping 600 million.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced the new figures during Microsoft's annual shareholders meeting today, missing the mark that they planned on reaching by 2018. Originally, Microsoft expected to have Windows 10 running on 1 billion devices, but is now 400 million - or 40%, short of that number.

The Verge report that Microsoft revised its numbers for Windows 10 installations, targeting 550 million active Windows 10 devices by the end of June, and 575 million by the end of September. This means reaching 600 million by the end of November is falling into line, but will there ever be 1 billion Windows 10 devices? If so, it won't be in 2018 at this rate.

With all of the hoopla surrounding the record breaking price of Bitcoin (John McAfee has now said he'd 'eat his own d*ick' if BTC didn't hit $1 million by 2020), a federal judge in San Francisco ruled on Wednesday that Coinbase will be forced to provide the IRS with information on its users who are traded more than $20,000 in cryptocurrency in a year, between 2013-2015.

The IRS noticed a bunch of tax returns claiming gains from cryptocurrency that didn't line up with the emerging popularity of digital currencies like Bitcoin as an investment vehicle, so the IRS asked Coinbase to provide information on its users. Coinbase isn't happy, pushing the court into a compromise that the company has called a "partial victory".

The court documents read: "Coinbase itself admits that the Narrowed Summons requests information regarding 8.9 million Coinbase transactions and 14,355 Coinbase account holders. That only 800 to 900 taxpayers reported gains related to bitcoin in each of the relevant years and that more than 14,000 Coinbase users have either bought, sold, sent or received at least $20,000 worth of bitcoin in a given year suggests that many Coinbase users may not be reporting their bitcoin gains".

It has only been a few weeks since WB's release of Justice League, which hasn't been doing too well (and Superman's mouth has seen better days) - but now Marvel have dropped the hammer with the first official trailer to Avengers: Infinity War.

Avengers: Infinity War continues to epic tale of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with a new enemy: Thanos the Mad Titan, which is voiced by the legendary Josh Brolin. Avengers: Infinity War has a release date of May 4, 2018 which isn't too far away and will see most of our beloved MCU characters duking it out. The story is so epic, it'll culminate in the second release on May 3, 2019.

I'm pumped for the movie, but need to see more of it before my hype meter blows up. Let me know what you thought about the trailer in the comments below.

Now that Bitcoin has reached its all-time high of over $10,000 we're now seeing plenty of people coming out making their own predictions of where Bitcoin will be in 2, 3, or 5 years time.

John McAfee, the anti-virus legend, has come out saying that he predicts Bitcoin will be priced at $1 million before the end of 2020, and if he's wrong he has said on Twitter to his 118K followers that he will "still eat my d*ick". Now I'm wanting to agree with McAfee that Bitcoin will indeed reach $1 million by 2020, but I wouldn't bet eating my own d*ck, but hey that's just me.

Toshiba today announced that it's begun sampling UFS storage based on its high-end 64-layer 3D VNAND memory.

Toshiba's new UFS 3D storage lineup has four capacities including 32GB, 64GB, 128GB and 256GB, with all of the drives featuring both flash memory and a controller--which manages the drives health--in a standard JEDEC form factor.

The flash drives potentially have a total theoretical interface speed of up to 11.6Gbps, and the sequential read and write speeds of the 64GB option are 900MB/sec and 180MB/sec respectively. Toshiba boasts that the random read and write performance of the new lineup is about 200% and 180% respectively better than previous gen drives.

The HDMI Forum released their specifications for HDMI 2.1 earlier this year, but have now tightened them and make them official. HDMI 2.1 is a freaking beast, and will power the next generation of monitors.

HDMI 2.1 packs a huge increase in bandwidth with up to 48Gbps on tap, and is backwards compatible with previous-gen HDMI cables. HDMI 2.1 supports an insane 10K resolution which throws the pixels up to a huge 10240 x 4320, up from the 7680 x 4320 that 8K is capable of. HDMI 2.1 supports higher refresh rates as well, with 4K120 and 8K60 support, as well as Dynamic HDR.

The inclusion of support for 10K is interesting, as it's mainly for commercial and speciality use - but now I want to see a 10K UltraWide monitor.

Not long ago EA closed down Visceral Games, and decided to gut the studio's ambitious Star Wars game, codenamed "Ragtag" in an effort to transform it into a service type of game. Now an EA exec talks more on why that decision was made, and what it means for the future of the publisher's games--especially its new Star Wars games.

Since it was announced, I had long been looking forward to Visceral's Star Wars game. We got a brief teaser which suggested we'd play as a bounty hunter, or at least a non-Jedi space scalliwag of sorts. With Uncharted's Amy Hennig at the helm, and help from Lucasfilm's full library of content as well as Visceral and two other EA studios to make the game, project Ragtag was looking and sounding pretty neat. But all of that came crashing down when EA made the decision to kill the studio and recycle the game in a kind of Frankenstein manner. And according to EA Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen, the "economic decision" was made because gamers just don't really like linear games any more.

As Electronic Arts makes billions every year from game sales and lucrative live services such as FIFA Ultimate Team, this pivot away from linear singleplayer-based games shouldn't come as a surprise. The publisher expects to make over $5 billion in the fiscal year ending in March 2018, and service games will be a chunk of those earnings.

Over the past 24 hours, Bitcoin (BTC) has been on a parabolic run all the way from $10,000 up to almost $11,500. Many including myself feared a sharp correction would be due at any moment, as the kind of growth we saw was not sustainable, not even in the crazy world of crypto.

BTC hit a high of $11, 441 on Bitfinex before tumbling quickly all the way down to $9,000 in just a few minutes. Many went to Twitter to voice opinion that the reason for the drop was a DDOS attacked on many of the largest exchanges around the world. While a mass DDOS attacked has not been confirmed yet, it seems likely it was the cause of the sudden crash.

Approximately $53 billion was wiped off the total cryptocurrency market cap in under an hour, a figure which calculates the value of Bitcoin and other alternative coins combined. At the time of publishing, Bitcoin was trading close to $9600, but appears to be facing resistance heading back to $10,000 and beyond.

Engagement is the life's blood to any successful online service game. Look at Overwatch, FIFA, and even PUBG, for example: players are constantly engaged with new content that carries the experience well past singleplayer game's shelf-lives. As one of the biggest titans in the industry, EA understands this live service model quite well, and the company CFO highlights the major reasons why gamers are shifting towards online games.

During Credit Suisse's 21st annual conference, EA Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen was asked if the publisher sees oversaturation in the gaming market. People's free time is limited, after all, and there's so many service games on the market. But ultimately it comes down to one big thing: engagement, and keeping players immersed in things they love.

"I think what we're seeing is that people are playing fewer games but they're playing the games they're playing for longer with deeper engagement. And the reality is people love to engage with something they really enjoy, right? If you love soccer, you're going to do everything around soccer: watch it, play it, engage in it, talk about it, and our games allow you to go deep into something you really love," the EA CFO said.

Electronic Arts' CFO Blake Jorgensen talked in length about Battlefront II's microtransactions, features, and the future of EA's live-service games...but most importantly he discussed why the game didn't have entirely cosmetic monetization like Path of Exile or Overwatch.

A bit ago we reported that sources close to Battlefront II's development team told Venture Beat that the game originally had cosmetic microtransactions only. Of course the full game launched with what gamers feared was a pay to win scheme that required tons of grinding--something we actually predicted before confirmation. Now an EA exec discusses why that plan wasn't instituted how the publisher is learning from its community.

I've transcribed most of the tidbits from EA CFO Blake Jorgensen's talk at the recent Credit Suisse technology conference below:

Uber's data breach has got the attention of Washington state attorney general Bob Ferguson, who has begun the process of filing a multi-million dollar consumer protection lawsuit against the transportation company.

Uber's data breach potentially affected 57 million passengers and drivers worldwide. 10,888 Uber drivers in Washington have had their license numbers compromised by the data breach and according Ferguson's press release, Uber was required to notify the passengers and drivers of breach as well as the attorney general's office within 45 days of the attack.

The lawsuit could see penalties of $2,000 per violation for failing to notify those affected and the attorney general's office. Uber failed to notify the attorney general's office until the 21st of November which was more than year after the initial breach happened, which was a result of Uber paying hush money to the hackers to destroy the data.

Canalys a global technology market analyst firm has published a market report on their website claiming that VR headsets have sold 1 million units in Q3 2017. According to Canalys this is the first time shipments have reached a million units, HTC and Oculus slashed prices for their products to try and compete Sony who sold a massive 49% of the units in the market.

Sony takes the prize for the most VR headsets being sold coming in at 490,000 units shipped for the quarter, this figure sits quite a distance away from Oculus with their unit count being 210,000 units. HTC comes in last with a measly 160,000 units and between those three companies is 86% of the VR market, leaving only 14% to other developing companies.

To acquire these statistics Canalys has used only VR headset sales that include 'true' VR headsets, this doesn't include any smartphone that uses the screen as both the driving device and the display.

Google's autonomous car division 'Waymo' is gearing up for a release of their service with an announcement of a collective 4 million miles traveled on public roads by their vehicles.

While the distance as a whole is quite an achievement it isn't necessarily in the spotlight, the focus point here is the time it took. It took 18 months for the company to reach one million miles, 14 months to reach two million miles, eight months to reach three million and finally just six months to reach the four million mile checkpoint.

Waymo continues to celebrate its achievements by mentioning in their blog post that their vehicles have gone through rigorous testing, calculating a total of 2.5 billion simulated miles in just the last year. Acquiring this amount of simulated testing has the company boasting that the vehicles are able to unlock 'full autonomy,' which Waymo says the public will 'get to use Waymo's driverless service to go to work, to school, to the grocery store and more.'

Magic Leap is a name you might have heard over the years but even with all of those years passing, we still don't know what the Florida-based startup is really working on.

But according to a new trademark filing the new augmented reality headset could be called Magic Leap One, which is a plain-ish but very mainstream name. TechCrunch as far back as last year was touting the 'One' moniker after Magic Leap hired National Geographic marketing boss Brenda Freeman as the company's fresh CMO.

There was also a company spokesperson who mentioned that the company were "full steam ahead toward the launch of Magic Leap One". Whatever it's called, bring it on. The latest release window we have for Magic Leap One is Q2 2018, which could change at any moment, or be another year or three away.

Bitcoin has not just reached its historic milestone of $10,000 but passed it and some, reaching a new all-time high of $10,831 before falling back down slightly to $10,371 at the time of writing.

With BTC priced at $10,300+ we have a market cap of $173 billion, which is simply insane. There are only 16.7 million Bitcoins in the world, and with the price not hovering and not going under $10,000 the question on my lips is: will BTC correct and drop to sub $7500 soon? The correction is coming, the only question is when. If the correction isn't coming, how long can BTC sustain this mind-blowing growth?

According to the latest leaks on Devil May Cry 5, we should expect Capcom to use Unreal Engine 4, which should make the game very, very pretty.

The leaker said that Devil May Cry 5 will be released on the "PlayStation 4 first, PC later. (highly unlikely to be on any other platform)", and that it will be powered by UE4. Other details on the game include a release window of somewhere between April 2018 and March 2019, with an early 2019 release the most likely of the two.

Sony is reportedly "paying for some of the funding for the game", and that the trailer has been "ready for a while now" and comes in at 1-minute 50 seconds. The level design of Devil May Cry 5 will reportedly be "more open" but not quite the whole "open world" thing that other games are famous for. The poster teased: "Level design and exploration is more similar to Bayonetta with action set pieces thrown in there but without the QTEs".

Remedy Entertainment is hard at work on their next game post-Quantum Break, a new game that is only known as P7, the studios seventh project.

We don't know much about P7 other than it will be a "cinematic third-person action game set in a new Remedy-created universe, featuring an intriguing story and the deepest game mechanics yet in a Remedy game". But it looks like P7 could be very different to Remedy's previous games in Quantum Break, Alan Wake, and Max Payne.

Remedy recently posted up a new a job on their website that teases P7 could be an online multiplayer game that sounds awfully like Destiny, with an interesting world with lore and online play. The job ad reads: "Remedy Entertainment, the creator of Quantum Break®, Max Payne®, Alan Wake® and Death Rally® and one of the leading independent game studios in the world, is looking for a World Systems Designer to create innovative and long-lasting gameplay for P7, a new Remedy project".

Toshiba has just announced their latest surveillance HDD, with the new MD06ACA-V being the latest in a growing line of SV Series 3.5-inch HDDs that Toshiba makes for surveillance applications.

The new models arrive in up to 10TB, and thanks to higher transfer rates over the MD04ABA-V models, Toshiba says the new drives support up to 64 camera streams. The larger capacity HDDs mixed with the higher speeds on the drive will allow higher resolution surveillance with long-term storage thanks to 10TB models.

Toshiba's new MD06ACA-V is designed for 24/7 streaming operation scenarios like surveillance digital video recorders (SDVR), surveillance network video recorders (SNVR) and Hybrid SDVR. Toshiba taps 7200RPM operation for the new drives, with the 10TB model offering a 58% increase in maximum sustained transfer rates over its predecessor.