Year: 2019

Razer, the company that makes high-end hardware and software specifically tailored to gaming enthusiasts, is adding new voice and touch features to its platform to bring it into the next generation of computing and take the Razer gaming experience to the next immersive level. Today at CES, the company announced that it will be integrating Amazon’s Alexa into its gaming platform to let users control certain aspects of the Razer gaming experience by voice; and it also announced a new range of devices it’s calling HyperSense, to provide haptic interfaces for its gamers.

The Alexa integration will start to be rolled out in Q2 2019, while the HyperSense ecosystem is only getting previewed with no launch date at this stage.

Razer is also making some strides in its efforts to expand the ubiquity of its ecosystem to more than just Razer products: the company said that its Chroma Connected Devices Program — which brings in a new range of peripherals that can work with Razer machines — now has 15 new partners and covers 300 different devices that can run Chroma-enabled games and apps.

The Alexa integration is a signal of how, while Amazon has yet to build its own dedicated gaming hardware, it has been making some headway into that consumer sector regardless among the 100 million devices that now work with the voice assistant. Last September, Microsoft announced that Alexa would work with the Xbox One, the first big gaming console announcement for Alexa after making a little headway with Sony and the PlayStation Vue a year before.

As with those two, it looks like the Alexa integration with Razer is more around controlling what happens around the game — you will be able to control voice-control lighting effects, device settings and so on, but not in-game actions themselves — although you might consider that in-game controls could be the next step (perhaps one that Amazon would prefer to make itself).

“We’re thrilled to work with Razer and provide customers a first-of-its kind integration that showcases how Alexa can enhance the gaming experience,” said Pete Thompson, VP of the Alexa Voice Service, in a statement. “With Alexa, users can control compatible Razer peripherals while taking full advantage of other Alexa capabilities, including the ability to manage smart devices, access tens of thousands of skills and more.”

In the case of Razer, the company is bringing Alexa into its ecosystem by way of its Razer Synapse 3 Internet-of-Things platform, which it uses to connect up Razer and third-party peripherals that a user might have set up to play.

As Razer describers it, those wearing Razer headsets and mics can then be used to control compatible devices, such as in-game lighting, mice, keyboards and headsets. 

“This is an amazing look forward for Razer into a future for gamers where the full potential of gaming gear is seamless and intuitively controlled through voice activation, synchronization and connected cloud services,” said Razer Co-Founder and CEO Min-Liang Tan (pictured above) in a statement.

The haptic developments, meanwhile, will also come by way of a partnership with third parties — in this case, two companies called Lofelt and Subpac, as well as others that Razer is not disclosing.

As with other haptic systems, the idea with HyperSense is not that die-hard gamers will start installing wind machines, chillers and strange smells in their living rooms, but that Razer wants to build and work with others to create, for example, high-fidelity speakers and touch boards that will give users the sensation of different experiences in a way that will bring them even closer into the action of the game. (If you think this sounds closer and closer to Ready Player One, you’re not alone.)

So in the case of HyperSense, cues might include specific sound cues in games like rocket firing, or wind, which will might get “played out” in the form of sound waves that you can feel in your feet or — if you might imagine — a connected jacket that will suddenly make you colder, lean to one side, and shudder with the gust.

“We are finally able to feel what we see and hear all around using the gaming arena, sensing the hiss of enemy fire or feeling the full bass of a monster’s growl,” said Min. “Much like Razer Chroma where we have demonstrated the power of a connected lighting system across gaming devices, Razer HyperSense syncs gaming devices equipped with high-fidelity haptic motors to enhance immersion in gaming.”

In the case of both the voice and touch-based features, it makes perfect sense to bring both to Razer and other games platforms. The wider trend in the gaming industry has been to use advances in technology to make the experience more authentic feeling. Up to now that has taken the form of better graphics and audio, tapping into VR and AR, and playing against and with other people instead of just the machine. Touch is one that hasn’t really been touched (sorry) much up to now, but as we start to see more haptic bells and whistles on devices like our smartphones, it’s logical that it should come to games, too.

Voice, meanwhile, has been shaping up for a long time now as the next big interface, and in cases where your hands and attention might otherwise be occupied, having a voice interface can be indispensable — for example, if you are lost while driving and need to reset your car’s navigation. Games don’t have that kind of urgency — not in the real-world sense, at least — but it seems like just a matter of time before we see games designers and console makers improving the overall experience by letting people speak naturally to move through the action with a scream or even a calm request to turn down the volume a bit.

The DJI Smart Controller lets Mavic 2 owners take to the skies without the need of a mobile device. The $650 controller includes a 5.5-inch screen that can display images streamed from the connected drone in full HD resolution.

DJI says this screen is twice as bright as mobile screens, too, which should make it easier to use in direct sunlight.

The device is a smart, though expensive accessory for drone owners. Right now, for most drones on the market, owners have to connect a mobile phone to a controller in order to access most of the controls of the drone and to view live video images. Often this is a cumbersome process and requires the owner to ensure multiple products are charged and connected. By combining the screen with the controller, it eliminates an extra step. The built-in screen in the cancelled GoPro Karma controller was one of its best features.

The screen itself is an Android device and reportedly supports DJI Go 4, DJI Pilot and other third party apps. The battery lasts 2.5 hours.

Video is streamed to the connected controller over DJI’s OcuSync 2.0 video transmission system. From my experience, it’s the best system available on a consumer drone platform, allowing images to hit a mobile device from an incredible distance.

DJI is going to sell the controller by itself starting today for $650. It will also be available in bundles with the Mavic 2 Pro and the Mavic 2 Zoom.

Virtual reality is — as many have learned the hard way — nothing without content. There are a number of solutions on the market at present, but many are unweildy and/or prohibitively expensive for  many content creators.

Taiwanese 3D imaging company eYs3D announced this week that it’s teaming with Lucid to create the Axis, a hand-held solution for a fraction of the price of higher end systems. What, precisely that fraction is, however, remains to be seen, so we’re going to have to take the companies’ words for it now.

Lucid’s certainly got experience with the small bit. The company has been providing modules for a number of mobile devices including, notably, Red’s Hydrogen One handset, which utilized camera depth to shoot photos for its innovative 3D display.

Per the release,

What was previously possible only with 8-16 high-end DSLR cameras and expensive software or depth sensors is now combined into a single, tiny camera module with stereo lenses paired with IR sensors. AXIS is the world’s first depth-sensing solution which will cover up to 180-degrees field of view while providing millimeter-accurate 3D in point cloud or depth map format.

The system is targeted primarily at game designers, developers and animators. It’s due out at some point in Q3 this year.

After a successful holiday season, Sony’s PlayStation 4 is nearing some pretty wild milestones.

The company announced Monday that they had sold over 5.6 million PS4 units over the holiday season worldwide, bringing the total number of current-gen consoles sold to 91.6 million, a number that suggests the popular console is still vibrant even after five years on the market.

Microsoft has been in a losing position throughout the “console wars” and while it hasn’t released its own numbers recently, it’s estimated that the quantity of Xbox One units sold may make up just about half of what Sony has shipped this generation. Meanwhile, Nintendo has had a banner year following the success of the Switch which launched in late 2017 and has become the fastest-selling game console ever in the U.S. though the total units sold still drags far behind the much older PS4.

Beyond the hardware, Sony also delivered some statistics on title sales, saying that they sold over 50 million titles and that they have sold at least 9 million copies of the Spiderman Sony-exclusive title. A staggering 876 million PS4 games have been sold to date.

Scape Technologies, a London-based computer vision startup, is de-cloaking today to announce that it has raised $8 million in seed fund and launching the first iteration of its “Visual Positioning Service,” which lets developers build apps that require location accuracy far beyond the capabilities of GPS alone.

The technology will initially target augmented reality apps, but can also be used to power applications in mobility, logistics and robotics. More broadly, Scape wants to enable any machine equipped with a camera to understand its surroundings.

Backing the round is LocalGlobe, Mosaic Ventures, Fly Ventures, and company builder Entrepreneur First. Scape Technologies was a member of EF cohort 7, which pitched at EF’s London demo day almost two years ago. The startup has remained pretty stealthy ever since. Until now, that is.

“There is a huge amount hype in the AR space right now which is why we’ve been working for the last two years in stealth, taking our time to make sure our technology is accurate, robust and scalable,” Scape Technologies co-founder and CEO Edward Miller tells TechCrunch. “We set out on a mission to build a new type of infrastructure, to allow computers to safely interpret and navigate the world, using only a camera. To make this possible, we’ve built what we refer to as our ‘Vision Engine’, which lies at the heart of everything we do at Scape”.

Miller describe’s Scape’s “Vision Engine” as a large-scale mapping pipeline that creates 3D maps from ordinary images and video. Camera devices can then query the Vision Engine using the startup’s newly launched Visual Positioning Service API to determine their exact location with far greater precision than GPS can ever provide. Starting today, the Visual Positioning Service is available within London for select partners via Scape’s SDK.

The fact that Scape’s 30 person-plus team has been able to build a detailed 3D map of London is slightly head-scratching, and that’s before factoring in the machine learning and computer vision technology required to enable machines to reference that map to accurately pinpoint “hyper location”. Miller declines to go into much detail on record with regards to how the young company was able to pull off such a large mapping exercise, for fear of giving away too much of the startup’s secret sauce.

However, it is noteworthy that Miller was one of the U.K.’s first Street View photographers, giving him a unique insight into how a company like Google can build maps at scale. He also has a background in interactive imagery, having been involved in VR projects for companies such as ESPN, UEFA and Jaguar. Scape’s other co-founder and CTO Huub Heijnen was previously a researcher in the field of robotics, where he was involved in teaching multi-legged robots how to learn to walk. “It’s pretty hardcore,” says Miller of his co-founder’s previous work.

Teaching a computer to “see” the world with a camera is no small task, either. Whereas humans might see a photograph and recognise in it a car or a building, a computer only sees a bunch of ones and zeros. The role of computer vision to interpret these ones and zeros into something meaningful.

“We’ve had to make significant technological breakthroughs to allow computers to recognise their location accurately, quickly and in varying weather conditions,” explains Miller. “Most importantly, we’ve invested significant efforts in ensuring our Visual Engine is scalable. The world is a big place and we can’t afford to rely on a system that can’t grow with demand. Unlike other approaches, Scape’s Vision Engine scales horizontally to 100s of servers at a time, so we can provide our Visual Positioning Service within areas the size of an entire city”.

More ambitious still, enabling accurate location is “just the beginning”. Over the next 5 years, Scape plans to develop what it calls “ubiquitous spatial intelligence,” which will allow devices to understand where they are and what is around them, using only a camera. The thinking is that with exponential growth in IoT and wearables, the world is becoming increasingly augmented with physical hardware designed to live and operate amongst us.

“With new industries like augmented reality and self-driving cars on the rise, it’s vital that these new types of computers understand with extreme precision where they are and what’s around them,” cautions Scape’s CEO.

Alibaba has paid €90 million ($103 million) to acquire Data Artisans, a Berlin-based startup that provides distributed systems and large-scale data streaming services for enterprises.

The deal was first announced by European media, including EU-Startups, before being confirmed by both Alibaba and Data Artisans through blog posts.

Data Artisans was founded in 2014 by the team leading the development of Apache Flink, an open source large-scale data processing technology. The startup offers its own dA Platform, with open source Apache Flink and Application Manager, to enterprise customers that include Netflix, ING, Uber and Alibaba itself.

The Chinese e-commerce giant has been working with Data Artisans since 2016, through support and open source work to help the architecture and performance of the software, both companies said in statements. Data Artisans is on record as raising $6.5 billion over two rounds, most recently a Series A in 2016 led by Intel Capital, but there was a seemingly unannounced Series B which closed last year and it looks like Alibaba was involved, according to a blog post from Data Artisans co-founders Kostas Tzoumas and Stephan Ewen.

Now Alibaba’s ownership — and you’d also presume, resources — can help the business reach “new horizons” with its open source technology, including moves to “expand to new areas that we have not explored in the past and make sure that Flink becomes a more valuable data processing framework for the modern data-driven, real-time enterprise,” the duo wrote.

“Moving forward together, data Artisans and Alibaba will not only continue, but accelerate contributions to Apache Flink and open source Big Data,” Tzoumas and Ewen added, explaining that Alibaba is one of Flink’s biggest users and contributors to the community.

To mark the new era, Alibaba has committed to providing its own in-house developments to Flink — which it calls Blink — to the community.

“By leveraging the technology expertise of both teams and shared passion to develop the open-source community, we are confident that this strategic tie-in will further strengthen the growth of the Flink community, accelerate the data-processing technologies and help bolster an open, collaborative and constructive environment for global developers who are passionate about stream processing and enabling real-time applications for modern enterprises,” said Jingren Zhou, vice president of Alibaba Group, in a statement.

This deal is reminiscent of Alibaba’s 2017 investment in MariaDB, an open source startup known for offering the most popular alternative to MySQL, a database management system. While not a full acquisition, the partnership has seen the two companies work together on new products for the community, and that’s also the goal here.

“Especially at times when many open source technologies and companies decide on a less collaborative and more “closed” approach, it is with great pleasure to see Alibaba committed to open source and our mission, eager to take Flink’s technological advancement to the next level,” Tzoumas and Ewen wrote in the announcement blog post.

We’ve contacted Alibaba and Data Artisans with follow-up questions, and we hope to have more information on the deal soon. Please refresh for updates.

Coinbase is preparing to list a lot of new coins this year, but its first major piece of action in 2019 is to temporarily pause one of its existing portfolio. The exchange said it has stopped all trading on Ethereum Classic — a cryptocurrency it added back in August — after it detected an attack on the cryptocurrency’s network.

Coinbase identified “a deep chain reorganization” of the Ethereum Classic blockchain which essentially means that someone controlling miners on the network had rewritten transaction history. Such tampering can allow what’s called ‘double spending,’ which essentially invalidates past transactions to alter the route of cryptocurrency transfers — a lot like stealing. Coinbase said it found a further eight reorganizations which, coupled with the larger one, saw around 88,500 RTC ($460,000) in double spends.

It is being suggested that the incident is a 51 percent attack — essentially, anyone who controls over half of the mining power has the ability to rewrite transaction history — but, as Coindesk notes, that is just one potential explanation. Others could be that Coinbase’s ETC nodes were ‘surrounded’ — an explanation put forward by Ethereum Classic advisor Cody Burns — while the official Ethereum Classic Twitter account suggested that powerful new miners could be to blame. It namechecked Linzhi, but the firm’s issued a strong denial to Coindesk.

For now, the Ethereum Classic community is investigating while Coinbase said it will monitor the situation. For now, any customers who keep ETC in their account with the exchange are frozen until further word. That’s not the only response. Other exchanges have moved to increase the number of confirmations required to process a transaction, which is one way to avoid falling foul of minority attacks.

Ethereum Classic was created in June 2016 following a major hack on The DAO, a fundraising vehicle for the project. The Ethereum Foundation created a new version of Ethereum — known today as Ethereum — that rescued the lost funds, but those who opposed continued on with the original chain which was known as Ethereum Classic.

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.

Nuvyyo, the makers of the Tablo OTA DVR aimed at cord cutters who want to watch and record live TV, just gave their DVR a big upgrade. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company launched a redesigned DVR called the Tablo Quad, a four-tuner DVR that now offers the option for an internal SATA drive instead of only external USB drives. But the more exciting news is Tablo’s new ability to automatically skip the commercials when you play back a recording. There’s not even a button to press – the software does it for you.

The commercial-skipping feature is still in beta, and the company won’t get into its secret sauce too much here. We understand, however, that Tablo is licensing the technology from a partner, as opposed to using something it built itself in-house.

According to the company, it’s not using human labor to mark where shows end and commercials begin. Instead, the tech is described as a “cloud-based hybrid of digital signal processing algorithms and machine learning.”

To work, the shows are uploaded to the cloud, where the commercials are marked on the recording.

It’s able to figure out which portions of a program are commercials because of how they’re filmed – with quick cuts, for example. That’s why it works well on a show like “Big Bang Theory” but doesn’t work too well on your local news.

Still, the feature is notable because it’s automatic – you don’t have to worry with fast-forwarding or even pressing a commercial skip button, as on TiVo. It also works across all timeslots and shows, for the most part – not only those airing during primetime.

When the commercials are detected, Tablo will skip past them in the Tablo apps for Roku, Fire TV, Android TV and Apple TV, the company says.

However, the feature is only available to Tablo customers who pay for a subscription for their Tablo OTA DVR – including the Quad as well as older devices.

The Tablo Quad, like other Tablo DVRs, offers an option guide data subscription service, which provides the episode and series synopsis, cover art, and metadata for programs airing over the next two weeks. It also includes access to advanced DVR features like one-touch recording and out-of-home streaming through Tablo Connect, as well the new commercial-skipping feature.

The subscription is $4.99 per month or $49.99 per year, depending on how you choose to pay. You can also opt for a one-time payment of $149.99 for lifetime service.

Tablo QUAD will be available in late Q1 2019 at an MSRP of $199.99.

The commercial-skipping open beta will launch in March for any subscription-enabled Tablo OTA DVR.

Apple isn’t the only smartphone maker steeling itself (and analysts) for disappointing results. Samsung Electronics issued earnings guidance for the final quarter of 2018 today that not only marks its first quarterly profit decline in two years, but also fell far below analysts’ expectations. The company attributed the drop to lower-than-expected demand for its memory chips, which in previous quarters had helped bolster its earnings even when its smartphone business was lackluster.

Samsung Electronics said it expects consolidated operating profit of about 10.8 trillion won ($9.67 billion), a 28.7 percent drop from the 15.15 trillion won it recorded in the same period a year ago, and below the 13.2 trillion won that analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had predicted. Consolidated sales are expected to be about 59 trillion won, a 10.6 percent decrease from 65.98 trillion won a year ago ($52.9 billion). Analysts had estimated sales of 62.8 trillion won.

In a statement, the company said “we expect earnings to remain subdued in the first quarter of 2019 due to difficult conditions for the memory business,” thanks to unexpectedly weak demand from some of its data center customers.

Last week Samsung rival Apple lowered its first-quarter earnings guidance, as CEO Tim Cook said that the company now expected revenue of $84 billion, down from its initial projection of $89 billion to $93 billion. The company blamed sluggish demand in emerging markets, but, in general, the smartphone market has been underwhelming over the past two years.

About a year ago, Gartner recorded the first ever decline for global smartphone sales since 2004, when it first began tracking the market. It attributed the drop to two main factors: fewer feature phone owners upgrading to smartphones because of the lack of quality “ultra-low-cost” smartphones, and current smartphone owners deciding to buy and keep quality devices for longer periods of time.

We may have passed the peak of the “patent war” in the mobile industry, but the concept of patents as power is far from disappearing, since they continue to be a strong marker for how a company is breaking new ground in technology, and do sometimes help to safeguard an inventor’s or company’s original work — even if the legal enforcement around patents sometimes gets abused.

Patent research firm IFI Claims today published its annual report on how patent grants played out in the tech industry in the past year, and it’s a mixed picture as well. It found that IBM has once again, for the 26th year running, topped the list, with 9,100 patents, followed by Samsung, Canon, Intel and LG — also the same top five as a year ago. Forty-six percent of all applications came from the US, with Asia accounting for 31 percent and the US for 15 percent.

But overall, the number of patents granted in 2018 dropped 3.5 percent over 2017, with many a company in the top 50 showing declines in their grants.

Notable declines included Sony (ranking at 15) down 21 percent; Google (number 11) down 16 percent, and Qualcomm (number 8) down 12 percent. Facebook, which last year made it into the top 50 for the first time, dropped out of the shortlist altogether. On the other hand, companies out of China on average saw overall gains across their patent portfolios.

IFI’s Larry Cady said that it’s not clear why so many companies collectively saw significant declines — whether it was due to a lull in innovation — something that I’d argue might actually be happening in the wider industry — or a new approach to how a company safeguards its intellectual property, or even a more conservative process at the USPTO.

What he does note is that there is an average cycle of two years between pre-grant applications and grants, and these were down in 2016 and 2017, meaning 2020 may also see some declines. (Applications were up in 2018 to 374,763, meaning the numbers will also bounce back for grants.)

Other notable trends: Ford has really been driving up its tech cred with its turn to autonomous vehicle technology, jumping up five spots to become the only car company in the top 10.

Apple also moved back into the top 10 ranking, even as its overall patents declined by three percent.

And IFI notes that if you combined all the subsidiaries of Samsung, it would have actually surpassed IBM this year for overall patents held, or “ultimate patent ownership,” in the words of the IFI.

Samsung Electronics has 61,608 active patent families, with Canon in second position with 34,905 and IBM rounding out the top list with 34,376.

Unlike IFI’s annual Top U.S. Patent Recipients, this broader ranking measures the size of a patent owner’s global portfolio based on the number of active patent families. A patent family is a set of patent publications filed around the world to cover a single invention.