“This week’s Bitcoin Atom fork: A quick primer” plus 7 more VentureBeat |
- This week’s Bitcoin Atom fork: A quick primer
- Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire — a step inside The Void’s new VR experience
- Hollywood’s Skydance Interactive doubles down on VR for the long term
- Augmented reality is no longer a novelty
- A candid take on the future of AI and job automation
- HTC: Vive Pro ‘will require a better machine’
- VC investments will remain high but target new sectors in 2018
- Why Brian Fargo thinks blockchain is key to an alternative PC game store
| This week’s Bitcoin Atom fork: A quick primer Posted: 21 Jan 2018 10:25 AM PST  GUEST: Bitcoin Atom, an ambitious Bitcoin fork due to come into existence within the next few days, plans to solve a substantial problem in the cryptocurrency world. The project will use atomic swaps to allow users to exchange tokens at absolutely minimal costs without any intermediaries or centralized exchanges. The project also plans to integrate Lightning Swaps (LS) to power extremely fast and cheap transactions. While the most appealing component of Bitcoin Atom is a potential solution to Bitcoin's scalability problems, it also has a few other differentiating points. Perhaps foremost among these, Bitcoin Atom uses a hybrid consensus model that combines Proof of Work (POW) and Proof of Stake (POS), two different types of algorithms for reaching consensus, or agreement, on whether or not a transaction is valid before it is added to the blockchain. This hybrid model aims to increase network stability and decrease the threat that a majority group of miners could sabotage the system. The current process of trading in cryptocurrencies involves several steps, as well as exchange and network fees. For example, if you want to trade Bitcoin for Ethereum, you have to create an account on an exchange such as Bittrex or Binance and place your order. However, with Bitcoin Atom, you'd be able to swap it directly (assuming you already have a wallet with some cryptocurrency to swap). Atomic swaps are a two-step process that involves placing your order inside your node and then receiving your exchange cryptocurrency. In bypassing third-party exchanges, Bitcoin Atom users can keep their identities private, perform faster trades, and reduce trading fees. With atomic swaps, either the trade happens, or it doesn't. There's no need to blindly trust that another party will fulfill their end of the bargain or to worry about your funds being sent into escrow. Bitcoin's scaleability issues have created a major roadblock to mainstream adoption. With the costs of a single Bitcoin transaction nearing $30 at some points over the last couple of months, many cryptocurrency evangelists are searching for a solution. Bitcoin currently has a throughput of 3-4 transactions per second (TPS). With SegWit (an update to the original protocol), Bitcoin could theoretically get 6 TPS. Ethereum, currently number two in cryptocurrency market capitalization, has a throughput of 20 TPS. To put this in perspective, PayPal is able to process 193 TPS, and Visa averages 1,667 TPS and is estimated to be able to process more than 56,000 TPS. For a token expected to revolutionize global payments, Bitcoin’s throughput rate doesn't inspire confidence. Several other Bitcoin forks have tried to address Bitcoin's scalability issues, but they mostly focus on expanding Bitcoin's 1MB blocksize. Bitcoin Cash, for example, increased the blocksize to 8MB, resulting in an exponentially cheaper transaction cost. These blocksize solutions, however, are limited. The problem isn't linear; even a 100MB blocksize poses a problem. That's where Bitcoin Atom comes into play. An atomic solutionBitcoin Atom (whose currency symbol is BCA) is a SegWit-enabled Bitcoin fork that, as mentioned above, uses "on-chain atomic swaps" and a hybrid consensus model. This isn't a blocksize expansion, it's a paradigm shift in how the token operates. Instead of Bitcoin Atom attempting to change Bitcoin's blocksize from 1MB to a hypothetical 100MB so that the network can add more stacks of transactions to the blockchain at a faster rate, it's fundamentally changing how transactions are conducted. As a cryptographically powered smart contract, an atomic swap creates a direct and trustless exchange. (Note on the video above: The concept of atomic swaps has been around since 2013 but has been a work-in-progress ever since. In September 2017, Litecoin founder Charlie Lee helped perform the first LTC/BTC cross-chain atomic swap. This served as the initial proof that atomic swaps can actually work and helped serve as the stimulus for the Bitcoin Atom project.) Final thoughtsIn a world where Bitcoin is seen as the flagship that launched a fleet of thousands of blockchain-based projects, it is starting to look more and more like an antiquated warship of yesteryear, with speedier, faster, and stronger ships being built. As Bitcoin continues to lose market dominance, the playing field is set for competitors. These ships (forks) take the skeleton and structural integrity of Bitcoin's blockchain and brand and tack on different features. The biggest challenge is building a ship that floats. Forks like Bitcoin Atom are looking to implement a technology that would give them a massive competitive advantage. Implementing a solution that consistently and reliably works, however, is a challenge in and of itself. We won't truly know how valuable the Bitcoin Atom solution is until we see it in action. The Bitcoin Atom fork is expected to occur this week — when Bitcoin reaches its 505,888th block. Full disclosure: I own some Bitcoin, so, assuming my exchange adds supports for BCA, I will automatically own some after the fork. This article isn’t intended to be used as investment advice. Alex Moskov has been active in the crypto space for four years. He currently writes for CoinCentral and Hacked.com and works for New York-based digital agency Juice. |
| Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire — a step inside The Void’s new VR experience Posted: 21 Jan 2018 10:25 AM PST  Before I went to Disneyland this week, I made it to what is a far more interesting attraction for Star Wars geeks. In the Downtown Disney retail area, I went to The Void and awaited my turn at the Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire virtual reality experience. The location is one of just three in the world — others are in Orlando, Florida, and London — that deliver a high-end VR experience. Utah-based The Void, which made the Ghostbusters: Dimension VR experience at Madame Tussauds in New York, teamed up with the Disney-owned ILMxLAB to create the attraction. This kind of experience represents the future of VR, which isn’t taking off in homes so well but has great promise as location-based entertainment. Editor's note: This story has some spoilers about the experience.  Above: The Void: Step Beyond Reality at Downtown Disney in Anaheim, California. Image Credit: Dean Takahashi I had to sign up in advance to pay for the $30 experience, which takes people in groups of four. A worker told me they were getting about 300 people a day through the experience, and it was pretty much sold out so far. I wasn’t allowed to take pictures inside the experience. After all, we were on a short 30-minute schedule. Once you sign in, a greeter asks you to use the Force to open the door to the attraction. When you walk in, more greeters in black outfits help you get into your VR rig. The rigs have a backpack with a laptop in them, with wires connecting to an Oculus headset. But in contrast to the Oculus Rift home consumer VR kits, this setup had no hand controllers. No wires. No controllers. That was pretty liberating.  Above: I was pretty excited after waiting in line (even though I had a reservation) at Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire. Image Credit: Dean Takahashi You strap yourself into the backpack and the greeters help you put on the headset. (You have to be at least 10 years old and 48 inches tall). They twist it tight, and you’re ready to go. My group had three people, and once we were ready, they showed us a video, which was our first step into the immersive story. They asked me to look down at my hands, and at first, I saw nothing. Then, after a little delay, my virtual hands appeared. As I moved my real hands around, the virtual hands mimicked the movement inside my VR screen. The tracking was a bit off, with considerable latency. But it worked. The video screen started out with the typical, “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” The tale takes place between Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. You get a video message from Cassian Andor (played by actor Diego Luna) from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. He asks you to complete an undercover mission for the Resistance. We had to go fetch some important object and make off with it. I looked at my fellow participants, and we were all decked out as Imperial stormtroopers. We boarded a ship that K-2SO (played by Alan Tudyk) headed, and we set off for the molten planet of Mustafar, the home of Darth Vader. Fortunately, we were sitting on a bench while we were flying through space and landing.  Above: Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire is a $30 VR experience. Image Credit: Dean Takahashi As we landed, we had to physically get up to go through a door. This was a little easier said than done. I didn’t want to bump into anything. So, I reached out to grab a virtual wall and found it was a real wall. That helped give me confidence to move around freely, so long as I avoided the other two people in the experience with me. It was a very tight and confined space, even though we had the freedom to move around because we weren’t tethered. We walked through the door and found ourselves inside an Imperial facility, trying to stay stealthy. We picked up some blasters, which were wooden guns with a trigger in real life. We were supposed to infiltrate the base, but for some reason, one of my colleagues just opened fire. That was the end of our stealth play, and we had to start shooting at stormtroopers. The gun was a big block in my hand with a trigger, and in VR, I could see it firing as I pulled it. The blaster was nice, making a loud sound as I fired at the stormtroopers, but the aiming wasn’t really easy. I usually missed on my first shot and had to adjust fire slightly to hit the hostiles. The blasters had a bit of a delay, so I couldn’t shoot at a rapid clip. But when I hit the enemies a couple of times, they went down. As I was doing so, I felt like the 3D graphics were merely adequate. Every now and then, my colleague’s leg would flicker out of place and snap back into position. So, the bodies weren’t always doing exactly what I thought they should be doing. I found that I was getting fired at from multiple directions, so I had turn my head and face the enemies. I found that my screen was turning slightly red, which meant I was getting shot, and a droid was telling me I should do something about that. I had to keep turning my head to find enemies who were popping out of various platforms in front of the lava beds. This was surprising as I figured the stormtroopers would be terrible marksmen. Once we took out the stormtroopers, we had to deal with some very big lava monsters. (I learned later that the lava was supposed to make us feel hot in the confined space where we were fighting, but I didn’t actually feel it. I thought I was simply getting a bit overheated from the gunplay.) At some point, we had to listen to a Simon-like series of tones and repeat them in order to open or close a door as needed. We were riding up and down in a virtual elevator and shooting at enemies. This Simon-like task became so laborious that it tied down one of our crew.  Above: The Void is making Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire as a VR experience. Image Credit: The Void (The adventure contains an Easter egg, but I won’t spoil that for you if you haven’t gone through it yet.) The experience builds to a crescendo of action, and you hear the signature heavy breathing of everybody’s favorite enemy. We tried to shoot Darth Vader, of course, but he used the Dark Side of the Force against us. Fortunately, K-2SO had our backs and came to the rescue. After it was done, we walked back to the room with the rigs and unstrapped ourselves. We had a chance to buy a $15 picture in both physical and digital form, and then, we walked out. I wish I could say the graphics were really impressive, but that just wasn’t the case.  Above: Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire is a VR experience for the galaxy far, far away. Image Credit: From the Void No leaderboard was available. I guess the point isn’t to score the most kills. It’s really about having fun in an immersive Star Wars experience. And while it fails in delivering a technologically impressive next-generation VR experience, it is a good time — or as fun as many of the aging rides at Disneyland. It’s not what I would call the Space Mountain of VR experiences, but it takes a step in the right direction. Is it worth the $30? That’s for you to decide, young Padawan. |
| Hollywood’s Skydance Interactive doubles down on VR for the long term Posted: 21 Jan 2018 08:35 AM PST  David Ellison, son of Oracle founder and billionaire Larry Ellison, started his own Hollywood entertainment studio in 2010. Skydance has made feature films including Mission Impossible — Rogue Nation, Terminator Genisys, World War Z, and Star Trek Into Darkness. Now the company is branching out into games with Skydance Interactive, and virtual reality is its entry point. Skydance acquired a studio, The Workshop, in 2016. The studio was making Pwnd, a cartoon-style first-person shooter that debuted in 2017. But the game was overshadowed by titles such as Overwatch and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. Skydance Interactive has about 70 people, and now they’re all focused on titles such as Archangel, a mech-oriented VR title. I spoke with Chris Hewish, executive vice president for VR at Skydance Interactive, in a fireside chat at Casual Connect USA 2018 in Anaheim, California. Hewish said the company is working on a VR version of The Walking Dead as well as another unannounced title. It is also going to update Archangel for multiplayer play. All of this, he said, is part of a plan for long-term success in a fledgling market. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.  Above: Chris Hewish, executive vice president for VR at Skydance. Image Credit: Dean Takahashi GamesBeat: Tell us more about yourself. Chris Hewish: I've been in the games industry for about 25 years, through a lot of different cycles. I joined Skydance almost a year ago. I got into games right out of college. I was a gamer all my life as a kid, and I took a shot at joining the company whose games I loved the most, which was Games Workshop. Just a funny anecdote, when I sent my resume to them, I added a cover letter that I wrote in the voice of an Ork Warboss, a letter of recommendation from an Ork Warboss in their fiction. That opened the door and got me into the game industry. From there I worked at Microprose, Activision, and Dreamworks Animation. GamesBeat: What was interesting to you about VR? Why have you focused on it? Hewish: After I was at Dreamworks Animation, I got into mobile a little bit, as a lot of people did. I did a little startup that didn't work out, and I was looking at what my next move would be. It was either do more mobile gaming, or a buddy of mine said, "You should check out this company called Survios. They're doing some VR work." Like a lot of people I hadn't experienced VR in its current iteration. I was a little unsure. But I went over anyway and got an early demo of what would become Raw Data, full room-scale VR. I was blown away. I said, "I get it now. This is awesome." That ability to get drawn into a whole new world, it embodied the fantasy of being a hero, seeing these new worlds and interacting with them in a direct way, it really hooked me and made me a believer. GamesBeat: We all know that VR isn't doing as well as expected. How does that affect what you're thinking about now? Hewish: Not to be contrarian, but I think VR is doing well. There were some big projections and hype about how it would come storming out the gate. When I say it's doing well, I mean in the sense of, when you look at most new electronics for home entertainment, they follow a slow ramp-up in the initial few years. We're seeing encouraging signs of that, where the adoption rate of VR is matching the curve of similar electronics that have come into the home. Certainly if you look at the hype cycle, we're in the trough of disillusionment right now, but–  Above: Pwnd Image Credit: Skydance GamesBeat: Is there a sign you see that this isn't like 3D TV, which was truly faddish? Hewish: A couple of things. We're already seeing a second generation of hardware coming out, which indicates that the money behind it, the manufacturers behind it see that there is value in iterating and evolving the hardware. We're seeing a broad adoption of VR in location-based entertainment. What we're still looking at right now is there's in-home VR and then there's location-based VR. Both of those, when combined, make a market. But I think the verdict is still out on which one becomes dominant or whether there's room for both over the next three years. GamesBeat: Skydance as well, tell us more about that. Generally people may know that Skydance is run by David Ellison, son of Larry Ellison. His sister is running Annapurna in Hollywood. These are some interesting new players doing different kinds of things. Hewish: Skydance Media is a film, TV, interactive, and animation content creator, a studio. We partner with Paramount and Netflix for distribution, and some other top companies. Our goal is to make great worlds, great content, triple-A big tentpole properties and worlds. We've done things like the last Star Trek, Mission Impossible, the Terminator reboot that will be coming out in 2019. On Netflix we're airing a show in a few weeks called Altered Carbon, which is based on a cyberpunk series of novels by Philip Morgan. Also Grace and Frankie, a popular show on Netflix. We have a wide range.  Above: Archangel features mechs in VR. Image Credit: Skydance GamesBeat: How did the gaming part get started? Hewish: That started about a year and a half ago. David wanted to build an interactive unit, and he wanted to do it in a way that's different from how interactive is treated at most studios. Really wanted it to be its own stand-alone business, not just an ancillary consumer product group. He also saw that VR held a lot of promise for a company looking to break into the game space and establish themselves, without having to go toe to toe with established players in console or mobile. David acquired a company called The Workshop, and a few people that are speaking here like Peter Ackerman. Really talented group of developers. They're down in Marina del Rey. We're up in Santa Monica. We acquired the studio with the goal of really shifting them to be a triple-A VR studio. I came on board eight months or so after the acquisition to help with those efforts. GamesBeat: And the first game was Pwnd? Hewish: We actually launched two games at the same time. One was Pwned, which is a league-based shooter, a multiplayer game. It's non-VR. The other one is Archangel, which is a big mech VR title, living out that fantasy of piloting a big robot and destroying things. GamesBeat: Pwnd didn't do as well as you guys had hoped. It was their passion project and they wanted to get it out, but– Hewish: It's a solid game. We encountered, as a lot of people have, the fact that the team shooter market is pretty dominated by Overwatch, and then PUBG coming out. We did want to respect the creators at The Workshop and the project they'd been working on for a number of years. That's a theme throughout Skydance. We really do respect the talent and we want to try to help them bring their visions to market. We stayed with Pwnd, brought it to market. We've been supporting it for six months now. We'll see if that can gain traction. Even though VR is our focus, we'd be happy to have something else that took off and would also be a good line of business. Unfortunately it didn't. GamesBeat: And now you're going to double down on VR? Hewish: We are. We're focused purely on VR now, at least within our interactive studio. From a broader perspective, when you look at the interactive division at Skydance, we're also looking at co-development and licensing deals to get our content onto other platforms, but we're doing VR in-house. We're working on Walking Dead and an unannounced title that will be coming out in 2019, as well as more content for Archangel.  Above: The game takes place in a post-apocalyptic version of America. GamesBeat: Tell us more about Archangel. Hewish: That was the big mech combat game that came out on the three premium headsets – Vive, Rift, and PSVR. The game's been doing well for us. I'm a big believer in trying to build a community and supporting our games after we launch them, as opposed to just a packaged-goods model. We're working on additional content for Archangel. We're doing multiplayer mech-on- mech combat. That'll be coming out in the middle of this year. If you've played the single-player game, it's an on-rails shooter with a narrative and all that good stuff, but with the player-versus- player combat, we're going off the rails and really embodying that fantasy. You're piloting this giant mech. We have locomotion and torso twisting and the fun combat that goes along with that. We're adding new classes of mechs into the mix. GamesBeat: Your first two titles weren't based on any of Skydance's movie IP. Why was that? Hewish: We're gluttons for punishment? [laughs] Actually, that was by design. As I mentioned, we really are treating this as its own stand-alone business unit, not just an ancillary to the film or TV business. Because of that, it was important that our first games out were original IP. If we had come out with one of our film properties, our streaming properties, it would have set the tone that we're just the child of that parent company, just relying on their IP. Our mandate is to do what's right for the interactive business, and if that means we work with some of our own IP, great. If it means licensing IP inbound, like with the Walking Dead, great. If it's original, also great. GamesBeat: Is there a broader, longer-term strategy around VR? Hewish: We really look at the next couple of years as an opportunity to establish ourselves as a triple-A player in the VR space, establish ourselves as one of the leaders, if not the leader, in VR. We believe that the market will pop in a few years, once we have additional hardware cycles, prices come down, and friction is removed from the whole process of setting it up and everything. We want to be there when the market takes off. That's how we believe we can position ourselves as a new interactive company. Continue Reading ... |
| Augmented reality is no longer a novelty Posted: 21 Jan 2018 06:00 AM PST  GUEST: Analysts project mobile augmented reality to become the primary driver of the global AR and VR market. In 2017 Digi-Capital projected the AR market got even stronger than expected. AR is one of the hottest technology developments in the mobile industry, but it’s is still far from being a major platform. Ultimately, AR has five big technical hurdles to clear to find mass market adoption in mobile gaming: 1) a hero device, 2) a battery that will let us play all day, 3) ubiquitous connectivity 4) a thriving developer ecosystem, and 5) a way to monetize. Some of these hurdles are closer to being overcome than others. Where AR gaming is nowBoth Google (ARCore) and Apple (ARKit) have introduced their own SDKs and are courting the development community to create compelling AR content designed to engage and retain audiences. These tools will help developers bring AR into the mainstream. New devices like the iPhone 8 and iPhone X, and the introduction of the inaugural ARKit and ARCore SDKs, will make it easier for developers to create compelling mobile AR experiences. Powered by Apple's new A11 Bionic chip, ARKit enables developers to use the iPhone's cameras and large screen size to deliver more engaging AR experiences. One of the featured demonstrations at the iPhone X release was for Warhammer 40K Freeblade, developed by Pixel Toys. The demo of robotic warriors battling on a table is cool, but more interesting for developers is the ability to overlay data onto AR characters. Zynga recently developed an AR mode for CSR Racing 2, which lets gamers view race cars in stunning AR. The new AR feature is free, providing gamers with extra added value. Eplay has taken that idea a step further to reinvent fantasy sports and provide traditional leagues concerned over waning fanbases a toolset to engage younger audiences—something the company refers to as "Poké-sports." Demonstrating the savvy of large media brands, The Walking Dead franchise has also taken a slash at AR gaming. The game will be available in the App Store and Google Play, but there’s no word yet on exactly when it will launch. While each of these apps is fascinating, it's still early for AR in mobile gaming, and there is a lot of experimentation, trial, and error yet to happen. On the monetization front, one of the key questions to answer is how ads can elegantly play and scale into the whole AR experience. Rewarded play?AR will create a number of new monetization wrinkles for mobile game developers, who will certainly be among the most committed early adopters of ARCore and ARKit, and a lot of questions still need to be answered. Will static ads and traditional formats, like interstitials, survive the transition? Can video ads, which have proven to be lucrative elsewhere, be integrated seamlessly? Can advertisements that the user actually plays be even more effective than those they can watch, like rewarded play? If companies buy space to overlay in augmented reality, what would be the trigger to display the ad? Will our AR future look like this? The reason ads, in-app and otherwise, get a bad rap is that they can be annoying and take users out of an experience. How much will the user be willing to tolerate ads when immersed in a mixed-reality world? These marketing metrics exist in other mobile gaming genres, but there are few authoritative public sources of this data in the AR realm. Publishers, marketers and brands will need to work through a new learning curve to learn how to optimally monetize AR games. Current challenges for ARSince monetization for AR games hasn't been hashed out yet, the tech may face difficulty attracting developers. For now, gaming is the most logical use of the technology and as a result, is spearheading a wave of AR apps. But gaming can only do so much for AR. Without a thriving ecosystem of AR apps beyond just games, the technology will remain dead in the water. One thing that will help launch AR apps into the mainstream is if Apple and Google create a dedicated section in their respective app stores featuring compelling AR apps. But for this to happen, there needs to be a surge of developers betting on the potential of AR in the future, which has not happened yet. Additionally, while powerful devices like the iPhone X are great for using AR, battery tech has yet to catch up. AR requires significant amounts of battery power in order to render digital elements in real-time as well as powering the camera. With current battery technology, mobile gamers will only be able to enjoy AR games in short spurts. If it comes down to playing an AR game or conserving battery life to last the rest of the night, consumers will choose the latter. There's no doubt that AR can help create some truly unique and compelling gaming experiences. But until there's mass adoption of AR-capable devices and a healthy ecosystem of AR apps, the tech will continue being a novelty instead of a necessity. Johannes Heinze is Managing Director, International at AppLovin, a leading mobile marketing platform that helps the world’s largest brands reach over two billion consumers globally with relevant content. |
| A candid take on the future of AI and job automation Posted: 20 Jan 2018 07:03 PM PST  GUEST: As automation and AI continue to transform businesses across the globe, the tech industry is in the process of building a world that will look very different from the one we know today. This implies profound changes in how business leaders will structure their companies and suggests a shift in the skills required for success. We must start preparing for these changes now. We can disagree about the number of jobs automation will replace, but most experts who study this closely predict monumental shifts in how we work. McKinsey projects that as many as 800 million workers worldwide could lose their jobs to robots and automation by 2030 — equivalent to more than a fifth of today's global labor force. A previous study from Oxford University concluded that almost half of all U.S. jobs will be "susceptible to computerization" in the next decade or two. Automation has already transformed manual industries, along with routine tasks that involve simple, rule-based activities like sorting mail and bookkeeping. But the wave of technologies referred to as “AI” — machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing — allow companies to hand over increasingly sophisticated tasks to machines. GE and Shell, for instance, both employ algorithms for managerial work. An example from Shell is the use of machine learning to match employees with the right projects for their skills. As Stanford University academic Jerry Kaplan writes in his book Humans Need Not Apply, automation is "blind to the color of your collar." Whether you're a factory worker, a paralegal, or a sales manager, automation is coming for your job over the next 25 years. Yes, AI could be smart enough to take your jobIt seems unlikely that half of tomorrow's workforce will be unemployed, as the Oxford study implies, and likely that automation will create new classes of work even as it destroys existing ones. But the skills needed in the future will be very different from those our education system selects for today. In the future, companies will highly reward skills that are not currently valued by this system, like creativity and emotional intelligence, as these are among the skills computers will find hardest to replicate. Conversely, the bureaucratic and administrative skills that our education system is geared toward providing will be far less relevant in the market. In fact, it's likely these jobs simply won't exist. To understand what future organizations will look like, it's helpful to think of the popular mantra that every business will become a software business. What does that mean, really? It implies that every business will leverage software to the greatest extent possible to outcompete its peers by “outsourcing” most traditional business functions to companies that specialize in those areas. This will be done to reduce costs, build better products, and ultimately, generate more profit. The businesses that thrive will be those that use software most effectively and wherever they can. Automation is a leading indicator of this transformation, and it has rapidly moved beyond the limitations of simple, repetitive tasks and into areas where a self-learning algorithm can make decisions with sufficient certainty. And it can do this at a speed and scale that humans simply can't. Thus, legal teams use machine learning to sift through millions of documents to find those relevant to a case, sales teams use it to identify targets and upsell opportunities, and financial advisers use algorithms to provide investment advice. These changes are happening today, and it's naive to think companies will not apply automation to ever more complex tasks in future. Experts often note that computers still can't come close to thinking like humans. Computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra offers an interesting counter-opinion by saying that asking whether machines can think like a human is "about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim." If a computer can perform the same task better, the process it uses to get there makes little difference. "We are approaching the time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task," Moshe Vardi, a computer science professor at Rice University in Texas, has said. If software becomes better at any task where data can be brought to bear, from optimizing supply chains to designing products, there are few roles left where human judgment will be a superior option. Some industries will likely always benefit from a human touch — the artisanal coffee shop, the hospital ward — but within the walls of business, software will perform more and more analytical, administrative, and bureaucratic functions. Honing valuable human skills in an automated futureThe enabling force is human-in-the-loop AI — where algorithms perform business functions and a human steps in when the software is uncertain of the answer. An operator can feed human judgment back into the algorithm so it learns to tackle the problem better in the future. Human-in-the-loop AI greatly increases the scope of work that AI can perform because it allows software to handle tasks that are traditionally considered too nuanced for a computer to deal with. In this model, software can handle almost anything to do with logistics, operations, and objective decision-making. What it can't do is the creative work. A human will be necessary to craft the marketing copy that strikes just the right chord with other humans. The writer can then feed the copy into a machine that A/B tests it across target audiences, refining and personalizing it along the way. In this scenario, the algorithm does the targeting, but a human creates the initial words that compel an emotional response. This example implies organizations that will look vastly different from today. We'll still need humans to set the company vision and developers, designers, and creatives to build and program the software. But an entire tier of employees will become redundant. Think about anyone you work alongside who performs their primary tasks using software — that’s a long list which includes sales, finance, HR, accounting, marketing, and office management functions. Instead of building applications that humans can use to do work, we'll increasingly build applications that perform the work itself. This raises important questions about policy. We need to have a conversation as a society about how we will deal with mass automation. Do we prioritize the freedom of corporations to maximize productivity and competitiveness at the expense of secure employment? Or do we enact policies that protect certain classes of jobs? That's not as far-fetched as it may sound: The Stimulus Act of 2008, for instance, focused on large-scale infrastructure projects, prioritizing employment over productivity. On a local level, San Francisco politicians voted to limit delivery companies to three robots each, clearly a move to assuage voter fears of automation. Our education system will also need to evolve. Today, schools churn out graduates optimized for the type of rote, administrative work computers are already more adept at handling. Few children are encouraged to pursue creative, interdisciplinary subjects or develop empathy and interpersonal skills, yet those are the attributes we will most need in order to augment computerized decision-making. Ironically, when I look around at other leaders in Silicon Valley, those skills are massively over-represented among my peers. Building a deliberate future for human employmentWhatever we decide, we need to proceed deliberately and in a way that balances the imperatives of business with what's best for society. As Satya Nadella noted at Microsoft's recent Ignite conference, the tools we build must ultimately contribute to our wellbeing, not detract from it. "How are we going to use technology to empower people?" Nadella asked. "Every piece of technology should help embellish the capability of human beings. We definitely want more productivity and efficiency, but we do not want to degrade humanity." Fred Stevens-Smith is the CEO of Rainforest, an on-demand QA solution that improves customer experience by enabling development teams to discover significantly more problems before code hits production. |
| HTC: Vive Pro ‘will require a better machine’ Posted: 20 Jan 2018 04:41 PM PST  This month at CES 2018 in Las Vegas, we saw the near-future of VR hardware when HTC unveiled the Vive Pro at its press conference. The 3K resolution is improved over its current model predecessor, and it also features an improved fit, embedded audio solution, and the promise of improved base station tracking sensors to arrive later this year. Upload went hands-on with the Vive Pro at CES, as well as seeing it sitting side-by-side with the original Vive that released in 2016, and came away mostly impressed with the crisp visual display. During the show HTC revealed that the Vive Pro will actually have the same minimum PC specifications as the current original Vive. This opens the door for current generation consumers to purchase just the Vive Pro when it releases for a marginal upgrade without having to break the bank on a whole new computer. At least, that's the idea. But just like any piece of cutting-edge technology though, you're going to want to have a powerful computer to get the most out of it and the Vive Pro is no different. "We have a minimum spec and a recommended spec, we haven't revealed recommended yet but those are two different things," explained J.B. McRee, a senior VR marketing manager at HTC, during an in-person interview at CES. "The minimum is the bare minimum for it to work, functionally, but just like with any VR headset or game that lets you modify graphics settings and things like that, with a higher end GPU you're gonna get higher performance. So the recommended spec will likely shift but the minimum spec will stay the same." So the ultimate question is: If you're running a minimum or near-minimum spec PC right now with an original Vive and you buy a Vive Pro, will you notice improved visuals at all? "It's hard to say since each piece of content has different requirements," answered McRee. "Let's say you have a game with three graphical settings, if you were minimum spec using the Pro then you might need to run the game on a lower overall setting because it's higher resolution and you're requesting more horsepower from the computer. A large bulk of the devs here at CES have gone through and optimized things to run well on the Pro. … It's a higher performance headset, so it will require a better machine. The people that we are currently marketing this product to, the most demanding consumers and enterprise customers, are not the type of people that have a minimum spec PC and they're not the type of people that would feel uncomfortable upgrading to a higher end GPU if that's what's needed to get the type of experience that they want."
This shouldn't come as much of a revelation to anyone, but it's important to understand that the Pro may not be a tangible upgrade for an everyday consumer. If you want to really see the resolution difference, then you may need to push your PC a bit further than it's being pushed currently. Until we know the recommended PC specs though, it's hard to say what that will be exactly other than it's going to be higher than the original Vive's. McRee indicated that all of the PCs running the Pro at CES were using a single Nvidia GTX 1080 or an equivalent GPU, which does serve as at least a starting indication of where to aim to get the most out of the improved visuals.
 The PC Gaming channel is presented by Intel®'s Game Dev program. |
| VC investments will remain high but target new sectors in 2018 Posted: 20 Jan 2018 02:33 PM PST  GUEST: 2017 saw a rebound in overall VC funding, approaching dotcom-era amounts. This was fueled by continued investor enthusiasm over the venture asset class, including new late-stage growth funds. The sectors that showed the largest growth were those in the business and financial services and healthcare sectors. In 2018, I expect VC investments levels to remain high, but several developments will impact the ecosystem. Here’s what I see happening over the next 12 months. 1. The IPO market for venture-backed companies will continue to open up. Many have predicted an IPO market comeback for some time. But they've considered predominantly tech-focused unicorns. But I expect biotech and life sciences to take the lead. With a new wave of innovation in areas like cell editing, and immunotherapy for oncology and infectious diseases, the biotech and life sciences sectors will be ready to raise money in the public markets to help realize their potential. 2. Fewer than 15 unicorns will go public — and the number could be as low as 10. These companies continue to raise almost limitless amounts of cash from an ever-increasing number of global investors. The availability of quick cash means many unicorns won't need to go public. Others don't yet have the proper infrastructure to operate effectively as public companies. Still others have raised money at valuations ahead of their metrics and will need time in the private market to grow into their valuations so they can provide a return in the public markets. For these reasons, most of the unicorn herd will continue to wait in the wings and stay private. 3. Venture funding will continue to hover at near-record levels. We'll see continued high levels of VC funding throughout 2018 for a number of reasons:
4. Initial coin offerings (ICOs) will pull back, and won't replace venture funding. According to ICO data, almost $5 billion was raised through ICOs in 2017, while over $71 billion was raised by venture-backed companies. In 2018 we will see a decrease in ICOs as the SEC continues to scrutinize these activities and starts to regulate them more like IPOs to protect investors. 5. Cryptocurrencies will cool down. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been on a tear this past quarter, producing incredible, unsustainable investor returns. With unrealized gains being posted, this market has assumed a life of its own but will start to cool before the summer. There will be a major correction, which will be the biggest test for the entire sector. 6. We will continue to see VC-funded companies fold or be sold. Some of the sales will be below the companies' last rounds. This won't be the end of the world. The natural process of the venture ecosystem is that companies are funded and go out of business almost daily. There are more than 18,000 venture-backed startups in the United States alone — all competing for capital, talent, space, and customers. It's unrealistic to think all of these companies will survive as funding reverts to historical norms. Entrepreneurs will need to be vigilant about how they deploy the precious capital they have raised, challenging every assumption in their models and pressing hard to do more with less. They must distinguish themselves from the crowd and be positioned to raise additional capital to take the next major step in their evolution. Jeff Grabow is a U.S. Venture Capital Leader at EY. He has more than 25 years of experience with high technology startup companies in Silicon Valley and works directly with rapidly growing, venture-backed companies and venture capitalists. |
| Why Brian Fargo thinks blockchain is key to an alternative PC game store Posted: 20 Jan 2018 12:10 PM PST  Veteran game publisher Brian Fargo and other game industry veterans announced a plan to shake up PC digital game purchases this week with the announcement of Robot Cache and its planned cryptocurrency, dubbed Iron. Their idea comes amid a sometimes hot, sometimes not — but always volatile — market for cryptocurrency and blockchain startups. Fargo’s plan to stage an initial coin offering (ICO) raised a lot of eyebrows among the 1,400 attendees to the Casual Connect USA 2018 event this week in Anaheim, California, where blockchain sessions were quite popular. Fargo’s new company will create a digital PC games platform as an alternative to Valve's Steam digital distribution service. But Fargo plans to give game publishers and developers about 95 percent of the proceeds from game sales, rather than just 70 percent as Steam and others do. It will also pay them quickly, in contrast to slow payments by the big app stores. Fargo hopes to leverage his relationships from 30 years of making games to sign up the major game publishers and developers, which, in turn, will help draw consumers to the new store. The ope is to take away some of the arbitrary power over game distribution from the platform owners. "I think this could be a paradigm shift for the industry," Fargo said. "It could be a game changer." I sat down with Fargo and Robot Cache chief technology officer Mark Caldwell at a party for the CoinAgenda event in Las Vegas, ahead of the recent CES 2018 tech trade show. We talked about cryptocurrency, blockchain, the hype around Bitcoin, and the chance to use the new technologies to disrupt the status quo in games. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.  Above: Mark Caldwell (CTO, left) and Brian Fargo (founder, right) of Robot Cache. Image Credit: Dean Takahashi GamesBeat: So is this a post-retirement thing? Brian Fargo: Hey, I got a lot to do in the next three years. I have to make my biggest impact. I'm in a hurry. At inXile we're going to announce we have a new strategic investor, which is a huge deal, in the next week or two. You'll want to know about that. It's around a product. I have a particular piece of talent. It's a new category we're going into. It's a pretty big play. But not as big as this. I'm also doing an ICO with these guys. They've raised a bunch of money through the ICO market. I've known them a long time. We have all these video game guys who want to do something. We're thinking about a play in the video game space, and I'm trying to get my head around this. Here's my first conversation on the ICO: I said, "I don't understand. What percentage of the company do they get?" Well, none. "Do they get a piece of the profits?" No. "What do they get?" They get a token. In my business mind, it took me a while—it's like a Dave and Buster's, right? You're giving the coins out. Okay, I get that. But it took a while to get my head around the process working. What you want, you want an economy. A single game makes no sense. One of the things, in thinking about what the blockchain does well—it minimizes the need for a middleman. That's one great part of it. I was reading about one company that—let's say you want a logo made, or contract programming. Normally you farm the job out, someone does the work for you, and the middleman company takes 30 to 40 percent. Now it's five or 10. That started me thinking about digital games distribution. Does it really take 30 percent to administer that business model? I don't think it does. And the fact that there are other savings, other ways to make money. So let's decentralize the digital game store for PC. We're going to pay publishers and indie developers 95 percent instead of 70. That gets everyone's attention. The margin swing for a small indie is life and death. And for the big publishers, on a million-unit seller, that's a $6 million swing. For fun, we ran the numbers on PUBG and the swing was $300 million, something like that. All the publishers I've spoken to, smaller developers, they've loved it, as you would imagine. There's nothing to lose. But consumers don't care that publishers are going to get an extra margin. How do I get them to come over to the service? Here's the innovative thing: thinking about GameStop, we're going to allow them to sell their games when they're done playing. At first, as you can imagine, the publishers didn't like this idea. But here's the thing. It's a secondary license. You control the price. You'll get the same 70 percent you used to from anybody else, only this time the consumer picks up 25 percent and we get our typical five. You think about a used car lot. Typically I buy a car and I'm stuck with it for life, but this one, I can actually sell on one of these days. That's what I think is going to motivate consumers to come over. Lastly, when you come on to our site, you can opt in and mine for crypto. We'll convert that into our currency, such that you might get three to five games per year for free, just by leaving your computer on at night, which most people do anyway. We'll explain the electricity costs and all that. That's the big idea. I think it can be a big paradigm shift for how people look at the business. We've had a few film people interested, because it's the same thing. If you put your movie on Vudu, 30 percent. That's the standard thing. When you're done with a movie on Vudu you don't get to sell it to anybody. I think this could really shake things up.  Above: Robot Cache will let consumers resell digital games. Image Credit: Robot Cache GamesBeat: So the token becomes a bit more valuable? Consumers are reselling games. Or would they always sell it for a used price? That price isn't going to go up, right? There's no reason for that. Mark Caldwell: You have to think of it as—it's still a new product. It's not like you're running off a VHS tape. When you buy it, you're not actually buying it from Brian. You're buying it from us. You're giving Brian his token and you're downloading the product from us, just like the guy who bought the new game. For the new buyer, he doesn't know if it's new or used. He doesn't care if it's new or used. But he's buying it with the idea that he can sell it. How we dictate what gets sold new or used is something we're working out with publishers in general. But you're effectively buying a brand new product. He's just getting the ability to recoup some of the money he spent on it. Fargo: Once you sell it you'll have our currency in the system. Theoretically, if our currency went up, that would be worth more. But we're not setting it up to speculate. The idea is to have an economy, like GameStop. They do, what, 25 percent of their business on used game sales? People like the concept of selling stuff when they're done. We already know consumers are used to it. We're tapping into that. I don't know that anybody's ever set up a system where you can resell product like this. When I first started this conversation with publishers and developers, their first answer is always, "Hell no." But as I take them through the controls they have and the percentages they get, the answer usually changes to, "That sounds pretty good. We might want to invest in that." It's exciting. I think it's going to get a lot of play. The other thing we're doing that's unique about the ICO is there's a lot of regulatory—there's no clear direction on this. We're taking a very conservative route. It's all going to be institutionalized, accredited investors only. We're not going to have an ICO countdown token event where anybody can buy in. We want to avoid any of the potential issues, because we don't know where the SEC is going to rule later on. We're taking a super conservative approach. Anybody that's accredited can come in, but we're not going to open it up for unaccredited sales. GamesBeat: Have you heard of the Game Credits guys, their ICO? They had the same idea, taking 10 percent, but they don't have the resale component. Caldwell: And they don't have the publishers. A lot of people out there are saying they're going to do something similar to what we're doing. First off, nobody is doing exactly what we're doing. Second, we're the only ones that are going to have the publishers. The relationships that Brian and I and the other guys have with the publishers and hardware vendors and everyone else are going to give us a head up above everyone else. We plan to launch day one with a thousand games, publisher approved. Fargo: There's a lot of ICOs where they say, "Once you plug in our SDK or our API, all these great things will happen." But I know what it's like being on the other side. If I need to tell my guys to drop an API in, we're not doing it. If I get 95 percent? Now we're talking. But with us we even do all the work. We do all the wrapping. We have to make it super frictionless. Otherwise, we're in the too-hard pile. Caldwell: The idea is to set up the publisher portal a lot like iTunes. The publisher goes in, publishes their game on our site, puts in all the graphics, does everything they want it to, lists it for sale, and they go. They control the whole thing. Continue Reading ... |
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