PCNewsBuzz

Disney is closing the FoxNext-owned game studio Fogbank Entertainment in San Francisco and laying off an estimated 60 people, GamesBeat has learned.

I’m a long-time Apple user, but not an Apple apologist. In other words, I’ve spent years separating my love for iPhones from my knowledge that most of them will break if dropped accidentally — and that making beautiful, fragile devices has been Apple’s deliberate design strategy for years. It’s impossible to calculate how much money Apple has made from screen replacements, full device replacements, and AppleCare warranties over the past two decades, but there’s little doubt that it has used designed-in fragility to squeeze billions of additional dollars from its customers’ wallets. Even its latest $249 earphones, AirPods Pro, are designed to be tossed out rather than repaired when their batteries expire.

Intel recently regained its title as the world's largest semiconductor vendor measured by revenue, after Samsung experienced a significant dip in sales due to an oversupply of DRAM and NAND chips, coupled with lackluster demand. But more importantly, demand for Intel's server processors is very strong and the company is selling Xeons like hotcakes to tech giants looking to bolster their data centers. Intel reported impressive earnings for Q4 2019, with revenue growing 8 percent year-over-year to $20.2 billion.

On Sunday, the Financial Times published an op-ed penned by Sundar Pichai titled “Why Google thinks we need to regulate AI.” Whether he wrote it himself or merely signed off on it, Pichai clearly wants the world to know that as the CEO of Alphabet and Google, he believes AI is too important not to be regulated. He has concerns about the potential negative consequences of AI, and like any technology, he believes there needs to be some ground rules.

Ever wish you could automatically dub foreign film dialogue in another tongue? Amazon’s on the case. In a paper published this week on the preprint server Arxiv.org, researchers from the tech giant detailed a novel “speech-to-speech” pipeline that taps AI to align translated speech with original speech and fine-tune speech duration before adding background noise and reverberation. They say that it improves the perceived naturalness of dubbing and highlights the relative importance of each proposed step.

GamesBeat Summit 2020 will focus on the latest trends in the gaming ecosystem, so of course we’re going to have a panel on the future of influencer marketing.

Three years ago, the NotPetya ransomware wreaked over $10 billion in damage. Crafted by the Russian military, the malware relied on a nearly decade-old code named Mimikatz. It highlighted an ongoing Windows flaw that could expose users’ passwords left as cleartext in system memory. Even today, any exploitable system that hosts multiple users stands ready to expose those passwords to hackers, who can then seize that data and use it to log into adjacent exploitable systems.

Amazon-backed autonomous vehicle company Aurora is in search of better metrics by which to compare driverless system safety. In a Medium post this morning, CEO Chris Urmson noted that the commonly used disengagement number, which indicates how often a vehicle switched from autonomous to manual mode, doesn’t adequately capture improvements or their impact over time.

Game developers favor the unionization of their industry. They consider the PC to be the best platform to develop games for. And they are excited about the coming next-generation consoles from Microsoft and Sony. Those are the results of a new survey of 4,000 game industry professionals.

The industry’s leading investors recognize the advantage that Life House’s software-driven platform and scalable authentic brand have in an increasingly competitive hotel landscape. The investment will support the Company’s rapid growth into new markets with a clear path to profitability by 2021.