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The year is over, and we want to talk about what happened. And that’s why we have a podcast.
It’s GamesBeat Rewind week on the GamesBeat Decides podcast. We’re posting new episode looking back on 2016 all throughout this week. That starts December 26 and continues through the end of the week with discussions regarding the best mobile games, the most impressive new universes, and more. All of this will culminate in our Game of the Year discussion so that we can put this year beh

GUEST: In 2017, the digital ad space will grow in size and complexity, creating more opportunities for advertisers and new challenges for market players. We’ll see more opportunities for ad placements within mobile apps and mobile messaging programs, but fake ad traffic generated by bots will continue to burn through advertisers’ budgets and erode trust in digital advertising.
Here are the top trends that will shape the digital advertising landscape in 2017.
Bots follow the money &md

For a mere $189 you can take your drone from maybe a little chilly to definitely toasty-warm. Wouldn’t you like to do that for your drone?If you would, San Francisco-based artist Danielle Baskin will help you. She makes this (the sweaters for drones) and many other things, such as tapestries of Pluto, tricycle-based pop-up shops, cloud storage systems that are actually physical objects, customized avocados, and signs.
When reached for comment Baskin told The Verge, “It started as a j

After weeks of criticism, Google’s search engine will no longer suggest to visitors that the Holocaust never happened — at least not part of the time, or on the front page. As Digital Trends reports, it initially appeared to have removed a result for the query “did the Holocaust happen” from white supremacist site Stormfront, which previously appeared at the top of the first page. That followed a smaller change that ranked the page a bit lower. But the algorithmic change

After weeks of criticism, Google’s search engine will no longer suggest to visitors that the Holocaust never happened. As Digital Trends reports, it appears to have removed a result for the query “did the Holocaust happen” from white supremacist site Stormfront, which previously appeared at the top of the first page. The removal follows a smaller change that simply ranked the page a bit lower.
“Google was built on providing people with high-quality and authoritative resul

GUEST: AI has been hot in 2016, and it’s not cooling off anytime soon. The investments, acquisitions, trials, reorganizations and breakthroughs of the past year have set the AI industry up to have tremendous impact over the next twelve months. Here are nine predictions to watch for in 2017:
1. We’ll end the hyperbole
AI will “land.” We’ll stop talking about far-fetched, man-versus-machine Skynet predictions and instead figure out how to harness AI to turn the s

2016 was a great year for smartphones. In fact, I can’t remember a year where almost every phone released was so consistently not bad. As such, it doesn’t make much sense to call out a single “best” phone of 2016. (If I had to pick one, it would have been the Note 7… but we all know how that turned out.) Still, there are great phones for everyone out there, depending on your needs. Easiest phones to recommend Apple iPhone 7 Look, I’ve been team And

It’s time to take part in the famous after-Christmas tradition of watching original anime content on YouTube. Why are you looking at me like that?
Gravity Rush: The Animation – Overture is a new anime available on YouTube that takes place between the original game and the sequel, Gravity Rush 2, which comes out for PlayStation 4 on January 2. It comes from Studio Khara, best known for the anime series of films Rebuild of Evangelion. You can watch the Gravity Rush animation above.
The

GUEST: Today’s tech buzzword, artificial intelligence (AI), can be a difficult concept to wrap your head around. AI technology, which holds vast potential to revolutionize the way the world works, is often used to paint an apocalyptic view of the future. We now live in a world where talking computers and self-driving cars are no longer a thing of the future — but are we also at risk of developing computers so smart that they can replace humans? Influential tech figures such as E

 Corporate machine learning research may be getting a new vanguard in Apple. Six researchers from the company’s recently formed machine learning group published a paper that describes a novel method for simulated + unsupervised learning. The aim is to improve the quality of synthetic training images. The work is a sign of the company’s aspirations to become a more visible leader… Read More

Longtime Oculus engineer Dov Katz was arrested last week after allegedly soliciting sex from a police officer he thought was a 15-year-old girl. Washington news outlet KING 5 reported on Friday that Katz responded to an online ad posted as part of a sting operation by an undercover detective, who claimed to be 15 years old.
According to charging documents published by GeekWire, Katz and the officer agreed to meet at a hotel in Tukwila, Washington. Katz showed up on the evening of December 21st a

GUEST: In the next year, the Internet will connect to about 1.5 billion new “things,” and by 2020, over 20 billion devices will be online. In theory, every one of them will be able to connect to every other.
The Internet was not created to handle this population explosion of data-generating devices. The Internet will be threatened by its own growth, and we will see cyber-attacks extend to more and more of these things.
So is the Internet headed for collapse? No, but it will change. H

Game developer Arc System Works bought the rights to Double Dragon series in 2015, and today the company announced that Double Dragon IV is happening. Better yet, the new game will be released on January 30th, 2017 — in time to honor the 30th anniversary of the original game. Double Dragon IV will be available on PlayStation 4 and Steam.While it might be hard to work up excitement for a different company’s take on the classic side-scrolling beat ‘em up, there is reason to hold

Bad things have happened around the globe forever, but many people are saying that 2016 was especially bad. Where did we go wrong? I decided to look back at some Twitter predictions from 2010 — a Goldilocks year of sorts where there weren’t too many tweets to sift through, but enough to produce some wonderful guesses.
FLASHFORWARD IS CANCELLED. Dec. 12, 2016 will forever be a mystery.— Carl (@drmcmuffin) May 14, 2010FlashForward was a short-lived television show that aired on A

Akonia Holographics, a startup in Longmont, Colorado, spent years trying to make holographic data storage work. It didn’t succeed, but now it found a new use for the same technology. The company now plans to use holography to make inexpensive transparent displays for augmented reality smartglasses.
Augmented reality is expected to be a $90 billion market by 2020, according to tech advisor Digi-Capital. And while big companies such as Microsoft, maker of the HoloLens AR smartglasses, could

You’d think the proliferation of smartphone photography would have sparked a revolution in digital cameras. Not so much. Sure, cameras are more connected now than ever, and mirrorless technology has helped make them smaller and lighter. But the basics — shoot as much as you want to a memory card and access the photos when and wherever — have remained. So new ideas are welcome, however bizarre they might be.
Enter Relonch, a startup that wants to upend the way we use digital cam

 Seattle police arrested Oculus’ Head of Computer Vision Dov Katz on December 23rd in a sting operation in which a police officer posed as a 15-year-old girl. Katz allegedly arrived at an Embassy Suites in Tukwila, Washington with $600 after agreeing in texts messages to pay $300 for sex without a condom. Katz told police he was there to rescue the girl. GeekWire has screenshots from… Read More

Yesterday morning my dad gave me a Fitbit Charge 2. This isn’t as rude as it sounds because I’ve spent the last six months trying to improve my physical fitness (I’m preparing for the worst, re: 2017).So far, here is how I can be quantified:Four text alerts. Three said “Merry Christmas!!!!!!” The other was a fake quote from Mark Zuckerberg. I discovered that text alerts do not go to my Fitbit if I have iMessage open on my computer. That is a “revelation”

Once upon a time, an former manager of mine and I were in a meeting with another colleague. This meeting included the most beautifully formatted document. And it was immediately clear to me that presenting manager knew exactly how every feature in Word worked – page numbering, a date stamp on every page, footer notes… There was even an index based on every numbered title, paragraph and subheader. No paragraph left unformatted. No detail left unnumbered. I was completely impressed b

Apple got a lot right with AirPods, the company’s first crack at truly wireless earbuds. I was impressed by the price, the robust wireless connection, and some of the simple (but smart) features that Apple has always been so good at delivering. You can read more of my thoughts in my full review, but there’s a lot I’d still like to see in the next generation — whenever that might come.
SiriSiri is 40 percent asking about the weather, 50 percent frustration, and 10 percent

The ISIS beheadings of journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. The radicalization of San Bernardino shooters Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik. The Orlando nightclub massacre. Social media, encrypted messages, or online propaganda from ISIS played a role in these horrific events and countless others like them.
Yet Silicon Valley’s approach to combatting ISIS might be compared to a game of whack-a-mole at best, largely a top-down affair. Terrorists use services lik

The day after Christmas isn’t a holiday per se, but it’s a day people take notice of, largely because it’s the first chance they’ll get to exchange presents they’ve received or run to stores to purchase the ones they didn’t get. However, people who have received gift cards may not rush out to use them if the cards are from places they rarely frequent.
This year, instead of storing gift cards someplace you’ll never think to find them again, there’s

Earlier this morning, the Twitter accounts for Sony Music Global and Bob Dylan announced that troubled pop singer Britney Spears had died. But thankfully, it turns out that she’s still with us, and rather had fallen victim of a cruel hoax. So, what happened? A few hours ago, the Sony Music Global account tweeted ‘RIP @Britney Spears’ with the #RIPBritney hashtag. This was followed up with another cryptic message that said she is ‘dead by accident [sic]’, and m

As 2016 draws to a close, Facebook looks to be in a pretty fantastic spot. Revenues are at $25 billion and growing strongly — as is the company’s 1.7 billion user base — and the stock has never been higher. And yet, all of that greatness sums up the social network’s challenge for 2017.
In a nutshell, Facebook has to figure out how to keep growing when it is already the largest company of its kind that has ever existed. In particular, it needs to find a way to keep its adv

Some Twitter accounts related to Sony Music were apparently accessed by hacker group OurMine this morning. The handles for Sony Music Global and Bob Dylan tweeted that Britney Spears was dead shortly after 8AM ET. “britney spears is dead by accident! we will tell you more soon,” the @SonyMusicGlobal account read before the tweets were deleted. A rep for Spears confirmed to CNN that the singer was, in fact, still alive.OurMine is well known for breaking into accounts like these, and i

Another 12 months have flown by. As we look back at this year in tech, The Verge staff members are grading each major company and product category in the industry on how they fared in 2016.
Last year, with its profits surging and user base surpassing 1 billion, Facebook entered its imperial phase. The company launched internet.org, an ambitious effort to bring all of the world's people online, and built prototypes of a solar-powered drone that would help it do so. And growth continued into this

FEATURE: The future may be digital, but so much of our present and past remains trapped in printed forms.
For several years now, Sofie Quidenus has been focused on solving this disconnect by trying to make printed text readable for computers so the knowledge contained within can be captured and searched. Now she has moved on to what is perhaps the most difficult challenge of this puzzle: handwriting.
With so many documents still being printed and filled out by hand, not to mention letters a

Another 12 months have flown by. As we look back at this year in tech, The Verge staff members are grading each major company and product category in the industry on how they fared in 2016.
Snapchat's the cool kid in school. So on trend, that in 2016 it decided to go by its nickname "Snap" to disassociate itself from chat. It worked for Cher when she dropped the "Sonny &," and it worked for Apple when it dropped "Computer" to more closely align with its broader ambitions.
Snap is already sli

The mummy returns, this time in IndiaAn Egyptian mummy from 4,000 years ago will be restored in the eastern city of Kolkata, the Times of India reported MondayHoused within the Indian Museum, the country’s largest and oldest museum, this mummy was brought to Kolkata by an Englishman in 1882, and continues to be among the most enduring attractions of the venue.  
SEE ALSO: 'God, I was nervous': Scientists open Egyptian mummy coffin for first time
Incidentally, India is one of the few c

As much of the world was welcoming Santa Claus down their chimneys, news emerged this week that Snap, the company behind perennially popular social network Snapchat, had acquired augmented reality (AR) startup Cimagine Media for “up to” $40 million.
Founded in 2012, Cimagine works on computer vision and real-time image-processing technologies, which is entirely in line with Snap’s mission to be a “camera company” that pushes far beyond its ephemeral photo-sharing ro

It turns out lying about userbase, millions of dollars, and ambitious claims aren’t enough for a company to take Android’s future away from Google. 
SEE ALSO: Cyanogen versus Google: Biting the Android that feeds
Cyanogen Inc., a startup based in Palo Alto, is shutting down all its services, including nightly builds. The company’s open source fork CyanogenMod will also be discontinued on New Year’s Eve. 
The surprise announcement leaves over 50 million users, wh

Take a dive with Ariadne Reynolds, a marine biologist restoring the underwater ecosystem in Santa Monica Bay.  
'How She Works' is Mashable's new series highlighting women in diverse occupations.  
Subscribe for weekly episodes: http://on.mash.to/subscribe  
Watch more episodes: http://bit.ly/2hP05rxDisney offers a deeper look into new 'Avatar' theme park
Behind-the-scenes footage of George Michael and David Bowie will give you the chills
Xenomorphs are back in the first trailer

As more filmmakers dip a toe into VR, the sheer volume of 360-degree video releases can be overwhelming. Samsung today just released its top five most viewed videos on its Samsung VR service in 2016, including The Conjuring 2 – Experience Enfield VR 360 and a couple of Six Flags rides, Twisted Colossus and Tatsu. Apparently the most-viewed video on the service in 2016 is The Beginning from Singularity Lab, which traces the birth of the world.
In addition

Seeing some of the musical legends who passed away in 2016 all together brings on a whole new wave of sadness.
People on Twitter are sharing this amazing video of a rehearsal for a 1992 tribute concert to Freddie Mercury. In it, George Michael absolutely slays a performance of "Somebody to Love," and if you watch closely you'll see the Thin White Duke himself, David Bowie, looking cool in the background, with Seal next to him. 
SEE ALSO: A look back at George Michael's legendary career
The

If you’re questioning whether learning Ruby on Rails adds value to your web dev career, consider this: Twitter, Github, Groupon, Hulu, and Airbnb were all developed using Ruby. And if you want to fully grasp this powerful yet streamlined programming environment, you need instruction like this Complete Ruby on Rails Super Bundle. Right now, you can pick up this A-to-Z overview of all things Ruby at over 90 percent off from TNW Deals. As you work your way through 10 courses and over 100 hou

Some ancient relics never cease to pique the interest of modern societies. 
Sample this: A 4,500-year-old metal figurine, one of the most critical excavations related to the Indus Valley Civilization — arguably the world's oldest human civilization — might have been something no archaeologist or historian ever thought before. 
SEE ALSO: The Bible may have been written earlier than thought, pottery reveals
The "Dancing Girl" of Mohenjodaro, a 4.1-inch tall bronze statuette,

We're not sure why, but Australia seems to be the land of seals doing whatever they want.
Just like this massive fur seal which was found in the suburbs of Launceston, Tasmania, on Boxing Day. Dubbed "Lou-seal" by Tasmania Police, the seal was roughly 50 kilometres (31 miles) away from the ocean.
SEE ALSO: Cheeky sunbathing seal is a literal traffic stopper and locals kind of love it
According to ABC News, the adult male seal is estimated to have weighed 200 kilograms (440 lbs). It was first spo

India just took its next major step in becoming a cashless society.
SEE ALSO: Inside UPI: How India is bringing mobile banking to 1.3 billion people
IDFC Bank has launched an app called Aadhaar Pay that aims to help millions of its citizens without a smartphone to pay for their purchases digitally with just their fingerprint. 
Merchants will be able to download the app on their Android smartphones and attach a fingerprint scanner device. To make payments, buyers will only have to choose the

This year saw a great crop of new and updated apps to make your Android device more useful, productive and entertaining. We’ve rounded up 40 of the best ones we tested all through 2016 – flip through our list, find your favorites and be sure to let us know which ones you’re rocking on your own device into the new year. Communication and social Flychat Messenger’s chat bubbles are a convenient way to view messages and respond to them without leaving your current app. But