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VentureBeat has a thriving AI channel that provides a 360-degree view of the industry ecosystem surrounding AI, machine learning, software automations, and many other advancements that will become part of the coming machine learning age. Speaking broadly, AI is already transforming our lives — turning off the thermostat in our home when we leave for vacation, automating call cen

GUEST: Coming off the heels of Snap’s Q2 earnings, its second report since going public in early March, it seems as though Wall Street is mainly concerned with one thing: user growth. But that’s the wrong metric to use when determining advertiser adoption, which is the ultimate revenue driver for the company.
To truly gauge the potential of Snap – or any other ad-supported property ­– investors must consider the key performance indicators that truly matter to marketer

An FBI affidavit alleges that the Islamic State used everyone’s favorite digital auction house to transfer cash to one of its US-based agents. The agent was disguising himself as a printer salesman — he’d pretend to sell a printer, only to receive payment from IS via eBay and PayPal. Supposedly, it was all part of a network operated by the late Siful Sujan, who was at one point a director of ISIS’s computer operations. The FBI document claims he’s just one of a net

Facebook and its family of apps been banned in China for years, but it appears the company found a way to get past the country’s Great Firewall. The New York Times reports Facebook snuck an app called ‘Colorful Balloons’ through – without anybody noticing. Facebook approved the app’s release back in May, and published it in China via a local company called Youge Internet Technology. To the outsider, there’s no indication that the app has anything to do with F

 Snap took a beating yesterday in its Q2 earnings, but in the midst of the disappointing financials and user growth numbers, the company’s 10-Q SEC document filed today also confirms that it purchased social maps app Zenly for $213 million, as TechCrunch first reported.
After Snapchat rolled out its location-sharing Snap Map feature in June, many were quick to point out the interface… Read More

Tonight, GamesBeat will stream the first Games Industry Family Chicken Dinner Invitational Tournament for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. This is an informal competition where developers and other people who work in the games business compete for dominance in the last-player-standing shooter. The stream starts at 8 p.m. Pacific time, and you can watch it on our Twitch page.
If you’re wondering how all this madness will work, we are planning on doing solo-only matches this evening wher

X.ai has raised $10 million to respond to calls by its user community for the intelligent assistant to adopt new features and move beyond English-speaking markets. X.ai previously raised about $23 million in April 2016.
The new funding will bring X.ai’s meeting scheduler assistant Amy beyond email to voice-enabled assistants like Alexa and chat apps like Slack and WeChat. Today, X.ai is only available to schedule meetings in emails. A Business Edition of Amy launched in February,

GUEST: Yesterday, BioGenerator’s first co-working lab tenant, Confluence Life Sciences, got acquired by Aclaris Therapeutics, Inc. at a valuation of $100 million.
On the acquisition, Confluence’s lead founder Joe Monahan said in a press release, “We are thrilled to achieve this significant milestone. … We built a team of proven drug hunters, successfully advanced multiple product candidates to the stage where they are appropriate to partner, and leveraged our p

The morning after one of Uber’s biggest investors sued former CEO Travis Kalanick for fraud, a set of other investors said they wanted that investor out, marking another wild turn for the company’s leadership.Shervin Pishevar, joined by Ron Burkle of Yucaipa Companies and Adam Leber of Maverick, sent an email on Friday to Uber investors and leaders requesting that venture capital firm Benchmark Capital give up its board seat and appointment rights because of the complaint alleging Ka

Chinese officials have begun investigations into content shared on the country’s largest social media platforms. The crackdown comes as part of China’s new censorship laws. WeChat, a messaging platform with over a billion users, is at the heart of the sweep, along with networks run by Baidu and Weibo. According to the Wall Street Journal China’s internet watchdog, the Cyberspace Administration, states preliminary findings indicated users were not only sharing terror-relat

The 75th World Science Fiction Convention (commonly known as WorldCon) is being held this weekend in Helsinki, Finland. The convention is where the annual Hugo Awards are presented, and today, the convention announced the latest recipients.This year, women almost completely swept the Hugo Awards, taking home the top prizes for literature in the science fiction community. That’s particularly notable, given how the awards have been increasingly recognizing works from female and minority crea

If you’ve been online, you’ve seen fake news. A team of graduate students from Carnegie Mellon University created a virtual reality game called Project Axon to raise awareness about how our own behavior on social media platforms can contribute to this problem.
The team hails from the Entertainment Technology Center at CMU, a two-year master’s program that focuses on interactive entertainment. It works closely each year with Games for Change on projects tackling social issu

LG’s V30 is expected to be revealed at the end of the month, and given months of leaks, that’s no surprise. What’s more surprising is that LG is rumored to be releasing a ‘Plus’ version too. Before you think LG is making a bigger version of what’s already expected to be a 6-inch device (albeit with tiny bezels), that’s not quite it. It seems LG is taking the same approach it did with the G6, and releasing a Plus version with added functionality. Unfortu

This week, Entertainment Weekly published its Fall Movie Review, and The Last Jedi takes center stage. Along with the covers, the site published a series of articles along with a batch of new pictures that give us our best look yet at the upcoming film.The revelations touch upon Luke and Rey’s relationship, Finn’s status in the Resistance, the identity of Benicio Del Toro's mysterious character, and the new cute, cuddly creatures known as Porgs. Here’s what we learned.Luke init

 U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis is concluding his tech tour of the West Coast today with a visit to Google’s Mountain View campus. Mattis spent time at Amazon and the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, earlier in the week. His key takeaway from all the socializing with tech leaders is that the Department of Defense needs to embrace technology coming out of the private sector… Read More

Google has found itself embroiled in controversy after a sexist memo, claiming that women are less biologically suited to be engineers than men, went viral throughout the company and was later released to the public.
Since then, Google has fired the male engineer who wrote it, the engineer has begun speaking out against his former company, and alt-right supporters have started to protest Google and attack those who supported his firing — even down to Google engineers who may already be fac

You’ll have two extra weeks to file your thoughts with the FCC on its plan to get rid of net neutrality. The proposal’s comment period was originally scheduled to end next week, on August 16th, but the commission just pushed the date out to August 30th.
The extension was granted in response to 10 groups asking for more time to respond. They had been looking for an additional eight weeks, but the commission said an additional two weeks would be more in line with the type of extensions

Canadian cinematographer Robert McLachlan is a Game of Thrones veteran. He’s shot eight episodes of the show, including “The Dance of Dragons,” where Daenerys faces assassins from dragonback in the Daznak fighting pit, and “The Rains of Castamere,” the episode with the Red Wedding. And most recently, he shot “The Spoils of War,” episode 4 of season 7, where Daenerys takes her dragons into battle in Westeros for the first time. The episode was tremendousl

Flo, an app that tracks women’s health from periods to pregnancy, announced today funding of $5 million. The round was led by returning investor Flint Capital, with participation from model and activist Natalia Vodianova and other angel investors.
Women can download the app on both iOS and Android for free and start logging in their menstrual cycles and symptoms. “Currently, there are over 50 symptoms to track, and this number is likely to double in the future,” wrote Flo found

If you want Sega’s new throwback Sonic The Hedgehog game on PC, you’re going to have to wait an extra two weeks. The publisher revealed today that Sonic Mania is coming out August 29 instead of August 15. The 16-bit-style platformer, which remixes many of the visuals and elements of the earliest Sonic games, will still hit PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch on its original release date.
In a livestream on Sonic The Hedgehog’s official YouTube account, Sega explained t

Making AI models at the University of Southern California (USC) Center for AI in Society does not involve a clean, sorted dataset. Sometimes it means interviewing homeless youth in Los Angeles to map human social networks. Sometimes it involves going to Uganda for better conservation of endangered species.
“With AI, we are able to reach 70 percent of the youth population in the pilot, compared to about 25 percent in the standard techniques. So AI algorithms are able to reach far more youth

 From Uber’s former CEO Travis Kalanick getting sued by his company’s lynchpin investors at Benchmark to Google’s struggles with a recently fired employee over a gender diversity screed that went viral, it’s been a wild week in tech. Meanwhile, Snap and Blue Apron both reported disappointing earnings — something we discuss in this week’s episode of the… Read More

OPINION: Facebook this week announced Watch, a new tab dedicated to watching (oh, my, how clever) shows on the social network. This isn’t the first time the company has attempted to take on traditional television, Netflix, and YouTube. But this time, I’m genuinely excited about the potential.
So, what’s different with Facebook’s latest push? I don’t care that Watchlist is basically a copy of YouTube’s subscription feature or that its various categories replica

Razer recently introduced a gaming mouse that's a nearly perfect competitor to my favorite mouse of all time, Logitech's G900. The Razer Lancehead is a high-end, ambidextrous wireless gaming mouse, with the option to seamlessly switch to wired. Also, Razer made a whole video comparing it to the G900's wireless performance. So the fight is definitely on, and I feel honored that these companies are spending so much time and money on building the perfect mouse for left-handers like me.
What is it?I

The latest update for No Man’s Sky was unveiled today, and the much-maligned game is finally taking the form it was supposed to have on release. According to the update notes, released today, the “Atlas Rises” update will have co-op play, improved graphics, interface tweaks, terraforming, portals, and “30 hours of new story content.” In any other game, I’d accuse it of compensating for something. In NMS, I just say, “It’s about

Motorola's Moto X line is back. Android Authority reports today that the lineup, which hasn't seen a new phone since 2015, will definitely be updated this year with a new device called the Moto X4. We thought this might be the case when a photo leaked last month. Android Authority says an anonymous source provided all the phone's specs.This is what the source says we can expect:
5.2-inch full HD display
Snapdragon 630 processor
3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage in North America, Latin America, and

Hello, and welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! This time, we delved into Hearthstone’s new expansion, Knights of the Frozen Throne. Also, Overwatch is getting Deathmatch modes, and we announced some exciting speakers for our GamesBeat 2017 conference.
Enjoy, and have a great weekend!
Pieces of flair and opinion
The DeanBeat: Intel’s 2014 Gamergate mistake paved the path for Google’s memo mess
PC Gaming Weekly: Watch out, Heartstone — here comes Artifact
Overwatch

If you’ve been hearing or reading a lot about blockchain but you still aren’t entirely certain how to define it, you’re not alone. It’s something that Jack Dorsey, the chief executive officer and chairman of Square (and CEO of Twitter), describes as the “next big unlock,” something that, he notes, is normally applied to accounting terms but has the potential to “be applied to so much more.”In an interview earlier this week at the Computer History M

Asus accidentally pushed new phone listings live on its French website this week, thereby leaking its own products. That's a bummer for the company, but good news for those of us who hate surprises. The leaks include the ZenFone 4, the ZenFone 4 Selfie, the ZenFone 4 Selfie Pro, and the ZenFone 4 Max. I'll break down the specs for each below, along with their listing. (Thanks to Android Police for gathering these screenshots.)
ZenFone 4WinFuture5.5-inch full HD AMOLED display
Snapdragon 630 proc

SoundCloud today announced that it has closed the investor round necessary to keep it going for the foreseeable future. As part of the agreement, Alex Ljung will step aside and former Vimeo leader Kerry Trainor will become SoundCloud’s new CEO, with Mike Weissman as COO. Ljung will stay on to “fully focus on the role of the chairman and the long-term.” Billboard reports the exact amount of the investment is $169.5 million, which, says Ljung, makes this infusion “the large

It’s been a busy week for streaming services, and Amazon is closing things out with a huge announcement: the company has closed an overall deal with The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, along with signing a first-look agreement for his production company Skybound Entertainment. In one fell swoop, it makes Amazon Prime Video the exclusive home for any new shows from the minds behind The Walking Dead, Fear the Walking Dead, and Cinemax’s Outcast.
Skybound historically has a close r

This week on The Vergecast, Nilay, Lauren, Dieter, and Paul begin by discussing the controversy over the Google engineer who was fired over writing a 10-page viral memo about diversity. The story illustrates a deeper problem in Silicon Valley, which Lauren has discussed in her podcast recently, so the cast talks about the science of the claims, the responsibly of Google, and what it means in the larger tech industry.In the second half of the show, the crew runs through the latest leaks, releases