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After You is a psychological horror game and the debut from Normal Wholesome Games, a studio that developer Andy Sum founded. It’s a big departure from his previous work — he co-created the family-friendly mobile game Crossy Road and developed the meme-laden shooter 420Blazeit. It will be out on PC, with no release date yet.
“I’ve always tried to understand the things that scare me, and making games is a great way to do that,” said Sum in a press release.

The 3G version of Nokia’s resurrected 3310 was announced in September as theoretically working in the US, unlike the 2G version released earlier this year. But at the time HMD Global, which owns the rights to Nokia phones, didn’t say when (or even if) the 3310 3G would be coming to the US.
Now, we know the answer to both of those questions: the phone is available for preorder starting today at Best Buy for $59.99, with the phone set to release on October 29th. If you’re thinkin

GUEST: I’m wondering out loud about the weather when my preschooler says, “Mama, you should ask Siri. She knows everything.”
“Gahhh! What the what?” is what the privacy fanatic and data scientist inside me shouts. Out loud, I choose to respond with the more neutral route: “That’s interesting. What makes you say that?”
“Because at school when you have a question, you can ask Siri and she knows all of the answers,” she tells me.
This

A Japanese company, which owns the trademark for “Animoji” in the US, is suing Apple for using the word to name its iPhone X feature.
The Tokyo-based company, Emonster, filed the suit on Wednesday in US federal court, saying, “Apple made the conscious decision to try to pilfer the name for itself.” The company’s CEO, Enrique Bonansea, is a US citizen living in Japan.Emonster’s Animoji app on iOS, which shares the same name as Apple’s iPhone X feature.Emo

When police in London recently trialled a new facial recognition system, they made a worrying and embarrassing mistake. At the Notting Hill Carnival, the technology made roughly 35 false matches between known suspects and members of the crowd, with one person “erroneously” arrested. Camera-based visual surveillance systems were supposed to deliver a safer and more secure society. But despite decades of development, they are generally not able to handle real-life situations. During t

Zain Jaffer, who founded mobile ad firm Vungle and was its CEO until this week, was arrested on Tuesday for felony assault, lewd act upon a child, and other related charges.
[Update 10/20/17 3:05 pm : The police filed a report for attempted murder. The district attorney did not file that charge and filed a charge for felony assault instead].
On Thursday, the San Francisco-based maker of a video ads platform announced that the board of directors had placed Jaffer on an indefinite leave of absence

The healing sniper Ana in Blizzard‘s class-based team shooter Overwatch got a new pirate-themed skin as part of this year’s Halloween event, but some fans are unhappy with Blizzard for promising parrots without actually delivering any birds. The new skin, which you can get in loot boxes or for 3,000 in-game credits, shows the avian friend of all scurvy scoundrels sitting on Ana’s shoulder when you equip it in the menus.
Players have noted, however, that the parrot doesn’t

Kyoto Animation’s work isn’t quite like anyone else’s. The style of its animation and storytelling separate the studio from the majority of other Japanese companies. It’s known for high production values compared to its contemporaries; Kyoto’s smooth, intricate animation is used for both subtle and spectacular sequences while having very stylized, but realistically detailed backgrounds.Kyoto Animation (often abbreviated KyoAni) gets more distinctive results than mos

Super Mario Odyssey hits Nintendo Switch next week, but we’re already learning about one of the many outfits the game’s Italian hero will get to wear. The box art for the Wedding Peach interactive Amiibo toy, which features the Mushroom Kingdom princess in a white dress for her special day, reveals that Mario can also wear … (and this is a spoiler) the same dress himself.
Images for the art appeared online thanks to YouTube channel Family Gamer TV. During an unboxing, Family G

I know it’s popular to hate on Apple these days. I’m guilty of this myself. But assertions made earlier this week by Sens. Ted Cruz and Patrick Leahy that Apple was enabling Chinese censorship are a step too far. In a public letter, Cruz and Leahy fused their remaining brain cells to argue Apple ‘enabled’ censorship in China by removing several popular VPN apps in July. The move, the duo argue, strengthens China’s control over its citizens by picking and choosing w

Razer launched two new products today for streamers: the Razer Seiren X portable microphone and the Razer Kiyo webcam with a selfie light. These two products are Razer's latest attempt to become the popular choice for microphones and webcams, which people normally don't go to it for.
The Razer Kiyo webcam comes with an adjustable ring light with twelve white LEDs, which you can control to twelve levels of brightness. It has a four-megapixel camera that can record up to 1080p at 30 fps or 720p at

GUEST: Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Watson, Zo, Buddy. As AI bot making continues to take off, bot developers and marketers have been keen on giving their bots names that sound human. They’re also giving them a face and their own distinct personality.
However, as intelligent bots or virtual assistants move towards becoming an $11 billion industry by 2024, bots with personalities, which have been programmed from the inside out — rather than the outside in — have been behaving badl

As a (failed) entrepreneur I can personally tell you that one of the biggest hardships me and my team faced was financial woes for things we needed around the office and online. Everything seemed to cost money – money that we didn’t have. Sure, there were some free programs we were able to use to help keep up with tasks and customer service, but none of them were nearly as robust as they needed to be. Granted, this was many moons ago and we’re now in a time where even free ver

The annual TwitchCon fan event for livestreamers and their fans is happening right now in Long Beach, California,, and Amazon’s video platform told its assembled audience about some new features it is rolling out.
As part of a keynote presentation, Twitch chief executive Emmett Shear and director of programming Marcus “DjWheat” Graham talked about how the service will change in the future. Some new tools will help broadcasters better understand their audiences and use them to h

Inside Cincinnati’s burgeoning startup ecosystem, one perhaps unlikely sector is making some waves: water tech.
Thanks to Pipeline H2O, a water tech accelerator launched in part by the Hamilton Mill, disruptive water technology companies from across the world are looking to Cincinnati. Pipeline launched its inaugural accelerator class earlier this year and received nearly 70 applications from companies across five continents, ultimately selecting six startups for its first c

OPINION: Finally, a 15-inch Surface. Microsoft added yet another form factor to its Surface lineup this week, and while I’m excited — this is exactly the size of Surface I’ve always wanted — I can’t help but feel there are now too many any options.
At the Canalys Channels Forum in Venice earlier this month, Canalys CEO Steve Brazier declared Microsoft would kill off its Surface business in 2019. Lenovo COO Gianfranco Lanci suggested this might happen even sooner tha

YouTube Red just greenlit a scripted comedy series about Tinder, Deadline reports. Swipe Right, written by and starring Carly Craig (Role Models), is about a mother and her two daughters navigating app-based dating in different ways.
Swipe Right is inspired by Craig’s real life, according to Deadline. She plays a woman who, frustrated with still being single on her 35th birthday, decides to go on dates with all of her 252 Tinder matches. Her younger sister is bored of being married and wan

Hello, and welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! This time, we check out Star Wars: Battlefront II’s solo campaign, Lego Dimensions runs out of bricks, and Overwatch passes 35 million players.
Enjoy, and have a great weekend!
Pieces of flair and opinion
The DeanBeat: What Visceral’s closing means for video games
PC Gaming Weekly: a divine solution
How I accidentally became a video game writer during the mobile boom
AR/VR Weekly: the view from Oculus Connect 4
Microsoft’s

PayPal peer-to-peer (P2P) payments can now be sent in Facebook Messenger. The service will begin to roll out to customers in the United States starting today, PayPal COO Bill Ready said in this morning’s blog post.
Payments can be made with Facebook chat extensions, a feature brought to Messenger earlier this year.
“When composing a message in Messenger with one person, or even a group, people can tap on the blue plus icon, and then select the green Payments button to quickly se

Every week, a slew of new music videos hits the web. Watching them at your desk is not time theft because you deserve it; think of it as a nice reward for surviving another work week. But what if you don’t have time to watch every video — maybe you have a deadline, a hungry pet, or other grown-up concerns. In consideration of your schedule, Lizzie and Kaitlyn bring you a series called One Video. Each week we’ll tell you “one video” you need to watch, why, and for ho

This week, a bipartisan group of US senators took the first steps toward regulating online political advertising in a manner similar to the way the government already regulates these ads in traditional media. Democratic Sens. Amy Klobuchar (MN) and Mark Warner (VA), joined by Republican Sen. John McCain (AZ), say their Honest Ads Act will protect against foreign interference in elections by requiring platforms like Facebook to make details about ads’ buyers, pricing, and targeting publicly

GUEST: For most city dwellers, going without internet is almost unthinkable. Every day we connect to the internet via ubiquitous Wi-Fi or 4G connections, with the occasional dropped call or slow video being the perfect example of “first-world problems.”
But get outside of an urban area, even just several miles, and connectivity changes dramatically. According to the FCC, 53 percent of the people living in rural communities in the U.S. — about 22 million people — lack

The board game Settlers of Catan is becoming a free-to-play multiplayer app, Catan Universe, for Android and iOS on November 15.
Catan Universe is already available on PC. All versions will feature crossplay, meaning that iOS users can compete against PC players, for example. The mobile release is launching with the base game, the Cities and Knights add-on, the Seafarers add-on, and the Rivals for Catan introductory card game. You can buy the base game and all add-ons for a one-off in-app p

For elderly gamers, this could be the biggest hit since Wii Sports: a new video game helped older people with hearing loss get better at tracking speech in noisy environments, new research says.The game had players complete a puzzle by listening for clues as background noise steadily got louder. After two months of playing, elderly adults with hearing loss could hear 25 percent more words spoken under noisy conditions than they could before, according to the study published in the journal Curren

The reviews are in and everybody just loves the quality OLED component Google picked for the Pixel 2 XL. They really just can't stop talking about it. And talking? That's what The Vergecast is for. On this week’s episode, Nilay, Dieter, and Paul discuss the reviews of Google's new phones. Then The Verge's security expert Russell Brandom drops by to explain Krack and four-way handshakes. It's all the grit and off-axis color shifting of a Pentile display, in podcast form.02:33 - Pixel 2 revi

Along with the ability to transfer save files and capture video, the Nintendo Switch’s 4.0 firmware update seems to have come with a hidden bonus: support for USB-based wireless headphones, via Engadget.To take advantage of the new feature, simply plug in your headphone’s USB adapter to the USB port on the Switch’s dock, and you’ll be good to go. Enterprising Reddit users are also reporting that the feature works with the Switch undocked, assuming you’ve got a USB T

Spotify just announced a new program called RISE, intended to “identify and break the next wave of music superstars.”
The promises of the program are a little vague, but Spotify says its hand-picked artists will be aided with “multi-tiered marketing” and “editorial programming,” including social promotion, a special “mixed-media” RISE playlist, “bespoke” videos about their life stories, and some kind of platform-sponsored “experie

The video game industry received a shock to the system this week as Electronic Arts rebooted its story-based Star Wars game and shut down Visceral Games, a studio that made some beefy blockbusters like Dead Space and Battlefield Hardline.
EA said that it was moving Star Wars project from Visceral to another studio in Canada, and it would do what it could to place the 70 employees of Visceral in other jobs. EA executive vice president Patrick Söderlund said that the game industry is evo

VB EVENT: Every year, companies spend 1.3 trillion dollars on 265 billion customer service calls. That’s five bucks a call. On average, the cost to find and hire a call center agent costs $4000 (not including salary), with an additional $4,800 for training — and with frustrated agents tending to drop like flies in the face of an often brutally stressful job, these costs mount up.
AI, or what IBM calls cognitive computing, is changing that. Autodesk began piloting the IBM Watson Conve

At first glance, the classic Star Trek: The Original Series episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” and the new series Star Trek: Discovery don’t have a lot in common. One is a lighthearted romp with some critters that are basically designed to be as adorable as possible, and the other is a fairly dark, serious take on Trek in a wartime setting.But there is one similarity: both shows feature a basic plot of “the Klingons are in conflict with the Federation.” But it&rsqu

Billboard just announced that it will change the way it counts streams on its charts beginning in 2018. Next year, streams from paid subscription services like Apple Music and “hybrid paid/ad-supported platforms” like Spotify will be given more weight on the charts than streams from purely ad-based platforms like YouTube. Currently, Billboard weighs all of these streams equally, under the umbrella of “on-demand” streams.The Billboard Hot 100, which charts singles, will co

It has been two weeks since The New York Times published a report detailing three decades of sexual misconduct and abuse by one of Hollywood’s most powerful players, producer Harvey Weinstein. That piece centered on eight women who spoke up about his behavior, and later settled with Weinstein out of court. Five days later, a second report followed in The New Yorker, presenting revelations from 13 more women who shared stories of harassment, assault, and rape.
In a follow-up from The New Yo