Technology news

Microsoft is continuing its push to create more exclusive titles for Xbox One. Earlier this year the software maker announced that five new studios would be joining Microsoft Studios, and now there’s more. Microsoft is acquiring inXile Entertainment and Obsidian Entertainment. Based in California, inXile was formed by Brian Fargo and now primarily develops RPG games like Wasteland 2.
Also based in California, Obsidian Entertainment is known for games like Fallout: New Vegas, South Park: T

Microsoft today announced the acquisition of two heavy-hitters in the RPG gaming world, namely inXile Entertainment and Obsidian Entertainment. And there was much rejoicing throughout every kingdom. The announcement came during the Redmond company’s annual XO18 fan fest in Mexico City. Microsoft stresses that both studios will remain autonomous. What this means for gamers remains to be seen, Microsoft’s publishing arm has a reputation for enabling studios without squashing creativit

Microsoft announced Xbox One keyboard and mouse support back in September, and it’s now arriving on consoles next week. Starting November 14th, Xbox One will support keyboard and mouse in 14 games.Fortnite and Warframe are the biggest names to offer the support at launch, alongside a variety of mainly indie titles:Bomber Crew
Warface
Children of Morta
Minion Master
DayZ
Warframe
Strange Brigade
Warhammer Vermintide 2
Moonlighter
Wargroove
Vigor
Warthunder
X Morph Defense
FortniteIt’

Microsoft announced Xbox One keyboard and mouse support back in September, and it’s now arriving on consoles next week. Starting November 14th, Xbox One will support keyboard and mouse in 14 games.Fortnite and Warframe are the biggest names to offer the support at launch, alongside a variety of mainly indie titles. While there are 14 confirmed games, only seven of them will be available during the initial launch of the keyboard and mouse feature. The rest are coming soon.
November:Fortnit

Microsoft is revealing a new Crackdown 3 release date today. The open-world crimefighting game has been delayed multiple times, and was originally supposed to arrive on November 7th, 2017. Microsoft pushed that release date to the second or third quarter of 2018 before revealing earlier this year that Crackdown 3 would appear in February 2019. It’s now set for a February 15th release date.
A lot of that extra time has been spent improving the game’s visuals, and to ensure it’s

Microsoft is adding Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) to the company’s Xbox Game Pass subscription on November 12th. The addition means Xbox One users who subscribe to Xbox Game Pass for $9.99 will now be able to access PUBG, alongside more than 100 others.Microsoft’s move to add PUBG to Xbox Game Pass comes just as rumors suggest the game is about to launch on Sony’s PlayStation 4 in December. Microsoft appears to have paid for a year of exclusivity on the Xbox One

Microsoft today announced its subscription-based gaming service Xbox Game Pass would be adding the incredibly popular Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds to its lineup. The Redmond company opened it’s XO18 show today in Mexico City with a PUBG montage featuring pumping music and the game’s typical frantic action. The reveal ended with a very enthusiastic crowd watching the “Xbox Game Pass” logo slide across the screen. One of the originators of the Battle Royale gaming

Aerospace startup Rocket Lab will try again this weekend to launch its first commercial mission to space, a flight the company has dubbed “It’s Business Time.” The small satellite launcher is aiming to send up seven tiny probes into low Earth orbit on its Electron rocket. If successful, the flight will officially kick off commercial operations for the company, which has only pulled off two test flights so far.
Rocket Lab has had a hard time getting “It’s Business T

This election season, the state of West Virginia implemented a blockchain-based voting app for the first time. The app, created by a company called Voatz, was first tested in two counties during the primaries earlier this year. After a successful test, it was used during the midterm election this past week at a wider scale. StateScoop reported that as few as 13 people used the app to vote in county primaries, a number that grew to nearly 150 people voting from 24 out of the 55 counties in the g

Electric scooter company Lime is recalling an unspecified number of its vehicles after reports that they might break apart after “repeated abuse,” according to The Washington Post. The recall comes weeks after the company recalled some of its Segway Ninebot scooters after concerns over battery fires.The Washington Post says that scooters manufactured by Chinese company Okai could break while in use, and that Lime will recall them from every city that they’re deployed in. Lime

You heard me correctly, I said “meh.” I’m not talking about the “meh” used to ironically describe something beautiful/awe-inspiring; like when your friend uploads a beautiful sunset to their Instagram story and captions it “meh” (yeah, yeah, we know you are such a jetsetter). I am talking about the uninspired, bored, indifferent “meh.” The one for when you see something that has been done again and again, just with a different color scheme a

Jason Rowley Contributor Jason Rowley is a venture capital and technology reporter for Crunchbase News.More posts by this contributorThe SaaS VC gap: China & other markets trail the US Early-stage SaaS VC slip snaps recovery as public software stocks soar
Crunchbase News recently profiled a selection of U.S. companies’ largest VC raised in 2018, and no surprise here: the 10 largest rounds all topped out well north of $100 million.
A major driver of global venture dollar growth is

Alibaba’s Singles Day is a huge international shopping event that originated in China and has now spread across the globe. Deals kicked off on November 6th, and shoppers everywhere from the US and UK to China and Indonesia are able to nab some good deals.
Many analysts, including App Annie and Adobe, predict that Singles Day will sell more than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined, based off of last year’s numbers. App Annie put the figure at over $32 billion, while Adobe is estim

CBS All Access might be adding another Star Trek show to its lineup. Deadline reports that Michelle Yeoh is in talks to headline a standalone series for the streaming service, reprising her role of Emperor / Captain Philippa Georgiou.Deadline says that the deal is still in the works, and that the series would likely jump off from Star Trek Discovery’s forthcoming second season. During the show’s first season, Georgiou was the captain of the USS Shenzhou before she was killed at the

It’s still rather early in November, but Black Friday has more or less arrived. Almost every major retailer has announced its deals, including Best Buy, Amazon, Target, Walmart, and Costco. Among them, there are a few deals that eager shoppers can hop on right now. Of course, each store wants you to brave the madness on Black Friday to snag the doorbuster offers, but, by and large, you’ll be able to shop most of these deals right from your computer or phone at home.
There are some p

Apple launched a pair of repair programs to fix issues for some 13-inch, non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro and some iPhone Xs, as spotted by Bloomberg. Affected MacBook Pro models have an issue with their solid-state drive, while the iPhone X might have a faulty display module.In the case of the MacBook Pro, the company says that a “limited number” of 128 GB and 256 GB non-Touch Bar models sold between June 2017 and June 2018 have an issue with their solid-state drives, which “may res

Apple launched a pair of repair programs to fix issues for some 13-inch, non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro and some iPhone Xs, as spotted by Bloomberg. Affected MacBook Pro models have an issue with their solid-state drive, while the iPhone X might have a faulty display module.In the case of the MacBook Pro, the company says that a “limited number” of 128 GB and 256 GB non-Touch Bar models sold between June 2017 and June 2018 have an issue with their solid-state drives, which “may res

The latest innovation from Oculus — the Oculus Quest — was supposed to take the digital world by storm, but a relatively muted response from the tech community has many scratching their heads and wondering if VR is really all that it’s made out to be. This is a drastic change from just a few years ago, when we were regularly told that VR was the way of the future, and that soon our entire lives would be constructed around alternative virtual realms where the digital sky was th

Open-world games need characters to feel lived-in, but these characters need to actually do things for these settings to feel real — even if it’s just for background flavor. Most games can get away with having non-playable characters that don’t do much beyond walk around or loop their animations, but Red Dead Redemption 2 is a game obsessed with details. Every character, no matter how small, appears to have a routine.
There aren’t many reasons to become acquainted with t

In March, human-rights investigators from the United Nations found that Facebook had played a role in spreading hate speech in Myanmar, fueling ethnic violence that has spurred more than 650,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee Myanmar’s Rakhine state into neighboring Bangladesh. The report, which came amid growing concerns about the way that social networks can incite violence, contained some of the most grave charges leveled against Facebook to date.
Chastened by the UN’s findings, Facebo

Think for a second: compared to your grandparents and parents, what do you actually own outright? Why own when you can rent, license, or subscribe? This seems to be the new mantra, where nothing is permanent — but everything is convenient. This is the era of the digital nomad, and consequently, it’s also the era of the digital serf. The masses of serfs in the feudal period in Europe provided the labor, and the owners of property reaped the profits. Today, the labor is largely data,

Amazon decided to shut down its experimental artificial intelligence (AI) recruiting tool after discovering it discriminated against women. The company created the tool to trawl the web and spot potential candidates, rating them from one to five stars. But the algorithm learned to systematically downgrade women’s CV’s for technical jobs such as software developer. Although Amazon is at the forefront of AI technology, the company couldn’t find a way to make its algorithm gender

Eight months after bringing in a $40 million Series D, Moogsoft‘s co-founder and chief executive officer Phil Tee confirmed to TechCrunch that the IT incident management startup had shed 18 percent of its workforce, or just over 30 employees.
The layoffs took place at the end of October; shortly after, Moogsoft announced two executive hires. Among the additions was Amer Deeba, who recently resigned from Qualysafter the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged him with insider t

Virtual reality hasn’t proven itself to be the lucrative escape of the every-man, but the medium has done a fairly good job enticing the gaming community and keeping that niche (mostly) happy. While a couple of big titles have gotten some halfway-decent ports to VR, for the most part VR users are confined to whatever indies can build or whatever Oculus can fund.
BigBox VR has been trying to capture attention in the space by not building solo adventures that lead users to find themselves, b

Libertarian on lockdown? Privacy minded or paranoid?
Security is more front of mind today than ever before. If it’s not a company vacuuming up your data or nation states trying to hack your email, it’s your own “opsec” that needs a refresh.
For this holiday season, we have more than a dozen gift ideas — from practical gadgets that will make it harder for spies to listen in, to data-saving tips that will keep your information safe — without breaking the bank.Pa

Mary Meeker,who revealed in September plans to leave Kleiner Perkins after an eight-year run with the venture firm, is reportedly looking to raise up to $1.25 billion for her debut fund. So says Business Insider, citing multiple sources.
We’ve reached out to Meeker for more information.
As Meeker told Recode a couple of months ago, she is forming her own late-stage investing firm with three of her KP colleagues, including Mood Rowghani, who joined the firm as a general partner in 2014; Noa