Microsoft is reportedly building an Xbox mobile store, challenging Apple and Google. The Redmond company’s pending Activision Blizzard deal is key to successful implementation of its mobile gaming strategy, which was previously hinted at and now comes to light in a filing with the UK Competition and Markets Authority, which requested additional information from Microsoft as part of its analysis of the $68.7 billion deal. In its filings, Microsoft says a “next generation” game store that “operates across a range of devices, including mobile” is significant impetus for the acquisition. Continue reading Microsoft’s New Gaming Strategy Includes Xbox Mobile Store

ClipperVision is the new direct-to-consumer regional streaming service for viewing Los Angeles Clippers basketball games and related content. The six channel options will make more than 70 of 84 regular season games available to fans located primarily in Southern California for $200 per season. Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer purchased the LA Clippers for $2 billion in 2014 and has since been strategizing an improved television platform for the franchise. The new offering makes the Clippers the first NBA team to host its own streaming platform, accessible without any additional TV subscription. Continue reading Clippers Become First NBA Team to Host a Streaming Service

Microsoft put the emphasis on security at Ignite 2022, launching Defender for DevOps and Defender Cloud Security Posture Management in public preview. The two offerings protect software development with runtime security across multicloud and multiple-pipeline environments. The company also touted improved protection tools for Windows and Office, beefing-up anti-ransomware capabilities for Microsoft 365 Defender, which now automatically repels attacks immediately on detection. To combat increasingly pervasive conditions like “tool sprawl” and “alert fatigue,” Microsoft combined six product lines into a single security portfolio. Continue reading New Microsoft Security Suite Focuses on Cloud, Ransomware

Netflix is introducing its ad-supported tier in the U.S. starting November 3, at a monthly subscription fee of $6.99. The Netflix economy service will reportedly average between four and five minutes of ads per hour, with individual spots running 15 seconds to 30 seconds. Certain TV shows and movies won’t be included on the ad-supported tier due to contract restrictions. To provide advertisers with viewership measurement, Netflix will begin using Nielsen’s digital measurement service in the U.S. starting in 2023. This will mark the streaming giant’s first third-party ratings. Continue reading Netflix Ad-Supported Plan to Debut Nov. 3 for $6.99 per Month

Microsoft is launching a host of new Surface products in time for the holidays. The Surface Pro 9, Surface Laptop 5, and Surface Studio 2+ were among the debuts at the fall 2022 Microsoft event. The Surface Pro 9 comes to market October 25 with two models, one with Intel inside and the other powered by Microsoft’s own SQ3 chip, an always-connected 5G ARM processor customized by Qualcomm that features a new Neural Processing Unit and up to 19 hours of battery. The Intel variants start at $999 while the SQ3 options begin at $1,299. Continue reading Microsoft Rolls Out New Surface Products, Apple Integrations

Microsoft announced it is integrating OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 into its new Microsoft Designer app, as well as its Microsoft Edge browser and the Image Creator tool in its Bing search engine. Microsoft provides cloud computing services to OpenAI and has partnered with OpenAI in AI commercialization efforts including the Azure OpenAI Service, now in preview, and GitHub Copilot. The Designer web app can be used to create designs for posters, presentations, invitations and other graphics that can be printed and used for display or shared on social or business media. Continue reading Microsoft Integrates DALL-E 2 into Designer and Creator Apps

Google is releasing what it says are “the world’s first laptops built for cloud gaming.” The Alphabet company is partnering with Acer, Asus and Lenovo to release three models featuring minimum 120Hz refresh rates and Wi-Fi 6 or 6E capability, among other features that make them a good fit for cloud-based interactivity. The company is also bundling free three-month trials to Nvidia’s GeForce NOW, Amazon Luna and Microsoft Xbox Cloud Gaming with the Chromebooks, and game-ready accessories certified as “Works with Chromebook” are being sold by Acer, Corsair, HyperX, Lenovo and SteelSeries. Continue reading Google Debuts Three Cloud-Gaming Optimized Chromebooks

Despite speculation that Apple will debut a realityOS (rOS) headset next year, CEO Tim Cook says the metaverse is not yet ready for prime time, telling a European publication he’s “really not sure the average person can tell you what the metaverse is.” On a continental excursion that included a commencement address at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy, Cook appeared bullish on augmented reality, while downplaying virtual reality, the technology around which Meta Platforms is building its future. “I think AR is a profound technology that will affect everything,” Cook told the magazine Bright. Continue reading Cook Hints Apple’s First realityOS Glasses Will Be AR, not VR

TikTok is said to be partnering with Los Angeles-based TalkShopLive to handle its live shopping initiative in North America after an in-house UK effort produced lackluster results. Due to hit the U.S. in time for the holiday season, TikTok Shop will be built on technology and support from TalkShopLive as it positions live-stream shopping hosted by influencers, brands and retailers selling products on the short-form video platform. Launched last year, TikTok Shop UK was the ByteDance company’s first such effort outside of Asia, where it is available in countries including Vietnam, Singapore and the Philippines. Continue reading TikTok May Team Up with TalkShopLive for a Holiday Launch

The NBA becomes the latest sports league to court digital viewers, launching an app for streaming, personalization and socializing. The app is free to download, and NBA League Pass will be integrated into the app, with promotional pricing of $14.99 per month ($99.99 per season) for a standard package and $19.99 per month ($129.99 per season) for a premium subscription. The NBA App is a product of NBA Digital, the league’s joint venture with Turner Sports, and was built in partnership with Microsoft, the NBA’s cloud and artificial intelligence partner. Continue reading NBA and Microsoft Team on New DTC Mobile Streaming App

LinkedIn’s experiments on users have drawn scrutiny from a new study that says the platform may have crossed a line into “social engineering.” The tests, over five years from 2015 to 2019, involved changing the “People You May Know” algorithm to alternate between weak and strong contacts when recommending new connections. Affecting an estimated 20 million users, the test was designed to collect insight to improve the Microsoft-owned platform’s performance, but may have impacted people’s career opportunities. The study was co-authored by researchers at LinkedIn, Harvard Business School, MIT and Stanford and appeared this month in Science. Continue reading LinkedIn Test Raises Ethics Questions Over Parsing Big Data

Senate Homeland Security Committee leaders Gary Peters (D-Michigan) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio) have introduced a bill requiring a risk framework for open-source code. The proposed legislation would require the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to develop the risk evaluation process for open-source software being used by federal agencies and critical infrastructure. The move follows the discovery in December of a vulnerability in the Apache Software Foundation’s popular Log4j Java logging utility. Peters said the Log4j incident presented a serious threat to banks, hospitals, and utility companies, among other national security operations. Continue reading Senate Group Wants CISA to Protect Open-Source Software

OpenAI has released a new open source AI speech recognition model called Whisper that can recognize and translate audio at levels it says compare in accuracy and robustness to human abilities. Case uses include transcription of speeches, interviews, podcasts and conversations. “Moreover, it enables transcription in multiple languages, as well as translation from those languages into English,” says OpenAI, which is open-sourcing models and inference code on GitHub “to serve as a foundation for building useful applications and for further research on robust speech processing.” Continue reading OpenAI Rolls Out Open-Source Speech Recognition System

Artificial intelligence company D-ID has launched a new presentation platform that can generate video from a single image and text. Creative Reality Studio offers from among 270 voices and 119 languages that users can pair with one of the company’s original avatar creations or an uploaded photo. The product is aimed at markets including education, the metaverse, advertising and sales. The company is offering a limited free 14-day trial, after which users would be required to switch to a $49 per month Pro subscription or higher-end Enterprise plan (pricing available on request). Continue reading D-ID Creative Reality Studio Helps Users Make DIY AI Videos

OpenAI has begun allowing users of its DALL-E 2 image-generating system to work with facial image uploads. The program previously allowed only computer-generated faces in an effort to prevent deepfakes and misuse, but OpenAI says improvements to its safety system succeeded in “minimizing the potential of harm” from things like explicit, political or violent content. OpenAI will continue to prohibit use of unauthorized photos and will seek to protect right of publicity, though it remains to be seen how effective that will be. In the past, customers have complained the company was overzealous in its policing. Continue reading OpenAI Expands DALL-E 2 Functionality with Facial Uploads