Virtual reality is the ultimate money pit. Tech giants are selling low-margin hardware on which users play software that was funded by those same companies. This strategy seems to continue year after year without a hockey stick chart in sight. While VR may still be waiting for its breakout hardware hit, there has already been…
China’s new rules on video games, introduced last month, are having an effect on the country’s gamers. Today, Tencent replaced hugely popular battle royale shooter game PUBG with a more government-friendly alternative that seems primed to pull in significant revenue. The company introduced ‘Game for Peace’ in a Weibo post at the same time as…
[Update: Changpeng Zhao’s comments on Periscope added to bottom of post] Cryptocurrency exchange Binance has confirmed a “large scale” data breach, in which hackers stole more than $40 million in cryptocurrency In a statement, the company said hackers stole API keys, two-factor codes and other information in the attack. Binance traced the cryptocurrency theft —…
Mark Zuckerberg: “The future is private”. Sundar Pichai: ~The present is private~. While both CEO’s made protecting user data a central theme of their conference keynotes this month, Facebook’s product updates were mostly vague vaporware while Google’s were either ready to ship or ready to demo. The contrast highlights the divergence in strategy between the…
Devices shipping with Android Q will receive over-the-air security patches without having to go through device manufacturers. A lack of steady security updates has been a major pain point for Android users over the years. Google finally has a fix for the problem. At its annual developer conference Tuesday, the tech giant said it’ll bypass…
Tencent, one of Asia’s most valuable companies with a current market cap of around $460 billion, has introduced a new motto after co-founder and CEO Pony Ma said this week he wanted ‘tech for good’ to be part of the company’s vision and mission in the future. The company has not yet officialized the new…
A new trailer for “Spider-Man: Far From Home” has just been released, and it’s setting up a way for Marvel to finally unite the disparate elements of its franchises. The trailer contains a pretty huge spoiler for “Avengers: Endgame,” so be prepared, but it also reveals how Disney’s super-heroically successful Marvel franchise will enter the…
“We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.” That’s the word from Sir Robert Watson, the chair of a massive multinational research effort to survey the impact of human development on the natural world. In the most comprehensive effort undertaken to date, some 145 expert…
Android Auto — the in-car platform that brings the look and functions of a smartphone to the vehicle’s central screen — is getting a new look and improved navigation and communication features that will roll out this summer. The improvements and new look were revealed Monday during Google I/O 2019, the annual developer conference. The…
Welcome back to this week’s transcribed edition of Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast that unpacks the numbers behind the headlines. This week, Crunchbase News’s Alex Wilhelm and Extra Crunch’s Danny Crichton connected from their respective sides of the States to run through a rash of news about Divvy, Cheddar, SoftBank’s Vision Fund and Andreessen Horowitz. Plus,…
