Rumour has it that the folks behind the Call of Duty franchise are working on a free battle Royale game that’s set for release in early 2020. The Battle Royale gameplay mode, inspired by a Japanese movie of the same name – and not the more recent Hunger Games franchise – and popularised by the likes of PUBG and Fortnite, is a game mode that the Call of Duty franchise has yet to crack. In this mode, up to 100 players are dumped in an arena and forced to scavenge for weapons and resources in an ever-shrinking arena. The last player to survive wins. PUBG could soon…
Author: Loknath Das
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The White House wants the U.S. government to have a much bigger say in what you see on social media. A new draft executive order from the White House would put the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in charge of deciding what sites like Twitter and Facebook can remove from their sites, reports CNN, which obtained a copy of a summary of the order. President Donald Trump and other conservative leaders have long said that conservative content is censored on major social media networks — even though the data clearly shows otherwise. This order, called “Protecting Americans from Online Censorship,” appears aimed at making…
Bengaluru: Altico Capital India Ltd, a non-banking financial company (NBFC), plans to expand into the housing finance sector and acquire a retail lending portfolio, said a top executive. Altico is in talks with a few housing finance companies, including Reliance Home Finance Ltd, and the due diligence process will start for the latter, he said. “Housing finance complements our wholesale lending business. The valuations of housing finance companies were quite high earlier unlike today, when there are opportunities and platforms available at reasonable valuations. Our strategy to enter the housing finance business is not a reaction to what has transpired in…
The FBI plans to more aggressively surveil social media, after threats from mass-murdering assailants have been discovered online, leading Trump and others to call for action. However, Facebook, Twitter and others may not be on the same page, according to The Wall Street Journal. The FBI is reviewing proposals for datamining contractors, who would monitor and collect perceived threats on social media “to proactively identify and reactively monitor threats to the United States and its interests.” The request was posted before the mass-shootings in El Paso and Dayton that prompted Trump to demand intensified threat detection measures. Ticker Security Last Change %Chg TWTR TWITTER…
Companies have rushed to embrace deep learning’s potential in their efforts to automate their enterprises, often with an eye towards replacing as much of their human workforce as possible or to scale their operations without expanding their hiring. An endless stream of success stories tout AI’s success in replacing an ever-growing array of traditionally automation-resistant jobs, while developers are hard at work finding ways to replace the rest of them. Yet social media platforms give pause to this idea that deep learning is quite at the inflection point of causing a wave of job displacement. Silicon Valley has been at…
Social media is a living organism. Things change all the time. They change in response to developers’ ideas, user requests, scandals, politics and the rise of social awareness. People behind social media networks never sleep. They test new features, algorithms, ads and designs. They are doing their best to keep you attached to your phone, even though one would assume it’s literally impossible to spend more time on social media than we do already. For marketers, it’s vital to stay up-to-date with how social media develops. Every feature and every update might become crucial to us. Then again, it might…
Everyone, who’s anyone, has been saying India’s information technology (IT) sector needs to shift its focus from services to products. That the two are chalk and cheese, and it isn’t easy to make the leap, is an understatement. Amit D. Mishra learnt this the hard way after he sold his seven-year-old business automation services company in Pune to build a software product. Mishra started his software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, Interview Mocha, in November 2012 when funding had just started to flow, and software products like Freshdesk were competing with the best in the world. Mishra, an ex-IBM-er, had struggled to find candidates with…
A Calgary man convicted of a sexual assault has been given an unusual sentence. Along with probation and community service, Zach Welch was ordered to make a public apology to his victim over social media. “You will disable the ability of anyone to comment on that posting and it will remain on your Facebook account for one month,” Justice Lynal Doerksen wrote in her probation order. The assault happened in March 2018 during a weekend getaway to Fairmont Hot Springs, B.C. Melanie Ykema says a group of friends, all couples, had rented a house to celebrate her birthday. The 30-year-old Calgary…
An unopened copy of a 1987 cult-classic video game that a Nevada man found in the attic of his childhood home is expected to sell for up to $10,000 at an online auction. The boxed game cartridge of Nintendo’s “Kid Icarus” was still in the bag with the receipt for $38.45 from J.C. Penney’s catalog department three decades earlier. Scott Amos of Reno told the Reno Gazette Journal he initially thought it might be worth a couple hundred dollars. But Valarie McLeckie, video game consignment director at Heritage Auctions, says it’s one of the hardest Nintendo titles to find in…
Early adopters of Peloton’s fitness bikes are in for a pricey upgrade: this week, the company announced via an email to users that it will stop sending updates to bikes using the first generation of its touchscreen monitor. This model was sold in 2014 when Peloton first launched its bike before releasing a second iteration in 2016 that allows users to cast their screen to a smart TV. Peloton says users with the first-generation screen on their bikes will still be able to ride and access live stream and on-demand content as usual, but they will stop receiving support for new features.…