Author: Loknath Das

If you have a friends who are PC or Xbox gamers, you’ve probably heard some buzz about Sea of Thieves. Microsoft, Amazon, B&H, and Walmart are offering a bundle with the rollicking pirate adventure, a new Xbox One S, a wireless controller, a month of Xbox Live and a month of Xbox Game Pass for $299, if you want to get in on the action. If Xbox One isn’t your jam and you’re more of a Nintendo person, you’re in luck. Nintendo Switch consoles really aren’t bundled or discounted very often, but eBay is bringing some heat by packaging a Switch with Neon Blue and Red Joy-Cons with…

 Education has long been notoriously slow to change. Most classrooms around the world look scarcely different than they did a century ago. But as the World Bank’s education lead Harry Patrinos told Devex at the Global Education & Skills Forum in Dubai, “the race is now being led by technology, and education is having trouble keeping up.” With automation and artificial intelligence likely to cut off the traditional path to development for many countries, which has included employing large numbers of workers in low-skill manufacturing, education systems simply aren’t ready. Take India, itself a global leader in advanced technologies. Between 50 and…

Normally, when Apple goes to the trouble of putting on an event, it’s somewhere near the company’s home base in sunny Cupertino. Not this time! After deciding not to hold a March keynote last year, Apple now has plans to hold court in Chicago’s prestigious Lane Tech College Prep school. This “field trip,” as Apple’s calling it, is far from business as usual, but with days to go before the event kicks off, we’ve got a few ideas about what you can expect Apple to unveil in the Windy City. Cheap new iPad(s) Around this time last year, Apple revealed its $329…

Just two months ago, comparing Facebook to cigarettes was a confronting and jarring suggestion when it was made by technology billionaire Marc Benioff. The founder of cloud computing company Salesforce was arguing for more regulation of social media companies and was blunt when asked how he would do this. “You’d do it exactly the same way you regulated the cigarette industry,” he said on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos. Like cigarettes, he said, Facebook was “addictive”, “not good for you” and there were “all kinds of forces trying to get you to do certain things.” Adrian Turner,…

Fortnite is getting around faster than mono in a college dorm. Everyone’s playing it—some nights you can catch Drake online, other days you can read about NBA All-Star Andre Drummond’s obsession with it. Your kid sister plays. My kid brother plays. Why shouldn’t they? Fortnite is free. It’s also fun—but maybe you don’t see how. Maybe you’re trying to understand. Maybe you have questions. Questions like: How do I get into Fortnite, Joshua? Glad you asked! The good news is, it’s not very hard, partly because the game is free, as I mentioned before. It’s also everywhere—on computers (with pretty reasonable system requirements), on Xbox One, on Playstation 4, and…

Part of Rare’s decision to build anti-toxicity measures directly into Sea of Thieves’ core design can be seen almost immediately upon playing. Players have a brig aboard their pirate ship, for example. Jerome Hagen, a user researcher at Microsoft, said that feature was one of many implemented to let players deal with others griefing their game. Hagen spoke about design strategy at GDC 2018 today in a panel on empowering players and combating multiplayer toxicity. The concept came down to giving players more control over their game-playing experience, while reinforcing the notion that disruptive behavior won’t be accepted by the Sea of Thieves community.…

Going into the Game Developers Conference this week, you could foresee some of the hot topics that would be consuming the world’s largest gathering of game makers: stuff like real-time raytraced graphics, fantastical blockchain-based business schemes, and how to design games for augmented reality. But another surprising issue has overtaken many of the discussions in the Moscone Center hallways this week: that of unionization. Labor organizing isn’t a new idea in the game industry—the first time I personally wrote about the issue was in Electronic Gaming Monthly more than a decade ago. There seems to be more momentum for the idea among the grassroots developers…

You’re never going to play Clunker Junker in your living room or on your desktop PC, no matter how many GPUs it has. Hardware is the issue here, but it’s not a matter of processing power — Clunker Junker requires two LED-adorned arm cranks, plus four crates with glowing lights and doors that come crashing down when they’re unlatched during gameplay. The game itself, to be fair, runs on a laptop, but that’s about as traditional as this thing gets. Clunker Junker is a cooperative space shooter for two players. Each crew member has a handheld, gun-like controller that stretches from palm to elbow; it’s made to…

A major new spending plan for buildings, roads and power supplies should be the number one priority for the U.S. administration this year, according to a new CNBC survey of global finance chiefs. The chief financial officers (CFO) from some of the world’s largest companies told CNBC that President Donald Trump should move ahead with his plans to shore up infrastructure across the country. The massive infrastructure plan, which could total $1.5 trillion according to Trump’s State of the Union speech this year, is currently stuck at the U.S. Congress stage as lawmakers cannot agree over the level of spending as well…

Bengaluru: Piramal Finance Ltd plans to invest around Rs10,000 crore in the hospitality sector in the next three years, a top company executive said, betting on growth prospects in a sector it entered earlier this year. The Mumbai-based firm, a unit of Piramal Enterprises Ltd, is also expanding investments in affordable housing, Khushru Jijina, managing director of Piramal Finance and Piramal Housing Finance Ltd said. It has already invested Rs520 crore—in structured debt and construction finance—in Bengaluru-based GM Infinite’s Global Techies Town project in Electronic City. After inking two deals totalling around Rs1,200 crore across four hospitality projects in 2018, Piramal…