Category: TECHNOLOGY
GPT-4’s new capabilities power a ‘virtual volunteer’ for the visually impaired
OpenAI has introduced the world to its latest powerful AI model, GPT-4, and refreshingly the first thing they partnered up on with its new capabilities is helping people with visual impairments. Be My Eyes, which lets blind and low vision folks ask sighted people to describe what their phone sees, is getting a ‘virtual volunteer’ that offers AI-powered help at any time.
We’ve written about Be My Eyes plenty of times since it was started in 2015, and of course the rise of computer vision and other tools has figured prominently in its story of helping the visually impaired more easily navigate everyday life. But the app itself can only do so much, and a core feature was always being able to get a helping hand from a volunteer, who could look through your phone’s camera view and give detailed descriptions or instructions.
The new version of the app is the first to integrate GPT-4’s multimodal capability, which is to say its ability to not just chat intelligibly, but to inspect and understand images it’s given.
Users can send images via the app to an AI-powered Virtual Volunteer, which will answer any question about that image and provide instantaneous visual assistance for a wide variety of tasks.
For example, if a user sends a picture of the inside of their refrigerator, the Virtual Volunteer will not only be able to correctly identify what’s in it, but also extrapolate and analyze what can be prepared with those ingredients. The tool can also then offer a number of recipes for those ingredients and send a step-by-step guide on how to make them.
But the video accompanying the description is more illuminating. In it, Be My Eyes user Lucy shows the app helping her with a bunch of things live. If you’re not familiar with the rapid-fire patois of a screen reader you may miss some of the dialogue, but she has it describe the look of a dress, identify a plant, read a map, translate a label, direct her to a certain machine treadmill at the gym, and tell her which buttons to push at a vending machine. (You can watch the video below.)
It’s a very concise demonstration of how unfriendly much of our urban and commercial infrastructure is for people with vision issues. And it also shows how useful GPT-4’s multimodal chat can be in the right circumstances.
No doubt human volunteers will continue to be instrumental for users of the Be My Eyes app — there’s no replacing them, only raising the bar for when they’re needed (and indeed they can be summoned immediately if the AI response isn’t good enough).
As an example, the AI helpfully suggests at the gym that “the available machines are the ones without people on them.” Thanks! As OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman said today, the capabilities are more impressive at first blush than once you’ve been using it for a while, but we must also be careful of looking this gift horse in the mouth too closely.
The team at Be My Eyes is working closely with OpenAI and with its community to define and guide its capabilities as it its development continues.
Right now the feature is in closed beta among a “small subset” of Be My Eyes users, which will be expanded over the coming weeks. “We hope to make the Virtual Volunteer broadly available in the coming months,” the team writes. “Just like our existing volunteer service, this tool is free for all blind and low-vision community members using the Be My Eyes app.”
Considering how quickly ChatGPT was co-opted into providing services for corporate SaaS platforms and other rather prosaic applications, it’s heartening to see this new one immediately put to work helping people. You can read more about GPT-4 here.
GPT-4’s new capabilities power a ‘virtual volunteer’ for the visually impaired by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/14/gpt-4s-first-app-is-a-virtual-volunteer-for-the-visually-impaired/
OpenAI releases GPT-4, a multimodal AI that it claims is state-of-the-art
There’s clearly a lot to unpack with GPT-4. But OpenAI, for its part, is forging full steam ahead — evidently confident in the enhancements it’s made.
“We look forward to GPT-4 becoming a valuable tool in improving people’s lives by powering many applications,” OpenAI wrote. “There’s still a lot of work to do, and we look forward to improving this model through the collective efforts of the community building on top of, exploring, and contributing to the model.”
OpenAI has released a powerful new image- and text-understanding AI model, GPT-4, that the company calls “the latest milestone in its effort in scaling up deep learning.”
GPT-4 is available today to OpenAI’s paying users via ChatGPT Plus (with a usage cap), and developers can sign up on a waitlist to access the API.
Pricing is $0.03 per 1,000 “prompt” tokens (about 750 words) and $0.06 per 1,000 “completion” tokens (again, about 750 words). Tokens represent raw text; for example, the word “fantastic” would be split into the tokens “fan,” “tas” and “tic.” Prompt tokens are the parts of words fed into GPT-4 while completion tokens are the content generated by GPT-4.
GPT-4 has been hiding in plain sight, as it turns out. Microsoft confirmed today that Bing Chat, its chatbot tech co-developed with OpenAI, is running on GPT-4.
Other early adopters include Stripe, which is using GPT-4 to scan business websites and deliver a summary to customer support staff. Duolingo built GPT-4 into a new language learning subscription tier. Morgan Stanley is creating a GPT-4-powered system that’ll retrieve info from company documents and serve it up to financial analysts. And Khan Academy is leveraging GPT-4 to build some sort of automated tutor.
GPT-4 can generate text and accept image and text inputs — an improvement over GPT-3.5, its predecessor, which only accepted text — and performs at “human level” on various professional and academic benchmarks. For example, GPT-4 passes a simulated bar exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers; in contrast, GPT-3.5’s score was around the bottom 10%.
OpenAI spent six months “iteratively aligning” GPT-4 using lessons from an internal adversarial testing program as well as ChatGPT, resulting in “best-ever results” on factuality, steerability and refusing to go outside of guardrails, according to the company. Like previous GPT models, GPT-4 was trained using publicly available data, including from public webpages, as well as data that OpenAI licensed.
OpenAI worked with Microsoft to develop a “supercomputer” from the ground up in the Azure cloud, which was used to train GPT-4.
“In a casual conversation, the distinction between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 can be subtle,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post announcing GPT-4. “The difference comes out when the complexity of the task reaches a sufficient threshold — GPT-4 is more reliable, creative and able to handle much more nuanced instructions than GPT-3.5.”
Without a doubt, one of GPT-4’s more interesting aspects is its ability to understand images as well as text. GPT-4 can caption — and even interpret — relatively complex images, for example identifying a Lightning Cable adapter from a picture of a plugged-in iPhone.
The image understanding capability isn’t available to all OpenAI customers just yet — OpenAI’s testing it with a single partner, Be My Eyes, to start with. Powered by GPT-4, Be My Eyes’ new Virtual Volunteer feature can answer questions about images sent to it. The company explains how it works in a blog post:
“For example, if a user sends a picture of the inside of their refrigerator, the Virtual Volunteer will not only be able to correctly identify what’s in it, but also extrapolate and analyze what can be prepared with those ingredients. The tool can also then offer a number of recipes for those ingredients and send a step-by-step guide on how to make them.”
A more meaningful improvement in GPT-4, potentially, is the aforementioned steerability tooling. With GPT-4, OpenAI is introducing a new API capability, “system” messages, that allow developers to prescribe style and task by describing specific directions. System messages, which will also come to ChatGPT in the future, are essentially instructions that set the tone — and establish boundaries — for the AI’s next interactions.
For example, a system message might read: “You are a tutor that always responds in the Socratic style. You never give the student the answer, but always try to ask just the right question to help them learn to think for themselves. You should always tune your question to the interest and knowledge of the student, breaking down the problem into simpler parts until it’s at just the right level for them.”
Even with system messages and the other upgrades, though, OpenAI acknowledges that GPT-4 is far from perfect. It still “hallucinates” facts and makes reasoning errors, sometimes with great confidence. In one example cited by OpenAI, GPT-4 described Elvis Presley the “son of an actor” — an obvious misstep.
“GPT-4 generally lacks knowledge of events that have occurred after the vast majority of its data cuts off (September 2021), and does not learn from its experience,” OpennAI wrote. “It can sometimes make simple reasoning errors which do not seem to comport with competence across so many domains, or be overly gullible in accepting obvious false statements from a user. And sometimes it can fail at hard problems the same way humans do, such as introducing security vulnerabilities into code it produces.”
OpenAI does note, though, that it made improvements in particular areas; GPT-4 is less likely to refuse requests on how to synthesize dangerous chemicals, for one. The company says that GPT-4 is 82% less likely overall to respond to requests for “disallowed” content compared to GPT-3.5 and responds to sensitive requests — e.g. medical advice and anything pertaining to self-harm — in accordance with OpenAI’s policies 29% more often.
Image Credits: OpenAI
There’s clearly a lot to unpack with GPT-4. But OpenAI, for its part, is forging full steam ahead — evidently confident in the enhancements it’s made.
“We look forward to GPT-4 becoming a valuable tool in improving people’s lives by powering many applications,” OpenAI wrote. “There’s still a lot of work to do, and we look forward to improving this model through the collective efforts of the community building on top of, exploring, and contributing to the model.”
OpenAI releases GPT-4, a multimodal AI that it claims is state-of-the-art by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/14/openai-releases-gpt-4-ai-that-it-claims-is-state-of-the-art/
First Republic bounces back as SVB panic lessens
Shares of First Republic Bank, a financial institution in the United States that does business with startups, are rebounding today after a punishing start to the trading week.
Caught in the wake of the shock collapse of erstwhile rival Silicon Valley Bank, shares of First Republic fell 62% yesterday. Investors, concerned that actions taken over the weekend by the American government to stem a potentially budding banking crisis might not be sufficient, sold First Republic and other, related banking stocks like PacWest and Western Alliance.
Today they are all on the bounce: First Republic is up around 57% as of the time of writing, PacWest is up 76%, and Western Alliance is up a comparatively modest 44%.
Before the government stepped in to calm markets by ensuring that depositors were whole and liquid at SVB, there was concern in the financial world that smaller banks (measured by total assets) could lose their appeal as places to do business. After all, why risk banking with a smaller institution if it could fail, whereas larger institutions could be considered too large to do so? It now appears that a far greater portion of the American banking industry will not be allowed to fail in a disorderly fashion, making the First Republics of the nation a sufficiently safe place to bank. Hence, a share-price rebound today at many banks that took stick yesterday.
While First Republic does work with tech clients, it is not as tech-centered as SVB was; First Republic’s recent 8-K filing reported that “no one sector [of its client base] represents more than 9% of total deposits,” adding that tech was just 4%. Oddly, despite the massive decline and rebound in the value of banks like First Republic, they could wind up with a good run of new deposits, provided former SVB customers choose them over larger banks.
It is possible to read the rebound in the value of smaller American banks as indication that investors consider the risk of contagion as falling. In contrast, yesterday when the same banks were crashing, we inferred the opposite. That’s how fast the news has been moving in recent weeks.
First Republic bounces back as SVB panic lessens by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/14/first-republic-bounces-back-as-svb-panic-lessens/
Security giant Rubrik says hackers used Fortra zero-day to steal internal data
Silicon Valley-based data security company Rubrik has come forward as the latest victim of the Fortra GoAnywhere zero-day vulnerability, which has been linked to hacks targeting a hospital chain and a bank.
In a blog post published on Tuesday, Rubrik’s chief information security officer Michael Mestrovich said that attackers had gained access to the company’s non-production IT testing environments as a result of the flaw in Fortra’s GoAnywhere file-transfer software, which Rubrik uses for sharing internal data.
This vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-0669, first came to light on February 2 after security journalist Brian Krebs publicly shared details of Fortra’s paywalled security advisory. Fortra released a patch for the actively-exploited flaw five days later on February 7.
Mestrovich said that since learning of the flaw last month, Rubrik conducted a “comprehensive review” of the affected data with an unnamed third-party firm, which found that the data accessed mainly consists of Rubrik internal sales information, including “certain customer and partner company names, business contact information, and a limited number of purchase orders from Rubrik distributors.”
“The third-party firm has also confirmed that no sensitive personal data such as Social Security numbers, financial account numbers, or payment card numbers were exposed,” Mestrovich said.
Rubrik provides enterprise data management and backup services across on-premise, cloud and hybrid networks.
In a statement, Rubrik spokesperson Najah Simmons told TechCrunch that the “unauthorized access did not include any data we secure on behalf of our customers via any Rubrik products.” Simmons declined to answer any additional questions, such as whether Rubrik has received or been made aware of a demand for payment.
Rubrik’s confirmation comes just hours after a listing naming the company appeared on the dark web leak site of the Clop ransomware gang. Samples of stolen data published by Clop, and seen by TechCrunch, align with Rubrik’s statement that it comprised of mostly corporate information.
The Russia-linked Clop gang claims to have exploited the zero-day flaw to steal data from more than 130 organizations — including Hatch Bank, and Community Health Systems, which last week confirmed in a filing with the Maine attorney general’s office that the hackers accessed medical billing and insurance information, diagnostic and medications data, and Social Security numbers.
Back in 2019, Rubrik suffered a security lapse that exposed a massive database of customer information. An exposed server that wasn’t protected with a password left tens of gigabytes of data, including customer names, contact information and casework for each corporate customer, accessible to anyone who knew the IP address of the server.
Security giant Rubrik says hackers used Fortra zero-day to steal internal data by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch
TechCrunch+ roundup: Beyond the Turing Test, 3 VCs on SVB, usage-based pricing tactics
A friend recently asked me to identify a block of ChatGPT text that they’d embedded in an email. I was able to easily, but only because the passage was particularly boring and didn’t sound like them at all.
Although generative AI is exceeding my expectations, the Turing Test is mostly intact in my personal experience. But for how much longer?
Entrepreneur/investor Chris Saad says we need a new benchmark that goes beyond Turing’s “simplistic pass/fail basis,” which is why he developed “a new approach to evaluating AI capabilities based on the Theory of Multiple Intelligences.”
When I moved to San Francisco, the quirky rotunda at 532 Market Street was a Sharper Image store full of plasma balls and tourists trying out massage chairs.
The E*Trade branch that took over the space closed a few years ago, but last August, it got a new tenant: Silicon Valley Bank. Sigh.
Downtown SF hasn’t bounced back from the pandemic, but this is a prime location with lots of foot traffic. Hopefully, after Silicon Valley Bridge Bank winds up its operations, a viable business will move in.
But that’s just one street corner. The second-largest bank failure in U.S. history is going to reshape the startup ecosystem for years to come.
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Silicon Valley Bank was more than just a preferred choice for managing payroll and investor cash: It also offered wealth management services, below-market-rate home loans and helped coordinate private stock sales. It was also a required choice for many clients whose contracts required them to “use the firm for all or most of their banking services,” CNBC reported.
So where does this bank’s collapse leave the tech industry? Who’s most vulnerable, who stands to benefit, and what are some of the long-term implications for VC? To learn more, Karan Bhasin and Ram Iyer interviewed:
- Maëlle Gavet, CEO, Techstars
- Niko Bonatsos, managing director, General Catalyst
- Colin Beirne, partner, Two Sigma Ventures
“We’re probably going to see consolidation in the VC class,” said Gavet.
“It was already on the way, but this is probably going to accelerate it, because SVB was also a preeminent provider of loans for GPs to make their capital commitment polls.”
Thanks very much for reading,
Walter Thompson
Editorial Manager, TechCrunch+
@yourprotagonist
The AI revolution has outgrown the Turing Test: Introducing a new framework
Image Credits: themacx (opens in a new window) / Getty Images (Image has been modified)
A friend recently asked me to identify a block of ChatGPT text that they’d embedded in an email. I was able to easily, but only because the passage was particularly boring and didn’t sound like them at all.
Although generative AI is exceeding my expectations, the Turing Test is mostly intact in my personal experience. But for how much longer?
Entrepreneur/investor Chris Saad says we need a new benchmark that goes beyond Turing’s “simplistic pass/fail basis,” which is why he developed “a new approach to evaluating AI capabilities based on the Theory of Multiple Intelligences.”
Building a PLG motion on top of usage-based pricing
Image Credits: miguelangelortega (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Last July, Puneet Gupta, a former AWS general manager who’s now CEO and co-founder of Amberflo.io, wrote a TC+ article explaining how SaaS startups can adopt usage-based pricing models.
In a follow-up, he shares four tactics teams can use to gather, analyze and leverage customer data to take the guesswork out of pricing decisions.
“When the time comes to make decisions about product packaging and pricing, the first place you turn to should be the metering pipeline for historical usage data,” he writes.
Time to trust: Questions cybersecurity customers ask and how to answer them
Image Credits: Thomas Hertwig/EyeEm (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Putting yourself in your customers’ shoes can raise uncomfortable questions, especially for cybersecurity startups, says angel investor Ross Haleliuk.
To help teams shorten the “time to trust” interval, he asks several questions cybersecurity customers are likely to pose while evaluating vendors, along with action items that can help provide convincing answers.
“It is important to keep in mind that trust is built over a long time, but it can be lost in an instant,” writes Haleliuk.
Finding your startup’s valuation: An angel investor explains how
Image Credits: sommart (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
In her latest column, TC+ contributor Marjorie Radlo-Zandi explains how angel investors like herself establish pre- and post-money valuations.
“While assessing prospective investments, I ensure it’s a product or service that I care deeply about and educate myself about the company’s market,” she says.
“I want to see a fair valuation of the business and a well-defined market worth at least $100 million.”
Coming in hot is a great way to cut short an investor meeting. To help first-time founders avoid waving red flags, she breaks down the Berkus Method and explains why uninformed founders often seek unrealistic valuations.
TechCrunch+ roundup: Beyond the Turing Test, 3 VCs on SVB, usage-based pricing tactics by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
Chaos in US banks could push crypto industry toward decentralization
The crypto industry lost a number of banking on- and off-ramps due to the recent turmoil in the U.S. banking industry, signaling that there may be a shift in the space toward decentralization and a need for regulation going forward.
Last week, Silvergate Capital, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank all shut down or were closed, which resulted in crypto companies and users alike scrambling to move their assets.
“Silvergate and Signature serve as the major on- and off-ramps for the crypto space with their SEN and Signet products, respectively,” Aaron Rafferty, CEO of Standard DAO, said to TechCrunch+. “The tie for SVB was more on the side of major startup and VC capital for the space with organizations like Lightspeed, Y Combinator.”
The shuttering of these banks also has bigger implications on the crypto industry because some of them were providing services to the industry, Mina Tadrus, CEO of quant investment management firm Tadrus Capital LLC and general partner of Tadrus Capital Fund, said. “These banks enabled cryptocurrency traders and companies to deposit, transfer and convert fiat currency into digital assets such as bitcoin, ethereum and other cryptocurrencies.”
With these banks’ closure, it will become difficult for cryptocurrency businesses to move money between entities and access banking services, Tadrus noted. “Furthermore, such closures could mean reduced trust from investors who may no longer be aware of the necessary safeguards involved in their bank transactions.”
This could lead to an overall decline in participation within the crypto community and ultimately could decrease liquidity within crypto markets and make it difficult for crypto startups to build new products or remain operational in the long term, Tadrus added.
Chaos in US banks could push crypto industry toward decentralization by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/14/svb-crypto-regulation-decentralization/
Google is making it easier to find low-cost healthcare centers in search results
At its health-focused event today, Google announced a series of health updates for its products, including Search. Most notably, the company announced that it’s making it easier for people to find affordable healthcare centers near them. The tech giant revealed that you will soon be able to see providers that identify as community health centers offering free or low cost care in search results.
If a medical clinic offers affordable care, you will soon see a label that reads “Free or low-cost care” under its name in search results.
“You’ll be able to see information for community health centers in the U.S. that offer free or low cost care,” said Hema Budaraju, Google’s senior director of product for health and search, during a briefing with reporters. “We’re focusing on these centers because we know that the access they provide to primary care has been demonstrated to show impact in improving chronic conditions, increasing the use of preventative services and decreasing ER visits. This data on the community health centers is based on publicly available information from Health Resources and Services. Administration, which include all registered federally qualified health centers.”
Google also announced that it’s making it easier to find Medicaid re-enrollment information easier to find on Search. In the U.S., millions of people signed up for Medicaid during the pandemic. At that time, the requirement to re-enroll each year was paused, but that pause is about to expire on March 31, which means that if people fail to re-enroll, they will lose their healthcare coverage.
To help people avoid this, Google is making Medicaid re-enrollment information easier to find on Search. Users will see what actions they need to take by getting acess to state-specific information about re-enrollment.
Image Credits: Google
Google said that it’s using new methods to ensure that Search is connecting people with up-to-date information. The company revealed that its conversation AI technology, Duplex, has called thousands of healthcare providers in the U.S. to verify their information on Google Search. Google has also used Duplex to verify if providers accept certain Medicaid plans in their state.
The tech giant is also partnering with ThroughLine, a network of mental health and crisis helplines around the world, to increase the number of crisis helplines that appear at the top of search results in additional languages and countries for searches related to suicide, domestic violence and other crisis topics.
Later this month, Google plans to make more of Fitbit’s Health Metrics Dashboard feature available without a subscription to people using Fitbit with compatible devices in countries where the feature is available. The feature helps you uncover changes with your breathing rate, skin temperature, blood oxygen and more. Google says that with this update, users will be able to see trends over longer periods of time, while also getting insights about what metrics changed from their baseline.
Google also announced that the content on the Harvard Medical School Continuing Education YouTube channel is eligible for clinicians to claim towards their Continuing Medical and Continuing Nursing Education credits. In addition, the company is working with the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education to provide best practices for video production and content strategy that will help accrediting organizations create even more CME-eligible content on YouTube.
Google is making it easier to find low-cost healthcare centers in search results by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
TikTok is adding a dedicated feed for STEM content
TikTok is introducing a new feed dedicated to STEM content in honor of Pi Day, the company announced on Tuesday. The feed, which will appear alongside the app’s “Following” and “For You” feeds, aims to give users a dedicated space to explore videos related to science, technology, engineering and math. The STEM feed will be rolling out to users in the U.S. in the coming weeks.
The launch expands on TikTok’s ongoing test of topic feeds, which are currently available in select markets. Topic feeds allow users to explore content across categories like Gaming, Food, Fashion and Sports. Swiping between the feeds shows you content for each category without having to specifically search for it. TikTok is now adding STEM to this list of topics.
The company says STEM-related hashtags have received over 110 billion views to date. TikTok has designed the STEM feed to serve as a destination for users looking to dive into these topics further.
“Whether encouraging aspiring scientists to work out experiments in comments sections or helping a new programmer learn to code, the STEM feed provides a space for co-learning, inspiration, and enrichment,” the company said in a blog post.
Image Credits: TikTok
TikTok also announced that it’s expanding its partnerships with Common Sense Networks and Poynter to bring high-quality STEM content to its users. As part of the partnerships, Common Sense Networks will assess all content to ensure it’s appropriate for the STEM feed and Poynter will assess the reliability of the information presented. If content does not pass both checkpoints, it will not be eligible for the STEM feed.
With TikTok’s new topic feeds, the company is likely hoping to reach a more defined audience. The feeds could also be a way for the company to better align itself with its competitors. For instance, YouTube has had topic categories at the top of its homepage for quite some time now, allowing users to find content that they’re particularly interested in, whether that’s music, gaming or podcasts.
TikTok says it believes that discovery is essential to the TikTok experience, and that it’s always looking to help users uncover new and relevant content. It’s unknown if TikTok plans add more topic feeds in the future, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the app introduces more categories for things like books and movies.
TikTok is adding a dedicated feed for STEM content by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/14/tiktok-is-adding-a-dedicated-feed-for-stem-content/
Amazon reveals terminal designs for Project Kuiper satellite internet
Amazon’s Project Kuiper has been working on building a competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink low-Earth orbit-based satellite internet for years, but it’s on the verge of launching its first actual prototype satellites, and today it unveiled what customers can expect in terms of terminals for actually connecting up to the future network.
Image Credits: Amazon
These are engineering models, so the final production versions may differ, but Amazon showed off three different versions designed to suit various customer needs. There’s a sub-five pound version with a flat, 11-inch square design that will offer speeds of up to 400 Mbps. Interestingly, Amazon isn’t sharing target pricing but did say that its cost to build these will be under $400 per unit.
A smaller, 7-inch square design will be less capable in terms of max speeds, maxing out at 100 Mbps, but it’ll be “lower-cost” and also have the advantage of being supremely portable for use on the go. Finally, a large, 19 x 30 inch version will offer gigabit speeds and is basically meant for commercial use (meaning probably $$$).
Image Credits: Amazon
Amazon also revealed that all of its terminals will be powered by an in-house designed baseband chip the company has codenamed “Prometheus.” Prometheus is also going to space aboard the Kuiper satellites, and Amazon says its unique design will allow processing of up to 1 terabit per second (Tbps) of traffic on each one, which should help with handling high network demand.
As announced last year, Amazon intends to launch its first two prototype satellites sometime in 2023 aboard the first United Launch Alliance flight of its all-new Vulcan Centaur rocket. The goal after that is to have mass production of its spacecraft kick off later in the year, with production version launches beginning in 2024 and at least some customers getting access to service by the end of the same year.
Amazon reveals terminal designs for Project Kuiper satellite internet by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch
Microsoft signs another ‘Call of Duty’ deal with cloud gaming company Boosteroid
Microsoft announced another ten-year agreement to bring its Xbox game lineup to cloud gaming service Boosteroid. This is Microsoft’s third deal with other gaming platforms as the company is trying to convince regulators that they should approve the acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
Last year, Microsoft announced its intention to buy Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. Activision Blizzard is one of the largest video game publishers in the world. The company and its internal studios are behind some very popular gaming franchises, such as ‘Call of Duty’, ‘Diablo’, ‘World of Warcraft’ and ‘Candy Crush Saga’.
But Microsoft has run into regulatory challenges in the U.K., the U.S. and the European Union. In particular, European regulators will take a decision on whether to clear or block the acquisition by April 11, 2023. In other words, it’s a matter of days before regulators say Microsoft can move forward.
That’s why Microsoft is announcing long-term commitments to bring ‘Call of Duty’ games and the rest of its catalog to other platforms — not just Xbox gaming consoles. Last month, Microsoft President Brad Smith announced a deal with Nintendo and another deal with Nvidia’s GeForce Now service.
Today, the company is adding a third partner and promises that Microsoft games will be available on Boosteroid for the next ten years. Boosteroid is a relatively small cloud gaming service that works more or less like Nvidia GeForce Now.
Instead of running games on your local device, games run on a gaming-optimized server in a data center near you. The video stream is then sent to your display. When you press a button on your controller, the action is relayed to the server.
Like on Nvidia’s cloud gaming service, the company isn’t a Netflix-like subscription. Instead, users have to buy individual games on online PC stores like Steam and the Epic Games Store. Boosteroid customers pay a monthly subscription fee to access the company’s servers. If they stop their subscription, users still own the games that they bought.
While Boosteroid doesn’t disclose the hardware specifications of its servers, the company promises a resolution of 1080p at 60 frames per second. The service costs €9.89 per month or €89.99 per year ($10.61 and $96.57 at today’s exchange rate respectively).
Originally from Ukraine, Boosteroid has servers in Europe (France, Italy, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine and the U.K.) and the U.S. (Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Texas, Illinois, Florida and Washington). As latency is key for cloud gaming, living near a data center is very important.
Boosteroid says that it has 4 million registered users. The service works in a web browser and the company also has dedicated applications for Windows, macOS, Android, Android TV and Linux. As for Sony, Microsoft hasn’t reached an agreement to make future ‘Call of Duty’ games available on PlayStation consoles.
Microsoft signs another ‘Call of Duty’ deal with cloud gaming company Boosteroid by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch