Starting November 12 through January 6, fans can visit Microsoft Experience Centers in London, Sydney, and New York to view an Indiana Jones-inspired display.
While there, they will be given the chance to solve a puzzle to enter the sweepstakes for a chance to win this unique console.
The one-of-a-kind Xbox Series X, which is encased in a puzzle box drawn from the game and adorned in gold, was built over 350 hours and also comes with a matching Xbox Wireless controller featuring a leather and gold finish with bejeweled buttons.
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The company has confirmed in an Xbox Wire post that if fans can’t make it to the Microsoft Experience Centers in person, there will be another chance via the Bethesda social channels.
Inspired by #IndianaJones and the Great Circle, this custom @Xbox Series X console and Xbox Wireless Controller are rarer than gold!From Nov. 12, visit select Microsoft Experience Centers and test your wits against a puzzle box reminiscent of the game—solve it, and you’ll be… pic.twitter.com/4KbKmzmvEeOctober 9, 2024
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is set to launch on December 9, 2024, for Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and PC as a timed exclusive. It will also be available day on on Xbox Game Pass.
During Gamescom’s Opening Night Live in August, it was announced that the action-adventure game will also be coming to PlayStation 5 in the “first half of 2025”, meaning we can expect it to be released in Spring.
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Developed by Wolfenstein studio MachineGames, The Great Circle will star actor Troy Baker as Indiana Jones and will feature an original narrative that draws from the iconic film franchise.
Another October Prime Day is on the books, but all of the deals haven’t disappeared from Amazon’s site just yet. This year’s Fall Prime Day brought a bunch of discounts on smartphones, speakers, wearables, robot vacuums and more tech, and you can still grab some of the sale prices right now even after the event has officially ended. While it’s possible we see some of these deals come back in a month during Black Friday, it’s a good idea to pick up your top items now if you’re keen on getting some of your holiday shopping done early. Here are the best Prime Day deals you can still get today.
Best Prime Day deals you can still get: Engadget’s top picks
Best Prime Day Apple deals
Apple deals can be hit or miss during Amazon Prime Day, but we saw a number of good ones this time and many of them are still available. Whether you’ve been on the hunt for a new Apple device for yourself or you know you want to pick one up as a gift, you can save a bit of cash if you do so now.
Apple 10th-gen iPad for $299 ($50 off): The new, baseline iPad updates a familiar device with a fresh design, improved performance, USB-C charging and a better battery life.
Apple 9th-gen iPad for $199 ($130 off): This model is on its way out, but $200 for an iPad is a solid sale price. This slab has a 10.2-inch display, an A13 Bionic chip and 64GB of storage — plus the antiquated physical Home button.
Apple AirPods Max for $395 ($154 off): These expensive cans are a much better buy when on sale, and they boast excellent sound quality, good ANC, a luxe design and a solid battery life. They’re available in Lightning or USB-C.
Apple AirPods 4 for $119 ($10 off): This modest discount has been available for a few weeks now, but it’s still worth highlighting given that Apple only launched its new wireless earbuds last month. We gave the pair a review score of 88, praising its improved fit, comfort and overall sound quality. This model doesn’t include active noise cancellation or wireless charging, however.
Apple Watch SE (2nd gen, GPS) for $170 ($79 off): The entry-level Apple Watch remains a fine choice for first-time smartwatch buyers, so long as you can live without the larger always-on display and more advanced health features of the pricier Series 10. This is another one of the lowest prices we’ve tracked for the 40mm model; the larger 44mm variant is similarly discounted at $200.
Apple 13-inch MacBook Air M2 for $749 ($250 off): Despite having a slightly older chipset, the M2 MacBook Air remains a great budget option for most anyone, save those who regularly push their daily driver to the limit with activities like video editing.
A number of Lego sets are still on sale post October Prime Day. Some of our favorites come from the Star Wars, Super Mario and Harry Potter lineups, and you’ll find savings up to 41 percent on those.
Best Prime Day deals on tech
Yes, Black Friday is right around the corner, but it would be unwise to sleep on these Prime Day tech deals that you can still get today. We’re seeing steep discounts on headphones, TVs, streaming devices, gaming gear and more, making it a good time to pick up something for yourself or cross a few items off your holiday shopping list early.
Sonos Era 100 for $199 ($50 off): This is one of our favorite smart speakers thanks to its excellent sound quality, Trueplay tuning and Bluetooth support. Plus, if you have two of them, you can pair them for a stellar stereo sound experience.
Roku Ultra (2024) for $79 ($21 off): The brand new Ultra is 30 percent faster than the previous model, and it supports Dolby Atmos, Dolby Vision and Wi-Fi 6.
Dyson V15 Detect Plus cordless vacuum cleaner for $696 ($54 off): This version of our top pick in our best cordless vacuum cleaner guide has superior suction power and can handle pet hair without breaking a sweat, plus it has 60 minutes of run time and comes with a number of cleaner-head accessories.
LG 55-inch C4 evo OLED smart TV for $1,297 ($700 off): LG’s midrange OLED sets, the C4 family includes upgraded Alpha 9 Gen 7 chip, improved brightness and a 144Hz max refresh rate. Most sizes are discounted at the moment.
Shark AI Ultra robot vacuum cleaner for $300 ($119 off): Shark’s robo-vac can clean both carpet and hard floors well and maps your home while it cleans so you can more easily send it to specific rooms and areas when you want. Its self-emptying base can also hold up to 60 days worth of debris.
Crucial X9 Pro portable SSD (1TB) for $85 ($10 off): The X9 Pro is the top pick in our guide to the best portable SSDs, combining dependable performance with a rugged compact design. We’ve seen this 1TB model go for much less in previously sales, but it’s sat in the $90 to $100 range for almost all of the past year. This discount marks the lowest price we’ve seen since January.
Ninja DualZone air fryer for $168 ($32 off): This 8-quart model of one of our favorite air fryers can cook two totally different foods at the same time, and you can set it up for both foods to be done cooking at the same time. The larger, 10-quart model is $50 off and down to $200.
Expired Prime Day deals
Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice, and stay tuned to Engadget.com for all of the best tech deals coming out of October Prime Day 2024.
PlanetPlay, a non-profit platform that contributes to environmental action through games, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) have joined forces to launch a new initiative called Play2Act.
Through a poll embedded in popular games, Play2Act aims to capture public views about how video games can contribute to addressing the urgent and interconnected climate and nature crises affecting people and the planet, said Jude Ower, chief strategy officer at PlanetPlay (and formerly the CEO at Playmob, which was acquired by PlanetPlay in May), in an interview with GamesBeat.
The poll, set to launch with an initial rollout in the last quarter of 2024, followed by a second phase anticipated in mid-2025, is being conducted in the framework of the Games Realizing Effective and Affective Transformation (GREAT) project funded by the European Union Horizon and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).
The GREAT initiative, running from 2023-2026, aims to explore the innovative potential of games in helping citizens express their preferences and attitudes on policy issues, including the climate crisis.
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“We’ve got so many studios now getting behind it. And essentially what we’re doing with the data is to take the aggregate, anonymized data to the UN and they’ll use that to see if they could influence climate policy as part of something called the climate promise,” Ower said. “We’ll have an industry wide report. Every six months, we’ll update the questions so that they can track progress and trends and have the most up to date data.”
Origins
Ower while at Playmob worked before with the UNDP to survey 30 million gamers to get their insights on how they feel about climate change, and that provided good feedback for policymakers. That took plae a few years ago.
And now the latest move, which has been a couple of years in the making, is to do new polls and collect that data on a regular basis to understand changing attitudes over time.
“The hopes is that could, at speed and scale, get gamers to speak up on how they feel, and then provide this data to policymakers,” Ower said.
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The only way to reach large numbers of people, Ower figured, was to do it through polls inside games. The UNDP thought about its next iteration about hwo to use games as a tool for policy change on climate. The funding came through GREAT. That helped “put the methodology under a microscope” and make the survey more scientifically robust.
Now the poll is live in a bunch of games.
“The partnership with the UN fits perfectly into this so we set something up called Play2Act. It is a two-year project with UNDP. Every six months, we roll out a new survey in game,” Ower said. “We use a game link that can be put into the editorial of in-game messaging.”
Play2Act will use in-game polls to gather insights from players, particularly younger audiences, on how green gaming content and video games can be powerful tools to help fight climate change and preserve nature. This interactive approach allows players to share their views while staying immersed in their favorite games.
Respondents will have the option to fill out the survey in 10 languages: Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
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Microsoft Xbox, FunPlus, Rovio (AngryBirds2, Angry Birds Friends and Dream Blast), Niantic (Pokemon GO!), Sybo (Subway Surfer), Space Ape Games (BeatStar, Transformers: Earth Wars), Jagex (Runescape), Trailmix (Love & Pies), Hi-Rez (Smite), Creative Mobile (Nitro Nation) and Ten Square Games (Fishing Clash) are some of the initiative’s founding game studios and publishers.
PlanetPlay and UNDP extend an open invitation to more game producers and studios, regardless of their size, to join Play2Act.
Given their impact and reach, video games have the potential to play a significant role in helping to tackle the climate and nature crisis.
Rhea Loucas, CEO at PlanetPlay, said in a statement, “With the global gaming population expected to surpass 3.3 billion by the end of 2024, video games have solidified their status as one of the most influential cultural forces of our era. This initiative seeks to strategically engage the gaming community, leveraging the unparalleled reach and impact of video games as a powerful driver of positive change.”
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Jennifer Baumwoll, acting UNDP Climate Hub Director, said in a statement, “Thanks to a multi-partner collaboration, Play2Act will enable players to speak up on how video games can be part of the solution. We want to use this popular platform to give a voice to all actors on how a critical industry like gaming can contribute to global climate and environmental action. Guided by Climate Promise, UNDP’s flagship climate action initiative, we aim to mobilise collective action and implement groundbreaking solutions to address the climate and nature crises.”
Yennie Solheim, Director of Social Impact at games publisher Niantic, said in a statement, “By giving video game players the opportunity to voice their opinions on sustainability, we can start to encourage positive change addressing the global nature of climate change. We’re excited to partner with PlanetPlay and use our technology to foster community engagement and support sustainability efforts.”
The results will be analyzed by academics contributing to the GREAT project on gaming and climate policy. Participating academic institutions include Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education (DIPF), Zentrum für Soziale Innovation (ZSI), Bolton University, Oxford University, and Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR), providing expertise in research, social science, and data science. This research project aims to provide a robust methodology and scientific foundation for games to act as a vehicle for influencing global policy.
Play2Act is breaking new ground in climate advocacy. Loucas added, “Together, we are pioneering a movement to make gaming a force for good. Let’s unite to reach one billion gamers and amplify our collective voice for a better future.”
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Right now, the engagement rates are above 50%. The goal is to reach more than 100 million people with the current poll.
“That’s amazing,” Ower said. “Players really want to speak up.”
The questions relate to things like how gamers feel about games taking action for climate change; if they want to take action for climate change and nature; and what more they would do. Altogether there are seven questions. Once the players finish the poll, they can return to the game.
Over time, Ower said the hope is to expand from mobile games to PC games and perhaps consoles, possibly through a QR code.
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As the demand for AI surges, AI vendors are devoting greater bandwidth to data security issues. Not only are they being compelled to comply with emerging data privacy regulations (e.g. the EU Data Act), but they’re finding themselves under the microscope of clients skeptical about how their data is being used and processed.
The trouble is, where it concerns tightening data security practices around AI, many orgs aren’t in a position to execute well. According to a survey from BigID, a data control platform, half of organizations rank data security as their top barrier to implementing AI.
Hailing from the app engineering and legal sectors, Abhi Sharma and Leila Golchehreh were well-versed in the challenges at play here. Confident they could build something to address the data security conundrum, the pair launched Relyance AI, a platform that checks if a company’s data usage is aligned with governance policies.
“The concept of how we would build Relyance came to us one evening when we were catching up over pizza in San Francisco,” Sharma told TechCrunch. “Although we came from two very different backgrounds, together, we realized that more could be done to ensure visibility in an organization’s data processing.”
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Golchehreh is an attorney by trade, having previously served as senior counsel at Workday and autonomous car startup Cruise. Sharma, a software dev, was a platform engineer at AppDynamics before helping to found FogHorn, an edge AI platform that Johnson Controls acquired in 2022.
Sharma says that most companies face three main hurdles to AI adoption: a lack of visibility to data in AI, the complexity of how data is handled, and the rapid pace of innovation. All these contribute to reputational risk, Sharma says — and open companies to legal threats.
Relyance’s solution is an engine that scans an org’s data sources — such as third-party apps, cloud environments, AI models, and code repositories — and checks to see if they’re in agreement with policies. Relyance creates a “data inventory” and ‘data map,” which it syncs with customer agreements, global privacy regulations, and compliance frameworks.
“Relyance enables organizations to monitor external vendor risks,” Sharma said, “while its data lineage feature tracks data flows across applications to identify potential risks proactively.”
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Now, Relyance isn’t executing on a totally novel concept. Sharma admits that OneTrust, Transcend, Datagrail, and Securiti AI are among the vendors that compete with it in some way. For example, Datagrail offers automated risk monitoring tools that help companies build third-party app risk assessments quickly.
But Relyance appears to be holding its own. Sharma claims that the business is on track to double annual recurring revenue this year, and that Relyance’s customer base — which includes Coinbase, Snowflake, MyFitnessPal, and Plaid — grew 30% in H1.
Setting the stage for further growth, Relyance this month closed a $32 million Series B round led by Thomvest with participation from M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund), Cheyenne Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and Unusual Ventures. Bringing the startup’s total raised to $59 million, the new funds will be put toward growing Relyance’s team to 90 employees by the end of the year.
“We decided to raise funds because the demand for AI continues to grow and new privacy and AI regulations are being put into place globally,” Sharma said. “Our hiring efforts will primarily focus on expanding our engineering team and increasing our go-to-market capacity to support our product development and growth momentum.”
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