Mattel and Outright Games today launched Barbie Project Friendship, on the PC and consoles.

Players can join Barbie “Malibu” Roberts and Barbie “Brooklyn” Roberts as they team up to save the Malibu Waves Community Center with help from their friends and family. It’s a test of the market in some ways, as it’s released broadly on most core game machines and it’s also coming out the same day as Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.

You can play it as a single-player experience or in two-player local co-op mode, where friends can tackle minigames together. The game includes accessibility features, offering numerous difficulty levels for each minigame and an auto-win option, ensuring satifying experience for Barbie fans of all ages and skills.

Developed with support from Ann Austen, producer and developer of numerous Barbie animated series and specials, including Barbie Dreamhouse Adventures, the game stays true to the charm of the series and includes all of Barbie’s best friends. The original English voice cast also returns to deliver an authentic experience, allowing fans to fully immerse themselves in the world of Barbie.

“We are excited that Barbie Project Friendship is now available on all major gaming platforms, letting kids jump into Barbie’s latest adventure,” said Erika Winterholler, head of business development for digital gaming at Mattel, in a statement. “With the local multiplayer options, friends and family can team up for the fun and celebrate the imagination and creativity that the brand represents.”

Stephanie Malham, managing director of Outright Games, said in a statement, “With a touching and inspiring story, amazing support from the television series cast, and a strong focus on accessibility for younger players, Barbie Project Friendship offers something for fans of all ages. Fans can now dive into this heartwarming adventure, with gameplay that is welcoming and accessible to everyone.”

Barbie has been around since 1959 and the brand is celebrating its 65th birthday. It’s been a while, but we’ll see if the game still has some glow from the Barbie movie, which generated $1.45 billion at the box office. The game is available on the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam and the Microsoft Store.

Founded in 2016, Outright Games has established its place in the market delivering engaging interactive games of entertainment licenses globally. Outright Games brings stories and characters to life with titles including Peppa Pig: World Adventures with Hasbro, DC’s Justice League: Cosmic Chaos with Warner, Star Trek Prodigy: Supernova and Paw Patrol: Grand Prix with Nickelodeon, and DreamWorks Dragons: Legends of The Nine Realms with NBC Universal.

Enterprises have a data inventory problem. The amount of data they’re collecting and storing is increasing, and that data is being spread across disparate storage buckets. Yet many organizations rely on processes that essentially amount to pencil-and-paper methods for tracking data provenance. According to one survey, more than 50% of companies use Excel spreadsheets in their data privacy and compliance efforts.

Karthik Krishnan, Shankar Subramaniam, and Madhu Shashanka thought they might have the engineering chops to build something to make this easier for companies. The trio had cut their teeth in cybersecurity: Years ago, Subramaniam and Shashanka had recruited Krishnan as one of the first employees at their behavioral analytics startup, Niara.

A few years after Hewlett Packard acquired Niara, the trio began sketching out ideas for an enterprise data management tool. They envisioned a product that could catalog a company’s critical data — including information stored in infrequently accessed places — and automatically flag any data that’s at risk of compromise.

“We hoped to solve one of the most pressing data security challenges facing the modern enterprise,” Krishnan told TechCrunch. “That is: identifying and securing business-critical information within structured and unstructured data, stored on-premises or in the cloud, at scale.”

The trio built an MVP and founded Concentric AI to further develop and commercialize it. Today, Concentric has customers in industrial manufacturing, insurance, and higher education, including car insurance carrier Hagerty and DeVry University.

Krishnan explained how the tech works.

First, a customer links Concentric to its databases, data stores, email and messaging apps, and even generative AI chatbots such as Microsoft Copilot. Then Concentric uses AI to find sensitive data like passwords, private files, and audio and video recordings of meetings in those linked places.

Concentric then gives the customer recommendations on ways to better secure its data and adhere to compliance standards. It can also trace lineage, showing where a certain piece of data came from and how it’s being used.

“Operationalizing data security is a huge challenge,” Krishnan said. “With Concentric, customers can identify anomalous activity and remediate those issues to prevent data loss.”

But doesn’t monitoring all this company data present a huge security risk? What if Concentric gets hacked, or what if hackers try to intercept the data flowing between apps and Concentric’s platform?

Krishnan told me that Concentric doesn’t deal with raw data; instead, it creates semantic representations of the data and data categories. “Concentric AI products do not store sensitive user data,” he said.

Concentric isn’t alone in the data protection market, which could be worth over $500 billion by 2032, according to one estimate. The startup competes with Varonis, BigID, Netwrix, Spirion, Cyera, and Securiti, among other vendors.

Still, Krishnan said that Concentric’s client base is growing at a healthy clip: It has grown by 300% from a year earlier.

The continued burgeoning of the data organizations have to wrangle is no doubt contributing to the boom. In a Matillion poll, data professionals said that their company’s data volumes are growing by 63% per month on average.

“There’s an unprecedented demand for data security posture management globally,” Krishnan said.

San Mateo-based Concentric recently closed a $45 million Series B round co-led by Top Tier Capital Partners and HarbourVest, with participation from CyberFuture, Ballistic Ventures, Citi Ventures, Engineering Capital and Clear Ventures. The new round brings the company’s total capital raised to $67 million, and the fresh cash will be used to expand Concentric’s partner program and product portfolio as well as increase the company’s headcount to 125 people by 2025.

The “Connection Machine” 

In the zone

Platform politics

Range life

Not dystopian

It’s easier to talk about the areas of life that AI won’t affect than where it will. Businesses are at the forefront of that adoption. But where businesses go, bad actors often follow – sometimes, they’re even ahead.

Whilst Gen AI is being used positively amongst businesses, speeding up admin tasks and acting as an assistant to many, it has already gotten into the ‘wrong hands’. More and more Gen AI offerings are available on the dark web to assist wanna-be hackers and bad actors in their endeavours. The commodification of AI can help cybercriminals make phishing attacks seem more personable and realistic, which can increase the likelihood of successful intrusions that could lead to ransomware attacks. Ransomware is one of the biggest threats to businesses today, putting businesses, reputations and careers at risk, and it is here to stay.

The ‘Amaravati Drone Summit 2024’ provided the perfect platform for Andhra Pradesh to highlight the successful use of drone technology during the recent floods that ravaged Vijayawada and surrounding areas. 

AP Drone Corporation Managing Director, K. Dinesh Kumar, presented a comprehensive case study detailing the key role that drones played in the state’s flood disaster management and relief efforts.

Responding to the disaster, the state deployed 437 drones which completed 4000 trips. The exercise was undertaken by 846 skilled professionals. Drones became essential for real-time flood mapping, allowing authorities to monitor inundated areas and assess damage with speed and precision. 

The state’s emergency response teams relied heavily on drone footage for quick decision-making, especially focusing on low-lying areas. According to the state government, a control room was established at the NTR District Collectorate, where 20 operators monitored live drone feeds from 22 flood-affected wards, identifying critical issues like crowd distress, garbage piles, dead animals and sanitation problems.

Over a six-day period, the drones delivered more than 1,23,731 relief packages to flood victims. On peak days, such as September 4, drones made as many as 80,630 deliveries. Not stopping at just that, 100 sanitation drones were deployed to spray 3,078 litres of disinfectant over 284 Km of flood-affected areas to prevent the outbreak of diseases.

The state leveraged Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) for data analytics by processing information gathered from drone surveillance. Andhra Pradesh also launched a sandbox initiative that offered startups access to drone-collected data to create innovative solutions for disaster management. The Amaravati Drone Summit attracted over 11,000 attendees including 4,000 participants and 62 experts who doubled up as panel speakers.

Visuals of inundated roads and people trapped in houses crying for help dominated news channels and social media after the floods hit the southern state. The Krishna River was overwhelmed, resulting in the worst floods in the last 100 years. Rainfall of over 32 cm was recorded between August 31 and September 1 which displaced over 200,000 people. The floods also paralyzed transportation systems and crippled infrastructure as many commercial establishments were inundated by knee-deep water. 

The New York Times has introduced the next title coming to its Games catalog following Wordle’s continued success — and it’s all about math. Digits has players adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing numbers. You can play its beta for free online right now. 
In Digits, players are presented with a target number that they need to match. Players are given six numbers and have the ability to add, subtract, multiply, or divide them to get as close to the target as they can. Not every number needs to be used, though, so this game should put your math skills to the test as you combine numbers and try to make the right equations to get as close to the target number as possible.

Players will get a five-star rating if they match the target number exactly, a three-star rating if they get within 10 of the target, and a one-star rating if they can get within 25 of the target number. Currently, players are also able to access five different puzzles with increasingly larger numbers as well.  I solved today’s puzzle and found it to be an enjoyable number-based game that should appeal to inquisitive minds that like puzzle games such as Threes or other The New York Times titles like Wordle and Spelling Bee.
In an article unveiling Digits and detailing The New York Time Games team’s process to game development, The Times says the team will use this free beta to fix bugs and assess if it’s worth moving into a more active development phase “where the game is coded and the designs are finalized.” So play Digits while you can, as The New York Times may move on from the project if it doesn’t get the response it is hoping for. 
Digits’ beta is available to play for free now on The New York Times Games’ website