Microsoft promised a new game announcement at its Xbox Developer Direct event, and that game turned out to be Ninja Gaiden 4. The new entry in the long-running franchise is being co-developed by Team Ninja along with Platinum Games, the team behind action games like Bayonetta and Nier: Automata. Though no release date was announced, the game will be coming to Xbox, and will be available via Game Pass.

While the Ninja Gaiden franchise has been around since the late ‘80s, it entered into a new era on the Xbox with the bloody, and tough-as-nails Ninja Gaiden on Xbox in 2004. That version, developed by Team Ninja, was ported to a handful of other consoles and also received a number of sequels. Based on the debut trailer, the new game looks to continue the dark action started with the 2004 release, but with even faster gameplay.

Roli on Thursday announced its latest educational product at the NAAM audio show in Anaheim. The simply named Roli Piano builds on products like the Roli Airwave and Piano M, more than doubling the latter’s key count to 49.

The Piano is much like its predecessor in most ways, with MIDI keys that light up and sync with an instructional app played back on a phone or tablet. The Airwave, meanwhile, adds hand tracking into the mix, creating gesture-based sounds.

The new instrument is pricey, at $599, well over double the Piano M’s current $249 price point. The London-based music tech startup is offering up the larger model at $399 for a limited time “super early bird special.”

And, of course, it wouldn’t be a 2025 product launch without some mention of generative AI. That arrives by way of the newly announced Piano AI Assistitant, which the company refers to as, “the first step in using generative AI to make learning to play easier, more intuitive and more fun than ever before.”

The Assistant, which is rolling out as part of the Piano launch, aims to further instruction, while adding music theory into the mix.

Over the past year, the Piano line has become Roli’s primary focus. The pivot toward educational products makes sense for the company, which filed for bankruptcy back in 2021. Products like the Seaboard and Blocks were always cool and clever, but remained niche in the music world.

Music education, on the other hand, offers massive market potential for a smaller hardware maker.

“The only way to stop data from ending up in the wrong hands is by not collecting it in the first place.” This is the claim included in an ad from one of the best VPN providers around that ran on Monday, January 20, 2025, in the New York Times.

Through a cartoon-style FBI agent, the Swiss company Mullvad seeks to shed light on the tensions between technologists and law enforcement around encryption.

“Pocketpair Publishing provides comprehensive support for game development through funding, development assistance, and publishing for indie game developers and small studios,” Pocketpair wrote in its press release.

We don’t even have to wait long for the company’s first game. Pocketpair Publishing has teamed up with Tales of Kenzera: Zau developer Surgent Studios to produce its next title, a horror game slated for release later this year. Surgent Studios was founded by video game voice performer and on-screen actor Abubakar Salim. After launching Tales of Kenzera, an afro-futuristic metroidvania, the company was forced to furlough its games division due to lack of funding — a common occurrence that’s become endemic over the last two years.

The indie game space has not been insulated from the effects of the layoff crisis that’s plagued the game industry. The big publishers, from which smaller indie outfits typically receive funding, are tightening their belts, choosing to either keep their cash or only dole it out to projects they believe are sure to make money. And even the publishers known for supporting quality indie games, like Annapurna Games, are having a hard time staying in operation.

However, Pocketpair Publishing joins a group of new companies that have entered the indie games space via non-traditional means. In 2022, YouTube video game critic and content creator videogamedunkey, created his own publishing company Bigmode which published its first game, Animal Well, to critical acclaim last year. Also last year, Innersloth, developers of the wildly-popular murder mystery multiplayer game Among Us, established Outersloth, which is an indie game fund rather than a traditional publisher. Like Outersloth and Bigmode, Pocketpair Publishing is seeking to parlay its commercial success into an avenue for more indie games like Palworld to get made.

“Game development comes with many challenges,” said Pocketpair Publishing head John Buckley. “But we want to ease that process as much as possible and provide an environment where creators can pursue their dreams.”

Voyager Technologies has filed its confidential paperwork to go public, according to multiple media reports. The defense and space company has raised over $215 million from investors like Afterburner Capital and Balerion Space Ventures, according to PitchBook. The Denver-based company will likely be valued between $2 billion and $3 billion, and Morgan Stanley and Latham & Watkins are expected to lead the IPO, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

The company, founded in 2019, has a wide set of offerings, from propulsion technologies for defense purposes to building in-space infrastructure. Voyager has also forged powerful partnerships in the industry, linking up with Palantir to integrate Palantir’s AI into Voyager’s offerings. 

Our Samsung Galaxy Unpacked live coverage may have wrapped up, but we’re still feeling the excitement of seeing the new Samsung Galaxy S25, S25 Plus, S25 Ultra, and all-new S25 Edge revealed unto the world.

The new flagship Galaxy lineup brings with it a handful of upgrades for each of the three models, with increased RAM, new AI tools, and the blazing-fast Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset.

Though they mobilized in a few instances in support of Trump ahead of the 2024 election, it was, overall, fairly lackluster, especially compared to 2020. This drove speculation that the gang was on its last legs.

Then, on Monday, as Trump was taking the oath of office, more than 100 uniformed Proud Boys marched through the streets of Washington, DC, led by their south-Florida chapter.

It was a striking scene—one that seemed intended to send a clear message: “We’re back.”

Ever since January 6, 2021, DC has been perceived by the far right as a no-go zone for Trump supporters of all stripes. But on Monday the Proud Boys chanted “Whose streets—our streets.” They received a hero’s welcome by other Trump supporters in the crowd, as seen on video recorded by freelance journalist Ford Fischer.

On Tuesday, as bureaucratic snafus delayed the release of about a dozen January 6-ers from the DC jail, protesters gathered outside. Among them were at least four uniformed Proud Boys. Though three of them had their faces covered, they milled around with what appeared to be zero concern about stigma from others present. Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes, whose 18-year sentence for seditious conspiracy was commuted by Trump, also appeared outside the jail—having walked free from a federal prison in Maryland the previous night.

One of the Proud Boys present spoke at the impromptu rally outside of the jail, identifying himself as “Harry Fox.” (This was the same name that other Proud Boys had given to reporters on Inauguration Day.)

“Donald Trump is back, baby. He is back, and he is stronger than ever,” he said over the microphone. “I’m so proud of what the American citizens did that day,” he added, referring to January 6, “for standing up finally after decades of being abused and oppressed by an authoritarian regime.”

He ended his speech with the Proud Boys slogan: “I am a Western chauvinist, and I will not apologize for creating the modern world.” The crowd cheered.

Tarrio, in his phone call to Jones on Tuesday, made it clear that he views the role of the Proud Boys as being no different to what it was four years ago—he sees them as the foot soldiers and the muscle of the GOP. “I think the future of the club will be what it’s always been,” said Tarrio. “A group of men that love America, get around and drink beer, and protect Trump supporters from being assaulted … We will defend ourselves and Trump supporters from being assaulted for their political views.”

He suggested that he feels vindicated by Trump’s election victory and decision to pardon almost everyone involved in the January 6 riot. “We went through hell, and I’m gonna tell you: It was worth it,” Tarrio told Jones. “What we stood for and what those guys stood for is what we’ve been fighting for, is what we saw yesterday on the inauguration stage … I can’t tell you it’s been easy. But I will tell you it’s been worth it.”

CNN is developing a new streaming service — and it sounds a lot like the one it shut down nearly three years ago. In an internal memo shared with The Verge, CNN CEO Mark Thompson says the service will give viewers the ability “to stream news programming from us on any device they choose” as part of a broader restructuring plan.

CNN jumped on the streaming bandwagon in 2022 with the launch of CNN Plus, a short-lived service that shut down after just one month. Thompson doesn’t say whether the new service will mirror the content on its linear channel, or if it will stick to original programming, similar to CNN Plus.

“It’s early days but we’ve already established that there’s immense demand for it not just in America but across much of the world,” Thompson wrote. “We’ll have more to say about this new digital product in the coming months, including content plans and how we will work with our existing and future distribution partners to bring this to market.”

Along with the new streaming service, Thompson’s memo also said Alex MacCallum, CNN’s executive vice president for digital products and services, will announce the company’s “first lifestyle-oriented digital product” and a “major pivot to digital video.”

As part of these changes, CNN will lay off six percent of jobs, making up around 200 employees. Thompson says the company “doesn’t expect total headcount to fall much this year” because of a $70 million investment from CNN parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, The Hollywood Reporter says.

Password managers have become commonplace at this point. But businesses often have different needs than consumers. Teams, after all, often have to share credentials to access resources, all while IT and security teams need ways to control who has access to them. Passbolt, which is announcing an $8 million seed round Thursday, aims to become the de facto password manager for small and midsize businesses, with ambitions to serve enterprise customers in the long run.

The Passbolt team, led by its France-born CEO Kevin Muller, argues that most organizations are not served well by what he argues are more consumer-oriented tools like Bitwarden or 1Password. “You look at Bitwarden, for example, or even 1Password, what they are doing is they have, at one end, a simple password management for the workforce, and then they built a secret manager — or they purchased a secret manager — for the DevOps teams, and then they build something else for authentication,” Muller said. “So it’s quite fragmented. And one of the problems is that these tools, most of the time, cannot talk to each other. They are very much standalone.”

Muller previously founded e-learning platform Click on French and ran a web development consultancy in India. He founded Passbolt in 2017, together with Remy Bertot and Cédric Alfonsi, after previously prototyping the opens source community edition for a few years.

The service is based, in part, on Keepass, the popular open source password manager, but as Muller stressed, KeePass was never built for them. KeePass itself is already widely popular with technical teams, but it essentially creates a single static file where credentials are securely stored, he noted. This can easily be shared among team members, but because of that, there is no way to easily control who has access to it and there is no way to audit access (or revoke it), among other things.

“What we wanted was more collaboration, more security, and more control,” Muller said. “With control I mean: How do we install it behind our firewall on a server that we manage? How do we have it interoperable? How do we share passwords, secrets, and all types of credentials granularly?”

Over the course of the last few years, the team added features like native desktop apps, password expiry and rotations, a tool for getting two-factor authentication codes, and role-based access controls for using Passbolt’s own user interface. One of the next features on the horizon is support for managing passkeys.

In the long run, the Passbolt team would also like to challenge the more enterprise-centric Privileged Access Management (PAM) services like CyberArk, Muller told me.

Today, Passbolt offers a free community edition that users can self-host, as well as a self-hosted Pro edition ($49/month for 10 seats) with additional features like LDAP provisioning, single-sign-on support, activity logs, and more. Like so many other open source projects, Passbolt also offers a hosted solution (starting at $54 per month for 10 seats.

About 38,000 teams use the free version, with 2,000 paying for Passbolt’s services. The majority of users (75%) opt to self-host.

As Muller stressed, the code is regularly audited, and Passbolt is SOC2 Type II certified.

Passbolt, which is based in Luxembourg and currently has about 30 employees, actually reached profitability in the summer of 2024. But the team still decided to raise in order to capitalize on the current growth and to keep up with feature requests from its users.

The company’s Series A round was led by Netherlands-based Airbridge Equity Partners. Existing investors Expon Capital’s Digital Tech Fund, ScaleFund, Seeder, Dedicated, Bondi Capital, Carricha Capital, and LBAN also participated, along with angel investors like Christophe Bianco (co-founder of Excellium Services) and Xavier Buck (co-founder of Datacenter Luxembourg).

“Legacy password managers like KeePass or Bitwarden and Privileged Access Management solutions such as CyberArk fall short for today’s cross-functional, distributed and agile teams,” said Rick van Boekel, managing partner at Airbridge Equity Partners. “Passbolt’s organic traction across various industries confirms the demand for a more collaborative, enterprise-grade solution, and their impressive SaaS metrics prove that Passbolt users are delighted with the solution offered.”

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