Connect with us

Technology

Celeste developers cancel follow-up game Earthblade

Published

on

Celeste developers cancel follow-up game Earthblade

Earthblade, the next game from the developers of Celeste, has been canceled. The fantasy-inspired game got its first trailer in late 2022, and the game would have let you explore a “free-roaming, dynamically-loading map,” Extremely OK Games’ Maddy Thorson said at the time. But the team decided to cancel the game in December after a team conflict and because of the pressure of trying to follow up on Celeste, Thorson says in a post detailing what happened.

The “disagreement” was between Thorson and Noel Berry (Thorson refers to the two of them as “us”) and Pedro Medeiros over “the IP rights of Celeste,” Thorson says. “We eventually reached a resolution, but both parties also agreed in the end that we should go our separate ways,” and Medeiros is currently working on a game called Neverway. “Losing Pedro wasn’t the only factor in cancelling the game, but it did prompt us to take a serious look at whether fighting through to finish Earthblade was the right path forward,” Thorson says.

The huge success of Celeste also “applied pressure on us to deliver something bigger and better with Earthblade, and that pressure is a large part of why working on it has become so exhausting,” Thorson says. “Pedro isn’t to blame for this — in fact the split with him has given us the clarity to see that we have lost our way, and the opportunity to admit defeat.”

Thorson and Berry want to refocus on “smaller-scale projects” and are “prototyping again” to try and “rediscover game development in a manner closer to how we approached it at Celeste’s or TowerFall’s inception.”

Advertisement

Source link

Continue Reading
Click to comment

You must be logged in to post a comment Login

Leave a Reply

Technology

Raymond Tonsing’s Caffeinated Capital seeks $400M for fifth fund

Published

on

women-led funds, venture capital, startups

Caffeinated Capital, a San Francisco venture firm started by a solo capitalist Raymond Tonsing, is raising a fifth fund of $400 million, according to a regulatory filing.

The firm, an early investor in software company Airtable and defense startup Saronic, has already raised $160 million toward the fund. If Caffeinated hits its target, it will be the 15-year-old firm’s largest capital haul date. Although the outfit didn’t announce its previous fund, PitchBook data estimates that Caffeinated closed its fund four with a total of $209 million in commitments.

Although Tonsing was Caffeinated’s only general partner until four years ago, Varun Gupta, who led data science and machine learning at Affirm, joined him as a second general partner in 2020.

Tonsing was an early investor in Affirm, a buy-now-pay-later platform that went public in 2021. The firm’s other notable exits include A/B testing startup Optimizely, which PitchBook estimates was sold for $600 million in 2020.

Advertisement

Source link

Continue Reading

Technology

NYT Strands today — my hints, answers and spangram for Thursday, January 23 (game #326)

Published

on

NYT Strands today — my hints, answers and spangram for Tuesday, December 17 (game #289)

Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.

Want more word-based fun? Then check out my NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games, and Marc’s Wordle today page for the original viral word game.

Source link

Continue Reading

Technology

A Samsung integration helps make Google’s Gemini the AI assistant to beat

Published

on

A Samsung integration helps make Google’s Gemini the AI assistant to beat

One of the most important changes in Samsung’s new phones is a simple one: when you long-press the side button on your phone, instead of activating Samsung’s own Bixby assistant by default, you’ll get Google Gemini

This is probably a good thing. Bixby was never a very good virtual assistant — Samsung originally built it primarily as a way to more simply navigate device settings, not to get information from the internet. It has gotten better since and can now do standard assistant things like performing visual searches and setting timers, but it never managed to catch up to the likes of Alexa, Google Assistant, and now, even Siri. So, if you’re a Samsung user, this is good news! Your assistant is probably better now. (And if, for some unknown reason, you really do truly love Bixby, don’t worry: there’s still an app.)

The switch to Gemini is an even bigger deal for Google. Google was caught off guard a couple of years ago when ChatGPT launched but has caught up in a big way. According to recent reporting from The Wall Street Journal, CEO Sundar Pichai now believes Gemini has surpassed ChatGPT, and he wants Google to have 500 million users by the end of this year. It might just get there one Samsung phone at a time.

Gemini is now a front-and-center feature on the world’s most popular Android phones, and millions upon millions of people will likely start to use it more — or use it at all — now that it’s so accessible. For Google, which is essentially betting that Gemini is the future of every single one of its products, that brings a hugely important new set of users and interactions. All that data makes Gemini better, which makes it more useful, which makes it more popular. Which makes it better again.

Advertisement

Right now, Google appears to be well ahead of its competitors in one important way: Gemini is the most capable virtual assistant on the market right now, and it’s not particularly close. It’s not that Gemini is specifically great; it’s just that it has more access to more information and more users than anyone else. This race is still in its early stages, and no AI product is very good yet — but Google knows better than anyone that if you can be everywhere, you can get good really fast. That worked so well with search that it got Google into antitrust trouble. This time, at least so far, it seems like Google’s going to have an even easier time taking over the market.

It’s not that Gemini is specifically great; it’s just that it has more access to more information and more users than anyone else

For years, there were three meaningful players in the virtual assistant space. Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant, and Apple’s Siri all offered similar features and were similarly accessible through speakers and phones and wearables. But now? The much-hyped, AI-first “Remarkable Alexa” is, by all accounts, massively delayed and massively underpowered. The latest versions of Siri shipped with a wackier animation and seemingly no new smarts or capabilities. 

There are other ascendant AI assistants, of course. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Copilot all have strong underlying models, and some share the same multimodal capabilities as Gemini. There are lots of good reasons to pick them or even something like Perplexity over Gemini. But they’re missing the most important thing: distribution. They’re apps you have to download, log in to, and open every time. Gemini is a button you can press — and that’s a big difference. There’s a reason OpenAI is reportedly working on everything from a web browser to a Jony Ive-designed ChatGPT gadget: the built-in options usually win.

Advertisement

The built-in options are also the ones that tend to have the best integration across the platform, which might be the whole ball game. Gemini can already change settings on your phone and, with new upgrades, can even do things across apps — grabbing information from your email and dumping it into a text message draft, just to name one example. Because of the way iOS and Android are architected, no other assistant has this kind of access — and again, there’s no indication that Siri’s ever going to be as good as it needs to be. If the future of assistants is this kind of agentic, using-your-apps-for-you behavior, Google’s inherent advantage might be insurmountable. 

Google is practically spoiled for places to put Gemini

Meanwhile, Google is practically spoiled for places to put Gemini. The company recently announced that all paying Workspace customers will get Gemini access. You can access Gemini with one click from your Gmail inbox or summon it with one keystroke in Docs. And the underlying tech is even more pervasive. You can use Gemini to find stuff on YouTube and in Drive, and practically every time you search, a Gemini-powered AI Overview appears at the top of your results. “Today, all seven of our products and platforms with more than two billion monthly users use Gemini models,” Pichai said on Google’s earnings call last fall. (Fun fact: the word “gemini” appears 29 times in that earnings call transcript, only three fewer than “search.”) 

When it comes to how people actually encounter and interact with these models, though, the phone is still the AI device of choice. And that’s where Google has maybe its largest advantage. “Gemini’s deep integration is improving Android,” Pichai said on that earnings call. “For example, Gemini Live lets you have free-flowing conversations with Gemini; people love it.” For now, smartphones are the most compelling AI devices, and Google can integrate its systems unlike any other. Apple, scrambling to play catch-up with the iPhone, had to launch an awkward handoff with ChatGPT just so Siri could answer more questions. 

Advertisement

All of these assistants, including Gemini, still have lots of limitations. They lie; they misunderstand; they lack the necessary integrations to do even some of the basic things Alexa and Assistant have been able to do for years. The Gemini models still occasionally do ridiculous, deal-breaking things like tell people to eat rocks and generate diverse founding fathers. But if you believe the AI era is coming, or is maybe even here, then there is nothing more important right now than getting your AI platform in front of users. People are developing new habits, learning new systems, developing new relationships with their virtual assistants. The more entrenched we become, the less likely we will be to dump our AI friend for another one. 

ChatGPT had the first-mover advantage and captured the world’s imagination by showing just how compelling an AI chatbot could be. But Google has the distribution. It can put its sparkly icon in front of practically the entire population of the internet every single day, across a huge range of products, and get the kind of data and feedback it needs to eventually do this well. Even as it fights in court over how powerful its default status made it in search, Google is executing the same playbook with AI. And it’s working again.

Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Technology

Some shareholders of a16z-backed Divvy Homes may not see a dime from $1B sale

Published

on

A house of cards collapsing on dark background

The $1 billion acquisition of rent-to-own startup Divvy Homes, which was announced Wednesday, is expected to leave some shareholders without a payout, according to sources familiar with the deal. 

The terms — and Divvy’s journey from buzzy startup to acquisition target — reflects the rollercoaster ride the proptech industry has endured over the past decade.

The San Francisco-based startup, founded in 2016, had raised more than $700 million in debt and equity from well-known investors such as Tiger Global Management, GGV Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), among others. By 2021, the company was valued at $2.3 billion.

And while the Brookfield Properties purchase of Divvy for $1 billion was at half of its peak valuation, the acquisition could still be considered a win in an industry that has had a string of shutdowns and bankruptcies. 

Advertisement

However, it’s a loss for some shareholders, according to a letter from Divvy CEO and co-founder Adena Hefets, which was viewed by TechCrunch. 

“If the transaction closes, Divvy will sell substantially all of its assets, namely its home portfolio and brand, to Brookfield for approximately $1 billion. However, after repaying its outstanding indebtedness, transaction costs, and liquidation preference to preferred shareholders, we unfortunately estimate that neither common shareholders nor holders of the Series FF preferred stock will receive any consideration,” according to the letter, which was sent to shareholders, former employees, and “Divvy supporters.”

FF preferred stock, also known as Founders Preferred Stock, is a type of stock that is issued to founders of a company. The law firm Cooley defines the shares as being issued to founders “at the time of incorporation in order to facilitate sales of stock by founders in connection with future equity financings.”  

TechCrunch has reached out to Hefets and Divvy Homes for comment and will update the article with any response.

Advertisement

Another source told TechCrunch that equity holders “got zero’d” so “founders, employees and VCs” will get “nothing” from the sale. The identity of the source, who asked to remain anonymous, has been verified by TechCrunch.

Divvy operated a rent-to-own model in which it worked with renters who wanted to become homeowners by buying the home they wanted and renting it back to them for three years while they built “the savings needed to own it themselves,” it said.

The company ran into some hiccups when mortgage interest rates began to surge in 2022, leading it to conduct three known rounds of layoffs in a year’s time. Divvy’s last known funding occurred in August 2021 — a $200 million Series D funding led by Tiger Global Management and Caffeinated Capital. The Series D round was announced just six months after a $110 million Series C

Hefets also shared in the letter the “decision to sell wasn’t easy” and “came after a thorough review of Divvy’s strategic alternatives … and with significant deliberation around our options.” 

Advertisement

She said the move followed “years of fighting difficult market conditions, including rising interest rates, and making as many cost cuts as possible.”

As the company looked into what lay ahead in 2025, it decided the best way forward was to sell its “portfolio of homes now and return as much capital as possible to shareholders.”

“With almost a decade of pouring myself into this company, and believing in this mission, this was not the ending I had hoped for…While I am not proud of the financial outcome, I am proud of the impact we had on our customers’ lives,” Hefets added.

Want more fintech news in your inbox? Sign up for TechCrunch Fintech here.

Advertisement

Want to reach out with a tip? Email me at maryann@techcrunch.com or send me a message on Signal at 408.204.3036. You can also send a note to the whole TechCrunch crew at tips@techcrunch.com. For more secure communications, click here to contact us, which includes SecureDrop and links to encrypted messaging apps.

Source link

Continue Reading

Technology

Quordle today – my hints and answers for Thursday, January 23 (game #1095)

Published

on

Quordle today – my hints and answers for Tuesday, December 17 (game #1058)

Quordle was one of the original Wordle alternatives and is still going strong now more than 1,000 games later. It offers a genuine challenge, though, so read on if you need some Quordle hints today – or scroll down further for the answers.

Enjoy playing word games? You can also check out my NYT Connections today and NYT Strands today pages for hints and answers for those puzzles, while Marc’s Wordle today column covers the original viral word game.

Source link

Continue Reading

Technology

This New AI Search Engine Has a Gimmick: Humans Answering Questions

Published

on

This New AI Search Engine Has a Gimmick: Humans Answering Questions

On top of that, he claims that Pearl is significantly less likely to provide misinformation than many other AI search engines—which he believes are likely to deal with “a tidal wave” of lawsuits based on bad answers they give. “Those other players are building amazing technologies. I call them Ferraris or Lamborghinis,” Kurtzig says. “We’re building a Volvo—safety first.”

This pitch about Pearl’s superiority, of course, made me even more keen to try it. Kurtzig seemed so certain that Pearl would still enjoy Section 230 protections. I asked the AI if it agreed.

Pearl said it likely qualifies as an “interactive computer service” under Section 230, which would mean that it’d be shielded from being treated as a publisher, just as Kurtzig suspected. But, the AI went on, “Pearl’s situation is unique because it generates content using AI.” It didn’t have a definitive answer for me after all.

When I asked to speak to a lawyer directly, it rerouted me to JustAnswer, where it asked me to provide the answer I wanted verified. I said I needed to go back and copy the answer, as it was several paragraphs long, but when I navigated back to the Pearl website, the conversation was gone and it had reset to a fresh chat.

Advertisement

When I tried again, this time opening the Pearl browser on desktop, I received a similarly uncertain answer. I decided to trigger a human-fact check; after several minutes, I received the TrustScore™—a measly 3!

Pearl recommended that I seek out an actual expert opinion, porting me to its subscription page. I’d been given a log-in so I didn’t have to pay while I tested the tool. It then connected me with one of its “legal eagle” experts.

Unfortunately, the lawyer’s answers were not clearer than the AI. He noted that there was ongoing legal debate about how Section 230 will apply to AI search engines and other AI tools, but when I asked him to provide specific arguments, he gave a strange answer noting that “most use shell companies or associations to file.”

When I asked for an example of one such shell company—quite confused about what that has to do with a public debate about Section 230—the “legal eagle” asked if I wanted him to put together a package. Even more confused, I said yes. I got a pop-up window indicating that my expert wanted to charge me an additional $165 to dig up the information.

Advertisement

I declined, frustrated.

I then asked Pearl about the history of WIRED. The AI response was serviceable, although basically the same stuff you’ll find on Wikipedia. When I asked for its TrustScore™ I was once again confronted with a 3, suggesting it was not a very good answer. I selected the option to connect with another human expert. This time around, possibly because it was a question about the media and not a straightforward legal or medical topic, it took a while for the expert to appear—well over 20 minutes. When he did, the expert (it was never established what gave him his media bona fides, although his profile indicated he’d been working with JustAnswer since 2010) gave me a remarkably similar answer to the AI. Since I was doing a free test, it didn’t matter, but I would’ve been annoyed if I had actually paid the subscription fee just to get the same mediocre answer from both a human and an AI.

For my last stab at using the service, I went for a straightforward question: how to refinish kitchen floors. This time, things went much more smoothly. The AI returned an adequate answer, akin to a transcript of a very basic YouTube tutorial. When I asked the human expert to assign a TrustScore™, they gave it a 5. It seemed accurate enough, for sure. But—as someone who really does want to DIY refinish my kitchen’s old pine planks—I think when I actually go looking for guidance, I’ll rely on other online communities of human voices, ones that don’t charge $28 a month: YouTube and Reddit.

If you end up testing Pearl, or any other newfangled AI search products, and you have a memorable experience, please do let me know how it went in the comments below the article. You can also reach me by email at kate_knibbs@wired.com. Thanks for reading, and stay warm!

Advertisement

Source link

Continue Reading

Technology

Canon set a new record with its 410-megapixel 35mm camera sensor

Published

on

Canon set a new record with its 410-megapixel 35mm camera sensor

The megapixel race isn’t over if you ask Canon. Today, the company announced a new 35mm full-frame CMOS sensor with a resolution of 410 megapixels. That’s 24,592 x 16,704 pixels and a resolution that’s equivalent to 24K — or 12 times the resolution of 8K and 198 times the resolution of HD.

It’s the ”largest number of pixels ever achieved in a 35mm full-frame sensor,” according to Canon, but don’t expect the company to introduce it on its consumer-ready digital cameras. It’s designed for surveillance, medicine, and other industrial “applications that demand extreme resolution,” and don’t mind paying a small fortune for it.

Thanks to a “redesigned circuitry pattern” and a newly developed “back-illuminated stacked formation in which the pixel segment and signal processing segment are interlayered,” Canon says the sensor has a readout speed of “3,280 megapixels per second,” allowing full-resolution images to be captured at eight frames per second.

Canon will also offer a monochrome version of the sensor with a “four-pixel binning” function that improves low-light sensitivity by treating four nearby pixels as one. Although that reduces its overall resolution, it allows the monochromatic version of the sensor to capture 100-megapixel videos at 24 frames per second.

Advertisement

If you want to maximize your megapixels, you typically need to turn to medium-format or larger sensors and bigger cameras. The Phase One XF IQ4 150MP, for example, can capture images at 150-megapixels. But by putting this much resolution into a 35mm sensor that will be compatible with a wide range of lenses already available for full-frame cameras, Canon says it will help “contribute to the miniaturization of shooting equipment.”

Source link

Continue Reading

Technology

Ati Motors raises $20M as India’s robotics industry grows

Published

on

Ati Motors Sherpa XT mobile robot

Ati Motors on Wednesday announced a $20 million raise. The funding arrives as the Indian-based autonomous mobile robots (AMR) startup looks toward global expansion. The firm hopes to tap into increased demand for domestic manufacturing in the U.S., India, and Southeast Asian nations, as countries look to lessen their dependence on China.

In 2023, the Indian IT ministry proposed a nationwide policy titled National Strategy for Robotics to position the South Asian nation as a global robotics leader by 2030. The country ranks as the seventh largest robotics market, with a 59% YoY growth in annual industrial robotics installations, with 8,500 units in 2023, per the International Federation of Robotics. However, it still lags significantly behind China, Japan, and the U.S.

“Our competitor is always the status quo, not really another robot,” Saurabh Chandra, founder and CEO of Ati Motors, said in an interview. “Typically, we are displacing manual operation or somebody driving a vehicle or often somebody pushing it by hands.”

The 7-year-old startup, which has a manufacturing and R&D facility in Bengaluru, has developed seven distinct robots, two of which are currently in testing and will be available starting this quarter. The robots can move trolleys, bins, and pallets in a factory or warehouse.

Advertisement
Image Credits:Ati Motors

Ati Motors’ robots come with 3D lidar sensors and have spatial awareness. This enables these robots to work even in a tough environment where harsh weather, including rain, can impact manufacturing. The robots can also move on various flooring conditions and even handle gradients, cracks, or oil spills in their path, Chandra told TechCrunch.

“We do the full stack ourselves,” he said. “That has been our USP that we are able to do complete multi-disciplinary engineering.”

Ati Motors has designed the software and hardware for its robots in-house, including their sensor-fusion algorithms. Like many others in the space, the company relies on Nvidia’s Jetson platform for edge computing. It also offers dedicated fleet management software that can work with other companies’ mobile robots to provide customers interoperability.

“The future is such that millions of robots are going to go into factories. No one company is going to make all the millions of robots alone. And should we want to play with other people from day one? Yes,” Chandra said.

Founded in February 2017, Ati Motors started its journey with a tugging robot. However, based on customer feedback and demand, it expanded into pallet movers and lifters.

Advertisement

The startup offers a robots-as-a-service (RaaS) model to let companies lease its AMRs. Customers can also buy the systems outright.

Ati Motors says it has deployed “hundreds” of its Sherpa robots across 40 manufacturers as its customers, including Airbus, Ceat Tyres, Forvia, Hyundai, Samsung, and TVS Motor. Of its total customer base, 80% are in the automobile sector and the U.S. dominates its revenues. Therefore, the startup plans to expand its North American presence in Detroit.

The all-equity Series B funding was co-led by Walden Catalyst Ventures and NGP Capital. It also featured existing investors, including True Ventures, Exfinity Venture Partners, Athera Venture Partners, and Blume Ventures.

Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Technology

Samsung brings major updates to its security suite to keep even the smallest SMBs safe

Published

on

Samsung Knox Suite


  • Samsung wants to expand Knox beyond its traditional enterprise remit
  • Three tiers are now available with basic plan available on all Samsung Galaxy devices at no extra cost
  • Base, Essentials, and Enterprise plans are tailored to address varying levels of security and management needs

Samsung has announced a new update for Knox Suite, its enterprise security and management solution for Galaxy business smartphones.

The updates introduce a tiered plan system, designed to cater to businesses of various sizes across multiple industries, from small businesses with a cybersecurity checklist through large enterprises.

Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Technology

eBay Sellers Are Hawking Used Phones With TikTok Preinstalled for Thousands of Dollars

Published

on

Secondhand phones with TikTok installed are being listed on eBay for thousands of dollars. And it appears that some people might actually be buying them.

Despite US president Donald Trump signing an executive order on Monday delaying any potential ban of the social media app for 75 days, TikTok remains absent from all US app stores—with Apple and Google giving no hints on whether it will return. That means if you are in America and delete the app or lose your phone, you are currently locked out, with no way to download it again. For content creators, brand marketers, and social media managers, that could spell disaster. And an expensive one at that.

Opportunistic eBayers have taken the chance to cash in on this misfortune. A quick search for “TikTok phone” brings up more than 9,000 listings of used smartphones from the likes of Apple and Samsung, all with the TikTok app already installed.

This is possible by the seller signing out of the iCloud or Google account associated with the device rather than wiping the phone back to factory settings. Any buyer would then need to be careful not to sync to any existing cloud backup, to avoid losing the app they’ve paid so much to get.

Advertisement

Some of these phones are listed for as much as $50,000 under eBay’s Buy It Now selling format, but it’s hard to believe anyone could truly think their phone would sell for that—and there’s no sign that they have.

There are many more listed in the $2,000 to $5,000 range, but as to whether anyone is actually buying them at this price, it still seems unlikely.

What can be said is that, in spite of the inflated prices, there is interest. These phones are selling, but for exactly how much is harder to ascertain. Select the “sold” filter on eBay’s search and there are plenty of sales that appear to be completed, but pretty much all of them have an undisclosed “best offer accepted” note connected to them.

Any finished auctions with incredibly inflated prices look to have been relisted shortly after, suggesting an unsuccessful sale, with only those that sit at close to market value for secondhand phones looking to have actually sold.

Advertisement

A quick glance at auctions that are currently running also show much more reasonable prices than an initial search might suggest.

The true impact of any TikTok premium is somewhat unclear, then, but that isn’t stopping people from trying. Results for the TikTok phone search term went up by over 2,000 items during the course of writing this article—a sense of urgency no doubt pushed along by the fact the app could be returned to the app stores at any time.

At the moment, a TikTok search on either app store is met with statements from Google and Apple citing legal requirements as the reason the app is not available on their stores. This is despite Trump’s executive order clearly instructing the Department of Justice to “take no action to enforce the Act or impose any penalties against any entity for any noncompliance with the Act.”

Whether TikTok reappears before the 75 days is up remains to be seen—as does any deal Trump cuts in the meantime—but those exiled are not completely without options. This week, thousands of users have flocked to another Chinese-owned social media platform, RedNote, leaving the app scrambling to hire English moderators.

Advertisement

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has also been doing its bit to take lost TikTokers under its wing, introducing a flurry of new familiar features and even offering big influencers as much as $5,000 to join its platforms.

Source link

Continue Reading

Trending

Copyright © 2025 WordupNews