Sony will make almost $1 billion on Spotify’s IPO

Spotify finally realized its IPO, after going the road less travelled and listing directly. Shares have already increased in value from $132 initially to settle around $140 for now. For those that already owned some Spotify stock, it was a good day. Like Sony: It held 5.7 percent of the streaming service through its Sony Music Entertainment arm, and sold under 20 percent of that when Spotify was listed, resulting in a payout of roughly $177 million. Good day is putting it mildly.

Sony issued a press release, which is based on stock prices at the NYSE on the close of Spotify’s IPO launch three days ago. “The sum of the unrealized valuation gain (net) and the gain on the sale of shares (net) to be recorded for the first quarter of the fiscal year ending March 31, 2019 would be approximately 105 billion yen in total.” In plain English, Sony could sell all of its Spotify stock and make close to $1 billion from this IPO. It probably won’t do that, but Sony Music Entertainment early sell-off of its shares on IPO day means around $177 million (19 billion yen) right from the outset, regardless of where prices go from here.

Sony is hedging its bets on Spotify for now, but the cash will help bolster the company’s finances for future earnings reports — not that it’s even needed it in more recent times.

Via: Yomiuri Shimbun

Source: Sony (PDF)

iOS Game ‘Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery’ Launching April 25 With Six Actors Reprising Roles

Developer Jam City today confirmed that the new mobile role-playing game “Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery” will launch globally on April 25 on both iOS and Android devices. In the game, players will be able to create their own Hogwarts student, go to classes, study spells, build friendships, and make pivotal decisions in a new “encounter system” that influences their personal story in Hogwarts.

Images via Jam City
In addition to the release date, Jam City announced that the mobile game will also have six actors from the main Harry Potter films reprise their roles within Hogwarts Mystery. The actors providing voice work for the game include Dame Maggie Smith (Professor McGonagall), Michael Gambon (Professor Dumbledore), Warwick Davis (Professor Flitwick), Sally Mortemore (Madam Irma Pince), Gemma Jones (Madam Pomfrey), and Zoe Wanamaker (Madam Hooch).

“Our goal with Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery is to make players really feel for the first time like they’re attending Hogwarts,” said Chris DeWolfe, co-founder and CEO of Jam City. “By including these iconic and incredibly talented actors in the game, we come one step closer to truly giving fans their own Hogwarts experience.”

In terms of story specifics, Jam City has said that Hogwarts Mystery is set in the 1980s, after Harry Potter is born but before he enrolls at Hogwarts. Jam City has worked on bringing other popular franchises to mobile before, including the development of “Futurama: Worlds of Tomorrow” with the show’s original writers, animators, and cast members.

Another mobile game set in the Harry Potter universe is also in the works at Niantic, called “Harry Potter: Wizards Unite” and previously reported to launch in 2018. Niantic’s game is said to be “significantly influenced” by its previous success with Pokémon Go, allowing players to explore their real world neighborhoods and cities in an effort to discover, fight, and capture the Harry Potter series’ fantastic beasts.

Tag: Harry Potter
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Microsoft vows to let partner companies keep their patents

Microsoft has launched a new policy that means its tech customers will keep hold of any patent rights that come out of its partnerships. In a blog post, Microsoft president Brad Smith explained that the Shared Innovation Initiative is designed to reassure customers that the company won’t use the knowledge gleaned from joint ventures to “enter their customer’s market and compete against them.”

Instead, Smith says the company wants to “strike a healthy balance that will both help our customers grow their business through technology and enable Microsoft to continue to improve its platform products.”

Microsoft cited a hospital in South Korea as an example of the policy in action. The facility co-created a motion-tracking AI application that uses sensors to collect data on a surgeon’s movements during operations, in order to identify errors or particularly beneficial techniques. While the technology was developed with Microsoft, the patent and intellectual property (IP) rights remain with the hospital, which plans to now sell the software to other hospitals, creating a new line of business and revenue stream.

As collaborations between tech companies and customers increase, so will the gray area around patent ownership and IP. By having a reassuring policy in writing, it seems that Microsoft is trying to differentiate itself from rival companies (many of which have been plagued by patent litigation), while, of course, encouraging big business to keep using its products.

Source: Microsoft

Apple Shares Photos of New Shinjuku Store in Tokyo, Japan

Apple today shared photos of its new Apple Shinjuku retail store, which will open on Saturday, April 7, 2018 at 10:00 a.m. local time. The store is located in the Shinjuku Marui main building — a department store in Tokyo — and marks the eighth location for Apple in Japan.

The interior pictures showcase the same neon banner that Apple posted on its website when it first announced the store, which is just blocks from Shinjuku Station in Tokyo’s famous shopping, business and entertainment district.

Also evident in the photos is Apple Shinjuku’s expansive 37-meter glass storefront lined with local Longstock Holly trees, as well as familiar Apple store design elements including the Forum, with a dynamic 6K video wall, and Avenues, with interactive displays for visitors to get hands-on with third-party products and accessories.

Apple’s senior VP of retail Angela Ahrendts commented on the store in the company’s press release:

“Apple has a long and special history in Japan, and Shinjuku marks the first of several new stores we’ll open in Japan in the coming years,” said Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s senior vice president of Retail. “We can’t wait to welcome the vibrant community in Shinjuku to experience all the best Apple has to offer.”

As with other Apple Stores, Apple Shinjuku will offer free daily Today at Apple sessions covering art and design, music, photography, coding, activity and more. Participants start by learning the basics in Quick Start and How To sessions, then dive deeper into their creative interests with Music Labs, Sketch Walks and Photo Walks, including evening walks to capture the iconic neon lights of Shinjuku.

Tags: Apple retail, Apple Stores
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Valve is ‘still working hard’ on Steam OS, Linux gaming

A few days ago Valve reworked the main navigation bar in its Steam Store and removed a direct link to buy Steam Machines, the Linux-based boxes it hailed as an open alternative to macOS or Windows PC gaming. Combined with a lack of recent announcements people figured that meant the end of the project, but Valve employee Pierre-Loup A. Griffais says that’s not so. It was removed based on user traffic, which isn’t surprising considering the lack of post-2016 hardware being offered. In a post to the Steam for Linux page, he explained the current state of things:

While it’s true Steam Machines aren’t exactly flying off the shelves, our reasons for striving towards a competitive and open gaming platform haven’t significantly changed. We’re still working hard on making Linux operating systems a great place for gaming and applications…We also have other Linux initiatives in the pipe that we’re not quite ready to talk about yet; SteamOS will continue to be our medium to deliver these improvements to our customers, and we think they will ultimately benefit the Linux ecosystem at large.

The plan moving forward includes more work on the Vulkan graphics API everywhere, including now on macOS and iOS, while also making sure it’s well-supported on Linux so that performance is up to par. It’s not clear what those other Linux initiatives in the pipe are exactly, but hopefully, we’ll hear about them sooner rather than later.

Via: GamesIndustry.biz

Source: Steam for Linux, Steam Hardware, Steam Machines

Windows 10 testers get access to experimental Sets features

Microsoft took some major cues from browsers to create Sets, which lets you group together Windows apps in tabs. Now, the tech giant is rolling out experimental features to testers that give Sets tabs evenmore browser-like behavior. If you’re a Windows Insider who has opted to Skip Ahead, you can now drag and drop tabs within Sets and combine several tabbed app windows into one. Those make it easier to organize open apps, so long as it’s not an Edge tab — you can’t drag and drop Microsoft’s browser tabs into Sets yet and doing so could crash your system.

Microsoft has also made it easier to switch between all those tabs you combined by using the Alt + Tab shortcut. You can tweak the shortcut’s behavior under the new Sets section in Multitasking, as you can see in the image below:

In addition, you’ll find the new “close other tabs,” “move to new window” and “close tabs to the right” options when you right click on a tab in a Set. If you want to bring up tabs you mistakenly closed, you can now choose which Previous Tabs to restore instead of simply reviving them all. Microsoft has also added a quick way to group two File Explorer windows together, introduced a feature in Settings that shows you how much battery your Bluetooth device has left, made sure the Calculator can compute for the accurate square roots of perfect squares and fixed a bunch of bugs and issues. It’ll take some time for all those to be available on the stable version of Windows 10, though, so you might have to wait a while if you’re not an Insider.

Source: Windows Blogs

Google makes good on promise to offset 100 percent of its electricity use

Many of the world’s top tech companies have been striving to reach 100-percent renewable energy usage for their international operations. After making a promise in 2016 to offset 100 percent of its electricity consumption, Google has achieved that goal. On Wednesday, April 4, Urs Hölzle, Google’s senior vice president, Technical Infrastructure, announced that the company had officially purchased enough renewable energy in order to offset — or match — the total amount of electricity the company consumed across 2017. “Google’s total purchase of energy from sources like wind and solar exceeded the amount of electricity used by our operations around the world, including offices and data centers,” Hölzle noted.

The achievement of this impressive feat meant that for every kilowatt hour of electricity the company used, Google also purchased a kilowatt hour of renewable energy from either a wind or solar farm. As of today, the tech giant is planning to purchase an impressive three gigawatts of output from various renewable energy sources, an amount that is unmatched by any other corporate purchaser. And while that’s a huge amount of energy, Google is, needless to say, a huge company.

Like many other big tech firms, Google has a lot of data to handle, which is why it has 13 large warehouses full of servers all over the world. They host everything from Gmail emails to YouTube videos and Play Store content. But all of those servers require power and their vast cooling systems required do, too.

“Our ultimate goal is to create a world where everyone — not just Google — has access to clean energy,” wrote Hölzle wrote back in 2016. And now, the company has taken a pretty major step toward achieving that goal.

To be fair, we should point out that this accomplishment by no means indicates that Google is running off of 100 percent renewable energy. Rather, to counter much-needed ‘dirty’ energy purchases in parts of the world where green power is less accessible, Google is buying up renewable energy and then filtering the excess back into the grid.

Still, this trade-off is genuinely good for the environment. It increases the amount of green energy that is required by the world’s grids and therefore signals there is more money to be made in providing it. That, in turn, drives prices down as competition increases and innovation is encouraged.

In the long term, too, Google says it does plan to quite literally power its entire operation with renewable sources. To do that, it hopes to encourage investment and development of renewable energy in the areas where it operates its major data centers and offices.

The company has also made big improvements in the efficiency of the hardware it uses, partly through upgrades to more efficient modern hardware but also through restructuring its own business and how it moves data around. Part of that will involve machine learning, which is also helping it streamline operations. Google suggests it may make those algorithms public in the future so other businesses can improve their energy efficiency in a similar manner.

Update: Google successfully offset 100 percent of its electricity usage in 2017. 

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The future of journalism? A.I. rewrites news depending on your politics

Today, all of us live in filter bubbles online, in which the news we read is increasingly tailormade for our personal tastes. This is a problem for media companies and readers alike — and it’s one that an intriguing new online news aggregator hopes to help solve.

Called Knowhere, the newly launched website is the work of a media-savvy entrepreneur and some Stanford-trained artificial intelligence experts. It uses machine learning tools to cover the day’s biggest stories by offering left, impartial, and right-leaning versions of each. The components of these stories are aggregated from various online news outlets and then rewritten by an A.I. Each story can reportedly be written in as little as 60 seconds to 15 minutes, depending on the complexity of the piece. Once that process is completed, a human editor then reviews the story, which further trains the news-writing algorithms. The result? Not only a whip-fast news aggregation site, but one which could help break the filter-bubble problem.

“I was inspired by my father who was an investigative journalist and correspondent for the BBC throughout my childhood,” co-founder, CEO and editor-in-chief Nathaniel Barling told Digital Trends. “Each night he would bring home three papers, The Guardian, The Times, and The Telegraph. He’d ask me to read all three of them so that I could gain a balanced perspective on the day’s news.”

Knowhere calls up the bias of each article it writes with a large “left,” “right” or “impartial” label. By featuring all three versions, Barling said he hopes the website will reduce the effect of people being trapped in their own online echo chambers — whichever side of the political spectrum those happen to be on.  (Or, if you’re cynical, try to pander to all possible audiences.)

“Knowhere is most useful for reaching one simple, but extremely hard to achieve, goal: finding the truth,” he said. “We present our readers with the facts of each story, and the narratives being built around them, so that they can develop their own informed opinions. This is particularly useful for news where there’s a high degree of controversy and partisan sentiment. In this case, you will often see different publications covering the same news with a very strong ‘house-spin’, without actually saying anything ‘untrue.’ There also tends to be a greater misrepresentation of facts on controversial news items, which our technology is designed to identify and omit. Our journalism will appeal to readers who want to know the full and accurate story, free of bias.”

Will it work? We will have to wait and see. Judging from the fact that Knowhere has already scored $1.8 million in funding, however, at least a few people believe that this is the future of journalism.

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This innovative chunky padlock promises to be virtually unpickable

If you’re on the lookout for a high-security padlock, a new lock that arrived on Kickstarter may be the answer to your prayers. Created by the renowned Bowley Lock Company, which has previously used the crowdfunding website to bring its innovative Bowley Lock to life, the chunky Model 543 padlock boasts a unique key and locking mechanism. The result promises to be one of the strongest and most secure locks you will find anywhere.

The padlock’s innovative design incorporates a dual-shielded 9 pin core with more than 2.3 billion key combinations. It builds on the company’s previous deadbolt five-pin design, which has proven formidable against lockpicks. It’s available in three materials, including aluminum, brass, and stainless steel. Simply put, no one except the rightful owner is getting into this sucker.

“I was looking at old locks, before pin tumblers existed, and admired the idea that you needed a very special-shaped key to navigate through the shields,” creator Ryan Bowley told Digital Trends. “I wondered why this old forgotten concept had been abandoned, given normal pin tumbler locks are no longer secure, and the idea began to take root. I put the two ideas together, we then worked out a few technical issues, and the Bowley Lock was born.”

Bowley explains that the new padlock is virtually tamper-proof since the tools needed to open it have to be both key-shaped, and able to take a convoluted route to the pins. “The common control and feedback that a lockpick offers to a picker almost disappears,” he said.

If you want to get your hands on a finished padlock, you can pledge money as part of the Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. Prices start at around $137 for the aluminum model, $164 for the stainless steel, and $176 for the Kickstarter-exclusive brass model. All models come with two keys, with shipping planned for September.

As always, we offer our usual warnings about the risks of getting involved with crowdfunding campaigns. Nonetheless, Bowley is confident he can deliver. “The lock is done,” he said. “There are a few tolerances and clearances we are changing because this was too tight or that was a bit sloppy, which is normal and already completed. Luckily the lock cylinder was perfect because we had already learned those lessons. We are now building jigs and fixtures to be able to mass produce the parts.”

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Join us for a live-stream race: ‘PC Building Simulator’ vs. building a real PC

If you have never built your own PC, the idea of it may sound daunting. At first, it sort of is, but after you get your bearings, you can get a PC up and running quicker than you would think. How quickly? Well, join us for our weekly gaming stream at 3 p.m. PT today to find out.

Digital Trends’ Hanif Jackson and Brendan Hesse will race to see who can build a PC the fastest. But wait, this competition has a twist. While Hanif is building a real PC (he has experience), Brendan will be building his in PC Building Simulator, the new simulation game that is doing remarkably well on Steam.

The game, which teaches users the ins and outs of building their own PCs, currently sits at No. 11 on the Steam top sellers chart. Before entering Early Access, more than 500,000 people downloaded the free pre-alpha demo. It’s more than just strong sales, though. The Irregular Corporation’s simulator has racked up a barrage of positive user reviews.

Part of the appeal of PC Building Simulator surely stems from the fact that you can learn how to build a PC in a safe environment, instead of worrying about frying the expensive components you just purchased.

For those interested, Hanif’s real PC will be built using an AMD Ryzen 5 1500 processor, AMD Radeon RX Vega Nano graphics card, and a Samsung 860 Pro 1TB hard drive. The game has license agreements with numerous companies including AMD, so you can actually build a similar PC to the one Hanif is constructing within the game.

As of now, PC Building Simulator serves more as a tutorial for those who want to learn about the process. In the future, however, the developers plan to implement a career mode that adds designated goals and more elaborate features to consider such as cooling and lighting.

You can watch the race right here in this post or over on Facebook. If after watching you’re inspired to build your own PC, make sure to check out our comprehensive guide. We walk you through everything that goes into building a PC, whether you’re a complete novice, or someone looking for ways to improve your rig.

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