News

Thursday, February 4, 2016

Nintendo will seek success in mobile games, new hardware and maybe even VR in 2016

Nintendo released its quarterly earnings statement from the final months of 2015 on Tuesday, revealing that its profits were down 36 percent, year-over-year. According to the company's most recent financial report, the massive success of Amiibo figures and successful games, such as Splatoon and Super Mario Maker, could not offset falling Wii U and 3DS hardware sales. In attempting to explain to investors how it would rebound and maintain it's current earnings projection for 2016, Nintendo teased upcoming projects and new areas of corporate “interest,” including mobile gaming, virtual reality and, of course, the mysterious NX console.

First and foremost, Nintendo's first foray into mobile software development, the Miiverse-style networking app Miitomo, will launch in March. The launch will come come a year after Nintendo revealed its plan to develop apps for mobile platforms, promising to release release five apps by March, 2017. President Tatsumi Kimishima said Tuesday Nintendo is already looking past Miitomo to its second app, which will “not be a communications device” and will feature “some intellectual property that is very well known to everyone,” according to Bloomberg.

Kimishima also hoped to reassure investors with a brief reminder that development on the Nintendo NX remains “on schedule.” Reports last fall suggested Nintendo aims to launch its new console by the end of 2016. The company said it plans to deliver more concrete information later this year.

Finally, in the context of discussing new hardware, Kimishima mentioned that Nintendo has been “exploring possibilities” in joining the coming virtual reality race. Just the suggestion that Nintendo would consider developing virtual reality games marks a dramatic philosophical shift. At E3 2015, Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime told Polygon he wasn't interested in the upcoming crop of virtual reality devices.

“I haven't walked the floor, so I can't say in terms of what's on the floor today,” Fils-Aime said, “but at least based on what I've seen to date, it's not fun, and it's not social. It's just tech.”

If Nintendo seems more cautious than other companies investing in VR, it's because the company has been burned before: The Virtual Boy, one of the first consumers grade virtual reality products released back in 1995, was a decisive failure. (It also really hurt your eyes after a while.) Similarly, while the 3DS did find an audience, the augmented reality games Nintendo showed off at launch did not resonate with players or developers.

Since Fils-Aime's comment, headset-makers Oculus and HTC have realized more information about upcoming hardware and software, including games such as The Climb and Rock Band VR, which could helped change Nintendo's stance.

Nintendo basically promises either Mario or Link in new smartphone game

Quick, what was the Wii U game that you played a ton of last winter? It's okay if you can't think of one, chances are you didn't buy a Wii U or any of the new games Nintendo and developers released for the system last year. Nintendo's profits are down this year and the company is looking for multiple ways to rebound from the slump. They're expected to announce something about a secret new console, the Nintendo NX, later this year, and the company has teamed with mobile games development firm DeNA to start making smartphone apps.

First the bad news: Nintendo only sold 10.5 million games in the last three months, which includes the holiday shopping season. That may seem like a lot of games, but it's actually less than one new game per existing Wii U system. Sure, some of those systems are sitting in the back rooms of electronics stores, but that's an anemic market compared to other home video game consoles. Nintendo announced that its third quarter profits were only $241 million, a decline of a whopping 36% from the same period in the previous year.

In March of 2015, rumors started to leak that Nintendo was developing a new hardware system after it was obvious the Wii U's sales were not going to get anywhere close to the Xbox One or PS4. This month, Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima said the company was “looking into VR” during the company's earnings call, but it's unclear if his statement is connected the rumored new system. It could be that the new “Nintendo NX” is a virtual reality headset to compete in the Oculus Rift market or will simply be built with the specs to add one later as an accessory. It's also possible that this new interest in revisiting VR (“revisiting” is the only acknowledgement of the Virtual Boy worth making) has nothing to do with the NX. Insiders are hoping for official news about the NX from Nintendo at this year's E3 Expo in June.

On the mobile game development front, the first foray into smartphone apps that DeNA and Nintendo announced was actually a game as much as a social networking app combined with the the Nintendo game Tomodachi Life.The app is called Miitomo and is supposed to launch in March. You will be able to create a Mii and asked a series of questions. Based on your answers to those questions, you'll open up the ability to interact with other people's Mii through a new service called My Nintendo. My Nintendo is a platform the company says it will use to communicate between consoles and their smartphone apps. Which all sounds interesting in theory, but not much like a social network or a game.

Which means that all eyes are on Nintendo to announce an actual mobile game while their console sales are experiencing a lull. The Miitomo announcement came before the dismal third quarter of 2015, so now Nintendo is going to rush some recognizable intellectual property to the table. The original plan with DeNA was to slowly build to the popular Nintendo characters: your Marios, Links, Yoshis, and Samus'. Now it looks like a panic over earnings is going to push one of the core characters into the limelight of their own mobile game.

Sadly, Nintendo has only said their first smartphone game will “feature one of the company's best-known characters,” so it's too early to know if you should break out your Super Mario Bros t-shirt or your Ocarina of Time. Even money on one of those two characters, though, because Nintendo wants to put its best foot forward into mobile gaming.

Microsoft confirms it has acquired SwiftKey, creators of the smart keyboard app

After a day of rumors, Microsoft has now confirmed that it has acquired SwiftKey, the London-based company behind the popular predictive keyboard app of the same name.

Founded in 2008, SwiftKey developed a solid reputation on Android over a number of years as a replacement keyboard app on phones and tablets. It learns your writing style over time to speed up typing, and even predicts the next word before you've started typing it — this is partly based on historical patterns, but it also scans texts from other sources to “learn” popular orders in which words are normally placed. SwiftKey finally launched for iOSin late 2014 after Apple opened up to third-party, system-wide keyboards.

Though SwiftKey is better known for its consumer keyboard app on Goole Play and the App Store, the company also offers a software development kit (SDK) for third-parties to integrate its language-learning technology into their own services. Indeed, SwiftKey carries out a lot of research internally involving artificial intelligence, machine-learning, and natural-language processing (NLP), and it's this that Microsoft is acquiring — not a consumer app that makes relatively small amounts of money through in-app purchases.

SwiftKey's backend has been used in a number of interesting use-cases. Back in 2014, the company revealed it had been working with esteemed physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, who suffers from a debilitating motor neuron disease (MND) that has left him almost entirely paralyzed, to help him communicate twice as fast. SwiftKey had been working behind the scenes for two years with Hawking to develop technology specifically for hi.

And back in October, SwiftKey revealed it was working on a new experimental app that uses artificial neural networks (ANNs) to predict and correct language. ANNs are part of the broader field of machine learning and artificial intelligence, and is closely aligned with the workings of the human brain to better predict what you're going to write.

It's also worth noting here that SwiftKey syncs its learnings from each user in the cloud, so the more platforms you use SwiftKey on, the smarter it gets. And this too was central to Microsoft's interest in buying the company. Indeed, Microsoft has been pushing its cloud credentials of late, with chief executive Satya Nadella announcing last June that creating “the intelligent cloud platform” is one of the company's three key investment areas — acquisitions have proven pivotal for this shift in direction, as Microsoft has made a number of cloud-focused deals with startups in the past 12 months.

“In this cloud-first, mobile-first world, SwiftKey's technology aligns with our vision for more personal computing experiences that anticipate our needs versus responding to our commands, and directly supports our ambition to reinvent productivity by leveraging the intelligent cloud,” explained Harry Shum, executive vice president, technology and research, at Microsoft. “SwiftKey estimates that its users have saved nearly 10 trillion keystrokes, across 100 languages, saving more than 100,000 years in combined typing time. Those are impressive results for an app that launched initially on Android in 2010 and arrived on iOS less than two years ago.”

SwiftKey, as it stands, will be going nowhere. The app will continue to be developed for Android and iOS, but the underlying technology will begin to rear its head across Microsoft's range of products. This will include Microsoft's Word Flow keyboard, which recently appeared on iOS to much acclaim.

So while the SwiftKey acquisition is about “keyboard apps” to a degree, Microsoft wouldn't have paid the reported $250 million just for that. With years of AI and machine-learning research in its arsenal, it was only a matter of time before one of the big tech titans came calling. Prior to today's news, my bet would have been Google, but Microsoft is nothing to be sniffed at.

Microsoft buys British keyboard apps firm SwiftKey

SwiftKey's app has been installed on 300m devices.

Tech company reportedly paid $250m for UK-based business, whose software is installed on more than 300m smartphones and tablets

Stuart Dredge

Microsoft has acquired British apps firm SwiftKey for a reported $250m (£173.2m), promising that it will continue to develop the company's Android and iOS keyboard apps.

Microsoft and SwiftKey confirmed the acquisition in blogposts, shortly after it was first reported in the Financial Times.

In its blogpost, Microsoft revealed that SwiftKey's software, which replaces the default on-screen keyboard for smartphones and tablets, has been installed on more than 300m Android and iOS devices.

SwiftKey's app originally launched for Android devices in 2010, but third-party keyboard apps were banned from Apple's iOS devices until 2014, when SwiftKey launched for those too.

SwiftKey's last financial results, filed through Companies House in the UK by its parent company TouchType Limited, revealed that its revenues fell from £9.88m in 2013 to £8.41m in 2014.

It reported a net profit of £103,000 in 2013, but a loss of £5.32m the following year. SwiftKey said that the fall in turnover was due to its decision to switch to a “freemium” business model where the initial download of its app was free.

Announcing the acquisition, Microsoft's executive vice-president of technology and research Harry Shum, said: “We'll continue to develop SwiftKey's market-leading keyboard apps for Android and iOS as well as explore scenarios for the integration of the core technology across the breadth of our product and services portfolio.”

“Our apps will continue to be available on Android and iOS, for free. We are as committed as ever to improving them in new and innovative ways,” added SwiftKey founders Jon Reynolds and Ben Medlock in their own blogpost.

The appeal for Microsoft is less about a slick keyboard-replacement app, and more about the predictive-text technology that powers it – something Microsoft says it will integrate with its own Word Flow tool.

SwiftKey is the latest in a series of Microsoft acquisitions of apps companies. Since 2014, it has also bought the developers of email app Acompli, calendar app Sunrise, productivity app Wunderlist and business communications app Talko, among others.

Facebook turns 12, celebrates birthday as 'Friends Day' for users

Facebook is giving friendship collages to its 1.6 billion users in celebration of the social network's 12th birthday.

The collages will be packaged in video presentations of photos of friends and family that have been previously been posted on Facebook.

The photos are picked out by automated technology, although each Facebook user will be able to delete some and select other pictures instead.

The videos won't be seen by anyone else unless a user decides to share the presentation.

Most Facebook users should start seeing the videos at the top of their Facebook feeds by noon Thursday, which the Menlo Park, California, company is hailing as "Friends Day." It coincides with the 12th anniversary of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg starting the social network in his Harvard University dorm room.

Facebook says that these 'Friends Day' videos stitch together special moments with your friends in a short film that can be edited and shared.

If you have enough content, you will see the Friends Day video on top of the News Feed. People can also see their Friends Day video by clicking Watch Yours below a friends Friends Day video.

You can also see an option to edit the video, before you decide to share. Once you choose edit, you can pick and choose the pictures you want in the Friends Day video.

How to share or edit your Friends Day video on Facebook

February 4 marks the 12th anniversary of Facebook, and the social media giant is urging people to celebrate the day as Friends Day. On the occasion, Facebook has released a personalized video for each user that they can share with others.

Users logging in today will see a message from Facebook wishing them a Happy Friends Day and a personalized video below. Alternatively, you can also head over to the Friends Day website, to see your video.

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As is the case with such videos, Facebook has randomly selected photos from your profile or News Feed and put them in a video. You can however edit the video by replacing any of the pre-selected photos. Hit the Edit button and move the slider option till you see the photos selected for each section of the video.

Below you will see all the photos you have shared on Facebook, and clicking on anyone from the list will replace it on the video. You can choose to replace all the pre-selected photos if you want. Once you are happy with the final video, simply hit the Share Video button, and it will be visible on your friends' News Feeds.

ALSO READ: Celebrate Facebook's anniversary as Friends Day: Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook has come a long way since its inception 12 years back. As per recent numbers, Facebook has over 1.59 billion users on the social media platform. Of these, more than 1.04 billion users are active on a daily basis, and nearly 930 million only access Facebook on their mobile phones. Companies like Instagram and WhatsApp, which Facebook owns, are also doing well. The photo sharing platform has over 400 million monthly active users, while WhatsApp recently crossed a billion active users.

Alphabet To Spend More On Google And Moonshots

Alphabet made a few spending cuts last year, their first year operating as Alphabet rather than just as Google, and displayed somewhat of a cautious attitude, seemingly getting their bearings with the new company format. Side projects and money-focused endeavors got a bit more attention than usual, as well. Expenditures went down a whopping 41 percent in the last quarter of 2015, falling to $2.1 billion. This may sound fairly high, but do recall that this is the most valuable company in the world and has cash to burn, just not an infinite supply. Alphabet Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat said in a conference on Monday that this pattern would not continue into 2016, which coincides with Google CEO Sundar Pichai's plans to ramp up spending and generate more innovations and R&D accomplishments in 2016.

Part of the expanded spending involves a plan to expand Google Fiber into many more markets, including givingfree Fiber service to the poor. Citigroup analyst Mark May expects Alphabet's spending to shoot up to $12 billion for 2016 as a result, citing the high possible costs involved with expanding Fiber aggressively. More money is also going to be funneled into Google's self-driving car business, since the space is poised to experience explosive growth once state and Federal lawmakers get the pertinent matters in order.

Moonshots, meanwhile, lost the company about $3.6 billion in 2015. A good few of them, however, will be receiving more funding, especially those that either fall into or bolster the core Google businesses of search and Android. According to Pichai, some of the biggest areas of Moonshot spending in 2016, aside from those related to core business, will be cloud computing and infrastructure as a service, artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Though the global market may be slowing down as China's economic slump erodes the economies of its direct and indirect trade partners, Google does not show signs of slowing down this year. Although many companies will cut marketing before any other expense when times get tough, hurting Google's search business, they have a decent sized pool of cash and clout to lay back on until the storm is over.