Decode the Week ≠ Audio and video Technology Weekly
Pic from Glasgow Film Festival
In 2021, More Together.
/News Briefing
Roblox shares will begin trading on March 10
The cross-platform gaming service, which is popular on mobile devices, opted for a Direct Listing ** rather than an IPO.
Chinese mobile games made $5.8 billion on the US App Store and Google Play Store in the second quarter of 2020
That was up 34.3 percent from the same period last year and accounted for more than a quarter of global mobile game revenue. The top games included Call of Duty, Unknown Battlefields, and games from smaller studios like Mihoyo’s Genshin Impact and Magic Tavern’s Project Makeover.
Byte reached a $92 million privacy deal with U.S. TikTok users
According to the lawsuit, TikTok uses vast amounts of biometric data and content from users’ devices to target ads and monetize them. TikTok says it disagrees with that claim, but wants to end the long-running (year-long) legal battle.
/Key Reports
Nasdaq releases 2021 Tech Trends Report
Trend 1. On-chip systems (SoCs) and FPgas
We are excited by the innovation in this area. We see the rise of ARM architecture, advances in GPU and graphics processing in CPU architecture, optimized chips for machine learning, and more. These innovations allow us to build more efficient trading systems that deliver better performance while reducing complexity & cost.
Trend 2. Edge clouds are reducing reliance on centralized processing
Trend 3. Cloud computing, collaborative learning and homomorphic encryption
This powerful combination could overcome regulatory and other barriers and help people share and analyze data more easily. Cloud computing is a neutral, secure infrastructure for internal and external stakeholders to share, analyze, and process data. At the same time, homomorphic encryption is emerging as a technology that allows organizations to share data while retaining full control over who can access or perform it.
Trend 4. SaaS expansion is accelerating
Cloud SaaS helps increase the resilience and security of our work and production because it mitigates some of the potential risks in our own data centers. Deploying the infrastructure in code allows us to manage and define the state of the technology we need, build the infrastructure using profiles and determine security configurations,
(www.nasdaq.com/docs/2021/0…
Okta has released a survey of the most popular apps for 2020
2020 Most Popular apps/Ranked by number of users
2020 Most Popular APP User Growth Trend chart/Ranked by number of users
The fastest growing APP in 2020
Top 10 IPO/DPO companies in 2020
In Okta’s ranking, we see AWS’s number two position globally driven by strong growth in the EMEA and APAC regions. AWS has grown more than 25 percent in both regions since April 2020, compared to 16 percent growth in North America during the same period. For many apps, such as Salesforce and Zoom, their popularity in North America determines their ranking on global charts. In the Asia-Pacific region, the two companies ranked lower, as did Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
(www.okta.com/businesses-…
/Startups
Oneplus founder NOTHING will launch wireless headphones
Former OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei’s new company, Nothing, plans to launch a pair of wireless earbuds this summer, with other products to follow later this year. In an interview, Pei said Nothing plans to eventually build an ecosystem where all devices can connect to each other. Details of the product were revealed in a statement that said Nothing had closed a new $15 million funding round led by Alphabet’s venture capital arm GV, formerly Google Ventures.
At present, Nothing has already attracted the likes of iPod inventor Tony Fadell, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman and youtuber Casey Neistat Investment (nothing. Tech /).
Some of the investors in Nothing
/Interviews
James Gwertzman, head of Microsoft’s cloud gaming division, recently sat down with GAMERANT to offer some insight into cloud computing, cloud services, and the gaming industry. Gwertzman’s company, PlayFab, was acquired by Microsoft three years ago. Microsoft has grown nearly tenfold in size in three years, and it was also one of the first companies to build cloud services specifically for games, providing backbone services for multi-player components and other infrastructure that requires an Internet connection.
In an interview with James Gwertzman, ** more and more servers are now hosted in the cloud by Amazon, Google or Azure, rather than in proprietary data centers built by companies themselves. You can launch a game and suddenly have 10 times as many players as you expected, and it’s easy to expand multiple times as long as you’re in the cloud.
Render the entire planet within 72 hours
James Gwertzman: What’s remarkable about Flight Sim is that it gets satellite data from all over the world…… So ai can take satellite images and model the Earth in a way that humans can’t. Once you build a model and train it, you can run the model all over the planet.
In my opinion this is a perfect example of a local cloud game that would not be possible without the cloud. ** But that’s not to say that this is a game that’s only possible on the Scale of Microsoft, just on the scale of the cloud. ** One of the cool things is that you don’t have to be a big company to use the cloud at that level.
In Flight Sim, the entire planet was rendered in just 72 hours — a lot of computing power, of course — but that’s the advantage of cloud computing. You can grab thousands of server data in 72 hours and release it when you’re done — which is expensive, of course — but you don’t have to be a big company to do it, you can rent data from somewhere and then rent server space.
The future of games as platforms also includes people making games themselves
James Gwertzman: I think one of the things that Microsoft is going to change over the next few months is that we’re going to talk less about game developers and more about game creators. The reason is that we do believe that the class of people who make games will grow over time. It used to be AAA, now there’s indie software, there’s a new generation — we need more citizen developers.
I’m excited about it. It’s an opportunity for us to take all of these services that I’ve described and make them available to citizen creators all the time. One example is Roblox, where Microsoft is developing an analytics platform within Roblox. We realized that one of the fundamental building blocks of any live game is analytics, so you know what the players are doing — that part of the work is expensive and difficult, but you have to do it.
The role of machine learning and artificial intelligence in game development
James Gwertzman: I was reading on VentureBeat the other day about a new company that’s using machine learning to help conceptuze games. Literally, this machine can burst out creative design ideas — from the earliest stages of creating concepts all the way up to creating actual art.
We’ve also been testing the AI on a loop throughout the game. We recently had a project where we built some personalization engines, or recommendation engines — which are being used by Walmart to recommend products to consumers. Then we tried using the exact same technique in Minecraft, and it turned out to be much more effective. It does a good job of marketing recommendations. So we’re going to try to roll this out and make it more available to developers. I love the opportunity to discover new things in other industries that we can bring to games.
Another example: We have spoken typeface technology where we can record and listen to dozens of hours of conversation and then build a model, reproduce that person’s voice and make them say whatever we want them to say. Sure, the concept can be very disconcerting, but at the same time it can be applied to game voice acting — it allows an indie developer to create thousands of hours of dialogue on a shoebreaking budget — and by letting computers speak with the AI you want, you can get some really cool creative experiences. I personally enjoy using spoken fonts to make computers speak in a more natural way than they do now.
Gamepads are not the answer to moving the platform forward
James Gwertzman: ** The average game developer doesn’t want controllers to take up too much of the controls. The average game developer wants to have their game on every device the player uses. ** They want a mobile version, a gamepad version. Console manufacturers sometimes support Console Only because they want to monopolize resources and audiences, because they want their games to be special or better than others. But we don’t think that’s the right answer, and we’re always open to supporting cross-platform experiences.
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