The surprise announcement Monday morning that Take-Two Interactive Software was acquiring Zynga shocked people—not just because of its unexpected nature, but because of the high premium the publisher of Grand Theft Auto put on the company behind Words With Friends. With an offer that represented a 64% premium to Zynga’s closing price on Friday, it would be the most expensive takeover in the video game industry’s history—50% more than Microsoft paid for ZeniMax and nea
Neeva, an ad-free Google search alternative that launched last June, will finally make good on plans to charge a subscription fee for its service. But instead of immediately throwing a paywall in front of prospective users, the startup is launching a free tier. Neeva’s free version will also be ad-free, but it’ll come with monthly usage limits and restrictions on certain features, such as Slack integration. Those who pay $5 per month for a Neeva Premium subscription will get extra
As 2022 begins, there’s more attention on early-stage startups than ever before. According to Crunchbase, venture investors bet $201 billion on 8,000 early-stage startups last year; that’s way up from the $101 billion invested in 2020. (VCs bet $643 billion on startups overall in 2021—10 times the amount invested in 2012.) The success of a promising early-stage startup, of course, depends on many things, including personalities, external forces (such as pandemics), and good
Over the quarter of a century that I’ve been covering CES in Las Vegas, I’ve used a lot of words to describe this annual tech-industry gathering. Until this year, “efficient” was not one of them. But with the resurgent pandemic deflating CES 2022’s attendance to what the Arlington, Va.-based Consumer Technology Association reported Friday as “well over 44,000 attendees”—down from 171,000 in in January 2020, shortly before COVID-19 struck&#x
In August 2019, Brittany Tomlinson uploaded a TikTok of herself trying kombucha for the first time.
@brittany_broski Me trying Kombucha for the first time #foryoupage #foryou #fyp #AllBrandNew ♬ original sound – Brittany
Her face whiplashed back and forth between utter disgust and thoughtful contemplation that it might not be all that bad, a reaction that had all the makings of a global meme. Tomlinson became known as “the kombucha girl” and found herself floo
Most boardrooms are ruled by the bottom line. Too many CEOs can recite a decade’s worth of earnings records but can’t hold a meaningful conversation about the communities they operate in or the customers they serve. However, in the last few years, that attitude has started to shift. More leaders understand that being good and being profitable are not mutually exclusive. More often than not, the former is a critical component to the latter. This is something we’ve known to be
The metaverse is coming. Like all technological innovation, it brings new opportunities, and new risks. The metaverse is an immersive virtual reality version of the internet where people can interact with digital objects and digital representations of themselves and others, and can move more or less freely from one virtual environment to another. It can also involve augmented reality, a blending of virtual and physical realities, both by representing people and objects from the physical world in
Reality and storytelling blend together smoothly on The Righteous Gemstones, both within the world of the series and behind the scenes. The titular family in Danny McBride’s dark evangelical comedy ended the show’s first season by incorporating into their preaching the climactic events viewers had just witnessed. During the closing moments of the finale, patriarch Eli Gemstone (John Goodman) used a betrayal by brother-in-law Baby Billy (Walton Goggins) as the basis for a sermon, co
Many of the biggest brands understandably stayed away from CES 2022. But there were still more than 2,000 exhibitors with an impressive array of technology on display. Like much of the press and analyst community, I initially canceled my plans to attend. But then I decided to go to Las Vegas anyway. I’ve been attending CES for nearly two decades, and this was the first time I had no hotel-suite meetings—and plenty of time (and space) to walk the show floor. These are a few of the b
Video games usually are something of an afterthought at the annual Consumer Electronics Show. The show has certainly had its moments in gaming. It’s where the Xbox was revealed, not to mention the Nintendo Entertainment System. And it was where Sony announced it was working on a game system with Nintendo in 1991 (before Nintendo, the next day, proclaimed it was walking away from that partnership). By 1995, the video game industry had a trade show of its own—E3—an