PlayStation 4 cross-play moves out of beta, finally available to developers

Sony hasn’t been the most supportive when it comes to cross-play between platform but the gaming giant did support the feature with a handful of games during the beta phase. This included Fortnite, Rocket League Paladins: Champions Of The Realm, SMITE, Dauntless, Realm Royale, Super Mega Baseball 2 and PUBG. According to Wired, “ While it's not announcing the news explicitly, the PS4's cross-play efforts have officially moved out of the beta stage, meaning that the console can support cross-play on any titles that studios provide the functionality for.” Call of Duty: Modern Warfare set to launch on October 25 will be the first major title to exploit the feature in its final stage. 

The PS4 is about to reach the end of its life cycle with the PS5 expected to launch in 2020. But that doesn't mean developers will not support the platform. With an install base of more than 100 million consoles, the platform will be lucrative for developers for a few more years. Same for the Xbox One. This means that we can expect many more games to support cross-platform play in the near future. 

In the past couple of days, The PlayStation 4 has been in the news for mostly good reasons. The company reduced its game streaming service price by half making it about $10 per month. PlayStation Now has a library of more than 800 games but is available in limited markets. With the introduction of the price drop, the service also announced the addition of God of War (read our review here), Infamous Second Son, Uncharted 4: A Thief's End (read our review here), and Grand Theft Auto V to the catalogue. If you own a PlayStation 4, then you can download the PS4 compatible games to your console to play via the PS Now subscription, similar to what we’ve seen with Game Pass on the Xbox One. However, other sony titles, like the PS3 games that are a part of the service need to be streamed. 

In some sad news, PlayStation studio chairman Shawn Layden is stepping down. The news came on October 1 via the official PlayStation Twitter handle. The tweet read, “It is with great emotion that we announce that Worldwide Studios Chairman Shawn Layden will be departing SIE. His visionary leadership will be greatly missed. We wish him success in future endeavours and are deeply grateful for his years of service. Thanks for everything, Shawn!” Shawn Layden was with Sony for 30 years. As of writing this story, it is unclear who will replace Layden at Sony.

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Xiaomi Mi band 5 to support NFC outside China: Report

Information circulating the internet suggests that the upcoming Mi Band 5 will support NFC outside of China. The Mi Band 4, which recently launched in India supports NFC in China only. According to the source, Xiaomi wants to make the Mi Band 5 more advanced. With NFC in the global market, Xiaomi is looking to enable features like contactless payments, uses the device as a work pass to log in attendance, and also use it as a bus card. In a country like India, it could be used as a metro pass, but that's just wishful thinking on our part. According to the source, the demand for the NFC enabled Mi Band 4 is high outside China with people ordering it from China for delivery in their own country. 

Speaking of the Mi Band 4 that launched in India, the band features a 0.95-inch colour AMOLED touchscreen display with 120x240 pixel resolution. The company claims that it will offer 20 days of battery life on a single charge. The Mi Band 4 packs a six-axis accelerometer that helps it monitor physical activities like cycling, exercising, walking, and running. The band is 5ATM rated for swimmers. It supports various swimming strokes including breaststroke, backstroke, freestyle, butterfly, and mixed-style. It supports Bluetooth 5.0. The Mi Band 4 is priced at Rs 2,299 in India. 

In other Xiaomi news, the company also launched a Smart Water Purifier. The highlight of the water purifier is the DIY filter replacement allowing users to change the filters in under 30 seconds. Customers can also connect the water purifier with the Mi Home app to view the level of water, and the life of each filter in real-time. Xiaomi claims that the in-tank UV light kills bacteria and viruses with up to 99.99 percent efficiency. It has a Penta purification process, and a 7-litre water tank. The Mi Smart Water Purifier is priced at Rs 11,999. You can read more about the water purifier here.

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Spain-based payments startup Bnext raises $25M Series A, plans to expand to Mexico later this year (Romain Dillet/TechCrunch)

Romain Dillet / TechCrunch:
Spain-based payments startup Bnext raises $25M Series A, plans to expand to Mexico later this year  —  Fintech startup Bnext has raised a $25 million funding round.  The Spanish company is building a banking product and has managed to attract 300,000 active users.

A look at the history of open source as the big VC raises and multi-billion dollar exits for open source software startups become the norm (Andreessen Horowitz)

Andreessen Horowitz:
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HTC stopped innovating on smartphones, new CEO admits

Several months back, we invited HTC cofounder and CEO Cher Wang to appear on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt. Sometimes, however, life happens. Two weeks ago, the company announced that Wang would be stepping down from the role, which would immediately be filled by longtime telecom vet, Yves Maitres. Thankfully, the former Orange exec also agreed to appear on stage at this week’s event.

Maitres took the stage immediately following a one on one with OnePlus cofounder, Carl Pei. The contrast of the two companies couldn’t be more stark. In six short years of existence, OnePlus has managed to buck a number of industry trends with a controlled growth that flies in the face of wider industry smartphone trends.

HTC, meanwhile, has been struggling for years. In Q2, the Taiwanese hardware maker posted its fifth consecutive quarterly loss. Last July, it laid off around a quarter of its staff. It’s been a precipitous fall. In 2011, the company comprised around 11 percent of global smartphone sales, per analyst figures. Now its figures are routinely classified among the “Others” in those reports.

Speaking to Maitres at an event such as this offers a rare opportunity for insight from a newly minted exec who has spent years watching his new company from the outside. As such, he addressed HTC’s struggles with a refreshing candidness.

“HTC has stopped innovating in the hardware of the smartphone,” he told the audience. “And people like Apple, like Samsung and, most recently, Huawei, have done an incredible job investing in their hardware. We didn’t, because we have been investing in innovation on virtual reality. When I was young, somebody told me, ‘to be be right at the wrong time is to be wrong and to be wrong at the right time is right.’ I think we’ve been right at the wrong time and now we have to catch up. We made a timing mistake. It is very difficult to anticipate the time. HTC made a mistake in terms of timing. It is a difficult mistake and we are paying for that, but we still have so many assets in terms of innovation, team and balance sheets that I feel we are recovering from the timing mistake.”

‘Timing,’ here, is primarily a reference to the company’s decision to move much of its R&D money into XR (primarily VR through its Vive wing). Maitres said he anticipates that HTC’s XR offerings will overtake the mobile side in about five years.

“We’ll do our best to make it shorter, but customer adoption is key,” he explained. “How people are adopting your technology. And we all know know it is absolutely critical. And the end of the day, we have human beings in front of us, and they’re dealing with something total new and totally unusual, which is virtual.”

On the mobile side, Maitres sees 5G as the primary bottleneck to growth. Contrary to suggestions that the company’s best play is in developing nations, he says HTC’s play going forward will be more premium handset focused on “countries with higher GDP.”

“The competition is changing,” he says. “We’re all having a situation where worldwide marketshare is going down and the customer is disappointed in not being to have the latest Huawei phone anymore. How to give our customers the ability to come back to what they wish, in terms of best in class hardware and photography that HTC to will to solve in the next few months.”

While figures will largely be dependent on decisions Brough to HTC’s board, Maitres maintains optimistic projections when it comes to returning the company profitability.

“I truly believe that it is going to depend on the way carriers deploy 5G,” he says. “And you know that 2020 will bee the starting point for 5G. Usually it takes two years to deploy a network. So 2023 will have significant coverage. That’s why I believe that 2025, probably even earlier will be the turning point. We are dependent on carrier deployment speed.”

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In continuation with the announcement made on June 5, "the said acquisition has been completed on October 3, 2019," Wipro said in a regulatory filing to BSE. https://ift.tt/31NKsnV

How Microsoft and Google Cloud are battling for enterprise customers with partnerships, hardball licensing tactics, and tailored offerings for deskless workers (Adam Mansfield/CIO.com)

Adam Mansfield / CIO.com:
How Microsoft and Google Cloud are battling for enterprise customers with partnerships, hardball licensing tactics, and tailored offerings for deskless workers  —  The competitive landscape is heating up.  As Google Cloud aggressively approaches enterprises to get a foot in the door …

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Amazon Says Its Festive Sale Brought Orders From 99.4 Percent of India

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Drivers say Lyft does very little to protect them from assaults and harassment by passengers and makes it "extremely traumatic to report anything" (Lauren Kaori Gurley/VICE)

Lauren Kaori Gurley / VICE:
Drivers say Lyft does very little to protect them from assaults and harassment by passengers and makes it “extremely traumatic to report anything”  —  Drivers Motherboard spoke to say they were assaulted by riders and Lyft did little to help them.  Experts say Uber and Lyft don't take the same safety measures as taxis.

Apple Sued by App Developer Over 'Sign In With Apple' Feature

An app developer is accusing Apple of patent infringement and antitrust violations in a new lawsuit filed Friday in Delaware federal court. https://ift.tt/31QjDzs