In Focus: Tech & Interactive Entertainment News and Happenings
This week -- Slush 2024, OpenAI, robot workers, Sony eyes Kadokawa, mapping the human body, Niantic's impressive geospatial model & so much more.
Shining a light on news and happenings in tech, media, and interactive entertainment.
Every Studio Sony Would Gain From a Kadokawa Acquisition Explained
Breaking the Ice: A Different Kind of Slush Helsinki
More than 3,600 Scientists are Building a Manual of all Human Cells: ‘A Google Maps of Biology’
Niantic Building a Large-Scale Geospatial Model
Canadian News Companies Sue OpenAI
South Korea Becomes First Country to Replace 10% of its Workforce with Robots
Bonus: Data Center Round-Up
Read on for details and links.
INTERACTIVE ENTERTAINMENT
🎯 Every Studio Sony Would Gain From a Kadokawa Acquisition Explained (GameRant)
Is an acquisition in the stars for Kadokawa Corporation and Sony? Sony has made another move to buy the parent company of FromSoftware, well-known for titles like "Elden Ring" and the "Dark Souls" series. Sony currently owns a 14% stake in FromSoftware. As covered in GameRant, this potential acquisition would grant Sony an abundance of IP and entertainment industry influence. Additional studios rolled up in the acquisition would be Spike Chunsoft, Acquire, and Gotcha Gotcha Games.
Beyond gaming, Kadokawa holds significant assets in the anime and manga sectors, including properties like "Re:Zero: Starting Life in Another World" and "Sword Art Online." Integrating these with Sony's existing ventures, such as Crunchyroll, could further cement Sony's dominant position in the entertainment industry. Discussions between the two companies have been prolonged, spanning many years and, Takashi Mochizuki suggests the timing for such an acquision might be right.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
🧊Breaking the Ice: A Different Kind of Slush Helsinki (Bloomberg)
Billed as “the most founder-focused event in Europe,” Slush 2024 returned with a notable shift in tone. A Bloomberg report described the event as more “somber” amidst global uncertainties. Despite this, Slush drew over 13,000 attendees, with a marked presence from the defense industry as Europe faces economic and national security challenges. Dutch health tech company focusing on personalized healthcare for accessing new medicine and clinical trials Oasys Now won the Slush 100 pitch competition, pocketing €1 million from General Catalyst and Cherry Ventures.
Here’s the Oasys Now winning pitch:
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
🦠More than 3,600 scientists are building a manual of all human cells: ‘A Google Maps of biology’ (EL PAÍS)
We are truly living in amazing times. The Human Cell Atlas (HCA) is an ambitious global initiative that involves over 3,600 scientists hailing from more than 100 countries. Their laudable aim is to create a comprehensive 3D map of all human cells. How awesome is that?
Dubbed by some as the "Google Maps of cellular biology," — HCA utilizes advanced genomic techniques and AI to capture and detail the activity of approximately 20,000 genes across various cell types, providing a cellular ID for each profile. Since its inception in 2016, the HCA has analyzed over 100 million (!) cells from around 10,000 individuals, contributing to more than 440 studies and offering detailed atlases of systems like the nervous system, lungs, and eyes. The first draft of the Human Cell Atlas is expected to be published between 2025 and 2026. This notably open-access atlas aims to transform our understanding of health and disease, driving major advances in diagnostics, personalized medicine, and therapeutic development.
Overview of this expansive HCA project:
🧭 Niantic Building a Large-Scale Geospatial Model (Niantic)
In November, Niantic announced that it uses player data to create a large geospatial model for achieving “spatial intelligence.” Niantic’s Large Geospatial Model (LGM) builds on Niantic's Visual Positioning System (VPS), which has trained over 50 million neural networks with more than 150 trillion parameters operating across a million locations. By integrating detailed geometrical, visual, and cultural data into scene-level features, the LGM aims to provide a shared understanding of geographic locations, even those not fully scanned. This advancement is poised to enhance augmented reality experiences and has potential applications in robotics, content creation, the Internet of Things, and autonomous systems. Understandably, some users have expressed privacy concerns after learning their data is being used for this purpose.
🇨🇦 Canadian News Companies Sue OpenAI (TechCrunch)
A coalition of Canadian news organizations — including the likes of CBC/Radio-Canada, Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, and The Canadian Press — has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that the company infringed on their copyrights by using their proprietary content to train its AI models without permission or compensation. They claim that OpenAI scraped monumental amounts of their source material to develop products like ChatGPT, profiting commercially from their journalism without proper consent. These organizations seek damages and a permanent injunction to prevent further unauthorized use of their content. OpenAI responded that its models are trained on publicly available data under fair use and related international copyright principles. It also emphasizes its collaborations with news publishers, offering them options to opt-out if desired. This is the latest in a run of lawsuits against OpenAI under similar grounds.
ROBOTS
🇰🇷South Korea Becomes First Country to Replace 10% of its Workforce with Robots (The Business Standard)
South Korea has become the first country to have robots constitute 10% of its workforce, with 1,102 robots per 10,000 employees, according to the World Robotics 2024 survey. This high robot density is attributed to the country's robust electronics and automotive industries — and employers' desire to save money. China leads in total robot installations, accounting for 51% of global installations in 2023, followed by Japan and India.
DATA CENTERS
🔢 Bonus: Data Center Round-Up (Various)
The rise of data centers continues to capture my attention. Blink, and you’ll miss the latest announcement or news story concerning the proliferation of global deal-making and developments around data centers — sometimes under protest by local communities. Here are a few data center stories that caught my eye:
Amazon teams up with Orbital to remove CO2 from the air at one of its data centers (TechCrunch)
$5B data center park in Farmington moves forward despite objections from some residents (Twin Cities Pioneer Press)
Neighbors split on whether to accept data center project in their small Douglas Co. community (WSB-TV)
AI Adoption, Data Center Building Boom Opening More Doors for Cybercriminals, Many of Them Teenagers (Law.com)
