Phoenix One Games hopes to build their realm with their first fantasy mobile strategy game, Guardian Kingdoms.

The mobile strategy genre has proven to be incredibly lucrative, with Supercell (Clash of Clans) reporting $2.3 billion of revenue last year and Machine Zone (Game of War) bringing in an estimated $590,000 revenue daily. Since these games launched in 2012 and 2013 respectively, competing studios have attempted to cash in on the popularity of mobile strategy. According to market research firm Verto Analytics, action/strategy games are the fourth most popular genre on mobile, with a comparatively high number of user sessions per month.

However, Phoenix One claims that Guardian Kingdoms offers something different from the other mobile strategy games on the market. Alongside mechanics from Clash of Clans and other similar apps, Guardian Kingdoms provides more control over individual units and heroes so players can execute real-time strategy. It also emphasizes timing in a way that the studio hopes will attract fans of the overall RTS genre.

“At the core, [Guardian Kingdoms] is still a base builder type game similar to [Clash of Clans] but with gameplay/battles more geared towards RTS players,” said Kevin Zhang, vice president of Phoenix One, describing Guardian Kingdoms as more of a “blend of StarCraft/Age of Empires and Clash of Clans.”

Mobile games is a tough market to stand out in. Even five years after Supercell released Clash of Clans, it still ranks high in downloads. And, according to Pocket Gamer, over 2,500 games are submitted per month to the Apple App Store, making it that much harder to draw attention to new titles. This is something Zhang is familiar with; before Phoenix One, he was previously at Kabam, a mobile game studio that released such titles as Marvel Contest of Champions. Their secret weapon, they’re hoping, is to combine the mobile-native deployment mechanics from other strategy games with synchronous gameplay.

“On a high level, our primary differentiator is the real-time tech we’ve built,” said Zhang. “This enables our game to be more multiplayer friendly — players can battle together using thousands of troops in real-time in the same fight, each battle is uniquely different and more dynamic/fun.”

Founded in 2016, Phoenix One Games is a mobile games studio with experienced industry vets from Blizzard, Kabam, EA, and Zynga.

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Amazon Web Services has added another computer science heavyweight to its employee roster. James Gosling, often referred to as the “Father of Java,” announced on Facebook Monday that he would be joining the cloud provider as a distinguished engineer.

Gosling came up with the original design of Java and implemented its first compiler and virtual machine as part of his work at Sun Microsystems. He left Sun in 2010 after the company was acquired by Oracle, spent a short time at Google, and most recently worked at Liquid Robotics designing software for an underwater robot.

Amazon confirmed that Gosling had joined the company but didn’t offer any further comment on the work he would be doing there. Gosling will join other tech luminaries, including Adrian Cockroft, Swami Sivasubramanian, and Werner Vogels.

While it’s unclear exactly what he’ll be working on, Gosling seems like a natural fit for the teams creating AWS’s tools for the Internet of Things. He’s intimately familiar with the process of deploying IoT systems, as well as the challenges that arise when it comes to using the public cloud with IoT.

“In my case, there are no cloud providers [Liquid Robotics] can use, so we end up rolling our own for everything, which is a real pain,” Gosling said at IP Expo Europe in 2016, when discussing IoT systems. “I mean, a lot of the cloud providers would make my life hugely easier, but convincing [a] random Coast Guard from some random country that they should trust Amazon is really, really hard.”

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Xbox One and Nintendo gamers are going to miss out on Cliff Bleszinski’s new game — at least at launch.

LawBreakers, a new character-based shooter (think Overwatch), is going to launch on both PC and Sony’s PlayStation 4 later this year. It doesn’t have an official release date, but it is currently in beta testing on PC and it should get a test on PS4 as well. But what about Xbox One or Nintendo Switch? Well, the studio is not actively working to bring LawBreakers to Xbox or Switch alongside the PC/PS4 releases. When asked if that was something that could eventually happen, the Gears of War designer and cofounder of Boss Key Productions didn’t commit to anything.

“Anything’s possible,” said Bleszinski.

As for why Boss Key chose PlayStation 4 over Microsoft’s or Nintendo’s machines, the company had a simple answer.

“We liked PlayStation best at that point in time,” Boss Key chief operating officer Arjan Brussee said. “And we had great conversations with Sony.”

Brussee explained that the PS4 and PC are enough to keep the Boss Key team busy

“We needed to focus,” he said. ” We can’t do everything at the same time. We’re not Call of Duty, with a five studios and a thousand people. So, yeah, we just focused on PlayStation 4. And PlayStation 4 has a lot of different configurations. It’s almost like mini PCs with different versions, specs, and resolutions. So, already, PlayStation 4 is not just PS4 — it’s Pro as well. It’s not simple.”

And that amount of work on top of ensuring the PC and PS4 versions launch at the same time is already taxing Boss Key enough.

“We’re a small studio,” said Bleszinski. “We have 65 people, and they work hard around here.”

And the studio wants to put maximize their efforts, so — for now — that means no Xbox One or Switch versions of Lawbreakers.

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GUEST:

There’s a startup renaissance underway — and it’s not happening in Silicon Valley. Or New York, Boston, Los Angeles, or any of the usual destinations for entrepreneurs with big ideas. From Lincoln to Phoenix to Madison, thriving startup ecosystems have emerged in the traditionally overlooked “flyover” states to challenge the “Silicon Valley or bust” narrative.

These days, entrepreneurs routinely bypass Silicon Valley’s rising costs and competition in favor of friendlier environments and steady, sustained regional growth in the Midwest, South, and Heartland before looking to the Valley to scale. This strategy paid huge dividends last month for Chewy.com, an online pet store that was acquired by PetSmart for over $3.3 billion after transforming itself into one of the world’s fastest-growing e-commerce sites — from Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Chewy’s success is hardly an isolated case; it follows the explosive growth of companies like Domo (Utah), Magic Leap (Florida), and Cradlepoint (Idaho). In the last two years, according to a March study by the Progressive Policy Institute, regions outside the US’s top 35 major cities accounted for almost half of the country’s new companies. Compare that surge to the previous seven years, when they accounted for less than a fifth of all new establishments. In the decade I’ve been part of the entrepreneur community in Birmingham, Alabama, I’ve seen an explosion in innovation — particularly in the last three years — fueled by real estate development, friendly regulatory policies, and collaboration between like-minded business organizations.

There’s no better time to be an entrepreneur outside Silicon Valley. Here are a few ways entrepreneurs can use their local startup ecosystems to their advantage in navigating the path to growth.

Solve problems, don’t create them

Silicon Valley is criticized for creating solutions in need of problems, showering consumers with referral codes and discounts to gain traction. Entrepreneurs don’t have that luxury in secondary and tertiary cities, where typical consumers have different mindsets and needs from their coastal, urban counterparts. For the “rest of America,” immediate practicality matters just as much as long-term vision. Consider these tangible issues as you build your vision. Are you solving problems in people’s daily lives? Will they need you after the referral codes have run out? Consumers in these regions may not be as immediately receptive to new offerings, but less saturated markets present more opportunities to capture return users if you can prove recurring value at the start.

Broaden the fundraising net

Raising capital can be discouraging when Sand Hill Road isn’t just down the road, but Valley venture capitalists are actively looking to broaden their reach. In the last month, I’ve spoken with many firms who say they’re now doing more deals outside the Bay Area than in it. While California still leads the nation in venture deals, deal activity in Q1 this year has shrunk proportionally compared to deals in the rest of the country.

You may also find more tailored support through regional networks. Whether they be VCs or incubators, chances are these investors and mentors are more attuned to local culture and infrastructure than someone who lives across the country. They pass your customers on the street and stand behind them in line at the store. They’ll have a better understanding of the challenges you face in gaining traction with the local community.

VCs and incubators aside, look to your neighbors. We raised seed money and got pre-launch market validation for my company, grocery marketplace Shipt, by offering 1,000 annual memberships through a crowdfunding campaign on Tilt. We reached our goal thanks to word of mouth alone, which would be much harder in cities like San Francisco or New York.

Invest early in local talent

Emerging tech hubs can’t beat Silicon Valley in the size of their talent pools. However, you don’t have to compete constantly with Facebook, Google, or headhunters to build your team. Instead, take advantage of the opportunity to unearth, develop, and retain potential talent — even as early as high school. I was 16 when I got a job with a Birmingham technology company. Encouraged by the mentorship I received and the local connections I formed, I remained in Birmingham after graduation to start my own business.

You can also help attract talent to the area by mentoring up-and-coming entrepreneurs through networks like 1 Million Cups, local accelerators, or university-sponsored programs. In Birmingham, I meet countless graduates who are hungry for opportunities with progressive, tech-forward companies without having to leave their home state. A Pew analysis last year found Rust Belt cities like Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis are experiencing a surge in millennials drawn to the “Brain Belt” by affordable housing, world-class research universities, and thriving startup scenes.

Work with your city, not just within it

Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” mentality has led to clashes between companies and local government as they attempt to enter new markets they don’t fully understand. Make it a point to connect with regulators and organizations as you scale — not after. Secondary and tertiary cities have a vested interest in strengthening their tech infrastructure, and, as a homegrown innovator, you can help them do so. Building solid working relationships with key local players enables you to take advantage of city grants, tax breaks, and networking opportunities. In the process, you might also have the chance to help shape favorable policies for the entire startup ecosystem.

Innovation can’t only belong to the coasts if the US wants to compete in the global economy. Silicon Valley remains the epicenter today, but we may be looking to Kansas City, Atlanta, or Akron to lead the way in the years to come.

Bill Smith is CEO of Birmingham, Alabama-based Shipt.

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GUEST:

Automotive companies are shifting from bending metal to bending bits. Soon they will be offering software and services to complement their manufactured metal.

As these companies become software-driven, open source will become a staple to drive innovation faster and more reliably. Today’s cloud is powered by open source software: 78 percent of businesses run open source software in some form. With the convergence of automobiles and the cloud (supporting autonomous systems and connectivity), it’s quite clear this open source paradigm that took over the cloud will take over the automobile.

This future of mobility includes the convergence of automotive hardware and software-driven cloud solutions. Open source will be at the core of this transformation and will drive innovation faster. Soon we will see Ford, GM, Fiat Chrysler, BMW, and other manufacturers launching their own open source initiatives.

Open-sourcing parts of your automobile

Whether it be navigation, music and media, or mobile phone support, you might be interfacing with features built on top of open source software already.

Genivi is an open source framework for in-vehicle infotainment launched in 2009 with founding members BMW, GM, Intel, and Delphi. It launched with a goal of “driving innovation” to “reduce time-to-market and total cost of ownership.”

This platform gives car makers more impact and leverage over the features available in an in-car experience. Automotive companies can reduce costs and enable richer experiences by leveraging an open source project like Genivi. This allows them to focus on what differentiates their own product.

Your engine, transmission, airbags, anti-lock brakes, and cruise control are all connected via a system called the CAN bus. This protocol powers the backbone network in a vehicle. Like the HTTP protocol that powers the internet, systems can be built on top of the CAN bus to enable entirely new applications, like cars that drive themselves. In the automotive world, examples include:

• PolySync developed an open source car control project detailing the conversion of a vehicle into an autonomous driving vehicle.
• George Hotz is giving away the code behind his self-driving car project, an open source alternative to Tesla’s Autopilot.
• ROS, a robot operating system, is enabling R&D teams at automotive companies to quickly develop and prototype autonomous vehicles and sensor-rich vehicles.

Just like much of the web is built on Linux, much of the autonomous future will be built on open source projects. Today, it already seems clear that ROS is one of those emerging open source platforms.

The blueprints to design and build electric vehicles and transportation services

One of the more audacious open source projects is OSVehicle, founded with a mission “to democratize mobility by enabling businesses and startups to design, prototype, and build custom electric vehicles and transportation services.”

Renault’s open source mass market vehicle platform was the first major automotive company to leverage this product. This was the world’s first open source mass market vehicle platform.

Other OSVehicle projects include:

• BusyBee, the first road-legal city car built on the open platform
• FabCar, a vehicle showcased at Fab10 in Barcelona that can be built inside a FabLab
• SPA’s Luxury EV, from a historical Italian brand and made of new high-tech materials
• Maker’s cars, vehicles created by hobbyists with local materials such as fabric and wood
• Nika, the first connected car made specifically to enable app development

The future of automotive is open source

The future of mobility will encompass services offered for getting around more freely. Automotive companies will shift from manufacturing steel to serving up bits. Software and data will drive this core differentiator, enabling new services and seamless experiences.

The entire internet infrastructure changed over the late ’90s and early ’00s, leveraging open source software. Those proprietary systems opened up, making it easier and cheaper to build websites. Content management systems became open, allowing publishers to focus on their core differentiator: their content. As a result, we saw a proliferation of amazing websites, apps, and tools online.

The automotive industry and emerging mobility companies will see the same result over the coming decade. It won’t be limited to infotainment, autonomous systems, or vehicle design. Open source will enhance every aspect of a vehicle in the coming decade. Companies that embrace this change will drive innovation faster. They will be able to shift to enabling new services and experiences. This will drive up their competitive advantages while reducing costs associated with running commodity parts of their business.

Ted Serbinski is the managing director of Techstars Mobility, a startup accelerator.

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Microsoft has launched a service for businesses to quickly and easily create a FAQ bot customers can chat with inside Bing search results.

The Bing Business Bot service begins by asking a business owner a series of basic questions about their business, like where parking is, how to make reservations, and handicap accessibility details. The service then creates a bot that draws on your answers as well as Bing Places business listing data.

If the bot doesn’t know the answer to a question, it will reach out to the restaurant owner — and remember the answer to the question for future customers.

The simple creation of a bot based on Bing Places information provides businesses with a less technical way to enhance their online presence. The Microsoft Bot Framework is currently used by 130,000 developers to create and publish bots for more than half a dozen chat apps, ranging from Skype to Facebook Messenger.

The new bots-for-businesses service is currently only available to restaurants; however, Microsoft expressed an interest in bringing bots to other sectors at Build, the annual developer conference that took place earlier this month in Seattle.

At the conference, held May 10-12, Microsoft announced that users of its Bot Framework can now publish their bots in Bing search results so that each time a person looks for your business, they get the chance to chat with your bot.

In another recent addition, the search engine is also being used to help people discover more bots.

Search Bing for “entertainment bots” or “sports bots” for example, and a series of bots from Microsoft — but also Facebook Messenger, Slack, Kik, and Telegram — will come up in search results.

Bots have been appearing in search results for a few weeks now in the Seattle area since Microsoft started testing bots on Bing this spring.

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Rockstar Games announced that it has delayed the launch of Red Dead Redemption 2 until the spring of 2018.

Red Dead Redemption 2 will launch first on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It is one of the most anticipated games of this year … but now it’s going to be one of the hot titles of 2018. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a sequel to Red Dead Redemption, which debuted in May 2010 and had an epic story that spanned more than 30 hours of gameplay in a Wild West setting.

“This outlaw epic set across the vast and unforgiving American heartland will be the first Rockstar game created from the ground up for the latest generation of console hardware, and some extra time is necessary to ensure that we can deliver the best experience possible for our fans,” Rockstar said in a statement.

Above: Red Dead Redemption 2 returns Rockstar to the Wild West.

Image Credit: Rockstar

The company added, “We are very sorry for any disappointment this delay causes, but we are firm believers in delivering a game only when it is ready. We are really excited to bring you more details about the game this summer. In the meantime, please enjoy this selection of new screenshots from the world of Red Dead Redemption 2.”

Rockstar has refined its storytelling skills in games such as 2013’s Grand Theft Auto V, reconciling narrative with the unpredictable, player-choice driven nature of open worlds. And the graphics from the trailer look great, with plenty of atmospheric effects like smoke, long vistas, and birds flying around realistic blue skies. I have high expectations that the open world, storytelling, and modern graphics will bring us something outstanding.

But we’re going to have to wait.

Above: The Old West had forests, too!

Image Credit: Rockstar

Here’s more screenshots, which give a bigger glimpse of what it will be like than anything Rockstar has revealed so far.

Above: In the Wild West, this is how you protect the payload.

Image Credit: Rockstar

Above: Red Dead Redemption 2 “choo-choo” chooses spring 2018.

Image Credit: Rockstar

Above: Why does every street in the Old West look like a hive of scum and villainy?

Image Credit: Rockstar

Above: These look like the cap guns Jason had when he was 4!

Image Credit: Rockstar

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GUEST:

When Hollywood isn’t doing comic book franchises, it’s doing AI. Why? Because AI gives us a window into our own souls by challenging us to consider what it means to be human, what it means to think, and what our place in the world is. It’s a topic that’s ripe for philosophical discussion, and hard-hitting directors such as Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, and Spike Jonze have all used it as a platform to explore what a world of AI looks like — and what it might mean to live in it. There’s also a long history of villainous AI, perhaps because those “just a machine” antagonists make human leads seem all the more heroic, or perhaps because science fiction has become increasingly dystopian over time.

But while Hollywood gets some of it right, there’s plenty of artistic license at work. Let’s take a look at some of the things that Hollywood gets wrong about AI, and why.

1. Intelligence vs. sentience vs. sapience

Hollywood is keen on “humanlike” intelligence because it makes it possible to skim over one of the deep philosophical roots of AI: defining intelligence and determining whether something exhibits intelligent behavior. These questions form an entire branch of philosophy, asking us to consider the nature of consciousness, intelligence, sentience, and sapience. These terms are all related but distinct in their own way — except where Hollywood is concerned. In Hollywood, sentience — the ability to experience subjectively — is typically used equivalently to sapience, the ability to act based on past experience and understanding. “Intelligence” is even harder to define, particularly when expressed in an artificial environment like the game of Go. Films typically arbitrarily pick a term and run with it, taking a challenging thought problem and using it to do nothing more than get across the idea that a given machine is less/better/scarier/smarter/more than a human.

2. Let’s all ignore our programming

In definitely one of the cuter outings in AI, the eponymous hero of Disney Pixar’s Wall-E takes service bots like the Roomba to a whole new level with its ability to level up its game from trash compactor to environmental activist. Wall-E’s transformation begins with its sudden gaining of sentience (and arguably sapience), but from where? Perhaps Wall-E was initially built as an AI so that it could learn to excel at collecting trash. This is a pretty narrow AI domain from which to develop feelings like love and nostalgia. The area around his docking station would certainly be clean, but it’s unclear how or why he would learn to collect fuzzy objects as a hobby. Yeah, this seems very nit-picky, and we loved the movie. But there were thousands of these robots, if not millions. Is Wall-E the only one that bootstrapped himself into intelligence through some magical process?

3. Stepping into the Uncanny Valley

Spielberg’s 2001 film A.I. gives us the story of a robotic child, David, who is programmed to be able to “love.” While the film gets some things right, such as David’s adherence to his programming, it misses a big one — the “uncanny valley.” Coined in 1970 by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, the term refers to the negative reaction people have to robots that are too human to look like robots, yet aren’t perfectly human. Even if you can grant that the film was closer to fantasy than to sci-fi (which is what I believe), or is so far in the future that all this has been solved, you really can’t make the same arguments for closer-in films about humanoid robots.

Humans are astonishingly good at spotting things that aren’t quite right, particularly in relation to body language and facial expressions. The most successful humanoid robots will necessarily have exaggerated features like those seen in anime. This approach gets around the uncanny valley by taking a humanoid design and piling enough extra cute on top that it’s obvious that the intent isn’t to be truly human.

4. All you need is you

While the notion of the life-creating mad scientist has been with us since Frankenstein, stitching together a few limbs requires much less technical expertise than building AI. And yet Hollywood likes to labor under the impression that not only is the software side of AI readily enough achieved by a single individual, but that the hardware side is just a plug-and-play device away. While the 2015 film Ex Machina takes the time to explore the circumspect, deeply iterative AI journey, it also gives us an inventor who single-handedly develops human-like AI and an accompanying humanoid physicality to match — all from the safety of his basement.

While AI tools are strongly driving towards ease of use, such AIs are designed to solve specific business problems — they’re not humanoid AIs. Sure, chatbots would like you to think that you’re talking to a person, but spend 20 minutes with one and you’ll be disabused of that notion. One essential purpose of science fiction is to declare a world or situation and then, scientifically and consistently, explore the possibilities of this world. Ex Machina explores the least interesting part of that AI’s story. How did she get booted up? Sure, she escaped, but what then? It was much more an escape caper with an AI shroud than truly exploratory sci-fi.

5. High-speed development

Not so far removed from our point above, Hollywood is also rife with AI development that moves at montage speed. Perhaps it’s because Hollywood conceives of AI as the result of a creative act, not a scientific one — with AI simply emerging as the result of inspiration. In Spielberg’s A.I., we go from zero to 100 percent humanlike artificial intelligence in just a year and a half, while Ex Machina gives us astonishingly humanoid bots in just a couple of years.

There are those who argue for the “coming of the singularity,” where AIs build AIs that build AIs and holy crap everything just changed in 2 weeks. It’s called the Singularity because it has an event horizon — in the world of black holes (also theoretically singularities), the event horizon is the hard boundary past which nobody can see from the outside. If things go all self-replicating, intelligences building greater intelligences in the space of hours or days, then that’s a situation where we simply can’t predict what’s going to happen. Maybe you can boot up a truly human AI in a year after we’ve passed some boundary, but we have absolutely no idea where that boundary is.

6. AI does not mean Atrocity Inside

From the riotous robot Maria in Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic Metropolis to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s unstoppable cyborg Terminator to HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Hollywood is full of menacing AI-gone-rogue tales. But the fear of AI probably stems more from our fear of human obsolescence than it does any actual logical fear of AI itself. Unless we’ve specifically programmed an AI to harm people — and there are some fairly strict checks and balances in place for that sort of thing — the only real threat from AI is in the workforce, where humans may perform less consistently and effectively than AI on particular information-gathering or pattern recognition tasks.

AIs will affect the job market. This is truth you can bank on. Whether they’ll be used to drive us toward a post-scarcity society or to create deeper and more entrenched income inequality remains to be seen. For some interesting, somewhat sobering reading, check out President Obama’s White House report on Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence, an extremely balanced, very clearly written look at the potential future impact. We’ve seen the enemy, and it is us, not the machines.

7. It’s more than the Turing test

Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner, based on the classic Philip K Dick short story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? brought the Turing test to the public consciousness with the Voight-Kampff machine. But there’s more to AI than the Turing test — originally a measure of discerning whether a robot displays behavior that is indistinguishable from a human via natural language conversations. While passing the Turing test definitely poses an interesting challenge, it’s not actually the goal of AI. AI research seeks to create programs that can perceive an environment and successfully achieve a particular goal — and there are plenty of situations where that goal is something other than passing for a human. It’s much more likely that the goal is assisting the human rather than imitating them.

8. It’s a sneak attack

The thing about AI isn’t that it’s coming. It’s that it’s already here. Hollywood might paint AI as something we’re on the cusp of, but that’s because Hollywood has conditioned us to see only a very particular definition of AI. These are the humanoid bots of Bicentennial Man and the disembodied voices of spaceships such as Mother in Alien or Icarus II in Sunshine, which together represent a kind of general artificial intelligence. The AI we have today is specialized to perform certain tasks, such as recognizing images, playing chess, or evaluating insurance claims.

9. AI (probably) ≠ human intelligence

Spike Jonze’s 2013 Oscar-nominated film Her explores the deepening romantic relationship between a man and “Sam,” his computer’s incredibly precocious OS. With her deductive, creative, and reasoning skills, Sam functions as a highly intelligent and competent human. Add in her ability to feel emotions and develop relationships, and she’s human in every sense but the corporeal one. Her works on the assumption that successful AI won’t just be indistinguishable from human intelligence, it will actually be human intelligence (just faster and smarter). When we anthropomorphize intelligence, we give it attributes that are familiar to us — emotions, consciousness, ego, conscience, and even a self-preservation instinct. But human intelligence isn’t the only type of intelligence, and there’s nothing to say that the intelligent systems we develop will think, feel, or act in a human way.

Imagine the Google DeepMind AlphaGo AI. Going back to our very first point, you can make a convincing argument that it has achieved some sort of sapience — the ability to act based on past experience and understanding. Now, imagine that it has achieved some sort of sentience — meaning that it can feel, perceive, and experience subjectively. Well, how can you communicate with such a mind? Its entire universe is the game of Go. Every game is a communication of a sort, but can other patterns be brought out? Say you place your pieces on the board in such a way to convey a basic mathematical principle. Does it have enough information to infer that you are trying to get something across, or will it just take your strange moves and wipe you off the board?  There’s no reason why it couldn’t achieve sentience — assuming you’re on the “computers can do sentience” side of the fence. If so, then, what might its world look like?

In other words, maybe we need to think a little less about the “intelligence” part of AI and ponder a bit more on the “artificial” part.

Seth Redmore is the CMO at Lexalytics, a machine learning and text analytics company

Above: The Machine Intelligence Landscape. This article is part of our Artificial Intelligence series. You can download a high-resolution version of the landscape featuring 288 companies by clicking the image.

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GamesBeat is excited to announce that Stephanie Chan starts today as our new general assignment reporter. She’ll be assuming the duties of Jeff Grubb, who’s now moving over full-time to PC Gaming coverage.

Stephanie comes to GamesBeat after writing about games as a freelancer while working at the media company Poncho, where she went from managing editor to head of operations and editorial. Her gaming bylines include Killscreen and Outermode, and she’s also a published sci-fi fiction author and reviews speculative fiction for Strange Horizons.

While at GamesBeat, Stephanie will focus on breaking news, interesting tidbits, and analysis that Jeff has helped build as a foundation of our publication over the last three years. Since she also has an interest in the indie gaming scene and how people make games, Stephanie will also cover development studios, publishers, and designers from outside the blockbuster triple-A industry process.

And she likes cats.

Please welcome Stephanie to GamesBeat — and feel free to pitch her on news, features, and analysis at stephanie@venturebeat.com.

VentureBeat’s PC Gaming channel is presented by the Intel^® Game Dev program. Stay informed about the latest game dev tools and tips. Get the news you can use.

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Developer Supercell expands the battlefield in the biggest Clash of Clans update of 2017, featuring an all-new 1-on-1 battle mode.

Nearly five years after its initial launch, this mobile strategy game is still going strong, reporting earnings of $1 billion in 2016. According to the market research firm App Annie, Clash of Clans was also one of the top 10 downloads in the strategy category in both the Apple App Store and the Google Play store for the last year.

“We estimate that Clash of Clans has earned more than $2.8 billion in worldwide net revenue since it first launched in 2012,” said Randy Nelson, head of mobile insights at research firm Sensor Tower. Nelson added that 46 percent of all revenue came from U.S. accounts, reflecting a strong interest in the game from overseas markets.

Citing Supercell’s capability to create globally successful mobile games, Tencent spent $8.6 billion to acquire a majority stake last year, a move that values the studio at $10.2 billion. According to market analyst Niko Partners, the mobile games market in China is growing quickly and estimated to reach $35 billion in 2021.

The latest Clash of Clans update is centers around the Builder Base on a new part of the map. New features include:

• 1-on-1 Versus Battle mode
• Upgraded abilities for existing buildings, such as the Archer Tower
• New abilities for characters, such as a new cloaking ability for the Sneaky Archer
• New troops, including Bomber and Cannon Cart
• An unlockable new hero, the Master Builder

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