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There are now 1 billion Windows 10 devices in the wild
Windows 10 is now being used on one billion devices around the world -- that's one in every seven people on the planet. Since 2015, the operating system has made its way onto consoles, laptops and PCs across 200 countries, as exec Yusuf Mehdi notes that the entirety of the Fortune 500 is using Windows 10 devices. According to Microsoft, more businesses are in the process of transitioning to the system, too, so this number is set to increase in the coming months and years.
Visa acquires fintech startup used by Venmo, CoinBase for $5.3 billion
Visa just spent $5.3 billion to acquire Plaid, the fintech company with an API that enables services for Venmo and other banking apps. Plaid's software allows startups, like the mobile investing app Robinhood and the cryptocurrency exchanges Coinbase and Gemini, to securely connect to users' bank accounts. According to Visa, one in four people with a US bank account have used Plaid's technology.
Microsoft invests $1 billion in Elon Musk-founded OpenAI
Today, Microsoft announced that it's investing $1 billion in the Elon Musk-founded company OpenAI. The two companies will work together to bring supercomputing technologies and AI to Microsoft Azure. And OpenAI will run its services exclusively in Microsoft's cloud. Ultimately, the partners hope to build artificial general intelligence (AGI), a technology that some say will match or exceed human intellect.
Samsung invests in logic chip R&D to take on Qualcomm and TSMC
Samsung's chip division is its most lucrative, but memory chip prices are falling and the company's overall operating profits are slipping. In response, Samsung just announced a $116 billion investment in non-memory chip R&D and production infrastructure. Some see that as a move to sell chips to other companies and take on competitors like Qualcomm, Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd (TSMC).
Tesla celebrates one billion Autopilot-assisted miles
Vehicle companies are big fans of marking achievements by mileage. Google's self-driving vehicles clocked up 1.2 million miles without getting a ticket back in 2015, earlier this year Waymo announced its self-driving cars had hit 10 million miles. Now, Tesla is upping the ante with news that its drivers have covered more than one billion miles with autopilot engaged.
Uber completes one billion rides
Despite the taxi industry's protests against its presence and all the legal issues it's had to face, Uber continues to thrive. In fact, it says it's given its billionth -- yes, that's billion with a "b" -- ride in London on Christmas Eve. Since the company launched in June 2010, that's an average of over 15 million trips a month. The bigger portion of that billion probably took place more recently though, while the service was spreading to more locations around the globe.
1 billion people used Facebook on Monday
What were you doing Monday? According to Mark Zuckerberg, it probably included using Facebook. He just posted that for the first time, the social network notched one billion individual users in a single day, calling it "just the beginning of connecting the whole world." With that kind of scale, it's no wonder the exec is focused on drones, lasers and satellites to connect the rest of the world to the internet ASAP, because he's got an idea what they'll be logging in to eventually.
Elite: Dangerous server goes haywire, creates instant billionaires [Updated]
The Elite: Dangerous server has had a relatively smooth launch since it released just over two weeks ago, but all that changed last night when the server went absolutely haywire. A suspected transaction server failure caused a whole slew of bizarre bugs for those playing the game last night, from benign errors like players getting disconnected to catastrophic failures like deleting a ship's entire cargo, rolling back ship upgrades, and deleting credits. The worst problems involved players having ghost cargo that could be sold over and over again, allowing them to rack up millions of credits in minutes. Though the problems were reported promptly, the server wasn't rebooted until its usual maintenance period over six hours later. In a feat of remarkably bad timing, the server problems happened on a national holiday in the UK, and so the developers at Frontier were taking time off to celebrate the new year. There has been no official announcement on the problems yet, and players are speculating on the damage that would be caused or reversed if Frontier performed a server rollback. Reports from the Elite forum suggest that developers may not be back to work until as late as January 5th, at which point it's unlikely that developers will roll the server back. The damage from last night's errors continues to cause problems today. One player was left shipless and unable to log in when the server reversed a ship purchase transaction, and another's ship teleported back across the galaxy and is being held hostage at a station with no shipyard. Dozens of players have reported broken cargo holds or missing cargo and credits, and one player logged in this morning to find 5 billion credits sitting in his wallet. These events have naturally prompted a resurgence of complaints about Elite's always-online gameplay, as players have found themselves unable to play without problem even in solo mode. We have reached out to Frontier for comment.
Kickstarter reaches $1 billion in pledges
Kickstarter backers have pledged over $1 billion to projects on the funding platform in the lifetime of the site, which first launched in late April 2009. That monumental chunk of change was pledged towards 135,344 projects, according to Kickstarter's perpetually-updated stats page. Of the money pledged, $859 million was deposited into 57,133 successfully-funded projects. The games category led the crowdfunding service with $215.82 million pledged, $189.89 million of which was invested into 2,945 successful video game and tabletop game projects (the games category includes both). Games were also fourth-worst among the categories in terms of their success rate, which Kickstarter listed as 35.15 percent. The big numbers offered by Kickstarter only say so much about crowdfunding as a whole. Our Crowdfund Bookie data found that $23 million was raised on both Kickstarter and Indiegogo in a six-month span last year, and that crowdfunded video game projects earn roughly $25,000 on average. Funding projects is one thing, but launching them is another, as previous research from Evil as a Hobby indicated a delivery rate of 37 percent for video game projects on Kickstarter. [Image: Kickstarter]
Grand Theft Auto 5 sales surpass $1 billion
Take-Two Interactive announced today that based on internal estimates it believes Grand Theft Auto 5 sales have surpassed $1 billion during its first three days at retail. According to the company, the game is the fastest product to achieve that milestone. If the estimates by the Rockstar Games' parent company are correct, it will have beaten the already ridiculous achievement by Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 last year, which hit the billion milestone in 15 days. Take-Two announced on Wednesday that Grand Theft Auto 5 had sales of $800 million in its first 24 hours (compared to CoD: Black Ops 2's $500 million). Also, we're just using Call of Duty here for comparative purposes. Don't you worry. Call of Duty: Ghosts is still going to do plenty fine, with GameStop recently noting it as the "most pre-ordered" game of the year.
Epic Rap Battles of History gets an iOS app
You've probably seen the YouTube series Epic Rap Battles of History before -- they're the wild guys behind the (slightly not safe for work) Steve Jobs and Bill Gates rap battle, where the two creators, Peter Shukoff and Lloyd Ahlquist, face off as the two titans of the computer industry in a catchy rap song. Shukoff and Ahlquist have been working hard on the video series, which is now in season 2, and have portrayed fights such as Barack Obama vs. Mitt Romney, Adam vs. Eve and Hitler vs. Darth Vader to the tune of more than a billion YouTube views so far. And all of that success has turned into an iPhone app, available for free from the App Store. The app lets you watch all of the various videos from the series, including behind-the-scenes footage, and you can get other news and insight about the series.
EVE Evolved: Is EVE becoming a spectator sport?
This week saw another landmark event in EVE Online grab the gaming community's attention as over 3,000 players from dozens of alliances battled it out in the lowsec system of Asakai on the Caldari border. The battle reached 2,800 concurrent players at peak, falling just short of 2011's record-breaking siege of LXQ2-T which hit 3,110 simultaneous combatants at its peak. There were livestreams, tons of after-action reports, and the story of this immense battle started by one man clicking the wrong button really captured our imaginations. EVE is one of those rare cases in which a lot of people find the media that surrounds the game more fun than the game itself. News of big in-game events like scams, heists, and huge battles spreads across the internet like wildfire, even among people who hate the game or have never tried it. When news of the Asakai battle emerged, someone on Reddit suggested that people should play EVE for only a few months to get some background and then quit and just read the stories. I've seen a lot of similar comments over the years saying that EVE is more fun to watch and read about than play, and it makes me wonder if the game is becoming a bit of a spectator sport. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at why stories like the Battle of Asakai are so pervasive and explain why I think EVE should embrace its role as a spectator sport.
EVE Online $6,000 ship kill may be a hoax
EVE Online player "stewie Zanjoahir" made history yesterday when he reportedly lost a tiny ship with cargo worth over $6,000 US. Now it appears that the value of the kill may not have been accurate or that the kill could even be a hoax. Evidence that the kill may not be authentic surfaced last night as players found that three Hulk blueprints listed on the kill were marked as originals. That would make them priceless items that change hands for over 500 billion ISK each, which would raise the kill's value to a ludicrous 1.71 trillion ISK ($51,685 US). It's believed that many of the original blueprints in the kill were actually cheaper blueprint copies. One possible explanation for the aberration is that there was an error in the EVE API that supplied the original kill data to third-party killboard websites. It's also possible that the kill was marked as API Verified without actually being checked, in which case the kill may have never even happened. An alternative version of the kill valued at only 34 billion ISK ($1,024 US) has also surfaced, but this was manually uploaded and so isn't verified at all. CCP Games posted the kill on its Facebook page and Twitter feed, but didn't officially confirm the kill or its value. We reached CCP for comment, but privacy concerns prevented the company from confirming or denying the kill's authenticity. If this monumental kill turns out to be an error or a hoax, the next-highest value confirmed EVE kill would be Bjoern's Avatar class titan destroyed in March 2011. The titan was kitted out with expensive officer modules and came to a total value of over 128 billion ISK. As the price of PLEX was much lower in 2011, this would have bought 355 PLEX worth a total of $6,212.50 US.
EVE Online player loses tiny ship worth over $6,000 [UPDATED]
EVE Online is well known for its sandbox gameplay and ruthless citizens, with monumental kills and record-breaking scams popping up year after year. In 2010, one player lost over $1,000 US worth of 30-day game time codes (PLEX) when he transported them in the cargo hold of a tiny, fragile frigate. Thinking his ship too fast to be caught, that player lost his entire alliance's budget in a single mishap. That record was thoroughly eradicated today by player "stewie Zanjoahir," who reportedly lost over 213,000,000,000 ISK when he tried to transport a huge cache of valuable blueprints through nullsec in a tiny, unfitted frigate. That much ISK could currently buy around 367 30-day game time codes (PLEX) at around 580 million ISK each, for a combined total of over 30 years of game time. To put that into perspective, 367 PLEX bought with real cash would cost about $6,422.50 US. Some players doubt the authenticity of the kill report, but the killboard it was posted on claims to have verified it with EVE's automated API service, and CCP Games itself posted about the kill on Facebook. Kills of this scale may have happened before, but it was previously impossible to tell whether a destroyed blueprint was a cheap copy or an expensive original. The value of this kill may even be higher than the reported figure, as several of the blueprint copies that weren't counted are actually worth billions of ISK. Today's kill may be the largest confirmed kill of any ship in EVE's history and could even be the most expensive character death in any MMO to date. [UPDATE: Evidence has emerged that the kill might not be authentic. EVE-Kill has since updated its report with a revised value of 5.3 billion ISK]
Zuckerberg: more than 1 billion people using Facebook actively each month
Active accounts have become one of the hottest currencies online, especially for social networks. Previous boasts by Facebook have been quickly shot down, but this latest number is pretty hard to ignore. According to Zuckerberg himself the site now has 1 billion active monthly users. That's right, one in seven people on the planet logs on to the social network at least once a full moon cycle. The announcement comes via the site's official news blog, which if the numbers are true, could mean most of you have read this already. Zuckerberg broke the news originally in a Q&A with Bloomberg Businessweek, also claiming that the site now has 600 million mobile users.
Samsung spending $4 billion to renovate Austin chip factory
Premiership footballers will be weeping in envy at the way Samsung's been spending its cash this month. After splashing $822 million on a Korean R&D center, it's now chucking $4 billion to renovate its semiconductor factory in Austin, Texas. The cash will be used to increase production on system-on-chip products used in a wide variety of smartphones and tablets, presumably to cope with future demand. It's not clear if this investment is in addition to the $1 billion it was raising in January to add a new SOC and OLED line to the same facility, but it's certainly a good time to be living in Texas, right now.
EVE players abuse faction warfare to produce trillions of ISK
If there's one constant in the EVE Online universe, it's that the players can never be underestimated and every care must be taken to make sure systems can't be abused in unintended ways. In 2009, a handful of players figured out how to artificially boost the number of valuable faction warfare loyalty points rewarded for completing missions and farmed enough ISK to build a titan. That record was completely blown out of the water today as five EVE players revealed how they'd generated five trillion ISK using game mechanics introduced in the Inferno expansion. Inferno added a new reward system for faction warfare that gave players loyalty points for enemy ship kills based on the value of the destroyed ship and cargo. A bug was found that rewarded players for both the destroyed and surviving cargo, even though surviving cargo could be recovered. GoonWaffe pilot Aryth and four friends began destroying their own freighters full of minerals to cash the minerals out into loyalty points, which were then used to buy items for sale. When CCP discovered this bug and fixed it, the group manipulated the market price of one of the game's least-purchased items up to a huge number. When the price index for the value of that item updated, the players began destroying haulers full of them to generate billions of loyalty points for almost nothing. The points were cashed out into items for sale on the market, producing a total profit of over five trillion ISK. The abuse has not yet been declared an exploit, but CCP has fixed the issue and is still investigating it. At current market prices, five trillion ISK is enough to buy around 10,000 30-day game time codes worth a total of $175,000 US.
Sprint: iPhone customers are "more profitable" than others
In an interview with Mobile World Live, Sprint's CEO Dan Hesse says that iPhone users are some of the best cellphone users to have around. Not only are iPhone customers "more profitable" (in that they just plain spend more money, given the price of the iPhone itself), but Hesse says iPhone users are also more loyal to Sprint (with "a lower level of churn"), and they actually use "less data on average than a high-end 4G Android device." That combination of more money coming in with fewer services going out means that iPhone customers are apparently just as premium as Sprint as the devices those customers use. That's probably why Hesse spent $15 billion last year to get the phone on his network in the first place. Given how happy he seems to be about the whole situation, it must have been worth it. [via Ars Technica & BGR]
Redbox notches its second billion rentals, offers freebies Thursday to celebrate
It took six years for Redbox to cross the one billion discs rented mark, but clearly the pace is picking up as it's taken only 18 months to duplicate the feat. Sure, two billion is no 25 billion, but at least the red kiosk company isn't only going to share the love with the milestone maker who just wanted to check out Ryan Gosling in Drive. Thursday, all customers can pick up a free DVD rental (Blu-ray and videogame rentals will just be discounted by the price of a DVD) courtesy of a promo code that can be found on the company's Facebook page, hit the giveaway link below to snag it.
China claims one billion mobile phone users, India shrugs
China claimed 900 million mobile users last April, but back then it still seemed possible that India might reach the billion user milestone first. China was ahead in absolute terms, while India's user base was growing faster. According to the latest figures from its government, however, China is ready to stake its claim. It had 997 million phone owners by late February, with growth of around three million per week, which means it should have tipped the scales in the last few days. Of course, it's not really about who gets there first: The salient fact is that millions more humans can now ring each other up, just, you know, to chat.
