Heads up, Animal Crossing fans: if you havent yet bought the paid version of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp and plan to do so, it might be a good idea to snap it up in the next day or so. The mobile game for iOS and Android is currently $10, but the price will double to $20 after 1AM ET on January 31. Thats when the introductory offer comes to an end.
Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete arrived in December, a few days after Nintendo shut down the free-to-play edition. Folks who played the original version can still transfer their save data via their Nintendo account and continue from where they left off. The deadline transferring the data is 2AM ET on June 2.
Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp debuted in 2017. It employed a freemium model with microtransactions, but Nintendo has since decided to ditch that approach. While you'll now need to pay for Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete upfront, the current iteration of the game doesn't have any in-app purchases. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/heads-up-animal-crossing-pocket-camp-complete-will-only-be-10-for-a-couple-more-days-183525135.html?src=rss
It seems that X is getting ready to finally roll out the payments app the companys leaders have long been promising The company will introduce X Money later this year with Visa as partner, CEO Linda Yaccarino announced.
According to Yaccarino, X Money will support person-to-person payments via users debit cards with the ability to transfer funds to a bank account, much like Venmo. The service will also allow you to deposit money into an X Wallet.
Another milestone for the Everything App: @Visa is our first partner for the @XMoney Account, which will debut later this year.Allows for secure + instant funding to your X Wallet via Visa Direct Connects to your debit card allowing P2P payments Option to instantly Linda Yaccarino (@lindayaX) January 28, 2025
Bothe Yaccarino and X owner Elon Musk have long promised to bring financial services to X as they attempt to turn the platform into an everything app. In a memo last year, Yaccarino said the company planned to support banking and payments features for users. Musk has also said he wants people to be able to run their entire financial world via X.
So far, X Money sounds like its a long way off from that vision, though Yaccarino said the Visa partnership is the first of many big announcements about X Money this year. X hasnt disclosed specifics about how X Money will work for users or how it might make money off the service. Xs business is reportedly struggling. Musk recently told employees that our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and were barely breaking even, in a memo reported by The Wall Street Journal.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/xs-payments-app-will-be-available-later-this-year-181046773.html?src=rss
A majority of workers at a Whole Foods location in Philadelphia have voted to unionize, as reported by Reuters. This makes the Pennsylvania store the first to unionize under Amazons ownership, and the second time overall.
Workers voted 130 to 100 for representation, according to the National Labor Relations Board, which translates to nearly 60 percent of workers choosing to unionize. Workers at this particular location filed to hold a union election back in November. A successful vote is just the beginning of this process, however, as a contract has yet to be ratified and accepted by both parties.
"We are ready to bring Whole Foods to the bargaining table to negotiate a fair first contract that reflects the workers' needs and priorities," Wendell Young IV, President of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776, said in an email.
Workers at Amazons Whole Foods in Philadelphia made history today as they voted to unionize and WON! pic.twitter.com/jKpkuhwRIi UFCW Local 1776 (@UFCWLocal1776) January 28, 2025
Coming as no surprise, Whole Foods expressed disappointment over the outcome of the vote. A company representative told Reuters that it already offers competitive compensation, great benefits and career advancement opportunities. Ahead of the vote, workers cited the need for better wages and benefits.
As previously noted, this is the first successful unionization bid for Whole Foods workers since Amazon bought the company in 2017 for nearly $14 billion. Its not, however, the first time a Whole Foods location has voted to unionize. Workers in a Wisconsin location voted to unionize back in 2002, but the union was dissolved the following year.
In the interest of full disclosure, I worked at a Whole Foods location in 2005 and, one day, someone snuck in the store to hand out pro-unionization pamphlets. Management sent an armed guard around to collect the pamphlets from us. It was weird.
Its no secret that Amazon isnt exactly a friend to unions. Workers in Quebec unionized last year but, surprise, the company now says its closing the entire facility. Amazon is worth over $2.5 trillion dollars and has doubled in value throughout the past year or so.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/whole-foods-workers-form-first-union-since-amazon-acquisition-180026628.html?src=rss
Ooni, the Scottish company known for its innovative outdoor pizza ovens, is expanding into a new product category without sacrificing the brands pizza theme. The Halo Pro is a $799 mixer that tries to do the same for pizza dough as the company did for pizza ovens: bring restaurant-quality baking to the home kitchen.
The Ooni Halo Pro uses spiral mixing technology, which is better for dough (including thicker ones, like for pizza). Their gentle, more efficient approach minimizes temperature increases and optimizes hydration, combining to create stronger gluten strands.
Although you can buy commercial-grade spiral mixers for the home, they tend to have industrial-chic designs (so, not chic at all). And those from trusted brands like Häussler and Famag cost thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, Oonis model has a sleek design more eye-catching than an eyesore that would look right at home in the modern kitchen. It will be available in two colors: polar white and charcoal gray.
Ooni
The Halo Pro has a removable 7.3-quart bowl and a digital interface. Twisting a dial lets you cycle through its 58 mixing speeds. Ooni says its bowl can mix 11 pounds of dough at once enough for 20 pizzas or six loaves of bread.
The mixer specializes in dough but is hardly limited to it. It ships with a spiral hook, removable breaker bar, geared whisk and flexible beater. That toolset opens the door to things like whipped cream, egg whites or batters.
The Ooni Halo Pro will cost a lot of dough compared to traditional planetary mixers. (But not compared to many industrial spiral mixers.) It launches for $799 on April 8. You can sign up on Oonis website to be alerted when its available.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/kitchen-tech/oonis-first-departure-from-pizza-ovens-is-a-799-spiral-mixer-174510926.html?src=rss
Boom, the startup developing a new generation of supersonic aircraft, has achieved a major milestone after its test plane broke the sound barrier for the first time. The XB-1 Baby Boom piloted by Tristan Gepetto Brandenburg, flew through the Bell X-1 Supersonic Corridor over the Mojave Desert. XB-1 reached a speed of Mach 1.1 at an altitude of 35,000 feet for a few minutes before running out of airspace authorized for supersonic travel. The plane would go on to break the sound barrier a total of three times before it returned to base. Its the first time a civilian aircraft has broken the sound barrier while flying over the United States.
Engadget covered Boom in an extensive profile back in 2020, where the company was gearing up to unveil XB-1 and make preparations for test flights. Since then, it has been undergoing a barrage of tests, with a series of subsonic test flights starting from March 2024 through the end of the year. In the background, the company has been signing deals with major airlines including United and American, to supply passenger jets for civilian service. This craft, dubbed Overture, has a planned top speed of Mach 1.7 equivalent of 1,305 miles per hour which would cut existing travel times in half. At least, for the folks who could afford a ticket.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/booms-xb-1-jet-breaks-the-sound-barrier-for-the-first-time-164930546.html?src=rss
The Google Nest WiFi Pro 6E mesh router is on sale for $120 via Amazon. Thats a discount of 40 percent, which is one heck of a deal. This discount only applies to the light green model.
This unit easily made our list of the best mesh routers, and for good reason. Its a reliable and easy-to-use device. The installation process is simple, which cant always be said of mesh systems. We called it the perfect router for folks who want to set their network up and then forget about it. Thats me. Im that folk.
The Nest WiFi Pro provides reliable tri-band Wi-Fi, so its great for streaming movies, gaming, web browsing and just about everything else. It also offers various useful integrations. It supports Matter, Thread and Google Assistant, as a start. We recommended this router at the full price, so we definitely like it at half the cost.
There are a couple of minor caveats here. This sale provides just a single unit, which offers 2,200 square feet of coverage. However, those with larger homes and multiple dead zones will likely need to pick up a second router to add to the system. Also, its not quite as fast or powerful as some rival Wi-Fi 6E routers.
Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/googles-nest-wifi-pro-6e-is-cheaper-than-ever-with-a-40-percent-discount-163456635.html?src=rss
OpenAI has begun offering a version of ChatGPT designed for US government agencies. ChatGPT Gov includes many of the same features found in the Enterprise offering of the chatbot, including access to the companys GPT-4o model. By making our products available to the US government, we aim to ensure AI serves the national interest and the public good, aligned with democratic values, while empowering policymakers to responsibly integrate these capabilities to deliver better services to the American people, OpenAI said in a blog post published Tuesday.
Before today, US government employees were already using ChatGPT in their day-to-day work. According to the company, federal, state and local government workers at 3,500 agencies across the country have sent more than 18 million messages since 2024. With todays announcement, those same agencies can now self-host ChatGPT within their own Microsoft Azure commercial or government cloud environment. In practice, that should make it easier for government IT heads to ensure the tool is used safely.
OpenAIs move to offer ChatGPT Gov comes after the company announced it was partnering with SoftBank to build $500 billion worth of AI infrastructure within the United States over the next four years. Many immediately questioned whether OpenAI had the money to fund Stargate to the level it said it would. After the announcement, The Information reported that SoftBank and OpenAI would each commit about $19 billion to the project to start, far less than the $100 billion the two had said they would deploy immediately.
More broadly, the arrival of ChatGPT Gov comes amid uncertainty about the strength of the American AI industry. On Monday, US tech stocks dropped dramatically after DeepSeek, an AI assistant from a Chinese startup, unseated ChatGPT as the top free app in the App Store over the weekend. DeepSeek purportedly spent less than $6 million to develop its R1 model.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-debuts-a-version-of-chatgpt-for-us-government-agencies-162809443.html?src=rss
You'll only need to remember the name Incention for the brief moment you're reading this post, because you'll likely never have to think about it again. As Variety reports, it's a new platform for building new Hollywood IP using the combined power of AI tools, fan contributions and the blockchain. Incention describes itself as "a new blueprint for building modern franchises, where IP holders, communities, and agents collaborate seamlessly in an endless playground rooted in real IP." Because, of course, the real problem plaguing Hollywood today is the inability to build franchises with user-generated content, unproven AI tools and blockchain hype.
Incention's first franchise the modern Hollywood term for "story" is Emergence, a sci-fi premise from Blade and The Dark Knight writer David S. Goyer. It centers on a universe where a white hole appears (my god, the opposite of a black hole!) and spews out mysterious high tech objects. Goyer describes it as a "creative sandbox" for artists and fans to build "limitless narratives" across multiple genres and mediums. (The name is also confounding. It sounds far too similar to Christopher Nolan's Inception, a movie that Goyer had no hand in. And what does it even mean? Incentive prevention?)
Atlas, an AI agent that's meant to be a "creative partner," serves as Incention's main AI tool for developing content. It'll be able to come up with ideas, help story direction and even generate full videos, according to the company. Incention also claims that Atlas can post autonomously to social media platforms to improve itself, perhaps because social media engagement for real franchises is too dangerous for humans these days.
Incention is powered by the Story blockchain, which will help to track the content produced by fans and creators across all of its franchises. Again, a major problem that needed to be solved. The NFT grift is over, and we've yet to see any product outside of Bitcoin and other digital currencies tapping into the blockchain effectively.
A couple of years ago, I realized that its [AI] not going away, its going to completely embed itself within society," Goyer told Variety. "So I tried to learn as much about it as I could, whether it be ChatGPT or Midjourney or the various other tools, and I think those have useful applications that dont necessarily put people out of a job although there are a lot of potential AI applications that could. But in this instance, were not putting anyone out of a job. If anything, this is a tool to allow people that normally wouldnt have an entry point into Hollywood or publishing houses or things like that."
The big problem Incention faces, though, is that it's not actually fixing anything in Hollywood. Similar to the short-lived Quibi, the entire impetus behind Incention is driven by technology, instead of genuine demands from creators or a franchise-hungry public. And unlike Quibi, Incention isn't launching with nearly $2 billion in funding (though it has raised an undisclosed amount from the a16z crypto fund) or the Hollywood bonafides of someone like DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg.
Incention also seems to fundamentally misunderstand how fan-produced content works. People aren't spending hours on their fanfic, fanart and cosplay simply because they want to get paid. They're doing it because someone created a story and characters that genuinely moved them. Good luck getting the same sort of support from a generic-sounding franchise like Emergence.
"The entertainment industry stands at a crossroads," Incention wrote in a "manifesto" of its vision. "As AI generates an endless stream of content, traditional entertainment grapples with an existential crisis: How do we preserve human creativity while harnessing the power of modern technology? The answer is not in resistance, but in collaboration and shared upside."
I give it a month.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/incention-is-a-desperate-attempt-to-make-new-hollywood-ip-with-ai-fans-and-the-blockchain-162024019.html?src=rss
Sens. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) are re-introducing a bill that aims to ban social media platforms from knowingly letting kids aged under 13 from using them. The bipartisan Kids Off Social Media Act (KOSMA) was introduced last year, but it didn't progress beyond the committee stage. However, KOSMA may pick up more momentum this time around given the current political landscape.
I'm going to do everything I can to get it passed out of committee and advanced on the floor [...] and signed into law, Cruz told The Washington Post. Ted and I are in the middle of about two dozen different disagreements and disputes, but the one thing that seems to unite the political parties is that we need to protect small children from the negative outcomes of being on social media, Schatz said.
Cruz is now the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee (which has become a prominent battleground for social media-related issues in recent years). Not only that, Republicans are in control of both houses of Congress while Lina Khan is no longer head of the Federal Trade Commission.
Under KOSMA, that agency would have extra regulatory power over social media platforms. Some Republicans were reluctant to hand Khan those reins. I think that [Khan's stint as FTC chair] understandably caused significant reluctance on the part of Congress to entrust any additional authority on the FTC, Cruz said.
If KOSMA becomes law as it stands, social media platforms would have to delete any accounts held by users aged under 13 as well as any data collected from those children. It would also block them from using data collected from users aged under 17 to algorithmically suggest or promote content. Furthermore, it stipulates that schools would have to block students from accessing social media services on school devices and networks in order to keep receiving certain subsidies.
Schatz was among a bipartisan group of senators that introduced the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act in 2023. That bill aimed to set 13 as the minimum age for using social media, and require parental consent for under 18s to access such platforms. However, the bill did not pass through the Commerce Committee.
Last July, two online safety bills that ostensibly sought to protect minors, the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act and the much-derided Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), passed the Senate in a 91-3 vote. However, neither passed through the House before the previous Congress ended on January 3.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/senators-again-attempt-to-ban-pre-teens-from-social-media-160535890.html?src=rss
The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has announced its preliminary findings that the cloud services market "is not working as well as it could be." That relatively vague statement follows a 16-month investigation into the UK's cloud services market, especially its two largest providers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft. Both companies hold between a 30 and 40 percent market share, followed by Google at five to 10 percent.
Despite the vague thesis statement, the CMA's investigation has so far raised a few critical points and recommendations. It found that there are alternative cloud suppliers face significant barriers to enter and expand in the market. Also, that "technical and commercial barriers" limit customers' ability to switch providers, such as data transfer charges. Specific to Microsoft, the CMA stated that the company uses its large software presence to limit how effectively AWS and Google can compete when it comes to customers who want to use that software while on the cloud.
The CMA reports that UK businesses and organizations have increased their spending on cloud services by 30 percent each year hitting 9 billion ($11 million) in 2023. Given this 9 billion spend, the CMA stated that paying just five percent more than prices in a "well-functioning market," would cumulatively cost another 430 million ($535 million) annually more if the growth continues.
"Given the size of capital investment and economies of scale required to provide cloud infrastructure services, there may be a natural limit to the number of providers who can compete effectively in these markets," the CMA's states in its release. "For this reason, it is vital that competition between even a small number of providers works well for customers."
The inquiry group points to a new solution: Strategic Market Status (SMS) designation for AWS and Microsoft's cloud services. The label comes courtesy of the UK's new Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers (DMCC) Act and would allow the CMA to enforce greater regulation and pro-competition directives on the two services. "Should AWS and Microsoft be designated as having SMS, the CMA would be able to consider the interventions we have considered in this inquiry relating to egress fees, technical barriers and Microsofts licensing practices," the release further states.
Earlier this month, the CMA opened investigations into whether Google's search practices and mobile ecosystems should receive SMS designation. The regulator is also probing Apple in the second instance. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/uk-seeks-greater-regulatory-power-over-microsoft-and-amazon-web-services-cloud-computing-services-155757650.html?src=rss
