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In a couple of months, you'll be able to get Microsoft's mobile games from its own store. Xbox President Sarah Bond has revealed at the Bloomberg Technology Summit that the company is launching a web-based store where you can download its mobile games and get add-ons or in-app purchases at a discount. Bond said the company has decided to launch a browser-based store instead of an app to make it "accessible across all devices, all countries, no matter what" so that you don't get "locked to a single ecosystem." Microsoft will only host its own games to start with, which means it will feature a lot of titles from Activision Blizzard. If you'll recall, it snapped up the gaming developer and publisher in a $70 billion deal that closed last year. You'll most likely find Candy Crush Saga, which has apparently generated $20 billion in revenue since it launched in 2012, and Call of Duty's mobile games in the first batch of titles available for download. Bond said that Minecraft may also be one of the first games you can get. An Xbox spokesperson told Bloomberg that this is "just the first step in [the company's] journey to building a trusted app store with its roots in gaming." Microsoft plans to open the app store to third-party publishers in the future, though it didn't share a timeline for that goal. The company first announced its intention to launch a gaming store for Android and iOS devices last year shortly before rules under the EU's Digital Markets Act became applicable. To comply with DMA rules, Apple and Google have to allow third-party app stores to be accessible on their platforms and to offer alternative billing systems for purchases. They're also compelled to allow app sideloading, which will be a massive change for Apple, a company known for its "walled garden" approach to business. Operators of third-party app stores will get to avoid some of the fees Google and Apple charge, but they'd still have to pay the companies for bypassing their mobile platforms' official stores. Both tech giants have already outlined how they're changing things up to comply with the DMA regulations. The companies' rivals found the changes they're making insufficient, however, prompting the European Commission to start investigating their compliance plans. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/microsofts-web-based-mobile-game-store-opens-in-july-090044359.html?src=rss
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Hail storms are unpredictable, often striking hyperlocally with unexpected force. When they descend on a field of leafy greens, the perforations caused by hailstones can render a harvest unsellable.When a large-scale spinach producer in the Netherlands recently saw a potential harvest damaged by a spring storm, the country's main supermarket chain came to the rescue. Instead of rejecting the spinach because of its visual imperfections standard practice in the grocery industry Albert Heijn purchased and packaged the crop. The retailer added a label for shoppers, explaining that some of the spinach leaves had suffered hail damage, making them slightly less attractive but equally delicious.Writing off crops for not meeting rigid aesthetic standards is a major cause of food waste. Supermarkets have conditioned consumers to expect perfection in fruits and vegetables. By implementing a simple act like Albert Heijn's stickers, they can now help reshape those norms, saving massive amounts of (im)perfectly good produce.
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Marketing and Advertising
Just in case there was any doubt about how Jack Dorsey really feels about Bluesky, the former Twitter CEO has offered new details on why he left the board and deleted his account on the service he helped kickstart. In a characteristically bizarre interview with Mike Solana of Founders Fund, Dorsey had plenty of criticism for Bluesky. In the interview, Dorsey claimed that Bluesky was literally repeating all the mistakes he made while running Twitter. The entire conversation is long and a bit rambly, but Dorseys complaints seem to boil down to two issues: He never intended Bluesky to be an independent company with its own board and stock and other vestiges of a corporate entity (Bluesky spun out of Twitter as a public benefit corporation in 2022.) Instead, his plan was for Twitter to be the first client to take advantage of the open source protocol. Bluesky created. The fact that Blueksy has some form of content moderation and has occasionally banned users for things like using racial slurs in their usernames. People started seeing Bluesky as something to run to, away from Twitter, Dorsey said. It's the thing that's not Twitter, and therefore it's great. And Bluesky saw this exodus of people from Twitter show up, and it was a very, very common crowd. But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it. That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. Dorsey also confirmed that he is financially backing Nostr, another decentralized Twitter-like service popular among some crypto enthusiasts and run by an anonymous founder. I know it's early, and Nostr is weird and hard to use, but if you truly believe in censorship resistance and free speech, you have to use the technologies that actually enable that, and defend your rights, Dorsey said. A lot of this isnt particularly surprising. If youve followed Dorseys public comments over the last couple years, hes repeatedly said that Twitters original sin was being a company that would be beholden to advertisers and other corporate interests. Its why he backed Elon Musks takeover of the company. (Not coincidentally, Dorsey still has about $1 billion of his personal wealth invested in the company now known as X.) Hes also been very clear that he made many of Twitters most consequential moderation decisions reluctantly. Unsurprisingly, Dorseys comments werent well-received on Bluesky. In a lengthy thread, Blueskys protocol engineer Paul Frazee said that Twitter was supposed to to be the AT Protocols first client but that Elon killed that straight dead after he took over the company. That entire company was frozen by the prolonged acquisition, and the agreement quickly ended when Elon took over, Frazee said. It was never going to happen. Also: unmoderated spaces are a ridiculous idea. We created a shared network for competing moderated spaces to exist. Even if somebody wanted to make an unmoderated ATProto app, I guess they could? Good luck with the app stores and regulators and users, I guess. While Dorsey was careful not to criticize Musk directly, he was slightly less enthusiastic than when he said that Musk would be the one to extend the light of consciousness by taking over Twitter. Dorsey noted that, while he used to fight government requests to take down accounts, Musk takes the other path and generally complies. Elon will fight in the way he fights, and I appreciate that, but he could certainly be compromised, Dorsey said.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/jack-dorsey-claims-bluesky-is-repeating-all-the-mistakes-he-made-at-twitter-234326121.html?src=rss
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