Month: December 2017

Enlarge / The Google Assistant on the LG G6.

Google's push to put the Google Assistant everywhere continues. The company's voice search interface exists on phones, watches, TVs, cars, and in standalone smart speakers, but the company has never done a great job of capturing the entire 2 billion-strong Android market. The Assistant originally launched on a single phone, the Google Pixel, and has slowly been creeping across the Android landscape.

Now the Assistant is coming to even more Android devices. Google announced the voice assistant is coming to older phones running Android 5.0 Lollipop and up. This is a big bump over the old rollout, which only included Android 6.0 Marshmallow and up. According to the Google Play active user stats, Lollipop compatibility will add another 26 percent of Android's install base to the Assistant's reach.

That number doesn't include Android tablets, which until now haven't really had access to the Assistant at all. The lone exceptions were "Google" branded tablets like the Google Pixel C and the Google Pixelbook. Now the Assistant is finally coming to Android tablets too, but only for those with the language set to English.

Enlarge / Watch out for giant faces and TIE fighters! (credit: Disney)

Spoiler-free assessment

There are a lot of good things I expected from Star Wars: The Last Jedi, but nuance wasn’t one of them. You can usually depend on this franchise to deliver zoomy action steered by easily recognizable good guys and bad guys, their motivations untainted by complexity. The possible exception would be The Empire Strikes Back, and The Last Jedi Writer/Director Rian Johnson is obviously trying to evoke that film here.

Luckily, The Last Jedi is not a reboot or recreation of The Empire Strikes Back, the way The Force Awakens was of A New Hope. Jedi turns our characters into multi-faceted people and takes the series in new and unexpected directions.

Without giving away any of the plot, I can say that The Last Jedi’s greatest strength comes from its characters—and of course the actors who play them. Instead of giving us legendary heroes whose main job is to propel the plot, The Last Jedi focuses on our protagonists’ struggles with the same everyday problems that all sentient creatures face. They are conflicted, disappointed, and unsure what to do. They go on wild goose chases. They do the wrong thing, or the right thing for the wrong reasons. In other words, they feel realistically ordinary. Luke actually makes fun of his mythical reputation when the wide-eyed Rey (Daisy Ridley) begs for his help (Mark Hamill is in fine form here as a sarcastic old dude).

Enlarge / Star Citizen's developers are flying into their own legal asteroid field, courtesy of Crytek.

Star Citizen's lengthy and heavily crowd-funded development has been marked by numerous changes to the project's direction and scope, including a move from Crytek's CryEngine to Amazon's Lumberyard in late 2016. That change is now the focus of a lawsuit from Crytek, which accuses Star Citizen developers Roberts Space Industries (RSI) and Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) of copyright infringement and breach of contract.

The complaint, filed in the US District Court for Central California, lays out how RSI agreed to work exclusively with CryEngine in a 2012 agreement, an agreement it says was broken when RSI moved to Amazon's Lumberyard engine in late 2016.

In a blog post following that transition, RSI's Chris Roberts explained that Lumberyard was essentially a more promising fork of an earlier CryEngine build that fit better as a base for "StarEngine," his name for the "heavily modified" version of CryEngine the developers were then using. "Crytek doesn't have the resources to compete with this level of investment and have never been focused on the network or online aspects of the engine in the way we or Amazon are," Roberts wrote.

Enlarge (credit: Shipt)

The battle between Amazon and Walmart is widely known, but Target is now entering the space in a new way. Target announced its plans to buy Shipt, a grocery delivery startup, in a $550 million all-cash deal. Born in 2014, Shipt lets members order groceries online from various supermarkets and then sends a shopper to pick up and delivery the items on the same day.

Shipt is based in Birmingham, Alabama, and already has partnerships with some of big grocery chains across the country, including Costco, Kroger, Publix, and HEB. Under the deal, Shipt will be a wholly owned Target subsidiary and will continue to operate independently while serving Target's new same-day delivery efforts.

Target already offers same-day delivery in New York City, but online retail seemingly becomes more competitive each day. Target's acquisition follows Walmart's recent purchase of Parcel, a New York City-based delivery company that Walmart plans to use to offer same-day delivery in the New York metro area. Meanwhile, Amazon offers same-day delivery in thousands of markets cross the country and its $99-per-year Prime membership offers free two-day shipping to most areas.

Enlarge (credit: 20th Century Fox)

Disney announced today that it will acquire a huge portion of 21st Century Fox in an all-stock deal valued at $52.4 billion. As part of the deal, Disney will own 21st Century Fox's film and television studios, some of its cable networks, and international TV businesses, as well as popular titles including The Simpsons, X-Men, and Avatar. The deal represents a huge shift in content ownership in Hollywood, giving Disney even more titles, characters, and stories to build upon across all its existing properties and any new services the company debuts in the future.

Disney did not acquire all of 21st Century Fox—the deal focuses on the company's entertainment businesses. 21st Century Fox announced plans to spin off its news and sports broadcasting businesses into a new company dubbed "Fox." This company will focus on news and sports and will include Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network, FS1, FS2, among other properties.

If the deal gains regulatory approval, Disney's already gigantic pool of content will expand even further. The company will own cable channels including National Geographic, FX Networks, Fox Sports Regional Networks, and international networks like Star TV and Sky. 21st Century Fox is expected to complete its acquisition of Sky, a popular network in the UK and Europe, by mid-2018. If and when it does so, Disney will own all of Sky.