Category: Technology

Jamie Siminoff, who founded Ring and started the company in his garage, is back at Amazon after leaving the company as its CEO in 2023. Siminoff joined Amazon when the e-commerce website acquired Ring in 2018, but he left in 2023 and founded another startup that he sold to lock maker Latch Inc. When he left Amazon two years ago, he said that invention was his true passion. Now, he’s taking on the role as the vice president in charge of not just Ring, but also Amazon’s smart home camera unit Blink, the company’s in-garage delivery operations called Key and the Amazon Sidewalk low-bandwith, long-range shared network. 

Siminoff is replacing Elizabeth Hamren, who took over his role two years ago. Hamren used to be the COO of Discord and was also an executive at Microsoft and at Meta. According to Bloomberg, she’s still looking for new opportunities from inside and outside the company. 

In a post welcoming him back posted on the Amazon website, Siminoff briefly and broadly talked about his plans for the divisions he’s heading. He plans to focus on security, on making people feel their “homes are safe, even when they’re thousands of miles away.” Siminoff also wants to make sure Amazon’s experiences related to home security “work seamlessly across different types of devices.” In addition, he talked about how he’s going to explore the use of artificial intelligence in Amazon’s products and services in the future. “The AI transformation happening right now is a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and I think we’re super well positioned with helpful and practical AI features like Smart Video Search,” he said. “It’s just the start here — we’re just scratching the surface of what we can do with AI — and I look forward to digging into this with the team even more.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/ring-founder-jamie-siminoff-is-back-at-amazon-to-run-its-video-doorbell-unit-130009731.html?src=rss 

Mewgenics, the cat-breeding RPG that was originally announced as a follow-up to Super Meat Boy, is coming out in 2025, based on a new trailer shared by IGN and the game’s updated Steam page.

A blend of a turned-based RPG and twisted cat simulator, Mewgenics started as the next project from Team Meat, the development duo made up of Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes. Team Meat teased Mewgenics throughout 2013, but ultimately put the game on hold in 2014 to focus on finishing Super Meat Boy Forever, a mobile sequel to Super Meat Boy.

When McMillen ultimately left Team Meat in 2018 to focus on supporting The Binding of Isaac, Mewgenics came with him, and the game has been slowly making its way to release since then. If the trailer is any indication, repeatable, turn-based battles have become a big part of Mewgenics, but McMillen’s trademark gross-out animation style remains intact (as does all of the cat furniture).

If you’re looking for more information about how the game has changed since it was announced over a decade ago, McMillen and co-developer Tyler Glaiel have kept up a relatively regular cadence of blog posts on Steam covering different aspects of the development process. We should also see a lot more of the game soon: In their latest update, Mewgenics‘ developers shared that IGN is publishing hands-on coverage of the game in May.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/the-creator-of-binding-of-isaac-will-release-a-new-game-mewgenics-this-year-211049653.html?src=rss 

Early this year, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would be ditching its long-running fact checking program, claiming that it has enabled too much “censorship” on the company’s apps. Now, Meta has set an end date for fact-checking on Facebook, Instagram and Threads (at least for its US users). 

“By Monday afternoon, our fact-checking program in the US will be officially over,” Meta’s recently elevated policy chief Joel Kaplan announced in a post on X. “That means no new fact checks and no fact checkers.”

Instead, Meta has been slowly ramping up Community Notes. Meta began allowing potential contributors to sign up in February. It began testing the system, which will initially be powered by the same algorithm as Community Notes on X, earlier this month. But the crowdsourced fact checks have yet to appear publicly on posts. It sounds like that’s also about to change with the official end of Meta’s existing fact checking partners. “The first Community Notes will start appearing gradually across Facebook, Threads & Instagram, with no penalties attached,” Kaplan said.

Though Meta has said it wants to eventually end fact checking entirely, the company has said relatively little about its plans for Community Notes outside of the US. That may be because officials in other countries, like Brazil and the European Union, have already expressed concern about how the change could affect the flow of disinformation around the world.

Meta’s push to end fact checking in the US came early this year alongside several other policy changes that marked a notable rightward shift for the social network just as President Donals Trump took office. The company also ended corporate DEI programs, rolled back hate speech protections on its services and added a close Trump ally to its board.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-is-entering-its-post-truth-era-on-monday-202858791.html?src=rss 

TikTok is going to get more time to figure out a plan to stay in the US. President Donald Trump is signing another executive order effectively extending the deadline for the company to find US buyers by another 75 days. The president signaled he intended to give the deal more time via a Truth Social post.

“My Administration has been working very hard on a Deal to SAVE TIKTOK, and we have made tremendous progress,” Trump wrote. “The Deal requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed, which is why I am signing an Executive Order to keep TikTok up and running for an additional 75 days.” 

Trump’s post suggests that the recently introduced suite of tariffs against US trade partners like China will somehow help close the deal. As part of the TikTok ban signed in to law by former President Biden in April 2024, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is forced to sell TikTok to a US buyer or get kicked out of US app stores and web hosting platforms. 

After a good bit of back and forth over the legality of the ban, the Supreme Court ultimately upheld it, and left the enforcement of the law to the incoming Trump administration. TikTok was briefly unavailable, but Trump ultimately signed an executive order that delayed the enforcement of the ban by 75 days to give TikTok more time to find a buyer and get the app back up and running.

Multiple companies and groups have expressed interest in outright buying or investing in TikTok — reportedly, even Amazon — but no one has come to a deal that satisfies ByteDance or the Chinese government. It’s not clear tariffs will change anyone’s motivations, but if everyone continues to accept Trump’s Justice Department just not enforcing the ban, than the whole ordeal seems like it could last as long as necessary.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/trump-is-extending-the-deadline-for-a-tiktok-deal-by-another-75-days-180526714.html?src=rss 

Microsoft just announced several updates to its Copilot AI assistant, and some sound downright useful. It’s bringing Copilot Vision to mobile, but with some new features. For the uninitiated, this software originally launched for the Edge web browser and gave Copilot the ability to “see” and comment on the contents of websites.

The company is upping its game for the mobile version, adding some multimodal functionality. It’ll be able to integrate with your phone’s camera to “enable an interactive experience with the real world.” Microsoft says it can analyze both real-time video from the camera and photos stored on the device

Microsoft gives an example of Copilot Vision analyzing a video of plants to determine if they are healthy or not and suggesting actions to take. We’ll see if it can actually perform that kind of nuanced reasoning. Modern AI companies love to promise the world and then, well, you know the rest. In any event, the mobile version of Vision is available today in the Copilot app for iOS and Android. The web version is also coming to Windows. 

Microsoft is bringing Copilot Search to Bing to “seamlessly blend the best of traditional and generative search together to help you find what you need.” The company is now calling Bing “your AI-powered search and answer engine.” Like most AI web search tools, this provides summaries to answer queries.

Microsoft says this can take the form of a simple paragraph, like Gemini AI for Google searches, but that it also can provide “images and data from your favorite publishers and content owners.” Copilot Search is rolling out today.

The company also introduced something called Copilot Memory. This is Microsoft’s attempt to bring more personalization to Copilot. After all, it’s tough to have a true AI companion when it doesn’t remember anything about you. With this addition, Copilot will be able to remember specific details about your life, like “your favorite food, the types of films you enjoy and your nephew’s birthday and his interests.”

The company touts that the software will recommend actions based on what it remembers. To that end, Microsoft says Copilot will be able to do stuff like buy tickets to events, order flowers and make dinner reservations. It says the service will “work with most websites across the web.” We’ll see how that works out.

The update brings some other tools to the table, like the ability to auto-generate podcasts based on specific topics and offer shopping advice based on sales history across the web. These updates begin rolling out today, but it may not hit every user for a bit. Microsoft says availability will expand in the coming weeks and months.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/microsofts-latest-copilot-updates-include-a-mobile-version-of-the-multimodal-vision-tool-182752162.html?src=rss 

It was Tuesday June 25, 2019. San Francisco became the first US city to (temporarily) ban the sale of vapes, SpaceX successfully launched and deployed 24 satellites and I sat in Nintendo’s UK office on the outskirts of London, playing a demo of a game that still isn’t out. 

However, according to yesterday’s Switch 2 presentation, Hollow Knight: Silksong will arrive at some point this year. Nintendo even showed off a couple of seconds of new footage. There are slopes!

Oh Silksong, oh Hollow Knight: Silksong, oh Hollow Knight’s repurposed DLC. The second Hollow Knight game from Team Cherry was initially meant to be a DLC addition to the original, but plans changed, with the developers saying that it had become “too large and too unique.” (This many years later, exactly how large and unique will Silksong be?)

Later, as part of the 2022 Xbox and Bethesda Games showcase, a Silksong trailer teased a release date in the next 12 months as part of Xbox’s attempt to deliver a wave of exciting games after a lackluster start to the Series X/S launch.

When the early 2023 release date passed us by, Team Cherry delayed the game into 2024 and now, well, it’s 2025. I played that demo so long ago that it might have just been a dream.

Without rewriting my six-year-old hands-on impressions entirely, the new game features a new playable character named Hornet, who featured as a repeatable boss fight in the original Hollow Knight, with silk-based attacks and faster, more agile gameplay. It also offers a more aggressive play style, with Hornet able to heal herself using silk charges and even repair damage with silk bundles left behind from prior unsuccessful attempts. It’s a different gameplay twist from having to beat the Hollow Knight shadow in the original.

I subtitled my hands-on impressions, saying it would be “worth the wait.” Back then, I’d recently finished Hollow Knight on the Switch, putting in a few too many hours and was hungry for more bug-shaped Metroidvania adventures. Silksong felt fresh, more responsive, faster and flashier — and I just wanted to play more Hollow Knight.

Barely six seconds of footage during Nintendo’s Switch 2 presentation was enough to re-ignite the Silksong fandom, when it revealed nothing new more than some downhill traversal. It’s proof that a lot of people are still excited — and still waiting.

I’m excited, and six years on, it feels like it must be pretty close. 

Right?

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/that-one-time-i-played-hollow-knight-silksong-160022483.html?src=rss 

Nintendo is delaying US Switch 2 pre-orders in response to the new set of tariffs announced by President Donald Trump earlier this week, as first reported by Polygon. Following Nintendo’s announcement of the console on Wednesday, pre-orders in the United States were slated to open on April 9. They’re now delayed indefinitely.   

“Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the US will not start April 9, 2025 in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions,” the company told Engadget. “Nintendo will update timing at a later date. The launch date of June 5, 2025 is unchanged.”

As mentioned earlier, Nintendo officially announced the Switch 2 on April 2. Hours later, the Trump administration said it would impose a sweeping set of new tariffs targeted against a broad swath of countries, including Japan, China and Vietnam. Products from the latter two countries, where Nintendo manufactures much of its hardware, will be subject to import duties of 54 percent and 46 percent, respectively.  

In the US, Nintendo said the Switch 2 would cost $450. As Polygon notes, sticker shock was already dominating the conversation around Nintendo’s new handheld, with many fans begging the company to “drop the price!” of console during its recent livestreams. It’s unclear what could happen following Nintendo’s assessment of the situation, but one possibility is that the company could allocate less stock for the US market.              

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/nintendo-delays-switch-2-us-pre-orders-following-trump-tariffs-150747208.html?src=rss 

A four-pack of Samsung’s SmartTag 2 trackers is on sale for $58 via Woot. That’s a massive discount of 42 percent, as the regular price is $100. This combo pack ships with two black trackers and two white trackers.

They easily made our list of the best Bluetooth trackers. We appreciated the vast finding network, as there are a lot of Samsung phones out there contributing to it. We said the network is “larger than anything out there for Android.” The trackers offer a decent battery life of 16 months, and the batteries are replaceable.

There’s also a large hole for keychains, which is something Apple AirTags lack. The ring volume is also louder than both AirTags and Tile Pro trackers. These trackers are fairly hearty, with IP67 water and dust-resistance. Setup is simple, as the companion app walks users through just about everything.

There’s only one downside, but it’s a doozy. SmartTag trackers only work with Samsung tablets and phones. This doesn’t really impact the finding network, as there are millions of Samsung devices out there, but does limit who should make this purchase.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on X for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/a-four-pack-of-samsung-smarttag-2-trackers-is-on-sale-for-58-right-now-152356230.html?src=rss