Meta May Resume Quest 2 Sales in Germany as the Antitrust Case Ages

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November 24, 2022

As per a report by MIXED, a German VR publication, residents of Germany may soon be able to order Quest 2 and Quest Pro by the end of this year. As the antitrust case ages, Meta may resume sales in Germany.

Over the past 2 years, Meta has been blocked from promoting its VR headsets on allegations that Meta’s social accounts can be wrongfully used to log in to the devices. After the sales hit a halt in 2022 following a probe over the company’s plan to tie Facebook accounts to Oculus, consumers had to procure the VR devices from neighboring European countries.

The probe involved Germany’s Federal Cartel Office (FCO) following up on the claim and leading Meta to untie its data with its VR devices due to Meta’s so-called ‘superprofiling’ of users. Herein, Meta pooled usage data and linked it to a single user ID for ad targeting purposes.

On the ongoing issue, the FCO informed that Meta expressed interest in finding a middle-ground in the Facebook/Oculus matter in August 2022. The suggested solution would allow users to use Quest 2 and Quest Pro without social media accounts.

The FCO suggested Meta tweak its proposal in the least possible manipulative way so that users can decide how to set the headsets. It added, “Following corresponding adjustments, particularly with regard to user dialogues, the Quest 2 and Quest Pro headsets are also expected to be available in Germany soon.”

Magic Eden Announces Polygon Integration to bring Blockchain Games

By

Preetipadma K

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November 24, 2022

The NFT marketplace Magic Eden announces a collaboration with the Ethereum scaling layer-2 blockchain Polygon in order to expand into the blockchain gaming and NFT ecosystems.

In addition to hosting some of the biggest Web3 game projects and publishers, including well-known brands like Ubisoft, Atari, Animoca, and Decentraland, Polygon also serves as a scaling solution for the Ethereum blockchain. It is the perfect choice for projects that need a lot of digital assets since it enables transactions that are considerably faster and cheaper than those possible on Ethereum’s own mainnet.

Since adding the Ethereum blockchain in August, Magic Eden, which was previously only recognized as the leading marketplace for Solana NFTs, has grown into a multi-chain platform. Magic Eden claims that it chose Polygon as the next addition for two main reasons: the platform’s potential for hosting massive Web3 gaming events and the rising acceptance among leading Web2 companies. Meanwhile, the Solana blockchain is facing an uncertain future since the value of its native token, SOL, has dropped by more than 50% following the collapse of one of the blockchain’s largest investors, FTX, in recent weeks.

1/ @0xPolygon 🤝🏼 @MagicEden

Today, we're continuing our multi-chain vision by adding Polygon as our 3rd chain!

We can't wait to partner w/ world-class game developers, creators, & everyday brands joining web3.

Read more: https://t.co/hOCiGXOhji

Our launch partners 👇🏼 pic.twitter.com/93Uak9fYih
— Magic Eden 🪄 (@MagicEden) November 22, 2022

After expanding to Polygon, Magic Eden will be able to collaborate with strategic intellectual property owners, world-class game developers, and emerging creators – who will be eager to avail Magic Eden’s cross-chain audience.

With major game development companies BORA by Kakao Games, IntellaX, no, Boomland, Block Games, Planet Mojo, and Taunt Battleworld poised to launch on its Polygon Launchpad coming out in December, the collaboration has already brought significant partnerships to Magic Eden. The distribution and go-to-market competence of Magic Eden, which includes project/concept positioning, pre-launch timetable planning, and links to Web3 groups, will be advantageous for these games.

Following the launch of Magic Eden’s Polygon Launchpad, a MATIC-compatible NFT market will be introduced. This marketplace will respect royalties while looking at additional cutting-edge strategies to encourage other sources of creator monetization.

After that, Magic Eden plans to roll out additional Polygon support for NFTs, including Magic Eden List (an audience targeting and allowlist tool), Drop Calendar, and analytics which will boost NFT discovery and trading.

There was a brief decline in trade volumes last month as a result of the Magic Eden switching to an optional royalty model. Despite conflicting opinions over the discontinuation of royalty payments, the integration of Polygon NFTs may aid in restoring greater trading activity to the platform.

In July, Magic Eden announced the launch of Magic Ventures, a new fund dedicated to investing in innovative blockchain games and gaming infrastructure. In the same month, it also started Eden Games, its own gaming subsidiary, as the platform advances into blockchain gaming.

China’s Tianjin University releases Brain-Computer Interface platform MetaBCI

By

Preetipadma K

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November 24, 2022

Tianjin University brain computer interface platform metabci

Together with startup Suishi Intelligent Technology and CEC Cloud Brain, a joint venture between the university and the state-owned China Electronics Corporation, Tianjin University in China developed and released a brain-computer interface (BCI) platform called MetaBCI.

Brain-computer interface technology enables signal exchange between the human brain and an external device. It enables direct human control of machines without being constrained by physical limitations. In simple words, it is a system that converts electrical impulses that are created when neurons fire and communicate into commands that are transferred to an output device to perform the desired action.

The primary goal of BCI technology development was to enable paralyzed individuals to use their thoughts to operate assistive devices. However, new use cases are always being found. For instance, Neurable garnered much media attention in 2017 for developing the first virtual reality (VR) game ever to be controlled by the brain. Players were instructed to operate a remote-controlled car with their minds while sitting in front of a computer, wearing an EEG (electroencephalography) headset. Recently, Science Eye announced working on a brain-computer interface device that targets retinitis pigmentosa (RP) and dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD), both of which can cause serious vision loss.

By analyzing signals and connecting devices, MetaBCI aims to disrupt the software side of the technology. According to Xu Minpeng, a professor at Tianjin University, who announced the project on Sunday at a seminar in Tianjin city, Chinese researchers claim that this open-source platform is capable of consolidating the BCI data structure and processing process and developing a common decoding algorithm framework, which provides a solution for the entire process as a BCI software. According to Xu, the system can already accommodate 14 BCI data sets, apply 16 data analysis methods, and use 53 decomposition models. The team plans to keep introducing more capabilities.

There are typically two kinds of brain-computer interface: invasive and non-invasive. Invasive BCI involves surgically implanting electrodes or other specialized equipment into the human brain or onto certain neuron sets. In contrast, non-invasive BCI devices are simple to install and remove. These devices monitor and record brain activity using sensors placed on or close to the head. Researchers often favor non-invasive BCI since it is the safer and more affordable option.

MetaBCI, written in the popular Python programming language, is now available on G itHub, a code-hosting site for version control and collaboration. According to its GitHub introduction, the platform only applies to non-invasive BCI devices and excludes, for instance, chips placed under a person’s scalp.

Advantages of working with a Digital Marketing Agency

By

Ratan Kumar

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November 23, 2022

Many people hesitate to contact a digital marketing agency. Several thoughts occur in the minds of business owners while making this decision. It may not be an easy portion of your money to spend, but worth it when you see the results. Getting digital marketing from edgeonline.com.au or similar services can be an excellent choice if you look forward to business expansion. The most important suggestion to remember is to choose an experienced agency.

A digital marketing agency can help you with SEO, Google Ads, Social Media Marketing, etc. Select an expert who offers complete transparency regarding their marketing operations. Your first experience with an inappropriate agency might put you in a dilemma to contact another agency. However, the right services will help you regain confidence in your business and digital marketing tools. From graphic designing to website development, much can be accomplished with the help of a digital marketing firm. Please read below to learn about the top benefits of working with them.

Perks of Working With a Digital Marketing Agency

If you need clarification about hiring an agency, the below points will help you make a sound decision.

You are on top of the latest trends

If you are aware of trends and algorithm updates in the digital world, you must also know their importance. There are different aspects of digital marketing, and only the experts can implement them correctly. When your business is in the hands of a marketing firm, it is their responsibility to ensure you stay on top of the latest trends. They will employ different strategies uniquely and help your business stay on top.

Extended Marketing Team

Hiring a digital marketing agency will speed up your game if you already have an internal team working on the marketing efforts. You will have an extended team working for a common goal: acquiring more customers with a higher conversion rate. Even if you don’t have an internal team, hiring a firm will ensure you have a specialist on your side. It is more convenient and wise for small and medium-sized companies to hand over their marketing responsibilities to a digital marketing agency.

Getting Advanced Insights

There are so many perks to working with a team of experts; one is getting access to advanced insights. They will help you get more details about your customers and overall performance on the digital platforms. These tools can make or break your marketing campaign. They can help you dive deeper into your data and offer suggestions that can be game-changers.

Getting Accountability

A quality agency will be accountable and reliable. Reliability means that you can call the experts and learn about what’s going on with the strategy. They are answerable to you and tell you why an ad is not working out. If a paid campaign doesn’t achieve the desired results, you have someone to ask questions and hold accountable. However, a reputed agency will provide you desired results and be transparent with their operation.

Bottom Line

Now that you know the advantages of having a digital marketing agency on your team, it’s time to start. You can learn about digital marketing from edgeonline.com.au or someone similar. Incorporating these strategies into your business operations will help you achieve your sales targets.

Times have changed, and they demand new tools and techniques for business expansion. Digital marketing is one of the essential tools in today’s times. Your marketing strategy is incomplete without it. So, contact a marketing expert and see how it makes a difference in the overall business.

UK government launches a new innovation program, AI decarbonization

By

Manjiri Gaikwad

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November 23, 2022

On Tuesday, the Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), the UK government, announces an innovation program to support artificial intelligence for reducing carbon emissions. The innovation program, also known as AI for decarbonization, is part of the UK government’s Net Zero Innovation Portfolio.

The program comprises two separate streams for grant funding that will be launched in two initial stages. The stream1 worth up to £500,000 will be used to co-fund the virtual center of excellence on AI innovation and decarbonization till March 2025. Stream2, worth up to £1 million, is designed to fund projects that will empower the development of AI technologies to enable decarbonization.

Science Minister George Freeman said, “AI decarbonization program offers an exciting opportunity to use and develop UK’s AI expertise. Putting AI into action can enable people to save energy costs for businesses and households.”

The program aims to stimulate further innovations in the AI sector in the UK to drive growth and achieve net zero ambitions by encouraging collaboration across technology, energy, and industry sectors. The AI decarbonization program is built on the ideas developed in the National AI strategy published last year.

NeurIPS 2022 announces winner of the Test of Time Award

By

Sahil Pawar

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November 23, 2022

The Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems has announced the award-winning papers for NeurIPS 2022. This year “ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks” by Ilya Sutskever, Alex Krizhevsky, and Geoffrey Hinton, aka “AlexNet paper,” was unanimously selected by the Program Chairs for the Test of Time Award.

In 2012, it was presented as the first CNN trained on the ImageNet Challenge, far surpassing the state-of-the-art at the time, and since then, it has made a huge impact on the machine learning community, according to the blog.

The three categories of awards for NeurIPS 2022 are Outstanding Main Track Papers, Outstanding Datasets and Benchmark Track papers, and the Test of Time paper.

According to the blog, winning papers in the category of Outstanding Main Track Papers include Is Out-of-distribution Detection Learnable?; Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding; Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models; ProcTHOR: Large-Scale Embodied AI Using Procedural Generation, and several more.

Winning papers in the category of Outstanding Datasets and Benchmark Track papers include LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next-generation image-text models and MineDojo: Building Open-Ended Embodied Agents with Internet-Scale Knowledge.

AWS launches its second infrastructure region in India

By

Manjiri Gaikwad

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November 23, 2022

After Mumbai, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces its second infrastructure region in India, Hyderabad. The AWS infrastructure in Hyderabad is assumed to support more than 48,000 full-time jobs annually.

With the Hyderabad infrastructure region, developers, startups, entrepreneurs, enterprises, government, education, and non-profit organizations will have more choices for running their applications and serving users from data centers in India. Customers can access advanced AWS technologies like data analytics, security, machine learning, and artificial intelligence through the Hyderabad region.

Prasad Kalyanaraman, the vice president of AWS infrastructure services at AWS, stated that the launch of the AWS Hyderabad region supports Indian digital transformation and is a part of the long-term in the country. Customers and partners in India will have an additional regional infrastructure to deploy applications with resilience, availability, and lower latency. AWS is glad to be a part of the future of the Indian technology community and is committed to helping organizations across industries to increase agility and drive innovation.

Besides Hyderabad, AWS has also planned to launch five more AWS regions in Australia, Israel, Canada, Thailand, and New Zealand. AWS regions comprise availability zones, which place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations.

RIL-backed Addverb to open its second manufacturing plant in India

By

Sahil Pawar

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November 23, 2022

Addverb second manufacturing plant India

Reliance Industries Limited (RIL)-backed robotics company Addverb Technologies will be opening its second manufacturing plant in India in the next three months.

According to Co-founder Satish Shukla, the new factory will facilitate more than 3,000 jobs, along with additional indirect employment opportunities at project deployment sites, Shukla added. Both facilities are located in Greater Noida.

“Our second manufacturing facility in Greater Noida will be spread across 15 acres. We will manufacture autonomous mobile and shuttle categories of robots. Production at the new facility will begin in the next three months,” Shukla said.

According to Shukla, the factory would be able to produce up to 60,000 robots every year. However, it can be scaled upto 6-8 times if required. Addverb’s current factory in Greater Noida is able to produce up to 50,000 robots annually.

The company also plans to use the new unit to take some pressure off its current facility, which also serves as a software research, R&D, and experience center. The new facility will be dedicated to large-scale manufacturing, while the existing one will focus on specialized manufacturing.

In January, Reliance Industries bought a 54% stake in Addverb for $132 million. It also placed an order worth $1 billion with Addverb.

39th global edition of World AI Show to take place in Mumbai

By

Sahil Pawar

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November 23, 2022

39th global edition of World AI Show Mumbai

Taking the developments and adoption of AI in India, the 39th global edition of the World AI Show is set to take place at The Leela, Mumbai, on November 23, 2022. It will highlight pioneering advancements and endeavors in India’s AI ecosystem.

The event will discuss significant developments in India’s AI, ML, information architecture (IA), and robotics environment, providing insights on various government initiatives aimed at maximizing internet access and promoting services like e-education, e-health, e-governance, and e-banking. The event will host some of the most renowned thinkers in the Indian robotics, AI, ML, and IA landscape.

“With the World AI Show, we aim to draw attention to India’s advantageous atmosphere for the development of global AI,” said Mithun Shetty, CEO of Trescon.

World AI Show is a thought-leadership-driven and business-focused global series of events that are conducted in strategic locations worldwide. As part of the world tour, the Indian edition is gathering pre-qualified CTOs, CIOs, CEOs, Heads of Innovation, International AI experts from the industry, Heads of AI, and Chief Digital Officers.

The show features exciting panel discussions, tech talks, keynotes, enterprise use-case presentations, and product showcases to discuss some of the latest challenges for the sector due to the pandemic. One can witness next-gen AI solutions from global leaders and explore their relevance and impact on their organization.

Peter Weckesser says that India is the AI Hub for Schneider Electric

By

Disha Chopra

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November 23, 2022

Peter Weckesser, the executive vice president of Scheider Digital and chief digital officer at Schneider Electric, said that India is the company’s most significant “AI Hub.” The company has its AI hubs at 4 central locations, including France and the USA.

With over 40% of its workforce team in India, Schneider Electric has accelerated its AI operations in the country. The company will build data centers, infrastructure, and other necessary elements required for digitization using the EcoStruxure architecture. As a prominent AI Hub, India will become a center of excellence in innovation and human capabilities to enhance the consumer experience.

Read More: AI Code Generator Kite Shuts Down

The company experienced significant growth in its AI team over the last year, approximately 30%. The team focuses on developing cutting-edge technologies while minimizing carbon emissions to transform industries to be sustainable potentially.

With extensive R&D centers and software engineers working for the company, Schneider aims to drive digital transformation by combining world-class processes and energy-focused technologies for businesses. It develops and provides end-to-point cloud solutions for products, software, and other IT-related services.