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Game developers favor Steam and PC over other platforms
About 75 percent of game developers say that Steam and the PC platform is “very important” for the future of the game industry, according to a survey by the International Game Developers Association. The survey of 2,200 developers show that many view the PC as the top platform for the next five years. And 25 percent of developers said that “proprietary platforms” such as virtual reality are also very important. The issue of diversity in game content has been a huge issue in the past year. Seventy-four percent of developers rank the “advancement of game design” as being a “very important” issue for the industry’s future growth. “More diversity in game content” was at second place with 65 percent, and “advancement of storytelling” was third with 60 percent.
Read the full report at VentureBeat.
FBI offers record $3M reward for Russian hacking suspect
The FBI is offering a $3 million reward for information leading to the arrest or conviction of a Russian hacking suspect, the highest bounty ever offered by US authorities in a cybercrime case. Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev is accused of being the mastermind behind the GameOver Zeus botnet, which was used by cybercriminals to steal more than $100 million from businesses and consumers since 2011. The botnet was used to secretly infect between 500,000 and 1 million computers worldwide, with the goal of stealing banking credentials from unsuspecting computer users. In its first two months on the Internet, Crypolocker extorted more than $27 million in ransom payments, the Justice Department said last year.
Full story at CNET.
Instart Logic Unveils SmartSequence, Industry’s First Machine-Learning-Based Web Optimizer
Instart Logic, the provider of innovative solutions for ensuring faster and better cloud application delivery, announced the debut of its SmartSequence offering, which is the first ever solution that leverages machine-learning to optimize how HTML and Javascript code is loaded into browsers and thus improves web performance by making intelligent delivery decisions in real-time.
The offering makes use of a unique cloud-client architecture and improves performance by identifying which part of code to download and hence optimizes performance. The solution also identifies what parts of the HTML code is dynamic and loads them in advance.
Read more at CDN Advisor.
IBM Marches Further With Its Global Expansion Plan For SoftLayer Cloud Centers
SoftLayer Technologies, now an IBM Company, announced that Company has been working on adding new cloud centers in Sydney and Montreal as part of its $1.2 billion investment plan for global expansion. This will make the Company’s recent count of facilities to 5 in the last 4 months (including the recent ones at Germany, Mexico and Japan). Both Sydney and Montreal are expected to be functional from sometime in March and IBM also mentioned that in 2015, as well as adding cloud centers across Australia, India, Canada and Italy.
Full story at CDN Advisor.
The FDA is finally embracing health tech
the U.S. Food and Drug Administration took a huge step towards patient-centric medicine when it approved the marketing of genetics testing company 23andMe’s carrier test for Bloom Syndrome. This also means that it has become urgent to develop policies to regulate the rights of companies to resell data derived from the contents of our DNA and from our medical records. 23andMe has made no secret of its ambition to become an information-services provider to large medical and drug companies.
Big Pharma is champing at the bit to obtain as much individual DNA information as possible about large swathes of the populace. This will be a key part of research into what is often called “precision medicine,” a future where treatments will be able to more finely target ailments at a truly individual level.
Read more at VentureBeat.
