Author: Starvision Desk

San Francisco, July 16 (IANS) Tech giant Microsoft has announced that it will “end” the ‘Xbox Game Pass Friends & Family’ preview programme on August 15.”On August 15, 2023, the Xbox Game Pass Friends & Family preview program will end as we review what we’ve learned over the past several months and investigate how to build an offer which we can launch worldwide,” the company said in a support page.”Thank you for your interest and participation in the Xbox Game Pass Friends & Family preview program. It has been incredible seeing our Game Pass Ultimate members share the fun of…

New Delhi, July 16 (IANS) Homegrown consumer electronics brand boAt Co-founder and CEO, Aman Gupta, was among the young entrepreneurs invited as part of the official delegation for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit to France. In a tweet, Gupta said that “no force can stop India as our time has come”.”I used to see second and third-generation entrepreneurs at state visits as an official delegation with the Prime Minister but now new-age entrepreneurs like myself are also being invited on such visits,” he said.”This is a significant moment for us, as it reflects the recognition and support given to the…

San Francisco, July 16 (IANS) Twitter-owner Elon Musk on Sunday said that “as promised”, the micro-blogging platform will “soon” share ad revenue from profile page views.Musk tweeted, “Soon, we will share ad revenue from profile page views, which should roughly double payouts.””Note, only views from verified users count, as it is otherwise trivial to bot scam the view count. “He also said, “We will increase the rate limit for verified users by 50 per cent. Should take effect within a few hours.”Twitter on Friday launched a new ads revenue sharing programme for creators, and started paying hefty sums.After receiving their…

New Delhi, July 16 (IANS) To compete with the Nintendo Switch, which transformed handheld gaming with its groundbreaking portable hybrid design and extensive game library, Asus has now stepped into the portable gaming PC market just a year later through its first portable handheld gaming device — “ROG Ally”.The ROG Ally has now been officially launched in India, which runs on the new Windows 11 so that you can continue your gaming experience while you’re on a long trip, commuting, or just chilling in your backyard.We used the 16GB+512GB variant of ROG Ally for a week, and here is what…

San Francisco, July 16 (IANS) Social discussion platform Reddit has unexpectedly removed users’ chat history prior to January 1 of this year. Reddit users asking why have been directed to a changelog update from June which announced feature updates to chats, reports The Verge.The update’s main announcement didn’t mention any information about data being removed, and discreetly placed a vague and short notice about the removal at the bottom.”In an effort to have a smooth and quick transition to this new infrastructure, we will migrate chat messages sent from January 1, 2023 onward,” the company said in the notice.If someone…

San Francisco, July 15 (IANS) Larry Hryb, also known by his Xbox Live Gamertag “Major Nelson”, has announced that he is leaving Microsoft after 20 years to work on the next chapter of his career. “After 20 incredible years, I have decided to take a step back and work on the next chapter of my career. As I take a moment and think about all we have done together, I want to thank the millions of gamers around the world who have included me as part of their lives,” Hryb tweeted on Friday.”Also, thanks to Xbox team members for trusting me…

San Francisco, July 15 (IANS) Meta (formerly Facebook) has introduced a generative artificial intelligence (AI) model — “CM3leon” (pronounced like chameleon), that does both text-to-image and image-to-text generation. “CM3leon is the first multimodal model trained with a recipe adapted from text-only language models, including a large-scale retrieval-augmented pre-training stage and a second multitask supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage,” Meta said in a blogpost on Friday.With CM3leon’s capabilities, the company said that the image generation tools can produce more coherent imagery that better follows the input prompts.According to Meta, CM3leon requires only five times the computing power and a smaller training dataset than…

London, July 15 (IANS) Meta (formerly Facebook) has confirmed that it is blocking EU-based users from using the newly-launched Instagram’s Threads app via VPN (Virtual Private Network). After several users complained about being unable to access the app via VPN, Meta confirmed that such attempts are being blocked, reports TechCrunch.Launched last week, Threads is not available in the EU due to privacy concerns.According to the company, it has taken additional steps to prevent users from accessing the new social app.”Threads is not currently available in most countries in Europe and we’ve taken additional steps to prevent people based there from…

New Delhi, July 15 (IANS) Around 127 online gaming companies and organisations have written an open letter to the government, urging it to reverse the 28 per cent GST on the full deposit value and segregate skill gaming from betting and gambling which has left the industry in significant distress.The letter, which has participants like Baazi Games, Dangal Games, Gameskraft Technologies, Nazara Technologies and WinZO Games PrivateLimited, said this move would potentially have devastating implications (including shut down of businesses) for MSMEs and startups that may nothave the capital reserves to withstand such a sharp tax increase.“Further, this decision will…

New Delhi, July 15 (IANS) London-based consumer technology brand Nothing has debuted its pop-up store “Drops” in India.The company launched Nothing Drops in Bengaluru for customers to buy the much-awaited Phone (2) with Ear (2) Black and related accessories in person.Phone (2) will go on open sale in India on July 21, from 12 p.m. onwards.For those eager to experience Phone (2) before that, they will be able to do so and pre-order it at the Bengaluru Nothing Drop location until July 16.The opportunity to own Phone (2) arrives with an exclusive launch offer price of Rs 39,999 on Flipkart…