Technology

Years ago, in the heyday of home video, I played a boardgames that used VHS tapes and electronic parts to help spur the action along. From Candy Land VCR to Captain Power, game makers were doing the best they could with a new technology. Now, thanks to Alexa, they can try something even cooler & board games that talk back.

The first company to try this is Voice Originals. Their new game, When In Rome, is a family board game that pits two teams against each other in a race to travel the world. The game itself consists of a board and a few colored pieces and the real magic comes from Alexa. You start the game by enabling the When In Rome skill and then you start the game. Alexa then prompts you with questions as you tool around the board.

The rules are simple because Alexa does most of the work. The game describes how to set up the board and gets you started and then you just trigger with your voice it as you play.

The companyfirst game, Beasts of Balance, was another clever hybrid of AR and real life board game action. Both games are a bit gimmicky and a bit high tech & you won&t be able to play these in a cozy beach house without Internet, for example & but ita fun departure from the norm.

Like the VCR games of yore, When In Rome depends on a new technology to find a new way to have fun. Ita clever addition to the standard board game fare and our family had a good time playing it. While itnot as timeless as a bit of Connect 4 or Risk, ita great addition to the boardgames shelf and a cool use of voice technology in gaming.

Skype redesign launched last year was met with mixed reviews, but the company is forging ahead by rolling out a number of its new features to other platforms, including the desktop. Microsoft today is launching Skype version 8.0 that will replace version 7.0 (aka Skype classic), the latter which will no longer function after September 1, 2018. The new release introduces a variety of features, including HD video and screen-sharing in calls, support for @mentions in chats, a chat media gallery, file and media sharing up to 300 MB, and more. It will also add several more features this summer, including most notably, supported for encrypted audio calls, texts, and file sharing as well as built-in call recording.

The 8.0 release follows on the update to Skype desktop that rolled out last fall,largely focusing on upgrading the visual elements of new design, like the color-coding in chat messages and &reaction& emojis. This release also included the chat media gallery and file sharing support, which are touted as new today, but may have already hit your desktop.

Although Skype still has some 300 million monthly users, it no longer appears to be growing. While once a must-have app for communication, Skype has faced increased competition over the years from the likes of AppleFaceTime, and other apps for texting and calls, like Messenger and WhatsApp, among others, plus new communication apps for business, like Slack. To better compete, Microsoft gave Skype a facelift starting last year, which introduced a number of social features seemingly aimed at a younger user base, including its own take on Stories.

Todaydesktop release focuses again on consumer-friendly features, with the added support of HD (1080px video) video calls which can include up to 24 people, as well as the Twitter-inspired @mentions.

Later this summer, Microsoft says Skype will add support for profile invites (to invite friends to join you on Skype), read receipts for messages, group links for chats and calls, and other features.

The most significant of the forthcoming additions includes an end-to-end encrypted experience where Skype audio calls, text messages, and shared files like images, audio and video, and secured with the industry standard Signal Protocol. Messages and notifications in these conversations will also be hidden in the chat list to keep the communication private.

And, at long last, Skype is adding built-in call recording. Many Skype users today use third-party add-ons in order to record calls & something that should have prompted Skype to react years ago by making this a native option. The calls will be recorded in the cloud and everyone in the call will be notified the call is being recorded, for privacysake and for legal reasons. The recorded calls will additionally include everyonevideo and screen shares, Microsoft notes.

Skype 8.0 will also soon roll out to iPad users with features likequoted messages, personalized themes, chat list, @mentions, and more.

Skype version 7.0 will continue to work until the cut off date, Microsoft says. (If you&re not sure which version you&re on, herehow to check on Windows, Mac and Linux desktops.) Afterwards, you&ll need to update to version 8.0 if you want to keep using Skype.

Last round before the IPO. Thathow Fastly frames its new $40 million Series F round. It means that the company has raised $219 million over the past few years.

The funding round was led by Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners with participation from Sozo Ventures, Swisscom Ventures, and existing investors.

Fastly operates a content delivery network to speed up web requests. Letsay you type nytimes.com in your browser. In the early days of the internet, your computer would send a request to one of The New York Times& servers in a data center. The server would receive the request and send back the page to the reader.

But the web has grown immensely, and this kind of architecture is no longer sustainable. The New York Times use Fastly to cache its homepage, media and articles on Fastlyservers. This way, when somebody types nytimes.com, Fastly already has the webpage on its servers and can send it directly. For some customers, it can represent as much as 90 percent of requests.

Scale and availability are one of the benefits of using a content delivery network. But speed is also another one. Even though the web is a digital platform, itvery physical by nature. When you load a page on a server on the other side of the world, itgoing to take hundreds of milliseconds to get the page. Over time, this latency adds up and it feels like a sluggish experience.

Fastly has data centers and servers all around the world so that you can load content in less than 20 or 30 milliseconds. This is particularly important for Stripe or Ticketmaster as response time can greatly influence an e-commerce purchase.

Fastlyplatform also provides additional benefits, such as DDoS mitigation and web application firewall. One of the main challenges for the platform is being able to cache content as quickly as possible. Users upload photos and videos all the time, so it should be on Fastlyservers within seconds.

The company has tripled its customer base over the past three years. It had a $100 million revenue run rate in 2017. Customers now include Reddit, GitHub, Stripe, Ticketmaster and Pinterest.

There are now 400 employees working for Fastly. Itworth noting that women represent 42 percent of the executive team, and 65 percent of the engineering leads are women, people of color or LGBTQ (or the intersection of those categories). And if you haven&t read all the diversity reports from tech companies, those are great numbers.