Technology

As you are likely already aware, Epic Games is pulling a massive PR stunt that has shrunk the worldmost popular game down to a single black hole.

As part of FortniteSeason 10 live event, called &The End,& the entire Battle Royale Island was sucked into a black hole, with every Fortnite social media channel deleting all of its content save for a live stream of the aforementioned black hole.

Itlike the game never existed.

This has been going on for nearly 24 hours now. I&d say thereless than 1% possibility that this is actually the end of the game.

For one thing, Fortnite is an insane revenue generator for Epic Games, a company that not only makes games but develops software for others to make games. In fact, Fortnite was actually built as a marketing vehicle for EpicUnreal Engine, to show off whatpossible with the technology.

No numbers have been released recently, but at one point last summer, The Verge reported that the game was making $300 million/month.

Fast-forward to today, more than two years after launch, and the game is far and away the most popular video game on the planet, with 250 million registered accounts. Italso one of the biggest esports by prize pool, with Epic pledging $100 million in prize cash for 2019.

But beyond the money (and letnot underplay the money here), there is also some evidence that the black hole event is slated to end on Tuesday morning. A data miner who goes by Lucas7yoshi on Twitter points to code on Fortnite.com that allegedly reveals the end of the event is on Tuesday at 6AM EST. Of course, this is far from confirmed and though we&ve reached out to Epic, we haven&t heard back.

The point? Epic didn&t just delete Fortnite. (However, itbeen terribly fun to watch gamers& temper tantrums play out on social media.)

Rather, the company is building as much hype as possible around its next chapter. With the entire map sucked into a black hole, all signs point to a brand new map.

This is important for two unequal reasons.

First and foremost, Fortnite has always taken place on the same map. Points of interest have been wiped away and replaced, and biodomes have been updated and tweaked along the way. Indeed, the ¤t& Fortnite map is markedly different from the map the game launched with.

But it has been a slow transition, with one small change here and there for more than two years. Whatever the reason behind this, one symptom has undoubtedly had an effect on the game. The longer you&ve played Fortnite, the more of an advantage you have.

This is particularly true with mechanics like building. Experience in other games, be it Battle Royale or third-person shooters, doesn&t carry over into Fortnite, where winning on both defense on offense rests in a playerability to build.

But the map plays its part, too. Long-time players of the game know this island inside and out. They know that you can slide down this part of the mountain without taking fall damage, or that itdifficult to jump your way onto this plateau without building. They know every single loot spawn on the map.

This has meant that, after two years, Fortnite has favored the veterans, which has left newcomers in a particularly difficult position.

Epic has tried to counter the imbalance of its players in a number of ways. For one, the game added Playground mode to give players a chance to practice in a relatively low-stakes environment. But Fortnite also made changes in the game that have given an edge to brand new players. The easiest and most obvious example of this is the introduction of the mechs in the beginning of Season 10, which were essentially unbeatable at their debut and took little to no skill to operate. Veterans were not pleased.

The piece that has been missing for the game is a good jumping-on point.

A brand new map may be the biggest opportunity yet for brand new players to join up alongside veterans of the game and have a fighting chance of being successful. For the first time, everyone will be lost. No one will know where all the loot is spawned in this or that building, or how to rotate from one point of interest to another with the greatest height advantage or the most cover.

But, instead of transitioning from the original map to a new one in a matter of hours, as is standard with every other update to a game, Epic has decided to draw this one out.

And letkeep this in context. Most schools are off today for Columbus Day. All those kids who were excited to grind out Season 11 on their day off are now left staring into a Black Hole with nothing to do but simmer in rage or… ya know, do something else.

This is exactly the kind of alpha energy from a game maker that I am here for. The ego!

While other games worry about getting as many players on their servers as possible at any given second of any day, Fortnite is taking a few days off to let you really miss it. Distance makes the heart grow fonder. For both old and new players, a new map means a fresh start and a fresh reason to get excited about Fortnite.

Much less critically, a new map addresses competition.

EAApex Legends remains one of the biggest threats to Fortnite. The Battle Royale game had an explosive (and reportedly expensive) launch and hit 50 million users faster than Fortnite did at launch. But interest in the game petered out until very recently, when EA introduced a brand new map for the first time.

The new map, called WorldEdge, reinvigorated the player base. Itbeen out for about two weeks now.

With Epicblack hole stunt, the publisher is having a true snap back moment.

&Go play your other game, if you must, or better yet just stare longingly into this cryptic black hole,& Fortnite is saying. &You&ll come running back the moment you hear I&ve returned.&

Before Google moves to bring its human-sounding robot calling service Duplex to help users automate their interactions with businesses to international markets, an Indian giant is deploying its own solution to get a jumpstart on the local market.

Reliance Jio today unveiled AI-powered Video Call Assistant service that will allow businesses to automate their customer support and other communications. The service, built in collaboration with Radisys, a U.S.-based subsidiary of Reliance Industries, can be accessed via a 4G phone call and does not require installation of any additional app, Jio said.

Executives of Reliance Jio demonstrated the technology on Monday at the third installment of Indian Mobile Congress, similar to but not affiliated with the trade show Mobile World Congress. They said they have already courted a number of customers for this service, including HDFC Bank.

In the demo, a user dials a regular phone number and sees a video chat option. Once tapped, the user is greeted by a pre-recorded video message from a human. To demonstrate the AIcapabilities, an executive of Reliance Jio asked the bot what was the interest rate on personal loans. The human-looking bot was able to answer the question without any delay.

The company, which became the largest telecom operator in India in three years, is also offering audio and text bot options to brands, executives said. &It may be a large business or small, our bot service is built for all,& one of the two executives said.

Image: Manish Singh / TechCrunch

The company said its developer toolkit — called Jio Bot Maker — will allow brands to build and deploy the AI assistant in &just five minutes.&

The company is hoping to address the ¤t customer pain points like endless call-hold music or seemingly never-ending IVR wait-times,& it said, as it looks to court more businesses in the country.

Earlier this year, Reliance Jio inked a deal with Microsoft to bring Office 365 and other services from the Redmond-headquartered giant to small businesses in India for subsidized cost.

The company has also developed a point-of-sale machine that its agents are increasingly trying to sell to neighborhood stores in the nation. Popularly known as kirana stores, these millions of mom and pop shops dot the entire country.

Reliance Industries, parent firm of Reliance Jio and the largest industrial house in the nation, also operates the largest retail chain in the country, called Reliance Retail. Despite billions of dollars spent on Indiae-commerce market, online sales still amount for just 3% of the overall sales in the nation, according to industry estimates.

The person who appears on the video chat could be replaced by anyone from the CEO of a company to a brand ambassador, Reliance Jio said. &We aim to democratize AI by enabling small businesses to create their own AI-based Bot with no coding and with minimal effort,& it added.

The company plans to introduce support for multiple languages to its bot service and serve &millions of businesses& across various industries in India.

Jio did not reveal when it plans to launch the developer kit to the public, but a spokesperson told TechCrunch that it will be made available &in the near future.&

Jio has made no secret that it wants to develop AI assistants to help businesses. Last year, it acquired Haptik, a Mumbai-based startup that develops &conversational& platforms and virtual assistants. The size of the deal was $100 million.

Aakrit Vaish, co-founder and CEO of Haptik, told TechCrunch in an interview earlier that the startup was developing voice bots.

Cambridge, UK-based biotech startup Mogrify, which is working on systematizing the development of novel cell therapies in areas such as regenerative medicine, has closed an initial $16 million Series A.

The raise from investors Ahren Innovation Capital,Parkwalkand24Haymarketfollows a $4M seed in February — taking its total raised to date to $20M.

Put simply, Mogrify approach entails analysis of vast amounts of genomic data in order to identify the specific energetic changes needed to flip an adult cell from one type to another without having to reset it to a stem cell state — with huge potential utility for a wide variety of therapeutic use-cases.

&What we&re trying to do with Mogrify is systematize that process where you can say heremy source cell, heremy target cell, here are the differences between the networks… and here are the most likely points of intervention that we&re going to have to make to drive the fate of an adult cell to another adult cell without going through a stem cell stage,& says CEO and investor Dr Darrin Disley.

So far he says itsuccessfully converted 15 cells out of 15 tries.

&We&re now rapidly moving those on through our own programs and partnership programs,& he adds.

Mogrifybusiness has three main components: Internal program development of cell therapies (current cell therapies itdeveloping include enhancing augmented cartilage implantation; non-invasive treatment of ocular damage; and for blood disorders). Italso developing a universal source of cells for use in immunotherapy — to act as &disease-eaters&, asDisley puts it.

Speculative IP development is another focus. &Because of the systematic nature of the technology we&re in a position very rapidly to identify areas of therapy that have particular cell conversions at their essence — and then drive that IP generation around those cells very quickly and create an IP footprint,& he says.

Partnering deals is the third piece. Mogrify is also working with others to co-develop and bring targeted cell therapies to market. Disley says italready closed some partnerships, though itnot announcing any names yet.

The startup is drawing on around a decadeworth of recent work genomics science. And specifically on a data-set generated by an international research effort, called Fantom 5, which its founders had early access to.

&We started with that massive Fantom data-set. Thatthe baseline, the background if you like. Think of it like two cities in America: Chicago and New York. Thereyour source cell, thereyour target cell. And because you have all the background data of every piece of the network — every building, every skyscraper — if you look at the two you can identify the difference in the gene expression, therefore you can identify which factors will regulate a wide array of those genes. So you can start identifying the differences between the two,& explainsDisley.

&We&ve then added to that massive data sets in DNA-protein and protein-protein interactions… so you start to now overlay all of that data. And then we&ve added on top of that new next-gen sequencing data and epigenetic data. So you&ve now got this massive data-set. Itlike having a network map between all the different cell types. So you&re therefore then able to make predictions on how many interventions, what interventions are needed to drive that change of state — and itsystematic. It doesn&t just recommend one set. Therea ranking. It can go down to hundreds. And there is some overlap and redundancies, so for example if one — you&re preferred thing — doesn&t work the way you wanted it to you can go back and select another.

&Or if therean IP issue around that factor you can ignore that piece of the network and use an alternative route. And once you&ve got to your target cell, if it needs to some tweaking you can actually re-sequence it and take that back and thatyour starting cell again. And you can go through this optimization process. So what comes out at the other end… you&ve got a patent that it like a small molecule composition of matter patent; itthe therapeutic. So you&re not coming out with the target, you&re actually coming out with here is the composition of matter on the cell.&

In terms of timeframe for getting novel cell therapies from concept to market Disley suggests a range of between four and seven years.

&Once you&ve identified the cell type that can be be the basis of your GMP manufacturable process and then you can tweak that to take it to the therapeutic indication you can develop a cell therapy and bring that to market in five years,& he says. &Itnot like the old days with small molecules where it can take ten, 15, 20 years to get a serious therapy on the market.

&When you&re treating patients… is because there are no other treatments for them, when you go into phase two and do your safety study [and] efficacy study you&re actually treating patients already in terms of their disease. And if you get it right you can get a fast track approval. Or a conditional approval… so that you may not even have to do a phase 3 [testing].&

&We&re not using any artificial intelligence here,& he also emphasizes, pointing to his experience investing in companies in the &big extreme data space& which he argues do best by using &unbiased approaches&.

&AI I think is still trying to find its way,& he continues. &Because in its essence it will be able to get to answers with smaller amounts of data but itonly as good as the data you train it on. And the danger with AI… it just learns to recognize what you want it to recognize. It doesn&t know what it doesn&t know.

&In combination, once you continue to generate this massive cell network data etc you can start applying aspects of machine learning and AI. But you couldn&t do Mogrify with AI without the data. You have to do it that way. And the data is so complex and combinatorial — 2,000 transcription factors, in terms of regulation of those genes, they then interact in network to do the protein-protein interactions, you&ve got epigenetic aspects of that, you could even start adding cell microbiome effects to that later — so you&ve got a lot of factors that could influence the phenotype of the cell thatcoming out the other end.

&So I think with AI you have to be a little careful. I think it will be a more optimizing tool once you&ve got sufficient confidence in your system.&

The plan for the Series A funding is to ramp up Mogrifycorporate operations and headcount — including bringing in senior executives and expertise from industry — as well as spending to fund its therapy development programs.

Disley notes its recent appointment of Dr Jane Osbourn as chair as one example.

&We&re bringing in more people with a lot of cell therapy experience from big pharma, around then more on the manufacturing and delivery of that — so really building so that we&re not just a tech company,& he says. &We&ve very strong already, we&re already 35 people on the tech and early stage drug discovery side — we&re going to add another 30 to that. But thatgoing to be increasingly more people with big pharma, cell therapy development, manufacturing experience to get products on to market.&

Partner search is another focus for the Series A. &We&re trying to find the right strategy partners. We&re not doing services, we&re not doing products — so we want to find the right strategic partners in terms of doing multi-programs in a partnership,& he adds. &And then a series of more tactical deals where people have got a specific problem with a cell conversion. These more turnkey deals, if you like. We still get up-fronts, milestones and royalties but they&re smaller.&

Despite now having enough money for the next two to two and half years italso leaving the Series A open to continue expanding the round over the next 12 months — up to a maximum of another $16M.

&We have so many interested investors,& Disley tells us. &This round we didn&t actually open our round. We did it with internal investors and people we&re very close to who we&ve worked with before, and there were investors lining up… [so] we are leaving it open so that in these next 12 months we may choose to increase the amount we bring in.

&It would be a maximum of another $16M if it was an A round but we may decide just to go straight forward if we progress very fast to a much bigger B round.&