Niantic Labs, maker of the wildly popular Pokémon Go and the augmented-reality adventure Ingress, has acquired social media startup Evertoon to expand its reach across mobile platforms. Rather than an acquisition, it looks like an acqu-hire: Niantic is hiring all five Evertoon employees for their social media expertise and engineering know-how, rather than a desire to take over the Evertoon property itself.
Their experience in adding social media to digital products was the reason for the hire, Niantic founder John Hanke said in a blog post. “Today I am excited to announce that we have acquired the Evertoon team, who bring with them a wealth of talent and experience in mobile products, tools for creativity, and community building.”
Evertoon released a mobile app that allowed users to create avatars based on their own likeness, which they could then manipulate to perform a variety of actions and create miniature movies or music videos. The company was founded in 2014 by Niane Wang, a Google veteran who co-founded Google Desktop.
“Our mission is to use animation to enable video creation for anyone with stories to tell, regardless of their looks, race, or age,” Evertoon said in a statement. “It has been wonderful seeing this come to fruition in our diverse community.”
The company will be shutting down its online support on November 30, although you can still continue to create animations in offline mode on your phone. “As a thank-you, we recently released 60 new animations and 13 clothing items. We hope you enjoy using these in your future videos,” the company said. The latest version of the iOS Evertoon app is now available in the App Store.
The Evertoon team will get to work adding a social platform to Pokémon Go and other upcoming Niantic games.
Although Pokémon Go is no longer the global phenomenon it once was, it still has a huge and loyal user base and generates a ton of money. Augmented reality certainly has a big future in gaming, as more than two million trainers participated in a recent “Pikachu Outbreak” event in Japan. With the release of third-generation monsters and ongoing events, this move could help to reinvigorate interest in the franchise — which remains one of the best augmented reality apps around.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.