Technology

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With the next version of Windows 10, coming this spring, Microsoft Cortana digital assistant will lose a number of consumer skills around music and connected homes, as well as some third-party skills. Thatvery much in line with Microsoftnew focus for Cortana, but it may still come as a surprise to the dozens of loyal Cortana fans.

Microsoft is also turning off Cortana support in its Microsoft Launcher on Android by the end of April and on older versions of Windows that have reached their end-of-service date, which usually comes about 36 months after the original release.

As the company explained last year, it now mostly thinks of Cortana as a service for business users. The new Cortana is all about productivity, with deep integrations into Microsoftsuite of Office tools, for example. In this context, consumer services are only a distraction, and Microsoft is leaving that market to the likes of Amazon and Google .

Because the new Cortana experience is all about Microsoft 365, the subscription service that includes access to the Office tools, email, online storage and more, it doesn&t come as a surprise that the assistantnew feature will give you access to data from these tools, including your calendar, Microsoft To Do notes and more.

And while some consumer features are going away, Microsoft stresses that Cortana will still be able to tell you a joke, set alarms and timers, and give you answers from Bing.

For now, all of this only applies to English-speaking users in the U.S. Outside of the U.S., most of the productivity features will launch in the future.

Coronavirus fears prompt even more event cancellations, controversial facial recognition software is being used widely and DocuSign acquires Seal Software. Hereyour Daily Crunch for February 28, 2020.

1. Facebook cancels F8 conference, citing coronavirus concerns

Facebook has confirmed that it has canceled its annual F8 developers conference over growing concerns about the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. More specifically, the company says itcanceling the &in-person component& — there may still be video presentations, along with live-streamed and local events, under the F8 umbrella.

At the same time, companies, including Microsoft, are pulling out of the Game Developers Conference over similar concerns. And the Geneva Motor Show was just canceled.

2. Clearview said its facial recognition app was only for law enforcement as it courted private companies

After claiming that it would only sell its controversial facial recognition software to law enforcement agencies, a new report in BuzzFeed News suggests that Clearview AI is less than discerning about its client base, and has in fact shopped its technology far and wide.

3. DocuSign acquires Seal Software for $188M to enhance its AI chops

Seal Software was founded in 2010, and, while it may not be a mainstream brand, its customers include the likes of PayPal, Dell, Nokia and DocuSign itself. (DocuSign previously invested in the company, too.) These businesses use Seal for its contract management tools, but also for its analytics, discovery and data extraction services.

4. Senate passes ‘rip and replace& bill to remove old Huawei and ZTE equipment from networks

Written as a response to recent concerns around Chinese hardware manufacturers, the bill would ban purchase of telecom equipment from embattled Chinese manufactures like Huawei and ZTE. It also includes $1 billion in funding to help smaller rural telecoms &rip and replace& existing equipment from specific manufacturers.

5. The world Bob Iger made

The Disney executive has been openly thinking about retirement and searching for a successor — a search that culminated in this weekannouncement that he&d be stepping down from the CEO role immediately. But Igersuccession planning hasn&t stopped him from solidifying Disneydominance of the entertainment business, a position designed to last long after his departure. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. ‘Robot& was coined 100 years ago, in a play predicting human extinction by android hands

Published 100 years ago, R.U.R. (RossumUniversal Robots) by Czech writer Karel Čapek is best remembered for bringing the word &robot& to sci-fi — and English, generally.

7. Catching up with Startup Battlefield

We&re trying out something new: As you (hopefully) know, TechCrunch hosts a number of Startup Battlefield events, and afterwards, those startups often go on to do interesting and newsworthy things. But there are so many Battlefield alumni at this point that we can&t cover every announcement. So occasionally, I&ll be rounding them up here.

This week, we&ve got news from Berlin 2019 competitor Nodle.io, which is crowdsourcing the connectivity of smart sensors by offloading the task to smartphones. And Nodle announced this week that it has acquired Internet-of-Things security company Brickchain.com.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunchroundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you&d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

In a wide-ranging discussion at the Air Warfare Symposium held by the U.S. Air Force, Elon Musk touched on some old and new themes, but one highlight of the discussion was the small window into hiring and firing practices at SpaceX — arguably one of the worldmost demanding engineering companies.

The company prides itself on innovation, and, for its chief executive officer, that apparently extends to the interview process itself.

&[When we] interview people we ask for some evidence of exceptional ability that includes innovation,& says Musk. &At the interview point we select for new people who want to create new technology.&

The mercurial chief executive didn&t elaborate more fully on what proof of innovation looks like in the interview process or in an applicantprevious work, but itan interesting bullet point on the companypractices.

And the emphasis on innovation extends to the companyincentive structure, advancement decisions and ultimately how long someone will remain at the company, Musk said.

&Incentive structure is set up that innovation is rewarded and making mistakes along the way but failure to try to innovate comes with a big penalty,& Musk said. &You will be fired.&

Itnot just a failure to innovate, according to Musk. If the employee&innovations aspirations are not very good, they will no longer be at the company.&

This emphasis on innovation is critical for companies and nations to remain ahead of their competition. Musk said he doesn&t necessarily worry about intellectual property theft at either Tesla or SpaceX because hopefully the companies are developing technologies that are at least three years ahead of the competition.

&The way you achieve intellectual property protection is by innovating fast enough,& says Musk. &Speed of innovation is what matters. I do say this to my teams quite a lot. Innovation per-year is what matters.&

Although a company like IBM, with a massive patent portfolio and thousands of innovations locked in its laboratory might take issue with the sentiment, Musk says his point extends not just to companies, but to competing nation-states too.

Specifically, Musk mentioned the need for innovation if the U.S. is going to compete effectively against China, a country that could have an economy twice to three-times the size of the United States in the coming years.

&The foundation of war is economics,& Musk said. &If you have half the resources of the counterparty then you better be real innovative because [otherwise] we&re going to lose… The U.S. will be, militarily, second.&

GDCtop sponsors continue to pull out of attending the San Francisco gaming conference. Today, Amazon announced it would no longer be sending employees to the event.

In an update, the team shared that they would instead be hosting a &global online event& to share news that they had been planning to detail at the conference.

Amazon Game Tech is a &diamond partner& at the Game Developers Conference this year, a designation that signifies sponsors &who play an integral role in the success of GDC,& the conference says on its website. At this point, the only diamond partners who have not officially withdrawn are Intel, Nvidia and Google.

Facebook, Sony, Microsoft, Unity and Epic Games have all pulled out of the conference over concerns surrounding the COVID-19 outbreak. Now, Amazon joins them.

TechCrunch has reached out to the other remaining sponsors at the event.

End Game Interactive CEO Yang C. Liu has a refreshingly straightforward description of what he and his co-founder Luke Zbihlyj are up to: &We&re just building games. And to be honest, we don&t know what we&re doing.&

Despite this self-proclaimed ignorance, End Game has just raised $3 million in seed funding from an impressive group of investors: The round was led by the game-focused firm Makers Fund, with participation from Clash of Clans developer Supercell, Unity CEO David Helgason, Twitch COO Kevin Lin, Twitch VP Hubert Thieblot, Danny Epstien and Alexandre Cohen of Main Street Advisors and music executive Scooter Braun.

Liu told me that he and Zbihlyj got their start by building websites tied to existing games, such as PokéVision, a site for finding Pokémon in Pokémon GO. However, they were inspired by the success of simple, browser-based multiplayer games like Slither.io to create games of their own — first Zombs.io, then Spinz.io, then Zombs Royale.

Altogether, End Game says its titles have attracted more than 160 million players, with 1 million people playing in a single day. Zombs Royale, in particular, seems to have been a hit — the battle royale game (where a single map can pit up to 100 players against each other) was one of 2018most Googled games in the United States.

Liu said the teamsuccess convinced them to focus their efforts on game development: &Do we want to make products that people simply use, or games that people think about out when they&re going to school, or going to work, or dream about?&

Zombs Royale was supposedly built in less than four weeks, but Liu said that after its launch in early 2018, the team spent most of the year maintaining and scaling the game. Then 2019 was all about building a team and creating the next game, Fate Arena, a title in the new Auto Chess genre thatsupposed to launch on PC, mobile and other platforms soon.

Liu noted that unlike End Gameprevious work, which featured simple 2D art (&On Zombs Royale and Spinz, I did the art, and itterrible&), Fate Arena will feature a &3D, high-fidelity art style.&

But even as the companygames start looking a little less primitive, the goal is still to develop and iterate quickly. Liu said he hopes to fund &many tries& at building other cross-platform, multiplayer games with this seed round.

&We pride ourselves on rapid experimentation,& he said, adding that the key is ¬ biting off more than we can chew.We design [our games] to scale from the beginning. We don&t necessarily need to be World of Warcraft, where you need to make 100 quests as the baseline. We&re focused on games with a small starting point that can scale into something much bigger.&

Supercell Developer Relations Lead Jaakko Harlas made a similar point in a statement included in the funding announcement:

Many companies are quick to point out how fast-moving they are. Then you come across a team like this and realize what being lean and moving fast really means. Yang, Luke and the team have already shown that they can ship accessible games that showcase a real flair for fun, and we look forward to supporting them in their quest for the next big hit game.