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Tech Radar

The PS5 and Xbox Series X games price hike is unpleasant – but not surprising


2K Games has been the first company to commit to next-gen game pricing, setting the price of NBA 2K21 on Xbox Series X and PS5 at an eye-watering $70 – $10 more than its price on PS4 and Xbox One.

But it looks like 2K Games isn’t the only publisher that will implement a price hike on Xbox Series X and PS5 games, as research company IDG told GamesIndustry.biz that other major publishers are considering doing the same.

While this is a very high amount to pay for the standard edition of any game, it’s also a necessary price increase. Compared to others industries, we’ve been fairly lucky when it comes to game prices – and here’s why. Read More

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VentureBeat

How Stitch Fix used AI to personalize its online shopping experience


Online retailers have long lured customers with the ability to browse vast selections of merchandise from home, quickly compare prices and offers, and have goods conveniently delivered to their doorstep. But much of the in-person shopping experience has been lost, not the least of which is trying on clothes to see how they fit, how the colors work with your complexion, and so on.

Companies like Stitch Fix, Wantable, and Trunk Club have attempted to address this problem by hiring professionals to choose clothes based on your custom parameters and ship them out to you. You can try things on, keep what you like, and send back what you don’t. Stitch Fix’s version of this service is called Fixes. Customers get a personalized Style Card with an outfit inspiration. It’s algorithmically driven and helps human style experts match a garment with a particular shopper. Each Fix included a Style Card that showed clothing options to complete outfits based on the various items in a customer’s Fix. Due to popular demand, last year the company began testing a way for shoppers to buy those related items directly from Stitch Fix through a program called Shop Your Looks. Read More

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Mashable

Were your taxes a hot mess? This receipt tracker app is 87% off.


Products featured here are selected by our partners at StackCommerce.If you buy something through links on our site, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission.

Foreceipt makes it easy to keep track of all your spending.
Foreceipt makes it easy to keep track of all your spending.

Image: Foreceipt

By StackCommerceMashable Shopping

TL;DR: Get a 5-year subscription to Foreceipt’s receipt tracker app for $29.99, an 87% savings as of July 5.

We’ve all encountered it: piles of receipts in need of filing all year until Tax Day comes along. Some are crumpled in our wallets, some are stacked in drawers, and some are laying around random places in the house or office.  Read More

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Tech Radar

Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 release date, price, leaks and everything we know


The Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 is expected to be released by the end of 2020, giving Samsung another shot at toppling Apple’s reign as the most popular tablet manufacturer with its iPad Pro devices.

Succeeding the Galaxy Tab S6 from 2019, the Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 will be Samsung’s top-end tablet for 2020, sitting above the Galaxy Tab S6 Lite and any Galaxy Tab A devices launched over the year. We’ve heard it could come with a Galaxy Tab S7 Plus, too, though it’s not clear how different this could be. Read More

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TechCrunch

The startups edition – TechCrunch


The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every Saturday in your inbox.

Hello and welcome back to The Station, a newsletter dedicated to all the present and future ways people and packages move from Point A to Point B. I’m your host Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch.

For all the U.S. readers here, I hope you are enjoying the holiday weekend.

I am mixing up the format this week because I am in charge here, it’s a holiday and I don’t want this newsletter to get too formulaic. So today, the newsletter will highlight a few mobility startups as well as some of their ideas that don’t typically get a lot of attention. Read More

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Mashable

‘The Hobbit’ is getting a new audio book edition read by Andy Serkis

As if we needed an excuse to dive back into J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, a new audiobook version of the prelude to The Lord of the Rings read by Andy Serkis is coming out in September.

To tease the release of this version of The Hobbit, publisher HarperCollins released a snippet of Serkis’s narration at the very beginning of the book. It’s just about two minutes of the book’s total 7-hour-and-40-minute running time and it sounds great.

Serkis portrayed Gollum in the Peter Jackson-directed The Lord of the Rings trilogy and was second unit director on The Hobbit trilogy so he’s certainly no stranger to Middle Earth. Plus he has a voice that just seems to fit the story very well. Read More

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Tech Radar

4th of July sale alert: Sony’s noise canceling headphones get an $82 price cut at Best Buy


The 4th of July sale event is still going on for many retailers like Best Buy, and we’ve spotted a fantastic deal on a pair of Sony noise canceling headphones. Today is your last day to get the Sony WH-CH700N earphones on sale for $118. That’s an $82 discount and the best price we’ve found for the wireless headphones.

The Sony WH-CH700N headphones provide artificial intelligence noise cancelation, which blocks unwanted noise by analyzing background sound. Whether you’re traveling, walking, or in a busy office, the Sony headphones will adapt to the sounds around with you with the push of a button. The Bluetooth headphones also feature a built-in microphone for hands-free calls and use with your voice assistant. The most impressive feature of the Sony WH-CH700N is the long-lasting battery. You can enjoy up to 35 hours of wireless playback on a single charge, and a quick 10-minute charge provides an impressive 60 minutes of playback time. Read More

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Engadget

Tencent’s new blockbuster US game studio is led by a ‘GTA’ veteran


Tencent is determined to have more of an impact on gaming outside of China, and not just by pouring money into existing studios. Reuters reports that Tencent Holdings has created a new California studio, LightSpeed LA, that will develop and publish “AAA” (read: blockbuster) titles. The team will be led by former Rockstar Games studio manager Steve Martin and will have alumni from both Rockstar as well as 2K Games, Insomniac and Sony.

The Grand Theft Auto veteran didn’t outline what LightSpeed would work on, but joined the wave of companies hoping to end crunch time with promises of a “stress-free work environment.” Read More

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VentureBeat

Why simple tech should excite us more


Picture any film scene set in “the future.” More often than not, it’s a futurescape populated by flying cars, efficient robots, and teleportation. These dazzling fictions color our perception of what progress looks like. And this means it’s the inventions that come with bells and whistles that grab our attention in real life too — think SpaceX’s Starlink mission or the Asimo robot from Honda. Technological propositions that are big, glitzy, and out of this world (sometimes literally) are those that attract the accolades and the headlines. And whilst such innovations are indeed incredible, truly impactful progress often comes from humbler technology. As we face the challenge of building a better future post-crisis, it’s the simple technology that should be getting us excited. Read More

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Wired

LG’s CX OLED TV Review: Pretty and Expensive


Most new TVs are very good. So good I have a hard time telling friends, family, and readers to spend more than a thousand dollars on any of them.

That’s because you can easily get a fantastic TV capable of delivering the best picture quality that Amazon, Netflix, or Disney+ have to offer—like 4K resolution and Dolby Vision HDR—for so much less. That even includes top-tier “local” backlighting for deeper blacks and quantum dots for brighter colors. And yet, each year when the first LG OLED arrives, I’m forced to rethink this value-based position. Read More