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Disclaimer: The opinions and viewpoints expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the opinions and viewpoints of Neoseeker. This afternoon Microsoft made the only decision available to it and backtracked on plans to make the Xbox One the first truly digital next-gen console. In the process it's likely Microsoft shelved a digital rights management system with countless hours of work and huge amounts of money invested in it. Microsoft weighed the numbers, watched preorders, ran test groups of core and casual gamers, read the thousands of memes and comments online and found no other option. Consumers made clear what they wanted, and it wasn't the digital future that the Xbox One was promising. Why, though? Why weren't consumers ready to make the shift? Look at the PC, which currently remains the leading platform for game sales the world over, and it should be apparent that the shift to digital distribution is already approaching if not already here. After all, Steam doesn't allow trading, they don't allow used game sales, and it's impossible to purchase a game without being online in the first place. Why couldn't Microsoft replicate Steam's success on a console? Ask any PC gamer what's so special about Steam and they'll pull out a laundry list of features and rewards that Steam provides. From spectacular sales to a huge and easily accessible community at their fingertips, Steam users are invested. Microsoft has comparable assets though, so what's the difference? At the heart of the issue comes one complex yet painfully obvious fact. Really, it's Microsoft's one mistake: trust. When Steam first launched in 2003 the greater gaming community absolutely hated it. The service was down more than it was up, account management was unnecessarily complex and let's not even talk about the launch of Half-Life 2. It has taken ten years for Steam to reach the position it's in now and despite that I bet if you ask Gabe Newell himself he'd say how tenuous their position is. Consumer trust is a malleable and delicate thing. Steam worked a long time to reach this point, and Valve knows a thing or two about taking its time. Trust was earned with each and every bug fix, each feature added and each sale run. There's nothing more important to a digital platform than constant efforts to retain the trust of its customers. Now let's look at the position Microsoft currently holds in the market. The Xbox 360 is currently leading the pack in terms of momentum going into the next-generation of consoles. The Xbox Live online community is huge and digital sales, both DLC and full games, are likely ever increasing. There's no better opportunity to aim for the stars, right? Wrong, because while Microsoft's sales, advertising and Gold subscription numbers are going up consumer trust for Xbox is precarious. Controversies persist on topics such as the growth of advertisements across Xbox 360 menus, the disappearing representation of indie games on the dashboard and the continued question as to why Microsoft's service had a subscription while Sony's didn't -- just to name a few. None of these issues alone are enough to throw gamers into full revolt, but over time a distrust builds -- especially due to Microsoft's half-hearted response to these issues. Then the Xbox One announcement came. In and of itself the Xbox One announcement was outstanding and every game shown to date looks outstanding. However, in tandem with several of the Xbox One's "features" the tenuous trust that had been built in recent years was dismantled. 24-hour check-ins, complicated ownership and trade-in rules and perhaps more significant than realized, the fact that digitally owned titles from the Xbox 360 would not work be converted to an Xbox One account. Could we trust our digital purchases would be conserved in the future? What happens in a few years when Microsoft closes down Xbox

The latest CUDA development suite from Nvidia supports ARM.

Samsung expands to Jelly Bean DSLRs: 1080p 60fps video and octa-core processor.

Hammerpoint Interactive's open world zombie survival game The War Z has changed its name to Infestation: Survivor Stories. Taking effect immediately, the change comes as a result of a trademark conflict with an similarly named, but not referenced property. Hammerpoint issued the notice to its community today, stating that the changes will only effect logos for the game and also its website. Otherwise, game on as normal. It's probably worth noting at this point that in November 2012 The War Z's request to trademark its name had been suspended as a result of the similarities between it and Paramount Picture's property World War Z. You know, the World War Z that releases this Friday in the United States. It may just be a coincidence though. Hopefully this ends up being the last controversy we hear about Infestation: Survivor Stories. Hopefully the people who love the game keep loving it and the rest of us can move on. I have a sneaking suspicion, however...Comment on this article (0)

Rocket Internet is bringing yet more investment to its e-commerce businesses in Southeast Asia, after Lazada — its Amazon-like marketplace service — announced the closure of a $100 million round of investment. The deal comes less than one month after its sister site — fashion store Zalora — also raised $100 million. The round is unparalleled by any other from a startup in Southeast Asia — Zalora aside — and it includes participation from existing investors (which are regular Rocket Internet co-investors): Holtzbrinck Ventures, Kinnevik, Summit Partners and Tengelmann Group. Belgium-based consumer investment firm Verlinvest also partook and becomes a new stakeholder in one-year-old Lazada. If you’re struggling to keep up with Lazada and its fundraising activities at this point, we quite understand. So, let’s break it down. The company launched in March 2012 and went on to announce four rounds of funding, today’s not included: JP Morgan invested ‘upwards of $50 million’ in September 2012, Kinnevik provided $40 million in November 2012, Summit Partners added $26 million in December 2012 and Tengelmann Group injected around $20 million in January 2012. All in all, this latest figure included, that amounts to at least $236 million in money from investors. That’s quite a haul for a company that just passed its first anniversary, let alone one that is in Southeast Asia, where funding deals are arranged at far more modest levels. Lazada operates in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia. It began selling consumer electronics items, but today its range is as diverse as books, home appliances, kids and babies items and more. It accepts multiple credit cards, as well as cash on delivery — a big issue in markets where credit card and bank account ownership are low. Like Zalora — the head of which we recently interviewed — Lazada is aiming to build an e-commerce business to serve Southeast Asia. Amazon only began shipping to some markets in the region this year, and Japanese Web retail giant Rakuten has a fragmented presence. Most other Western retailers are busy prioritizing other markets. That may be down to a long-held belief that cultural, political, linguistic and geographical barriers make the region difficult to focus on; however Lazada aims to overcome them all. Following the lead of other ventures backed by Germany’s Samwer brothers and their Rocket Internet incubator, the company is focused on building the logistics and infrastructure that will allow it to offer a “world-class” selection of products that are delivered within one or two days to any location across the region. Lazada CEO Maximillian Bittner tells TNW that he believes Southeast Asia represents a “high single-digit billion US dollar opportunity” for e-commerce within the next five years, and he’s keen to see his company lead that market. The Lazada service adjusted its model and adopted a marketplace-style approach this year, going on to pass one million orders within the last month. Like most Rocket Internet-backed businesses, Bittner does not reveal raw financial figures for Lazada, but he does say the firm sold ‘three-digit million euros’ in gross merchandise volume (GMV) — i.e total goods on its site — last month; unfortunately that’s suitably vague for us to gain no real insight into its finances. However, we do know Lazada is not yet profitable. Bittner tells TNW that there is a “clear roadmap to profitability”, which he estimates will come by the latter end of 2014. That’s a statement that bears striking resemblance to an estimation made by Zalora MD Michele Ferrario, who said his company would be profitable by 2015. “There’s no reason e-commerce shouldn’t be big in Southeast Asia,” Bittner explains. “There are a number of ‘social media capital cities’ [Bangkok and Jakarta are among the world's most populous Facebook cities], while tens of millions of people use messaging apps like Line, all of which indicates that there’s clearly a strong

A group of technology executives played the cloud computing and enterprise IT version of “hot or not” during a Wednesday afternoon session at GigaOM Structure. While hardly a scientific study, their viewpoints on the various technology trends that tech vendors have pushed over the past few years were at least interesting. Here are the winners and losers, according to Paul Santinell, general partner at North Bridge Venture Partners; Arne Josefsberg CTO of ServiceNow; Peter Frey, president and founder of Krey Associates; and Raj Patel, VP of cloud services at Cisco Systems. Winners Software as a service Solid-state drives Enterprise cloud OpenStack/li> Self-service IT Puppet and Chef Losers Software-defined networking IPv6 Carrier clouds Facebook’s custom switch plans Memorable quotes On SDN: “The conversations today sound almost exactly like the conversations we had three to four years ago,” Josefsberg said. On OpenStack: It’s great conceptually, Santinelli said, but “the contrarian view to OpenStack is are there too many chefs in the kitchen?” On carrier clouds: “All I can think of is someone in a pair of spikes climbing up the telephone pole to turn the phone on,” Sanitelli said. If we couldn’t trust them with voice, he added, how can we trust them with managing enterprise applications? On self-service IT: “Try moving a really high-end video0conferencing system with FPGAs and ASICs to the public cloud,” Patel said. You can’t really do it today, but that doesn’t mean IT organizations can’t enable service-oriented applications behind the firewall. Check out the rest of our Structure 2013 live coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below: Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.How intelligent networks address enterprise cloud issuesCloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlookThe fourth quarter of 2012 in cloud

The Open Compute Project hosted its second-ever hardware hackathon on Tuesday and the winning hack, a paired board that allowed for remote monitoring and diagnostics of servers was presented onstage at the GigaOM Structure conference in San Francisco Wednesday. The winning project was designed by a team that called themselves the Cheesemongers. Their boards were called Cheesy Finger (that’s the board that plugs into each server) and The Big Cheese, the board that sends the collected information from the cheesy fingers to an iPad app. Matt Gabradella, whose day job is at Nebula, led the winning team. Matt Gambardella of Nebula, winner of the Open Compute Hackathon at Structure 2013 John Kenevey, a program manager at Facebook who organizes the hackathons, noted that the social network and Open Compute are trying to build up interest and a series of tools around hardware innovation that will help turn them into a “Maker Faire for the enterprise.” Other than the cheesy project which would help reduce the number of people needed to manage a bunch of servers. Notable hacks included porting Facebook’s HipHop PHP compiler so it ran on a 32-bit ARM-based cluster. Kenevey stressed that Facebook was not moving its production environment to 32-bit ARM servers. More than 50 hackers gathered at Facebook’s headquarters on Tuesday to build six projects during a 13-hour session (it was supposed to be 12). TechShop, Tempo Automation and Upverter provided tooling and machinery to create boards. Check out the rest of our Structure 2013 live coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below: Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.A near-term outlook for big dataDataSift highlights more limitations in the public cloudDissecting the data: 5 issues for our digital future

Vodafone was the last of the major three Australians to launch a 4G network, meaning that nearly all Australians can be using 4G if they want. But with faster mobile speeds comes the ability to burn through data allowances just as fast.In order to prevent customers exceeding their data limits, Vodafone Australia yesterday announced data packs, allowing 4G post-paid customers to top up their plans, either on a 12 month commitment or month-to-month."We are taking direct action against bill shock so customers can make the most of their services by giving them the tools they need to monitor their usage and top up when they need to," Vodafone Australia's Chief Customer Officer Craig Reines said in a statement.Month-to-month add-ons start at $5 a month for 150MB, up to $30 a month for 2GB. The 12 month add-ons are priced the same, but for double the corresponding data allowance.While the data packs will be able to get you out of a tight spot quickly, Vodafone's add-ons are slightly more expensive than on Optus and Telstra. Telstra's lowest offering of $5 will get you 200MB, $10 on Optus will get you 500MB.Voda's shock treatmentVodafone had already implemented Vodafone Alerts for 4G customers, which sends out a text messages at 50%, 85% and 100% of usage.It has now also included text messages that will inform customers when they have gone over their monthly allowance by $100 or $200."These tools give our customers the ability to get the most out of their service whilst remaining in total control of their monthly mobile bills," Craig Reines said.While these top-ups can help, mobile data usage is on the rise and faster networks will only have use downloading apps, games, music and videos more. Hopefully soon, we will all have cheaper and higher data allowances across all networks in the future.

Electronics giant LG is set to begin production on flexible OLED displays layer this year, with a company spokesman saying it'll be in the fourth quarter. Around 12,000 sheets are expected each month, although there's no telling just how many displays that can be used for. Odds are most of the applications for the screens will be for smartphones, as the screen size is thought to be in the four to five inch range. LG Electronics plans to sell a smartphone with a flexible display later this year, while LG Display (separate from LG Electronics) plans to sell the flexible screens to other companies. Before you go thinking that flexible screens mean flexible smartphones, the other materials associated have to be flexible, too. However, it could mean smartphones with curved displays, or even other curved devices with a screen, like watches, are a possibility, as is the possibility for flexible screens to be unbreakable. Source: Tech Report

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