Internet of Things Review: From Games to Robot Love
Valve Corporation, the privately-held game distribution giant, is expanding the Internet of Things with a new console for its flagship Steam platform. Rumored to be dubbed Steam Box, the platform aims to disrupt living room entertainment by bringing Linux into mainstream gaming.
Gabe Newell, the co-founder and managing director of Valve, revealed during a keynote at LinuxCon that the Steam Box is set to make its official debut sometime next week, presumably Monday.
“The next step in our contribution to this is to release some work we’ve done on the hardware side. Next week we’re going to be rolling out more information about how we get there and what are the hardware opportunities we see for bringing Linux into the living room,” Newell said. He added that as part of its commitment to Linux, Value is “contributing to the LLDB debugger project and is co-developing an additional debugger” for the operating system.
While Valve is trying to persuade gamers that Linux is the future of gaming, Google is making making big strides towards popularizing near-field communication. The search giant announced this week that it has acquired Bump Technologies, the startup behind the hugely popular Bump sharing app.
The deal is widely perceived as a talent buy that underscores Google’s plans to bake location-based features into its mobile lineup. Android powers the overwhelming majority of smartphones and tablets, but it faces increased competition from Apple’s iOS as well as emerging platforms such as Mozilla OS and Sailfish.
Sailfish is a Linux-based mobile operating system that made headlines this week after developer Jolla announced that it’s fully compatible with native Android apps. Not only that, but the OS can now run on any device that has been optimized to run Google’s platform.
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