Playstation 5 Alleged Drop Date & Price; Google Buys Pointy; RIP Win 7 & Major Win Bug; Amazon AI- Why People Buy Irrelevant Stuff

Sony showed off the Playstation 5 logo last week at CES. Now, thanks to a big leak, it looks like we have the release date and pricing info. Bgr.com reports that the leak has the PS5 bowing at a PlayStation meeting on February 5th at Sony Hall in New York City. It’s expected that the console design, controller, home screen, specs, and of course games will be shown. The rumor touts ‘little to no load times,’ ‘blazing fast downloads,’ ‘immersive controls,’ and claims Sony will use ‘It’s time to play’ as their new PS5 slogan…and may apply that tag line to the entire brand. What about the pricing?? $499 is the amount leaked. There will apparently only be a single model out at launch, and no Pro version will make it into stores in 2020. It will supposedly have 10 teraflops of GPU power, compared to 4 of the Xbox. Another rumor has a more expensive Xbox sporting 12, however. The leak claims Sony will offer full backwards compatibility with all PS4 games, which is huge. Also…saved data/ backups form PS4 games will be transferable.

Google seems to be moving in on some of Amazon’s territory, picking up Pointy…a startup that helps brick and mortar retailers to list products online (I’m just smelling a whiff of Amazon Marketplace here). According to techcrunch.com, Pointy has developed hardware and software tech to help retailers…especially those that don’t already have deep e-commerce presence…to get their inventory findable online without any extra work. Pointy is a startup out of Dublin, Ireland. It looks like for now, Google will let the company operate relatively independently. Google has partnered with them since 2018. The original Pointy hardware is only $700, and they have a free app that integrates with point of sale equipment from the likes of Clover, Square, Lightspeed, Vend, Liberty, WooPOS, BestRx, and CashRx POS, so a retailer can essentially get into their ecosystem for nothing at first. It seems pretty likely that Google will be looking to scale this up into a major presence.

You’ve probably heard the news that today is the day Microsoft ends support for venerable Windows 7. Ironically….or maybe not…security expert Brian Krebs warns that there is a nasty bug that affects not only Windows 7, but Vista as well. Pcworld.com says Microsoft may be pushing out a patch for it today. The bug allegedly concerned crypt32.dll, which controls ‘certificate and cryptographic messaging functions in the CryptoAPI.’ Infection creates the possibility of your PC allowing a piece of malware to be installed posing as a legit application.

Amazon is using AI to try to figure out why people buy products that seem irrelevant to their searches (both web and voice ones.) According venturebeat.com, the AI group has found that people are most likely to do so in a few categories…like toys and digital products…and not so much in beauty products or groceries. An interesting result so far…it turns out that people who use either very short or unusually long queries tend to be more ‘flexible’ in their purchasing decisions than people who use medium length ones. So if you go for the really short ones or long ones, you’re apparently a soft touch!