SXSW restores talks on gaming harassment once canceled over threats

By Jon Herskovitz AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) – The South by Southwest tech meeting said on Friday it made a mistake when it canceled sessions on video gaming culture, including one on harassment, after facing criticism of dodging its duty by dropping talks on an issue engulfing gaming culture. The organizers of South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive, a major annual meeting of the tech industry held in Austin, Texas, said they have now added a day-long summit on the topic and expanded the reach and participation of its originally planned sessions. “By canceling two sessions we sent an unintended message that SXSW not only tolerates online harassment but condones it, and for that we are truly sorry,” Hugh Forrest, the SXSW Interactive director, said in a blog post.

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Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon give Wall Street reason to cheer

Google parent Alphabet Inc , Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc made headway in the latest quarter in the areas that will be their main engines of growth for years to come, driving up shares across the tech sector on Friday. For Alphabet, search traffic on mobiles surpassed desktop traffic worldwide for the first time, while Amazon was able to boost margins, an area of concern, as its cloud business boomed

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Saudi’s Kingdom Holding pays $50 million to raise Twitter stake to 0.72 percent

DUBAI (Reuters) – Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Holding has paid $50 million to double its stake in microblogging site Twitter Inc, the Riyadh-based company said on Wednesday. Kingdom Holding, the investment firm owned by billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, now owns 0.72 percent of Twitter, having originally invested $50 million in the tech company in 2011

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Video gamers win millions of dollars in Seattle championship

By Curtis Skinner SEATTLE (Reuters) – Teams of video gamers playing characters ranging from wizards to monsters exchanged virtual punches, fireballs and lightning strikes over the past six days, battling at the main event of the Dota 2 International 2015 tournament in Seattle. Now in its fifth year and playing to a sold-out crowd in the 17,000-seat Key Arena, the International has grown every year in size, popularity and possible winnings for players. Video games have long been a moneymaker for the tech sector, forecast to generate some $111 billion in revenue this year by consultants Gartner Inc.

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Canadian venture capital, private equity deals surge in 2015

By Euan Rocha TORONTO (Reuters) – Deal-making activity in Canada’s venture capital and private equity arena surged in the first half of 2015, driven by a spate of financings in the tech start-up space and large investments in energy assets, data from Thomson Reuters showed on Monday. The data indicates there was C$636 million ($488.48 million) in venture capital invested in 143 deals in the second quarter, a sum that was 15 percent higher than that invested by VC firms in the first quarter. This propelled VC investments in the first half of this year to C$1.19 billion, a 33 percent increase from the first half of last year and the strongest first half for VC funding in Canada since 2002.

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Uber settles wrongful death lawsuit in San Francisco

By Dan Levine SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Ride service Uber has reached a tentative settlement in a lawsuit brought by the family of a 6-year-old girl who died in a San Francisco car accident, according to court filings. The girl, Sofia Liu, died after she, her younger brother and their mother were hit by a car in a San Francisco cross-walk on New Year's Eve in 2013

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