KPMB is one of Toronto and Canada’s leading design practices, a firm of influence and action. The four founding partners—Bruce Kuwabara, Thomas Payne, Marianne McKenna and Shirley Blumberg—were senior associates in the studio of Barton Myers Associates. In 1984, Myers opened an office in Los Angeles, and in 1987 relocated his practice there to focus on American projects. Remaining in Toronto, the new KPMB partners became the joint venture associates to finish the work begun by Myers on the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Phase 3 expansion, which opened in 1993.  The KPMB founding partners in 2001. Photo by Michael Rafelson Barton Myers had been a forceful personality and a strong influence during his relatively short interlude as a Canadian architect. After immigrating from the U.S., he first partnered with Jack Diamond from 1968 to 1975, and was known for a strong sense of urban context and activism. These themes endured in KPMB, which from the beginning upheld the importance of cities, often through creative adaptive reuse projects. What set the new firm apart was a finesse in detail and a flair for design innovation. These qualities informed their winning submission in a national design competition for Kitchener City Hall—their first major commission independent of Myers.  Myers’ signature love for overarching roofs with villages of program below and preference for high-tech architectural expression (what Shirley Blumberg calls “Kahnian planning with Eamesian expression”) were soon supplanted by KPMB’s more situational, materially refined design approach. KPMB would quickly develop a reputation for quality with carefully detailed, elegant materials (wood, steel, glass), highly articulated and often sculptural stairs, and strategic transparency to support signature social spaces. These“city rooms” were at the heart of many of their projects, focusing the spirit of a project—and its highest purpose in the city—in a single space. Shirley Blumberg, Bruce Kuwabara, Thomas Payne, and Marianne McKenna at Woodsworth College in 1993, following the completion of the addition of new facilities and a courtyard to the University of Toronto institution. Photo from KPMB Archives KPMB’s ascendency as an important design practice in the late 1980s and early 1990s is interesting firstly for its timing: the recession of that period devastated architectural practices across the country. However, early on, KPMB’s win of the Kitchener City Hall competition would allow them to survive and expand against the prevailing economic cycle. The firm was also quick to establish their design credentials by a steady accrual of competition wins and awards that laid the groundwork for a natural expansion into the university and corporate sectors, providing further resiliency.  The firm started out with around 16 people, including the four partners. While with Barton, Shirley had led the firm’s work for Hasbro headquarters; her strong credibility with the client brought its second phase to KPMB. Shortly thereafter, a KPMB team led by Shirley won a competition for the Design Exchange, and after that, the firm clinched a number of “cultural renaissance” projects initiated in Toronto and supported by generous government funding: Canada’s National Ballet School (2005), the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art (2006), and the Royal Conservatory of Music (2008).   Shirley Blumberg at the site for the Design Exchange, Canada’s design museum, as showcased in NOW Magazine. Photo by Laurence Acland Each partner would carve a personalized trajectory based on their connections, talents and affinities. Bruce Kuwabara, a third-generation Japanese Canadian from Hamilton, was a gifted all-rounder with exceptional design skills who quickly insinuated himself into Toronto’s cultural scene. Thomas Payne, hailing from Chatham, Ontario, and a partner until launching his own practice in 2013, brought East Coast academic connections that would translate into a series of notable educational projects. Yale-educated, Montreal-born Marianne McKenna was a natural strategist, comfortable in the complexities of adaptive reuse cultural projects, with a knack for place branding. Shirley Blumberg, whose activist leanings saw her immigrate from Cape Town, South Africa, would pursue and design social justice-inscribed projects. The ethnic diversity and gender balance of KPMB’s founding partners was a differentiator of their emerging brand, in a time when very few architectural practices were led by women or non-white men. KPMB’s collaborative model was such that individual partner’s design predilections are discernible in their projects, yet a common and identifiable attention to quality and detailing remains a backbone to the practice.  Shirley Blumberg, Thomas Payne, Marianne McKenna, and Bruce Kuwabara gather around a 1988 model of the upcoming renovation and expansion to the Art Gallery of Ontario. The firm would go on to become one of Canada’s most internationally recognized and widely published architectural practices, earning hundreds of global awards, including 18 Governor General’s Awards in architecture, and delivering more than 31 million square feet in projects that run the gamut from educational, healthcare, and scientific research spaces to arts and culture, government, corporate, hospitality, recreation and mixed-use developments.  Marianne McKenna delivers a keynote address after receiving an honorary doctorate from Swarthmore College. Photo courtesy Swarthmore College  M: Soft Powerbroker In what may have been an early predictor of the precocious soft power for which she would be known, Marianne McKenna met Barton Myers in 1980 at a lecture in Montreal, and over the dinner that followed, accepted a job offer with one condition: to be made an associate in one year. Seven years later, she became the M in KPMB, one of four scrappy “all for one, one for all” partners sharing an ethos that was entrepreneurial, competitive and grounded in mutual respect.  McKenna remembers hiring young actors to be receptionists to rhyme off the difficult string of names (the brand went by Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg before eventually evolving to its abbreviated KPMB moniker). The dynamic practice would capture the imagination of Toronto mainstream and architectural press alike, with features in magazines like Chatelaine and Toronto Life central to their emerging identity and sense of their own brand. McKenna’s brand-within-the-brand was as a lead-by-example feminist with a gift for strategy, a bottomless work ethic and infinite energy for high-quality design. The adaptive reuse office conversion for Tudhope Studios was led by Marianne McKenna in 1987. Photo by Wolfgang Hoyt One of McKenna’s first notable projects was the adaptive reuse office conversion for Tudhope Studios in 1987. This project came about because Tudhope shared office space on the third floor of the same King Street building that was home to KPMB’s studio. KPMB’s work in restoration and adaptive reuse was unusual for the time: it diverged from the typical approaches of either a straight-up conversion of warehouse spaces, or the “facadism” of propping up historic facades and inserting an entirely new building behind them. Instead, it introduced a hybrid of respect for the old and a strong sense of the new—a sophisticated vision of architecture as an extension of brand identity. New stucco panels layered upon the old building and then unified by colour made this project perfect for a highly visual client conscious of brand image, as well as of the importance of design to attract both clients and creatives. McKenna’s cultural interests aligned well with the “cultural renaissance” projects that were being funded in Toronto in the wake of the recession of the early 1990s. Her design tenacity and unrelenting drive for excellence is perhaps best exemplified in the Royal Conservatory of Music—arguably one of Toronto’s best loved cultural venues. This project would span nearly a decade, and culminate in the addition of two great city rooms to KPMB’s growing list: the delicate strategic renovation of the Conservatory’s Mazzoleni Concert Hall, and the architectural and acoustical virtuosity of the 1,135-seat Michael and Sonja Koerner Hall, beloved by musicians and music lovers alike. For her dedication to the project, Marianne was named an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Conservatory. For the renewal of the Minnesota Orchestra Hall, in Minneapolis, Marianne McKenna added a new entry and reimagined the lobby, doubling the average floor area for each patron. Photo by Nic Lehoux She would also steer the design of Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis (2013), a project that has proved a catalyst for local downtown revitalization and the dramatic expansion of the orchestra’s audience. Then in 2015, McKenna was approached to “improve everything, change nothing” at one of Canada’s most storied, revered—and possibly most neglected—performance venues: Toronto’s Massey Hall, originally constructed in 1895. The meticulous renovation of the original performance hall would also see a seven-storey addition of two new venues and suspended exterior walkways that tie them together.  McKenna’s leadership has extended to notable educational projects in the U.S. and Canada, including Concordia University’s competition-winning integrated vertical campus in Montreal (in joint venture with Fichten Soiferman et associés architectes, 2009), the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University (2017), and the restoration and expansion of the Jenny Belzberg Theatre at the Banff Centre For Arts and Creativity (2020).   Several of KPMB’s best known educational projects showcase Marianne’s specialization in restoring urban fabric and her place-branding abilities. This includes The Brearley School in New York, a vertical campus housing a private day school containing academics, performance and science. The School’s generous central space evokes Rome’s Spanish Steps: it’s a natural hybrid of the enigmatic stair and the city room of the KPMB signature. Greencedar Commons in Toronto’s Woburn neighbourhood is one of many rental residential projects by Kindred Works, the world’s first comprehensive portfolio converting under-utilized properties into an ecosystem of homes across Canada that are attainable and climate-responsive. The portfolio is stewarded by Marianne McKenna. Rendering by Studio Sang Most recently, McKenna leads Kindred Works, a national multi-residential program with the goal of building beautiful, sustainable and attainable rental housing, incorporating carbon-reduction features like mass timber, geothermal heating and cooling, and passive solar strategies. McKenna’s role as a board member for the province of Ontario’s transit agency is a prime example of her powers of architectural persuasion at the scale of the city. Working in a time in which multi-billion-dollar transit investments included UP Express and the Eglinton Crosstown, but had little design ambition, Marianne galvanized the board of directors to create a small but powerful design excellence team. This team—which I headed as its founding Chief Design Excellence Officer—was charged with elevating the level of design and architecture on the customer-facing parts of transit, by focusing the brand and changing underlying determinants of quality, like procurement. The end result saw an unprecedented leap in the quality of design during Marianne’s six-year tenure. McKenna serves on the advisory board of the McEwen School of Architecture in Sudbury, where she received an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 2017. In 2019, she was named one of Canada’s Top 100 Most Powerful Women by the Financial Post and one of Azure’s 30 outstanding women in architecture and design. In 2021, she was named one of Toronto Life’s 50 Most Influential Torontonians, and became the first woman to receive a lifetime achievement award from the Design Futures Council. She continues to lead and provide mentorship on significant projects like Equitable Bank in Toronto, the competition-winning Arts Common Transformation in Calgary, and, coming full circle, her alma mater Yale’s Dramatic Arts Building. In 2022, Shirley Blumberg participated in the Candian Centre for Architecture’s residency program Find & Tell to explore the architectural practice of John C. Parkinthrough his drawings, photographs and textual records. Photo courtesy Canadian Centre for Architecture B: Social Justice Leadership Shirley Blumberg grew up in the apartheid-era culture and politics of Cape Town, having been a youth activist for racial equality. She briefly moved to London, where she married her British boyfriend. At 21, she came to Canada out of a desire to live in a place that was not culturally divided, attracted to what she called “the relatively European culture and diversity of Toronto.”  When she began her architectural degree in South Africa, Shirley’s education had been devoid of professional female role models. She finished her education at the University of Toronto, under the directorship of Peter Pragnell, in an educational milieu little more gender-balanced than the one she had left behind. She was one of five female graduates, and throughout her architectural education there were no female professors, and only one female guest critic. George Baird proved an influential thesis advisor—Shirley’s thesis involved redesigning the Union Station train shed, establishing a lifelong interest in architecture’s capacity to shape public space. Marshall McLuhan acted as a thesis reviewer—his insights into the differences in the Canadian sense of private and public space had a lasting impact on Blumberg’s thinking. Blumberg saw gender and social justice advocacy as lifelong callings, and this coloured her career as an architect and an influential member of the profession. Social justice causes she has championed range from affordable housing to advocating for the preservation of threatened buildings and sites.  Seeing echoes of the apartheid system she had left behind reflected in residential schools and in the wake of the suicide crisis in Attawapiskat First Nation—which identified housing and overcrowding as a contributory factor—Blumberg joined forces with Two Row Architect to led an Indigenous housing prototype for Fort Severn, the northernmost Indigenous community in Ontario. The team was part of a National Research Council initiative called Path to Healthy Homes that produced a best-practice manual for architects and engineers working with Indigenous communities; KPMB and Two Row focused on a simple, stick-frame duplex designed to foster close extended family structures and to be easily constructible with local building techniques. In 2014, on the eve of her investment as a Member of the Order of Canada, Blumberg felt compelled to pull together women in the architecture profession for a proactive, networked approach to addressing gender challenges in the architectural profession. While the graduation rate from professional schools had been well over 50% female for several years, the number of female architects was around 23%, with fewer still partners in architectural firms. With a strong cohort of like-minded colleagues, BEAT (Building Equality in Architecture Toronto) was born as a grassroots initiative to promote equality for women in the profession. It focused on activities like organizing industry talks, social events and female-led site visits, supporting symposia at schools, and promoting mentorship and role model opportunities for women in the profession to connect. Today, there are chapters across Canada, and Blumberg continues to sit on the Advisory Board. After Toronto’s Dominion Foundry was threatened with demolition, Shirley Blumberg was part of a team that put together a design concept for retaining the buildings while adding affordable and market housing to the site. Rendering by Norm Li Blumberg recently rallied a pro bono effort to defend a significant heritage project threatened with destruction, the Toronto Dominion Foundry complex. Blumberg championed a better idea by donating time and proactive ideas to demonstrate how leading with good design could avert the wholesale destruction of the irreplaceable buildings, and advocacy efforts were able to divert demolition.  Ottawa is a city where Blumberg’s activism and architecture are showcased, both involving sensitive sites close to the parliamentary precinct. The conversion of the former Canadian War Museum on Sussex Drive to the Global Centre for Pluralism—an institution dedicated to advancing respect for diversity worldwide—involved rehabilitating and stabilizing the historical building and carefully revealing the original structure within, with a trademark KPMB “city room” breaking the back wall to establish a link to the Ottawa River. Ottawa’s Global Centre for Pluralism opened up the former War Museum to connect the city to the Ottawa River. Photo by Adrien Williams After being invited to be a jury member of a competition for a memorial to the victims of communism in Ottawa, Blumberg resigned from the jury and publicly challenged the politically motivated siting of the monument—part of the Harper government’s ploy to win votes from Polish and Russian voters from western Canada. An influential piece in the New York Times and a legal injunction ensued, leading to the project’s suspension just before the 2015 federal election. For one of the rare Canadian international competitions of the last decade, Blumberg convened a team for the Holocaust Museum competition in Montreal including renowned Holocaust scholar Robert-Jan van Pelt, urban culture expert Sherry Simon, and joint venture architects Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker. Their architectural approach would avoid a literal paradigm of replicating aspects of Auschwitz to instead create a gentle, serene place of rooted materials and choreographed light—an austere transparent ground plane with a solid stone building poised above, quietly defying gravity. Shirley considers the project one of the highlights of the later part of her career. Led by Shirley Blumberg, the Julis Romo Rabinowitz Building and the Louis A. Simpson International Building saw Princeton University’s former Frick Chemistry Laboratories fully renovated with strategic new additions. Photo by Adrien Williams Coda  In the family tree of Canadian architecture, KPMB’s dominant design genes carry through into architectural firms its alumni have established. This includes a who’s who of Toronto-based influential female-partner-led firms—Shim-Sutcliffe Architects, Dubbeldam Architecture + Design, Superkül, Gow Hastings Architects, Jill Greaves Design, StudioAC, Akb Architects, Studio VAARO, Deborah Wang—as well as notable Canadian-based firms such as TaylorSmyth Architects, Omar Gandhi Architects, Anthony Provenzano Architects, Drew Mandel Architects, MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects, AXIA Design, and accomplished architecture-adjacents like furniture designer Andrew Jones, visual content expert Norm Li, and designer/artist Michael Awad. Bruce Kuwabara, Marianne McKenna and Shirley Blumberg are all recipients of the Order of Canada. In 2021, the firm announced an expansion of its leadership team, many of them with multiple decades of experience at KPMB. Kuwabara, McKenna and Blumberg remain active as founding partners. The 143-person studio remains located in Toronto, having expanded to include seven new partners. As appeared in the 2025 RAIC Gold Medal issue of Canadian Architect magazine (May 2025) The post 2025 RAIC Gold Medal: Charting the Course appeared first on Canadian Architect.

See Rare Pablo Picasso Masterpieces Curated by His Daughter, Paloma Nearly a dozen of the works on view in “Picasso: Tête-à-tête” at the Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan have never been on public display before The installation at 980 Madison Avenue features drawings, sculptures and paintings from throughout Picasso's career. Owen Conway / Gagosian “You see me here, and yet I’ve already changed,” Pablo Picasso said in 1963. “I’m already elsewhere.” This mercurial sentiment guides “Picasso: Tête-à-tête,” an exhibition of nearly 70 rarely seen Picasso paintings, sculptures and drawings on view at the Gagosian Gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Many of the works on view are sourced from Picasso’s estate and curated by Paloma Picasso, the youngest of the artist’s four children. Nearly a dozen of the works on view have never been exhibited publicly before. “A number of the works we selected haven’t been seen since my father had them in his studio,” Paloma says in a statement. “To have them reunited with important examples from other collections will be a very special event.”Paloma, now 76, recalls sitting with her father in his studio as he created masterpieces. “Because I was a very quiet little girl, I was able to stay with him,” she tells the New York Times’ Robin Pogrebin. “He would let me stay next to him while he was painting because I could spend hours without uttering a word.” The six drawings, 24 sculptures and 38 paintings in the exhibition date to between 1896 and 1972—the entirety of Picasso’s career. Instead of a chronological organization, however, the works are arranged more organically, with artworks from different eras hanging side by side. That may be how Picasso would have wanted it. At a 1932 retrospective in Paris—one of the few exhibitions that the artist installed himself—Picasso eschewed a chronological organization. Instead, he hung the 225 paintings according to his personal vision and associations between works. Portrait de Femme (Marie-Thérèse), Pablo Picasso, 1936 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society / Sandra Pointet “These works complicate our understanding of Picasso,” art historian Marcel Dumont tells Rain magazine. “They reveal an artist constantly questioning his own solutions, always striving to reinvent what he had already mastered. Even in his private moments of creation, Picasso’s inventive spirit was relentless.” But for an artist of Picasso’s stature, private moments don’t remain private for long. Paloma was just 24 when her father died in 1973. She’s long reckoned with his legacy, both for better and for worse. Picasso was known for mistreating the women in his life. For instance, many of his works depict Marie-Thérèse Walter, a model who was just 17 when she began an affair with the artist, who was married and in his mid-40s at the time. After Paloma’s mother, the French painter Françoise Gilot, split with Picasso in the 1950s, she wrote a memoir about the artist’s abusive behavior during their relationship. After its publication, Picasso never contacted Paloma or her brother, Claude, again. Femme au Béret Bleu Assise dans un Fauteuil Gris, Manches Rouges (Marie-Thérèse), Pablo Picasso, 1937 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society / Sandra Pointet “When my mother wrote the book, she wanted to make him less of a god and more of a man,” Paloma tells the Times. “And it doesn’t make him less great where he’s great. He’s the greatest. But he can also have weaknesses. And that’s OK.” “Picasso: Tête-à-tête” will be Gagosian’s final show at its flagship 980 Madison Avenue gallery, which it has occupied since 1989. “I have been fortunate to present more than 20 exhibitions dedicated to Pablo Picasso throughout my career, and it seems only fitting that a blockbuster show of the artist’s work should close out our time at 980 Madison,” Larry Gagosian, the art dealer who owns the galleries, says in the statement. Tête de Femme, Pablo Picasso, 1957 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society / Sandra Pointet For Paloma, curating her father’s artworks is something of a homecoming, after years of staking out an independent career as a jewelry designer and stepping outside the shadow of his legacy. “I made every effort for my work not to be connected to my father, which is why now I can do it,” she tells the Times. “I’ve proven to myself that I can exist on my own merits. I think I had to prove to myself that I could be worth something on my own.” “Picasso: Tête-à-tête” is on view at the Gagosian Gallery at 980 Madison Avenue in New York City through July 3, 2025. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Scopely announced today that Monopoly Go! has surpassed $5B in gross bookings, the fastest title in mobile game history to do so.Read More

Polygon sold to Valnet, editorial staff hit with layoffs The owner of Game Rant has acquired the video game and pop culture website from Vox Media Image credit: Polygon News by Samuel Roberts Editorial Director Published on May 1, 2025 Video game and pop culture website Polygon has been acquired by The Gamer and Game Rant owner Valnet, with numerous long-time staff members revealing they've either been laid off or have chosen to leave as part of the sale. As reported by Kotaku, co-founder and editor-in-chief Chris Plante, senior writer Michael McWhertor, deputy editor Matthew Reynolds, games writer Tyler Colp, and senior reporter Nicole Carpenter are among those sharing that they're no longer with Polygon on social media. Deputy editor Maddy Myers and games editor Zoë Hannah are among those still working on the site following the acquisition, according to Kotaku's report. Polygon was previously owned by Vox Media, owners of The Verge. "It is with immense pride and gratitude that we welcome Polygon into our growing family of world-class gaming brands," said Valnet founder and CEO Hassan Youssef in a statement. Polygon was founded in 2012 with an emphasis on long-form feature content around video games, and reaches around 6 million users in the US, according to Comscore. Following the sale, Vox Media said it will focus resources on other areas of its business. "This transaction will enable us to focus our energies and investment resources in other priority areas of growth across our portfolio of iconic digital publications and audio/video programming, while enabling Valnet to grow their leadership and authority in the gaming information category," Vox Media's CEO Jim Bankoff said in a statement announcing the sale.

Microsoft continues to focus on the cloud and integrating AI across Xbox amid news of new console pricing changes, as shown in the company‛s third quarter report for the 2025 fiscal year, covering the period ending March 31, 2025.Intelligent cloud, which includes the cloud computing platform Azure, saw $26.8 billion in revenue, totaling a 21 percent increase. For Azure and "other cloud services," the revenue growth was 33 percent, including "16 points from AI services," as explained by chief financial officer Amy Hood during the conference call.The total figure towers over the $13.4 billion revenue of more personal computing, which includes games and related services. For the video game business specifically, revenue increased 5 percent and 6 percent in constant currency, with Xbox content and services seeing revenue growth of 8 percent and 9 percent in constant currency.The company highlighted ending the quarter as the "top publisher by pre-orders and pre-installs" across Xbox and the PlayStation store, although it didn‛t share specific numbers. For Game Pass, revenue increased over 45 percent year-over-year on PC, and people played over 150 million hours using cloud gaming.Microsoft also dedicated time to mention how it‛s "integrating AI across Xbox," with examples including a generative AI model (meant to assist game developers) announced in February, as well as the AI-powered Copilot tool (meant to assist players). As with the initial announcement from a few months back, the company didn‛t explain exactly how each AI integration will manifest, nor the specific benefits or use cases for each.Related:A Minecraft Movie also received a shout-out as part of "monetizing our IP in new ways," which grossed $550 million globally in under two weeks since its premiere. Microsoft also saw a 75 percent-plus increase in Minecraft weekly active users year-over-year since the movie's release in early April.Earlier today, the company announced an increase in hardware prices—which includes consoles, controllers, and some accessories—as well as some first-party titles costing $80 starting this holiday season. Looking back to previous figures shows that this move follows a Q2 decline in Xbox hardware sales, which itself continues a similar trend from Q1.Revenue after a year of rampant layoffs and an active boycottThroughout 2024, more developers under the Microsoft umbrella banded together amidst rampant layoffs. Both Microsoft and subsidiary Activision Blizzard were accused of "bad faith bargaining" by Raven Software union workers, while Activision Blizzard quality assurance workers rallied against a mandate to return to office. Bethesda Game Studios and World of Warcraft developers formed wall-to-wall unions, comprised of 241 and over 500 developers, respectively.Related:The unions came together during a year in which Microsoft laid off around 2,550 people and shut down a handful of ZeniMax studios, including Arkane Austin, Alpha Dog Games, and Tango Gameworks."We continue to transform the business and focus on margin expansion, as we bring our games to over 500 million monthly active users across devices," chairman and chief executive officer Satya Nadella said during the Q3 conference call.Microsoft has, and continues to face, pressure from the current state of global events. Azure cloud and AI services are two of the services that have drawn the ire of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, where Microsoft is one of the main active targets. Last week, Tenderfoot Tactics developer Badru pulled the title from Xbox platforms in solidarity with the campaign. Microsoft employees also launched No Azure for Apartheid in 2024, pressuring the company to terminate all Azure contracts and partnerships with the Israeli military and government.Related:To summarize, the company shared the following figures: $70.1 billion in revenue (up 13% year-on-year), composed of $29.9 billion across productivity and business processes, $26.8 billion in intelligent cloud, and $13.4 billion in more personal computing. The latter takes into consideration Windows OEM pre-builds, usage from a third-party partnership in search, and revenue across Xbox games and services.

Google is giving its Google Voice app some much-needed love after leaving it practically untouched for a long time. The company is adding a refreshed in-call interface with key call control buttons lined up in a row, plus the ability to start a three-way conference call. In a Workspace update today, Google says the call interface now has a prominent and easily accessible layout that looks more like Google Meet. It includes a “Transfer” button to the left of the Hold button, and an “Add” button to the right that changes to “Merge” when you have a second call waiting. You start a three-way call by tapping the Add button during an existing call and selecting someone from your contact list. Voice will then start a call with the other person and let you merge the calls with a tap. The interface also gives you a notification-like message on top to let you know when someone is on hold and gives you a button to switch between calls. This three-way calling update is currently on extended rollout that could take up to 15 days or longer; and is only coming to Google Workspace customers who have a Voice Starter, Voice Standard, or Voice Premier subscription, as well as customers with SIP Link Standard and SIP Link Premier. Google says the new looks will come to all Google Voice users; however, it does not mention whether that includes iOS (Google’s examples only show the interface for Android).

Hot on the heels of Apple’s AppStore legal loss forcing them to open up the App Store in the US to external stores, Epic Games have another major announcement. You will be able to host/sell your games on their newly created Web Shops. In addition, they have also announced a massive update to the revenue share agreement enabling developers to keep the first $1,000,000 in earnings per app per year! Details from the Epic Games announcement: We’re making some exciting updates to the Epic Games Store to provide an even better deal for developers, starting in June.  0% Store Fee For First $1,000,000 in Revenue Per App Per Year Starting in June 2025, for any Epic Games Store payments we process, developers will pay a 0% revenue share on their first $1,000,000 in revenue per app per year, and then our regular 88%/12% revenue share when they earn more than that.Epic Games Store Webshops In June 2025, we are releasing a new feature enabling developers to launch their own webshops hosted by the Epic Games Store. These webshops can offer players out-of-app purchases, as a more cost-effective alternative to in-app purchases, where Apple, Google, and others charge exorbitant fees. With new legal rulings in place, developers will be able to send players from games to make digital purchases from webshops on any platform that allows it, including iOS in the European Union and United States.As an extra bonus, players spending in Epic Webshops will also accrue 5% Epic Rewards on all their purchases. You can learn more about the new Epic Game Store Webshops and the new EGS revenue split in the video below.

Salesforce AI Research has outlined a comprehensive roadmap for building more intelligent, reliable, and versatile AI agents. The recent initiative focuses on addressing foundational limitations in current AI systems—particularly their inconsistent task performance, lack of robustness, and challenges in adapting to complex enterprise workflows. By introducing new benchmarks, model architectures, and safety mechanisms, Salesforce is establishing a multi-layered framework to scale agentic systems responsibly. Addressing “Jagged Intelligence” Through Targeted Benchmarks One of the central challenges highlighted in this research is what Salesforce terms jagged intelligence: the erratic behavior of AI agents across tasks of similar complexity. To systematically diagnose and reduce this problem, the team introduced the SIMPLE benchmark. This dataset contains 225 straightforward, reasoning-oriented questions that humans answer with near-perfect consistency but remain non-trivial for language models. The goal is to reveal gaps in models’ ability to generalize across seemingly uniform problems, particularly in real-world reasoning scenarios. Complementing SIMPLE is ContextualJudgeBench, which evaluates an agent’s ability to maintain accuracy and faithfulness in context-specific answers. This benchmark emphasizes not only factual correctness but also the agent’s ability to recognize when to abstain from answering—an important trait for trust-sensitive applications such as legal, financial, and healthcare domains. Strengthening Safety and Robustness with Trust Mechanisms Recognizing the importance of AI reliability in enterprise settings, Salesforce is expanding its Trust Layer with new safeguards. The SFR-Guard model family has been trained on both open-domain and domain-specific (CRM) data to detect prompt injections, toxic outputs, and hallucinated content. These models serve as dynamic filters, supporting real-time inference with contextual moderation capabilities. Another component, CRMArena, is a simulation-based evaluation suite designed to test agent performance under conditions that mimic real CRM workflows. This ensures AI agents can generalize beyond training prompts and operate predictably across varied enterprise tasks. Specialized Model Families for Reasoning and Action To support more structured, goal-directed behavior in agents, Salesforce introduced two new model families: xLAM and TACO. The xLAM (eXtended Language and Action Models) series is optimized for tool use, multi-turn interaction, and function calling. These models vary in scale (from 1B to 200B+ parameters) and are built to support enterprise-grade deployments, where integration with APIs and internal knowledge sources is essential. TACO (Thought-and-Action Chain Optimization) models aim to improve agent planning capabilities. By explicitly modeling intermediate reasoning steps and corresponding actions, TACO enhances the agent’s ability to decompose complex goals into sequences of operations. This structure is particularly relevant for use cases like document automation, analytics, and decision support systems. Operationalizing Agents via Agentforce These capabilities are being unified under Agentforce, Salesforce’s platform for building and deploying autonomous agents. The platform includes a no-code Agent Builder, which allows developers and domain experts to specify agent behaviors and constraints using natural language. Integration with the broader Salesforce ecosystem ensures agents can access customer data, invoke workflows, and remain auditable. A study by Valoir found that teams using Agentforce can build production-ready agents 16 times faster compared to traditional software approaches, while improving operational accuracy by up to 75%. Importantly, Agentforce agents are embedded within the Salesforce Trust Layer, inheriting the safety and compliance features required in enterprise contexts. Conclusion Salesforce’s research agenda reflects a shift toward more deliberate, architecture-aware AI development. By combining targeted evaluations, fine-grained safety models, and purpose-built architectures for reasoning and action, the company is laying the groundwork for next-generation agentic systems. These advances are not only technical but structural—emphasizing reliability, adaptability, and alignment with the nuanced needs of enterprise software. Check out the Technical details. Also, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and join our Telegram Channel and LinkedIn Group. Don’t Forget to join our 90k+ ML SubReddit. Asif RazzaqWebsite |  + postsBioAsif Razzaq is the CEO of Marktechpost Media Inc.. As a visionary entrepreneur and engineer, Asif is committed to harnessing the potential of Artificial Intelligence for social good. His most recent endeavor is the launch of an Artificial Intelligence Media Platform, Marktechpost, which stands out for its in-depth coverage of machine learning and deep learning news that is both technically sound and easily understandable by a wide audience. The platform boasts of over 2 million monthly views, illustrating its popularity among audiences.Asif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/Microsoft AI Released Phi-4-Reasoning: A 14B Parameter Open-Weight Reasoning Model that Achieves Strong Performance on Complex Reasoning TasksAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/Meta AI Introduces ReasonIR-8B: A Reasoning-Focused Retriever Optimized for Efficiency and RAG PerformanceAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/Multimodal AI on Developer GPUs: Alibaba Releases Qwen2.5-Omni-3B with 50% Lower VRAM Usage and Nearly-7B Model PerformanceAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/Mem0: A Scalable Memory Architecture Enabling Persistent, Structured Recall for Long-Term AI Conversations Across Sessions

Latest   Machine Learning How Towards AI Helps Transform Enterprise Teams into “AI-First” Employees 0 like May 1, 2025 Share this post Author(s): Towards AI Editorial Team Originally published on Towards AI. With recent progress in AI capabilities in just the last six months, effective AI adoption has become more urgent than ever; both for everyday professional usage and for custom LLM development. We have seen this both in recent aggressive company wide “AI-first” initiatives at Shopify and Duolingo as well as recent surveys (such as a Dataiku study showing 74% of CEOs said they could lose their jobs within two years without meaningful AI results). Today we have a one off special edition discussing how we help corporate teams with this transition. As you know we have been teaching AI for many years now; both via our free tutorials and paid in-depth courses. Seeing the impact on individual developers has been incredible, but we also saw a recurring theme: entire companies grappling with how to effectively, securely, and strategically adopt AI (both with everyday AI use and custom development). We have built many client AI projects from delivering custom live LLM corporate bootcamp training sessions to building advanced finance research agents for stealth startups. We help with training AI power users across professional tasks, conversion training for development teams to start building custom LLM apps and advising on or building whole LLM projects or prototypes ourselves. We’re now thrilled to share the next evolution of Towards AI: we’re doubling down on helping organizations make the “AI-first” leap! We would love your help to spread the word at your organisation! We can even offer an affiliate cut. It would be amazing if you could please help share and amplify our posts on x and Linkedin! Most enterprise teams find themselves at Stage 1 in the above chart; mostly disorganised, untrained and unauthorised AI adoption delivering neutral to negative value. Towards AI’s offers are focussed on taking your team or company on to Stage 2 (using AI tools safely and effectively and becoming AI power users) or to Stage 3 (in-house custom LLM workflow and product development). AI adoption at enterprise is lagging far behind AI’s latest capabilities and benefits vary wildly between individuals. Some AI power users are achieving genuine double or triple digit productivity gains together with improved work quality via AI assistance, but much more often AI users achieve minimal speed gains while introducing new business risks and reducing the quality of their work output. We would guess fewer than 1 million people globally are truly using AI to its full potential at work. Successful AI adoption is deceptively complex. Superficial results emerge quickly but it is not enough to simply open ChatGPT, type a question and copy and answer, or to download Cursor and start coding. AI has clear flaws and holes in its capabilities; many of these gaps can be filled with the user’s human expertise, guided instructions, and adopting best practices, others are filled by developing LLM customizations for your task while the remainder still require learning to check, edit and iterate on an AI’s outputs effectively. Towards AI helps organizations master AI strategically and safely. We transform teams into skilled AI collaborators and accelerate the development of high-impact custom AI solutions. Leverage our expertise, honed from teaching 500k+ learners and building complex LLM pipelines and agents for diverse clients. Here’s how we empower enterprise teams: AI Acceleration Programs: Comprehensive Upskilling. A blended approach: Live intro session to motivate your team and demonstrate its potential with relatable examples + bulk discounted access to our 40hr+ online courses + optional follow-on coaching or consultancy. We have Two Tracks: AI for Business Professionals: Master safe/effective prompting, tool use (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.), workflow integration for non-technical roles. Advanced LLM Developer Conversion: Full-stack training for Python devs (RAG, Fine-tuning, Data Collection and Curation, Agents, Evaluation, Deployment and more). Ideal for company-wide readiness. Packages from $3k. 2. Custom Live Bootcamps: Intensive, Targeted Skills. Focused 3 or 15-hour live training (online/in-person) for specific teams (AI users or future LLM Developers). Includes deep Customization (5–80+ hours) tailored to your industry, data, and objectives (e.g., identifying relevant use cases, mastering model selection or development techniques, successful prompt engineering and context provisioning for your industry). Rapid skill injection for specific needs. Packages from $6k. 3. Expert Consulting & Development: Build Your Custom Advantage. Strategic Advisory (Hands-Off): Get expert guidance on AI roadmaps, use-case validation, model/architecture selection. (Packages from $3k). Hands-On Development Sprints: Engage our team via modular 2 week/75-hour sprints to build custom internal tools or external product features. Significant results often take ~300h (internal) / ~600h+ (external), but custom LLM development can continue towards transformative potential (like $10bn+ firms Perplexity/Anysphere). Help Your Company Level Up: Are you struggling to achieve the massive AI productivity gains you hear about either in software development or everyday work tasks? Frustrated by the slow or ineffective pace of Generative AI adoption within your team or company? The potential today is huge, but bridging the gap between basic AI use and true “AI power user” status is challenging, often leading to inefficient workflows and even security risks. If you see the need for a more strategic approach to AI in your workplace, connect Towards AI with your manager or leadership team. We can provide a detailed overview and tailor a solution. Referral Bonus: As a thank you, we offer custom affiliate commissions for introductions leading to bulk purchases of our AI Acceleration Program courses. Ready to bridge the AI adoption gap? Read more on our B2B offerings page; Transform Your Team into “AI-First” Employees: GenAI Acceleration Programs, Live AI Bootcamps, LLM Development Consulting Please email Louis-François Bouchard ([email protected]) now for more information or to organise an “AI First” Adoption Consultation call. Join thousands of data leaders on the AI newsletter. Join over 80,000 subscribers and keep up to date with the latest developments in AI. From research to projects and ideas. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming a sponsor. Published via Towards AI Towards AI - Medium Share this post

Starting today, Amazon has dropped the price of the newest 2025 11th gen Apple iPad (A16) tablet. All four colors - Blue, Yellow, Pink, and Silver - equipped with 128GB of RAM and Wi-Fi only connectivity are down to $299 after a $50 price drop. This is the best discount I've seen for the latest generation iPad since its launch earlier this year and a great gift idea for Mother's Day, which lands on May 11. A sizeable discount on a very recent iPad release is uncommon, and I don't expect the sale to stick around for more than a couple of days.Update: Last week the price of these iPads dropped from $349 to $319. This week the price has gone down yet again to $299. Also, whereas only Blue and Yellow were on sale previously, all four colors are discounted right now.$50 Off New 2025 Apple iPad 10.9" (A16) TabletSilverApple iPad (A16) 128GBBlueApple iPad (A16) 128GBPinkApple iPad (A16) 128GBYellowApple iPad (A16) 128GBFor most people, the iPad (not the Air, Mini, or Pro) is the best model to get because it offers all the benefits of iOS as well as snappy performance at an affordable price. The current generation model was released on March 12, 2025, over two years after the previous generation (October 2022). The upgrades include a more powerful processor (A16 vs A14), more RAM (6GB vs 4GB), and more storage (128GB vs 64GB), all. Best of all, the launch price of $349 is actually lower than when the previous generation model was released, which was $399.The specs that have carried over are the 10.9" Liquid Retina 2360x1640 (264ppi) display, USB Type-C charging, Wi-Fi 6 connectivity, and the same camera. It's also compatible with the Magic Folio keyboard so you can convert it into a mini laptop for better workflow, making it one of the best iPads for students, and the newer Apple Pencil with USB-C.The 2025 iPad Air with nicer display and M3 chip is also on saleAmazon is offering the 7th generation Apple iPad Air M3 tablets at the lowest prices I've seen so far. The 11" model is down to $499 and the 13" model is down to $699, both after a $100 off instant discount. That's the best price we've seen for this 2025 model with the M3 chip. The 7th gen iPad Pro Air was released in March and is the current generation model. It's only one year newer than the 6th gen model and the only major upgrade is the jump from the M2 to the M3 chip.Apple iPad Air 11" (M3) 128GBApple iPad Air 13" (M3) 128GBLooking for more iPad resources?If you're not sure which iPad is best for you, we have an iPad guide which details which iPad is ideal for which use case. If you intend want to get an iPad for schoolwork, we have an iPad guide for students as well. If you're looking for options outside of iOS, check out the best Android tablets of 2025.Why Should You Trust IGN's Deals Team?IGN's deals team has a combined 30+ years of experience finding the best discounts in gaming, tech, and just about every other category. We don't try to trick our readers into buying things they don't need at prices that aren't worth buying something at. Our ultimate goal is to surface the best possible deals from brands we trust and our editorial team has personal experience with. You can check out our deals standards here for more information on our process, or keep up with the latest deals we find on IGN's Deals account on Twitter.Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn't hunting for deals for other people at work, he's hunting for deals for himself during his free time.