One of the biggest, most iconic gaming series is almost back. Grand Theft Auto 6 is apparently on track for a fall launch next year -- a little more specific than the previous release window of "2025." There's no new trailer, and GTA publisher, Take-Two, is not quite ready to offer a specific release date. CEO Strauss Zelnick told Variety: "I think we're going to leave it there for now." The sixth mainline installment will be set in Leonida (Rockstar's Florida equivalent) and focused mostly on Vice City (Miami).

The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter. On Tuesday morning, Ruben Martinez Jr. was staring at his computer screen, calculating his chances. He was on a group chat trying to strategize the best way to score Taylor Swift tickets, and it was looking bleak. Everyone seemed to have 2,000-plus people ahead of them in line. Martinez, a software engineer at OkCupid, checked the browser developer tools to see if he could figure out his actual place in the queue. He thought he could find a percentage for how far back he was.

Sometimes we over-complicate AI, thinking it's too high-tech and futuristic for us to use in our everyday work. But AI is not the future, it's the present. Let's not consider it an unattainable technology, because sometimes AI is so simple that we don't even realise we're using it. AI in marketing is here right now. Results from our latest State of Marketing research report show the highest-performing marketers are 9.7 times more likely than underperformers to be completely satisfied with their ability to personalise omni-channel experiences at scale.

Ticketmaster envisions a future wherein you no longer need either a physical or a digital ticket to get into a venue. Its parent company Live Nation, has announced that the ticket sales giant has teamed up with and invested in a face recognition company called Blink Identity. In its first quarter financial report (PDF), Live Nation has explained that Blink has "cutting-edge facial recognition technology, enabling you to associate your digital ticket with your image, then just walk into the show." According to Blink's website, its system can register an image of your face as soon as you walk past a sensor. Blink's technology can then match it against a large database in half a second -- in a blink, so to speak. It's also apparently powerful enough that you don't even have to slow down for its system to recognize you: Just walk normally, and if the technology gets a match, it'll automatically open doors or turnstiles to let you in.

Ticketmaster has quietly revealed plans to use facial recognition technology in venues to facilitate admission to live shows and more. The rollout constitutes part of a trial that follows the ticketing giant's investment in Blink Identity, an Austin, Texas-based startup that participated in the TechStars music accelerator program earlier this year. Ticketmaster's plans were revealed as part of parent company Live Nation's Q1 2018 earnings: We will continue investing in new technologies to further differentiate Ticketmaster from others in the ticketing business. It is very notable that today we announce our partnership with, and investment in, Blink Identity, which has cutting-edge facial recognition technology, enabling you to associate your digital ticket with your image, then just walk into the show. Blink Identity's platform basically allows a venue to identify people using their facial biometrics without requiring them to stop and stand in front of a lens.

Retailers know that it is harder and more expensive to acquire new customers than to sell new things to existing customers. That's why they spend a lot on loyalty programs and Customer 360/Customer Journey programs. One of the best tools a retailer has for selling products to customers is recommendations. Recommendations are simply that, suggestions by the retailer on other things the customer may be interested in. In order to do this, a retailer needs to know the customer.

If you've ever struggled to pair your phone with a Bluetooth speaker or set up a wireless printer, you know that it's often easier to connect to a server halfway around the world than to a gadget across the room. That's a problem as we increasingly use our phones to pay for stuff, unlock doors, and control everything from televisions to thermostats. No one wants to wait for coffee because the cash register can't detect their phone, or shiver in the cold because their watch is trying to connect to their neighbor's door lock instead of their own. Multiple wireless technologies have emerged in recent years to tackle this problem, including Bluetooth, LoRa, and NFC. These technologies are all based on radio frequencies. But a growing number of businesses, from Ticketmaster to Google to nuclear-power plants, are turning to a simpler solution: sound.

At Google I/O this year, Google quietly introduced a new chatbot analytics platform called Chatbase, a project developed within the company's internal R&D incubator, Area 120. Today, that platform is being publicly launched to all, after testing with hundreds of early adopters including Ticketmaster, HBO, Keller Williams, Viber, and others. The idea behind Chatbase's cloud service is to offer tools to more easily analyze and optimize chatbots. This includes giving bot builders the ability to understand what works to increase customer conversions, improve the bot's accuracy, and create a better user experience. This data is available through an analytics dashboard, where developers can track specific metrics like active users, sessions, and user retention.

The following interview is part of our ongoing Expert Series that asks C-level professionals, team presidents, league executives, athletic directors and other sports influencers about their latest thoughts and insights on new technologies impacting the sports industry. Jody Mulkey is the Chief Technology Officer at Ticketmaster. An accomplished technologist and inspirational engineering leader, he is known for building high performance systems and teams. Prior to Ticketmaster, the Texas native spent over 14 years at Shopzilla Inc, a leading source for connecting buyers and sellers online that reaches a global audience of over 40 million shoppers monthly. As Chief Information Officer of Shopzilla, he led the overall the technology development and operations of the company.

Arik Hesseldahl is a veteran journalist with more than 20 years experience covering world-changing technology companies and trends for high profile media properties. Living in San Francisco for a few years, you learn a few things about the fall: First, the weather tends to be hotter and sunnier than the summer months. Second, you learn to avoid the area around the area around the Moscone Convention Center in late September and early October. That's when the software giants Oracle and Salesforce hold their almost back-to-back annual conferences that draw thousands of software developers. The two compete to see who can throw the more epic parties complete with big name musical acts like Aerosmith (Oracle last year) and U2 (Salesforce this year.)