How do you build a more inviting and inclusive game community? Building and nurturing strong communities is crucial in a crowded game market, says David Wynn, head of solutions consulting at Google Cloud for Games. Last year more than 10,000 new games were released on Steam alone, and that record looks like it will be broken again this year. As studios and publishers battle for players' attention, they are finding that communities can make the experience stickier and more meaningful to their player base. But that's only if it doesn't fall prey to the toxicity that can plague so many online spaces.

Artificial intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and automation will create more jobs than they eliminate. And the people employed in the new work environment must bring higher thinking skills, as well as social and emotional intelligence as technologists, to their workplaces and positions. In the Technologist Talk podcast series, Charles Eaton, Creating IT Futures CEO and CompTIA's executive vice president for social innovation, has referred to this workforce evolution as becoming "technologists, not just technicians." That was the key message shared by Diya Wynn, global readiness lead at Amazon Web Services Inc., during her breakout session at today's Women In Technology Summit Southeast (WITS) held in Raleigh, North Carolina. WITS is the only technical conference that features all women speakers and has programming specifically designed for women technologists working in technical and non-technical roles.

Since launching it in 2015, Amazon has been improving its voice-controlled home assistant Echo, from adding thousands of recipe walkthroughs to releasing its hockey puck-sized sibling, the Dot. But soon the device will be moving in to hotel rooms, too. The Wynn Las Vegas will begin outfitting all 4,748 guest rooms with an Echo this month, allowing visitors to control environmental conditions with vocal commands. The suites will get Amazon's domestic device first, rolling out to the whole hotel by next summer. Just don't expect your room's Echo to help you plan your day, as they'll only be set to voice-control lights, room temperature, drapes and the TV to begin. Future features may include the device's fancier personal assistant features, according to the press release.

Some secrets are buried too deep to get at. Ocean fronts deep below the surface, where distinct masses of water come together, are hard to study. But a marine robot and its submarine buddy might be about to change that. Thomas, an uncrewed boat designed and built near Portsmouth, UK, is embarking on a two-week mission to record data from such hard-to-reach waters. The main goal is to study oceanographic fronts, boundaries between two distinct water masses, which are common in the seas around the UK.