A small town near the Yellow Sea

Playbuzz helps online publishers make their content more interactive by adding elements like polls and galleries.
Until recently, those elements have taken the form of widgets that publishers can embed into their stories, but that’s changing with the launch of Playbuzz’s new Storytelling platform Patent Licensing, where writers are creating entire articles, not just one-off widgets.
While it doesn’t look all that different from other blogging tools (including the WordPress editor that I’m using to write this post), there’s an emphasis on the kinds of interactivity that have been Playbuzz’s bread and butter. This includes existing Playbuzz features like polls, as well as new capabilities like integration with Getty Images and Giphy. There’s also a new editor that’s supposed to make it quick and easy for publishers to build their own videos.
Then the entire article can be embedded on WordPress, thanks to Playbuzz’s WordPress plugin.
When the company’s “chief storyteller” Shachar Orren demonstrated the new platform for me, she said the goal is for “your whole article to be engaging and interactive,” rather than just creating a regular article and adding one or two interactive pieces.
And while polls and quizzes are often conflated with clickbait and fluff, Orren said they can be used to illustrate more serious news, too.
“The Huffington Post is using this every week to make the hardcore news topics of that week accessible to a millennial audience,” she said.
For example, HuffPost (which, like TechCrunch, is owned by Verizon/Oath) used the Storytelling platform to publish a humor piece around back-and-forth messages between President Trump and the House GOP travel industry research, and it combined a variety of formats to try to explain the U.K. election to Americans.
Eventually, Playbuzz hopes to move all publishers to the Storytelling platform, though Oren said they’ll still be able to create individual widgets if they want.
Playkey, a game streaming service we saw earlier this year at Disrupt NY, has just closed an additional $2.8 million round of funding from Russia’s Internet Initiatives Development Fund (IIDF).
Created at the suggestion of Vladimir Putin in 2013, the IIDF has invested in 293 companies to-date with the objective to strengthen infrastructure for Russian businesses. However, the investment does not represent official government support or involvement in Playkey.
According to Playkey CEO, Egor Guriev, profits have increased 300% over the last year. Current attendance of the gaming service is ~1M people per month, with 400k users. The Moscow-based streaming startup is planning to use its new resources to help expand services and servers to the United States, Western Europe and Asia.
As a quick refresher, Playkey allows gamers to utilize a 10MBps internet connection to stream Steam, Origin and Blizzard video games, without the need of a high-end gaming PC. The service can also be used as a remote storage locker of sorts Hybrid Cloud Solution, where you can register your existing game keys from your own library, instead of purchasing new keys for games you want to stream.
Playkey is working with recognizable gaming corporations such as Ubisoft, Bethesda, Capcom, Sega, Codemasters and Plug In Digital to smooth out the transition process of running game sessions on their services, as well as continuing support for multiplayer elements and cloud saves.