When you've been a journalist on the

XR technology beat for 20 years, like VentureBeat's lead writer Dean

Takahashi has, you develop a hunch or two about the direction the

industry might go. Alan picks Dean's brain for a few such scoops.

Alan: Thank you for joining the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson, today's guest is the one and only Dean Takahashi, the lead writer for VentureBeat. He's been a tech journalist for more than 28 years, and he's covered games for a twenty one of those years. He's authored two books: Opening the XBox, and The XBox 360 Uncloaked. He organizes the annual GamesBeat and GamesBeat Summit conferences. To learn more, you can visit games beat dot com or venture beat dot com.

Dean, welcome to the show, my friend.

Dean: Thank you. And thank you

for having me.

Alan: It's my absolute pleasure.

We had the distinct opportunity to meet at AWE this year for a very

short amount of time. I think we rode the escalator down? But I've

been a big fan of yours for a long time. I read the articles that you

write, and they're very insightful. They're very factual. I'm just

very honored to have you on the show. So, thank you very much.

Dean: Thank you. Nice, and happy

to hear.

Alan: How did you start... first

of all, I guess you've been in the games world for a long time. How

did you kind of pivot over to VentureBeat, and what is VentureBeat?

Let's let's unpack what VentureBeat is, for people that may or may

not know?

Dean: Yeah, I was sort of a traditional newspaper and magazine journalist for a long time, and then, when the web came along and people started podcasting and blogging, I looked around and felt like it was less of a risk to go try something new than it was to stay at a newspaper. I was at the San Jose newspaper at the time. So about 11 years ago, I joined VentureBeat, and it had been started two years earlier by Matt Marshall, who was a venture capital writer for the Mercury News and an early blogger as well. And so, we were a tech news blog and competed at the time with likes of GIGO, and TechCrunch. They have been either... gone away, or they they've been acquired by larger companies. So we're still one of the last, larger independent tech blogs.

And then within that, when I joined about eleven years ago, we started GamesBeat as well, as sort of a subsection that focused on games. At the very beginning, we were sort of a startup and venture capital site. But now we pretty much cover the gamut of tech news and game news. And then, our particular vertical focuses are artificial intelligence on the tech side, and then the whole game sector. And then, I guess as far as getting into VR and AR, I've really followed the news. I remember seeing the Oculus guys -- Palmer Luckey and Nate Mitchell and Brendan (Iribe) over at one of their CES tables in the early years, well before they were acquired. I think I even tried to get an interview with John Carmack, like, the day after he did a demo at E3. The next day, he was gone. So I was on the hunt kind of early. Never quite the absolute first person to dive into VR.

Alan: But very close. You've

seen it from pre-DK1 days -- where [it was] probably a

cobbled-together a collection of flat screens, wires, and duct tape

-- and what it is today, where you have real consumer-grade virtual

reality that's not even connected to computers. You've seen a lot

over the years. You've written countless articles on virtual and

augmented reality. Is there anything that you may have written about

before that you couldn't have predicted, that has happened already?

Dean: I didn't really anticipate

that Enterprise was actually going to take off as well as it has. It

was always sort of there as something that might be a