Microsoft’s Xbox One may have ridden the momentum of Halo 5: Guardians to chalk up a rare win over PS4 for the month of October, but we’re back to the status quo for November, according to NPD. Sony’s PS4 was once again the top selling console in the US for the month of November, riding what seems to have been a very successful Black Friday into the holiday season. On an anecdotal level, I saw all sorts of more casual gamers amongst my friends and family make the leap on Black Friday, and all of them went with PS4.

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Things are getting a little different for Destiny this year. As Senior Designer Derek Carrol said in an interview with Eurogamer, the team is leaning away from big DLC packs like House of Wolves and the Dark Below and more towards “events” on par with the Festival of The Lost or the SRL racing league that we’re currently working with. Like everything with Destiny, this is cause to freak out. Will these “events” be enough to keep us invested in the game while we wait for Destiny 2? Will players exit en masse without new story missions, new strikes, and maybe a new raid? Forbes’ Paul Tassi has high hopes that bungie will keep things moving for dedicated players, but they might have trouble attracting the sort of broader attention and mindshare big DLC demands. I tend to agree — Destiny won’t appreciably grow this year, and that’s probably the bargain Bungie has struck to give themselves space to work on Destiny 2.

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By Daryl Plummer
Gartner, Inc.

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In the opaque digital world of the loose hacktivist collective Anonymous, December 11 is also known as “Trolling ISIS Day,” an open invitation to the world to join the hackers in mocking the Islamic State on social media. At the same time, Anonymous is also targeting Donald Trump, the GOP front-runner for President of the U.S. who has promised to crush ISIS in the real world.

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When you write about as many companies as I do, expressing your positive and negative opinions about each, you get called a lot of things. Talking about what Xbox One could have done better? Sony sell-out. Explaining that you’ve grown to hate the PS4 controller? Microsoft shill. And so on.

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The cloudy, amber-hued liquid comes from India or Thailand or the United States or—as is most often the case—a warehouse in China. Deep in a lab hidden in the French countryside, a team of scientists pours the mysterious substance into a series of machines that measure its sugar, its alcohol content, its age—even its place of origin. Only then does the equipment verify what the scientists’ senses of smell and taste had already taken as a near given: This is not Cognac.
Like Tequila, bourbon, and Champagne, Cognac is a legally protected category of drink that must meet specific criteria. A particular type of brandy born from distilled wine, something can only be called Cognac if it’s been twice-distilled in copper pot stills, sits in French oak barrels for at least two years, and—perhaps most notably—is born from the vineyards that blanket the Cognac region of western France.
With Cognac sales to the United States (by far, its largest market) jumping by roughly 12 percent between 2013 and 2014, the spirit is largely growing in popularity. And as a category whose brand has benefited from a hundreds-year-old history, recent associations with hip-hop artists such as Jay-Z (who is now part-owner in the Cognac house d’Ussé) and Nas (who has worked with Hennessy in an official capacity), and growing popularity amongst the business elite in countries such as China, Cognac is also particularly appealing to counterfeiters.
“People want to use your name because it’s famous”, says Lionel Lalague, director of GI Protection and Market Access at the Bureau National Interprofessional du Cognac (or BNIC), the group charged with protecting and promoting the Cognac industry’s interests. “The best counterfeit will be a mix between real Cognac and other brandies. And if it comes from France or from the region, it can be difficult to trace.”

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“Walking away from my day-to-day responsibility at Donna Karan, that was, the toughest thing I’ve ever done,” says iconic fashion designer Donna Karan on her departure from her namesake company earlier this year. Since launching her label over 30 years ago, Karan has defined how generations of American women dress through feminine and flattering designs that began with her simple collection of “seven easy pieces.” “What I realized, when I got older, I couldn’t do as much as I thought I could do–and do it well,” says Karan, which motivated her “heartbreaking” decision to leave behind her company.

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Samsung looks set to unleash a monster smartphone judging by these images…

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