Month: October 2018

If you are dying to get your hands on some crazy Magic Leap hardware, you have some much better options as of today.

At the company’s first developer conference, Magic Leap announced that they are opening order of the Magic Leap One Creator’s Edition headset to the 48 contiguous states of the USA. If you’re in Hawaii or Alaska, no dice.

Previously, you had to be in Chicago, LA, Miami, NYC, San Francisco or Seattle in order to get your hands on it. Also, if you had previously ordered the headset in one of those cities, someone would come to you, drop it off and get you set up personally. That service is expanding to 50 cities, but you also don’t need to have someone set it up for you in order to buy one now.

It’s worth reiterating that this thing costs $2,295. The company is doing a financing plan with Affirm so that interested buyers can spread the cost of the device over 24 months as well now.

It’s called a Creator’s Edition but it’s definitely geared towards the developer crowd. There are a few apps available for download in the Magic Leap World Store but this isn’t anywhere near consumer-ready and that’s why they’re getting developers to start building out some cool stuff while they get their ducks in a row and further hone their pitch for a post-iPhone vision of computing.

The sharing economy ends up sharing a ton of labor’s earnings with middlemen like Uber and Airbnb . $38 million-funded Origin wants the next great two-sided marketplace to be decentralized on the blockchain so drivers and riders or hosts and guests can connect directly and avoid paying steep fees that can range up to 20 percent or higher. So today Origin launches its decentralized marketplace protocol on the Ethererum mainnet that replaces a central business that connects users and vendors with a smart contract.

“Marketplaces don’t redistribute the profits they make to members. They accrue to founders and venture capitalists” Origin co-founder Matt Lie, who was the third product manager at YouTube. “Building these decentralized marketplaces, we want to make them peer-to-peer, not peer-to-corporate-monopoly-to-peer.” When people transact through Origin, it plans to issue them tokens that will let them participate in the governance of the protocol, and could incentivize them to get on these marketplaces early as well as convince others to use them.

Today’s mainnet beta sees Origin offering its own basic decentralized app that operates like a Craigslist on the blockchain. Users can create profile, connect their ethereum wallet through services like MetaMask, browse product and service listings, message each other to arrange transactions through smart contracts with no extra fees, leave reviews, and appeal disputes to Origin’s in-house arbitrators.

Eventually with the Origin protocol, developers will be able to quickly build their own sub-marketplaces for specific services like dog walking, house cleaning, ride sharing, and more. These developers can opt to charge fees, though Origin hopes the cost-savings from its blockchain platform will let them undercut non-blockchain services. And vendors can offer a commission to any marketplace that gets their listing matched/sold.

It might be years before the necessary infrastructure like login systems and simple wallets make it easy for developers and mainstream users to build and adopt DApps built on Origin. But it has plenty of runway thanks to $3 million in seed token sale funding from Pantera Capital, $6.6 million raised through a Coinlist token sale, plus $26.4 million in traditional venture funding from Pantera Capital, Foundation Capital, Garry Tan, Alexis Ohanian, Gil Penchina, Kamal Ravikant, Steve Jang, and Randall Kaplan.

“Marketplaces are at the core of what makes the internet so valuable and useful and the Origin team has one of the most promising blockchain platforms for the new sharing economy — with currency baked in — this could be really disruptive (and one of the best utilizations of the ethereum blockchain)” says Ohanian, the Reddit and Initialized Capital co-founder.

Liu and co-founder Josh Fraser came up with the idea after trying to imagine the downstream effects of Ethereum. Liu recalls thinking, “What if we could replace dozens of multi-million and multi-billion dollar companies with open source protocols that aren’t owned or controlled by anyone?”

So why would marketplaces want to build on Origin instead of creating their own blockchain or traditional proprietary system? Fraser tells me smart contracts can save money, but that “these individual pieces are incredibly difficult to build” so he sees Origin as “analogous to Stripe — able to abstract away all the friction of building on the blockchain.” 40 marketplaces have already signed letters of intent to build on the protocol.

If Origin reaches critical mass, it could also benefit from the concept of shared network effect. Users only have to sign up once, and can then interact with any marketplace built on Origin. That means new marketplaces the builds on the protocol instantly has a registered user base.

Origin will face some stiff challenges, though. There’ll be a chicken-and-egg problem of getting the first marketplaces signed up before there are users on its self-sovereign identity platform, or geting those users aboard when there’s little for them to do. Liu admits that timing is the startup’s biggest threat. “We believe that decentralized marketplaces are inevitable, but a lot of smart people seem to think we’re too early and that we should be focused on building lower-level infrastructure instead” the co-founder says. For us, we’d rather be too early than too late.”

There’s also the trouble of leaving actors in a capitalist system to treat each other properly without a centralized authority. If an Uber driver treats you terribly, you can complain and get them kicked off the platform. Even with Origin’s review system, abusers of the system may be able to continue operating. It’s easy to imagine its arbitration service becoming completely overwhelmed with disputes. Luckily, Origin has made some strong hires to tackle these challenges, including Yu Pan who it says was a PayPal co-founder, former head of Dropbox’s NYC engineering tream Cuong Du, and Franck Chastagnol who previously led engineering teams at Paypal, YouTube, Google, and Dropbox.

Origin’s success will all come down to usability. Your average Uber driver or Airbnb host is no blockchain expert. They vend through those apps because it’s easy. Those centralized organizations are also highly incentivized to fulfill transactions quickly and smoothly in ways prohibited by eliminating fees. Origin will have to effectively make the blockchain aspects of its service disappear so all users and vendors know is that they’re paying less or earning more.

Square’s CFO Sarah Friar is stepping down to become the CEO of Nextdoor, according to the payment company’s CEO, Jack Dorsey.

In a statement issued a bit ago, he says of Friar that she “steered us through an IPO and helped build a growing ecosystem of businesses that will scale into the future.” Friar “leaves us having established a culture of entrepreneurship and discipline across the entire company. She has been an amazing leader, partner, and friend, and we are grateful for all she’s done for Square.”

Nextdoor has since released its own statement about Friar, who will assume the position in December. Quoting the company’s cofounder and outgoing CEO Nirav Tolia, the statement reads: “Sarah is one of the most highly regarded executives in Silicon Valley with an exceptionally rare mix of proven business skills, and authentic heart and soul. . . From the very beginning of our CEO search, she has been the top choice, and the board of directors and I feel exceptionally fortunate and excited for her to lead Nextdoor moving forward.”

The hire looks like a smart move by Nextdoor, the fast-growing social network that centers around neighborhoods and which, three months ago, announced that Tolia planned to step aside as soon as he found the right person to take Nextdoor “to the next level.”

At the time, Tolia had said in an email to employees that the role of CEO needed to evolve as the company evolves. He also said then that he will remain the company’s board chairman.

San Francisco-based Nextdoor has raised $285 million from investors over its eight-plus years, including from Insight Venture Partners, Benchmark, Shasta Ventures, Tiger Global Management and Kleiner Perkins. The company has soared into unicorn terrain, but it also seemingly needs to generate more revenue before it can be taken public. Toward that end, it began offering paid real estate listings roughly one year ago. The company also sells targeted ads.

Friar, often described as Dorsey’s right-hand woman at Square, grew up in Northern Ireland, the daughter of farmers. She was the first in her family to go to university, studying engineering at Oxford.

After graduating, she joined McKinsey as a business analyst in London, then Johannesburg, before moving to California in 1998 to nab an MBA at Stanford. Friar went on to spend a decade with Goldman Sachs in Silicon Valley, leaving the powerhouse bank as a managing director before spending a year with Salesforce as an SVP, then joining Square in 2012.

In addition to her work with Square, Friar sits on the boards of two powerful companies:  Slack and Walmart.

Shares of Square have fallen in after-hours trading on the news.

Microsoft announced today that it’s joined open-source patent group, the Open Invention Network in an effort to help shield Linux and other open-source software from patent-related suits. As part of the deal, the software giant is opening a library of 60,000 patents to OIN members. Access to the massive portfolio is unlimited and royalty free.

It is, as ZDNET notes, a shift away from the aggressively litigious corporation of year’s past. Among other suits, the company had previously gone after a number of different companies in the Android ecosystem. Microsoft acknowledges as much in its announcement, adding that the news should be taken as a sign that its turning over a new leaf.

“We know Microsoft’s decision to join OIN may be viewed as surprising to some,” EVP Erich Andersen writes in a blog post, “it is no secret that there has been friction in the past between Microsoft and the open source community over the issue of patents. For others who have followed our evolution, we hope this announcement will be viewed as the next logical step for a company that is listening to customers and developers and is firmly committed to Linux and other open source programs.”

The news also finds the company looking to blur the lines between Windows and Linus development, encouraging devs to create programs for both operating systems, along with .NET and Java.

Last week, Microsoft followed the lead of companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon by joining anti-patent trolling group, the LOT Network.

On October 18 — just one week away — some of the most brilliant and innovative minds in reality creation will gather at UCLA’s Royce Hall in Los Angeles to attend TC Sessions AR/VR 2018. Whether you’re an early start-up founder, an investor, a developer or a student, if you’re focused on AR/VR, you don’t want to miss this day-long intensive that goes deep into the current and future state of augmented and virtual realities.

Need a bit more convincing? Here are four reasons why you should buy a ticket and attend TC Sessions AR/VR 2018.

1. Deep-dive discussions

We have an outstanding roster of speakers ready to take the stage and go deep on both the opportunities and the challenges facing the AR/VR industry now and in the future. Here are just some of the people and topics we have on tap.

Niko Bonatsos, managing director at General Catalyst, Jacob Mullins, a partner at Shasta Ventures and Catherine Ulrich, managing director at FirstMark Capital will offer a reality check on the state of AR/VR funding — and discuss where the opportunities lie.

Survios co-founders Nathan Burba and James Illiff will talk VR gaming. The big question is whether VR gaming will continue to be a big opportunity and whether the studio can keep the momentum rolling.

Stephanie Zhan, a partner at Sequoia Capital, discusses how to build an inclusive — if virtual — future. As we spend more time in online virtual worlds, can the game developers who build them address the social issues we encounter?

2. Presentations: The challenging future of AR/VR

From expensive hardware to breaking out beyond gaming, AR/VR technology faces hurdles to widespread adoption. Heavy-hitters at Oculus, Facebook, and Snap (to name a few) weigh in on this important subject. Here’s a taste.

Finding users isn’t the only hurdle when it comes to augmented reality. Creating developer platforms ranks right up there on the AR challenge-o-meter. Eitan Pilipski, a VP at Snap, will talk about leveraging the company’s extensive AR selfie-filter expertise to attract more developers.

Yelena Rachitzky is an executive producer of experiences at Oculus, a company that’s invested hundreds of millions of dollars into VR content. She’ll discuss how the company plans to help Facebook kickstart its VR future. Will Facebook’s customers buy in?

Speaking of Facebook’s future, Ficus Kirkpatrick leads the company’s camera team, and he’ll talk about the company’s entry into AR — by augmenting customers’ smartphone cameras. But where will Facebook’s AR journey lead?

3. Networking

You won’t find a better opportunity to connect with the leaders, innovators, investors and makers within the AR/VR community. Whether you’re looking for collaborators, an investment opportunity, your next job or your next round of funding, you’ll find the people who can make it happen at TC Sessions AR/VR 2018 — all in one day, all in one place.

4. Build community

Community building goes beyond simple networking. It’s like-minded people sharing their ideas, philosophies and dreams. It’s about learning from each other and then returning to the work with renewed inspiration. Come and enrich the community.

TC Sessions AR/VR 2018 takes place on October 18 at UCLA’s Royce Hall in Los Angeles. Tickets cost $149, but you can save 35 percent simply by tweeting your attendance. Go buy a ticket and join your people for one incredible, inspiring day. We can’t wait to see you next week!

 

 

AT&T will launch a new direct-to-consumer streaming service next year, the company announced today. Yes, another one. AT&T currently already operates cord cutter-friendly streaming services DirecTV Now and the low-cost WatchTV, but its new service will be focused on WarnerMedia properties, including HBO.

The move follows AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, which completed this past June. That means AT&T also now operates Time Warner’s streaming services HBO GO, for pay TV viewers, and HBO NOW, for cord cutters.

The upcoming, subscription-based service will include all of WarnerMedia’s properties, like HBO plus WarnerMedia’s other TV and movie franchises, as well as third-party licensed content.

And unlike DirecTV Now and Watch TV, the focus is not on streaming live TV, but on-demand content.

In that way, it’s being positioned more as a Netflix competitor, or even a rival to Disney’s upcoming streaming service, also due in 2019.

WarnerMedia CEO John Stankey discussed the service on stage at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit on Wednesday, but didn’t confirm its pricing or even what titles, specifically, would be included.

However, as CNBC noted, the company owns many major media brands like “Harry Potter,” “Batman,” and shows from cable TV networks like CNN, TNT, and TBS.

The service will cost more than HBO NOW, Variety also reports, and will be competitive in terms of content spend with Netflix. Currently, Warner Media spends $2.5 million to Netflix’s $8 billion on content, its report said.

In a statement, Stankey confirmed the new service would arrive in the fourth quarter of 2019.

“This is another benefit of the AT&T/Time Warner merger, and we are committed to launching a compelling and competitive product that will serve as a complement to our existing businesses and help us to expand our reach by offering a new choice for entertainment with the WarnerMedia collection of films, television series, libraries, documentaries and animation loved by consumers around the world,” Stankey said.

“We expect to create such a compelling product that it will help distributors increase consumer penetration of their current packages and help us successfully reach more customers,” he added.

On stage at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit in Los Angeles, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman unveiled the name of their highly-anticipated mobile video company known until now as NewTV.

The name is Quibi, short for “quick bites,” per a note on its new website: “Something cool is coming from Hollywood and Silicon Valley — quick bites of captivating entertainment, created for mobile by the best talent, designed to fit perfectly into any moment of your day.”

The short-form video service, launching next year, will operate on a two-tiered subscription model similar to Hulu, per Deadline. Quibi is cooking up original content with Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, Southpaw director Antoine Fuqua and Spiderman director Sami Raimi, as well as Get Out producer Jason Blum and Van Toffler, the CEO of digital media production company Gunpowder & Sky.

The Hollywood Reporter says the del Toro project “is a modern zombie story,” the Fuqua project is “a modern version of Dog Day Afternoon” and the Blum project, titled Wolves and Villagers, could be compared to Fatal Attraction.

Katzenberg, the former chairman of Walt Disney Studios and founder of WndrCo, a consumer tech investment and holding company, has raised $1 billion for Quibi from Disney, 21st Century Fox, Entertainment One, NBCUniversal, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Alibaba Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Madrone Capital and several others. He hired Meg Whitman as Quibi’s CEO in January.

Quibi, given Katzenberg and Whitman’s entertainment and business acumen, is expected to compete with the biggest players in the space, including Instagram, Netflix and Snap, which today announced Snap Originals. The new effort will have the ephemeral messaging service rolling out 12 new scripted shows on its app from Keeping Up With The Kardashians creator Bunim/Murray, Friday Night Lights writer Carter Harris and more.

Quibi is hiring aggressively, recently bringing on former Viacom executive Doug Herzog, former Instagram product manager Blake Barnes and former Hulu chief technology officer Rob Post, also per THR.

Quibi did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Early-stage venture capital firm Shasta Ventures has brought on three new faces to beef up its enterprise software and security portfolio amid a big push to “go deeper” into cybersecurity, per Shasta’s managing director Doug Pepper.

Balaji Yelamanchili (above left), the former general manager and executive vice president of Symantec’s enterprise security business unit, joins as a venture partner on the firm’s enterprise software team. He was previously a senior vice president at Oracle and Dell EMC. Pepper says Yelamanchili will be sourcing investments and may take board seats in “certain cases.”

The firm has also tapped Salesforce’s former chief information security officer Izak Mutlu (above center) as an executive-in-residence, a role in which he’ll advise Shasta portfolio companies. Mutlu spent 11 years at the cloud computing company managing IT security and compliance.

InterWest board partner Drew Harman, the final new hire, has joined as a board partner and will work closely with the chief executive officers of Shasta’s startups. Harman has worked in enterprise software for 25 years across a number of roles. He is currently on the boards of the cloud-based monetization platform Aria, enterprise content marketing startup NewsCred, customer retention software provider Totango and others.

“There’s no area today that’s more important than cybersecurity,” Pepper told TechCrunch. “The business of venture has gotten increasingly competitive and it demands more focus than ever before. We aren’t looking for generalists, we are looking for domain experts.”

Shasta’s security investments include email authentication service Valimail, which raised a $25 million Series B in May. Airspace Systems, a startup that built “kinetic capture” technologies that can identify offending unmanned aircrafts and take them down, raised a $20 million round with participation from Shasta in March. And four-year-old Stealth Security, a startup that defends companies from automated bot attacks, secured an $8 million investment from Shasta in February.

The Menlo Park-based firm filed to raise $300 million for its fifth flagship VC fund in 2016. A year later, it announced a specialty vehicle geared toward augmented and virtual reality app development. With more than $1 billion under management, the firm also backs consumer, IoT, robotics and space-tech companies across the U.S.

In the last year, Shasta has promoted Nikhil Basu Trivedi, Nitin Chopra and Jacob Mullins from associate to partner, as well as added two new associates, Natalie Sandman and Rachel Star.

Target is no stranger to running startup accelerators. The company today operates its Target + Techstars program, the beauty-focused Target Takeoff, and the India-based Target Accelerator Program. Now it’s adding a fourth business accelerator to the mix with the launch of Target Incubator. The new program is aimed at Gen Z entrepreneurs and its only real require is that the businesses involved are doing some sort of good.

As Target puts it, the businesses simply need to be making things “better for people or the planet.”

That broad requirement could cover a range of businesses, including those with new product ideas, new technology, or new services. Target says these could be things that impact everything from how you get your groceries to greenhouse emissions.

The businesses themselves don’t have to be too far along, either. All Target is asking is the company has taken some steps to try to get traction, but the business itself doesn’t have to have already publicly launched. It just needs to be more than “an idea” and it needs to be established as a legal entity. The founders must also still retain majority ownership (51%+) to be considered.

The retailer says it will select eight businesses for the program, with up to two members per business directly participating in the new incubator.

These “Gen Z”-focused entrepreneurs will then participate in virtual programming one hour per week from late April through June 2019, followed by a two-month in-person incubator program at Target’s HQ in Minneapolis from mid July through early August 2019.

While there, they’ll receive mentorship from Target leaders and other businesses; participate in workshops, learning sessions and team-building events; be able to access subject matter experts across industries; and participate in other founder growth and development opportunities, Target says.

Applications opened up Monday and will close on October 29, with offers doled out on December 5, following a round of finalist interviews.

The businesses selected will also receive a $10,000 stipend from Target.

And the retailer will cover travel and accommodations for the interviews, plus travel and housing for those attending the eight-week program, which wraps with a demo day.

For Target, being involved with startups gives it the chance to invest in businesses at an early stage, which can ultimately benefit Target’s own bottom line, help it keep up with trends – especially those that draw in younger shoppers – and aid in its battle with Amazon.

The company has already established itself as a company that wants to work with emerging brands, through moves like its investment in online mattress company Casper, as well as through partnerships with digital-first brands like Bevel, Harry’s, Bark, Who What Wear, Native, Quip, Rocketbook, GIR, NatureBox, Hello, and others. It also last year acquired same-day delivery service Shipt, a still-emerging company that allowed it to get into the hot grocery delivery market.

Beyond working with new and digital-first brands, Target wants to reach businesses doing “good.” Today, many younger shoppers – those Target dubs as “Gen Z” – are driven to stores by more than just price. They often want to feel happy about their purchases because they believe in the company’s mission, or because it supports sustainable businesses, for example. Target Incubator will give the retailer a first look into those kinds of businesses now, too.

Nintendo has set a strange new precedent with the release of Legend of Zelda SP on the Switch: it’s essentially the original NES game but with Link starts loaded up with good gear and cash. In a way it’s no different from a cheat code, but the way it’s executed feels like a missed opportunity.

The game itself (SP stands for “special”) is described by Nintendo in the menu as a “souped up version” of the original: “Living the life of luxury!” It’s a separate entry in the menu with all the other NES games you get as part of the company’s subscription service.

You’re given the white sword, big shield, blue ring and power bracelet, plus 255 rupees to replace that shield when a Like-like eats it. Basically they’ve given you all the stuff you can find on the overworld (including max bombs and keys), but no items you’d get from inside a dungeon. You also have six hearts, and traveling around a little bit I determined these were awarded by raiding nearby hidden areas, not simply assigned. Secret passages are already revealed, and so on.

Because it skips the title screen and save game selection it seems like someone must have essentially played through the game to this point (or more likely edited the values in game RAM) and then walked to the classic starting point and made a save state that automatically loads when you start or reset the game. This means the only way to save is to use the Switch’s built-in save states, not the rather inconvenient save method the game used.

It’s plain enough that this will be a less frustrating way to explore this famously difficult game, but it seems untrue to Zelda’s roots. I understand perhaps gifting the player some of the impossible to find things like a heart hidden inside a random block here or there. Getting some bombs to start is great too, and maybe even the rings (warping is helpful, and the game is pretty punishing, so damage reduction is nice). But the white sword?

For one thing, a player experiencing the game this way misses out on one of the most iconic moments in all gaming — “It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this!” Then the ritual lifting of the wooden sword. And then setting out into the world to die again and again.

And for me, the white sword was always sort of a rite of passage in the game — your first big step toward becoming powerful. You earned it by finding those extra heart containers, perhaps after asking in vain after it before you were ready. Once you have it, you’re cutting through enemies like butter.

To make it the default sword and to skip these steps seems like it causes the player to miss out on what makes Zelda Zelda.

To be fair, it’s not the only version of the game you can play — the original is available, too. But it seems like a missed opportunity. Why not just have a save game you can load with this stuff, so you can continue playing as normal? Why not have the option baked into the launch of the original Zelda — have a couple secret save states ready with differing levels of items?

Nintendo has the opportunity to introduce a new generation to classic NES games here, having provided a rather bare-bones experience with the NES Classic Edition. Why not enhance them? Include the manual, god mode, developer commentary? This is the legacy the company has been stewarding for decades, and what better than to give it the respect it deserves?

I’m probably overthinking it. But this Zelda SP just seems like a rushed job when players would appreciate something like it, just not so heavy-handed. It’s not that these games are inviolable, but that if they’re going to be fiddled with, we’d like to see it done properly.