DC Entertainment is sharing more information today about DC Universe, a subscription service built around DC superheroes.
The biggest draw remains the previously announced slate of original shows, starting with “Titans,” a series that brings the Teen Titans (a team led by Dick Grayson/Robin) to live action. There also will be live action “Doom Patrol” and “Swamp Thing” shows, as well as an animated “Harley Quinn” and the third season of “Young Justice: Outsiders.”
The streaming library won’t be limited to new shows. It also will include the four Christopher Reeve-starring Superman films (the first “Superman” remains the greatest superhero movie ever made; fight me if you think otherwise), a selection of DC animated movies and older TV series like the classic “Wonder Woman” and the first two seasons of “Batman: The Animated Series.”
Still, a devoted DC fan could probably tear through all of that in a month or two, so as DC’s publisher and chief creative officer Jim Lee put it in the announcement, the goal is for DC Universe to be “so much more than a streaming service.”
For one thing, it will include what DC describes as a rotating, curated lineup of digital comics, with classic issues like Action Comics #1 (Superman’s first appearance) and Detective Comics #27 (Batman’s first appearance), plus more recent work like the Geoff Johns/Jim Lee run on Justice League, Swamp Thing by Scott Snyder and Harley Quinn by Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner.
Plus, there will be an online community and forum, a digital storefront with exclusive access to DC Collectibles and additional content like news and a DC encyclopedia.
DC isn’t announcing pricing yet, but the plan is to launch DC Universe on iOS, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV and the web in the fall, with beta access starting in August. Fans can sign up now.
All good things, as the saying goes, must come to an end. And to which good thing do we refer? Your chance to exhibit for FREE as a TC Top Pick at Disrupt San Francisco 2018 on September 5-7. The application window slams shut tomorrow, June 29 at 5 p.m. (PST). Don’t miss out on your chance to showcase your early-stage startup to all the right people at a price anyone can afford: free. Apply right here, right now.
Granted, not just any pre-Series A startup can qualify to be a TC Top Pick. For starters, your company must fall into one of these categories: AI, AR/VR, Blockchain, Biotech, Fintech, Gaming, Healthtech, Privacy/Security, Space (as in “outer”), Mobility, Retail or Robotics/Hardware.
Still with us? Great. Next, our team of TechCrunch editors will review every eligible application and select up to five startups to represent each category. Several companies will earn the coveted TC Top Pick designation and each team receives a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package. Here’s what that gets you:
A one-day exhibit space in Startup Alley
Three Founder passes (good for all three days of the show)
Full use of CrunchMatch — our investor-to-startup matching platform
Access to the full event press list
TC Top Pick Media Bonus: A three-minute video interview on the Showcase Stage with a TechCrunch editor — promoted across our social media platforms
Exhibiting in Startup Alley at a Disrupt event offers founders tremendous networking, collaboration and investment opportunities. Luke Heron, the CEO of TestCard.com, had this to say about the benefits of exhibiting in Startup Alley at Disrupt:
“TechCrunch uses a curation process regarding the companies it accepts. So being at Disrupt — among all these other fantastic startups — has a hugely positive impact when you’re fundraising.”
You truly have nothing to lose by applying to be a TC Top Pick, but you’ll never know what you missed if you don’t get your application in before the clock runs out.
Disrupt San Francisco 2018 takes place on September 5-7 at Moscone Center West. The opportunity clock is winding down, and the application window for TC Top Picks closes on June 29 at 5 p.m. (PST). Click and apply right now.
For over 50 years, Disneyland and its sister parks have been a showcase for increasingly technically proficient versions of its “animatronic” characters. First pneumatic and hydraulic and more recently fully electronic — these figures create a feeling of life and emotion inside rides and attractions, in shows and, increasingly, in interactive ways throughout the parks.
The machines they’re creating are becoming more active and mobile in order to better represent the wildly physical nature of the characters they portray within the expanding Disney universe. And a recent addition to the pantheon could change the way that characters move throughout the parks and influence how we think about mobile robots at large.
I wrote recently about the new tack Disney was taking with self-contained characters that felt more flexible, interactive and, well, alive than ‘static’, pre-programmed animatronics. That has done a lot to add to the convincing nature of what is essentially a very limited robot.
Traditionally, most animatronic figures cannot move from where they sit or stand, and are pre-built to exacting show specifications. The design and programming phases of the show are closely related, so that the hero characters are efficient and durable enough to run hundreds of times a day, every day, for years.
The Na’avi Shaman from Pandora: The World of Avatar, at Walt Disney World, represents the state of the art of this kind of figure.
However, with the expanded universe of Disney properties including more and more dynamic and heroic figures by the year, it makes sense that they’d want to explore ways of making the robots that represent those properties in the parks more believable and active.
That’s where the Stuntronics project comes in. Built out of a research experiment called Stickman, which we covered a few months ago, Stuntronics are autonomous, self-correcting aerial performers that make on-the-go corrections to nail high-flying stunts every time. Basically robotic stuntpeople, hence the name.
I spoke to Tony Dohi, Principle R&D Imagineer and Morgan Pope, Associate Research Scientist at Disney, about the project.
“So what this is about is the realization we came to after seeing where our characters are going on screen,” says Dohi, “whether they be Star Wars characters, or Pixar characters, or Marvel characters or our own animation characters, is that they’re doing all these things that are really, really active. And so that becomes the expectation our park guests have that our characters are doing all these things on screen — but when it comes to our attractions, what are our animatronic figures doing? We realized we have kind of a disconnect here.”
So they came up with the concept of a stunt double for the ‘hero’ animatronic figures that could take their place within a show or scene to perform more aggressive maneuvering, much in the same way a double replaces a valuable and delicate actor in a dangerous scene.
The Stuntronics robot features on-board accelerometer and gyroscope arrays supported by laser range finding. In its current form, it’s humanoid, taking on the size and shape of a performer that could easily be imagined clothed in the costume of, say, one of The Incredibles, or someone on the Marvel roster. The bot is able to be slung from the end of a wire to fly through the air, controlling its pose, rotation and center of mass to not only land aerial tricks correctly but to do them on target while holding heroic poses in midair.
One use of this could be mid-show in an attraction. For relatively static shots, hero animatronics like the Shaman or new figures Imagineering is constantly working on could provide nuanced performances of face and figure. Then, a transition to a scene that requires dramatic, un-fettered action and boom, a Stuntronics double could fly across the space on its own, calculating trajectories and striking poses with its on-board hardware, hitting a target dead on every time. Queue re-set for the next audience.
This focus on creating scenarios where animatronics feel more ‘real’ and dynamic is at work in other areas of Imagineering as well, with autonomous rolling robots and — some day — the holy grail of bipedal walking robots. But Stuntronics fills one specific gap in the repertoire of a standard Animatronic figure — the ability to convince you it can be a being of action and dynamism.
“So often our robots are in the uncanny valley where you got a lot of function, but it still doesn’t look quite right. And I think here the opposite is true,” says Pope. “When you’re flying through the air, you can have a little bit of function and you can produce a lot of stuff that looks pretty good, because of this really neat physics opportunity — you’ve got these beautiful kinds of parabolas and sine waves that just kind of fall out of rotating and spinning through the air in ways that are hard for people to predict, but that look fantastic.”
The original BRICK
Like many of the solutions Imagineering comes up with for its problems, Stuntronics started out as a research project without a real purpose. In this case, it was called BRICK (Binary Robotic Inertially Controlled bricK). Basically, a metal brick with sensors and the ability to change its center of mass to control its spin to hit a precise orientation at a precise height – to ‘stick the landing’ every time.
From the initial BRICK, Disney moved on to Stickman, an articulated version of the device that could now more aggressively control the rotation and orientation of the device. Combined with some laser rangefinders you had the bones of something that, if you squint, could emulate a ‘human’ acrobat.
“Morgan, I got together and said, maybe there’s something here, we’re not really be sure. But let’s poke at it in a bunch of different directions and see what comes out of it,” says Dohi.
But the Stickman didn’t stick for long.
“When we did the BRICK, I thought that was pretty cool,” says Pope. “And then by the time I was presenting the BRICK at a conference, Tony [Dohi] had helped us make stick man. And I was like, well, this isn’t cool anymore. The Stickman is what’s really cool. And then I was down in Australia presenting Stickman and I knew we were doing the full Stuntronic back at R&D. And I was like, well, this isn’t cool anymore,” he jokes.
“But it has been so much fun. Every step of the way I think oh, this is blowing my mind. but,they just keep pushing…so it’s nice to have that challenge.”
This process has always been one of the fascinating things to me about the way that Imagineering works as a whole. You have people that are enabled by management and internal structure to spool out the threads of a problem, even though you’re not really sure what’s going to come out of it. The biggest companies on the planet have similar R&D departments in place — though the ones that make a habit of disconnecting them from a balance sheet, like Apple, are few and far in between, in my experience. Typically, so much of R&D is tied to a profit/loss spreadsheet so tightly that it’s really, really difficult to sussurate something enough to see what comes of it.
The ability to kind of have vastly different specialities like math, physics, art and design to be able to put ideas on the table and sift through them and say hey, we have this storytelling problem on one hand and this research project on the other. If we drill down on this a bit more — would this serve the purpose? As long as the storytelling always remains the North Star then you end up having a a guiding light to serve drag you through the pile and you come out the other end, holding a couple of things that could be coupled to solve a problem.
“We’re set up to do the really high risk stuff that you don’t know is going to be successful or not, because you don’t know if there’s going to be a direct application of what you’re doing,” says Dohi. “But you just have a hunch that there might be something there, and they give us a long leash, and they let us explore the possibilities and the space around just an idea, which is really quite a privilege. It’s one of the reasons why I love this place.”
This process of play and iteration and pursuit of a goal of storytelling pops up again and again with Imagineering. It’s really a cluster of very smart people across a broad spectrum of disciplines that are governed by a central nervous system of leaders like Jon Snoddy, the head of R&D at the studios, who help to connect the dots between the research side and the other areas of Imagineering that deal with the Parks or interactive projects or the digital division.
There’s an economy and lack of ego to the organization that enables exploration without wastefulness and organically curtails the pursuit of things not in service to the story. In my time exploring the workings of Imagineering I’ve often found that there is a significant disconnect between how fascinating the process is and how well the organization communicates the cleverness of its solutions.
The Disney Research white papers are certainly infinitely fascinating to people interested in emerging tech, but the points of integration between the research and the practical applications in the parks often remain unexplored. Still, they’re getting better at understanding when they’ve really got something they feel is killer and thinking about better ways to communicate that to the world.
Indeed, near the end of our conversation, Dohi says he’s come up with a solid sound byte and I have him give me his best pitch.
“One of our goals of Stuntronics is to see if we can leap across the uncanny valley.”
After years of legal procedures, Apple and Samsung have reached an agreement in the infamous patent case. Terms of the settlement were undisclosed. So is everything clear between Samsung and Apple? Not so fast, as Bloomberg reports that Apple wants to use OLED displays from LG to reduce its dependence on Samsung.
You might remember that Apple first sued Samsung for copying the design of the iPhone with early Samsung Galaxy phones. The first trial led to an Apple victory. Samsung had to pay $1 billion.
But the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office later invalidated one of Apple’s patents. It led to multiple retrials and appeals, and the Supreme Court even had to rule at some point.
After many years, Samsung ended up owing $539 million to Apple. According to Reuters, Samsung has already paid $399 million.
If you look closely at the original case, it feels like it happened many decades ago. At some point, the Samsung Galaxy S 4G, the Nexus S and a few other devices looked a lot like the iPhone 3G.
But now, it’s hard to say that Samsung is copying Apple. For instance, Samsung is one of the only phone manufacturers that hasn’t switched to a notch design. The Samsung Galaxy S9 and the rest of the product lineup still features a rectangular display . Huawei, LG, OnePlus, Asus and countless of others sell devices with a notch.
That could be the reason why it seems weird to spend all this money on legal fees for things that are no longer true.
And yet, the irony is that Apple and Samsung are the perfect example of asymmetric competition. They both sell smartphones, laptops and other electronics devices. But they also work together on various projects.
In particular, the iPhone X is the first iPhone with an OLED display. It’s a better display technology compared to traditional LCD displays. It’s also one of the most expensive components of the iPhone X.
According to Bloomberg, Apple wants to find a second supplier to drive component prices down. And that second supplier is LG.
LG already manufactures OLED displays. But it’s difficult to meet Apple’s demands when it comes to the iPhone. Apple sells tens of millions of smartphones every year. So you need to have a great supply chain to be able to become an Apple supplier. LG could be ramping up its production capacity for future iPhone models.
According to multiple rumors, Apple plans to ship an updated iPhone X with an OLED display as well as a bigger iPhone. The company could also introduce another phone with an edge-to-edge LCD display with a notch and a cheaper price.
There’s one thing for sure, it’ll take time to switch the entire iPhone lineup to OLED displays.
Amazon has gotten flack in the past for some of the challenges its crowdsourced “last mile” delivery drivers face, but now it’s offering those with entrepreneurial ambitions the option to do more. Instead of showing up for gig work, drivers can opt for a new program where Amazon helps them to establish their own delivery business.
The program will include access to Amazon’s delivery technology, hands-on training, and discounts on a suite of assets and services, including the vehicle leasing and insurance. the retailer says.
That means drivers won’t have to use their own cars, as in the crowdsourced delivery program known as Amazon Flex. This gives them more space for organizing packages, the ability to use parking spots for delivery vehicles, and the ability to haul extra equipment, like straps and dollies.
Amazon says the earning potential for successful owners is as much as $300,000 in annual profit operating a fleet of 40 vehicles. The company expects that, over time, hundreds of small business owners will hire tens of thousands of delivery drivers across the U.S., it says.
In other words, Amazon just launched its own UPS competitor of sorts, by offering leased vans, training and resources to those who want to drive for Amazon instead of Uber.
The retailer says people can start up their Amazon delivery businesses with as little as $10,000. Military vets can get that 10K reimbursed, as Amazon is investing a million into a program that funds their startup costs.
The business owners – who don’t need logistics experience, Amazon notes – will be offered discounts on the customized delivery vans, branded uniforms, fuel, comprehensive insurance coverage, and more – deals the retailer pre-negotiated on their behalf.
This also addresses some of the problems the gig work Flex drivers faced – gas prices would often cut far too much into profits; the lack of insurance; and the general challenges associated with trying to delivery packages from an unbranded, small car.
“We have great partners in our traditional carriers and it’s exciting to continue to see the logistics industry grow,” said Dave Clark, Amazon’s senior vice president of worldwide operations, in a statement about the launch. “Customer demand is higher than ever and we have a need to build more capacity. As we evaluated how to support our growth, we went back to our roots to share the opportunity with small-and-medium-sized businesses. We are going to empower new, small businesses to form in order to take advantage of the growing opportunity in e-commerce package delivery.”
The changes come at a time when there’s been debate about Amazon’s financial impact on the U.S. Postal Service. But with this new program, Amazon could reduce its reliance on outside partners as the program scales.
However, Amazon will continue to work existing partners, including UPS and FedEx, in addition to the USPS and smaller last-mile delivery partners, for some time. As Amazon’s business continues to grow, it will need these partners’ help to get packages to customers for the foreseeable future – a fleet of leased Prime vans can’t pick do it all.
Sling TV, the first to deliver an over-the-top TV service aimed at cord cutters, is shaking up its business. The company announced today it’s raising the base price of its core package of over 30 channels, including ESPN, by $5 per month to now $25 per month. But it’s also rolling out free content and a la carte channel subscriptions, similar to Amazon Channels, in order to attract a new audience.
The service would not be the first to inch up its pricing.
YouTube TV in March also raised its prices by $5 per month. It’s now $40 per month, which is more in line with competitors like Hulu ($40/mo) and DirecTV Now ($35/mo).
That means, even with the price hike, Sling TV remains one of the more affordable options for live TV, a DVR, and access to sports via ESPN.
Unfortunately, though, existing customers aren’t being grandfathered in to the old pricing structure – just like back in the cable TV days, your monthly bill will simply increase. And there’s nothing you can do except cancel.
The pricing changes affects only those on Sling’s core offering, Sling Orange. Those with expanded service (Sling Orange + Sling Blue), will continue to pay $40 per month. And the optional add-on packs will remain at $10 per month.
To woo subscribers, Sling TV is also now launching free content.
When you launch the Sling TV app, you’ll now see over 100 hours of popular TV shows and movies to watch without a subscription, including “Wrecked,” “At Home with Amy Sedaris,” “Good Behavior,” “Flip or Flop” and more. The idea here is to attract viewers – particularly those with lapsed subscriptions – and encourage them to come back and watch. The company hopes its former customers will choose to restart their subscription after some time.
Perhaps the most significant change is that Sling TV is going a la carte.
One of the biggest draws for Amazon Channels, which reportedly accounts for more than half of direct to consumer video subscriptions, is that you can pick and choose which ones you actually want to watch. Sling TV is now doing the same.
Without a base subscription, customers can subscribe to: Showtime ($10 per month), CuriosityStream ($6 per month), Stingray Karaoke ($7 per month), Dove Channel ($5 per month), Outside TV Features ($5 per month), UP Faith & Family ($5 per month), Pantaya ($6 per month) and NBA League Pass ($28.99 per month).
Stingray Karaoke, Dove Channel and Outside TV Features are new channels launching today, which combined add more than 10,000 titles to Sling’s on-demand library.
The company says more a la carte channels will arrive in time.
In addition, Sling TV will offer pay-per-view (PPV) events and over 5,000 movies which can be watch without a monthly subscription. The company previously offered UFC and boxing matches via PPV – the first for a live streaming service – so expect more of the same here.
“When we first launched Sling in 2015, we set out to create an entertainment experience that put our customers first, offering unprecedented flexibility and control – no annual contracts, no hidden fees and the ability to customize programming,” said Warren Schlichting, president of Sling TV, about the changes. “The new Sling evolves the experience even further by providing access to great content without anchoring customers to a base subscription.”
The changes to the service will be made available through a new user interface that’s arriving first on Roku devices, starting today. It will come to other devices in the near future, Sling TV says.
If there’s still any doubt that eSports is coming into the mainstream, just look to the world’s biggest sporting event: The Olympics.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Global Association of International Sports Federations (GAISF) have announced that they will host an eSports Forum, looking to gauge whether or not esports has a place in the Olympics.
According to the release, the IOC and GAISF will host esports players, game publishers, teams, media, sponsors and event organizers, as well as National Olympic Committees, International Sports Federations, athletes and the IOC. The group as a whole is looking to “explore synergies, build joint understanding, and set a platform for future engagement between esports and gaming industries and the Olympic Movement.”
In the release, GAISF President Patrick Baumann said:
Along with the IOC, the GAISF looks forward to welcoming the esports and gaming community to Lausanne. We understand that sport never stands still and the phenomenal growth of esports and gaming is part of its continuing evolution. The Esports Forum provides an important and extremely valuable opportunity for us to gain a deeper understanding of esports, their impact and likely future development, so that we can jointly consider the ways in which we may collaborate to the mutual benefit of all of sport in the years ahead.
Some of the panels at the forum include an interview on “The Key to Twitch’s Success,” “Future Opportunities for Collaboration,” an interview on “A Day in the Life of an Elite Player” and a panel on “Gender Equality in All Sports.”
eSports have continued to grow at an impressive clip. The Overwatch League has introduced city-based teams into the mix, while Fortnite had a huge Pro-Am tournament at e3, not to mention Epic’s introduction of a $100 million tournament prize pool for competitive play.
Considering how bizarre some of the Olympic sports are — I’m looking at you, Biathlon — the potential introduction of esports to the Olympic slate almost seems ordinary.
For a long time, it has been hard to buy a cloud-first security platform that delivers full-stack security in a single data path. Current market solutions offer a “one trick pony”, leaving companies with overly complex routing setups or abnormal latency of traffic to get a solution that fulfills their needs.
Swedish cybersecurity startup Baffin Bay Networks thinks it has the answer, with distributed “threat protection centers” which interfere with the traffic before it reaches its customers’ services and removes any potential threats.
It has today announced the closing of a $6.4 million Series A round. The investment was led by European VC EQT Ventures and the capital will be used for further international expansion.
“We’re passionate about building a world-class threat protection platform – one that is easy to use for any company or service provider to protect their key assets and services,” said Joakim Sundberg, CEO at Baffin Bay Networks.
Competitors include Incapsula, Cloudflare, Akamai, Arbor and the like.
Via the customer portal Riverview, users can configure their own security settings and level of protection. The user interface allows for real-time tracking of traffic and delivers real-time results from threat analysis, providing current and complete information on the activity in their online environment.
Should users wish not to configure settings on their own, they can rely on preset, sensible defaults which are calculated using sophisticated algorithms.
Unblockable is tackling a new area for blockchain technology — sports fandom, specifically collectibles and fantasy sports.
CEO Jeb Terry (a former Fox Sports executive, and before that a former offensive lineman for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers) said the goal is to connect pro sports and pro athletes with the technology, and to “create new means of access and really empower the fans to celebrate their fandom, to show off who they’re fans of and create new relationships.”
Terry founded Unblockable with Eben Smith, a former derivatives trader, as well as Greg Dean and Kedric Van de Carr, entrepreneurs who have founded multiple crypto projects in the past.
The startup is announcing that it has raised $5 million from Shasta Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Shasta’s Jacob Mullins joining the board of directors. (Mullins and I have been friends since we worked together at VentureBeat a decade ago.)
“Taking advantage of the unique characteristics of the emerging blockchain platform, UNBLOCKABLE is defining a new category of fun, engaging and approachable experiences and games for consumers as well as new ways for stars, athletes and leagues to build new relationships with fans,” Mullins said in the announcement.
Unblockable isn’t launching its consumer product yet – Terry told me that will probably happen later this year. But the basic idea is to release collectible crypto tokens tied to pro athletes. The goal is to have tokens representing every player (including their likeness), not just the big stars, and to create “true, authentic scarcity.”
Terry argued that the tokens will function as a kind of virtual collectible, with “a limited volume ever minted.” The value of each token should also fluctuate depending on the player’s performance on the field, especially since there will be a fantasy sports component of the platform — you’ll need to own a player’s token in order to include them on your team.
“There will be market dynamics in play,” Terry said. “With the value of the performance of the athletes in the field, it will be basic supply-demand behavior.”
When asked about reaching the (presumably) huge swath of sports fans that have no real familiarity with cryptocurrencies, Terry said, “It’s the core crypto enthusiasts that are going to get this right away.” At the same time, he’s hoping to “bridge that gap” to all those other fans, partly by making sure the buying and selling process is as “frictionless” as possible.
Unblockable hasn’t announced any partnerships with specific leagues or athletes, aside from naming NFL Hall of Famer Ronnie Lott as the head of its advisory panel. But it sounds like Terry’s working on that.
“There are a lot of opportunities for playeres to get involved,” he said. “As a former player, as a guy that’s worked with players in the past, it’s something that we really know and live. We want to make sure [they] trust us to take care of their brands. That’s important here. You can’t just take that lightly in this space.”
Cyberthreats are on the rise everywhere. Companies are facing a barrage of attacks from hackers near and far, and their security operations centers are struggling to keep up. They can no longer rely on manual processes to respond to automated attacks, forcing security chiefs to consider new approaches to automating their defenses.
That’s where JASK comes in. The startup offers an autonomous security operations platform to respond to this new security environment, and it’s a mission that is finding resonance among investors. After raising a $12 million Series A round led by Dell Technologies Capital last year, the company has now received a $25 million Series B from Ted Schlein of Kleiner Perkins, bringing the company’s total funding to $39 million including its seed. Schlein will join the board of directors.
Schlein is a distinguished security investor, having invested in such noted security exits as Mandiant, LifeLock, and CarbonBlack. He was also the first investor in ArcSight, where JASK founders Greg Martin and Damian Miller led the security operations practice. Shlein is also an investor in stealthy security startup Endgame Systems as well as enterprise analytics startup Segment.
As I wrote in an in-depth profile of JASK earlier this year, the startup is attempting to completely rebuild the modern security operations center from the ground up. Rather than building manual playbooks, it wants to create a hybrid human-artificial intelligence system that can learn and adapt to new threats while offering more engaging feedback to security analysts. The hope is that the platform will massively reduce the burden of security so that human analysts can spend more of their time on challenging cases rather than routine ones.
The challenges in building such an autonomous security operations center (SOC) are multi-fold. Wrangling the data is difficult, since formats can be highly divergent between companies. How companies respond to threats can also be very diverse — some companies may choose to ignore some low-level threats while others have more robust policies, requiring JASK’s platform to adapt to each company in a unique way. Perhaps the toughest challenge is just constantly adapting the system’s machine learning models to counter innovative hackers.
A few weeks ago, the company announced further visualization tools to help security analysts understand their threat environment. Last month, it brought on Greg Fitzgerald as chief marketing officer. Fitzgerald previously served as CMO of security high-flyer Cylance, as well as SVP of marketing at Fortinet and Sourcefire at Cisco. It has also announced a massive expansion of its second headquarters in Austin, where it expects to grow to 100 people this year.
In addition to Kleiner and DTC, other investors included Battery, TenEleven Ventures, and Vertical Venture Partners.
The retailer says people can start up their Amazon delivery businesses with as little as $10,000. Military vets can get that 10K reimbursed, as Amazon is investing a million into a program that funds their startup costs.
