Year: 2018

Oculus made good on a lot of their promises from last year at today’s F8 keynote, one of the big ones that we heard a lot more about was Oculus Venues, an app the company has developed to house live sporting events, comedy shows and concerts shot in VR.

The unified app will feature content from a bunch of different partners including stuff from startups like NextVR, which has been among the most prolific in terms of streaming sporting events from its own partnerships with the NBA, NFL, NHL and WWE. They have also streamed concerts via a partnership with Live Nation.

“Oculus Venues is a bold move to provide profound social VR engagement and we are honored to deliver such an important part of this new product release from Oculus,” NextVR CEO David Cole said in a statement. “NextVR has built a passionate fan base around leading VR content experiences. Venues will satisfy our fans who want to enjoy this type of content on a massively social scale.”

The app is launching May 30 on Oculus Go and the Gear VR.

Facebook made a small but interesting announcement at the end of its F8 keynote today: you’ll soon be able to post 3d photos to your newsfeed. For now, we know very little about this feature — or even how you’ll capture these photos — but chances are you’ll see them pop up in your friends’ status updates in the coming months.

How exactly Facebook will pull this 3D effect off, which looked pretty good in today’s demos, but also quite limited in how ‘3D’ these photos actually are, remains to be seen. What’s most likely, though, is that Facebook will use some of its machine learning smarts to power some of this, especially given that the company also announced its (somewhat odd) ‘3D memories‘ feature today which uses machine learning to recreate the scenes of old photos in VR.

Facebook already supports 360-degree photos and video in the news feed, so the addition of 3D photos makes perfect sense in this context. For now, though, we’ll have to wait and see how exactly this will work.

Among all of the other announcements that surfaced today during the F8 keynote, only one of the announcements involved Boggle.

Oculus announced a bug update to its social platform, Oculus Rooms, which brings a redesigned space with cool new features designed to keep people coming back to the app.

This is a big update to Rooms, which takes a lot of the cool features from other social VR apps (including Facebook Spaces) and brings them all together. What’s most impressive is how much they are able to accomplish inside a space you can only control with a simple controller.

You can bring friends into the environment and navigate through your giant video screen, on which you can watch videos, full-length movies and more.

What’s actually quite fun is that Oculus has partnered with Hasbro to start bringing board games into its VR social space so that users can play games while they chat or watch videos in VR. Rooms will be starting with the game Boggle, and will soon be adding Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit experiences to the app. This comes in addition to non-branded games like chess and checkers, which are also available.

The updated app is available now.

We’re rounding the far turn and heading into the home stretch, folks. You have a mere 48 hours left to snag the best pricing available on passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2018, which takes place September 5-7 at Moscone Center West. Right now, you can save up to $1,800, but once the calendar clicks over to May 3, prices go up. Save some dough, and buy your passes today.

This is the only North American Disrupt event this year, and you simply can’t afford to miss out. You can expect 10,000+ attendees, more than 1,200 startups and exhibitors, not to mention three program-packed days of world-renowned speakers, workshops, exhibits, networking and demos.

We’ll have four separate stages with a content focus on these 12 hot-topic tracks: AI, AR/VR, Blockchain, Biotech, Fintech, Gaming, Healthtech, Privacy/Security, Space, Mobility, Retail and Robotics. You can bet those topics will be reflected in Startup Alley — the show’s exhibition floor and the very heart of Disrupt — where each day features a new roster of some of the best emerging tech, talent and products.

We’re absolutely thrilled that Dropbox founder and CEO Drew Houston will dispense his wit, wisdom and perspective from the Disrupt SF stage. True fact: Houston pitched Dropbox in the TC 50 Startup Battlefield back in 2008. Take a moment to go back in time and watch the original pitch and demo. It may have been awkward but, clearly, his Startup Battlefield story had a happy ending.

Think you have what it takes to make it to the Startup Battlefield stage? Apply here now and, while you’re at it, use the same form to apply to exhibit for free in Startup Alley as a TC Top Pick. Who knows? Maybe you’ll raise a huge round and be a speaker at Disrupt SF in the future. It could happen.

Whether funding is your aim or your game, you’ll want to know about  — and take advantage of — CrunchMatch. It’s our free, curated platform that simplifies the way founders and investors find each other, set up meetings and conduct business. Needle in a haystack? No problem. Job done.

And there’s still more. Like Q&A Sessions that bring speakers and attendees together for moderated discussions in a smaller, more intimate setting so you can dive deeper into new technology or ask questions about topics raised on the Main Stage. And after parties that leave room for both fun and serious networking.

Disrupt SF 2018 promises to be a value-packed conference of epic proportion. Don’t miss out on the best price possible. You have 48 hours. Get your passes now.

While Facebook execs had plenty of updates to share at Tuesday’s F8 keynote, there were far less announcements focused on the weird and experimental things that Facebook is trying to leverage AI and VR to do.

That was, until the company made its last announcement for something it’s calling “VR memories,” a weird feature which will take your old photos and leverage computer vision to take the flat 2D images and videos and turn them into spatial point clouds, giving users a bizarre, ethereal sense of the locations where photos were taken.

There was a lot that wasn’t answered in the keynote, and they maintained that this was definitely still in development as a demo, but it looks like they’re pitching this as a way to use VR to get deeper into old memories. “It’s like a Facebook album that has come to life,” Facebook exec Rachel Franklin told the audience during a brief demo.

How impressive this tech really is will likely depend on seeing just how much data the feature needs to be fed in order to spit out these 3D point cloud models. If the company is promising that the feature could reconstruct your childhood home then that’s going to take a lot of photos and perspectives no matter how you slice it. Being able to infer depth from flat images is an area where computer vision tech has made leaps and bounds in recent years, while there are many major contributions to be made with things like photo editing thanks to this, using it as a tool to craft “VR memories” is certainly… creative?

I can’t imagine a ton coming of this, but it’s certainly interesting and definitely an odd thing for Facebook to end its F8 keynote with.

Snapchat neglected the international market in its early years, and now WhatsApp has snatched that growth opportunity. WhatsApp’s clone of Snapchat Stories, WhatsApp Status, now has 450 million daily active users. That’s compared to just 187 million daily users on all of Snapchat. This update from today’s F8 conference comes after Facebook said WhatsApp Status and Instagram Stories had 300 million daily users as of November.

WhatsApp is getting stickers

Group video calling is coming to WhatsApp

Rather than rest on its laurels, WhatsApp just announced stickers and Group Video calling to make the lean communications utility more fun. Users already spend 2 billion minutes per day on WhatsApp video and audio calls. But in the coming months, they’ll be able to have at least four people on a single split-screen video call, and possibly more. And rather than just chat with text, in the coming months you’ll be able to send stickers inside WhatsApp. Third-party sticker packs will also be available, so developers can contribute illustrations to help people chat visually.

Meanwhile, on the serious side, WhatsApp is inching toward monetization. It now has 3 million companies on its new WhatsApp For Business app. While it’s a free product currently, WhatsApp has said it plans to charge big brands like airlines, banks and mobile carriers for bonus features that will help them do commerce and customer support on the app. With strong traction already, it seems like Facebook will be able to squeeze a solid new revenue stream out of Facebook when it’s ready.

With all the talk of election interference on Facebook and Instagram, WhatsApp was the company’s feel-good story for today’s F8 conference. The division’s director Mubarik Imam said that if she could work for any company for free, she would have picked WhatsApp. Facebook needs as much positive PR as it can get right now amidst all its scandals, and WhatsApp might be its ticket.

It goes without saying that getting dressed is one of the most critical steps in our daily routine. But long practice has made it second nature, and people suffering from dementia may lose that familiarity, making dressing a difficult and frustrating process. This smart dresser from NYU is meant to help them through the process while reducing the load on overworked caregivers.

It may seem that replacing responsive human help with a robotic dresser is a bit insensitive. But not only are there rarely enough caregivers to help everyone in a timely manner at, say, a nursing care facility, the residents themselves might very well prefer the privacy and independence conferred by such a solution.

“Our goal is to provide assistance for people with dementia to help them age in place more gracefully, while ideally giving the caregiver a break as the person dresses – with the assurance that the system will alert them when the dressing process is completed or prompt them if intervention is needed,” explained the project’s leader, Winslow Burleson, in an NYU news release.

DRESS, as the team calls the device, is essentially a five-drawer dresser with a tablet on top that serves as both display and camera, monitoring and guiding the user through the dressing process.

There are lots of things that can go wrong when you’re putting on your clothes, and really only one way it can go right — shirts go on right side out and trousers forwards, socks on both feet, etc. That simplifies the problem for DRESS, which looks for tags attached to the clothes to make sure they’re on right and in order, making sure someone doesn’t attempt to put on their shoes before their trousers. Lights on each drawer signal the next item of clothing to don.

If there’s any problem — the person can’t figure something out, can’t find the right drawer or gets distracted, for instance — the caregiver is alerted and will come help. But if all goes right, the person will have dressed themselves all on their own, something that might not have been possible before.

DRESS is just a prototype right now, a proof of concept to demonstrate its utility. The team is looking into improving the vision system, standardizing clothing folding and enlarging or otherwise changing the coded tags on each item.

We’ve already got a star-studded lineup prepped to speak at Disrupt SF, running September 5 to September 7. So far, we’ve announced appearances by Sophia Amoruso, Carbon’s Dr. Joseph DeSimone, Adidas’ Eric Liedtke, Ripple’s Brad Garlinghouse, Michael Arrington, and Drew Houston.

But given that today is the last day to purchase early bird tickets, we thought we’d let slip a couple more stellar speakers joining the agenda.

We’re thrilled to announce that Roblox CEO and cofounder David Baszucki and Goldman Sachs CFO Martin Chavez will be joining us on the Disrupt SF stage. (Not together, to be clear.)

David Baszucki – Roblox

Back in 2006, Roblox started out as an interactive physics program, giving people the opportunity to test out their own physics experiments in a virtual setting, from testing out pulley systems to simulating a car crash.

In the time since, Roblox has managed to turn physics into a gaming sensation for young people.

The massively multiplayer online game has overtaken Minecraft and is wildly popular with the pre-teen crowd. In fact, the company recently announced that it has hit 60 million monthly users, spending more than 780 million hours on the platform.

Roblox lets users build their avatars and almost anything else using their imagination, sort of replacing the LEGO of older generations. But because those users tend to skew young, Roblox has made safety a priority, implementing a number of parental controls, with moderators scanning all communication between users, ensuring that a young person doesn’t give out any personal identifying information.

The company has raised nearly $100 million from investors like Index Venture Partners, First Round Capital, Altos Ventures, and Meritech Capital Partners. Roblox also recently signed a deal with HarperCollins to grant them the publishing rights for Roblox, marking the beginning of Roblox’s existence in the physical world.

Plus, Roblox has established itself on YouTube as well as with merchandise, which is an increasingly important part of successfully running a game studio.

We’re absolutely psyched to have David Baszucki join us on stage to talk about the company’s meteoric rise.

Martin Chavez – Goldman Sachs

Many don’t think of Goldman Sachs as a technology company. But those people would be wrong.

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein has said many a time that the firm is a technology company, and has gone on to state that Goldman Sachs employs more engineers than companies like Facebook and Twitter.

But Goldman Sachs is also a huge investor, with more than 600 investments according to CrunchBase. Some of those investments include WeWork China, Cadre, Dropbox, Uber, and Ring, which recently sold to Amazon for more than $1 billion, according to reports.

Trust us, keeping a finger on the bleeding pulse of technology is exhausting. But Goldman Sachs CFO Martin Chavez, who has a long history in the technology sector, is keeping up with the Joneses.

Before serving as the CFO, Chavez was the Chief Information Officer at Goldman Sachs and led the technology division. He’s also a serial founder, cofounding and serving as CTO of Quorum Software Systems from 1989 to 1993, as well as cofounding Kiodex, where he served as Chairman and CEO until 2004.

We’re excited to pick Chavez’s brain on how fintech might evolve over the next five years and what role Goldman Sachs might play in that evolution, especially given the rise of cryptocurrencies and the blockchain.

Instagram is getting a revamped “Explore” section to improve discovery, the company announced this morning during the keynote address at Facebook’s F8 developer conference. The update will better organize its suggestions into topical channels based on your own interests and tastes, so you can more easily find the type of content you’re looking for.

Before, you would scroll down on the Explore page to find groups of photos and videos tied to a particular theme you may  like. In the updated Explore section, however, you’ll instead find buttons in a scrollable, horizontal row across the top of the page – which gets you to the topic you want to browse more quickly.

The company offered a preview of the new look for Explore on stage, showing how the page would now work.

As you’re browsing the page and land on one of the buttons – for example, “Animals” – you’ll see a set of related hashtags underneath – like “#dogsofinstagram” or “thedailykitten,” in the case of this example.

Instagram had launched the ability to follow hashtags in December, and says the feature has become a popular way people interact with Instagram content. More than 100 million people around the world now follow hashtags the company said.

In addition, millions use Explore to find content, so it makes sense to further develop this section to connect people to hashtags they’ll like.

Under the hood, the new Explore section is powered by artificial intelligence, which is being augmented with content classification and curation signals from the Instagram community to make the experience more personalized.

But as users happen upon content that’s from more public figures and accounts, they may not always act appropriately – leaving harassing or bullying messages.

Instagram says it’s addressing this with the launch of a new “bullying filter” which will hide language that’s used to harass and upset people. This filter is based on machine learning technology, and expands on Instagram’s earlier efforts with comment filtering technology.

The new Explore will be rolling out over the coming weeks.

The augmented reality platform on Facebook has largely been hampered by the fact that it’s only on Facebook. Well, today the feature lands on Instagram where it will arrive it front of an audience more-devoted to photo-sharing in a platform more suited to AR filters.

The filter platform will operate a little differently on Instagram where people will be exposed to user-designed filters based on the accounts that they follow. This change will do a lot to promote more appropriate filters being suggested to users in a way that Snapchat’s platform just isn’t set up to handle.

The AR camera effects platform will also enable users to try out filters directly from their friends’ Stories, so if they see something they haven’t seen before, they can see who made it and follow the account.