Stranger Things 4 got its first teaser today, courtesy of the official Stranger Things Twitter account. The Netflix series, which is in its fourth season (although the creators, brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, maintain that each instalment isn’t really a ‘season’ in the traditional TV sense, but rather more like a movie broken up across multiple episodes), is being renewed alongside an overall film and TV deal with a 9-figure value for the Duffers at Netflix.
Stranger Things manages a unique blend of sci-fi, horror, 1980s-era nostalgia and coming-of-age teen buddy comedy. It’s among the most successful of Netflix’s original content creations, by most accounts, and also one of the most critically-acclaimed. Details about this fourth series are scarce for now, but based on the teaser we can expect the action to move out of Hawkins, the sleepy town which has provided the backdrop for all of the action thus far (minus a very strange outing for main character Elle back in season two).
Judging strictly from this preview, we can also probably safely assume that a lot of the action will take place in the ‘Upside Down,’ the fictional dark mirror dimension where the series villain monsters are from. It’ll be interesting to see if Stranger Things 4 can spend a whole season in this realm, which seems to mostly be filled with moss, slime, dust and spores of some kind.
Stranger Things 4 got its first teaser today, courtesy of the official Stranger Things Twitter account. The Netflix series, which is in its fourth season (although the creators, brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, maintain that each instalment isn’t really a ‘season’ in the traditional TV sense, but rather more like a movie broken up across multiple episodes), is being renewed alongside an overall film and TV deal with a 9-figure value for the Duffers at Netflix.
Stranger Things manages a unique blend of sci-fi, horror, 1980s-era nostalgia and coming-of-age teen buddy comedy. It’s among the most successful of Netflix’s original content creations, by most accounts, and also one of the most critically-acclaimed. Details about this fourth series are scarce for now, but based on the teaser we can expect the action to move out of Hawkins, the sleepy town which has provided the backdrop for all of the action thus far (minus a very strange outing for main character Elle back in season two).
Judging strictly from this preview, we can also probably safely assume that a lot of the action will take place in the ‘Upside Down,’ the fictional dark mirror dimension where the series villain monsters are from. It’ll be interesting to see if Stranger Things 4 can spend a whole season in this realm, which seems to mostly be filled with moss, slime, dust and spores of some kind.
Hyundai Motor Group has launched a new air mobility division aimed at developing technology for the commercialization of flying cars, the latest company to dive into the emerging industry.
The division will be led by Dr. Jaiwon Shin, an aeronautics engineer who most recently led the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate at NASA. While at NASA, Shin oversaw a $725 million program into aeronautics research initiatives, such as supersonic X-plane, electrification of aircraft, UAS traffic management, and urban air mobility.
The South Korean automaker said the business unit led by Shin will “develop core technologies and innovative solutions for safe and efficient airborne travel.” Shin’s expertise centers on airframe, engine, aviation safety, and air traffic management — technologies that Hyundai says will allow it to take a lead in the urban air mobility sector.
That urban air sector is expected to grow into a market worth $1.5 trillion within the next 20 years,” according to Shin.
Of course, there are many others pursuing various kinds of air taxis, including Uber, Kitty Hawk Corp., Terrafugia and Volocopter, to name just a few.
All of these companies, including Hyundai see the flying cars as a way to solve the traffic problems on the ground. Flying cars could merely move that congestion to the skies, which is why technologies around airspace traffic management — which Shin has experience in — is just as important as developing the aircraft.
Hyundai Motor Group has launched a new air mobility division aimed at developing technology for the commercialization of flying cars, the latest company to dive into the emerging industry.
The division will be led by Dr. Jaiwon Shin, an aeronautics engineer who most recently led the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate at NASA. While at NASA, Shin oversaw a $725 million program into aeronautics research initiatives, such as supersonic X-plane, electrification of aircraft, UAS traffic management, and urban air mobility.
The South Korean automaker said the business unit led by Shin will “develop core technologies and innovative solutions for safe and efficient airborne travel.” Shin’s expertise centers on airframe, engine, aviation safety, and air traffic management — technologies that Hyundai says will allow it to take a lead in the urban air mobility sector.
That urban air sector is expected to grow into a market worth $1.5 trillion within the next 20 years,” according to Shin.
Of course, there are many others pursuing various kinds of air taxis, including Uber, Kitty Hawk Corp., Terrafugia and Volocopter, to name just a few.
All of these companies, including Hyundai see the flying cars as a way to solve the traffic problems on the ground. Flying cars could merely move that congestion to the skies, which is why technologies around airspace traffic management — which Shin has experience in — is just as important as developing the aircraft.
Instagram deployed a new tool today that should help it continue to build a more viable alternative to YouTube for individual creators looking to try a different platform. It’s a dedicated account called @creators, which will deliver tips and tricks for people hoping to become more active on the platform.
Based on the pinned FAQ story that Instagram has posted to the account, and a brief explainer with some testimonials from actual creators using the platform. Some of the questions that Instagram answers include how to get Verified, which must be asked so incredibly frequently by this particular set of folks.
The grid posts of @creators include some helpful tips like pointing out that 60% of people listen to stories on the platform with the sound on. Clearly, the account is geared towards pushing video creation tips and tools, which makes sense given that’s an area of growth for the company, and a way for it to win over disaffected YouTubers and younger creators who are looking for their new home on the web.
This could be a huge potential opportunity for Instagram, in fact, and this account, while a small part of an overall approach to wooing creators, is a good one.
Since launching in the United States five years ago, SmartNews, the news aggregation app that recently hit unicorn status, has quietly built a reputation for presenting reliable information from a wide range of publishers. The company straddles two very different markets: the U.S. and its home country of Japan, where it is one of the leading news apps.
SmartNews wants readers to see it as a way to break out of their filter bubbles, says Jeannie Yang, its senior vice president of product, especially as the American presidential election heats up. For example, it recently launched a feature, called “News From All Sides,” that lets people see how media outlets from across the political spectrum are covering a specific topic.
The app is driven by machine-learning algorithms, but it also has an editorial team led by Rich Jaroslovsky, the first managing editor of WSJ.com and founder of the Online News Association. One of SmartNews’ goal is to surface news that its users might not seek out on their own, but it must balance that with audience retention in a market that is crowded with many ways to consume content online, including competing news aggregation apps, Facebook and Google Search.
In a wide-ranging interview with Extra Crunch, Yang talked about SmartNews’ place in the media ecosystem, creating recommendation algorithms that don’t reinforce biases, the difference between its Japanese and American users and the challenges of presenting political news in a highly polarized environment.
Catherine Shu: One of the reasons why SmartNews is interesting is because there are a lot of news aggregation apps in America, but there hasn’t been one huge breakout app like SmartNews is in Japan or Toutiao in China. But at the same time, there are obviously a lot of issues in the publishing and news industry in the United States that a good dominant news app might be able to help, ranging from monetization to fake news.
Jeannie Yang: I think that’s definitely a challenge for everybody in the U.S. With SmartNews, we really want to see how we can help create a healthier media ecosystem and actually have publishers thrive as well. SmartNews has such respect for the publishers and the industry and we want to be good partners, but also really understand the challenges of the business model, as well as the challenges for users and thinking of how we can create a healthier ecosystem.
Microsoft today announced that Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD), its Azure-based system for virtualizing the Windows and Office user experience it announced last September, is now generally available. Using WVD, enterprises can give their employees access to virtualized applications and remote desktops, including the ability to provide multi-session Windows 10 experiences, something that sets Microsoft’s own apart from that of other vendors who offer virtualized Windows desktops and applications.
In addition to making the service generally available, Microsoft is also rolling it out globally, whereas the preview was U.S.-only and the original plan was to slowly roll it out globally. As Scott Manchester, the principal engineering lead for WVD, also told me that over 20,000 companies signed up for the preview. He also noted that Microsoft Teams is getting enhanced support in WVD with a significantly improved video conferencing experience.
Shortly after announcing the preview of WVD, Microsoft acquired a company called FSLogix, which specialized in provisioning the same kind of virtualized Windows environments that Microsoft offers through WVD. As Microsoft’s corporate VP for Microsoft 365 told me ahead of today’s announcement, the company took a lot of the know-how from FSLogix to ensure that the user experience on WVD is as smooth as possible.
Andreson noted that just as enterprises are getting more comfortable with moving some of their infrastructure to the cloud (and have others worry about managing it), there is now also growing demand from organizations that want this same experience for their desktop experiences. “They look at the cloud as a way of saying, ‘listen, let the experts manage the infrastructure. They can optimize it; they can fine-tune it; they can make sure that it’s all done right.’ And then I’ll just have a first-party service — in this case Microsoft — that I can leverage to simplify my life and enable me to spin up and down capacity on demand,” Anderson said. He also noted, though, that making sure that these services are always available is maybe even more critical than for other workloads that have moved to the cloud. If your desktop stops working, you can’t get much done, after all.
Anderson also stressed that if a customer wants a multi-session Windows 10 environment in the cloud, WVD is the only way to go because that is the only way to get a license to do so. “We’ve built the operating system, we built the public cloud, so that combination is going to be unique and this gives us the ability to make sure that that Windows 10 experience is the absolute best on top of that public cloud,” he noted.
He also stressed that the FSLogix acquisition enabled his team to work with the Office team to optimize the user experience there. Thanks to this, when you spin up a new virtualized version of Outlook, for example, it’ll just take a second or two to load instead of almost a minute.
A number of companies are also still looking to upgrade their old Windows 7 deployments. Microsoft will stop providing free security patches for them very soon, but on WVD, these users will still be able to get access to virtualized Windows 7 desktops with free extended security updates until January 2023. Anderson does not believe that this will be a major driver for WVD adoption, but he does see “pockets of customers who are working on their transition.”
Enterprises can access Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 7 Enterprise on WVD at no additional licensing cost (though, of course, the Azure resources they consume will cost them) if they have an eligible Windows 10 Enterprise or Microsoft 365 license.
The People’s Bank of China has approved PayPal’s acquisition of a 70% equity state in GoPay (Guofubao Information Technology Co. (GoPay), Ltd.), which will make PayPal the first foreign payment platform to provide online payment services in China. GoPay has licenses for online and mobile transactions, and mainly provides payment products for industries including e-commerce, cross-border commerce, aviation tourism, and others.
According to a statement from Guofubao, PayPal acquired the 70% stake through the Shanghai-based subsidiary, Yinbaobao Information Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd.
The companies did not disclose deal terms.
The news of PayPal’s entry into China comes at a time when there’s increased tensions between the U.S. and China, with The White House reportedly now considering curbing some U.S. investments in China amid the trade dispute between the countries.
Though China’s payments market today is led by local players, including eWallet providers like AliPay and WeChat Pay on the mobile side, there’s still plenty of room for it to grow — which would benefit PayPal.
On the mobile payments side alone, the market is expected to grow 21.8% from 2017 to $96.73 trillion in 2023, driven partly by increasing demand for e-commerce, a report from Frost & Sullivan found. The market has also seen an increase in cross-border transactions, particularly in sectors like e-commerce, travel and overseas education. These reached $6.66 trillion in 2016.
The report additionally said the total number of active mobile payment customers is expected to reach 956 million by 2023, up from 562 million in 2017.
PayPal said the transaction is expected to close in Q4 2019 and is subject to customary closing conditions.
The company’s full statement on the acquisition is below:
The People’s Bank of China has approved PayPal Information Technologies Co., Ltd.’s acquisition of a 70% equity interest in Guofubao Information Technology Co. (GoPay), Ltd., a holder of a payment business license in China. We are honored to become the first foreign payment platform to be licensed to provide online payment services in China. We look forward to partnering with China’s financial institutions and technology platforms, providing a more comprehensive set of payment solutions to businesses and consumers, both in China and globally. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2019 and is subject to customary closing conditions.
As a result, Neumann stepped down down as CEO last week (he will continue to serve as non-executive chairman). In addition, the company is looking to focus on its core co-working business, which means it’s planning major layoffs and even reportedly looking to sell some of the companies it acquired over the last couple years — namely Managed by Q, Conductor and Meetup.
So it was widely expected that The We Company would delay its IPO Today, it made things official with the release of a statement from new co-CEOs Artie Minson and Sebastian Gunningham:
We have decided to postpone our IPO to focus on our core business, the fundamentals of which remain strong. We are as committed as ever to serving our members, enterprise customers, landlord partners, employees and shareholders. We have every intention to operate WeWork as a public company and look forward to revisiting the public equity markets in the future.
When Confluent launched a cloud service in 2017, it was trying to reduce some of the complexity related to running a Kafka streaming data application. Today, it introduced a free tier to that cloud service. The company hopes to expand its market beyond large technology company customers, and the free tier should make it easier for smaller companies to get started.
The new tier provides up to $50 of service a month for up to three months. Company CEO Jay Kreps says that while $50 might not sound like much, it’s actually hundreds of gigabytes of throughput and makes it easy to get started with the tool.
“We felt like we can make this technology really accessible. We can make it as easy as we can. We want to make it something where you can just get going in seconds, and not have to pay anything to start building an application that uses real time streams of data,” Kreps said.
Kafka has been available as an open source product since 2011, so it’s been free to download, install and build applications, but still required a ton of compute and engineering resources to pull off. The cloud service was designed to simplify that, and the free tier lets developers get comfortable building a small application without making a large financial investment.
Once they get comfortable working with Kafka on the free version, users can then buy in whatever increments make sense for them, and only pay for what they use. It can be pennies worth of Kafka or hundreds of dollars depending on a customer’s individual requirements. “After free, you can buy 11 cents worth of Kafka or you can buy it $10 worth, all the way up to these massive users like Lyft that use Kafka Cloud at huge scale as part of their ride sharing service,” he said.
While a free SaaS trial might feel like a common kind of marketing approach, Kreps says for a service like Kafka, it’s actually much more difficult to pull off. “With something like a distributed system where you get a whole chunk of infrastructure, it’s actually technically an extraordinarily difficult thing to provide zero to elastic scale up capabilities. And a huge amount of engineering goes into making that possible,” Kreps explained.
Kafka processes massive streams of data in real time. It was originally developed inside LinkedIn and open sourced in 2011. Confluent launched as a commercial entity on top of the open source project in 2014. In January the company raised $125 million on a $2.5 billion valuation. It has raised over $205 million, according to Crunchbase data.
