Netflix and The Roald Dahl Story Company announced today that they’ve signed a deal for the streaming service to create a slate of animated “event series” based on a long list of titles by the classic children’s author, including “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Matilda” and “The BFG.”
All of those books have already been turned into feature films — multiple times, in the case of “Charlie.” But the deal also includes less famous titles like “George’s Marvelous Medicine,” “Going Solo” and even Dahl’s memoir “Boy.” (However, my favorite Dahl novel, “Danny the Champion of the World,” does not appear to be on the list on the list, which is a travesty.)
It sounds like the idea is less about straightforward adaptations and more about telling new stories using various characters, storylines and settings. Could it be a Roald Dahl … cinematic universe? Well, the press release describes it as “an imaginative story universe that expands far beyond the pages of the books themselves.”
“Our mission, which is purposefully lofty, is for as many children as possible around the world to experience the unique magic and positive message of Roald Dahl’s stories,” said Felicity Dahl (his widow) in the release. “This partnership with Netflix marks a significant move toward making that possible and is an incredibly exciting new chapter for the Roald Dahl Story Company. Roald would, I know, be thrilled.”
Netflix and The Roald Dahl Story Company say they will go into production on the first series in 2019.
Source: TechCrunch
Powered by both Chrome OS and Android, Google’s answer to the iPad and Surface promises a computing future where anything is possible. And it sort of delivers.
Source: Wired
Lawmakers from nine countries grilled Facebook on Tuesday using a cache of sealed documents that had been seized in London last week.
Source: Wired
Recent developments in the special counsel investigation show indicate that things are about to heat up.
Source: Wired
Red Hat is in the process of being acquired by IBM for a massive $34 billion, but that deal hasn’t closed yet and in the meantime, Red Hat is still running independently and making its own acquisitions, too. As the company today announced, it has acquired Tel Aviv-based NooBaa, an early state startup that helps enterprises manage their data more easily and access their various data providers through a single API.
NooBaa’s technology makes it a good fit for Red Hat, which has recently emphasized its ability to help enterprise more effectively manage their hybrid and multicloud deployments. At its core, NooBaa is all about bringing together various data silos, which should make it a good fit in Red Hat’s portfolio. With OpenShift and the OpenShift Container Platform, as well as its Ceph Storage service, Red Hat already offers a range of hybrid cloud tools, after all.
“NooBaa’s technologies will augment our portfolio and strengthen our ability to meet the needs of developers in today’s hybrid and multicloud world,” writes Ranga Rangachari, the VP and general manager for storage and hyperconverged infrastructure at Red Hat, in today’s announcement. “We are thrilled to welcome a technical team of nine to the Red Hat family as we work together to further solidify Red Hat as a leading provider of open hybrid cloud technologies.”
While virtually all of Red Hat’s technology is open source, NooBaa’s code is not. The company says that it plans to open source NooBaa’s technology in due time, though the exact timeline has yet to be determined yet.
NooBaa was founded in 2013. The company has raised funding some venture fundingfrom the likes of Jerusalem Venture Partners and OurCrowd, with a strategic investment from Akamai Capital thrown in for good measure. The company never disclosed the size of that round, though, and neither Red Hat nor NooBaa are disclosing the financial terms of the acquisition.
Source: TechCrunch
Sales via phones hit a new record on Cyber Monday.
Source: CNET
Disney’s antihero fantasy, based on the popular series of Artemis Fowl books, is out in August 2019.
Source: CNET
Exclusive: Audi and Disney have teamed up on an in-car stealth project that will be revealed at CES 2019. Is it AR? Is it VR? Here’s what we know.
Source: CNET
Higher education is a mess. College students spend years learning arcana and quaint academic theories, only to be thrust into the harsh light of the workplace where they are ill-equipped to handle even the most mundane task. A crisis, a moral failure, or perhaps simply an expensive mistake, college is clearly in need of a reboot.
Colleges would perhaps love to innovate on their models, but are stymied by accreditation agencies charged with maintaining the standards and integrity of higher education. Unfortunately for students, those standards are based on inputs like classroom time, years on campus, and major / minor curriculums rather than on measurable outputs like job income. Worse, these agencies are advised by the colleges and universities themselves, who rarely see disruptive and innovative education as a positive.
That’s why the news today that Make School has received accreditation from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) is so interesting.
Make School is a project-based, product-focused program based in San Francisco founded by Ashu Desai and Jeremy Rossmann. The two founders centered the program’s curriculum around a bachelor’s in applied computer science, but rather than learning algorithms or data structures theoretically from a textbook, they reimagined the university from the bottom up by teaching skills through a progression of working software applications and products.
As I wrote in a profile of the company three years ago, “At the heart of the school’s approach is the belief that focusing on an actual project helps motivate students in ways that college never does.” Desai and Rossmann started by teaching game programming, but then saw that the enthusiasm of their students could be extended to other areas of software engineering and product design.
Beyond just redesigning a typical college program, they scrapped the notion of a four-year bachelor’s degree and replaced it with a full-time, two-year curriculum. That simultaneously eliminated the “summer melt” that plagues the traditional American academic calendar, and also significantly cut the cost of tuition for the program. Make School generally uses an income-share agreement in lieu of upfront tuition for its students, which means that students pay nothing during the program, but then pay a percentage of their income after they graduate.
Make School had a novel model for teaching a complicated subject, but it was unaccredited. For students, that meant that Make School’s courses most likely couldn’t be transferred to other accredited universities, nor could they receive public student loans, which mandate that a school be accredited for disbursement.
WASC, the accreditation agency in charge of higher education in California, Hawaii, and certain territories, has in recent years revised its “incubation policy” to encourage more non-traditional education providers to pursue accreditation. The model works by linking accredited universities with unaccredited institutions, with the eventual goal of making the startup accredited itself.
In Make School’s case, its accreditation collaborator is Dominican University, located just north of San Francisco. Make School students will be able to minor in computer science by taking classes at the university’s campus.
For Make School, it’s one more milestone on the way to rebuilding higher education.
Source: TechCrunch
Take a virtual tour of Santa Claus’ log cabin, the elves’ living quarters and more via the online real estate site.
Source: CNET