Will your favorite movies or shows be included in Disney’s $7-a-month streaming service? Here’s all the ones that are confirmed.
Source: CNET
Commentary: “A New Order” was just sitting there waiting to be used.
Source: CNET
Commentary: Pedro Pascal’s magnificently charming Dornish prince was the show’s best character, and one of its paragons of justice.
Source: CNET
A day after the big Episode IX reveal, Disney and subsidiary Lucas film announced that it will be donating $1.5 million to FIRST . The non-profit group was founded by Dean Kamen in 1989 to help teach STEM through initiatives like robotics competitions.
Disney’s money will go to provide education and outreach to the underserved communities on which FIRST focuses. Details are pretty thin on precisely what the partnership will entail, but Disney’s certainly got a lot to gain from this sort of outreach — and Lucasfilm knows a thing or two about robots.
The Star Wars: Force for Change announcement was made in conjunction with Lucasfilm’s annual Star Wars Celebration in Chicago. Yesterday the event hosted a panel with the cast of the upcoming film that included a teaser trailer and title reveal.
“Star Wars has always inspired young people to look past what is and imagine a world beyond,” Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy said in a release tied to the news. “It is crucial that we pass on the importance of science and technology to young people—they will be the ones who will have to confront the global challenges that lie ahead. To support this effort, Lucasfilm and Disney are teaming up with FIRST to bring learning opportunities and mentorship to the next generation of innovators.”
It’s been a good week for FIRST investments. Just yesterday Amazon announced its own commitment to the group’s robotics offerings.
Source: TechCrunch
It’s been more than a half-decade since Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures kicked off the unicorn craze. Noting in a well-read post for TechCrunch that an interesting cohort of private companies worth a billion dollars or more was worth examining, the post brought the “unicorn” into its current usage inside of tech.
And then tech itself did the term a favor, building and financing hundreds more. Now unicorns swarm like fleas, and simply snagging a $1 billion valuation these days is something that has been done in mere months and is a well-known vanity tactic used to juice hiring.
Anyway.
This has now gone on so long that many of us in the tech-focused journalism space are sick of saying the word. Kate Clark, Equity co-host and cool person, literally has “I am so sick of the buzz word [sic] ‘unicorn’ ” on her Twitter page. I agree with the sentiment.
But the phrase unicorn is back in the mix, so let’s examine the hubbub.
The term unicorn quickly became overused as startups stayed private longer by pushing IPOs off as long as they could, and the capital world decided it was fine. Bored capital was pooling in venture coffers where it was itching to be disbursed by the wealthy into the holsters of the privileged. And thus the companies that in other cycles might have gone public simply didn’t, and the ranks of unicorns multiplied.
The joke’s on us, however, as we have used the term on the order of six billion times.
Soon the overused “unicorn” moniker was also too small. Decacorns took their own spot in the pantheon of silly names. A decacorn, in case you’ve led a more exciting life than me and are thus otherwise unfamiliar, is a private tech company that has racked up a $10 billion valuation. (A centacorn, I suppose, would be worth $100 billion?)
What a unicorn is has stretched and bent over time. But regardless of how the phrase has come to be defined in recent quarters, most people are talking about tech shops when they use it. And that’s pretty reasonable.
But what tech companies do very well is go up, and go down. And that’s when we wind up on the other side (tail-end?) of the unicorn debate: All are agreed that the phrase unicorn is useful. Not all, however, agree on what we call a unicorn that has fallen.
We have two questions: What do you call a unicorn that falls under the $1 billion valuation mark. And, relatedly, what do you call a unicorn that eventually goes public or otherwise exits at a discount to its final private market valuation?
Regarding the leading question, there are two definitions that I am aware of.
First, as has come back into the discussion this week, there’s the concept of an “undercorn.” As Business Insider noted through a blog citation, Axios’ Dan Primack may have coined the term. Here, per Ian Sigalow’s post, which quotes the original Dan, is what Primack said:
When a venture-backed company breaks through the $1BN valuation mark, we call it a Unicorn. When the same company falls back below the $1BN threshold, it becomes an Undercorn.
That’s simple enough. However, Erin Griffith of The New York Times used the phrase recently in a slightly different manner. Here’s her riff:
Unicorns that sell or go public below their last private valuation are known as undercorns.
That’s different, as it’s defining undercorns as exited unicorns that lose altitude; that’s different than unicorns losing their unicornyness altogether. However, as we’re working on defining made-up words to describe an economic anomaly caused by government-determined free money, we can relax a little and realize that both uses of the word undercorn are equally differentiated from zero.
Now I get to talk about myself. I had my own thoughts on what a unicorn that had lost the requisite billion-dollar valuation should be called back in 2016. Regarding what a unicorn that had fallen under the needed worth:
If a unicorn is a horse with a spike, when you take the spike off you just have a horse.
I thought it was pretty smart. No one else agreed, and thus I have to admit that Primack and Griffith have made quite a lot more noise with the undercorn phrase, even if they don’t quite agree on what it means. (Feel free to become a partisan of either side, as we are long overdue for something useless and entertaining on the internet.)
Sadly, there are even more unicorn-related terms and phrases in and amidst the tech conversation that we shouldn’t miss.
Returning to Axios, it has a new phrase out this year that’s worth keeping in our hat. From its February coverage of the venture landscape, I give you the phrase “minotaur:”
The Big Picture: Meet the minotaurs — our term for the companies that would be worth more than $1 billion even if the only thing they did was to take the cash that they have raised and put it in a checking account.
I wanted to hate this, but wound up deciding there are a host of worse words that could have been selected. And as it wasn’t a unicorn-variant, how could I complain?
The only other thing I can recall that fits our task today is something that Jason and I wrote four years ago in TechCrunch. As a follow-up to our “How To Speak Startup” post, we wrote the brilliantly titled “How To Speak Startup, Part Deux,” which contained the following definition:
Unicorn — As if metaphors in Silicon Valley couldn’t get more childish.
The joke’s on us, however, as we have used the term on the order of six billion times since then. And that’s that, I think. Now you know!
Source: TechCrunch
After deep dives into the story of Niantic’s spinout from Google and its creation and development of Pokémon GO, TechCrunch editor Greg Kumparak turns his attention to Niantic’s future, looking at how Harry Potter: Wizards Unite is not just uniting wand-wielders, but also the company’s ambitions in areas as diverse as 5G, China, 3D mapping, and the next-generation of augmented reality.
This is definitely a weekend read (it’s about 25 mins in length), but here’s a taste:
There’s one more piece to this grander AR vision, and it’s perhaps the biggest and most challenging one.
Your phone knows your location, but current GPS tech is really only accurate within a few feet. Even when it’s at its most accurate, it doesn’t always stay there for long. Ever use Google Maps in a big city and had your marker hop around all over the map? That’s probably from the signals bouncing off buildings, vehicles, and all of the myriad metal things around you.
That’s good enough for basic augmented reality functionality seen in Pokémon GO today. But Niantic wants to get closer and closer to the vision of GO’s original trailer, where hundreds of people can look up to see the same Zapdos flying overhead, synchronized in time and space across all of their devices. Where you can gather in a park with friends to watch massive Pokémon battles play out in real time, or leave a virtual gift on a bench for a friend to walk up to and discover. For this, Niantic will need something more precise and more consistent. Like pretty much everything with Niantic, it all goes back to maps.
More specifically, they’ll need to build a 3D map of the environments where people are playing. It’s easy enough to get relatively accurate 3D data about huge things like buildings, but what about everything around those buildings? The statues, the planters, the trees, the bus stops. John [Hanke, Niantic’s CEO], and others in the space, refer to this map as the “AR Cloud.”
Source: TechCrunch
With all the Disney movies our family watches, I’ll be subscribing on Day One.
Source: CNET
The right light for the right room matters. Here are our top tips.
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Jordan Peele fans who go to his latest film “Us” hoping to find another “Get Out” may be disappointed: Where Peele’s directorial debut lent itself to straightforward political allegory, the follow-up feels murkier and stranger.
“Us” is a nightmarish journey into a world invaded by sinister doppelgangers. The film does, eventually, offer a rationale for what’s happening, but the surreal imagery (and the unsettling work by the cast, led by Lupita Nyong’o) will stick with you in a way that the explanations do not.
On this week’s episode of the Original Content podcast, we’re joined by Megan Rose Dickey to review the film. Now that it’s been a few weeks since “Us” hit theaters, it feels like the right time to argue about what actually happened, dig into the film’s symbolism and see which fan theories resonate.
We also talk about our expectations after watching the first trailer for the next Star Wars film, “The Rise of Skywalker,” which is meant to wrap up the whole nine-episode story.
You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)
Source: TechCrunch
After six months in beta, the game’s now open to anyone.
Source: CNET