Ideaforge

More than a decade after the end of “Alias,” J.J. Abrams and Jennifer Garner are teaming up on a new limited series for Apple.

The show, titled “My Glory Was I Had Such Friends,” will be based on the Amy Silverstein memoir of the same name, about how Silverstein’s friends supported her as she waited for her second heart transplant.

As reported in Variety and elsewhere, the series will be produced by Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions in association with Warner Bros. Television. Karen Croner will write and executive produce (she previously wrote “The Tribes of Palos Verdes,” which Garner starred in last year), Garner will serve as both star and executive producer and Abrams will also be an executive producer.

“Alias” first aired in 2001 — Abrams created, wrote and directed, while Garner starred as double agent Sydney Bristow. The show helped make Garner a star, while also landing Abrams his first gig as a feature film director, “Mission Impossible III.”

Garner recently returned to television on the HBO series “Camping.” Abrams, meanwhile, has remained involved in TV despite his commitments to Star Wars, but usually just as an executive producer. Earlier this year, Apple was reportedly bidding for “Demimonde,” the first series that Abrams co-created since “Fringe,” but it lost out to HBO.

Source: Tech Crunch

Lyft is turning its app into a one-stop multimodal transportation app in a few U.S. cities, the latest illustration of its transformation from ridesharing startup to a company that wants to own, or at least be a part of, every way people move from Point A to Point B, whether it’s cars, bikes, scooters or even public transit.

This new version of Lyft’s app, which allows users to request a shared car, find a scooter or bike, as well as see nearby public transit options, is only available in those cities where the company has launched these services. For now, it’s a short list that includes Washington, D.C., Santa Monica, Calif. and Los Angeles. But it will likely grow as the company launches scooter and bike sharing in more cities and as it forms partnerships with transit authorities through its Nearby Transit feature, which includes route information and schedules for buses and trains.

The new version of Lyft’s app shows every mobility option and makes suggestions based on user behavior, location and other data. And because the app integrates with public transit as well, it will show users when their trip might be quicker or more efficient using a local bus or subway, even though Lyft doesn’t financially benefit from that option.

Lyft has been moving toward this “all-of-the-above” approach for much of 2018, a shift accelerated by its acquisition of Motivate, the oldest and largest electric bike-share company in North America, the launch of its scooter business and its Nearby Transit program that kicked off in Santa Monica this September.

Lyft’s scooter-sharing service, which launched in Denver, is now in six cities. The company plans to nearly double that number by the end of 2018 — just a few weeks away. It’s scaling up bike sharing, as well. The company, through its Motivate bike-share brand, has invested $100 million in Citi Bike, expanding the fleet to 40,000 bikes over the next five years. Lyft is now the largest bike-share service in North America.

On Thursday, Ford GoBike — a Motivate system that is now owned by Lyft — is introducing more than 500 new pedal-assist electric bikes to its bike-share network in the East Bay of San Francisco.

This multimodal strategy, which Lyft outlined back in July, will help the company meet its goal of taking 1 million cars off the road by 2019. (Last year, Lyft says 250,000 of its community members gave up their personal cars.) It’s an effort that has been driven, in part, by Caroline Samponaro, Lyft’s head of bikes, scooters and pedestrian policy who has a long history as a bike activist. Samponaro, who posted a blog on Thursday describing her approach, fought for protected bike lanes in New York and led a grassroots campaign to redesign NYC’s streets. Samponaro most recently worked at Transportation Alternatives, a bicycle and pedestrian advocacy group.

“We’re taking a long view, and really leaning in hard into the ways that we can help solve large transportation problems for cities by getting people out of cars, and onto bikes and scooters or out of cars and into transit,” Samponaro told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “This really is making good on the vision that the founders have for the company to be a part of these large systemic transportation solutions, and partnerships with cities is core to the success of that.”

Lyft is also pushing to improve bike safety. It recently received approval for its Valencia Street project in the Mission District of San Francisco, which is one of the most heavily trafficked bicycling corridors in the city. To decrease double parking that obstructs bike lanes, Lyft is piloting a geo-fenced program that diverts to a dedicated location outside of traffic flow drivers’ pick-ups and drop-offs for passengers.

Of course, this isn’t just about making the world a better place. Lyft is a company after all, and one that sees greater opportunity and benefits to diversifying its business.

The battle between Uber and Lyft over ride-hailing market share in the U.S. has shifted to a larger war for control over transportation. While much of the attention has focused on the Uber versus Lyft story line, there are other important players in the mix that will influence the outcomes. And those are cities and transit authorities.

Source: Tech Crunch

Earlier this year, we told you about a now 18-month-old, Hoboken, N.J.-based cryptocurrency startup working on a “stable coin” whose elastic supply would ostensibly expand and contract to keep its value at about a dollar instead of all over the map. The company’s big idea: to develop a new token that people would actually use, instead of use to speculate.

Investors — a lot of them — fell in love with the concept. In fact, eight months ago, Basis landed $133 million in funding from Bain Capital Ventures, GV, longtime hedge fund manager Stan Druckenmiller, one-time Federal Reserve governor Kevin Warsh, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Foundation Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, WingVC, NFX Ventures, Valor Capital, Zhenfund, Ceyuan, Sky9 Capital, Digital Currency Group and others.

Today, that same team, led by CEO Nader Al-Naji — who co-founded the company with former Princeton classmates Lawrence Diao and Josh Chen — says it is shutting down the project. Basis is also returning the capital to investors that it didn’t use in trying to make a go of things.

As Al-Naji explained it in a post at Basis’s site a bit ago, its technology road map and U.S. securities regulations didn’t quite mix. More specifically, writes Al-Naji, the founders didn’t foresee the some of the ripple effects of the regulatory guidance it began receiving.

For one thing, he writes, Basis soon realized that there would be “no way to avoid securities status for bond and share tokens” and that “due to their status as unregistered securities, bond and share tokens would be subject to transfer restrictions, with [Basis] responsible for limiting token ownership to accredited investors in the U.S. for the first year after issuance, and for performing eligibility checks on international users.”

Part of the problem with this scenario, continues Al Naji, is that “enforcing transfer restrictions would require a centralized whitelist, meaning our system would not only lose its censorship resistance, but also that on-chain auctions would have significantly less liquidity.”

Ultimately, having fewer participants in those on-chain auctions would adversely affect the stability of Basis, he adds, which was sort of the whole point.

It isn’t clear from what’s happened to Basis whether so-called stablecoins are simply not viable, or whether its particular approach to an asset with price stability characteristics was ill-planned. Though it’s easy to grasp how they could spur the adoption of crypto payment applications, the technology remains unproven, even as a stablecoin rush got underway this past summer. As Garrick Hileman, head of research at the cryptocurrency services firm Blockchain, told Technology Review back in September, there were a handful of stablecoins in the works in early 2017. As of this fall, that number was closer to 60.

We’ve reached out to some of Basis’s investors to learn more. In the meantime, it’s worth noting that even when Basis raised that giant round of funding, Al-Naji was candid about not knowing when Basis’s token would be used in circulation. In short, he never made aggressive promises that Basis was unable to keep — at least, not to us directly.

You can read the full text of his letter to investors and supporters below.

Eighteen months ago, we set out with the ambitious goal of creating a better monetary system: one that would be resistant to hyperinflation, free from centralized control, and more stable and robust than the monetary systems that came before it. This was a goal we felt could create tremendous value for society if achieved, and one we also felt well-positioned to take on.

We started with a white paper that proposed a stable, decentralized cryptocurrency called Basis that had the potential to fulfill this vision.

Basis remains stable by incentivizing traders to buy and sell Basis in response to changes in demand. These incentives are set up through regular, on-chain auctions of “bond” and “share” tokens, which serve to adjust Basis supply. Because the Basis ecosystem would take some time to develop, we knew we’d need to initially play the role of trader ourselves, which would be capital-intensive. As such, after publishing our white paper, we raised a $133M round of financing. This allowed us to involve a diverse set of investors who we felt could add a lot of value to the project and enabled us to build a large stabilization fund to bootstrap the system. We then assembled an outstanding team and set our sights on launching the system.

Unfortunately, having to apply US securities regulation to the system had a serious negative impact on our ability to launch Basis.

As regulatory guidance started to trickle out over time, our lawyers came to a consensus that there would be no way to avoid securities status for bond and share tokens (though Basis would likely be free of this characterization).

Due to their status as unregistered securities, bond and share tokens would be subject to transfer restrictions, with Intangible Labs responsible for limiting token ownership to accredited investors in the US for the first year after issuance and for performing eligibility checks on international users.

Enforcing transfer restrictions would require a centralized whitelist, meaning our system would not only lose its censorship resistance, but also that on-chain auctions would have significantly less liquidity.

Having fewer participants in the on-chain auctions adversely affects the stability of Basis, making Basis intrinsically less attractive to users. Additionally, imposing transfer restrictions on bond and share token auctions materially hurts our ability to build the Basis ecosystem.

While transfer restrictions can generally lapse 12 months after a security is issued, because the auctions of bond and share tokens governed by our monetary policy would be continuously issued, transfer restrictions and a centralized whitelist would be required indefinitely.

We considered many alternative paths to launch to try and comply with the regulatory constraints while keeping our product compelling and competitive. These paths included launching offshore with added utility to make bond and share tokens less financial in nature, and starting off with a centralized stability mechanism. Ultimately, however, we don’t think any of the paths we considered are compelling enough for our users or our investors, or consistent enough with our vision to justify moving forward.

As such, I am sad to share the news that we have decided to return capital to our investors. This also means, unfortunately, that the Basis project will be shutting down.

Although this isn’t the outcome any of us wanted, we knew going into this that we were fundamentally making a binary bet on a favorable regulatory landscape. The binary nature of our bet is precisely why we included a return of capital clause in our token sale to begin with, even though it was something we hoped we’d never have to rely on. So, while we’re disappointed we couldn’t launch the system we were all hoping to build, we’re thankful that we can at least do right by our investors given these circumstances.

Finally, we owe our sincere thanks to everyone who supported us and our project—from the extraordinary backers and partners who believed in us, to the outstanding team that joined us in our mission. You gave us the opportunity to change the world, and we’re looking forward to trying again.

Until next time,

Nader Al-Naji, CEO

Source: Tech Crunch

Batteries. Clothing. Household goods. Supplements. Diapers. Furniture. Toys? Yes, toys. It seems Amazon’s private label business is preparing to enter the toy market next. The retailer’s initial toy listings include an indoor play set for toddlers, along with other toys for climbing and playing on, as well as a toy storage system.

The listings were first spotted by TJI Research this week, but the items themselves are not available for sale. (The listings have also been pulled down, following our inquiry to Amazon.)

In total, the firm found five SKUs: a Soft Play Single Tunnel; Soft Play Climber; Soft Play Climb and Crawl Play Set, 5-Piece, and Kids’ Toy Storage Organizer.

We were able to confirm that the products will be added to the AmazonBasics line in the future and they’re aimed at daycares, more so than consumers.

AmazonBasics is Amazon’s flagship private label brand, where consumers can shop for Amazon’s version of everyday needs like cables, batteries, and other home necessities, such as bed sheets, bath towels, knife sets, tools, and more, plus office products, sports and travel accessories, pet supplies, and many other things. Basically, it’s Amazon’s attempt at owning a piece of the market for every top-selling item and category on its site.

As for the new toys, they’re not exactly Amazon’s attempt to take on Mattel or LEGO, but rather are meant to cater towards childcare business owners, we understand. That is to say, these are not dolls and playthings – they’re classroom needs.

A tunnel for toddlers to climb through or soft foamy shapes for the kids to climb up and over, for example.

Image credit: Amazon.com, via TJI Research

These aren’t the only AmazonBasics supplies geared towards early education classrooms, like daycares and preschools. The retailer already today sells things like small lockers and bookshelves which are also targeted towards the same business customer base.

Still, it is notable that this the first time Amazon has produced its own toys.

Amazon declined to offer an official comment.

The new additions are arriving at a time when Amazon has been looking to increase its precense in the toy market. This year, it mailed out its first printed holiday toy catalog to consumers. It also reported selling over 18 million toys on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, TJI Research noted.

Today, many children’s toys rely on the power of their brand to sell, and their YouTube unboxing videos, too. But Amazon could easily compete on classic toys and staples, if it chose – things like stacking rings or wooden blocks for baby, little wagons, toy cars, easels, wooden puzzles, and more. Newer brands like Melissa & Doug have proven there’s a market for classic toys like this, even in a day and age when kids are drawn to digital playthings like tablets and video games.

However, Amazon hasn’t made any moves yet into the broader toy space – and it may not do so, given the potential for alienating toy makers whose brands it needs to list and sell.

Given the launch of the toy listings pages, TJI Research estimates the toys will begin to ship in the days or weeks ahead.

(Featured image is not an AmazonBasics playset, as the listing was pulled down. It’s a similar product from Walmart’s Hayneedle.)

Source: Tech Crunch

When the former CTOs of YouTube, Facebook, and Dropbox seed fund a database startup, you know there’s something special going on under the hood. Jiten Vaidya and Sugu Sougoumarane saved YouTube from a scalability nightmare by inventing and open sourcing Vitess, a brilliant relational data storage system. But in the decade since working there, the pair have been inundated with requests from tech companies desperate for help building the operational scaffolding needed to actually integrate Vitess.

So today the pair are revealing their new startup PlanetScale that makes it easy to build multi-cloud databases that handle enormous amounts of information without locking customers into Amazon, Google, or Microsoft’s infrastructure. Battletested at YouTube, the technology could allow startups to fret less about their backend and focus more on their unique value proposition. “Now they don’t have to reinvent the wheel” Vaidya tells me. “A lot of companies facing this scaling problem end up solving it badly in-house and now there’s a way to solve that problem by using us to help.”

PlanetScale has quietly raised a $3 million seed round in April led by SignalFire and joined by a who’s who of engineering luminaries. They include YouTube co-founder and CTO Steve Chen, Quora CEO and former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo, former Dropbox CTO Aditya Agarwal, PayPal and Affirm co-founder Max Levchin, MuleSoft co-founder and CTO Ross Mason, Google director of engineering Parisa Tabriz, and Facebook’s first female engineer and South Park Commons Founder Ruchi Sanghvi. If anyone could foresee the need for Vitess implementation services, it’s these leaders who’ve dealt with scaling headaches at tech’s top companies.

But how can a scrappy startup challenge the tech juggernauts for cloud supremacy? First, by actually working with them. The PlanetScale beta that’s now launching lets companies spin up Vitess clusters on its database-as-a-service, their own through a licensing deal, or on AWS with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure coming shortly. Once these integrations with the tech giants are established, PlanetScale clients can use it as an interface for a multi-cloud setup where they could keep their data master copies on AWS US-West with replicas on Google Cloud in Ireland and elsewhere. That protects companies from becoming dependent on one provider and then getting stuck with price hikes or service problems.

PlanetScale also promises to uphold the principles that undergirded Vitess. “It’s our value that we will keep everything in the query pack completely open source so none of our customers ever have to worry about lock-in” Vaidya says.

Battletested, YouTube Approved

He and Sougoumarane met 25 years ago while at Indian Institute Of Technology Bombay. Back in 1993 they worked at pioneering database company Informix together before it flamed out. Sougoumarane was eventually hired by Elon Musk as an early engineer for X.com before it got acquired by PayPal, and then left for YouTube. Vaidya was working at Google and the pair were reunited when it bought YouTube and Sougoumarane pulled him on to the team.

“YouTube was growing really quickly and the relationship database they were using with MySQL was sort of falling apart at the seams” Vaidya recalls. Adding more CPU and memory to the database infra wasn’t cutting it, so the team created Vitess. The horizontal scaling sharding middleware for MySQL let users segment their database to reduce memory usage while still being able to rapidly run operations. YouTube has smoothly ridden that infrastructure to 1.8 billion users ever since.

“Sugu and Mike Solomon invented and made Vitess open source right from the beginning since 2010 because they knew the scaling problem wasn’t just for YouTube, and they’ll be at other companies 5 or 10 years later trying to solve the same problem” Vaidya explains. That proved true, and now top apps like Square and HubSpot run entirely on Vitess, with Slack now 30 percent onboard.

Vaidya left YouTube in 2012 and became the lead engineer at Endorse, which got acquired by Dropbox where he worked for four years. But in the meantime, the engineering community strayed towards MongoDB-style key-value store databases, which Vaidya considers inferior. He sees indexing issues and says that if the system hiccups during an operation, data can become inconsistent — a big problem for banking and commerce apps. “We think horizontally-scaled relationship databases are more elegant and are something enterprises really need.

Database Legends Reunite

Fed up with the engineering heresy, a year ago Vaidya committed to creating PlanetScale. It’s composed of four core offerings: professional training in Vitess, on-demand support for open source Vitess users, Vitess database-as-a-service on Planetscale’s servers, and software licensing for clients that want to run Vitess on premises or through other cloud providers. It lets companies re-shard their databases on the fly to relocate user data to comply with regulations like GDPR, safely migrate from other systems without major codebase changes, make on-demand changes, and run on Kubernetes.

PlanetScale’s customers now include Indonesian ecommerce giant Bukalapak, and it’s helping Booking.com, GitHub, and New Relic migrate to open source Vitess. Growth is suddenly ramping up due to inbound inquiries. Last month around when Square Cash became the number one app, its engineering team published a blog post extolling the virtues of Vitess. Now everyone’s seeking help with Vitess sharding, and PlanetScale is waiting with open arms. “Jiten and Sugu are legends and know firsthand what companies require to be successful in this booming data landscape” says Ilya Kirnos, founding partner and CTO of SignalFire.

The big cloud providers are trying to adapt to the relational database trend, with Google’s Cloud Spanner and Cloud SQL, and Amazon’s AWS SQL and AWS Aurora. Their huge networks and marketing war chests could pose a threat. But Vaidya insists that while it might be easy to get data into these systems, it can be a pain to get it out. PlanetScale is designed to give them freedom of optionality through its multi-cloud functionality so their eggs aren’t all in one basket.

Finding product market fit is tough enough. Trying to suddenly scale a popular app while also dealing with all the other challenges of growing a company can drive founders crazy. But if it’s good enough for YouTube, startups can trust PlanetScale to make databases one less thing they have to worry about.

Source: Tech Crunch

Oracle filed suit in federal court last week alleging yet again that the decade-long $10 billion Pentagon JEDI contract with its single-vendor award is unfair and illegal. The complaint, which has been sealed at Oracle’s request, is available in the public record with redactions.

If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same argument the company used when it filed a similar complaint with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) last August. The GAO ruled against Oracle last month stating, “…the Defense Department’s decision to pursue a single-award approach to obtain these cloud services is consistent with applicable statutes (and regulations) because the agency reasonably determined that a single-award approach is in the government’s best interests for various reasons, including national security concerns, as the statute allows.”

That hasn’t stopped Oracle from trying one more time, this time filing suit in the United States Court of Federal Claims this week, alleging pretty much the same thing it did with the GAO, that the process was unfair and violated federal procurement law.

Oracle Senior Vice President, Ken Glueck reiterated this point in a statement to TechCrunch. “The technology industry is innovating around next generation cloud at an unprecedented pace and JEDI as currently envisioned virtually assures DoD will be locked into legacy cloud for a decade or more. The single-award approach is contrary to well established procurement requirements and is out of sync with industry’s multi-cloud strategy, which promotes constant competition, fosters rapid innovation and lowers prices,” he said echoing the language in the complaint.

The JEDI contract process is about determining the cloud strategy for the Department of Defense for the next decade, but it’s important to point out that even though it is framed as a 10 year contract, it has been designed with several opt out points for DOD with an initial two year option, two three year options and a final two year option, leaving open the possibility it might never go the full 10 years.

Oracle has complained for months that it believes the contract has been written to favor the industry leader, Amazon Web Services. Company co-CEO Safra Catz even complained directly to the president in April, before the RFP process even started. IBM filed a similar protest in October citing many of the same arguments. Oracle’s federal court complaint filing cites the IBM complaint and language from other bidders including Google (which has since withdrawn from the process) and Microsoft that supports their point that a multi-vendor solution would make more sense.

The Department of Justice, which represents the US government in the complaint, declined to comment.

The DOD also indicated it wouldn’t comment on pending litigation, but in September spokesperson Heather Babb told TechCrunch that the contract RFP was not written to favor any vendor in advance. “The JEDI Cloud final RFP reflects the unique and critical needs of DOD, employing the best practices of competitive pricing and security. No vendors have been pre-selected,” she said at the time.

That hasn’t stopped Oracle from continually complaining about the process to whoever would listen. This time they have literally made a federal case out of it. The lawsuit is only the latest move by the company. It’s worth pointing out that the RFP process closed in October and a winner won’t be chosen until April. In other words, they appear to be assuming they will lose before the vendor selection process is even completed.

Source: Tech Crunch

The VPN industry sucks. Dozens of companies promise you the impossible dream of perfect privacy. But it’s simply a big lie. A company called Confirmed VPN wants to change that by holding VPN companies accountable.

VPN companies let you establish an encrypted tunnel between your device and a server in a data center somewhere. While nobody can see what’s inside the tunnel, the VPN company can see everything on their servers.

Many shady companies use that to analyze your browsing habits, sell them to advertisers, inject their own ads on non-secure pages or steal your identity. The worst of them can hand to authorities a ton of data about your online life.

They lie in privacy policies and often don’t even have an About page with the names of people working for those companies. They spend a ton of money buying reviews and endorsements.

Don’t trust any of them.

In other words, VPN services don’t make you more secure on the internet. Install HTTPS Everywhere, install an ad blocker and change your DNS settings to Quad9 or Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1. Those are better steps to secure your connection.

Now that I got that out of the way, Confirmed VPN is yet another VPN service that wants to try something new. The team behind it (Duet Display’s Rahul Dewan and former iCloud engineer Johnny Lin) has open-sourced the code of its clients and server-side components. It then automatically deploys new commits on Amazon Web Services.

The company uses AWS CloudWatch to monitor unusual activity on the server to prove that they’re not downloading logs or anything like that. Security experts can also log into AWS using read-only credentials. Confirmed VPN has also completed two security audits and has a bug bounty program.

I’m not a security expert, so I can’t endorse or recommend Confirmed VPN — remember, I still think you shouldn’t use a VPN service. But this transparent approach is interesting by itself. Now let’s see how competitors react.

Source: Tech Crunch

The Google Play Store is receiving an update today that will allow customers to make charitable donations to nonprofits from their Android device. While it may seem odd to to be rallying for support for charities within the same marketplace where users download apps and games, it’s not uncommon. Apple for years has collected donations for the American Red Cross in the wake of natural disaster like the California wildfires hurricanes, for example.

Google’s implementation, however, isn’t a launch tied to a single event. And it’s rolling out support for several charities, not just the Red Cross.

Users in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Germany, Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Taiwan and Indonesia will soon see the option to make a donation to a number of organizations, including also charity:water, Doctors Without Borders USA, Girls Who code, International Rescue Committee, Room to Red, Save the Children, UNICEF, World Food Program USA, and World Wildlife Fund US, in addition to the American Red Cross.

To access the feature Android users canb head to play.google.com/donate to read about the organizations or to make a donation using the payment card they have on file for the Play Store.

To be clear, this is about the Play Store itself collecting charitable donations, not allowing Android app developers to do so. Google Play is covering all the transaction and disbursement costs, so the organizations receive 100 percent of the user’s donation.

The feature’s launch has been timed with the holiday season, which often inspires charitable giving. It’s also a sort of belated nod to Giving Week 2018, the movement which encourages people to volunteer, fundraise and donate to worthy causes.  (Giving Week this year wrapped on December 5).

The donations feature may offer a different selection of nonprofits in the future, we understand, though Google is not announcing any planned additions at this time.

Google says the feature will begin to roll out to Android users in the supported markets over the next few days.

Source: Tech Crunch

Nearly five years after announcing its acquisition of Oculus VR, Facebook is finally ready to put behind it the drama surrounding its founding.

Gaming giant ZeniMax Media’s lawsuit against Facebook over the misuse of intellectual property related to the founding of Oculus VR has finally been settled.

In a statement, ZeniMax CEO Robert Altman confirmed the settlement, saying, “We are pleased that a settlement has been reached and are fully satisfied by the outcome. While we dislike litigation, we will always vigorously defend against any infringement or misappropriation of our intellectual property by third parties.”

At the trial’s conclusion, the judge awarded ZeniMax $500 million in damages to be paid by the defendants, including Facebook and some of the Oculus VR co-founders, a figure that Facebook appealed and had reduced to $250 million. Following the initial verdict, ZeniMax sought an injunction on sales of Facebook’s Oculus Rift headset, claiming the device violated key IP. Terms of this settlement weren’t disclosed.

The trial was notable in that it offered a rare moment on the stand for a number of Facebook executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It also gave rare insight into the details surrounding the company’s founding and acquisition.

“We’re pleased to put this behind us and continue building the future of VR,” a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Source: Tech Crunch

Bloomberg today updated its earlier reporting on Apple’s plans for a news and magazine subscription service. Earlier this year, the outlet said Apple would relaunch the digital newsstand business Texture, which it acquired this spring, as part of the Apple News app. Now, Bloomberg confirms the launch time frame could be “as soon as this spring.” It also detailed some of the industry reaction, which is cautious at best.

Apple is said to be courting paywalled newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times to join Texture, and is working on a new design for the magazine content. Instead of trying to mimic what a magazine looks like in print, as it does today, Apple is making the content look more like typical online news articles, Bloomberg said.

The report also noted publishers were proceeding with trepidation, in many cases. Because Apple is offering a lower pricing — $9.99 per month for all-you-can-eat news and magazine content, similar to the Netflix model — publishers are worried Apple’s service will eat into their revenues. This $10 price point, after all, is cheaper than a subscription to a single publication — like The NYT’s digital subscription — in some cases

Instead, publishers prefer a platform that lets them build their own paywalls right into Apple’s app.

But Apple’s counterpoint during negotiations has been that the subscriber growth it could bring would make up for the lost revenues from publishers’ own subscription businesses, the report also said. The company compared its potential to that of Apple Music, which is nearing 60 million users, according to the latest from Billboard.

Texture today offers access to more than 200 magazines, including Vanity Fair, EW, GQ, Vogue, Forbes, Time, People, Rolling Stone, Cosmopolitan, Sports Illustrated and many others, including Bloomberg Businessweek.

Source: Tech Crunch