Palmer Luckey

Augmented reality’s half-decade of stagnation

Hello readers, and welcome back to Week in Review! Last week, I talked about the future of this newsletter and what’s coming next. The short of which is that in the coming weeks I will be windin

Company formerly known as Facebook unceremoniously kills off ‘Oculus’ brand

At the company’s AR/VR-focused Connect event this morning, Mark Zuckerberg announced that despite a name change, Facebook Meta’s mission will remain the same and that its existing brands w

Anduril raises $450M as the defense tech company’s valuation soars to $4.6B

The AI-powered defense company founded by tech iconoclast Palmer Luckey has landed a $450 million round of investment that values the startup at $4.6 billion just four years in. In April, reports sugg

Magic Leap’s $2.6 billion bait and switch

Intended or not — I assume it wasn't — Magic Leap became a $2.6 billion bait-and-switch, the consequences of which are now all too apparent.

Vannevar Labs comes out of stealth to bring best-in-class AI tech to national security agencies

Few organizations have the complex data and analytics problems that challenge the defense and intelligence communities every single day. Whether it is managing petabytes of text, audio, or video data,

Inside the history of Silicon Valley labor, with Louis Hyman

As I wrote for TechCrunch recently, immigration is not an issue always associated with tech — not even when thinking about the ethics of technology, as I do here. So when I was moved to tears a few

LIV, a startup making VR gaming more interactive for audiences, raises $1M from Oculus founder and Seedcamp

LIV, a Prague-based company that wants to make VR gaming more fun to watch, and in turn bring players and spectators closer together, has picked up $1 million in funding. That’s a pretty modest

Facebook AR/VR product head Hugo Barra is being replaced

Facebook’s VP of AR/VR product Hugo Barra is out after some leadership changes at the top of the Oculus organization. After initially being hired to lead the whole VR division, Barra will now be

Oculus co-founder shipping free Rift repair kits to users with VR headset audio issue

Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey isn’t in the VR hardware business these days since getting canned by Facebook (he’s focused on smart border security at his new company Anduril), but he sti

Startups Weekly: Is Y Combinator’s latest cohort too big?

Plus, e-scooter subscription services are a thing now, the Vision Fund is betting big on autonomous delivery and Facebook almost bought Unity.

Oculus co-founder trashes Magic Leap headset in review, calling it a ‘tragic heap’

It isn’t the most usual situation for a founder to write a review trashing a competitor’s new product, but Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey has never been the most conventional entrepreneur

Palmer Luckey’s defense company Anduril is already leading to arrests at the southern border

Palmer Luckey’s defense project just crawled out of stealth mode. Between a flattering new Wired piece and its first few official tweets, the secretive year-old company known as Anduril is stepp

Palmer Luckey’s new defense company Anduril looks interested in AR and VR on the battlefield

Palmer Luckey's new defense startup Anduril has aspirations well beyond a high-tech border wall. According to new information on the company's website and its hires, Anduril intends to apply its virtu

Social virtual reality startup AltspaceVR may not be dead after all

What is dead in VR may never die, perhaps? Social VR startup AltspaceVR may not be shutting down after all. The company, which raised more than $15 million in funding from GV, Comcast Ventures and oth

Border wall bill draws on Palmer Luckey’s new defense company

After being ousted from the VR empire he built, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey is wasting no time on his next project: building the wall. As CNN reports, Luckey's newfound interest in defense is evident

Palmer Luckey backs development of VR tool that lets HTC Vive users play Oculus exclusives

The rift between Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey and the company he left earlier this year appears to be growing wider. Luckey is putting some of the money he made from Facebook buying his VR company

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey is developing border surveillance technology

Last time we heard from Palmer Luckey, the one-time poster boy for VR, he was quietly ousted from Facebook after a $100,000 donation to a pro-Trump "shitposting" group came to light. Now Luckey, who

Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey donated $100,000 to Trump’s inauguration

Oculus Rift co-founder Palmer Luckey didn’t just support Donald Trump by backing an organization called Nimble America that made anti-Hillary Clinton “shitposts.” He also donated $100,000 to Tru

Crunch Report | SpaceX Successfully Re-launches a Rocket

Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey leaves Facebook, SpaceX successfully re-launches a rocket, Cloudera files for IPO and Snapchat now allows you to search Stories. All this on Crunch Report.

Embattled Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey leaves Facebook

Palmer Luckey is out at Facebook. The Oculus co-founder, who helped kickstart the recent VR craze with a prototype headset built out of his parents' garage, has left the company after a year that hera
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