Lucas Matney
Writer
The Latest from Lucas Matney
Snap’s exec team continues to shrink as more reports of internal drama surface
Days after Snap announced the departure of its CFO, reports have emerged that the company’s HR chief was asked to leave following an internal investigation late last year that had led to the fir
Wine-by-the-glass subscription service Vinebox raises $5.9 million
One SF startup wants you to get home from a day at work and polish off a bottle of wine by yourself. Vinebox isn’t really trying to get you wasted though, these bottles are cute and tiny. The sm
Facebook poaches Google’s AR/VR engineering lead to take over Portal team
Facebook is bringing on the engineering lead for Google’s entire AR/VR team to tackle Portal hardware. Ryan Cairns comes aboard after 12 years at Google, where he was most recently the engineeri
Ubiquity6 acquires AR music startup Wavy
Today, Ubiquity6 has announced that it is acquiring Wavy, a small AR music startup founded last year. In a blog post, the Wavy team confirmed they’ll be joining the Ubiquity6 team and won’
Twitter’s de-algorithmizing ‘sparkle button’ rolls out on Android
After launching on iOS, Twitter is giving Android users the ability to easily switch between seeing the reverse-chronological “latest tweets” and the algorithmic “top tweets” f
Computer vision startup AnyVision pulls in new funding from Lightspeed
While there have been a few massive surveillance startups in China that have raised funds on the back of computer vision advances, there’s seemed to be less fervor outside of that market. Tel Av
Improbable urges Unity to unsuspend their license, rectify ‘farcical’ situation for developers
Improbable may be pissed at Unity, but they still want them back. In a blog post titled “A final statement on SpatialOS and Unity,” the team at the cloud gaming startup aimed to tell their
Improbable and Epic Games establish $25M fund to help devs move to ‘more open engines’ after Unity debacle
Improbable is taking a daring step after announcing earlier today that Unity had revoked its license to operate on the popular game development engine. The U.K.-based cloud gaming startup has inked a
Unity pulls nuclear option on cloud gaming startup Improbable, terminating game engine license
A pair of highly-funded gaming unicorns are publicly skirmishing and the deal could have major repercussions for game developers. Today, UK-based cloud gaming startup Improbable, announced that Unity,
An AR glasses pioneer collapses
In the first days of 2017, Osterhout Design Group arrived at CES with a two-story booth and huge promises. The startup’s founder, Ralph Osterhout, wanted to take the small San Francisco-based co
After 5 years, Sony’s PS4 is still killing it
After a successful holiday season, Sony’s PlayStation 4 is nearing some pretty wild milestones. The company announced Monday that they had sold more than 5.6 million PS4 units over the holiday s
Meural shows off a newer, smaller version of its smart art display
When Electric Objects was bought by Giphy, the company soon shutdown the hardware team and got rid of the subscription fees for existing content. While Meural actually bumped up its annual subscriptio
HTC’s next consumer virtual reality headset is the first PC VR hybrid
Vive has seemed to be devoting a lot of attention to the enterprise, but the company teased their new consumer VR headset called the Vive Cosmos at CES today. The positionally-tracked headset boasts t
HTC teases Vive Pro with embedded eye-tracking
HTC is giving its high-end enterprise-focused Vive Pro VR headset a feature bump in the next few months that’s focused on eye-tracking. The company has certainly been having some financial strug
More than 100 million Alexa devices have been sold
More than 100 million devices with Amazon’s Alexa assistant pre-installed have been sold, the company said Friday. The new metric, revealed by Amazon devices SVP Dave Limp in an interview with T
Boom Supersonic nabs $100M to build its Mach 2.2 commercial airliner
One Denver-based startup’s long-shot bid to move today’s commercial jets beyond supersonic speeds just got a big injection of cash. Boom Supersonic, which is building and designing what it
Pokémon GO creator Niantic closes $190M funding round
Mobile AR gaming startup Niantic has closed a $190 million round of funding according to newly filed SEC docs. The filing comes after a WSJ report last month suggested the company was in the process o
Synapse raises $6M to bring neural net weapon detection to x-ray machines
With all of the advances made by computer vision tech in the past few years, it might seem a little crazy that so much of the x-ray security equipment being used at sensitive locations is leaning so h
Magic Leap and other AR startups have a rough 2019 ahead of them
Very rarely does an early technology garner such an air of inevitability like AR has in the past few years. 2018 was supposed to be a year where the foundational tech for augmented reality was built o
Gaming chat startup Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation
Chatty gamers are apparently worth billions. Discord, the gaming chat startup with more than 200 million active users, announced Friday that it had secured $150 million in funding at a $2.05 billion v