Techmeme
October 12, 2017, 12:10 AM

Top News

Lucas Matney / TechCrunch:
Facebook unveils Oculus Go, a new $199 standalone wireless VR headset, shipping early next year with Gear VR support, integrated spatial audio, and new optics  —  Onstage at Oculus Connect 4 in San Jose, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a new mobile headset called “Oculus Go.”
Oculus:
Facebook drops Oculus Rift's price with bundled Touch controllers to $399  —  Summer of Rift had a major impact on the VR industry, and the community's response showed that the appetite for best-in-class VR hardware and games is stronger than ever.  We want to continue getting VR into more people's hands …
Oculus:
Facebook debuts Rift Core 2.0 with redesigned Dash UI featuring dock-like hub and Home, the desktop-like space that can be shown to friends in VR, coming in Dec  —  Today, we announced Rift Core 2.0, a complete overhaul of Rift's core experience that lets people do more in VR than ever before.
Facebook:
Facebook plans Venues app for '18 to let users experience events with thousands of others, shows prototype that brings inside-out tracking to standalone headset  —  Today at its fourth developer conference in San Jose, Oculus announced its newest and most affordable VR headset, called Oculus Go.
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Amazon's Alexa can now recognize different voices and give personalized responses  —  Your Echo just got smart enough to tell you apart from the people you live with  —  The battle of the smart speakers has become a constant back and forth between Amazon and Google.
Andrew Griffin / The Independent:
In an interview focusing on augmented reality, Tim Cook says the technology doesn't exist to make quality AR smart glasses  —  In a wide-ranging interview, the CEO of the biggest tech company in the world explains how AR will change our lives, and why he thinks the world is actually getting better
Aamna Mohdin / Quartz:
Apple's VP of diversity Denise Young Smith says she is “a little” frustrated that “diversity” is “tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT”  —  Denise Young Smith is Silicon Valley's most powerful black woman.  “My name was not talked about prior to maybe 5 years ago,” she says.
Bloomberg:
Sources: 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., Universal Pictures to join Disney's Movies Anywhere service  —  Movies Anywhere provides digital storage to watch on devices  —  Paramount, Lions Gate are said supportive, not participating  —  Several major Hollywood movie studios have signed …
Bloomberg:
Qualcomm fined $773M by Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission for violating antitrust rules for at least seven years  —  Qualcomm Inc. was fined a record NT$23.4 billion ($773 million) by Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission in the latest blow from regulators over the way the U.S. company prices mobile phone chips and patents.
Devindra Hardawar / Engadget:
Amazon unveils new waterproof Kindle Oasis with a 7-inch screen and support for Audible audiobooks, available to order now starting at $249.99, ships October 31  —  We called Amazon's last Kindle Oasis “the perfect e-reader for the one percent.”  That still describes the new Oasis, which Amazon is officially unveiling today.
John Mannes / TechCrunch:
ROSS Intelligence raises $8.7M Series A to help legal teams search case law using machine learning  —  Armed with an understanding of machine learning, ROSS Intelligence is going after LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters for ownership of legal research.  The startup, founded in 2015 by Andrew Arruda …
More: BetaKit
Scott Martin / Wall Street Journal:
Brilliant, which makes a $199 smart home hub, raises $21M Series A led by August Capital  —  Funding was led by August Capital  —  Talk about a lightbulb moment.  —  Aaron Emigh was taking some time off after Shopkick, a startup he co-founded, was acquired for about $250 million.
More: PR Newswire and FinSMEsThanks:@emay916
Wall Street Journal:
Sources say Kaspersky antivirus tool was modified for espionage purposes to search for terms like “top secret” and that the firm must have known  —  Searches exploited popular Russian-made antivirus software to seek classified material, officials say

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