Tue, 2017-04-04 08:45
Sam
AR/VR: Shapes of Things to Come
The first company to sell virtual reality (VR) goggles and gloves, VPL Research Inc., was founded in 1985. How, then, can VR still be seen as an emerging technology? If you’ve ever applied a filter in Snapchat — and who hasn’t? — you’ve used augmented reality (AR). Why does AR seem so exotic?
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In Jan. 2016 Alex Wilhelm left a safe, good job at TechCrunch to build a news staff at Mattermark, a startup selling access to rich data on tech startups and investors. Alex is now at rival Crunchbase on a similar mission: infusing smart analysis with numbers that prove the case.
eWeek last week redesigned its web site and launched new personalization features that allow readers to easily follow topics and authors. Coming soon: a content-sharing arrangement with Silicon Angle’s video brand, theCube, as well as a new approach to case studies broadly named “IT Science.”
TechCrunch has launched a new event series, Sessions, designed to dive deeply into a single tech topic. Sessions: Justice takes place Jun. 6 in San Francisco. The second, Sessions: Robotics, follows Jul. 17 in Boston. A Los Angeles-based event (AR/VR?) remains unannounced.
When Adam Lashinsky joined Fortune 15 years ago, the Dow was at 9,800, Enron had just collapsed and columnist Stewart Alsop was advising the reader to “say goodbye to your PDA.” Today Adam is Fortune’s newly promoted executive editor...
Axios debuts Login, a daily tech newsletter, on Monday. You’ll want to read it. Produced by chief technology correspondent Ina Fried, Login will cover tech for “a broad, sophisticated audience,” Ina says. An inspiration, she explains, is the Good Morning Silicon Valley newsletter back when John Paczkowski (now at BuzzFeed) wrote it. 
A builder of IT software and IT community, Spiceworks is now in the IT media business, too. Former eWeek and ZDNet editor Matthew Rothenberg joined the Austin, Tex.-based company this week as executive editor.
If the term “Yelp for IT” doesn’t ring a bell, it soon will. Sites such as TrustRadius, G2Crowd, Peer Insights and Software Advice allow IT pros to post reviews of the products and services they buy, just as Yelp lets consumers share their views of restaurants, nightlife and home services.
“Newsletters might be the new newspaper,” a subscriber wrote us recently. “They certainly are for me, I read a range of them ‘cover to cover’ every morning.” Newsletters also can be potent places to pitch. Which ones matter?
Are tech events on the wane? Quartz last month pulled the plug on The Next Billion, its three-year-old conference series with $1,500 ticket prices. The Bloomberg Technology Conference, historically held each June in San Francisco, is as yet unscheduled for 2017.
Surprise! Eighty-six percent of B2B video viewing takes place on the desktop, only 14 percent on mobile, according to a recently released study sponsored by SWMS subscriber Vidyard, a Kitchener, Ontario-based video analytics provider.
