Hudson’s Bay Company, the owner of department chain stores like Saks Fifth Avenue, said today it was acquiring Gilt Groupe for $250 million. The sale still represents a tough end to the story of Gilt. The startup was one of the original darling flash-sale sites coming out of New York. But that whole market has found itself challenged by slim operating margins, its initial popularity… Read More
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As we dip our toes into virtual reality more and more each day, one could imagine a far-off unintended consequence — the blurring of virtual and actual reality. A short film called “Uncanny Valley” explores that notion, with a bit of an “Ender’s Game” plot and feel. Here’s the setup from its creator, Federico Heller. In the slums of the future,… Read More
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Facebook is narrowing the focus of the LiveRail ad platform that it acquired in 2014 — the company says it will no longer be accepting new customers to LiveRail’s ad serving business. Facebook’s head of advertising technology David Jakubowski said that’s not actually a dramatic change, since the LiveRail ad server represents a small part of the business (“tens… Read More
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Seeso, NBCUniversal’s oddly named subscription service aimed at cord cutters, is now live. The ad-free streaming service is solely focused on comedies, pulling together well-known titles and fan favorites, including Monty Python classics, “Parks and Recreation,” “The Office” (US and UK versions), “The IT Crowd,” “The Kids In The Hall,”… Read More
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Kill SMS, spawn a chat bot platform, bring friends together offline, improve artificial intelligence, and delight people. That’s Facebook Messenger’s roadmap for 2016 now that it has 800 million monthly active users, up from 700 million in June, 600 Million in March, and 500 million last November. That makes Messenger the fastest growing app of 2015, according to Nielsen, and it… Read More
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Instagram’s answer to Snapchat’s Live Stories isn’t just for holidays and big events any more. Internally, they’re known as Spotlight Compilations — vertical slideshows of the best videos related to a theme, like “Dynamic Duos – Odd Couple Animal Videos” or “Ramped Up – Rad Skateboarding Videos”. They appear in the Spotlight… Read More
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We’ve seen some pretty cool stuff at day 1 of CES 2016, but probably nothing more eye-catching than the EHang 184, a human-sized drone built by the Chinese UAV company EHang. Yes you heard right, a giant autonomous drone that fits a human. It’s basically what you would expect to see if someone shrunk you down the lego-size and stuck you next to a DJI Inspire. Except no one was… Read More
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Watch a sad old man (age 25) interview the top pre-tween entrepreneurs in this hilarious video. Even though it’s a parody of the Forbes 30 Under 30, this is too real. “Even an 8-year-old could have regrets because there’s always going to be that 6-year-old inventor who speaks 7 languages” filmmaker Ankush Jindal from MasterClass tells me. Thanks for capturing everyone… Read More
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Storytelling is fun, but it’s also not easy. You have to have an idea of what story you want to tell and what pieces to include to illustrate it. Sometimes it’s words, sometimes it’s photos, sometimes it’s videos, and sometimes it’s all of them. 
Oculus co-founder admits he screwed up Rift price-point messaging, explaining in a Reddit AMA that when he said “that ballpark” he had been thinking about the ‘all in’ cost of the headset — which requires a gaming PC to power it…