Making a comeback: Roberta Williams, whose pioneering design work helped popularize adventure games like King’s Quest in the 1980s through a company she co-founded with husband Ken.
Driving the news: Roberta and Ken are working with a team of more than a dozen developers to remake a 1970s classic that inspired them, Colossal Cave Adventure.
Launch House, which runs in-person and virtual programs for startup founders, is debuting the first product of its media ambitions: an email newsletter, dubbed Homescreen, geared towards entrepreneurs.
Why it matters: Producing high-quality content remains a popular and powerful marketing tactic in the startup world, with everyone from VCs like Andreessen Horowitz to vendors like Stripe partaking.
Crusoe Energy Systems, a Denver-based flared gas bitcoin miner, raised $350 million in Series C venture capital funding led by G2VP. It also secured $155 million in new credit facilities.
Why it matters: Crusoe's tech, which uses waste natural gas to power mining activities, could cut conflicts between crypto and climate. The company soon plans to expand its commercial efforts into cloud computing, which also has giant energy requirements.
Every decade or two, a new wave of innovators tells us they've found the technological key to eliminating society's gatekeepers and empowering individuals — but every time the music stops, big companies remain in charge.
Driving the news: Today's prophets of web3 — which promises a new financial and cultural order based on the decentralizing power of blockchains — are the latest in this lineage.
Netflix's market swan dive and CNN+'s sudden death underscore a fundamental shift in the streaming economy toward ad-supported services.
Why it matters: For years Wall Street has rewarded companies like Netflix and rival Disney for adding paid users, then punished them when they hit a ceiling. Every streaming service is now looking toward ads as a way off that rollercoaster.
A federal judge dismissed much of a former Sony PlayStation employee's gender discrimination lawsuit against the gaming giant on Thursday, but is giving her an opportunity to make a stronger case.
Driving the news: In a 20-page order, U.S. magistrate judge Laurel Beeler dismissed 10 of ex-worker Emma Majo's 13 claims without prejudice, including those focused on pay discrimination and harassment.
Democracy is being eroded by an overwhelming information ecosystem buoyed by major tech platforms, former President Barack Obama said Thursday.
Why it matters: Obama's comments reflect a shift in his feelings toward technology, in contrast to his embrace of Silicon Valley and social media as a force for good as president.
California's Department of Public Health announced Thursday that it has launched a Spanish- and English-language chatbot to help spread reliable information about COVID-19 and the safety of its vaccines.
Why it matters: The launch makes California the first state to try out a tool of this kind, the press release noted.
Digital Distribution platform GOG, headquartered in Poland, is now providing its employees with menstrual leave, a policy unheard of in the game industry, and even many countries.
Why it matters: It’s considered a controversial policy, one that some say respects the physical toll of menstruation but risks making employees who take advantage of the time off seem less capable.
There are two "leading" forks of the two biggest blockchains, Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum Classic — neither of them are doing great, compared to their parent chain.
Why it matters: Because blockchains run on open-source software, they can always be forked — the term for when someone makes a change that's not approved by the developers in charge of a codebase. This provides a check on the developers who maintain that codebase, making sure they don't veer wildly away from what their users want.
Traditional money is speeding up. The Federal Reserve has promised a new service to banks and credit unions around the country called FedNow, a 24/7 payment settlement service.
Why it matters: More and more services function round the clock, but payments are still on something of a 9-to-5 schedule. For payments in the U.S., FedNow will really settle payments immediately, all day, every day.
Monday was an important deadline in Washington for the crypto industry: comments on a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission proposal to expand the definition of "exchange" were due. In short: it's getting a big thumbs down.
Why it matters: The crypto industry is mostly worried that the definition would become too broad and vague and could easily encompass — or at least create uncertainty for — decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and other participants that should not be regulated as such.
Boring Company, the urban tunneling transportation company founded by Elon Musk, raised $675 million in Series C funding at a $5.68 billion valuation co-led by Sequoia Capital and Vy Capital.
Why it matters: Urban transportation tunnels aren't new, for either cars or trains, but Boring has claimed its shuttles eventually will travel at a breakneck 150 miles per hour. In Las Vegas, which recently approved a 29-mile tunnel network, that could mean more than 55,000 passengers per hour and a significant reduction to Strip traffic.
Elon Musk on Thursday disclosed in a federal securities filing that he doesn't yet have any equity partners on his takeover bid for Twitter, but said that he has secured billions of dollars worth of loan commitments from Morgan Stanley.
Why it matters: Musk is saying he can afford to buy Twitter, either via last week's $43 billion offer, to which Twitter's board hasn't yet responded, or via a hostile tender offer that would be taken straight to company shareholders.
Activision Blizzard is adding two women senior executives to its board, sources familiar told Axios. The company is expected to announce soon that Lulu Cheng Meservey is joining immediately and that it will nominate Kerry Carr for election at its annual meeting in June.
The states, not Washington, are where tech regulation happens for now, thanks to a deadlocked Congress.
What's happening: Statehouses are drawing money and attention from tech firms and advocates hoping to influence laws on everything from privacy to digital taxes to driverless cars — and now online speech.
The numbers are in: Venture capital deployment in the U.S. slumped in Q1, per the latest PitchBook data.
Why it matters: This is largely a knock-on effect of the public market pullback that kicked off late last year. Companies are rethinking near-term public listing plans, and investors are recalibrating deal sizes — particularly when it comes to late-stage funding.
