Stranger Things 4 got its first teaser today, courtesy of the official Stranger Things Twitter account. The Netflix series, which is in its fourth season (although the creators, brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, maintain that each instalment isn’t really a ‘season’ in the traditional TV sense, but rather more like a movie broken up across multiple episodes), is being renewed alongside an overall film and TV deal with a 9-figure value for the Duffers at Netflix.
Stranger Things manages a unique blend of sci-fi, horror, 1980s-era nostalgia and coming-of-age teen buddy comedy. It’s among the most successful of Netflix’s original content creations, by most accounts, and also one of the most critically-acclaimed. Details about this fourth series are scarce for now, but based on the teaser we can expect the action to move out of Hawkins, the sleepy town which has provided the backdrop for all of the action thus far (minus a very strange outing for main character Elle back in season two).
Judging strictly from this preview, we can also probably safely assume that a lot of the action will take place in the ‘Upside Down,’ the fictional dark mirror dimension where the series villain monsters are from. It’ll be interesting to see if Stranger Things 4 can spend a whole season in this realm, which seems to mostly be filled with moss, slime, dust and spores of some kind.
Hyundai Motor Group has launched a new air mobility division aimed at developing technology for the commercialization of flying cars, the latest company to dive into the emerging industry.
The division will be led by Dr. Jaiwon Shin, an aeronautics engineer who most recently led the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate at NASA. While at NASA, Shin oversaw a $725 million program into aeronautics research initiatives, such as supersonic X-plane, electrification of aircraft, UAS traffic management, and urban air mobility.
The South Korean automaker said the business unit led by Shin will “develop core technologies and innovative solutions for safe and efficient airborne travel.” Shin’s expertise centers on airframe, engine, aviation safety, and air traffic management — technologies that Hyundai says will allow it to take a lead in the urban air mobility sector.
That urban air sector is expected to grow into a market worth $1.5 trillion within the next 20 years,” according to Shin.
Of course, there are many others pursuing various kinds of air taxis, including Uber, Kitty Hawk Corp., Terrafugia and Volocopter, to name just a few.
All of these companies, including Hyundai see the flying cars as a way to solve the traffic problems on the ground. Flying cars could merely move that congestion to the skies, which is why technologies around airspace traffic management — which Shin has experience in — is just as important as developing the aircraft.
Instagram deployed a new tool today that should help it continue to build a more viable alternative to YouTube for individual creators looking to try a different platform. It’s a dedicated account called @creators, which will deliver tips and tricks for people hoping to become more active on the platform.
Based on the pinned FAQ story that Instagram has posted to the account, and a brief explainer with some testimonials from actual creators using the platform. Some of the questions that Instagram answers include how to get Verified, which must be asked so incredibly frequently by this particular set of folks.
The grid posts of @creators include some helpful tips like pointing out that 60% of people listen to stories on the platform with the sound on. Clearly, the account is geared towards pushing video creation tips and tools, which makes sense given that’s an area of growth for the company, and a way for it to win over disaffected YouTubers and younger creators who are looking for their new home on the web.
This could be a huge potential opportunity for Instagram, in fact, and this account, while a small part of an overall approach to wooing creators, is a good one.
Since launching in the United States five years ago, SmartNews, the news aggregation app that recently hit unicorn status, has quietly built a reputation for presenting reliable information from a wide range of publishers. The company straddles two very different markets: the U.S. and its home country of Japan, where it is one of the leading news apps.
SmartNews wants readers to see it as a way to break out of their filter bubbles, says Jeannie Yang, its senior vice president of product, especially as the American presidential election heats up. For example, it recently launched a feature, called “News From All Sides,” that lets people see how media outlets from across the political spectrum are covering a specific topic.
The app is driven by machine-learning algorithms, but it also has an editorial team led by Rich Jaroslovsky, the first managing editor of WSJ.com and founder of the Online News Association. One of SmartNews’ goal is to surface news that its users might not seek out on their own, but it must balance that with audience retention in a market that is crowded with many ways to consume content online, including competing news aggregation apps, Facebook and Google Search.
In a wide-ranging interview with Extra Crunch, Yang talked about SmartNews’ place in the media ecosystem, creating recommendation algorithms that don’t reinforce biases, the difference between its Japanese and American users and the challenges of presenting political news in a highly polarized environment.
Catherine Shu: One of the reasons why SmartNews is interesting is because there are a lot of news aggregation apps in America, but there hasn’t been one huge breakout app like SmartNews is in Japan or Toutiao in China. But at the same time, there are obviously a lot of issues in the publishing and news industry in the United States that a good dominant news app might be able to help, ranging from monetization to fake news.
Jeannie Yang: I think that’s definitely a challenge for everybody in the U.S. With SmartNews, we really want to see how we can help create a healthier media ecosystem and actually have publishers thrive as well. SmartNews has such respect for the publishers and the industry and we want to be good partners, but also really understand the challenges of the business model, as well as the challenges for users and thinking of how we can create a healthier ecosystem.
Microsoft today announced that Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD), its Azure-based system for virtualizing the Windows and Office user experience it announced last September, is now generally available. Using WVD, enterprises can give their employees access to virtualized applications and remote desktops, including the ability to provide multi-session Windows 10 experiences, something that sets Microsoft’s own apart from that of other vendors who offer virtualized Windows desktops and applications.
In addition to making the service generally available, Microsoft is also rolling it out globally, whereas the preview was U.S.-only and the original plan was to slowly roll it out globally. As Scott Manchester, the principal engineering lead for WVD, also told me that over 20,000 companies signed up for the preview. He also noted that Microsoft Teams is getting enhanced support in WVD with a significantly improved video conferencing experience.
Shortly after announcing the preview of WVD, Microsoft acquired a company called FSLogix, which specialized in provisioning the same kind of virtualized Windows environments that Microsoft offers through WVD. As Microsoft’s corporate VP for Microsoft 365 told me ahead of today’s announcement, the company took a lot of the know-how from FSLogix to ensure that the user experience on WVD is as smooth as possible.
Andreson noted that just as enterprises are getting more comfortable with moving some of their infrastructure to the cloud (and have others worry about managing it), there is now also growing demand from organizations that want this same experience for their desktop experiences. “They look at the cloud as a way of saying, ‘listen, let the experts manage the infrastructure. They can optimize it; they can fine-tune it; they can make sure that it’s all done right.’ And then I’ll just have a first-party service — in this case Microsoft — that I can leverage to simplify my life and enable me to spin up and down capacity on demand,” Anderson said. He also noted, though, that making sure that these services are always available is maybe even more critical than for other workloads that have moved to the cloud. If your desktop stops working, you can’t get much done, after all.
Anderson also stressed that if a customer wants a multi-session Windows 10 environment in the cloud, WVD is the only way to go because that is the only way to get a license to do so. “We’ve built the operating system, we built the public cloud, so that combination is going to be unique and this gives us the ability to make sure that that Windows 10 experience is the absolute best on top of that public cloud,” he noted.
He also stressed that the FSLogix acquisition enabled his team to work with the Office team to optimize the user experience there. Thanks to this, when you spin up a new virtualized version of Outlook, for example, it’ll just take a second or two to load instead of almost a minute.
A number of companies are also still looking to upgrade their old Windows 7 deployments. Microsoft will stop providing free security patches for them very soon, but on WVD, these users will still be able to get access to virtualized Windows 7 desktops with free extended security updates until January 2023. Anderson does not believe that this will be a major driver for WVD adoption, but he does see “pockets of customers who are working on their transition.”
Enterprises can access Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 7 Enterprise on WVD at no additional licensing cost (though, of course, the Azure resources they consume will cost them) if they have an eligible Windows 10 Enterprise or Microsoft 365 license.
