Looking from afar it really looks like Magic Leap is the largest money laundering vehicle that everybody is using. It's either that or the tech is so freaking groundbreaking that it is literally going to melt brains.
I think any kind of AR glasses that do not look like regular glasses are going to be a tough sell to the general public at least. I think we're still years away from this kind of tech though. I mean if it were possible today Apple would be all over it. Can Magic Leap pull it off before Apple if it is at all possible to do it in the next 5 to 10 years? I'm doubtful.
This just isn't possible in the foreseeable future. Maybe someone will figure out how to fit enough processing power for decent AR into the "regular glasses" form-factor within the next couple decades, but there is no discernible path to a viable battery that could work in that form-factor even if we didn't have to also make room for the GPU. Additionally, none of this takes into account heating issues. If this goal is ever reached, its so far out that it's impossible to predict which company will achieve it.
as a person who has spent a fair amount of time researching the current state of the art for battery technology, both in watt-hours per kilogram and watt-hours per cubic cm: I have to agree with you. Anything with sufficient processing power to drive a high resolution, 60 fps AR display is going to need a good amount of battery. And that amount of battery is not going to fit into a google glass or hololens sized thing without needing to be recharged every half hour of usage.
That's why long term Magic Leap's hip-worn battery/processor and Apple's likely to be iPhone connected to glasses solution will trump the all-in-one Hololens style design.
Very good point. But even iPhones can't do HD 60fps video + bluetooth for too long. I guess if it's just used to send AR text and tiny UI that could last longer.
Speculation but it would be interesting if the rumored over ear headphones contained additional power that could be routed to the glasses/phone. It’s another place with space that could contribute.
The typical life-cycle in tech is to make something awesome, even if it's big at first, and then shrink it down. If it's really awesome, no one will care that it's big. Waiting until something is small before unleashing it seems to me like they don't actually have anything at all.
Given my age, I would bet that it is great technology, but also that they are spending money ridiculously. Most likely outcome is probably something like what happened to the Iridium satellite network from 1996-2002:
a) massive profligate spending
b) great tech, but not much money from customers
c) bankruptcy and acquisition by a new corporation formed to acquire the assets of the defunct company, new acquisition-corp renames itself to magic leap.
d) new company which has acquired everything for pennies on the dollar proceeds to become successful and profitable.
I wonder if given the bulky size of the thing, the tech might be great, but it's just too early. For those people who are old enough to have been working in the tech industry in the dotcom 1.0 boom days, the business model proposed by the epic failure of Webvan was later validated by Amazon/Prime Now.
It's possible. The Apple Newton is a great case study of a good idea that was too early. And the inability to minitiarize it sufficiently to fit in a pocket was one reason for it's failure. A few years later the Palm Pilot was much more successful because it could fit in your pocket, especially the baggy jeans that were fashionable in the late 90's.
Webvan's model hasn't yet been validated. The local delivery startups and offerings are still losing lots of money. If anyone can make it work it will be Amazing, but it has yet to be validated as a profitable business.
"A good idea too early" makes it sound like they were ahead-of-their-time geniuses. Reality is that everyone had that idea and knew the technology wasn't ready.
> "The company raised an additional $375 million in an initial public offering in November 1999 that valued the company at more than $4.8 billion.[14] Up to that time, the company had reported cumulative revenue of $395,000 and cumulative net losses of more than $50 million.[15]"
I think you'll be surprised if that's really what you expect. Developers don't pay money to see something like that. They're there to learn and the three presentations are aimed at using the platform. Expect an SDK release as well.
Er, I didn't say that. But the three presentations are to teach devs how to use their platform. I'm sure you were just being snarky with the assumption that it will just be another celebrity appearance, but I'm pointing out that there is about to be a windfall of info about their device, it's capabilities and real world demos.
It always depends on how great the product is. If you had a credible approach to improving power plant efficiency by 5% you could raise ten times as much investment before shipping a product as long as you were privately hitting your development milestones.
> How can you raise that much money without shipping a product?
Some businesses and technologies are extremely capital intensive and funding can/should/is provided on achieving benchmarks instead of a cohesive product. This is different than shipping an MVP and improving it which in some industries is not possible. YC for example funds hardsci fusion reactor companies and SA talks about how they iterate really fast during the YC period to produce some tangible benchmark which is obviously much less than a full-fledged product but much more than some nebulous "concept".
So yes, it makes sense that certain industries receive larger than average investment relative to other industries at similar product stages. While I myself am extremely skeptical of Magic Leap, their technology and the likelihood investors aren't participating in some sunk-cost fallacy investment thesis there is a non-cyncial view: MagicLeap has been showing significant achievement along both technological and production benchmarks privately to investors and they are confident that the technology & manufacturing improvements warrant continued investment.
I think the amount of capital raised pre-validation is insane as it isn't simply larger than average it is orders of magnitude larger...
How? You convince people it's worth the investment.
Why? You're building something that requires massive upfront capitilization.
People here act like this kind of money is unprecedented. How much many goes into building infrastructure? How much money do investors put into building a new building? Large construction projects routinely raise 10s or even 100s of millions of dollars.
Sure, if you're funding a building you're "buying" a "product" that is much better understood and has a higher chance of success (but can also fail!). But it also has a much lower chance of getting you very high returns. All that startups like Magic Leap do is take both of these numbers to the extreme: very small chance of success, but at being a 100-billion-dollar company. Some investors like this tradeoff, and they tend to be pretty savvy and educated. This also tends to be a small part of their portfolio. I think we shouldn't assume we know better than them, just because we read some stuff on the internet.
I’ve heard some second hand anecdotes about Magic. Apparently they have one big technology advance, which is that they’ve solved the eye tracking and vertigo challenges of AR. These are hard and not to be underestimated. However the company is supposedly a mess internally - with huge management and political issues. This isn’t surprising - I’ve been in a number of early stage startups and by default they are a mess. Add on top of that billions of dollars of funding and no customers or sales to anchor the company to reality, and its easy to see how AR can become “Alternative Reality”! Further evidence - their recently released headset photos were renderings, not actual products. I genuinely hope that I’m wrong - I’d love for the amazing demo videos they’ve released to congeal into real mass market products.
Not any good data, but I've had recruiters tell me that they don't pay very well (in SV terms), instead opting to sell employees on large options packages that will be "worth millions one day". It's a typical SV story, but one I wouldn't expect from a company that's valued at billions of dollars. That kind of behavior seems shady to me, so I wouldn't even consider working there.
not to excuse significantly lower pay from magic leap, but their compensation might be calculated based on their office location in Plantation, Florida which I presume has significantly lower real estate (rental or purchase) costs than the bay area.
actual take home after rent or mortgage each month might be greater than something in mountain view.
spending 20 seconds looking at zillow for that city I see what looks like some fairly decent 3BD/2BA detached homes for $300,000. which would be a pipe dream in seattle, vancouver or bay area.
but depending on your political views, you also have to tolerate living in florida, which can be a distasteful experience to people whose cultural, religious and political values more closely align with the residents of portland, OR.
For someone who lives outside the US, but has visited Florida (Miami and Orlando), what do yo mean by tolerate? I understand that they may be more... conservative?. As a tourist, Miami seemed multicultural and fairly liberal, are state politics different?
Speaking as a former Floridian who lived both in south Florida and the panhandle: South Florida is a tiny blue outlier in an otherwise deep red southern state. State laws and politics are dominated by Tallahassee which is physically and culturally closer to Alabama. It would be a shock to someone moving from the Bay Area or Seattle.
That said, zero income taxes, low sales taxes, warm weather year round, and great beaches are all very compelling.
in brief, and this is a highly anecdotal biased view, florida (in aggregate, not the more liberal cities) is a deep red state that generally agrees with Trump.
as a random white person, caucasian floridians I have met are racist as hell. You would not believe the things that come out of their mouths when there are no ethnic/religious minorities within earshot and they believe you to be a person that might agree with their worldview.
it's a state that believes in cutting taxes to the level that they have the absolute bare minimum of social services, government services and other things that people in a western european nation (or canada, au, nz) take for granted.
florida is a state that regularly elects, at the state and county level, christian-religious politicians who will attempt to do things like make abortion illegal, introduce religious into public schools, and other policies generally supported by the evangelical religious right wing.
> as a random white person, caucasian floridians I have met are racist as hell. You would not believe the things that come out of their mouths when there are no ethnic/religious minorities within earshot and they believe you to be a person that might agree with their worldview.
Where did you come to in Florida? I haven't met people like what you are describing. Or perhaps you brought up the subject with them? When you say "as a random caucasian" that gives me the impression that there is a little racism in the air.
In a work environment, I in no way brought up the subject of anything controversial race/religious/ethnic related.
At the time I worked for a market sector that does a lot of telecom-related work overseas and in developing nation environments. Probably with a higher than usual percentage of ex military people.
What i meant by "As a random white person", by virtue of me being pale skinned and from a northern country, other people took it as tacit acceptance that they could raise their bigoted views towards me... Basically the sort of folks who go on endlessly about how Sharia Law is coming to the united states, and barack obama is a secret muslim kenyan communist manchurian candidate.
What I have found in the US is that racism is alive and well everywhere. In the US southeast it's more overt.
Well, you are not getting the picture of an entire state by that experience alone.
I live in South Florida and the mix of culture here perhaps helps to alleviate racism. But yes, I agree with you that racism is alive an well in the US. That was very noticeable when I moved here from Brazil.
Don’t listen to him, he’s never lived in Florida. It’s fine.
Half the people in Florida are liberals, it is in fact a swing state that can go either red or blue in any election. If you blanche at the thought of living anywhere that isn’t a liberal stronghold or you shiver at the idea of interacting with a conservative you won’t like it; if you’re a normal person you’ll be just fine.
their listed hq is in plantation but their offices are scattered around south florida (ft lauderdale and miami). i actually grew up right down the street from their plantation office and housing is very cheap but i guarantee most of their engineers live here in this neighborhood
I am probably showing my anti-florida bias here. But if you google "jacaranda lakes gated community", real estate in Florida and other parts of the US southeast creep me out. In a civil society that is functioning properly it should not be necessary for people in the top 15% income earning bracket to isolate themselves off in burbclave-like gated communities (proto-snow-crash style). I have seen this also in Charleston, SC where as a random caucasian, real estate agents warned me away from even thinking about trying to live in certain parts of the city.
Seattle might have some expensive and exclusive areas but it is not like anyone has erected walls and gates around upper queen anne, magnolia, or alaska junction in west seattle.
A Hologram for the King (2016): "A failed American sales rep looks to recoup his losses by traveling to Saudi Arabia and selling his company's product to a wealthy monarch."
+1. The inability to invest against startups and other privately held companies seems like a big economic inefficiency. It would be a counter force to these sorts of nose bleed valuations.
Shorting a company will bet specifically against that company, in a way that both:
1. Gives you monetary gain if that specific company/stock decreases in value.
2. Puts pressure on the stock to be lower value.
Thus it acts as a correcting mechanism to the market, since just by the fact that a lot of people who have an incentive to make a correct bet on a stock declining, upon placing that bet, help correct the price downwards.
Funding a competitor doesn't act anything like that, and specifically probably doesn't give you a great monetary reward, since most startups fail (thus most competitors will fail).
But but but they're our allies! There's definitely some selective enforcement of our ideals. As long as it doesn't get in the way of military or business it's fine. This is the country that financed 9/11. It's not "racist" to be skeptical of Saudi Arabia.
We should elect better leaders and avoid getting in bed with such regimes.
“Be the change you want to see in the world”
“Practice what you preach”
From a previous article
“Most people do not share the belief that a process must be morally pure before its results can be celebrated; they can be jubilant about the Falcon Heavy and question Tesla’s treatment of its workers at the same time, without the one invalidating the other. “
There is no such thing as clean money. Everything we've built in the west was done on stolen land, on the backs of slaves and migrants. So whether it's $450mil that came off the backs of Yemenis or $450mil that came off the backs of natives and mexicans - it's all the same.
saying "we did terrible things in the past" does not excuse us from the responsibility to, present tense, refuse to become complicit in ongoing atrocities.
I won a magi leap at a hackathon a long time ago, and while it was a cute device and fairly well working, it was pretty much useless so I ended up selling it. I wonder what will be different this time, especially given the internal turmoil of the company, and the ludicrous amount of funding they received.
edit: Thanks, I was indeed thinking about Leap Motion. Which makes it even weirder, did these people truly never put anything on the market yet?
edit2: people love giving out downvotes. please, the more the merrier
Regardless of whether Magic Leap is a Theranos level scam (and I personally think it is), this is additional evidence that there are massive amounts of investment money available out there.
I used to work with people who now work there. I can say for sure that they are both good at what they do and good people. If it is a scam, the employees I know there don't appear to think so.
Also, Theranos was lying to the general public about very important health issues that affect your daily life. So far, Magic Leap hasn't released a single product. Even if they do, at worst it will be a computer that isn't as good at playing games as they claimed it would be. Not really even in the same league as Theranos.
I also know people who work there. Very talented engineers. I find it highly unlikely that they have been duped. And even if they are, they're sure as shit still making money out of the deal.
I /was/ one of the leads working there, and I can tell you, I made more money elsewhere and actually took a pay cut going to ML. All in all, it wasn't pleasant, and the promises weren't enough.
It's unlikely to be a total scam like Theranos, given that third parties have tried it and didn't go "omg this is shit". But it definitely seems to be a Faraday Future level of over-promising, growing way to fast and burning through all your money with nothing to show.
Theranos' tech plain didn't work. If you're looking for a historical analogy that fits better, I'd suggest Segway.
There's a number of parallels with Magic Leap. Both have engineering founders. Both founders made their first big money in medical tech (Kamen with stents and Abovitz with Mako Surgical).
Where things got away from Segway was on the PR + Hype front and that seems where Magic Leap is at as well. Magic Leap is going to ship something this year, it will likely be "ok" but not brilliant and then after a few iterations and a half dozen years it may well be a device on a similar trajectory to how we use mobile phones.
That's why all the money is going to these companies, the thought is that the patents and expertise is going to lay the foundation for what replaces mobile phones and what's a $500 million dollar bet against a 5 Trillion a year industry.
>…going to lay the foundation for what replaces mobile phones
I having a hard time seeing how this technology (and AR glasses/devices in general, at least what we hear of it) is going to be more of utility in the future than the billions of people with cheap smartphones are today.
I think brain(neural) computer interfaces (transmitters/sensors) have a better chance of leaping over the smartphone than anything coming from this, and currently have utility to some of the most physically marginalized people on the planet, which is a lot more than magic can say for its product.
I have to agree with you. Getting people to wear any sort of AR glasses, no matter how small and light they are, is going to be a lot higher barrier than convincing people to keep 6" screen sized high-end phablet/phones in their pockets and purses. Advancements in flash memory density, low power CPU and I/O are continuing to come rapidly for mobile phones. The near future will have phones with 8 or 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, 802.11ac wave2/802.11ax wifi, LTE radios that can sustain 500 Mbps with MU-MIMO, and so on.
The difference between those two is 10 years to mass market and 20 years to mass market. Considering that smart phones really came to mass market 10 years ago, that's still a window to make a lot of money.
I dislike replies like these because they don't really add anything to the conversation - of course investors liked the demos! They wouldn't have invested otherwise. But this would hardly be the first instance of investors being distracted by flashy demos that cover up deep set problems.
Ultimately, we'll all just have to wait and find out.
There is no doubt the technology is incredible and awe inspiring. However, zero shipped products, taking in tons of outside money, leaks galore and internal turmoil including one employee stealing 1M from the company through recruitment fees, this place has all the right tech but is making all the wrong moves, its valuation is pure speculation at this point. There will come a point where their investors demand a product shipped, that point will come soon and I hope they have this battery issue fixed by then.
I think this is just incredible. Let's suppose they have an incredible technology and that works (which it is not true at this time because they don't have any product out yet). How do they justify the product adoption which such high valuation? (with patents of products they also don't have any idea if the people will want them?).
Even it is the best technology ever, if not enough people buy it the company will go down very quickly.
They could pivot into being an OEM. Marketing doesn't seem to be their strength, it only got a bit better recently after they outsourced their branding to a bigger agency.
I suspect that they spend a lot for content, because growing organically is almost impossible if you target entertainment with an rumored $2k price point. Nobody would buy that if the're only a few apps, even if they're unlinke anything else.
Then, as the next step they'd need to provide a good developer experience. Needing a PC for a device that aspires to disrupt the industry and replace other devices, won't cut it. It would need to run on the device.
I hope the content is really good and worth the experience, otherwise this is useless. But I am still afraid that if they have to create their own content it might not make sense as a business, why people wouldn't be interested in created content for the next audiovisual platform?
Has there ever been a company that sucked up huge amounts of investment, made vague and questionable claims over many years and then came out with tech that backed their claims? From my casual observation this type of company immediately fizzles out as soon as they take something to the market and people see the real product.
In telecom, Iridium spent close to a billion dollars but did actually succeed in building a truly worldwide (pole to pole) handheld satellite phone network which also supported SMS and low-data-rate M2M.
Then went bankrupt and was acquired. The tech was revolutionary at the time, 18 years ago (handheld phone size vs. 10 kilogram fat briefcase sized inmarsat terminal that didn't work above 60 degrees latitude), the revenue just wasn't there.
I didn't follow Iridium closely but as far as I know it didn't have this secrecy around them. The tech was well understood. Unlike Magic Leap where there are still rumors about what they are actually doing.
That is true. What stood out to me about Magic Leap is that the huge/weird looking AR glasses look a lot to me like the AR version of an Iridium 9505 (first generation handheld) phone. Something that is so bulky and weird that you'll only use one if you absolutely need to. That and the combination of ridiculous amount of VC money.
If you compare a 9505 to a current generation 9575:
When will we have a _real_ product? And what is the company's strategy? I mean they are trying to bring something new to the market (read something much more mainstream than Google Glass), and aside from the fact that the hardware is not ready, I doubt they have reached an affordable enough price level for general public adoption nor developed killer apps yet.
My only thinking here is that they expect to be acquired by Google/Amazon/Netflix/Apple et al for the team and promising tech, as they know they'll never make the revenue to justify the billions they ate in funding.
I really can't understand the hatred directed towards Magic Leap. All we know at this point in time is a) those who have experienced the technology are impressed (but obviously bound to NDA) and b) ML has raised near-unprecedented amounts of money for a company with no product on sale (2.3MM by CB[1]). To think Google and Alibaba, not to mention other big funders, are so wrong in their large contributions is serious - such a mistake is historic. I'm not suggesting they will deliver, only that all we can say is we don't know.
They sell dreams. Unfortunately they got social proof - "quickly, other already gave us a lot of money, you should too!".
There is already existing HoloLens tech which you can already buy.
This assumes a very high level of naivety by the people funding the company, who at least theoretically, should be, or have access to, technical experts that can study the technology for themselves.
We're not talking about people raising money from the general public or using heavy-handed sales tactics. We're talking about billionaires funding this thing - I'm not going to cry if they lose money on a bad investment (unless there is outright fraud involved).
It's was not very high level of naivety to invest in ML back then, they did impressive marketing job and innovation most often happens in smaller companies - it is far more easy to acquire company shares than try to build a team - hard to hire experts, build labs and finally this requires time.
Note that ARKit/ARCore are steps required for this kind of tech - so at least Google and Apple are building expertise on AR/MR software technology, but the hardware part is still left for others to figure out.
Today except Microsoft there is Intel using Sony's waveguide simple display and other headsets that are not giving magic experience by using more primitive tech.
Anyway for me it is sad they still invest in ML only for this reason that supporting more players would greatly improve chances that some company would figure out better solutions and ML is stuck in local minima to keep most of their story and promises.
124 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadhttp://money.cnn.com/2017/05/21/technology/saudi-softbank-te...
Given my age, the cynic is winning.
That might be a rumor but it’d make sense for how much money they’re pulling in.
This just isn't possible in the foreseeable future. Maybe someone will figure out how to fit enough processing power for decent AR into the "regular glasses" form-factor within the next couple decades, but there is no discernible path to a viable battery that could work in that form-factor even if we didn't have to also make room for the GPU. Additionally, none of this takes into account heating issues. If this goal is ever reached, its so far out that it's impossible to predict which company will achieve it.
a) massive profligate spending
b) great tech, but not much money from customers
c) bankruptcy and acquisition by a new corporation formed to acquire the assets of the defunct company, new acquisition-corp renames itself to magic leap.
d) new company which has acquired everything for pennies on the dollar proceeds to become successful and profitable.
How can you raise that much money without shipping a product? Or better question, why do you need raise that much money in the first place?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan
Look at all that money down the drain.
Webvan's model hasn't yet been validated. The local delivery startups and offerings are still losing lots of money. If anyone can make it work it will be Amazing, but it has yet to be validated as a profitable business.
Ideas are the easy part.
That's astonishing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beenz.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flooz.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Crossing
to be fair to global crossing, they did build a really awesome international network, the revenues just didn't support the billions spent on it.
Some businesses and technologies are extremely capital intensive and funding can/should/is provided on achieving benchmarks instead of a cohesive product. This is different than shipping an MVP and improving it which in some industries is not possible. YC for example funds hardsci fusion reactor companies and SA talks about how they iterate really fast during the YC period to produce some tangible benchmark which is obviously much less than a full-fledged product but much more than some nebulous "concept".
So yes, it makes sense that certain industries receive larger than average investment relative to other industries at similar product stages. While I myself am extremely skeptical of Magic Leap, their technology and the likelihood investors aren't participating in some sunk-cost fallacy investment thesis there is a non-cyncial view: MagicLeap has been showing significant achievement along both technological and production benchmarks privately to investors and they are confident that the technology & manufacturing improvements warrant continued investment.
I think the amount of capital raised pre-validation is insane as it isn't simply larger than average it is orders of magnitude larger...
Why? You're building something that requires massive upfront capitilization.
People here act like this kind of money is unprecedented. How much many goes into building infrastructure? How much money do investors put into building a new building? Large construction projects routinely raise 10s or even 100s of millions of dollars.
Sure, if you're funding a building you're "buying" a "product" that is much better understood and has a higher chance of success (but can also fail!). But it also has a much lower chance of getting you very high returns. All that startups like Magic Leap do is take both of these numbers to the extreme: very small chance of success, but at being a 100-billion-dollar company. Some investors like this tradeoff, and they tend to be pretty savvy and educated. This also tends to be a small part of their portfolio. I think we shouldn't assume we know better than them, just because we read some stuff on the internet.
I’ve heard some second hand anecdotes about Magic. Apparently they have one big technology advance, which is that they’ve solved the eye tracking and vertigo challenges of AR. These are hard and not to be underestimated. However the company is supposedly a mess internally - with huge management and political issues. This isn’t surprising - I’ve been in a number of early stage startups and by default they are a mess. Add on top of that billions of dollars of funding and no customers or sales to anchor the company to reality, and its easy to see how AR can become “Alternative Reality”! Further evidence - their recently released headset photos were renderings, not actual products. I genuinely hope that I’m wrong - I’d love for the amazing demo videos they’ve released to congeal into real mass market products.
Does anyone else have good data on Magic?
actual take home after rent or mortgage each month might be greater than something in mountain view.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantation,_Florida
spending 20 seconds looking at zillow for that city I see what looks like some fairly decent 3BD/2BA detached homes for $300,000. which would be a pipe dream in seattle, vancouver or bay area.
That said, zero income taxes, low sales taxes, warm weather year round, and great beaches are all very compelling.
https://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president...
as a random white person, caucasian floridians I have met are racist as hell. You would not believe the things that come out of their mouths when there are no ethnic/religious minorities within earshot and they believe you to be a person that might agree with their worldview.
it's a state that believes in cutting taxes to the level that they have the absolute bare minimum of social services, government services and other things that people in a western european nation (or canada, au, nz) take for granted.
florida is a state that regularly elects, at the state and county level, christian-religious politicians who will attempt to do things like make abortion illegal, introduce religious into public schools, and other policies generally supported by the evangelical religious right wing.
Where did you come to in Florida? I haven't met people like what you are describing. Or perhaps you brought up the subject with them? When you say "as a random caucasian" that gives me the impression that there is a little racism in the air.
In a work environment, I in no way brought up the subject of anything controversial race/religious/ethnic related.
At the time I worked for a market sector that does a lot of telecom-related work overseas and in developing nation environments. Probably with a higher than usual percentage of ex military people.
What i meant by "As a random white person", by virtue of me being pale skinned and from a northern country, other people took it as tacit acceptance that they could raise their bigoted views towards me... Basically the sort of folks who go on endlessly about how Sharia Law is coming to the united states, and barack obama is a secret muslim kenyan communist manchurian candidate.
What I have found in the US is that racism is alive and well everywhere. In the US southeast it's more overt.
I live in South Florida and the mix of culture here perhaps helps to alleviate racism. But yes, I agree with you that racism is alive an well in the US. That was very noticeable when I moved here from Brazil.
Half the people in Florida are liberals, it is in fact a swing state that can go either red or blue in any election. If you blanche at the thought of living anywhere that isn’t a liberal stronghold or you shiver at the idea of interacting with a conservative you won’t like it; if you’re a normal person you’ll be just fine.
https://www.zillow.com/plantation-fl/in-Jacaranda-Lakes_att/
Seattle might have some expensive and exclusive areas but it is not like anyone has erected walls and gates around upper queen anne, magnolia, or alaska junction in west seattle.
http://www.hawkslandingrealty.net/
If we ever want to get to the cyberpunk dystopian future, somebody has to lead the way.
They're also notorious for refusing to allow employees to sell their shares, even if nothing in the original agreement prohibits a compliant transfer.
This typically happens when there is high pressure to deliver, but you have zero revenues. So, it wouldn't surprise me.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2980210/
Shorting a company will bet specifically against that company, in a way that both:
1. Gives you monetary gain if that specific company/stock decreases in value.
2. Puts pressure on the stock to be lower value.
Thus it acts as a correcting mechanism to the market, since just by the fact that a lot of people who have an incentive to make a correct bet on a stock declining, upon placing that bet, help correct the price downwards.
Funding a competitor doesn't act anything like that, and specifically probably doesn't give you a great monetary reward, since most startups fail (thus most competitors will fail).
How do you accept funding from oppressive, dictatorial, mysoginist regimes and then claim to “make the world a better place”?
Sigh. The political implications are so ironically cringe-worthy
You've got the causal relationship backwards.
What nation has the highest level of incarceration in the world?
In Saudi Arabia their regime is hereditary but in the USA we elect our leaders.
Who should we be angry at?
“Be the change you want to see in the world”
“Practice what you preach”
From a previous article
“Most people do not share the belief that a process must be morally pure before its results can be celebrated; they can be jubilant about the Falcon Heavy and question Tesla’s treatment of its workers at the same time, without the one invalidating the other. “
I don't think they want to change the world, just multiply money.
edit: Thanks, I was indeed thinking about Leap Motion. Which makes it even weirder, did these people truly never put anything on the market yet?
edit2: people love giving out downvotes. please, the more the merrier
Also, Theranos was lying to the general public about very important health issues that affect your daily life. So far, Magic Leap hasn't released a single product. Even if they do, at worst it will be a computer that isn't as good at playing games as they claimed it would be. Not really even in the same league as Theranos.
How many people knew that Enron is a scam? I bet 99% of people there were hard working intelligent people who had no idea. Same for Theranos.
There's a number of parallels with Magic Leap. Both have engineering founders. Both founders made their first big money in medical tech (Kamen with stents and Abovitz with Mako Surgical).
Where things got away from Segway was on the PR + Hype front and that seems where Magic Leap is at as well. Magic Leap is going to ship something this year, it will likely be "ok" but not brilliant and then after a few iterations and a half dozen years it may well be a device on a similar trajectory to how we use mobile phones.
That's why all the money is going to these companies, the thought is that the patents and expertise is going to lay the foundation for what replaces mobile phones and what's a $500 million dollar bet against a 5 Trillion a year industry.
I having a hard time seeing how this technology (and AR glasses/devices in general, at least what we hear of it) is going to be more of utility in the future than the billions of people with cheap smartphones are today.
I think brain(neural) computer interfaces (transmitters/sensors) have a better chance of leaping over the smartphone than anything coming from this, and currently have utility to some of the most physically marginalized people on the planet, which is a lot more than magic can say for its product.
> Frontier hardware tech is expensive. And, the investors have actually seen the tech. As will you, pretty soon ;)
source: https://twitter.com/BenedictEvans/status/971404194300141568
Ultimately, we'll all just have to wait and find out.
Even it is the best technology ever, if not enough people buy it the company will go down very quickly.
I suspect that they spend a lot for content, because growing organically is almost impossible if you target entertainment with an rumored $2k price point. Nobody would buy that if the're only a few apps, even if they're unlinke anything else.
Then, as the next step they'd need to provide a good developer experience. Needing a PC for a device that aspires to disrupt the industry and replace other devices, won't cut it. It would need to run on the device.
I hope the content is really good and worth the experience, otherwise this is useless. But I am still afraid that if they have to create their own content it might not make sense as a business, why people wouldn't be interested in created content for the next audiovisual platform?
I don't think the PC is the problem here.
Then went bankrupt and was acquired. The tech was revolutionary at the time, 18 years ago (handheld phone size vs. 10 kilogram fat briefcase sized inmarsat terminal that didn't work above 60 degrees latitude), the revenue just wasn't there.
If you compare a 9505 to a current generation 9575:
https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&hs=DVL&channel=f...
if you hold and use one, a 9505 is huge and has short battery life.
current gen: https://www.google.com/search?q=iridium+9575&num=100&client=...
https://web.archive.org/web/20150402084910/http://www.magicl...
It promises a product far more futuristic and advanced than they are delivering this year: https://www.magicleap.com/
My only thinking here is that they expect to be acquired by Google/Amazon/Netflix/Apple et al for the team and promising tech, as they know they'll never make the revenue to justify the billions they ate in funding.
[1]https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/magic-leap
They sell dreams. Unfortunately they got social proof - "quickly, other already gave us a lot of money, you should too!". There is already existing HoloLens tech which you can already buy.
We're not talking about people raising money from the general public or using heavy-handed sales tactics. We're talking about billionaires funding this thing - I'm not going to cry if they lose money on a bad investment (unless there is outright fraud involved).
Anyway for me it is sad they still invest in ML only for this reason that supporting more players would greatly improve chances that some company would figure out better solutions and ML is stuck in local minima to keep most of their story and promises.