Technology

Nio, the Chinese electric automaker aiming to compete with Tesla, reported that it delivered 3,268 of its new ES8 vehicles in the third quarter, beating its own target by 9 percent.

The company planned to deliver between 2,900 and 3,000 ES8s in the third quarter, according to Nio CFOLouis T. Hsieh.

Nio began deliveries of the ES8, a seven-seater high-performance electric SUV, inChinaon June 28.The company reported that its year-to-date ES8 deliveries, as of September 30, 2018, totaled 3,368 vehicles. The first 100 vehicles were delivered in the last days of the second quarter.

&Growing our monthly deliveries from 381 in July to 1,766 in September demonstrates our steady production ramp, strong demand from users and the initial acceptance of NIO as a premium brand,& William Li, founder, Chairman and CEO of Nio, said in a statement.

The company, which shut down its ES8 production line for 10 days for routine maintenance and to install equipment for its second production line, warned that deliveries in October will be lower.

However, the company said it remains on track to hit its delivery target of 10,000 ES8 vehicles for the second half of 2018.

The company is planning to release the ES6, a five-seater premium SUV, in June/July 2019.

Nio, whichraised $1 billionwhen it debuted on theNew York Stock Exchange in September,has operations in the U.S., U.K. and Germany, although it only sells its ES8 vehicle in China. The seven-seater ES8 SUV ispriced at 448,000 RMB, or around $65,000.

Baillie Gifford- Co., the second-biggest shareholder ofTeslastock, owns an 11.44 percent stake in Nio, according to aregulatory filing posted October 9.

Niantic is one of the few companies in the augmented reality world making some actual goddamn revenue.

As such, it didn&t feel right not to have the company that built Pokémon GO represented at our one-day Sessions AR/VR event this Thursday in LA. I&ll be sitting down with the companyAR research lead Ross Finman at the event to talk about why augmented reality is so important to Nianticfuture and why AR tech can actually make tomorrowgames and apps more engaging.

The game maker struck gold with Pokémon GO, but as it looks for lightning to strike twice with its upcoming Harry Potter title thatbeing released later this year, the company has become a lot more vocal about the potential of AR tech to make users feel like the game world and the physical world are aligned.

Finman joined Niantic after the startup he co-founded, Escher Reality, was acquired by the company earlier this year. Prior to founding Escher, Finman spent 7 years at MIT researching 3D perception and mapping. There isn&t much in the augmented reality space he hasn&t directly interacted with.

We&ll chat with Finman about the challenges of scaling to a global user base some of these more experimental technologies, and what learnings Niantic has garnered from all of the success of Pokémon GO.

Final tickets are now on sale — book yours here and you&ll save 35 percent on general admission tickets. Student tickets are $45.

The charmingly outdated media player Winamp is being reinvented as a platform-agnostic mobile audio app that brings together all your music, podcasts and streaming services to a single location. Itan ambitious relaunch, but the company behind it says itstill all about the millions-strong global Winamp community — and as proof, the original desktop app is getting an official update as well.

For those who don&t remember: Winamp was the MP3 player of choice around the turn of the century, but went through a rocky period during Aol ownership (our former parent company) and failed to counter the likes of iTunes and the onslaught of streaming services, and more or less crumbled over the years. The original app, last updated in 2013, still works, but to say itlong in the tooth would be something of an understatement (the community has worked hard to keep it updated, however). So itwith pleasure that I can confirm rumors that substantial updates are on the way.

&There will be a completely new version next year, with the legacy of Winamp but a more complete listening experience,& said Alexandre Saboundjian, CEO of Radionomy, the company that bought Winamp (or what remained of it) in 2014. &You can listen to the MP3s you may have at home, but also to the cloud, to podcasts, to streaming radio stations, to a playlist you perhaps have built.&

&People want one single experience,& he concluded. &I think Winamp is the perfect player to bring that to everybody. And we want people to have it on every device.&

Laugh if you want but I laugh back

Now, I&m a Winamp user myself. And while I&ve been saddened by the drama through which the iconic MP3 player and the team that created it have gone (at the hands of TechCrunchformer parent company, Aol), I can&t say I&ve been affected by it in any real way. Winamp 2 and 5 have taken me all the way from Windows 98 SE to 10 with nary a hiccup, and the player is docked just to the right of this browser window as I type this. (I use the nucleo_nlog skin.)

And although I bear the burden of my colleagues& derisive comments for my choice of player, I&m far from alone. Winamp has as many as a hundred million monthly users, most of whom are outside the U.S. This real, engaged user base could be a powerful foot in the door for a new platform — mobile-first, but with plenty of love for the desktop too.

&Winamp users really are everywhere. Ita huge number,& said Saboundjian. &We have a really strong and important community. But everybody ‘knows& that Winamp is dead, that we don&t work on it any more. This is not the case.&

This may not come as a shock to Winamp users still plugged into the scene: Following years of rumors, an update to the desktop player leaked last month, bringing it from version 5.666 to 5.8. It was a pleasant surprise to users who had encountered compatibility problems with Windows 10 but had taken the &more coming soon& notice on the website with a massive grain of salt.

This kind of thing happens a lot, after all: an old property or app gets bought, promises are made and after a few years it just sort of fades away. So a free update — in fact, 5.8 eliminates all paid options originally offered in the Pro version — bringing a bucketful of fixes is like Christmas coming early. Or late. At any rate itappreciated.

The official non-leaked 5.8 release should come out this week (the 18th, to be precise), and won&t be substantially different from the one we&ve been using for years or the one that leaked. Just bug and compatibility fixes that should keep this relic trucking along for a few years longer.

The update to the desktop app is basically a good faith advance payment to the community: Radionomy showing they aren&t just running away with the property and slapping the brand on some random venture. But the real news is Winamp 6, which Saboundjian says should come out in 2019.

&What I see today is you have to jump from one player to another player or aggregator if you want to listen to a radio station, to a podcast player if you want to listen to a podcast — this, to me, is not the final experience,& he explained. Itall audio, and itall searchable in one fashion or another. So why isn&t it all in one place

The planned version of Winamp for iOS and Android will be that place, Saboundjian claims. On desktop, &the war is over,& he said, and between the likes of iTunes and web apps, therenot much room to squeeze in. But mobile audio is fractured and inconvenient.

While Saboundjian declined to get into the specifics of which services would be part of the new Winamp or how the app would plug into, say, your Spotify playlists, your Google Music library, your Podcasts app, Audible and so on, he seemed confident that it would meet the needs he outlined. There are many conversations underway, he said, but licensing and agreements aren&t the main difficulty, and of course release is still quite a ways out. The team has focused on creating a consistent app across every platform you might want encounter mobile audio. A highly improved search will also play a role — as it ought to, when your media is all lumped into one place.

No word on whether it will retain its trademark intro upon installation — &WINAMP. It really whips the llamaass.& I certainly hope so.

This lack of specifics is a bit frustrating, of course, but I&m not worried about vaporware. I&m worried that other services will insist on the fragmented experience they&ve created that serves their interests better than ours. But if Radionomy can navigate these tricky waters and deliver a product even a little like what they&ve described, I&ll be thrilled (and my guess is tens of millions more will be, as well). And if not, well, we&ll always have the original.