Technology

Virtual reality is largely an expensive hobby for Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg today, but the company hopes that within the decade, it can build out an entire VR empire for the social media giant to conquer.

Later this morning, we&ll get a taste of the future of VR from Facebook at the Oculus Connect 5 keynote. We&ll see the companylatest hardware efforts, the future of gaming on the platforms and perhaps a taste of what they have planned for the next couple years of their product lineup.

The action all starts at 10:00am PT.

We&ll be covering the breaking news and offering our analysis on the dayevents, but feel free to follow along with the livestream for the big updates from the Oculus and Facebook teams.

You can check out a livestream of the keynote on the Oculus Facebook page or Oculus YouTube channel.

Additionally, if you&re an Oculus Go or Gear VR owner, you&ll actually be able to watch the keynote in virtual reality. I&ve never found keynotes shot in 360-degrees to be particularly engaging, but if you&re excited about the announcements and want to stay super on-brand, you can dive into the Oculus Venues app later this morning to get the lowdown.

What should you be expecting Chances are Oculus will cram a lot of announcements into the keynote, but we&ve broken down some of the pieces of hardware and trends you should be expecting. So check it out.

Say hello to the Bandwidth Alliance, a new group led by Cloudflare that promises to reduce the price of bandwidth for many cloud customers. The overall idea here is that customers who use both Cloudflare, which is turning eight years old this week, and a cloud provider thatpart of this alliance will get a significant discount on their egress traffic or won&t have to pay for it at all.

The alliance is open, and others may join still, but right now it includes virtually every major and minor cloud provider you&ve ever heard of — with one exception. Current members include Automattic, Backblaze, Digital Ocean, DreamHost, IBM Cloud, Linode, Google, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Packet, Scaleway and Vapor. Some of these will now offer free egress traffic to mutual customers with Cloudflare, while others will offer at least a 75 percent discount.

Thatquite the alliance, but as Cloudflare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince told me, once the first member joined, the rest of the pieces fell into place quickly. Surely it also helped that both Google and Microsoft have invested in Cloudflare.

Why would these businesses choose to do away with whata minor but high-margin business, though &The argument that we made to them was a pretty simple argument: it makes sense for you to charge for transit when you are actually paying for it,& Prince said. Most of the time, though, those costs are very minor and Cloudflare, thanks to his massive number of global peering locations, can ingest the traffic directly from the cloud provider with no middlemen involved.

The first company Cloudflare partnered with was Google, thanks to that companyCDN Interconnect program, which launched in 2015. Cloudflare was one of the initial partners in the program, though as Prince noted, there was still a lot to learn for all parties involved, especially because traffic was sometimes routed in very unpredictable ways that circumvented the cost savings mechanisms. Cloudflare learned from this, though, and is now using its own Argo technology to intelligently route traffic.

As Prince noted, though, one thing that turned out to be harder than anticipated was ensuring that the cloud vendors would know that one of their customers is a mutual customer. Some have that instrumentation in place, while Cloudflare needs to pass a special header to them so they can know where their traffic is coming from.

Prince also argued that this will make it easier for many companies to use multiple cloud providers without having to pay extremely high bandwidth cost. While Cloudflareearly focus was very much on web traffic, Prince said that more than half is now API-based traffic, and thatexactly the kind of user who will likely save quite a bit of money thanks to this.

The one company thatnot part of this alliance, of course, is Amazon with its AWS platform. Prince said that Cloudflare has talked to them, though, and the group is open to all cloud and CDN providers.

Verbinden wie nie zuvor! Very roughly translated that means &connect like never before.& If you&re planning to attendDisrupt Berlin 2018on November 29-30, we&re happy to tell you that networking will be easier and more exacting than ever. How We&re making our CrunchMatch platform available to all attendees.

Not familiar with CrunchMatch Itour free business match-making service that connects investors and founders — who want to discuss potential funding opportunities — based on their specific criteria, goals and interests. CrunchMatch (powered by our partnerBrella) uses algorithmic magic to suggest matches and, if approved, send meeting requests and propose meeting times.

CrunchMatch really works well, if you ask TestCard CEO Luke Heronabout his experience with the platform at Disrupt Berlin 2017. &We used the CrunchMatch platform to schedule a meetings with six or seven VCs and, by and large, they were very positive meetings.& So positive, in fact, that Heron recently wrote us to say that TestCard &just closed $1.7 million in funding (which is thanks to you and your team, bless you!) You guys are fantastic — the lifeblood of the startup scene.& At Disrupt San Francisco in September, several founders who used CrunchMatch walked away from their meetings with term sheets.

On the VC side of the investment coin, Michael Kocan, managing partner at Trend Discovery, noted that CrunchMatch helps him find startups that have a good chance of meeting his investment criteria.

&I get the most value at the intersection of CrunchMatch and Startup Battlefield. If I see an interesting company present on stage, I use CrunchMatch to quickly schedule a meeting with them for later that day. It makes vetting deals extremely efficient.&

The platformpowerful combination of curation and automated efficiency means you make the most of your limited time at Disrupt — and still find the people you need in the easiest way possible. Think of CrunchMatch as the solution to the age-old needle-in-a-haystack scenario.

Disrupt Berlin 2018 marks the first time we&re opening up CrunchMatch to all attendees — not just investors and founders. Who else can benefit from using CrunchMatch Letsay founders looking for developers, technology service providers eager to help founders, founders looking for marketing help — the list is endless. But with CrunchMatch, Disrupt Berlin attendees can spell out what they are looking for and discover other attendees who are a fit.

And of course, investors and founders can still use it to discuss potential funding opportunities.

Now that CrunchMatch will be available to all Disrupt Berlin 2018 attendees, herewhat you need to know to make the most of this opportunity.

Once we launch CrunchMatch, registered Disrupt Berlin attendees will receive an email explaining how to access the platform and fill out their profiles. Simply identify your role (developer, service provider, founder, etc.) and who you want to connect with at Disrupt. CrunchMatch will get to work and make suggestions, which you can approve — and CrunchMatch will do the rest.

Disrupt Berlin 2018takes place on November 29-30. Be sure to buy your tickets today and get ready to network. CrunchMatch saves you time, it saves you shoe leather and it helps you connect like never before. Verbinden wie nie zuvor!