Technology

Update:It seems the original source on of the report misconstrued a comment from Iger, who was referring more broadly to &a Disney Play,& rather than giving name to the service itself. A spokesperson for the service told TechCrunch, &A name for the upcoming Disney steaming service has not yet been announced&

Itbeen a full year since Disney first made public its intentions to go head to head with Netflix. In the intervening months, the media giant has started the process of pulling content from the streaming service, bit by bit.

And while Disney isn&t planning to launch the product until some time next year, at least we&ve finally got a name. CEO Bob Iger is calling the video service &Disney Play,& according to a new report from Variety.

That little tidbit is buried in a larger piece of about Netflix competitors. In it, the chief executive notes that the services is Disney&biggest priority of the company during calendar [year] 2019.& Thatsome big talk from a company with the reach and resources of a Disney.

From the sound of things, however, itgoing all in on its plan to beat Netflix and its ilk at their own game. Along with an extremely strong slate of existing films, the companygot some big titles just over the horizon.

ThereMarvelCaptain Marvel, the final installment of the Star Wars sequel trilogy and surefire sequels like Frozen 2 and Toy Story 4.And then therethe original content, led by a live action Star Wars series helmed by Iron Man director, Jon Favreau (whoalso directing Disneyupcoming Lion King remake).

The exact date and pricing for the service are still TBD, but Iger has promised to undercut Netflix monthly fee.

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Last year, Walmart acquiredoutdoor retailer Moosejaw for $51 million & a company thatnow one of several brands Walmart picked up during a speciality retail buying spree, along with ShoeBuy, Jet.com, Hayneedle, ModCloth, and Bonobos. Now, the company is making good on that purchase, as Moosejaw is the first of Walmartacquired brands to arrive on Walmart.com. The company will now curate its own storefront, in addition to operating its own separate site.

Since its acquisition, Moosejaw began to offer customers free, two-day shipping on orders over $49, and invested in technology improvements to its own site. It also enhanced its rewards program, and reported a 50% increase in redemption rates, as a result.

On Walmart.com, Moosejaw will now curate the new &Premium Outdoor Store,& which will offer Walmart online shoppers access to an assortment of outdoor speciality items that weren&t available on the site in the past.

This includes thousands of items from brands like Craghoppers, Deuter, First Ascent by Eddie Bauer, Gramicci, Jack Wolfskin, KLYMIT, LEKI, Stonewear and Tentsile. The store will also carry the full range of Moosejaw-branded clothing, jackets and gear. This premium assortment will complement the everyday camping assortment currently available on Walmart.com.

However, the store itself is not being branded as &Moosejaw& because Walmart plans to expand the assortment over time to pull in products from other speciality retailers and brands in the future. That means Moosejaw will fulfill much, but not all, of the orders placed in the new online shop.

In addition, the Walmart shop will launch with nearly 50 brands, while Moosejaw itself carries nearly 500 & thatwhy itreferred to as a more &curated& selection, in addition to the fact that non-Moosejaw products will join at a later point.

The online storefront will also featureWalmart.comnew design, which offers a more modern and clean look-and-feel, and other personalization features.

In its quest to challenge Amazon, Walmartspeciality retailer buying spree last year allowed it to bring in small, but tactically important brands targeting upscale shoppers and millennials.. But it was unclear if Walmart planned to allow them to run independently forever, or try to bring them onto Walmart.com & or both. In the case of Moosejaw, at least, the latter is true.

The addition is not the only way Walmart is trying to target a new type of consumer via more premium merchandise.

In May, Walmart announced a Lord - Taylor speciality shop was arriving its site, to pull in more upscale shoppers. Many of its e-commerce initiatives & including online grocery, the redesign, partnerships like that with Lord - Taylor and others & appear to be finding success. The company reported its U.S. online sales were up 40% in Q2.

It recently took on Amazon in an area thata definite part of Amazonbrand, too: e-books and e-readers. Through a partnership with Rakuten Kobo, Walmart now sells e-books, audiobooks, and Kobo e-readers online and in its store. Italso rumored to be working on its own video service, which could help to flesh out an alternative to Amazon Prime.

Asked if Walmart had similar plans to launch speciality shops for its other acquired brands, a spokesperson replied with an intentionally vague, ¬ at this time.&

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French cloud hosting company OVH just announced a new CEO. Michel Paulin is now heading the company. Founder Octave Klaba remains Chairman of the Board and plans to focus on the big picture.

Paulin recently worked at telecom company SFR. If you look further in the past, he also was a key member at Neuf Cegetel, another telecom company. He overlooked the IPO of Neuf Cegetel and the merger with SFR more than ten years ago.

While telecom companies and cloud hosting companies aren&t the same thing, it sounds like Paulin could bring his operational and M-A experience at OVH.

OVH is currently trying to morph its cloud offering into a leading alternative service to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud. The company is currently working on simplifying its offering and attracting new clients.

The company currently has 2,500 employees and generated $488 million in revenue in 2017 (€420 million). OVH still plans to invest a ton of money in hiring more people, opening more data centers and launching new offerings.

The company has raised hundreds of millions of dollars over the years. More recently, OVH got a $467 million credit line (€400 million) from multiple banks to expand aggressively. The new executive team could help when it comes to… executing this roadmap.

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Caffeine-infused meal replacement products may be all the rage among techies, but a good ol& cup of joe is still the choice morning beverage for most of us. To capitalize on Americainsatiable coffee habit, Bellwether Coffee has raised a $10 million Series A and begun selling its zero-emissions commercial roaster and online coffee bean marketplace to cafés and grocers. The funding followsa $6 million seed round in 2016.

Congruent Ventures led the round for the Berkeley, Calif.-based startup, with participation from FusionX Ventures, Tandem Capital, New Ground Ventures, Hardware Club, XN Ventures and SolarCity founders Pete and Lyndon Rive. As part of the deal, Pete Rive has joined the startupboard, as has Congruent managing partner Josh Posamentier. Bellwether was founded by Ricardo Lopez, who serves as the companyhead of product innovation, in 2013.

Bellwether CEO Nathan Gillilandsays the company sits at the nexus of software and hardware. The latter can be a tougher sell to VCs, though Gilliland said its latest round was oversubscribed. The company has just begun leasing its $1,000 per month ventless, electric coffee roaster to cafés, grocers and other businesses.

As part of the monthly fee, Bellwether customers get access to its online bean marketplace, which they can use to order beans from a revolving list of 20-some coffee farms curated by the team at Bellwether. Retailers and coffee consumers also can tip farmers directly via Bellwether. Gilliland explained that could be a game changer for the industry. Coffee farmers, he said, earn roughly 75 cents per pound of coffee sold. If a dollar is tipped on every pound of coffee, a farmer could double their revenue.

Tracing where the beans in your daily brew originated from, whether that be Guatemala, Ethiopia, Colombia or another one of the top producers of beans, can be difficult. Bellwethermarketplace, which lets retailers browse coffee farms based on factors, including whether the farm is organically certified or woman-owned, is intended to add a bit of transparency to an often opaque business.

&We live in such a connected world now it really makes sense to enable consumers to know who made their coffee and where they are located,& Gilliland told TechCrunch. &We really try to align the quality and the taste with the sustainability metrics. We want a perfect balance between the two.&

Bellwether Coffee raises $10M to bring more transparency to the coffee industry

Berkeley, Calif.-based Bellwether Coffee has raised a $10 million Series A led by Congruent Ventures

Bellwether has a large potential market, as most cafés and grocers don&t have in-house roasters, but can save money by leasing one like Bellwether&s. On top of that, Americans drink a whole lot of coffee. According to a recent study by the money-saving app Acorns, one-third of its users spent more on coffee annually than they invested. Most of their respondents, however, were millennials, who of course are known to overspend on avocado toast, among other things. So their spending habits may not be the most accurate representation of all coffee consumers. Regardless, there could be a big opportunity here for Bellwether.

In the coffee tech scene generally, a few other companies have captured the attention of venture capital investors recently. Luckin Coffee, a Chinese on-demand coffee delivery startup, raised $200 million in July at a billion-dollar valuation, followed by a $40 million round for Bulletproof 360, the company behind Bulletproof Coffee.

If Bellwether doesn&t soar into unicorn territory, Gilliland has at least come to appreciate a good cup of coffee and its many subtleties.

&I will admit, I used to throw a little creamer in my coffee but no, itall black now.&

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We can largely thank Apple and its MacBook Air for the Ultrabook trend we're seeing. Where large, clunky laptops aren't sleek enough, and thin, portable tablets aren't powerful enough, the Ultrabook shines.

A unibody chassis packed with some of the best SSDs, processors and battery life available to devices this size, the Ultrabook is a thin and

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2018's iPhones could offer much better battery life thanks to new A12 chips2018's iPhones could offer much better battery life thanks to new A12 chips

Apple's A11 chip made last year's iPhones exceptional in terms of performance, and thanks to a new chip manufacturing process, we could be seeing another huge boost in 2018, according to Cult of Mac. 

TSMC, the Taiwanese company that is exclusively manufacturing Apple's iPhone processors this year, is reportedly implementing a 7 nanometre process

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