Technology

Eighteen months since its initial release, Oculus is delivering some major updates to its Medium &immersive sculpting tool& in a free 2.0 update thatbeing released today.

The artistic tool is one of the companyfew first-party apps on the PC Rift platform. Todayupdates focus primarily on performance bumps, a UI revamp and some features the company says were frequently requested by users, including snapping grids and increased layer limits.

&This is the culmination of a year of listening to our users and not only seeing what they&re creating but how — and learning what tools and features they love and lack,& OculusJessica Zeta said in a blog post.

While VR art apps like GoogleTilt Brush have seemed a bit amateurish in vibes, Oculus has been looking to position Medium as a more professional application thateasy to get going with but hard to master. Alongside the new layer limit of 100 layers, Medium 2.0 will have a new file management system and some UI changes that the company hopes will make navigation a bit quicker.

Speaking of quicker, Oculus says that 2.0 will get a bump in rendering horsepower after a rewrite in Vulkan, which the company says will improve performance handily.

Oculus has devoted quite a few resources in its latest Rift Core 2.0 updates to bringing some customizability to the home environments that users launch experiences from. With Medium 2.0, users will be able to export their creations directly into their Home area.

Oculus has learned quite a bit in the past 18 months about writing rules and leading a trail-blazing platform; Mediumlatest update seems to offer the group an opportunity to learn from users and just give them what they&ve been asking for.

And there we have it: Bird, one of the emerging massively hyped Scooter startups, has roped in its next pile of funding by picking up another $300 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital.

The company announced the long-anticipated round this morning, with SequoiaRoelof Botha joining the companyboard of directors. This is the second round of funding that Bird has raised over the span of a few months, sending it from a reported $1 billion valuation in May to a $2 billion valuation by the end of June. In March, the company had a $300 million valuation, but the Scooter hype train has officially hit a pretty impressive inflection point as investors pile on to get money into what many consider to be the next iteration of resolving transportation at an even more granular level than cars or bikes. New investors in the round includeAccel, B Capital, CRV, Sound Ventures, Greycroft and e.ventures; previous investorsCraft Ventures, Index Ventures, Valor, Goldcrest, Tusk Ventures and Upfront Ventures are also in the round. (So, basically everyone else who isn&t in competitor Lime.)

Scooter mania has captured the hearts of Silicon Valley and investors in general — including Paige Craig, who actually jumped from VC to join Bird as its VP of business— with a large amount of capital flowing into the area about as quickly as it possibly can. These sort of revolving-door fundraising processes are not entirely uncommon, especially for very hot areas of investment, though the scooter scene has exploded considerably faster than most.Birdround comes amid reports of a mega-round for Lime, one of its competitors, with the company reportedly raising another $250 million led by GV, and Skip also raising $25 million.

&We have met with over 20 companies focused on the last-mile problem over the years and feel this is a multi-billion dollar opportunity that can have a big impact in the world,& CRVSaar Gur, who did the deal for the firm, said. &We have a ton of conviction that this team has original product thought (they created the space) and the execution chops to build something extremely valuable here. And we have been long-term focused, not short-term focused, in making the investment. The ‘hype& in our decision (the non-zero answer) is thatBirdhas built the best product in the market and while we kept meeting with more startups wanting to invest in the space — we kept coming back toBirdas the best company. So in that sense, the hype from consumers is real and was a part of the decision. On unit economics: We view the first product as an MVP (as the company is less than a year old) — and while the unit economics are encouraging, they played a part of the investment decision but we know it is not even the first inning in this market.&

Therecertainly an argument to be made for Bird, whose scooters you&ll see pretty much all over the place in cities like Los Angeles. For trips that are just a few miles down wide roads or sidewalks, where you aren&t likely to run into anyone, a quick scan of a code and a hop on a Bird may be worth the few bucks in order to save a few minutes crossing those considerably long blocks. Users can grab a bird that they see and start going right away if they are running late, and it does potentially alleviate the pressure of calling a car for short distances in traffic, where a scooter may actually make more sense physically to get from point A to point B than a car.

There are some considerable hurdles going forward, both theoretical and in effect. In San Francisco, though just a small slice of the United States metropolitan area population, the company is facing significant pushback from the local government, and scooters for the time being have been kicked off the sidewalks. Therealso the looming shadow of what may happen regarding changes in tariffs, though Gur said that it likely wouldn&t be an issue and &the unit economics appear to be viable even if tariffs were to be added to the cost of the scooters.& (Xiaomi is one of the suppliers for Bird, for example.)

While it's undoubtedly one of Microsoft's biggest video game properties, Halo has had a rough time branching out into the live action film and television scene, despite having a ready-made fan base and a wealth of mythology and lore to draw from. 

That's all about to change. US-based, premium cable channel Showtime has announced that a 10-part live