Technology

At the Oculus Connect developer conference, one of the companyveteran executives offered some insights on the end of its best-selling product. &As we move forward into the future with Quest, it is probably time for me to give a bit of a eulogy for Gear VR,& CTO John Carmack told the audience.

Carmack detailed that the software was current but that Samsunglatest and future phones will not support the headset and its &days were numbered.&

&I do think we missed an opportunity here,& said John Carmack. &I invested a whole lot of effort into it and itthe foundation that we based all of the mobile things off of.&

The headset was first launched in 2014 with an Innovator Edition that supported the Note 4 and endured a number of editions that made minor adjustments to the size and onboard electronics of the headset. Users could slot their Samsung phones into the headset, which would then launch Oculussoftware and storefront.

Carmack said that the headset line was the companybest selling by far but that it was also the least retentive of users, trailing Rift, Quest and Go. This isn&t hugely surprising, given the friction it took to get into an experience as well as just how many of the headsets were given away for free through bundle deals.

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1. Everything Amazon announced at its Alexa event

Amazon held a big shindig yesterday to announce a whole bunch of new hardware ahead of the holidays. Naturally, the lineup includes new Echo smart speakers, as well as Alexa-powered earbuds, glasses, a smart ring and even an oven.

Oh, and Alexa is also getting celebrity voices — starting with Samuel L. Jackson, whose smooth tones you can purchase for just 99 cents.

2. Facebook announces Horizon, a VR massive-multiplayer world

Facebook Horizon is a virtual reality sandbox universe where you can build your own environments and games, play and socialize with friends or just explore the user-generated landscapes. Basically, itFacebooktake on Second Life, and itlaunching in private beta next year.

3. Verizon lights up 5G in (parts of) NYC

Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn are the carrierfirst focus in New York City, bringing the total number of cities with Verizon 5G to 13. (Obligatory reminder: Verizon owns TechCrunch.)

4. Summer wants to vanquish student loans for borrowers, and now has $10M to do it

Through Summerplatform, borrowers can get a full 360-degree view of their current student loan situation, and begin exploring options for how to repay it in the most financially efficient way possible.

5. NigeriaCcHub acquires KenyaiHub to create mega Africa incubator

Two of Africapowerhouse tech incubators will join forces: Nigerian innovation center and seed-fund CcHub has acquired Nairobi-based iHub.

6. Founders, get to Disrupt SF for answers to the really hard questions

Yes, it&ll be fun to see all the celebrities (Will Smith! Steph Curry!) at Disrupt SF, but be sure to check out the agenda for the Extra Crunch stage, where we&ll get more in-depth aboutthe challenges that every founder faces.

7. How Amazon is closing out competitors by opening up voice

More Amazon news: The company announced the formation of a new consortium called the Voice Interoperability Group, which aims to create a set of standards and technology for voice-enabled hardware, with users able to trigger one voice over another with the right set of &wake words.& (Extra Crunch membership required.)

Gatsby, a platform that uses modern web technologies like React and GraphQL to help developers build better sites faster, today announced that it has raised a $15 million Series A round led by CRV. Previous investors Trinity Ventures, Mango Capital, Fathom Capital and Dig Ventures also participated, as did Kong CEO Augusto Marietti and Adobe CPO Scott Belsky. The company previously raised a $3.8 million seed round.

While Gatsby may not be a household name yet, it has grown quickly since its launch in 2015. Its users today include the likes of IBM, PayPal, Braun, Airbnb and Impossible Burger. The company argues that about 1% of the top 10,000 websites have now been built on top of the platform, which promises that it allows these companies to do away with their old LAMP stack and move to a more modern stack, based on modern open-source tools and engineering practices. Gatsby also does away with a monolithic CMS system and instead brings together a variety of tools that still allow content creators to use platforms like WordPress or Drupal to create whatessentially a headless CMS system. In that case, Gatsby simply becomes the presentation layer for the CMS.

&We&ve spent four years building Gatsby to be the most comprehensive platform for building a modern website,& writes Gatsby founder and CEO Kyle Matthews. &What would take companies months or even years to implement with a cutting edge web stack is trivial to start with, build with, and deploy on Gatsby.&

Gatsby itself is based on the GatsbyJS open-source project. The company says more than 2,500 people have contributed since that project started. Matthews says Gatsby (the company) is now contributing about $3 million per year to open-source projects that include the core Gatsby tools and the plugin ecosystem around it.

Like similar open-source projects, Gatsby monetizes its tools by offering a hosted service that helps teams of developers stand up a new site quickly, with prices starting at $50/month for one site.