Technology

Right on the heels of launching its concierge service Hooch Black, Hooch announced today that it has raised $5 million in seed funding.

The companybasic subscription of $9.99 gets you one free drink per day from a variety of partner bars and restaurants. Hooch Black (which you have to apply for, and which costs $295 per year) adds hotel deals, concierge service and other perks on top.

Even though Hooch had already raised $2.75 million in two pre-seed rounds, co-founder and CEO Lin Dai said it was more important to bring on strategic investors than it was to raise a lot of money: &We feel like the most important thing for our business is really the relationships.&

After all, he said the hospitality industry is controlled by &a few key companies,& so success is determined by working with those companies — itnot a situation where someone can just beat you by outspending you.

The funding was led by Revelis Capital Group and Blue Scorpion Investments, with participation from Access Industries Holdings, Warner Music Group (Dai said that Hooch will be working with Warner Music on content, events and promotions), FJ Labs, Diesel CEO Stefano Rosso, former Comcast CTO Sree Kotay and others.

At the same time, the company is expanding its advisory board to include Bob Hurst (previously vice chairman of Goldman Sachs), Bonin Bough (former chief media and ecommerce officer at Mondelez) and Teymour Farman-Farmaian (previously CMO and CRO at Spotify and now managing director of Bitcoin wallet company Xapo).

Dai also said Hooch is preparing to launch its blockchain initiative this summer. What does blockchain have to do with free drinks Well, Dai didn&t go into detail, but he suggested that by launching its own cryptocurrency token, Hooch could work with partners to create a &decentralized model for consumer rewards.&

Looking ahead, Dai said that Hooch might raise a &proper& Series A in 12 to 18 months, though he expects to reach profitability before then.

&At that point, we will have already built the moat around us with exclusive deals with all the top hospitality and experiential players,& he said. &That would be the appropriate time for us, if needed, to go back to a traditional round of funding.&

Twitter is shutting down its TV apps on Roku, Android TV and Xbox starting on May 24, the company announced this morning. The news of the apps& closure comes at a time when Twitter is now trying to steer its users to its first-party mobile apps and its desktop website by killing off apps used by a minority of its user base & like the Twitter for Mac app it shut down earlier this year. And more recently, it hasattempted to kill off popular third-party Mac apps with a series of unfriendly API changes.

Itunclear why this has become Twitteragenda. While it can be a burden for a company to support a broader ecosystem of apps where some only have a niche audience, in some cases those &niche& users are also the most influential and heavy users. And arguably, anyone launching Twitterapp on their TV must be a die-hard user & because who is really watching that much Twitter on their TV

In terms of the TV apps& shutdown, this is a somewhat abrupt strategy shift. The company had been steadily expanding its live streaming video content over the past year, and it saw its TV apps as a way to get that video in front of a television audience & and particularly cord cutters & who are looking to watch major news events, sports matches, and other entertainment.

The Twitter Roku app was one of the later TV apps to arrive, launching just a year ago, following the September 2016 launch of the Apple TV, Fire TV and Xbox One apps. At the time, the company touted the app as a way for people to &…watch live events and see what people are talking about, keeping them connected to whathappening.&

Itlikely that none of TwitterTV apps have much traction. After all, Twitter didn&t have much in the terms of high-profile exclusive live video content. And on the TV, it has to compete for attention with top streaming services like Netflix and Hulu.

But these TV apps shutdowns aren&t tied to TwitterAPI changes, we&ve heard. Rather, Twitter has made the decision to kill off these apps as it works towards GDPR compliance. (Apparently, these apps were undeserving of time and attention on that front.) In addition, neither Xbox or Roku support a standard regularly supported video player, which made them more difficult to maintain. That also came into play with this decision.

Not all of TwitterTV apps are getting the cut, though.

Twitter for tvOS (Apple TV) and Twitter for Amazon Fire TV will continue to be available.

The team at Disney Research never fails to deliver fascinating (if not always particularly useful) experiments. Take Stickman. The robot is essentially one long limb, capable of some cool acrobatic maneuvers.

The system, detailed in a new paper from DR titled &Towards a Human Scale Acrobatic Robotic,& has two degrees of freedom and a pendulum it uses to launch itself in the air after swinging on a rope. The relatively simple robot tucks and folds, somersaulting in the air before landing on the padding below.

Those aerials are executed courtesy of a built-in laser range finder and six axis inertial measurement unit (a combination gyroscope/accelerometer), which calculate its position in-flight and adjust its positioning accordingly.

&Stickman emulates the behavior of human performers using a very limited set of sensing and actuation capabilities,& the team writes in the paper. &It is able to successfully perform several different somersaulting stunts by changing initial orientation and the timing of tuck, release, and untuck.&

The team says itgoing to continue experimenting with the robot, in an attempt to create more complex stunts down the road. No word on future plans beyond that, but for this headless acrobat of a robot, the sky, it seems, is the limit.