Study Point

From the moment that Disney announced its acquisition of Lucasfilm, the question on every fan’s mind was “when will they build Star Wars in real life?” While most assumed that they would do it eventually, they probably weren’t aware that in 2013 even as work began on the first movie of the ‘final’ trilogy, work also commenced on the early planning of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. That initial team of a handful of people would eventually grow to over 4,000. Over the course of the past 5 years, Walt Disney Imagineering has been hard at work making the world of Star Wars a reality on Earth. In two locations, California and Florida, Black Spire outpost on the planet of Batuu is now under construction. It’s an enormous several-billion-dollar bet that people will want to visit a place very similar to the ones that they’ve seen on the screen for decades. In some ways, this project seems like the safest bet ever. The confluence of rabid fans of Star Wars and disciples of Disney’s particular fla...

Fortnite Season 8 is almost here. There’s a lot we don’t know — most things, really — but the long wait will be over soon. If you can’t stand the anticipation or the requisite server downtime, we’re here to speculate so you’ll be mildly less bored. It worked for us. If Fortnite’s snowy Season 7 felt like it was dragging on through winter, things look to be warming up and melting out. Epic’s hinting makes it pretty clear that Season 8 will be a maritime adventure of some kind, swapping abominable snowmen for… pirates. There have been other watery clues though in recent days those expanded on what we assumed to be a marine theme of some kind, suggesting the map may soon be crawling with sea-faring marauders. — Fortnite (@FortniteGame) February 28, 2019 If you combine the four pieces of an image teaser for the new season, you’ll clearly see a skull-looking situation with a hook hand on the right side and a… dragon-like creature (viper? scaly dude?) on the left. Below those image...

If you’re not the paying sort, Medium has a mile-wide new hole in its paywall that might interest you. (But really, you should be the paying sort.) On Wednesday, Medium CEO and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams announced that Medium is tearing down its paywall for readers that visit the site through Twitter. In tweets, Williams elaborated on the company’s thinking a bit, explaining that the decision wouldn’t affect Medium members who rely on paid readerships, as paid readers would still be counted like they were before. All @Medium paywalled stories are now free and unmetered when you’re coming from Twitter. — Ev Williams (@ev) February 27, 2019 “It doesn’t affect compensation—assuming you mean for Partner Program,” Williams said . “That’s determined by readership from paying members, which will still be counted (assuming they’re logged in).” Still, it’s difficult to imagine how paid memberships will go up with content readily accessible for free. When asked by a Twitter...

Figure , a 13-month-old, San Francisco-based company that says it uses blockchain technology to provide home equity loans online in as little as five days, has raised a whole lot of money in not a lot of time: $120 million to date, including $65 million in fresh funding from RPM Ventures and partners at DST Global, with participation from DCG, Nimble Ventures, Morgan Creek, and earlier investors Ribbit Capital and DCM. The money isn’t entirely surprising, given who founded the company, Mike Cagney, who founded SoFi and built it into a major player in student loan refinancing in the U.S. before leaving amid allegations of sexual harassment and an anything-goes corporate culture that saw at least two former employees sue the company. Today, SoFi has moved on under the leadership of CEO Anthony Noto, a former Twitter executive who is working to reshape SoFi from a lending company into more of a full-fledged financial services company with savings and checking accounts, as well as exch...

When you think of MWC Barcelona, chances are you’re thinking about the newest smartphones and other mobile gadgets, but that’s only half the story. Actually, it’s probably far less than half the story because the majority of the business that’s done at MWC is enterprise telco business. Not too long ago, that business was all about selling expensive proprietary hardware. Today, it’s about moving all of that into software — and a lot of that software is open source. It’s maybe no surprise then that this year, the Linux Foundation (LF) has its own booth at MWC . It’s not massive, but it’s big enough to have its own meeting space. The booth is shared by the three LF projects: the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Hyperleger and Linux Foundation Networking, the home of many of the foundational projects like ONAP and the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) that power many a modern network. And with the advent of 5G, there’s a lot of new market share to grab here. To discuss the CNCF’s...