cofounders

I like Agog's use of the term "immersive media" to describe the results it is working towards. Immersive media (please, in the name of sanity, do not abbreviate it as IM) clearly isn't a term Agog's co-founders coined. It goes back at least to 1994, if not earlier. I like that it describes the experience more than, say, AR, XR, VR, or even spatial computing. When you put on XR goggles, you're being immersed in the media, even if you're also seeing the room around you. Also: I recorded spatial videos to view on…

Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca flew solo with Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg, the co-founders and co-CEOs of theSkimm, a digital media company delivering news through a newsletter targeted at millennial women. Zakin and Weisberg talked about what market gap they wanted theSkimm to fill. They also talked about: Riding the bumpy roller coaster of the digital media landscape over the past decade. What it was like pitching a millennial…

Launched by Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, Artifact is set to shut down just one year after its January 2023 debut. The founders revealed that the overall market opportunity wasn't substantial enough to justify ongoing investment…

Artifact, the news aggregator-turned social network from Instagram’s founders, is shutting down. On Friday, the startup announced via a blog post it had made the decision to “wind down operations” of the app launched over a year ago, saying that the market opportunity wasn’t big enough to warrant continued investment. The team had rapidly iterated on its product from a SmartNews-like news reading app to a curation and news discovery platform where individual users could become creators of a sort, finding interesting…

In a surprising turn of events, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the co-founders of Instagram, are shutting down their highly anticipated news app, Artifact, just shy of its one-year anniversary. The announcement, delivered through a Medium post by Systrom, outlined that the app's core news reading features would remain accessible until the end of February, but commenting and posting capabilities were immediately disabled. Renowned for its AI-centric functionalities and a Reddit-like interactive environment, Artifact…

Artifact, the AI-driven news app cofounded by Instagram's Kevin Systrom, is shutting down after failing to find a large enough market, the company announced on its blog. "We've been working hard to build Artifact into a product that millions of people could use every day," the company wrote. "But, unfortunately, we haven't found a way to do that."Artifact launched in January 2023 and quickly gained a following for its personalized news feed and ability to create and share posts. However, the company says it was not able…

Since Bill Ryder-Jones left the Coral in 2008 after five Top 10 albums, he’s been quietly busying himself away in his Yawn studio in West Kirby on the Wirral Peninsula. He’s produced records for the likes of Saint Saviour, Brooke Bentham and Michael Head (his 2022 masterpiece, Dear Scott) while his succession of Yawn-created solo albums has mapped out a singular musical vision. This has stretched from orchestral imaginary soundtracks (2011 debut If…); fragile, damaged folk-rock (2013’s A Bad Wind Blows in My Heart);…

A pair of veteran Rockstar employees have joined Dan Houser’s new studio, Absurd Ventures. As noted by BeGeek and reporter Stephen Totilo, Lazlow Jones joined Absurd Ventures in June 2021, and is also listed on LinkedIn as being a “founding member of Absurd Ventures, a media company creating new IP, building narrative worlds and writing stories for a variety of genres.” Jones was previously in charge of producing dialogue for the GTA series, in addition to appearing in the series as a satirical version of himself. He…

Sam Altman and Greg Brockman and many of their former OpenAI colleagues will join Microsoft, the software conglomerate’s chief Satya Nadella said Monday, capping an intense three days discussion following the sudden departure of the AI startup’s executives. At Microsoft, the former OpenAI members will lead a “new advanced AI research team,” Nadella said in a statement. “We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success,” he added. More to follow.…

LaundryMate, an online laundry services startup founded by Bigbasket co-founder Abhinay Choudhary, said on Monday that it raised Rs 50 crore ($6.25 million) in a pre-series-A funding from the Blume Founders Fund and multiple angel investors.These included Ola cofounder Ankit Bhati, Boston Consulting Group managing partner Deepak Goyal, Trilegal cofounder Karan Singh and Nutanix India managing director Sankalp Saxena, LaundryMate said in a news release.LaundryMate said it has built India’s largest laundry facility in…