French small launch developer Latitude has closed $30 million in new capital as it eyes the first flight of its Zephyr rocket in 2025.
While other rocket companies are going bigger, developing even more massive rockets, Latitude is taking a different approach: light, small, and hopefully cheap enough to beat out competitors.
Its first rocket, Zephyr, will stand at just 62 feet and will be capable of delivering up to 100 kilograms of payload to low Earth orbit.
The two-stage rocket will be powered by eight 3D-printed engines called Navier, which Latitude is developing in-house.
In a statement, Latitude CEO and cofounder Stanislas Maximin said 2024 would be a “pivotal year” before Zephyr’s first flight in 2025.
We’ve covered Lego Fortnite since it launched last month, when the new title lured in 2.4 million simultaneous players.
A little over a month after its launch, Lego Fortnite’s content was beginning to run dry for players who dove in headlong in December (present company included).
More on our latest update here: https://t.co/p28TYzZD49 pic.twitter.com/fzquiEGRVj — LEGO Fortnite (@LEGOFortnite) January 23, 2024Building-oriented players also get some tweaks to make things go more smoothly.
Some of those experienced are made by Epic itself, like Lego Fortnite, but most are “user-made” with Epic’s beefy game development toolkit.
So far, Lego Fortnite is Fortnite’s most compelling alternative offering — and a game that’s likely to build more momentum as the updates keep rolling in.
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After working together at Xerox Corp.’s corporate venture capital firm Xerox Ventures, Chris Fisher, Tim Chiang and Dean Mai form Myriad Venture Partners.
They secured $100 million in capital commitments for their first fund, which targets $200 million in total, Fisher told TechCrunch.
Fisher is the former senior vice president and chief strategy officer of Xerox and former founder and managing partner of Xerox Ventures, a firm started in 2021.
This is something he is already seeing happening at companies through R&D, expansion and spending across AI software, including ChatGPT.
“With Xerox Ventures as an internal firm, the ability to scale wasn’t there.
For the second week in a row, we have lunar lander news to report on.
Story of the weekHow could the story of the week be anything other than SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon), the Japanese lunar lander that touched down on the moon on Friday?
But even with the issue, the mission achieved a huge portion of its goal, which was to demonstrate a soft lunar landing using optical navigation technology.
Launch highlightsWe saw our first crewed mission this year – but even more notably, it was a completely private mission (as in not a NASA astronaut mission).
Axiom Space launched its third mission with launch partner SpaceX on Thursday, with the crew successfully docking with the International Space Station at 5:42 AM EST on Saturday, January 20.
It’s also unclear if YouTube plans to support Vision Pro in the future.
However, this could change by the time Vision Pro launches on February 2.
The music streaming service isn’t making its iPad app available on the Vision Pro store either.
Spotify told us it couldn’t confirm the speculation about its app plans for the Vision Pro.
Apple explains that unless developers say they don’t want to participate, their iPad apps in the App Store will automatically appear in the Vision Pro store by default.
Forget Apple Vision Pro – rabbit r1 is 2024’s most exciting launch yet Apple is doing everything it can to make VR happen, but a tiny startup has a better vision of the futureThe year is off to a quick start in terms of new product launches and availability, even leaving aside the usual mid-tier smorgasbord that is CES.
Apple just started pre-sales of its Vision Pro mixed reality headset, with shipments beginning in early February; meanwhile Samsung debuted the next generation of the only viable iPhone competitor out there, the Galaxy S-series.
Unlike the Apple Vision Pro, which looks like the lavish, over-slick encumbered bit of technology’s past masquerading as technology’s future that it is, the rabbit r1 has a pared down, satisfying economy that I think comes much closer to what future generations want from their tech.
On the functionality side, Vision Pro is a an exercise in UI over saturation; the r1 aims to be as close as you can currently get to having no UI at all.
Rabbit is introducing the r1 when people are already in love with AI, as the term applies to large language models like ChatGPT.
Media streamer Plex’s long-delayed plans to launch a marketplace for TV and movie rentals are finally being realized after multiple false starts.
The media startup originally announced its plan to expand its streaming service to include rentals just ahead of the Covid-19 pandemic, which impacted launch plans alongside other technical concerns.
Then, at CES a year ago, Plex said the rentals market was due for a second-quarter launch.
With those headaches behind it, the rentals service is finally nearing launch — for real this time, Plex says.
In addition to the TVOD store, the report noted Plex’s plans for the year ahead included a redesign and additional social features, too.
Reddit is preparing to launch its initial public offering (IPO) in March, according to a new report from Reuters.
Reddit is planning to make its public filing in late February and complete the IPO by the end of March.
The company is looking to sell around 10% of its shares in the IPO, and will decide on what IPO valuation to pursue closer to the time of the listing.
However, Reuters sources cautioned that Reddit’s IPO plans could potentially be pushed back, which has happened in the past.
Its IPO plans have also been delayed due to uncertainty around the IPO market over the last two years, Reuters notes.
Axiom Space is gearing up to launch its third fully private astronaut mission to the International Space Station.
Per NASA rules, all private missions to the ISS must be led by a former NASA astronaut.
Houston-based Axiom’s first private mission launched in April 2022 and the second followed in May 2023.
But Axiom is not stopping at private astronaut missions — as if that wasn’t ambitious enough.
Instead, the company aims to eventually attach commercial modules to the ISS, that Axiom owns and operates, which would detach by the end of the decade to become a free-flying Axiom Space Station.
