Tech Drop Every Minute

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...

An arbitrator has awarded $179 million in damages to the stars and creative team behind the Fox show “Bones.” As laid out in an in-depth Hollywood Reporter story , the ruling could have bigger implications for the streaming world, particularly as the major media companies are looking to launch their own streaming services, which will presumably take advantage of their existing content libraries. Stars David Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel, along with executive producer Barry Josephson and Kathy Reichs (who wrote the novels that “Bones” was based on), sued 21st Century Fox in 2015. They alleged that the Fox studio licensed the show for below-market rates to Fox networks and later to Hulu, cheating them out of their rightful share of the profits. The dispute ultimately went into arbitration. Now arbitrator Peter Lichtman has ordered Fox (which currently owns a 30 percent stake in Hulu, and is in the process of being acquired by Disney ) to pay one of the largest profit-sharing awar...

By most common sense measurements, Box had a pretty good earnings report today, reporting revenue up 20 percent year over year to $163.7 million. That doesn’t sound bad, yet Wall Street was not happy with the stock getting whacked, down more than 22 percent after hours as we went to press. It appears investors were unhappy with the company’s guidance. Part of the problem, says Alan Pelz-Sharpe, principal analyst at Deep Analysis, a firm that watches the content management space, is that the company failed to hit its projections, combined with weaker guidance; a tough combination, but he points out the future does look bright for the company. “ Box did miss its estimates and got dinged pretty hard today; however, the bigger picture is still of solid growth. As Box moves more and more into the enterprise space, the deal cycle takes longer to close and I think that has played a large part in this shift. The onus is on Box to close those bigger deals over the next couple of quarters, ...