SA国际传媒

Morning Report: Yes, the world is bad. No, you can’t escape from it鈥攄espite the best efforts of a host of huge companies.

Perhaps you a recall the short, recent period when virtual reality (VR) was hot. Indeed, VR had quite a moment. The sector’s highlights聽came聽from tech’s biggest players: Facebook , and, in early 2015, Microsoft , an augmented-reality nerd helmet that brought another giant into the race.

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Along the way, other players ducked in, and the space became sufficiently The Next Thing. Eventually,聽a venture firm actually invested its investors’ capital in . (It 聽amidst fraud allegations, but fool me thrice, shame on the market.)

The VR/AR space slowed over the following years. That slow descent finally led to , , a season capped off by a good piece from TechCrunch’s own Natasha Lomas entitled “.”

The Lomas piece is worth reading as a compendium of data points about the VR market, but it also quoted another 聽that is a must-read:

Over the past several months it鈥檚 become clear that the war is no longer HTC and Oculus trying to discover who is Betamax and who is VHS, now they鈥檙e just trying to ensure that high-end VR doesn鈥檛 turn out to be LaserDisc. Though few of the big players are keen to readily admit it, many investors and analysts have been less than thrilled with the pace of headset sales over the past year

In light of all that, you might expect that tech’s largest players would be slowing their move into the space and its related-genres. Today’s news implies the opposite.

Recall that Microsoft, despite being in the middle of an enterprise-cloud-SaaS push, is also working to聽. That work included the promise of “” back in May.

Those headsets are now far better fleshed out. Two sample headlines from this morning’s media cycle:

We selected those for two reasons. First, that the headset mix will include lower-priced hardware. Throw in a holiday discount and the cost of headsets could be slowly lowering itself into the mass-market range.

Second, that the content question is looking less like an existential query and more like a discussion of future scale. With Steam, Minecraft, and Halo, Microsoft has enough titles to claim a partially-mature platform.

None of the above is enough to change the VR world overnight. But it shows that, even though consumer market response was more muted than initially expected, work continues. I hold by the view that, at some point inside the next 10 years, I will spend a decent portion of my day inside of a visor of sorts.

When that day comes still isn’t clear.

贵谤辞尘听:

Expedia鈥檚 Khosrowshahi tapped to lead Uber

• Uber鈥檚 board reportedly voted to hire聽, CEO of Expedia, to head the ride-sharing giant. Both Meg Whitman and Jeff Immelt had been in the running but failed to win support of a majority of directors under the terms they sought.聽聽has been without a CEO since June 20, when founder Travis Kalanick stepped down under pressure from major shareholders.

VCs more active in Latin America

• Venture investors are doing more deals in Latin America and recently launched a few new funds dedicated to the region,聽SA国际传媒 News reports. Still, it remains a small VC ecosystem, with only about $500 million going to startups in the region last year.

U.S.-educated founders scale in Asia

• Some of the most-heavily-funded companies in Asia have founders who went to schools in the U.S., according to a SA国际传媒 News analysis. Among the top ten most funded companies in Asia with U.S.-schooled founders,聽five have already raised over a billion, and all have made SA国际传媒鈥檚聽.