Архив метки: CEO

Bob Iger is returning to head Disney as Bob Chapek steps down

The Walt Disney Co. said today that Bob Iger is returning to head the company as Bob Chapek is stepping down from the CEO post. Iger, who officially left the company last year, is set to take the command immediately. The company said that he will serve as the CEO for two years.
“We thank Bob Chapek for his service to Disney over his long career, including navigating the company through the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic. The Board has concluded that as Disney embarks on an increasingly complex period of industry transformation, Bob Iger is uniquely situated to lead the Company through this pivotal period,”  Chairman of the Board Susan Arnold said in a letter.
“Mr. Iger has the deep respect of Disney’s senior leadership team, most of whom he worked closely with until his departure as executive chairman 11 months ago, and he is greatly admired by Disney employees worldwide–all of which will allow for a seamless transition of leadership.”
The company said that there is no change in the board and Arnold will continue to serve as a chairman.
Iger served as Disney’s CEO from 2005 to 2020 for 15 years before deciding to step down and hand over the reins to Chapek. Notably, Chapek signed a three-year extension contract with the company in June.
On his return, Iger said that optimistic about Disney’s future and was thrilled to return to the company.
“Disney and its incomparable brands and franchises hold a special place in the hearts of so many people around the globe—most especially in the hearts of our employees, whose dedication to this company and its mission is an inspiration. I am deeply honored to be asked to again lead this remarkable team, with a clear mission focused on creative excellence to inspire generations through unrivaled, bold storytelling,” he said in a statement.
In his previous stint, Iger oversaw major acquisitions like Pixar, Marvel, and 21st Century Fox. The returning CEO also sent an email to the Disney Staff including cast members saying they’ll hear more about this move from the leadership “tomorrow and in coming weeks.”

Email from Bob Iger to Disney staff, 7:19 p.m. pic.twitter.com/IiTQvBYYZp
— The Ankler (@TheAnkler) November 21, 2022

Chapek’s 11-month tenure hadn’t been great for the company as its stock value has dropped by more than 40% at the time of writing. He was also criticized for not taking an active stance to oppose Florida’s anti-gay bill. Under his management, the company fired senior content executive Peter Rice and passed up an opportunity to get digital rights for streaming the Indian Premier League Cricket tournament.
The company registered a revenue of $20.2 billion in Q3 2022 and missed analyst expectations by nearly $1 billion. At that time, Disney’s CFO Christine McCarthy said that the entertainment company aims to achieve profitability by the fiscal year 2024. The company adjusted its target of global Disney+ subscribers by 2024 from 230-260 million to 215-245 million.
Bob Iger is returning to head Disney as Bob Chapek steps down by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
Bob Iger is returning to head Disney as Bob Chapek steps down

Deep Render believes AI holds the key to more efficient video compression

Chri Besenbruch, CEO of Deep Render, sees many problems with the way video compression standards are developed today. He thinks they aren’t advancing quickly enough, bemoans the fact that they’re plagued with legal uncertainty and decries their reliance on specialized hardware for acceleration.
“The codec development process is broken,” Besenbruch said in an interview with TechCrunch ahead of Disrupt, where Deep Render is participating in the Disrupt Battlefield 200. “In the compression industry, there is a significant challenge of finding a new way forward and searching for new innovations.”
Seeking a better way, Besenbruch co-founded Deep Render with Arsalan Zafar, whom he met at Imperial College London. At the time, Besenbruch was studying computer science and machine learning. He and Zafar collaborated on a research project involving distributing terabytes of video across a network, during which they say they experienced the shortcomings of compression technology firsthand.
The last time TechCrunch covered Deep Render, the startup had just closed a £1.6 million seed round ($1.81 million) led by Pentech Ventures with participation from Speedinvest. In the roughly two years since then, Deep Render has raised an additional several million dollars from existing investors, bringing its total raised to $5.7 million.
“We thought to ourselves, if the internet pipes are difficult to extend, the only thing we can do is make the data that flows through the pipes smaller,” Besenbruch said. “Hence, we decided to fuse machine learning and AI and compression technology to develop a fundamentally new way of compression data getting significantly better image and video compression ratios.”
Deep Render isn’t the first to apply AI to video compression. Alphabet’s DeepMind adapted a machine learning algorithm originally developed to play board games to the problem of compressing YouTube videos, leading to a 4% reduction in the amount of data the video-sharing service needs to stream to users. Elsewhere, there’s startup WaveOne, which claims its machine learning-based video codec outperforms all existing standards across popular quality metrics.
But Deep Render’s solution is platform-agnostic. To create it, Besenbruch says that the company compiled a dataset of over 10 million video sequences on which they trained algorithms to learn to compress video data efficiently. Deep Render used a combination of on-premise and cloud hardware for the training, with the former comprising over a hundred GPUs.
Deep Render claims the resulting compression standard is 5x better than HEVC, a widely used codec and can run in real time on mobile devices with a dedicated AI accelerator chip (e.g., the Apple Neural Engine in modern iPhones). Besenbruch says the company is in talks with three large tech firms — all with market caps over $300 billion — about paid pilots, though he declined to share names.
Eddie Anderson, a founding partner at Pentech and board member at Deep Render, shared via email: “Deep Render’s machine learning approach to codecs completely disrupts an established market. Not only is it a software route to market, but their [compression] performance is significantly better than the current state of the art. As bandwidth demands continue to increase, their solution has the potential to drive vastly improved commercial performance for current media owners and distributors.”
Deep Render currently employs 20 people. By the end of 2023, Besenbruch expects that number will more than triple to 62.
Deep Render believes AI holds the key to more efficient video compression by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Deep Render believes AI holds the key to more efficient video compression

Former MoviePass execs are being sued by the SEC for lying to customers

Ahead of the official relaunch of subscription-based movie ticketing service MoviePass, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a complaint against three of its former executives, claiming they lied to investors and the public.
The SEC filing targeted former MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe and Ted Farnsworth, the former CEO of parent company Helios and Matheson Analytics (HMNY), claiming they lied about how it planned to be profitable and used “fraudulent tactics to prevent MoviePass’s heavy users from using the [unlimited subscription service],” the SEC wrote.
When under the rule of Lowe and Farnsworth, MoviePass promised users a $9.95 per month subscription that would give them an unlimited number of 2D movie tickets. However, MoviePass quickly kissed “unlimited” goodbye, ending the service that was likely losing a lot of money. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2020.
Last year, Farnsworth and Lowe settled with the Federal Trade Commission after MoviePass was accused of preventing users from using the subscription service they were paying for.
The original founder and owner of MoviePass, Stacy Spikes, hopefully won’t repeat the mistakes of its previous owners. Spikes is launching an updated version of MoviePass, which is currently beta testing in three markets: Chicago, Kansas City, and Dallas. However, there will be no such thing as unlimited viewing, and instead MoviePass will have three subscription price tiers with set limits ranging from $10, $20, and $30 per month.

MoviePass readies a Labor Day return

Former MoviePass execs are being sued by the SEC for lying to customers by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch
Former MoviePass execs are being sued by the SEC for lying to customers

Tinder to kill virtual currency, metaverse plans amid Match Group earnings loss; Tinder loses its CEO

Dating giant Match Group announced a series of changes to Tinder’s management team alongside the announcement of disappointing second-quarter earnings on Tuesday. Notably, Tinder CEO Renate Nyborg will be departing the company after less than a year in the top job. Match Group is also killing Tinder’s plans to adopt new technology, like virtual currencies and metaverse-based dating.
In a shareholder letter, Match Group CEO Bernard Kim expressed frustration with Tinder’s current performance, noting the popular dating app has not been able to realize its typical monetization success over the past few quarters and is failing to meet the company’s original expectations for revenue growth for the latter half of 2022.
Kim chalked up Tinder’s troubles to “disappointing execution on several optimizations and new product initiatives,” but added that Tinder’s product execution and velocity could still be improved.
Alongside the departure of Nyborg, Tinder will have a reorganized management team that also includes:
Faye Iosotaluno, formerly Match Group’s chief strategy officer, as Tinder’s COO
Mark van Ryswyk, as Tinder’s chief product officer. Ryswyk is an experienced gaming executive who joined the company in June.
Melissa Hobley, formerly OkCupid’s CMO, as Tinder’s chief marketing officer
Tom Jacques, as Tinder’s chief technology officer. An 11-year Match Group veteran, he has been Tinder’s CTO for the last five years.
Advisor Amarnath Thombre. The current CEO of Match Group Americas and 15-year Match Group veteran will advise the Tinder management team on product roadmap and growth.
Kim said he will oversee the team while Tinder searches for a permanent CEO.
Reading between the lines, there was also a hint that the younger generation of users may have lost its appetite for dating apps like Tinder — a culture shift which can’t just be chalked up to lingering pandemic impacts. The letter notes that people have moved past COVID lockdowns and re-entered “a more normal way of life,” but their willingness to try online dating apps for the first time hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Instead, Match Group reports that its highest engagement is now coming from existing users.
As part of Tinder’s revamp, its “dating metaverse” ambitions have been dramatically scaled back. The company had been planning to leverage its Hyperconnect acquisition to create a new form of online dating in a virtual environment, but those ideas are on pause as Match Group now has to address broader issues.
“…Given uncertainty about the ultimate contours of the metaverse and what will or won’t work, as well as the more challenging operating environment, I’ve instructed the Hyperconnect team to iterate but not invest heavily in metaverse at this time,” wrote Kim. “We’ll continue to evaluate this space carefully, and we will consider moving forward at the appropriate time when we have more clarity on the overall opportunity and feel we have a service that is well-positioned to succeed.”
Also on the chopping block was virtual currency, which Match Group was experimenting with as Tinder Coins. (While Match Group hadn’t gotten so far as to announce blockchain integrations for the coins, the virtual currency’s role in its broader metaverse plans suggested crypto could be part of its long-term roadmap.)
“After seeing mixed results from testing Tinder Coins, we’ve decided to take a step back and re-examine that initiative so that it can more effectively contribute to Tinder’s revenue,” said Kim. “We also intend to do more thinking about virtual goods to ensure that they can be a real driver for Tinder’s next leg of growth and help us unlock the untapped power users on the platform,” he added.
The company says it’s still planning to develop features to make Tinder more appealing to women, including a subscription-based package that will provide “curated recommendations” as well as features designed to get friends involved in introductions. Across other products, it will also look to new features, like livestreaming video, to drive adoption.
Overall, Match posted Q2 2022 revenue of $795 million, up 12% year-over-year, but below average Wall Street estimates of $804.22 million. It also posted a loss of $31.86 million, or 11 cents per share, versus 46 cents in the year-ago quarter. Analysts were expecting earnings of 57 cents per share. Match said its operating loss was $10 million, impacted by a $217 million write-down of intangibles related to lower financial outlooks for its Azar and Hakuna apps from Hyperconnect.
Match Group paying users were up 10% year-over-year to 16.4 million. Tinder direct revenue grew 13% from the prior quarters, driven by 14% growth to 10.9 million paying users.
Image Credits: Match Group
Estimates for the quarter ahead weren’t good either, with Match Group forecasting flat Q3 growth to $790 million to $800 million in revenue, below estimates of $883 million. Tinder revenue growth is expected to be in the “mid single digits.”
Shares dropped more than 20% in after-hours trading on the news.
Updated 8/2/22, 6:00 pm ET to clarify Tinder had not formally announced blockchain integrations for Tinder’s virtual currency. 
Tinder to kill virtual currency, metaverse plans amid Match Group earnings loss; Tinder loses its CEO

Cozy houseplants and self-care: How one startup is reimagining mobile gameplay as a healing activity

Mobile well-being apps topped 1.2 billion downloads last year, while leading meditation app Calm alone pulled in $118.2 million in revenue, data from Sensor Tower indicates. That may leave some to believe the digital well-being market is essentially solved, but a new startup, Lumi Interactive, believes the opposite is true. The Melbourne-based, women-led company has identified a under-explored niche in the mobile market that involves translating offline, self-care activities into games as a means of reducing our collective stress and anxiety.
While most mobile games focus on having users compete against one another or achieve some sort of goal, the startup’s forthcoming title Kinder World’s main aim is to help users relax. It accomplishes this through short, snack-sized sessions where it asks players to care for virtual houseplants by taking care of themselves in the real world.
In the game, players are encouraged to perform simple acts of kindness — like practicing daily gratitude, for example — in order to improve their own well-being and that of the game’s wider community. The game features a variety of non-stressful activities — like watering houseplants, interacting with animal neighbors and decorating a cozy room with plants, among other things.
Image Credits: Lumi Interactive
In some ways, this recalls how many of us spent months in creative play during the height of the pandemic engaged with games like Animal Crossing, the popular Nintendo game whose pressure-free environment helped many relax and pass the time under COVID-19 lockdowns. In Animal Crossing, players designed indoor and outdoor spaces, shopped for outfits and home accessories, planted flowers and chitchatted with animal pals.
As it turns out, the pandemic played a big role in Lumi Interactive’s founding, too, the company told TechCrunch.
“In late 2020, we were a small team of three, exhausted by the pandemic and a hard year for the business,” explains Lumi Interactive co-founder and CEO Lauren Clinnick. “We decided to take two weeks to refresh ourselves with a game jam to make something totally new, and mental well-being was very much on our minds. We’d also all become closer to nature over the harsh Melbourne lockdowns and wanted to examine why houseplants had become part of a self-care routine for so many people we knew,” she says.
That gave rise to a question as to whether houseplant care could be brought into the digital world, and the team prototyped Kinder World as a result.
“It had a spark of something special after just two weeks, and the concept tested very strongly with our target audience straight away,” Clinnick says.
Both Clinnick and Lumi Interactive co-founder Christina Chen had a background in gaming before founding their new company and had known each other for nearly a decade. Clinnick first entered the games industry as a marketing consultant for games like Crossy Road, co-founded a boutique games marketing agency, then moved into direct games development. Chen, meanwhile, had a technical background that saw her working on payments at Xbox Live and later as a senior producer at PopCap in Shanghai before co-founding games publisher Surprise Attack (now known as Fellow Traveller).
The duo had bonded over their mutual love for data, underserved player communities and the new opportunities they believed were still on the horizon for mobile gaming, Clinnick says.
Image Credits: Lumi Interactive
As the team investigated the idea for a more collaborative, self-care-focused title, they discovered that many of today’s consumers weren’t finding satisfaction with mainstream well-being apps.
“When we actually interviewed users — especially Gen Z and millennial women and nonbinary folks — we found that 97% had dropped out of apps like Headspace and Calm, citing they ‘felt like work’ or became another thing for them to fail at,” says Clinnick. “Instead they often have fragmented relaxation hobbies such as gaming, houseplants, Squishmallow collecting, crafting and ASMR. These are mostly distraction activities that helped their short-term anxiety but didn’t help them build important resilience skills in the long term,” she says.
Lumi Interactive responded to this feedback by making sure their game was designed in a way where you couldn’t fail, no matter how you played. For instance, all the activities in the game are optional and the virtual houseplants will never die.
“We’ve consciously made these choices to prevent a burdened feeling for players,” says Clinnick. 
In keeping with a strategy to co-develop the game along with their community, the startup turned to TikTok to test various elements, like game design, the art style and to find out what interested their users.
Now a full-time team of 12 and growing, Lumi Interactive closed on $6.75 million in seed funding in March in a round led by a16z — which it’s officially announcing this week. Other investors include 1Up Ventures, Galileo Ventures, Eric Seufert’s Heracles Capital and Double Loop Games’ co-founder and CEO, Emily Greer.
The startup is using the funds to grow the team so it can further develop the larger concept it calls “crowd healing,” informed by Lumi Interactive’s full-time well-being researcher, Dr. Hannah Gunderman, Ph.D. The company believes the idea — which references sharing kindness with others through self-care style gameplay — could become a new gaming category.
Lumi Interactive, of course, is not the first to imagine games that aren’t goal-focused. There are games that are interactive stories or graphic novels or other indie projects, but they often still have the gamer play through the experience to come to a conclusion. Kinder World, meanwhile, would be something players come back to whenever they need to relax, which is why the company is considering a subscription offering, in addition to standard in-app purchases. It’s also exploring online-offline experiences with physical items that could unlock certain game benefits or activities. 
Kinder World is currently in alpha testing on iOS and Android and aims for a full release later in 2022.
Cozy houseplants and self-care: How one startup is reimagining mobile gameplay as a healing activity