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Niantic tries its hand at sports with NBA All-World

TechCrunch

Whether because of pandemic fatigue or frustration over the limitations of today’s AR tech, the Google-spawned startup has struggled mightily to replicate the success of GO, which became one of the fastest-growing games in history shortly after it launched in July 2016. Why’d the studio choose this sport for its next AR venture?

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“Link-in-bio” company Linktree raises $45M Series B for its social commerce features

TechCrunch

Linktree’s latest funding will be used on tools that make social commerce easier. This is in partly because people have been spending more time on social media and e-commerce shopping during the pandemic. Linktree raises $10.7M for its lightweight, link-centric user profiles.

Social 265
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OpenSponsorship lands new capital to bring brands, athletes together

TechCrunch

Ishveen Anand grew up in England playing sports all of her life, including during her time at Oxford. However, what she found was that the process was inefficient — the sports world was slow-moving in terms of brands getting contracts with athletes. million from investors that included 500 Startups after being in their program in 2016.

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SAP poaches Microsoft exec as its new global head of AI

CIO

As part of Microsoft’s development team, Sun created Bing Predicts, the inference engine that provides the “favored to win” forecasts beneath search results for sporting fixtures and attempted to predict the 2016 US presidential election winner. Spoiler alert: it failed.)

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YC and a16z back virtual reality basketball app Gym Class

TechCrunch

spending billions of dollars on virtual reality tech every fiscal quarter, the wider VR startup ecosystem has been having a tough few years coming down from the highs of 2016, when investors dumped money into the sector expecting Oculus-sized returns only to see most of their investments slowly wilt away. Despite Zuckerberg & Co.

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Meet the 5 judges who will pick the 2021 winner of TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield

TechCrunch

During his time at CBSi, Lanzone led the creation, launch and growth of streaming services CBS All Access, CBSN and CBS Sports HQ. Sarah Tavel is a general partner at Benchmark, where she invests in network effect businesses with a focus on marketplaces and social, as well as cryptocurrency.

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Gaming is Eating Media… and Pokemon is Just the Start

Battery Ventures

Gaming has become so popular that more people are now watching professional gaming teams—part of the larger trends of e-sports–than some major, traditional sporting events. sports markets, Boston and Los Angeles. million people watched the e-sports League of Legends Championship Tournament. Meanwhile, 78.5

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