Mawari Raises $10.8 Million To Tokenize Spatial Streaming, A Peek At Google’s AI Agent Jarvis
Among Tuesday night's biggest winners: American tech oligarchs. Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Peter Theil, Mark Zuckerberg, their Silicon Valley posse, corporations, and high net worth individuals, will continue to enjoy low taxes. Social media, AI and crypto will not be regulated. Indeed, Musk, whose company Space-X has multibillion dollar contracts with NASA, will get his investment back many times over.
Mawari Raises $10.8 Million To Launch Tokenized Spatial Streaming Network. Mawari's plan is to build a network of servers to enable real time spatial content at scale, without apps. The decentralized network will be tokenized to support the network of nodes through the globe. Anfield LTD, Borderless Capital, and 1kx led the round, with notable contributions from investors such as Animoca Brands, Blockchange Ventures, and Samsung Next.
Squido Raises $3M to expand Digigods XR Sandbox. Montreal-based Squido Studio has secured $3 million in funding to advance its social extended reality (XR) platform, DigiGods, a mixed-reality social sandbox that enables users to create virtual worlds and share them with others. Triptyq Capital led the investment round and included contributions from Grishin Robotics, FJ Labs, Hartmann Capital, Fairway Capital, Earthling VC, and the Canada Media Fund, which provided $1.1 million through its Innovation in Experimentation Program.
Google accidentally leaked a preview of its Jarvis AI and it's groundbreaking. Google's upcoming AI assistant, due next month, is codenamed "Project Jarvis." It was inadvertently made available on the Chrome Web Store, offering a glimpse into its capabilities. Designed to autonomously perform tasks such as online shopping, flight bookings, and research, leaked Jarvis lacked full functionality due to restricted permissions. Looks like Siri is going to finally have some real competition. Google promptly removed the listing.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced plans to legislate a ban on social media access for children under 16. The proposed legislation will require social media platforms to implement age verification measures, with companies facing significant fines for non-compliance. The government stresses that enforcement responsibility will rest with the platforms, not with users or their parents. This initiative positions Australia as a leader in online child safety, addressing growing concerns about the impact of social media on young people.
Disney Shuffles Tech Execs, Establishes AI Group. The new Office of Technology Enablement (OTE) is to oversee the integration of emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) and mixed reality, across its film, television, and theme park divisions. Jamie Voris, will step down as the studio's CTO to head the unit. Eddie Drake will take his place. The office will not centralize projects but will coordinate efforts to leverage AI and XR to enhance consumer experiences and creative processes. The OTE is expected to expand to approximately 100 employees.
Wonder Studio's New AI, Video-To-3D Animation, Puts The Power Of Pixar In Your Phone Autodesk's Wonder Dynamics, the AI-driven animation, CGI, and VFX tech company, launches a new AI animation tool, Wonder Animation, which will convert a 2D video scene into a 3D spatial environment, segmenting the characters and the background, making them instantly ready for import into game engines.
This column, formerly called "This Week in XR," is also a podcast hosted by the author of this column, Charlie Fink, Ted Schilowitz, former studio executive and co-founder of Red Camera, and Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap. This week our guest is Alex Masharov, founder of Higgsfield AI. We can be found on Spotify , iTunes , and YouTube .
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Hollywood is dead, according to Justine Bateman. Here's what comes
(Fast Company)
