The 11th Hour Dispatch — Tuesday, October 9, 2018
BINGE WATCH
TNT has ordered 10 episodes of a live medical series tentatively titled M.D. Live. The series is reportedly the first live non-fiction series focused on medical crowdsourcing. The multi-platform series will feature a recurring panel of physicians that will discuss potential diagnoses for patients battling a variety of “undiagnosed, misdiagnosed, or uncured” diseases and ailments. The show will also feature breaking alerts and live remotes from around the world. If we’ve learned ANYTHING from Dr. Pimple Popper, it’s that people love weird human body stuff, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see something like this find a cult following.
YOUNG MONEY
The founders of Wunderlist have picked up $19 million for their presentation startup Pitch. CEO and co-founder Christian Reber refers to it as “a presentation tool for the Slack generation,” and its slated to make its debut in the summer of next year. Interesting choice of words since part of that $19 million comes from the Slack Fund, the VC arm of workplace messaging platform Slack. Other investors include Index Ventures, BlueYard, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, Framer CEO Koen Bok, Elastic co-founder Simon Willnauer, Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel, Wunderlist backer Frank Thelen, and Metalab founder Andrew Wilkinson. BlueYard previously led Pitch’s seed funding round. The early-stage company has now raised $22 million to date. The highly funded but yet-to-be actualized product will “integrate with everything you already use” and enable presentations to act as “living documents” that can be shared with others, whether that be individually for collaboration purposes or published on the Pitch platform for the wider audience to view.
BIG BUSINESS
Facebook has finally released that smart speaker its been promising, and it features an AI-enabled camera. The device, which is named Portal, will cost you $200 and does pretty much what every other smart speaker on the market does. However, its being marketed primarily as a video conferencing device for groups of people since it has a camera and microphone built in. As you might imagine, consumers don’t seem too stoked about having a camera from Facebook in their homes. It claims the device only turns on when a user says “Hey Portal,” but that’s coming from the company that has more or less become synonymous with data misuse. Personally, I’m siding with the 95% of respondents to a Vox Twitter poll that said they would not trust the speaker in their home, but if you want Zuckerberg to have a literal Portal to your bedroom, more power to you.
NOTHIN’ BUT ‘NET
A Banksy painting self-destructed after it auctioned for $1.4 million. Savage. (JK it’s probably worth more now than it was in perfect condition.)
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