Skip to main content
https://www.highperformancecpmgate.com/rgeesizw1?key=a9d7b2ab045c91688419e8e18a006621

Extra Crunch Live: Join Playground Global co-founder Peter Barrett for a live Q&A today at 11AM PT

Playground Global has an eye on the future. A quick glance at the investment firm’s portfolio showcases a wide-ranging list of investments, covering robotics, autonomous driving, neural network, quantum computing, metallic 3D printing and gene therapy.

Playground GlobalCEO Barrett will join us on Extra Crunch Live to chat about these categories and more at 2 p.m. EDT/11 a.m. PDT/6 p.m. GMT. Login details are below the fold for EC members. He’ll join us to discuss these concepts and answer questions from the Extra Crunch audience. If you’d like to join in on the action, you can sign up here and check out best EC Live interviews, including Inspired Capital’s Alexa von Tobel and Emergence Capital’s Jason Green.

Prior to cofounding Playground, Barrett has had a long and distinguished career, dating back to an interest in security in his late teenage years. Beyond Playground, he’s probably best known as the founder of Rocket Science Games and his time serving as the CTO of Microsoft’s IPTV unit.

I’ve interviewed Barrett a number of times over the years, and he always brings thoughtful insight into future technologies. Barrett was one of our guests at last year’s event in Shenzhen, which seems like a lifetime ago now. Given how profoundly the state of the world has shifted in 2020, it’s certainly worth revisiting some of these ideas — in particular, automation and robotics, which have both been near and dear to Barrett’s heart and investment portfolio.

He’ll join us to discuss these concepts and answer questions from the Extra Crunch audience.

Side note: You can check out the full Extra Crunch Live agenda here.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Uber co-founder Garrett Camp steps back from board director role

Uber co-founder Garrett Camp is relinquishing his role as a board director and switching to board observer — where he says he’ll focus on product strategy for the ride hailing giant. Camp made the announcement in a short Medium post in which he writes of his decade at Uber: “I’ve learned a lot, and realized that I’m most helpful when focused on product strategy & design, and this is where I’d like to focus going forward.” “I will continue to work with Dara [Khosrowshahi, Uber CEO] and the product and technology leadership teams to brainstorm new ideas, iterate on plans and designs, and continue to innovate at scale,” he adds. “We have a strong and diverse team in place, and I’m confident everyone will navigate well during these turbulent times.” The Canadian billionaire entrepreneur signs off by saying he’s looking forward to helping Uber “brainstorm the next big idea”. Camp hasn’t been short of ideas over his career in tech. He’s the co-founder of the web 2.0 recommendatio

Drone crash near kids leads Swiss Post and Matternet to suspend autonomous deliveries

A serious crash by a delivery drone in Switzerland have grounded the fleet and put a partnership on ice. Within a stone’s throw of a school, the incident raised grim possibilities for the possibilities of catastrophic failure of payload-bearing autonomous aerial vehicles. The drones were operated by Matternet as part of a partnership with the Swiss Post (i.e. the postal service), which was using the craft to dispatch lab samples from one medical center for priority cases. As far as potential applications of drone delivery, it’s a home run — but twice now the craft have crashed, first with a soft landing and the second time a very hard one. The first incident, in January, was the result of a GPS hardware error; the drone entered a planned failback state and deployed its emergency parachute, falling slowly to the ground. Measures were taken to improve the GPS systems. The second failure in May, however, led to the drone attempting to deploy its parachute again, only to sever the line

ProtonMail logged IP address of French activist after order by Swiss authorities

ProtonMail , a hosted email service with a focus on end-to-end encrypted communications, has been facing criticism after a police report showed that French authorities managed to obtain the IP address of a French activist who was using the online service. The company has communicated widely about the incident, stating that it doesn’t log IP addresses by default and it only complies with local regulation — in that case Swiss law. While ProtonMail didn’t cooperate with French authorities, French police sent a request to Swiss police via Europol to force the company to obtain the IP address of one of its users. For the past year, a group of people have taken over a handful of commercial premises and apartments near Place Sainte Marthe in Paris. They want to fight against gentrification, real estate speculation, Airbnb and high-end restaurants. While it started as a local conflict, it quickly became a symbolic campaign. They attracted newspaper headlines when they started occupying prem