Author: Eric Cohen-Peckham

Interview with Lightspeed’s Jeremy Liew about always-on media startups

I spoke with Jeremy Liew, general partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners and the first investor in Snapchat, about his interest in media startups whose content runs in the background while we do other primary tasks. Read our transcript on TechCrunch >>

Lightspeed’s Jeremy Liew is on the hunt for always-on media startups

How Unity built the world’s most popular game engine

I’m excited to share my in-depth profile on the founding and rise of Unity Technologies, the most used game engine in the world and a multi-billion dollar startup poised to IPO in 2020.

I interviewed two dozen Unity executives in San Francisco and Copenhagen for this and other research into the gaming industry, including hours of discussion with two of Unity’s co-founders (David Helgason and Joachim Ante) and current CEO John Riccitiello.

Read it on TechCrunch >>

How Unity built the world’s most popular game engine

Kobalt Music, Part 2: Music’s broken system of copyright and royalty management

Part 2 of my series on Kobalt Music and the state of the music industry breaks down the complex structure of copyright tracking and royalty payments in music and how Kobalt has pushed the industry forward through centralization and transparency. Read it on TechCrunch >>

How Kobalt is simplifying the killer complexities of the music industry

Kobalt Music, Part 1: The Rise of Kobalt

Similar to my past series on Patreon and the efforts of independent content creators to monetize their core fans, I’m writing a series of posts on the music company Kobalt and the state of the music industry. The first post explores the founding of (London-based) Kobalt and its overall structure. Read it on TechCrunch >>

How a Swedish saxophonist built Kobalt, the world’s next music unicorn

My interview with Laura Martin of Needham & Company

I saw leading Wall St media analyst Laura Martin of Needham & Company debate the future of Netflix on stage at the Banff World Media Conference in June and caught up with her after to expand on her assessment of the streaming giant and the streaming video landscape more broadly. Check out the transcript of our conversation on TechCrunch >>

Wall St analyst Laura Martin on the fate of Netflix, breaking up Google, EU regulation, and a decade of more money for Hollywood

A guide to Virtual Beings

Last week in San Francisco, I spoke at the first Virtual Beings Summit (organized by Fable Studio CEO Edward Saatchi).

The term “virtual beings” gets used as a catch-all categorization of fictional personalities that humans can interact with. This ranges from activities like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft pouring resources into conversational AI technology to chip-maker Nvidia and game engines Unreal and Unity advancing real-time ray tracing for photorealistic graphics to VCs backng “virtual influencer” startups like Brud and Shadows.

There are really three separate fields getting conflated though:

  1. Virtual Companions
  2. Humanoid Character Creation
  3. Virtual Influencers

These can overlap — there are humanoid virtual influencers for example — but they represent separate challenges, separate business opportunities, and separate societal concerns. I’ve outlined an overview of at these fields and how they collectively comprise this concept of virtual beings… Read my article on TechCrunch >>

A guide to Virtual Beings and how they impact our world