The Daily Crunch 10/07/16

Facebook goes over-the-top on virtual social interaction, Google makes a devil's deal and Yahoo loses bargaining power. All that and more in The Daily Crunch for October 7, 2016. And if you enjoy this newsletter, just let me know by raising your left hand to your right ear and tugging twice – that'll produce a virtual smiley.

1. Zuckerberg's VR fever dream

Oculus is doing a lot when it comes to VR and social, which makes sense since it's owned by Facebook, and Facebook's entire purpose in acquiring the company is basically to expand time-on-site by putting the site right in front of our eyes as much as possible. The CEO showed off a new social VR experience populated by animated avatars, and it also "invented" social gestures for VR use. I guess our future is going to be one in which we use our hands to transmit instructions to our virtual cartoon faces about what expression to make, but that's not a future I'm personally interested in signing up for.

VR and AR will still have significant impact in tech, but this tentative first step into social expressed at Oculus Connect seems more like a sour note, than a new communicative cantata, at least as presented this week. Untethered VR is a good step for the medium in general, however, so I'm glad to see the Santa Cruz prototype push things forward in making VR more practical to use.

2. Google goofs on the Pixel update mechanism

The Pixel smartphones from Google are a terrific idea – Google should control hardware and software in tandem, and thus hopefully provide some real competition to Apple when it comes to premium mobile devices and a solid OS experience. Unfortunately, in pursuing greater reach via carriers, it's giving up control of the pace of Android OS updates on Verizon-sold Pixel devices, and allowing bloatware, both of which are pretty important pieces of the overall picture. Hopefully this just means more people will opt for Google's instalment payment pricing plan on unlocked units, hastening the increasing irrelevancy of carriers.

3. Verizon's looking for a Yahoo price break

Verizon (which owns TC through Aol) still looks like it wants to buy Yahoo, but it's now asking for a $1 billion discount from the original $4.8 billion on the table, which will I suppose help make up for the fact that Yahoo didn't disclose the largest registered user database breach on record prior to the two companies making an agreement. That might still look like a bargain to Yahoo's board and investors on the heels of fresh allegations that Yahoo created and previously ran a system to scan the email accounts of Yahoo users.

4. Self-driving startup Nauto gets some strong backing from BMW and Toyota

The game of self-driving thrones continues with more tie-ups between big car makers and small startups. Nauto is the latest young company to benefit, with investment from Toyota and BMW's innovation wings as part of the company's Series A round. The startup actually does more with monitoring what happened when accidents happen than with creating autonomous driving systems, but the data they can collect and the way they do it could be super useful for information useful for training systems to avoid accidents in the future.

5. Turning away from Twitter

The saga of Twitter's acquisition (if it ever gets to one) will be a tale for the ages. Right now, we're in a painful moment where it seems all hope is lost – will our heroes recover? Not sure Twitter is anyone's hero exactly but the metaphor mostly fits, after reports claim Apple, Google, Disney and Salesforce have all dropped out of the bidding for Twitter, which might leave only more unsavoury characters like asset management firms. That's a whole new kind of fail whale.

6. The future Nike foretold is here

Self-lacing shoes have always been a great idea, and have become a high-water mark of "the future" arriving since they appeared in Back to the Future 2. Now they've arrived, so we must be at the end of time. So long, and thanks for all the fish.