MomentFeed Introduces Visibility Manager To Boost Brands’ Local Visibility

MomentFeed has released Visibility Manager, a solution designed to ensure multi-location brands appear as the first and most obvious choice for nearby consumers.

By improving the precision, consistency, quality and distribution of each store’s business information, Visibility Manager is designed to make a brand’s nearest location a nearby consumer’s first choice on any mobile device. These results can drive more online-to-offline actions, foot traffic and higher sales.

With Visibility Manager, marketing teams gain insights into the health of each store’s digital presence across more than 310 network directories, maps, navigation systems, social media sites and web services. This solution empowers centralized marketing teams by maximizing a brand’s mobile visibility and increasing awareness to each of their locations.

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Seismic Games Bring Marvel Superheroes And Blockbuster Movies To New Next-Level Mobile RPG And VR

The people who helped bring you Star Wars: Battlefront and several entries in the Call of Dutyseries are making waves again. This year, Seismic Games will release the innovative mobile role playing game Marvel Strike Force and the immersive virtual reality game Blade Runner: Revelations, tied to the recent film sequel Blade Runner 2049 starring Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford. As gaming increasingly leans toward major IP including big box office brands, the potential for VR, AR, and other innovative technologies to change how we experience entertainment -- including cinema -- grows.

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Occipital closes $12M more as it strives to build a ‘perception engine’

Sensors are growing more and more sophisticated as we build machines that can interpret the world with more precision than we can.

Occipital is aiming to do this as effectively and cheaply as possible as it morphs its 3D scanning technology into a product that can do much, much more. The company has closed $12 million of what it plans to be a $15 million Series C. The round is being led by the Foundry Group. The company has raised about $33 million to date.

With this round, Occipital is looking to expand its tracking platform into what it calls its “Perception Engine,” which will require it making some deeper moves into machine learning, pushing into technologies that reside outside of simply defining the geometry of a space. The startup wants its tracking tech to recognize people and identify objects.

SF-based Occipital has moved around a little bit within the tracking space as it’s sought to find a worthwhile niche. The company’s $379 Structure sensor allows users to 3D scan their environment and objects using the high-frame-rate depth camera that attaches to the back of an iOS device. Occipital’s Canvas software solution allows customers to use the camera to develop more refined CAD models. The company later introduced a mixed reality dev kit that brought positional tracking to the iPhone.

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Workers Get Faster Access to Wages With These New Apps

For more workers across America, every day is payday.

Uber Technologies Inc., McDonald’s Corp. and Bloomin’ Brands Inc.’s Outback Steakhouse are among a growing group of employers giving workers near-instant access to their wages through payday apps.

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One of VR's most annoying problems could be solved soon

Trying to navigate a room while wearing a VR headset? A company named Occipital has a self-contained solution to that problem.

When wandering around with a VR headset on, I'm afraid of going too far without someone to spot me. The reason is simple: I can't really see where I'm going. Odds of tripping over a chair or a table are extremely high.

One company seems to have tried to solve that problem, and I tried out the result deep in the noisy VR/AR subsection of CES in Las Vegas.

Occipital, a company based in Boulder, Colorado, focuses on 3D scanning hardware and depth-sensing cameras: One of its Structure camera sensor arrays works with both an iPhone mixed-reality headset and an upcoming home robot. Occipital's team put an HTC Vive VR headset on me, outfitted with an in-development feature that let me see the room even with my headset on. The technology is called Occipital Tracking. Its aim is to replace external room-sensing hardware completely, like the Oculus Rift'scumbersome stands or the Vive's light-emitting Lighthouse system, in favor of all in-headset tech.

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