Month: January 2019

Enlarge / Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com Inc. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

Jeff Bezos and fellow billionaire CEOs Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon teamed up last year to form a healthcare company they hoped would shake up the country’s pricey and bloated health industry. But, gripped by a new lawsuit, the still-unnamed fledgling venture may be heading for a shakeup of its own.

A UnitedHealth Group subsidiary called Optum filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts District Court in Boston last week, alleging that its former executive, David Smith, has breached his noncompete agreement and is divulging invaluable trade secrets to the Bezos, Buffett, and Dimon startup. Last month, Smith accepted a high-level position at the startup, which Optum calls “ABC” in the lawsuit (a nickname that refers to the three founders’ companies, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase, respectively).

Optum’s complaint (PDF) does not list ABC as a defendant (only Smith), but it takes a few swipes at the company. Specifically, it accuses ABC of trying to steal its thunder as a technology- and analytics-driven venture that works to improve healthcare quality and efficiency while reducing costs.

Enlarge (credit: GameDev.World)

In recent years, more stories have bubbled up around tech conferences whose developers have faced a specific kind of hardship: visa troubles and other international-law woes. Thursday's announcement of GameDev.World, a virtual conference scheduled for June 21-23, 2019, revolves largely around finding an answer to this and other accessibility issues for game makers around the world.

Vlambeer co-founder and development toolkit creator Rami Ismail confirmed that GD.W, a live-streamed video event full of live-translated speeches and Q&As, picked up significant steam after he struggled to organize a single conference panel last year. It wasn't because his Game Developers Conference panel members canceled or flaked. It's because five of his hopeful attendees had their visas to visit the United States canceled with barely a month's notice—in one case, a week's notice.

Ismail's Thursday announcement included confirmation that this moment crystallized an effort he'd begun years earlier. Having attended conferences around the world since launching popular games like Nuclear Throne and Ridiculous Fishing, Ismail said he saw missing voices at major gaming events due to visas, travel costs, or in some cases, foreign speakers not being as welcome due to thickly accented English. "The language of games is supposed to be universal, but for most people around the world, the world itself is not accessible," Ismail said at the aforementioned 2018 GDC panel.

Enlarge / The Rocket Report is published weekly. (credit: Arianespace)

Welcome to Edition 1.34 of the Rocket Report! It's a sad week for new space, as just three months after the passing of Paul Allen—who shared the vision of low-cost access to space—Stratolaunch has abandoned its plans to build a line of rockets for its large aircraft. In somewhat happier news, both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin appear to be getting closer to commercial space tourism.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Stratolaunch abandons rocket development. After it had already completed successful tests of pre-burner, Stratolaunch will discontinue its programs to develop a new type of rocket engine and a new line of rockets, Geek Wire reports. "Stratolaunch is ending the development of [its] family of launch vehicles and rocket engine. We are streamlining operations [and] focusing on the aircraft and our ability to support a demonstration launch of the Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL air-launch vehicle," the company said.