Technology

&The Mandalorian& was a pretty good show. On that most people seem to agree. But while a successful live-action Star Wars TV series is important in its own right, the way this particular show was made represents a far greater change, perhaps the most important since the green screen. The cutting edge tech (literally) behind &The Mandalorian& creates a new standard and paradigm for media — and the audience will be none the wiser.

What is this magical new technology? Itan evolution of a technique thatbeen in use for nearly a century in one form or another: displaying a live image behind the actors. The advance is not in the idea but the execution: a confluence of technologies that redefines &virtual production& and will empower a new generation of creators.

As detailed in an extensive report in American Cinematographer Magazine (I&ve been chasing this story for some time, but suspected this venerable trade publication would get the drop on me), the production process of &The Mandalorian& is completely unlike any before, and ithard to imagine any major film production not using the technology going forward.

&So what the hell is it?& I hear you asking.

Meet &the Volume.&

Formally called Stagecraft, it20 feet tall, 270 degrees around, and 75 feet across — the largest and most sophisticated virtual filmmaking environment yet made. ILM just today publicly released a behind-the-scenes video of the system in use, as well as a number of new details about it.

Itnot easy being green

In filmmaking terms, a &volume& generally refers to a space where motion capture and compositing take place. Some volumes are big and built into sets, as you might have seen in behind-the-scenes footage of Marvel or Star Wars movies. Some are smaller, plainer affairs, where the motions of the actors behind CG characters play out their roles.

But they generally have one thing in common: They&re static. Giant, bright green, blank expanses.

Does that look like fun to shoot in?

One of the most difficult things for an actor in modern filmmaking is getting into character while surrounded by green walls, foam blocks indicating obstacles to be painted in later and people with mocap dots on their face and suits with ping-pong balls attached. Not to mention everything has green reflections that need to be lit or colored out.

Advances some time ago (think prequels-era Star Wars) enabled cameras to display a rough pre-visualization of what the final film would look like, instantly substituting CG backgrounds and characters onto monitors. Sure, that helps with composition and camera movement, but the world of the film isn&t there, the way it is with practical sets and on-site shoots.

Practical effects were a deliberate choice for &The Child& (AKA Baby Yoda) as well.

Whatmore, because of the limitations in rendering CG content, the movements of the camera are often restricted to a dolly track or a few pre-selected shots for which the content (and lighting, as we&ll see) has been prepared.

This particular volume, called Stagecraft by ILM, the company that put it together, is not static. The background is a set of enormous LED screens such as you might have seen onstage at conferences and concerts. The Stagecraft volume is bigger than any of those — but more importantly, itsmarter.

See, itnot enough to just show an image behind the actors. Filmmakers have been doing that with projected backgrounds since the silent era! And thatfine if you just want to have a fake view out of a studio window or fake a location behind a static shot. The problem arises when you want to do anything more fancy than that, like move the camera. Because when the camera moves, it immediately becomes clear that the background is a flat image.

The innovation in Stagecraft and other, smaller LED walls (the more general term for these backgrounds) is not only that the image shown is generated live in photorealistic 3D by powerful GPUs, but that 3D scene is directly affected by the movements and settings of the camera. If the camera moves to the right, the image alters just as if it were a real scene.

This is remarkably hard to achieve. In order for it to work, the camera must send its real-time position and orientation to, essentially, a beast of a gaming PC, because this and other setups like it generally run on the Unreal engine (Epic does its own breakdown of the process here). This must take that movement and render it exactly in the 3D environment, with attendant changes to perspective, lighting, distortion, depth of field and so on — all fast enough so that those changes can be shown on the giant wall nearly instantly. After all, if the movement of the background lagged the camera by more than a handful frames it would be noticeable to even the most naive viewer.

Yet fully half of the scenes in &The Mandalorian& were shot within Stagecraft, and my guess is no one had any idea. Interior, exterior, alien worlds or spaceship cockpits, all used this giant volume for one purpose or another.

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There are innumerable technological advances that have contributed to this; &The Mandalorian& could not have been made as it was five years ago. The walls weren&t ready; the rendering tech wasn&t ready; the tracking wasn&t ready — nothing was ready. But itready now.

It must be mentioned that Jon Favreau has been a driving force behind this filmmaking method for years now; films like the remake of &The Lion King& were in some ways tech tryouts for &The Mandalorian.& Combined with advances made by James Cameron in virtual filmmaking, and, of course, the indefatigable Andy Serkiswork in motion capture, this kind of production is only just now becoming realistic due to a confluence of circumstances.

Not just for SFX

Of course Stagecraft is probably also the most expensive and complex production environments ever used. But what it adds in technological overhead (and therea lot) it more than pays back in all kinds of benefits.

For one thing, it nearly eliminates on-location shooting, which is phenomenally expensive and time-consuming. Instead of going to Tunisia to get those wide-open desert shots, you can build a sandy set and put a photorealistic desert behind the actors. You can even combine these ideas for the best of both worlds: Send a team to scout locations in Tunisia and capture them in high-definition 3D to be used as a virtual background.

This last option produces an amazing secondary benefit: Reshoots are way easier. If you filmed at a bar in Santa Monica and changes to the dialogue mean you have to shoot the scene over again, no need to wrangle permits and painstakingly light the bar again. Instead, the first time you&re there, you carefully capture the whole scene with the exact lighting and props you had there the first time and use that as a virtual background for the reshoots.

The fact that many effects and backgrounds can be rendered ahead of time and shot in-camera rather than composited in later saves a lot of time and money. It also streamlines the creative process, with decisions able to be made on the spot by the filmmakers and actors, since the volume is reactive to their needs, not vice versa.

Lighting is another thing that is vastly simplified, in some ways at least, by something like Stagecraft. The bright LED wall can provide a ton of illumination, and because it actually represents the scene, that illumination is accurate to the needs of that scene. A red-lit interior of a space station, and the usual falling sparks and so on, shows red on the faces and of course the highly reflective helmet of the Mandalorian himself. Yet the team can also tweak it, for instance sticking a bright white line high on the LED wall out of sight of the camera but which creates a pleasing highlight on the helmet.

Naturally there are some trade-offs. At 20 feet tall, the volume is large but not so large that wide shots won&t capture the top of it, above which you&d see cameras and a different type of LED (the ceiling is also a display, though not as powerful). This necessitates some rotoscoping and post-production, or limits the angles and lenses one can shoot with — but thattrue of any soundstage or volume.

A shot like this would need a little massaging in post, obviously.

The size of the LEDs, that is of the pixels themselves, also limits how close the camera can get to them, and of course you can&t zoom in on an object for closer inspection. If you&re not careful, you&ll end up with Moiré patterns, those stripes you often see on images of screens.

Stagecraft is not the first application of LED walls — they&ve been used for years at smaller scales — but it is certainly by far the most high-profile, and &The Mandalorian& is the first real demonstration of whatpossible using this technology. And believe me, itnot a one-off.

I&ve been told that nearly every production house is building or experimenting with LED walls of various sizes and types — the benefits are that obvious. TV productions can save money but look just as good. Movies can be shot on more flexible schedules. Actors who hate working in front of green screens may find this more palatable. And you better believe commercials are going to find a way to use these as well.

In short, a few years from now itgoing to be uncommon to find a production that doesn&t use an LED wall in some form or another. This is the new standard.

This is only a general overview of the technology that ILM, Disney and their many partners and suppliers are working on. In a follow-up article I&ll be sharing more detailed technical information directly from the production team and technologists who created Stagecraft and its attendant systems.

A bold mission by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to Mars& two moons, including a lander component for one of them, is all set to enter the development phase after the plan was submitted to the Japanese governmentscience ministry this week.

Dubbed the &Martian Moons Exploration& (MMX) mission, the goal is to launch the probe in 2024, using the new H-3 rocket being developed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which is expected to launch for the first time sometime later in 2020. The probe will survey and observe both Phobos and Deimos, the two moons that orbit the Red Planet, which are both smaller and more irregularly shaped than EarthMoon.

The MMX lander will park on Phobos, while the probe studies the two space-based bodies from a distance. This is the first-ever mission that seeks to land a spacecraft on one of the moons of Mars, and it&ll include a rover that is being developed by JAXA in partnership with teams at German space agency DLR and French space agency CNES.

The mission will include an ambitious plan to actually collect a sample of the surface of Phobos and return it to Earth for study — which will mean a round-trip for the MMX spacecraft that should see it make its terrestrial return by 2029.

NASA is also planning a Mars-sample return mission, which would aim to bring back a sample from the Red Planet itself using the Mars 2020 six-wheel rover that itplanning to launch later this year.

Both of these missions could be crucial stepping stones for eventual human exploration and colonization of Mars. Itpossible that Phobos could act as an eventual staging ground for Mars missions, as its lower gravity makes it an easier body from which to depart for eventual astronauts. And Mars is obviously the ultimate goal for NASAArtemis program, which seeks to first establish a more permanent human scientific presence on the Moon before heading to the Red Planet.

If you&ve been following cryptocurrency news for the past few months, thereone word that keeps coming back — DeFi, also known as decentralized finance. As the name suggests, DeFi aims to bridge the gap between decentralized blockchains and financial services.

The original purpose of bitcoin hasn&t changed; ita crypto asset that lets users transfer money digitally without any bank in the middle. During the early days of bitcoin, people claimed that the blockchain could replace banks altogether.

But retail banks provide a ton of services beyond payments. If you have a bank account, itunlikely that you only use it to store, receive and send money. You may have a credit card, a savings account, a loan, some shares, etc.

Thatwhy developers have been looking at ways to port financial services to blockchains that support smart contracts. Some blockchains, such as Ethereum, EOS or Tezos, let you add a script to a transaction. The script is executed when some conditions are met.

And this is a key element of DeFi — the financial product shouldn&t be managed by a central server. Everything happens on the blockchain. If you want to read the fine print of your financial product, you can look at the code on the blockchain directly.

Like most investors, I am a little too obsessed with unicorns.

But not just the Silicon Valley kind. As the mother of a five-year-old daughter, my interests also veer in a pink, sparkly direction. So it should not be all that surprising that I recently found myself in a dusty corner of the internet where die-hard unicorn fans go to spread their wings.

It was there, deep in the My Little Pony forums, that one question stopped me in my tracks: &is a male alicorn possible in the future?¹&

An alicorn, for those uninitiated to the mythological particulars, is the rare winged, female version of a traditional unicorn.

My Little Pony popularized the term, and the fan forum on which user &Green Precision& asked his question back in 2015 had some interesting answers to the particulars of this philosophical dilemma.

Shadow Stallion responded immediately, &I don&t think a male Alicorn will be possible in the future. Not because its [sic] not wanted or because its [sic] not genetically possible…but generally when male characters are introduced to a show where female characters are prominent, things get ugly.&

Malinter posited, &they probably do but given the female-to-male ratio of Equestria² they are probably exceptionally rare. The real problem for a male alicorn is not that they exist but where is their place in the world? …Our male alicorn has some pretty big hoof prints to fill in while at the same time not make a trainwreck of established lore.&

Wind Chaser went straight from unconscious bias to conscious bias in their response: &aesthetically a male alicorn just wouldn&t look right, because their bodies are already naturally larger than females, thus the wings would cause an imbalance to the design.&

But it wasn&t all bad news.

&Until itproven otherwise, itsafe to say that something like a male alicorn is possible,& responded Geek0zoid. Crysahis agreed. &Overall yes, I believe there could be a male alicorn it may just take a while to actually happen!&

It doesn&t take a PhD in philosophy from Stanford or the one lone female investing partner at Sequoia³ to posit that these same conversations were probably happening all over Sandhill Road in December of 2009, as male VCs discussed whether female unicorns could actually happen⁴.

As we move into 2020, though, we&re about to see a pink, winged stampede.

Just look at the recent trends. In 2019, more female-funded unicorns were born than ever before.⁵And things are only looking up. (I&m looking at you, ClassPass!)

Public opinion agrees. Alongside TruePublic, where I am an advisor and angel investor, I ran a study asking if people believed we would see more female-led unicorns in the 2020s.⁶ At the time of this article, 68% of the 6,500 respondents said they believed we would see more, with 30% of women responding &many more& (as opposed to only 16% of men). Only 4% of women, but 9% of men, responded &no, not a chance.&⁷

Kaben Clauson, founder and CEO, says &to represent Gen Z, Millennials and Gen X, TruePublic needs a weighted sample of roughly one thousand Americans to represent that population of the USA.& This particular study already has 6,500 respondents, making it statistically significant.

In fact, female-founded and female co-founded companies are actually over-indexing for unicorn status despite a lack of investment dollars.

Shelby Porges, co-founder of The Billion Dollar Fund for Women, explains: &Recent tracking has shown that female-founded companies represent 4% of all unicorns. Thatastonishing considering that in the past couple of years, they have gotten only slightly more than 2% of all venture funding.& Porges, whose group has mobilized more than 80 venture funds to pledge to invest over a billion dollars into women-founded companies, continues, &It demonstrates why we say, ‘when you invest in women, you&re in good company.& &

Here are the three reasons I believe a herd of winged female unicorns (OK, alicorns) is coming down the pipeline in the 2020s:

1. Women invest in women at 3x the rate of men

New data reveals that women invest in women at nearly three times the rate that men do and with the (slow) rise in the number of female investing partners at VCV firms, we are poised to see more and more gender-balanced founding teams getting funding.⁸ Like one male GP at one of the worldtop VC funds said to me when discussing one of the few female partners at his firm, &she always brings us parenting companies.& It might be cringe-worthy if TechCrunch hadn&t declared 2020 &a big year for online childcare& and that same female partner weren&t about to make a big chunk of cash thanks to all the upcoming parenting alicorns she was smartly funding.

Sophia Bendz, a partner at Atomico who also leads the Atomico Angel Program, said, &I&m confident we&ll see more female unicorns in the next decade because therea growing wave of ambitious female founders building incredible products and services. There are also more women in VC now and I&ve seen first-hand the impact having female investment partners can have on increasing the amount of investment into female-led companies. The data shows that women invest in women at three times the rate as male investment partners.&

My study at TruePublic coincided with these findings. When asked if a female investor was more likely to invest in a female entrepreneur, 64% of people responded affirmatively (64% of these individuals were women and 63% were men).⁹

Jomayra Herrera agrees. An investor at Cowboy Ventures (which thanks to Aileen Lee coined the term &unicorn& in the first place), and a volunteer with AllRaise, a nonprofit promoting women in VC, she says: &As the venture industry continues to diversify, especially as it relates to gender and race/ethnicity, I am optimistic that we will see more female-led and people of color-led unicorns over the next decade. We know that diverse teams not only function better, but they are able to see areas of opportunities that more homogenous teams might miss. I think the next generation of investors are more likely to question conventional wisdom, forms of pattern recognition that may lead to bias, and other structural barriers that have historically left out promising entrepreneurs.&

Camila Farani is a well-known investor in Brazil. As founder of G2 Capital, former president of Gavea Angels and a personality on Brazil&Shark Tank,& she says &having diverse points of view at the table makes the decision clearer and more certain. People who think differently than you and have other visions of the market, sometimes can show you what you can&t see by yourself.&

She also reminds us not to forget the impact that angel investors can have. &The investments market is still made up mostly of men, but this landscape is changing gradually. It is interesting to see that angel investing is being the most common choice for women who want to make their first investments.&

This trend of investing more in women isn&t just limited to female investors. Susana Robles has spent two decades leading the charge to invest in women in Latin America and alongside Marta Cruz of NXTP Labs is co-founder of WeXchange, a platform that connects women entrepreneurs from Latin America and the Caribbean with mentors and investors.

As Robles says, &I think the world is finally waking up to the fact that there is serious research proving that startups with women co-founders win in all aspects: profitability, as well as greater social and environmental awareness. Investors should want to have this triple win.& She continues, &women tend to return money to investors faster than men, and at the same time, they obtain higher returns. Women are in charge of 64% of all global purchasing decisions on products and services, so having women on C-level positions increases the chance that a startup [will] be highly attractive to a massive market and become a unicorn.&

It also extends to the LPs in the funds. &I also think many investors in funds (mostly DFIs [development finance institutions] but not exclusively) have become more vocal in stating that they don&t want any more to invest in teams led by an all-white, all-male cast who choose startups with all-white, all-male founders.& Jennifer Neundorfer is the co-founder of Jane VC and an investor in Kinside, a parenting app that just raised a $3 million seed round. When describing her fundrationale for focusing on female founders, she drops the mic: &we&re going to invest in an under-looked asset class that is overperforming.& Boom.

2. Female founders are creating new billion-dollar markets

Another reason we&ll see more female-founded &alicorns& in the 2020s has everything to do with the new markets that female founders are creating. Hunter Walk of Homebrew was one of the initial seed investors in Winnie, an online marketplace for childcare that recently raised a $9 million Series A. At the time, he saw something that others investors didn&t. Winnie co-founder Sara Mauskopf explains, &Four years ago when we started Winnie, parenting and especially child care were not hot investment areas. This has been changing. It certainly helps that more investors are women and are in the thick of their child-bearing and rearing years.&

Part of what Walk says he recognized was the clear founder-market fit displayed by Mauskopf and her co-founder Annie Halsall. As Mauskopf says, &With Winnie, we saw an opportunity to solve the child-care crisis that other founders either did not recognize or did not care to solve. While everyone else was starting crypto and scooter companies, we were building the first-ever tech platform for $57 billion child care industry. Lack of access to quality child care disproportionately impacts women, so it shouldn&t be surprising that it took a female led team to capitalize on this opportunity.& Expanding on the concept of founder-market fit, Walk says, &I love to come away thinking, these are the absolute right founders to build this business.&¹⁰

Bendz, the Atomico partner who specializes in femtech and is also an avid angel investor, agrees. &Often I meet founders that you can tell are at the right place at the right time with the right mindset and the right team. Italmost like all of the experiences they have had prior to launching a company have been preparing them to create that business at that time. These are the kind of founders who I know are in it for the long haul, and who are going to weather the ups and downs.& As a woman who uses the products and services she invests in, Bendz is also an example of investor-market fit, which I believe will open new markets in the decades to come.

Something else investors like Walk and Bendz believe in? Outsized opportunities. And the potential for outsized opportunities are especially ripe in untapped markets. The rise of femtech is yet another example of how the intuitive success of the concept of founder-market fit ultimately needed more female founders for certain markets to blossom. As Bendz explains, &Throughout a womanlife there are many big events that have a big impact on our overall health — from childbirth to menopause. I know all women are tired of poor or non-existent solutions for women surrounding those life events, and thatwhy we are seeing so many companies launching to better serve womenneeds. When you think about the fact that women have only had the right to vote and educate themselves for 100 years, itmind-blowing how long the world was operating with only 50% of the population in control. Thatreflected in the products and services we as a society have funded.&

Womenconsumer products are another area. Ornella Moraes is one of four female co-founders of Brazilian-led Sousmile, which recently raised a $6 million USD Series A led by Kaszek Ventures. &Our brand is a woman,& Moraes says of her dental beauty startup that retails throughout São Paulo. And so are the leaders of the company. At Sousmile, there are four female co-founders and two male co-founders. &More dentists in the world are women than men, so itbeen critical for our team to have more female founders,& she says. In this way, the rise of female founders and co-founders can completely change markets. &We believe this will fundamentally create a different type of product,& says Walk.

3. Emerging markets will take the lead

Finally, certain emerging markets pose a particular opportunity for female founders by over-indexing for both large IPOs and female founders. 2017 was the first year that more of the largest IPOs in the internet sector globally came from emerging markets. Nazar Yasin, founder of Rise Capital, which invests in emerging markets, says &This trend isn&t going away.& After all, most GDP growth comes from emerging markets, where most global internet users live. As he explains, &the future of market capitalization growth in the internet sector globally belongs to emerging markets.& And yet this type of innovation takes resilience. &If you&re a startup in one of these markets, itlike trying to grow a plant in the desert.&¹¹ In an environment that demands more daily resilience, there is a different appetite for risk and innovation. (I call this resilience innovation.)

Perhaps the easiest example of emerging market innovation fueled by resilience is fintech. Emerging markets and their often unstable economies boast a much higher number of frustratingly unbanked individuals. This brings about innovation. Hanna Schiuma, the Brazilian-born fintech founder of ElasBank, where I am an angel investor and advisor, explains how ubiquitous such fintech innovation is becoming.

&Soon all finance will be tailor-made and fintech will be common ground because all financial services will be technology-intensive.& She also argues that the nature of such an innovation allows the industry to become more innovative, and thus inclusive, which is exactly what is happening with her own womenbank, launching in 2020. &That means great opportunities to better serve womenfinancial needs to offer dedicated products, and to gather female talent to build those products from a diverse and innovative perspective.& Ultimately, &resilience is key for us to build that pool of talent and open the doors for gender balance and financial inclusion.&

Furthermore, data shows Africa and Latin America both beat global averages for percentages of startup female founders. Laura Stebbing is co-CEO of accelerateHER, a global community of leaders addressing the under-representation of women in tech through action. Raised in Southern Africa, Stebbing is passionate about Africarise as a hub of female entrepreneurship.

&Africa has both the highest proportion of women founders at 26% [Latam comes in second]¹²and a $42 billion funding gap. Thereclearly no lack of talent across Africa54 countries, so for the investors, corporate executives, policy makers and established founders that aren&t moved by the moral arguments for gender parity, notice the enormous business opportunity. We will start to see a higher volume of resilient, scalable companies emerge as leaders build more diverse networks and ecosystems that support women to unlock their entrepreneurial potential.& Nathan Lustig, founder of Magma Partners, a VC firm in Latin America which invests in female founders above the regional average, explains, &investing in and empowering resilient women entrepreneurs is just good business, and is one of the biggest investment opportunities, especially in emerging markets.&

I believe Latin American can have an edge. I am a Silicon Valley-born investor now living in &Silicon Aires,& where I have been thrilled to see exciting numbers of female founders in Latin America. Susana Robles agrees, and says the reason is in part due to the nature of a committed ecosystem to support one another. &Itthe sheer need that forces you to collaborate.& An ecosystem like Silicon Valley doesn&t have the same need to do so. Of Latin America, Robles says, &In 10 years, we will have created a much more collaborative market than the developed ones.& And that collaboration is leading to great female founders. 2019, in fact, saw more funding going to female co-founders in Latin America than in Europe or the USA.¹³

This will lead to future alicorns. Ann Williams, COO of Creditas, a Brazilian fintech currently closing in on its own unicorn status, says &the conversion funnel for unicorns works just like any other selection process. We fill the top with a bunch of great women in supporting roles in emerging market startups, these women take their experiences and found rocking new companies. A percentage of these will convert to scaleups raising Series C and D rounds with valuations at $1 billion or higher. And voila! we get women-led unicorns.& She continues, &the odds are with us and I am sure the talent is too!&

Juliane Butty, startup head at Platzi and former regional manager of Seedstars, one of the leading accelerators and investors fostering female entrepreneurship in emerging markets, joins Williams. &We have definitely seen the rise of female founders and investors in emerging markets in the last decade. One supports the other. And we know that success breeds success.&

Perhaps My Little Pony fan Malinter said it best when he suggested how a male version of the alicorn could finally emerge in such a female-dominated space: &The simplest way they could probably add one in would be to make said alicorn the ruler of a neighboring nation.& In the same way, emerging markets may just hold the key for female unicorns.

No matter the region, Robles says &if we keep opening doors to women entrepreneurs who are as ambitious as men in growing their companies, we&ll begin to see many more unicorns with gender diversified teams.& Hanna Schiuma, the Elasbank founder who just might be building the next female-founded unicorn, agrees. &The alicorns are coming. And we&re ready to fly.&

²Equestria is of course where the My Little Ponies and their assorted unicorns, alicorns and friends all live.³Go Jess Lee!⁴Yes, Aileen Lee of Cowboy VC first invented the term in her 2013 TechCrunch piece, but we&re in a unicorn-fueled time machine, people.⁸&Do Female Investors Support Female Entrepreneurs? An Empirical Analysis of Angel Investor Behavior,& Seth C. Oranburg, Duquesne University School of Law, Pittsburgh PA, USA and Mark Geiger, Duquesne University School of Business, Pittsburgh PA, USA¹²Forthcoming research from TechCrunch/Crunchbase¹³Forthcoming research from TechCrunch/Crunchbase

French cloud-hosting company Scaleway is updating its lineup of dedicated servers and giving it a new name. Dedicated servers might not be the hot new thing, but many customers still rely on dedicated servers for predictable performances and pricing.

Scaleway originally started as Online.net as the hosting and data center division of Iliad. Its original dedicated servers were an instant hit back in 2005. You could rent your own server for €30 per month, with 1GB of RAM, unlimited 100Mbps bandwidth and 160GB of storage.

This sounds ridiculously underpowered today, but Dedibox has remained a well-known name when it comes to dedicated servers. More recently, Online .net launched a public cloud offering under the Scaleway brand with cloud instances, object storage, block storage, managed databases, etc.

Scaleway has become the main brand of the company, as cloud hosting probably has a brighter future than dedicated servers. Its dedicated server lineup is now called Scaleway Dedibox. This isn&t just a name change, as Scaleway wants to integrate its dedicated servers with its public cloud offering. You could use a dedicated server combined with a load balancer and cloud instances when you get a lot of traffic. Or you could use Scalewaymanaged database service combined with a dedicated server.

There are more than a hundred different configurations with dedicated servers starting at €8.99 per month, with 4GB of RAM, 1TB of storage and a 1GHz Intel CPU. But you can also rent a server with 384GB of RAM and 4TB of NVMe storage with an Intel Xeon Gold CPU for €439.99 per month.

Overall, Scaleway is running 100,000 servers, with customers in 150 different countries. Scaleway also offers bare metal cloud instances as an alternative to dedicated servers.

Tesla Model 3 is among the top 10 choices for car buyers in 2020, according to Consumer Reports. The nonprofit organization released its &Top Picks& of the year on Thursday, and it included Teslamost affordable vehicle alongside cars from automakers including Toyota, Subaru, Honda, Kia and Lexus.

The Model 3 was chosen as one of three vehicles in the $45K-$55K category, alongside the Lexus RX and the Toyota Supra. CR lauded its &thrilling driving experience,& including &impressive handling and quick precise steering [that] help it feel like a sports car.& They did ding it slightly for having a &stiff ride& overall, but said that thatmore than made up for by its long EV battery range and emission-free eco-friendly qualities.

Consumer Reports also specifically called out a worry about the Model 3 that &Autopilot, an optional system on the vehicle, does not require the driver to stay engaged, creating safety concerns.& Tesla has always positioned Autopilot as a driver-assist feature that still requires a driver to be ready to take over control at a momentnotice, but critics have suggested its implementation can lead to misuse resulting in inattentiveness.

Clearly, that concern wasn&t enough to prevent CR from counting the Model 3 among its top recommendations for vehicles in 2020. Tesla also ended up ranking 11th overall out of 33 automakers in Consumer Reports& 2020 automotive brand report card, climbing eight positions from last year. The Model 3, and the rapid improvements that Tesla was able to make in its production as it scaled assembly of the vehicle, clearly helped it in the eyes of the consumer-focused nonprofit.