Disney Accelerator Program Companies Speak at Fifth Annual Demo Day
The Walt Disney Company announced the roster of 2018 Disney Accelerator companies presenting at its fifth annual Demo Day, today, October 10. This year’s event features talks from Disney Accelerator companies about their visions for the future they are building, along with a TED fireside chat.
Demo Day concludes this year’s Disney Accelerator program, which gives select companies from around the world access to Disney’s leadership team, mentorship, and support.
Speakers at Demo Day include:
- Ethan Agarwal, Founder and CEO, Aaptiv: a leading provider of premium digital wellness content with a fast-growing community of more than 200,000 members who take more than 30,000 of Aaptiv’s innovative audio-guided classes each day.
- Pravin Prakash, Co-Founding Student and Chief Marketing Officer, BYJU’s: India’s largest edtech company that is reinventing how students learn through its learning app with personalized video.
- Ben Keighran, Founder and CEO, Caffeine: a social broadcasting platform for live gaming, entertainment, and creative arts.
- Joanna McFarland, Co-founder and CEO, HopSkipDrive: a leader in technology-enabled ride services for kids, serving families, K-12 schools, non-profits and businesses that serve children.
- Anjney Midha, Co-Founder and CEO, Ubiquity6: a multiplayer augmented reality platform focused on bringing people together in physical spaces.
- Jessica O. Matthews, Founder and CEO, Uncharted Power: an award-winning renewable power company that specializes in harnessing the energy from motion to create ecosystems of power for communities around the world.
- Noah Horton, Founder and CEO, Unsupervised: a company that helps teams find hidden insights in their data. Unsupervised built an AI based on unsupervised learning that finds actionable insights in data without requiring human guidance or supervision.
- TED fireside chat with Fadi Chehadé, a partner at ABRY Partners, Chehadé serves on the World Economic Forum’s Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution advisory board and is a member of the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation. Chehadé is a serial entrepreneur, having built and sold three internet content-delivery companies including the AI company Vocado acquired by Oracle, and is the former CEO of ICANN and former General Manager of IBM Global Technology Services in the Middle East and Africa.
Over the last five years, numerous Disney Accelerator companies continue to collaborate with various divisions of the company to bring innovative, industry-leading products to market including the tech toy company littleBits; StatMuse, developer of AI-powered voice apps for sports stats; VOID and ILMxLAB, which, in collaboration with Lucasfilm, created the location-based hyper-reality experience Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire; and Epic Games, developers of Unreal Engine and Fortnite. Epic Games is currently collaborating with Lucasfilm to bring its Unreal Engine real-time rendering to live-action production on a series for the Disney’s Direct-to-Consumer streaming service launching late next year.
The Disney Accelerator Demo Day will be live streamed worldwide on ABCNews.com and ABC News mobile and OTT apps for Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV today at 2:30 p.m. PT.
Mastercard, Scholastic Expand Reach of Girls4Tech Program
Mastercard and Scholastic announced plans to help raise awareness of STEM opportunities among all students, reaching 20,000 classrooms, including 300,000 girls nationwide through hands-on, in-class materials.
The free materials are based on Mastercard’s Girls4Tech program, launched in 2014 to help bridge the gap between opportunity, awareness, and readiness. It provides schools and community organizations with resources to educate, inspire and equip young girls with the skills and confidence they need to envision themselves as future professionals in STEM fields.
Girls4Tech has reached nearly 75,000 girls in 21 countries around the world since launch. Through the collaboration with Mastercard and Scholastic, Girls4Tech will broaden its reach in the U.S. by making these curriculum and resources more accessible for teachers to introduce into their classrooms.
Mastercard and Scholastic will work with teachers to adopt the Girls4Tech materials through a dedicated microsite on Scholastic.com, magazines, and in-classroom guides. Teachers will have access to lesson plans and hands-on demos related to algorithms, encryption, fraud detection, data analysis, digital convergence, and more. These materials were created in collaboration with leading technologists and inspired by the Mastercard network.
The initiative also includes two contests: the Tech4Innovation contest encourages students to develop a future digital innovation to solve a real-world problem and the Teacher Sweepstakes asks educators to explain why their school would benefit from a Girls4Tech workshop event where students participate in activities based on innovation and technology.
For more information on Girls4Tech, visit https://www.facebook.com/mastercardgirls4tech/.
SYBO Games Launches SYBO TV Platform
SYBO Games (F92), the IP-owner and game developer of Subway Surfers, the mobile game phenomenon with more than 2.1 billion downloads, announced the launch of SYBO TV, a video streaming, content creation and distribution platform.
Launching in Q4 this year, SYBO TV will be the destination for the Subway Surfers brand universe. Led by the game itself, Subway Surfers: The Animated Series and the Jake’s Shakes bite-size videos, SYBO TV will also offer game live streams, trailers, extensive behind-the-scenes looks, lifestyle content, and more. SYBO TV also offers a platform for influencers and content creators from across the globe a central location to share their original Subway Surfers content.
Six years after its mobile game launch, Subway Surfers continues to top the charts. In June, the game hit an all-time monthly download record at 52.5 million, which follows its No. 1 spot as 2017’s most downloaded game worldwide. Subway Surfers also touts the first game to pass one billion downloads in Google Play’s store.
The Subsurf brand emulates the street-culture ethos of Subway Surfers. The style—whether it be graffiti, stencils, prints and murals, large-scale paintings and projects of artistic collaboration, among others—is part of the brand and represented in all aspects. There are 10 style guides.
Subway Surfers: The Animated Series premiered earlier this year on SYBO Games YouTube channel. The 10 four-minute episodes, scripted by Brent Friedman (Star Wars Rebels, Star Wars: The Clone Wars) and produced by Sander Schwartz (The Batman, Justice League, Scooby Doo, Teen Titans), will be followed by a long-form series in 2019.
In Subway Surfers, SYBO Games and publisher/co-developer Kiloo, introduced the World Tour concept. Every month, Subway Surfers lands in a new city or country. Its key characters have travelled to more than 43 destinations.