This is no ordinary fan film, as it has received Warner Bros.’ blessing even though it’s not endorsed by the studio or J.K. Rowling.
Fan of the Harry Potter series who are clamoring for more will be happy to know that a fan film about Voldemort’s rise is now up on YouTube. Voldemort: Origins of the Heir is an hour long flick. However, this is no ordinary fan film, as it has received Warner Bros.’ blessing. After its crowdfunding campaign in 2016, it looks like it’s finally ready to be viewed. Tryangle Films, the group behind it, put it up on YouTube on Saturday.
Tryangle Films comes out of the gate with the disclaimer that it’s non-commercial. They also state that it’s not endorsed by HP author J.K. Rowling or Warner Bros. Either way, for any Harry Potter fan, it’s a welcome addition. Also given that it gives a backstory to Harry Potter’s biggest villain, HP fans should definitely give this film a look.
The backstory for the backstory involves a crowdfunding effort by Tryangle Films. Crowdfunding went on a brief hiatus after the group was contacted by Warner Bros. WB has the right to the series, and both sides eventually discussed the fan film. They walked away with permission to continue funding and making of the film. Warner Bros. did require that the film be made on a non-profit basis and that it be put on YouTube.
The story follows Grisha Mac Laggen, heir of Gryffindor as she’s pitted against Tom Riddle as he grows into the HP villain Voldemort. Mac Laggen finds Hepzibah Smith, descendant of Hufflepuff, murdered in her home. Riddle is shown as being responsible for Smith’s death. The story came together after film co-directors Gianmaria Pezzato and Stefano Prestia developed the fan film concept after reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
We’ve included the movie for you below. So, if you have an hour, grab a friend and some popcorn and enjoy so HP backstory goodness. Are you excited to see Voldemort’s rise? Let us know by leaving your comments down below, or on Google+, Twitter, or Facebook.
From October 12th to October 26th we ran a contest in our Office International Community in search of the top language issues in localized versions of Sway. We wanted people to discover how cool Sway is, use it in their native language and let us know about issues that affected their user experience.
Jorgen Koch from Denmark wins category 2 for his reporting of a gender inconsistency in Danish Sway for the word "this".
And finally, Japanese native speaker Kazuto Shibata wins category 3 for his reporting of a bad layout bug.
Below is a Power BI Dashboard that summarizes all the feedback we received during the competition. At the top it shows who the competitions contributors were, how many bugs they each reported, the languages they were reported in and the type of issue reported. Competition entrants can also see the status of what they reported by clicking on the bug row in the table at the bottom and the comment for that bug will appear in the top left.
There is one outstanding item from the competition that will take a while to be get a decision on. Our entrants told us we should translate the Sway Templates (Start from a template) & Sway examples (Get inspired by a featured sway). This request is now sitting with our Business Planning who are looking into it. Once we get a final decision on it I will let folks in our community know.
Thanks to everyone who entered the competition and congratulations to the winners! We will have another competition on Monday November 13th that will be focused on Office web applications. Please let anyone you feel that may be interested know about our next competition and ask them to join our Office International Community when you see it advertised on Tech Community.
The columns in the table of the Power BI Dashboard are hopefully not too difficult to understand. But just in case here are some definitions: Bug ( post title), Raised by (the person who reported it), Product Name (Sway in this case), Area (e.g. User Interface or Templates or Articles), Hyperlink (a URL link to the original post in the Tech Community). The ones that probably need explanation are O365, Office 2013, Office 2016, Cross language and Content:
Office 2013 means the bug applies to Office 2013 perpetual customers and we consider it important enough to fix it in those files also. It does not apply in the case of Sway which is a Windows 10 Application or Web service and not part of the Office 2013 suite.
Office 2016 means the bug applies to Office 2016 perpetual customers and we consider important enough to fix it in those files also. It does not apply in the case of Sway which is a Windows 10 Application or Web service and not part of the Office 2016 suite.
Hi Mourad & Jorgen - Thanks for entering and congratulations on winning your prizes! I will send them to you this week. Regards, Stafford
We wrote about Apture Highlights, a new plug-in that brings instantaneous search to content on the web, a few months ago. Today, Apture has scored a pretty significant deal with document-sharing site Scribd to allow users to use Apture Highlights on the tens of millions of public documents on the content platform.
As we wrote in August, ‘Apture Highlights’ plugs the “search leak” that is taking place with content on the web. The feature allows you to highlight any word or phrase on a page and instantly bring up search results in a window. The startup brings results from 60-plus sources including YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Google and more for extra context around content.
Now, when users are reading documents, books, or other works on Scribd, they will be able to highlight any word, and Apture will open a small browser within the page to search for the additional information on Google, Bing or Yahoo.
Scribd representative Michelle Laird says that this integration is made possible party because of the company’s move to convert the platform to HTML5, which provides a more engaging experience for users (as of July, user engagement had tripled on Scribd.)
According to Laird, 50 percent of documents will be integrated with Apture today, with the remaining integrations rolled out over the next few days. For Apture, which has raised $4.1 million in funding, the deal with Scribd is a big win. This will be largest implementation of Apture to date, says the startup’s CEO Tristan Harris. Other Apture partners include The Financial Times and Reuters.
Seven years ago, when he first approached investors with the idea of creating a fund-of-funds that would invest in seed-stage, or so-called micro VC, funds, they were cool to the idea. In fact, it took Kim — formerly a partner with the venture firm Rustic Canyon Ventures — roughly two years to raise the firm’s $28.5 million debut fund.
Fast-forward, and Kim’s Cendana Capital — which has backed venture firms Forerunner Ventures, SoftTech VC, IA Ventures, Freestyle Capital, K9 Ventures, Bowery Capital and Lerer Hippeau Ventures, among others — just closed on $260 million in fresh capital across a network of five funds.
One vehicle is Cendana’s third and newest fund-of-funds, which works just like that $28.5 million debut fund, except it’s nearly three times as big, with $80 million in commitments.
Kim also raised $35 million to make direct co-investments; a $60 million co-investment fund that he manages on behalf of The University of Texas Investment Management Company; a $75 million fund called Cendana Blackbird that Cendana manages on behalf of an unnamed pension fund (it invests in Cendana’s portfolio funds in cases where it can get a greater allocation); and a $10 million, late-stage fund called Cendana Kendall that’s being managed on behalf of an unnamed family office. (The idea is for Kim to plug the money into one or two breakaway companies in one of his fund managers’ portfolios.)
Altogether, the San Francisco-based outfit now manages around $450 million — which says a lot about how much the market has changed. We talked yesterday with Kim — who runs Cendana with principal Graham Pingree — about that ongoing evolution.
TC: Cendana seems to be an investor in every major micro VC fund out there. How many funds are you involved with?
MK: We have 15 “core” relations, where we’ve invested $8 million to $10 million, then we have a pilot program where we invest $1 million in 8 or 9 groups that we like but we have some lingering questions about their strategy. For example, NextView Ventures in Boston and Mucker Capital in L.A. were part of our pilot program because we didn’t have a high conviction about either the Boston or L.A. ecosystems. Now we do, so they’ve become core.
The hardware investment firms Bolt and Root Ventures also became part of that pilot program, because we had questions about whether seed was the right entry point for hardware investing.
MK: No. And we’ve ended up not continuing with some core funds as some have evolved from seed-stage to Series A-stage funds, and backing them is not the mandate our LPs gave us, notwithstanding how amazingly they’ve performed for us. I won’t share publicly which those are, though.
TC: Where do you draw the line? So many of your managers are now investing two or three times the amount of their debut funds.
MK: We’re SoftTech’s biggest LP. And SoftTech could have easily raised a $150 million vehicle (when it was last out fundraising). But it realized a seed found should be no larger than $100 million so raised a $100 million seed fund and a separate $50 million opportunity fund. We’re investors in the $100 million piece alone.
TC: So as far as you’re concerned, a fund can’t do seed well with more than $100 million under management. What about ownership stakes? Do you have a strong feeling about how much a manager should own of each company?
MK: We look for those who lead deals. We think ownership is paramount. We want our fund managers to focus on at least 15 percent ownership. So with the average seed fund going from $1 million to $3 million in recent years, to lead that round, you need to write a check for $1.5 million. That’s why these seed funds have gotten bigger.
TC: Do you care how many people are managing money at these seed firms? You see some that have several partners; you have others, like K9 Ventures, that’s run by a solo general partner, Manu Kumar.
MK: We look at it as capital per partner. Lerer Hippeau has four people investing $113 million, so that’s $28 million per partner. We think the ideal range is $25 million to $35 million per partner.
TC: There are so many seed fund investors. How many groups do you think you’ve met with altogether, and do you ever fund firms outside of the U.S.?
We haven’t invested internationally. We felt that the ecosystems outside the U.S. were substantially weaker, owing to the lack of available follow-on capital. That was a huge concern in Europe, where for a long time it was basically Accel and Balderton and Index. But now there’s BlueYard Capital in Berlin and Felix Capital and Mosaic Ventures in London. There’s a lot more going on, so we think the ecosystem has gotten better.
TC: You make direct investments in certain companies when you can. For example, you were able to get equity in Dollar Shave Club through Forerunner Ventures, which also provided an introduction to the company when you asked for one. How do these things come together? How do you choose which companies to pursue with so many startups in your managers’ portfolios?
MK: We have a monthly call with fund managers, but we’re also always trading calls or IMing because we have a pretty close relationship with them. And if a fund manager talks about a certain company and keeps mentioning it every month and it becomes clear that it’s tracking well, we’ll ask for an intro to its management team.
MK: We only invest if the fund manager is coming into the same round, and usually they are stretching their reserves to do that; they can’t do full pro rata, which creates an opportunity for us to try and get in.
These are usually very attractive opportunities; we’ve had to fight to get into most of these. But I do think the opportunity set is increasing as these companies bubble up to the Series A and B stages.
TC: Any thoughts on secondary sales and whether seed funds should hang on for the long haul if they have a buzzy company in their portfolio?
MK: There’s definitely an opportunity for managers to sell into these higher-priced rounds. Our advice is if you have a 10x return, consider selling 10 to 20 percent and getting liquidity to investors. And we’ve seen a lot more of that over the last 12 to 24 months.
Seed funds can become hostages in high-valuation companies otherwise. Say the company ends up raising $100 million at a $2 billion valuation. Well, the seed would have been happy to sell, but now the new investor wants 3x from there, so this company has to get to a $6 billion valuation, and a lot of bad things can happen in pursuit of that.
TC: Do you sell before the big exit? I’m guessing you don’t need to worry about so-called signaling risk — or do you?
MK: We really don’t. We could sell into the next round and no one would blink an eye. It’s a negative signal if Sequoia does it. If Cendana does it, no one cares.