Author: Jason

  • French e-bike startup Angell nears bankruptcy

    Angell, a French smart electric bike startup, has announced in an email to customers that the company is declaring insolvency and approaching a court to ask for judicial liquidation. “It’s over for Angell,” said company co-founder and CEO Marc Simoncini on Instagram. (He also happens to be a judge on the French version of “Shark… Read more

  • Kodiak has made its first driverless truck deliveries to customer Atlas Energy

    Kodiak Robotics has officially handed off two autonomous trucks to customer Atlas Energy Solutions, marking the startup’s first commercial launch.  Atlas, a provider of proppant (i.e., sand) and oilfield logistics, received its first Kodiak-equipped trucks in December and began driverless operations in an off-road environment in West Texas’s remote Permian Basin shortly after. The company… Read more

  • Threads is testing ads in the U.S. and Japan

    Meta’s X rival Threads said Friday that it is now testing ads with select brands in the U.S. and Japan. Instagram head Adam Mosseri said that the company will listen to feedback before expanding this experiment in other markets. “We know there will be plenty of feedback about how we should approach ads, and we… Read more

  • Sam Altman’s World now wants to link AI agents to your digital identity

    OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took the technology world by surprise on Thursday with the release of Operator, his company’s first AI agent that can act autonomously on the web. But OpenAI is not Altman’s only venture that’s trying to capitalize on the popularity of AI agents. Altman’s World project now wants to create tools that… Read more

  • Flip, the TikTok Shop rival, launches a creator fund that grants up to $100M of equity

    Flip is a social commerce app that lets shoppers become creators. They can share honest reviews and earn cash based on engagement on the platform. As Flip competes with TikTok Shop and other platforms in a highly competitive market, it has introduced a new creator fund that offers a unique opportunity to help it stand… Read more

  • Mark Zuckerberg says Meta will have 1.3M GPUs for AI by year-end

    Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company plans to significantly up its capital expenditures this year as it aims to keep pace with rivals in the cutthroat AI space. In a Facebook post Friday, Zuckerberg said that Meta expects to spend $60 billion-$80 billion on capex in 2025, primarily on data centers and growing… Read more

  • OpenAI’s Stargate project reportedly doesn’t have the money it needs

    Stargate — the massive infrastructure project to build data centers for OpenAI in the U.S. — lacks a fully developed plan and hasn’t secured funding yet, according to a report from the Financial Times. Backed by OpenAI, SoftBank, Middle East AI fund MGX, and others, Stargate would funnel around $100 billion — and upward of… Read more

  • Apple admits next-gen CarPlay is late, but still in development

    Though Apple rarely misses self-imposed deadlines, it’s done so with the next-generation CarPlay. The company originally teased the update back in 2022. With this new version, CarPlay will integrate seamlessly with the instrument cluster to provide information on speed, climate control, and other car data. Apple had promised an initial rollout for a limit set… Read more

  • Google commits to combatting fake reviews in the UK after 5-year probe

    The U.K.’s antitrust regulator has reached an agreement with Google to counter the scourge of fake online reviews. The internet giant has committed to several remedies. Bogus endorsements have blighted the web since the creation of user reviews, which is why regulators around the world have been upping the ante on tech companies to put… Read more

  • Allara lands $26M to expand women’s hormone telehealth

    Growing up with an OB-GYN father, Rachel Blank assumed that most women received excellent gynecological care.  She regularly witnessed her dad’s patients thanking him for delivering their child when they would bump into him around town. But Blank realized that not all women’s health issues are treated equally when, at the age of 21, she… Read more