News

Ten years ago this December, Google acquired Bot & Dolly and about a dozen other robotics companies. San Francisco-based firm known for special effects work on films like “Gravity,” was merged into a new portfolio with ambitious industry-changing plans. Things didn’t go as planned for many reasons we won’t discuss. …

WM Motor, another promising Chinese EV startup, has filed for bankruptcy as bigger players gain market share and Chinese spending on big ticket items declines. WM Motor, Nio, Li Auto, and XPeng were China’s best-funded EV startups, backed by Baidu and Tencent. Investors gave the company over $5.3 billion, including …

In June, Vodafone and Hutchison-owned Three announced their plan to merge in a non-cash deal to create a $19B mega mobile operator. We predicted a significant regulatory hurdle. The country’s main antitrust regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority, announced an investigation into the deal today. Today’s announcement invites competitors, companies, …

The race to create AI assistants that help programmers is on. TabbyML, founded by two ex-Googlers, received $3.2 million in seed funding for its open-source code generator. TabbyML, a self-hosted coding assistant, is more customizable than GitHub’s Copilot, according to startup co-founder Meng Zhang. “We believe in a future where …

ChatGPT’s mobile efforts have good and bad news. On the bright side, the AI chatbot set a new record in September with 15.6 million app installs and nearly $4.6 million in gross revenue across its iOS and Android apps worldwide. New data from Appfigures shows revenue growth slowing. Revenue growth …

Today, Unity announced that CEO John Riccitiello was resigning as president, CEO, and board chair, leaving him with little to do after weeks of upsetting developers with a runtime fee. The company unexpectedly appointed former Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst as interim CEO. Whitehurst is a placeholder while the company …

Several hacktivist groups have flooded Israeli websites with malicious traffic after Hamas’ surprise land, sea, and air attack on Saturday, which prompted Israel to declare war and retaliate. The Jerusalem Post reported Monday that its website was down since Saturday morning “due to a series of cyberattacks initiated against us.” …

X, formerly Twitter, has redefined its “Public interest expectations” policy to define newsworthy posts that can be kept up despite platform rules. The company no longer requires 100,000 followers for newsworthy posts. The previous policy limited newsworthy posts to verified accounts. Since Elon Musk’s X allows people to get verified …

Canopy is a new peer-to-peer social networking app for content creators to connect, crowdsource, and “spill the tea.” The company announced its 1,000-influencer pilot program today. Founder and CEO Ayomi Samaraweera told that Canopy hopes the program will “build critical mass on the platform in our core content niches: beauty, …

Spotify is restricting free features in India to attract paid users. Years after the streaming service launched in India in 2019, these limits will prevent users from playing songs manually or rewinding, skipping, or repeating them. The Swedish company has offered a generous free tier in India to let users …