Topic: tech event
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Early-Stage Startup Hiring: Avoid Costly Mistakes
Building the right team is a founder's most critical challenge, as hiring mistakes can drain resources and derail a company early on. The CEO of Mappa developed a behavioral intelligence platform to assess team and role compatibility, moving beyond traditional resume markers that often lead to po...
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Samsung's New Display Tech Protects App Privacy
Samsung has introduced a new dual-pixel display technology that actively combats "shoulder surfing" by limiting screen visibility to side angles only when a privacy mode is activated. The feature offers customizable, app-specific control, allowing users to automatically enable privacy mode for se...
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Wispr Flow Launches AI-Powered Dictation App for Android
The Wispr Flow AI dictation app has launched on Android, featuring a floating bubble interface and offering intelligent transcription that removes filler words and applies contextual formatting. The launch includes a backend upgrade for 30% faster dictation, real-time translation in over 100 lang...
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Spotify's AI Playlists Expand to the UK and Beyond
Spotify has expanded its AI Playlist feature, allowing Premium subscribers in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and Sweden to create music collections by entering descriptive text prompts. The AI generates customized playlists by analyzing user prompts, listening history, and trends, with each song inc...
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Meta's Metaverse Moves Beyond Virtual Reality
Meta is pivoting its Horizon Worlds platform to become "almost exclusively mobile," decoupling it from VR hardware to pursue a larger audience and compete with platforms like Roblox. This strategic shift follows massive financial losses in Meta's Reality Labs division, nearing $80 billion since 2...
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Give Your AI Agents a Shared Memory with Reload
The AI landscape is shifting from tools to collaborative teammates, driving demand for management platforms like **Reload**, which centralizes oversight of digital employees and recently launched its product Epic with $2.275M in funding. **Reload's platform addresses a key problem: AI agents lack...
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eBay Acquires Depop From Etsy in $1.2 Billion Deal
eBay is acquiring the fashion resale app Depop from Etsy for $1.2 billion, a strategic move to attract a younger demographic and a reversal of Etsy's 2021 purchase. Depop is a major social commerce platform popular with younger users, reporting about $1 billion in 2025 sales and a community where...
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Sarvam AI's Open-Source Models Bet Big on India's AI Future
Sarvam AI has launched a suite of powerful, open-source AI models, including large language models with up to 105 billion parameters, to challenge global giants and reduce India's reliance on foreign technology. A key innovation is the use of a mixture-of-experts architecture for efficiency, and ...
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Airbnb to Integrate AI for Smarter Search and Support
Airbnb is strategically integrating AI to transform its platform into an intelligent, conversational assistant for trip planning and property discovery, moving beyond traditional search filters. The company is carefully developing AI-driven features, including personalized search and expanded cus...
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Uber Eats AI Assistant Helps You Build Your Grocery Cart
Uber Eats has launched a beta AI feature called Cart Assistant, which allows users to quickly build a grocery cart by typing a list or uploading a photo of a handwritten list or recipe. The tool personalizes suggestions by learning from a user's past orders and allows for item swaps, aiming to si...
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OpenAI Shuts Down AI Safety Team
OpenAI has dissolved its dedicated mission alignment team, reassigning its members and transforming the team leader's role into a new "chief futurist" position. The company states the team's educational work on its core goal of beneficial AI continues, now distributed across the entire organizati...
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Fusion Startup Secures $450M From Bessemer, Alphabet's GV
Inertia Enterprises secured $450 million in Series A funding to develop a powerful laser system for a commercial fusion power plant, aiming to begin construction by 2030. The startup is commercializing the inertial confinement fusion method proven at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which ...
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EU Orders TikTok to Disable Addictive Features Like Infinite Scroll
The European Commission has accused TikTok of creating an addictive user experience under the Digital Services Act, citing features like infinite scroll and autoplay that harm minors and vulnerable adults. TikTok must alter its core interface to comply, including disabling infinite scroll and rev...
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Amazon vs. Google: Who Wins the AI Spending War?
Amazon and Google are leading an unprecedented surge in capital expenditure, driven by the belief that controlling advanced computing infrastructure is essential for future AI dominance and market leadership. Amazon projects the highest spending at $200 billion for 2026, though part of this budge...
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Snap's Q4: Revenue Up, Users Down as Spectacles Prep for Mass Market
Snap's revenue grew 10% to $1.7 billion, driven by a surge in paid subscriptions, even as its daily active user base slightly declined in key markets. The company achieved a higher net income and average revenue per user, highlighting the success of its Snap+ subscription service as an alternativ...
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Waymo Secures $16 Billion for Global Robotaxi Expansion
Waymo has secured $16 billion in new funding, valuing the company at $126 billion, to accelerate its shift from testing to large-scale commercial deployment and expand its driverless taxi service internationally. The company is rapidly scaling its operations, now providing about 400,000 rides wee...
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AI Notetakers: Record and Transcribe Meetings Effortlessly
AI-powered physical notetakers are portable hardware devices that record audio and use AI to generate transcripts, summaries, and task lists, ensuring no critical detail is missed. Key devices include the Plaud Note/Pro, Mobvoi TicNote, and Comulytic Note Pro, which vary in features like transcri...
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SpaceX Acquires xAI to Build Space Data Centers
SpaceX has acquired xAI, creating the world's most valuable private firm with a $1.25 trillion valuation and a strategic focus on developing space-based data centers to address the energy demands of AI. The merger combines two financially pressured ventures, with xAI reportedly spending $1 billio...
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UpScrolled Surpasses 2.5M Users, Founder Reveals
UpScrolled has rapidly grown to over 2.5 million users, a surge its founder attributes to shifts in the social media landscape and competitor changes. The platform positions itself as an inclusive hybrid of Instagram and X, promising not to shadowban users while openly criticizing major tech gian...
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OpenClaw's AI Builds Its Own Social Network
The AI assistant project has been rebranded to **OpenClaw** after a previous legal challenge, with the founder proactively securing the name through trademark research and permission from OpenAI to honor its origins and community. The project's community has created **Moltbook**, a social network...
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Microsoft CEO: Copilot AI Usage Is Soaring
Microsoft reported strong quarterly financial results, with revenue and net income growing significantly and Microsoft Cloud revenue exceeding $50 billion, yet investor caution led to a stock price decline due to concerns over massive AI infrastructure spending. The company is making staggering c...
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Microsoft to Keep Buying Nvidia, AMD AI Chips Despite In-House Designs
Microsoft has deployed its first custom AI accelerator, the Maia 200, designed as an "AI inference powerhouse" for running trained models, with performance reportedly surpassing rival chips. The company's strategy involves parallel innovation and partnership, as CEO Satya Nadella emphasized conti...
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Waymo Robotaxis Now Serve San Francisco International Airport
Waymo has launched a commercial service providing autonomous rides to and from San Francisco International Airport, a key expansion of its geographic reach and a highly requested feature. The launch occurs amid safety scrutiny, as federal agencies are investigating incidents involving Waymo vehic...
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Handshake Acquires Cleanlab in Competitive AI Data Deal
Handshake, an AI data services company, has acquired the data quality startup Cleanlab in a strategic acqui-hire to integrate its specialized talent and technology. The acquisition primarily aims to bolster Handshake's in-house research and data-labeling capabilities by adding Cleanlab's team, wh...
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Google AI Overviews Now Launch Direct AI Chats
Google has upgraded its search engine to allow direct conversational chat with its AI from search results, using the more advanced Gemini 3 model for higher-quality AI Overviews. The update aims to transform search into an interactive assistant that handles complex inquiries through a continuous,...
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Nvidia Invests $2B to Boost CoreWeave's AI Compute by 5GW
Nvidia is investing $2 billion in CoreWeave to accelerate the deployment of over 5 gigawatts of AI computing capacity by 2030, funding the collaborative construction of specialized "AI factories" powered by Nvidia hardware. The partnership involves CoreWeave integrating Nvidia's full product ecos...
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Google AI Now Uses Your Gmail and Photos for Personalized Help
Google is expanding its "Personal Intelligence" feature into AI Mode, allowing it to use data from a user's Gmail and Photos to create highly personalized answers, starting for U.S. subscribers of its premium AI tiers. This opt-in service enables practical applications like trip planning, where A...
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Edit PDFs with AI prompts & summarize podcasts in Adobe Acrobat
Adobe has introduced new AI features in Acrobat, including prompt-based PDF editing, automated podcast summaries from documents, and the ability to generate full presentations directly from stored content. A key update enhances Adobe Spaces, allowing teams to synthesize information from various f...
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Grubhub Parent Company Buys Restaurant Rewards Startup Claim
Wonder, Grubhub's parent company, has acquired the restaurant rewards startup Claim to integrate cash-back incentives into its dining ecosystem, enhancing tools for restaurants and savings for customers. The acquisition provides Grubhub's extensive restaurant network with advanced customer acquis...
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Snowflake to Acquire Observability Platform Observe
Snowflake is acquiring Observe to integrate its observability platform, aiming to provide a unified solution for collecting and analyzing telemetry data to improve issue resolution. The deal, valued at around $1 billion, represents Snowflake's largest acquisition and deepens a long-standing partn...
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EverNitro Unveils Effortless Nitro Coffee at CES 2026
The EverNitro is a new countertop appliance that generates its own nitrogen from the air, offering a sustainable and potentially more affordable way to make nitro coffee at home without disposable cartridges. It replicates the café-quality experience by infusing beverages with nitrogen, creating ...
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Top 7 Space & Defense Startups from TechCrunch Disrupt
TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield highlights 200 top contenders, with this year's selection featuring standout startups in space and defense technology. In the space sector, innovations include a manned eVTOL aircraft, a propellantless spacecraft propulsion system, and a fintech platform for space...
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Waymo Robotaxis Stalled in San Francisco Blackout: Here's Why
Waymo is updating its autonomous vehicle software to improve handling of widespread power outages after a San Francisco blackout caused significant delays due to an overwhelmed remote confirmation system. The update aims to make vehicles navigate more decisively at intersections with dark signals...
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Waymo Robotaxis Halted in San Francisco Blackout
A major power outage in San Francisco forced Waymo to suspend its autonomous ride-hailing service, stranding vehicles and revealing a critical vulnerability in robotaxi networks that depend on stable infrastructure and data connectivity. The blackout, caused by a fire at a PG&E substation, disabl...
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OpenAI Unveils New Image Generator Amid Intense AI Race
OpenAI has launched GPT-Image-1.5, a significantly faster and more precise image generation model for ChatGPT, released in response to competitive pressure from Google's AI offerings. The new model provides granular user control for detailed editing and iterative changes, allowing adjustments to ...
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Google's Dark Web Report Feature Discontinued in February
Google will retire its dark web monitoring tool in February 2026, citing user feedback that the alerts lacked actionable next steps for addressing data exposures. The tool, which scanned for personal information in data breaches, is being replaced by integrated security features like Security Che...
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Lisa Su: Why AMD Isn't Scared of the Competition
AMD CEO Lisa Su emphasized a strategy of focusing on the company's own technology and execution rather than reacting to competitors. The core of AMD's approach is controlling its innovation, product quality, and customer relationships to drive growth in key sectors like data centers and gaming. T...
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Google's 'Disco' Crafts Web Apps from Browser Tabs Using Gemini AI
Google has introduced an experimental AI tool called Disco, featuring a **GenTabs** function that creates personalized web applications directly from a user's open browser tabs and research activity. The tool leverages the Gemini AI model to instantly generate interactive apps for tasks like plan...
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Microbes Transform Idle Oil Wells into Hydrogen Factories
A Houston-based startup is repurposing abandoned oil wells by using specialized microbes to convert residual hydrocarbons into hydrogen gas, offering a novel clean energy source. The company, Eclipse Energy, has proven the technology and partnered with Weatherford International for global deploym...
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Users Chat for Hours Daily with Tavus AI's Santa
Tavus has launched an upgraded AI Santa for the second year, offering free, personalized video chats where the AI can now perceive user expressions and remember past conversations to create a more human-like interaction. The experience is highly engaging, with millions of interactions expected, b...
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Rivian Develops Its Own AI Assistant for Vehicles
Rivian has independently developed a proprietary AI assistant for its vehicles, targeting a consumer launch by year-end, with more details to be revealed at its December AI & Autonomy Day. The assistant is designed for deep vehicle integration using a flexible, model-agnostic architecture and a h...
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Rad Power Bikes Batteries Pose Major Fire Hazard
Federal safety officials have issued an urgent warning for Rad Power Bikes batteries due to fire and explosion hazards, advising owners to stop use immediately to prevent serious injury or death. The CPSC reported 31 fire incidents linked to these batteries, with some causing property damage and ...
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ChatGPT Expands Group Chats to Japan, New Zealand, South Korea & Taiwan
OpenAI has launched a group chat feature for ChatGPT in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan, enabling real-time collaboration across multiple subscription tiers on mobile and web. The feature prioritizes privacy with invitation-only access, individual conversation confidentiality, and enh...
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Apple to Pay Masimo $634M After Losing Patent Infringement Case
A federal jury ordered Apple to pay Masimo $634 million for patent infringement related to blood oxygen monitoring features in Apple Watch, which Apple plans to appeal. Masimo claims Apple incorporated its patented pulse oximetry technology by hiring key personnel, leading to an import ban on cer...
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Google's AI Shops for You: Conversational Search & Agentic Checkout
Google has launched AI shopping innovations including conversational search, an enhanced Gemini app, and automated checkout to streamline the online buying experience for the holidays. The AI features provide tailored product responses, price tracking, and automated purchasing via Google Pay, whi...
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Meet the 10 Startups from Betaworks' Latest Launch Camp
Betaworks has selected ten startups for its latest Launch Camp, focusing on companies that are redefining AI interaction through innovative interfaces. The program, which began in August and concluded with a Demo Day on November 4th, supports ventures like Nora for shopping insights, Primitive fo...
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Google Maps India: Gemini AI & Safety Alerts Boost Navigation
Google Maps has introduced Gemini AI integration and enhanced safety alerts in India, offering hands-free assistance and contextual information during navigation, adapted specifically for local usage patterns and languages. The update includes India-specific safety features such as visual and aud...
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ClickUp's New AI Assistant Takes on Slack and Notion
ClickUp 4.0 introduces a unified platform integrating calendar management, communication tools, document handling, and task tracking, alongside new AI assistant capabilities. The release features two AI agents: one that proactively answers questions using internal and external sources, and anothe...
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Figma Acquires Weavy to Supercharge AI Media Creation
Figma has acquired Weavy, an AI-driven image and video generation company, which will be rebranded as Figma Weave and integrated into Figma's ecosystem to enhance its AI media creation capabilities. Weavy's tools enable designers to generate and refine high-quality images and videos using various...
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TechCrunch Disrupt 25: Key Moments and Highlights
TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 gathered innovators in San Francisco to discuss AI, climate tech, and venture capital, highlighting future technological trends and startup showcases. Key speakers like Vinod Khosla and Roelof Botha addressed AI's energy solutions, investment strategies, and market timing,...
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