Hi, welcome to your Weekend. This week, Annie brings us the story of a family-run startup arming young women with a new kind of safety device: The Birdie. Invented by two sisters whose children had been sexually assaulted, the emergency alarm attaches easo;u to bags or belt loops and screeches like a smoke detector when it’s activated. It is a simple piece of technology, but for Annie and other women... Read more ›
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As a technology, the bicycle hasn’t changed much since 1885, when designer J.K. Starley decided to use a chain to drive the rear wheel. Nearly 140 years later, a foot still turns a crank that pulls a chain that spins a wheel. But the tech that’s layered on top of the modern bicycle is the stuff of sci-fi. I spoke with a number of hardcore amateur riders (aka roadies)—the kind... Read more ›
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When Michael Brancato began working with Chess.com in late 2017, it wasn’t particularly popular. A product manager at Twitch, Brancato was tapped to spearhead a two-year partnership between the chess site and the video streaming giant, hoping to grow the 1,500-year-old game’s reputation as a legitimate e-sport. He had his work cut out for him. Chess.com, which was launched a decade earlier by former Brigham Young University dorm mates Erik... Read more ›
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A few months ago, I broke down and bought myself a Birdie, a $30 personal safety device that’s the size of a canary and the color of a candy bracelet. When activated, it emits an electronic shriek that is said to reach 130 decibels, loud enough to make your ears hurt and, theoretically, to keep bad guys at heel. Already my relationship with my Birdie is a complicated one. I’m... Read more ›
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Welcome back!Scott is on vacation, and so I’m coming to you Pro subscribers this week to say a quick hello and share some thoughts ahead of this holiday weekend. It’s a pretty lively time between technology and Washington. Over the last few years, all anyone wanted to talk about was antitrust. And while those cases and issues are still intensifying, there’s all of a sudden a whole big patchwork of... Read more ›
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Startups and other companies trying to capitalize on the artificial intelligence boom sparked by OpenAI are running into a problem: They can’t find enough specialized computers to make their own AI software. A spike in demand for server chips that can train and run machine-learning software has caused a shortage, prompting major cloud-server providers including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and Oracle to limit their availability for customers, according to... Read more ›
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Sibling rivalry. It’s a real thing, as any parent with more than one child knows, and it can either motivate a kid to work harder or alienate them. No, you haven’t accidentally opened a newsletter about parenting. Sibling rivalry turns out to be a big problem in tech. It prevented the two AI labs within Google’s parent Alphabet from working together, at least until very recently, which likely slowed Alphabet’s... Read more ›
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So many TikTok videos on my For You Page the last few weeks have featured a CapCut overlay of “The Last of Us” actor Pedro Pascal eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The template, made on the app owned by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has been used more than 1.15 million times on TikTok and other apps, according to metrics from the CapCut app. The viral spread of the... Read more ›
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A few weeks ago, at the SXSW conference, I sat down with journalist and the host of “Pivot” and “On with Kara Swisher,” Kara Swisher. With Silicon Valley Bank imploding around us, and technology companies on edge about all sorts of issues, it felt like a good time to check with Swisher on not just the state of tech, but also the state of news. Swisher’s career in journalism has... Read more ›
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After months of writing about layoffs and cram downs, I stumbled across the rare buzzy deal in Silicon Valley this week. More than half a dozen venture capital firms have been vying for a stake in a San Francisco startup—EvenUp—that uses artificial intelligence to help personal injury lawyers compile claims using medical documents and case files. Bessemer Venture Partners won the deal and is leading the Series B round at... Read more ›
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Historically, India has been a software kingdom, a place where more advanced economies such as the U.S. outsource their development jobs. Lacking both the infrastructure and the expertise necessary to be competitive in manufacturing, India rarely produced any major consumer electronic products. That is poised to change. As major tech companies—including Apple—begin to shift more of their manufacturing away from China due to its aging population and uncertain geopolitical position,... Read more ›
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The last time Disney CEO Bob Iger and Comcast CEO Brian Roberts tangled, in a battle for control of 21st Century Fox’s entertainment business, Roberts came off second best. But as they prepare for their next contest, over ownership of streaming service Hulu, it’s the Comcast CEO who appears to have all the leverage. Next January, Comcast has the right to sell its 33% stake in Hulu to Disney, the... Read more ›
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Greg Brockman needed a win. In 2017, Brockman—then chief technology officer of OpenAI, a 50-person nonprofit at the time—was worried about getting left in the dust by bigger rivals like DeepMind, an AI lab owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet. He also was concerned that OpenAI might fall into the trap that had ensnared other artificial intelligence labs, where researchers fiddled around with projects that were never put into practice.... Read more ›
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In September 2020, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, right, and his deputy, Drew Baglino, laid out a case for making battery electrodes in a completely dry process. Photo: Courtesy TeslaIn a fresh attempt to produce $25,000 electric vehicles, Tesla has hired manufacturing specialist Matt Tyler to jump-start its stalled efforts to cut the cost of making batteries. As Tesla’s “director of dry electrode development,” Tyler is taking on a key challenge... Read more ›
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It’s become a major refrain among several U.S. tech leaders that the U.S. can’t let China win in artificial intelligence. And so it is pretty interesting that leading venture firms funded by U.S. endowments and other institutional investors are putting money into the most promising young AI startups in China. In an important piece in The Information today, Juro reported from Hong Kong that Sequoia’s China arm had quietly backed... Read more ›
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Until November, Priyanka Naik’s career as a food blogger took place around the sidelines of her main job at Twitter, where she most recently led the social network’s North American and Latin American partnerships with large companies developing products with its API, or backend to its tweet data. But after she lost that position in layoffs that followed Elon Musk’s takeover, Naik decided to focus solely on building her own... Read more ›
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Stablecoins have been in the spotlight recently, thanks to regulatory crackdowns and chaos in the traditional financial sector, and investors have been pulling money out of some stablecoins at a staggering pace. To recap what’s been going on: The New York State Department of Financial Services in February ordered Paxos to stop issuing the Binance-branded stablecoin BUSD, and Paxos cut ties with the crypto exchange. And Circle’s USDC briefly plunged... Read more ›
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Tiger Global Management, the most prolific investor in private tech companies during the recent boom, also invested in dozens of venture capital firms as it sought to forge closer ties to the young startups those funds backed. But in recent months, the New York–based investment firm has been looking to dump some of those VC fund stakes. The firm has been working with banks to sell some of its VC... Read more ›
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A boom in artificial intelligence startup funding sparked by OpenAI has spilled over to China, the world’s second-biggest venture capital market. Now American institutional investors are indirectly financing a rash of Chinese AI startups aspiring to be China’s answer to OpenAI. The American investors, including U.S. endowments, back key Chinese VC firms such as Sequoia Capital China, Matrix Partners China, Qiming Venture Partners and Hillhouse Capital Management that are striking... Read more ›
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Who says there are no laughs in tech business news? Our scoop today that Amazon, the premier online retail website, was marking products made by big companies and foreign sellers with a label meant to denote small U.S. businesses has a comedic side (make sure you check out the anecdote about Chomps jerky). But there’s a serious angle here. Over a period of nearly 30 years, Amazon has won over... Read more ›
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06.04.2026 02:42
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