Masayoshi Son isn’t known for half measures. The SoftBank founder’s career has been studded with brow-raising bets, each one seemingly more outrageous than the last. His latest move is to cash out his entire $5.8 billion NVIDIA stake to go all-in on AI, and while it surprised the business world on Tuesday, it maybe should…
Google announced its November software update for Pixel phones, called Pixel Drop — a quarterly feature release that brings new capabilities to existing devices — with features including notification summaries, a power-saving mode for the Maps app, prompt-based edits for Photos, and Gemini Nano-powered photo edits in Messages. Apple introduced notification summaries with its Apple…
Threads, Meta’s competitor to X, will now begin targeting a specific type of creator: podcasters. The company said on Tuesday that Threads will focus on bringing more discussions around podcasts to its app and helping creators promote their shows. Initially, Threads will roll out a couple of new features to help on this front. For…
Google Photos has rolled out a series of new AI-powered features, including a way to edit objects and people in images, a new Ask button for AI-powered answers about the photo or edit requests, AI templates to create new photos, and the expansion of natural language search. The company first introduced prompt-based editing for Pixel…
Raising a $250 million Series D round may seem like a distant and unnecessary distraction to startup founders pitching investors for that first $1 million in seed money. But it shouldn’t be, according to several founders and venture capitalists. In their view, founders should be charting out a strategy for those later stage fundraises from…
Jenny Shao was a practicing physician and was in residency at Harvard. During the pandemic, Shao saw that people in isolation had a neurological impact, and they needed support. This drove her to leave her medical career, the Harvard residency, to launch a start offering an AI assistant called Robyn. Robyn is intended to be…
Autonomous vehicles are having a moment, and it’s making it a lot easier for smaller companies to raise money. Vay, a German startup offering remote-controlled rental cars, will get $60 million in cash from Singaporean tech heavyweight Grab, the company announced on Monday. The deal, which is subject to regulatory approval and expected to close…
Nearly seven years after announcing its first fund, Sapphire Sport — the venture fund focused on sports, media, and entertainment — is spinning out from Sapphire Ventures. The fund will rebrand as an independent venture firm, 359 Capital. The firm’s new name is a tribute to the sub-four-minute mile, a feat once deemed humanly impossible…
Amazon Music announced on Monday the launch of “Fan Groups,” a new beta feature that lets users create and join groups based on their favorite genres and artists. The feature allows fans to chat, post, and listen to songs shared within these groups. The feature is currently being tested in Canada on iOS and Android…
Five years ago, when Miles “Deuce” McBride moved to New York as a 20-year-old rookie playing for the Knicks, he found the transition to a big city overwhelming and struggled to find the right crowd. “When I got up here, everybody on my team was married with kids or just kind of loners,” he told…
