Author: Emmy's Digital
Spyware maker NSO Group will have to pay more than $167 million in damages to WhatsApp for a 2019 hacking campaign against more than 1,400 users. On Tuesday, after a five-year legal battle, a jury ruled that NSO Group must pay $167,254,000 in punitive damages and around $444,719 in compensatory damages. This is a huge legal win for WhatsApp, which had asked for more than $400,000 in compensatory damages, based on the time its employees had to dedicate to remediate the attacks, investigate them, and push fixes to patch the vulnerability abused by NSO Group, as well as unspecified…
Rivian said in its earnings report Tuesday it will likely deliver fewer vehicles this year than previously forecasted due to President Trump’s tariffs and other regulatory changes, making it the latest automaker to be affected by the new administration’s chaotic economic policies. The company said Tuesday it expects to deliver between 40,000 and 46,000 EVs by the end of 2025. That’s despite Rivian saying one month ago that it was still holding to its estimate of delivering 46,000 to 51,000 vehicles across this year. Rivian raised its capital expenditure guidance to between $1.8 billion and $1.9 billion due to…
A team at Hugging Face has released a freely available, cloud-hosted computer-using AI “agent.” But be forewarned: it’s quite sluggish and occasionally makes mistakes. Hugging Face’s agent, called Open Computer Agent, is accessible via the web and can use a Linux virtual machine preloaded with several applications, including Firefox. Similar to OpenAI’s Operator, you can prompt Open Computer Agent to complete a task — say, “Use Google Maps to find the Hugging Face HQ in Paris” — and sit back as the agent opens the necessary programs and figures out the required steps. Open Computer Agent can handle simple…
Like many leaders in tech, Arvind Krishna, the CEO of IBM, thinks federal R&D funding for AI and related technologies should be increased — not the other way around. “We have been an extremely strong advocate — and this is both the company and me personally — on that federally funded R&D should be increased,” Kirshna said in an interview with TechCrunch. “That’s the position, which is unequivocal, and we strongly believe in that.” President Donald Trump and his cabinet have sought to make deep cuts to federal grantmaking and scientific research programs in pursuit of a far different…
Uber announced its third partnership with a Chinese autonomous vehicle company this week, revealing the ride-hail and delivery giant’s appetite for global domination in the emerging robotaxi sector. Uber said Tuesday it would work with Guangzhou-based Pony AI, which late last year went public on the Nasdaq at a $5.25 billion valuation, to launch robotaxis on the Uber platform in “a key market in the Middle East” later this year. The Pony tie-up comes a day after Uber shared plans for two other strategic deals with Chinese firms: Momenta and WeRide. Uber said it would work with Momenta to…
NewLimit, a startup that aims to increase how long people can live a healthy life by genetically programming their cells, has raised a $130 million Series B led by Kleiner Perkins. New investors Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Khosla Ventures also invested, as did returning backers Founders Fund, Dimension Capital, Elad Gil, Garry Tan, Patrick Collison and others. The fundraise comes two years after the company raised a $40 million Series A. Founded over four years ago by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong (pictured above), former GV partner Blake Bryers, and stem cell professor Jacob Kimmel, NewLimit claims it has…
YouTube continues to dominate the podcasting space, but Spotify is actively working to close the gap. The latest development: a new feature that lets users see how many times an audio-only or video podcast episode has been actively listened to or watched. The streaming giant revealed its new podcast metric called “plays” on Tuesday, making it possible for users to see which podcast episodes are most popular. This is the first time a podcast metric like this will be viewable for creators and users. The plays will appear next to a podcast episode throughout the app, including the home…
The autonomous navigation market — where ships, guided by AI, steer themselves, resulting in fuel and time savings — is projected to sail past $11 billion by 2028. As a result, companies in this space are pushing on an open door. The latest is Orca AI, which closed a Series B funding round of $72.5 million led by Brighton Park Capital. Existing investors Ankona Capital and Hyperlink Ventures also participated. The London-based company has now raised over $111 million, including a $23 million funding round last year. So what drove the new round? In a word: defense. Founded in 2018 by CEO Yarden Gross…
The U.S. Department of Justice is proposing that Google sell two of its advertising products to restore competition in the ad tech space, according to a new filing. The proposal comes after a judge found Google guilty of “willfully acquiring and maintaining monopoly power” in the digital ad space last month. The DOJ’s filing notes that Google should divest its ad exchange product AdX, along with a “phased” sale of DoubleClick for Publishers, an ad server for website publishers. The department also wants Google to avoid running an ad exchange for 10 years post the sale of AdX. The…
It’s 2025, but business cards are still in vogue — just visit any conference or industry expo and you’ll end up with a pile that’s likely to be discarded sooner than later. But as smartphones have become our repositories of information and contacts, people are understandably keen to try out digital alternatives to business cards. Blinq, a startup out of Melbourne, bet that trend would take off when it started off as a hobby project in 2017, offering a digital business card app with a QR-code widget. Today, the company is making off with a bag of gold: It…