June 18, 2025

Pope Leo makes AI’s threat to humanity a signature issue

Pope Leo XIV, the new American pope, is making the threat of AI to humanity a key issue of his legacy, even as the technology industry has spent years attempting to make friends with the Vatican. 

August 2023

China is escalating its war on kids’ screen time

August 9, 2023
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Two years ago, parents around the world likely looked at China with a bit of jealousy: the country had instituted a strict three-hour-per-week limit for children playing video games. In the…

Pretiosum Ventures hits first close on its second fund to back infrastructure startups

August 9, 2023
London-based Pretiosum Ventures has reached the first close of what TechCrunch understands could eventually be a $20 million second fund. Founded in London in 2019 by Yana Abramova, the solo GP fund invests in ‘infrastructure’ startups, (enterprise SaaS, Fintech, and Web3). Pretiosum (a witty inflexion of the Latin phrase ‘pretiōsus’ meaning ‘precious’) typically writes cheques […]

Coupang to ramp up investment in Taiwan after four quarters of profits

August 9, 2023
Coupang, a South Korea-headquartered e-commerce company, said it will accelerate its investment in Taiwan after four straight quarters of profits. Coupang was the most downloaded app in the second quarter of this year in Taiwan, the company said in an earnings call on Wednesday.  “Taiwan is another investment that is thus far exceeding our expectations,” […]

Micromax, smartphone sales stalled, eyes a steer into electric vehicles

August 9, 2023
Micromax Informatics once had a firm grip on the local mobile phone market in India, for a time passing stalwarts like Samsung, icons like Apple and many more to be the biggest handset maker of them all. But a mix of stronger (and cheaper) competition, coupled with the rapid pace of technology development and the […]

Zoom knots itself a legal tangle over use of customer data for training AI models

August 9, 2023
Three years ago Zoom settled with the FTC over a claim of deceptive marketing around security claims, having been accused of overstating the strength of the encryption it offered. Now the videoconferencing platform could be headed for a similar tangle in Europe in relation to its privacy small print. The recent terms & conditions controversy […]

BlueJeans folds

August 9, 2023
Verizon dropped hundreds on millions on BlueJeans at the height of pandemic lockdowns. Three years and some change later, the lesser-known video-conferencing app is done for, the telecom giant told users today. In a mass email, Verizon wrote that it “made the difficult decision to sunset our suite of BlueJeans products.” 9to5Google first reported the […]