August 2023

Meta said today that the company plans to enable end-to-end encryption by default for Messenger by the end of this year. The tech giant is also expanding its test of end-to-end encryption features to “millions more people’s chats.” The company has been building end-to-end encryption features in Messenger for years now. However, most of them […]

Snap has restructured its reporting system in India and named Pulkit Trivedi as the new country head, underscoring the increasing importance of the South Asian market to the company. Snapchat’s parent company will now have its Indian team report directly to Trivedi, giving India leadership more autonomy over the local growth, partnership and market development […]

Kombai, a startup that aims to help front-end developers easily convert UI designs to code using AI, has emerged from stealth and announced a $4.5 million in a seed funding round led by Stellaris Venture Partners and Foundation Capital. In response to rapid hardware advancements, software evolution has underscored a pressing need for superior user […]

High energy prices are leading to a solar boom across the world, but in Singapore, many home owners are still hesitant to install solar panels because of the high cost, says Bolong Chew, the founder of Solar AI Technologies. The startup wants to make solar energy more accessible in Southeast Asia with a rent-to-own model […]

MrBeast stumbled into the heated discourse of global affairs in his latest stunt. The billionaire creator inadvertently stoked generations of geopolitical tension in his latest YouTube video, in which participants from “every country on Earth” competed in “Squid Game”-like elimination challenges for a chance to win $250,000. “Behind me is one person from every country […]

ElevenLabs, the viral AI-powered platform for creating synthetic voices, today launched its platform out of beta with support for more than 30 languages. Using a new AI model developed in-house, ElevenLabs says that its tools are now capable of automatically identifying languages including Korean, Dutch and Vietnamese and generating “emotionally rich” speech in those languages. […]

Chemists from MIT and Duke University have discovered a counterintuitive way to make polymers stronger. Working with polyacrylate elastomers, which are polymer networks made from strands of acrylate held together by linking molecules, the researchers found that they could increase the materials’ resistance to tearing up to nearly tenfold by using a weaker type of…

By infusing a salt into a material used in disposable diapers, MIT engineers have synthesized a superabsorbent gel that can soak up a record amount of moisture from even the driest air, offering a possible way to harvest drinkable water. The transparent, rubbery material combines the advantages of lithium chloride, a salt that can absorb…