February 2024

Early Stage 2024 Audience Choice winner revealed

February 21, 2024

You voted and the results are finally in! We’re excited to announce that you chose Dana Louie, Hubspot’s Senior Manager of Corporate Development, as this year’s Audience Choice roundtable winner at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024. The winning Early Stage 2024 roundtable Dana’s roundtable “Exiting via M&A: What Acquirers Are Looking for and How You Can […]

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Qloo raises $25M to predict your favorite movies, TV shows and more

February 21, 2024

The buzziest AI today — GenAI — is an undoubted labor savor, generating images, emails, songs and more in record time. But one of AI’s more useful applications in the long run might be identifying the counterintuitive correlations humans miss. Consider, for example, that people who like horror movies might be inclined to try certain […]

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Samphire Neuroscience is building a brain stimulating wearable for period pain

February 21, 2024

It’s a horrible truth that many women simply endure period pain every month — perhaps relying on painkillers or a hot water bottle to relieve stomach cramps. For others, menstrual pain can be inescapably debilitating — to the point where they have to stay in bed for days each month and wait the pain out, […]

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The Download: deep diving, and virtual power plants in China

February 21, 2024
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Meet the divers trying to figure out how deep humans can go Two hundred thirty meters into one of the deepest underwater caves on Earth, Richard “Harry” Harris knew that not far ahead…

Google launches two new open LLMs

February 21, 2024

Barely a week after launching the latest iteration of its Gemini models, Google today announced the launch of Gemma, a new family of lightweight open-weight models. Starting with Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B, these new models were “inspired by Gemini” and are available for commercial and research usage. Google did not provide us with a […]

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India’s PhonePe launches Android app store with Amazon, Meta and Microsoft apps

February 21, 2024

Microsoft, Amazon and Meta are among the top brands whose apps are available on the Indian fintech PhonePe’s Indus Appstore, an app store for the Android mobile operating system, launched Wednesday in challenge to Google’s monopoly in its largest market by users. Indus Appstore supports 12 regional languages and features over 200,000 apps — including […]

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Is 5,000 a Stop Sign for Stocks?

February 21, 2024
We all enjoyed the ride up to 5,000 for the S&P 500 (SPY). But more and more it looks like this will be a near term top for the market….

Loora wants to leverage AI to teach English

February 21, 2024

Of the professions in danger of being replaced by AI, language teacher is certainly up there. That’s not necessarily because it’s a good idea. AI, some employers have decided — including Duolingo, recently — is a reasonable enough stand-in for human experts when it comes to language instruction. Despite the fact that AI-translated text tends […]

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Why China’s EV ambitions need virtual power plants

February 21, 2024
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. The first time I heard the term “virtual power plants,” I was reporting on how extreme heat waves in 2022 had overwhelmed the Chinese grid and led the government to restrict electric-vehicle…