February 11, 2025

AI crawler wars threaten to make the web more closed for everyone

We often take the internet for granted. It’s an ocean of information at our fingertips—and it simply works. But this system relies on swarms of “crawlers”—bots that roam the web, visit millions of websites every day, and report what they see. This is how Google powers its search engines, how Amazon sets competitive prices, and…

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New bird flu infections: Here’s what you need to know

April 5, 2024
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.  A dairy worker in Texas tested positive for avian influenza this week. This new human case of bird flu—the second ever reported in the United…

How to safely watch and photograph the total solar eclipse

April 5, 2024
On April 8, the moon will pass directly between Earth and the sun, creating a total solar eclipse across much of the United States, Mexico, and Canada.  Although total solar eclipses occur somewhere in the world every 18 months or so, this one is unusual because tens of millions of people in North America will…

GameStop fails to meet financial expectations

April 5, 2024
Videogame trading empire GameStop has reached the financial year-end with a disappointing shortfall in expectations. The closing bell was not generous to the household name known throughout the United States…

As deal rumors fly, Alphabet and HubSpot would be a strange pairing

April 4, 2024

Reuters reported on Thursday that Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is exploring the possibility of buying Boston-based HubSpot, a CRM and marketing automation company with a market cap of over $33 billion – a number that has been climbing on those reports. If such a deal were to happen, the cost would likely be pretty substantial, […]

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Facebook’s Oculus acquisition turns 10

April 4, 2024

Every year, Time Magazine issues a list of the 200 best inventions of the past 12 months. Frankly, I don’t know how the editors do it. The dirty secret of this job is that true, game-changing inventions rarely cross your desk. In fact, you’re extraordinarily lucky if you average one a year. Oculus’ Rift prototype […]

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Against games industry doldrums, Bitkraft Ventures raises $275M to back studios and platforms

April 4, 2024

Bitkraft Ventures — a games investor based out of Denver, Colorado, but with European founders — has raised its third fund, coming in at $275 million. The fund will make seed and Series A investments in gaming studios, and platforms to support game production. The moves comes at a time when games investments have actually […]

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