February 5, 2025

XOi raises $230M, acquires Specifx to expand its tech for field service technicians

Field service engineers may not be the first group of customers that come to mind when you think about lucrative opportunities in B2B technology. But that same blind spot speaks of the opportunity in the space for those who are stepping up and targeting “the job site.” One of the players in that space, XOi  […]

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Technology

Here’s the defense tech at the center of US aid to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan

April 26, 2024
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. After weeks of drawn-out congressional debate over how much the United States should spend on conflicts abroad, President Joe Biden signed a $95.3 billion aid package into…

The Download: how to tell when a chatbot is lying, and RIP my biotech plants

April 26, 2024
Chatbot answers are all made up. This new tool helps you figure out which ones to trust. The news: Large language models are famous for their ability to make things up—in fact, it’s what they’re best at. But their inability to tell fact from fiction has left many businesses wondering if using them is worth…

My biotech plants are dead

April 26, 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.  Six weeks ago, I pre-ordered the “Firefly Petunia,” a houseplant engineered with genes from bioluminescent fungi so that it glows in the dark.  After years of writing about…

The Download: hyperrealistic deepfakes, and clean energy’s implications for mining

April 25, 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. An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary Until now, AI-generated videos of people have tended to have some stiffness, glitchiness, or other unnatural elements that make…

Hydrogen could be used for nearly everything. It probably shouldn’t be. 

April 25, 2024
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. From toaster ovens that work as air fryers to hair dryers that can also curl your hair, single tools that do multiple jobs have an undeniable appeal.  In the climate world, hydrogen…

An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary

April 25, 2024
I’m stressed and running late, because what do you wear for the rest of eternity?  This makes it sound like I’m dying, but it’s the opposite. I am, in a way, about to live forever, thanks to the AI video startup Synthesia. For the past several years, the company has produced AI-generated avatars, but today…

Stripe, doubling down on embedded finance, de-couples payments from the rest of its stack

April 24, 2024

Stripe continues to hold the title of being the biggest financial technology business still in private hands, with a current valuation of about $65 billion and a whopping $1 trillion in total processed payment volume last year alone. But fintech is fragmented and a fast-moving target, and with competitors chipping away at its place, Stripe is […]

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