AI crawler Firecrawl raises $14.5M, is still looking to hire agents as employees
Firecrawl nabbed Shopify’s CEO Tobias Lütke as an investor from a gutsy email after they discovered he was using the product.
Why Clear Leadership Beats Cutting-Edge Tools Every Single Time
Strong leadership, not technology, is the real driver of team performance and organizational success.
Apple AirPods : a gateway hearing aid
When the US Food and Drug Administration approved over-the-counter hearing-aid software for Apple’s AirPods Pro in September 2024, with a device price point right around $200, I was excited. I have mild to medium hearing loss and tinnitus, and my everyday programmed hearing aids cost just over $2,000—a lower-cost option I chose after my audiologist…
How churches use data and AI as engines of surveillance
On a Sunday morning in a Midwestern megachurch, worshippers step through sliding glass doors into a bustling lobby—unaware they’ve just passed through a gauntlet of biometric surveillance. High-speed cameras snap multiple face “probes” per second, isolating eyes, noses, and mouths before passing the results to a local neural network that distills these images into digital…
Spotify’s latest feature lets you add your own transitions to playlists
The new options are designed to appeal to playlist experts and other music fans, who have collectively created nearly 9 billion playlists on Spotify’s platform to date.
Eight Sleep raises $100M to expand it AI-powered sleep tech
The sleep tech company raised from HSG, Valor Equity Partners, Founders Fund, Y Combinator and big F1 names like Charles Leclerc and Zak Brown.
Should AI flatter us, fix us, or just inform us?
How do you want your AI to treat you? It’s a serious question, and it’s one that Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has clearly been chewing on since GPT-5’s bumpy launch at the start of the month. He faces a trilemma. Should ChatGPT flatter us, at the risk of fueling delusions that can spiral out of…
How to make clean energy progress under Trump in the states—blue and red alike
The second Trump administration is proving to be more disastrous for the climate and the clean energy economy than many had feared. Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act repealed most of the clean energy incentives in former president Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Meanwhile, his EPA administrator moved to revoke the endangerment finding, the…
OpenAI launches a sub $5 ChatGPT plan in India
This plan will offer 10x more messages and image generation than the free tier, among other benefits.
SoftBank makes $2B investment in Intel
Softbank will pay $23 per share for Intel common stock.
Allianz Life data breach affects 1.1 million customers
Data breach notification site Have I Been Pwned notified 1.1 million customers of a July data breach, a number not previously reported.