Société Générale to sell its freelancer challenger bank Shine to Ageras

June 19, 2024

Four years after acquiring Shine, a French fintech startup that offers bank accounts to freelancers and very small companies, Société Générale has announced plans to sell Shine to Ageras. In 2020, TechCrunch reported that Société Générale spent around €100 million to acquire Shine. It wasn’t a huge acquisition but it attracted quite a bit of […]

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The Download: video-generating AI, and Meta’s voice cloning watermarks

June 19, 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. I tested out a buzzy new text-to-video AI model from China You may not be familiar with Kuaishou, but this Chinese company just hit a major milestone: It’s released the first ever text-to-video…

UK probes HPE’s planned $14B Juniper Networks acquisition

June 19, 2024

The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has initiated a formal “phase 1” investigation into Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) planned acquisition of Juniper Networks. HPE announced plans to acquire Juniper Networks back in January, a deal designed to unify their respective strengths in the networking and IT infrastructure realm, spanning servers, storage, consulting, routing, switching, […]

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The return of pneumatic tubes

June 19, 2024
Pneumatic tubes were touted as something that would revolutionize the world. In science fiction, they were envisioned as a fundamental part of the future—even in dystopias like George Orwell’s 1984, where the main character, Winston Smith, sits in a room peppered with pneumatic tubes that spit out orders for him to alter previously published news…

I tested out a buzzy new text-to-video AI model from China

June 19, 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. You may not be familiar with Kuaishou, but this Chinese company just hit a major milestone: It’s released the first text-to-video generative AI model that’s freely available for the public…

How Abridge became one of the most talked about healthcare AI startups

June 19, 2024

Ask any of the health-focused VCs to name one of the top AI startups and one name comes up over and over again: a company  based in Pittsburgh called Abridge. And it’s a startup that launched before OpenAI was a household name and LLMs entered the common Valley vocabulary.  In 2019, Shiv Rao, a practicing […]

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Kilimo helps farmers save water and get paid for it

June 19, 2024

Cheap irrigation has transformed many regions around the world into breadbaskets, but it also means that there can be little left for other uses.

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Fisker failed because it wasn’t ready to be a car company

June 18, 2024

Two years ago, an employee at Fisker Inc. told me that the most pressing concern inside the EV startup was not whether its Ocean SUV would get built. Fisker was outsourcing the manufacturing of its first EV to highly respected automotive supplier Magna, after all. The startup’s November 2022 start-of-production target was aggressive, but not […]

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