MWC 2024: Motorola’s Rollable Concept phone laughs at your silly foldable

December 25, 2024

These stunning images trace ships’ routes as they move

As we run, drive, bike, and fly, we leave behind telltale marks of our movements on Earth—if you know where to look. Physical tracks, thermal signatures, and chemical traces can reveal where we’ve been. But another type of trail we leave comes from the radio signals emitted by the cars, planes, trains, and boats we…

February 27, 2024

[Cartoonishly exaggerated Crocodile Dundee accent] That’s not a foldable. This is a foldable. More specifically, it’s a foldable concept device from Lenovo/Motorola showcased on the floor at this year’s MWC. The company walked us through a demo of a device that’s another terrific example of its ability to get weird with design. The Rollable Concept […]

Subsets helps subscription businesses reduce churn with ‘retention experiments’ and explainable AI

February 27, 2024

Recurring revenue is pretty much the holy grail for any business — it’s precisely why Apple has segued towards being almost as much a services company as it is a hardware company, with 20% of its revenue now emanating from Apple TV+, Apple Music, iCloud, among an array of other subscription and non-subscription-based services. The […]

Algorithms are everywhere

February 27, 2024

Like a lot of Netflix subscribers, I find that my personal feed tends to be hit or miss. Usually more miss. The movies and shows the algorithms recommend often seem less predicated on my viewing history and ratings, and more geared toward promoting whatever’s newly available. Still, when a superhero movie starring one of the…

Bans on deepfakes take us only so far—here’s what we really need

February 27, 2024

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. There has been some really encouraging news in the fight against deepfakes. A couple of weeks ago the US Federal Trade Commission announced it is finalizing rules banning the use of deepfakes that impersonate…

How Wi-Fi sensing became usable tech

February 27, 2024

Over a decade ago, Neal Patwari lay in a hospital bed, carefully timing his breathing. Around him, 20 wireless transceivers stood sentry. As Patwari’s chest rose and fell, their electromagnetic waves rippled around him. Patwari, now a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, had just demonstrated that those ripples could reveal his breathing patterns. …

China’s next cultural export could be TikTok-style short soap operas

February 27, 2024

Until last year, Ty Coker, a 28-year-old voice actor who lives in Missouri, mostly voiced video games and animations. But in December, they got a casting call for their first shot at live-action content: a Chinese series called Adored by the CEO, which was being remade for an American audience. Coker was hired to dub…

Alibaba staff offers glimpse into life of building LLM in China

February 27, 2024

Chinese tech companies are gathering all sorts of resources and talent to narrow their gap with OpenAI, and experiences for researchers on both sides of the Pacific Ocean can be surprisingly similar. A recent X post from an Alibaba researcher offers a rare glimpse into the life of developing large language models at the ecommerce […]

Shadowfax speeds ahead with $100M funding as instant delivery boom fuels growth

February 27, 2024

Shadowfax, one of the largest logistics service providers to hyper-local and on-demand delivery businesses in India, has raised $100 million in a new funding round as it clocks an yearly growth of over 35%. TPG NewQuest led Shadowfax’s Series E financing round, which includes some secondary transactions, the startup said on Tuesday. TechCrunch reported last […]

COTU Ventures launches $54M fund for pre-seed and seed startups in MENA

February 27, 2024

Dubai-based early-stage venture capital firm COTU Ventures is announcing that it has raised $54 million for its inaugural fund to support startups in the Middle East from pre-seed to seed stages. With a final close achieved last year, COTU Ventures, which identifies and backs founders from the inception to post-product launch, invests between $500,000 to […]

The Supreme Court could decide the fate of content moderation — or it could punt

February 27, 2024

The Supreme Court is considering the fate of two state laws that limit how social media companies can moderate the content on their platforms. In oral arguments on Monday, the justices grappled with a thorny set of questions that could reshape the internet, from social networks like Facebook and TikTok to apps like Yelp and […]

These stunning images trace ships’ routes as they move