The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened a third investigation into EV startup Fisker’s Ocean SUV, this time centered on problems getting the doors to open. NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) says in a new notice that it has received 14 complaints from owners who have not been able to open the doors … Read more
Lithium-ion batteries have transformed the global economy, making possible everything from smartphones and laptops to electric vehicles, e-bikes, and more. But while costs have dropped precipitously in the last decade or so, they’re still too expensive to electrify all the ways humans need to store energy. With the advent of cheap solar, making electricity has … Read more
Full Glass Wine, a brand acquisition management startup that specializes in acquiring wine marketplaces, has raised $14 million in a Series A round to continue acquiring DTC (direct-to-consumer) wine marketplaces, aiming to lead the DTC wine market. The outfit recently acquired Bright Cellars, a subscription-based wine service provider in Wisconsin, for an undisclosed price. The deal … Read more
Chatbots have come a long way. For years, they were limited to responding with predetermined replies that followed a simple logic structure. But customers can have complex problems, and no tree-diagram of possible replies can have enough branches to account for all the edge cases that arise. Thankfully, the advent of large language models has … Read more
U.S. police departments are increasingly relying on a controversial surveillance practice to demand large amounts of users’ data from tech companies, with the aim of identifying criminal suspects. So-called “reverse” searches allow law enforcement and federal agencies to force big tech companies, like Google, to turn over information from their vast stores of user data. … Read more
Much like the headset for which they were designed, Apple’s Personas are very much a work in progress. The original version of the beta avatars were — is “nightmarish” too strong a word? A subsequent update has made them more palatable and truer to life, and Apple says it’s continuing to work on the 3D … Read more
The fediverse — the name for the social network made of of interconnected servers, like Mastodon and others — just got another boost of legitimacy on Tuesday as the @Potus (President of the United States) account on Instagram Threads shared its first federated post. The account operated by Biden’s team published a message regarding the … Read more
Seven open source foundations are coming together to create common specifications and standards for Europe’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), regulation adopted by the European Parliament last month. The Apache Software Foundation, Blender Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, OpenSSL Software Foundation, PHP Foundation, Python Software Foundation, and Rust Foundation revealed their intentions to pool their collective resources and join … Read more
In an announcement timed for the National Association of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas, which kicks off later this month, Amazon today announced Deadline Cloud, a new service that lets customers set up, deploy and scale up graphics and visual effects rendering pipelines on AWS cloud infrastructure. Using Deadline Cloud, customers in media and entertainment … Read more
Turkey has gained a well-earned reputation as a veritable cauldron of mobile games startups, leading to the rise of VCs dedicated to the sector. The latest to join this coterie is Laton Ventures, a new gaming-focused VC that has raised a $35 million fund. Founding Partner — and Solo GP — Görkem Türk says he’s … Read more