Author: GT

Bounce, a technology designed to make your social media account more portable across open social services, is making it possible for users to move their Mastodon accounts to Bluesky. On Tuesday, the makers of Bounce introduced its latest beta version, Bounce 2, which lets you take your Mastodon social graph and migrate it or merge it into a profile for your Bluesky account. With this change, arriving on October 20, users on the open social web will be able to move in either direction: from Mastodon to Bluesky or vice versa. The idea is that this account portability prevents users…

Base Power has built one of the largest battery storage systems in Texas in two years — and now it wants to grow faster. The Austin-based startup, which had raised $200 million in April, is back with another $1 billion in funding. The Series C round was led by Addition with participation from CapitalG, Elad Gil, Lightspeed, Ribbit, Thrive Capital, and Valor Equity Partners. The new round values the company at $3 billion pre-money, according to The New York Times. Base Power has sold more than 100 megawatt-hours’ worth of its home storage batteries in Texas — a notable figure…

AST SpaceMobile has inked a new deal with Verizon to bring space-based cellular broadband across the United States, marking its most significant partnership to date and its latest move to capture a larger share of the emerging space-to-cellular market. Under the agreement, Verizon will integrate AST’s satellite network with its terrestrial infrastructure, using Verizon’s 850 MHz spectrum to extend coverage in remote areas where towers can’t reach. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The deal builds on an earlier partnership between the two entities announced last year, in which Verizon made a $100 million commitment to support AST’s service…

BRUSSELS (AP) — Greenland’s leader on Wednesday thanked the European Union for being “a trusted friend” and urged the 27-nation bloc to invest in his country’s mineral resources, renewable energy, airports and internet services.In a speech to the European Parliament, Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said that “2025 has been an eventful if not dramatic year for Greenland.” He noted the challenge posed by climate change but did not mention President Donald Trump’s talk of seizing the Arctic island.“We need cooperation and partnerships with like-minded countries and institutions who share our values. The EU has been a stable, reliable and important…

Zendesk announced Wednesday at its AI summit a string of LLM-driven products meant to reshape the company’s reliance on human technicians. The center of the new features is an autonomous support agent that Zendesk believes will solve 80% of support issues without human intervention. That system will be supplemented by a co-pilot agent, which will assist human technicians with the remaining 20% of issues, as well as an admin-layer agent, a voice-based agent, and an analytics agent. According to Shashi Upadhyay, Zendesk’s president of Product, Engineering and AI, the new agents are part of a broader change in the support…

President Donald Trump made countering immigration one of his flagship issues during last year’s presidential campaign, promising an unprecedented number of deportations.  In his first eight months in office, that promise turned into around 350,000 deportations, a figure that includes deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE (around 200,000), Customs and Border Protection (more than 132,000), and almost 18,000 self-deportations, according to CNN.   ICE has taken center stage in Trump’s mass deportation campaign, raiding homes, workplaces, and public parks in search of undocumented immigrants. To aid its efforts, ICE has at its disposal several technologies capable of identifying and…

Amazon announced on Wednesday that it’s debuting prescription vending machines at its One Medical clinics. The new in-office kiosks, which are operated by Amazon Pharmacy, let patients pick up their prescriptions immediately after their appointment. Amazon Pharmacy Kiosks will be available at One Medical locations in Los Angeles starting in December, and Amazon plans to expand to more locations soon after. After a provider writes a prescription, patients can choose to have it sent to Amazon Pharmacy for in-office kiosk pickup. Patients then use their phone to check out in the Amazon app, after which medications are typically “ready in minutes,” Amazon…

After OpenAI’s video-generating app Sora surged to the No. 1 position on the U.S. App Store, it has now, technically, experienced a bigger first week than ChatGPT on iOS, according to new data from app intelligence provider Appfigures. Its estimates show that Sora saw 627,000 iOS downloads in its first seven days of availability, compared with ChatGPT’s 606,000 iOS downloads during its first week. This isn’t the fairest comparison, however, because ChatGPT was available only in the U.S. during its first week, while Sora is currently offered in the U.S. and Canada at launch. Still, Appfigures says that Canada contributed…

When Nick Turley joined OpenAI in 2022 as the head of ChatGPT, he was tasked with commercializing the company’s research. He has made great strides toward that goal, growing the product to 800 million weekly active users. Now Turley wants to take an even bigger swing: transforming ChatGPT into a new type of operating system full of third-party apps. I sat down with Turley this week on the outskirts of San Francisco’s Fort Mason, a former U.S. military post where OpenAI held its third annual developer conference, to discuss how he’s thinking about ChatGPT’s future. You can find a transcript…

NEW YORK (AP) — A resurgence of meme stock interest has prompted the return of a one-stop fund for the volatile and quirky investments.Roundhill Investments is launching a meme ETF, which is an exchange-traded fund consisting solely of meme stocks. Several of those stocks have ridden a wave of meme investment sentiment this year. The move comes two years after the provider of ETFs closed the fund because of slumping interest. The new fund trades under the “MEME” symbol.Investors have been sporadically turning to meme stocks throughout 2025 in an effort to find bargains amid a very pricey stock market.…