Author: GT

Amazon is denying that it’s shutting down Wondery, the podcast studio it acquired in late 2020, after Bloomberg reported on Monday that the company was closing the studio and cutting 110 jobs. Amazon told TechCrunch that Wondery will continue to develop creator-led podcasts under the Wondery brand within a new team. What’s changing is that the company is separating the teams that oversee Wondery’s narrative podcast efforts from those developing its creator-led shows. Wondery is combining its narrative podcast studio, which includes podcasts like Dr. Death and American Scandal, with Audible.  “The podcast landscape has evolved significantly in the past few years,…

Google has removed the names of more than 50 DEI groups from a list of companies to which it substantially contributes, according to a new watchdog report and as reported by CNBC. The list, Google’s 2024 selection of groups and organizations backed by Google’s U.S. Government Affairs and Public Policy team, no longer features the names of 58 DEI groups, including the Latino Leadership Alliance and the ACLU of Illinois. When reached for comment, a spokesperson for Google gave the following statement: “This report mischaracterizes our public policy contributions. We contribute to hundreds of groups from across the political spectrum…

The Hers app arranged on a smartphone in New York, US, on Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2025. Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesShares of Hims & Hers Health fell 9% in extended trading on Monday after the telehealth company reported second-quarter results that missed Wall Street’s expectations for revenue.Here’s how the company did based on average analysts’ estimates compiled by LSEG:Earnings per share: 17 cents adjusted vs. 15 centsRevenue: $544.8 million vs. $552 millionRevenue at Hims & Hers increased 73% in the second quarter from $315.6 million during the same period last year, according to a release. Hims & Hers reported a net income…

Lyft’s European expansion will include Chinese-made robotaxis. The U.S. ride-hailing company announced Monday it has made a strategic partnership with Baidu to deploy the Chinese tech giant’s Apollo Go autonomous vehicles across several European markets. The companies want to launch robotaxi services in Germany and the United Kingdom in 2026, pending regulatory approval. If approved, Baidu’s RT6 vehicles, which are equipped with its Apollo Go self-driving system, will be integrated into Lyft’s ride-hailing app. Lyft CEO David Risher said the robotaxi service is an example of its “hybrid network approach, where AVs and human drivers work together to provide customer-obsessed options…

Elon Musk’s AI company has officially rolled out Grok Imagine, xAI’s image and video generator, to all SuperGrok and Premium+ X subscribers on its iOS app. And true to form for Musk, who positions Grok as an unfiltered, boundary-pushing AI, the generator allows users to make NSFW content.  Grok Imagine, which promises to turn text or image prompts into a 15-second video featuring native audio, has a “spicy mode” that allows users to generate sexually explicit content, including partial female nudity . There are limits to how explicit one can get. Many of our spicier prompts — made in the…

Every weekday, the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer releases the Homestretch — an actionable afternoon update, just in time for the last hour of trading on Wall Street. Markets: Wall Street is putting together a strong bounce-back session Monday after wrapping up last week on a sour note thanks to a weak jobs report. All three major benchmarks — the S & P 500 , tech-heavy Nasdaq and 30-stock Dow — added more than 1% in afternoon trading. It’s a broad-based rally, with 10 of the 11 sectors in the S & P 500 in the green. Energy is…

Elon Musk says he’s bringing back Vine — sort of. The X owner announced over the weekend that the company discovered the video archive for the popular short-form video app, thought to have been deleted, and is working to restore user access. Vine — something of a precursor to today’s TikTok, but with only six-second-long looping videos — was acquired by Twitter back in October 2012 for $30 million to expand the social media platform’s video ambitions. Unfortunately for Vine creators and fans, the company fumbled the app’s potential and decided to shut down Vine in 2016 by limiting all…

ChatGPT’s impressive growth as a consumer app continues as the chatbot is on track to hit 700 million weekly active users this week, the company says. The app had earlier reached 500 million weekly active users as of the end of March, noted Nick Turley, OpenAI VP and head of ChatGPT’s app, in a post on X. He also said the app has grown 4x since last year. “Every day, people and teams are learning, creating, and solving harder problems. Big week ahead. Grateful to the team for making ChatGPT more useful and delivering on our mission so everyone can…

The logo for Wondery is displayed on a smartphone in an arranged photograph taken in the Brooklyn borough of New York, U.S., on Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2020. Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesAmazon is terminating some positions in its Wondery podcast division and the head of the group is leaving as part of a broader reshuffling of the company’s audio unit.In a Monday note to staffers, Steve Boom, Amazon’s vice president of audio, Twitch and games, said the company is consolidating some Wondery units under its Audible audiobook and podcasting division. Wondery CEO Jen Sargent is also stepping down…

AI startup Perplexity is crawling and scraping content from websites that have explicitly indicated they don’t want to be scraped, according to internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare. On Monday, Cloudflare published research saying it observed the AI startup ignore blocks and hide its crawling and scraping activities. The network infrastructure giant accused Perplexity of obscuring its identity when trying to scrape web pages “in an attempt to circumvent the website’s preferences,” Cloudflare’s researchers wrote. AI products like those offered by Perplexity rely on gobbling up large amounts of data from the internet, and AI startups have long scraped text, images, and…