Author: GT

On Monday, Clipbook, an AI-powered platform that helps companies monitor their media coverage, announced a $3 million seed round co-led by Mark Cuban, Commonweal Ventures, and Carpenter Capital.  The deal happened because Clipbook’s founder, Adam Joseph, took a long shot with a cold email that he never thought anyone would read, he told TechCrunch.  Joseph launched Clipbook in 2023 and bootstrapped it to a million dollars in annual recurring revenue, he said. At that point, about a year ago, he felt he was ready to find investors.  “I literally made a list of the top five media investors in the…

NEW YORK (AP) — Deals promoted as some of the best of the holiday season are expected to keep people across the United States glued to their computers and smartphones as the post-Thanksgiving shopping marathon wraps up on Cyber Monday. It’s no secret that buying things online is now a staple of many people’s everyday routines. And year after year, those purchases mount during the gift-giving holiday rush. Experts expect consumers to drive record Cyber Monday spending this year, despite wider economic uncertainty.Adobe Analytics estimates that U.S. shoppers will spend $14.2 billion online Monday, or 6.3% more than in 2024.…

Our muscles are nature’s actuators. The sinewy tissue is what generates the forces that make our bodies move. In recent years, engineers have used real muscle tissue to actuate “biohybrid robots” made from both living tissue and synthetic parts. By pairing lab-grown muscles with synthetic skeletons, researchers are engineering a menagerie of muscle-powered crawlers, walkers, swimmers, and grippers.But for the most part, these designs are limited in the amount of motion and power they can produce. Now, MIT engineers are aiming to give bio-bots a power lift with artificial tendons.In a study appearing today in the journal Advanced Science, the researchers…

Nvidia on Monday announced it has purchased $2 billion of Synopsys’ common stock as part of a strategic partnership to accelerate computing and artificial intelligence engineering solutions.As part of the multiyear partnership, Nvidia will help Synopsys accelerate its portfolio of compute-intensive applications, advance agentic AI engineering, expand cloud access and develop joint go-to-market initiatives, according to a release. Nvidia said it purchased Synopsys’ stock at $414.79 per share.”Our partnership with Synopsys harnesses the power of Nvidia accelerated computing and AI to reimagine engineering and design — empowering engineers to invent the extraordinary products that will shape our future,” Nvidia CEO…

SAP is moving its sovereignty plans forward with EU AI Cloud, a setup meant to unify its efforts in the region under one approach. The goal is to give organisations in Europe more choice and control of how they run AI and cloud services.EU AI Cloud is built to support organisations using SAP’s data centres, other European providers, or on-premise topologies.Strengthening AI sovereignty in EuropeSAP is also working with Cohere to bring new agent-style and multimodal AI tools to customers through Cohere North. Models will be available through SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), giving industries with strict data residency…

Mustafa Hatipoglu | Anadolu | Getty ImagesArtificial intelligence startup Runway on Monday announced Gen 4.5, a new video model that outperforms similar models from Google and OpenAI in an independent benchmark.Gen 4.5 allows users to generate high-definition videos based on written prompts that describe the motion and action they want. Runway said the model is good at understanding physics, human motion, camera movements and cause and effect.The model holds the No. 1 spot on the Video Arena leaderboard, which is maintained by the independent AI benchmarking and analysis company Artificial Analysis. To determine the text-to-video model rankings, people compare two different…

South Korean e-commerce platform Coupang over the weekend said nearly 34 million Korean customers’ personal information had been leaked in a data breach that had been ongoing for more than five months. The company said it first detected the unauthorized exposure of 4,500 user accounts on November 18, but a subsequent investigation revealed that the breach had actually compromised about 33.7 million customer accounts in South Korea. The breach affected customers’ names, email addresses, phone numbers, shipping addresses and certain order histories, per Coupang. More sensitive data like payment information, credit card numbers, and login credentials was not compromised and…

When Will Bruey talks about the future, the timelines are shorter than most might imagine. The Varda Space Industries CEO predicts that within 10 years, someone could stand at a landing site and watch multiple specialized spacecraft per night zooming toward Earth like shooting stars, each carrying pharmaceuticals manufactured in space. Within 15 to 20 years, he says, it will be cheaper to send a working-class human to orbit for a month than to keep them on Earth. The reason Bruey thinks these scenarios are realistic is because he has watched ambitious business projections unfold before, while working as an…

LOS ANGELES (AP) — When an AI-generated country song called “Walk My Walk” hit No. 1 on Billboard’s country digital song sales chart this month, it was credited to a fictional artist named Breaking Rust — a white, digitally generated avatar that didn’t exist two months ago.But the song’s vocal phrasing, melodic shape and stylistic DNA came from someone who does exist: Grammy-nominated country artist Blanco Brown, a Black music artist who has worked with Britney Spears, Childish Gambino and Rihanna.And he had no idea.“I didn’t even know about the song until people hit me up about it,” said Brown,…

David Sacks’ role as President Donald Trump’s artificial intelligence and crypto czar could work out very well for his investments, as well as his friends, according to a new report The New York Times. However, Sacks fired back in a post on X, in which he described a five-month reporting process in which accusations were “debunked in detail.” “Today they evidently just threw up their hands and published this nothing burger,” Sacks said. “Anyone who reads the story carefully can see that they strung together a bunch of anecdotes that don’t support the headline.” This isn’t the first time critics…