Author: GT

Building an app dedicated to helping people aggregate and read news, articles, and social media posts in one place is apparently a tough proposition these days. Smashing, an AI-powered app that lets users curate the news and posts they’d like to read, is shutting down, seemingly because of its inability to scale rapidly enough. “We simply didn’t grow fast enough to keep going. We weren’t able to scale it into a sustainable product,” the company said in an email to customers announcing its closure. Goodreads’ founder, Otis Chandler, launched Smashing last June, aiming to use AI and the community to…

A new study predicts that Bitcoin could hit $1 million as early as 2027 as a result of daily withdrawals from liquid supply exceeding 1,000 BTC. The model is based on economic fundamentals and describes a setting whereby institutional accumulation is increasing and supply is contracting quickly—driving prices at an increasingly rapid rate. Published in the Journal of Risk and Financial Management, the study named ‘A Supply and Demand Framework for Bitcoin Price Forecasting’ uses a supply and demand equilibrium model built specifically off of Bitcoin’s fixed issuance schedule. Unlike traditional commodities, Bitcoin is particularly vulnerable to supply shocks because…

New York City is one of those places in the world where you can get a dollar slice at 2 a.m. or have a burger delivered in less than 30 minutes, but you’ll still spend two hours crawling down the highway to catch a flight. Archer Aviation wants to change that with air taxis that it envisions flying passengers from Manhattan to nearby airports within 15 minutes. The startup on Thursday unveiled its proposed air taxi network for New York City in partnership with United Airlines, which would allow passengers to tack on an Archer ride to their traditional airline…

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Netflix fared better than analysts anticipated during the first three months of the year, signaling the world’s largest video streaming service is still thriving as President Donald Trump’s policies cast a pall on the economy. The numbers released Thursday indicated Netflix is still building on the momentum that enabled it to add 41 million worldwide subscribers last year — the biggest annual gain in the company’s 27-year history.But it’s unclear precisely how many more subscribers Netflix picked up during the January-March period because this report marks the first time that that the Los Gatos, California, company…

By Pritam Biswas and Ateev Bhandari (Reuters) – Kraken, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, is reorganizing its workforce by reducing some positions and consolidating teams where redundancies exist, while continuing to hire in key areas, a company spokesperson said on Thursday. “We continuously evaluate our workforce to ensure it aligns with our strategic priorities,” the spokesperson said. Last year, Kraken appointed Arjun Sethi as co-CEO and announced a 15% reduction in its workforce, impacting about 400 employees. This follows the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s dismissal of a civil lawsuit in March, which had accused Kraken of operating…

Jason Citron, CEO of Discord in Washington, DC, on January 31, 2024.Andrew Caballero-Reynolds | AFP | Getty ImagesThe New Jersey attorney general sued Discord on Thursday, alleging that the company misled consumers about child safety features on the gaming-centric social messaging app.The lawsuit, filed in the New Jersey Superior Court by Attorney General Matthew Platkin and the state’s division of consumer affairs, alleges that Discord violated the state’s consumer fraud laws.Discord did so, the complaint said, by allegedly “misleading children and parents from New Jersey” about safety features, “obscuring” the risks children face on the platform and failing to enforce…

When Matija Šošić started working in web development, he was surprised by how hard it was to build a full-stack production-ready web application. One of the biggest hurdles Šošić faced was navigating the fragmented dev tooling landscape. Coding a web application required utilizing different tools for developing the front end versus the back end, and so on. “The whole ecosystem is very modular and granulated,” Šošić told TechCrunch. “There’s a lot of these separate sub-systems, which you have to figure out how to paste together, and then also make sure they are both, you know, scalable and secure with everything…

Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifies before the House Judiciary Committee at the Rayburn House Office Building on December 11, 2018 in Washington, DC.Alex Wong | Getty ImagesGoogle’s antitrust woes are continuing to mount, just as the company tries to brace for a future dominated by artificial intelligence.On Thursday, a federal judge ruled that Google held illegal monopolies in online advertising markets due to its position between ad buyers and sellers.The ruling, which followed a September trial in Alexandria, Virginia, represents a second major antitrust blow for Google in under a year. In August, a judge determined the company has held…

Temu and Shein plan to raise prices for U.S. customers starting April 25, due to President Donald Trump’s tariffs on goods shipped from China, the Associated Press reports. The 145% tariff on products made in China, along with Trump’s decision to end a customs exemption that had allowed goods under $800 to enter the U.S. duty-free, has disrupted the business models of both platforms. The report says nearly 4 million parcels, most of them from China, enter the U.S. every day under this soon-to-be-ended exemption. Shein and Temu have gained significant popularity in the U.S. over the past few years…

There are thousands of cryptocurrencies on the market these days. But there’s just a handful of elite names I’d recommend buying in this unstable economy. In a race with lots of challengers and runners-up, I’m focused on five top coins that look ready to thrive in the long run. These are not the only cryptocurrencies in my portfolio, but they are the only ones I’d trust for the long haul. They play very specific roles in the diverse crypto sector. All five come with long operating histories and ambitious plans for their technology development. Where to invest $1,000 right now? Our…