A new US administration is about to enter office, one that will incentivize companies to build in America rather than overseas. And Apple seems well prepared for that change, as the company has reportedly just expanded its US-based chip production.
more…AT&T is kicking off 2025 with a new “AT&T Guarantee” program that the company says will “set a new bar” for customer and network service. The headlining part of the announcement? AT&T will now credit you if you experience a network outage …
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San Francisco startup Based Hardware announced the launch of a new AI wearable, Omi, to boost productivity during the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas this week. The device can be worn as a necklace where Omi’s AI assistant can be activated by saying “Hey Omi.” The startup also claims Omi can be attached to […]
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Tran Le was an engineering student at Stanford University when she tried to enroll in a clinical trial for her chronic condition. Although she identified several promising trials, she found the sign-up process daunting — she had to have extensive email exchanges with clinical sites and complete lengthy 20-page forms. All that paperwork was so […]
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I don't want or need 99 percent of the stuff on display at CES — don't get me wrong, most of what we're seeing this week is impressive in one way or another, but nothing had seemed like a necessary addition to my life until I happened upon the Copper Charlie, a battery-equipped induction range that plugs directly into a standard 120V outlet. Yes, among the robots, future cars, bionic exoskeletons and AI everything, the thing that's exited me most is a stove (OK, the fluffball robot is pretty great).
Up until a few years ago, I had no idea natural gas cooktops were bad for your health, not to mention the environment. Unfortunately, if your home is set up on gas, it's not easy or cheap to switch up to electric. Nearly all full-sized induction stoves require a dedicated 240V outlet and if you don't have one where the stove goes, a call to a electrician is likely in your future.
Charlie is a full-sized oven and range that packs a ceramic glass cooktop, a 4.5 cubic-foot oven and an integrated 5 kWh battery. That battery allows the stove to run off a standard plug by storing up a charge that can bump up the power output when it's time to cook (it can also cook three to five meals during a power outage).
In person, the range looks properly high-end with a large LCD display, wooden dials and handle, stainless steel finish and clean lines. It also has a high-end price tag at $6,000. It should qualify for a 30-percent tax credit as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, so it could end up costing around $4,200 instead.
A rewiring job for a 240V outlet shouldn't run you more than $500 for the average house, though if you're dealing with an older home with tricky wiring, that price could go up. And if you're in an apartment, that may not be an option at all. Still, after rebates and deducting the cost of an outlet conversion, you're still paying around $3,500 for Charlie. That's cheaper than some induction ranges, more expensive than others — but none of those models have a back-up battery that'll let you make mac and cheese when the power goes out.
The Charlie from Copper is expected to ship in April of this year and is open for pre-orders.
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Meta is expanding Facebook Marketplace to include eBay listings. A test will launch in the US, France and Germany, allowing users to browse eBay offerings on Marketplace. Sellers on eBay can list products as usual and "as long as your account is in good standing, your listings could appear on any of these partners, including Facebook Marketplace, based on user interest, shopping trends, and listing quality," eBay states. The company will continue to handle all product inquiries and transactions.
The decision by Meta comes as an attempt to placate the European Union, which fined the tech company €797.12 million ($821 million) last November. The European Commission charged Meta with violating antitrust regulations as "Meta tied its online classified ads service Facebook Marketplace to its personal social network Facebook and imposed unfair trading conditions on other online classified ads service providers," Margrethe Vestager, then European Commission's executive vice-president in charge of competition policy, said at the time. "It did so to benefit its own service Facebook Marketplace, thereby giving it advantages that other online classified ads service providers could not match."
Meta's decision to showcase eBay listings on Facebook Marketplace is far from an admission of guilt. "While we disagree with and continue to appeal the European Commission’s decision on Facebook Marketplace, we are working quickly and constructively to build a solution which addresses the points raised," Meta stated in its announcement.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/meta-test-will-bring-ebay-listings-to-facebook-marketplace-153958205.html?src=rss
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Nik Shevchenko closes his eyes and starts to focus intently. He’s spent the last half hour or so telling me about his new product, an $89 wearable called Omi that can listen to, summarize, and get information out of your conversations. Now he wants to show me the future. So his eyes are closed, and he’s focusing all his attention on the round white puck stuck to his left temple with medical tape. (Did I mention he’s had this thing on his face the whole time? It’s very distracting.)
“Hey, what do you think about The Verge, like as a news media website?” Shevchenko asks, to no one in particular. Then he waits. Fifteen or so seconds later, a notification pops up on his phone, with some AI-generated information about how reputable and terrific a news source The Verge is. Shevchenko is thrilled, and maybe a little relieved. The device read his brain waves to understand he was talking to it, and not to me, and answered his question without any prompting or switching.
So far, that’s all the brain-computer-interface stuff Omi can do. And it seems pretty fragile. “It just understands one channel,” he says, “it’s one electrode.” What he’s trying to build is a device that understands when you’re talking to it and when you’re not. And then eventually understands and saves your thoughts, which Shevchenko both waves off as total science fiction and says will probably be possible in two years. Whenever it happens, he thinks it might change the way you use your AI devices.
Image: Omi
For now, the Omi’s actual purpose is much simpler: it’s an always-listening device (the battery apparently lasts three days on a charge) that you wear on a lanyard around your neck that can help you make sense of your day-to-day life. There’s no wake word, but you can still talk to it directly because it’s always on. Think of it as 80 percent companion and 20 percent Alexa assistant.
Omi can summarize a meeting or conversation and give you action items. It can give you information — Shevchenko offhandedly wondered about the price of Bitcoin during our conversation and got a notification from the Omi companion app a few seconds later with the answer. There’s also an Omi app store, which developers are already using to plug the audio input into things like Zapier and Google Drive.
For Shevchenko himself, though, Omi is a personal mentor above all else. “I was born in the middle of nowhere on an island near Japan,” he tells me, and always wanted access to the tech visionaries he grew up admiring. For years, he says he cold-emailed people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk asking for advice and mentorship on how to make it in tech but never got much response. With no real-life options, Shevchenko decided to build his own.
Omi already has a product called “Personas,” which allows you to plug in anyone’s X handle and create a bot that assumes their social network persona. When Shevchenko shares his screen with me, it shows he’s been chatting with an AI Elon Musk for a long time. “It helps me to understand what I should be working on tomorrow,” Shevchenko says. “Or when I’m talking to someone and I don’t know an answer to the question, it will give me a small nudge — it sometimes tells me I’m wrong!” His wearable heard him say he was sick a few days ago and has been reminding him ever since to get more rest. He asks it every month to give him feedback and tell him how to do better.
He gets a lot of notifications from the Omi app, including during our call, and not all of them make much sense — one was just a transcription of a sentence he’d said a minute earlier. Shevchenko acknowledges it’s early, but he doesn’t seem bothered by the system’s misses. The communication works for him.
Image: Omi
Most people won’t use Omi this way, though. The product will ship widely in the second quarter of this year, but Shevchenko says the 5,000 people with an early version of the device are using it to help remember things, look up information, and perform other tasks common to AI assistants.
In that sense, Omi has a lot in common with devices like the Limitless Pendant and bears a striking resemblance to another wearable called Friend. When Friend launched last year, Shevchenko claimed Friend CEO Avi Schiffmann was stealing his work, and the subsequent beef included everything from sniping on X to a freestyle rap diss track. Omi was actually called Friend for a while, and Shevchenko says he changed the name both to avoid confusion and because Schiffmann dropped $1.8 million on Friend.com and subsequently dominated search results.
Shevchenko is confident that Omi can improve on those other devices. All of Omi’s code is open source, and there are already 250 apps in the store. Omi’s plan is to be a big, broad platform, rather than a specific device or app — the device itself is only one piece of the puzzle. The company is using models from OpenAI and Meta to power Omi, so it can iterate more quickly on the product itself.
For all their issues and underlying concerns, it’s clear that AI models are already good enough to feel like a true companion to millions of people. You can feel about that however you’d like, but from Omi and Friend to Character.AI and Replika, bot friends are quickly becoming real friends. What they need, then, is both more information about you and more ways to help you. Omi thinks the first answer is an always-on microphone, and the second is an app store. Then, I guess, comes the brain.
Samsung announced its first Galaxy Unpacked event of 2025, which it’s historically used to introduce the latest flagship Galaxy smartphones. That would be the Galaxy S25 family if our count is right, including the base model, the expected Galaxy S25 Ultra, and whatever else falls between. We’ll know for sure before too long with an unveiling scheduled for January 22nd.
But before the company even confirms what we’re getting, you can already place a reservation to preorder the device. If you sign up at Samsung’s website or the Shop Samsung app by January 22nd at 1 PM ET (which only entails submitting your name and email address) and later place your pre-order, you’ll get a $50 credit that’s good toward any additional devices or accessories you’re purchasing alongside it. That sadly means you can’t use the $50 toward the device itself. The fine print also mentions that you can get a $100 credit toward your pre-order of a qualifying 2025 TV (perhaps some of the models it announced at CES) or audio device using the same email address, hinting that we may see more than just smartphones at the event.
As for what to expect from the Galaxy S25 family, they could be some of the first “Qi2 Ready” devices, which would mean they’ll support the wireless charging standard, but require cases to use them with magnetic Qi2 chargers. A recent video leak suggests the Galaxy S25 Ultra may get a slight redesign with a curvier chassis. We may even get a Galaxy S25 “Slim” to turn the de facto trio of flagships into a quartet.
And we didn’t need to see the letters “AI” in Samsung’s teaser to know that would be a central selling point for its latest devices. We’ve already seen Galaxy AI deployed in several of its devices over the last couple of years, which includes features like Circle to Search, computational photography and video tricks with generative photo manipulation, summarized notes and transcriptions, and live translations. Samsung will presumably continue building that experience out as part of One UI 7.
Mythic Quest’s third season ended on a hopeful note as the Playpen team hunkered down to start developing an all-new expansion, but all that hard work looks like it’s just going to lead to more headaches judging from the show’s latest season 4 trailer.
While Mythic Quest’s new season will find Dana (Imani Hakim), Jo (Jessie Ennis), and Brad (Dani Pudi) basking in the success of their Cozy Galaxy project, things are going to be a bit tougher for Ian (Rob McElhenney) and Poppy (Charlotte Nicdao) as they try to figure out how keep players coming back to Playpen. In the trailer, David (David Hornsby) says that he wants the pair to take their time to come up with some genuinely good ideas. But it’s clear that he really wants those solutions quickly, which feels like part of why one of Ian’s first moves is to incorporate an AI duplicate of himself into his workflow.
Poppy’s idea to let Playpen players create their own in-game content seems a bit more on the level and like something that might actually get people logging on regularly. But of course, the first thing players want to do with the features is find ways to make their characters pantomime sex, which is exactly the sort of thing that gets Congress wondering who the game is actually for. No one actually says “Roblox” in the trailer, but it’s obvious that Mythic Quest’s writers room has been reading the news and getting the sense that something smells a bit off about games with these kinds of business models. Which is probably why the show won’t pull any punches when it returns on January 29th (and its spin-off debuts on March 26th).
Meta is testing eBay listings on Facebook Marketplace in the US, Germany, and France. The company said in a post on Wednesday that it’s making the change to comply with last year’s antitrust order by the European Union, though it continues to appeal the decision.
With the test, Facebook Marketplace users can browse eBay listings on Facebook Marketplace and then check out on eBay. Meta said it could “benefit” both platforms, as it exposes eBay sellers to Facebook’s audience, while giving Marketplace users access to “a broader array of listings from the eBay community.” The news was reported earlier by Bloomberg.
Last year, the EU fined Meta $840 million over claims it forcibly exposed Facebook users to Marketplace by linking its selling and social platforms. It also accused Meta of imposing “unfair trading conditions” on rival classified ads services to benefit Marketplace, and ordered Meta to stop engaging in this allegedly illegal behavior. At the time, Meta said it would work on a solution while appealing the fine, saying that the EU’s decision relies “on a hypothetical potential to harm competition.”
Meta doesn’t say whether the Marketplace test will impact all users across the US, Germany, and France, but we’ve reached out to the company with a request for more information.
Apple TV+ has two big returning series coming this month: Severance and Mythic Quest. The two shows are polar opposites, but both promise to be a treat for viewers. Today, Apple has released the first trailer for Mythic Quest season 4—and it looks very good.
more…Ahead of the holidays, Microsoft said it was upgrading the AI model behind Bing Image Creator, the AI-powered image editing tool built into the company’s Bing search engine. Microsoft promised that the new model — the latest version of OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 model, code-named “PR16” — would allow users to create images “twice as fast […]
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The former chief executive of the parent company of MoviePass, Theodore Farnsworth, pleaded guilty to charges of securities fraud and conspiracy after being accused of misleading investors over the service’s “unlimited plan.” Farnsworth also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud as the chief executive of Vinco Ventures, a publicly traded company. Helios & […]
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