Less than a year after unveiling its AI avatars that convey human emotions using user text inputs, Nvidia-backed AI startup Synthesia announced on Wednesday that it has secured $180 million in a Series D funding round to advance its AI-powered […]
Apple recently made a donation to assist with LA wildfire recovery efforts, and is now inviting customers to do the same.
Those based in the US can make a donation to the American Red Cross’s Southern California Wildfires Relief fund though the App Store or Apple Music apps …
Several Meta properties including Facebook are reportedly down for users within the last few minutes. Downdetector shows a spike of more than 10,000 reports and climbing for Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
Honda announced that its first original electric vehicle — that is, an EV built on its own platform and not one based on another automaker’s tech, like the Honda Prologue — will be the Acura RSX, due out in 2026.
Honda’s two battery-electric vehicles in the US, the Honda Prologue and the Acura ZDX, are both based on General Motors’ Ultium vehicle platform. The Prologue, in particular, has been an early success for Honda, outselling its sister vehicles, the Chevy Blazer and Equinox EVs.
But now Honda is ready to start working on its own tech. The RSX will also be the first EV to be built at Honda’s new factory in Ohio, where production is expected to kick off in late 2025. The $4.4 billion plant is a joint venture between Honda and LG Chem, the Korean battery company.
Honda is resurrecting the RSX badge that it first used in the early 2000s as its performance brand’s version of the Honda Integra. This follows Honda’s decision to also bring back the Prelude as a sporty, two-door hybrid.
“In RSX, we turn to an Acura nameplate that communicates fun to drive performance, a great name for a sporty SUV with a coupe silhouette for our first original Acura EV,” said Lance Woelfer, VP of automobile sales at American Honda Motor Co.
The RSX will also be the first vehicle from Honda to feature its in-house-developed Asimo OS. At CES, Honda said that Asimo would be the company’s first effort at designing a software-defined vehicle, in which updatable software controls the vehicle’s core functions. The OS was named after Honda’s Asimo humanoid robot, which was retired in 2018. Asimo will also underpin the automaker’s new Honda Zero vehicles, with the first being the Honda 0 SUV.
“So it works out that Acura is once again, sort of the tip of the spear for electrification and our digital future,” said Jessica Fini, Honda’s assistant VP for communications.
TikTok will shut down entirely in the US on Sunday without intervention from the US Supreme Court, unnamed sources have told Reuters. That would go beyond the ban’s requirement for app stores to stop offering downloads of the app, but not immediately halt use of it.
If TikTok shuts down, it will show users a pop-up message pointing them to a website with information about the ban, according to the outlet's sources. The company will also reportedly let users download all of their data.
On Friday last week, a lawyer for TikTok said during a Supreme Court hearing that the app will “go dark” if the court doesn’t pause the ban. The court’s decision on the matter could come as soon as today, and a shutdown is one of the possible outcomes for TikTok, whose executives recently told employees were “planning for various scenarios,” as we reported yesterday.
For years, Vyas Sekar would call up Muckai Girish, an old friend from undergrad, to talk through potential startup ideas and get Girish’s opinion. The two usually talked through an idea and ended the conversation at that. When Sekar called Girish with an idea involving synthetic data in early 2022, the conversation didn’t just end […]
Sinclair said it has deals with select creditors to boost its liquidity and strengthen its balance sheet for the long-term, meaning the station group may be expecting the Trump administration to open the market up for more station acquisitions. Sinclair Television Group and certain affiliated entities have entered into a "transaction support agreement" or TSA...
Dallas-Fort Worth's Fox-owned and-operated duopoly KDFW and KDFI will build a new, purpose-built television studio and state-of-the-art content creation center in Irving-Las Colinas, Texas. "We are pleased to relocate to Irving in what will be a grade-A complex, and we thank Mayor Stopfer and the Irving-Las Colinas Chamber of Commerce for making this possible," said...
We've got much more on what is happening inside Meta with the company's recent speech policy changes. Jason runs us through it. After the break, Joseph explains how thousands of apps have been hijacked to steal your location data, possibly without the app developers' knowledge. In the subscribers-only section, we talk about various stories intersecting with the LA fires, such as Amazon delivery drivers and AI images. (YouTube version to come shortly.)
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
Starting in the Public Preview program, Google Home is finally adding support for the Nest Protect, as well as Matter-certified smart locks. Android app support is rolling out starting today.
Previously, Google charged an additional $20+ per user/month for Gemini in Gmail, Docs, Meet, and other Workspace apps. The full Gemini experience is now coming to Google Workspace business users as part of a price increase.
There’s a general sense of doom on the TikTok feeds these days, and no wonder: it looks like the video service may be banned in the US as of January 19th. TikTok creators are offering satirical goodbyes to their Chinese spies and wondering how quickly they can download the several hundred — or thousand — videos they have up on the service.
TikTok itself apparently doesn’t like the idea of allowing its creators to bulk download their videos. You can download — in TXT or JSON format — a certain amount of your data, which, according to the support page, “may include but is not limited to your username, watch video history, comment history, and privacy settings.” When I tried it, it did not include my videos.
You can also share individual videos — the same way you can any file — but if you’ve got a library of a couple of hundred or more TikTok videos, that’s going to be quite a job. In that case, it’s a lot better to have a bulk download strategy.
To find out how to do that, I went into TikTok and waded through a group of videos offering different methods for downloading your content. I tried several of the methods and found two that worked relatively painlessly: one is easier but...
