Meta and the Internet Society have established the Connectivity Co-Funding Initiative, which aims to expand affordable internet connection around the world. They announced the new project at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The partners are committing a $30 million investment through 2030 that will go to funding infrastructure development in various communities, specifically those overlooked or intentionally ignored by commercial providers. In addition, the initiative's money will go towards training programs that improve the technical know-how of marginalized grounds, to community-centered solutions for underserved areas, as well as to locally owned networks that create jobs. 

This an expansion of the non-profit organization's partnership with Meta, which started years ago when they worked together to improve internet connectivity in Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America by developing Internet exchange points. These points, or IXPs, are physical locations where internet providers can exchange traffic. 

Meta is only the Internet Society's first partner for the Co-Funding Initiative, and the non-profit org is putting out a call for more partners who can help grow that fund. "This new Connectivity Co-Funding initiative, supported by Meta, is a prime example of collective action that will help provide meaningful access to more than 2 billion people across the world with insufficient or no Internet," said Sally Wentworth, President and CEO of the Internet Society. "It is our hope that this fund plays a pivotal role in reducing this gap and creating a more equitable digital society."

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/meta-and-internet-society-team-up-to-expand-internet-access-around-the-world-080034114.html?src=rss

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Big tech companies aren’t sleeping on quantum chips: Amazon Web Services introduced Ocelot; Microsoft, Majorana; and Google, Willow. But although all of these can be considered to be breakthroughs, quantum startups often focus on more practical advancements — and they are making progress. Founded in 2020, Dutch startup QuantWare is one of these, which claims […]

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The drive to decarbonize our economies through electrification and clean energy continues to generate momentum around battery technologies, as storage has a key role to play in enabling the green transition. While renewables are clean sources of energy compared to burning fossil fuels, their power output isn’t always consistent. In the case of solar — […]

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A new commentary highlights the potential health risks of microplastics in our bodies and brains.

Generative AI is a tempting short-cut that can prevent those at university from gaining foundational skills

After wielding a chainsaw to the federal budget, managing consulting contracts may be next on the chopping block

Aircraft servicer AAR has hired a lobbyist and is pressing Doge to buy overhauled parts for civilian-modelled planes

Oxa and Wayve are making hard choices in the face of well-funded Chinese and US competition

Asian tech stocks were also under pressure from the 8.69% fall in artificial intelligence darling Nvidia's shares overnight.

Oscar voters may have loved Anora, but viewers at home still need to get to know her. Preliminary ratings for the 97th Oscars are in, and this year's independent film-dominated show saw a 7% dip from 2024's Barbenheimer barnburner. Per early Nielsen fast national ratings, the telecast brought in an average of 18.1 million total...

News podcast listeners are more likely to use YouTube to watch videos and consume and find podcasts, compared to non-news podcast listeners, according to a report by NPR, NPM and Sounds Profitable.

“The News Podcast Consumer,” which came out last week, looked at news podcast listeners to analyze their demographics, media behaviors and consumption habits. The data is a segment of the “2024 Podcast Landscape Report” from Sounds Profitable and Signal Hill Insights, which surveyed over 5,000 Americans. Of those, nearly 800 respondents had consumed a news podcast in the last month.

The findings — which also show news podcast listeners are more likely to consume video podcasts — shouldn’t come as a surprise, given the recent dominance of YouTube as a podcast platform and the growth of video podcasts.

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A year ago News U.K. replaced brand safety heavyweight Integral Ad Science with a little-known company called Illuma. So far, the gamble is paying off. 

The publisher has increased its brand safe ad inventory by up to 20%, up from 16% just six months ago. 

“We’ve created more ad inventory that we know is brand safe,” said Charlie Celino, head of strategic development at News U.K, without revealing exact figures.

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Questions that keep marketers up at night:

Why did our customers buy our product? 

Why did they buy when they did?

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Amazon just raised the walls of its walled garden.

Last week, the company finally pulled back the curtain on its long-awaited Alexa overhaul, a chattier, more personalized and supposedly more useful version of its voice assistant. Generative AI powers this new version, called Alexa+, which is available beyond just Echo devices, spreading across car infotainment systems, connected TVs and anything else running Alexa.

This is Amazon’s latest attempt to deliver on the grand vision it pitched a decade ago: making voice as intuitive for controlling devices as touch. So far it’s been more gimmick than game-changer, but early reactions to this newest update suggest that could change. If it does, the bigger question isn’t what Alexa can do, it is how Amazon plans to cash in.

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If you ask today’s marketers what’s important to them, you’ll hear a common refrain: They want their brands to truly be part of culture. But what does that actually mean and how are marketers going about making that happen?

There’s a necessary recalibration of control and planning. Culture is ever changing, ephemeral and impossible to predict — and yet, today’s marketers are more beholden to the cultural zeitgeist than ever, intent on finding ways for their brands to be part of whatever the obsession of the moment may be and capitalizing on that. To be part of the cultural zeitgeist requires marketers to change not only how they show up and what they say, but also how they spend their ad dollars.

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Puck’s famed journalist-centric publishing model is changing. Sort of.

The news outlet debuted in 2021 with its journalists as the company’s audience-facing focal point, not the publication. People would subscribe less so to Puck than to Matthew Belloni’s or Julia Ioffe’s newsletters via Puck. And Puck’s journalists were, in part, compensated directly for the subscribers they attracted. Lately though, Puck’s newsletters have come to resemble publications in their own right.

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Twitch is expanding its monetization and moderation tools, and creators see the move as an attempt to regain ground lost to competitors such as Kick and YouTube.

In an open letter penned by Twitch CEO Dan Clancy on Feb. 27, the company revealed a slew of updates for 2025, including the opening up of monetization features such as subscriptions and Bits (a virtual currency that users can purchase from Twitch and donate to creators) to streamers of all sizes, as well as the expansion of the platform’s moderation functions.

Previously, Twitch creators could only enable subscriptions and Bits by joining the platform’s affiliate program, whose guidelines require users to stream for at least eight hours on seven different days and average at least three viewers per stream to qualify. Now, users will be able to turn on subscriptions and Bits from the moment they create their Twitch account, although other monetization features, such as Twitch’s advertising revenue share, remain available only to Twitch partners or affiliates.

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Nearly half of journalists surveyed in a new report said they are using generative AI tools not approved or bought by their organization.

That’s according to a survey by Trint, an AI transcription software platform, which asked producers, editors and correspondents from 29 global newsrooms how they plan to use AI for work this year.

The report found that 42.3% of journalists surveyed are using generative AI tools at work that are not licensed by their company. Journalists said their newsrooms were adopting AI tools to improve efficiency and stay ahead of their competitors, and expected using AI for processes like transcription and translation, information gathering and analyzing large volumes of data to increase in the next few years.

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Highlighting businesses that have achieved rapid revenue growth despite a difficult economic environment