Telcos are talking up efforts to transform themselves into tech players, touting advances in AI, 5G and 6G networks, satellite internet and even smart cities.
A broad coalition drawn from across the ranks of Europe’s tech industry is calling for “radical action” from European Union lawmakers to shrink reliance on foreign-owned digital infrastructure and services to bolster the bloc’s economic prospects, resilience, and security in increasingly fraught geopolitical times. In an open letter to European Commission president, Ursula von der […]
Agency holding companies are gradually remolding themselves. No longer constellations of disparate talent, some of them now behave as “operating companies”.
That’s partially a branding trick, but behind the marquee, units like WPP’s Choreograph, or Omnicom’s Omni provide real connective tissue. And in the pitch room, they’re becoming ever more important.
Take Havas, for example. Its Converged “operating system” (or “data spine”, depending on your taste for corporate metaphors) was launched last February as a cookieless media planning and activation solution.
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Last week, Scope3 made a series of product announcements, touching on two of the hot-button issues in ad tech right now: brand safety and ad curation. This is a further sign that competition in ad tech is heating up.
First of all, it’s worth recapping the particulars of the launch — Digiday earlier perused the details in an interview with Scope3 CEO Brian O’Kelley — which included an “agentic advertising platform” among a raft of tie-ups. Among the high-profile names involved are Amazon, Google, Meta and The Trade Desk.
At the core of all the announcements was “AI-driven media optimization,” including a hub for agentic media products, a curation offering whereby users can use a centralized application to set controls across supply-side platforms, and a Brand Standards tool.
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By the looks of Target’s latest earnings call, its ad business continues to be a bright spot for the retailer. Last year, Target’s ad business raked in $649 million in revenue, up 25% from the $522 million it pulled in the year prior.
But for all its growth, Target is the David to the Goliaths of Walmart and Amazon, whose ad businesses brought in $4.4 billion and $50 billion in 2024, respectively. But even if Target is a long shot from hitting the bullseye to become a retail media power player, buyers see potential thanks to the retailer’s new self-service and second-price auction ad offerings.
For the first few months of 2025, Target has been caught in a media frenzy due to its moves involving diversity, equity and inclusion policies and subsequent boycotting, on top of missing its revenue expectations last November. Media buyers and commerce executives say they don’t expect to put a dent in the retailer’s audience data, making it unlikely to impact its ad business — at least for now.
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Starting a family is one of the most exciting moments in life. But for so many people, the reality comes with unexpected hurdles — whether it’s struggling with fertility, figuring out what benefits your job actually offers, or realizing, too late, that your employer doesn’t provide much support at all.
Fertility issues are more common than ever, and the cost of treatments like IVF is sky-high. That means fertility benefits, paternity leave, parental support, and family-friendly policies are becoming make-or-break factors for many job seekers.
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BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said in an earnings call last week that the company was investing $10 million of resources into BF Island, a social platform BuzzFeed is building that will focus on user-generated content supported by AI technology.
The project will begin private beta testing in Q2, and details remain slim. But Peretti said the goal is to convert 5% of BuzzFeed’s audience of 34 million monthly users to join BF Island. If the company achieves this, Peretti thinks the initiative will make money.
Peretti expects the platform to be at least on par with some smaller social media platforms, when it comes to growth. And he sees a future in which BF Island’s business grows faster than BuzzFeed’s publishing side. (Axios reported in February that BuzzFeed plans to offer a freemium model for BF Island, where some features are free and others need a paid subscription.)
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Double-decker AirPower. That’s basically the pitch for this wireless charging station from Zens that Apple is selling. Unlike Apple’s AirPower charging mat, this two-story power apartment for iPhones and AirPods is an actual shipping product.
Open-source software used by more than 23,000 organizations, some of them in large enterprises, was compromised with credential-stealing code after attackers gained unauthorized access to a maintainer account, in the latest open-source supply-chain attack to roil the Internet.
The corrupted package, tj-actions/changed-files, is part of tj-actions, a collection of files that's used by more than 23,000 organizations. Tj-actions is one of many Github Actions, a form of platform for streamlining software available on the open-source developer platform. Actions are a core means of implementing what's known as CI/CD, short for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (or Continuous Delivery).
Scraping server memory at scale
On Friday or earlier, the source code for all versions of tj-actions/changed-files received unauthorized updates that changed the "tags" developers use to reference specific code versions. The tags pointed to a publicly available file that copies the internal memory of severs running it, searches for credentials, and writes them to a log. In the aftermath, many publicly accessible repositories running tj-actions ended up displaying their most sensitive credentials in logs anyone could view.
Netflix and other streaming platforms are stepping up efforts to sign YouTubers, which could mean big streaming deals for sports channel Dude Perfect or former NASA engineer Mark Rober, reports TheWall Street Journal.
The Journal writes that streaming platformsâ creator-signing ambitions have âshifted into overdriveâ in response to the success of MrBeastâs Beast Games. Amazon has made âat least $100 millionâ in profit from the show and is apparently already working out deals for two more seasons. Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, is apparently asking over $150 million per season to renew.
Rober and Dude Perfect have each been approached by Netflix, writes the Journal. But Netflix âdoesnât usually allow for sales promotions in shows that it pays to makeâ â something that has apparently âbeen a sticking pointâ in its talks with Rober, who sells robotics kit subscriptions through his channel. That sort of thing is more in line with Amazonâs business, making it a âparticularly attractiveâ option for creators like Rober, the article says.
Evan Feinman, who directed the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program meant to bring high-speed internet access to rural areas, exited the role on Friday after he was not reappointed for a new term, according to ProPublica’s Craig Silverman. In an email sent to staffers, which Silverman shared screenshots of on Bluesky, Feinman warned against changes proposed by the new administration that could “benefit technology that delivers slower speeds at higher costs to the household paying the bill” in order to line Elon Musk's pockets.
BEAD was established in 2021, and the new Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick recently announced that the Commerce Department would be overhauling the program, which he said has “not connected a single person to the internet” due to the previous administration's handling of it. In a statement, Lutnick called for a “tech-neutral stance,” which would do away with the preference for faster fiber connections and open the door for a shift toward satellite internet like that offered by Elon Musk’s Starlink. Lutnick also slammed “woke mandates, favoritism towards certain technologies, and burdensome regulations.”
In the email shared on Sunday, Feinman urged colleagues to speak up in favor of removing “needless requirements,” but warned against a shift away from fiber. The bottom line is, he wrote:
The new administration seems to want to make changes that ignore the clear direction laid out by Congress, reduce the number of American homes and businesses that get fiber connections, and increase the number that get satellite connections. The degree of that shift remains unknown, but regardless of size, it will be a disservice to rural and small-town America. Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/director-of-rural-broadband-program-exits-with-a-warning-about-shift-to-worse-satellite-internet-223204374.html?src=rss
American flag displayed on a laptop screen and Starlink logo displayed on a phone screen are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on March 11, 2025. (Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Smart home company SwitchBot is preparing a new Matter-enabled smart hub called the SwitchBot Hub 3, according to a registration with the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) that HomeKitNews spotted. It has a display like the $70 Hub 2, but adds physical controls — including, delightfully, a knob.
According to the CSA listing, the Hub 3’s knob works for things like tweaking temperature on your smart thermostat or adjusting media volume — it says it’s compatible with “Apple TV, Spotify, and other streaming platforms for unified audio management.” The other physical controls include what looks like a home button, back button, and a mysterious button with an “S” logo on it. It also has four “editable quick-scene buttons on the home page for one-touch activation of customized modes.”
The SwitchBot Hub 3’s display will turn on when it detects motion, including “hand gestures or device movements,” and will show indoor temperature and humidity, third-party weather forecasts, and “real-time status updates for door locks.” It will support SwitchBot’s Bluetooth-connected smart devices, which the Hub 2 bridges to Matter, making them controllable via major smart home platforms from the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung. The listing says the Hub 3 supports voice control through both Alexa and Google Assistant. SwitchBot hasn’t officially announced the new hub, and it’s not clear when it might launch.
After reporting in January that Apple is adding an “Air” option to its iPhone lineup, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is offering more details about the upcoming slimmer iPhone. The iPhone 17 Air will launch this fall, Gurman says — and like the MacBook Air, it will be thinner than standard models, while combining high-end and low-end […]
