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Kerry Washington invests in wedding marketplace Cheersy

Kerry Washington is expanding her angel investment portfolio, serving as lead investor in the pre-seed round of the wedding marketplace Cheersy.  Cheersy, which was founded in 2024 by Amy Shack Egan, helps couples find day-of-service wedding coordinators and has raised a total of $550,000 from other investors, including Elizabeth Cutler, co-founder of Soul Cycle, and […]

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UK’s secret iCloud backdoor order triggers civil rights challenge

The U.K. government’s secret order to Apple demanding it backdoor the end-to-end encrypted version of its iCloud storage service has now been challenged by two civil rights groups, Liberty and Privacy International, which filed complaints Thursday. They called the order “unacceptable and disproportionate” and warned of “global consequences” as the access order is thought to […]

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Trump family is reportedly in talks to acquire stake in Binance’s US arm

President Trump’s family has been weighing an investment in Binance.US, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. The investment would come just a couple of years after Binance’s U.S. arm plead guilty to violating anti-money laundering regulation. As part of that guilty plea, Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, better known as CZ, paid a […]

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SoftBank buys $676M old Sharp plant for its OpenAI collab in Japan

SoftBank is marching ahead on its ambitions to build out a major AI operation in its home market of Japan, on its own steam and in strategic partnership with others like OpenAI. On Friday, the tech company confirmed it would pay $676 million for factory previously used by Sharp to build LCD panels to convert […]

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Waymo was slapped with nearly 600 parking tickets last year in SF alone

Waymo now has more than 300 driverless vehicles zipping passengers around San Francisco, but while they follow traffic laws, parking is another matter entirely. According to city records cited by the Washington Post, these rolling robots racked up 589 citations totaling $65,065 in fines last year for parking violations that ranged from blocking traffic to […]

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Anti-aging zealot Bryan Johnson wants to start ‘foodome sequencing’

In the same way that genome sequencing determines the genetic makeup of an organism, Bryan Johnson — the investor and founder behind the Don’t Die movement — wants to start “foodome” sequencing.  “We’re going to sequence the U.S. ‘foodome,’ which means test 20% of foods that constitute 80% of the American diet based on stuff […]

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Sesame, the startup behind the viral virtual assistant Maya, releases its base AI model

AI company Sesame has released the base model that powers Maya, the impressively realistic voice assistant. The model, which is 1 billion parameters in size (“parameters” referring to individual components of the model), is under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning it can be used commercially with few restrictions. Called CSM-1B, the model generates “RVQ audio codes” from text […]

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Rad Power Bikes already has a new CEO

Rad Power Bikes has named a new CEO, just a few days after its previous leader stepped down. The e-bike company has tapped Kathi Lentzsch, who has spent the last few decades helping turn around underperforming companies in both the consumer and B2B spaces. The change comes as Rad Power continues to shift away from […]

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Y Combinator’s police surveillance darling Flock Safety raises $275M at $7.5B valuation

Flock Safety and one of its long-time VCs, Bedrock Capital, announced Thursday that the startup raised a fresh $275 million at a $7.5 billion valuation. Flock makes computer vision-enabled video surveillance technology used by law enforcement as well as businesses, property management companies, and so on. It’s best known for its automatic license plate recognition […]

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Android is adding Auracast support, which allows hearing aids to connect to public audio broadcasts

Google announced on Thursday that Android phones will soon support Auracast, a new Bluetooth technology that uses a phone to enable a direct connection from hearing aids to audio broadcasts in noisy environments. With Auracast, compatible hearing aids and earbuds can receive direct audio streams, such as a PA system at a train station or […]

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Y Combinator urges the White House to support Europe’s Digital Markets Act

Y Combinator, one of the world’s most prolific startup accelerators, sent a letter on Wednesday urging the Trump administration to openly support Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), a wide-ranging piece of legislation that aims to crack open Big Tech’s market power. The DMA designates six tech companies as “gatekeepers” to the internet — Alphabet, Amazon, […]

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Oracle is reportedly a top choice for helping run TikTok

TikTok has until April to finalize a sale to a U.S.-based buyer, yet uncertainties about the future of the short-form video app remain. However, a new report has emerged, suggesting that Oracle is the leading candidate to serve as the cloud technology partner for managing TikTok in the U.S., according to The Information.  Sources including […]

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Bluesky quickly sold out of the T-shirt its CEO wore to troll Mark Zuckerberg

When Bluesky CEO Jay Graber took the SXSW stage this week, she managed to make fun of Mark Zuckerberg without mentioning Meta at all. Her black T-shirt was emblazoned with black text stretching across the chest and sleeves, similar to the style of a T-shirt that the billionaire founder wore at an event last year. […]

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Google calls for weakened copyright and export rules in AI policy proposal

Google, following on the heels of OpenAI, published a policy proposal in response to the Trump administration’s call for a national “AI Action Plan.” The tech giant endorsed weak copyright restrictions on AI training, as well as “balanced” export controls that “protect national security while enabling U.S. exports and global business operations.” “The U.S. needs […]

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Ex-Twitter AI ethics lead Rumman Chowdhury is worried about Musk’s impact on the federal government

Rumman Chowdhury, a data scientist, nonprofit founder, and former director of Twitter’s machine ethics team, had strong words for Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) during a panel at SXSW on Thursday. “When your funding is frozen and you don’t know if you’re gonna be fired, and there’s this, like, absolutely unhinged […]

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Minimalist Light Phone III launches March 27

Light, the maker of a minimalist phone designed to help consumers disconnect from smartphone distractions and social media, will launch its newest model, the Light Phone III, on March 27. This version of the device, like its older counterpart, offers a simple black-and-white display and necessary features like support for calls, texts, navigation, alarms, hotspots, […]

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