Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
The surge in data company acquisitions continued Monday with Snowflake’s purchase of Crunchy Data. Cloud data platform Snowflake announced its intent to acquire Crunchy Data, a Postgres database partner, late this afternoon. A source familiar with the matter estimated the deal to be worth around $250 million. The terms weren’t disclosed. Snowflake declined to comment on the deal’s valuation. It’s the latest in a string of tech giants buying data startups to bolster their underlying database offerings that power AI agents. Last week, Salesforce acquired decades-old Informatica to fortify its data management tooling for AI agents. A few weeks ago,…
MILAN (AP) — Foreign tourists were among a dozen people injured when a 50-year-old tree fell next to a bus stop in the Italian lagoon city of Venice on Monday, authorities said.The oak tree fell on a group of people waiting in a shaded area at Piazzale Roma, the last stop for buses and taxis ferrying visitors to and from the lagoon city from the mainland, city officials said. It wasn’t immediately clear why the tree fell.The most seriously injured was a 30-year-old Italian woman, who was sitting on a wall near the tree with her two small children when…
The rebooted version of social site Digg aims to bring back the spirit of the old web at a time when AI-generated content is threatening to overwhelm traditional social media platforms, drowning out the voices of real people. This presents an opportunity to build a social site for the AI era, where the people who create content and manage online communities are given a bigger stake in a platform’s success, Digg’s founders think. A Web 2.0-era news aggregation giant, Digg was once valued at $175 million at its height back in 2008 and is now being given new life under…
CNN — There’s been a lot of conversation over the years about JoJo Siwa’s romantic relationships and now she’s added a new chapter. In an interview with The Guardian, Siwa, 22, confirmed that she is dating former “Love Island” cast member Chris Hughes, whom she met when they both participated in a recent season of the UK series “Celebrity Big Brother.” “It’s not platonic any more, and it’s been a beautiful development, a beautiful connection, and I’m absolutely head over heels for him and he’s the same way.” Siwa said of her relationship with the man she calls “sweet Christopher.”…
CNN — After nearly 16 years and hours of conversations, comedian Marc Maron will bring his groundbreaking podcast “WTF” to an end this fall. Maron announced the news during the Monday episode of his show, while speaking with guest John Mulaney. The host said he and his longtime producer, Brendan McDonald, made the decision together. “We both realized together that we were done,” Maron explained. “There was no convincing or pushback or arguing. We were done, and it’s OK for things to end.” “It really comes down to the fact that we have put up a new show every Monday…
A platform for chatting and role-playing with AI-generated characters, Character.AI announced in a blog post on Monday that it is rolling out a slate of multimedia features. These features include AvatarFX, Character.AI’s video-generation model, plus Scenes and Streams, which allow users to create videos featuring their characters and then share them on a new social feed. “Character.AI started as 1:1 text chat and today we’re evolving to do so much more, inspired by what our users have told [us] they want to see on the platform,” the company wrote in the blog post. Character.AI began rolling out AvatarFX to subscribers…
Jony Ive is hoping to change the tech world again after pioneering some of Apple’s most popular products, including the iPhone — and he has the full support of Steve Jobs’ widow.Investor and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs is a longtime friend of Ive and a financial backer of his design collective, LoveFrom, which he formed after departing Apple in 2019. Ive is now embarking on another technology journey with one of the most recognizable men in Silicon Valley, OpenAI’s Sam Altman.Ive and Altman announced May 21 that OpenAI would acquire Ive’s hardware startup, IO, to collaborate on an unknown AI…
Updated 1:13 p.m. Pacific: A Salesforce spokesperson told TechCrunch that Moonhub has not, in fact, been acquired (by the company’s definition of the term). Rather, Moonhub is shutting down, and only some of the company’s team — not the whole team, as MoonHub implied in its post about the news — will be joining Salesforce. The original story follows. Salesforce has quietly snapped up Moonhub, a startup building AI to vet and hire talent. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. In a post on Moonhub’s website on Monday, the company said that its entire Menlo Park, California-based team will…
(Reuters) -Elon Musk’s Neuralink said on Monday that it had raised $650 million in its latest funding round as its brain implant device enters clinical trials.”This funding helps us bring our technology to more people — restoring independence for those with unmet medical needs and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with brain interfaces,” Neuralink said.It has started clinical trials for the device, which has a chip that processes neural signals that can be transmitted to computers or phones, in three countries.According to the company, five patients with severe paralysis are using Neuralink to control digital and physical devices with…
Tomatoes distributed in three southern states are now the subject of a possibly deadly recall, according to the Food and Drug Administration.The recall, first announced by the FDA on May 2 for potential salmonella contamination, has now been upgraded to the most severe warning the federal agency issues.Williams Farms Repack LLC, based in Lodge, South Carolina, said the affected tomatoes were packaged and sold to wholesalers and distributors between April 23-28 under the name H&C Farms Label, the FDA reported.In a notice published online May 28th, the FDA labeled this a Class I recall − the highest recall risk level issued…