Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
A typical merger-and-acquisition process is time-consuming and expensive, even for the largest, well-staffed private equity firms. In addition to spending countless hours meeting with senior executives of potential targets and modeling financial outcomes, these groups spend millions of dollars on external advisers: accountants, lawyers, and management consultants. Since expenses for external advisers are not reimbursed if a deal falls through, PE firms wait until they are certain of their interest before engaging costly specialists such as consultants from McKinsey, BCG, or Bain to perform extensive commercial research on the market and the target company. DiligenceSquared, a startup that was part…
New research is taking a closer look at what can happen a year or more after people stop taking GLP-1 medications.A new systematic review published in the journal eClinicalMedicine on Wednesday examined 48 studies that analyzed and predicted the outcomes of people who either had diabetes or were overweight or obese and took popular GLP-1 medications such as liraglutide (under brand names such as Victoza and Saxenda), semaglutide (under brand names such as Ozempic, Wegovy, Rybelsus) and tirzepatide (under brand names like Mounjaro and Zepbound).George Frey/Reuters, FILE – PHOTO: Boxes of Ozempic and Mounjaro, semaglutide and tirzepatide injection drugs used for…
Amazon Web Services announced Thursday the launch of Amazon Connect Health. This AI agent-powered platform is meant to help healthcare organizations automate repetitive administrative tasks, including appointment scheduling, documentation, and patient verification, among other things. Amazon Connect Health is HIPAA-eligible and connects with electronic health record (EHR) software. The platform is currently partnered with EHR software providers, data integrators, and patient engagement companies, the company said. This move is not the cloud giant’s first in the healthcare space, and it comes at a time when AWS is increasingly looking to grow its footprint in the $5 trillion U.S. healthcare industry.…
How, and if, the Trump administration plans to regulate the export of semiconductors has remained unclear since Donald Trump took office last year. Now, we have an idea of what the administration is thinking. U.S. regulators have allegedly drafted rules that would require U.S. government approval to ship AI chips anywhere outside the U.S., according to Bloomberg, citing sources. This would give the U.S. significantly more control over companies like AMD and Nvidia. TechCrunch reached out to AMD and Nvidia for comment. A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Commerce provided the following: “The Commerce Department is committed to promoting…
The Department of Defense (DOD) has officially notified Anthropic leadership that the company and its products have been designated a supply-chain risk, Bloomberg reports, citing a senior department official. The designation comes after weeks of conflict between the AI lab and the DOD. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has refused to allow the military to use its AI systems for mass surveillance of Americans or to power fully autonomous weapons with no humans assisting in the targeting or firing decisions. The Department has argued that its use of AI should not be limited by a private contractor. Supply-chain-risk designations are typically…
As the U.S.-Israeli military escalation with Iran continues, children may be experiencing devastating consequences of being caught in a conflict zone. Dozens of children and adolescents have been killed, many of whom were attending school at the time, according to the Iranian education ministry.Doctors and humanitarian aid workers told ABC News that millions of children in the region are at risk of physical and mental health repercussions.MORE: Building where US troops were killed was largely unfortified: OfficialsThey add that it’s important children have as much structure as possible to keep a sense of stability in their lives.“Every war is a…
Meta recently hired the team of engineers behind Gizmo, a buzzy AI startup founded by ex-Snapchat staffers.A spokesperson for Meta confirmed that the team joined Meta earlier this year. The company declined to disclose the financial details of the deal.Gizmo is the sole product from Atma Sciences Inc., which was founded in 2024. The team includes Josh Siegel (CEO), Daniel Amitay (CTO), Brandon Francis, and Rudd Fawcett, among several other ex-Snapchat engineers, according to LinkedIn. Meta has a non-exclusive license to Atma Sciences’ technology.Gizmo lets users create interactive, touch-enabled content — like a tiny game or mini-app — by typing…
Salesforce leadership addressed the controversy around CEO Marc Benioff’s recent jokes about Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to audio of an internal meeting reviewed by Business Insider.Salesforce President Robin Washington spoke at an all-hands meeting on Thursday, the first companywide gathering since the episode in February when Benioff joked that ICE was tracking international employees.Washington, also the company’s chief operating officer and CFO, didn’t mention Benioff’s specific comments, but assured employees that the company was listening to them and taking appropriate action.”We’ve got different ways of thinking, different opinions, different ways that we approach things,” Washington said, according to the…
The number of confirmed measles cases in New Mexico increased to six after the state’s Department of Health confirmed Wednesday a new case inside a local jail in Las Cruces.A federal inmate being held in the Doña Ana County Detention Center is the latest person to have tested positive for measles. The New Mexico Department of Health said others may have been exposed to the highly contagious disease from this confirmed case if they visited the U.S. District Court building in Las Cruces on Feb. 24.State heath officials are now urging anyone who was at the courthouse that day to…
AI video generation startup Luma on Thursday launched Luma Agents, designed to handle end-to-end creative work across text, image, video, and audio. Luma Agents are powered by the startup’s Unified Intelligence family of models, with architecture trained on a single multimodal reasoning system. Luma Agents are being pitched as a new way of doing work for ad agencies, marketing teams, design studios, and enterprises. Luma says its agents are capable of planning and generating text, image, video and audio while coordinating with other AI models, including Luma’s Ray 3.14, Google’s Veo 3 and Nano Banana Pro, ByteDance’s Seedream, and ElevenLabs’s…