Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
As persistent spam complaints have clouded Google’s Rich Communication Services (RCS) push in India, the company is turning to deeper carrier integration to bolster protections on the platform. On Sunday, Bharti Airtel, India’s second-largest telecom operator with over 463 million subscribers, said it had partnered with Google to integrate the carrier’s network-level spam filtering into the RCS ecosystem in the country. The move is aimed at strengthening protections against unwanted messages and fraud on the platform, the companies said. India has emerged as a particularly challenging market for spam and fraud across messaging channels, driven by the country’s vast mobile…
Investors have been pouring billions into AI companies over the past few years, as the technology continues to hold sway in the Valley and thus the world. But not all AI companies are grabbing investor attention. Indeed, even as it seems every company these days is rebranding to include “AI” in its name, some startup ideas are just no longer in favor with investors. TechCrunch spoke with VCs to learn what investors aren’t looking for in AI software-as-a-service startups anymore. Popular SaaS categories for investors now include startups building AI-native infrastructure, vertical SaaS with proprietary data, systems of action (those…
By CEO Sam Altman’s own admission, OpenAI’s deal with the Department of Defense was “definitely rushed,” and “the optics don’t look good.” After negotiations between Anthropic and the Pentagon fell through on Friday, President Donald Trump directed federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s technology after a six-month transition period, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said he was designating the AI company as a supply-chain risk. Then, OpenAI quickly announced that it had reached a deal of its own for models to be deployed in classified environments. With Anthropic saying it was drawing red lines around the use of its…
The number of bills directly targeting and undermining the existing legal rights of transgender and nonbinary people in the U.S. has been escalating, with sharp increases since 2021 and with each consecutive year. Kansas dealt the most radical blow yet on Feb. 26, 2026, as a law that immediately invalidates state-issued driver’s licenses, identification cards and birth certificates for holders whose gender marker does not match their sex assigned at birth took effect overnight.This new law, called the House Substitute for Senate Bill 244, passed after legislators overrode the governor’s veto to rush it through legislation.There is no grace period…
I’ve spent more than a decade reviewing audio gear, and year after year, Sony impresses with its wireless headphones. If you’re a music lover, a frequent flyer, or just hunting for a great pair of cans, the best Sony headphones are almost always worth a look. They consistently nail the things that matter most: rich, detailed sound, comfortable designs you can wear for hours, and some of the most effective active noise cancellation (ANC) available.Even though they’ve been out for a few years, the Sony WH-1000XM5 headphones are still my top overall pick. They’re incredibly versatile over-ear headphones that work…
Anthropic’s chatbot Claude seems to have benefited from the attention around the company’s fraught negotiations with the Pentagon. As first reported by CNBC, Claude has been rising to the top of the free app rankings in Apple’s US App Store. On Saturday evening, it overtook OpenAI’s ChatGPT to claim the number one spot, a position that it still held on Sunday morning. According to data from SensorTower, Claude was just outside the top 100 at the end of January, and has spent most of February somewhere in the top 20. It’s climbed rapidly in the past few days, from sixth…
CINCINNATI – Nine people were injured in a mass shooting during an event at concert venue in Cincinnati early Sunday, March 1, police said.The people injured at Riverfront Live were taken to local hospitals and their injuries are not considered life-threatening, according to Adam Hennie, interim chief of the Cincinnati Police Department.The call for the shooting came in about 1 a.m. ET, Hennie said. The music venue and the area around it were blocked off as police investigated at 3 a.m. ET.AdvertisementAdvertisementPolice have not said anything about suspects or what led up to the shooting. An event was in progress…
One day not long ago, a founder texted his investor with an update: he was replacing his entire customer service team with Claude Code, an AI tool that can write and deploy software on its own. To Lex Zhao, an investor at One Way Ventures, the message indicated something bigger — the moment when companies like Salesforce stopped being the automatic default. “The barriers to entry for creating software are so low now thanks to coding agents, that the build versus buy decision is shifting toward build in so many cases,” Zhao told TechCrunch. The build versus buy shift is…
The first Block fallsThe AI-driven job apocalypse is no longer a hypothetical.Block CEO and cofounder Jack Dorsey gutted his fintech company, restructuring it into smaller, flatter teams built to move fast and embrace what he calls “a new way of working.”He put it bluntly: “we’re not making this decision because we’re in trouble.”That’s the part rattling white-collar workers across Corporate America. If Dorsey’s move wasn’t about survival, what was it about? And what does that mean for everyone else?As AI spreads, anxiety is rising. People are questioning what it means for their jobs. Every time Steve publishes a story, you’ll…
Passion could be the best defense against AI taking your job, Bill Gurley says.”The people that are most at risk are the ones that are sitting idly in the job and don’t really have a why or a purpose for it,” the legendary venture capitalist said during the latest episode of the “On with Kara Swisher” podcast.”I think a lot of the people that go through that college conveyor belt, that are chasing a safe job, that end up working as a widget or a cog in an industry they may not love — I think they are ripe for…