Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Andrew Lissimore grew his e-commerce business, Headphones.com, by cracking search engine optimization (SEO).When ChatGPT emerged on the market, Lissimore prompted the LLM to see how the chatbot ranked his website’s audio equipment.”It didn’t reference us,” Lissimore told Business Insider.Search results for e-commerce brands, like his own, are a cornerstone for discovery, customer acquisition, and sales. Now, AI is changing how consumers seek product recommendations, from the rise of agentic commerce to how search engines like Google fundamentally work.”It’s the most important transition since search,” Lissimore said, which is why his new startup, Lantern, is doubling down on AI optimization for…

Another micro drama app has scored a big fundraise, a sign that investors are still hot on the category — especially if a company is embracing AI.The micro drama app Shortical, based in Israel, raised $100 million in financing from PvX Partners, a financial services firm, the companies shared exclusively with Business Insider.Shortical is part of the buzzy micro-drama market. These companies produce short-episode series meant for watching on your phone, with titles like “Foul Play With My Brother’s Best Friend” and “Beach Volleyball Virgin.”Deloitte predicted that revenue made by micro drama apps would more than double this year to…

AI is minting millionaires at a rapid rate. Now comes the spending boom.Investors have poured hundreds of billions into AI startups and infrastructure, causing company valuations to skyrocket. That’s turned founders’ paper stakes into fortunes and made employee stock grants at leading AI firms worth millions.But not all AI wealth is paper wealth anymore. Founders are selling stakes in startups worth billions. Early employees are cashing out equity that has multiplied in value in just a few years. And elite AI researchers and engineers are landing pay packages that would have been unthinkable in tech a decade ago.When SpaceX IPO-ed…

AI is reshaping coding. How software engineers feel about it is far from binary.Powerful tools like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s Codex mean, for many, writing code is no longer the core of the job.Millions of software developers around the world are figuring out this new normal. They’re battling over token budgets, excited by AI’s productivity-boosting potential, and overwhelmed by the blistering pace of change.Nearly 60% of developers have a positive view of using AI coding tools, according to a 2025 survey from Stack Overflow. But the technology has advanced dramatically since then — and the full picture is more nuanced.…

Some of the world’s richest tech companies are spending huge sums to lay off employees.Business Insider reviewed the latest annual reports from some of the biggest US tech companies to see how much they spent on severance and workforce reductions.We started by looking at the so-called Magnificent Seven tech companies — Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Nvidia, Tesla, and Alphabet.Of those seven, Meta, Nvidia, Apple, and Alphabet did not disclose severance costs. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Tesla only included severance together with other charges, so we excluded them because we couldn’t accurately compare them with the other companies.The only Mag 7 company…

UBS analysts say executives are becoming more conscious of AI-related spending.”Based on a dozen+ conversations with enterprise IT execs over the prior several weeks, ~60% of enterprises were now in some manner throttling AI spend by putting some degree of guardrails in place,” UBS analysts Karl Keirstead, Timothy Arcuri, and Taylor McGinnis wrote alongside their colleagues in a recent report.Token spending has become a major concern for companies, especially larger enterprises, as CFOs and CTOs see their AI bills rise. Uber’s operations chief, Andrew Macdonald, said in May that it was getting harder to justify the rising costs given the…

LENEXA, Kan. (AP) — Jude Cornell joined a swarm of toddlers crawling after soccer balls, tossing training cones into the air and relocating a goalie net that was proving to be very, very portable.“He just started walking,” laughed his mother, 27-year-old Kyra Cornell. She’s already plotting her son’s soccer career during a World Cup-themed event for toddlers at a suburban Kansas City library, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) from the stadium where six matches are being played.Across the country, experts are watching to see whether the World Cup will give a boost to youth soccer — and mint fans for…

The US energy secretary said that a lot of concerns about data centers are real but “overblown.”At an Amazon Web Services conference on Tuesday, Chris Wright urged supporters of data centers to push back on those who criticize their development because of environmental concerns and job losses.”The pluses are way bigger than the minuses,” he said. “So please keep driving hard, keep driving these improvements in our country.”Wright added that more data centers are the path to lower-cost electricity, and water consumption is “tiny” compared to their benefits.”There’s probably no higher value use of water, full stop, than there is…

Vinton Cerf will step down from his role as Google’s chief internet evangelist next week, marking the conclusion of one of the most influential careers in technology history. While speaking at the Open Frontier conference hosted by the Laude Institute, Cerf was recognized by Dave Patterson, the UC Berkeley professor best known for co-developing RISC processor architecture. “Vint…has been at Google more than 20 years, and he is retiring a week from today, and so I think we ought to give him a round of applause for a relatively good career,” Patterson said, to cheers from the room. Google did…

The US has lifted a requirement that Anthropic obtain a license before exporting its Mythos and Fable models abroad, a requirement that effectively cut off public access to what are widely considered the most advanced AI models released to date. The AI lab said it would begin restoring access to the models on Wednesday, July 1. On June 12, the US government had added the products to its list of export-restricted technologies, meaning they could no longer be made available to foreign nationals without special approval. Complying with that rule proved impractical at scale, forcing Anthropic to end public access…