Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Amazon is rolling out a new user interface for its Fire TV streaming devices, designed to put more focus on the content, while also simplifying navigation. The update, which is initially available to Fire TV owners in the U.S., represents the first major Fire TV redesign in years. The changes arrive after an explosion of streaming content has made it more difficult to know what’s available to watch on which service, requiring streaming platforms like Fire TV to serve more as a discovery hub than just a tool to launch streaming apps. The company first previewed the new design at…

Nearly 20 U.S.-based AI startups have raised mega rounds of $100 million or more in 2026 — and it’s been less than two months.   If the first few weeks of 2026 are any indicator, the AI startup market is in for another year of monster funding rounds at eye-watering valuations. U.S. AI startups raised more than $76 billion through megarounds in 2025, per TechCrunch’s count.   Will startups see the same success in 2026? Time will tell.   Here are all the U.S.-based AI startups that have raised $100 million or more thus far:   February Simile, which builds AI to mimic human decisions, raised a $100 million Series A round led by Index Ventures. The round was announced on…

There were once so many children at Frisha Moore’s Elk Grove preschool that families filled up the waitlist. Now, one of her playgrounds and two classrooms sit empty because one key group of kids has stopped coming. Dozens of families in recent years have opted not to enroll their 4-year-olds at Moore Learning Preschool & Child Care Center, she said. Instead, they’re putting their children in transitional kindergarten, California’s new public pre-kindergarten grade. Even though she provides a full day of preschool, compared with transitional kindergarten that lasts only about 3.5 hours, Moore can’t compete: Public school is free. She…

India has set out an aggressive push to attract more than $200 billion in artificial-intelligence infrastructure investment over the next two years, as it seeks to position itself as a global hub for AI computing and applications at a time when capacity, capital, and regulation are becoming strategic assets. The plans were outlined on Tuesday by India’s IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw (pictured above) at the Indian government-backed five-day AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, attended by senior executives from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and other global technology firms. To attract investment, the government is rolling out a mix of tax incentives,…

The federal government’s message in its new Dietary Guidelines for Americans, released in January 2026, couldn’t be simpler: “Eat real food.”But for pregnant women in rural America, that straightforward advice runs headlong into a harsh reality: Rural women have less access to healthy whole foods.We are a public health professor and postdoctoral researcher who are working on the Pregnancy 24/7 Cohort Study at West Virginia University and the University of Iowa. The five-year observational study investigated how 24-hour behavioral patterns throughout pregnancy affected maternal and fetal health, including pregnancy complications.Most pregnant women in the United States aren’t meeting dietary recommendations.…

Civil rights icon Rev. Jesse Jackson died on Feb. 17 at age 84 after living over a decade with a progressive neurological condition.The organization he founded, the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, announced he died “peacefully” surrounded by his family that morning.”Our father was a servant leader – not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” Jackson’s family said in a statement shared by the organization.Jackson’s family didn’t specify his cause of death, but Jackson had been diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder known as progressive supranuclear palsy, which can appear similar to Parkinson’s…

Indian vibe-coding platform Emergent was launched just eight months ago, and it now says it’s generating annual run-rate revenue of more than $100 million, thanks to surging demand by small businesses and non-technical users. The startup on Tuesday said it had doubled its annual run-rate revenue to $100 million in the past month, and it now has more than 6 million users worldwide across 190 countries, of which about 150,000 are paying customers. Emergent claims its users have created over 7 million applications on its platform. Nearly 40% of Emergent’s users are small businesses, and about 70% have no prior…

Last year, Chris Heckler was coming to the end of a five-year non-compete after selling his last company, a healthcare startup. “I was sitting on the sidelines doing angel investing, and I realized I was too young to retire,” he told TechCrunch. “I wanted to get back into it.”  At the same time, Joseph Akintolayo had just sold his fintech company. He, too, had a non-compete, but was noodling on ideas for a company. He knew Heckler, as Akintolayo had once served as an advisor on one of his projects.  In this downtime, however, they wanted to come together —…

If artificial intelligence eliminates millions of jobs, it might make sense to scrap income taxes for the vast majority of Americans and target capital instead, Vinod Khosla says.”AI will transform economies and need a rethink of capitalism & equity,” the billionaire venture capitalist wrote in an X post on Monday. “Labor portion of economy (vs capital) will decline sharply. Should we eliminate preferential treatment of capital gains tax and equalize to ordinary income?”Khosla — who cofounded Sun Microsystems and made the first VC investment in OpenAI — was making the point that AI replacing labor on a grand scale might…

Emily Orta was a seemingly healthy 14-year-old soccer player in Adrian when her life changed in seconds. In the middle of a shooting drill, her heart stopped. She wasn’t breathing. “It was a complete shock,” Orta, now 26, told Bridge Michigan. She’d later discover she was living with a rare heart defect from birth — anomalous left coronary artery from the pulmonary artery, or ALCAPA.“We had no idea that there was any issues.”Orta said she “wouldn’t be here today” if it weren’t for the quick work of her coaches, who started emergency CPR on the field to keep her heart…