Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

In 2017, Respond.io set out to solve a simple problem: businesses couldn’t keep up with customers who had moved to messaging apps. Today Respond, with its customer conversation management software, has become one of the tech success stories of Malaysia. The startup, headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, has raised a $62.5 million Series B round led by Camber Partners, with participation from Endeavor Catalyst and existing investors. It last raised a $7 million Series A in 2022. The company has grown to $35 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), growing 169% year-over-year, at a 30% profit margin, it tells TechCrunch. Co-founder…

Perplexity’s CEO shared two unusual pieces of advice he learned from the leaders of two of the world’s biggest companies.On an episode of the “20VC” podcast released on Monday, Aravind Srinivas said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Tesla CEO Elon Musk taught him two important entrepreneurship lessons that stuck with him.Srinivas cofounded AI search engine Perplexity in 2022 after working as a researcher at Google’s DeepMind and OpenAI. In August, Business Insider reported that the company was seeking fresh funding at a $20 billion post-money valuation. The startup’s investors include SoftBank, Nvidia, and Jeff Bezos.On Monday’s podcast, he said that…

Australian mining billionaire Gina Rinehart has made a major bet on Elon Musk’s SpaceX that could lead to more than just a financial return.Rinehart — Australia’s richest person with a fortune estimated at $38.4 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index — invested through Hancock Prospecting, her privately held mining and agriculture company.Hancock Prospecting said Monday that it was allocated shares in SpaceX’s initial public offering. The company did not disclose the size of its “significant investment,” though The Wall Street Journal reported that the stake was worth more than $1 billion.”In the future, we also see the possibility of mutually…

Microsoft is turning to its biggest cloud rival, Amazon, to help address capacity issues on its GitHub coding platform following a series of AI-driven outages, according to two people familiar with the plans.GitHub, which Microsoft acquired in 2018, is a popular place for engineers to store and manage code, and collaborate on projects. As an independent company, GitHub mostly operated its own data centers, but Microsoft had planned to move the coding platform entirely to its Azure cloud service by 2027.Now, a boom in AI demand is forcing Microsoft to lean on Amazon. AI coding tools have made it easier…

Over the weekend, Google CEO Sundar Pichai faced a small revolt when he delivered his commencement speech at Stanford University, where he earned his graduate degree in materials science and engineering. About 200 students from the graduating class reportedly walked out, while others loudly booed the tech executive. The focus of the protest was Google’s defense ties — including Project Nimbus, the controversial $1.2 billion contract, shared with Amazon, to provide cloud and AI services to the Israeli military, as well as its relationship with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Student signs included phrases like “ICE SPIES WITH…

Anthropic staff met Monday with senior Trump administration officials for their first in-person sit-downs after a federally imposed export ban forced the artificial intelligence startup to pull its latest model from the market Friday night, two administration officials, a person familiar with the discussions and a person close to the company told POLITICO, which is — like Business Insider — part of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network.It will likely take longer than a few days to reach a resolution that eases the federal government’s Friday action, which had barred Anthropic from allowing non-U.S. users to access its newest model…

The U.S. government’s enforcement letter to Anthropic, which effectively forced the company to pull its latest AI models offline just before the weekend, should be a wake-up call for any U.S. tech company — AI lab or otherwise.  To catch you up on the news blitz: On Friday afternoon, the U.S. Commerce Department sent Anthropic a letter invoking an obscure export control directive that banned non-Americans, including Anthropic’s employees, from accessing Fable 5 and Mythos 5, citing an unspecified national security concern. Anthropic said it believes the letter is related to a bypass of the model’s guardrails, but isn’t sure…

I’m a daily runner, and over the last couple of years, I’ve tested more than 50 wireless earbuds in my search for the best running headphones. Though a few models have excelled in certain areas, I’ve finally come across a pair that nails the complete package: the Shokz OpenDots 2.These open-ear buds deliver just the right balance between fit, performance, and awareness that I look for when running. Their open-ear design lets you naturally hear your surroundings. They don’t pool as much sweat in your ears as other models I’ve used. They also don’t slip out or shift around as…

By Seth Brickman, head of global product — platform at Splunk, a Cisco companyThe relationship between the SOC and NOC is one fraught with contradictions. While both teams seek to reach the same destination to keep the business secure, protected, and free of disruptions, they’ve taken wildly different routes along the way. Historically, dividing the two teams helped each focus on their respective missions, but this also created a lack of context, preventing either team from conducting in-depth investigations and accurately determining the source of an outage or incident quickly. This begs the question: is it time to merge the…

As Meta tries to catch up in the AI race and boost engagement with its AI bot, the company announced Monday that it’s rolling out new AI features on Facebook that aim to change how users find information, create content, and interact with the platform.  The headline update is “AI Mode,” a new way to search Facebook that uses Meta AI to surface answers pulled from public posts across the platform, including Groups and Reels. Instead of scrolling through search results, users can ask a question in plain language and get a synthesized answer based on what people are actually…