Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Software stocks soared after Snowflake’s blowout earnings report sent the stock up 36% on May 28.Days later, Huang’s comment fueled a fresh rally in the space, piling on to the bullish sentiment that helped lift many beaten-down stocks out of their rut.”This is actually an incredible time to be a software company,” Huang said, dismissing the fears about an AI-driven wipeout that sent the sector spiraling in the first quarter of the year.The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF saw nearly 6% gains on Monday, adding to the more than 6% rally the Friday before.”A lot of people have said, ‘Jensen,…

I recently asked a startup CEO for his take on the best AI coding tools. He mentioned the usual suspects: OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code.Then he brought up a less familiar name.”There’s another coding agent, Code Puppy, built by an amazing guy called Mike Pfaffenberger at Walmart, ” this CEO told me. “It’s got masses of usage in Walmart.”The tip sent me down a rabbit hole that revealed something much bigger than another AI coding assistant. Code Puppy is part of Walmart’s effort to avoid what many technology executives fear could become one of the defining business problems of…

In New York City, where almost nothing is free, a startup called Shift Robotics is offering to clean your apartment for $0.There is, of course, a catch: The cleaners wear head-mounted cameras that record first-person footage as they do dishes, mop floors, and fold laundry. That footage is turned into training data for AI labs and robotics companies.Few people had heard of Shift before last week. Then its launch video went viral, drawing more than 8 million views. The initial 250 cleaning sessions sold out almost immediately. “We had thousands and thousands of people trying to book,” Harry Kilberg, Shift’s…

Katie Anne Hayes felt like her Garmin watch was giving her a lot of valuable information, at least at first. She took particular interest in the “Body Battery” feature, which purports to tell users how much energy they’ve got left in the tank. Hayes says she started checking it “pretty religiously” to gauge whether she could handle a workout or weekend concert. If her battery was low, “that was usually a good predictor of how I’d feel at the end of the day,” she says.Hayes, 29, wasn’t doing all this for fun: Her doctor shrugged off long Covid symptoms she…

WASHINGTON (AP) — A year ago, the White House was unleashing a blitz on higher education. At one campus after another, Trump officials opened investigations and cut federal funding unless schools fell in line with the Republican president’s political agenda.Now, after a campaign that put dozens of universities under investigation, President Donald Trump’s administration is taking a wider approach, moving to rewrite the federal rules that govern all of higher education. Demands that were being pressed on individual schools are being written into the fine print for thousands of U.S. universities.“We’re coming over the higher education system and course correcting,”…

Lovable and Google announced an expanded multiyear collaboration on Wednesday. Lovable, the fast-growing Stockholm vibe-coding startup, has long been a Google Cloud user. Under the new agreement, it will be a much bigger one. While the companies did not disclose the dollar figure, a person with knowledge of the deal tells TechCrunch it involves a fivefold increase in Lovable’s footprint on Google Cloud, including AI usage. As part of the deal, this individual tells us, Lovable will gain expanded access to both Anthropic’s Claude — the AI model widely used for coding tasks — and Google’s own Gemini models. The…

SpaceX officially wants to have the largest initial public offering of all time.Elon Musk’s rocket company is seeking to raise $75 billion in its initial public offering, according to a filing it submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission. It plans to offer 555,555,555 shares of common stock at $135 per share.That offering would be over twice as big as the prior record for the largest IPO, which was set by Aramco when it raised $29 billion for its opening in 2019.The updated filing came a week after SpaceX’s initial S-1, which offered an unprecedented look into the finances and…

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Ohio State University agreed Wednesday to pay approximately $100 million to settle legal claims from hundreds of former student athletes who said they were sexually abused decades ago by a doctor at the university.The school has fought lawsuits in federal court since 2018 brought by former student athletes against the university over its failure to stop abuse by Dr. Richard Strauss. Strauss worked at the school from 1978 to 1998 and also ran an off-campus clinic. He died in 2005.During a meeting Wednesday, the school’s Board of Trustees approved a preliminary agreement with all but one…

Meta’s metaverse division has a new leader — again.The latest executive shuffle inside Reality Labs comes as Meta continues to scale back parts of its metaverse ambitions and pour billions into AI, raising questions about where the company’s virtual-world strategy fits in its future.Gabriel Aul, who had served as the head of the metaverse products group since October of last year, announced his retirement after a few months on the job in February, according to a memo obtained by Business Insider.”Even though we will still have Gabe for a few more months, please join me in wishing him all the…

If Alphabet’s record-breaking $85 billion stock sale signals investor appetite for AI-related offerings — and it does — we can safely say that investors are voracious. Google’s parent company had initially intended to sell a first tranche of $40 billion worth of various equity instruments — two different classes of shares, plus smaller “depositary shares” priced to be accessible to a broader range of investors. But the offering was so oversubscribed that it raised $45 billion instead, CEO Sundar Pichai said in a post on X on Monday. Among the buyers: Berkshire Hathaway, still known for its love of value…