Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

DuckDuckGo has seen usage surge after Google unveiled its biggest Search overhaul in decades, suggesting some users may be looking for alternatives as the internet giant pushes deeper into AI.DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, said US installs rose an average of 20.8% week over week in the seven days after Google’s May 19 announcements at its I/O conference.Growth peaked at 37.6% on May 26, according to DuckDuckGo. On iOS in the US, installs climbed an average of 33% during the same period, reaching nearly 70% growth on May 25.DuckDuckGo also said visits to its noai.duckduckgo.com page, where AI features are…

Remote , a seven-year-old, Amsterdam-based payroll service provider, says it recently surpassed $300 million in annual recurring revenue and became cash-flow positive. But the real story, it insists, is what happened behind the scenes: a 50% increase in revenue per employee after the startup adopted AI at every level of the organization. “As we are talking, on the second screen of my laptop, I have five different Claude instances running, building different things — and some of those are for me, but a lot of them are for Remote,” CEO Job van der Voort tells TechCrunch. This includes a Slack…

Silicon Valley’s backlash against tokenmaxxing has officially begun.Uber COO Andrew Macdonald said in an interview released last week that he hasn’t observed direct productivity improvements from increased AI token usage.”That link is not there yet, right?” Macdonald said in comments that went viral, racking up over 2 million views on X. “I think maybe implicitly there is more that is getting shipped, but it’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, ‘OK, now we’re actually producing 25% more useful consumer features.'”AI tokens are the basic building blocks processed by AI chatbots, making up roughly ¾…

Google I/O made it official: AI-generated answers are now front and center in search, and most brands have almost no visibility into how AI is describing them to their customers. For anyone who has spent years building a strategy around 10 blue links, the rules just changed in a pretty significant way.  On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan caught up with Matt Thompson, VP of partnerships at Scrunch, a startup positioning itself at the center of the AI search shift, to talk about what Google’s changes mean and what marketers and founders should actually do about it.  Listen to the full episode to hear:  Why AI referrals are converting at…

Meta is doubling down on its subscription offerings. On Wednesday, the social networking giant announced it’s now rolling out its consumer subscription plans globally for its flagship apps, Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, and beginning tests of new subscriptions for businesses, creators, and Meta AI users. For a few dollars per month, consumers subscribing to Instagram Plus ($3.99/mo), Facebook Plus ($3.99/mo), or WhatsApp Plus ($2.99/mo) will gain access to extra features, like profile customization, super reactions, and story insights, among other things. In an announcement, Meta’s head of product, Naomi Gleit, noted that “more fun features” will be added in the…

Maybe AI isn’t going to ruin everything — or fix everything! — after all.People as different as the pope, Sam Altman, and Jensen Huang have given me some hope in recent days: Maybe we can find an AI middle ground where it doesn’t kill us all, or become a substitute for real life.We keep hearing that AI is going to change everything — completely reshape all that we know about our jobs, about the economy, about life itself.Some of this seems fantastical, like Elon Musk’s prediction that we won’t have to worry about retirement — or working, if we don’t…

When Hyaat Chaudhary founded Luxome in 2018 to sell luxury weighted blankets, “returns were an afterthought,” he said. Not every customer wants to keep the products they order, so returns piled up at the warehouse.Other retailers disposed of their returns in landfills. “It just drove me crazy as a human being. It seems wasteful, and I care about the environment,” Chaudhary told Business Insider.At one point, Chaudhary donated 5,000 weighted blankets locally. His approach flooded the market, and Luxome customers started canceling their orders, he said. Instead, they were purchasing “new open box” Luxome blankets on eBay from resellers contracted…

Anthropic’s Boris Cherny has a simple message for the 22-year-old computer science graduates looking to figure out what’s next.”If you want to work at a company, you can totally still do that — there are entry-level jobs, there’s a lot you can do,” Cherny told tech journalist Casey Newton during a recent episode of Newton’s “Platformer” podcast. “But if you’re at all entrepreneurial, go start a startup.”Thanks to AI tools like Claude Code, which Cherny created, entrepreneurs can build and scale their companies like never before.”There has never been a better time in history to do it; it’s the golden…

Investor Chris Degnan is pouring cold water on one of the buzziest jobs in tech right now: the “forward-deployed” engineer.Popularized by Palantir, the forward-deployed engineer, or FDE, is embedded within a client company, building technology and helping customers apply it from the inside. The model is especially popular in the AI era, as firms race to make their workforces “AI native.”Degnan spent over 11 years as Snowflake’s chief revenue officer before retiring last year. Now, he works as an investor and startup advisor. On the “20VC” podcast, Degnan highlighted the challenges of staffing FDEs and the realities of the day-to-day…

WASHINGTON (AP) — Shrey Parikh finished third in the 2024 Scripps National Spelling Bee before making a stunning exit from his school bee last year. Now in his final year before he ages out of the competition, he’s fully committed.The 14-year-old from Rancho Cucamonga, California, works with three coaches. He pays for word lists and study guides. He tries to learn every Greek and Latin root, every language pattern, every spelling bee-worthy word he can find. And he competes throughout the year in online bees that pit him against the country’s other top spellers.Shrey’s approach has proven effective for spellers…