Amid ongoing controversy about handling of media articles and original reporting, AI-powered search startup Perplexity now displays results for factual queries such as weather and time at a place, currency conversion, and answers to simple math queries directly through cards. This is a move to stop Perplexity users from going to other search engines like…
When people think about the water they use, they tend to think about drinking water out of the tap or maybe their daily shower. But about 70% of the water we use goes toward growing the crops that feed us, a number that swells to as high as 90% in low-income countries. Finding water for…
Pok Pok, a kids’ app maker focused on building play-based learning experiences for the preschool set, has made a name for itself in the iOS developer community after winning both an App Store award for cultural impact and an Apple Design Award. But now the company is ready to expand its reach by bringing its…
Butterflies is a social network where humans and AIs interact with each other through posts, comments and DMs. After five months in beta, the app is launching Tuesday to the public on iOS and Android. Anyone can create an AI persona, called a Butterfly, in minutes on the app. After that, the Butterfly automatically creates…
Apple’s practice of leveraging ideas from its third-party developer community to become new iOS and Mac features and apps has a hefty price tag, a new report indicates. With the release of iOS 18 later this fall, Apple’s changes may affect apps that today have an estimated $393 million in revenue and have been downloaded…
Brothers Tobie Morgan Hitchcock and Jaime Morgan Hitchcock spent years building cloud-based software-as-a-service systems together, ranging from tools to let golf courses measure “golfer engagement” to online platforms designed to assess job candidates. While the systems they built had wildly different functions, the unifying thread running through all of them was a dependence on databases…
Fisker Group Inc., the EV startup founded by famed designer Henrik Fisker, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection — a capstone to months of problems with its Ocean SUV that included recalls and dozens of lemon law lawsuits. The California-based company, which filed for bankruptcy in Delaware District Court, had been seeking a deal with another…
Climate change is raising the risk, rate and cost of sewage failures. Floods are becoming more common, leading to backups that frequently overwhelm wastewater treatment systems. Exacerbating the issue, America’s infrastructure is woefully outdated; the EPA estimates that nearly $700 billion in investments is needed to simply maintain existing wastewater, stormwater and other clean water…
Self-driving vehicles rely on many sensors to detect objects and the world around them. The conventional approach is to work with cameras and lidars. But some tech companies and startups have built advanced high-resolution radar technology for autonomous vehicles, also known as 4D imaging radar. Among them is a South Korea-based startup called bitsensing. The…
Pok Pok, a kids’ app maker focused on building play-based learning experiences for the preschool set, has made a name for itself in the iOS developer community after winning both an App Store award for cultural impact and an Apple Design Award. But now the company is ready to expand its reach by bringing its…
