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Gupshup raises $60M in equity and debt, leaves unicorn status hanging

Gupshup, a business messaging startup that began its journey in India over two decades ago and became a unicorn four years ago, has raised a new over $60 million round — but is keeping its new valuation under wraps. In 2021, Gupshup raised two funding rounds within four months, securing $340 million from prominent investors including Tiger Global, Fidelity Management, Think Investments, and Malabar Investments. These rounds — the startup’s first in roughly a decade — valued Gupshup at $1.4 bill

Mixture-of-recursions delivers 2x faster inference—Here’s how to implement it

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now Researchers at KAIST AI and Mila have introduced a new Transformer architecture that makes large language models (LLMs) more memory- and compute-efficient. The architecture, called Mixture-of-Recursions (MoR), significantly improves model accuracy and delivers higher throughput compared with vanilla transformers, even when constrained by th

VSCO launches ‘Capture’, its iPhone camera app with analog-style filters

After a limited launch last month in Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, the VSCO Capture app is now live in the App Store worldwide, offering yet another option for iPhone users looking to go beyond the native camera app. Here’s everything the app has to offer. Surprisingly capable Unlike the main VSCO app, which focuses on photo editing and post-production creativity, Capture lets you apply more than 50 of VSCO’s iconic film presets before taking a photo. You can fine-tune the look with a r

Meta Is Breaking OpenAI $100 Million at a Time

The artificial intelligence landscape, once characterized by collaborative innovation, has dramatically shifted into an all-out war for top talent. At the forefront of this aggressive new era stands Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms, orchestrating an unprecedented assault on rival OpenAI. This isn’t merely a recruitment drive; it’s a clear declaration of war, fueled by a staggering $300 million offer designed to dismantle the very core of its competitor. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that

'South Park': How to Watch the Season 27 Premiere Without Cable

Kenny, Kyle, Stan and Cartman are about to return. Comedy Central South Park's season 27 rollout has been hectic. The hit animated series has had its premiere date pushed and lacked definitive streaming details caused by behind-the-scenes ongoings. As of today, July 22, the show is a day away from its Comedy Central debut, and the US streaming method is becoming clear. According to a report from Deadline, a deal is being completed that would bring South Park to Paramount Plus in the US. The gl

Intuit brings agentic AI to the mid-market saving organizations 17 to 20 hours a month

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now One of the fastest-growing segments of the business market faces a technology paradox. They’ve outgrown small business tools but sometimes remain too small for many types of traditional enterprise solutions. That’s the domain of the mid-market, which Intuit defines as companies that generate anywhere from $2.5 million to $100 million in an

Aardman’s Pokémon show is a delightful-looking romp that follows Sirfetch'd and Pichu

We knew that Aardman, the animation studio behind Wallace & Gromit, was prepping a Pokémon show , but now we have some juicy details and actual footage. Pokémon Tales: The Misadventures of Sirfetch’d and Pichu, as the name suggests, follows the sword-wielding Sirfetch'd and the baby pre-evolution of Pikachu. It looks extremely charming, as one would expect from Aardman. The trailer is on the shorter side, but shows the dynamic duo getting involved in some cutesy shenanigans as an oblivious Wool

LSM-2: Learning from incomplete wearable sensor data

Training and evaluation We leverage a dataset with 40 million hours of wearable data sampled from over 60,000 participants during the period from March to May 2024. The dataset was thoroughly anonymized or de-identified to ensure that participant information was removed and privacy was maintained. Subjects wore a variety of Fitbit and Google Pixel smartwatches and trackers and consented for their data to be used for research and development of new health and wellness products and services. The

Asymmetry of verification and verifier's law

Asymmetry of verification is the idea that some tasks are much easier to verify than to solve. With reinforcement learning (RL) that finally works in a general sense, asymmetry of verification is becoming one of the most important ideas in AI. Understanding asymmetry of verification through examples Asymmetry of verification is everywhere, if you look for it. Some prime examples: Sudoku and crossword puzzles take a lot of time to solve because you have to try many candidates against various c

‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Is Trying a ‘Stranger Things’ Collab Game Again

Fans of Eddie Munson are having a moment right now between actor Joseph Quinn launching into a marvelous blaze of glory and now a new Stranger Things collab with Dungeons & Dragons. The timing couldn’t be more perfect for more Hellfire Club adventures, and this release promises enough of them to last you at least until Stranger Things season five premieres in November on Netflix. With Stranger Things: Welcome to the Hellfire Club, tabletop enthusiasts can uncover Eddie’s lost campaigns and “tak

Etsy faces user boycott over ‘Alligator Alcatraz’-branded products

The Florida GOP isn’t the only one profiting from the detention center known as “Alligator Alcatraz” by selling merchandise. A subset of Etsy buyers and sellers began a boycott of the online marketplace this month over its decision to allow “Alligator Alcatraz”-branded merchandise on its site. Today, this sort of merchandise — including T-shirts, hats, mugs, stickers, patches, and other items — can be found across e-commerce platforms beyond Etsy, ranging from large retailers like Amazon to onl

Meta has ended its bonus program on Threads

It's still trying to lure new users, but it's done paying anyone to post. Meta is no longer paying creators to post on Threads. The company quietly ended the Threads bonus program, which offered some creators thousands of dollars a month in bonuses, earlier this year, Engadget has confirmed. The company hasn't officially commented on why it stopped the payments, but an Instagram support page that once listed details about the creator incentives no longer references Threads at all. In posts on

Windows 11 KB5062660 update brings new 'Windows Resilience' features

​​Microsoft has released the KB5062660 preview cumulative update for Windows 11 24H2 with twenty-nine new features or changes, with many gradually rolling out, such as the new Black Screen of Death and Quick Machine Recovery tool. The KB5062660 update is part of the company's optional non-security preview updates schedule, which releases updates at the end of each month to test new fixes and features coming to next month's August Patch Tuesday. Unlike regular Patch Tuesday cumulative updates,

Walmart is selling the latest Apple Pencil Pro for the exact same price as the older Apple Pencil 2nd Gen

'ZDNET Recommends': What exactly does it mean? ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or

Asymmetry of Verification and Verifier's Law

Asymmetry of verification is the idea that some tasks are much easier to verify than to solve. With reinforcement learning (RL) that finally works in a general sense, asymmetry of verification is becoming one of the most important ideas in AI. Understanding asymmetry of verification through examples Asymmetry of verification is everywhere, if you look for it. Some prime examples: Sudoku and crossword puzzles take a lot of time to solve because you have to try many candidates against various c

Rocket Lab’s first hurdle to flying its new rocket is getting it to the pad

Rocket Lab has asked regulators for permission to transport oversized Neutron rocket structures through shallow waters to a spaceport off the coast of Virginia as it races to meet a September delivery deadline. The request, which was made in July, is a temporary stop gap while the company awaits federal clearance to dredge a permanent channel to the Wallops Island site. Rocket Lab plans to launch its Neutron medium-lift rocket from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island, V

Apple TV+ teases new show coming soon from Breaking Bad creator

Three years ago, Apple struck a deal with Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, for a new show at Apple TV+. Now, the company is teasing its unveiling with a live countdown timer. New Apple TV+ series reunites Better Call Saul creator and star Today Apple TV’s X account posted a cryptic teaser that read: “Happiness is Contagious.” The new show in question is Vince Gilligan’s next project, starring Rhea Seehorn from Better Call Saul. Very little is known about the new

Topics: apple better new saul tv

Blip: Peer-to-peer massive file sharing

Really fast. Blip’s fast relay supports multi-gigabit speeds, even over long distances where other services slow down. Because there are no separate “upload” and “download” steps, sending with Blip can be at least twice as fast as many other services. The recipient will start receiving right away rather than having to wait for you to finish uploading. Now, Blip might seem like magic, but it can’t break the laws of physics! Performance will be affected by the upload speed of the sender’s intern

TODOs aren't for doing

July 21, 2025 Some teams require that every TODO comment in a codebase gets logged in the bug tracker. Others automatically delete any “stale” TODO that has been in the codebase for over a year. Don’t do it! TODO comments don’t need to get done in order to be valuable. If you have // TODO: Write the second half of this file so next week's launch won't explode then sure, you should probably track that somewhere. But to me, a good TODO looks more like this: // TODO: If the user triple-clicks

Netflix and Apple are backing away from great games

is a reporter who covers the business, culture, and communities of video games, with a focus on marginalized gamers and the quirky, horny culture of video game communities. For the last few years, subscription gaming services like Apple Arcade and Netflix have offered mobile game developers something of a haven for high-quality, premium mobile games: a type of game that had become vanishingly rare following the rise of the microtransaction-stuffed free-to-play model. But as these services’ once

Elon Now Facing the Possibility That SpaceX Will Never Get Starship Working

SpaceX is nine full-scale test launches into developing its enormous, nearly 400-feet-tall Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built. Over the last two and a half years, we've seen over half a dozen spectacular explosions. Two launches earlier this year sent massive streaks of debris hurtling over the Turks and Caicos Islands, prompting airspace closures. Its most recent test in May ended in an uncontrolled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico after helplessly spinning on its axis and suffering

Android 16 QPR1 Beta 3 delivers fix for persistent Galaxy Watch connection problems

Andy Walker / Android Authority TL;DR Galaxy Watch owners have been experiencing issues when attempting to use their wearable with a device running any version of the Android 16 QPR1 beta. Reports say the issue results in connection drops, compatibility problems, and crashes. The recently released Android 16 QPR1 Beta 3 update appears to fix the bug. As with beta, there’s always the threat of running into a bug. That’s exactly what happened recently to some Android 16 beta testers who own a

iOS 26 beta 4 adds new Dynamic option for iPhone wallpaper

iOS 26 beta 4 is available now, and the public beta is expected soon too. Besides adding more liquid back into the Liquid Glass design, the new beta also introduces a new Dynamic wallpaper option. Here are the details. Dynamic wallpaper changes colors automatically in iOS 26 beta 4 Like it does every year, Apple has a new default iPhone wallpaper coming in iOS 26. The new default added several different color options in the last beta, too. You can choose from: Dusk Halo Shadow Sky Most o

iOS 26 developer beta 4 brings Silence Unknown Callers to Call Screening

If you’re running the developer beta on your iPhone and get a lot of spam or robocalls, you might have noticed that the Silence Unknown Callers feature had gone missing, at least for some users. With today’s beta release, it’s back, now integrated as part of the new Call Screening feature. Call Screening is one of the most useful features coming in iOS 26. When enabled, your iPhone will automatically answer calls from unknown numbers, ask the caller for more information, and decide whether to l

Nothing just launched a stylish $99 smartwatch - with a reported 13-day battery

'ZDNET Recommends': What exactly does it mean? ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or

Mobile subscriptions are shedding unique indie games in search of a bigger audience

is a reporter who covers the business, culture, and communities of video games, with a focus on marginalized gamers and the quirky, horny culture of video game communities. For the last few years, subscription gaming services like Apple Arcade and Netflix have offered mobile game developers something of a haven for high-quality, premium mobile games: a type of game that had become vanishingly rare following the rise of the microtransaction-stuffed free-to-play model. But as these services’ once

Apple Intelligence tries summarizing news again after botching BBC stories

is a news editor covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme. Apple’s fourth iOS 26 developer beta has reintroduced Apple Intelligence-powered notification summaries for news and entertainment apps, MacRumors reports. The company temporarily switched off the feature earlier this year after botching some headlines and promised they would be available again in a future update. After installing the new beta, your iPhone will show a splash

iOS 26 beta 4 arrives, with Liquid Glass tweaks and AI news summaries

Apple on Tuesday released the fourth developer beta of its next big software update, iOS 26, which brings with it slight changes to its Liquid Glass redesign and the re-introduction of AI-powered notification summaries for news, among other updates. The rollout arrived just ahead of the iOS 26 public beta, which is expected to launch later this week. The developer betas are meant to give mobile app makers time to test their apps with Apple’s new software so they’re ready for the public launch

Topics: 26 apple beta ios new

iPadOS 26 beta 4 now available with latest iPad changes

Apple has just released iPadOS 26 beta 4 to developers. Today’s release will likely also be the build that gets shipped as the public beta soon. Here’s what to expect. Beta 4 arrives ahead of expected iPadOS 26 public beta Just over two weeks ago, Apple shipped iPadOS 26 beta 3 with a variety of changes and improvements. Following its current biweekly release pattern, iPadOS 26 beta 4 is now here at about the time we expected. This release should provide the most stable version of the iPad’s

Apple releases iOS 26 beta 4 for iPhone

Apple changed a few Liquid Glass elements in iOS 26 developer beta 3 and got a lot of online feedback. Now we’re on to iOS 26 beta 4, which will surely be compared under the microscope in as much detail in this season of change. iOS 26 developer beta 4 has arrived Apple describes the upcoming iPhone software update by saying that iOS 26 “delivers a stunning new design, powerful Apple Intelligence capabilities, new ways to stay connected in the Phone and Messages apps, and exciting updates to C

Topics: 26 apple beta ios iphone