Apps & Smartphones news

• Gemini Live gains agentic tasks, voice inbox control and personal intelligence

  27-08-2026 00:12 via thenextweb.com
  
  Google has added four capabilities to Gemini Live, letting spoken commands trigger background agents that work across Docs, Sheets and Drive, alongside hands-free Gmail control and a spoken daily brief. Its DMA settlement requires it to let rival assistants reach comparable functionality on Android by July 2027. Google has given its voice assistant the ability […]
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• France’s Pasqal is public, with $360M and a valuation of about 100 times revenue

  28-08-2026 16:44 via thenextweb.com
  
  Pasqal began trading on Nasdaq on Friday under the ticker PSQL, five months after announcing it would go public through a special purpose acquisition company. Shares surged on the debut, according to Reuters. The merger with Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II closed on 27 August, a day after shareholders approved it, leaving the company with roughly […]
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• a16z has raised $1.1bn to invest in the physical layer of AI

  28-08-2026 16:19 via thenextweb.com
  
  Andreessen Horowitz has closed a $1.1bn fund that will invest exclusively in hardware. The Machine Age Fund, announced on Friday, covers the physical layer artificial intelligence runs on, from chips to the buildings that house them. The mandate takes in chips, memory, networking and storage, and then keeps going. Complete systems qualify too, defined broadly […]
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• Lovable has the .com now, and it belonged to an Italian lingerie brand

  28-08-2026 14:17 via thenextweb.com
  
  If you type lovable.com into a browser now, you land on a vibe-coding platform valued at $13.3bn. If you had typed it a month ago, you would have landed on an Italian underwear company, which is the more interesting half of the sentence. We checked the domain on Friday, after seeing some reports, and the […]
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• SoftBank seeks a second $10bn loan against its OpenAI stake

  28-08-2026 13:30 via thenextweb.com
  
  SoftBank is seeking a further $10bn loan to fund its OpenAI stake, Bloomberg reported on Friday. It closed a loan of exactly that size, secured against the same asset, 22 days earlier. TNW has not independently verified the report and could not review its full terms, so what follows sets the reported request against the […]
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• Nvidia has paused parts of the revenue-sharing programme it launched in July

  28-08-2026 13:19 via thenextweb.com
  
  Nvidia has halted some of the transactions under the financing programme it introduced eight weeks ago, in which it extends credit to AI cloud companies buying its chips and takes a cut of what those chips later earn, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. The scheme was announced on 1 July, and it does […]
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• Anthropic planned a $7bn takeover of chip startup MatX, then walked away

  28-08-2026 11:53 via thenextweb.com
  
  Anthropic got far enough into a plan to buy the AI chip startup MatX to have a number attached to it, roughly $7bn, before the deal stopped moving. Reuters reported the talks on Thursday, citing people familiar with them, and said the discussions have since evolved into a conversation about a partnership rather than an acquisition. Why […]
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• Google stops demoting EU publishers under its spam policy from Sunday

  28-08-2026 11:02 via thenextweb.com
  
  From Sunday, a European news publisher that runs sponsored content on its site will no longer be at risk of a manual demotion in Google Search. Google confirmed the change on Friday, and Reuters reported that it is designed to settle a European Commission investigation that could otherwise have ended in a fine. The company said […]
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• OpenAI hires Meta’s Sandhya Devanathan to lead Southeast Asia and Australia

  28-08-2026 10:44 via thenextweb.com
  
  OpenAI has hired Meta’s Sandhya Devanathan to lead Southeast Asia and Australia from October, covering consumer growth, enterprise adoption and regulatory engagement across markets of more than 600 million people. Its European expansion has centred on Dublin and Brussels. OpenAI has hired a Meta executive to run Southeast Asia and Australia. Sandhya Devanathan starts in […]
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• Nvidia ships first H200 chips to China, but expects no data-centre revenue from them

  28-08-2026 10:19 via thenextweb.com
  
  Nvidia shipped its first H200 processors to China under a new US licensing scheme, and they accounted for less than 1% of $89B in quarterly data centre revenue. Its $108B forecast for the current quarter assumes no data centre computing revenue from China at all. Nvidia has started shipping H200 processors to China and told […]
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• Kevin Durant’s $250,000 Hugging Face bet is reportedly worth $60M

  28-08-2026 10:02 via thenextweb.com
  
  Kevin Durant and his business partner invested $250,000 in Hugging Face’s early rounds and his payout is reported at around $60M if Nvidia’s $12.9B acquisition completes. Employees at late-stage European startups own roughly 10% of their companies against 20% in the United States. Kevin Durant put $250,000 into Hugging Face and may be about to […]
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• US judge strikes down Pentagon blacklist of Anthropic as illegal retaliation

  28-08-2026 09:47 via thenextweb.com
  
  A federal judge has voided the Pentagon’s designation of Anthropic as a national security supply-chain risk, finding that the label was punishment for the company’s public criticism of the Trump administration rather than a security assessment. US District Judge Rita Lin, of the Northern District of California, issued the decision on Thursday in a 59-page […]
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• BYD charged one car 350 times in nine days

  28-08-2026 09:40 via thenextweb.com
  
  BYD says it drove a randomly selected Yangwang U7 for 30,000 kilometres over nine days with 350 ultra-fast charging stops, and the battery retained 98.7% of its capacity. Euro 7 will require new car types to keep 80% of original capacity after five years from 29 November. BYD has answered the question everyone asks about […]
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• Rivian’s CFO is leaving after six years

  28-08-2026 09:14 via thenextweb.com
  
  Rivian’s chief financial officer Claire McDonough is leaving at the end of October after nearly six years, to take the same role at energy equipment maker GE Vernova. Volkswagen, now Rivian’s largest shareholder, has committed up to $5.8B to their joint venture with much of it still tied to technical milestones. Rivian is losing its […]
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• What’s next for AI and how to get there

  28-08-2026 00:09 via thenextweb.com
  
  In 2026, the way we talk about AI is beginning to change. Two years ago, every boardroom argument circled the same question: which model do we bet on? Today, that question barely registers. Frontier systems have converged so tightly that, according to Stanford’s 2026 AI Index, leading models gained roughly 30 percentage points in a […]
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• Anthropic tests a new standard for Claude to work with factory and lab hardware

  27-08-2026 22:15 via thenextweb.com
  
  Anthropic has released the Model Hardware Standard in research preview, a specification that stores how a piece of hardware works and how an AI may safely operate it, such as limiting a robot arm’s speed and angles. Europe’s Machinery Regulation starts covering AI-based safety functions on 20 January 2027. Anthropic has written a standard for […]
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• AI agents are getting wallets: the Web3 infrastructure behind the machine economy

  27-08-2026 21:52 via thenextweb.com
  
  After years of promise, the machine economy is finally taking shape. AI agents are getting wallets and are now able to make decisions on behalf of owners. For investors, this is a potentially exciting opportunity. Early movers in this space will be able to take advantage of opportunities as they become available. The biggest news […]
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• Claude now has its own browser and no longer needs the Chrome extension

  27-08-2026 20:48 via thenextweb.com
  
  Anthropic has built a browser directly into Claude Cowork, opening it in a side panel when a prompt needs the web instead of using its Chrome extension. It is on by default for Enterprise, Pro, Max and Team users, who can switch back in settings. Anthropic has put a browser inside Claude. Cowork now detects […]
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• OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft want cyber defence treated as a leadership priority

  27-08-2026 20:08 via thenextweb.com
  
  More than 100 organisations including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft have signed an open letter urging businesses and governments to make cyber defence an immediate leadership priority and fix weaknesses in their own software. The EU’s Cyber Resilience Act makes much of that mandatory from 11 September. More than 100 organisations have signed a letter […]
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• As AI reshapes business, the fractional CTO finds its moment

  27-08-2026 19:45 via thenextweb.com
  
  The AI race is producing an uncomfortable management gap. Deloitte’s 2026 research found only 21% of enterprises have mature governance for agentic AI, while 74% expect to use agents at least moderately by 2027. Technology is moving faster than the structures responsible for controlling it. Recent reporting by NBC News of nearly 700 rogue AI […]
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• Plaud’s $250 earbuds record your conversations and act on what they hear

  27-08-2026 19:22 via thenextweb.com
  
  Plaud has announced $250 wireless earbuds with 4G connectivity that record conversations and let an AI assistant act on what was said, with pre-orders open in eight countries including Germany and France. Both criminalise recording another person’s private speech without consent. Plaud has put a cellular microphone in your ears. The $250 Plaud One earbuds […]
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• SK Hynix breaks ground on a $4B memory packaging hub in Indiana

  27-08-2026 19:02 via thenextweb.com
  
  SK Hynix has broken ground on a plant costing more than $4B in West Lafayette, Indiana, its first US base for packaging high-bandwidth memory, with production due in the second half of 2029. Intel’s equivalent assembly and testing plant near Wroclaw was cancelled last year after state aid had been approved. SK Hynix has put […]
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• The executive assistant of the future: DonnaPro’s approach to human-AI collaboration

  27-08-2026 18:40 via thenextweb.com
  
  Every productivity tool on the market right now is telling you the same thing: AI will replace what you do. Cut the middleman. Automate the humans. Do more with less. Filip Pesek disagrees. “The best AI tools still come with a human who knows how to think,” says the founder of DonnaPro, Europe’s premium executive […]
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• JPMorgan leads a $5B debt package for Volta’s AI data centre buildout

  27-08-2026 18:22 via thenextweb.com
  
  JPMorgan has begun approaching lenders about a $5B debt package to fund Volta Infra Holdings’ AI data centre buildout, weeks after the seven-month-old company raised $300M at a $2.4B valuation. Its first major site is a 121-megawatt campus in Norway leased from bitcoin miner Bitdeer. JPMorgan has started sounding out lenders for a $5B debt […]
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• Voltpost is making an EV charger that hangs from your garage ceiling

  27-08-2026 18:00 via thenextweb.com
  
  Voltpost has launched two Level 2 chargers that mount on parking garage ceilings and on walls, avoiding trenching and cutting installation costs by up to 70% according to the company. Europe’s revised buildings directive requires member states to make it easier for tenants to install charging points, with transposition due this May. Voltpost has built […]
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• UiPath founder Daniel Dines has written a book that dares readers to prove it wrong by 2028

  27-08-2026 16:24 via thenextweb.com
  
  Daniel Dines has published The Work That Remains, arguing that enterprises should let AI agents prepare work while humans own consequential decisions and deterministic automation carries them out. He stakes the framework on a dated prediction and names the evidence that would weaken it. Daniel Dines has written a book, and its most useful sentence […]
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• The AI revolution is optimizing for the wrong things

  27-08-2026 15:49 via thenextweb.com
  
  Every large language model existing today is getting worse at writing, and almost nobody is measuring it. The industry keeps asking which model is smartest, but the bigger question is: smartest at what? As tech giants chase lucrative enterprise contracts, they are optimizing frontier models for coding, logic, and autonomous agent workflows. In the process, […]
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• Nvidia is reportedly in talks to buy Hugging Face for $12.9bn

  27-08-2026 15:44 via thenextweb.com
  
  Nvidia has been in talks to acquire Hugging Face at a valuation above $13bn, according to Business Insider, days after reports that the open-model hub was exploring a sale at roughly that figure. The Information puts the process further along than that, reporting an agreed deal at $12.9bn, and Nvidia did not respond to a request […]
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• The next frontier in fintech is understanding the person behind the data

  27-08-2026 15:17 via thenextweb.com
  
  Fintech has spent almost two decades making financial information increasingly accessible, portable, and actionable. Open banking, digital wallets and connected financial platforms have created an environment in which consumers can move between products while allowing authorized providers to access increasingly detailed information about their financial activity. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau estimates that more than […]
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• Perion acquires PRN for up to $12 million, expanding in-store retail media reach across North America

  27-08-2026 14:32 via thenextweb.com
  
  For years, advertisers have been trying to connect digital campaigns with what happens inside physical stores. Perion’s latest acquisition is aimed at closing that gap, extending its advertising infrastructure from channels such as connected TV and digital out-of-home into the point of purchase. Perion, an advertising technology company operating in North America and Israel, announced […]
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