Apps & Smartphones news

• Nadella won’t call it a bubble. He’ll only say how it ends badly.

  27-07-2026 12:44 via thenextweb.com
  
  Fareed Zakaria opened with the question everyone is circling. Are we in an AI bubble, and has it begun to deflate? OpenAI has promised to spend hundreds of billions while making a fraction of that, he noted. The maths does not add up. Nadella did not push back. He reframed the question as a test […]
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• Two hotel groups moved into ChatGPT this week. Neither will let you pay there

  28-07-2026 18:56 via thenextweb.com
  
  Two hotel groups moved into ChatGPT this week, a day apart and at opposite ends of the market. Radisson Hotel Group launched an app on Tuesday, built with Accenture, covering more than 1,000 hotels in over 100 countries. G6 Hospitality launched a plugin for Motel 6 on Monday, covering nearly 1,500 economy locations across the […]
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• A quarter of the S&P now claims measurable AI benefits. Last year it was 14%

  28-07-2026 18:44 via thenextweb.com
  
  Wall Street has spent three years paying for the companies that build AI. It is starting to pay for the companies that use it. The rotation has a number behind it. Morgan Stanley ran a systematic analysis of earnings call transcripts. It found that 25% of S&P 500 members cited measurable benefits from AI adoption […]
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• Friendsurance invented peer-to-peer insurance. It just sold for its paperwork.

  28-07-2026 18:32 via thenextweb.com
  
  Cover Genius has acquired Friendsurance, the Berlin company that invented peer-to-peer insurance. The deal took effect immediately, and neither side disclosed a price. Friendsurance built its name on a simple idea. Small groups of policyholders pool together, and everyone who stays claim-free collects cash back at the end of the year. Its own German language […]
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• Coforge says AI is expanding its margins. Its rivals call it ‘AI deflation’

  28-07-2026 18:21 via thenextweb.com
  
  Coforge reported first quarter revenue of $592.2m on Monday. That is a rise of 33% in dollar terms over the year, and 21.1% on the previous quarter. In rupees the annual increase reads 49%. Profit after tax reached $55.6m. Those numbers land in an industry bracing to shrink. HCL Technologies has warned of “AI deflation”. […]
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• Amkor will spend up to $3bn this year, close to 40% of its revenue

  28-07-2026 17:49 via thenextweb.com
  
  Amkor Technology reported record second quarter results on Monday. Revenue reached $1.9bn, up 26% on a year earlier, and net income more than tripled. Operating income roughly doubled to $200m. Earnings came in at $0.70 a diluted share, against $0.22. EBITDA reached $400m. The numbers matter less than what the company plans to do next. […]
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• X Money can cut off your account over what you post

  28-07-2026 17:37 via thenextweb.com
  
  X Money went live on Monday. Buried in its support pages is a rule that no ordinary bank applies to a current account. “If your X account is suspended for violating Child Safety or Violent and Hateful Entities policies, you will lose Money access,” the company FAQ states. Any remaining balance “will be mailed to […]
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• A new AI listens to every prison call and decides who is speaking

  28-07-2026 17:16 via thenextweb.com
  
  A Texas company has begun selling corrections agencies an artificial intelligence system that listens to prison phone calls. It works out who is speaking, whether or not the speaker wants that. LEO Technologies, based in Austin, announced Verus Voice AI on Monday. The product uses voice biometrics to catch prisoners who call on someone else’s […]
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• Apple’s new smart home hardware has been finished for months. Siri was the hold-up.

  28-07-2026 17:11 via thenextweb.com
  
  Apple is preparing a push into the smart home with a new Apple TV 4K, an updated HomePod mini, and a hub device built around its rebuilt Siri, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported on Tuesday. The hardware for the first two has reportedly been finished for months and is already being tested by Apple employees on […]
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• Australia’s world-first data centre rules need every state to agree. Two just said no.

  28-07-2026 16:32 via thenextweb.com
  
  Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s proposed national environmental and energy controls for the country’s A$150 billion data centre pipeline hit their first obstacle on Tuesday, when two jurisdictions declined to back them. Federal, state and territory energy ministers met virtually to discuss the plan, and Queensland and the Northern Territory opposed most of the measures, […]
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• Nvidia announced $750bn of AI deals. Its own credit market flinched.

  28-07-2026 16:03 via thenextweb.com
  
  Nvidia is working on a fresh round of AI infrastructure deals potentially worth more than $750 billion, Bloomberg reported, accelerating a pattern of investment that critics say inflates demand and valuations across the sector. The response from the debt market was unusually direct. Nvidia’s five-year credit default swap spread surged to a record 82 basis […]
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• UK MP asks High Court to force xAI to stop Grok making sexualised images of her

  28-07-2026 16:02 via thenextweb.com
  
  Jess Asato, the Labour MP for Lowestoft, has asked the High Court in London to force Elon Musk’s xAI to stop its Grok chatbot from generating sexualised images of her, sharpening a claim that her lawyers say could help settle how far an AI company answers for what its tools produce. Asato is seeking a […]
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• Ofcom has never blocked an Openreach offer before. It just moved to block this one.

  28-07-2026 15:51 via thenextweb.com
  
  Ofcom proposed on Tuesday to block a discounted wholesale offer from Openreach, the first time the regulator has ever moved to stop a commercial deal from BT’s network arm. The offer would have given internet providers up to £9.50 off per customer per month, for as long as 30 months, when they connected more new […]
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• An AI correction is now a top global credit risk, Fitch says

  28-07-2026 15:48 via thenextweb.com
  
  Fitch Ratings has gathered a number of the market’s quieter anxieties into a single sentence, warning that a possible AI market correction is now emerging as one of the biggest credit risks facing the global economy. The judgement comes in the agency’s third-quarter Global Risk Outlook, published this week, and it lands at a moment […]
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• Core Scientific pivots to AMD with 2.5GW AI data-centre pact months after CoreWeave deal collapsed

  28-07-2026 15:36 via thenextweb.com
  
  Nine months after its own shareholders torpedoed a roughly $9bn takeover by CoreWeave, Core Scientific has found a far larger partner in the chipmaker trying to loosen Nvidia’s grip on artificial intelligence. On Tuesday the former bitcoin miner said it had signed a data-centre agreement with AMD that could eventually reach 2.5 gigawatts of capacity across the American […]
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• Meta and BlackRock form a $14bn venture to build an El Paso AI data centre

  28-07-2026 15:28 via thenextweb.com
  
  Meta has folded its half-built El Paso data centre into a joint venture with BlackRock, formalising a structure that keeps most of a $14bn project off its own books. Under the agreement, funds managed by BlackRock will own 80% of the Texas campus and Meta the remaining 20%, though Meta stays on as the site’s […]
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• Mate Security Crosses $50M in Funding as AI Security Operations Startup Heads to Black Hat USA

  28-07-2026 15:10 via thenextweb.com
  
  Artificial intelligence is reshaping cybersecurity at a pace that many security operations centers were never designed to handle. While organizations are embracing AI to improve efficiency, attackers are also using the technology to increase the speed, scale, and sophistication of cyberattacks. The result is growing pressure on enterprises to rethink the foundations of security operations […]
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• Dwelly raises $170M to turn UK lettings agencies into software

  28-07-2026 15:07 via thenextweb.com
  
  The London startup is buying independent lettings firms and folding them onto an AI platform, with EQT Growth leading the equity and Trinity Capital supplying the debt. The UK lettings business still runs on phone calls, paperwork, and the slow choreography of getting a boiler fixed, and Dwelly is betting that most of it can […]
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• Most enterprise AI spend still hasn’t left the lab

  28-07-2026 14:43 via thenextweb.com
  
  New research puts a hard number on something a lot of IT leaders already suspected. Most AI pilots never make it into production, and the spend behind them isn’t disappearing, it’s just sitting in limbo. Jon Bitz, chief relationship officer and co-founder at KloudStax, says that limbo isn’t the failure it looks like from the outside. The […]
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• AI is turning B2B outreach into a tragedy of the commons

  28-07-2026 14:02 via thenextweb.com
  
  AI did not make buyers easier to reach. It made everyone cheaper to interrupt. A modern AI sales agent can research a company, identify a plausible buying signal, compose a personalised email, schedule follow-ups, evaluate the response, and hand a qualified opportunity to a human salesperson. Major CRM vendors now market agents that research leads, […]
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• New York school pauses humanoid robot ‘Sally’ after state and union pushback

  28-07-2026 11:30 via thenextweb.com
  
  A humanoid robot named Sally was due to take a seat in a Western New York high-school classroom this autumn, silicone skin, long brown hair, and all. Instead she is on hold. A plan that had quietly cleared the Salamanca school board back in June turned, over the following weeks, into a public fight over […]
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• Apple’s incoming CEO wants to build on the company’s film and TV run

  28-07-2026 11:21 via thenextweb.com
  
  John Ternus has spent 24 years engineering Apple’s hardware, and when he takes over as chief executive on 1 September, he inherits a company defined by iPhones and silicon rather than prestige television. Yet one of the first things Apple’s incoming boss chose to talk about in public was neither. Speaking to reporters at the […]
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• China’s homegrown DUV chip tool now has a name: Shanghai Aishengna

  28-07-2026 11:06 via thenextweb.com
  
  The state-owned company at the centre of China’s newest chipmaking push finally has a name. Reuters reported on Tuesday that Shanghai Aishengna Electronic Technology Group, a little-known state-owned group, is leading the effort to mass-produce domestically developed immersion deep-ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machines, according to a person familiar with the matter who declined to be identified […]
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• Australia’s world-first data centre rules hit their first snag: the power isn’t there yet

  28-07-2026 10:29 via thenextweb.com
  
  Australia has told its data centres to put more power into the grid than they pull out, an obligation no other country has tried to write into law. The demand is barely a fortnight old, and it has already met the most basic of objections: the electricity the industry is meant to supply cannot be […]
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• Taiwan detains an Nvidia employee as its chip-smuggling probe reaches the chipmaker

  28-07-2026 10:20 via thenextweb.com
  
  Taiwan’s investigation into smuggled AI hardware, which began with Super Micro and had spent months working through the island’s distributors, has now reached inside Nvidia itself. On July 28, prosecutors detained an Nvidia employee as part of the probe into whether restricted AI servers were being routed to China, Bloomberg first reported, the first time the […]
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• Orange raises full-year targets on Spain deal and Africa growth

  28-07-2026 10:15 via thenextweb.com
  
  Orange raised its full-year financial targets on Tuesday, after posting record first-half growth and, for the first time, consolidating its Spanish business in full. The French group now expects EBITDAaL, the after-leases profit measure that the industry watches most closely, to grow by more than 4% across 2026, up from earlier guidance of above 3%. It […]
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• China accuses the US of ‘AI hegemonism’ and threatens countermeasures

  28-07-2026 10:09 via thenextweb.com
  
  China’s commerce ministry accused the United States of “AI hegemonism” on Monday and warned that it would retaliate, an escalation in a quarrel that started with an accusation of copying and has since pulled in chips, sanctions, and a pair of senior White House officials. The ministry said Washington was threatening Chinese companies with punishment on the […]
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• Nvidia is the mystery tenant behind Hut 8’s $50bn Texas data centre, FT reports

  28-07-2026 09:53 via thenextweb.com
  
  For the better part of a fortnight, the tenant behind one of the largest data centre leases in Texas history existed only in the negative, described in Hut 8’s own filings as an “unnamed, investment-grade hyperscaler,” and now the Financial Times says the name is Nvidia. The FT reported citing five people familiar with the arrangement, that Nvidia is […]
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• Sam Altman and Jensen Huang to meet Senate Intelligence’s top Democrat after OpenAI’s rogue-agent breach

  28-07-2026 09:43 via thenextweb.com
  
  OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang are due in Senator Mark Warner’s office this week, and the meeting was arranged only days after one of OpenAI’s own models did something no frontier system had publicly managed before. Warner, the vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and its most senior Democrat, will host both chief […]
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• Tennessee tells jury Meta knew Instagram harmed teens and stayed silent

  28-07-2026 09:37 via thenextweb.com
  
  A jury in Nashville heard this week that Meta once concluded, in its own internal language, that the features keeping teenagers glued to Instagram were “inherently at odds with well-being”, and that the company then chose to say nothing about it. The line comes from a 2017 document that the state of Tennessee has placed […]
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