social media news - NewsLocker

NASA hired a startup to catch its falling telescope

29-06-2026 21:23 via thenextweb.com

Swift has watched the sky since 2004, catching some of the universe’s biggest explosions. Now it is sinking, and time is short. NASA is paying Katalyst Space Technologies about $30mn to save it, the Associated Press reported. Liftoff could come as early as Tuesday. The plan sounds simple and is anything but. Reach a satellite […]
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Taiwan raids Super Micro’s office as Nvidia chip smuggling investigation widens

29-06-2026 21:18 via thenextweb.com

Taiwan’s Keelung District Prosecutors Office raided Super Micro Computer’s local office on Monday, widening an investigation into the alleged smuggling of Nvidia chips to China through the company’s servers. The raid also targeted the residences of six individuals and the sites of two other affiliated companies, according to Bloomberg. Super Micro shares fell more than […]
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Waymo and Uber quietly part ways in Phoenix after nearly three years of robotaxi collaboration

29-06-2026 21:02 via thenextweb.com

Waymo robotaxis are no longer available on Uber’s app in Phoenix, ending a nearly three-year partnership in the city that served as the first test of whether the two former courtroom rivals could work together. Both companies confirmed the split to TechCrunch on Monday. Waymo said the vehicles have already been folded back into its […]
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Alibaba and Tencent lose their Washington lobbyists as new Pentagon rule takes effect

29-06-2026 20:47 via thenextweb.com

Washington lobbying firms have been quietly dropping Alibaba and Tencent as clients ahead of a new Pentagon rule that takes effect on Tuesday. According to Bloomberg, Alibaba has lost five lobbying firms and Tencent has lost four since the Defense Department expanded its list of Chinese military companies earlier this month. The departures leave two […]
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California gives all state agencies access to Claude at half price in first-of-its-kind Anthropic deal

29-06-2026 20:31 via thenextweb.com

California has struck a deal with Anthropic that gives all state agencies and local governments access to Claude at half price. The agreement, announced by Governor Gavin Newsom on Sunday, makes Claude the first AI productivity tool available statewide through the California Department of Technology’s shared services portal. Anthropic will also provide free workforce training […]
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Arena, the AI leaderboard everyone uses, just became a 100 million dollar business

29-06-2026 20:00 via thenextweb.com

Arena, the crowdsourced AI leaderboard that started as a UC Berkeley research project in 2023, has reached 100 million dollars in annualized revenue just eight months after launching its first commercial product. The platform is best known for letting users compare two anonymous AI model responses side by side and vote on which is better. […]
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Cursor launches an iOS app that lets developers run coding agents from their phone

29-06-2026 19:47 via thenextweb.com

Cursor launched an iOS mobile app today that lets developers spin up and manage AI coding agents directly from their phone. The app connects to the desktop version of Cursor and allows users to start new coding sessions, review agent output, and interact with running agents while away from their computer. It is the clearest […]
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TIDAL will strip royalties from AI-generated music and tag every track it catches

29-06-2026 18:54 via thenextweb.com

TIDAL is cutting off the money supply for AI-generated music. The streaming service announced a new policy that will prevent fully AI-generated tracks from earning royalties, collecting revenue from direct-to-fan sales, or being monetised in any way on its platform. TIDAL will also use automated tools to identify and remove AI-generated music that attempts to […]
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WhatsApp is finally letting users reserve usernames so they never have to hand over their phone number

29-06-2026 18:39 via thenextweb.com

WhatsApp is opening username reservations starting today, allowing its more than three billion users to connect with people without sharing their phone number for the first time. The feature, which has been in development for several years, will officially roll out later this year. A phone number is still required to create an account, but […]
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AI Made Every Individual Stronger and Every Team More Fragmented. Yimao Zhou Is Building the OS to Reverse That

29-06-2026 18:16 via thenextweb.com

The 23-year-old founder of Emagen AI argues the entire agent industry is optimizing the wrong unit. His answer is an operating system where AI drives the work and calls on humans, not the other way around. Every week, another AI agent startup launches. They write code, draft emails, generate slides, analyze data. Each one promises […]
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A former Tesla Optimus engineer settled a trade secret lawsuit and raised $11M to build the robot hands his old employer still cannot crack

29-06-2026 17:12 via thenextweb.com

Proception, a robotics startup founded by former Tesla Optimus engineer Jay Li, has settled a year-long trade secret lawsuit with Tesla and raised an $11 million seed round led by First Round Capital to build dexterous robotic hands. The company told TechCrunch it is now shipping the first batch of its high-dexterity hand to researchers […]
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As a deadly heatwave grips Europe, Rome leans on a bracelet to watch its elderly

29-06-2026 15:58 via thenextweb.com

Dina Gazzella is 85, and on her wrist is a small black band that looks like a watch and does rather more than tell the time. “If I feel unwell, this is a lifesaver,” she told Reuters. In a summer that has turned lethal across Europe, that is not a figure of speech.The bracelet is […]
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Omen AI raises $31m to watch the water inside AI data centres

29-06-2026 15:47 via thenextweb.com

The unglamorous truth about the AI boom is that some of its hardest problems are plumbing. As data centres pack more GPUs into every rack and run them hotter, the fluid that keeps the chips from cooking has started, occasionally, to grow bacteria. That is the problem Omen AI has built a company around, and […]
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Google Cloud will sell specialist AI models built for science

29-06-2026 15:36 via thenextweb.com

Google is adding SandboxAQ’s ‘large quantitative models’ to its cloud marketplace, pairing Gemini with AI trained on scientific equations and laboratory data. The large language models that power most of the AI industry are very good at words and surprisingly unreliable at numbers. Google’s latest move is an admission that, for science, a different kind […]
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RELX lines up another £100M buyback as its 2026 repurchases roll on

29-06-2026 15:33 via thenextweb.com

RELX does not make headlines the way a chip foundry or an AI lab does, which is rather the point of the business. It sells data, analytics, and the dull certainty of recurring revenue, and it returns the proceeds to shareholders on a metronome. The latest beat of that metronome arrived this week. The company […]
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Rocket Lab buys Iridium for $8bn in a bet to become a smaller Starlink

29-06-2026 15:27 via thenextweb.com

For most of its life Rocket Lab has sold the picks and shovels of the space economy: small rockets, satellite buses, components for other people’s missions. It has now decided that selling the tools is not as valuable as owning the mine. The company agreed to acquire Iridium Communications for about $8bn, paying $54 per […]
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Self-driving firm Momenta opens $752mn Hong Kong IPO

29-06-2026 14:28 via thenextweb.com

Momenta is heading to the public markets. The self-driving software firm has opened its Hong Kong IPO, seeking up to $752mn to pour into AI research and robotaxis. The Momenta IPO would value the GM-backed company at close to $9bn. The Suzhou-based company started taking investor orders this week under stock code 6880. It is […]
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Flock’s surveillance cameras are spreading fast across the US

29-06-2026 14:20 via thenextweb.com

Most people call them automated licence plate readers, or ALPRs. They sit beside roads and log every car that passes. Flock Safety dominates the market. Engadget reports that Flock makes the vast majority of the 100,000-plus readers now blanketing the US. Calling them licence plate readers undersells them. Reading plates is the main job, but […]
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Google earthquake alerts warned 11.4M before Venezuela’s quakes

29-06-2026 14:08 via thenextweb.com

Venezuela has no national earthquake warning system. Yet moments before two huge quakes hit on Wednesday, millions of phones lit up. Google earthquake alerts reached 11.4 million people, the company says, buying some of them up to two minutes to act. The warnings came from Google’s Earthquake Alerts system, which turns ordinary Android phones into […]
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South Korea bets $880bn to win the AI era

29-06-2026 13:37 via thenextweb.com

South Korea has placed its biggest bet yet on the AI era. The plan commits at least $880bn over a decade to chips, data centres and robots. It is the boldest South Korea AI investment to date, and the government says speed is now the only way to survive. President Lee Jae Myung unveiled the […]
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DeepSeek’s $7.4bn raise is one symptom of China’s AI cash surge

29-06-2026 13:00 via thenextweb.com

China’s AI sector is not short of cash. If anything, American pressure is pumping more in. DeepSeek shows the pattern best. The Hangzhou lab closed a $7.4bn round, the biggest first-time raise by a Chinese startup, at a valuation above $50bn. It had run for three years on founder Liang Wenfeng’s own wealth and never […]
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OpenAI may delay its IPO to 2027 to hold out for $1tn

29-06-2026 12:34 via thenextweb.com

Patience has a price, and someone else is paying it. OpenAI may wait until 2027 to go public. The wait is meant to buy a bigger number. OpenAI is weighing a listing as late as 2027, Bloomberg reported. That timeline could see it go public after its rival Anthropic. Altman has reportedly rejected an earlier […]
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Trump threatens 100% tariffs over digital services taxes

29-06-2026 12:12 via thenextweb.com

The ink was barely dry. The EU had just signed a trade deal with Washington. A day later, Trump threatened to blow a hole in it. On Friday, the president posted the threat on Truth Social. Any country that imposes a digital services tax on US firms, he wrote, would face “a 100% TARIFF on […]
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Peec AI doubles its valuation betting GEO is the new SEO

29-06-2026 11:50 via thenextweb.com

For 20 years, marketing meant one thing: rank on Google. That deal is breaking. A Berlin startup has just doubled its valuation on a bet about what comes next. Peec AI is in talks to raise new funding at a pre-money valuation of $200M, Sifted reported, citing three sources. That is roughly double its worth […]
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ETH Zurich’s bidirectional pixel could turn screens into cameras

29-06-2026 11:41 via thenextweb.com

A pixel has always done one job. On a screen it emits light to build a picture. In a camera it absorbs light to record one. A team in Switzerland has now made one that does both. Researchers at ETH Zurich have built the first bidirectional pixel, in work published in Nature. The same tiny […]
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Tesla settles a fatal Full Self-Driving crash lawsuit

29-06-2026 11:33 via thenextweb.com

A settlement is the sound a lawsuit makes when it stops. For Tesla, one just went quiet. The far louder problem, a federal safety investigation, is still talking. Tesla has settled a lawsuit tied to a fatal 2023 crash involving its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) system, Bloomberg first reported. Neither side disclosed the terms. TechCrunch laid […]
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SpaceX wants its own gas pipeline to fuel Starship

29-06-2026 11:20 via thenextweb.com

Most rocket companies buy their fuel. SpaceX wants to pipe it in. Filings in Texas show the company plans to build its own natural gas pipeline, an unusual move for a space firm, and a telling one. SpaceX calls the line Starpipe. It would run eight miles, about 13km, to Starbase, SpaceX’s company town on […]
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AWS raises GPU prices 20% as the memory crunch bites

29-06-2026 11:07 via thenextweb.com

Renting an AI chip is starting to feel like booking a hotel in a sold-out city. You pay to hold the room, and the rate keeps climbing. On AWS, it just climbed again. Amazon Web Services has raised prices for EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML by roughly 20%, starting in July. Business Insider first reported […]
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Ex-Anthropic researchers raise $200M for self-improving AI

29-06-2026 10:51 via thenextweb.com

Mirendil, founded by two researchers who left Anthropic after barely a year, has raised $200m at a $1bn valuation. The pitch: sell the self-improving AI that the big labs build for themselves and guard from everyone else. The biggest AI labs share one private conviction. The fastest way to build better AI is to point […]
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OpenAI hires Apple’s Vision Pro chief Paul Meade

29-06-2026 10:39 via thenextweb.com

Paul Meade, Apple’s Vision Pro chief, is leaving to build OpenAI’s devices. It is the most senior Apple defection yet, and it points the AI hardware talent war straight at Cupertino. Apple does not lose vice presidents to rivals. That is the unwritten rule, and for years it held. Designers slipped away to Jony Ive’s […]
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Germany’s AI rollout is being sold as a fix for its worker shortage

29-06-2026 10:28 via thenextweb.com

The case for artificial intelligence in Germany is being made, increasingly, in the language of arithmetic rather than ambition. The country does not have enough workers, and AI is being pitched as a way to need fewer of them. The concrete version of that pitch is small and unglamorous. A homebuilder in the northwest of […]
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Nearly 400 local newspapers sue OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright

29-06-2026 10:26 via thenextweb.com

A coalition that owns nearly 400 local US newspapers has sued OpenAI and Microsoft. The publishers call AI training on their reporting a death knell for local journalism. It is the largest copyright case the local press has brought yet. Local newspapers report the meetings no algorithm attends. The council vote, the school board row, […]
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Amazon’s rapid-delivery push wipes $15bn off India’s Eternal and Swiggy

29-06-2026 10:17 via thenextweb.com

Amazon spent years circling India’s quick-commerce market without committing to it. Investors have now decided the circling is over, and they have repriced the incumbents accordingly. Shares in Eternal, the parent of grocery-delivery leader Blinkit, and in rival Swiggy have fallen sharply as Amazon accelerates its rapid-delivery business in the country. Eternal has slipped about […]
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Prosus profit roughly doubles as its e-commerce bets and Tencent stake pay off

29-06-2026 10:13 via thenextweb.com

For years Prosus was, in effect, a single bet wearing the costume of a diversified investor: a sprawling portfolio whose value rose and fell with one Chinese asset. Its latest results suggest the costume is becoming the company. Prosus reported revenue of about $7.3bn for the financial year ended 31 March 2026 and roughly $1.1bn […]
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Australia moves to double Big Tech fines and arm its regulator over the under-16 ban

29-06-2026 10:04 via thenextweb.com

Six months after Australia became the first country to bar under-16s from social media, the government has concluded that the platforms are not taking the rule seriously enough, and is preparing to make the consequences of ignoring it considerably more expensive. New legislation announced this week would roughly double the maximum penalty for a systemic […]
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China’s CXMT wins a reported $3bn memory deal with Tencent

29-06-2026 09:57 via thenextweb.com

ChangXin Memory Technologies has agreed to supply Tencent with roughly $3bn of memory chips, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters, in a deal that would bind one of China’s largest cloud operators to its largest homegrown DRAM maker. Neither company has confirmed the agreement publicly, and the figure comes from sourcing rather than […]
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Austria asks the EU to consider giving Anthropic a home in Europe

29-06-2026 09:52 via thenextweb.com

European government has, in writing, asked the European Union to find a way to host an American artificial-intelligence company. The request is unusual enough that the official making it conceded, in the same breath, that people would doubt it could be done. The official is Alexander Pröll, Austria’s state secretary for digitalisation, and the company […]
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Iran’s cyberattacks on Israel tripled in a year, Israeli cyber chief says

29-06-2026 09:48 via thenextweb.com

Israel logged roughly 4,800 hostile cyber incidents in June 2026, up from about 1,600 a year earlier, the head of its National Cyber Directorate told a German newspaper. The fighting between Israel and Iran has a ceasefire. The fighting in cyberspace does not, and the numbers from the past year show it widening rather than […]
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Instagram is testing a more convenient way to tune recommendations

29-06-2026 05:39 via digitaltrends.com

Instagram is testing new shortcuts for Your Algorithm, making it easier for users to adjust recommendations while browsing Feed and Reels.

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ChatGPT is the most popular AI tool for people in the US

29-06-2026 00:00 via socialmediatoday.com

Most users are turning to artificial intelligence for help with searches, with less than a quarter using them for image generation, according to research from Pew.

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29 Jun 2026

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