In a historic 2012 ImageNet competition, a team led by Geoff Hinton debuted a new network architecture whose performance outshone all previous efforts at computer-based image recognition. With that, the era of deep learning was born, with computer vision as its original use case. Since then, computer vision capabilities have raced ahead. In layman terms,…
Read more
Many teachers and parents in Indonesia rely on WhatsApp to keep in touch, creating “multiple groups that often become messy and highly ineffective, and result in confusion or lost threads,” says Rizky Aniez, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Gredu. The Jakarta-based startup was created to give everyone involved in the educational process—school administrators,…
Read more
US antitrust enforcers have mounted their first challenge to a mobile app store, accusing Google of overcharging developers who sell through the Play store that is built into its Android operating system. The complaint, filed in federal court in San Francisco on Wednesday, is the fourth against the search giant in the US in less than…
Read more
We’ve been hearing about BMW’s electric city scooters, not to be confused with electric kick scooters, for years. The German automaker came out with the BMW Motorrad Concept Link in 2017, a concept vehicle that imagines the future of expensive micromobility. After revealing the latest concept scooter, the CE 04, in November 2020, BMW is…
Read more
This article is an on-site version of our #techFT newsletter. Sign up here to get the complete newsletter sent straight to your inbox every weekday Never mind Huawei and other Chinese tech companies, it’s Amazon that has become a threat to US national security, according to its cloud rival Microsoft. That was its response to…
Read more
WellSaid Labs, whose tools create synthetic speech that could be mistaken for the real thing, has raised a $10M Series A to grow the business. The company’s home-baked text-to-speech engine works faster than real time and produces natural-sounding clips of pretty much any length, from quick snippets to hours-long readings. WellSaid came out of the…
Read more
Former president Donald Trump is suing Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube, as well as their respective chief executives, in lawsuits alleging “unlawful censorship” of Americans. Trump on Wednesday said he would lead class actions against chief executives Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and Sundar Pichai, as well their Big Tech platforms. “We’re asking the US district…
Read more
Public contracts sound like a great business for companies. The ultimate customer is typically a government with a huge budget, high creditworthiness and a myriad other contracts to award. In reality, public bodies and arms of the state can be chaotic, entitled and insanely demanding. Microsoft is the latest casualty. The tech giant’s deal to…
Read more
It’s been quite the year for crypto capital, what with Coinbase’s blockbuster debut earlier this year in a direct listing and A16Z raising $2.2 billion for its third crypto-focused fund. But as the numbers in this frenetic market continue to skyrocket to dizzying highs, there is an open question for a lot of crypto founders:…
Read more
Planet Labs, the Earth imaging business whose fleet of small satellites captures daily data about how the globe is changing, has struck a $2.8bn deal to become a public company. San Francisco-based Planet will merge with dMY Technology Group IV, a special purpose acquisition company listed on NYSE, raising net proceeds of $434m, after transaction…
Read more