It’s demo day season. This morning marked the kickoff of VC firm 500 Global’s Fall 2022 Demo Day, which saw over a dozen startups give their best pitches to prospective investors — and customers. Participants ran the gamut from fintech and sustainability to edtech and developer tools, and several stood out from the rest of … Read more
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Peloton continues to expand outside of its own marketplace. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In August, Peloton partnered with Amazon to sell its bikes and other accessories and apparel via the retailer’s website and apps. Today, Peloton announced another partnership with Dick’s Sporting Goods to sell its equipment both online and exclusively … Read more
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Apple’s vice president of procurement, Tony Blevins, has been fired from the company after his crude remarks in a TikTok interview went viral, according to a report from Bloomberg. Earlier this month, creator Daniel Mac posted a video where he asked Blevins what he does for a living, … Read more
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Meta’s researchers have made a significant leap in the AI art generation field with Make-A-Video, the creatively named new technique for — you guessed it — making a video out of nothing but a text prompt. The results are impressive and varied, and all, with no exceptions, slightly creepy. We’ve seen text-to-video models before — … Read more
Twitter is adding new features to make it easier for users to watch and discover videos on its platform, the social network announced on Thursday. Most notably, the company is launching a scrollable TikTok-like scrollable video feed. In the coming days, users on iOS will be able to click on a video in their feed … Read more
Image: Epic Games Epic Games is partnering with industry design software giant Autodesk to bring game-like graphics to architecture tools in order to visualize design concepts and plans as more immersive environments. While Autodesk architecture software such as Revit is capable of creating 3D design plans, the partnership will introduce easy-to-use tools to designers, with … Read more
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The Federal Trade Commission is facing mounting pressure to block Amazon’s proposed $1.65 billion purchase of iRobot, the company behind Roomba autonomous vacuums. In a letter to FTC Chair Lina Khan on Thursday, a group of Democratic lawmakers argued that the proposed merger would unfairly bolster Amazon’s dominance … Read more
Insurtech companies have been among the biggest victims of the public market selloff, especially those that went public in 2021. Notably, Metromile saw its valuation decline over 85% and was subsequently acquired by peer Lemonade, and it hasn’t been alone in losing a lot of value and being eyed by peers and incumbents. All this … Read more
When insurtech company Metromile went public via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in February last year, it was valued at over $1 billion. A year and five months later, Lemonade acquired the company for less than $145 million. As the markets turned early this year, insurtech left most generalist investors’ playbooks almost as fast … Read more
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Swipe up for more videos — where have I heard that before? | Image: Twitter Twitter is joining the bandwagon of social media companies copying TikTok’s everlasting scroll of videos. In a blog post on Thursday, the company announced that it’s updating its video player to be “immersive” — tapping on it will make the … Read more
Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees on Thursday that the company is enacting a company-wide hiring freeze and warned them that more downsizing is likely coming. First reported by Bloomberg’s Kurt Wagner and confirmed by sources to The Verge, the comments made during an internal all-hands call show how Meta … Read more
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Google’s text-to-speech tech is getting new voices across Android apps to improve clarity and sound more natural. | The Verge The speech engine Speech Services by Google is being upgraded to improve clarity and make text-to-speech voices in Android apps sound more natural. You can hear the difference between the old voices and the updated … Read more
Concept art from Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes | Image: 20th Century Studios The next entry in the Planet of the Apes saga will start filming soon — and it has yet another very long name. Today, 20th Century Studios unveiled the first real details on Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, … Read more
Here’s a question for you: How seriously should we take Amazon’s home robotics play? Perhaps a better way of framing it is: When do we take Amazon’s home robotics play seriously? I realize these sound like pointed questions, and I should specify that they’re not really specific to Amazon. They’re more a result of having … Read more