Duolingo now offers a portable piano for its music course

Duolingo now offers a portable piano for its music course

Duolingo, best known for its language-learning app, has teamed up with the instrument brand Loog to offer a beginner-friendly portable piano. The $249 Loog x Duolingo Piano is meant to complement Duolingo’s similarly gamified music course launched last year. The keyboard is essentially a co-branded version of the portable digital piano that Loog launched on … Read more

WhatFix raises a whopping $125M for its in-app user guides

WhatFix raises a whopping 5M for its in-app user guides

Digital transformation — upgrading a company’s legacy apps and processes with new tech — has long been a buzzy and lucrative business. But the pandemic supercharged the market. Covid pandemic lockdowns and the widespread move to work-from-home spurred brands relying on old technology to modernize their organizations. According to Statista, worldwide spending on digital transformation … Read more

Google’s revised ad targeting plan triggers fresh competition concerns in UK

Google’s revised ad targeting plan triggers fresh competition concerns in UK

What is going on with Google’s long-touted migration to an alternative adtech stack (aka its Privacy Sandbox proposal)? What indeed. The entire multi-year endeavour to reshape the commercial web looks dangerously close to being killed off after the latest intervention by the U.K.’s antitrust regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). This comes on top … Read more

Hone Capital, a Silicon Valley firm, is being probed by the FBI

Hone Capital, a Silicon Valley firm, is being probed by the FBI

According to the FT, the FBI is now poking around nine-year-old Hone Capital, a Palo Alto, Ca.-based venture firm funded by a Chinese private equity firm, to determine whether some of its capital came from the Chinese government — and if it shared sensitive startup data with Beijing. Originally launched with $115 million from China’s … Read more

Airtel admits spam call ‘menace’ in India, deploys free AI shield to all users

Airtel admits spam call ‘menace’ in India, deploys free AI shield to all users

Bharti Airtel, India’s second-largest telecom operator, said on Wednesday it’s rolling out an AI-powered spam detection solution to all its customers to curb the raging spam calls and messages problem in the country.  The company claims the solution is India’s first network-based, AI-powered, spam detection system. The feature will alert Airtel’s customers in real-time to … Read more

Vsim, founded by Nvidia alums, raises $21.5M for robotics simulation tech  

Vsim, founded by Nvidia alums, raises .5M for robotics simulation tech  

One of Nvidia’s fundamental breakthroughs has involved processors that power detailed, compute-intensive graphical simulations that can be used for everything from games and industrial development to AI training. Now, two of the engineers who helped build those physical simulations for Nvidia have raised a sizable amount of seed funding for their new startup. Manchester-based Vsim … Read more

Reddit is bringing AI-powered, automatic translation to dozens of new countries

Reddit is bringing AI-powered, automatic translation to dozens of new countries

Reddit is bringing machine learning-powered translations to more than 35 new locales in Europe, Asia and Latin America in a move designed to open the largely English-centric social network to more users. The service comes nearly five months after Reddit first introduced site-wide translation for French-speakers, though the company had previously enabled users to translate … Read more

Legal ping-pong in the WordPress world continues as Automattic sends WP Engine a cease-and-desist letter alleging trademark infringement

Legal ping-pong in the WordPress world continues as Automattic sends WP Engine a cease-and-desist letter alleging trademark infringement

The brouhaha in the WordPress community looks likely to escalate into a legal battle around trademarks. Just a day after WordPress hosting service WP Engine sent a cease-and-desist notice to Automattic asking its CEO to stop publicly trashing WP Engine, now Automattic has sent its own cease-and-desist letter to WP Engine, saying the latter has … Read more