United plans to have the retrofits done on each plane within two days after the talks are over and the hardware is secured. United Airlines said late last week that it had signed a deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to use SpaceX’s Starlink internet service on all of its planes and give all customers free Wi-Fi for the first time. Chief Customer Officer Linda Jojo of United told us more about why the company chose Starlink, how it will be put into use, and what it means for passengers and workers. Jojo told me that the company is switching providers…
Author: David
Google was given a $1.7 billion antitrust fine by the European Union in March 2019, but they were able to get it thrown out. The tech giant was fined €1.49 billion by the European Commission because its search ads brokering business broke competition rules from 2006 to 2016 to gain a strong position. Google then filed an appeal. The EU’s General Court upheld most of the EU’s findings on Wednesday, but threw out the earlier decision in its entirety because the Commission hadn’t taken into account all the relevant circumstances when judging the duration of the contract terms it found…
Amazon has named Samir Kumar, a long-time executive, as the new head of its India consumer business. This comes a month after the head of its India business quit because of tougher competition in the key market. Kumar will be Country Manager for India for the e-commerce giant. He has worked there for 25 years, the company said. This job would be in addition to Kumar’s current duties as head of Amazon’s customer business in the Middle East, South Africa, and Turkey, the company said. Amit Agarwal, Amazon’s senior vice president for developing markets, told staff about the change in…
Two people familiar with the matter told Parhlo World that Myntra, India’s biggest fashion e-commerce site, is testing a four-hour delivery service in four Indian cities. This is a big change from its normal two to three-day delivery period, which is being sped up because of the rise of fast commerce. One source told us that the fast-tracked delivery service is being tested by the Flipkart Group-owned company in places like Bengaluru and New Delhi. Our sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the information is not public, said that the company plans to offer four-hour delivery in…
A group calling itself The Flappy Bird Foundation said they were going to “re-hatch the official Flappy Bird® game” ten years after the hugely famous game Flappy Bird went away. Dong Nguyen, who made the game, left a short comment this morning saying that he has nothing to do with the revival and that he “did not sell anything.” He also said, “I’m against crypto.” To be clear, Nguyen’s comments don’t really go against what the foundation said in its announcement. The foundation called the group a “new team of passionate fans committed to sharing the game with the world”…
AWS said today that it is moving OpenSearch, its open source version of the popular Elasticsearch search and analytics engine, to the Linux Foundation. The OpenSearch Foundation is the perfect name for this move. Elastic changed the license for its Elasticsearch and Kibana projects to its own license, called the Elastic License, in 2021. That’s when AWS started the OpenSearch project for the first time. A lot of open source vendors made similar changes at the time, mostly to stop the big cloud providers, especially AWS, from giving hosted services based on their software. It’s kind of funny that this…
The U.K.’s antitrust regulator has made a preliminary decision in the long-running case to merge two of the country’s biggest phone companies. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) says that the planned $19 billion merger between Three and Vodafone, which was revealed 15 months ago, could cause prices to go up for customers, service to get worse (like smaller data plans in contracts), and less investment in U.K. mobile networks. The CMA also went after the market for mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs). MVNOs were created to make the market more competitive by letting new carriers start up and offer…
Apple will finally let third-party app shops work on the iPad next week, on September 16. It was only a matter of time. With the next big release of iPadOS, the operating system made just for the iPad, this change will happen. The move has to do with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) of the European Union, which is a set of rules for fair markets and competition. The Commission released a list of six tech companies last fall. These companies are called “gatekeepers” because they run “core platform services” (CPS). Since then, a seventh has been added. At first,…
Late Thursday night, Oprah Winfrey showed a series about AI called “AI and the Future of Us.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, tech influencer Marques Brownlee, and current FBI head Christopher Wray were among the guests. There was a lot of doubt and caution in the air. In prepared comments, Oprah said that AI is now out in the open, and people will have to learn how to live with the results, good or bad. “AI is still out of our hands and mostly beyond our comprehension,” she said. “But it is here, and we will have to live with technology…
Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google and former president of Alphabet, said he works at Google “pretty much every day” because he doesn’t want to miss the current progress in AI. Brin told the story in an interview this week at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles. Several news outlets said last year that Brin was back at Google HQ working on different AI projects. However, Brin’s statement at the sit-down is the first time he has talked about his return in public. Brin said of AI, “It’s a big, fast-moving field.” He also said that it has…
Adtech startup InMobi has raised $100 million in debt financing. The Indian company, which is already making money, wants to “significantly deepen” its AI efforts and pay for possible AI acquisitions before its planned IPO next year. InMobi said Wednesday that the money came from Mars Growth Capital, a partnership between MUFG and Liquidity Group. Mars has recently invested in a number of companies in India. In the past few months, it has also backed the quick commerce startup Zepto and the website Infra.Market. InMobi, which has users like Mastercard, Samsung, Vodafone, and Coca-Cola and is backed by SoftBank, has…
Apple Intelligence is a new set of AI features that will be available in iOS 18. These features will allow users to use apps in a new way. Today, regulators are always going after the old App Store strategy. At the same time, people can get a lot done by asking an AI assistant like ChatGPT pretty easy questions. Some people think that AI could replace humans as the main way we find answers, get work done, and try out new ideas. What does that mean for apps and the services they provide, which brought in more than $6 billion…
Even though users have asked them to, the Threads team is not yet working on a separate inbox or direct messaging system for the social network. They will still use Instagram’s inbox. That being said, the business may make it easier to message Instagram from the Threads app. Adwaith Varma, an app researcher, wrote on Threads about a new messaging button on users’ profiles that was part of an unreleased Threads feature. When people tapped that button, they saw a text box and a button that said “Send.” This let them quickly send a message to someone’s Instagram account. Parhlo…
The biggest event of the year for Apple brings new iPhones, changes to AI, and other hardware. The iPhone 16 lineup and a bunch of AI-related iOS 18 changes came with Apple’s biggest event of the year. Like at WWDC in June, Apple Intelligence was the star of the show at this year’s event. Apple also announced a lot of gear that people were looking forward to, like the new iPhone 16, AirPods 4, the Apple Watch Series 10, and more. The “Glowtime” event from Apple began at 10 a.m. PT and was broadcast live from the company’s offices in…
Google has lost again in its attempt to overturn a European Commission antitrust decision from 2017. The bloc decided that Alphabet, Google’s parent company, had broken competition rules with its shopping comparison service. They fined Alphabet a record-breaking €2.42 billion, which is about $2.7 billion today, and told it to change how it runs the service. Google made an appeal, but in November 2021, the General Court of the European Union mostly threw out the case. It confirmed that putting its own shopping service at the top of general search results was unfair and hurt competitive shopping comparison services. It…
A report said that Elon Musk’s company Tesla had talked about splitting profits with another of his companies, xAI, so that xAI could use Tesla’s AI models. Musk denied the claim. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Tesla would use xAI models in its Full Self-Driving (FSD) software, as part of a deal that was being talked about with investors. The AI company would also help make features like a voice assistant for Tesla cars and software for Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot. Musk wrote on his social media site X (formerly Twitter) that he hadn’t read the WSJ story…
The big car rental company Avis is telling hundreds of thousands of people that their driver’s license numbers and personal information were stolen in a cyberattack in August. The company based in New Jersey said in a data breach notice sent to several U.S. attorneys general over the past week that it found hackers in one of its business applications on August 5 and worked to stop the two-day-old unauthorised access. Avis didn’t say what kind of cyberattack it was, and there are still not many information available about it. An email to Avis asking for a word on the…
Analysts thought that the AI feature Apple showed off at WWDC in June could help the iPhone 16 get ready for another “supercycle.” People who follow the industry thought that the addition of Apple Intelligence, like the addition of 5G before it, might finally get people to change their devices. When Apple shows off the iPhone 16 at tomorrow’s “It’s Glowtime” event in Cupertino, we’ll have a much better idea of what it looks like. In the meantime, though, the slow spread of Apple Intelligence is thought to could seriously hurt the supercycle potential. Apple showed the world in June…
This week, the EU’s top privacy regulator closed its court case about how X used user data to train its Grok AI chatbot. However, the problems for Elon Musk’s social media site that used to be called Twitter are still not over. Parhlo World stated that the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has received and will “examine” a number of complaints made under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the EU. The regulator told Parhlo World, “The DPC will now look into how well any processing that has taken place complies with the relevant provisions of the GDPR.” “If,…
Telegram stresses private chat reporting as the app’s founder defends it after being arrested The company said in its FAQ page that users can now report private chats to Telegram’s moderators. This comes after the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France last month for “crimes committed by third parties” on the platform. The messaging app has more than 10 million members and almost 1 billion monthly active users. It has a reputation for not keeping a close eye on what its users do. The FAQ page used to say that requests to moderate the secret chats would not…
Google is having more problems with antitrust. On Friday, the U.K.’s competition watchdog said it thinks the company broke trade rules in the adtech industry. Now, the tech giant has a chance to respond to the preliminary results before the regulator makes a final choice. If you are found to have broken U.K. competition law, you could be given corrective orders and fines of up to 10% of your annual global group sales. People are going to pay close attention to how this case turns out. Since May 2022, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in the U.K. has been…
If you hang out on X or Threads, where rude jokes come and go, you may have seen posts about “founder mode” like this one in the last few days: You may have even seen this joke about “goblin mode.” The commotion is related to a blog post that Paul Graham, head of Y Combinator and startup guru, wrote not long ago about how founders like Airbnb’s Brian Chesky often don’t follow the rules for running a large business. It’s common sense to hire good people and let them do their job, but Graham says that this often turns into…
Apple will also show off AI and possible AirPods and Apple Watches at its big iPhone 16 range reveal. At times, just a title is enough. We know for sure that Apple will show off the iPhone 16 at its “It’s Glowtime” event on September 9. But Apple doesn’t ask us to fly across the country for a single item, or even book a hotel room for the first game of the 49ers season. Putting football aside, the event’s time is important because it’s the last big chance to show off a lot of new hardware before the holidays. Monday…
Fb was cool when I was young. A lot of middle schoolers were having fun at the mall, and we would go into the Apple Store, find an early MacBook Pro, and use tacky Photo Booth effects to take dozens of pictures that we would then post on Facebook. Teenagers would sometimes forget to log off, so we would post something like “I just pooped” before logging back in. This isn’t true anymore. The Pew Research Centre said that 71% of U.S. teens used Facebook in 2014. By 2022, that number had dropped to 32%, but it slightly rose to…
Fabrizio Longo, a respected Audi executive and passionate mountain climber, sadly died when he fell while climbing a mountain by himself in Italy’s Cima Payer. Longo, 62, died on Saturday, August 31, while climbing up a mountain on a “via ferrata,” which is a protected path. The Italian Winter Sports Federation said this. In a statement, Flavio Roda, President of the Italian Winter Sports Federation, said he was very sorry about Longo’s death and that it was “a terrible loss for the federation, which has worked well with Longo for years.” Roda sent his sympathies to Longo’s family and the…
You can now edit your direct messages on X, the social network that Elon Musk owns. This is one of the most-requested tools for direct messages. The change message feature was added to X over the weekend for iOS users. An engineer at the business wrote about the rollout and said that soon the edit messages feature will be available on more devices. Here’s how to use the new feature now that it’s out there: A help page says that you can change the messages for as long as you want. During our tests, we found that you can also…
What are the odds that Elon will win his fight in the Amazonian jungle? Another judge had banned X the week before for failing to comply with take-down requests. Over the weekend, the Brazilian high court voted to keep that ban. If someone uses a VPN to get around the ban, they could be fined up to $9,000. But the argument and drama aren’t over yet. Mike Masnick at TechDirt talks about how the case shows how hard it is to support free speech while also following so-called “hostage laws.” He also talks about how Musk, as the owner of…
If creative AI gets really good, writer Ted Chiang says it will never make real art. The story “Story of Your Life,” which was made into the movie “Arrival,” made Chiang one of the most admired science fiction writers working today. In addition, he has written great pieces for The New Yorker about the risks and problems of AI. Reading his most recent piece in its completeness is highly recommended. While Chiang agrees that big language models have a lot of promise, he also says that generative AI has been most successful at “lowering our expectations, both of the things…
Mark Gurman of Bloomberg says that the Mac mini will be the next Apple gadget to no longer use USB-A. Customers of Apple products are probably used to seeing thinner USB-C ports instead of the usual, round USB-A ports. There are some good things about USB-C, but users are sometimes confused and have to scramble for ports. On the other hand, the Mac mini hasn’t had a major update since 2010, but Gurman says that will happen this fall. The new models will have five USB-C ports, an Ethernet port, an HDMI connection, and a headphone jack. They will also…
A company lawyer said on Monday that customers of WazirX, the Indian bitcoin exchange that was hacked in July and lost $234 million, probably won’t get all of their money back during the restructuring process. George Gwee, a director at the restructuring company Kroll that works with WazirX, said that customers are not likely to get back at least 43% of the money they put into WazirX. Last week, WazirX asked the Singapore High Court to protect it for six months while it restructures its debts. For Gwee, the best outcome would be a return of “anywhere between 55% and…
Dropbox has bought the AI-powered schedule app Reclaim.ai. Calendly and Index Ventures have backed the app. The news was posted on Reclaim.ai’s website in a blog post on Tuesday. The terms of the deal have not been made public by Dropbox. Henry Shapiro and Patrick Lightbody started Reclaim.ai in 2019. The company said it hopes to keep working on its product with the new owner. The company also said it would keep helping all of its users. The blog post says that the tool is used by over 43,000 businesses and over 320,000 people around the world. As of now,…
Early this year, voters in New Hampshire heard fake audio of Vice President Biden that was made by AI. Right away, the FCC fought back. They found the scammer to be the Texas-based Life Corporation, which has been behind similar schemes for years. They fined the company and a person connected to them $6 million. In addition, the con artists hired a game-changing company that has been linked to shady activities in the past. Now Lingo Telecom, which has also been called Ameritel, Excel, Impact, Startec, Trinsic, and other names, will pay a $1 million fine and promise to follow…
It’s been on Meta’s test for months now to let people post from Instagram and Facebook to Threads, its social networking site that competes with X (formerly known as Twitter). Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that the function is now available in all countries where Threads is available. Because Meta wants to get the most out of the information people share on its family of apps, it has added the ability to cross-post. Meta has been letting people who use both Instagram and Facebook share posts from Facebook to Instagram and Instagram posts to Facebook for years now. Also, in 2023,…
Waymo said on Tuesday that it now gives more than 100,000 paid robotaxi rides each week in its three main business markets: Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The co-CEO of Waymo, Tekedra Mawakana, shared those numbers in a post on X. The new number of 100,000 is twice what the company said before. Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said on the company’s earnings call this summer that Waymo was providing more than 50,000 paid rides per week. Waymo also wrote in a June blog post that the number was higher. Waymo has reached that goal with a fleet…
Tech giant Cisco said it would be laying off workers for the second time this year. Employees told Parhlo World that they won’t know if they are affected for about a month. Reuters said earlier this month that Cisco was going to fire another 4,000 workers this year. This comes after the company fired these workers in February. In a filing with the SEC last week, Cisco revealed that it is letting go of 7% of its staff. Even though employees have been told that more jobs will be cut, the company has refused to tell those affected until September…
There are cheaper thermostats that work just as well, but once you put the Nest, you won’t want to use anything else. One of the first things I bought when I moved into my first house last month was a used third-generation Nest Learning Thermostat. Since I’ve lived in an apartment in New York City for a long time, I mostly watched the device from a distance and wondered how a thermostat, of all things, became so important to Google’s hardware play. Of course, I could have picked a better time, since the fourth-generation device just came out. Another person…
The rise in AI is increasing the need for data centers, which in turn increases the amount of water used. (In data centers, water is used to cool down the computers.) FT says that between 2019 and 2023, water use will have increased by almost two-thirds in Virginia, which has the most data centers in the world, going from 1.13 billion gallons to 1.85 billion gallons. Many people say the trend, which is happening all over the world, can’t last. The big data center company Microsoft says that 42% of the water it used in 2023 came from “areas with…
PostEx is a Pakistani company that helps online stores with shipping and money matters. Parhlo World has learned that the company is about to expand into new markets, starting with Saudi Arabia this year. On the phone, Muhammad Omer Khan, founder and CEO of PostEx, said, “We want to go into other markets to really disrupt them because we see the gap.” There is about 1.5% of Pakistan’s total retail market that is made up of online shopping. This number has grown by 50% in the last year. Most likely, PostEx is a part of that growth. Since 95% of…
What’s the point of chatting with a human-like bot if it’s an unreliable narrator — and has a colorless personality? That’s the question I’ve been turning over in my head since I began testing Gemini Live, Google’s take on OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode, last week. Gemini Live is an attempt at a more engaging chatbot experience — one with realistic voices and the freedom to interrupt the bot at any point. Gemini Live is “custom-tuned to be intuitive and have a back-and-forth, actual conversation,” Sissie Hsiao, GM for Gemini experiences at Google, told TechCrunch in May. “[It] can provide information…
The man who got the most attention at the first White House Creator Economy Conference wasn’t a TikTok or YouTube star. President Joe Biden was the one who emphasised how social media users can change people’s minds. President Biden said of content makers, “Until about three or four months ago, I didn’t pay very much attention, following you guys.” He said that his niece told him to read more about how social media gives more people the chance to reach a huge audience. “She called me and said, ‘Pop, you need to start listening to these guys.'” That’s you guys.…