Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple is making a 6″ wall-mounted display that can control appliances, do videoconferencing, and use AI to navigate apps, and may unveil it by March — – Product will spotlight the new Siri and Apple Intelligence — Device will tap into cameras, doorbells and run Apple’s apps
Source: Elon Musk’s America PAC spent ~$200M to help elect Trump; Musk says the PAC is gearing up for midterms as well as judicial and DA elections (Dan Merica/Associated Press)
Dan Merica / Associated Press:
Source: Elon Musk’s America PAC spent ~$200M to help elect Trump; Musk says the PAC is gearing up for midterms as well as judicial and DA elections — Elon Musk’s super PAC spent around $200 million to help elect Donald Trump, according to a person familiar with the group’s spending …
Sources: advisors to Donald Trump expect the president-elect to halt a potential US ban of TikTok, which faces a January 19 deadline to divest (Washington Post)
Washington Post:
Sources: advisors to Donald Trump expect the president-elect to halt a potential US ban of TikTok, which faces a January 19 deadline to divest — The president-elect promised to ‘save’ the social media app, which faces a deadline early next year to find a non-China-based owner.
A survey by Slack of 17K+ workers in August: 48% said they were uncomfortable telling managers they use AI, and AI adoption rates stalled in the US at ~33% (Ina Fried/Axios)
Ina Fried / Axios:
A survey by Slack of 17K+ workers in August: 48% said they were uncomfortable telling managers they use AI, and AI adoption rates stalled in the US at ~33% — The percentage of workers in the U.S. that say they are using AI at work has remained largely flat over the last three months, according to a new study commissioned by Slack.
Microsoft plans to end support for the Windows Mail, Calendar, and People apps on December 31, after moving users to the new Outlook app in recent months (Tom Warren/The Verge)
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft plans to end support for the Windows Mail, Calendar, and People apps on December 31, after moving users to the new Outlook app in recent months — Microsoft is planning to no longer support the Windows Mail, Calendar, and People apps later this year.
Waymo opens robotaxi rides to anyone in LA within an 80-square-mile area running from downtown LA to Santa Monica and says ~300K users had been on the waitlist (Alan Ohnsman/Forbes)
Alan Ohnsman / Forbes:
Waymo opens robotaxi rides to anyone in LA within an 80-square-mile area running from downtown LA to Santa Monica and says ~300K users had been on the waitlist — The Alphabet company said about 300,000 people in the second-largest U.S. city have been waiting to use its robotic ridehail service …
Zurich-based LocalStack, which helps developers emulate and test cloud apps locally, raised a $25M Series A led by Notable Capital (Paul Sawers/TechCrunch)
Paul Sawers / TechCrunch:
Zurich-based LocalStack, which helps developers emulate and test cloud apps locally, raised a $25M Series A led by Notable Capital — Knowing how your cloud application will behave in production usually requires significant development and testing in the environment in which it will be deployed …
New York-based ScaleOps, which offers cloud spend management tools, raised a $58M Series B led by Lightspeed, taking its total funding to $80M (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
New York-based ScaleOps, which offers cloud spend management tools, raised a $58M Series B led by Lightspeed, taking its total funding to $80M — Thanks to AI, the appetite for cloud services is growing. Cloud expenditures more than doubled between 2019 and 2023, and are expected …
Writer, which makes enterprise generative AI tools, raised a $200M Series C led by Premji, Radical Ventures, and Iconiq at a $1.9B valuation, for $326M raised (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Writer, which makes enterprise generative AI tools, raised a $200M Series C led by Premji, Radical Ventures, and Iconiq at a $1.9B valuation, for $326M raised — Writer has raised $200 million at a $1.9 billion valuation to expand its generative AI platform.
Netflix says its ad tier has 70M users globally, up from 40M in May 2024 and 22M in January 2024, and 50%+ of sign-ups are for ad plans in supported countries (Brian Steinberg/Variety)
Brian Steinberg / Variety:
Netflix says its ad tier has 70M users globally, up from 40M in May 2024 and 22M in January 2024, and 50%+ of sign-ups are for ad plans in supported countries — Netflix, a company that once dismissed the concept of allowing commercials around its popular streaming content, now can’t seem to get enough of them.
