Enterprise AI agents today face a fundamental timing problem: They can't easily act on critical business events because they aren't always aware of them in real-time.

The challenge is infrastructure. Most enterprise data lives in databases fed by extract-transform-load (ETL) jobs that run hourly or daily — ultimately too slow for agents that must respond in real time.

One potential way to tackle that challenge is to have agents directly interface with streaming data systems. Among the primary approaches in use today are the open source Apache Kafka and Apache Flink technologies. There are multiple commercial implementations based on those technologies, too, Confluent, which is led by the original creators behind Kafka, being one of them.

Today, Confluent is introducing a real-time context engine designed to solve this latency problem. The technology builds on Apache Kafka, the distributed event streaming platform that captures data as events occur, and open-source Apache Flink, the stream processing engine that transforms those events in real time.

The company is also releasing an open-source framework, Flink Agents, developed in collaboration with Alibaba Cloud, LinkedIn and Ververica. The framework brings event-driven AI agent capabilities directly to Apache Flink, allowing organizations to build agents that monitor data streams and trigger automatically based on conditions without committing to Confluent's managed platform.

"Today, most enterprise AI systems can't respond automatically to important events in a business without someone prompting them first," Sean Falconer, Confluent's head of AI, told VentureBeat. "This leads to lost revenue, unhappy customers or added risk when a payment fails or a network malfunctions."

The significance extends beyond Confluent's specific products. The industry is recognizing that AI agents require different data infrastructure than traditional applications. Agents don't just retrieve information when asked. They need to observe continuous streams of business events and act automatically when conditions warrant. This requires streaming architecture, not batch pipelines.

Batch versus streaming: Why RAG alone isn't enough

To understand the problem, it's important to distinguish between the different approaches to moving data through enterprise systems and how they can connect to agentic AI.

In batch processing, data accumulates in source systems until a scheduled job runs. That job extracts the data, transforms it and loads it into a target database or data warehouse. This might occur hourly, daily or even weekly. The approach works well for analytical workloads, but it creates latency between when something happens in the business and when systems can act on it.

Data streaming inverts this model. Instead of waiting for scheduled jobs, streaming platforms like Apache Kafka capture events as they occur. Each database update, user action, transaction or sensor reading becomes an event published to a stream. Apache Flink then processes these streams to join, filter and aggregate data in real time. The result is processed data that reflects the current state of the business, updating continuously as new events arrive.

This distinction becomes critical when you consider what kinds of context AI agents actually need. Much of the current enterprise AI discussion focuses on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which handles semantic search over knowledge bases to find relevant documentation, policies or historical information. RAG works well for questions like "What's our refund policy?" where the answer exists in static documents.

But many enterprise use cases require what Falconer calls "structural context" — precise, up-to-date information from multiple operational systems stitched together in real time. Consider a job recommendation agent that requires user profile data from the HR database, browsing behavior from the last hour, search queries from minutes ago and current open positions across multiple systems.

"The part that we're unlocking for businesses is the ability to essentially serve that structural context needed to deliver the freshest version," Falconer said.

The MCP connection problem: Stale data and fragmented context

The challenge isn't simply connecting AI to enterprise data. Model Context Protocol (MCP), introduced by Anthropic earlier this year, already standardized how agents access data sources. The problem is what happens after the connection is made.

In most enterprise architectures today, AI agents connect via MCP to data lakes or warehouses fed by batch ETL pipelines. This creates two critical failures: The data is stale, reflecting yesterday's reality rather than current events, and it's fragmented across multiple systems, requiring significant preprocessing before an agent can reason about it effectively.

The alternative — putting MCP servers directly in front of operational databases and APIs — creates different problems. Those endpoints weren't designed for agent consumption, which can lead to high token costs as agents process excessive raw data and multiple inference loops as they try to make sense of unstructured responses.

"Enterprises have the data, but it's often stale, fragmented or locked in formats that AI can't use effectively," Falconer explained. "The real-time context engine solves this by unifying data processing, reprocessing and serving, turning continuous data streams into live context for smarter, faster and more reliable AI decisions."

The technical architecture: Three layers for real-time agent context

Confluent's platform encompasses three elements that work together or adopted separately.

The real-time context engine is the managed data infrastructure layer on Confluent Cloud. Connectors pull data into Kafka topics as events occur. Flink jobs process these streams into "derived datasets" — materialized views joining historical and real-time signals. For customer support, this might combine account history, current session behavior and inventory status into one unified context object. The Engine exposes this through a managed MCP server.

Streaming agents is Confluent's proprietary framework for building AI agents that run natively on Flink. These agents monitor data streams and trigger automatically based on conditions — they don't wait for prompts. The framework includes simplified agent definitions, built-in observability and native Claude integration from Anthropic. It's available in open preview on Confluent's platform.

Flink Agents is the open-source framework developed with Alibaba Cloud, LinkedIn and Ververica. It brings event-driven agent capabilities directly to Apache Flink, allowing organizations to build streaming agents without committing to Confluent's managed platform. They handle operational complexity themselves but avoid vendor lock-in.

Competition heats up for agent-ready data infrastructure

Confluent isn't alone in recognizing that AI agents need different data infrastructure. 

The day before Confluent's announcement, rival Redpanda introduced its own Agentic Data Plane — combining streaming, SQL and governance specifically for AI agents. Redpanda acquired Oxla's distributed SQL engine to give agents standard SQL endpoints for querying data in motion or at rest. The platform emphasizes MCP-aware connectivity, full observability of agent interactions and what it calls "agentic access control" with fine-grained, short-lived tokens.

The architectural approaches differ. Confluent emphasizes stream processing with Flink to create derived datasets optimized for agents. Redpanda emphasizes federated SQL querying across disparate sources. Both recognize agents need real-time context with governance and observability.

Beyond direct streaming competitors, Databricks and Snowflake are fundamentally analytical platforms adding streaming capabilities. Their strength is complex queries over large datasets, with streaming as an enhancement. Confluent and Redpanda invert this: Streaming is the foundation, with analytical and AI workloads built on top of data in motion.

How streaming context works in practice

Among the users of Confluent's system is transportation vendor Busie. The company is building a modern operating system for charter bus companies that helps them manage quotes, trips, payments and drivers in real time. 

"Data streaming is what makes that possible," Louis Bookoff, Busie co-founder and CEO told VentureBeat. "Using Confluent, we move data instantly between different parts of our system instead of waiting for overnight updates or batch reports. That keeps everything in sync and helps us ship new features faster.

Bookoff noted that the same foundation is what will make gen AI valuable for his customers.

"In our case, every action like a quote sent or a driver assigned becomes an event that streams through the system immediately," Bookoff said. "That live feed of information is what will let our AI tools respond in real time with low latency rather than just summarize what already happened."

The challenge, however, is how to understand context. When thousands of live events flow through the system every minute, AI models need relevant, accurate data without getting overwhelmed.

 "If the data isn't grounded in what is happening in the real world, AI can easily make wrong assumptions and in turn take wrong actions," Bookoff said. "Stream processing solves that by continuously validating and reconciling live data against activity in Busie."

What this means for enterprise AI strategy

Streaming context architecture signals a fundamental shift in how AI agents consume enterprise data. 

AI agents require continuous context that blends historical understanding with real-time awareness — they need to know what happened, what's happening and what might happen next, all at once.

For enterprises evaluating this approach, start by identifying use cases where data staleness breaks the agent. Fraud detection, anomaly investigation and real-time customer intervention fail with batch pipelines that refresh hourly or daily. If your agents need to act on events within seconds or minutes of them occurring, streaming context becomes necessary rather than optional.

"When you're building applications on top of foundation models, because they're inherently probabilistic, you use data and context to steer the model in a direction where you want to get some kind of outcome," Falconer said. "The better you can do that, the more reliable and better the outcome."

Presented by Splunk, a Cisco Company

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As AI rapidly evolves from a theoretical promise to an operational reality, CISOs and CIOs face a fundamental challenge: how to harness AI's transformative potential while maintaining the human oversight and strategic thinking that security demands. The rise of agentic AI is reshaping security operations, but success requires balancing automation with accountability.

The efficiency paradox: Automation without abdication

The pressure to adopt AI is intense. Organizations are being pushed to reduce headcount or redirect resources toward AI-driven initiatives, often without fully understanding what that transformation entails. The promise is compelling: AI can reduce investigation times from 60 minutes to just 5 minutes, potentially delivering 10x productivity improvements for security analysts.

However, the critical question isn't whether AI can automate tasks — it's which tasks should be automated and where human judgment remains irreplaceable. The answer lies in understanding that AI excels at accelerating investigative workflows, but remediation and response actions still require human validation. Taking a system offline or quarantining an endpoint can have massive business impact. An AI making that call autonomously could inadvertently cause the very disruption it's meant to prevent.

The goal isn't to replace security analysts but to free them for higher-value work. With routine alert triage automated, analysts can focus on red team/blue team exercises, collaborate with engineering teams on remediation, and engage in proactive threat hunting. There's no shortage of security problems to solve — there's a shortage of security experts to address them strategically.

The trust deficit: Showing your work

While confidence in AI's ability to improve efficiency is high, skepticism about the quality of AI-driven decisions remains significant. Security teams need more than just AI-generated conclusions — they need transparency into how those conclusions were reached.

When AI determines an alert is benign and closes it, SOC analysts need to understand the investigative steps that led to that determination. What data was examined? What patterns were identified? What alternative explanations were considered and ruled out?

This transparency builds trust in AI recommendations, enables validation of AI logic, and creates opportunities for continuous improvement. Most importantly, it maintains the critical human-in-the-loop for complex judgment calls that require nuanced understanding of business context, compliance requirements, and potential cascading impacts.

The future likely involves a hybrid model where autonomous capabilities are integrated into guided workflows and playbooks, with analysts remaining involved in complex decisions.

The adversarial advantage: Fighting AI with AI — carefully

AI presents a dual-edged sword in security. While we're carefully implementing AI with appropriate guardrails, adversaries face no such constraints. AI lowers the barrier to entry for attackers, enabling rapid exploit development and vulnerability discovery at scale. What was once the domain of sophisticated threat actors could soon be accessible to script kiddies armed with AI tools.

The asymmetry is striking: defenders must be thoughtful and risk-averse, while attackers can experiment freely. If we make a mistake implementing autonomous security responses, we risk taking down production systems. If an attacker's AI-driven exploit fails, they simply try again with no consequences.

This creates an imperative to use AI defensively, but with appropriate caution. We must learn from attackers' techniques while maintaining the guardrails that prevent our AI from becoming the vulnerability. The recent emergence of malicious MCP (Model Context Protocol) supply chain attacks demonstrates how quickly adversaries exploit new AI infrastructure.

The skills dilemma: Building capabilities while maintaining core competencies

As AI handles more routine investigative work, a concerning question emerges: will security professionals' fundamental skills atrophy over time? This isn't an argument against AI adoption — it's a call for intentional skill development strategies. Organizations must balance AI-enabled efficiency with programs that maintain core competencies. This includes regular exercises that require manual investigation, cross-training that deepens understanding of underlying systems, and career paths that evolve roles rather than eliminate them.

The responsibility is shared. Employers must provide tools, training, and culture that enable AI to augment rather than replace human expertise. Employees must actively engage in continuous learning, treating AI as a collaborative partner rather than a replacement for critical thinking.

The identity crisis: Governing the agent explosion

Perhaps the most underestimated challenge ahead is identity and access management in an agentic AI world. IDC estimates 1.3 billion agents by 2028 — each requiring identity, permissions, and governance. The complexity compounds exponentially.

Overly permissive agents represent significant risk. An agent with broad administrative access could be socially engineered into taking destructive actions, approving fraudulent transactions, or exfiltrating sensitive data. The technical shortcuts engineers take to "just make it work" — granting excessive permissions to expedite deployment — create vulnerabilities that adversaries will exploit.

Tool-based access control offers one path forward, granting agents only the specific capabilities they need. But governance frameworks must also address how LLMs themselves might learn and retain authentication information, potentially enabling impersonation attacks that bypass traditional access controls.

The path forward: Start with compliance and reporting

Amid these challenges, one area offers immediate, high-impact opportunity: continuous compliance and risk reporting. AI's ability to consume vast amounts of documentation, interpret complex requirements, and generate concise summaries makes it ideal for compliance and reporting work that has traditionally consumed enormous analysts’ time. This represents a low-risk, high-value entry point for AI in security operations.

The data foundation: Enabling the AI-powered SOC

None of these AI capabilities can succeed without addressing the fundamental data challenges facing security operations. SOC teams struggle with siloed data and disparate tools. Success requires a deliberate data strategy that prioritizes accessibility, quality, and unified data contexts. Security-relevant data must be immediately available to AI agents without friction, properly governed to ensure reliability, and enriched with metadata that provides the business context AI cannot understand.

Closing thought: Innovation with intentionality

The autonomous SOC is emerging — not as a light switch to flip, but as an evolutionary journey requiring continuous adaptation. Success demands that we embrace AI's efficiency gains while maintaining the human judgment, strategic thinking, and ethical oversight that security requires.

We're not replacing security teams with AI. We're building collaborative, multi-agent systems where human expertise guides AI capabilities toward outcomes that neither could achieve alone. That's the promise of the agentic AI era — if we're intentional about how we get there.

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Tanya Faddoul, VP Product, Customer Strategy and Chief of Staff for Splunk, a Cisco Company. Michael Fanning is Chief Information Security Officer for Splunk, a Cisco Company.

Cisco Data Fabric provides the needed data architecture powered by Splunk Platform — unified data fabric, federated search capabilities, comprehensive metadata management — to unlock AI and SOC’s full potential. Learn more about Cisco Data Fabric.

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Sponsored articles are content produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.

Presented by Elastic

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As organizations scramble to enact agentic AI solutions, accessing proprietary data from all the nooks and crannies will be key

By now, most organizations have heard of agentic AI, which are systems that “think” by autonomously gathering tools, data and other sources of information to return an answer. But here’s the rub: reliability and relevance depend on delivering accurate context. In most enterprises, this context is scattered across various unstructured data sources, including documents, emails, business apps, and customer feedback.

As organizations look ahead to 2026, solving this problem will be key to accelerating agentic AI rollouts around the world, says Ken Exner, chief product officer at Elastic.

"People are starting to realize that to do agentic AI correctly, you have to have relevant data," Exner says. "Relevance is critical in the context of agentic AI, because that AI is taking action on your behalf. When people struggle to build AI applications, I can almost guarantee you the problem is relevance.”

Agents everywhere

The struggle could be entering a make-or-break period as organizations scramble for competitive edge or to create new efficiencies. A Deloitte study predicts that by 2026, more than 60% of large enterprises will have deployed agentic AI at scale, marking a major increase from experimental phases to mainstream implementation. And researcher Gartner forecasts that by the end of 2026, 40% of all enterprise applications will incorporate task-specific agents, up from less than 5% in 2025. Adding task specialization capabilities evolves AI assistants into context-aware AI agents.

Enter context engineering

The process for getting the relevant context into agents at the right time is known as context engineering. It not only ensures that an agentic application has the data it needs to provide accurate, in-depth responses, it helps the large language model (LLM) understand what tools it needs to find and use that data, and how to call those APIs.

While there are now open-source standards such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that allow LLMs to connect to and communicate with external data, there are few platforms that let organizations build precise AI agents that use your data and combine retrieval, governance, and orchestration in one place, natively.

Elasticsearch has always been a leading platform for the core of context engineering. It recently released a new feature within Elasticsearch called Agent Builder, which simplifies the entire operational lifecycle of agents: development, configuration, execution, customization, and observability.

Agent Builder helps build MCP tools on private data using various techniques, including Elasticsearch Query Language, a piped query language for filtering, transforming, and analyzing data, or workflow modeling. Users can then take various tools and combine them with prompts and an LLM to build an agent.

Agent Builder offers a configurable, out-of-the-box conversational agent that allows you to chat with the data in the index, and it also gives users the ability to build one from scratch using various tools and prompts on top of private data.

"Data is the center of our world at Elastic. We’re trying to make sure that you have the tools you need to put that data to work," Exner explains. "The second you open up Agent Builder, you point it to an index in Elasticsearch, and you can begin chatting with any data you connect this to, any data that’s indexed in Elasticsearch — or from external sources through integrations.”

Context engineering as a discipline

Prompt and context engineering is becoming a discipli. It’s not something you need a computer science degree in, but more classes and best practices will emerge, because there’s an art to it.

"We want to make it very simple to do that," Exner says. "The thing that people will have to figure out is, how do you drive automation with AI? That’s what’s going to drive productivity. The people who are focused on that will see more success."

Beyond that, other context engineering patterns will emerge. The industry has gone from prompt engineering to retrieval-augmented generation, where information is passed to the LLM in a context window, to MCP solutions that help LLMs with tool selection. But it won't stop there.

"Given how fast things are moving, I will guarantee that new patterns will emerge quite quickly," Exner says. "There will still be context engineering, but they’ll be new patterns for how to share data with an LLM, how to get it to be grounded in the right information. And I predict more patterns that make it possible for the LLM to understand private data that it’s not been trained on."

Agent Builder is available now as a tech preview. Get started with an Elastic Cloud Trial, and check out the documentation for Agent Builder here.

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Sponsored articles are content produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.

It’s 3:37 am on a Sunday in Los Angeles, and one of the leading financial services firms on the West Coast is experiencing the second week of a living-off-the-land (LOTL) attack. A nation-state cyberattack squad has targeted the firm’s pricing, trading and valuation algorithms for cryptocurrency gain. Using common tools, the nation state has penetrated the firm’s infrastructure and is slowly weaponizing it for its own gain.

According to CrowdStrike’s 2025 Global Threat Report, nearly 80% of modern attacks, including those in finance, are now malware-free, relying on adversaries exploiting valid credentials, remote monitoring tools and administrative utilities with breakout times (sometimes less than a minute).

No one in the SOC or across the cybersecurity leadership team suspects anything is wrong. But there are unmistakable signals that an attack is underway.

The upsurge in credential theft, business email compromise and exploit of zero-day vulnerabilities is creating the ideal conditions for LOTL attacks to proliferate. Bitdefender’s recent research found that 84% of modern attacks use LOTL techniques, bypassing traditional detection systems. In nearly 1 in 5 cases, attackers increasingly aided by automation and streamlined toolkits exfiltrated sensitive data within the first hour of compromise.

LOTL-based tactics now account for the majority of modern cyber intrusions, with advanced persistent threats (APTs) often lingering undetected for weeks or months before hackers exfiltrate valuable data, according to IBM’s X-Force 2025 Threat Intelligence Index.

The financial repercussions are staggering. CrowdStrike’s 2025 threat research puts the average cost of ransomware-related downtime at $1.7 million per incident, which can balloon to $2.5 million in the public sector. For industry leaders, the stakes are so high that security budgets now rival those of core profit centers.

Your most trusted tools are an attacker’s arsenal

"These are the tools that you cannot disable because your administrators are using them, your applications are using them, your [employees] are using them, but attackers [are using them, too]," Martin Zugec, technical solutions director at Bitdefender, said at RSAC-2025 earlier this year. "You cannot disable them because you will impact the business."

CrowdStrike’s 2025 report confirms that adversaries routinely exploit utilities such as PowerShell, Windows management instrumentation (WMI), PsExec, remote desktop protocol (RDP), Microsoft Quick Assist, Certutil, Bitsadmin, MSBuild and more to persist inside enterprises and evade detection. LOTL tools of the trade leave no digital exhaust, making it extremely difficult to spot an attack in progress.

“Threat actors increasingly exploit techniques such as bring your own vulnerable driver (BYOVD) and LOTL to disable endpoint detection and response (EDR) agents and conceal malicious activity within legitimate system operations," Gartner notes in a recent report. "By leveraging common OS tools, such as PowerShell, MSHTA and Certutil, they complicate detection and hide in the noise of EDR alerts."

CrowdStrike’s ransomware survey reveals that 31% of ransomware incidents begin with the misuse of legitimate remote monitoring and management tools, proving that even enterprise IT utilities are rapidly weaponized by attackers.

The documented realities in CrowdStrike's reports corroborate the industry's deeper research: The IT stack itself is now the attack vector, and those relying on traditional controls and signature-based detection are dangerously behind the curve.

Behavioral clues hiding in plain sight

Adversaries who rely on LOTL techniques are notorious for their patience.

Attacks that once required malware and attention-grabbing exploits have given way to a new norm: Adversaries blending into the background, using the very administrative and remote management tools security teams depend on.

As Bitdefender's Zugec pointed out: “We are mostly seeing that the playbook attackers use works so well they just repeat it at scale. They don’t break in, they log in. They don’t use new malware. They just use the tools that already exist on the network.”

Zugec described a textbook LOTL breach: No malware, no new tools. BitLocker, PowerShell, common admin scripts; everything looked routine until the files were gone and no one could trace it back. That’s where threat actors are winning today.

Adversaries are using normality as their camouflage. Many of the admins’ most trusted and used tools are the very reason LOTL attacks have scaled so quickly and quietly. Zugec is brutally honest: “It has never been as easy to get inside the network as it is right now.” What was once a breach of perimeter is now a breach by familiarity, invisible to legacy tools and indistinguishable from routine administration.

CrowdStrike’s 2025 Global Threat Report captures the scale of this phenomenon in numbers that should command every board’s attention. The reports’ authors write: “In 2024, 79% of detections CrowdStrike observed were malware-free [a significant rise from 40% in 2019], indicating adversaries are instead using hands-on-keyboard techniques that blend in with legitimate user activity and impede detection. This shift toward malware-free attack techniques has been a defining trend over the past five years."

The report’s researchers also found that breakout times for successful attacks continue to shrink; the average is just 48 minutes, the fastest 51 seconds.

Zugec’s advice for defenders working in this new paradigm is blunt and pragmatic. “Instead of just chasing something else, figure out how we can take all these capabilities that we have, all these technologies, and make them work together and fuel each other.” The first step: “Understanding your attack surface. Just getting familiar with how the attackers operate, what they do, not five weeks ago, but right now, should be the first step.”

He urges teams to learn what normal looks like inside their own environment and use this baseline to spot what’s truly out of place, so defenders stop chasing endless alerts and start responding only when it matters.

Take complete ownership of your tech stack now

LOTL attacks don’t just exploit trusted tools and infrastructures, they take advantage of an organizations’ culture and daily ability to compete.

Staying secure means making constant vigilance a core value, backed by zero trust and microsegmentation as cultural anchors. These are just the first steps. Consider the NIST Zero Trust Architecture (SP 800-207) as an organizational backbone and playbook to tackle LOTL head-on:

• Limit privileges now on all accounts and delete long-standing accounts for contractors that haven’t been used in years: Apply least-privilege access across all admin and user accounts to stop attackers from escalating.

• Enforce microsegmentation: Divide your network into secure zones; this will help confine attackers, limit movement and shrink the blast radius if something goes wrong.

• Harden tool access and audit who is using them: Restrict, monitor and log PowerShell, WMI and other utilities. Use code signing, constrained language modes and limit access to trusted personnel.

• Adopt NIST zero trust principles: Continuously verify identity, device hygiene and access context as outlined in SP 800-207, making adaptive trust the default.

• Centralize behavioral analytics and logging: Use extended monitoring to flag unusual activities with system tools before an incident escalates.

• Deploy adaptive detection if you have an existing platform that can scale and provide this at a minimal charge: Employ EDR/XDR to hunt for suspicious patterns, especially when attackers use legitimate tools in ways that sidestep traditional alerting.

• Red team regularly: Actively test defenses with simulated attacks and know how adversaries misuse trusted tools to penetrate routine security.

• Elevate security awareness and make it muscle memory: Train users and admins on LOTL methods, social engineering and what subtle signals betray compromise.

• Update and inventory: Maintain application inventories, patch known vulnerabilities and conduct frequent security audits.

Bottom line: The financial services firm referenced at the beginning of this story eventually recovered from its LOTL attack. Today, their models, the CI/CD process for AI development and gen AI R&D are managed by a team of cybersecurity managers with decades of experience locking down U.S. Department of Defense sites and vaults.

LOTL attacks are real, growing, lethal and require a new mindset by everyone in cybersecurity.

Learn how to use Pixel Watch 4’s Raise to Talk feature so you can access Gemini hands-free.

Google Arts & Culture is partnering with the National Trust for Historic Preservation to celebrate Route 66’s legacy

The AI for Math Initiative brings together five of the world's most prestigious research institutions.

The gap between Today and GMA stretched to 76,000 demo viewers.

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign is worth studying, not for its policies, but for its marketing.

The CBS news comes as John Dickerson is set to depart the network.

The company is planning on cutting around 2,000 roles overall.

Gut's Anselmo Ramos reviews the latest chapter of Apple's long-running 'Underdogs' series.

Plus, what happened at Vogue Singapore's Next in Vogue and Singularity South Africa.

The combined company creates one of the largest MVPDs in the market.

SerpAPI said it will “vigorously defend” itself after being sued by Reddit for allegedly scraping and reselling data from the platform via Google Search results.

The response. SerpAPI called Reddit’s language “inflammatory” and said it was “extremely disappointed” to learn of the lawsuit without prior communication.

• “Our work is guided by a simple principle: public search data should be accessible,” the company said.
• SerpAPI argued its position is backed by the First Amendment and called Reddit’s actions a threat to “the free and open Web we all enjoy.”

What they’re saying. According to SerpApi:

• “For eight years, SerpApi has operated transparently and lawfully, helping countless developers, researchers, and businesses build on top of publicly available search data. Our technology is used across multiple industries, from SEO, marketing, and advertising to copyright verification, background checks, news monitoring, and now AI. Our work is guided by a simple principle: public search data should be accessible. And accessibility cannot exist without clean unified data structures, speed, and automation possibilities.”

Catch up quick. Reddit sued SerpAPI, Perplexity, Oxylabs, and AWMProxy last week, claiming they scraped Reddit content from Google results “at an industrial scale” and hid their identities to bypass restrictions. Reddit:

• Claimed it set a “trap” for Perplexity to prove scraping.
• Is seeking financial damages and a ban on further data use.

Zoom out. Reddit licenses its data to OpenAI and Google. Meanwhile, Google and Reddit are reportedly exploring a deeper AI partnership that could bring Reddit discussions directly into AI Overviews and other Google experiences.

Why we care. This fight isn’t just about data – it’s about control. The big tech platforms are battling over who owns the information that powers search results and AI-generated answers, while brands struggle to understand what’s driving rankings, visibility, and attribution.

SerpApi’s statement. Our Response to Reddit, Inc. v. SerpApi, LLC: Defending the First Amendment

With Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holiday season fast approaching, you’re probably knee-deep in holiday account planning.

Today, we’re zeroing in on a Google Ads feature that you can use all year ‘round, but may be particularly useful to you and your customers during the holidays: Promotion assets.

What are promotion assets in Google Ads?

Promotion assets (formerly known as promotion extensions) are an optional addition to your Search or Performance Max campaigns. They allow you to highlight special deals, sales, and discounts your business is currently running, alongside your standard ad headlines and descriptions.

Promotion assets can show on Google Search, and on Google Maps if you have a local promotion offer.

Why should you use promotion assets in Google Ads rather than editing your ad headlines?

While you absolutely can edit your search ad text to include promotional messaging, promotion assets offer a few unique benefits. Specifically, they:

• Stand out in search results: Promotion assets may be bold or have a box around them, so they can really capture a user’s attention and increase your click-through rate.
• Allow for flexibility: You can highlight deals and offers without constantly editing and re-submitting your core ad text. You can even schedule them to go live (and turn off) in advance, which saves you lots of time.

Why can’t you use promotion assets with Shopping campaigns in Google Ads?

To show special deals and sales with your Shopping ads, you need to set that up in Google Merchant Center rather than Google Ads. These are called Merchant Promotions, and they run through a separate system.

If you’re an ecommerce business, head over to Merchant Center to set up your deals and promotions.

How to create promotion assets in Google Ads

To create a new promotion asset, go to Assets > Assets on the left-side navigation in Google Ads, tap the + button, and choose Promotion.

You can add promotion assets at the account, campaign, or ad group level.

If you define multiple assets across the various levels, Google will use the most specific level available. For example, ad group-level promotion assets would be selected over campaign-level promotion assets.

Which holidays allow for promotion assets?

Part of creating a promotion asset is selecting an “occasion” for your promotion. While you must select from Google’s list of occasions, there is a wide variety of options.

Some are seasonal (like Halloween or Valentine’s Day), but many are generic and flexible, allowing you to run promotions year-round. For example:

• Fall Sale
• Winter Sale
• Spring Sale
• Summer Sale

This means that although you need an “occasion,” promotion assets are not just for big tentpole holidays. Any kind of business can have promotions, sales, and discounts throughout the year.

What additional details are required to use promotion assets?

To ensure your promotion assets get approved, and provide a good user experience, you need to pay close attention to several “fiddly” details. Inconsistency between your asset and your landing page is a common reason for disapproval.

Here’s a checklist of some of those details:

• Language and Currency
• Discount Type: For example
  • Monetary Discount: e.g., “$20 off”
  • Percent Discount: e.g., “20% off”
  • Up to Discount: e.g., “Up to $100 off”
• Item Text (20 Characters): This is where you specify the actual product or service on sale. Keep it brief and relevant, e.g., “shoes” or “house cleaning.”
• Final URL: This link must take the user directly to the specific promotion for that specific item. Do not link to a generic homepage.
• Promo code (optional)
• Minimum order value (e.g., “Valid on orders over $50”) (optional)
• Terms and Conditions (optional)

Three types of scheduling for promotion assets

Promotion assets give you three layers of scheduling control. While we appreciate Google’s thoroughness, the use cases can be a bit confusing! Here’s what you need to know:

1. Promotion Scheduling: the dates your promotion is active

Understandably, the promotion asset is only eligible to show when the promotion is actually running. This means you cannot advertise a promotion before it has started or after it has ended.

2. Asset Scheduling: the dates when your promotion asset can run

This controls when your promotion asset will be eligible to run, which may or may not be the same as the actual promotion dates.

• For example, if your business is running a sale for six weeks but only wants to advertise it via Google Ads during the last two weeks, you can set the promotion asset to be live only during those final 14 days.

3. Ad Scheduling: time of day and day of week

You can set additional scheduling rules to show your promotion asset only on specific days or times of the week (e.g., only during evenings or on weekends).

This article is part of our ongoing Search Engine Land series, Everything you need to know about Google Ads in less than 3 minutes. In each edition, Jyll highlights a different Google Ads feature, and what you need to know to get the best results from it – all in a quick 3-minute read.

💾

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a spike in automated attacks targeting PHP servers, IoT devices, and cloud gateways by various botnets such as Mirai, Gafgyt, and Mozi. "These automated campaigns exploit known CVE vulnerabilities and cloud misconfigurations to gain control over exposed systems and expand botnet networks," the Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU) said in a report

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new security issue in agentic web browsers like OpenAI ChatGPT Atlas that exposes underlying artificial intelligence (AI) models to context poisoning attacks. In the attack devised by AI security company SPLX, a bad actor can set up websites that serve different content to browsers and AI crawlers run by ChatGPT and Perplexity. The technique has been

These digital photo frames both blew me away when I tested them – but which should you buy come Black Friday?

A major Microsoft outage appears to be taking place - here's what we know.

Save on the world’s number-one mobile charging brand

At least 10 npm packages were uploaded in early July 2025 and were downloaded almost 10,000 times.

Creative Cloud gets full suite of Google AI models, while Premiere mobile app has a dedicated YouTube mode.

The Garmin Epix Pro is actually the best value Garmin Watch you can buy, thanks to some massive discounts.

OpenAI plans to introduce major improvements to the world of AI in 2026 and beyond, starting with AI research interns.

The Lenovo Idea Tab Pro is top of our 'best cheap tablets' guide, and it's on sale now ahead of Black Friday.

There's a The Simpsons Fortnite event coming this weekend. Here's the start time, and what's been revealed so far.

Save up to 63% across their hauntingly popular range

Sure, the iPhone 16e is cheap, but at AO’s early Black Friday price, I’d go for the iPhone 16 instead.

Taxfix recently conducted a survey of people who file Self Assessment tax returns in the UK and found that 59% plan to use AI tools to help them complete their returns ahead of HMRC’s 31 January deadline.

Grab one of the best password managers for significantly less, way before Black Friday.

AI ROI requires strategy, adaptation, skilled workforce, and industry focus.

EDR tools aren't scanning Linux sandbox environments on Windows, giving cybercriminals a unique opportunity to work undetected.

Looking for Quordle clues? We can help. Plus get the answers to Quordle today and past solutions.

Looking for NYT Connections answers and hints? Here's all you need to know to solve today's game, plus my commentary on the puzzles.

Looking for NYT Strands answers and hints? Here's all you need to know to solve today's game, including the spangram.

Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake takes two classic JRPGs and transports them into the modern era with finesse and grace.

Netflix has teased changes to profiles for kids, interactive voting, themed homepages, vertical video, and more.

This Call of Duty pop-up lets you play Black Ops 7 one last time ahead of launch.

I guess home theater and vacuum cleaners are all about making air move…

The 1X Neo Home robot is a cleaning, dancing, listening, talking, and potentially helpful home assistant that is now on preorder, ready to march into your home and even plug itself into a wall outlet when necessary.

Anti-DEI requirements pose ‘enormous, open-ended financial risks’, Python Software Foundation argues.

We're breaking down all the key differences when it comes to the SteelSeries Arctis Nova Elite vs SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless matchup.

The latest VanTrue Nexus 5S dash cam comes complete with four lenses, all of which deliver high-quality video.

PayPal and OpenAI sign an agreement to embed the payments wallet into ChatGPT.

Mercor CEO Brendan Foody has built a $10 billion empire freeing up valuable data from legacy industries, and making it available to AI labs.

With a market cap of $5 trillion, Nvidia is now worth more than the aggregated stock markets of all countries, apart from the United States, China and Japan.

Kruti Patel Goyal is replacing Etsy's long-time CEO, Josh Silverman, who is stepping down by the end of the year.

This is the third and final day of TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 at Moscone West in San Francisco. Register here to get a 50% discount and don't miss out on innovation and scaling.

The U.S. inked Technology Prosperity Deals (TPD) with Japan and South Korea with an eye toward spurring collaboration on AI, semiconductors, quantum computing, biotech, space, 6G, and other technologies.

Grammarly is renaming itself as Superhuman, after acquiring Superhuman email client in July

Key updates include the introduction of QR codes that let you identify and shop for items in tagged videos, AI-powered upscaling, and improved search.

After facing lawsuits and public outcry following the suicides of two teenagers, Character.AI says it's making changes to its platform to protect children, changes that could affect the startup’s bottom line.

It’s rare for a tech executive to cue up a video mocking themselves — but that’s just what Microsoft President Brad Smith did on Tuesday at the Cascadia Innovation Corridor conference in Seattle. Smith played a clip from The Daily Show in which comedian Jon Stewart lampooned his and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s interviews about AI’s impact on jobs.

The segment poked fun at the idea that displaced workers might become “prompt engineers” — a new job Stewart rebranded as “types questions guy.”

It was a self-aware feature of a talk that balanced enthusiasm for artificial intelligence’s potential with sober reflections on its hype and potential pitfalls.

The Microsoft leader called AI the “next great general purpose technology” on par with electricity. He said AI will transform sectors including health, education, biotech, aerospace, agriculture, climate and others.

That was a theme during Tuesday’s event. Former Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire, who leads the Cascadia Innovation Corridor group, kicked off the day by calling AI “a defining technology of our generation.”

Smith, who in his three decades at Microsoft has witnessed tech bubbles and bursts, also offered a “breadth of perspective” on AI that he hinted might be lacking in Silicon Valley.

“In so many ways, the sky is the limit,” Smith said. “That is exciting, but I don’t want to just be another tech bro who says, ‘Hey, great, here it comes. Get ready, get out your wallet.'”

AI-driven employment threats are becoming increasingly real in the tech sector and beyond. Amazon on Tuesday announced a huge round of layoffs, slashing 14,000 corporate and tech jobs. Earlier this year Microsoft laid off 15,000 employees worldwide. The cuts aren’t all tied to AI, but many executives are talking about worker efficiency gains thanks to the tech.

Despite the recent layoffs, many industry and elected leaders in the Cascadia region, which stretches from Vancouver, B.C., through Seattle and down to Portland, see AI as a promising economic engine that can build on the area’s strong tech foundation. That includes Microsoft and Amazon as well as a growing slate of AI startups, plus institutions such as the University of Washington, University of British Columbia, Allen Institute for AI and others.

But Smith — who manages to strike a persona blending tech evangelist, politician and favorite uncle — also acknowledged concerns about disparities in AI access, whether looking locally at rural versus urban divides, or the gap between AI use in affluent and low-income countries that lack widespread electricity and internet connections.

He also tackled the meta questions around the responsible use of AI and encouraged society to get out in front of the technology with appropriate guardrails.

“What are we trying to do as an industry, as a region, as a planet, as a species? Are we trying to build machines that are better than people? Are we trying to build machines that will help people become smarter and better?” he asked.

“If the experience that we’ve all had with social media over the last 15 years teaches us anything at all,” Smith continued, “it is that the best time to ask these questions and to debate them is before technology answers them for us.”

RELATED: Cascadia’s AI paradox: A world-leading opportunity threatened by rising costs and a talent crunch

A YouTuber's videos telling people how to use Windows 11 without a Microsoft account and how to install it on unsupported hardware were allegedly violating community guidelines on dangerous and illegal activities.

GTC announcements drive Nvidia's market capitalization by over $200 billion in one day, making the company the world's first firm to reach a market capitalization of over $5 trillion.

China has launched what it claims is the world’s first wind-powered undersea data center — a sealed, seawater-cooled cluster sitting 35 meters beneath the surface off the coast of Shanghai.

Someone has explained how they used AI to slash hospital bills from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars.

Save on some of the best 3D printers in Bambu Lab's Black Friday sale

NZXT and partner Flex are being brought to court following claims that Flex's rental program is a scam.

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The post El-Erian Warns of AI’s “Rational Bubble” and Unaddressed Risks appeared first on StartupHub.ai.

“Some AI names will end up in tears,” declared Mohamed El-Erian, Allianz’s chief economic advisor, during a recent segment on CNBC’s ‘Squawk on the Street.’ His candid assessment cut through the prevailing market euphoria, offering a nuanced perspective on the artificial intelligence revolution. El-Erian, a former PIMCO CEO, engaged with the program’s hosts, providing commentary […]

The post El-Erian Warns of AI’s “Rational Bubble” and Unaddressed Risks appeared first on StartupHub.ai.

The post AI’s Unprecedented Infrastructure Revolution: Scarcity, Specialization, and a Cultural Reset appeared first on StartupHub.ai.

“I’ve seen nothing like this. I’m fairly certain no one’s seen anything like this. The Internet in the late 90s, early 2000s was big… this makes it… 10x is an understatement. It’s 100x what the Internet was.” This stark assessment by Amin Vahdat, VP and GM of AI and Infrastructure at Google, encapsulates the central […]

The post AI’s Unprecedented Infrastructure Revolution: Scarcity, Specialization, and a Cultural Reset appeared first on StartupHub.ai.

The post AI for Math Initiative: DeepMind’s Bold Research Play appeared first on StartupHub.ai.

Google DeepMind's AI for Math Initiative unites top research institutions to pioneer AI in mathematical discovery, promising significant breakthroughs and accelerated scientific progress.

The post AI for Math Initiative: DeepMind’s Bold Research Play appeared first on StartupHub.ai.

The post Outlier Talent and the Unscripted Symphony of Innovation appeared first on StartupHub.ai.

“Outlier talent will always be outlier talent,” declared Alex Pall, half of the Grammy-winning duo The Chainsmokers and co-founder of Mantis VC, an observation that cuts directly to the heart of creativity in an age increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. This potent statement, emerging during a wide-ranging conversation with Jack Altman on the *Uncapped* podcast, […]

The post Outlier Talent and the Unscripted Symphony of Innovation appeared first on StartupHub.ai.

The post Mitrione: AI is alive and well and continues to power the market appeared first on StartupHub.ai.

AI’s Ascendancy and Market Concentration “AI is alive and well and continues to power the market,” stated RaeAnn Mitrione, Investment Management Partner at Callan Family Office, during her discussion with Frank Holland at the CNBC studio. The recent surge of NVIDIA past a $5 trillion market capitalization underscores the pervasive influence of artificial intelligence on […]

The post Mitrione: AI is alive and well and continues to power the market appeared first on StartupHub.ai.

The post AI layoffs hit Big Tech: Here’s what to know appeared first on StartupHub.ai.

Partsinevelos, speaking with Andrew Ross Sorkin, framed the discussion around a central query: are the reported AI layoffs in Big Tech genuine, or are they serving as a convenient “scapegoat” for other underlying issues in the employment landscape? She highlighted recent job cuts across major tech companies—Amazon, Applied Materials, Meta, and Google Cloud—some explicitly attributing […]

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The post Impala AI Targets LLM Inference Costs with $11M Seed appeared first on StartupHub.ai.

Impala AI has secured $11 million to launch an AI stack that promises to cut large language model inference costs by up to 13x for enterprises.

The post Impala AI Targets LLM Inference Costs with $11M Seed appeared first on StartupHub.ai.

The post Reflectiz raises $22M to advance web exposure management appeared first on StartupHub.ai.

Web exposure management platform Reflectiz raised $22 million to help enterprises secure their websites from risks posed by third-party scripts and open-source components.

The post Reflectiz raises $22M to advance web exposure management appeared first on StartupHub.ai.

The post The AI Infrastructure Gold Rush: Opportunities, Risks, and Strategic Moats appeared first on StartupHub.ai.

The burgeoning artificial intelligence landscape, characterized by unprecedented infrastructure buildout and escalating capital expenditure, is creating both immense opportunities and significant strategic challenges for the world’s leading tech companies. This dynamic was a central theme in a recent CNBC discussion where Alex Kantrowitz, Founder of Big Technology and CNBC contributor, provided incisive commentary on Nvidia’s […]

The post The AI Infrastructure Gold Rush: Opportunities, Risks, and Strategic Moats appeared first on StartupHub.ai.

More than 117 years after Seattle residents first saw a flying machine in the sky, a unique aircraft over Jet City can still turn heads.

That happened this week with the arrival of Beta Technologies‘ all-electric ALIA CX300 conventional takeoff and landing aircraft as it dropped into King County International Airport – Boeing Field.

Photographer Steve Rice captured the strange-looking airplane with a rear propellor and posted images on Reddit, where aviation geeks launched into a debate about e-planes, range, charging times, vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, and more.

Vermont-based Beta wasn’t just doing a fly-by. The company brought the plane to Seattle for an official demonstration of the ALIA in an event that drew state officials, aviation experts, and industry leaders from across Washington.

In a news release Tuesday, Beta said Washington has a “deep-rooted aviation heritage that has long positioned the state as a global leader in aerospace innovation and manufacturing.” And the company said the state is now “actively advancing the future of flight through strategic investments in sustainable aviation and the critical infrastructure needed to support next-generation technologies.”

Beta founder and CEO Kyle Clark called the event at Boeing Field “a step toward realizing a future where electric aviation is accessible, reliable, and benefits local communities.” 

Founded in 2017, Beta is building two electric aircraft — the fixed-wing ALIA CTOL, and the ALIA VTOL, a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft — at a production facility in Vermont.

The inaugural flight of Beta’s first production model airplane was last November. The ALIA CTOL has a range of 336 nautical miles, and Beta’s planes are designed to carry passengers or cargo.

The company has also developed and is rolling out a network of charging infrastructure for use across airports and the electric aviation ecosystem.

Beta filed for an initial public offering earlier this month with plans to sell 25 million shares at $27 to $33 each — a price range that could value the company at $7.2 billion.

Vancouver, B.C.-based Helijet International previously placed orders with Beta for a fleet of eVTOL aircraft.

Other electric and hybrid aircraft makers are getting their planes off the ground in Washington, including Seattle-based Aero-TEC and Everett, Wash.-based magniX. Arlington, Wash.-based Eviation Aircraft paused work on its Alice airplane earlier this year.

With a new OpenAI partnership in hand, Microsoft is going into its earnings report Wednesday afternoon with a resolution to one of the biggest questions about its business.

The company’s market value reached $4 trillion again as Wall Street reacted to the details of the new Microsoft-OpenAI agreement, which gives Microsoft a 27% equity stake in OpenAI’s new for-profit entity, and a commitment for $250 billion in cloud purchasing by the ChatGPT maker.

Analysts expect the tech giant to report another strong quarter, fueled primarily by continued momentum in its Azure cloud business and growing adoption of its Copilot AI tools.

Quarterly revenue is expected to be about $75.4 billion for the first quarter of Microsoft’s 2026 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, according to numbers tracked by Yahoo Finance. That would represent a 15% jump compared to the $65.6 billion reported in the same period last year. 

Analysts expect earnings per share of $3.66, up about 11% year-over-year from $3.30.

Investors will be paying close attention to the growth rate in Microsoft’s Azure cloud business, with some analysts expecting as much as 39% growth (in constant currency, excluding the impact of exchange rates). Hitting this mark would exceed the company’s prior guidance and maintain the 39% growth pace set in the previous quarter.

Yet the potential for an AI bubble will no doubt be the focus of questions on company’s earnings conference call. Amid surging investment and growing valuations in the AI sector, some analysts and tech leaders are warning that the enthusiasm could outpace the business realities

Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet will both report numbers on Wednesday afternoon, and Amazon the following day, making for quick comparisons across the major cloud platforms.

As of the most recent quarter, ended in June, Microsoft reported more than $75 billion in annual Azure revenue for its just-ended fiscal year, compared to an annual run rate that had surpassed $50 billion for Google Cloud and a run rate of nearly $124 billion for Amazon Web Services (based on its $30.9 billion revenue in the June quarter).

Check back with GeekWire on Wednesday afternoon for full coverage.

A trio of veteran entrepreneurs have joined forces to create a new Seattle startup — and any mentions of the company across the internet will likely be tracked by what they’re building.

Alertmouse generates email alerts for people and brands who want to know what’s being said about them — or anything else they’re interested in — online. The goal is to provide a better offering than other monitoring tools, most notably Google Alerts, which Alertmouse calls “so bad it might as well not exist.”

The startup was created by co-founders Rand Fishkin (SparkToro, Snackbar Studio), Adam Doppelt (Urbanspoon, Dwellable), and Nathan Kriege (Blueprint AI, Fresh Chalk).

Fishkin, the CEO, posted about Alertmouse on LinkedIn this week, saying that while the side project has turned into a full-fledged business, he’s not leaving his other two jobs.

“It doesn’t take a ton of my time but it has been really fun to build this thing that I desperately needed,” Fishkin said in a video on his post, before listing his grievances with Google Alerts, including how it “doesn’t pick up everything you want, it sends you useless alerts” and more.

Fishkin said tracking his mentions or those related to his companies, whether it’s in a news article or in a Reddit thread, allows him to monitor what’s being said and jump in if necessary to reply.

Alertmouse says it searches the index of websites and pages it can reach two or three times each day for the unique string of words/phrases/rules a user has entered. An email is sent with the pages that contained them.

“It’s not rocket science, but it takes a lot of clever programming, testing, and iteration to make a good alert service,” the company says in its FAQ.

In an interview with GeekWire this week, Fishkin said there are enterprise tracking tools that do what Alertmouse does, such as Mentioned, Hootsuite, and Brandwatch, but they can be cost-prohibitive.

“Google Alerts has been this free alternative for a long time, but sometime in the last decade, maybe even before that, it just stopped sending me anything decent,” he said. “I have no idea what they’re doing under the hood. I suspect it’s a defunct product that no one maintains anymore, but I couldn’t tell you what’s really going on.”

On a website loaded with cheesy puns, Alertmouse has four pricing tiers, including Nibble (free), Slice ($120/year), Wedge ($600/year), and Wheel ($1,200/year).

Alertmouse attracted 1,000 sign-ups in the first several hours it was live, and Fishkin credits the fun interface and language on the website, and the fact that it’s easy to use.

“We wanted to make a brand that no one could confuse for AI,” Fishkin laughed. “This is not an AI company. There’s going to be no venture capital, there’s no AI under the hood. It’s just really simple, straightforward, fun, delightful humans.”

Fishkin, an SEO expert who founded and led Moz, a Seattle-based maker of marketing software tools, co-founded SparkToro in 2018. The audience research tool helps marketers and others understand their target audiences. He raised $2.15 million last year for his new independent video game studio, Snackbar Studio.

Doppelt and Kriege previously worked on vacation rental startup Dwellable (sold to HomeAway in 2015), local professional recommendation site Fresh Chalk, and task management company Blueprint AI together. Last year they teamed up to create a resource website for everything you’d ever want to know about smoke detectors.

Fishkin and Doppelt are also part of dedicated group of “Dungeons & Dragons” players.

The Alertmouse website says the startup has no plans to hire. But that could change after a morning in which lots of people were emailing with questions.

“If it keeps going like this we might have to bring someone on,” Fishkin said.

Off the coast of Shanghai, a revolutionary structure is forming beneath the waves: the world’s first wind-powered, commercial-scale underwater data center (UDC). Basically, submerging servers in pressure-resistant pods (similar to Microsoft's non-commercial Project Natick in 2018) is a direct response to the escalating power and cooling demands

NVIDIA held its annual Graphics Technology Conference (GTC) in Washington D.C. yesterday, and as a surprise showing in the middle of his keynote, company CEO Jensen Huang pulled out a Vera Rubin Superchip, marking the first time that this product was shown to the public. The part looks quite different from even the GB300 Blackwell Ultra Superchip,

We're already big fans of Bose's audio products, so it doesn't take much arm twisting to convince us to consider the brand if we're in the market for a new set of headphones or earbuds. We won't turn down a good deal, either. It just so happens that you can have both right now, with Woot serving up some massive discounts on Bose's QuietComfort

13-hour flights between Tokyo and New York may soon be relegated to history books, as a major Japanese travel agency announced plans to launch a point-to-point transport service that could connect the two cities in just 60 minutes via outer space. The audacious plan (set to launch in the 2030s) comes from a partnership between the Nippon Travel

For Google loyalists, the first purported look at the Pixel 10a could ring a familiar tune rather than drastically advance the bar. Not expected to debut until early 2026, the well-regarded mid-budget handset has been revealed in CAD renders and the consensus is clear: Google is playing it safe, delivering a device that is essentially a Pixel

A new wave of flagship solid state drives (SSDs) that nearly saturate the available PCI Express 5.0 bandwidth available to x4 NVMe storage drives is starting to be appear. In back-to-back announcements, both PNY and Corsair unveiled new lightning-fast Gen 5 models—CS3250 and MP700 Pro XT, respectively—that are rated to deliver sequential read

Uber has already changed the taxi game with its, ahem, uber-popular ride sharing service, and now NVIDIA is hopping into the driver's seat on what figures to be the next evolution—a fleet of autonomous robotaxis built on NVIDIA's new DRIVE AGX Hyperion 10 platform. To make this happen, NVIDIA and Uber are teaming up to scale what's being pitched

Believe it or not, this could actually be a very big breakthrough.

The company also said its next-gen console would be backward compatible.

Prominent AMD Radeon Gallium3D driver developer Marek Olšák just changed the RadeonSI driver's default from the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end over to the ACO back-end initially developed by Valve. This should lead to better performance and quicker shader compilation and in turn faster game loads...

On Monday the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 officially arrived at Internet retailers and is successfully selling at the $1299 price point. Some models have sine sold out but as of writing two days later some Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics cards remain available at that competitive price point. On Monday I provided some initial benchmarks of the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 for vLLM AI inferencing with more AI benchmarks on the way... While the craze is all about AI in 2025, the Radeon AI PRO R9700 does work for other non-AI workloads too and in this article is a look at its competitive OpenCL performance with great value compared to the NVIDIA RTX competition.

In addition to talking up the openSFI firmware collaboration between AMD and Intel at the OCP Global Summit 2025, AMD engineer Raj Kapoor provided a status update on the company's much anticipated openSIL effort for working to ultimately replace AGESA with a new open-source CPU silicon initialization codebase...

Intel Compute Runtime 25.40.35563.4 is out today as the newest update to their open-source GPU compute stack for Level Zero and OpenCL on Intel integrated/discrete graphics hardware...

Inseego Corp., a global leader in 5G mobile broadband and 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) solutions, today introduced a new approach to enterprise FWA with a completely new 5G hardware platform, the Inseego Wavemaker FX4200, and updated software suite, Inseego Connect. Designed to bridge the gap between performance and ease-of-use for enterprise wireless networks, this innovative approach to FWA pairs the power and functionality of enterprise network solutions with the simplicity and ease-of-management of small- and medium-sized (SMB)-oriented solutions.

"In order to take advantage of the power of 5G for business, organizations have been forced to choose between feature-heavy solutions that can be complicated and expensive to deploy, and simplistic products that can't scale or meet business needs," said Juho Sarvikas, CEO of Inseego. "With the FX4200, X700 mesh Wi-Fi, and the innovative Inseego Connect software, we're eliminating that tradeoff. We've built the solution that the market has been asking for, and it will propel growth in FWA and 5G use in business."

Inno3D today rolled out the GeForce RTX 5060 LP, a low-profile graphics card capable of maxed out gaming at 1080p, including with ray tracing. The card is strictly half-height (low-profile), and is 2 slots thick. It uses an aluminium fin-stack heatsink with a tightly packed fin-stack sitting on top of a copper baseplate, with copper heat pipes spreading heat across. This heatsink is ventilated by three 50 mm fans.

The card draws power from a single 8-pin power connector, and display outputs include two standard DisplayPort 2.1b and one full-size HDMI 2.1b. The power connector points toward the tail end, to ensure clearance along the top edge. In all, the Inno3D RTX 5060 LP measures 17.8 cm x 6.9 cm x 4.1 cm (WxHxD). It sticks to NVIDIA-reference clock speeds, boosting up to 2497 MHz. Based on the 5 nm GB206 silicon and the Blackwell graphics architecture, the RTX 5060 offers 3,840 CUDA cores, 30 RT cores, 120 Tensor cores, 120 TMUs, and 48 ROPs. It comes with 8 GB of 28 Gbps GDDR7 memory across a 128-bit wide memory bus. Inno3D did not announce pricing, and availability for now is limited to the Chinese market.

GlobalFoundries (GF) today announced plans to invest €1.1 billion to expand its manufacturing capabilities at its Dresden, Germany site. The investment will enable a production capacity increase to more than one million wafers per year by the end of 2028, making it the largest site of its kind in Europe.

The expansion, known as project SPRINT, is expected to be supported by the German federal government and the State of Saxony under the framework of the European Chips Act, with EU approval for the full program expected later this year. This investment underscores Saxony's role as a critical hub for semiconductor manufacturing and innovation and reinforces Europe's strategic goal of supply chain resilience.

NVIDIA's stock jumped 5% on Tuesday, closing at a record high and pushing the company's valuation to $4.89 trillion, just shy of the $5 trillion milestone. The surge followed a wave of new announcements at its GTC event in Washington, D.C., covering AI, supercomputing, and major industry partnerships. NVIDIA's shares have risen more than 50% year-to-date, more than doubling since April, fueled by demand for GPUs powering cloud data centers from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. The company has also invested up to $100 billion in OpenAI one of its largest customers. In his keynote, CEO Jensen Huang said that it is expecting $500 billion in GPU sales by the end of 2026, a realistic target if we consider that NVIDIA generated over $100 billion in revenue in just the first two quarters of this year.

During the GTC event NVIDIA revealed plans with the U.S. Department of Energy to build seven new supercomputers including one powered by 10,000 Blackwell GPUs. NVIDIA also introduced NVQLink, a new open systems architecture designed to accelerate the development of quantum supercomputers. Moreover, NVIDIA yesterday showcased its highly anticipated "Vera Rubin" Superchip, a single package combining two Rubin GPUs with a Vera CPU featuring 88 cores and 176 threads. While competition from AMD, Qualcomm, and in-house chips developed by hyperscalers continues to grow, NVIDIA remains positioned at the center of the AI infrastructure boom edging closer to the $5 trillion milestone valuation that seems set to become reality in a matter of days.

HighPoint Technologies, Inc., a leading manufacturer of high-performance PCIe storage and connectivity solutions, has unveiled the newest member of its industry leading PCIe Switch Solutions - the Rocket 1624A, a compact, high-efficiency variant of the acclaimed PCIe Gen 5 x16 Rocket 1628A Switch Adapter. The Rocket 1624A redefines PCIe scalability by combining dedicated NVMe storage connectivity with full-bandwidth PCIe expansion capability for GPUs, specialized accelerators, and other high-performance peripherals - all through a cost-effective Gen 5 switching platform.

Priced competitively at USD $899, the Rocket 1624A is designed for system integrators, datacenter administrators, and solution providers seeking to unlock the full potential of PCIe Gen 5 connectivity by enhancing the versatility and value of the target computing platform.

Acer America today debuted the premium Acer Chromebook Plus Enterprise 714 laptop line designed for businesses and organizations that need the latest technology to work in the cloud more efficiently and securely. In addition, the new Acer Chromebook Plus Enterprise 514 is now shipping in North America.

The new Chromebook Plus Enterprise models come with the business capabilities of ChromeOS unlocked, ensuring best-in-class security, simple management, flexible access, and enhanced administrative support. ChromeOS has built-in Google AI features that help employees do their best work, whether it's creating compelling content, leading meetings, and more. In addition, the new Chromebooks feature a Quick Insert key that encourages creativity and efficiency by providing one-touch access to tools, menus, and other applications.

NVIDIA yesterday had a GTC conference in Washington D.C., showing its latest "Vera Rubin" Superchip symbiote. Pictured for the first time is the combination of two "Rubin" GPU paired with a single "Vera" CPU carrying 88 custom NVIDIA cores and 176 threads in a single package. NVIDIA quoted performance targets of roughly 50 PetaFLOPS of FP4 compute per Rubin GPU, which yields about 100 PetaFLOPS FP4 for the two-GPU Superchip. The company said engineering samples are already moving through labs and set mass production goals for 2026 with broader shipments and deployments into 2027.

Each Rubin GPU appears to integrate two reticle-sized compute chiplets (2x830mm²?) paired with eight HBM4 stacks, delivering about 288 GB of HBM4 per GPU and roughly 576 GB of HBM4 on the full Superchip. NVIDIA also populated the board with SOCAMM2 LPDDR5X modules to provide large, low-latency system memory, with some older briefings indicating around 1.5 TB of LPDDR5X per Vera CPU on typical trays. The Vera CPU itself uses an 88-core, 176-thread Arm-based custom design and shows signs of a multi-chiplet layout with a distinct I/O chiplet nearby. With "Grace," NVIDIA relied on Arm's Neoverse design, but with Vera, the design team brought this CPU core in the house to extract maximum performance. Additionally, NVLink bandwidth climbs to approximately 1.8 TB/s to sustain heavy CPU-to-GPU traffic in system-demanding workloads such as AI inference and training.

ViewSonic Corp., a leading global provider of visual and edtech solutions, is celebrating the 2025 holiday season with a dynamic showcase of displays at the Pepcom Holiday Spectacular!, October 29th in New York City. The latest offerings from ViewSonic deliver powerful performance, sleek portability, and simplified connectivity, ideal for content creators, gamers, and remote working professionals.

This year's collection of displays features high-resolution desktop monitors, ultra-portable OLED displays, and projectors for work and entertainment needs. ViewSonic is debuting the VP3276T-4K, a 32-inch ColorPro monitor that is Pantone Validated and features a Thunderbolt 4 docking station. Also being demonstrated is the lightweight M1X projector that is part of the AtmosKIT Autoplay GO Bundle and festive decoration kit to create a showstopping holiday experience.

GMKtec has introduced the NucBox M7 Ultra compact Mini PC, the system is powered by AMD's Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U, an 8-core, 16-thread Zen 3+ processor built on TSMC's 6 nm process, paired with Radeon 680M graphics featuring 12 CUs running at 2200 MHz. The NucBox M7 Ultra supports up to 64 GB of DDR5-4800 memory and includes PCIe 4.0 M.2 storage with up to 16 TB of total expansion (2× M.2 2280). Display output options include HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 2.0 and dual USB4 supporting up to 8K resolution across four screens. Connectivity is handled by Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, and dual 2.5 GbE LAN ports.

Front I/O includes two USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, a 3.5 mm combo jack, USB4, and an OCulink connector. The rear panel adds two USB 2.0 ports, HDMI, DP, USB4, dual LAN, and a security lock slot. The system ships with Windows 11 Pro pre-installed and also supports Linux distributions such as Ubuntu. The GMKtec NucBox M7 Ultra is available globally starting at $309.99 for the base model (no DDR, SSD or OS), with configurations up to 32 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD priced at $429.99. Early buyers before November 9 will receive a free USB Hub expansion dock.

TrendForce's latest investigations show that server DRAM contract prices are strengthening in 4Q25, driven by ongoing data center expansion among global CSPs. This momentum is lifting overall DRAM pricing. Although final contract pricing for the quarter is still being negotiated, suppliers are showing a greater willingness to raise quotes as CSPs increase order volumes.

TrendForce has accordingly revised its 4Q25 outlook for conventional DRAM pricing upward, from an earlier forecast of 8-13% growth to 18-23%, with a strong likelihood of further upward revision.

Thermaltake accidentally confirms Intel LGA 1954 support for its newest CPU cooler On the web page for its new MINECUBE 360 Ultra CPU cooler, which we saw at Computex 2025, Thermaltake accidentally unveiled that its new cooler supports Intel’s upcoming Nova Lake CPUs. Specifically, their cooler was listed as supporting Intel’s next-generation LGA-1954 socket, which […]

The post Thermaltake confirms Intel Nova Lake/LGA 1954 support with new MINECUBE CPU cooler appeared first on OC3D.

Celebrate the reveal of Halo: Campaign Evolved with our ultimate quiz covering Halo 1, 2, and 3. From iconic missions to obscure lore, see if you’ve got what it takes to finish the fight.

The critically acclaimed, multi-million copy-selling remake of Silent Hill 2 by Bloober Team is off by 55% over at Loaded for its limited-time Halloween sale.

Apparently, only one leader is fully committed to giving power to the players.

We have found a special 79% Halloween discount for Carrion, a classic indie horror game that flips the script by having you play as the monster instead of being hunted by one.

In the last two weeks of October 2025, Microsoft released several Insider builds for Windows 11 versions 25H2 and 24H2 with various visual changes and improvements, including a redesigned About page, the Copy & Search feature, proactive memory diagnostics, and more dark mode improvements for File Explorer.

The Dell portfolio of laptops and other devices can be overwhelming, even after a simplifying rebrand. Here's what you need to know to pick the best Dell for you.

Battlefield 6 and its new battle royale mode, RedSec, both support cross-play across Xbox, PlayStation, and PC — but not everyone wants mixed-platform lobbies.

Nintendo’s patent fight over Palworld takes a blow as Japan’s patent office rejects one of its “monster capture” patents, citing older games like ARK and Pokémon GO, and potentially bolstering Pocketpair’s defense.

Venture funding has most definitely rebounded since the 2022 correction, but there’s a sharp divide between who’s getting funding and who’s not.

That was the overarching theme from our third-quarter market reports, which showed that global startup funding in Q3 totaled $97 billion, marking only the fourth quarter above $90 billion since Q3 2022.

Still, there are stark differences between the 2021 market peak and now, as contributing reporter Joanna Glasner noted in a couple of recent columns, here and here. Just as we saw four years ago, funding is frothy and often seems to be driven by investor FOMO. Some companies are even raising follow-on rounds at head-spinning speeds.

But the funding surge this time is also much, much more concentrated — namely in outsized rounds for AI companies.

With that, let’s take a look at the charts that illustrate the major private-market and startup funding themes as we head into the final quarter of 2025.

AI funding continues to drive venture growth

Nearly half — 46% — of startup funding globally in Q3 went to AI companies, Crunchbase data shows. Almost a third went to a single company: Anthropic, which raised $13 billion last quarter.

Even with an astonishing $45 billion going to artificial intelligence startups in Q3, it was only the third-highest quarter on record for AI funding, with Q4 2024 and Q1 2025 each clocking in higher.

Megarounds gobble up lion’s share

It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that AI has also skewed investment heavily toward megarounds, which we define as funding deals of $100 million or more.

The percentage of overall funding going into such deals hit a record high this year, with an astonishing 60% of global and 70% of U.S. venture capital going to $100 million-plus rounds, per Crunchbase data.

Even with several months left in the year, it also seems plausible that the total dollars going into such deals will match or top what we saw in 2021, which marked a peak for startup funding not scaled before or since.

The difference? Back then, startup dollars were widely distributed, going to a whole host of sectors — from food tech to health tech to robotics — and to early-stage, late-stage and in-between companies alike.

Contrast that with recent quarters, when the LLM giants and other large, established, AI-centric companies are getting the largest slice of venture dollars.

Seed deals slide further

As megarounds have increased, seed deals have declined.

The number of seed deals has shown a steady downward trend in recent quarters, Crunchbase data shows, even as total dollars invested at the stage has stayed relatively steady. That indicates that while seed deals are growing larger, they’re also harder to come by.

Early-stage funding has essentially flatlined, despite larger rounds to companies working on robotics, biotech, AI and other technologies.

The AI haves and have-nots

AI has enthralled investors for the past three years.

What are they less interested in? Old standbys like cybersecurity and biotech. Biotech investment as a share of overall funding recently hit a 20-year low. Crunchbase data shows that cybersecurity investment, while still relatively steady, also retreated somewhat in Q3 2025. That’s notable given that many cybersecurity companies are integrating AI into their offerings.

Still, other sectors that benefit heavily from AI-driven automation are seeing a surge in investment. Perhaps most notable is legal tech, which hit an all-time high last month on the back of large rounds for companies promising to automate much of the drudgery of the profession.

Among the other sectors buoyed by AI is human resources software (including AI-powered recruitment and hiring offerings).

Other data points of note

Other interesting points that emerged from our Q3 reports and recent coverage include:

• Unicorn creation in the third quarter swelled as 26 new billion-dollar startups trotted onto our Unicorn Board in September alone.
• Q3’s most-active investors were the serial backers in those AI megarounds. They included well-known names such as Insight Partners, General Catalyst, Accel, Andreessen Horowitz and Iconiq Capital.
• Funding for Asia-based startups rose sequentially in the third quarter, boosted by a handful of hardtech-focused megarounds.
• European startups raised $13.1 billion across more than 1,000 deals in Q3, flat quarter over quarter but up 22% year over year. Early-stage investment was particularly strong, and the region benefited from the excitement around Klarna’s long-awaited IPO.
• In Latin America, Brazil pushed Mexico out of the top spot to retake its crown as the region’s largest funding recipient.

Looking ahead

The increasing concentration of capital into a small cadre of large AI companies — not to mention the interconnectedness of those deals — begs some obvious questions. Are we in a bubble? And given that nearly half of venture capital in recent years has been tied up in AI, what happens to the startup ecosystem if or when it pops?

Related reading:

• Q3 Venture Funding Jumps 38% As More Massive Rounds Go To AI Giants And Exits Gain Steam
• North American Startup Funding Held High In Q3
• Europe’s Venture Scene Held Steady In Q3, Buoyed By Early-Stage Funding And Klarna IPO
• Asia Startup Investment Up In Q3
• Active Investors Kept Busy In An AI-Centric Quarter
• Brazil Back On Top In Q3 When It Comes To Venture Funding In Latin America

Illustration: Dom Guzman

In a rare deep-dive on Microsoft's gaming strategy with TPBN, CEO Satya Nadella outlined the company's evolving vision for Xbox and Windows gaming. His comments follow Microsoft's 2023 acquisition of Activision Blizzard, as the company reconsiders the future of Xbox – not just as a console, but as a broader platform.

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In recent months, leadership at Electronic Arts, the publisher behind popular game franchises such as The Sims and Madden NFL, has intensified calls for its nearly 15,000 employees to incorporate AI into daily operations.

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Robotics company 1X Technologies (1XT), which secured $100 million in funding from OpenAI, EQT Ventures, and others in 2024, unveiled a bipedal humanoid robot, Neo Beta, last year.

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CRN senior editor Dylan Martin highlighted the fake GTC keynote on X yesterday. While YouTube says it does all it can to fight scams, the fake stream, hosted on a channel called NVIDIA Live, was the top result when typing "Nvidia gtc dc" into the platform's search bar.

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The new arrangement solidifies OpenAI's position as a profit-seeking enterprise, ending nearly a year of restructuring discussions that had drawn scrutiny from regulators and investors. Under the terms, Microsoft's access to OpenAI's technology, including any systems capable of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), extends through 2032.

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With the flak that Apple is reportedly receiving for its ultra-slim iPhone Air, there was an evolving consensus for a time that Samsung would simply trash its upcoming Galaxy S26 Edge. However, new reporting from the Netherlands now indicates that the project is not only alive but thriving, and is all set to debut next year, albeit with a hefty delay. Samsung Galaxy S26 Edge is likely to debut months after the rest of the S26 variants To wit, Netherland's GalaxyClub is now reporting that Samsung continues to develop a smartphone under the relatively silly alias of "More Slim." This […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/no-wait-a-more-slim-galaxy-s26-edge-is-still-in-the-cards/

Hideo Kojima was as surprised as anyone learning this week that he was offered to develop a video game project based on the Matrix franchise, as no one ever told him such a conversation took place between the Wachowskis and Konami. Earlier today, the legendary game designer and creator of the Metal Gear and Death Stranding series clarified the statements made a few days ago by Christopher Bergstresser, the Senior Vice President of Strategic Planning and business Development at Konami between 1996 and 2002. In his post on X, Kojima-san confirmed that, back in 1999, he and the Wachowskis exchanged […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/hideo-kojima-wasnt-aware-he-was-offered-a-matrix-video-game-project/

A new GeekBench 6 test is doing the rounds today on social media, showing the raw performance of what appears to be the final configuration of Samsung's upcoming flagship Exynos 2600 chip. Unfortunately, the chip fails to exceed the proven benchmark scores of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, but manages to significantly narrow down the erstwhile performance gap between the two SoCs. Samsung Exynos 2600 falls behind Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in both single-core and multi-core GeekBench 6 tests First, let's go over the Exynos 2600 setup used in the test: For comparison, here is the CPU […]

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This is another cheap OLED 1440p gaming monitor, which boasts up to 280Hz refresh rate and uses LG's latest LG Tandem OLED panel. KTC Unveils G27P6M OLED 280Hz@1440p Gaming Monitor With LG Primary RGB Tandem OLED; Official Price $422, but Limited Time Deal Price is $281 Looks like Lenovo isn't the only one that is willing to offer its OLED gaming monitors at the cheapest price. KTC, a popular Chinese monitor maker, joined the race and has unveiled its latest offering called G27P6M, which is based on LG's Primary RGB Tandem OLED panel. The monitor launched recently, offering competitive specifications, […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/ktc-launches-g27p6m-2k-oled-monitor-featuring-4th-gen-lg-oled/

The PlayStation Portal handheld system may be about to get a highly-requested feature soon, judging from a PS App leak. Over on the PlayStation Portal official subreddit, user GetTheWetsOn shared a screenshot captured from the PS App of the Deliver at All Costs store page, which seemingly confirms that cloud streaming of purchased digital games could be coming to the PlayStation Portal for PS Plus Premium subscribers. The user also stated that the same confirmation, which has since been removed, could be found on the Dead Space remake store page. While there's no indication this new PlayStation Portal streaming option […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/playstation-portal-leak-suggests-highly-requested-feature-is-coming-soon/

It seems like the US chip industry is going through a 'massive' revolution, and with that, a startup, Substrate, has decided to tap into the lithography segment, which ASML heavily dominates. Substrate Intends to Utilize X-Rays Over EUV For Lithography, Claiming It To Be a Cheaper Alternative When it comes to chip lithography equipment, the US is entirely dependent on companies like ASML, as the nation lacks a domestic technology that can rival the Dutch chipmaker. However, in a new report by Bloomberg, it seems like there's a startup by the name of 'Substrate' out there that plans to end […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/american-chip-startup-substrate-vows-to-end-dependency-on-asml/

SK Hynix has reportedly prepared several new DDR5 chips that can achieve a native speed of 7200 MT/s, as spotted on a popular e-commerce platform. Three More SK Hynix Memory Chips Get Prepared, Offering 7200 MT/s Speed; SK Hynix Reportedly Prepares 2 Gb and 4 Gb Chips as Well Last week, we reported that SK Hynix is preparing 3 Gb (Gigabit) DDR5 A-Die chips, which are rated for 7200 MT/s, above the current JEDEC standard of 6400 MT/s. It appears that SK Hynix isn't just limiting itself to A-Die 3 Gb chips, but has also silently prepared three more dies, […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/new-sk-hynix-7200-mt-s-ddr5-memory-spotted-2-gb-b-die-and-4-gb-m-die-prepared/

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Read full article at https://wccftech.com/new-world-gets-killed-off-amazon-just-as-people-were-returning/

This morning, Remedy Entertainment published its Q3 2025 financial report. As expected, it's not great news for the Finnish studio. Tero Virtala, the company's CEO for nine years, stepped down earlier this month after Remedy told investors that the game FBC: Firebreak had effectively failed. This past quarter, just as the studio celebrated the thirty years since its foundation, the financial highlights were indeed very negative: However, interim CEO Markus Mäki reassured investors (and fans) that the remaining projects are on track, and the studio is still confident in its ability to achieve 'significant commercial success' by 2030. Despite challenges […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/remedy-isnt-satisfied-recent-sales-remains-confident-significant-commercial-success/

The moment Mack McConnell knew everything about search had changed came last summer at the Paris Olympics. His parents, independently and without prompting, had both turned to ChatGPT to plan their day's activities in the French capital. The AI recommended specific tour companies, restaurants, and attractions — businesses that had won a new kind of visibility lottery.

"It was almost like this intuitive interface that older people were as comfortable with using as younger people," McConnell recalled in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. "I could just see the businesses were now being recommended."

That observation has now become the foundation of Geostar, a Pear VC-backed startup that's racing to help businesses navigate what may be the most significant shift in online discovery since Google's founding. 

The company, which recently emerged from stealth with impressive early customer traction, is betting that the rise of AI-powered search represents a significant opportunity to reinvent how companies get found online. The global AI search engine market alone is projected to grow from $43.63 billion in 2025 to $108.88 billion by 2032.

Already the fastest-growing company in PearX's latest cohort, Geostar is fast approaching $1 million in annual recurring revenue in just four months — with only two founders and no employees.

Why Gartner predicts traditional search volume will decline 25% by 2026

The numbers tell a stark story of disruption. Gartner predicts that traditional search engine volume will decline by 25% by 2026, largely due to the rise of AI chatbots. Google's AI Overviews now appear on billions of searches monthly. Princeton University researchers have found that optimizing for these new AI systems can increase visibility by up to 40%.

"Search used to mean that you had to make Google happy," McConnell explained. "But now you have to optimize for four different Google interfaces — traditional search, AI Mode, Gemini, and AI Overviews — each with different criteria. And then ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity each work differently on top of that."

This fragmentation is creating chaos for businesses that have spent decades perfecting their Google search strategies. A recent Forrester study found that 95% of B2B buyers plan to use generative AI in future purchase decisions. Yet most companies remain woefully unprepared for this shift.

"Anybody who's not on this right now is losing out," said Cihan Tas, Geostar's co-founder and chief technology officer. "We see lawyers getting 50% of their clients through ChatGPT now. It's just such a massive shift."

How language models read the web differently than search engines ever did

What Geostar and a growing cohort of competitors call Generative Engine Optimization or GEO represents a fundamental departure from traditional search engine optimization. Where SEO focused primarily on keywords and backlinks, GEO requires understanding how large language models parse, understand, and synthesize information across the entire web.

The technical challenges are formidable. Every website must now function as what Tas calls "its own little database" capable of being understood by dozens of different AI crawlers, each with unique requirements and preferences. Google's systems pull from their existing search index. ChatGPT relies heavily on structured data and specific content formats. Perplexity shows a marked preference for Wikipedia and authoritative sources.

"Now the strategy is actually being concise, clear, and answering the question, because that's directly what the AI is looking for," Tas explained. "You're actually tuning for somewhat of an intelligent model that makes decisions similarly to how we make decisions."

Consider schema markup, the structured data that helps machines understand web content. While only 30% of websites currently implement comprehensive schema, research shows that pages with proper markup are 36% more likely to appear in AI-generated summaries. Yet most businesses don't even know what schema markup is, let alone how to implement it effectively.

Inside Geostar's AI agents that optimize websites continuously without human intervention

Geostar's solution embodies a broader trend in enterprise software: the rise of autonomous AI agents that can take action on behalf of businesses. The company embeds what it calls "ambient agents" directly into client websites, continuously optimizing content, technical configurations, and even creating new pages based on patterns learned across its entire customer base.

"Once we learn something about the way content performs, or the way a technical optimization performs, we can then syndicate that same change across the remaining users so everyone in the network benefits," McConnell said.

For RedSift, a cybersecurity company, this approach yielded a 27% increase in AI mentions within three months. In one case, Geostar identified an opportunity to rank for "best DMARC vendors," a high-value search term in the email security space. The company's agents created and optimized content that achieved first-page rankings on both Google and ChatGPT within four days.

"We're doing the work of an agency that charges $10,000 a month," McConnell said, noting that Geostar's pricing ranges from $1,000 to $3,000 monthly. "AI creates a situation where, for the first time ever, you can take action like an agency, but you can scale like software."

Why brand mentions without links now matter more than ever in the AI era

The implications of this shift extend far beyond technical optimizations. In the SEO era, a mention without a link was essentially worthless. In the age of AI, that calculus has reversed. AI systems can analyze vast amounts of text to understand sentiment and context, meaning that brand mentions on Reddit, in news articles, or across social media now directly influence how AI systems describe and recommend companies.

"If the New York Times mentions a company without linking to it, that company would actually benefit from that in an AI system," McConnell explained. "AI has the ability to do mass analysis of huge amounts of text, and it will understand the sentiment around that mention."

This has created new vulnerabilities. Research from the Indian Institute of Technology and Princeton found that AI systems show systematic bias toward third-party sources over brand-owned content. A company's own website might be less influential in shaping AI perceptions than what others say about it online.

The shifting landscape has also disrupted traditional metrics of success. Where SEO focused on rankings and click-through rates, GEO must account for what researchers call impression metrics — how prominently and positively a brand appears within AI-generated responses, even when users never click through to the source.

A growing market as SEO veterans and new players rush to dominate AI optimization

Geostar is hardly alone in recognizing this opportunity. Companies like Brandlight, Profound, and Goodie are all racing to help businesses navigate the new landscape. The SEO industry, worth approximately $80 billion globally, is scrambling to adapt, with established players like Semrush and Ahrefs rushing to add AI visibility tracking features.

But the company's founders, who previously built and sold a Y-Combinator-backed e-commerce optimization startup called Monto, believe their technical approach gives them an edge. Unlike competitors who largely provide dashboards and recommendations, Geostar's agents actively implement changes.

"Everyone is taking the same solutions that worked in the last era and just saying, 'We'll do this for AI instead,'" McConnell argued. "But when you think about what AI is truly capable of, it can actually do the work for you."

The stakes are particularly high for small and medium-sized businesses. While large corporations can afford to hire specialized consultants or build internal expertise, smaller companies risk becoming invisible in AI-mediated search. Geostar sees this as its primary market opportunity: nearly half of the 33.2 million small businesses in America invest in SEO. Among the roughly 418,000 law firms in the U.S., many spend between $2,500 and $5,000 monthly on search optimization to stay competitive in local markets.

From Kurdish village to PearX: The unlikely partnership building the future of search

For Tas, whose journey to Silicon Valley began in a tiny Kurdish village in Turkey with just 50 residents, the current moment represents both opportunity and responsibility. His mother's battle with cancer prevented him from finishing college, leading him to teach himself programming and eventually partner with McConnell — whom he worked with for an entire year before they ever met in person.

"We're not just copy and pasting a solution that was existing before," Tas emphasized. "This is something that's different and was uniquely possible today."

Looking forward, the transformation of search appears to be accelerating rather than stabilizing. Industry observers predict that search functionality will soon be embedded in productivity tools, wearables, and even augmented reality interfaces. Each new surface will likely have its own optimization requirements, further complicating the landscape.

"Soon, search will be in our eyes, in our ears," McConnell predicted. "When Siri breaks out of her prison, whatever that Jony Ive and OpenAI are building together will be like a multimodal search interface."

The technical challenges are matched by ethical ones. As businesses scramble to influence AI recommendations, questions arise about manipulation, fairness, and transparency. There's currently no oversight body or established best practices for GEO, creating what some critics describe as a Wild West environment.

As businesses grapple with these changes, one thing seems certain: the era of simply optimizing for Google is over. In its place is emerging a far more complex ecosystem where success requires understanding not just how machines index information, but how they think about it, synthesize it, and ultimately decide what to recommend to humans seeking answers.

For the millions of businesses whose survival depends on being discovered online, mastering this new paradigm isn't just an opportunity — it's an existential imperative. The question is no longer whether to optimize for AI search, but whether companies can adapt quickly enough to remain visible as the pace of change accelerates.

McConnell's parents at the Olympics were a preview of what's already becoming the norm. They didn't search for tour companies in Paris. They didn't scroll through results or click on links. They simply asked ChatGPT what to do — and the AI decided which businesses deserved their attention.

In the new economy of discovery, the businesses that win won't be the ones that rank highest. They'll be the ones AI chooses to recommend.

Last week, we launched the Internet2 NET+ Google AI Education Leadership Program (ELP).

Comscore's streaming TV report showcases how ad-supported and FAST platforms are thriving.

Most people associate U.S. automotive innovation and industry with Michigan—Detroit, or perhaps Dearborn, where Henry Ford built his colossal River Rouge Plant. They probably wouldn’t think of Englewood Cliffs, New […]

London-based social agency Coolr has appointed Mark Lainas as its first U.S. president, marking a major push into the American market. Coolr, founded in London in 2017, blends influencer marketing, […]

The winning entry for NBC's On Brand billboard design contest will be displayed in Los Angeles.

Sports linear channel NBCSN is set to launch this fall.

Most marketing teams still treat SEO and PPC as budget rivals, not as complementary systems facing the same performance challenges.

In practice, these relationships fall into three types:

• Parasitism: One benefits at the other’s expense.
• Commensalism: One benefits while the other remains unaffected.
• Mutualism: Both thrive through shared optimization and accountability.

Only mutualism creates sustainable performance gains – and it’s the shift marketing teams need to make next.

Mutualism: Solving joint problems

One glaring problem unites online marketers: we’re getting less traffic for the same budget.

Navigating the coming years requires more than the coexistence many teams mistake for collaboration. 

We need mutualism – shared technical standards that optimize for both organic visibility and paid performance. 

Shared accountability drives lower acquisition costs, faster market response, and sustainable gains that neither channel can achieve alone.

Here’s what it looks like in practice: 

• Fostering a culture of experimentation and learning.
• PPC tests messaging while SEO builds long-term content assets​.
• SEO uncovers search intent that PPC capitalizes on immediately​.
• Both channels learn from shared incrementality testing (guerrilla testing)​.
• Cross-pollination of keyword intelligence and conversion data​.
• Combined technical standards (modified Core Web Vitals weights) align engineering with marketing goals​.
• Feedback loops accelerate market insights and reduce wasted spend​.

Stabilizing performance during SEO volatility

During SEO penalties and core updates, PPC can maintain traffic until recovery. 

Core updates cause fluctuations in organic rankings and user behavior, which, in turn, can affect ad relevance and placements.

Do you involve SEO during a CPC price surge?

PPC-only landing pages affect the Core Web Vitals of entire sites, influencing Google’s default assumptions for URLs without enough traffic to calculate individual scores. 

Paid pages are penalized for slow loading just as much as organic ones, impacting Quality Score and, ultimately, bids.

New-market launch considerations

PPC should answer a simple question: Are we getting the types of results we expect and want? 

Setting clear PPC baselines by market and country provides valuable, real-time keyword and conversion data that SEO teams can use to strengthen organic strategies. 

By analyzing which PPC clicks drive signups or demo requests, SEO teams can prioritize content and keyword targets with proven high intent. 

Sharing PPC insights enables organic search teams to make smarter decisions, improve rankings, and drive better-qualified traffic.

Dig deeper: The end of SEO-PPC silos: Building a unified search strategy for the AI era

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Building unified performance measurement

One key question to ask is: how do we measure incrementality? 

We need to quantify the true, additional contribution PPC and SEO drive above the baseline. 

Guerrilla testing offers a lo-fi way to do this – turning campaigns on or off in specific markets to see whether organic conversions are affected. 

A more targeted test involves turning off branded campaigns. 

PPC ads on branded terms can capture conversions that would have occurred organically, making paid results appear stronger and SEO weaker. 

That’s exactly what Arturs Cavniss’ company did – and here are the results.

For teams ready to operate in a more sophisticated way, several options are available. 

One worth exploring is Robyn, an open-source, AI/ML-powered marketing mix modeling (MMM) package.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals measures layout stability, rendering efficiency, and server response times – key factors influencing search visibility and overall performance. 

These metrics are weighted by Google in evaluating page experience.

Core Web Vitals Metric	Google’s Weight
First Contentful Paint	10%
Speed Index	10%
Largest Contentful Paint	25%
Total Blocking Time	30%
Cumulative Layout Shift	25%

Core Web Vitals:

• Affect PPC performance through CLS metrics.
• Influence SEO rankings through search vitals.
• Give engineering teams clear benchmarks that align development efforts with marketing goals.

You can create a modified weighted system to reflect a combined SEO and PPC baseline. (Here’s a quick MVP spreadsheet to get started.)

However, SEO-focused weightings don’t capture PPC’s Quality Score requirements or conversion optimization needs. 

Clicking an ad link can be slower than an organic one because Google’s ad network introduces extra processes – additional data handling and script execution – before the page loads. 

The hypothesis is that ad clicks may consistently load slower than organic ones due to these extra steps in the ad-serving process. 

This suggests that performance standards designed for organic results may not fully represent the experience of paid users.

Microsoft Ads Liaison Navah Hopkins notes that paid pages are penalized for slow loading just as severely as organic ones – a factor that directly affects Quality Score and bids.

SEOs also take responsibility for improving PPC-only landing pages, even without being asked. As Jono Alderson explains:

• “All of your PPC-only landing pages are affecting the CWV of your whole site (and, Google’s default assumptions for all of your URLs that don’t have enough traffic to calculate), and thus f*ck with your SEO.”

PPC-only landing pages influence the Core Web Vitals of entire sites, shaping Google’s assumptions for low-traffic URLs.

INP gains importance with agentic AI

Agentic AI’s sensitivity to interaction delays has made Interaction to Next Paint (INP) a critical performance metric.

INP measures how quickly a website responds when a human or AI agent interacts with a page – clicking, scrolling, or filling out forms while completing tasks. 

When response times lag, agents fail tasks, abandon the site, and may turn to competitors. 

INP doesn’t appear in Chrome Lighthouse or PageSpeed Insights because those are synthetic testing tools that don’t simulate real interactions. 

Real user monitoring helps reveal what’s happening in practice, but it still can’t capture the full picture for AI-driven interactions.

Bringing quality scoring to SEO

PPC practitioners have long relied on Quality Score – a 1-10 scale measuring expected CTR and user intent fit – to optimize landing pages and reduce costs. 

SEO lacks an equivalent unified metric, leaving teams to juggle separate signals like Core Web Vitals, keyword relevance, and user engagement without a clear prioritization framework.

You can create a company-wide quality score for pages to incentivize optimization and align teams while maintaining channel-specific goals. 

This score can account for page type, with sub-scores for trial, demo, or usage pages – adaptable to the content that drives the most business value.

The system should account for overlapping metrics across subscores yet remain simple enough for all teams – SEO, PPC, engineering, and product – to understand and act on. 

A unified scoring model gives everyone a common language and turns distributed accountability into daily practice. 

When both channels share quality standards, teams can prioritize fixes that strengthen organic rankings and paid performance simultaneously.

Give a comprehensive view across channels

Display advertising and SEO rarely share performance metrics, yet both pursue the same goal – converting impressions into engaged users. 

Click-per-thousand impressions (CPTI) measures the number of clicks generated per 1,000 impressions, creating a shared language for evaluating content effectiveness across paid display and organic search.

For display teams, CPTI reveals which creative and targeting combinations drive engagement beyond vanity metrics like reach. 

For SEO teams, applying CPTI to search impressions (via Google Search Console) shows which pages and queries convert visibility into traffic – exposing content that ranks well but fails to earn clicks.

This shared metric allows teams to compare efficiency directly: if a blog post drives 50 clicks per 1,000 organic impressions while a display campaign with similar visibility generates only 15 clicks, the performance gap warrants investigation.

Reverse CPM offers another useful lens. It measures how long content takes to “pay for itself” – the point where it reaches ROI. 

For example, if an article earns 1 million impressions in a month, it should deliver roughly 1,000 clicks. 

As generative AI continues to reshape traffic patterns, this metric will need refinement.

Feedback loops

The most valuable insights emerge when SEO and PPC teams share operational intelligence rather than compete for credit. 

PPC provides quick keyword performance data to respond to market trends faster, while SEO uncovers emerging search intent that PPC can immediately act on. 

Together, these feedback loops create compound advantages.

SEO signals PPC should act on:

• Google is testing a feature that impacts SEO rankings and traffic – PPC can maintain visibility during organic volatility.
• SEO keyword research uncovers search intent, emerging keywords, seasonal patterns, and regional differences in query popularity.
• Long-tail insights reveal shifting search intents after core updates, signaling format and content opportunities.

PPC signals SEO should act on: 

• Some PPC keywords are effectively “dead.” They’ll never convert and are better handled by SEO.
• PPC competitors bidding on brand keywords expose gaps in brand protection strategy.
• PPC data highlights which product messaging, features, or offers resonate most with users, informing content priorities.

When both channels share intelligence, insights extend beyond marketing performance into product and business strategy.

• Product managers exploring new features benefit from unified search data across both channels.
• Joining Merchant Center and Google Search Console data in BigQuery provides a strong foundation for ecommerce attribution.

These feedback loops don’t require expensive tools – only an organizational commitment to regular cross-channel reviews in which teams share what’s working, what’s failing, and what deserves coordinated testing.

Optimizing the system, not the channel

Treat technical performance as shared infrastructure, not channel-specific optimization. 

Teams that implement unified Core Web Vitals standards, cross-channel attribution models, and distributed accountability systems will capture opportunities that siloed operations miss. 

As agentic AI adoption accelerates and digital marketing grows more complex, symbiotic SEO-PPC operations become a competitive advantage rather than a luxury.

Something’s shifting in how SEO services are being marketed, and if you’ve been shopping for help with search lately, you’ve probably noticed it.

AI search demand is real – but so is the spin

Over the past few months, “AI SEO” has emerged as a distinct service offering. 

Browse service provider websites, scroll through Fiverr, or sit through sales presentations, and you’ll see it positioned as something fundamentally new and separate from traditional SEO. 

Some are packaging it as “GEO” (generative engine optimization) or “AEO” (answer engine optimization), with separate pricing, distinct deliverables, and the implication that you need both this and traditional SEO to compete.

The pitch goes like this: 

• “Traditional SEO handles Google and Bing. But now you need AI SEO for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and other AI search platforms. They work completely differently and require specialized optimization.”

The data helps explain why the industry is moving so quickly.

AI-sourced traffic jumped 527% year-over-year from early 2024 to early 2025. 

Service providers are responding to genuine market demand for AI search optimization.

But here’s what I’ve observed after evaluating what these AI SEO services actually deliver. 

Many of these so-called new tactics are the same SEO fundamentals – just repackaged under a different name.

As a marketer responsible for budget and results, understanding this distinction matters. 

It affects how you allocate resources, evaluate agency partners, and structure your search strategy. 

Let’s dig into what’s really happening so you can make smarter decisions about where to invest.

The AI SEO pitch: What you’re hearing in sales calls

The typical AI SEO sales deck has become pretty standardized. 

• First comes the narrative about how search is fragmenting across platforms. 
• Then, the impressive dashboard showing AI visibility metrics. 
• Finally, the recommendation to treat AI optimization as a separate workstream, often with separate pricing.

Here are the most common claims I’m hearing.

‘AI search is fundamentally different and requires specialized optimization’ 

They’ll show you how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude are changing search behavior, and they’re not wrong about that. 

Research shows that 82% of consumers agree that “AI-powered search is more helpful than traditional search engines,” signaling how search behavior is evolving.

‘You need to optimize for how AI platforms chunk and retrieve content’ 

The pitch emphasizes passage-level optimization, structured data, and Q&A formatting specifically for AI retrieval. 

They’ll discuss how AI values mentions and citations differently than backlinks and how entity recognition matters more than keywords.

‘Only 22% of marketers are monitoring AI visibility; you need to act now’

This creates urgency around a supposedly new practice that requires immediate investment.

The urgency is real. Only 22% of marketers have set up LLM brand visibility monitoring, but the question is whether this requires a separate “AI SEO” service or an expansion of your existing search strategy.

Understanding the rebranding trend

To be clear, the AI capabilities are real. What’s new is the positioning – familiar SEO practices rebranded to sound more revolutionary than they are.

When you examine what’s actually being recommended (passage-level content structure, semantic clarity, Q&A formatting, earning citations and mentions), you will find that these practices have been core to SEO for years. 

Google introduced passage ranking in 2020 and featured snippets back in 2014.

Research from Fractl, Search Engine Land, and MFour found that generative engine optimization “is based on similar value systems that advanced SEOs, content marketers, and digital PR teams are already experts in.”

Let me show you what I mean.

What you’re hearing: “AI-powered semantic analysis and predictive keyword intelligence.”

• What’s actually happening: Keyword research using advanced tools to analyze search volume, competition, user intent, and content opportunities. The strategic fundamentals (understanding what your audience is searching for and why) haven’t changed.

What you’re hearing: “Machine learning content optimization that aligns with AI algorithms.”

• What’s actually happening: Analyzing top-ranking content, understanding user intent, identifying content gaps, and creating comprehensive content. AI tools can accelerate analysis, which is valuable. But the strategic work (determining what topics matter for your business, how to position your expertise, and what content will drive conversions) still requires human insight.

What you’re hearing: “Entity-based authority building for AI platforms.”

• What’s actually happening: Building quality mentions and citations, earning coverage from reputable sources, and establishing expertise in your industry. Authority building is inherently relationship-driven and time-dependent. No AI tool shortcuts to becoming a recognized expert in your space.

Dig deeper: AI search is booming, but SEO is still not dead

---

Where real differences exist (and why fundamentals still matter)

I want to be fair here. There’s genuine debate in the SEO community about whether optimizing for AI-powered search represents a distinct discipline or an evolution of existing practices.

The differences are real.

• AI search handles queries differently from traditional search. 
• Users write longer, conversational prompts rather than short keywords.
• AI platforms use query fan-out to match multiple sub-queries. 
• Optimization happens at the passage or chunk level rather than the page level. 
• Authority signals shift from links and engagement to mentions and citations.

These differences affect execution, but the strategic foundation remains consistent.

You still need to:

• Understand what users are trying to accomplish.
• Create content demonstrating genuine expertise.
• Build authority and credibility.
• Ensure content is technically accessible.
• Optimize for relevance and user intent.

And here’s something that reinforces the overlap.

SEO professionals recently discovered that ChatGPT’s Atlas browser directly uses Google search results. 

Even AI-powered search platforms are relying on traditional search infrastructure.

So yes, there are platform-specific tactics that matter. 

The question for you as a marketer isn’t whether differences exist (they do). 

The real question is whether those differences justify treating this as an entirely separate service with its own strategy and budget.

Or are they simply tactical adaptations of the same fundamental approach?

Dig deeper: GEO and SEO: How to invest your time and efforts wisely

The risk of chasing platform-specific tactics

The “separate AI SEO service” approach comes with a real risk.

It can shift focus toward short-term, platform-specific tactics at the expense of long-term fundamentals.

I’m seeing recommendations that feel remarkably similar to the blackhat SEO tactics we saw a decade ago: 

• Invisible text that only LLMs can see.
• Content cloaking for AI bots.
• Scaled content targeting every possible prompt variation. 

These tactics might work today, but they’re playing a dangerous game.

Dig deeper: Black hat GEO is real – Here’s why you should pay attention

AI platforms are still in their infancy. Their spam detection systems aren’t yet as mature as Google’s or Bing’s, but that will change, likely faster than many expect.

AI platforms like Perplexity are building their own search indexes (hundreds of billions of documents). 

They’ll need to develop the same core systems traditional search engines have: 

• Site quality scoring.
• Authority evaluation.
• Anti-spam measures. 

They’re supposedly buying link data from third-party providers, recognizing that understanding authority requires signals beyond just content analysis.

The pattern is predictable

We’ve seen this with Google. 

In the early days, keyword stuffing and link schemes worked great.

Then, Google developed Panda and Penguin updates that devastated sites relying on those tactics. 

Overnight, sites lost 50-90% of their traffic.

The same thing will likely happen with AI platforms. 

Sites gaming visibility now with spammy tactics will face serious problems when these platforms implement stronger quality and spam detection. 

As one SEO veteran put it, “It works until it doesn’t.”

This is why fundamentals matter more than ever

Building around platform-specific tactics is like building on sand. 

Focus instead on fundamentals – creating valuable content, earning authority, demonstrating expertise, and optimizing for intent – and you’ll have something sustainable across platforms.

Where AI genuinely helps

I’m not anti-AI. Used well, it meaningfully improves SEO workflows and results.

AI excels at large-scale research and ideation – analyzing competitor content, spotting gaps, and mapping topic clusters in minutes.

For one client, it surfaced 73 subtopics we hadn’t fully considered. 

But human expertise was still essential to align those ideas with business goals and strategic priorities.

AI also transforms data analysis and workflow automation – from reporting and rank tracking to technical monitoring – freeing more time for strategy.

AI clearly helps. The real question is whether these AI offerings bring truly new strategies or familiar ones powered by better tools.

What to watch for when evaluating services

After working with clients to evaluate various service models, I’ve seen consistent patterns in proposals that overpromise and underdeliver.

• They lead with technology, not strategy: If the conversation jumps immediately to tools and dashboards rather than starting with your business goals, that suggests a tools-first rather than strategy-first approach.
• Vague explanations of their approach: Watch for responses about “proprietary algorithms” or “advanced machine learning” without concrete explanations of what specific problems this solves.
• Focus on vanity metrics: “We generated 500 AI citations!” sounds impressive but doesn’t answer: Did qualified traffic increase? Did conversion rates improve? How did search contribute to revenue?
• Case studies that focus on visibility, not business results: They might have increased AI mentions or improved rankings, but did it drive revenue growth? Did it increase qualified leads?

Questions to ask instead

When evaluating any service provider, ask:

• How would you approach our business? Walk me through your strategic process. The best approaches start by understanding your business, not showcasing tools. If they jump immediately to AI tools or technical tactics without understanding your business context, that’s a red flag.
• How do you determine content strategy and prioritization? Look for answers that balance data insights with business context and audience understanding, not just what AI tools suggest would perform well.
• What specific results have you achieved for similar businesses? Push for concrete business metrics (revenue growth, lead generation, conversion improvements), not just traffic or ranking increases.
• How do you integrate optimization across traditional search and AI platforms? This reveals whether they view these as separate disciplines requiring separate work or as interconnected parts of a unified search strategy.

What actually drives long-term success

After working in SEO for 20 years, through multiple algorithm updates and trend cycles, I keep coming back to the same fundamentals:

• Deep audience understanding drives every strategic decision.
• Quality and expertise still win (search algorithms are increasingly sophisticated at evaluating content quality).
• Authority building takes time and authenticity (you can’t automate trust and credibility).
• Business alignment drives meaningful results (rankings and AI citations are means to an end: revenue growth, customer acquisition, or whatever your primary business goals are).

Dig deeper: Thriving in AI search starts with SEO fundamentals

What sustainable SEO looks like in the AI era

AI is genuinely changing how we work in search marketing – and that’s mostly positive. 

The tools make us more efficient and enable analysis that wasn’t previously practical.

But AI only enhances good strategy. It doesn’t replace it. 

Fundamentals still matter – along with audience understanding, quality, and expertise.

Search behavior is fragmenting across Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and social platforms, but the principles that drive visibility and trust remain consistent.

Real advantage doesn’t come from the newest tools or the flashiest “GEO” tactics. 

It comes from a clear strategy, deep market understanding, strong execution of fundamentals, and smart use of technology to strengthen human expertise.

Don’t get distracted by hype or dismiss innovation. The balance lies in thoughtful AI integration within a solid strategic framework focused on business goals.

That’s what delivers sustainable results – whether people find you through Google, ChatGPT, or whatever comes next.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC). It's no longer a future concept—it's here, and it's already reshaping how teams operate. AI's capabilities are profound: it's speeding up audits, flagging critical risks faster, and drastically cutting down on time-consuming manual work. This leads to greater efficiency, higher accuracy, and a more

BeyondTrust’s annual cybersecurity predictions point to a year where old defenses will fail quietly, and new attack vectors will surge. Introduction The next major breach won’t be a phished password. It will be the result of a massive, unmanaged identity debt. This debt takes many forms: it’s the “ghost” identity from a 2015 breach lurking in your IAM, the privilege sprawl from thousands of new

Organizations in Ukraine have been targeted by threat actors of Russian origin with an aim to siphon sensitive data and maintain persistent access to compromised networks. The activity, according to a new report from the Symantec and Carbon Black Threat Hunter Team, targeted a large business services organization for two months and a local government entity in the country for a week. The attacks

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a set of 10 malicious npm packages that are designed to deliver an information stealer targeting Windows, Linux, and macOS systems. "The malware uses four layers of obfuscation to hide its payload, displays a fake CAPTCHA to appear legitimate, fingerprints victims by IP address, and downloads a 24MB PyInstaller-packaged information stealer that harvests

Don't get trapped in a payment plan – these doorbells will give you advanced features and local storage for your videos with no added fees.

The Google Pixel 10a might look almost exactly the same as the Pixel 9a, and have many of the same specs too.

Apple may upgrade its iPad mini with an OLED display next year, according to a new report.

UK retailers have surprised us all by launching several early Black Friday sales, so I'm looking through all the offers and picking out the best deals worth buying now.

The 1TB WD Black C50 Floral Fusion edition looks nice, but it's even cheaper than the discount for the standard product right now.

Lanterns will examine the "push and pull" between Aaron Pierre and Kyle Chandler's lead characters, its co-creator has teased.

Every new movie has a perfect pairing, so I asked the cast of Prime Video's Hedda for their double bill streaming suggestions.

Gaming on Linux just keeps getting better thanks to wider compatibility, but anti-cheat games remain stubbornly problematic.

The 'first wave' of users are finding they've got Gemini for Home alerts on their mobile devices.

Does Only Murders in the Building season 6 being set in the UK make sense? No, but I want this epic crime crossover anyway.

The Sound Blaster Re:Imagine "redefines what a sound card can be"

The redesigned Start menu is exciting, true, but I'd advise you to hold fire for now.

Don't miss this hefty Nintendo Switch 2 Pro Controller price cut on EE, available for a limited time for UK customers.

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OnePlus teams up with Google to bring Gemini to its Mind Space AI tool, and that might be the biggest reason yet to buy a OnePlus 15.

The Turtle Beach Stealth Ultra has had its price slashed in the UK.

Nokia and Nvidia will work together to boost work towards 6G and AI native mobile networks.

This is a huge price drop for one of our favorite smartwatches, so take this as your sign to upgrade.

Most enterprises are running "flat" networks, putting their entire infrastructure at risk.

TechRadar spoke with Celina Shi, CMO of OnePlus Europe, to discuss the company’s upcoming OnePlus 15 flagship.

A unified approach to protection centered on a strong integrated security platform is vital, researchers say.

Disney has provided an update on whether Doctor Who will stay on Disney+ after it decided not to renew its deal with the BBC.

The Creative Aurvana Ace 3 take the framework of their predecessors and fix a few of the biggest issues, delivering better earbuds.

A Nintendo Switch 2 + Mario Kart World bundle discount before Black Friday? It's more likely than you think.

The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip hasn’t always been a reliable source of Black Friday Deals, but I’m hoping the Galaxy Z Flip 7 FE could change that.

The budget-friendly and highly-rated Huawei Watch Fit 3 is available for £68.99 in a limited-time deal at Amazon.

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Phia founders, Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, are building an AI assistant that aims to help you shop, and save.

Mogul is a film studio fantasy platform where players draft a team of actors, directors, and movies to earn points.

The move puts Uber in direct competitor with Waymo, which has dominated the metro area.

The advantages of the LOQ 15 can’t outweigh the fact that Lenovo could offer more RAN and storage at this price.

A young student was left traumatized after being ordered to the ground and handcuffed by police because an AI gun detection system erroneously called the cops on his Doritos habit.

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Create stunning videos by chatting with the best AI models

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The post Alphabet’s AI Reckoning: Cloud Momentum vs. Search Durability appeared first on StartupHub.ai.

The burgeoning influence of artificial intelligence presents a dual narrative for tech giants, particularly Alphabet, as it navigates both profound opportunities and existential threats to its established revenue streams. As CNBC’s MacKenzie Sigalos reported on “Worldwide Exchange,” ahead of Alphabet’s recent earnings call, the company finds itself at a critical juncture, balancing the burgeoning momentum […]

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The post TestSprite raises $6.7M to fix AI generated code testing appeared first on StartupHub.ai.

TestSprite raised $6.7 million to address the critical bottleneck of AI generated code testing, enabling developers to validate AI-written code at unprecedented speeds.

The post TestSprite raises $6.7M to fix AI generated code testing appeared first on StartupHub.ai.

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Amazon’s latest $11 billion AI data center in Indiana signals a profound shift in the foundational infrastructure powering the artificial intelligence revolution, an investment of unprecedented scale that underscores the intense competition for AI compute. In less than a year, Amazon transformed vast Indiana cornfields into its largest AI data center yet, an astonishing feat […]

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“The rush to get these things to market has not allowed them to be secured.” This stark assessment from Dave McGinnis, Global Partner for Cyber Threat Management Offering Group at IBM, encapsulates the central tension explored in a recent episode of IBM’s Security Intelligence podcast. Host Matt Kosinski, alongside McGinnis and fellow panelists Suja Viswesan […]

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Seattle-based Radical says it has put a full-size prototype for a solar-powered drone through its first flight, marking one low-altitude step in the startup’s campaign to send robo-planes into the stratosphere for long-duration military and commercial missions.

“It’s a 120-foot-wingspan aircraft that only weighs 240 pounds,” Radical CEO James Thomas told GeekWire. “We’re talking about something that has a wingspan just a bit bigger than a Boeing 737, but it only weighs a little bit more than a person. So, it’s a pretty extreme piece of engineering, and we’re really proud of what our team has achieved so far.”

Last month’s flight test was conducted at the Tillamook UAS Test Range in Oregon, which is one of the sites designated by the Federal Aviation Administration for testing uncrewed aerial systems. Thomas declined to delve into the details about the flight’s duration or maximum altitude, other than to say that it was a low-altitude flight.

“We take off from the top of a car, and takeoff speeds are very low, so it flies just over 15 miles an hour on the ground or at low altitudes,” he said. (Thomas later added that the car was a Subaru, a choice he called “a Pacific Northwest move, I guess.”)

The prototype ran on battery power alone, but future flights will make use of solar arrays mounted on the plane’s wings to keep it in the air at altitudes as high as 65,000 feet for months at a time. For last month’s test, engineers added ballast to the prototype to match the weight of the solar panels and batteries required for stratospheric flight. Thomas said he expects high-altitude tests to begin next year.

Thomas and his fellow co-founder, chief technology officer Cyriel Notteboom, are veterans of Prime Air, Amazon’s effort to field a fleet of delivery drones. They left Amazon in mid-2022 to launch Radical and have since raised more than $4.5 million in funding. September’s test of a full-size drone follows up on the 24-hour-plus flight of a 13-pound subscale prototype in 2023.

The company’s manufacturing operation is based in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. There are currently six people on the team, plus a new hire, Thomas said. “We’re still lean,” he said. “To make this airplane work, it has to be really efficient, right? Really efficient electronics and aerodynamics. And you also need a really efficient team.”

Thomas said Radical has attracted interest from potential customers, but he shied away from discussing details. “We’re working with groups in the government and also commercially,” he said. “Obviously there are applications at the end of this that span everything from imagery through telecommunications and weather forecasting. There are a lot of people really interested in the technology, and the thing that stops us from serving those customers is not having a product up in the sky. So, that’s what we’re working through.”

Radical’s solar-powered airplane, known as Evenstar, is just one example of a class of aircraft known as high-altitude platform stations, or HAPS. Thomas and his teammates use a different term to refer to Evenstar. They call it a StratoSat, because it’s designed to take on many of the tasks typically assigned to satellites — but without the costs and the hassles associated with launching a spacecraft.

Potential applications include doing surveillance from a vantage point that’s difficult to attack, providing telecommunication links in areas where connectivity is constrained, monitoring weather patterns and conducting atmospheric research.

“We have customers who are really excited about the way that this can improve how we understand Earth’s weather systems and climate,” Thomas said. “That’s an application that we’re really excited to get into.”

Evenstar will carry payloads weighing up to about 33 pounds (15 kilograms). “That was based on analysis about major use cases,” Thomas explained. “That payload is enough to carry high-bandwidth, direct-to-device radio communications, or to carry ultra-high-resolution imaging equipment.”

Radical isn’t the only company working on solar-powered aircraft built for long-duration flights in the stratosphere. Other entrants in the market include AeroVironment, SoftBank, BAE Systems, Swift Engineering, Kea Aerospace, Korea Aerospace Industries and NewSpace Research & Technologies. Airbus’ solar-powered Zephyr set the record for long-duration stratospheric flight in 2022 with a 64-day test mission that ended in a crash.

Among those who tried but failed to field stratospheric solar drones are Alphabet, which closed down Titan Aerospace in 2016; and Facebook, which abandoned Project Aquila in 2018.

Thomas said the outlook for high-flying solar planes has brightened in the past decade.

“The key supporting technologies have matured enormously,” he said. “Commercial battery energy density has doubled in that 10-year time period. Solar cells are 10 times cheaper than they were just 10 years ago. And then you have advances in compute and AI, and all of these things feed into the situation we have now, where it’s actually possible to make the models close — whereas when we run the 10-year-old numbers, we can’t close the models.”

The way Thomas sees it, the concept behind Radical isn’t all that radical anymore.

“Not only do our models say this will work, but we have flight data that agrees with our models, and says this is a technology that can serve its purpose and unlock the potential of persistent infrastructure in the sky,” he said. “I can see why other people are pursuing it. It’s not a new idea. It’s one that people have wanted to crack for a long time, and we’re at this critical inflection point where it’s finally possible.”

Socket compatibility is common, but not a given. At least now you don't have to upgrade your cooler, too.

Yesterday the GitHub-hosted AMD XDNA driver code saw a new tagged release as version 202610.2.21.17. That itself wasn't too interesting but while diving into there is new yet-to-be-merged code for a new "NPU3A" revision to their NPU3 IP in Ryzen AI...

An engineer on Apple's static security tools team announced publicly that they have prototyped a tool to apply security hardening across entire C++ codebases. Ultimately their plan is to open-source and upstream this static analysis based tool into LLVM...

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AAEON's UP brand, predominately known for its industrial-grade developer board series, today announced the release of the UP Xtreme ARL Edge, its first Mini PC to feature the new Intel Core Ultra 200H Series platform (formerly Arrow Lake). Primarily designed to bring AI functionality to applications such as industrial robots and AMRs, the UP Xtreme ARL Edge boasts a ruggedized enclosure with fanless operation, capable of operating in temperatures as wide as -20°C to 60°C. Moreover, the Mini PC is equipped with a 9 V to 36 V DC power input range, while also boasting impressive resistance to shock and vibration.

Despite its fanless operation, the UP Xtreme ARL Edge offers a choice of Intel Core Ultra (Series 2) processors, with default models offering the Intel Core Ultra 5 processor 225H, Intel Core Ultra 7 processor 255H, or the Intel Core Ultra 7 processor 265H, with the latter capable of utilizing the platform's enhanced integrated CPU, GPU, and NPU to provide up to 97 TOPS of AI performance.

Electronic Arts Inc. today announced preliminary financial results for its second fiscal quarter ended September 30, 2025. "Across our broad portfolio - from EA SPORTS to Battlefield, The Sims, and skate. - our teams continue to create high-quality experiences that connect and inspire players around the world," said Andrew Wilson, CEO of Electronic Arts. "The creativity, passion, and innovation of our teams are at the heart of everything we do."

Selected Operating Highlights and Metrics

• Net bookings for the quarter totaled $1.818 billion, down 13% year-over-year, driven largely by the extraordinary release of College Football 25 in the prior year period.
• EA SPORTS Madden NFL 26 delivered net bookings growth year-over-year in the quarter, with players returning to the title.
• Apex Legends returned to net bookings growth on a year-over-year basis in Q2, growing double digits, as the team continues to deliver new experiences that drove deeper engagement.
• EA SPORTS FC 26 HD net bookings were up mid single digits year-over-year versus EA SPORTS FC 25 HD net bookings in the quarter, after adjusting for differences in deluxe edition content timing.
• The successful launches of skate. and Battlefield 6 - underscore the strength of EA's long-term strategy to build community-driven experiences centered on creativity, connection, and long-term growth.

Logitech International today announced financial results for the second quarter of Fiscal Year 2026.

• Sales were $1.19 billion, up 6 percent in US dollars and 4 percent in constant currency compared to Q2 of the prior year.
• GAAP gross margin was 43.4 percent, down 20 basis points compared to Q2 of the prior year. Non-GAAP gross margin was 43.8 percent, down 30 basis points compared to Q2 of the prior year.
• GAAP operating income was $191 million, up 19 percent compared to Q2 of the prior year. Non-GAAP operating income was $230 million, up 19 percent compared to Q2 of the prior year.
• GAAP earnings per share (EPS) was $1.15, up 21 percent compared to Q2 of the prior year. Non-GAAP EPS was $1.45, up 21 percent compared to Q2 of the prior year.
• Cash flow from operations was $229 million. The quarter-ending cash balance was $1.4 billion.
• The Company returned $340 million to shareholders through its annual dividend payment and share repurchases.

Leading gaming accessories maker Turtle Beach Corporation and its Victrix brand, today announced the launch of the new Victrix Pro BFG Reloaded Wireless Modular Controller - PC Edition. The Victrix Pro BFG Controllers have long been coveted by competitive esports gamers the world over, and the refined Victrix Pro BFG Reloaded Wireless Modular Controller - PC Edition adds powerful features. These latest upgrades include magnetic, anti-drift Hall Effect thumbsticks and triggers, a new touch-sensitive trackpad on the front of the controller, back buttons that can be mapped to any controller input as well as to keyboard and mouse inputs, and a 1 kHz polling rate for even faster input that's available when using the controller in wired mode.

The Victrix Pro BFG Reloaded Wireless Modular Controller - PC Edition is built for serious PC gamers and is available in North America as a Best Buy retail exclusive and directly from Turtle Beach at www.turtlebeach.com. Globally, the controller is also available on turtlebeach.com and participating retailers for $189.99|£159.99|€179.99 MSRP.

SK hynix Inc. announced today that it has recorded 24.4489 trillion won in revenues, 11.3834 trillion won in operating profit (with an operating margin of 47%), and 12.5975 trillion won in net profit (with a net margin of 52%) in the third quarter. The company achieved its highest-ever quarterly performance, driven by the full-scale rise in prices of DRAM and NAND, as well as the increasing shipments of high-performance products for AI servers. In particular, operating profit exceeded 10 trillion won for the first time in the company's history.

As demand across the memory segment has soared due to customers' expanding investments in AI infrastructure, SK hynix once again surpassed the record-high performance of the previous quarter due to increased sales of high value-added products such as 12-high HBM3E and DDR5 for servers. Driven by surging demand for AI servers, shipments of high-capacity DDR5s of 128 GB or more have more than doubled from the previous quarter. In NAND, the portion of AI server eSSD, which commands a price premium, expanded significantly as well. Building on this strong performance, the company's cash and cash equivalents at the end of the third quarter increased by 10.9 trillion won from the previous quarter, reaching 27.9 trillion won. Meanwhile, interest bearing debt stood at 24.1 trillion won, enabling the company to successfully transition to a net cash position of 3.8 trillion won.

A leaked product installation guide by Thermaltake confirms that Intel's upcoming desktop socket for its Core Ultra 400 series "Nova Lake-S" processors, the LGA1954, will retain cooler compatibility with the current LGA1851 and previous LGA1700. This was rumored as far back as May 2025, but now has confirmation from a major CPU cooler manufacturer. This means you should be able to reuse your CPU coolers purchased as far back as 2021 for your 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" build, with your future "Nova Lake" build. The LGA1954 socket and package is expected to have similar physical dimensions to current Intel desktop chips, with the company increasing socket pin counts by reducing the size of the contact points, and making the island—the central region of the land grid that has some SMDs—smaller.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading computing, and storage solutions innovator, today announced new models of the acclaimed TBS-h574TX all-flash NASbook, which come pre-installed with enterprise-grade E1.S SSDs. Available with two raw capacities, 9.6 TB or 19.2 TB, the new models are purpose-built for high-throughput post-production workflows including video editing, visual effects (VFX), and animation. With support for hot-swappable E1.S SSDs, the TBS-h574TX enables uninterrupted ingest-to-delivery operations—empowering on-location shoots, small-scale video production teams, SOHO users, and mobile media professionals to collaborate seamlessly and maintain peak productivity.

"Speed and reliability are critical in media production. By integrating QNAP-validated E1.S SSDs into the TBS-h574TX, users no longer need to worry about drive compatibility. They can power on, configure, and get straight to editing." said Andy Chuang, Product Manager of QNAP, adding "This NASbook combines portable design, all-flash performance, and hot-swappable SSDs to offer a uniquely compact, powerful, and zero-downtime experience—so teams can focus on creativity anytime, anywhere with peace of mind."

Seagate Technology Holdings plc (NASDAQ: STX), a leading innovator of mass-capacity data storage, today reported financial results for its fiscal first quarter ended October 3, 2025. "Seagate delivered strong September quarter results, with revenue growth of 21% year-over-year and non-GAAP EPS exceeding the high end of our guided range. Our performance underscores the team's strong execution and robust customer demand for our high-capacity storage products," said Dave Mosley, Seagate's chair and chief executive officer.

"With clear visibility into sustained demand strength, we are ramping shipments of our areal density-leading Mozaic HAMR products, which are now qualified with five of the world's largest cloud customers. These products address customers' performance, durability and TCO needs at scale to continue supporting demand for existing use cases such as social media video platforms as well as growth driven by new AI applications. AI is transforming how content is being consumed and generated, increasing the value of data and storage and Seagate is well positioned for continued profitable growth," Mosley concluded.

Durabook, the global rugged mobile solutions brand owned by Twinhead International Corporation, today announced the launch of its next-generation AI-powered fully rugged R10 tablet. Equipped with high-performance Intel Core Ultra 200V series processors, the 10" device is one of the first Copilot+ PC rugged tablets on the market. Redefining versatility in the tablet world, the R10 can be paired with a detachable backlit keyboard, seamlessly transforming it into a 2-in-1 rugged laptop PC. This adaptable design delivers the ideal balance of performance, reliability, and mobility, empowering users with a powerful and intelligent rugged device that fuses cutting-edge AI capabilities with Durabook's hallmark durability and field-proven design.

Twinhead's CEO, Fred Kao, said: "Durabook devices are built to meet the needs of professionals who depend on powerful, reliable technology to stay productive in any environment. The compact and versatile R10 redefines the 10-inch rugged tablet category by providing AI-enhanced productivity supported by smart engineering for optimal usability. The R10's adaptive design and customisation capability make it the perfect partner for field service operatives working across a wide range of sectors, including industrial manufacturing, warehouse management, automotive diagnostics, public safety, utilities, transport and logistics."

In the era of AI-generated software, developers still need to make sure their code is clean. That’s where TestSprite wants to help.

The Seattle startup announced $6.7 million in seed funding to expand its platform that automatically tests and monitors code written by AI tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Windsurf.

TestSprite’s autonomous agent integrates directly into development environments, running tests throughout the coding process rather than as a separate step after deployment.

“As AI writes more code, validation becomes the bottleneck,” said CEO Yunhao Jiao. “TestSprite solves that by making testing autonomous and continuous, matching AI speed.”

The platform can generate and run front- and back-end tests during development to ensure AI-written code works as expected, help AI IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) fix software based on TestSprite’s integration testing reports, and continuously update and rerun test cases to monitor deployed software for ongoing reliability.

Founded last year, TestSprite says its user base grew from 6,000 to 35,000 in three months, and revenue has doubled each month since launching its 2.0 version and new Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration. The company employs about 25 people.

Jiao is a former engineer at Amazon and a natural language processing researcher. He co-founded TestSprite with Rui Li, a former Google engineer.

Jiao said TestSprite doesn’t compete with AI coding copilots, but complements them by focusing on continuous validation and test generation. Developers can trigger tests using simple natural-language commands, such as “Test my payment-related features,” directly inside their IDEs.

The seed round was led by Bellevue, Wash.-based Trilogy Equity Partners, with participation from Techstars, Jinqiu Capital, MiraclePlus, Hat-trick Capital, Baidu Ventures, and EdgeCase Capital Partners. Total funding to date is about $8.1 million.

It looks like Crash Bandicoot is the newest video game classic to move to Netflix Netflix is the king of video game adaptations. In recent years, Netflix has adapted Castlevania, Tomb Raider, Splinter Cell, Sonic the Hedgehog, and even Cyberpunk 2077. Now, the streaming giant is reportedly developing a new animated series based on Crash […]

The post Crash Bandicoot Netflix series in the works – reports claim appeared first on OC3D.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed that securing board approval for investing $1 billion in OpenAI was challenging. Bill Gates warned that it was like setting the money ablaze.

From veteran developers behind the early God of War titles and various PlatinumGames and FromSoftware titles comes an exciting new action RPG called Loulan: The Cursed Sand, coming soon to PlayStation 5 and Steam.

By Yakov Filippenko

No founder plans for the day they get fired from their own company.

You plan for funding rounds, product launches and exits, but not for the boardroom moment when everyone raises their hand, and you realize your journey inside the company is over.

It happened to me. I called that board meeting. I set the vote. We had to choose who would stay, me or my co-founder. The vote didn’t go my way.

In movies, this is where the music swells and the credits roll. Steve Jobs after John Sculley. Travis Kalanick after Bill Gurley. In real life, there’s no cinematic pause. No final scene. Just the quiet realization that everything you built now belongs to someone else.

What follows isn’t drama, either. It’s disorientation. And like most founders, I had no idea how to handle it.

Don’t fill the silence too fast

When it ended, I filled my calendar with aimless meetings. Five or six a day. Not because they had any real purpose, but because it felt strange not to be doing business. For more than 10 years, I’d never had a day when I didn’t have to think about work. A startup teaches you to fix things fast.

When you’re out, though, there’s nothing left to fix. Only yourself. Getting pushed out isn’t like missing a quarterly target. It’s like losing the story you’ve been telling yourself for years.

The hardest part is that you don’t know who to blame.

Investors? They were doing their job. Yourself? Every decision made sense in context. So the frustration lands on the person closest to you. Your co-founder. It’s not about logic. I would say it is more of a defense mechanism. It’s how the mind tries to make sense of loss.

Learn to see the pattern

For months, I kept asking: What did we do wrong? It took me a couple of years to see the pattern.

Later, working inside a venture fund helped me see the truth. I saw the same story play out again and again. Founders repeating the same emotional arc, as follows:

• Expectation of an M&A deal;
• Long wait for the deal;
• The deal collapses;
• The startup stalls;
• Expectations diverge; and then
• Resentment between co-founders

Every time, the same sequence. And when the dream fades, blame fills the gap.

The pattern itself is that the anger toward a co-founder is often a projection of disappointment from a failed deal. If that energy isn’t processed consciously, it finds its own way out, usually as anger. You can’t really be mad at yourself; you did everything right. The other side acted in their own interest. So it lands on the person next to you, your co-founder and your team, and for them, it’s you.

And that’s where I have a bit of a claim toward investors because they often see this dynamic coming and could at least warn founders about it.

Once I recognized the pattern, I stopped seeing my story as a failure. It was part of a cycle almost every founder goes through, only most don’t talk about it.

Trade strategy for emotional tools

Traditional business tools didn’t help. OKRs, planning sessions, strategy off-sites, none of it worked on the inner collapse that comes when your identity and your company split apart.

This led me to begin studying Gestalt therapy. It gave me the language to understand how situations like this actually work, their cycles, causes and effects, and how to think about them with the right awareness and perspective. One part of building startups isn’t about pivots or fundraising. It’s realizing how much of yourself you’ve tied to the story you’re telling the world.

The point is to first get conscious of your anger, and then let it out.

Acceptance comes in stages

Acceptance doesn’t show up all at once. It arrives in pieces.

For me, the first piece came when I watched another founder go through the same breakdown and recognized every stage.

The second came when my first startup was acquired. Not at the valuation I’d dreamed of, but enough to accept that it continued without me. The third came with my current company, Intch, which is built from calm, not from fear.

I no longer measure success by control, but by clarity.

What I’d tell a founder in that room

Here’s what I’d share now with another entrepreneur who finds themselves in the same situation.

• You’re losing a story, not your worth. Give yourself space to grieve it.
• Don’t let anger choose a target. Name the pattern instead.
• Find mirrors. Other founders are walking through the same steps.
• Business tools have limits. Emotional tools matter here.
• Acceptance comes in stages. You’ll recognize them when they arrive.

Founders are trained to manage everything except their own psychology. But startups are way more than capital and code. They run on the emotional architecture of the people who build them. And when that structure breaks, rebuilding it is the most important startup you’ll ever work on.

---

 Yakov Filippenko is a seasoned entrepreneur with more than 10 years of experience in IT and technologies, as well as scaling businesses internationally. As a product manager at Yandex, he led a team that grew the product’s user base from 500,000 to 1.2 million and secured its entry into the international market. Subsequently, he co-founded SailPlay, which he scaled to 45 countries and eventually exited, after it was acquired by Retail Rocket in 2018. In 2021, Filippenko launched Intch, an AI-powered platform connecting part-time professionals with flexible roles.

Illustration: Dom Guzman

The stunning OLED display on the iPad Pro is one of its most compelling features, but the tablet's high price remains a barrrier for those who don't need all its power and features.

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With its many accessibility options, Ninja Gaiden 4 is one of the most approachable entries in the series, allowing players to experience its high-speed action without letting the high challenge level get in the way of enjoyment. Those who want to truly appreciate the game, however, will wish to master many of its intricacies, put their skills to the test, and attempt to achieve an S rank for completing each of the story chapters. Here are some tips to help you understand the mission scoring system and what you should always strive to do to achieve such a high rank. […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/how-to/ninja-gaiden-4-achieve-s-rank-easily-in-all-missions-with-this-trick/

The A20 and A20 Pro will be Apple’s first chipsets fabricated on TSMC’s 2nm process, pretty much highlighting the company’s propensity to jump to the newest manufacturing nodes as quickly as possible to have an advantage over the competition. On the same lithography, we expect the California-based giant to introduce a total of four chipsets, and after a couple of generations, Apple will switch to an even more advanced technology. The most obvious transition would be TSMC’s A16, or 1.6nm, but a report says neither company has entered talks for this node. Future Apple chipsets are expected to take advantage of […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/apple-not-yet-in-talks-with-tsmc-over-a16-process/

John Romero might not be a name that youngsters recognize, but he was a legend of the early days of the first-person shooter genre, co-founding id Software and making videogames like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Hexen, and Quake, to name a few. Nowadays, he makes smaller titles at Romero Games. The studio's most recent title was the Mafia-themed turn-based strategy game Empire of Sin, launched in late 2020 to a mixed reception. More recently, John Romero and his fellow developers signed a deal with Microsoft for their next project, but that deal went awry along with the latest Xbox layoffs. The […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/john-romero-talking-companies-finish-game-funded-by-microsoft/

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was featured in a live interview on TBPN (Technology Business Programming Network) discussing various topics, including the company's updated multiplatform strategy on the gaming front. Nadella pointed out that following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft is now the largest gaming publisher in terms of revenue. The goal, then, is to be everywhere the consumer is, just like with Office. The Microsoft CEO then interestingly referred to TikTok, or, to be more accurate, short-form video as a whole, as the true competitor of gaming. Remember, the biggest gaming business is the Windows business. And of course, […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/microsoft-ceo-largest-gaming-publisher-want-to-be-everywhere-competition-tiktok/

ZipWik lets you turn several documents—PDFs, slides, images or spreadsheets—into one simple document and a link you can share anywhere, from WhatsApp to Slack. You can control who sees it, set it to expire, and skip the hassle of sending large attachments. ZipWik also shows you what happens after you share: who viewed it, how long they spent, whether they downloaded or shared it, and which documents got the most attention. It’s an easy way to share files, stay in control, and actually understand how people engage with your content.

No more struggles with large attachments, sharing documents that you cannot control, inability to combine document formats..ZipWik does it all. Try Today.

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Threat actors are actively exploiting multiple security flaws impacting Dassault Systèmes DELMIA Apriso and XWiki, according to alerts issued by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and VulnCheck. The vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2025-6204 (CVSS score: 8.0) - A code injection vulnerability in Dassault Systèmes DELMIA Apriso that could allow an attacker to

Microsoft and OpenAI’s new deal means the arrival of AGI must be confirmed by independent experts.

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The Dell Tower Plus (EBT2250) can be so many things, a budget productivity machine or gaming powerhouse, depending on the configuration. Regardless, it’s worth your attention.

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Powerful and easily pocketable, the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 and Z Flip FE are Samsung's latest compact foldables – these are the best plans available for them.

The partnership aims to issue about 2 million fixed-deposit-backed credit cards in the next 12 months.

A new modular audio hub combining sound card power and stream deck flexibility.

Microsoft is testing a new memory diagnostic tool that will scan for memory errors after Windows 11 hard crashes with a bug check and BSOD. The new tool is aimed at better identifying BSODs caused by memory instability.

AI launches your product: page, posts, PH draft all in one

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Your copilot for on-brand content at any scale

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One workspace where AI, code, and teams work together

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Host LLMs across devices sharing GPU to make your AI go brrr

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When startups Financial data meets business intelligence

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The weekly AI project chart judged by AI

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All investor relations material in one powerful AI chat.

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Understand, review, and refactor your code 20x faster

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Preview and share live app updates across any device

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Stop running commands one by one yourself

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The AI writing partner with taste

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Turn a boring LinkedIn post into a fun TikTok-style video

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Screen recordings made beautiful

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AI code editor for PyTorch development on GPU workspaces

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Build full-stack apps with AI from Database first

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