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Your Purple Team Isn't Purple — It's Just Red and Blue in the Same Room

Defending a network at 2 am looks a lot like this: an analyst copy-pasting a hash from a PDF into a SIEM query. A red team script is being rewritten by hand so the blue team can use it. A patch waiting on a change-approval window that's longer than the exploitation window itself. Nobody in that chain is incompetent. Every human is doing their job correctly. The problem is the system, its

RPCS3 says no to AI slop code with new code guidelines

RPCS3 posts strict AI guidelines to combat “AI slop code” The team behind RPCS3, the PlayStation 3 emulator, has taken action against “AI slop code” due to its impact on the emulator’s development. The team has reported that it has had to revert many “slop PRs” (pull requests) that caused major regressions within the PS3 […]

The post RPCS3 says no to AI slop code with new code guidelines appeared first on OC3D.

Microsoft Drops The Hammer On Forza Horizon 6 Leakers With Hardware Bans Lasting Nearly 8,000 Years

Three cars in Forza Horizona 6, including a blue Toyota GR86, drive between towering snow walls towards a snowy mountain.

Forza Horizon 6 is launching next week on PC and Xbox Series X|S, but a massive failure in Steamworks publishing leaked a fully playable build of the game without DRM. With the latest entry in the series being one of the biggest titles published by Xbox this year, the publisher is dealing with the situation in the harshest way possible, hitting users playing the leaked build with what essentially is a lifetime hardware ban. As widely reported in now-deleted threads on the series' official subreddit, early players are being suspended for "cheating/unallowed modding," which was to be expected. The suspension […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/microsoft-drops-hammer-forza-horizon-6-leakers-hardware-ban/

AI data center developers target rural territory to bypass city construction bans and regulations — rural locations allow sites to bypass city council approvals, rezoning votes, land-use reviews, and reduce public scrutiny

Data center projects are increasingly being put on unincorporated land to reduce the regulatory friction brought about by municipal level permits. These rural sites also offer larger parcels, giving more spaces to build various building and could potentially affect less people.

Scammers are selling fake DDR5 with empty plastic chips relabeled to pass as legit — fake components mounted to PCBs are yet another sign of the RAMpocalypse

DDR5 memory is overpriced right now, which might make some people desperate to get their hands on a good deal. Unfortunately, that could lead to you being taken advantage of with fake modules that are literally empty inside. A Japanese buyer warns of how this scam works and how to stay away from it.

Promizi – Find verified coupon codes that work in real time


Promizi is a coupon platform that helps users find discount codes that actually work. Instead of listing thousands of unverified offers, it highlights codes with higher success rates based on recent usage and real user activity. It’s built to remove the frustration of trying expired or unreliable coupons. By focusing on clarity and relevance, Promizi makes it faster and easier to find deals that can be used immediately.

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StatusBird – Monitor 75+ ecommerce services and get instant outage alerts


StatusBird provides uptime monitoring for over 75 e-commerce services like Shopify, Stripe, Klaviyo, and ShipStation. It checks each service every two minutes and sends SMS, email, Slack, Teams, or Discord alerts as soon as outages or degraded performance occur.

You get a real-time status dashboard, incident history, smart alert controls, and a public status page, all set up in under two minutes with no code.

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Movaguide – Get tailored things to do based on your time, location, and budget


Movaguide helps you decide what to do based on your available time, location, budget, and mood. Enter where you are and how long you have, and it builds smart plans with curated activities you can like and save. You can explore nearby options and adjust your budget or preferences to refine recommendations so you make the most of any free time.

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Winning the next era of local visibility: How AI is changing local search by SOCi

AI-powered experiences like Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Ask Maps are changing how customers discover local businesses. People are asking more detailed, conversational questions, and AI-powered systems can now influence which businesses get surfaced.

Traditional rankings are only part of the visibility equation. Complete, accurate business information — including your Google Business Profile, reviews, photos, and local content — can help customers and AI systems better understand your brand.

Join SOCi and Google for an exclusive webinar, Winning the Next Era of Local Visibility, on June 3.

You will learn:

  • How AI is transforming local search.
  • Which signals may influence AI recommendations.
  • How to improve visibility across Search, Maps, and Gemini.
  • What Ask Maps means for your brand.

AI is already shaping how customers find businesses. Make sure yours is one of them.

Register now

AMD Radeon 26.5.1 driver breaks Blender Cycles – Fix incoming

AMD Software 26.5.1 breaks Blender Cycles, but a fix is incoming AMD released its AMD Software 26.5.1 Radeon GPU drivers last week, and they are causing mayhem amongst Blender users. Blender users have reported a number of issues, including crashes, non-functional denoising, and broken HIP support. These bugs are caused by AMD’s move to ROCm […]

The post AMD Radeon 26.5.1 driver breaks Blender Cycles – Fix incoming appeared first on OC3D.

Intel CEO Confirms Ongoing Product Collaboration with NVIDIA

Intel's CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, has confirmed that the collaboration with NVIDIA is ongoing, and we are about to see the results of the partnership announced late last year. Yesterday, Carnegie Mellon University awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Science and Technology to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang for his outstanding contributions to the fields of accelerated computing and AI. Intel's Lip-Bu Tan had the honor of placing the doctoral hood on him. In a post on X, the Intel CEO confirmed that Intel and NVIDIA are still working together to "develop exciting new products," indicating that the long-promised integration of NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs within Intel SoCs is still in progress. What began as an initial investment from NVIDIA into Intel and an announcement of product collaboration is evolving into a much deeper integration of both companies into a unified ecosystem.

First, we look forward to seeing Intel chips that integrate third-party GPU IP, this time from NVIDIA, with its GeForce RTX graphics embedded in an Intel-branded package. Similar to the now almost forgotten "Kaby Lake G" collaboration with AMD, Intel plans to integrate third-party graphics into its x86 SoC, codenamed "Serpent Lake," which is scheduled to be the first joint collaboration between NVIDIA and Intel in a single chip package. Second, we anticipate customized x86 Xeon server processors for NVIDIA, which Intel has been producing for large hyperscalers like Amazon for years. NVIDIA is also integrating Intel Xeon processors alongside its custom "Grace" and "Vera" CPUs, with designs customized by Intel for their HGX AI server nodes.

(PR) ASUS Announces ProArt Display OLED PA27USD and PA32USD Monitors

ASUS today announced that ProArt Display OLED PA27USD and OLED PA32USD will be available by May 2026. These two monitors are the latest additions to the ProArt OLED monitor lineup, with the PA27USD winning a CES 2026 Innovation Award earlier this year and Red Dot Product Design Awards. The 26.5-inch ProArt Display OLED PA27USD and 31.5-inch PA32USD boast 4K QD-OLED panels with up to 1000 nits peak brightness (3% area) for exceptional contrast. Both monitors offer 99% DCI-P3 and true 10-bit color depth for exceptional color reproduction that exceeds industry standards, making them ideal for video editing and other post-production workflows.

ProArt Display OLED PA27USD and PA32USD are factory calibrated to Delta E<1 color accuracy and support ProArt calibration software as well as Calman and Light Illusion ColourSpace CMS professional hardware-calibration software. Both monitors also offer an array of connectivity options, including dual Thunderbolt 4 ports (one supporting up to 96-watt Power Delivery and the other offering daisy-chain support), HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 2.1, and a built-in USB 3.2 hub with two USB Type-A and one USB Type-C ports to support a wide range of devices and peripherals. In addition, the PA27USD includes one 12G-SDI input and the PA32USD is equipped with dual 12G-SDI inputs to support uncompressed video signals at up to 4K @ 60 Hz.

Dragon Quest XII: The Flames of Fate Could Finally Get Revealed This Month, 5 Years After Its Announcement

The logo for Dragon Quest XII with fiery cracks in the background.

Dragon Quest XII: The Flames of Fate has been known to be in the works since the series' 35th anniversary in May 2021, but very little is known about the next main entry in the long-running JRPG series other than the fact that it will be powered by Unreal Engine 5. Since the game's reveal, we saw the release of four remakes, but series creator Yuji Horii recently teased that the game will be back in the spotlight starting later this month. Speaking during the latest episode of the KosoKoso broadcast, the Dragon Quest series creator confirmed that a series […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/dragon-quest-xii-the-flames-of-fate-revealed-5-years-announcement/

Steam Machine Buyers Will Face a Queue System For Its 4 Models, as Valve Moves to Prevent Scalper Markups Early

A Steam Machine with visible USB ports and a power button on a beige surface.

Following the disappointing launch of the Steam Controller, which saw units sell out almost immediately, only to end up in the hands of scalpers, Valve introduced a reservation queue to prevent a repeat of the situation. As spotted in the same Steam update that introduced the system for the new controller, a similar safeguard will be in place for both the Steam Machine and the Steam Frame. Users analyzing the system via Steam Tracker have discovered code for four Steam Machine packages and two Steam Frame packages alongside the Steam Controller and Steam Deck entries. This heavily suggests that the […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/steam-machine-queue-system-4-models-scalpers/

Gears of War: E-Day Lands Between Halo and Fable as WWE Sponsorship Hints at September Slot in Xbox’s Calendar

Marcus Fenix from the video game Gears of War: E-Day wearing futuristic armor with glowing blue lights and a headband.

We might have a probable launch month for Gears of War: E-Day, The Coalition's new installment in the third-person shooter series. The rumor comes not from an insider but from an unlikely source: a sponsorship. During WWE Backlash on Saturday, May 9, it was announced that Gears of War: E-Day is the official presenting sponsor of AAA Triplemania 2026, the premier Lucha Libre event happening on September 11 and 13 in Mexico City. The thing is, publishers don't sponsor major live events months before their game releases: the whole point is to reach a mass audience at peak marketing momentum. Moreover, historically, […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/gears-of-war-e-day-release-date-september-wwe-sponsorship/

Crimson Desert Patch 1.06 Turns Bears, Tigers, And Raptors Into Mounts While Pearl Abyss Chases Player Wishlists

A character in Crimson Desert walking through a lush forest landscape with a dog wearing armor at their side.

Missing the early weekend release window of the previous major patches, the Crimson Desert 1.06.00 patch is now live across PC and consoles, introducing yet another highly requested feature by the community - the Extraction feature that essentially rolls back weapon upgrades to receive materials back - new Special Mounts and the one feature no one would have expected to see in the game: a gacha vending machine. The new patch significantly expands the Special Mounts options, allowing you to register Bears, Boars, Wolves, Deer, Mountain Goats, Kuku Birds, Raptors, Camels, Lions, and Tigers as a mount after subduing and […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/crimson-desert-patch-1-06-bears-raptors-mounts-player-whishlists/

Markat.ai – Test early-stage AI products with real users and get structured feedback


Markat.ai is a private beta testing sandbox for product validation. It lets founders, product teams, and developers test early AI products with real users and capture structured feedback on usability, clarity, and direction. Use guided sessions to validate concepts, refine features, and reduce launch risk before going public. Testers explore pre-release products and share actionable insights that shape what you build next.

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Zorq AI – Create videos, images, voices, and avatars from one AI workspace


Zorq AI is a multimodal workspace for creative teams to produce finished assets from a single brief. It combines AI image and video generation, motion transfer, typography design, editing, voice cloning, and lip-sync into guided workflows, so you describe the outcome and receive the deliverable. Use one account and credit pool across twelve workflows, from text-to-video and image-to-video to create and edit images, plus talking avatars and cloned voiceovers. Skip model menus and handoffs; deliver cinematic clips, polished images, and production-ready audio quickly.

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Fake OpenAI Privacy Filter Repo Hits #1 on Hugging Face, Draws 244K Downloads

A malicious Hugging Face repository managed to take a spot in the platform's trending list by impersonating OpenAI's Privacy Filter open-weight model to deliver a Rust-based information stealer to Windows users. The project, named Open-OSS/privacy-filter, masqueraded as its legitimate counterpart, released by OpenAI late last month (openai/privacy-filter), including copying the entire

SK hynix Eyes Intel EMIB 2.5D Packaging for HBM Memory

SK hynix is collaborating with Intel to utilize its Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB) 2.5D packaging technology for HBM memory. As SK hynix aims to diversify its supply chain and customers are increasingly considering Intel Foundry, the South Korean memory giant is exploring research and development efforts with Intel on 2.5D packaging technology. Intel's premier 2.5D packaging technology is its EMIB, which interconnects multiple silicon dies using bridges embedded in a packaging substrate. SK hynix is interested in integrating this technology into its HBM memory, presumably to bring its HBM4 memory modules up to standard for EMIB integration, should its AI chip partners choose Intel Foundry for advanced packaging of their next-generation solutions.

We have already covered that small silicon EMIB bridges—available in variants like EMIB-M with embedded MIM capacitors and EMIB-T with TSVs—provide low-cost, high-density shoreline connections ideal for logic-to-logic and logic-to-HBM interfaces. However, until now, SK hynix has been using TSMC and its CoWoS 2.5D packaging technology. As CoWoS is gradually reaching its limits and customers are seeking alternative packaging methods, EMIB is emerging as a strong candidate to continue the scaling of chiplets in many directions beyond the traditional reticle limit of 830 mm² of silicon area.

AMD Radeon GPU Drivers 26.5.1 Break Blender Cycles Path-Tracing Engine

AMD's latest Adrenalin Edition 26.5.1 WHQL Drivers are causing problems for Blender users, according to the latest Blender issue tracker. Blender 5.1.1 is crashing with these drivers, particularly when using the Cycles path-tracing render engine. The issue appears to be a ROCm runtime mismatch. Blender 5.1.1 uses ROCm 6 runtimes, but the latest AMD driver 26.5.1 only includes ROCm 7, leading to compatibility issues that prevent the application from running smoothly. Multiple users have reported crashes, and we now understand the background.

Developer involved in AMD evosystem Sahar A. Kashi confirmed that when a factory reset is performed and the system is installed from scratch, the amdhip64_6.dll file is removed, causing Blender Cycles to attempt loading ROCm 7 kernels. However, since Blender version 5.1.1 is compiled only for ROCm 6, this runtime mismatch results in application crashes. To resolve this issue on AMD GPU systems, users should install the older 26.4.1 drivers and use them until Blender version 5.2 is released, and the Cycles path-tracing render engine achieves full ROCm 7 compatibility.

SK hynix Turns to Intel’s EMIB Packaging as TSMC CoWoS Bottlenecks Squeeze the AI Supply Chain

As the race for the AI buildout continues to intensify, a shortage in the packaging industry has led memory manufacturer SK hynix to team up with Intel for chip packaging technology. After a strong comeback under CEO Lip-Bu Tan, Intel is now aiming to expand its presence in the packaging industry. The firm and SK hynix are collaborating on 2.5D packaging technology and Intel's Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB) technology as shortages create tightness in the current packaging supply chain. Intel & SK hynix Collaborating On EMIB Packaging As Shortages Impact 2.5D Packaging Supply Chain Intel's EMIB packaging technology is […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/sk-hynix-turns-to-intels-emib-packaging-as-tsmc-cowos-bottlenecks-squeeze-the-ai-supply-chain/

CAPCOM’s Rumored Upcoming Slate: Devil May Cry 1 Remake, RE1 in Full Production, and a Full Roadmap Through 2030

Three panels featuring characters from CAPCOM video games: Ada Wong from Resident Evil, Dante from Devil May Cry, and Claire Redfield from Resident Evil, each in a distinct action pose.

Renowned CAPCOM leaker Dusk Golem recently corroborated a claim from an anonymous insider that Ada Wong will appear in Resident Evil Requiem DLC. However, after Dusk Golem named that insider as his source, Reddit users went digging through the same person's post history and surfaced a series of additional CAPCOM-related claims, none of which Dusk Golem has vouched for. The leaker has since explicitly distanced himself from the two most attention-grabbing ones: "The Devil May Cry 1 Remake and RE10 protag rumor did not come from me. Typical deal of people stuffing rumors together and then claiming I said them — that […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/capcom-leak-devil-may-cry-1-remake-re1-re10-full-roadmap/

Apple Strikes Deal with Intel Foundry Services for Chip Production in the U.S.

Apple and Intel Foundry Services have reached a preliminary agreement to onboard Apple as a foundry customer for manufacturing of Apple Silicon on its latest foundry nodes, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The move could see Apple end its near-total reliance on TSMC for production of its chips. Apple is looking to leverage the Intel 18A foundry node that offers comparable transistor densities and electric characteristics as TSMC's 2 nm-class nodes. Intel manufactures chips on the Intel 18A node in the state of Oregon, and is building new facilities in Ohio that will cater to future nodes. The company also has chip packaging facilities in states such as Arizona and Nevada. The move could improve Apple's contribution to the U.S. Government's efforts to onshore manufacturing of chips and other strategic commodities.

AMD's DGF SuperCompression Shrinks Geometry File Size by 22%

Late last year, AMD released a paper introducing its new Dense Geometry Format (DGF) 3D graphics technology, designed to compete with NVIDIA's RTX Mega Geometry. Today, the company is unveiling DGF SuperCompression (DGFS), a new compression technique within the DGF graphics stack, which reduces game geometry file sizes by up to 22% compared to standard DGF. With DGFS, AMD aims to achieve an average 22% reduction in compressed game asset streams when GDeflate is applied. This results in significantly smaller asset sizes, allowing for larger games without the need for expanded storage. As games now often require hundreds of gigabytes of installation space, compressing storage formats is a key strategy to fit more games on your PC without immediately needing additional storage. A 22% reduction in file size through proprietary compression makes installation sizes much more manageable.

However, it's important to note that since DGFS is a compression format for DGF, the mesh stream array produced by DGFS must be decoded before the game can load it. It's similar to a ZIP file, which you can't use until it's unzipped. DGFS data will behave in the same way, residing only in PC storage, not in memory as it is not a component that will be directly processed by the GPU. AMD has developed a CPU-based decoding process that decodes the compressed DGFS assets in real time during asset streaming, which AMD claims "should be sufficiently fast." There are also potential GPU-based decoding solutions, suggesting we might see faster implementations in the future when it hits software SDKs.
DGF SuperCompression

GIGABYTE Announces OLED Monitor Bundle with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Elevating Gaming Across Every Genre

GIGABYTE, the world's leading computer brand, announced a new limited-time bundle campaign offering gamers an enhanced way to experience today's most popular titles. Starting April 24 through May 31, 2026, customers who purchase select GIGABYTE OLED gaming monitors will receive three months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, unlocking access to a vast library of high-quality games across genres.

At the center of this campaign is the GIGABYTE MO27Q2A, a premium QHD OLED gaming monitor designed to deliver exceptional visual clarity, ultra-fast responsiveness, and immersive color performance. With its OLED panel technology, the MO27Q2A delivers VESA DisplayHDR True Black 400, 1.5M:1 vibrant contrast ratio, and stunning color accuracy, bringing every scene to life whether players are exploring expansive RPG worlds, competing in fast-paced shooters, or enjoying cinematic story-driven experiences available through Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.

For more information about the GIGABYTE MO27Q2A and the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate bundle, visit this page.

Clubly – See where your friends are going out tonight and join them


Clubly is a nightlife discovery and social app that answers the question everyone asks on a Friday night: where should we go tonight? Open the app to see which friends are heading out, discover nearby venues worth going to, RSVP, check in, and share moments from the night all in one place. For venue owners, Clubly offers an easy way to reach people who are actively deciding where to go. Claim your venue, get discovered, and promote your night to the right audience at the right moment.

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Actvtec – Drive measurable growth with Google Ads, SEO, and GEO services


Actvtec is an Israeli digital marketing agency with 19 years of experience. It specializes in Google Ads management, SEO, and GEO, optimizing brand visibility in AI answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. As a certified Google Partner, the team focuses on ROAS, lower CAC, and conversion lift with transparent reporting and senior-level management. Actvtec also runs Meta campaigns, builds high-converting landing pages and websites, and provides strategy supported by proprietary AI automations and a GEO Checker to monitor AI citations.

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The Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU And ASUS TUF Motherboard Combo From Amazon Offers A Solid PC Gaming Bundle Saving You $136 On Amazon

This Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU and ASUS TUF motherboard combo is going for $136 off on Amazon

AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D continues to be one of the finest gaming CPUs of this generation, and Amazon is making life much easier for gamers wanting to set up their high-end rigs at a lower price. With the DRAM crisis showing no signs of slowing down, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to own semi-decent hardware at incredible discounts, but this combo is a great start. You now get a premium ASUS TUF motherboard, and with the two parts combined, you get $136 in savings with the $622.98 price. You couldn’t have asked for a better motherboard pairing, as the ASUS TUF Gaming X870-PLUS […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/ryzen-7-9800x3d-and-asus-tuf-cpu-motherboard-combo-136-off-on-amazon/

Other Perspectives – Compare and analyze Facebook and Instagram accounts in one dashboard


Other Perspectives lets marketers, agencies, and creators benchmark Facebook and Instagram performance against competitors in one dashboard. Connect your pages through Meta’s official integration, add public competitor profiles, and get fresh post-level insights updated multiple times a day. Group accounts into brands, track engagement trends, and surface top-performing content to guide strategy. Start fast with a 14-day free trial, then choose a plan by account limits, team seats, and historical depth.

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Samsung Foundry Has Apparently Won A 2nm CPU Order From A “North American Fabless Customer,” With AMD Identified As The Order’s Source

A Samsung 2nm chip and an AMD EPYC processor are displayed against a blue cosmic background.

In what is entirely in line with rumors that have been swirling fairly persistently, AMD appears to have settled on Samsung's chip fabrication arm to produce its next-gen 2nm CPUs, Venice and Verano, as per the outlines of a fresh speculative reverie, this time from Daishin Securities. AMD best fits the contours of a fresh rumor that suggests Samsung has just won an order for 2nm CPUs The prolific tipster Jukan has just cited Daishin Securities to note that Samsung has likely won a new order for 2nm notebook CPUs. While Daishin only referenced a "North American fabless customer," Jukan […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/samsung-foundry-has-apparently-won-a-2nm-cpu-order-from-a-north-american-fabless-customer-with-amd-identified-as-the-orders-source/

Smilify – Manage your dental practice with AI scheduling, imaging, and insights


Smilify is a dental practice management platform that unifies scheduling, patient records, AI image enhancement, and real-time analytics in a secure cloud. It reduces no-shows with automated reminders, visualizes treatment outcomes with before/after galleries, and keeps HIPAA-compliant data accessible anywhere.

Teams use Smilify to manage calendars, profiles, and documents, track revenue and KPIs, collect testimonials, and control access with role-based permissions. Start quickly with a 14-day trial and scale from single offices to multi-location groups.

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3vo – Use AI agents to design, build, and launch your product in days


3vo is an AI-native product studio that uses teams of specialized AI agents to design, build, and launch digital products quickly and affordably. Agents handle design, development, and copy in parallel, so you can go from idea to live product in days or weeks. 3vo also sells its own tools, including Notion templates, AI prompt packs, automation workflows, an idea validator, and VC pitch prep. Independent builders can buy off-the-shelf systems or share an idea and have agents ship a real, revenue-ready product.

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NVIDIA Squashes Vera Rubin Rumors, First Shipments Rolling Out In July To Major AI Customers With Mass Production In 2H 26

NVIDIA Squashes Vera Rubin Rumors, First Shipments Rolling Out In July To Major AI Customers With Mass Production In 2H 26

NVIDIA has accelerated the rollout of its next-gen AI powerhouse, Vera Rubin, with first shipments commencing as early as July this year. Despite Rumors of Design Issues, NVIDIA is pushing ahead with a spectacular Vera Rubin Launch, The Center of Next-Gen AI A few days ago, we reported a few rumors that were going around regarding NVIDIA's Vera Rubin related to its design and specs changes. While the rumors sounded similar to what we heard about Blackwell GPU servers before their launch, NVIDIA has the ability to quickly address these pre-shipment drawbacks with the help of its supply chain partners, […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/nvidia-squashes-vera-rubin-rumors-first-shipments-rolling-out-in-july-to-ai-customers/

TechLexicon – Gamified tech vocabulary for beginners and career switchers


TechLexicon makes it easy to learn tech vocabulary through quick, addictive games. Play Acronym Blitz, Speed Round, Matching Game, Flashcards, and Tech Forge scenarios on web, iOS, and Android. Earn XP, build streaks, and challenge others in real-time 1v1 battles. Built for people breaking into tech—students, career switchers, and anyone studying for cloud or developer certifications. Instead of memorizing lists, you practice terms daily in ways that actually stick.

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Plume – Get fact-checked SEO articles that fill real ranking gaps in minutes


Plume creates research-backed SEO articles that rank. It starts with a SERP analysis of your top competitors, maps H1–H3 structure and coverage gaps, captures your brand voice with a questionnaire, independently verifies every claim, then drafts and auto-revises a full article before you see it. A dashboard tracks statuses, E-E-A-T, and SEO scores to guide optimization. You can export Word-ready DOCX files for any CMS. Plans scale from solo bloggers to agencies with monthly article credits and white-label options.

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Mortgage Compare Calculator – Compare mortgages and calculate payments with full amortization


Mortgage Compare Calculator helps you estimate true mortgage costs and payoff timelines. Adjust home price, down payment, interest rate, loan program, amortization, start date, and payment frequency, and factor in property taxes, insurance, and HOA. Add recurring or one-time extra payments and see the impact in a clear amortization schedule showing principal, interest, expenses, extras, and remaining balance. Free, private, no login, and runs entirely in your browser.

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StandrERly – Get on-demand HR decision support from certified professionals


StandrERly provides on-demand HR decision support from certified professionals. Submit your situation, get an upfront price, and receive clear, actionable guidance on employee relations, terminations, workplace complaints, documentation, and policy or compliance questions. Use it without contracts or minimums, with fast turnaround and transparent pricing, so you can move forward with confidence.

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NVIDIA’s V100, An 8-Year Old GPU, Now Sells for $100 and Crushes Modern Consumer Cards in AI LLM Workloads

NVIDIA's V100, An 8-Year Old GPU, Now Sells for $100 and Crushes Modern Consumer Cards in AI LLM Workloads

New GPUs are optimized substantially for AI workloads, but what if old GPUs like the 8-year-old NVIDIA V100, costing around $100, start to outperform recent offerings in LLMs? NVIDIA V100, an 8-Year-Old GPU, Dusted The 5-Year Old RTX 3060 & 3-Year Old RX 7800 XT With Better Performance & Efficienct In AL LLMs The NVIDIA Volta generation was the first purely dedicated data center series that wasn't available in the standard consumer gaming segment. Volta was the first family to feature the Tensor Core architecture, which has since become the staple for its AI advancements. The tensor core architecture was […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/nvidia-v100-an-8-year-old-gpu-now-sells-for-100-us-crushes-modern-consumer-cards-in-ai-llms/

SEO Refresher – Refresh blog posts with AI to boost SEO and AEO performance


SEO Refresher helps you update underperforming blog posts using real data from Google Search Console. Connect your site, choose posts that need improvement, and let Claude AI restructure and refine content to match search intent and AI answer engines. Export results to HTML or Google Docs and publish faster. With plans from free to enterprise, you save hours while lifting rankings, engagement, and ROI.

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The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess now has an unofficial PC version

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess now has a fully functional PC version The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has been successfully reverse-engineered, allowing modders to create new, unofficial versions of the game for Windows PC, Linux, macOS, iOS and Android. With the Dusk project, Twilight Princess is now playable at higher resolutions, higher framerates, […]

The post The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess now has an unofficial PC version appeared first on OC3D.

Silicon Motion CEO Warns Memory & SSD Shortages Will Drag Into 2028 as AI Firms Lock Up Supply Through Long-Term Contracts

Silicon Motion CEO Rings The Alarm Bells, Says Memory & SSD Shortages To Drag Into 2028

Silicon Motion's CEO has said that memory (DRAM) and SSD (NAND) shortages would last until 2028 due to the continued demand from AI firms. Memory & SSD Shortages Are So Bad That They Are Expected To Last Till 2028, And Prices Are Expected To Continue To Climb We know that memory and SSD shortages are bad, both in the enterprise and consumer segments. DRAM & NAND makers are adding new factories to boost production capabilities, but these aren't expected to become operational within this year. At the earliest, the first facility expansion and bring-up plans are expected around 2027, which […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/silicon-motion-ceo-warns-memory-ssd-shortages-will-drag-into-2028/

SMIC Founder Says It’s A “Misconception” That Semiconductor Success Is “Only Achieved When 3nm Or 2nm Is Reached” In New Interview

SMIC founder says it's a misconception to says that success can only be achieved when manufacturing 3nm or 2nm wafers

TSMC’s success in the semiconductor industry is primarily due to the manufacturer’s unyielding focus on its advanced processes and ability to achieve stability in record time, allowing the company to form long-term business relationships with trillion-dollar firms like Apple and NVIDIA. While being able to mass produce 3nm and 2nm wafers at a mammoth scale is certainly a tremendous feat, SMIC founder Richard Chang does not consider these accomplishments as a benchmark for success and calls it a misconception in the latest interview. Instead, he believes that there’s another attribute that semiconductor companies must acquire. SMIC’s founder says that “excellence […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/smic-founder-says-semiconductor-success-in-advanced-nodes-is-a-misconception/

Intel’s Lip-Bu Tan Teases “Exciting New Products” With NVIDIA as He Hoods Jensen Huang at Carnegie Mellon Doctorate Ceremony

Intel's Lip-Bu Tan Teases "Exciting New Products" With NVIDIA as He Hoods Jensen Huang at Carnegie Mellon Doctorate Ceremony

Intel's CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, has congratulated NVIDIA's CEO, Jensen Huang, on his Honorary Doctorate in Science and Technology, while working together on "exciting new products". Intel & NVIDIA's Journey Has Just Begun, & The World Will Soon See "Exciting New Product" Collabs Between The Tech Giants Today, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang delivered a keynote at Carnegie Mellon’s 2026 Commencement and received an honorary Doctor of Science and Technology degree. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan congratulated Jensen on this achievement and also announced that the two firms were working on new and exciting products. Lip-Bu acknowledged Jensen's contributions to accelerated computing and […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-lip-bu-tan-exciting-new-products-nvidia-hoods-jensen-huang-at-doctorate-ceremony/

A Customer Nabs An M4 Max MacBook Pro With A Terrific Configuration From A Pawn Shop Of All Places, For Just $1,501

A customer purchases an M4 Max MacBook Pro from a pawn shop for just $1,501

Apple’s M5 Max is currently the company’s top-end SoC to be found in the MacBook Pro, but there’s no universe in which the M4 Max would be considered diminished in any way because it’s still a ridiculously powerful SoC, and a downright expensive one at that. Naturally, any portable Mac featuring the previous-generation silicon would be sold at a premium, but one lucky customer managed to find a top-notch configuration from the most unlikely of places: a pawn shop, for just $1,501. Near-top-tier specifications of the M4 Max MacBook Pro found in a pawn shop featured 64GB of unified RAM and a […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/m4-max-macbook-pro-purchased-for-1501-from-a-pawn-shop/

Exabase – Give your AI agents real memory, context, and a workspace


Exabase is a data layer for AI agents that provides persistent, self-improving memory, semantic search, and a cloud filesystem. Its Memory API stores facts and events, builds a dynamic ontology, and returns task-ready context. The Resources and Bases APIs offer each user or agent a searchable workspace with files, notes, and isolated environments. Developers integrate via SDKs, REST, and CLI with fast retrieval, encryption in transit and at rest, and 99.9% uptime, so you can ship reliable, stateful agents quickly.

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Fake DDR5 memory is hitting the market amid supply shortage

Fake DDR5 modules are hitting the market as scammers attempt to take advantage of memory shortages Fake DDR5 memory modules have reportedly started circulating. While they appear legitimate at first glance, they are completely non-functional. The memory chips include bare circuit boards with no memory. TAKI on Twitter/X, as reported by WCCFTECH, cut into the […]

The post Fake DDR5 memory is hitting the market amid supply shortage appeared first on OC3D.

iPredicta – Compare prediction markets from Polymarket, Kalshi and more in one place


iPredicta is a discovery and intelligence platform for prediction markets. We aggregate live markets from Polymarket and Kalshi into one searchable hub, so you can compare odds across platforms, save markets you're tracking, and get alerts when prices move. Plain-English explainers help you understand how prediction markets work and how to think about probability, built for the next generation moving beyond traditional bookmakers. Coming soon: an arbitrage engine that surfaces price gaps between platforms in real time, alongside expansion to PredictIt, Robinhood, and Crypto.com. UK-launched, US expansion underway.

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RankSpot – Automate daily SEO articles that rank on Google and AI answers


RankSpot is an automated SEO agent that researches keywords, writes 2,000+ word articles, and publishes them to your blog daily. It connects to WordPress, Webflow, Wix, Shopify, and more, generates on-brand images, structures content for Google, and optimizes for AI assistant mentions. Track competitors, target high-intent queries, and review or edit before publishing while RankSpot grows your organic traffic hands-free.

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A cyberattack on Canvas knocked out access for students at Harvard, Columbia, and hundreds of other schools during finals


The company's chief information security officer, Steve Proud, wrote in an incident log that Instructure had "recently experienced a cybersecurity incident perpetrated by a criminal threat actor." A day later, he added that the exposed data included names, email addresses, student ID numbers, and messages exchanged on the platform. How...

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Apple’s visionOS Job Listings Don’t Indicate The Vision Pro’s Success, As Company Is Working On Incredible Advancements In Same Segment

visionOS job listings aren't an indicating that the Apple Vision Pro is selling well

There is a torrent of jobs available for Apple’s visionOS platform, which may hint that the California-based giant is going through an aggressive hiring spree since there’s incredible demand for the Vision Pro. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman didn’t believe this was the case and, as a result, was receiving flak for shutting down claims that Apple’s expensive $3,499 mixed-reality headset was a dud, despite the myriad of job postings. Now, he has come forth to bury the confusion by mentioning that Apple has grand plans for the future of visionOS. New job posts are for optimizing the visionOS platform, not to […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/apple-vision-pro-not-thriving-as-visionos-job-listings-are-for-other-products/

Apple’s Base M5 Pro MacBook Pro With 24GB Unified RAM Breaks Another Discount Record On Amazon, Now $215 On The Space Black Color

Apple's base M5 Pro MacBook Pro is now $215 off on Amazon

The M5 Pro is a fantastic chipset upgrade for those who want to migrate from Windows or those who believe that their older Apple Silicon is no longer the performer that it used to be. Fortunately, you get to pocket incredible savings on the powerful 14-inch MacBook Pro featuring this chipset because its base configuration has now broken yet another record by crossing the $200 discount threshold on Amazon and can be yours for $1,983.94. The M5 Pro MacBook Pro delivers legendary firepower, which is surprising given its double-digit battery life claims, all that and more, while being $215 off on […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/base-m5-pro-macbook-pro-now-215-cheaper-on-amazon/

AMD's excellent Radeon RX 9070 with 16 GB of VRAM hits all-time low pricing — PowerColor Hellhound variant is 23% off list price

If you've been looking for a GPU upgrade but were disappointed by the ongoing market conditions, a small window of opportunity has just sprung open. AMD's fantastic RX 9070 is on sale for just $554, discounted $165 from its typical retail price. It's a very capable 1440p card that can even game at 4K with enough upscaling.

Buzzblender – Manage and schedule digital signage across all screens from one dashboard


BuzzBlender is hardware-agnostic digital signage software made for small businesses tired of overpriced or complex tools. It works on any TV (LG, Samsung, Android TV, Philips, etc.) with no extra hardware needed and sets up quickly, with most people up and running in minutes. The software supports QR codes for promos, menus, lead capture, and more. It is fully cloud-based, so you can manage screens remotely. Pricing starts at $5 per screen per month.

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SpendCrypto – Buy gift cards for top brands with crypto, delivered instantly


SpendCrypto lets you buy digital gift cards for thousands of brands worldwide using Bitcoin, Ethereum, stablecoins, and more. You can browse categories from food and gaming to travel, pay on networks like Ethereum, Tron, BSC, and Polygon, and receive codes instantly in your account or by email. SpendCrypto makes it easy to turn crypto into everyday purchases.

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"A realm of remarkable efficiency and performance": Lenovo's new Yoga Slim 7x and its Snapdragon X2 Elite chip are a match I've had a blast using

Lenovo's new Yoga Slim 7x (Gen 11) has been my daily driver for a few weeks, and I've had an absolute blast testing out its performance and efficiency. It's not perfect, but most of the issues I encountered are remedied with an inexpensive upgrade.

Fake DDR5 Memory Sticks Flood The PC Markets, Equipped With Plastic DRAM As Prices Continue To Skyrocket

Counterfeit DDR5 Sticks Pack Plastic Chips and Fake Labels as Memory Prices Spiral Out of Control

Memory prices continue going up, and to make matters worse, fake DDR5 memory modules are now flooding the PC segment. Beware, Your Expensive DDR5 Memory Might Be Fake, PC Buyers Advised To Double-Check Their RAM Asian markets are now seeing fake DDR5 memory at several retailers, both online and in shops. These DDR5 memory modules might look real to an average buyer, but on closer inspection, they're equipped with fake DRAM modules and sometimes even worse. So there are several cases of fake DDR5 DRAM modules circulating in Asian markets. Some of these RAM sticks feature fake DRAM modules, which […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/fake-ddr5-memory-floods-pc-markets-prices-continue-to-rise/

3DMakerPro Toucan 3D Scanner review: All-in-one 3D scanning

Designed to be used as a standalone device, the 3DMakerPro Toucan allows users to capture a point cloud, generate a 3D model, and export it without using a computer. The hardware has a premium feel, and the Class 3R laser can create detailed point clouds quickly. However, the software lacks polish and has some quirks. Tracking loss, inconsistent export via Wi-Fi, and blurry color textures are all issues that occurred during testing.

Zappr – Meet real people nearby right now


Zappr is a French dating platform that sparks spontaneous, real-world connections. It helps you meet nearby people for short-lived, in-the-moment conversations and encounters. You start with basic details—first name, age, and gender—then get matched instantly to chat and meet now. Zappr emphasizes authenticity and immediacy over endless profiles and swipes, making it easy to act in the moment and connect face-to-face. Everything is temporary with a 2-hour time to live, so there are no GDPR issues. It is a classic "Tinder-like" meeting app but focuses on future location or events-oriented connections with QR codes.

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Ollama Out-of-Bounds Read Vulnerability Allows Remote Process Memory Leak

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a critical security vulnerability in Ollama that, if successfully exploited, could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to leak its entire process memory. The out-of-bounds read flaw, which likely impacts over 300,000 servers globally, is tracked as CVE-2026-7482 (CVSS score: 9.1). It has been codenamed Bleeding Llama by Cyera. Ollama is a

GIGABYTE Mixes Up GeForce And Radeon Shrouds, Shipping An RTX 5060 Ti With AMD Branding To A Stunned Buyer

A person holds a Gigabyte GeForce RTX graphics card repurposed with Radeon branding on a desk next to a keyboard.

A weird incident was just reported by a Redditor, detailing how his GPU got a different shroud instead of the GeForce one. GIGABYTE Mistakenly Swaps GeForce and Radeon Coolers on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs; Both Users Report Different Branding on Their Cards It's rare to see such incidents, but both reports confirm that GIGABYTE indeed made a mistake in the GPU assembly. A Reddit user u/atta4821 reported that he bought a GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5060 Ti from Canada Computers. Weirdly, something was unusual when he opened the box, as his GPU didn't look like an NVIDIA GPU. He reports that […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/gigabyte-mixes-up-geforce-and-radeon-shrouds-shipping-an-rtx-5060-ti-with-amd-branding/

Maxsun Squeezes Intel’s 10-Core Raptor Lake Onto a $200 Motherboard, Undercutting Traditional CPU+Board Combos by Nearly Half

Maxsun Squeezes Intel's 10-Core Raptor Lake Onto a $200 MoDT Motherboard, Undercutting Traditional CPU+Board Combos by Nearly Half

Maxsun has updated its Intel MoDT (Mobile on Desktop) lineup with two new motherboards featuring the Core 200H "Raptor Lake" CPUs. Intel Raptor Lake "Core 200H" MoDT Motherboards Are Now Super-Affordable, & Compatible With DDR4 Memory MoDT motherboards come in all shapes and sizes. We have seen ATX and mATX offerings, with higher-end versions featuring up to AMD 9955HX3D and Intel 285H options. The thing is that MoDT boards generally aim at the value segment, offering prices that are much lower than traditional socketed CPUs and motherboard combos. These motherboards offer a 2-in-1 design, and while they lack the option […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/maxsun-squeezes-intel-10-core-raptor-lake-onto-a-200-usd-motherboard/

Louis Rossmann tells 3D printer maker Bambu Lab to ‘Go (Bleep) yourself’ over its threatened lawsuit against enthusiast — Right to Repair advocate offers to pay the legal fees for a threatened OrcaSlicer developer

Louis Rossmann has officially pledged $10,000 to cover the initial legal fees for an independent software developer threatened with a cease and desist letter from Bambu Lab. He posted a video on Saturday to mobilize the Right to Repair community to back the developer and crowd-fund his legal defense.

ByteChef – Build workflows and AI agents with no vendor lock-in


ByteChef is an open-source automation platform that lets teams build visual workflows, create multi-step AI agents, and connect apps without vendor lock-in. You own your data and get transparent pricing while bridging business users and developers with a drag-and-drop editor, flow controls, and execution previews. Use it to automate cross-app processes, integrate SaaS tools, and deploy AI-powered operations quickly.

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This Week in Gaming (Week 20)

Welcome to week 20, which kicks off with a game about the camper van life as this week's major release. This is followed by some galactic space battles, some space alien horror, another mobile home came, but with beasts, an underwater sequel and finally some post-apocalyptic cyberpunk survival. As most of the time, don't forget to check out the other releases that are launching this week as well.

Outbound / This week's major release / Monday 11 May
Outbound is a cozy open-world exploration game set in a utopian near future. Start with an empty camper van and turn it into the home of your dreams - alone or together with your friends. Build and explore at your own pace. Collect materials, craft, and build in and on top of your vehicle with modular parts. Advance in technology and efficiently use energy to power your home. Steam link

NVIDIA’s Own AI Costs Now Exceed What It Pays Human Employees, VP Admits, as Compute Bills Spiral Across the Industry

A presenter in a black jacket stands on stage illustrated with several robotic models labeled 'Hexagon Robotics,' 'AgiBot,' 'Pollen Robotics,' and 'Idealworks,' alongside a futuristic vehicle front.

AI is great for many tasks, but the costs to run AI are also exponentially higher than those of human workers, says NVIDIA. NVIDIA Highlights Large Cost of Running AI Versus Human Employees, While Suggesting That Humanity's Future Revolves Around The Adoption of AI As AI becomes part of every single IT domain, the costs to keep the entire ecosystem up and running have also grown rapidly. AI firms are spending trillions of dollars in upgrade costs of their existing AI factories while setting up new ones in multi-Gigawatt projects. At the same time, NVIDIA, the pioneer of AI advancements, […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/nvidia-own-ai-costs-now-exceed-what-it-pays-human-employees/

AI data centers face increasing complaints about inaudible but 'felt' infrasound — citizens complain high- and low-frequency sounds do not register on decibel meters but cause adverse health effects

Residents living near data centers are raising concerns about noise pollution, as these massive sites operate 24/7 and generate low-frequency sounds that disturb the neighborhood's peace.

$200 'socketed' Nvidia AI GPU for servers hacked into a PCIe card with custom PCB and 3D-printed cooling — modded Tesla V100 SMX data center GPU runs AI LLMs and is more efficient than many modern midrange offerings in AI inference

Turns out, Nvidia's older Turing-era V100 AI GPU is still pretty capable today, even with just 16GB of VRAM. A YouTuber got his hands on the SMX variant for just $100, converted it to a PCIe x16 interface for another $100 with an adapter, and got some pretty impressive results across AI inference and NVR benchmarks.

Lima – Discover when AI platforms mention your brand


Lima makes it easy to see how top AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Google AI, and Perplexity talk about your brand. You can track your brand and competitors to see when they're mentioned, get insights on how to grow AI search traffic, receive a free site audit to check AI readiness, get prompt suggestions and monitoring, and see citation URLs to understand how you or competitors are mentioned. AI platforms are shaping how people find brands, products, and services. Lima helps you know where you appear, how competitors compare, and what to do to grow your visibility in AI search.

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AICVscreening – Screen hundreds of CVs in minutes with AI


AICVscreening helps recruiters shortlist top talent fast. Paste a job description, upload CVs in PDF or DOCX, and get ranked candidates with AI-generated relevance scores and clear explanations. The platform bulk-processes resumes, parses skills and experience, reduces bias with consistent criteria, and exports shortlists to CSV. Start free with 50 credits and pay as you go when you need more.

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FamFeel – See family moods and share a simple, private calendar


FamFeel is a private family check-in and calendar. Set it on a kitchen iPad or phones so each person taps an avatar, slides a mood, and optionally adds a quick note; you see the whole house at a glance. It's easy for all ages to keep track of upcoming events.

FamFeel keeps data in the family with a join code and PIN, no accounts, and no background tracking. Toddler mode helps non-readers, and it scales from four members to large blended households, pets included.

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Samsung’s Desperation To Keep Galaxy S27 Component Costs Down Has Forced It To Seek A Supplier Of Inferior Quality Displays

Samsung to reportedly source Chinese OLED panels for the base Galaxy S27 model to reduce its component costs

Smartphone titans like Samsung have made efforts to ensure that the DRAM crisis doesn’t adversely affect their ‘day to day’ operations, but these attempts were futile as the Korean giant has been forced to introduce a price hike to the Galaxy S26 series. However, the company is working to ensure that it minimizes additional component cost bumps by moving to a dual-sourcing strategy. Since displays are among the more expensive parts of a smartphone, the base Galaxy S27 could feature panels from Samsung and another manufacturer, but this could lead to quality disparities in the future. Chinese suppliers could become a […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/galaxy-seeking-inferior-display-supplier-to-keep-galaxy-s27-component-costs-down/

Kin – Get a personal AI advisory board that knows your context


Kin is a privacy-first AI advisor app with five specialist advisors covering work, relationships, health, values, and social confidence that remember who you are. Unlike general AI that starts fresh every session, Kin builds a persistent picture of your patterns, decisions, and relationships over time. Context compounds, decisions get sharper, and support is there when the pressure is on. It is built on zero-access architecture so your personal data belongs to you.

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Levanta – A personal growth system that works like a game


Levanta turns personal growth into a structured system instead of random content. Instead of watching videos and hoping for change, you follow a skill tree that builds real abilities step by step with clear progression. Each skill includes actions, challenges, and measurable progress, so you don’t just learn, you actually improve. We’re opening early access to a limited group of users to test the system and help shape it before full launch.

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WishDay – Never miss an occasion and always send the perfect greeting


WishDay reminds you of birthdays and special occasions and creates a ready-to-share greeting instantly. When it's time to wish, WishDay uses AI to generate personalized greetings based on your relationship, tone, and style. You can adjust and polish greetings with just a few taps and add custom occasions for the moments that matter to you. No more last-minute scrambling, just thoughtful greetings ready when you need them.

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LifeJar – Turn words, photos, and voice into a video delivered when it matters


LifeJar is a scheduled delivery platform for messages you want to send loved ones on important days. You write a letter, upload photos, and record a short video, then LifeJar compiles it all into one cinematic video. The jar stays sealed until the date you choose, like graduation morning, a wedding, or a milestone birthday. On that day, your recipient gets an email to watch what you created. You can also invite family to contribute so that a grandmother's voice memo, a sibling's photo, and your own letter appear in the same jar before it opens. It's built for parents, adult children of aging parents, or anyone with a milestone that deserves more than a text.

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LocalPipe – Find, export, and enrich local business owner names, emails, and phones


LocalPipe helps you find, export, and contact local business owners at scale. Use Google Maps search to build lead lists, then enrich owner names, verified emails, and direct phone numbers with pay-on-find credits. The platform triple-verifies emails, supports multi-title searches, and offers an API and Clay integration so you can push fresh, live-scraped contacts straight into your workflows.

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Omniflow HQ – Turn spreadsheets into clear financial insights in seconds


Omniflow HQ turns your raw spreadsheets into institutional-grade financial intelligence. Upload an Excel file to get AI-driven budget analysis, cash flow forecasts, variance explanations, and clear recommendations with risk flags. It also detects broken formulas, missing references, and data entry errors so you can trust your numbers. View results in-app today, with PDF and Excel exports coming soon. Your data stays protected with SSL/TLS, and files are never sold or shared.

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decivo – Test your product idea before investing in the wrong direction


decivo helps teams validate ideas and build meaningful MVPs fast. It offers fixed-price modules such as Innovation Workshop, Clickable Prototype, UX Validation, and Code Prototype so you can test assumptions early and iterate toward a product users understand. You work directly with experts who blend AI acceleration with human review to research, design, and code, reducing risk and wasted development.

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Near Here – Find local events near you that big sites miss


Near Here finds events that bigger platforms miss, such as quiz nights, toddler groups, village fêtes, craft fairs, and live music at your local pub. It automatically crawls hundreds of small venue websites across the UK, from parish councils to community centres, and uses AI to extract the details so you don't have to check multiple sites yourself.

Search by town or browse what's happening near you today, this weekend, or later. No app to download, no account needed—just the events actually happening in your neighbourhood, all in one place.

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AMD’s Lisa Su Quietly Cashes In On The Smartphone Industry’s Deep Freeze As MediaTek And Qualcomm Vacate TSMC’s 4nm And 5nm Lines

A smartphone screen displaying the 'Ryzen AI' logo on a dark background.

One person's loss is another's gain, or a company's in this case. After all, AMD seems to be having a field day with its older 5nm CPUs, which entail crazy-high yields by the way, as both Qualcomm and MediaTek vacate some of TSMC's 4nm and 5nm lines on shrinking smartphone demand. AMD reaps the benefits as the broader smartphone industry enters a deep freeze, forcing Qualcomm and MediaTek to abandon some of their reserved capacity at TSMC By now, it's public knowledge that the global mobile industry is contending with a chronic DRAM shortage as most of the associated fabrication […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/amds-lisa-su-quietly-cashes-in-on-the-smartphone-industrys-deep-freeze-as-mediatek-and-qualcomm-vacate-tsmcs-4nm-and-5nm-lines/

Datologist – Get answers from your data in seconds, no SQL required


Datologist turns any SQL database into a chat interface. Connect your database once, then ask questions in plain English to get tables, charts, and explanations without using SQL. It maps your schema, writes safe SELECT-only SQL, and explains results clearly. It supports Postgres, MySQL, Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, and more, with AES-256 encryption; the AI sees only metadata, not raw data. You see the generated query alongside the answer to verify the logic before sharing with your team. Use Research Mode for multi-step investigations and Semantic Model to align business concepts with your schema.

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AI Face Swap – Swap faces in photos and videos instantly with realistic AI


AI Face Swap lets you swap faces in photos, videos, and GIFs directly in your browser. Upload media, choose a source face, and the AI detects facial landmarks to blend expressions, lighting, and skin tone for natural results. It supports multi-face swaps, frame-accurate video tracking, and high-resolution downloads. Create social content, fix group photos, or make profile images without installing software.

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Lupibu – Track feedings, sleep, and milestones with AI voice logging


Lupibu helps you track your baby's sleep, feedings, diapers, walks, medications, and more all in one calm, beautifully designed app. It knows exactly when your baby needs the next nap and learns your child's unique sleep patterns to calculate the optimal time, personalized rather than using generic age charts. The app has an AI assistant with full context—covering every sleep, feeding, diaper, vaccine, symptom, medication, and milestone. You can log events naturally, like "nursed left 15 min, walk in the park until noon." You can ask questions such as "why did she wake up crying?" or "when was the last vaccine?" and get answers based on your baby's actual data.

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AMD’s New CPPC HighestFreq Ends OS Frequency Guesswork, Letting Windows And Linux See True Ryzen Boost Clocks

An AMD processor next to graphics with the text 'AMD CPPC HighestFreq'.

The upcoming ACPI support could allow OS like Windows and Linux read CPU frequencies directly without having to estimate them for optimal performance. AMD's New CPPC HighestFreq Could Improve CPU Scheduling on Future Ryzen Chips, Resulting in Better Responsiveness Traditionally, OS like Windows and Linux do not have the capability to read the CPU boost frequencies directly from the firmware, but the AMD CPPC HighestFreq could change this forever. The new feature reportedly would allow CPUs to directly report their real maximum boost frequencies to the operating systems through the firmware, which eliminates the need for frequency calculations by the […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/amd-new-cppc-highestfreq-ends-os-frequency-guesswork-letting-os-see-true-ryzen-boost-clocks/

OfoxAI – One API for 100+ LLMs including GPT-5.4, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3.1


OfoxAI is a unified API gateway that gives developers access to over 100 large language models through a single endpoint. Connect to GPT-5.4, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, DeepSeek V4, MiniMax M2.5, and more, all with one API key. It supports OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini SDK protocols, offers low-latency global routing under 300ms, and accepts payments via WeChat, Alipay, or credit card. It also provides team collaboration with shared billing and a 99.9% uptime SLA.

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RoboApply – Auto-apply to jobs, tailor resumes, and ace interviews with AI


RoboApply streamlines your job search with AI that tailors resumes and cover letters to each role, auto-applies across 40+ job boards, and tracks applications while keeping your accounts safe. Use ATS-friendly templates, resume scoring, analytics, and a job tracker to improve results. The Interview Copilot provides real-time guidance during interviews so you show up prepared and confident. Plans scale from individual job seekers to enterprise teams needing high-volume automation and management.

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Aliens Fireteam Elite 2 has been unveiled, as it should run great on PC

Aliens Fireteam Elite 2 is coming to PC this summer Cold Iron Studios has officially unveiled Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2, which is coming to PC and consoles this summer. On PC, the game will launch on both Steam and the Epic Games Store. Alongside the game’s first trailer, Cold Iron Studios has released the game’s […]

The post Aliens Fireteam Elite 2 has been unveiled, as it should run great on PC appeared first on OC3D.

Trump Touted The “Tens Of Billions Of Dollars” The Government Has Made From Intel, While Selling A Deal To Apple That Undercuts TSMC By 25% On Wafer Pricing

An Apple logo and an Intel chip are placed side by side on a blue circuit board.

Whatever else one might think of President Trump, it is plain as day that he is a connoisseur at shaping narratives. And, apparently, the President seems to have played a material role in selling an Intel deal to Apple, one that might accrue sizable short- and long-term benefits to the Cupertino-based tech giant. Apple's chip fabrication deal with Intel entails sizable margin benefits, reduces supply chain risks, and weakens TSMC's monopoly Apple has reached a preliminary chip fabrication deal with Intel, according to the Wall Street Journal. While the specifics of this agreement are not known at this time, it […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/trump-touted-the-tens-of-billions-of-dollars-the-government-has-made-from-intel-while-selling-a-deal-to-apple-that-undercuts-tsmc-by-25-on-wafer-pricing/

AMD DGF Tech Offers Massive Increase In Geometry In Ray Traced Games With Future RDNA GPUs, Achieves Up To 30% Compression With Current GPUs

AMD DGF Tech Offers Massive Increase In Geometry In Ray Traced Games With Future RDNA GPUs, Achieves Up To 30% Compression With Current GPUs

AMD has further detailed its DGF or Dense Geometry Format technology, which rivals NVIDIA's RTX Mega Geometry, delivering vastly higher geometry counts in ray tracing games while offering new compression methods designed with future RDNA GPUs in mind. As Geometry Scale Increases in Games, Tech Such as AMD's DGF & NVIDIA's RTX Mega Geometry becomes vital in powering advanced ray-traced games Last year, AMD announced its Dense Geometry Format technology, or DGF in short. This tech aims to handle massive polygon counts by streaming geometry clusters rather than full scenes. The principle of AMD's DGF is simple. It is designed […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/amd-dgf-dense-geometry-format-leap-in-ray-traced-games-30-percent-compression-future-rdna-gpus/

NVIDIA’s AI Chips Reached China’s Alibaba Through Thailand, As US Indicts Supermicro Execs In $2.5 Billion Smuggling Ring

NVIDIA's AI Chips Reached China's Alibaba Through Thailand, As US Indicts Supermicro Execs In $2.5 Billion Smuggling Ring

NVIDIA's AI chips have once again bypassed barriers and landed at Alibaba in China, as the US suspects Supermicro's role in smuggling through Thailand. NVIDIA's AI Chips Still Carry Immense Interest In China As Alibaba Lands Restricted Supermico Servers That Were Smuggled Via Thailand Despite China dropping the hammer on NVIDIA's chips to increase dependency on in-house AI chips, the leading Chinese firms, such as Alibaba, are still procuring the latest hardware from NVIDIA through illegal channels. As per Bloomberg, several Supermicro employees, including high-level executives, are involved in a $2.5 billion smuggling case. The case revolves around shipping several […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/nvidia-ai-chips-reached-china-alibaba-through-thailand-smuggling-ring/

Find Albi – An AI dating coach that roasts your profile and rescues you from ghosting


Find Albi is an AI-powered dating coach with a free Profile Roast: paste your bio and get a brutally honest Vibe Score. The Social Gym lets you practice conversations with AI personas that react like real people. A real-time AI critic coaches you through every message, provides personalized strategy advice, and polishes your profile or chats with detailed reviews so you can show up more confident on your next match. Free to start, no signup needed for the roast.

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GuildScope – Measure Discord community reaction to patches without reading messages


GuildScope gives game studios a clear read on how their Discord community responds to patches, updates, and events without reading message content. It tracks behavioral signals like reaction velocity, bug channel spikes, voice activity, and new member retention to deliver fast patch intelligence and cross-patch comparisons. It flags brigading with a Concentration Index, surfaces members going quiet, and alerts on mod burnout. With Ask GuildScope, teams ask plain-English questions and get real answers. Setup takes minutes via a Discord bot, and strict privacy controls keep player data safe.

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Your Yarbo lawnmower is a backdoor into your Wi-Fi network


Security researcher Andreas Makris recently outlined exploits that could allow hackers to hijack thousands of Yarbo lawnmowers sold across more than 30 countries. According to Makris, all units ship with a preinstalled backdoor capable of exposing owners' private information, and the vulnerability cannot currently be disabled.

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200MW of US-UAE’s Jointly Planned 5GW AI Campus Is Coming Online Soon, Powered by 1000s of Next-Gen Chips

200MW of US-UAE's Jointly Planned 5GW AI Campus Is Coming Online Soon, Powered by 1000s of Next-Gen Chips

UAE has just announced that its AI Campus, being built with the United States, is coming online soon, housing a total AI compute capacity of 5 Gigawatts through next-gen chips. More Gigawatt-Level AI Facilities Are Coming Online, Like The One Being Built By the UAE With Thousands of Next-Gen Chips Last year, the UAE (United Arab Emirates) signed a deal to invest $1.4 trillion in the United States, with a total of 30 planned projects. The investment encompasses AI infrastructure, energy, and manufacturing projects, which will create thousands of jobs across America. UAE states that a large portion of these […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/200mw-of-us-uae-jointly-planned-5gw-ai-campus-is-coming-online-powered-by-1000s-of-next-gen-chips/

NVIDIA Rubin & Rubin Ultra Platforms Facing Design/Spec Issues As Per Rumors While AMD MI500 Positioned For 2H 2027 Launch

An individual in a leather jacket is presenting a large circuit board design next to a stack of horizontal units.

NVIDIA's Rubin platforms are rumoredly facing design/spec issues, making way for the competition, such as AMD MI500, to get the headstart with HBM4E in 2027. Will AMD Beat NVIDIA In The Race To HBM4E? Design & Spec Changes In Rubin Platforms Can Give MI500 The Lead Based on recent reports, NVIDIA's upcoming Rubin and Rubin Ultra platforms are undergoing serious design and spec changes. These changes come ahead of the expected launch of the Rubin generation, which is going to uplift AI performance miles above Blackwell with new features, efficiency upgrades & brand new architectures. As per the rumors, NVIDIA […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/nvidia-rubin-rubin-ultra-platforms-facing-design-spec-issues-amd-mi500-positioned-for-2h-2027/

Goldman Sachs Bets Big On Agentic AI Boom By 2040, But Warns Bad Data Could Leave A Bad Taste

The GeForce RTX graphics card is displayed between large letters 'RTX' and 'AI' with green light beams in the background.

As agentic AI now dominates the conversation when it comes to AI computing, investment bank Goldman Sachs is out with a report that agentic computing will drive a jump in token consumption. The bank believes that token consumption will grow 24 times by 2030 compared to 2026's figures as AI queries jump from five billion to 23 billion, driven particularly by non-human agents. Goldman Sachs Out With Optimistic Report About Agentic AI The central theme in Goldman Sachs' report concerns a rapid growth in the use of agentic AI. Agentic AI involves the use of software bots that compute through […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/goldman-sachs-bets-big-on-agentic-ai-boom-by-2040-but-warns-bad-data-could-leave-a-bad-taste/

Maryland citizens slapped with $2 billion power grid upgrade bill for out-of-state AI data centers — state complains to federal energy regulators, says additional cost breaks ‘ratepayer protection pledge’ promises

Maryland is complaining to the federal energy regulator about PJM's plan to charge it $2 billion for grid upgrades that will mostly benefit data centers, especially as the state claims that the majority of these developments are being built in neighboring regions.

Steam Client Update delivers early Steam Controller fixes

Valve updates its Steam Client with early Steam Controller fixes Valve’s new May 8th update for its Steam Client has been released, and it includes many fixes for the company’s newly released Steam Controller. This includes fixes for compatibility issues, firmware fixes, and configuration fixes. Another important fix addresses an issue where Steam Controller users […]

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Google caught automatically downloading 4GB AI model on Chrome without consent

Google Chrome has been silently downloading a 4GB AI model to devices Alexander Haniff, the AI researcher known as “That Privacy Guy“, discovered this week that Google has been silently downloading a 4GB AI model onto the systems of Google Chrome users. This model was downloaded without users’ consent and redownloads itself when users delete […]

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ClarusNode Intelligence – Intercept your competitors' churning customers in real-time


Stop losing deals to blind spots. ClarusNode is a programmatic DaaS platform that monitors social chatter on Reddit and Hacker News for high-value B2B buying intent. We deliver a daily or weekly executive brief of highly qualified leads who are actively frustrated with your competitors, such as Calendly and HubSpot. For $199 per month, equip your SDR team with actionable defection signals and suggested outreach framing before competitors even know they lost a customer. No software to install—just pure, high-intent intelligence delivered to your inbox.

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CardIndex – Real-time Pokémon card prices and sales data across major marketplaces


CardIndex is a real-time price tracker for graded and raw Pokémon cards. It aggregates completed sales and active listings from eBay, Goldin, Alt, Fanatics Collect, and Heritage into one searchable database, letting collectors and investors compare PSA, BGS, and CGC prices side by side, spot underpriced listings, and track market trends as they happen.

Beyond pricing, CardIndex offers portfolio tracking with cost basis and ROI, watchlists with instant sale and price-drop alerts, population data from every major grading company, and daily market volume analytics. Whether you're deciding what to grade, when to sell, or what to buy next, CardIndex gives you the data to make the call.

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Skywind Crosses Major 2026 Milestone With Every Quest Written, but Volunteer Team Still Won’t Commit to a Release Date

A character in the Skywind Update 2026 image wearing detailed gold and blue armor stands in a fantasy landscape with large text in the background.

The volunteer team behind Skywind, the ambitious fan-made recreation of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind in Skyrim's engine, has released a new 33-minute development update video titled "Skywind 2026: The Road Continued". It's the first full-fledged developer update since 2024, and followers of this total conversion mod will be happy to learn that the numbers suggest the project is closer to completion than ever before. All of Skywind's approximately 3,000 NPCs have now been fully cast, a feat accomplished with the help of nearly 300 volunteer voice actors. Over 92% of those NPCs are fully recorded, meaning the voice acting pipeline, historically one of the most […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/skywind-2026-milestone-quests-written-no-release-date/

The EU becomes the latest authority to signal that VPNs are next, after launching its age verification app — here's how VPNs went from a necessity security tool to circumvention software that needs to be restricted

As the internet gets age-gated, users turn to VPN apps in a bid to circumvent mandatory checks. The EU is now the last to turn its attention towards this tech — and cybersecurity experts are worried.

ProfitSpot – Find real DeFi yields with net APY, risk scores, AI insights, and forecasts


ProfitSpot helps DeFi investors find real yields by showing true net returns after gas, fees, and impermanent loss across 6,400+ pools on 86 chains. It aggregates live data from DeFiLlama, GoPlus, and Moralis, adds security scores, and lets you track portfolios, impermanent loss risk, and time to profit.

Use AI insights, simulators, alerts, whale tracking, and a unified dashboard to evaluate pools, monitor positions, and act with confidence.

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SimpleRMD – Calculate your RMD in under 2 minutes, free and no signup


SimpleRMD helps you calculate, track, and manage required minimum distributions across all your IRAs. It uses IRS life expectancy tables updated for 2026, consolidates accounts from multiple custodians into one dashboard, and sends deadline reminders so you never scramble in December.

Export CPA-ready PDFs, share read-only access with family or advisors, and navigate inherited IRA rules with clear guidance. Try the calculator free without signup and save your results by creating an account.

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TAYP – Tayp is a short-form sports highlight platform helping athletes


Tayp is a sports-first platform where athletes post short game highlights, build profiles, and get discovered. Athletes can showcase their sport, school, and position while sharing real game clips in a vertical, highlight-driven feed. Tayp connects athletes directly with coaches, peers, and opportunities without needing expensive recruiting services or traditional exposure channels. Available on iOS and Android.

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ASUS launches its ROG Strix XG129C secondary touchscreen monitor

ASUS challenges Elgato with its ROG Strix XG129C Touchscreen display ASUS has officially launched its ROG Strix XG129C secondary display, a 12.3-inch touchscreen that is designed for app control and system monitoring. Users can use their primary display for gaming and applications, and use this secondary screen for chats, system monitoring, and widgets. The ROG […]

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Qualcomm To Have A Stacked Chipset Lineup This Year, Offering Both Flagship 2nm And Lower-Tier 3nm Options To Offer Device Diversification

Qualcomm to offer various 2nm and 3nm chipset options this year

The industry’s first 2nm chipsets are launching later this year, with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro rumored on multiple occasions to take advantage of TSMC’s next-generation lithography. As expected, this manufacturing process is costly, with phone makers likely adopting these solutions in their absolute top-tier offerings, and in the middle of a DRAM crisis, their margins will be drastically affected. Fortunately, the latest rumor from a tipster states that Qualcomm will have plenty of options arriving this year for customers, allowing them to offer immense diversification of smartphone models in the fourth quarter […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/qualcomm-to-offer-various-2nm-and-3nm-chipset-options-this-year/

cPanel, WHM Release Fixes for Three New Vulnerabilities — Patch Now

cPanel has released updates to address three vulnerabilities in cPanel and Web Host Manager (WHM) that could be exploited to achieve privilege escalation, code execution, and denial-of-service. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2026-29201 (CVSS score: 4.3) - An insufficient input validation of the feature file name in the "feature::LOADFEATUREFILE" adminbin call that could result

Crime Brasil – Explore crimes by neighborhood on the map with real data from SSP


Crime Brasil is an interactive map that gathers official crime data from Public Security Secretariats for states, cities, and neighborhoods. Navigate the map, filter by crime type, compare regions, and follow historical series from 2003 to 2026.

The platform helps you understand local risks and make informed decisions about housing, work, and travel.

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BidSprout – Turn briefs into complete production estimates in minutes


BidSprout helps directors, photographers, and producers generate complete production estimates quickly. Describe your shoot or upload a treatment or RFP, and it auto-fills crew, equipment, locations, post, and licensing with rates localized to your city. Edit any line item, then export client-ready PDFs or Excel files and share live links. BidSprout also finds your market day rate and generates treatment decks from your estimate, so you bid faster and win more work.

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SetSmart – Qualify leads and auto-book calls via Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger


SetSmart helps consultants and online businesses automate direct message conversations on Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. It qualifies prospects with custom scripts, filters out poor fits, and books Calendly appointments directly in chat. You can tweak its behavior with plain language, intervene anytime, and connect Zapier, Make, GoHighLevel, and more. Multilingual AI handles voice and images, runs via official Meta APIs, and supports control from tools like Claude and ChatGPT through MCP.

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Snoopreport – See any Instagram account's likes, follows, and weekly activity


Snoopreport tracks Instagram activity so you can see any profile's recent likes, new follows and unfollows, and engagement patterns. Choose accounts to monitor and get weekly or monthly reports with posts they liked, who they follow, when they're active, and interests inferred from public data.

It also provides AI summaries that highlight personality traits, conversation starters, and gift ideas while keeping your identity private and requiring no app install.

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Ploopy Releases $52 Ploopy Bean Pointing Stick for ThinkPad TrackPoint Lovers

Ploopy, the makers of the DIY-friendly peripherals, like the Ploopy Adept trackball and the Ploopy Trackpad, has just released the Ploopy Bean, a standalone pointing device that mimics the functionality of something like the Lenovo TrackPoint that has become so popular with ThinkPad users. However, the Bean takes the pointing stick and dials it up to 11, giving users four programmable buttons around the pointing stick and allowing full customization via open-source QMK firmware. By default, the Ploopy Bean's keymap features left, middle, and right click as well as a drag scroll option and pre-configured QMK combos for forward and back buttons, making it equivalent to a standard six-button mouse.

Ploopy has opted for a magnetic Texas Instruments TMAG5273 magnetic sensor, which is theoretically capable of reading the position of the pointing stick 20,000 times a minute. The pointing stick also has a wider-than-average range of motion, allowing for up to 11 mm of movement in each axis. The switches in the Bean are Omron D2LS-21 "Subminiature" switches, which are rated for 20 million clicks—basically extra-small mouse switches with a clicky actuation. The Bean is compatible with VIA for easy customization, although more in-depth customization can be performed by editing the firmware directly (if you're comfortable coding), or with the QMK Configurator. While Ploopy does sell the Bean for CAD 69 (~$52 converted)—currently under pre-order—it has also published all of the necessary 3D models, electrical CAD files, firmware, and documentation necessary to make your own version or tweak the design. The version Ploopy sells is also 3D printed in

immovio – All-in-one software for landlords in Austria


immovio brings the entire rental process for private landlords in Austria onto one central platform. Manage properties and units, assign tenants and contracts, track rent payments, outstanding amounts, and deposits, and organize documents efficiently. You can link bank accounts, transactions are automatically assigned, monthly summaries provide clarity, and operating cost statements are easy to handle. The platform is developed in Austria, stores data in the EU, and complies with GDPR. Test it free for 45 days without a credit card.

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Scorementor AI – AI-powered exam simulations and instant scoring for institutes


Scorementor AI is a white-labeled exam simulation platform for institutes that delivers AI-powered mock tests, instant scoring, and personalized study plans for exams like IELTS, PTE, TOEFL, GRE, GMAT, SAT, OET, and more. It mirrors real test interfaces and provides real-time feedback on grammar, pronunciation, and timing. Institutes can run their own branded portals, manage branches and faculty, track cohort performance, and sell test packages with integrated analytics and revenue tools.

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ImageGen2 – GPT Image 2 for product photos, edits, and image variations


ImageGen2 is an AI image tool built around GPT Image 2 for creators, marketers, and ecommerce teams. It helps you create product photos, edit images with reference inputs, and generate multiple variations in one run.

ImageGen2 is designed for fast visual iteration. You can start from a prompt or an existing image, adjust quality and output format, and create assets for ads, social posts, product pages, and brand visuals.

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Nintendo Announces $50 Switch 2 Price Increase as Pokémon Pokopia Crosses 4 Million Sales

Pokémon Pokopia is widely known to have been a successful launch for Nintendo, with the life sim having recently climbed its way to the top of Metacritic's 2026 game rankings with an impressive 89 Metacritic score. Now, recent financial filings indicate that Pokopia has been more than simply a critical success, with the Japanese gaming giant having sold over 4 million copies of the game in the five weeks after its launch on March 31, 2026. By comparison, Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen had achieved roughly the same sales figures in six weeks, while Donkey Kong Bananza and Pokémon ZA have sold 4.52 million and 3.94 million units, respectively.

In less positive news, however, Nintendo has also revealed that the Nintendo Switch 2 will get a price increase on September 1, 2026, to $499 in the US and €499 in the EU, while Japanese customers can expect to pay ¥59,980, up from ¥49,980, as soon as May 25, 2025. Nintendo expects the Switch 2 to sell 16.5 million units in the 2027 financial year, down 16.9% from the FY 2026 projection of 19.86 million units. Between the Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, Nintendo reported hardware sales of 23 million units for the same period. The Switch 2 price increase has been expected since January 2026, thanks to rising DRAM and BOM costs across the board.

How often do you upgrade your PC?


Is it me, or did PC gaming used to move faster? In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a graphics card could feel outdated within a year, and major platform jumps arrived so often that upgrading became part of the hobby. Today, things are different.

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BlazeHive – Automate SEO research, writing, and daily publishing to grow traffic


BlazeHive is an AI SEO agent that turns a single URL into a daily stream of search-optimized pages. It researches keywords, writes humanized content with custom diagrams, validates SEO, and publishes automatically to your CMS. Use it to rank on Google and get cited by AI answer engines while avoiding agency costs. It integrates with WordPress, Ghost, Strapi, Webflow, Framer, Contentful, and Storyblok, delivering enterprise-level output for a fraction of the price.

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PostMine – Capture posts with one click, AI rewrite and publish everywhere as yours


PostMine turns social media discussions into a full content pack in seconds. With a Chrome extension, you can right-click any post on LinkedIn, Reddit, Facebook, and more to capture it. Then AI generates seven platform-ready pieces in your brand voice. You can schedule to a built-in content calendar, run bulk capture, and get AI reply suggestions. Use the included PostMine AI or plug in your own API key, and scale with team seats, white-label output, and priority support.

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Apple and Intel reportedly reach “preliminary” chipmaking agreement

Apple could soon become an Intel Foundry customer According to a Wall Street Journal report, Apple has reached a “preliminary agreement” with Intel to manufacture some chips at Intel Foundry. This deal will see Apple become an Intel Foundry customer, a major breakthrough for Intel and its efforts to rival TSMC as a 3rd party […]

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Veronika Höller talks on a perfectly set-up but poor performing campaign

In this episode of PPC Live The Podcast, I sit with Veronika Höller to unpack a real-world PPC mistake — from campaigns that looked perfect on the surface to the deeper issues that were quietly killing performance.

From “perfect” campaigns to zero revenue

Veronika Holler didn’t walk into a broken account. Quite the opposite. Everything looked right — clean structure, strong creatives, solid budgets, conversions coming in. On paper, it was a high-performing PPC setup.

But there was one problem: it wasn’t driving revenue.

That disconnect forced a deeper look beyond surface-level metrics. Because while impressions, clicks and conversions were ticking up, the campaigns weren’t actually delivering business impact — and that’s where things started to unravel.

The real issue: nothing stood out

The turning point didn’t come from inside the account. It came from looking outside it.

During competitor research, Veronika realised the brand sounded just like everyone else. The messaging blended into the market. There was no clear reason for a user to choose them over competitors.

From a user perspective, the ads weren’t wrong — they were just forgettable. And in a crowded category, “good” isn’t enough.

That insight reframed the entire problem: it wasn’t a performance issue. It was a positioning issue.

Starting again — from scratch

Instead of tweaking the existing campaigns, Veronika made a bold call: rebuild everything.

That meant new messaging, new creatives, and a new strategic foundation. One key shift was defining not just ideal customers, but also who they didn’t want to target — using anti-ICPs to sharpen the messaging.

They also introduced stronger localisation, tailored landing pages by market, and platform-specific strategies instead of copying campaigns across channels.

It wasn’t optimisation. It was a reset. And it worked.

The mistake that nearly broke everything

But earlier in her career, Veronika made a far more painful mistake — one that many PPC marketers will recognise.

She applied a recommended target CPA… without increasing the budget.

The result? Campaigns stopped delivering. Performance tanked. And worst of all, it went unnoticed over a weekend.

By Monday, the damage was clear — and the client was not happy.

Owning the mistake — and fixing it fast

There was no hiding from it.

Veronika immediately admitted the mistake, explained what happened, and took responsibility. That honesty changed the outcome. While the client was initially frustrated, the situation de-escalated quickly because there was no deflection — just a clear plan to fix it.

The lesson stuck: don’t blindly apply recommendations, and always understand the full context before making changes.

Why failure is part of getting good

For Veronika, mistakes aren’t something to avoid — they’re essential.

“You can only be good if you fail,” she said.

That mindset now shapes how she works and how she mentors others. Mistakes aren’t a sign of incompetence — they’re a sign that work is being done, tested, and improved.

And more importantly, sharing those mistakes helps others avoid repeating them.

The biggest issue she still sees today

Despite all the changes in PPC, one problem keeps showing up: tracking.

Broken implementations, over-reliance on micro conversions, and poor setup in tools like Google Tag Manager are still common.

In a world of smart bidding and automation, bad data doesn’t just limit performance — it actively misleads it.

Without clean tracking, even the best campaigns will fail.

AI won’t fix average marketing

Veronika is clear on one thing: AI is not a shortcut to better performance.

If you feed it average data, you’ll get average results.

Too many marketers rely on AI tools to analyse accounts without first understanding what needs to be improved. But AI can’t create differentiation — it can only optimise what’s already there.

Standing out still requires human thinking, strategy, and creativity.

The mindset that matters now

The biggest takeaway isn’t tactical — it’s mental.

Don’t aim for perfection. Don’t blindly follow recommendations. And don’t assume tools will do the thinking for you.

Instead, trust your instincts, test your ideas, and accept that mistakes are part of the process.

Because in performance marketing, the real risk isn’t failing — it’s playing it safe and blending in.

💾

A “perfect” PPC account delivered zero revenue—until one critical mistake revealed what was really going wrong.

PitchMit – Win more Upwork jobs with AI that learns your winning patterns


PitchMit is an AI sales system built for Upwork freelancers and agencies. It doesn't just write proposals; it manages your entire Upwork sales workflow. It generates proposals using your real portfolio projects, answers client screening questions, schedules follow-ups when clients go silent, and optimizes your Upwork profile with AI-powered scoring. What makes it different is that every win and loss teaches the AI your patterns. Won a job? It learns what worked. Lost one? It learns what to avoid. Your proposals get smarter over time.

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Nexscope – AI agent for product research, market intelligence, and competitor analysis


Nexscope is an ecommerce AI agent for Amazon, Shopify, TikTok Shop sellers, and more. It automates product research, market intelligence, and competitor analysis in one place. Access over 200 expert-built AI skills for product research, PPC, listing optimization, and competitor analysis. You can install it on your favorite AI tools like OpenClaw and Claude Code, or use it directly in chat. Stop switching tabs and start selling smarter.

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Minisforum Unveils S5 and S7 All-Flash NAS Units with Intel Core Series 3 Processors

Minisforum and Intel held a joint launch event in Xiamen, introducing two new all-flash NAS systems built around Intel Series 3 processors, the compact S5 and the seven-bay S7. The S5 is the more distinctive of the two. It runs Intel Core Series 3 (Wildcat Lake), Intel's 18A-based platform for edge, laptops and commercial devices and adopts a no-HDDs approach featuring five M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 x1 SSD slots. The fanless design combined with the all-SSD layout means it runs completely silent. Minisforum is even pitching it at home theater setups and anywhere noise is a concern. Memory goes up to 16 GB of LPDDR5X-7200, and connectivity includes a 10 GbE RJ45, a 2.5 GbE RJ45, two USB4 40 Gbps ports, two USB 3.2 Type-A ports, and HDMI 2.1. Wi-Fi 7 is also on board, and combined SSD throughput is rated at up to 10.8 GB/s.

The S7 is built on the MS-03 workstation platform and steps up to seven NVMe slots for heavier storage workloads. Networking is more enterprise-oriented, with dual 10G SFP+ fiber ports, a 10G RJ45, a 2.5G RJ45, and two USB4 40 Gbps ports. An LED status display lets users check system and storage activity making it more suited to home-lab and power user setups. Both systems support Minisforum MinisOpenClaw AI agent, which includes features like AI semantic photo search and installs in one click. No pricing or release date has been announced.

GTA 6 Could Trigger a $1,000 Console Sticker Shock for Casual Buyers, Analyst Warns Ahead of November Launch

The image shows the cover art for 'Grand Theft Auto VI' GTA 6 with two characters holding guns next to a body of water, alongside two PlayStation 5 consoles.

There's no doubt that GTA 6 will attract an absolutely massive audience when it launches on November 19 across PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S, and Xbox Series X. According to Circana's Matt Piscatella, though, a lot of casual gamers may be in for a rude awakening when they head to the store to buy one of those consoles and the game in six months' time. Speaking to The Game Business show, he said: Those folks who don't pay a lot of attention that have heard, okay, well GTA 6 is coming, but they're not really keyed in. That's a lot of […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/gta-6-console-price-shock-casual-buyers-analyst-warning/

TCLBANKER Banking Trojan Targets Financial Platforms via WhatsApp and Outlook Worms

Threat hunters have flagged a previously undocumented Brazilian banking trojan dubbed TCLBANKER that's capable of targeting 59 banking, fintech, and cryptocurrency platforms. The activity is being tracked by Elastic Security Labs under the moniker REF3076. The malware family is assessed to be a major update of the Maverick family, which is known to leverage a worm called SORVEPOTEL to

Arc Raiders Dev Tests New Kernel-Level Anti-Cheat Solution, Raising Questions About Linux Support

Arc Raiders is one of only a handful of semi-competitive, shooters with a large player base that has a Platinum rating on ProtonDB, thanks to its Linux-friendly Easy Anti-Cheat implementation. In a recent blog post addressing the studio's plans to "ensure fair play," Arc Raiders developer, Embark Studios, confirmed that it is testing a new kernel-level anti-cheat solution that the studio expects "will sharpen both detection and precision throughout Speranza and the Rust Belt." The studio confirms that, in addition to the pre-existing kernel-level anti-cheat implementation, it relies heavily on machine learning tools and input telemetry data in order to catch cheaters. In spite of these existing efforts, Steam user reviews still complain bitterly about the presence of cheaters in Arc Raiders.

It should be noted that Embark has clearly considered Linux playability via Proton and similar tools, as well as its Steam Deck Verified status, until now. There's a fair bit of the anti-cheat blog post dedicated to accessibility and players on uncommon hardware and input devices, with the developer promising to continue letting players with unorthodox accessibility tools play the game. Additionally, when Embark first implemented kernel-level anti-cheat in The Finals, it promised to maintain support for Linux and the Steam Deck, so there's a fairly decent chance that Arc Raiders may remain playable on Linux devices. That said, in cases like that of Apex Legends, Respawn and EA have claimed that dropping Linux support resulted in a 33% decline in cheaters, giving rise to a notion in certain circles that Linux is a cheater's operating system.

PlayStation 6 Price and Launch Date Remain Uncertain in Face of DRAM Pricing Uncertainty

Despite earlier rumors speculating about both the upcoming PlayStation 6's pricing and supposed launch date, it has come to light in a recent investor call that Sony has yet to actually decide on either of those aspects of the new console's launch. When asked about the progress of the next-gen console, Sony CEO, Hiroki Totoki, said that "Looking at the current circumstances, the memory price is also expected to be very high FY 2027, because there will still be a shortage of supply," going on to explain that "We have not yet decided on at what timing we will launch the new console or at what prices, so we would like to really observe and follow the situation."

Sony isn't the only console maker struggling with pricing. The Xbox Helix is expected to launch at a price of around $1,000 when it eventually hits the market, and, while the rumor mill has nothing to say about Nintendo's next console launch this early in the Switch 2's lifecycle, there has been talk of a potential price increase for the Nintendo Switch 2—an issue worsened by softening US sales. The PS5 itself also recently saw a sizeable price increase, and although Sony didn't provide a justification for the price increases outside of "the global economic landscape," the assumption has largely been that increasing DRAM prices have been to blame for the price increase.

Diablo IV players finally discover the game's secret cow level


Diablo IV's secret cow level – which according to the game's former general manager Rod Fergusson did not exist – has finally been discovered by an enthusiastic player of Blizzard's action-RPG series. Streamer LoatheBurger, a self-confessed Diablo fan since 1996, explained the convoluted steps required to unlock the hidden level,...

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31st Union Studio Head Says he has “Never Been More Confident” in its F2P Shooter Project Ethos While Announcing Layoffs

A character in the game Project Ethos stands in a futuristic plaza with large screens displaying the word 'PATHFINDERS' and images of other characters.

Back in October 2024, 2K announced an upcoming title codenamed Project Ethos from developer 31st Union Studio, a team that was founded within 2K five years prior by former Visceral Games director Michael Condrey. After little to no update on the project six years after the studio's founding, Condrey was ousted as president, but 2K was insistent that Project Ethos was still in the works. Now, new studio head Ben Brinkman is just as insistent and confident that the game is still coming as he announces a round of layoffs at 31st Union. In a statement seen by GamesIndustry.Biz, Brinkman […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/31st-union-studio-layoffs-project-ethos/

Elon Musk Just Visited Intel’s Oregon Fab, The Same Fab Producing Cutting-Edge Panther Lake & Next-Gen Chips on 18A

Elon Musk Just Visited Intel's Oregon Fab, The Same Fab Producing Cutting-Edge Panther Lake & Next-Gen Chips on 18A

Intel is on a roll today as it has not only managed to bag a deal with Apple, but its cutting-edge Oregon Fab also got a visit by Elon Musk. Intel's 18A Fab in Oregon Sees a Surprise Visit by Elon Musk, Paving the Way for AI Chip Supply Allocation Ahead of TeraFab Bring-Up? A deal with Apple and now a visit by Elon Musk, today seems to be Intel's day. It is reported that Elon Musk has toured Intel's state-of-the-art Oregon fab, which is part of its Foundry business & producing cutting-edge chips such as Panther Lake CPUs on […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/elon-musk-visits-intel-oregon-fab/

GeIL Breaks The DDR5 Overclocking Barrier With Spear V, Pushing 8000 MT/s Under Official JEDEC Specs Without Touching The BIOS

A set of GeIL DDR5 SPEAR V memory modules in black, gold, and silver with visible GeIL branding.

Unlike conventional DDR5 memory modules that need to push to 8000 MT/s manually, the GeIL Spear V can reach 8000 MT/s out of the box. GeIL Announces Spear V DDR5 Memory Ahead of Computex, Rated at 8000 MT/s Under Official JEDEC Standards Memory maker, GeIL, has reached a major milestone by achieving what conventionally was possible only through manual overclocking. Since the debut of the DDR5 memory standard, enthusiasts have been trying to push the DDR5 memory speeds beyond the official JEDEC standards, but the new GeIL Spear V DDR5 memory breaks that constraint. With the announcement of Spear V […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/geil-announces-spear-v-ddr5-8000-mt-s-memory-under-jedec-standards/

Windrose Reportedly Outsold Crimson Desert in April With an Estimated 1.7M Copies in Just Two Weeks

Two pirate characters, a woman holding a musket and a man with a pistol, stand together under the title 'Windrose' with ships visible in the background.

April had a few major game releases across PC and consoles with games like Pragmata, Saros, and Invincible Vs. all arriving within its 30 days, but a new report from Alinea Analytics points to only one of those games reaching near the top of the sales charts. While Pragmata reportedly made the top-five games sold across Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox, it was the recently released pirate adventure Windrose that landed at the top spot, with March's Crimson Desert slightly behind in second place. According to the report, despite only being available on Steam, Windrose was the best-selling game of the […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/windrose-reportedly-april-top-selling-game-estimated-1-7m-copies-sold-crimson-desert-behind-1-6m/

Apple Formally Returns To Intel’s Fabs After Burning The Bridge In 2023, Signaling A Major TSMC Hedge

The image shows Apple and Intel logos side by side on a black background with a horizontal loading bar below them.

In what is nothing short of a veritable earthquake, Apple has finally signed a preliminary chip-making agreement with Intel, adding critical optionality within its supply chains at a time when TSMC's advanced node capacity largely remains choked. Apple and Intel formalize their rumored chip-making tie-up via a preliminary agreement According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple and Intel have now reached a preliminary agreement, whereby the silicon powering some of Apple's devices will be fabricated within Intel's fabs. It remains unclear at this stage exactly which Apple products will get their silicon from Intel. At any rate, the agreement is […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/apple-formally-returns-to-intels-fabs-after-burning-the-bridge-in-2023-signaling-a-major-tsmc-hedge/

Apple Taps Intel To Make Its Next-Gen Macbook Neo Chips, A21, The Competitor To x86 PCs

Apple and Intel logos on a blue digital background, glowing prominently.

Intel and Apple have just entered a "preliminary" chipmaking deal, which will see the production of the A21 chips for MacBook Neo. Apple Wants Extra Supply For Its Highly Successful MacBook Neo Laptops & Intel Is Here To Save The Day Currently, Apple uses TSMC's N3B process technology to make its A18 chips, the ones that power the MacBook Neo and its iPhone 16 series. But the recent surge in MacBook Neo demand has prompted Apple to diversify its chip production strategy. As per the latest announcements just minutes ago, both Apple and Intel have reached a "preliminary" chipmaking deal […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/apple-taps-intel-to-make-its-next-gen-macbook-neo-chips-a21/

Nacon Puts Midgar Studio Up for Sale One Day After Spotlighting Its RPG Edge of Memories at Nacon Connect 2026

A fantasy character with a sword stands amidst vibrant scenery with the text 'Edge of Memories' across the image.

The saga of Nacon's upheaval continues, as the French publisher has officially put another one of its subsidiary studios up for sale, and this time it's not one of the studios that already filed for insolvency. Midgar Studios, which is currently working on Edge of Memories, a game featured in yesterday's Nacon Connect 2026 event, is looking for a buyer. Spotted by French outlet Origami, a listing for the studio appeared online today, which, it's once again worth noting, is just one day after Edge of Memories held a major spotlight in Nacon's annual showcase event. It's not clear what […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/nacon-puts-edge-of-memories-midgar-studio-up-for-sale-amidst-insolvency-crisis/

Delphi Security – Zero-trust extended detection and response for AI agents, xAIDR


Delphi Security is building the security layer for AI agents, providing infrastructure that lets enterprises trust what their agents are doing. We created xAIDR, Extended AI Detection and Response, a new category designed for a world where AI agents outnumber humans and communicate autonomously. When those agents face attacks or manipulation, existing solutions can't detect it, but we can. Our in-agent sensors inspect tool calls and enforce policies with sub-200ms latency. Teams gain fleet visibility, automated blocking, and data loss prevention with MCP-native and RAG pipeline protection.

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Starborn – Describe an app, AI builds it with auth, database, and AI tools included


Starborn is an AI app builder for makers who want to ship a real product, not a static page. Describe a member portal, tracker, quiz, or custom AI tool your users can interact with. Auth, database, file uploads, and multi-model AI are included instead of added later. When you get stuck, a human engineer can fix it for $25 per request.

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SoftDesk – Deploy an AI agent that learns your product and answers instantly


SoftDesk delivers AI-first customer support with an agent that learns your product from docs, URLs, and PDFs, answers customers instantly 24/7 across chat and email, and lets a single person handle the volume of a full team. You stay in control with pause-and-takeover, smart routing, a unified inbox, customizable widgets, and real-time visitor insights. Plans range from Free to Enterprise with extras like SMS and WhatsApp, analytics, custom domains, SSO, and API access.

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IO Interactive release more detailed 007 First Light PC system requirements

007 First Light is coming to PC on May 27th – Here’s what you need to run it IO Interactive have released more detailed PC system requirements for 007 First Light, which is releasing on Steam and the Epic Games Store later this month on May 27th. These updated PC system requirements add new “Enthusiast” […]

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(PR) GMKtec Launches NucBox M3 Pro Mini PC with Intel Core i5-13500H

GMKtec officially announces the launch of its latest high-performance Mini PC, powered by the 13th Gen Intel Core i5-13500H processor. Designed for users seeking a compact yet powerful desktop solution, the new Mini PC combines strong productivity performance, triple-display 4K output, advanced connectivity, and flexible storage expansion in an elegant ultra-small form factor. The new GMKtec Mini PC is now available globally with special launch pricing and limited-time discounts.

Compact Size, Powerful Performance
At the heart of the system is the Intel Core i5-13500H processor, featuring 12 cores and 16 threads with a turbo frequency up to 4.7 GHz. Built on Intel 7 process technology, the processor delivers strong multitasking capabilities and excellent energy efficiency for both professional and entertainment workloads.

SK Hynix Buried Under Customer Cash Offers to Expand Memory Output, but Insider Warns Available Capacity Is ‘Essentially Zero’

SK Hynix Buried Under Customer Cash Offers to Expand Memory Output, but Insider Warns Available Capacity Is ‘Essentially Zero’

SK Hynix is being crushed by massive memory demand, but investors are offering assistance to increase its production capacity. SK Hynix Memory Demand Swells, but It Is Wary of Investments Towards Its Production Capacity While Agentic AI shifts gears from GPUs to CPUs, the DRAM demand continues to remain high as both components require memory. SK Hynix, being one of the leading DRAM makers, is already facing severe production constraints. At the same time, SK Hynix is being approached by tech firms to invest in its chip production capabilities. As per Reuters, it is reported that tech firms, mainly in […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/sk-hynix-buried-under-customer-cash-offers-to-expand-memory-output-but-insider-warns-available-capacity-essentially-zero/

IO Interactive Confirms 007 First Light Won’t Feature Path Tracing or Ray Reconstruction at Launch in Latest PC Specs Update

A character wearing sunglasses in a tropical setting with palm trees and an umbrella visible in the background.

IO Interactive has updated the PC specs for 007 First Light once again ahead of the game's launch at the end of this month. Thankfully, the update doesn't return to the first iteration of the game's PC specs that would've had you go into debt just to afford the RAM required to run the game. Instead, it adds specifications for Enthusiast and Ultra settings, showing what you'll need to run the game at 1440p and 60 FPS or 4K at 60 FPS. Everything save for Ultra requirements has stayed at 16GB of RAM, with the recommended CPUs staying the same […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/007-first-light-no-path-tracing-at-launch-pc-specs-update-may-2026/

Fake Call History Apps Stole Payments From Users After 7.3 Million Play Store Downloads

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered fraudulent apps on the official Google Play Store for Android that falsely claimed to offer access to call histories for any phone number, only to trick users into joining a subscription that provided fake data and incurred financial loss. The 28 apps have collectively racked up more than 7.3 million downloads, with one of them alone accounting for over

Pentagon releases UFO files on new website

The initial set of files housed on the site will include those containing unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) videos, photos, and original source documents from across the entire U.S. government. The materials have been reviewed for security purposes, but many have "not yet been analyzed for resolution of any anomalies," the Department's statement read.

ASUS launches its ROG Strix OLED XG34WCDMS RGB-Stripe Gaming Monitor

ASUS broadens the availability of RGB-Stripe OLED tech with its ROG Strix OLED XG34WCDMS gaming monitor ASUS has officially unveiled its new 34-inch ROG Strix OLED XG34WCDMS, a new ultra-wide RGB Stripe QD-OLED gaming monitor that boasts an ultra-fast 280Hz refresh rate. This new monitor acts as the little brother of ASUS’ 360 Hz ROG […]

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TSMC and Sony Team Up on Next-Gen Image Sensor and New Production Lines for AI

Sony Semiconductor Solutions and TSMC have signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to form a joint venture focused on next-generation image sensor development and manufacturing. Sony will be the majority and controlling shareholder in the joint venture, which plans to set up development and production lines at Sony's newly built fab in Koshi City, Kumamoto Prefecture. The partnership brings together Sony's image sensor design expertise and TSMC's process technology and manufacturing scale. Beyond conventional imaging, the two companies are also looking at opportunities in physical AI applications, automotive and robotics specifically, where high-performance sensing is becoming increasingly important. Investment plans for the joint venture are still being worked out, and Sony is also considering additional capital investment in its existing Nagasaki plant. Both are being planned in phases based on market demand and are contingent on Japanese government support. Earlier reporting from Reuters indicated Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) has confirmed subsidies of up to ¥60 billion (around $380 million) for Sony's Kumamoto image sensor facility.

The timing makes sense for both sides. TSMC is already involved in Kumamoto through its first fab there, which entered mass production in late 2024 supplying Sony Semiconductor Solutions and DENSO on 22/28 nm and 12/16 nm nodes. The new joint venture would push that relationship into more advanced territory. For Sony, the move comes as competitive pressure in the image sensor market is building as Samsung has been gaining ground in supplying sensors for Apple, squeezing Sony's position in a segment it has long dominated. However, the joint venture still needs a definitive legally binding agreement before it's official.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT Drops Below MSRP in China

Chinese GPU distributors are now selling some AMD Radeon RX graphics cards below the MSRP set by AMD. According to Channel Gate, AMD graphics cards in China are currently being sold at a loss, with many channel distributors actually losing money on some Radeon models. For example, the entry-level Radeon RX 7650 GRE, which has an MSRP of 2,099 RMB ($308), is now being sold for about 1,740 RMB ($256), including sales tax. This represents a 17% decrease compared to the MSRP, making it an attractive price point for buyers, but not so much for sellers who have a stockpile of these graphics cards. Moving on to the more recent RDNA 4 generation, the Radeon RX 9060 XT 8 GB edition has an MSRP of 2,499 RMB ($367) but is now being sold at 2,250 RMB ($330). This is another drop of 10% compared to the MSRP, offering gamers a better deal.

The smallest difference is seen with AMD's top RDNA 4 GPU, the Radeon RX 9070 XT. This model has an MSRP of 4,999 RMB ($735) in China but is now trading at a slight discount of less than one percentage point at 4,950 RMB ($727). While this may not seem significant, it indicates that the card is finally trading at prices that AMD encouraged its board partners to adopt for the latest RDNA 4 family. However, these changes are only now starting to appear in China.

Nintendo is raising the price of the Switch 2 by $50 starting in September — Console will soon cost $499, but you can avoid the price hike if you buy now

The price hikes have come for the last remaining current-gen console, as Nintendo has just announced that it'll make the Switch 2 more expensive in various regions around the world. America is getting a $50 bump this September, while Japan will see similar increases by the end of this month. Even Switch Online subscriptions will become costlier.

North Korean fake remote worker scam lands two Americans 18-month prison sentences for hosting laptops — US firms unknowingly shipped laptops to “employees” who secretly worked from overseas via remote desktop, generating $1.2 million for Pyongyang

Two Americans have been sentenced to prison for helping North Korean operatives infiltrate nearly 70 US companies through fraudulent remote IT jobs, enabling overseas access to company laptops via RDP and generating over $1.2 million for the regime.

Google Ads surfaces Tag Manager controls inside its interface

Why Google Ads auctions now run on intent, not keywords

Google appears to be pulling parts of the Google Tag Manager interface directly into Google Ads — a move that could simplify how advertisers manage tracking and tags.

What’s happening. Advertisers are spotting a new “Manage” option inside the Data Manager section of Google Ads that opens Tag Manager controls without leaving the platform.

The update was first shared by Marthijn Hoiting and Adriaan Dekker, who posted screenshots showing Tag Manager elements embedded within the Google Ads environment.

Why we care. Tag setup and troubleshooting have long been a friction point for advertisers, often requiring multiple tools and technical handoffs.

Bringing Tag Manager functionality into Google Ads could reduce that complexity — especially for smaller teams or advertisers without dedicated dev support.

Zoom in. Inside the Data Manager interface, users can see connected data sources (including Tag Manager) and trigger management actions directly from within Google Ads.

That suggests Google is moving toward a more unified measurement workflow, where tagging, data connections and campaign setup live closer together.

Between the lines. This aligns with Google’s broader push to simplify measurement and improve data accuracy — particularly as privacy changes and signal loss make clean tracking more critical.

It also mirrors recent efforts to make tagging more accessible without heavy technical setup.

What to watch:

  • Whether full Tag Manager functionality gets embedded or remains partial
  • How this impacts workflows between marketers and developers
  • If this becomes the default way to manage tags for advertisers

Bottom line. Google is quietly reducing the gap between campaign setup and measurement — bringing tagging closer to where ads are actually managed.

First seen. This update was shared by Adrian Dekker on LinkedIn, who credited Data and Analytics specialist Marthijn Hoiting for spotting it.

Google to no longer support FAQ rich results

Google will no longer support FAQ rich results as of May 7, 2026. This means you will no longer see FAQ rich results in the Google Search results going forward.

Plus, Google Search Console will stop reporting on FAQ structured data.

What Google said. Google posted a note at the top of the FAQ structured data developer documentation saying:

FAQ rich results are no longer appearing in Google Search. We will be dropping the FAQ search appearance, rich result report, and support in the Rich results test in June 2026. To allow time for adjusting your API calls, support for the FAQ rich result in the Search Console API will be removed in August 2026.

Remove code. You can remove the FAQ structured data from your code, if you want but you can also leave it. Other search engines may be able to continue to process it and use it for their own purposes.

Why we care. Rich results have helped web pages with click-through rates and get more traffic. FAQ rich results may have helped as well. But that is now no longer supported.

Keep an eye on your pages with FAQ structured data to see if your traffic from Google is impacted or not.

Sydium – Trains AI on your past posts to write and publish content in your voice


Sydium clones your writing voice and runs your social media on autopilot. Connect your accounts, let its Brand Voice AI learn from your best posts, then have it create, schedule, and publish content across platforms. It repurposes posts to each channel, generates videos, and replies to comments in your voice. Choose your topics, cadence, and approval mode: review everything, batch weekly, or go fully autonomous. Sydium supports 9 platforms and 50 content generation languages, protects your data with encryption and GDPR compliance, and provides an AI audit trail.

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Mockupanda – Generate unlimited professional mockups for print-on-demand


Mockupanda helps print sellers create bulk, professional poster and art print mockups for Etsy and POD stores. Upload a design once to instantly generate consistent, high-res images across multiple frames and realistic room scenes. Adjust artwork in real time, keep brand consistency across listings, and export watermark-free on Pro. The free plan offers unlimited generations.

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Augurine – See which life chapter you're in and what to do next


Augurine maps your life into chapters and shows what to do with the one you're in. It turns astrology into structure over time using profections, progressions, solar arc, and time lords, then highlights echoes between periods on a Replay timeline. Atlas translates your current chapter into focus areas, daily prompts, and a practice you can track. You can start free for your chart, daily transits, and forecasting, and upgrade to unlock your full timeline, pattern matches, and the chapter practice system.

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Noctua teases new Chromax Black NF-A12x25 G2 fans

Noctua teases its new NF-A12x25 G2 Chromax Black fans It’s almost here. Noctua has started to tease its new NF-A12x25 G2 Chromax Black fans. Soon, Noctua’s entire G2 series lineup will be available in black, giving PC enthusiasts an alternative to Noctua’s brown and beige colour scheme. Following last year’s release of Noctua’s Chromax Black […]

The post Noctua teases new Chromax Black NF-A12x25 G2 fans appeared first on OC3D.

(PR) Avalue Launches ECM-PTL 3.5 Micro Module with Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Processors

Avalue Technology Inc. (TPEx: 3479.TWO), a provider specializing in industrial computer solutions, announces the launch of its next-generation value Technology Inc. (TPEx: 3479.TWO), a provider specializing in industrial computer solutions, announces the launch of its next-generation ECM-PTL 3.5" Micro Module, powered by the latest Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors. Purpose-built for AI-driven edge computing and industrial automation, ECM-PTL brings AI PC architecture to the edge, delivering powerful AI acceleration, enhanced energy efficiency, and advanced heterogeneous computing capabilities.

Extending AI PC Architecture to the Edge
Designed in line with the evolution of AI PCs, ECM-PTL integrates CPU, GPU, and a dedicated NPU to enable efficient workload distribution. The built-in NPU is optimized for sustained AI workloads, allowing real-time AI inference while reducing CPU and GPU utilization. This architecture makes ECM-PTL ideal for edge scenarios requiring continuous AI processing, including machine vision, smart surveillance, and intelligent automation, where performance, efficiency, and responsiveness are critical.

How to run prompt-level SEO experiments for AI search

How to run prompt-level SEO experiments for AI search

As LLMs continue to grow, optimizing brand visibility in AI-generated responses is becoming increasingly important. Consumers are turning to these models for answers, recommendations, recipes, vacations, and nearly everything else imaginable.

But what happens if your brand isn’t included in those responses? Can you influence the outcome? And what are some proven ways to improve your brand’s inclusion and visibility?

That’s where structured experimentation comes in. Prompt-level SEO requires more than assumptions or one-off wins. It requires repeatable testing frameworks that help isolate what actually influences LLM responses.

Build prompt-level SEO tests with a hypothesis framework

There are countless recommendations on how to improve your LLM presence. Experimentation is key to discovering what works for your industry and brand.

Hypothesis-driven testing is the way we structure these tests for our brands. It breaks things down in a structured way that can be replicated across tests and situations.

This framework creates a common approach to testing and helps you quickly understand the test and its outputs. The structure consists of three main pieces: if, then, because.

  • If: This part provides the hypothesis: what is the test action?
    • “If we include more detailed product specifications in our content.”
  • Then: What will happen once the “if” section is completed? The outcome.
    • “Then we’ll see our brand get included in more product-specific prompts.”
  • Because: This is why you believe this will occur. What is the theory behind this test?
    • “Because LLMs value detailed and specific information in their prompt responses.”

This framework requires some basic fundamentals that ensure you’re thinking through the test. It also allows you to go back later and validate whether you have tested these specific elements in the past and what the premises, theories, and outcomes were. 

This helps because, as things change, the test elements may still be valid simply because the world shifts — changing the “because” section.

Key considerations before running prompt-level SEO tests

Before we get to the recommendations for testing best practices, here are some considerations when running these tests:

  • Model updates: These models are updated constantly. As some models move from 4.1 to 4.2, it’s time to revisit those results. How did the model change the inputs and outputs?
  • Prompt drift: Have you ever run the exact same prompt twice in a day or on consecutive days? Often, the results change. Therefore, running the prompt more than once and on consecutive days to evaluate the outcome is important to get a true baseline. This is no different from personalized search results. Brands get comfortable with the variance, but some averages surface and become the benchmark. Prompt testing works much the same way.

Now that you have the framework of the test, let’s think about the core elements of tests that can be used in prompt-specific testing.

How to isolate variables: A methodological approach

Designing a reliable prompt-level SEO experiment requires isolating a single causal variable. This is crucial for confidently attributing changes in LLM response inclusion or position to a specific action.

1. Content changes

When testing content modifications, the variable must be surgical. A common pitfall is changing too much at once (e.g., updating a product description and the page’s schema).

  • Best practice — The single-paragraph swap: Focus on modifying a single, targeted piece of text on the page, such as a product description, FAQ answer, or a specific feature bullet point.
  • Methodology: For true isolation, implement A/B testing with a control page containing the original content and a test page containing the modified content. The prompt should be designed to target the specific information you changed. Measure the brand’s inclusion rate and position-in-response over a defined period (e.g., seven days – keep in mind these models are moving at a variety of speeds. This work, much like SEO, isn’t a microwave, but more like an oven).

2. Structured data

Structured data (schema) provides explicit signals to both search engines and LLM ingestion layers. Testing this requires treating the schema update as the only change to the page.

  • Variable isolation: Test adding new properties (e.g., brand, model, and offer details) without altering the visible HTML text. This isolates the impact of the machine-readable layer.
  • Specific experiment — FAQ schema: A highly effective experiment is adding FAQ schema to pages that already have Q&A sections in their HTML, isolating the effect of the explicit schema markup on LLM ingestion. Our work with brands has demonstrated that adding FAQ schema to pages with Q&A sections makes those sections easier for LLMs to ingest.

3. Before-and-after prompt testing

This process involves establishing a stringent baseline, making the change, and then repeating the prompt query. This is an essential control method in lieu of true A/B testing on the LLM itself.

Protocol

  • Phase 1 (baseline): Execute a set of 5-10 target prompts daily for seven consecutive days to establish a true average of inclusion and position-in-response, accounting for prompt drift.
    • Action: Deploy the isolated change (e.g., content or schema update).
  • Phase 2 (measurement): Re-run the exact same set of prompts daily for the next seven days.
    • Analysis: Compare the average inclusion rate and position of Phase 1 versus Phase 2. This method is central to initial presence score analyses, such as using three buckets of 25 keywords and prompts for a total of 75 queries.

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Encouraging reproducible experiments

With the speed of model evolution and the lack of detailed model insights, it’s difficult to ensure reproducibility of results. However, the goal is to move beyond simple “it worked once” findings to build a durable methodology.

Mandatory frameworks

Ensure every test is documented using the “if, then, because” hypothesis structure. This archives the premise, action, and expected outcome, allowing future teams to quickly validate whether a test remains relevant as LLMs evolve.

Technical integrity

  • Version control: Document the specific model and version used for testing (e.g., “Gemini 4.1.2”). This allows for easy comparison when a model update occurs.
  • Prompt libraries: Maintain an organized, time-stamped repository of the exact prompt queries used for baseline and measurement phases. This repository should track inclusion rate, position-in-response, and sentiment/framing for each query.

Infrastructure consistency

Define the testing environment (e.g., clear browser cache, no login state) and, where possible, use APIs or synthetic testing platforms to remove the impact of personalization and location bias, which is analogous to controlling for personalized search results in traditional SEO.

Moving beyond one-off wins in AI search

The key to prompt-level SEO is rigorous methodology. By adopting a hypothesis-driven approach, surgically isolating variables (content, entities, schema), and establishing strict before-and-after testing protocols, you can confidently move past speculation. 

The path to influencing LLM responses is paved with controlled, documented, and reproducible experiments.

SEO’s new goal in 2026: Recognition, not rankings

SEO’s new goal in 2026: Recognition, not rankings

For the best part of two decades, we had a clear and accepted mandate: Get your brand to the top of the search results page. The problem was understood, the success metrics were agreed upon, and a supporting ensemble of tools, talent, and tactics was built around solving it.

Rankings were the scoreboard. Position 1 meant visibility. Traffic followed, and a brand’s value seemed to follow it.

It’s this core premise that is now under serious renegotiation with the search landscape changing more in the past 18 months than in the previous 10 years combined: 

  • AI Overviews are absorbing queries that previously generated clicks. 
  • AI/LLM platforms are becoming the first stop for research and decision-making. 
  • Zero-click is no longer a niche concern. It’s increasingly becoming the default.

What’s required now isn’t a new set of tactics. It’s a fundamental change in mindset. This is the SEO problem of 2026. Let me show you why recognition is your new goal and how to earn it.

The world changed faster than we did

SEO has always been a discipline that chases the algorithm.

We reverse-engineered signals, built strategies around them, and then scrambled to adapt when they shifted. Yes, there has always been the argument that if you cater your content to humans, you typically perform well.

That said, there have been obvious shifts in the types of content that resonate with the algorithm and those that don’t, dictated by changes to the Google algorithm at specific times.  

It was never a perfect or complete system; anyone who worked through (or has since learned about) the Panda and Penguin years will tell you the algorithm was always a shifting target. But the fundamentals remained stable. Aim to rank well, get found, win.

The shift we’re living through now isn’t a Google core update. Instead, we’re experiencing a structural change in how information is surfaced, interacted with, and ultimately trusted. 

AI has fundamentally transformed what searchers see

There’s a mental model baked into traditional SEO: If you’re at the top of the SERP, you’re visible. That model was accurate for a long time. But it isn’t now.

AI and LLM platforms — whether Google’s own generative features or external tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude — don’t crawl the SERP and pick from the top results. They build understanding from training data, citation patterns, entity relationships in knowledge graphs, and signals about who is genuinely considered authoritative on a given topic. 

A high-ranking page can be largely invisible to these systems if the brand behind it hasn’t established recognition and preference (a.k.a., the quality of being known, cited, and trusted beyond its own domain).

Dig deeper: Entity-first SEO: How to align content with Google’s Knowledge Graph

Ranking no longer equals visibility

If your instinct is to treat it like another algorithm update, to find the new signals, maybe even game the new system, you are missing how dramatically the search landscape has shifted.

Think about it this way:

  • A brand can rank No. 1 for vital trophy keywords.
  • Their domain authority is strong.
  • Their technical SEO is clean, meeting best practices.
  • Their content team publishes weekly.
  • Their link profile is healthy.

By every traditional metric, this brand would be seen as winning. And yet, when their potential customers ask an AI or LLM platform which brand solutions to consider in their category, this brand doesn’t come up.

When Google’s AI Overview summarizes the landscape, it cites three competitors. When a journalist writes a roundup and asks an LLM to help research it, this brand is invisible.

They rank. Yet it’s as if they don’t exist — because ranking well doesn’t solve for recognition.

Even if the dashboards still report rankings and the tools still track positions one through ten, optimizing for a metric that’s losing its meaning is no longer a viable strategy.

User behavior is also changing

A growing share of search journeys now end before a user ever clicks a result, because they get the information they need without having to click through.

AI Overviews takes the majority of the headlines for this, but there has also been a huge shift in the SERP towards featured snippet expansions. This is further amplified by the adoption of  LLM-powered assistants that surface direct answers outside the traditional search environment.

Meanwhile, queries are increasingly conversational, with more and more users asking AI tools questions the way they’d ask a knowledgeable colleague or trusted friend, and they’re expecting thorough, contextualized, and personalized answers rather than a list of blue links.

In this world, the question your SEO strategy needs to answer is no longer “how do I rank?”, it’s “Is my brand the preferred option in the conversation?” 

And these are absolutely different questions that require different answers.

How AI ‘chooses’ brands to recognize

Think about how an AI model decides what to say when someone asks, “What’s the best CRM for a small B2B team?” It doesn’t run a Google search and summarize the top result. It draws on patterns it sees throughout the knowledge at its disposal:

  • Training data.
  • Industry publications.
  • Reviews.
  • Expert commentary.
  • Forum discussions.
  • Solution comparisons.

The brands that appear in that answer are the ones that have accumulated recognition across the broader landscape, not just the one that ranks.

This is becoming an invisible tax on brands that have focused exclusively on rankings. They may dominate the SERP today. But in the AI-mediated version of that same query, they’re absent.

“Recognition” doesn’t have to be a vague brand concept. It has specific, measurable components. Let’s break them down.

Brand awareness across the search universe

This is the most basic layer. Does your brand name appear, in context, across the search universe?

Not just on your own domain, but in industry publications, analyst reports, user reviews, forum discussions, podcast transcripts, and news coverage. You must also consider where audiences are spending time, because they are developing brand awareness on social-search destinations, too.

AI and LLM platforms are increasingly trained on and drawing from the wider internet when answering questions. Certain domains are massively outperforming others in terms of citations from these platforms, Semrush found. 

If your brand is only present on your own website, you’re harder to find and aren’t in the platforms’ go-to sources.

Topical authority 

This goes beyond keyword rankings. Topical authority means that when a given subject area comes up, your brand is consistently associated with it — not just by Google’s algorithms, but by writers, analysts, content creators, and communities. 

It’s the difference between a site that covers a topic and a brand that owns the conversation in people’s minds who discuss it.

The signal here isn’t domain authority. It’s authority, trust, and relevance (a.k.a., preference). You are asking, “Does our brand appear alongside the recognized leaders in our space?” and “When people discuss an essential topic, are we in the conversation?”

Dig deeper: Why topical authority isn’t enough for AI search 

Entity clarity

This is the most technical layer and the one most often overlooked. An “entity” in SEO terms is a clearly defined, consistently described “thing.” This could be: 

  • Your company.
  • Your product.
  • Key voice or person. 
  • Key topic or conversation.

Put simply, it’s something that knowledge systems can reliably identify and categorize.

If your brand’s description varies across your site, your Wikipedia page (if you have one), your Google Business Profile, your Crunchbase entry, and your LinkedIn page, you create ambiguity for every system.

This is as confusing for your human audience as it is for the AI/LLM layer trying to understand who you are and what you do.

Entity clarity means having a canonical, consistent answer to the questions:

  • What is this company?
  • What does it do?
  • Who does it serve?
  • How is it different?

Brands with strong entity clarity get pulled into knowledge graphs. They get cited. They get recognized.

Dig deeper: From links to brand signals: The new SEO authority model

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6 things to get you started on the path to recognition

True recognition cannot be built overnight. Instead, your focus is on engineering discovery that develops recognition over time. With that in mind, here are six ways to begin the process:

1. Audit your entity presence

Go and look at how your brand is described in the places that matter: 

  • Google’s Knowledge Panel. 
  • Wikipedia (if applicable). 
  • Wikidata.
  • Social media conversations.
  • Key person/business LinkedIn profiles.
  • Your own “About” page. 

You should be asking if the messaging here is consistent. If your homepage describes you as “an AI-powered B2B sales platform” while the content you discuss and share on your YouTube says “CRM software for startups,” you have an entity problem. 

2. Fix the inconsistencies

Write a canonical description of your company — one clear, accurate, jargon-free paragraph — and work to get it reflected everywhere. Then mold the content format to the needs of the various platforms you want to show up on.

Alongside this, decide which conversations are most important to your brand and consistently look to own these topics. This is part engineering discovery, but it’s also developing your entity and the topics that contribute to that.

Dig deeper: Why entity authority is the foundation of AI search visibility

3. Create citable assets

There’s a difference between content that ranks on a SERP and content that gets cited.

Ranking content is optimized around keywords, and too often, content has become homogenized in trying to meet the expectations of an algorithm so that you can rank.

Citable content, on the other hand, is original, specific, and useful enough that other people (and AI/LLM platforms) want to reference it. Citable content is strong enough that your audience feels like they miss an integral part of a conversation by not featuring or citing the asset or source. 

Think original research and surveys, clear and ownable frameworks or methodologies, definitions that don’t yet exist clearly in your space, and data that journalists, analysts, creators, and bloggers actually want to quote or build upon.

If the only content on your site are search-optimized blog posts, ask yourself: 

  • Is there anything here that a writer at a key niche publication or a researcher at a relevant public body would want to cite? 
  • Is there anything that a content creator would want to build upon or explore further? 

If the answer is no, that’s the gap to close.

4. Build off-site recognition deliberately

This isn’t about traditional link building. It’s about building presence in the right conversations, be that industry publications, podcasts, analyst briefings, conference talks, social content, or community forums.

Every time your brand name appears in a meaningful context outside your own domain, you’re building the recognition signal that AI and LLMs draw on and that resonates with humans in the journey.

Prioritize quality of context over volume. A single, substantive mention in a respected publication is worth more than fifty low-quality directory listings.

5. Optimize for clarity and intent

A keyword is a moment. Intent is a journey. Traditional SEO has trained us to think in snapshots: a user types a query, we rank for it, we win.

But a real buying journey in 2026 looks nothing like that. It might start with a conversational AI query, move through a Reddit thread, surface a YouTube comparison, hit a review platform, and only then arrive at a branded search. The keyword at any single point is almost beside the point.

What matters is whether your brand shows up meaningfully across the full arc of that journey — not just at the moment someone is ready to convert.

Start by mapping intent honestly. 

  • What is someone actually trying to understand when they enter your space? 
  • What does the journey from problem-aware to solution-decided look like for your customer? 

Then audit where your brand is present, absent, or ambiguous across it.

The second part is clarity. As search becomes more conversational and AI-mediated, the brands that get surfaced are those that clearly communicate what they do, who they serve, and why they’re the right choice — consistently across every touchpoint. 

Vague positioning might survive a keyword-match algorithm. It won’t survive a language model deciding whether your brand is the right answer to a specific human question.

Be specific and consistent. Make sure your description holds up whether someone finds you on your own site, in a third-party review, or in an AI-generated summary.

Dig deeper: If you can’t say what problem your brand solves, AI won’t either

6. Start measuring recognition

Your current reporting probably tracks keyword rankings, organic traffic, and backlinks. I would argue that this should continue, but there should be a shift in the importance of these metrics versus the following signal:

  • [Brand] search volume: Are more people searching directly for you?
  • [Brand] + [Intent or Keyword]: Are more people associating you with specific topics?
  • Unlinked mentions: Is your brand name appearing in content that doesn’t link to you?

You can then use the following alongside these and begin to further understand if your brand is being recognized:

  • Increase in referral traffic.
  • Increase in direct traffic.
  • Increase in quality of traffic (measured in longer sessions, per user increase in pages viewed, purchases earlier in the journey).

This will then allow you to look towards the most important SEO metric there should ever be: revenue. Especially if you can assess and report on the development of average order value (AOV) and lifetime value (LTV) or the specific values of the pages that have seen higher traffic because of an increase in unlinked mentions and/or brand searches.

When you begin to think about these considerations, the most important shift isn’t adding new metrics to your dashboard. It’s changing what you treat as the primary signal.

Branded search volume, specifically branded search paired with intent, is one of the clearest indicators of genuine preference in the user journey and also the competitive landscape.

Someone searching for you by name, combined with a buying signal, isn’t discovering you. They’ve already decided you’re worth considering. That’s recognition doing its job.

The goal is to grow that signal deliberately, and then make sure that when someone arrives with that intent, you meet it head on.

A branded intent search that lands on a generic homepage is a wasted moment. These users are telling you exactly what they need. Your job as an SEO in 2026 is to have already built the page, the answer, the experience that closes the gap.

The supporting metrics — unlinked mentions, referral traffic, direct traffic, AOV, LTV — all tell you whether recognition is compounding into something commercially meaningful. 

And that’s ultimately the conversation that needs to happen in every boardroom and strategy session: Recognition isn’t a brand vanity play, it’s a revenue strategy.

Rankings as the primary focus have gotten us so far. Recognition, with a view and monitoring mindset on the signals identified here, is what takes us, the SEO’s role and importance to brands further than ever before.

Get ready for a longer game with a bigger potential to win

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about the recognition-first approach: It’s slower.

You can’t optimize your way to being well-known in the same way you can optimize your way to a ranking — and I think it’s what’s most intimidating to SEOs.

Recognition compounds over time, developed through consistent presence, genuine authoritativeness, relevance, and the slow accumulation of trustworthiness. But that’s also what makes it durable. 

Rankings fluctuate with every algorithm update, and the value of a No. 1 ranking is seemingly shrinking with every update due to the continued and increasing number of SERP features and AI/LLM integrations into the SERP.

Recognition, though, once established, is much harder to displace. To own AI-mediated search in the coming years, spend this period building something that AI systems — and the increasing number of humans utilizing them — genuinely recognize as authoritative.

The No. 1 ranking is a vanity metric if it ends up below the fold, stuck under a SERP of AI/LLM integrations and SERP features — ultimately ensuring nobody knows who you are.

Start building recognition. Your appearance in those top-of-page SERP features and AI/LLM integrations will follow.

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Why intent alignment matters more than perfect technical SEO

Why intent alignment matters more than perfect technical SEO

Improving technical SEO on your site may not be enough to move the needle these days. 

Once a site reaches technical parity with its competitors — the point at which a proper infrastructure no longer gives you an advantage — Google shifts its ranking criteria toward relevance. And relevance is determined by aligning with search intent. 

Let’s talk about how to make your site more relevant.

Why an intent mismatch may be suppressing your site’s performance

An intent mismatch occurs when the copy on a page doesn’t match what the user is expecting to find on it. This happens when pages aren’t relevant to a topic or have mismatched signals.

This generates poor behavior signals — users click through from a SERP, see that the page doesn’t answer their need, and leave. Google interprets these signals as evidence that the page doesn’t satisfy the query. 

This can lead to a decline in rankings, which means fewer users see the page, which means the behavioral signals worsen. It’s a feedback loop that technical SEO alone can’t resolve.

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Technical SEO improvements may no longer make a difference

In the early stages of implementing an SEO strategy, the needle can move quickly. If a site is operating below the technical baseline needed for Google to properly evaluate it, applying simple fixes — such as fixed crawl errors, resolved duplicate content issues, improved page speed, and adding schema — can produce big gains.

However, after these changes, your site’s technical foundations are now comparable to those of your main competitors — you hit a ceiling. Now, Google isn’t ranking pages based on which ones it can access the easiest, but on those that best satisfy the user’s query. 

Your technical infrastructure, or lack thereof, no longer disadvantages you, but now the rules of the ranking game have changed.

This is where intent alignment becomes the primary lever for improvement. 

Signals that reinforce search intent

Elements that have an impact on a page’s intent, and how Google decides whether the intent matches the page, include: 

  • Click-through rate.
  • Engagement signals.
  • Core Web Vitals.
  • Schema type.
  • Internal linking anchor texts.
  • URL structure.

Click-through rate (CTR)

Click-through rate can be determined by your title tag, meta description, URL structure, and schema. It is also measured against intent. 

For example, if your title tag is optimized for a keyword but doesn’t match the user’s query, your CTR will drop. Google treats a low CTR as a relevance signal and adjusts rankings accordingly.

Engagement rate

Time-on-page, scroll depth, and interaction rates can suffer when intent doesn’t align with a page. 

If a user is searching to purchase something but lands on a how-to guide, they may exit that page within seconds. The same can be said of a user looking for an emergency plumber who lands on a page without a phone number. 

Engagement signals feed directly into how Google evaluates a page’s usefulness for a given query.

Core Web Vitals (CWV)

The three Core Web Vitals — Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — determine page loading speed.

A transactional page that loads slowly suffers more than a slow-loading informational article. With the transactional page, the user is ready to buy and their patience is minimal, whereas a reader in research mode can tolerate a longer wait. 

CWV thresholds matter everywhere, but their impact on conversion and bounce behavior is greater on high-intent pages. 

Schema type

Schema markup tells Google explicitly what type of content is on a page. Generally:

  • Article/HowTo is informational.
  • Product is transactional.
  • FAQ is informational and commercial.
  • Local business/event is navigational.

When schema type contradicts the content on a page, Google gets a conflicting signal, resulting in a traffic drop.

Internal linking anchor texts

The anchor text of internal links tells Google about the page that’s being linked to, including its intent. 

If a transactional landing page receives internal links with informational anchor text — “learn more about X,” rather than “get a quote for X” or “buy X” —  the intent signal Google receives about that page’s purpose gets diluted.

URL structure

Google uses URL patterns to infer page type. 

For example, URLs sitting under /blog/ are treated with informational bias. A product or service page buried under a blog path fights against that structural expectation, regardless of its content, and it may not rank well. 

Cannibalization and canonicalization

If your site has multiple pages targeting the same keyword but with different intents, neither is likely to rank well. They compete against each other and dilute the signal Google receives. 

To fix, use canonical tags to clearly signal which page is the preferred one for a given keyword, consolidate or redirect competing pages where appropriate, and ensure your internal linking reinforces the canonical choice.

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How to fix intent misalignment

Here’s an example of a common intent mismatch and some steps to audit your content and fix it. 

What an intent mismatch looks like

For example, if a user searches for “financial analysis software,” they’re looking to buy software. The keyword phrase is highly transactional. 

But if your site targets this keyword phrase for an informational blog post that explains how a person can complete a financial analysis report themselves, this creates a mismatch.

The user is looking for a product that does the analysis for them, which means they want to compare features, understand pricing, see integrations, or book a demo. 

The keyword phrase should be applied to a dedicated product or landing page that clearly outlines functionality, benefits, use cases, and pricing. This would align more with the user’s needs, resulting in more inquiries, leads, and conversions.

Identify the intent of your pages

To fix intent mismatches, to start, compile a list of the top performing keywords that best describe your business and manually check the Google rankings for each.

This initial research will tell you exactly what type of page and copy you should have for these keywords. For example:

  • Knowledge panels, AI Overviews, and People Also Ask boxes usually appear for informational searches.
  • Paid results usually suggest commercial intent.
  • Shopping feeds suggest a transactional keyword.

Next, add the keywords to a spreadsheet and add a column for intent. Work down the list, adding whether you think the page is informational, commercial, transactional, or navigational. 

You can then create another column that states the type of page that will rank well: 

  • Informational: Blog or resource content.
  • Commercial: Service or landing pages.
  • Transactional: Collection, category, or product pages.
  • Navigational: Brand, specific service, or specific location pages.

See what your competitors are doing

Research your competitors’ pages for the keywords you’re targeting. Analyze and note what they have that your pages don’t have.

They may have:

  • Tables.
  • Comparisons.
  • Calculators.
  • Tools.
  • FAQs.
  • Reviews.
  • Step-by-steps.
  • Images.
  • Videos.
  • And more. 

Consider how to improve your own pages to match theirs. 

Measure your page’s performance based on intent metrics

Once you’ve made changes to your pages, track their performance to see whether they helped. Look at:

  • Clicks and impressions for intent-aligned keywords.
  • Rankings for core target queries.
  • Time on page.
  • Conversion rates, particularly those of previously underperforming pages.

Technical SEO still plays a decisive role

Technical SEO is still important, especially for complex, enterprise-scale sites. Here are some ways that technical SEO work can still move the needle significantly, in ways that content optimization alone can’t.

Crawl budget management

An ecommerce site with thousands of URLs can have its crawl budget consumed by low-value pages before its allotment reaches high-intent category and product pages that you want to rank. 

Cleaning up low-value pages is purely technical work and will ensure your crawl budget goes toward pages that count. 

International site architecture

Technical SEO is crucial when handling international sites that contain pages in multiple languages. 

A keyword that’s purely informational in one market may be transactional in another, reflecting different buyer behaviors and levels of market maturity. Hreflang implementation, regional subdomain or subdirectory structures, and URL strategies all affect whether the right page, with the right intent, reaches the right audience.

Log file analysis

A log file analysis will reveal which pages Google is successfully crawling and how frequently they are. For sites with intent alignment problems, Google often spends a disproportionate amount of attention crawling low-value or misaligned pages, while high-intent pages are visited infrequently. 

For small sites with a clean structure and limited number of URLs, technical SEO can reach parity quickly, so the need to shift to intent alignment happens sooner. For large, complex sites, technical and intent work often need to happen in parallel.

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Technical SEO and intent need to work together

Technical SEO is still important today — think of it as a foundation that the rest of the site sits on. Pages that can’t be crawled, indexed, or rendered correctly will be unable to rank, regardless of how well their content matches user intent.

Think of intent alignment as the ceiling — it’s what determines how high a technically sound page can rank, and whether it converts the traffic it earns. 

Every page on a site should have a clearly defined intent, expressed in the right format, with the right content type. And they should also be supported by technical signals, be it schema, URL structure, relevant anchor text, etc., so that the page’s intent is constantly reinforced. 

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