Author: admin

Monarch Tractor’s assets have been acquired by construction giant Caterpillar, after struggling to pivot to a software services business, according to filings with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The acquisition, first reported by Bloomberg, caps a few tough years for Monarch as it went through multiple rounds of layoffs, was sued by three different dealers, and lost a major contract manufacturing partner in Foxconn. It also comes just a few weeks after co-founder and wine scion Carlo Mondavi said he was “pushed out” after disagreeing with CEO Praveen Penmetsa’s software-forward approach. Mondavi couldn’t be immediately reached for comment.…

The US federal government’s central energy information agency is planning to implement a mandatory nationwide survey of data centers focused on their energy use, according to a letter seen by WIRED. This survey would be the first effort of its type to collect basic information about data centers.The letter was sent to senators Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley on April 9 by the head of the Energy Information Administration, Tristan Abbey, and comes in response to a previous inquiry from the senators about the EIA’s plans to get more information about data centers. WIRED reported on Hawley and Warren’s letter…

Men’s grooming brand Manscape had a problem. It was really good at balls humor—but not much else. And as the company expanded further into the personal care space with hair and beard care products, it was stuck in a nether-region niche of its own making.Onstage at ADWEEK’s Social Media Week, Jori Evans, Manscaped social media director, and Michael Miller, Consiglieri founder and head of creative, shared how the balls-trimmer brand broke out of its pigeon hole on social without abandoning its roots.Manscaped was a beta tester for Clamor, an AI tool created by Consiglieri to help brands understand social chatter…

Agentic AI is the tech industry’s newest success story, and companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to give enterprises the tools they need to create these automated little helpers. To that end, OpenAI has now updated its agents software development toolkit (SDK), introducing a number of new features designed to help businesses create their own agents that run on the backs of OpenAI’s models. The SDK’s new capabilities include a sandboxing ability, which allows the agents to operate in controlled computer environments. This is important because running agents in a totally unsupervised fashion can be risky due to their…

If you’ve been waiting for Microsoft to update its Surface PC lineup—perhaps with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 Elite processors—I’ve got bad news for you.Microsoft is shaking up its PC lineup, but it’s doing so by instituting big price hikes. This means you’ll be paying at least $1,500 for Surface devices that launched at $1,000 just two years ago and that Microsoft no longer offers new Surface devices under $1,000 at all.The 12-inch Surface Pro tablet that originally started at $799 and the 13-inch Surface Laptop that launched at $899 now cost $1,049 and $1,149, respectively, a $250 price increase. The higher-end…

SharkNinja, the company behind the Shark and Ninja household products brands, has hired Elizabeth Nolan as chief creative officer.She was most recently SVP and global creative director at Clinique, where she led visual merchandising, packaging, retail experiences, and digital platforms.In her new role, Nolan will build and lead a creative team at SharkNinja, shaping how the company tells its stories across 36 product categories, ranging from air fryers and vacuums to hair styling tools and more.Nolan will report to SharkNinka’s chief brand and experience officer, Michelle Crossan-Matos, who joined the business from Ulta Beauty last year.

Historically, marketers relied on designers and other creative professionals to develop images and videos for personalized online ad campaigns. In late 2024, seven-year-old startup Hightouch launched an AI-powered service that allows marketing professionals to create custom content for brands such as Domino’s, Chime, PetSmart, and Spotify without involving brand design teams or ad agencies. The offering has been highly successful. Since introducing its AI product 20 months ago, Hightouch has added $70 million in annualized recurring revenue (ARR), it tells TechCrunch, bringing the startup to a total of $100 million in ARR. “Before Gen AI, it was impossible for someone…

Having demonstrated that it has the operational capability to transport humans safely to the moon and back, the United States is moving on to its next major aim: It wants nuclear reactors in orbit and on the lunar surface by 2030. For such a feat, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will have to work in conjunction with the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy.In a post on X, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) unveiled a document with new guidelines for federal agencies to establish the space nuclear technology road map for the…

Advertising giants WPP, Publicis, and Dentsu on Wednesday agreed to an order from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and a handful of U.S. states over allegations that the groups illegally colluded since 2018 to implement brand safety standards that would direct advertisers’ budgets away from certain media platforms and publishers. Collusion on these brand safety standards led to an effective boycott of conservative media platforms, the government concluded. “The ad agencies’ brand-safety conspiracy turned competition in the market for ad-buying services on its head,” FTC chair Andrew Ferguson said in a statement. “The antitrust laws guarantee participation in a market free…

Glydways, a San Francisco-based startup developing personal autonomous pods designed to operate on dedicated 2-meter-wide lanes in cities, has raised $170 million in a Series C funding round. The round was co-led by Suzuki Motor Corporation, ACS Group, and Khosla Ventures. Existing investors Mitsui Chemicals and Gates Frontier, and new investor Obayashi Corporation also participated.  Now it seems the startup is already in discussions to raise another $250 million in funding that would push its valuation to more than $1 billion, Bloomberg reported. Glydways has made progress on its concept, which it claims can move up to 10,000 people per…

Nvidia is the undisputed king of AI chips. But thanks to the AI it helped build, the champ could soon face growing competition.Modern AI runs on Nvidia designs, a dynamic that has propelled the company to a market cap of well over $4 trillion. Each new generation of Nvidia chip allows companies to train more powerful AI models using hundreds or thousands of processors networked together inside vast data centers. One reason for Nvidia’s success is that it provides software to help program each new generation of chip. That may soon not be such a differentiated skill.A startup called Wafer…

Dr. Squatch has teamed up with actress and model Megan Fox to remind men there are healthier choices when it comes to deodorant.A new campaign from the Unilever-owned men’s personal care brand, “Dr. Squatch’s Foundation for Odor eXcellence,” is a six-part series starring Fox as Professor Fox, head professor at The Dr. Squatch Foundation for Odor Excellence, also known as The F.O.X. Dressed in a black leather outfit, she strolls through campus, educating her all-male students on the virtues of natural personal care products with a mix of innuendo and a riding crop.In “Manliness 101,” Professor Fox commands the classroom…

VCs love to chase after the hottest startups, but startups aren’t always interested in selling more shares. So it is with Anthropic, sources tell Bloomberg. VCs have been offering the OpenAI competitor a preemptive funding round that would value the company at $800 billion or more — almost matching, or perhaps even surpassing, its rival. In February, OpenAI closed a record-breaking $110 billion round that gave it an $852 billion post-money valuation. Just a few weeks earlier, Anthropic announced a $30 billion round (which, in another era, would have been record-breaking, too), at a $380 billion valuation. But so far,…

On Tuesday, Amazon announced it would be acquiring Globalstar, a company that manufactures and operates low Earth orbit satellites with the spectrums needed to communicate with devices on the ground. Amazon also says it is partnering with Apple, which has relied on Globalstar to provide off-grid emergency communication features on devices like its iPhone and Apple Watch.The $11.57 billion deal is Amazon’s latest effort to take on Elon Musk’s Starlink. It comes at a time when satellite internet is becoming critical to the spread of AI tech, but it also adds to concerns about what happens when our orbit fills…

Subway Takes, the Instagram account where people share their hot takes while riding the New York City Subway, has grown to more than 2 million followers and booked A-list celebrity guests like Cate Blanchett and Jason Bateman. And host Kareem Rahma isn’t changing the show’s premise or format, no matter how big it gets.“I’ve been always pushing against changing the show, against any new variation of it,” he said on stage at ADWEEK’s Social Media Week in New York. “I’ve always been very aggressive about trying to keep the DNA of the show to be mostly independent comedians, independent writers, independent…

Motorola has filed a lawsuit in India against social media platforms and content creators over posts it alleges are defamatory, raising concerns it could dampen critical coverage of the company, experts say. The lawsuit, filed in a Bengaluru court and obtained by TechCrunch, names platforms including X, YouTube, and Instagram along with dozens of content creators, and seeks takedown of the content as well as broader restraint on what it describes as false or defamatory material related to the company’s devices. In its over 60-page filing, Motorola has sought a permanent injunction restraining the defendants from publishing or sharing what…