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Canada’s BKR Capital announced Monday that its Fund II has closed CA$20 million (around $14.5 million), bringing it closer to its CA$50 million target. This fund is looking to back “high-growth technology companies led by founders from the Black community, building solutions for the future of work, living, and global connectivity,” managing partner Lise Birikundavyi told TechCrunch. The firm is mainly looking at Canada but is open to backing select companies globally. The average check size will be between $250,000 and $1.5 million, she said. Birikundavyi said that almost 70% of the Black population in Canada is first or second-generation…
Whether you’re an experienced vinyl collector or just getting started on your journey, we recommend the Audio-Technica AT-LP120XUSB. This excellent record player comes with great connectivity and a built-in phono preamp, and it has the backing of one of the biggest players in home and professional audio. You can currently pick up the LP120XUSB for just $398 on Amazon, a $51 markdown from the usual price.Courtesy of Audio TechnicaThe AT-LP120XUSB features basically everything you could want from a modern, upgraded turntable. The built-in phono preamp lets you easily swap the turntable from your headphones to your speakers without any extra…
The North American sports betting industry is growing up, and challenger Bet365 is putting its chips on building a strong brand to stand out.Late last year, the global sports betting giant selected the WPP network as its first creative agency of record in the United States and Canada. VML beat out four other agencies for the three year contract in an eight-week review, managed by consultancy ID Comms. Their first campaign together, “Winning Is Everything,” launched three months later.With a multi-year UFC partnership and expansion into more U.S. states ahead of NFL season, Bet365 realized it needed a dedicated partner…
Apple Music announced on Tuesday that it’s partnering with Ticketmaster to power its Concert Discovery feature. This integration aims to improve how users discover live music events based on their listening habits. Ticketmaster is the first ticketing service to integrate with Apple Music, allowing listeners to find nearby concerts and events tailored to their individual music preferences. Every event listing on the music streaming app now includes a direct link to Ticketmaster for easy ticket purchasing. With the new integration, Apple Music users can explore ticket options through various features in the app, including the homepage carousel that highlights nearby…
When NASA’s new moon rocket lifts off as soon as April 1, its immense core stage will mix 537,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen with 196,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and ignite the propellant in four, eight-foot-wide engines, producing some 1.7 million pounds of thrust. Shortly after these main engines fire, two solid rocket boosters, one on each side, will light their gunpowder-like propellant to add 3.3 million pounds of thrust each.This immense force will lift the 322-foot-tall rocket, named the Space Launch System (SLS), on the first leg of Artemis II, a more than 600,000-mile journey to the moon and…
The programmatic supply chain may be headed for a reset—one where buyers no longer toggle between dashboards, stitch together vendors, or manually orchestrate campaigns.That’s the pitch from PubMatic, which is deploying a set of AI agents to plan, execute and optimize media campaigns in real time, through a new partnership with Untapped Growth, a collective representing 20 independent agencies.At the center of the effort is AgenticOS, PubMatic’s AI infrastructure built in collaboration with NVIDIA, alongside its buying platform Activate. The system replaces traditional campaign setup workflows with a network of specialized AI agents that handle tasks like audience discovery and…
A secretive AI lab founded by serial entrepreneur Brett Adcock shared new details about what it believes is a novel marriage of model-building and hardware design that will change how humans interact with intelligent software. The company said in a statement it would design multi-modal end-to-end models, their hardware, and their interfaces in tandem to deliver a “seamless end-to-end personal intelligence product.” The system will have a persistent memory of your life and can listen, see, and interact with the world in real time. How that will be executed remains unclear outside the company, but Hark’s ambition is representative of…
Know thyself. It’s an old adage that has new resonance in the digital age. Today, you can buy smart devices that monitor your heartbeat, blood pressure, exercise habits, water intake, sleep, mood, menstrual cycle, sexual activity, and meditation patterns, not to mention your poop. The internet of things has turned into what academic and author Andrea Matwyshyn has termed the “Internet of Bodies” with the promise of selling you insights about your “quantified self.”The desire for self-awareness is not new, but these data offer a different twist on enlightenment. Millions of Americans live with a smartwatch that reminds them to…
The main takeaway:At its IAB NewFronts 2026 event, Samsung revealed a new partnership with Amazon Ads to bring interactive video and shoppable content to a user’s remote control. According to the company, Samsung TV Plus is the first external CTV device partner to offer this capability thanks to its integration with Amazon DSP.In addition to new content and live events, Samsung is looking to make the viewer experience easier with interactivity and new AI tools to engage consumers.The biggest announcements:Among the most significant announcements at its NewFronts event on Tuesday, Samsung revealed a partnership with Amazon Ads to bring remote-enabled…
Apple on Tuesday announced that it will begin to allow advertisers to target customers on Apple Maps, starting in the U.S. and Canada later this summer. The ads will be available to any size business that has a physical location and has already created a business listing on Apple Maps. Users, meanwhile, will see the ads appear next to relevant search results. The ads are part of a revamped business offering Apple is calling Apple Business, which includes an integrated email, calendar, and directory service, as well as tools for managing employee devices. Apple says it will only show users…
The ICE raids in Chicago that have terrorized immigrant neighborhoods like Ava and Sam’s have been both highly performative and extremely random. Six weeks earlier, on September 9, Greg Bovino, the G.I. Joe look-alike who previously served as ICE’s “commander-at-large,” arrived in town with a caravan of unmarked, black-tinted vans to patrol Chicago’s immigrant-heavy neighborhoods. Three days later, ICE agents shot and killed Silverio Villegas González, an undocumented father of two from Mexico who worked as a line cook, and who had no criminal record, after he tried to drive away from them. ICE officers began lurking on sidewalks, downtown,…
The Devil Wears Prada 2 won’t hit theaters until May 1, but it’s already spawning a brand ecosystem.TRESemmé, L’Oréal Paris, and Grey Goose all aired campaigns during the Oscars. Diet Coke is rolling out limited-edition cans across Europe. Cinemark has six collectibles. TRESemmé is the most interesting one to me. It recently announced its status as the “signature hair brand” of the film. This word choice matters. It goes beyond being a sponsor, or a co-branding partner. “Signature” is pro sports league territory. It’s how Infosys talks about its premium relationship with Madison Square Garden—where it has naming rights on a theater—or…
Cauldron Ferm has an unlikely origin story, as startups go. Its core technology can be traced back to the 1960s, or maybe the 1970s. The exact start is a bit hazy, actually. What is known is that David and Polly McLennan had a dream of feeding the world using protein grown from microbes. The pair knew they needed to improve the process, which was pricy and time consuming. Most fermentation happens in batches. Picture a brewery or a vineyard. Ingredients go in and the microbes work for a while, but then the process stops when it’s time to take out…
At the same time Apple announced the AirPods Pro 3 last year, the company also introduced a new feature called Live Translation. It makes the idea of the Babel fish, so evocatively described in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a reality: Something sitting in your ear that can instantly translate between languages, on demand.Rather than an exotic fish though, here we have wireless headphones from Apple. This isn’t actually exclusive to the latest earbuds, despite the launch timing—it’ll work with the AirPods 4 with active noise cancellation and the AirPods Pro 2, as well as the AirPods Pro 3.…
The social media platform TikTok made its return to the NewFronts on Tuesday, unveiling a suite of new advertising products as the company looks to rebuild advertiser confidence following one of the most consequential years in its history.The presentation, delivered at the Ziegfeld Ballroom in Manhattan, marks TikTok’s first NewFronts appearance since it survived a potential ban in the United States and emerged under new ownership after a court-ordered sale in January. Complicating matters further, the Trump administration is set to receive a $10 billion fee for brokering the deal, a development that has drawn further scrutiny to the company…
Agile Robots has landed a partnership with Google DeepMind to develop robots with the artificial intelligence research lab, the latest in a string of robotics company to do so. Munich, Germany-based Agile Robots announced it entered into a strategic research partnership with Google DeepMind on Tuesday. The partnership involves Agile Robots implementing Google DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics foundation models into its bots and the data being collected by the robots being used to improve the underlying Gemini AI models. The companies will work together to test, fine tune, and deploy robots that use Gemini foundation models in industrial use cases across…