Google Workspace’s founding fathers ad is sixty-five seconds long, set in 1776, and built on a premise that is, against all odds, less insufferable than it sounds. The Google Workspace founding fathers ad arrived this week as part of a broader ‘in America 250’ campaign, timed to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and the internet has responded in its usual unified fashion: by disagreeing.The concept, built around the tagline ‘Group project, but make it 1776,’ places Thomas Jefferson mid-draft when a nagging text message arrives from Ben Franklin. What follows is a tour of the product suite…
Author: Marcus Hale
Marcus Hale
Marcus Hale has been filing general news for the better part of fifteen years. He started at a regional evening paper, moved to a mid-sized digital outlet covering UK news, and spent three years as a general assignment reporter before going freelance. He has covered inquests, council elections, infrastructure announcements, and the kind of stories that sit on page five but matter on page one. He writes about public services, housing, local government, and the institutional stories that take six months to develop and thirty seconds to read. He prefers facts to angles and considers that unfashionable. Marcus lives in Bristol. He still reads the local paper and thinks that makes him an endangered species.
Midjourney is asking Hollywood studios to hand over their internal AI files in court, turning a copyright infringement case into an awkward question: are the studios doing privately what they’re suing the startup for doing publicly? The dispute has its roots in a 110-page complaint filed on 11 June 2025, when Disney, Universal, and DreamWorks Animation sued Midjourney in the Central District of California, alleging mass copyright infringement involving characters from Star Wars, Marvel, The Simpsons, Pixar, Shrek, and Minions. CNBC reported that the suit demands a jury trial, arguing Midjourney’s conduct threatens to ‘upend the bedrock incentives of U.S.…
This essential AI terms glossary exists because the field has a habit of minting new vocabulary faster than anyone can absorb it. Sit in on a product meeting these days and you’ll hear LLMs, RAG, RLHF and a dozen other abbreviations flying around, terms that can make even seasoned technologists feel slightly adrift. Below are plain-language definitions of the terms you’re most likely to run into, whether you’re building, investing, or just trying to follow the conversation. The Essential AI Terms Glossary, From LLMs to Agents AGI, Artificial general intelligence is a phrase everyone uses and nobody quite agrees on.…
The Dune keypad for Mac is a three-button aluminium sliver from San Francisco and Bangalore-based startup Project Mirage that promises to replace the maddening patchwork of mute shortcuts scattered across Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet. At $119 during its introductory period (rising to $149 thereafter), it’s a genuinely clever idea wrapped in hardware that still has a few kinks to work out. Project Mirage was founded by Apoorv Shankar, formerly Vice President of Hardware at Ultrahuman, according to TechGoggles. The company debuted three conceptual devices at CES (Dune, Shift, and Radiance) each aimed at augmenting traditional Mac workflows through hardware…
The Pegasus spyware PEGA committee set up by the European Parliament to investigate government surveillance abuses has itself become a surveillance target: Citizen Lab has confirmed that Greek journalist and former MEP Stelios Kouloglou had his phone compromised with Pegasus during 2022 and 2023, while serving on the committee probing its misuse. It is the first time a PEGA committee member has been publicly identified as a Pegasus victim, and the timing lands with some precision: the hacks coincide almost exactly with the committee’s most sensitive deliberative moments. What Citizen Lab’s forensic analysis found According to the University of Toronto’s…
The Hopper FTC settlement, announced this week, will see the travel booking app pay $35 million in consumer redress after the US regulator accused it of burying fees, misrepresenting its paid features, and steering users into charges they never knowingly agreed to. Call it the price of friction design. What the Hopper FTC Settlement Actually Covers The FTC complaint against Hopper, filed on 2 July 2026 as Case 1:26-cv-13058, brings charges under Section 5(a) of the FTC Act and the agency’s Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees (the Fees Rule, 16 C.F.R. pt.). That rule specifically prohibits failing to disclose…
Bhavin Turakhia’s Neo platform is the latest $30 million argument that workplace software needs to be torn down and rebuilt for the AI era, not merely patched with a chatbot bolted on the side. Turakhia, 46, is bootstrapping the new venture entirely from his own pocket. The logic, he told TechCrunch, is that generative AI represents a shift big enough to justify starting from scratch rather than layering features onto legacy architecture. ‘If you want to build an iPhone, you can’t take the parts of a Nokia and somehow convert it into an iPhone,’ he said. It is the kind…
Together AI’s Series C has landed at $800 million, pushing the open-source inference platform to an $8.3 billion post-money valuation, the company announced via Business Wire. That is the kind of number that makes you sit up, especially for a company that only existed on paper four years ago. Aramco’s Prosperity7 Leads the Together AI Series C The round was led by Aramco Ventures, specifically through its Prosperity7 Ventures arm, the diversified venturing programme of Saudi Aramco’s investment vehicle. That is not a first encounter: The Next Web reports that Prosperity7 co-led Together AI’s Series B alongside General Catalyst, so…
The Venice AI Series A has landed at $65 million, valuing the two-year-old startup at $1 billion and marking its first external fundraise. The round was led by crypto-focused venture firm Dragonfly, with Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures, and others joining in. The unicorn tag arrived fast, and, to Venice’s credit, the underlying numbers give it more substance than most. The company already has more than 850,000 unique visitors to its website, serves more than 3 million active users, and fields an average of 1.7 million API calls per day. Annualised run-rate revenues have topped $70 million, according to CEO…
Vint Cerf’s Google retirement brings to an end a two-decade chapter for the 83-year-old engineer who, alongside Robert Kahn, built the networking protocols that became the foundation of the modern internet. The news came not from a press release but from a warm public tribute: Dave Patterson, the UC Berkeley professor best known for co-developing RISC processor architecture, announced it during a panel at the Open Frontier conference hosted by the Laude Institute.’Vint… has been at Google more than 20 years, and he is retiring a week from today, and so I think we ought to give him a round…