When it comes to phones, it would be easy to consider Samsung as the best simply because of its sheer scale. However, look beneath the surface, and you’ll see a bubbling sense of competition. Samsung has failed to innovate and increase its healthy advantage, and the door is open for at least one company to provide a sustained challenge. Google wants to be that company, and while I think there are better phones in certain categories, Google is the only phone maker that can compete with Samsung at every level. Samsung’s success comes from an ability to spend lavishly to…
Author: Olsi
U.S. telecom giant Verizon says it has secured its network after being targeted by the China-linked Salt Typhoon cyberespionage group. In a statement given to The Tech Spot on Sunday, Verizon spokesperson Richard Young said the company has “contained the cyber incident brought on by this nation-state threat actor,” and that it has not detected any threat actor activity on its network “for some time.” Verizon’s containment of the incident has been confirmed by a “highly respected cybersecurity firm,” the company said, but Young declined to name the third-party company. While the scale of the Salt Typhoon breach is not yet…
A business built around increasingly customized ready-to-eat meals has netted Middle Eastern startup Calo a sizeable funding injection as it looks to expand both what it can offer its time-strapped customers and where it delivers its growing range of just-heat-to-eat dishes. The meal delivery market in the Middle East will hit $11.2 billion by 2030, according to a report from MarkNtel Advisors published last year. Food aggregators such as Careem, Deliveroo and Talabat have built big businesses by banking on the habits of busy professionals ordering food in rather than making meals themselves — fuelled in large part by the COVID-19…
Is Microsoft secretly working on the return of its Surface Duo folding smartphone? Possibly, as a recently filed patent shows it’s still coming up with ideas for hinges that are the key to making foldables work. The unusual design of the hinge, and the way it’s illustrated in the patent, makes it different to what we expect from Microsoft and foldables in general. The majority of folding smartphones use a “water drop” style hinge, where the flexible screen forms a water drop shape at the point where it’s folded to improve durability and minimize any crease, but Microsoft’s patent doesn’t…
Just over three years ago, Disney+ announced Spider-Man: Freshman Year, the first Spider-Man animated series directly produced by Marvel Studios. The show was subsequently renamed Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, and it veered away from the MCU connections it was supposedly going to have. Instead, this series will take place in an alternate timeline where Tony Stark/Iron Man was never Peter Parker’s mentor. As seen in the first trailer below, it’s Norman Osborn — the future Green Goblin — who will guide Peter’s destiny in this incarnation. Marvel Animation also shared a new look at the series’ official key art. In…
LG has announced new extra-large additions to its line of UltraGear GX9 OLED gaming monitors: one being a massive, 45-inch display with a bendable panel, and the other, a 39-inch “smart” gaming monitor with webOS built-in. Let’s start with the big boy, though, because it has an impressive “world’s first” designation behind it. It’s the first 5K OLED monitor on the market, featuring a resolution of 5120 x 2160 — also known as 5K2K. Not only is it the first OLED monitor in general to have a 5K resolution but it’s also the first gaming monitor to launch with this higher…
The proliferation of data centers aiming to meet the computational needs of AI could be bad news for the US power grid, according to a new report in Bloomberg. Using the 1 million residential sensors tracked by Whisker Labs, along with market intelligence data from DC Byte, Bloomberg found that more than half of the households showing the worst power distortions live within 20 miles of significant data center activity. In other words, there appears to be a link between data center proximity and “bad harmonics” — a term for the less-than-ideal flow of electrical power into homes. Bloomberg says…
Nvidia NVDA 0.39%increase; green up pointing triangle is set to bring its new technology for powering humanoid robots to market in the first half of 2025, aiming to stake its claim in the fast-growing robotics sector, a senior company executive said. The chipmaking giant Nvidia is leaning more heavily into robotics in 2025. More specifically, in the first half of the new year, confirms the Financial Times, Nvidia is launching a new generation of compact computers for humanoid robots called Jetson Thor. The move, which was expected, is part of an evolving, years-long strategy. Nvidia doesn’t plan to compete directly…
It’s basically the YouTube equivalent of Google’s ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button. YouTube is testing a new floating “Play something” button that will pick a video for you, 9to5Google spotted in the YouTube app for Android. The button floats just above the bottom bar of the app, and when tapped, it picks a YouTube video to play for you. Just as in earlier versions of this feature, YouTube’s been testing the new button reportedly uses the portrait-oriented YouTube Shorts player to show videos, regardless of whether they’re vertically formatted Shorts or standard YouTube videos. Hopefully that changes by the time the…
Three crypto industry groups — the DeFi Education Fund, the Blockchain Association, and the Texas Blockchain Council — are suing the Internal Revenue Service to block new regulations that require decentralized finance (DeFi) entities to report customer information. The IRS has been finalizing crypto tax regulations as part of the Biden Administration’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The IRS says these new rules should help “close the information gap with respect to digital assets.” The lawsuit, on the other hand, claims that this approach would unduly burden “DeFi trading front-ends,” — basically, online platforms that allow users to access crypto…
