All posts tagged: powered

Hightouch reaches 0M ARR fueled by marketing tools powered by AI

Hightouch reaches $100M ARR fueled by marketing tools powered by AI

Published by skeptic

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 GenAI, it was impossible for someone without many, many years of design skills to create consumer-level assets,” said Kashish Gupta, Hightouch’s co-CEO. The company is also led by co-CEO Tejas Manohar, a former engineering manager at Segment, a customer data platform acquired by Twilio for $3.2 billion in 2020. However, Hightouch’s approach goes beyond what standard AI models can do on their own. Hightouch says that many brands initially attempted to generate ad campaigns using general foundational models — broad AI systems …

This new Ohio solar farm is powered by Ohio-made panels

This new Ohio solar farm is powered by Ohio-made panels

Published by skeptic

Photo: Geronimo Power A new utility-scale solar farm just came online in Ohio, and it’s generating power with panels manufactured in-state. Geronimo Power has switched on its 117-megawatt (MW) Dodson Creek Solar Project in Highland County, Ohio. The project feeds electricity into the PJM grid and uses Series 7 modules from First Solar, which are manufactured in Ohio. That local supply chain angle matters. The project isn’t just producing electricity in-state – it’s also relying on in-state manufacturing to do it. Dodson Creek is expected to generate about $49 million in direct economic benefits for the community. Over its first 20 years, it’s projected to deliver about $21 million in new tax revenue to Highland County, local townships, schools, and emergency services such as fire, EMS, and mental health programs. Advertisement – scroll for more content The project also created jobs during construction, employing up to 125 workers at peak. It was built by Kiewit Power Constructors Co. With Dodson Creek now online, Geronimo says its total operating portfolio in Ohio has reached 675 MW. …

A New Google-Funded Data Center Will Be Powered by a Massive Gas Plant

A New Google-Funded Data Center Will Be Powered by a Massive Gas Plant

Published by skeptic

“Grid growth can’t match AI demand, so a pragmatic ‘all-of-the-above’ strategy is essential—with gas as a critical bridge,” Cully Cavness, the cofounder and president of Crusoe, told WIRED in a statement. “This isn’t the destination; it’s the foundation we build on while investing in batteries, solar, wind, and small modular nuclear reactors. We’re not waiting for a carbon-free grid—we’re building the path to one.” Other tech companies are publicly embracing new gas build-outs. This week, Microsoft signed a deal with oil giant Chevron to supply up to 2.5 gigawatts of gas power for a data center in West Texas. For his part, Thomas sees behind-the-meter power potentially becoming the main power strategy for data center developers. “It’s important to note how novel this is,” he says. “This is not something that any business was doing up until a year ago or so, and now it is so popular. The speed is so much better than waiting for the grid.” Since the start of the AI arms race, Big Tech companies that previously shared aggressive climate …

MacBook Neo review: the budget Apple laptop powered by an iPhone chip | Apple

MacBook Neo review: the budget Apple laptop powered by an iPhone chip | Apple

Published by Sam Flores

Apple’s brand new entry-level laptop is powered by the chip from an iPhone and offers more than just the essential MacBook experience for a great price, putting the PC industry on notice. The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. The MacBook Neo is the first of its kind from Apple. A 13in laptop that runs on an A18 Pro chip and brings the starting price for a brand new MacBook down to £599 (€699/$599/A$899) – £500 or the equivalent less than the MacBook Air. The Neo is an entirely new model but shares almost all its design DNA with the MacBook Air and Pro, including its quality aluminium body, sleek lines and rounded corners. Despite being cheaper, the Neo doesn’t look, feel or work like a cut-price machine. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian The Neo is 10g lighter, 1.4mm thicker and slightly smaller than the current Air by 8.6mm and 6.6mm on width and height respectively, which makes it feel quite dense for the …

Canny marketing has powered growing revenue at London Review of Books

Canny marketing has powered growing revenue at London Review of Books

Published by Sam Flores

Renee Doegar, publisher of London Review of Books (top left), London Review of Books website (bottom left) and December 2025 edition of the magazine. Pictures: London Review of Books The London Review of Books (LRB) has grown revenue by an average of 6.8% year on year since the pandemic helped by consistent investment in marketing. The independently-owned title has seen sales decline from a post pandemic high of 91,000 copies in 2021. But it has increased revenue per copy and is now focusing on that, rather than deep discounting. Despite being distinctly high-brow (average article lengths are more than 3,000 words) – the LRB is one of the best-selling news and current affairs titles in the UK. The fortnightly literary magazine, founded in 1979, publishes long-form essays on a range of topics including politics, technology and culture. “In our Christmas issue we had a really interesting piece about AI and some of the possible ways that that could go,” said Renée Doegar, publisher of the title. “But we also had a hilarious piece about Samuel …

Trevor Milton Is Back And Wants To Produce AI Powered “Fully Autonomous Corporate Jets”

Trevor Milton Is Back And Wants To Produce AI Powered “Fully Autonomous Corporate Jets”

Published by Jenni Sidey

Trevor Milton, founder and former CEO of the now-bankrupt Nikola, is trying to mount a “comeback story”. Through social media, interviews, and bold public claims, Milton once convinced investors that Nikola was on the verge of delivering breakthrough technology with trucks. Now he’s going to attempt the same in the aircraft business, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. He has reemerged in the aviation sector through his involvement with SyberJet, a company focused on developing a small business jet known as the SJ30. The aircraft itself is not new; its design dates back decades and has changed hands multiple times through bankruptcies and restructurings. SyberJet acquired the program and has since promoted plans to bring the jet into full-scale production, emphasizing its speed, range, and efficiency relative to competitors in the light jet category. Milton’s involvement has drawn attention because it places him back in a leadership context tied to capital-intensive, technology-driven manufacturing—an environment similar to the one in which he previously operated.  SyberJet’s core asset, the SJ30, is designed to fly …

Staff at New Data Center Powered by Human Brain Cells Need to Swap Out Cerebrospinal Fluid Every Day

Staff at New Data Center Powered by Human Brain Cells Need to Swap Out Cerebrospinal Fluid Every Day

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech A grisly detail about a new data center powered by human neurons: technicians have to constantly replenish the brainy computers’ cerebrospinal fluid. “We remove the fluid every 24 hours,” Hong Weng Chong, CEO and founder of Cortical Labs, told The Register. Biological computers, evidently, come with biological limitations. The hundreds of thousands of brain cells that power each of the Australian biotech startup’s “CL1” machines deplete the oxygen and glucose in the liquid, Chong explained. And so, at the start of every day, an employee tops up the biological sludge to keep everything ticking along. Some operational details sound more like they come from a greenhouse than a data center. Chong described how technicians carefully manage the mixture of gases that shroud the computers. The company adds nitrogen and carbon dioxide so that the atmosphere is made of five percent oxygen — a quarter of what occurs naturally on Earth — which is apparently the optimal level for …

New Data Centers Will Be Powered by Human Brain Cells

New Data Centers Will Be Powered by Human Brain Cells

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Last year, researchers at Australian biotech startup Cortical Labs showed off its CL1, the “world’s first code deployable biological computer” that’s made up of 200,000 living human neurons. In February, the company showed off its progress, demonstrating how the neurons could be taught how to play the seminal video game Doom — a far more complex and impressive showing than much earlier attempts to have them play Pong in 2022. Now, Cortical Labs is ready to scale up the operation. As Bloomberg reports, the company says it’s working on “biological data centers” in Melbourne, Australia, and Singapore. Simply put, instead of relying on Nvidia chips like AI companies, Cortical Labs is planning to outfit its futuristic facilities with racks of CL1 biological computers, powered by many more human brain cells, instead. The company refers to this approach as “wetware,” an unsettling new take on software and hardware terminology. Simply put, the computers send electrical signals to neurons derived …

The Ingenious Engineering of Silk: How the 2,000-Year-Old Pattern Loom Powered the Silk Road and the Wealth of Ancient China

The Ingenious Engineering of Silk: How the 2,000-Year-Old Pattern Loom Powered the Silk Road and the Wealth of Ancient China

Published by José Betancourt

The Silk Road’s long peri­od of high activ­i­ty spanned the sec­ond cen­tu­ry BC and the fif­teenth cen­tu­ry AD, but its name was­n’t coined until more than 400 years after that. Schol­ars have argued it prac­ti­cal­ly ever since, giv­en that the ref­er­ent was­n’t just one road but a vast and ever-chang­ing net­work of them, and that silk was hard­ly the only com­mod­i­ty car­ried by its traders. Yet the name per­sists, and not only due to Mar­co Polo-type roman­ti­cism. Silk may not have been the high­est-vol­ume item on its epony­mous road — more busi­ness was sure­ly done in every­day tex­tiles, to say noth­ing of spices, grains, or dyes — but it was per­haps the most vis­i­ble, and sure­ly the most glam­orous. From the per­spec­tive of Chi­nese civ­i­liza­tion, it can also look like the most impor­tant. In the new Pri­mal Space video above, you can hear the sto­ry of “the machine that made Chi­na rich”: the pat­tern loom, that is, a mod­el of which was unearthed in 2017 dur­ing sub­way con­struc­tion in the city of Cheng­du. At some­where between 2,100 and 2,200 …

Ring and Kidde’s Newest Smoke Detector Is Here, and It’s Battery Powered (2026)

Ring and Kidde’s Newest Smoke Detector Is Here, and It’s Battery Powered (2026)

Published by skeptic

Kidde has become the best-known name in the world of smart smoke detectors—a relatively low bar given how few people know the brand of their smoke detector. Still, you’ll find Kidde recommended by reviewers and customers across the internet with surprising enthusiasm, which has only increased since the brand started collaborating with Ring and Amazon, making it an easy add-on to Alexa-powered smart homes. Until now, if you wanted a Kidde smart smoke alarm connected to your other devices, one that would send you alerts by Ring app, you could only choose a hardwired model. Anyone who wanted something battery-powered from Kidde along the lines of the now-discontinued Google Nest Protect had to skip the smarts. At the CES trade show in January, Kidde announced its first battery-only smart smoke alarm, once again in collaboration with Ring. The Kidde Ring Smart Smoke + CO Alarm has been available for preorder since the announcement, but as of today is fully available to buy. Kidde Ring Smart Smoke Alarm, AA Battery Powered How It’ll Work Kidde’s Ring …