Best Apple Watch apps for boosting your productivity

The Apple Watch helps people track their health and fitness, but it can also be a great tool to help people stay productive and get work done. This is especially true for people who get easily distracted by their phone. Although the Apple Watch comes with simple built-in productivity apps like Rem

Bluesky promises more verification and an 'aggressive' approach to impersonation

As more celebrities and popular influencers join Bluesky, the fast-growing social media service has been facing more concerns around impersonation and verified identity. The Bluesky Safety team posted Friday that the company has updated its impersonation policy to be “more aggressive,” adding

Elon Musk files for injunction to halt OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit

Attorneys for tech billionaire Elon Musk have filed for a preliminary injunction against OpenAI, several of its co-founders, and its investor and close collaborator, Microsoft, to prevent OpenAI and other named defendants from engaging in what Musk’s counsel claims is anticompetitive behavior

Why Olympic champion cyclist Sir Chris Hoy is backing Skarper to make any bike an e-bike

As one of the most decorated track cyclists of all time, Sir Chris Hoy might not seem an obvious candidate to back the burgeoning electric bike movement. The common refrain, after all, is that e-bikes aren’t real bikes. However, the six-time Olympic gold medalist has done exactly that, inves

Black Friday hits a record $74.4B in sales online, up 5% on last year

The momentum of Thanksgiving — which saw consumers spend a record $33.6 billion globally online on the day — looks like it continued into Black Friday, with a bang. Adobe said that in the U.S., consumers made a record-breaking $10.8 billion of purchases, up 10.2% on last year. Meanwhile, Salesf

Canadian news companies sue OpenAI

A group of Canadian news and media companies filed a lawsuit Friday against OpenAI, alleging that the ChatGPT maker has infringed their copyrights and unjustly enriched itself at their expense. The companies behind the lawsuit include the Toronto Star, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Gl

As the year draws to a close, startups don’t pause

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can't miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. With only so many days left in the year, there was plenty of startup news to round up since last Friday, despite a short workweek in the U

Study of ChatGPT citations makes dismal reading for publishers

As more publishers cut content licensing deals with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, a study put out this week by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism — looking at how the AI chatbot produces citations (i.e. sources) for publishers’ content — makes for interesting, or, well, concerning, rea

ASL Aspire wants to gamify STEM education for deaf kids

Poor literacy skills have plagued the deaf and hard of hearing community for decades. The median literacy rates of deaf high school graduates have languished at a fourth-grade level since the turn of the 20th century, according to the National Center for Special Education Research. Bringing STEM co

Sequoia nears first Asia-Pacific deal since regional split

Sequoia is closing in on making its first deal in India and the broader Asia Pacific region since its split with former partners, according to four sources familiar with the matter. The venture capital firm, one of the world’s largest, is in advanced talks to back Vance, a Bengaluru-based cr

Thanksgiving 2024: $33.6B spent online, 72% of that on mobile, says Salesforce

Thanksgiving weekend has long been seen as the traditional start of the most important sales period for retailers, and so far, the indication is that we're in for a strong holiday season for e-commerce. Salesforce is tracking activity in real time and said that yesterday, Thanksgiving, genera

X could introduce labels for parody accounts, but enforcement might be tricky

X is filled with accounts that mimic real-life public figures, ranging from politicians to sports professionals and artists. While some accounts mention “Parody” in their display names, others mention it in their bios, leading some people to mistake them for real accounts — including news anc

Indoor climbing tracking startup, Lizcore, sharpens its focus on safety as it pulls in pre-seed

Indoor climbing is a tricky sport to track. That’s why Spanish startup Lizcore caught technewss’s eye at MWC earlier this year. The team of two co-founders — led by CEO Edgar Casanovas Lorente, a climbing instructor and guide turned entrepreneur — were showin

Meta plans to build a $10B subsea cable spanning the world, sources say

Meta, the parent of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is the second-biggest driver of internet usage globally. Its properties — and their billions of users — account for 10% of all fixed and 22% of all mobile traffic. Meta's investments into artificial intelligence stand to boost that usag