Techtonic

The CEO of a flying car company backed by Larry Page has left the company. Ken Karklin, who was Pivotal’s CEO for more than four years, left the role this week, according to a press release. Pivotal said Karklin is “pursuing new endeavors” but didn’t offer any other information about the executive’s departure from the […] More

Apple has followed Google’s lead and officially changed the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” on its Apple Maps service less than a week after President Trump ordered the change. Apple Maps users in the United States will begin to see Lake America, not Lake Ontario — one of the five Great Lakes in […] More

It’s not the first time this has been tried. In 2016, the billionaire tech investor Yuri Milner announced an interstellar mission called Breakthrough Starshot to launch humanity’s first spacecraft to Alpha Centauri. The plan was to use powerful lasers that would propel tiny probes to a fifth of the speed of light—fast enough to reach […] More

Google is entering the creative design market with a new image-creation and editing tool called Google Pics, which will become a part of its Google Workspace suite for business customers and premium Google AI subscribers. The company says the product, which is powered by Google’s Nano Banana image-generation model, will roll out over the coming […] More

There are two dimensions, as I mentioned. One is technical ROI or technology-related ROI, and second is business ROI. On the technical side, and as you heard from Asifa as well, the biggest benefits come from faster time to market, platform stability and resilience, of course, and a lot of times, in fact, almost in […] More

Waymo has started to offer its robotaxi service to the public in Denver, San Diego, and Tampa, extending the Alphabet-owned company’s commercial operations to 14 U.S. cities. The company said on Tuesday that it will begin inviting riders on a rolling basis and slowly ramp up access in the three cities, following its usual commercial […] More

Startup Switch Bioworks is taking a new approach: using a genetic switch that allows microbes to establish themselves and grow before shifting into nitrogen-producing mode. The company is currently trialing its product in six US states. And, although it’s too early to say exactly how well the approach works in the field, its modeling suggests […] More

The founders behind Starcloud, a startup with plans to operate a fleet of GPUs in orbit, have a new pitch for potential investors: A plan to send a tiny spacecraft on an 80,000 year journey to Alpha Centauri. If they do it, it will be the first human-built object explicitly aimed for another star, and […] More

Humans have used biological fertilizers like manure for thousands of years, and companies have long been developing microbial fertilizers, including some that rely on genetic engineering. But it’s difficult to engineer microbes that can reliably provide nitrogen for crops while also thriving themselves.  A startup called Switch Bioworks is taking a new approach that essentially […] More

While battery swapping has struggled to take off in much of the world, Canadian auto parts giant Magna International believes the model could work at scale in India, where millions of two- and three-wheelers and a fast-growing delivery economy create a different set of economics. And it’s placing that bet on Yuma Energy, a Bengaluru-based […] More