Spotify had a strong third quarter, reaching 788 million monthly active users and generating nearly €5 billion (around $5.6 billion USD) in revenue. But the more interesting takeaway from its earnings call was how the company sees people listening to music in the future, and why the rise of AI agents could be good news for its business.
Co-CEO Gustav Söderström thinks the music streaming giant…
Nirva raises $33M for a pendant that only listens to you
October 23, 2026
Ambient AI is having a moment. Amazon launched a new wrist-worn device with Bee; a former Plaud exec launched ambient apps through a startup called Ambi, which aims to also build its own hardware; and Apple launched Voice Intelligence features during its iPhone launch in…
Meta is making a big push into AI, and it’s creating a new kind of stock that could help pay for it.
On Wednesday, as the company reported its third-quarter earnings, Semafor reported the company might issue non-voting stock, meaning shares that don’t give their…
While Amazon blocks AI agents, Walmart rolls out the welcome mat
October 22, 2026
Walmart is embracing agentic commerce with the launch of its own Agent Gateway to manage transactions and other new features aimed at customers using AI agents, the retailer announced on Wednesday. The move comes shortly after Walmart’s top competitor, Amazon, began blocking AI agents from making purchases on behalf of online shoppers.
The company’s embrace of AI technology…
The U.S. National Security Agency’s sent out an alarming warning on Wednesday that two critical holes had been found in PHP, with patches already issued by the PHP Foundation.
PHP is a server-side programming language so widely used for web applications that it powers…
Companies are giving employees AI tools to make them more productive, but the tools appear to be creating new problems for their managers.
More than half of senior leaders say they find it harder to evaluate employees’ work after adopting AI, according to a Nielsen…
Robots still aren’t that good at picking things up, despite billions of dollars of investment and endless videos fed into deep learning models.
That may be about to change, thanks to a manipulation architecture built by Eka Robotics, which encompasses a force-sensitive gripper and a new kind of deep-learning model. Founded by MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and former Google DeepMind…
Meeting notetaking tool Otter.ai announced on Tuesday that it has raised $320 million from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF), which provides capital to startups without diluting equity and gets returns on the results of marketing spend.
Otter.ai said that it…
Over the last few weeks, personal assistants like Instinct, Fo, and Muse have enabled users to call businesses for customer support and appointment booking. Following this trend, Yelp is adding the ability for its app users to get a voice agent to call a restaurant to check…
People are using AI to make their smart TVs dumb again
October 20, 2026
The latest use case for AI? Dumbing down your smart TV to get rid of the bloat. A number of developers and vibe coders have recently been sharing solutions for “vibe-coding” your TV to get rid of sponsored ads, speed up the app launcher, redesign the home screen, disable tracking features, and more.
One such solution, called “dumbtv,” describes its mission on its GitHub…
