THURSDAY, 25 DECEMBER 2025, 05:13
Instacart has ended its AI-powered pricing tests after a study from Groundwork Collaborative, Consumer Reports and More Perfect Union revealed that the grocery delivery platform was showing different customers different prices for identical items at the same store. The company said Monday that retailers can no longer use Eversight, the AI pricing technology Instacart acquired in 2022, to run...
The Web3 Year-End Gala: Seoul 2025, hosted by GRID, co-hosted by Coinness, and strategically sponsored by global digital asset trading platform Zoomex Lab, concluded successfully in Seoul. The flagship year-end event brought together leading industry players including Tencent Cloud, SuperNet, and other Web3 innovators, with a shared mission to advance the industry narrative from asset […]
BrianFagioli writes: Visa says it has completed hundreds of secure, AI-initiated transactions with partners, arguing this proves agent driven shopping is ready to move beyond experiments. The company believes 2025 will be the last full year most consumers manually check out, with AI agents handling purchases at scale by the 2026 holiday season. Nearly half of US shoppers already use AI tools...
The answers to today’s problems
Earlier today I set you the following set of numerical challenges to celebrate the arrival of 2026.
Auld lang signs
Five 9s
Six 8s.
Six 7s.
Six 6s.
Four 5s.
Six 4s.
Four 3s.
Four 2s.
a partridge in a pair tree. (Only joking)
Continue reading…
The self-driving cars came to a halt at intersections when the power outage knocked out traffic signals, causing tie-ups but no accidents or injuries.
The video games industry in 2025 finds itself caught between the familiar forces of consolidation and job losses that have plagued creative industries, and a newer development: governments and the ultra-wealthy have begun treating games as tools of political influence. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund closed a $55 billion deal for EA this year and acquired Niantic, the makers of Pokemon...
The company made 80 times as many reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children during the first six months of 2025 as it did in the same period a year prior.
BrianFagioli writes: Samsung is bringing Google Gemini directly into the kitchen, starting with a refrigerator that can see what you eat. At CES 2026, the company plans to show off a new Bespoke AI Refrigerator that uses a built in camera system paired with Gemini to automatically recognize food items, including leftovers stored in unlabeled containers. The idea is to keep an always up to date...
The Competition Tribunal has issued rulings in a series of interlocutory applications in an alleged abuse of dominance case between South African chat platform GovChat and WhatsApp owner Meta Platforms.
Beverly Hills High School has deployed an AI-powered surveillance apparatus that includes facial recognition cameras, behavioral analysis software, smoke detector-shaped bathroom listening devices from Motorola, drones, and license plate readers from Flock Safety — a setup the district spent $4.8 million on in the 2024-2025 fiscal year and considers necessary given the school’s high-profile...
South coast most likely to see snowflakes, though a full festive blanketing has been unlikely for decades now
While ongoing showers might suggest this Christmas will be a washout, experts say a wintry snap is on its way and some areas of the UK might even have a white Christmas.
According to the Met Office, high pressure is building – meaning that, while some areas may experience showers,...
An analysis of the expansion of cracks in the Thwaites Glacier over the past 20 years suggests that a total collapse could be only a matter of time.
Colin Angle, the founder of iRobot who built the company from his living room over 35 years and sold more than 50 million Roomba vacuums, watched his creation file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this month after what he describes as an “avoidable” regulatory ordeal that killed Amazon’s $1.7 billion acquisition bid. In an interview with TechCrunch, Angle recounted the 18-month investigation...
LiDAR technology addresses limitations, such as slow capture times, limited range, and indoor-only constraints, of older methods, thanks to LiDAR’s automation, efficiency, and the ability to capture a space’s or object’s full geometry with precision, with millimeter accuracy. It works well both in indoor and outdoor conditions, including total darkness or bright outdoors. That’s why […]
Baidu’s Apollo Go robotaxis have already accrued millions of driverless rides in cities worldwide.
President Cyril Ramaphosa appointed Solly Malatsi Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies in July 2024.
As number of lunar satellites soars, sites will be marked out where defunct hardware can be crash-landed
Patches of the moon are destined to become spacecraft graveyards where dead lunar satellites and other defunct hardware can be crashed into the ground, far away from sites of cultural and scientific importance, researchers say.
The number of satellites circling the moon is set to soar in the...
A group of activists has scraped Spotify’s entire library, accessing 256 million rows of track metadata and 86 million audio files totaling roughly 300TB of data. The metadata has been released via Anna’s Archive, a search engine for “shadow libraries” that previously focused on books. Spotify described the activists as “anti-copyright extremists who’ve previously pirated content from YouTube...
These open-back headphones sound insane, but they aren’t that comfortable.
NTT Data is South Africa’s oldest data centre operator and among its oldest IT firms.
A “slew of layoffs, price hikes and studio closures” for Microsoft’s Xbox “have led many to declare — not for the first time — that the Xbox is dead,” reports CNBC. Or is it just changing its business model?The company’s overall gaming revenue decreased 2% year-over-year, with a 29% dip in Xbox hardware sales, according to Microsoft’s first-quarter earnings for fiscal 2026. The broader...