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It turns out the space industry has a lot of ideas on how to improve NASA’s $11 billion, 15-year plan to collect and return samples from Mars.
Announced today, NASA has awarded $1.5 million contracts to seven companies to further develop their plans for the revamped Mars Sample Return mission.
According to the request for proposal, studies could be for complete overhauls of the mission design, or for designs that include elements of NASA’s MSR mission or NASA’s Artemis program.
NASA turned to private industry after finally admitting that its architecture for MSR is incredibly complicated.
Last year, an independent review board recommended that NASA revisit the mission design given the concerns about the technical features and the high costs.
Shopify has acquired Threads.com, the Seqiuoa-backed Slack alternative, Threads said on its website.
The companies didn’t disclose the terms of the deal but said that the Threads.com team will join Shopify.
It was thrown into the limelight after Meta launched Threads, its Twitter-like social network.
Notably, Meta also had another product named Threads, an Instagram companion app that started in 2019 and was shut down in 2021.
And on Android the app crossed the mark of a million lifetime downloads with just a few downloads prior to Meta launching its Threads social network.
It created an electric pickup and an electric SUV while prepping a monster IPO.
It now plans to sell an even cheaper SUV that could make Rivian a dominant EV player for years to come.
These changes mean that, for the first time since the company broke stealth in 2018, Rivian’s immediate future is actually remarkably clear.
Fisker is on the brink of bankruptcy after dealing with underwhelming sales of its electric SUV and myriad quality and service problems.
If Rivian wants to survive long enough to ship its more affordable mass-market R2, it really needs these revamped vehicles to sell well.
Today, Meta announced AI-powered features for WhatsApp Business apps, such as helping with the creation of click-to-WhatsApp ads and generating responses to frequent customer messages.
WhatsApp Business users will be able to leverage AI to create Facebook and Instagram ads that can start a WhatsApp chat with a business.
The company said it is testing AI-powered customer support, which will automatically answer customer queries related to catalog or frequently asked questions.
Meta noted that it plans to denote AI-generated messages clearly so customers know that they are not talking to a representative of a company.
While Meta is offering these tools without a cost, its primary driver for revenue on the WhatsApp Business platform is businesses having more conversations with customers.
Twitch has come up with a solution for the ongoing copyright issues that DJs encounter on the platform.
Participating DJs in the program must contribute a percentage of their earnings from streams to cover some of the music rights costs.
Twitch partnered with all major labels to bring a majority of popular music to the offering, including Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music, as well as several independent labels represented by music licensing partner Merlin.
Additionally, a one-year subsidy is being offered to existing Twitch DJs, providing financial support and a transition period to adapt to the new program.
Twitch will soon require DJs to share part of their revenue with the music industry.
But look beyond the hype and high-profile deals like the one between OpenAI and PwC last week, and you’ll see that the world is already years into using customer-facing, no-code AI tools for extracting information and working faster.
The deal underscores not just the opportunity around increasing demand for AI in the B2B market, but also a wider trend in enterprise IT.
Eigen and Sirion are not disclosing the financial terms of the deal, but below is relevant context that tells some of the story.
London-based Eigen is led and co-founded by Dr Lewis Liu, an Oxford PhD who studied both art and physics.
It says that it works with over 250 large enterprises manages more than 7 million contracts worth $800 billion.
But to reuse, you have to recover, and SpaceX is proving that it will be able to do just that with Starship.
The ultimate goal is to fly Super Heavy and the Starship upper stage back to Starbase, SpaceX’s private Starship launch and development site in southeast Texas, where they’d make vertical landings on solid ground.
Starship lifted off from Starbase at 8:50 AM CT, the fourth launch in the rocket test campaign.
A little over an hour after launch, Starship followed suit, surviving the extreme heat from traveling through the Earth’s atmosphere at hypersonic speeds and splashing down in the Indian Ocean.
During that test, SpaceX also tested capabilities that will be key for delivering payload to space, including opening and closing the payload door.
This partly explains why Belgium-based startup Qargo has now raised £11 million ($14 million) in a Series A round led by Balderton Capital.
With the logistics industry facing rising operating costs, decarbonization pressures, hikes in fuel prices and cyber attacks, companies in the space are in tricky times.
There is clear pressure to digitize the industry to introduce cost savings.
While the transport industry does use legacy software platforms like Mcleod Software, Rose Rocket and Dash Doc, many of these platforms are from an earlier era.
In a statement, Rob Moffat, partner at Balderton Capital, said, “Logistics is a $5T market globally but is often overlooked by software companies.
It’s been 20 years since Shira Yevin, the lead singer of punk band Shiragirl drove a pink RV into the Vans Warped Tour grounds, the now-defunct punk rock festival notorious for being male-dominated.
After Shiragirl Stage, Yevin went on a “lifelong crusade for carving out a space for women in music and other male-dominated industries,” she told TechCrunch.
This began with the launch of Gritty in Pink in 2020, a Live Nation-backed platform designed to empower women in the music industry.
Like freelance platforms Fiverr and Upwork, users can publish listings to highlight their services on InPink’s marketplace and connect with major brands.
Yevin said InPink is already working with one sports client, Angel City Football Club (the LA-based women’s soccer league), to help them hire talent for pre-shows.
