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Agile Space Industries Sparks Animas Test Stand to Address High Demand

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Founder Daudi Barnes started the company in 2019 to augment the work of his previous company, Advanced Mobile Propulsion Test. The Colorado-based startup already operates one test stand, called Sunshine, which AMPT stood up in 2010. “The market is just really, really expanding really fast right now,” Animas project manager Graham Dudley explained. So they’ve had four plus years of design and development that they have to reboot on, and that’s really, really expensive and hard for your schedule prediction. Its a competitive edge in the space propulsion market, which has become increasingly crowded as the cost to launch spacecraft to orbit has dropped.

“Nvidia Debuts Suite of Microservices for Enhanced Inferencing Capabilities”

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At its GTC conference, Nvidia today announced Nvidia NIM, a new software platform designed to streamline the deployment of custom and pre-trained AI models into production environments. NIM takes the software work Nvidia has done around inferencing and optimizing models and makes it easily accessible by combining a given model with an optimized inferencing engine and then packing this into a container, making that accessible as a microservice. Nvidia is already working with Amazon, Google and Microsoft to make these NIM microservices available on SageMaker, Kubernetes Engine and Azure AI, respectively. Some of the Nvidia microservices available through NIM will include Riva for customizing speech and translation models, cuOpt for routing optimizations and the Earth-2 model for weather and climate simulations. “Created with our partner ecosystem, these containerized AI microservices are the building blocks for enterprises in every industry to become AI companies.”

SECO Stage Separation Test Sparks FAA Investigation of Second Starship Burn Trial

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The Federal Aviation Administration has concluded its review of SpaceX’s investigation of the second Starship launch in November, with the regulator saying Monday that it accepted the “root causes and 17 corrective actions” identified by the company. While this means the investigation is now closed, SpaceX must implement all the corrective actions and apply for a modified launch license before it can fly Starship again. When any rocket launch encounters catastrophic issues during flight, the FAA opens what’s known as a “mishap investigation” — that’s what’s happened here. After the first test, the FAA directed SpaceX to complete 63 corrective actions. “More Starships are ready to fly, putting flight hardware in a flight environment to learn as quickly as possible.

Court Filing Reveals Struggle of DuckDuckGo and Neeva in Competition Against Google’s Dominance in Search Startups

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Google’s proposed “Findings of Fact” filing documents the history of search competition, including Google’s own beginnings, its innovations, the competitive landscape, Google’s search ads business, distribution agreements, and more. When shareholders sold stock to various VC firms, those funds were not used to improve the search engine, the filing argues. But it contradicts this point, too, noting that a third of DuckDuckGo’s 50 employees in 2018 were working on improving the search engine, for example. The search engine receives only about 2.5% of general search queries in the U.S., despite estimates that 10% of people in the U.S. claim to be users. This, DuckDuckGo’s leadership had explained, is due to the fact that people often use its search engine for some, but not all of their search queries.

Inngest Secures $6.1M in Funds for Workflow Engine Expansion

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As Inngest founders Tony Holdstock-Brown (CEO) and Dan Farrelly (CTO) told me, the team added new flow control features, for example, which now make it easier to manage concurrency down to the user level. Inngest will handle the queues and database state for these functions and the developers don’t have to do anything special to make that work. Combining that with the new flow control features, Inngest argues, is unlocking a lot of new capabilities for users. “The durability and the reliability, which we have, combined with the flow control aspect allows you to build into this reliability layer. The Inngest team also expanded its language support from only offering a TypeScript SDK to also offering Python and Go SDKs — and users can migrate between them as needed without having to shut down their functions.

Krafton Aims to Expand PUBG’s Dominance Through Franchise Expansion and Visual Enhancements

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Krafton has more in store for its battle royale shooting game PUBG, its biggest mobile title, according to Goldman Sachs. The South Korean firm is plotting “incremental updates” to its strategy to sustain and expand PUBG, Goldman Sachs said in a note Wednesday seen by TechCrunch. Major graphics upgrade is also in the works, Goldman Sachs said, adding that Krafton plans to use Unreal Engine 5 for a PUBG 2.0 revamp. The current version of PUBG uses a customized version of Unreal Engine 4. Epic Game’s latest iteration of the ubiquitous Unreal Engine offers developers significant advancements in achieving heightened realism and immersion at reduced performance costs.

“BMW’s Future Expansion Hinges on EV Integration: A Full Commitment”

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While other automakers are dialing back their electric vehicle plans, BMW is quietly going all in. “The tipping point for the combustion engine was last year,” CFO Walter Mertl told journalists at a roundtable in Munich recently. The German automaker has seen sales of its fossil fuel vehicles plateau and is expecting a slow decline, he said. “Growth will come increasingly from electric vehicles.”BMW sold a record 2.5 million vehicles last year, 15% of which were all-electric. This year, the company thinks it’ll sell 500,000 EVs, or 33% more than last year.

“Exploring the Benefits of Accelerators and Incubators: A Discussion with Emily Knight at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024”

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Emily Knight will talk about choosing an accelerator or incubator at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024In just three short months, TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 — our one-day founder summit/bootcamp — kicks off on April 25 in Boston. Emily Knight’s talking at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024Turning a deep tech breakthrough into a tech startup — and then turning it into a commercial success — is a series of complex challenges. TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 takes place on April 25, 2024, in Boston, Massachusetts. Buy a TC Early Stage pass now — saving up to $300 — and join us in Boston! Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Early Stage 2024?

“Programming Made Easy: Discover Your Answers with Brave Search!”

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Brave announced today that it’s adding its newly-built CodeLLM to its search engine to deliver results for programming queries. If Brave Search is your default search engine then all you need to do to access CodeLLM is start a search in your browser’s address bar. If Brave Search isn’t your default search engine, then you need to head to search.brave.com to conduct your search. Brave Search, which launched two year ago, has grown to serve an average of 25 million queries per day. The company says Brave Search is the default search engine for many of Brave’s over 60 million users.

“Diem: Empowering Women and Non-Binary Individuals through Social Search”

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A startup called Diem wants to tackle the problem of “search engine gender bias,” where results can produce default male information, making many women feel unsatisfied by the answers they receive to taboo or personal questions online. Diem also recently partnered with verified content providers so users can get information from trusted sources. The first four companies are experts in the reproductive health space, including hormone health startup Aavia, sexual telehealth clinic Hey Jane, vaginal health startup Evvy, and female health brand Stix. In the future, users will be able to nominate community members who already have a Diem account. Six spaces are available, run by community members and inspired by popular posts on the platform.