Samsung's smart ring debut earlier this year has put the product firmly in the spotlight, with one analyst predicting earlier this year that Apple could launch its own smart ring in 2026.

But Tom Hale, CEO of Oura — which has been developing smart rings since the company was established in 2013 — said he doesn't think Apple will enter the space.

"I think they [Apple] are unconvinced about the value of having a ring and a watch together and they're not interested in undercutting the Apple Watch as a business," Hale told CNBC in an interview on Tuesday at the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal.

"I think they're probably keeping a close eye on Samsung and a close eye on us, but it's hard to do this product category right."

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I see so much innovation with Android and a bit of complaints from Apple. 🤦
If Samsung did it why can't they. Well maybe they'll have a better different alternate response to it.

Apple really does what it wants and doesn't follow after any other company until they realize they're falling behind. If the rings becomes a bigger trend I bet they'll change their minds

Under CEO Tim Cook, Apple has put a large focus on health applications through the Apple Watch and related services.

A smart ring is a type of wearable device full of sensors that can give the wearer information about things like their health, activity and sleep. They are lightweight and have a long battery life which fans say make them ideal for wearing all day, including when sleeping, versus a smartwatch that may be less comfortable and so removed more often.

With a few text or image prompts, businesses can use Accio to find wholesale products — including analysis on their popularity with consumers and projected profit, according to demos viewed by CNBC.

Examples shown included helping a sports entrepreneur to build a line of pickleball products. At the end of the search, the tool lists a number of procurement options for the business to discuss directly with each supplier.

"Apple is very much a focused company. They're like: 'We've put our bet on the watch. We're gonna make the watch our platform,'" Hale said.

Oura recently launched its next-generation Oura Ring 4 as competition in the wearable sector ramps up.

The tech uses generative AI from Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen large language model, Zhang said, declining to confirm whether the product integrates AI from other companies.

An LLM is an artificial intelligence model trained on large amounts of data. A model supports generative AI applications, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, which generates human-like responses to user prompts. To be sure, several businesses are still in the experimentation phase with AI and many firms are yet to find a way of monetizing the technology.

As someone who has never liked the look of smartwatches, I was excited to try out the Oura Ring 4 and use it to track my sleep. The wearable was so comfortable, I often forgot I had it on.

That's at least in part due to the device's new sensors, which are significantly smaller than those of its predecessor. The third-generation Oura has sensors that are raised and feel like little bumps, while those on the Ring 4 are basically flat, giving it a smooth interior like any other ring.

Accio uses data from 50 million businesses on Alibaba International's platform, and publicly available industry information, Zhang said. He said the tool incorporates 1 billion product listings and documents covering industries across more than 100 markets from Alibaba.com, the company's business-to-business platform which sells to companies outside China.

Businesses based in Europe and North America are the largest group of buyers, the company said.

I purposely wore the ring on my right index finger. I still write a lot of my stories by hand (old school, I know), so I wanted to see if it would bother me while holding a pen or pencil. It didn't. The ring is also designed to be worn 24/7 and is water resistant, and it didn't give me any trouble when I washed my hands or showered with it.

Another highlight was the Oura app. The company began rolling out a redesign of the app to all its users earlier this month, and I thought the layout of the app was very intuitive. Data from the smart rings is presented in three tabs called Today, Vitals and My Health.

Alibaba's international arm in October announced an updated version of an AI translation tool to help merchants reach customers in other countries. The company claimed the tech's translation capabilities beat that of Google, DeepL and ChatGPT.

The international business has grown rapidly in recent years, but Alibaba's main revenue driver remains its domestic e-commerce platforms Taobao and Tmall. In August 2023, management told investors that "the Taobao app has the greatest potential to become a one stop smart portal for life and consumption enabled by AI."

The Today tab highlights information based on the time of day, and it includes shortcuts where I could quickly view the latest readings for things such as my sleep, activity, heart rate, stress or my readiness for the day. These at-a-glance metrics are easy to digest and helpful to look at when I had a quick minute throughout the day.

I also enjoyed looking at my reading at a more granular level in the Vitals tab. There's a lot to learn and decipher. Oura shows you nearly 20 different data points about your sleep alone. Even so, the company does a nice job breaking down all of these concepts in simple language. I wasn't familiar with the term latency, for example, but the app taught me that it's the amount of time it takes to fall asleep.

During the weeks-long Singles Day shopping festival that wrapped up Monday, more than half of over 500 merchants selling on Chinese e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba and JD.com used a generative AI-enabled tool, according to a survey by Bain & Company.

Those features include AI for customer service and generating content. The survey found 56% of respondents said AI tools had "high positive impact" on improving productivity.

The My Health tab gives users access to longer-term insights such as heart health, sleep health and resilience, a metric that measures your ability to recover from stress over time. These metrics are calibrated once Oura has recorded several weeks' worth of data, so I was unable to explore this feature in depth for this review.

Before the review, I was concerned about whether Oura's metrics would negatively affect my mood. For instance, if Oura tells me that I slept poorly, would I feel less prepared to take on my day?

Masayoshi Son's tech conglomerate, has seen its share of controversial high-value investments in recent years in companies that have either collapsed or sharply marked down their valuations. It is now repositioning itself at the epicenter of the artificial intelligence boom, where players like Nvidia are reaping in the rewards of meteoric demand for chips and data center GPUs.

"That's just shifted 180 degrees," Matt Hougan, chief investment officer of Bitwise Asset Management, told CNBC. "We're now in a positive regulatory environment, we now have tailwinds from that, and that comes in the case of a market that was already in a bull market … that's going to push us higher."

I was pleasantly surprised by how the company approached this framing. I never felt like I was being reprimanded for getting a bad night's sleep, feeling stressed or missing a workout. Instead, Oura gave me tips about small changes I could make to feel better throughout the day, such as taking a few minutes for a break or meditation.

I also liked that the exercise goal in the app varied based on my readings. If there was a day where I was particularly tired or stressed, Oura lowered my activity goal. This helped me feel a sense of accomplishment even when I wasn't at my very best.

Across the crypto market, coins that have soared in the past week hit the brakes on Tuesday, including memecoin Shiba Inu, which was down 4% after it soared 57% in the past week.

Dogecoin was an outlier, however. It's been one of the biggest winners, up more than 135% since Nov. 5, likely due to its connection with Elon Musk, who helped get Trump elected. It was last higher by 14%.

On its website, Oura says users can prevent scratches by wearing the ring on their nondominant hand, keeping it separated from other rings and taking it off in high-friction scenarios such as weight lifting.

Despite this warning, I was surprised by how quickly the Ring 4 showed signs of wear, especially given its price tag. And no, scratches are not covered by Oura's warranty policy.

Another let down was the ring's battery life. It didn't last as long as Oura said it would.

In the stock market, Coinbase and MicroStrategy retreated by about 6% each in premarket trading. In regular trading on Monday, Coinbase surged 19% to trade above $300 for the first time since 2021 and about 6% from its high from that year.

Traders and analysts agree the past week's rally is only beginning.

The company touts eight days of battery life, but I was usually prompted to charge my ring after about five or six days. The company said battery life depends on users' ring size, feature configuration, app settings, usage and other factors, so it varies from person to person.

Five to six days is still better than an Apple Watch, which usually needs daily charging, but I definitely wasn't getting the eight days I was expecting.

"It does seem like there's an air gap between the previous [bitcoin] all-time highs around $72,000 and $100,000," Hougan said. "It's hard exactly to see what would force sellers to come into this market and halt the momentum before we get to that level. Of course, there are no guarantees. You could see pullbacks, but we're in a new crypto market cycle. … I do think that we are right to be bullish and the bias is still on the upside."

In Google's case, the company is required under the DMA to share data that would be useful for training a search model.

Why build a European search index?
Currently, alternative search engines like Ecosia, Qwant and DuckDuckGo don't develop their own back-end infrastructure. The new venture will see them build their own search index from scratch, however, amassing results from a mix of different search engines. Ecosia last year switched to a mix of Google and Bing search results.

My last gripe was purely aesthetic. I have small hands, so I thought the Ring 4 looked a little clunky in comparison to the jewelry I normally wear. My friends said they didn't notice this, but the Ring 4 is not a style I would typically reach for, though admittedly, I've gotten more used to it with time.

Ecosia and Qwant say their new search index will be "privacy-first," using technologies from Qwant that were redesigned in 2023. Both companies will use the search index themselves but the tech will also be made available to other independent search engines and tech firms.

The launch comes as alternative search providers like Ecosia and Qwant are being forced to grapple with higher prices from Microsoft to access its Bing Search API (application programming interface), a piece of software that lets developers access the tech giant's backend search infrastructure.

An early investor in Yahoo! and Alibaba, Son now calls Nvidia, the $3.57 trillion U.S. titan, "undervalued" and forecasts the advent of AI that is 10,000 times smarter than humans within 10 years — amid late-September media reports that SoftBank will be investing $500 million into key artificial intelligence player OpenAI's latest funding round.

Net sales for the SoftBank Group as a whole added 6% to 1.77 trillion yen.

You don't have to pay for the company's monthly subscription if you don't want to, but without it, you'll only be able to access your daily sleep, readiness and activity scores, according to Oura's website. I really enjoyed being able to track my stress levels, so for that feature alone, I would get the membership. If you want that kind of information, be prepared to make a monthly $5 commitment before getting hitched to an Oura Ring 4.

"We are European companies and we need to build technology that makes sure no third-party decision — for instance, Microsoft's decision to increase costs to access their search API — could jeopardize our business," Olivier Abecassis, CEO of Qwant, told CNBC.

"It is nothing against the U.S. or U.S. companies. It is all about the sovereignty of our business and companies," he added. Abecassis will also serve as CEO of the new venture, which hasn't yet raised funding from external investors.

The group's print benefitted from investment gains of 1.28 trillion yen on shares of Chinese retail giant Alibaba and of 566.2 billion yen on stock of T-Mobile.

Tokyo-listed shares of SoftBank are up roughly 50% in the year to date, as of Tuesday morning. The company posted its latest quarterly earnings after the close of the Japanese bourse.

Overall, the new Oura smart ring is easy to wear and use, and it's a great option if you're looking for a low-maintenance way to track your health. I've been recommending it to family and friends, and I wouldn't be surprised if I do end up purchasing one for myself someday.

Europeans are "very dependent on the United States for our technology," Kroll said in an interview last week ahead of the launch. The election of Donald Trump as U.S. president could escalate geopolitical tensions, he added — and this could be a problem for Europe's reliance on U.S. technology.

He pointed to the disruption to European energy supplies after Russia cut off gas to Europe following its invasion of Ukraine, saying this should serve as a warning for what can happen when an entire continent becomes too dependent on a single country for a key resource.

Meanwhile, a slew of new search engines, such as Perplexity, have also entered the market, offering their own generative-AI-based alternatives to Google.

Google has fought back with its own generative AI search product, integrating its Gemini large language model into search results.

Now, Musk is trying to make sure he cashes in on his investments.

After the election last week, Musk briefly joined Trump's phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, NBC News reported. Other outlets, including The New York Times and ABC, have reported that Musk has been weighing in on staffing decisions for the next administration, and he's spent a lot of time since the election at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Brendan Carr, who is likely to be Trump's choice to run the Federal Communications Commission, is seen as a longstanding Musk ally.

The company faces pressure from activist investor Elliott Management, which built a roughly $2 billion stake in SoftBank and pushed for a $15 billion share buyback, CNBC reported in June. The group announced in August that it would repurchase 6.8% of shares available in the company, amounting to 500 billion yen ($3.25 billion). On Tuesday, it said it had repurchased a cumulative 153.8 billion yen in shares by the end of the second quarter.

Musk ran a straw poll on X for his 200-million plus followers asking who should be Senate majority leader, and he's personally endorsed Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott for the position. He also reposted a comment from Trump about the need for the majority leader to support recess appointments for his nominees so they don't need Senate confirmation.

"Without recess appointments, it will take two years or more to confirm the new administration!" Musk wrote.

Japanese companies contended with high fluctuations over the summer quarter, amid a rapid strengthening of the yen and a dramatic sell-off of risk assets in August. Domestic markets have calmed relative to the summer turmoil, as Japan navigates its transition away from its ultra-low-rate policy — but analysts at Barclays note that the country's economic horizon is not yet stable.

"Crucially, this volatility is likely to continue. Wage growth, particularly in the service sector, is progressing in line with the BOJ's expectations, leading many to anticipate another interest rate hike in December 2024 or January 2025," they wrote on Nov. 8.

Musk has long sought to reduce regulatory authority so that he can eliminate impediments to his sprawling business empire, which includes Tesla and X, as well as defense contractor SpaceX, artificial intelligence startup xAI, brain computer interface company Neuralink and tunneling venture Boring Co.

Those companies are currently embroiled in a range of probes and lawsuits from federal agencies pertaining to matters including alleged securities law violations, workplace safety, labor and civil rights violations, violations of federal environmental laws, consumer fraud and vehicle safety defects.

The move comes after Misra withdrew from his executive positions at SoftBank Group in August 2022, when he stepped back from his roles as corporate officer and executive vice president of the parent company. The former Deutsche Bank executive launched One Investment Management, a $6.8 billion fund backed by Abu Dhabi, in 2022.

Misra will no longer have an official role at SoftBank, the company said.

Given the executive branch's outsized control over federal regulatory bodies, Musk can look forward to regulators and intelligence agencies winding down some or all of the 19 known ongoing federal investigations and lawsuits against Tesla, SpaceX and X.

During his ten-year tenure at SoftBank, Misra’s Vision Fund also became known for several troubled investments including WeWork, dog-walking app Wag and Greensill Capital, while he also clashed with senior colleagues including Nikesh Arora and Marcelo Claure, both of whom eventually left the firm.

"He's got the golden touch right now and has the ear," said Deepwater Asset Management's Gene Munster, a longtime Tesla bull, in an interview with CNBC on Wednesday.

In addition to Tesla, SpaceX is also a "clear beneficiary" of a Trump presidency, Munster said. He added that xAI could be rewarded as the new administration considers AI regulations.

He got to chatting with a vintage clothes shop manager. Used-clothing wholesalers, the manager told him, serve as funnels for sourcing clothing, providing many second-hand stores with stock. These wholesalers were offline, so the retailers tended to travel to source goods from the wholesalers in person, picking through racks, going “heads down, bums up,” in the words of Arora, Fleek’s CEO.

That practice became impossible with travel restrictions, yet what this retailer had noticed was that a handful of the wholesalers had started showing off their goods on Instagram, and they were negotiating ad-hoc over video calls.

"I'm stretched to try to find out how this could play out negative for Elon," Munster said.

Musk didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Musk owns 411.06 million Tesla shares, as of the latest filings, and about 304 million performance-based options. In January, Judge Kathaleen McCormick of the Delaware Chancery Court voided Musk's historic pay package from 2018 that included the options, calling it "unfathomable" in part because Musk controlled the board. Shareholders then voted in June to retroactively ratify the package. McCormick has said a final ruling on whether to restore Musk's compensation will come soon.

That gave Arora and Agarwal, a software engineer who previously worked at Google, their inspiration. They would build a marketplace to make it easier for any wholesaler to sell online, and for any retailer to buy that way. Make the experience consistent for everyone on both sides of the table and take a cut on the payment for providing the service.

Fleek’s commission, Agarwal said, depends on the amount and quality of goods being sold: its cut comes out of the payments that buyers are paying to the wholesalers.

Musk and Ellison aren't the only two billionaire tech executives to see a post-election windfall.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has added about $4.5 billion to his net worth since Trump's victory. Coinbase shares soared 20% on Monday, bringing their gains since Tuesday to 67%.

And then, as they started to look into who these offline wholesalers actually were, it felt like fate.

“It turned out that the sub-continent is one of the biggest exporters and importers of used clothes,” Arora said. “Sanket and I both grew up in India. We speak the language. That really helped us connect with these wholesalers.”

The crypto exchange was a major contributor to pro-crypto candidates up and down the ballot, largely through a PAC called Fairshake. Most of its preferred candidates were victorious, setting the stage for the likelihood of a more favorable regulatory environment for the industry.

That's a win for Tesla as well. At the end of the third quarter, the company reported "digital assets" with a fair value of $729 million. Cryptocurrencies have rallied since the election, with bitcoin jumping about 29% to a record of over $88,000 on Monday.

IAC said there's no specific timeline for when the spinoff would take place, but if it decides to move forward with the plan, a transaction is expected to happen by the end of the company's second quarter. Media platform Dotdash Meredith and MGM Resorts "would comprise the core of IAC" in the event of an Angi spinoff, Levin said.

From basic necessity to virtuous circles and vintage vibes
It wasn’t that long ago that second-hand clothing was mainly the domain of lower-income consumers: charity shops and donation points were mainstays for collecting those items and redistributing them to those who needed them near and far… sometimes very far. The whole process of intake and selling was quite analog.

"With the considerable progress made and developments on the horizon, we have real upside in the business," Levin wrote. "Angi's economic foundation continues to strengthen, and we suspect that Angi's best shot at realizing that upside to the benefit of our shareholders may be as a standalone company."

Over the years, the concept has had a major makeover, particularly in more developed economies, where second-hand clothing — sometimes loftily referred to as “vintage” — has come into its own. Besides those who can’t spend a lot or just want to save money, there are shoppers who can afford to buy new clothes, but they opt for second-hand to assert their individuality in a sea of mass-market goods. Or they are buying used to tap into the circular economy and virtuously reduce waste.

For those of us on the lookout for a diamond-in-the-rough bargain, prices may not be much different than new, and in many cases, much higher. And the number of places selling used clothes has ballooned. Charity shops now compete with more curated second-hand stores, and even major chains like Urban Outfitters and high-end high-street boutiques are leaning into the vintage vibe.

Levin went on to say that Angi is "healthy, profitable and on a path to resume revenue growth." The company's revenue declined 16% year over year to $296.7 million during the third quarter, which Angi attributed to lower sales and marketing spend, which led to a decrease in service requests and lower acquisition of new professionals. Analysts were looking for revenue of $297 million, according to LSEG.

Angi saw earnings of 7 cents per share, compared with consensus expectations for zero cents per share, according to LSEG.

Alongside this has been a boom of online sellers across eBay, Vinted, Poshmark, ThredUp, The RealReal, Depop, Instagram, TikTok, and many more. Used clothing now makes up 10% of all clothing sales, according to a survey from GlobalData and ThredUp.

The ECDB, a specialist e-commerce data analytics firm, estimates that 68% of all Gen-Z and Millennial consumers in the U.K. (a big market for vintage) bought at least one second-hand item in the last year.

IAC acquired Angi in 2017, and it's been weighing a spinoff of the business for several years. The company postponed the effort in 2019 as it completed the spinoff of Match Group, which owns dating services including Tinder, Match and Hinge.

IAC has become known for incubating businesses and spinning them off into separate companies. It's done the same with Expedia, Ticketmaster and LendingTree, among others.

Fleek has customers all around the world buying goods from its sellers, but according to Arora, the biggest suppliers are not individuals who donate their clothes to charity, but wholesalers, who in this case are very large warehouses that are the ultimate collectors and distributors of those items.

The wholesalers that Fleek tends to work with are in countries like Pakistan, India and Dubai, and they serve both the developing world (still major customers for second-hand clothes) and the developed world (where someone with a bigger wallet might pay as much or possibly more for a great pair of used Levi’s over a new pair).

In IAC's earnings release, the company also broke out results from its Care.com segment for the first time. IAC in 2019 acquired Care.com, an online marketplace for consumers to find child care, senior care, pet care and other services, for nearly $500 million.

Care.com revenue declined 6% year over year to $95.7 million during the third quarter. In the last 12 months, Care.com generated adjusted EBITDA of $46 million.

When I spoke to Arora and Agarwal the other day, they were respectively in Pakistan and India visiting suppliers, and they said that typically these wholesalers can handle — take in, sort, mend, clean up and send out — up to 400,000 kilograms of clothing in a single day. That sounds chaotic, but that’s what makes Fleek so interesting: Go to the site and you’ll see extreme organization, where those hundreds of thousands of kilos can be bought by weight, or by brand, style, size, material and more.

As well as doing the hard work of bringing massive, physical businesses online for the first time, Fleek is also spinning up technology for those further along that journey.

Fintech plays a major role in this evolution, Al-Falih stressed.

"We are just getting started. I feel like there's so much more investment that needs to go into deepening our tech stack, to expanding our payment solutions, to expanding our data services, to deepening our partnerships with banks in the region and with the support and enablement of the central banks in the region as well," Al-Falih said. "If you look at the region's growth over the last three to five years, it's been phenomenal, but there is still so much more room for growth."

It already offers predictive analytics to customers to help them forecast different trends. (Surely this has to be programmed to just tell buyers to seek things popular 20 and 40 years previously.) You could imagine more AI tooling to help with quality control and to better safeguard against counterfeiting, something the two admit is a huge problem in the industry that they want to help stop.

Another area it will likely develop more functionality is in speeding up logistics around buying, shipping and receiving, especially around wholesalers who are being positively reviewed by buyers, said Agarwal.

Revenue from the fintech industry in the Middle East and North Africa amounted to $1.5 billion in 2022, and could grow to be between $3.5 billion and $4.5 billion by 2025, according to a report by McKinsey & Company. Fintech revenues in the region are less than 1% of banking revenues, Al-Falih said citing the report, compared to 4 to 5% in more mature markets like the U.S. and U.K.

“We want to bring on more buyers, bring on more sellers, and build technology to continue empowering these entrepreneurs on both sides of the marketplace,” he said.

“Video calls have become a new normal meeting place for organizations, workplaces, and groups of friends all over the world. As communication norms change, Signal’s promise of a private place to communicate stays the same. To make Signal calling better overall, we’ve spent the last few months building some welcome improvements,” the company said in a blog post.

Signal is rolling out the feature on its iOS, Android, and desktop apps.

"We are almost an order of magnitude away from where we could be in terms of the fintech revenue and its participation to the economy," the Lean Technologies CEO said. "And that gives us the wind behind our sales and the motivation to keep building those tools and the picks and shovels, if you will, to enable those bold innovators to achieve their dreams."

Lean Technologies specializes in providing the financial infrastructure that allows secure data-sharing between bank accounts and applications. Regulated by Abu Dhabi Global Markets in the United Arab Emirates, Lean works to facilitate A2A (account-to-account) payments, meaning funds transferred directly between two bank accounts rather than via intermediaries like payment processors or credit card networks.

Coincidentally, one of the angels, Shachar, made his name with a cloud cost optimization tool called Spot, which he eventually sold to NetApp, before going on to found Upwind. It’s the opposite story with PointFive’s CEO and co-founder, Alon Arvatz, who previously founded a security startup, IntSights, which he sold to Rapid7 for $350 million before founding PointFive in cloud optimization. This is because in the cloud, security and cost control are really two sides of the same coin: both need the same data on usage across instances, apps and endpoints to operate. (Sidenote: that was also the impetus for founding PointFive. Arvatz said he realised with his previous startup that it was a challenge to sell cloud security to teams who were under pressure to explain why they needed quite so much of it, when they couldn’t show to finance where cloud spend was going in the first place.)

The company works with major local clients like Emirati state telecoms firm e& and ride-hailing super app company Careem, with over $2 billion in total processed volumes, according to its press release issued Sunday.

In Saudi Arabia, Lean's "launch of its data solutions under the Saudi Central Bank's regulatory sandbox has impacted clients across various industries, including insurance, lending, and marketplaces, verifying nearly 1 million bank accounts," the release said.

Arvatz said in an interview that Shachar has now become the go-to in Israel for any investor doing due diligence before backing a startup in the cloud cost space and that’s how he came to be an investor himself in this company. Shachar thought that “We are the next big thing in the space,” Arvatz claimed.

As for what that “next big thing” is, as Arvatz describes it, previous cloud cost optimizing solutions have been limited in their scope, focusing on one particular cloud platform (Spot for example helped provide visibility on AWS), looking at tracking basic usage on that platform across a wide array of apps and services.

As of September of this year, Saudi Arabia's fintech startups have raised over $1.84 billion in venture capital investments since 2018, according to Monsha'a, the kingdom's General Authority for Small and Medium Enterprises. KPMG in September reported that in 2023 alone, Saudi fintechs attracted $791 million — a 231% leap from the previous year.

The number of active fintech startups in the country since the launch of its "Fintech Saudi" initiative in 2018 has reached 216 and they employ a more than 6,500 people, Monsha'a said. The Kingdom aims to establish 525 new companies in the fintech sector by 2030.

However, the reality of how organizations engage in cloud services is very different. Typically they have hybrid architectures in place, using multiple clouds, combined with warehousing solutions like Snowflake and more.

PointFive’s breakthrough, in Arvatz’s view, is the tech that can do that more comprehensively across more silos.

“We were able to build the technology to collect and ingest various data points from the cloud providers,” he said. “Plus we’re the only ones in the industry [that have] developed an agent-less Kubernetes solution. So today, within five minutes, we can give you all the data around your cloud infrastructure and everything you need to know about your Kubernetes clusters.”

The Vistiq's interior and exterior styling are in line with Cadillac's current and upcoming EVs, including the Lyriq and Escalade IQ. The interior features a long screen across the dashboard, while the exterior includes sleek vertical and horizontal front lights and an illuminated grille.

The vehicle has a 102-kilowatt-hour battery pack and offers 615 horsepower and 650 pound-feet of torque. The Cadillac-estimated range of the vehicle fully charged is 300 miles.

Alongside this, he said, PointFive’s research team has developed AI algorithms to identify what the company describes as “Deep Waste”. This is cost-control equivalent (sort of) of deep learning.

“Traditionally, waste in cloud environments was unused resources,” he said. “You pay for certain resources, but you don’t use them, or use only half of them. When you have containerized environment, and a lot of managed services for storage, when networking is a huge cost and networking is very influenced by architecture, you have tons of waste that is very, very deep and hard to identify, and this is where you need very sophisticated algorithms to actually map them out and do this ongoing monitoring.” This may not be the case forever, but for today, PointFive is the only company out there that can map this, and mapping it is step one to remediating, which can include reallocating, but at the least tracking to know what to negotiate for and get in the future.

The Vistiq will be sold globally, including in the U.S. and Canada, with production starting in early 2025 at GM's Spring Hill Manufacturing plant in Tennessee. At launch, the Vistiq will offer three trims: Luxury, Sport and Premium Luxury. A top-end "Platinum" trim will be offered starting in summer 2025.

This is particularly important in newer areas like AI, where there are genuine compute constraints and high costs as a result.

It’s very interesting to see Salesforce Ventures leading this round. The company is a leader in SaaS services and so to help upsell more customers to their products, having a solution to make those customers feel more empowered is definitely in their favour. But also, as Salesforce continues to add in more cloud apps for more use cases well beyond sales and marketing, you could imagine them becoming more interested in cloud management and security down the line, too.

“We are excited to support the acceleration of PointFive’s platform and look forward to seeing the value they bring to customers through multi cloud coverage,” said Nowi Kallen, Managing Director, Salesforce Ventures, in a statement.

“Customers have struggled with the data explosion, under-utilization and technical hurdles that come with scaling real-time data,” Orban said. “We now work with some of the largest companies in the world, as they are the most impacted by these challenges.”

Companies can monitor their data streams using Conduktor, or they can share them with third parties via Conduktor Share, which lets organizations serve specific streams externally for data licensing.

“[This technology] works beautifully in a lab. In the lab, everything is super stable. You can stabilize the temperature. You can stabilize the pressure when you push your arm against the sensor,” Kischkat said. “When you’re going out and taking this thing jogging, everything vibrates, everything moves around. You need a stable reference point for every measurement.”

To bolster its R&D, the company just raised €8.5 million ($9.05 million) in seed funding from Point72 Ventures (a firm founded by prominent hedge fund manager Steven Cohen) and Munich-based Vsquared Ventures.

The tool runs on a company’s infrastructure, and can enforce data masking and access controls to ensure that a company’s data handling practices align with regulations like GDPR.

This month, Conduktor closed a $30 million Series B funding round led by RTP Global, with participation from Ansa, M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund) and Accel.

The company expects this R&D process to take about two years, but given that even deep-pocketed Apple has been hacking away at its non-invasive glucose monitoring research for reportedly 12 years now, Quantune’s timeline may be ambitious.

Kischkat and Hahne told TechCrunch that the seed funding will also go towards hiring additional staff. The company was previously awarded €5 million ($5.3 million) in public grants awarded by the European Innovation Council (EIC) and the Investment Bank of Berlin (IBB)

Conduktor has competition in the space (like Immerok), but the startup has grown at a rapid clip, tripling its annual recurring revenue in the past year. The startup counts DraftKings and Lufthansa as customers, and expects to double its 60-person team by 2026.

“As streaming is inevitable for digital innovation, the demand for an enterprise data management platform continues to rise,” Orban said, citing a Fortune Business Insights report that estimates the market for stream processing to grow to $185 billion by 2032.

Other startups trying to crack the code on needle-free blood sugar monitoring include Synex Medical, which in September raised $22 million, and HME Square, which uses photoacoustics, a technique that combines the principles of optics and acoustics to image biological tissues (such as blood).

In 2021, GraphWear raised a $20.5 million Series B for developing technology that can fit into a watch. The company hasn’t provided any public updates on its scientific progress since then.

The fresh cash, which brings the New York-based company’s total capital raised to $52 million, will be put toward general expansion and product development, Orban said.

In recent years, the FDA has approved several continuous glucose monitoring devices, including the FreeStyle Libre in 2017. While these devices offer significant benefits, they still require a small, needle-like sensor inserted under the skin to measure glucose levels.

Narrow focus — ‘huge’ market
Agicap’s relative success comes down to a narrow focus on treasury management software — it isn’t trying to do everything at once like most fintech startups.

It’s also a relatively untapped market as many companies still rely on Excel and file exports from bank accounts and ERP software. Evidence of this lies in a recent study Agicap did with 500 European CFOs of midmarket companies. When asked about the tool of choice to manage and forecast their cash positions, 80% of them answered Excel.

Even if the glasses do go ahead, it could take years to perfect. Amazon is currently struggling to make a battery for the wearable that can last a full eight-hour shift and is still light enough to wear all day without causing fatigue. The company also needs to gather data on each house, sidewalk, street, curb and driveway, which could take years, said people familiar with the project.

It’s also worth noting that Agicap’s main customers are CFOs and financial departments. And when teams in charge of money like a product they’re not going to unsubscribe anytime soon.

Agicap customers can sync data from their existing bank accounts, credit institutions and ERP solutions. It then acts as a central repository to view everything related to past and future cash flows. But Agicap isn’t just a visualization dashboard; users can initiate and schedule transfers directly from its interface, too.

The embedded screen in project Amelia might make its way to a future generation of Echo Frames that could release as soon as the second quarter of 2026. Sales of the consumer wearable have been disappointing, with fewer than 10,000 units of the current third generation being sold since their release late in 2023. Complaints include the lack of a charging case, less than stellar audio, and Alexa not being the best assistant while you're on the go.

“We think that we’ll be able to use cash management as the basis for what we call the CFO suite, and provide other tools to CFOs and treasurers,” Beyet said.

In that vein, more recently, the startup added accounts payable and accounts receivable. These features help you get paid faster as you can see pending invoices and nudge customers in case they’re late. Similarly, Agicap imports purchase orders so that you can pay suppliers on time and use that data for your upcoming budgets.

The material pulls this off by bridging the gap between the theoretical heat transfer limits of these materials and what's achieved in real products. Through mechanochemistry, the liquid metal and ceramic ingredients are mixed in an extremely controlled way, creating gradient interfaces that heat can flow across much more easily.

Beyond just being better at cooling, the researchers claim that the higher performance reduces the energy needed to run cooling pumps and fans by up to 65%. It also unlocks the ability to cram more heat-generating processors into the same space without overheating issues.

In addition to hiring new people to find new customers, Agicap plans to use the funding to launch new features around credit management and foreign exchange risk management.

What about offering credit products directly? “We don’t want to become a bank,” said Beyet. “In other words, we don’t want to take on the financial risk of lending money ourselves. We know how to make software, and that’s what we intend to focus on.”

It's an important breakthrough in a world where data centers burn through around 8 terawatt-hours per year just on cooling, which is about 40% of their total energy usage. The UT Austin researchers estimate that their new TIM could reduce cooling energy needs by 13% across the industry, cutting overall data center energy usage by at least 5%. That should translate to a gigantic reduction in operating costs and carbon emissions.

As for how you can get your hands on the material: it's yet to make it out of the labs. The UT team has so far only tested it successfully at small scales but is now working on producing larger batches to put through real-world trials with data center partners.

“After that, it’s unlimited, infinite, exponential growth possible,” Fleischer claimed. “Our idea is to operate the plants ourselves worldwide. We focus on Germany, on Europe, and then we go to North America. But after we reach that [FOAK] plant, we can expand Tozero on multiple dimensions around the world. So that’s going to be a key milestone for the next growth phase.”

The startup pointed to projections that global demand for lithium is expected to quadruple to 3.1 million metric tons by 2030, driven by rapid uptake of electric vehicles and growing need for large-scale renewable energy batteries. For context, lithium mining production yielded only 180,000 metric tons last year, so recycling will have a critical role to play in servicing that demand.

Of course, that means even if it lives up to the hype, you'll probably see this liquid metal thermal grease keeping huge server farms frosty before it ever hits the shelves for you to slather on your home PC's Intel or AMD processor.

"The power consumption of cooling infrastructure for energy-intensive data centers and other large electronic systems is skyrocketing," said Guihua Yu, professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering's Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and Texas Materials Institute. "That trend isn't dissipating anytime soon, so it's critical to develop new ways, like the material we've created."

The EU’s Battery Directive will also make it mandatory that at least 80% of lithium must be recovered from batteries by 2031.

“The technology works… So the core part of our technology is already nailed. Now we just have to industrialize it,” Fleischer said.

Smashing recycling bottlenecks
The startup is tackling bottlenecks in lithium battery recycling using a water-based carbonation recovery process that’s more environmentally friendly than conventional pyrometallurgy (smelting). Its method of reclaiming lithium also doesn’t entail the use of harsh acids, as can be the case with other battery recycling processes.

Valve says it has allocated stock of the white Steam Deck proportionally across each region. Once they're sold out, they're gone forever; Valve won't be making any more. The fact it's a limited edition means we can expect the new Steam Deck to be a prime target of scalpers – don't be surprised to see this one listed for a small fortune on eBay.

Tozero says its method also results in substantially lower emissions — 70% lower — than mining.

“The security of the raw material — it’s national security in a way,” Fleischer said. “There are so many underserved industries here in Europe that are starving for the material because Europe doesn’t produce lithium carbonate; we’re importing. If you look at [European Commission president] Ursula von der Leyen, she makes statements that we import over 97% of the lithium carbonate from China. So we’re highly dependent on the eastern front and mining industries.”

To try to stop scalpers, Valve is limited sales to one unit per account. Moreover, the accounts must have made a Steam purchase before November 2024 and be in good standing to be eligible to make a purchase.

Access to black mass, the byproduct of mechanical recycling of lithium batteries that Tozero processes, is not restricted across borders. And on the competition front, Fleischer describes this as a “completely blue ocean market,” with battery recycling efforts mostly focused elsewhere. The startup says it can use black mass from any type of lithium-ion batteries so the waste streams can be mixed.

“Lithium will be always inside [the batteries for recycling], but the other elements are changing — with innovations in battery manufacturing — so we don’t care if there is nickel, or if it’s a few percent less or more, for example, cobalt, but lithium is always there,” said Milicevic Neumann.

As for why Valve is releasing this variant, the company says that it released a smoky translucent limited edition Steam Deck OLED as an experiment last year to gauge if there was an interest in alternative colorways. As it proved popular, Valve is doing it again. So, while there may not be any more white Steam Decks made after this one, there could be other color options in the future.

Tozero also reclaims graphite from the black mass waste streams. The startup says its focus on these two critical raw materials is a “key differentiation” versus other battery recycling players.

The focus on lithium is also why the startup has customers beating a path to its door.

“Customers are just storming this place,” Fleischer said, couching market demand as “way too high” for many industrial use-cases in Europe. Tozero has lined up customers worth “over a billion of off-take that are keen to have our material,” she said.

As a reminder, the OLED Steam Deck's specs include a 1280 x 800 7.4-inch HDR OLED screen, 16GB of LPDDR5, and an AMD APU featuring a quad-core Zen 2 CPU and an RDNA 2-based GPU with 8 compute units.

Tozero delivered its first batch of recycled high-purity lithium to commercial customers this April, nine months after opening its pilot facility in Germany.

The need for speed
Tozero was only founded in 2022, so how has it achieved something larger players in the space evidently haven’t managed over the past couple of decades? The startup says it boils down to having a tight focus, being fast and thinking creatively.

“There is either an outage or network maintenance impacting your area. We don’t have full details just yet. Our apologies for any inconvenience this is causing,” Verizon responded to a user on X asking about the outages.

“We’re trying to get all the information from our network team so we can provide you all an update.”

An X user in Maryland posted an update from Verizon stating that repairs had begun at 10:50 p.m. ET Monday and that service was expected to be restored by 10:58 a.m. ET Tuesday.

Being fast requires being creative when you’re building hardware, Fleischer argued, explaining that the biggest challenge for hardware startups is the issue of delivery times for getting the equipment needed to scale.

“We break things fast, learn, iterate and improve at a very fast pace — probably like Elon Musk’s SpaceX kind of principle — just get stuff building and see [what happens] until things break, learn from it, and iterate and improve in very fast sprints, which is very unfamiliar for hardware companies,” said Fleischer.

Either way, Bukele said that the nation wouldn’t sell in February when he claimed to be at 40% profit.

El Salvador first started purchasing Bitcoin in September 2021, when the price was approximately $51,000, according to the Nayib Bukele portfolio tracker. The nation then purchased the leading cryptocurrency ten times over the coming year before it committed to purchasing one BTC every day, following the collapse of FTX.

“I would say we protect ourselves with speed,” she added, confirming that Tozero’s approach is based on a “process innovation” that’s protected as a trade secret, though it’s not patented. “The entire process, steps or parameters, the order, how we do specific things, that is completely our ‘Coca Cola’ [trade secret] recipe,” she added.

Tozero believes it can expand its approach to reclaim other raw materials that could be used as “energy sources,” though it wouldn’t specify which materials it may add later.

When this pledge started, Bitcoin was worth approximately $16,600. It has since climbed to a new all-time high of $89,000—that’s a 436% increase.

According to SpotOnChain, El Salvador’s stockpiled Bitcoin was actually in a loss of $14 million just over a week ago, November 4. But as Bitcoin’s price skyrocketed following Donald Trump’s reelection as U.S. President, so did El Salvador’s fortunes.

The overarching mission is to get to zero waste of critical raw materials. “We’re quite aware of [the broader challenges entailed in decarbonizing in a sustainable way],” Milicevic Neumann told TechCrunch. “So we want also to focus on recycling of some other materials in the future as well.”

But if it wants to achieve real impact, wouldn’t Tozero have to license its trade secrets to others? The pair say they haven’t fully decided their approach, but prefer to retain control over the process as they scale — though they are open to partnerships.

Trump was seen as the pro-crypto candidate, when compared to a more crypto-cautious Democrat Kamala Harris. This is why Bitcoin has seen significant gains since the Republican was reelected—speculators are hopeful for a brighter future for crypto in the U.S.

One example of this is the potential strategic Bitcoin reserve that Trump’s administration could help build. Similar to El Salvador’s Bitcoin stockpile, the current plan outlined by Senator Cynthia Lummis, a Republican from Wyoming, would see the U.S. purchase 5% of the supply over a five year period and hold it in reserve for 20 years.

“On the operational side, we believe we can only really deliver the highest quality if we operate the plants ourselves,” said Fleischer. “This can be also with partners. I mean, we’re open for that. So I don’t want to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to licensing. Partnerships are great to scale, if helpful, but we’re going to operate our plants ourselves.”

Tozero’s seed round was led by NordicNinja, with participation from new investors In-Q-Tel (the U.S. strategic public-private fund), Honda, and global infrastructure engineering giant JGC Group. The startup’s €3.5 million pre-seed round, closed around two years ago, was led by Berlin-based Atlantic Labs. To date, Tozero has raised €17 million, which includes a €2.5 million grant from the EU’s R&D support arm, the European Innovation Council.

While the U.S. may be turning a corner with crypto, El Salvador has been deeply experimenting with it for years. Aside from making Bitcoin legal tender and buying $500 million worth of it, the nation has also started up a Bitcoin mining operation that uses energy from volcanoes, offering Bitcoin “volcano bonds.”

It appears the people of El Salvador have enjoyed the Bitcoin experiment so far as Bukele secured re-election in February this year. Nine months later, the country is richer to the tune of $100 million.

“Tozero’s innovative approach to battery recycling is exactly what Europe needs to secure key supplies in the global electrification race and Japan would love to collaborate,” said Shin Nikkuni, co-founder and managing partner at NordicNinja, in a statement. “Sarah and Ksenija, two exceptional founders, have the expertise and drive to transform the landscape for sustainable battery solutions. We’re excited to support the tozero team in scaling its technology and commercial operation and contributing to a more sustainable and independent energy future for all.”

The firm released its SmolLM language model earlier this year. "We are not the only one," said Wolf, adding that, "Almost every open source company has been releasing smaller and smaller models this year."

He explained that, "For a lot of very interesting tasks that we need that we could automate with AI, we don't need to have a model that can solve the Riemann conjecture or general relativity." Instead, simple tasks such as data wrangling, image processing and speech can be performed using small language models, with corresponding benefits in speed.

Amazon has just re-launched its best deal on the Amazon Music Unlimited streaming service. For a limited time only you'll be able to get an extended three month trial - a deal that basically triples the usual introductory period.

Music Unlimited usually costs at least $10 a month so you're getting a pretty decent saving here on one of the better streaming services available currently. With Music Unlimited, you get access to over 10 million songs - 2 million of which are ad-free - as well as support for high-quality lossless audio and offline downloads.

The performance of Hugging Face's LLaMA 1b model to 1 billion parameters this year is "equivalent, if not better than, the performance of a 10 billion parameters model of last year," he said. "So you have a 10 times smaller model that can reach roughly similar performance."

Selling quickly! Folks, I usually don't like to rush our readers but this is a PSA. The 256GB Google Pixel 9 deal here is selling out extremely quickly. Two colors have already gone so this could be your last chance to score one of the better cell phone deals from the retailer in recent weeks.

For the record, the 256GB Google Pixel 9 is selling for only $50 more than the record-low price for the entry-level 128GB model. That's twice the storage for a very, very small upcharge. Recommended!

"A lot of the knowledge we discovered for our large language model can actually be translated to smaller models," Wolf said. He explained that the firm trains them on "very specific data sets" that are "slightly simpler, with some form of adaptation that's tailored for this model."

Those adaptations include "very tiny, tiny neural nets that you put inside the small model," he said. "And you have an even smaller model that you add into it and that specializes," a process he likened to "putting a hat for a specific task that you're gonna do. I put my cooking hat on, and I'm a cook."

Another record low price on one of our favorite products! Right now Amazon is selling the excellent Sony Alpha 7 IV mirrorless camera for an eye-wateringly low price of just $1,849 for the body only. By my estimation, that's a price that beats the previous record-low by a whopping $200!

While discounts on Sony cameras aren't super rare in themselves, it is pretty rare to see a price cut this deep on a model that's this popular. For the record, we rank the A7 IV as one of the best options for those looking for a camera that's just as capable with stills and video.

In the future, Wolf said, the AI space will split across two main trends.

"On the one hand, we'll have this huge frontier model that will keep getting bigger, because the ultimate goal is to do things that human cannot do, like new scientific discoveries," using LLMs, he said. The long tail of AI applications will see the technology "embedded a bit everywhere, like we have today with the internet."

My first spotlight recommendation - and it's a good one, folks. It's the incredible LG C4 OLED TV on sale for a record-low price at the retailer. There's not much I can say about this deal apart from that it's pretty bonkers to see a price cut this good on such a popular model this far ahead of Black Friday.

So, as an overview, the C4 OLED is one of our favorite TVs here at TechRadar. Not only does it have a superb OLED display with the brilliant contrast and colors that these sets are known for, but support for 144Hz refresh rate also makes it a superb TV for next-gen gaming. It's pricey, yes, but worth every penny in our books!

The limitations emerge at a critical juncture for OpenAI following its recent $6.6 billion funding round.

The company now faces heightened expectations from investors while grappling with technical constraints that challenge traditional scaling approaches in AI development. If these early versions don't meet expectations, the company’s upcoming fundraising efforts may not be met with the same hype as before—and that could be a problem for a potentially for-profit company, which is what Sam Altman seems to want for OpenAI.

It should come as no surprise that the best Disney Plus movies include huge franchises, much-loved animations, and iconic classics. It is the home of Marvel, Pixar, and Lucasfilm after all. Not forgetting the cornucopia of Disney movies spanning decades and decades of family-friendly titles and nostalgia. It's one of the best streaming services for good reason.

With over 500 films and more than 80 Disney Originals on the platform, we know the choice can feel a little overwhelming, especially when there are new Disney Plus movies being added every month to the service. Our team of experts keep up to date with all of the latest movies on the popular streaming service, so we know what's worth watching and what's not. That's why we've created this guide to help you find the perfect movie to watch. From Marvel Phase 5 and Marvel Phase 6 movies and shows to new Star Wars movies and Disney Plus shows, we've got you covered.

Underwhelming results point to a fundamental challenge facing the entire AI industry: the diminishing supply of high-quality training data and the need to remain relevant in a field as competitive as generative AI.

However, if nothing takes your fancy here, you can check out our list of best Netflix movies, best Prime Video movies, best Paramount Plus movies or best Apple TV Plus movies, as you're bound to find something to watch in there. But without further ado, here are 38 of the best Disney Plus movies to stream.

Research published in June predicted that AI companies will exhaust available public human-generated text data between 2026 and 2032, marking a critical inflection point for traditional development approaches.

"Our findings indicate that current LLM development trends cannot be sustained through conventional data scaling alone," the research paper states, highlighting the need for alternative approaches to model improvement, including synthetic data generation, transfer learning from data-rich domains, and the use of non-public data.

Research published in June predicted that AI companies will exhaust available public human-generated text data between 2026 and 2032, marking a critical inflection point for traditional development approaches.

"Our findings indicate that current LLM development trends cannot be sustained through conventional data scaling alone," the research paper states, highlighting the need for alternative approaches to model improvement, including synthetic data generation, transfer learning from data-rich domains, and the use of non-public data.

The historical strategy of training language models on publicly available text from websites, books, and other sources has reached a point of diminishing returns, with developers having "largely squeezed as much out of that type of data as they can," according to The Information.

While Apocalypse, Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants meant the X-Men franchise mostly lost its way after 2014’s Days of Future Past, 2017's Logan is arguably the best X-movie of them all. Designed as Hugh Jackman’s swansong as Wolverine (at least, it was until he signed up for the aforementioned Deadpool and Wolverine), it’s a bleak, but perfectly crafted study of a hero whose best days are behind him. Reunited with Patrick Stewart’s Professor Xavier (now struggling to control his psychic gifts), Logan finds new purpose protecting young mutant, Laura (His Dark Materials’ Dafne Keen), in a movie that pushes the boundaries of superhero stories on screen.

How OpenAI is Tackling This Issue: Reasoning vs. Language Models
To tackle these challenges, OpenAI is fundamentally restructuring its approach to AI development.

“In response to the recent challenge to training-based scaling laws posed by slowing GPT improvements, the industry appears to be shifting its effort to improving models after their initial training, potentially yielding a different type of scaling law,” The Information reports.

The Ghostbusters said you should never cross the streams, but Disney had massive success when its animation division adapted a little-known Marvel comic. As in many classic Disney animations, the plot is driven by the tragic death of a parent, but what Bambi and The Lion King lacked in robots and sci-fi action, Big Hero 6 delivers in spades. The San Fransokyo setting is a wonderfully inventive fusion of East and West, while inflatable robot Baymax instantly earned himself a place alongside R2-D2 and WALL-E in the pantheon of all-time great droids. And yes, even though you have to keep your eyes peeled to spot it, the regulation Stan Lee cameo is all present and correct.

To achieve this state of continuous improvement, OpenAI is separating model development into two distinct tracks:

The O-Series (which seems to be codename Strawberry), focused on reasoning capabilities, represents a new direction in model architecture. These models operate with significantly higher computational intensity and are explicitly designed for complex problem-solving tasks.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is acclaimed director Wes Anderson's adaptation of Roald Dahl's classic story. It follows Mr. Fox who is living a lovely life in the countryside with his family. But, he raids the farms of the local human neighbors, which results in the animal community being hunted down by three farmers; Boggis, Bunce, and Bean. It's a delightful movie that should appeal to the whole family. Kids will love the story, the creatures, and the silliness. Adults will love the humor, Wes Anderson's fresh take on a much-loved story, and appreciating the talent of the voice actors, including George Clooney as Mr. Fox, Meryl Streep as Mrs. Fox, Bill Murray as Badger and Willem Dafoe as Rat.

The computational demands are substantial, with early estimates suggesting operational costs at six times that of current models. However, the enhanced reasoning capabilities could justify the increased expense for specific applications requiring advanced analytical processing.

As the first ever entirely computer-generated movie, Toy Story was always going to grab headlines. The fact we’re still talking about it more than 25 years later, however, shows that Pixar struck storytelling gold when it united an insecure cowboy with an action figure who believes he’s a real-life space ranger. In a movie where the dialogue sizzles, every single toy in Andy’s playroom could be worthy of a spin-off – indeed, Buzz Lightyear got one in the form of Lightyear – while the gags and surprisingly complex themes ensured grown-ups were just as captivated as their kids. The three sequels are similarly brilliant, which is a truly incredible accomplishment, possibly unparalleled in recent Hollywood history.

The massive success of Encanto hit ‘We Don’t Talk About Bruno’ has got everyone talking about Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda again, but his first Disney collaboration is the better movie. Assisted by Miranda’s ear for a hit tune, the eponymous Moana is undoubtedly one of the studio’s great characters, the daughter of a Polynesian island chief who learns a lot of life lessons when she takes to the high seas to save her community. The movie also earns extra credit for showing that, among all his other skills, Dwayne Johnson can hold a tune.

This model, if it’s the same as Strawberry, is also tasked to generate enough synthetic data to increase the quality of OpenAI's LLMs constantly.

In parallel, the Orion Models or the GPT Series (considering OpenAI trademarked the name GPT-5) continue to evolve, focusing on general language processing and communication tasks. These models maintain more efficient computational requirements while leveraging their broader knowledge base for writing and argumentation tasks.

In the first decade of the 21st century, Pixar was on the sort of golden run most studios – live-action or animated – could only dream of. Having tackled insects (A Bug’s Life), fish (Finding Nemo) and superheroes (The Incredibles), the CG pioneers turned their attentions to space, and the results were truly out of this world. It’s difficult to pinpoint what’s boldest about this futuristic tale: is it the bleakness of a future Earth that’s become so polluted that the human race has left for the stars? Or is it that the first act is largely wordless, as the eponymous robot trundles along, carrying out his never-ending clean-up operation? Either way, WALL-E is undoubtedly one of the best Disney Plus movies, a bona fide classic from a studio that specializes in classics.

OpenAI’s CPO Kevin Weil also confirmed this during an AMA and said he expects to converge both developments at some point in the future.

“It's not either or, it's both,” he replied when asked whether OpenAI would focus on scaling LLMs with more data or using a different approach, focusing on smaller but faster models, “better base models plus more strawberry scaling/inference time compute.”

If you have kids of a certain age, the thought of ice princesses, talking snowmen and letting it go may be enough to bring you out in very cold sweats. But if you look past the relentless, heavily merchandised juggernaut surrounding the original Frozen, it’s actually one of Disney’s best fairytale retellings (it's based on Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen), with a pair of inspiring female leads, spectacular animation and, yes, some killer songs.

A workaround or the ultimate solution?
OpenAI's approach to addressing data scarcity through synthetic data generation presents complex challenges for the industry. The company's researchers are developing sophisticated models designed to generate training data, yet this solution introduces new complications in maintaining model quality and reliability.

As previously reported by Decrypt, researchers have found that model training on synthetic data represents a double-edged sword. While it offers a potential solution to data scarcity, it introduces new risks of model degradation and reliability concerns with proven degradation after several training iterations.

By the time The Incredibles arrived in 2004, Pixar had seemingly stumbled on a formula, in which two chalk-and-cheese characters would be thrown together on some kind of quest – see Toy Story, Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo. When The Iron Giant and The Simpsons director Brad Bird entered the fold, however, he shook things up with a hilarious, action-packed story about an (otherwise) ordinary family with superpowers. Thanks to Marvel, there’s no shortage of superhero movies on Disney Plus, but few are as smart, funny and inventive as The Incredibles. Set in a timeless alternative USA, the movie’s visuals are stylish and beautiful to look at, while the fact that the movie is more interested in the Parr family than their superhero alter-egos sets it apart from the herd. How does The Incredibles compare with the animation studio's best? Check out our guide on the best Pixar movies ranked.

In other words, as models train on AI-generated content, they may begin to amplify subtle imperfections in their outputs. These feedback loops can perpetuate and magnify existing biases, creating a compounding effect that becomes increasingly difficult to detect and correct.

OpenAI's Foundations team is developing new filtering mechanisms to maintain data quality, implementing different validation techniques to distinguish between high-quality and potentially problematic synthetic content. The team is also exploring hybrid training approaches that strategically combine human and AI-generated content to maximize the benefits of both sources while minimizing their respective drawbacks.

Pete Docter is now the chief creative officer of Pixar and his qualifications for the job have long been clear – as director he’s been responsible for some of the biggest, boldest storytelling ideas in the studio’s glorious history. Despite Up’s powerful opening and Soul’s intelligent examination of the afterlife, however, Inside Out is his true masterpiece, a trip inside a girl’s mind that turns her emotions into fully rounded characters. This being Pixar – a studio so successful it could easily fill a lot more slots on this list of the best Disney Plus movies – the characterization and storytelling are second-to-none. But even more impressive is the way the film translates a kid’s subconscious into a fully functioning society. Movies – animated or otherwise – don’t get much smarter than this.

Post-training optimization has also gained relevance. Researchers are developing new methods to enhance model performance after the initial training phase, potentially offering a way to improve capabilities without relying solely on expanding the training dataset.

That said, GPT-5 is still an embryo of a complete model with significant development work ahead. Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, has indicated that it won't be ready for deployment this year or next. This extended timeline could prove advantageous, allowing researchers to address current limitations and potentially discover new methods for model enhancement, considerably improving GPT-5 before its eventual release.

The 1980s were a dark time for Disney’s animation division, but the studio rediscovered its mojo with the triple whammy of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin during the decade that followed. The highlight of the renaissance shifted away from Disney’s traditional fairytales to tell the Hamlet-inspired story of an exiled lion cub returning to reclaim his throne. Packed with memorable songs, built around some stunning set-pieces, and impeccable cast – who’d have thought of casting James Earl Jones as an absent father? – it stands up as one of 2D animation’s finest hours. The photo-real ‘live-action’ remake is also available on Disney Plus.

Leandro Garcia, Visa’s Executive Director of Solutions for Digital Payments, explains how Visa tokens facilitate the secure and reliable management of substantial payment flows for issuers and merchants. He emphasizes that the increasing adoption of this technology not only enhances consumer experience but also significantly boosts security for online purchases.

As we already mentioned in CNF, tokenization technology, which replaces the 16-digit number of a credit or debit card with a unique and secure “token,” represents innovation for Visa. Each token is unique to each device, website, or application and is stored in a secure environment. Retailers can access the token solely for payment purposes, and storage is allowed only with the consumer’s consent.

Pete Doctor is behind the stories of so many masterpiece animations from Disney and Pixar. From Monsters Inc and Up to Inside Out, each of these movies are known for offering big life lessons using digestible metaphors wrapped in whimsical fantasy but it's his work alongside Mike Jones (The Incredibles) and Kemp Powers (Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse) on the 2020 adventure family film Soul that strikes a chord with me the most. It tackles the existential question: what does it mean to have a soul? And going by its wins at the 93rd Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature Film and Best Original Score, you can probably tell that its philosophical answer is a knockout with audiences. It's fun for the whole family.

“Tokenization is increasingly being used to enhance security, optimize sales conversions and improve the online shopping experience. We see great potential for its growth, both in Brazil and globally, as more issuers, retailers and consumers realize the benefits of technology for their businesses and data protection,” concludes Garcia.

A black-and-white Judy Garland walking into Technicolor in the original Wizard of Oz is rightly hailed as one of the greatest moments in cinema but, for a younger generation, Baby Herman storming out of a cartoon onto an actual movie set had the same effect. The way Back to the Future director Robert Zemeckis brought animated characters into a live-action world is an incredible technical achievement, but even beyond the ‘how did they do that?’ magic, it’s a hell of a movie. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a family-friendly take on classic film noir, with a stuff-of-nightmares villain and – in Londoner Bob Hoskins – one of cinema’s great hard-boiled PIs.

Garcia highlights the growing use of tokenization to improve security, optimize sales conversions, and enhance the online shopping experience. He sees substantial potential for its growth, both in Brazil and globally, as more issuers, retailers, and consumers recognize the benefits of the technology for their businesses and data protection.

Currently, 29% of Visa’s global transactions are tokenized, a technology that prevented $650 million in fraud losses in 2023 alone. This underscores the increasing reliance on and the effectiveness of tokenization in safeguarding digital financial transactions worldwide.

Inside Out 2 is not only one of 2024's biggest new movies but also the highest-grossing animated film of all-time after earning more than $1.6 billion worldwide. The animated sequel arrived nearly a decade after the first and it was well worth the wait. Much like the main character Riley, I was laughing, crying, and experiencing every emotion in between with this installment that's just as heartwarming as the original. Inside Out 2 follows teen Riley a year later as she enters a new stage in her life and faces fresh emotional challenges which opens the door to some new arrivals that Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust all feel unsure about. Whether you're a child or adult, this emotions-led hit really tugs at the heartstrings (I mean, we did rank that Big Bong scene in our top 10 most heartbreaking Pixar moments). There's even more good news for as there's an Inside Out 2 spin-off show called Win or Lose coming on December 11 and I already can't contain my emotions.

Trump had previously voiced his dissatisfaction with the Fed during his first term, and in his recent campaign, he expressed interest in having more control over monetary policy.

Musk supported this position, suggesting that unelected bureaucracies like the Fed hold excessive power compared to elected officials, sparking significant discussion on the Fed’s role in economic governance.

My palms get sweaty just thinking about this documentary. It's one thing to climb up the El Capitan mountain summit in Yosemite National Park with ropes and safety equipment, but to do it without any gear at all is a whole other feat. In Free Solo, we meet Alex Honnold as he plans to achieve his lifetime dream of climbing up the face of the world's most famous rock – that sentence could have easily ended there and still be impressive but this is the legendary rock climber Honnold after all – without a rope. Honnold's jaw-dropping ascent up the vertical rock face is a tense watch (even from my living room's low to the ground couch), but the documentary also offers some respite from the sporting action by breaking up the narrative with scenes of the daredevil's home life with his friends and girlfriend. It's an extraordinary, nerve-racking watch that left me in awe.

However, the debate intensified after Fed Chair Jerome Powell stated he would not resign even if asked by President Trump, a stance that Lee and Musk criticized as overstepping constitutional authority.

Legendary musician John Williams has composed unforgettable soundtracks for beloved franchises and movies I've seen over the years like Jaws, E.T, Star Wars, Indiana Jones and many more. Even if you haven't seen the films, the iconic tunes are instantly recognizable and have become the greatest soundtracks in cinematic history. This heartwarming documentary celebrates the maestro's life and career that spans decades, with interviews from filmmakers, musicians and other famous faces who have been inspired by his work. TechRadar's Tom Power wrote that: "I implore any film buff, regardless of whether they enjoy Williams' scores or not, to check it out, because it's full of unheard stories and anecdotal information about the famous US musician that'll endear him further to, well, anyone." Music by John Williams is a laudable documentary that perfectly praises one of the best musicians there will ever be.

Bitcoin as a Potential Economic Solution
Amid calls for Fed reform, attention is growing on Bitcoin as an inflation hedge, especially with the U.S. national debt now surpassing $35 trillion. Influential voices, including Florida CFO Jimmy Patronis and Senator Cynthia Lummis, are advocating for BTC investments to preserve purchasing power.

Trump has even suggested that Bitcoin could play a role in managing the debt, positioning it as a critical tool in potential U.S. economic strategy. As discussions on the Fed’s influence evolve, Bitcoin’s role as a hedge against inflation garners increasing interest.

In Young Woman and the Sea, Daisy Ridley plays Trudy Ederle, the first woman to successfully swim the English Channel. Through the unrelenting support of her older sister and trainers, she overcomes hardships and hostility of a patriarchal society to progress through the Olympic swimming team and complete the 21-mile trip from France to England. Ridley shines as Ederle in this inspiring true story that also features a star-studded cast of Stephen Graham and Christopher Eccleston, which makes it a winning movie in my eyes.

“Why would you go out and shoot an establishing shot of a house in a television show when you could just create the establishing shot for $100? To go out and shoot it would cost you thousands of dollars,” Kutcher said, according to Variety. “Action scenes of me jumping off of this building, you don’t have to have a stunt person go do it, you could just go do it.”

Kutcher’s arguments for AI’s cost-saving potential in production were controversial, to say the least, leading to the actor to walk back his comments on social media.

Rise is based on the true story of the Antetokounmpo family, in particular three Greek-Nigerian brothers: Giannis (Uche Agada), Thanasis (Ral Agada), and Kostas (Jaden Osimuwa), who were the first trio of brothers to become NBA champions in the history of the league. I'm not a basketball fan, and you don't have to be to watch this uplifting sports biopic that shines a light on a truly remarkable family who launched the careers of three NBA champions despite adversity. To top it off, the three lead actors are phenomenal in their first movie roles.

Despite the potential threat of AI to impact jobs, for filmmakers like Scott Mann, the technology offers the ability to be more flexible—and believes it's something the entertainment industry should join Scott in embracing.

"AI-powered tools offer filmmakers greater freedom and flexibility, reducing shoot time and costs while still allowing them to perfect scenes in post-production,” Mann told Decrypt. “This shift enables a more agile, less linear approach to filmmaking, enhancing creativity without compromising the artistic vision. However, it’s crucial that AI is used ethically and responsibly.”

With AI being one of the major factors in the 2023 SAG-AFTRA, WGA strikes, and the ongoing video game actors strike, Mann—who directed Robert De Niro in the 2015 crime caper "Heist"—emphasized the need for studios not to replace creators with AI.

“Human creatives must remain at the forefront, ensuring AI enriches both the audience and artists’ experiences,” Mann said. “AI should be a tool to enhance human creativity, not replace it."

Tom Hanks won successive Oscars in the ’90s for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, but it was the 1988 comedy-drama Big that bagged him his first nomination. Indeed, the star has arguably never been better than he is here, playing a 12-year-old boy whose wish to be “big” comes true. Of course, the kid soon discovers that being a grown-up isn’t all it’s cracked up to be – despite his remarkable success at a major toy company – but Hanks kept me rooting for Josh with a performance of believable naivety.

At the time, Bitcoin was worth a comparatively paltry $27,000. Fast forward four years and the cryptocurrency is trading at $87,803 late Monday, an increase of more than 220%, placing Okung's Bitcoin bet at $21 million.

In 2021, the Bitcoin aficionado defended the crypto when Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced his company would no longer accept Bitcoin payments, citing environmental concerns over its energy consumption.

Disney loves the premise of this body-swap comedy so much it’s made three versions of Freaky Friday – and they're all available on Disney Plus. It’s the 2003 version that’s the standout, however, as Jamie-Lee Curtis’s uptight mom and Lindsay Lohan’s rebellious teen swap places thanks to magical fortune cookies. The secret of the movie’s success is the casting, with both leads displaying an uncanny talent for role-reversal comedy, playing their opposite number with all the relish of John Travolta and Nicolas Cage in Face/Off. Made a year before Mean Girls, this is the movie that marked out Lohan as one of the most talented actors of her generation. To top it off, the comedy is getting a sequel with Freakier Friday and best believe I'll be tuning in to watch.

In response to Musk’s proclamation, Okung launched the “Stick to Space, Elon” campaign.

“Bitcoin is humanity’s best shot at freedom," Okung told Decrypt at the time. "The public narrative needed correction as Elon apparently misunderstands its true benefit to our species.”

He continued: “No individual is a threat to Bitcoin in the grand scheme of things. In Elon’s words, it is inevitable. His impact on Bitcoin is temporary.”

Disney has its cake and eats it with a post-modern movie that pokes fun at the clichés of its animated classics, while also being a magical fairytale in its own right. Amy Adams is typically brilliant as Giselle, a traditional cartoon Disney Princess who finds herself transported to a place way scarier than any magical kingdom – the real world. Both the animated and live-action segments are flawlessly executed, as the self-aware script seamlessly blends comedy, an evil queen (played by Susan Sarandon), and a romance with a down-on-his-luck lawyer (Patrick Dempsey) who doesn’t necessarily believe in happily ever afters. Long awaited sequel Disenchanted was released on Disney Plus in 2022.

Okung retired from football in June 2023. If he’s still holding bitcoin, he could go down in history as the GOAT—among all ex-athlete investors.

Neither movies about pirates nor movies based on theme park attractions were considered a recipe for success back in 2003. Nonetheless, the original Pirates of the Caribbean managed to surprise everyone by becoming one of the standout blockbusters of the era. The film’s crowd-pleasing mix of romance, ghosts and swashbuckling action on the high seas proved infectious, but it was the wonderfully eccentric Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp based his performance on Rolling Stone Keith Richards) that lifted The Curse of the Black Pearl to the next level. Just pretend the four disappointing sequels – also available on Disney Plus – didn’t happen. Now I just have one question: why is the rum gone?

There are countless beverage brands out there, but Rekt Drinks was able to leverage the existing Web3 community to move initial product and build some buzz around the launch.

“Traditional startups may have a great product, but they often struggle to get off the ground as they have a lack of community or existing customer base,” Faruq told Decrypt. “Conversely, Web3 excels at fostering die-hard communities.”

Taking hide and seek to a whole new level, Ready or Not shouldn't be missed whether it's the Halloween season or beyond. Here, Samara Weaving shines as a new bride who meets her husband's family and ends up being hunted by them as part of a strange tradition. It's shocking, it's hilarious, it's unlike anything you've seen before. I got the chance to see this with a crowd, but it's equally as satisfying in the comfort of your own home. Are you ready (or not)?

One of the most successful drink launches in recent years is Prime, led by YouTubers-turned-boxers KSI and Logan Paul. While not Web3-native, the drinks sold out upon launch and were in demand thanks to the two influencers' cultlike followings, with fans queued at shops to get their hands on the drinks.

While Rekt believes it has a strong community, it’s not nearly as large as the 40 million subscribers that KSI and Logan Paul collectively command.

No One Will Save You is another unique horror offering I highly recommend. Something I found very intriguing was the fact there are only five lines of dialogue spoken throughout the entire movie, but don't let it put you off. It more than holds your attention by showing, not telling, and it's a clever tactic. Here, Kaitlyn Dever is a woman who lives alone and has been shunned by the local community, who finds herself fighting for her life against mysterious aliens. Perfect for both sci-fi and horror lovers, it's the kind of story that will make you think.

In this absence, Rekt engaged its community using a rewards system that feels native to Web3 audiences. By completing social tasks (such as liking a tweet or following an account), purchasing Rekt Drinks, or owning particular NFT collections, users earned DRANK points.

For now, what these points will add up to is unclear. Faruq would not comment specifically on the topic, citing legal reasons.

You generally have to wait more than a decade for a new James Cameron movie to come along, but luckily everything that the director makes is worth talking about. So, while the plot of his 2009 record-breaker is a tad forgettable – a human soldier falls in love with a giant blue alien on the distant moon of Pandora – it remains a thoroughly entertaining technical marvel. Fifteen years later, no film has surpassed its incredibly detailed 3D visuals, and even without the third dimension, watching on the best 4K TV you can find makes you feel as if you've been transported to another world. Long-awaited sequel The Way of Water is similarly spectacular and also available on Disney Plus. In the mood for more from the most successful director in history? Check out our guide on the best James Cameron movies.

However, this is a similar viral mechanic that helped push the success of the tap-to-earn genre, as Telegram games encourage users to share projects socially in exchange for points. What these points will add up to is often unknown early on, but eventually the points typically determine how many tokens players will receive in an airdrop.

Regardless of whether Rekt will have a future airdrop or not, the launch of its drink is being billed as a success, with 222,000 cans of Liquidated Lime sold across 32 countries in less than two days.

The two-part culmination of the Marvel’s original 23-movie odyssey was more than worth the wait, as Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy and various superpowered hangers-on joined forces to thwart Thanos’s quest to obtain all six Infinity Stones. With Infinity War delivering one of cinema’s greatest cliffhangers, and Endgame going to some surprisingly dark places, the two films feature many of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s boldest and most epic moments – not to mention some of the most unashamedly triumphant.

“I genuinely believe we have something really special with Rekt,” Faruq told Decrypt, “and the fact that we've been able to achieve what we have from a free mint at the beginning of a two-year bear market is a testament to how loyal and die-hard our community is.”

The Force Awakens proved Disney knew how to make a Star Wars film, albeit one that closely followed the beats of George Lucas's original movie. This brilliant standalone pips it to a place on our list of the best Disney Plus movies by showing that unfamiliar characters, a war-movie vibe, and a mission whose success was never in doubt are no barrier to success. Based on a couple of lines from A New Hope’s opening crawl, it sees a brave group of Rebels going behind enemy lines to recover plans to the first dreaded Death Star. The final act is surprisingly bleak, but it’s also one of the most accomplished in the entire franchise. There’s also something rather wonderful about seeing original trilogy X-wings back in action, powered by 21st century CG magic. It's also been confirmed that Andor season 2 – one of the most best new Star Wars TV shows – will lead directly into the events of Rogue One.

Bitcoin's rally reflects a broader shift in investor sentiment following recent political developments in the U.S. elections, which saw Donald Trump claiming victory.

Those shifts have signaled both opportunity and optimism in the markets, with potential regulatory support expected as pro-crypto lawmakers take power.

A rising tide

While there haven’t been quite as many live-action Spider-Men as there have Batmen or James Bonds, Marvel’s iconic webslinger has been through plenty of screen incarnations since the turn of the century. Tom Holland’s Marvel Cinematic Universe version is arguably the best, simultaneously a convincing update of the geeky teen superhero of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s original comics, and a character capable of going toe-to-toe with Tony Stark, Steve Rogers and the rest of the Avengers. Spider-Man: Homecoming is a fun coming-of-age adventure that takes the MCU back to high school. Former screen Batman Michael Keaton gives good villain as Adrian 'The Vulture' Toomes, while the decision to stage most of the superheroics outside Spider-Man’s traditional Manhattan skyscraper stomping ground keeps things fresh.

Spider-Man: Homecoming is available to watch on Netflix in the UK.

A rising tide
Bitcoin’s performance for the week has also helped bolster adjacent indices as investors look to alternative investment vehicles for high-risk beta plays compared to traditional assets.

The broader "Bitcoin Industrial Complex" index, which includes U.S.-listed spot Bitcoin ETFs, MicroStrategy, and Coinbase, achieved a record $38 billion in trading volume, according to a post on X from Bloomberg senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas.

What’s left to say about three movies that changed cinema forever, and spawned a franchise that’s still the size of a Death Star 47 years later? George Lucas discovered some strange but potent alchemy when he mixed together Samurai-inspired warriors, old Westerns and mystical mumbo-jumbo – and then set the concoction in a galaxy far, far away. If you pressed us, we’d say The Empire Strikes Back is the best of the trilogy – it’s more sophisticated, it's home to cinema’s most celebrated big reveal, and boasts AT-ATs and asteroids in its first act – but the Force is still strong with all three of these timeless classics.

Coinbase stock closed at $334.24 for Monday's trading session, marking a 3-year high. MicroStrategy's stock also broke another all-time high above $351, its first in almost 25 years.

Bitcoin now trails only seven global assets: gold, with its $14.7 trillion market cap, followed by tech giants NVIDIA, Apple, Microsoft, and Alphabet, and Amazon. Saudi Aramco, the national petroleum and natural gas company, retains its spot as the seventh-largest at $1.8 trillion in size.

If Thor had hung up his hammer for good after the plodding Thor: The Dark World, few tears would have been shed. Then Taika Waititi – at the time best known for the brilliant Hunt for the Wilderpeople – came along and reinvented Odin’s firstborn as a comedy god. Not only does Chris Hemsworth’s Asgardian deity finally get to step out of the shadow of little brother Loki (a typically watchable Tom Hiddleston), every supporting player is given a scene-stealing moment, whether it’s Cate Blanchett’s wonderfully arch villain, Hela, Mark Ruffalo’s newly sensitive Hulk or Jeff Goldblum’s sublimely kooky despot the Grandmaster. Waititi saved the best role for himself, however, as Korg, a soft-spoken revolutionary quite literally hewn from rock. Unfortunately the director was unable to recapture the same magic with sillier, less-smartly plotted follow-up Thor: Love and Thunder, also available on Disney Plus.

While gold remains over 10 times larger than Bitcoin on market capitalization, the scarcity narrative over Bitcoin continues to attract investors seeking a hedge against traditional market uncertainties.

“The fact that gold is still 10 times larger than Bitcoin is incredible,” authors of the financial newsletter, The Kobessi Letter, wrote in a Monday post on X. "Not only does this show how big gold is, but it also shows how big Bitcoin can be."

Until Spider-Man: No Way Home reignited the post-Covid box office, Black Panther was Marvel’s best performing solo superhero. It’s not hard to see why, because while the story – King T’Challa, aka Black Panther, fights off rival Erik Killmonger’s claim to the throne of Wakanda – is fairly standard superhero fare, director Ryan Coogler’s presentation lifts it to another level. The futuristic African kingdom of Wakanda is a truly magnificent creation – a world where advanced technology meets weaponized rhinos – while the late Chadwick Boseman’s performance as the eponymous hero is one of dignity and power.

The current floor price for one of the Schiff NFTs is 0.1245 BTC, around $10,774 for each collectible, according to Magic Eden data. Despite having a low trading volume, the Schiff NFTs rose 149% last year with an original price of 0.05 BTC, around $1,885.

“There's 21 million Bitcoin but only 50 Golden Triumph ordinals. It's clear which one is more valuable,” Schiff tweeted. “You can't argue with math.”

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is the second instalment in the series, and it's safe to say it had some big shoes to fill. After the unexpected death of Chadwick Boseman, Black Panther 2 could have floundered, but Marvel did an astonishing job of continuing the story in an emotionally-charged and totally respectful way. It even earned a rare five stars in our Black Panther: Wakanda Forever review. The story begins one year after the end of the original movie, following the death of King T'Challa. With those closest to the king struggling to move forward, Wakanda is left vulnerable and without a Black Panther as protector. Queen Ramonda (an Oscar-nominated Angela Bassett) is left to lead the nation through a turbulent time, and to try to fend off world powers that want to get hold of her country's much-coveted vibranium.

It's unclear if Schiff is attempting to profit from Bitcoin mania. The gold bug did not immediately return a request for comment.

I'm a big fan of the Planet of the Apes franchise, so I was intrigued to see what direction the universe would take with the absence of Andy Serkis' Caesar – and it's safe to say I wasn't disappointed. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is the 10th addition to the Planet of the Apes universe and a pseudo-sequel to War for the Planet of the Apes. Set 300 years after the reign of Caesar, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes follows intelligent young ape Noa (Owen Teague), who embarks on a journey to save his tribe of chimpanzees from the ruthless Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand). In our Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes review, the epic is described as a "thoroughly entertaining post-apocalyptic adventure that stands on its own two feet" and I couldn't agree more.

Despite Schiff announcing the sale of the Ordinals collection, he claimed not to own a Bitcoin wallet himself or ownership of the collection.

“The ordinals belong to the people who bought them in the original auction,” he said.

In the early ’00s, Hollywood studios were still figuring out how to make the best superhero movies. After the first ­X-Men movie (released in 2000) had proved that Marvel heroes could hit big at the box office, this follow-up (titled X-Men 2 outside the US) became one of the early classics of the 21st century comic-book blockbuster boom. With most of the ensemble established first time out, X2 expands the scope of the storytelling with the X-Men on the run, and dodgy military guy Colonel Stryker (future Succession star Brian Cox) initiating a plan to wipe out all mutants. Along the way Wolverine learns about his origins, new characters (most notably Alan Cumming's Nightcrawler) come to the fore, and heroes and villains are forced to work together, in a first class Marvel adventure.

When asked why someone would part with the increasingly valuable Bitcoin for one of his NFTs, Schiff said it was because of scarcity.

“Why is Bitcoin more valuable,” Schiff said. “The Golden Triumph originals are way more scarce than Bitcoin.”

Okay, it’s not technically a movie but in the absence of a proper big-screen adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash-hit musical, this recording of the Broadway show Hamilton fits the bill perfectly. Featuring Miranda in the lead role of Alexander Hamilton, one of the founding fathers of the United States of America, it’s one of the most invigorating history lessons you’ll ever see. The hip-hop influenced songs sound amazing coming out of your TV, while the inventive cinematography brings the immediacy of the stage show into your living room. A sing-along version of the film is also available, if you can't resist the urge to join in.

Schiff has consistently argued that gold is a better investment than Bitcoin, comparing it to Tulip mania.

On Monday, he decried Trump’s vow to establish a Bitcoin Reserve, prognosticating that such a move would cause a massive market meltdown.

Pop quiz! For which movie did Julie Andrews win her Best Actress Oscar? While The Sound of Music would be a reasonable guess, she actually struck gold with this tale of a magical nanny. She’s a revelation as the stern but inspiring Ms Poppins, utterly in tune with the character whether she’s dealing with humans or the assortment of cartoon characters seamlessly integrated with the live-action. Songs like ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’, ‘A Spoonful of Sugar’ and ‘Feed the Birds’ have crossed over into the collective pop-culture consciousness, and the movie’s so good that the weirdness of Dick Van Dyke’s cockney accent barely even registers. Mary Poppins Returns, which gifted Emily Blunt the unenviable task of emulating Andrews, arrived in 2018 and is also available on Disney Plus.

“To maintain the pretense that its Bitcoin reserve has actual value, the U.S. government would be forced to keep buying, destroying the value of the dollar in the process.” he tweeted.

Next on the agenda will be a few more Starlink launches that are set to take off before the end of the week. The company is also looking toward the sixth Starship test flight in the coming weeks. CEO Elon Musk said on Tuesday that it would be coming soon.

As of now, the earliest expected date that IFT-6 would launch is next Monday, November 18.

Launching on this date will require SpaceX to obtain all necessary FAA licenses.

Disney’s big-money acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm are the purchases that made everyone sit up and take notice, but they also had the smart business sense to nab the rights to Jim Henson’s enduring felt-covered creations. Numerous brilliant Muppet movies are available on Disney Plus – as well as TV classic The Muppet Show – but we’ve plumped for this 2011 comeback. As Jason Segel’s Gary and his Muppet brother Walter try to save a theater from developers, the story is witty, heartfelt and every bit as self-aware as we’ve come to expect from Kermit and co. And thanks to showstopping song ‘Man or Muppet’ – written by Flight of the Conchords’ Bret McKenzie – the movie even bagged itself an Oscar.

The expansion begins just a few months after the Town of Normal approved Rivian’s application to expand its factory. Currently, the Normal plant includes 2.6 million square feet of manufacturing space. The new expansion is set to add 1.14 million square feet to that total.

The R2 was unveiled back in March as Rivian aimed to get a cheaper, more accessible EV on the market to begin ramping deliveries and move toward profitability.

Steven Spielberg didn’t make life easy for himself with his first ever musical – by remaking Robert Wise’s 1961 take on Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s song-and-dance hit, the director was inviting comparisons with a beloved movie that won a shed-load of Oscars. Luckily, he was more than up to the task, and his powerful retelling brings a very modern edge to a love story set against the backdrop of rival gangs in New York. The choreography is electric and the cinematography expands way beyond the musical's theatrical origins. But Spielberg also deserves credit for accentuating the still-relevant race politics the original brushed over. An instant classic.

The R1T and R1S, its first two vehicles, have been successful in the EV space, and Rivian has gained a reputation for making great products.

However, the company is still working toward being profitable, as most EV entities are. The R2 aims to move Rivian to that point, and is a big improvement from the R1.

There are more than 500 movies to choose from on Disney Plus and while a lot are great watches, not all would be considered the best. To be picked as one of the best to stream on the service and be included in this guide, a movie must have a Rotten Tomatoes score from the critics of at least 80%, be available to stream on the Disney Plus app in the US, UK and Australia, and recommended by one of the members of the TechRadar streaming team.

This is by no means an exhaustive list and we'll continue to add to the guide as new movies get added to the service, while also making sure to remove any that don't fit the above criteria. As more movies get added on a regular basis, we’ll be sure to keep this updated. So, be sure to check back. And, if you’re not a subscriber and are considering it, here’s a guide to Disney Plus that’s packed with useful information on signing up.

Where can I watch Disney movies besides Disney Plus?
You can rent or buy Disney movies on services like Apple TV and Amazon. Hulu subscribers with the Disney Bundle can also access Disney movies. In the UK, you can sometimes get Disney Movies on BBC iPlayer or ITVX.

Byers wrote: 'Redundant assignments will be nixed, and various divisions will be reduced or even eliminated.

'Some of the on-air talent are also likely to be affected,' he went on to reveal.

Sources who spoke to the reporter, who worked at CNN for three years before founding Puck, added how the looming layoffs are part of an overarching plan - one that puts a premium on the station's digital platforms.

The man behind it, they said, is none other than new CEO Mark Thompson - the former New York Times boss brought in to overhaul the network under its Warner Bros. Discovery parent.

Can Disney Plus movies be downloaded?
Yes, subscribers with a Standard or Premium plan can download content on up to 10 supported mobile devices that you can watch offline. Unfortunately the Standard with Ads plan does not allow you to download content.

When do Disney movies go to Disney Plus?
Disney movies are typically added to the platform at midnight PT/3am ET and 8am in the UK on the day of their release. In the past, there's usually been a three month wait for Disney movies to be added to the streamer after their theatrical release.

However, following a Trump presidency and a term from the Biden Administration, it lost to MSNBC in terms of ratings - something never seen before as it only drew in 5.1million sets of eyes that night.

MSNBC, meanwhile, raked in 6million - a number eclipsed almost twofold by Fox News' 10.3million.

The numbers, aired this week in the form of Nielsen statistics, appear to show a shifting field when it comes to cable news - one seemingly set to continue with Trump's second term in office.

The state of Tesla Energy heading into the end of 2024
The news comes as Tesla has been rapidly expanding its energy business throughout this year, after Elon Musk predicted that the sector’s sales growth would outpace its automotive business in 2024. Musk also said he expected the energy division to become the company’s highest margin business this year, and there has been no shortage of production or deployment of the company’s Powerwalls and grid-scale Megapack batteries over the last several months.

In Q3, Tesla’s Energy division reached a record gross profit margin of 30.5 percent, along with the company highlighting that it has deployed over 750,000 Powerwall units worldwide. Of those, Tesla says that over 100,000 Powerwall units around the world have been enrolled into one of the company’s Virtual Power Plant (VPP) programs, which essentially creates a giant, distributed battery across large regions during times of peak demand.

Tesla has also unveiled its Powerwall 3 batteries in markets including the U.S., Canada, Germany, the UK, and Western Australia, with the rest of the world still only having access to the Powerwall 2 for the time being. Last month, the company also launched expansion units for the Powerwall in the U.S., offering decreased installation time with increased stacked capacity.

In addition to the home- and commercial-scale Powerwall, Tesla also offers the grid-scale Megapack, which has been reaching similar records and deploying just as quickly. Tesla’s so-called “Megafactory” in Lathrop, California built its 10,000th Megapack earlier this month, and it’s eventually expected to reach an annual production capacity of 10,000 units, or 40GWh.

Along with the Lathrop Megafactory, Tesla has nearly completed a second Megafactory in Shanghai, China, which is also expected to eventually reach a volume production of 10,000 units per year. Currently, the Shanghai Megafactory aims to begin shipping units in the first quarter of 2025.

It's an attempt to leverage ChatGPT-like tech to increase sales. Initial tests showed businesses' purchase intent using the new tool increased by 40% versus traditional search engines, according to Kuo Zhang, president of Alibaba.com and vice president of Alibaba International.

The product is called Accio, after the spell used in the Harry Potter fantasy series for summoning objects. The initial version is web-based and supports English, German, French, Portuguese and Spanish, according to the company.

Article

They're trying to incorporate AI in their business already. Well they see the future and they get it. With this, their business can move faster. I think tech support will get an upgrade

The Oura Ring 4 began shipping to customers and became available in retail stores on Tuesday, and it's an impressive option for those looking for a sleek and comfortable way to learn more about their bodies and make healthier choices.

The smart ring offers more accurate sensors, a more comfortable design and longer battery life than its predecessor. The gadget is available in 12 sizes and six colors, including a new black finish, and it costs $349, although users have to pay a $5.99 a month, or $69.99 a year, subscription to use all of the accompanying app's features.

On the whole, the Oura Ring 4 is comfortable to wear and its app is easy to navigate. The ring was a bit more clunky and scratched more easily than I'd prefer, but after two weeks of testing it, the Oura Ring 4 did provide me useful information about my health.