• Spotify rolls out group chats

    January 30, 2026

    After launching a messaging feature last August, Spotify is now rolling out group chats. The company announced this week that users can now share the podcasts, playlists, and audiobooks they’re listening to with up to 10 people. You can only start a chat with someone you’ve previously shared content with. For example, if you have a collaborative playlist with someone or have joined a Jam or a Blend together, you can start a conversation with them. The move comes as Spotify continues to invest in making its streaming app more social. Over the years, the company has gradually added social…

  • The Nex Playground is everything Xbox Kinect wanted to be

    January 30, 2026

    It’s the year 2026 and the hottest game in my living room is Fruit Ninja. No, I’m not in the midst of an ill-advised retro mobile gaming kick. Instead, my family and I have been jumping around and slicing flying fruit in our living room using the Nex Playground. It’s a tiny gaming system built entirely around Kinect-like games. With its camera and onboard computer vision processing, the $249 Nex Playground can track up to four players as effectively as Microsoft’s clunky old Xbox motion tracker. Simply put, the dream of the Kinect, as well as Nintendo’s Wii, lives on…

  • Tesla’s energy storage business is growing faster than any other part of the company

    January 30, 2026

    Tesla’s energy storage business saved a dismal earnings report from turning into a horrible one. Last year, the company’s profit fell 45% compared with 2024, driven in large part by falling sales of its electric vehicles. Investors anticipated the decline in sales, but Tesla still beat Wall Street earnings and revenue estimates thanks to its energy storage business. Tesla deployed a record 46.7 gigawatt-hours of energy storage products in 2025, a 48% increase from last year, according to the company’s official filings. Big, stationary batteries like the Megapack and Powerwall, along with solar installations, now drive nearly a quarter of…

  • The best power banks and portable chargers for every device in 2026

    January 30, 2026

    To find the best power bank out there, I tested more than 60 portable chargers and batteries from big brands like Anker, Belkin, UGreen and Mophie — as well as from smaller players such as Biolite, Nimble and Satechi. I tested the batteries on a number of devices including iPhones, Galaxy phones, an iPad, a MacBook and even my ereader and a PlayStation controller. If you just want a brick that can charge anything, go for Anker’s 25kmAh Laptop Power bank. It has two built-in USB-C cables, a massive capacity and super fast charging speeds. But if that’s not quite…

  • Flapping Airplanes and the promise of research-driven AI

    January 30, 2026

    A new AI lab called Flapping Airplanes launched on Wednesday, with $180 million in seed funding from Google Ventures, Sequoia, and Index. The founding team is impressive, and the goal — finding a less data-hungry way to train large models — is a particularly interesting one. Based on what I’ve seen so far, I would rate them as Level Two on the trying-to-make-money scale. But there’s something even more exciting about the Flapping Airplanes project that I hadn’t been able to put my finger on until I read this post from Sequoia partner David Cahn. As Cahn describes it, Flapping…

  • Microsoft Unveils Maia 200, An FP4 and FP8 Optimized AI Inference Accelerator for Azure Datacenters

    January 30, 2026

    Maia 200 is Microsoft’s new in house AI accelerator designed for inference in Azure datacenters. It targets the cost of token generation for large language models and other reasoning workloads by combining narrow precision compute, a dense on chip memory hierarchy and an Ethernet based scale up fabric. Why Microsoft built a dedicated inference chip? Training and inference stress hardware in different ways. Training needs very large all to all communication and long running jobs. Inference cares about tokens per second, latency and tokens per dollar. Microsoft positions Maia 200 as its most efficient inference system, with about 30 percent…

  • 2026 Kia EV4 review | CarExpert

    January 30, 2026

    You might be surprised to hear that the 2026 Kia EV4 is the Korean brand’s first all-electric passenger vehicle that isn’t an SUV… Following the EV3, EV5, EV6 and EV9 electric SUVs is the EV4 ‘Sedan’ or ‘Fastback’ depending on where you live – a hatchback is available in Europe, but might not come here due to its exclusively Slovakian production. While the name seems pretty conventional, the design surely isn’t. Kia’s first rival for the popular Tesla Model 3 and BYD Seal looks anything but conventional, with its angular, futuristic lines making it look like something between spaceship and…

  • Apple’s AirPods 4 with ANC are on sale for $119

    January 30, 2026

    Apple’s AirPods 4 have a ton of improvements over the previous generation, but the version with active noise cancellation takes things up a notch. With them, you can get noise-cancelling power without the in-ear design of the AirPods Pro 3 that may bother some folks. They’re even more enticing when they’re on sale, like right now. The AirPods 4 with ANC are down to $119 at the moment, or $60 less than their usual price. While we’ve seen the ANC model as low as $99, the $119 price tag is the best deal we’ve seen so far this year. Apple…

  • OpenAI’s Sora app is struggling after its stellar launch

    January 30, 2026

    After rapidly hitting the top of the App Store in October, OpenAI’s video-generation app Sora is now struggling. New data suggests the app is seeing declines in both app downloads and consumer spending, as the early hype about the AI video social network wears off. Powered by OpenAI’s video generation model Sora 2, the iOS version topped 100,000 installs on day one, despite being an invite-only experience. It soon hit the No. 1 spot on the U.S. App Store, and it reached the 1 million downloads milestone faster than ChatGPT. At the time, Sora’s app was iOS-only and still required…

  • DeepSeek AI Releases DeepSeek-OCR 2 with Causal Visual Flow Encoder for Layout Aware Document Understanding

    January 30, 2026

    DeepSeek AI released DeepSeek-OCR 2, an open source document OCR and understanding system that restructures its vision encoder to read pages in a causal order that is closer to how humans scan complex documents. The key component is DeepEncoder V2, a language model style transformer that converts a 2D page into a 1D sequence of visual tokens that already follow a learned reading flow before text decoding starts. https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-OCR-2 From raster order to causal visual flow Most multimodal models still flatten images into a fixed raster sequence, top left to bottom right, and apply a transformer with static positional encodings.…