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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: TechCrunch gathered data from several sources and found similar trends. In 2024, 966 startups shut down, compared to 769 in 2023, according to Carta. That's a 25.6% increase. One note on methodology: Those numbers are for U.S.-based companies that were Carta customers and left Carta due to bankruptcy or dissolution. There are likely other shutdowns that wouldn't be accounted for through Carta, estimates Peter Walker, Carta's head of insights. [...] Meanwhile, AngelList found that 2024 saw 364 startup winddowns, compared to 233 in 2023. That's a 56.2% jump. However, AngelList CEO Avlok Kohli has a fairly optimistic take, noting that winddowns "are still very low relative to the number of companies that were funded across both years." Layoffs.fyi found a contradicting trend: 85 tech companies shut down in 2024, compared to 109 in 2023 and 58 in 2022. But as founder Roger Lee acknowledges, that data only includes publicly reported shutdowns "and therefore represents an underestimate." Of those 2024 tech shutdowns, 81% were startups, while the rest were either public companies or previously acquired companies that were later shut down by their parent organizations. So many companies got funded in 2020 and 2021 at heated valuations with famously thin diligence, that it's only logical that up to three years later, an increasing number couldn't raise more cash to fund their operations. Taking investment at too high of a valuation increases the risk such that investors won't want to invest more unless business is growing extremely well. [...] Looking ahead, Walker also expects we'll continue to see more shutdowns in the first half of 2025, and then a gradual decline for the rest of the year. That projection is based mostly on a time-lag estimate from the peak of funding, which he estimates was the first quarter of 2022 in most stages. So by the first quarter of 2025, "most companies will have either found a new path forward or had to make this difficult choice." "Tech zombies and a startup graveyard will continue to make headlines," said Dori Yona, CEO and co-founder of SimpleClosure. "Despite the crop of new investments, there are a lot of companies that have raised at high valuations and without enough revenue."

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Dangerous temperatures could kill 50% more people in Europe by the end of the century, a study has found, with the lives lost to stronger heat projected to outnumber those saved from milder cold. From a report: The researchers estimated an extra 8,000 people would die each year as a result of "suboptimal temperatures" even under the most optimistic scenario for cutting planet-heating pollution. The hottest plausible scenario they considered showed a net increase of 80,000 temperature-related deaths a year. The findings challenge an argument popular among those who say global heating is good for society because fewer people will die from cold weather. "We wanted to test this," said Pierre Masselot, a statistician at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and lead author of the study. "And we show clearly that we will see a net increase in temperature-related deaths under climate change." The study builds on previous research in which the scientists linked temperature to mortality rates for different age groups in 854 cities across Europe. They combined these with three climate scenarios that map possible changes in population structure and temperature over the century.

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Google has open-sourced the PebbleOS, with the original founder, Eric Migicovsky, starting a company to continue where he left off in 2016. "This is part of an effort from Google to help and support the volunteers who have come together to maintain functionality for Pebble watches after the original company ceased operations in 2016," said Google in a blog post. The Verge reports: The company -- which can't be named Pebble because Google still owns that -- doesn't have a name yet. For now, Migicovsky is hosting a waitlist and news signup at a website called RePebble. Later this year, once the company has a name and access to all that Pebble software, the plan is to start shipping new wearables that look, feel, and work like the Pebbles of old. The reason, Migicovsky tells me, is simple. "I've tried literally everything else," he says, "and nothing else comes close." Sure, he may just have a very specific set of requirements -- lots of people are clearly happy with what Apple, Garmin, Google, and others are making. But it's true that there's been nothing like Pebble since Pebble. "For the things I want out of it, like a good e-paper screen, long battery life, good and simple user experience, hackable, there's just nothing." The core of Pebble, he says, is a few things. A Pebble should be quirky and fun and should feel like a gadget in an important way. It shows notifications, lets you control your music with buttons, lasts a long time, and doesn't try to do too much. It sounds like Migicovsky might have Pebble-y ambitions beyond smartwatches, but he appears to be starting with smartwatches. If that sounds like the old Pebble and not much else, that's precisely the point. [...] Migicovsky also hopes to be part of a broader open-source community around Pebble OS. The Pebble diehards still exist: a group of developers at Rebble have worked to keep many of the platform's apps alive, for instance, along with the Cobble app for connecting to phones, and the Pebble subreddit is surprisingly active for a product that hasn't been updated since the Obama administration. Migicovsky says he plans to open-source whatever his new company builds and hopes lots of other folks will build stuff, too.

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Microsoft has launched an open-source document database platform built on PostgreSQL, partnering with FerretDB as a front-end interface. The solution includes two PostgreSQL extensions: pg_documentdb_core for BSON optimization and pg_documentdb_api for data operations. FerretDB CEO Peter Farkas said the integration with Microsoft's DocumentDB extension has improved performance twentyfold for certain workloads in FerretDB 2.0. The platform carries no commercial licensing fees or usage restrictions under its MIT license, according to Microsoft.

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Nvidia has responded to the market panic over Chinese AI group DeepSeek, arguing that the startup's breakthrough still requires "significant numbers of NVIDIA GPUs" for its operation. The US chipmaker, which saw more than $600 billion wiped from its market value on Monday, characterized DeepSeek's advancement as "excellent" but asserted that the technology remains dependent on its hardware. "DeepSeek's work illustrates how new models can be created using [test time scaling], leveraging widely-available models and compute that is fully export control compliant," Nvidia said in a statement Monday. However, it stressed that "inference requires significant numbers of NVIDIA GPUs and high-performance networking." The statement came after DeepSeek's release of an AI model that reportedly achieves performance comparable to those from US tech giants while using fewer chips, sparking the biggest one-day drop in Nvidia's history and sending shockwaves through global tech stocks. Nvidia sought to frame DeepSeek's breakthrough within existing technical frameworks, citing it as "a perfect example of Test Time Scaling" and noting that traditional scaling approaches in AI development - pre-training and post-training - "continue" alongside this new method. The company's attempt to calm market fears follows warnings from analysts about potential threats to US dominance in AI technology. Goldman Sachs earlier warned of possible "spillover effects" from any setbacks in the tech sector to the broader market. The shares stabilized somewhat in afternoon trading but remained on track for their worst session since March 2020, when pandemic fears roiled markets.

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Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has launched Janus Pro, a new family of open-source multimodal models that it claims outperforms OpenAI's DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion's offering on key benchmarks. The models, ranging from 1 billion to 7 billion parameters, are available on Hugging Face under an MIT license for commercial use. The largest model, Janus Pro 7B, surpasses DALL-E 3 and other image generators on GenEval and DPG-Bench tests, despite being limited to 384 x 384 pixel images.

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Meta's AI chatbot will now use personal data from users' Facebook and Instagram accounts for personalized responses in the United States and Canada, the company said in a blog post. The upgraded Meta AI can remember user preferences from previous conversations across Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp, such as dietary choices and interests. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the feature helps create personalized content like bedtime stories based on his children's interests. Users cannot opt out of the data-sharing feature, a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch.

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Vice President JD Vance said Saturday that "we believe fundamentally that big tech does have too much power," despite the prominent positioning of tech CEOs at President Trump's inauguration earlier this month. From a report: "They can either respect America's constitutional rights, they can stop engaging in censorship, and if they don't, you can be absolutely sure that Donald Trump's leadership is not going to look too kindly on them," Vance said on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan." The comments came in response to the unusual attendance of a slate of tech CEOs at Mr. Trump's inauguration, including Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Tesla's Elon Musk, Apple's Tim Cook, and Google's Sundar Pichai. The tech titans, some of whom are among the richest men in the world and directed donations from their companies to Mr. Trump's inauguration, were seated in some of the most highly sought after seats in the Capitol Rotunda. Vance noted that the tech CEOs "didn't have as good of seating as my mom and a lot of other people who were there to support us." In an August interview on "Face the Nation", the vice president outlined his thinking on big tech, saying that companies like Google are too powerful and censor American information, while possessing a "monopoly over free speech" that he argued ought to be broken up.

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Meta has set up four war rooms to analyze DeepSeek's technology, including two focusing on how High-Flyer reduced training costs, and one on what data High-Flyer may have used, The Information's Kalley Huang and Stephanie Palazzolo report. China's DeepSeek is a large-language open source model that claims to rival offerings from OpenAI's ChatGPT and Meta Platforms, while using a much smaller budgets.

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Chinese AI firm DeepSeek said Monday it had degraded the service, only accepting registration of new users with China-code phones numbers, amid a "large-scale malicious attack."

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A growing number of doctors are advocating to rename low-grade prostate cancer to reduce unnecessary aggressive treatments that can lead to debilitating side effects. About one-quarter of men diagnosed with prostate cancer have the lowest-risk form, yet studies show 40% opt for surgery or radiation despite recommendations for active surveillance. The push comes amid mounting evidence that careful monitoring is effective in managing low-grade cases. A U.K. study of 1,600 men found similar 15-year mortality rates between those who chose surgery, radiation or surveillance. Some doctors oppose the change, warning it could reduce patient compliance with follow-up care.

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AmiMoJo shares a report: Two hundred UK companies have signed up for a permanent four-day working week for all their employees with no loss of pay, in the latest landmark in the campaign to reinvent Britain's working week. Together the companies employ more than 5,000 people, with charities, marketing and technology firms among the best-represented, according to the latest update from the 4 Day Week Foundation. Proponents of the four-day week say that the five-day pattern is a hangover from an earlier economic age. Joe Ryle, the foundation's campaign director, said that the "9-5, five-day working week was invented 100 years ago and is no longer fit for purpose. We are long overdue an update." With "50% more free time, a four-day week gives people the freedom to live happier, more fulfilling lives," he continued. "As hundreds of British companies and one local council have already shown, a four-day week with no loss of pay can be a win-win for both workers and employers."

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Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is challenging U.S. tech giants with claims it can deliver performance comparable to leading AI models at a fraction of the cost, sparking debate among Wall Street analysts about the industry's massive spending plans. While Jefferies warns that DeepSeek's efficient approach "punctures some of the capex euphoria" following Meta and Microsoft's $60 billion commitments this year, Citi questions whether such results were achieved without advanced GPUs. Goldman Sachs suggests the development could reshape competition by lowering barriers to entry for startups. Founded in 2023 by former hedge fund executive Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek's open-source models have gained traction with its mobile app topping charts across major markets. DeepSeek's latest AI model had sparked over $1 trillion rout in US and European technology stocks Monday, before even the U.S. market opened.

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In Friday's excerpt from Bill Gates' upcoming memoir, the Microsoft co-founder acknowledges that "It's impossible to overstate the unearned privilege I enjoyed. To be born in the rich U.S. is a big part of a winning birth-lottery ticket... Add to that my lucky timing..." The biggest part of my good fortune was being born to Bill and Mary Gates — parents who struggled with their complicated son but ultimately seemed to intuitively understand how to guide him. If I were growing up today, I probably would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum. During my childhood, the fact that some people's brains process information differently from others wasn't widely understood. (The term "neurodivergent" wouldn't be coined until the 1990s.) My parents had no guideposts or textbooks to help them grasp why their son became so obsessed with certain projects, missed social cues and could be rude and inappropriate without seeming to notice his effect on others. What I do know is that my parents afforded me the precise blend of support and pressure I needed... Instead of allowing me to turn inward, they pushed me out into the world — to the baseball team, the Cub Scouts and other families' dinner tables. And they gave me constant exposure to adults, immersing me in the language and ideas of their friends and colleagues, which fed my curiosity about the world beyond school. Even with their influence, my social side would be slow to develop, as would my awareness of the impact I can have on other people. But that has come with age, with experience, with children, and I'm better for it. I wish it had come sooner, even if I wouldn't trade the brain I was given for anything... I will never have my father's calm bearing, but he instilled in me a fundamental sense of confidence and capability. My mother's influence was more complex. Internalized by me, her expectations bloomed into an even stronger ambition to succeed, to stand out and to do something important. It was as if I needed to clear my mom's bar by such a wide margin that there would be nothing left to say on the matter. But, of course, there was always something more to be said. It was my mother who regularly reminded me that I was merely a steward of any wealth I gained. With wealth came the responsibility to give it away, she would tell me. I regret that my mom didn't live long enough to see how fully I've tried to meet that expectation: she passed away in 1994, at age 64, from breast cancer. It would be my father in the years after my mom died who would help get our foundation started and serve as a co-chair for years, bringing the same compassion and decency that had served so well in his law career. Proceeds from book sales will be donated to the nonprofit United Way Worldwide, in recognition of Mary's longtime work as a volunteer and board member with the organization.

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The EFF has complained that in general "smart" products for babies "collect a ton of information about you and your baby on an ongoing basis". (For this year's "worst in privacy" product at CES they chose a $1,200 baby bassinet equipped with a camera, a microphone, and a radar sensor...) But today the Washington Post reported on a $1,700 bassinet that surprised the mother of a one-month-old when it "abruptly demanded money for a feature she relied on to soothe her baby to sleep." The internet-connected bassinet... reliably comforted her 1-month-old — just as it had her first child — until it started charging $20 a month for some abilities, including one that keeps the bassinet's motion and sounds at one level all night. The level-lock feature previously was available without a fee. "It all felt really intrusive — like they went into our bedroom and clawed back this feature that we've been depending on...." When the Snoo's maker, Happiest Baby, introduced a premium subscription for some of the bassinet's most popular features in July, owners filed dozens of complaints to the Federal Trade Commission and the Better Business Bureau, coordinated review bombs and vented on social media — saying the company took advantage of their desperation for sleep to bait-and-switch them... Happiest Baby isn't the only baby gear company that has rolled out a subscription. In 2023, makers of the Miku baby monitor, which retails for up to $400, elicited similar fury from parents when it introduced a $10 monthly subscription for most features. A growing number of internet-connected products have lost software support or functionality after purchase in recent years, such as Spotify's Car Thing — a $90 Bluetooth streaming device that the company announced in May it plans to discontinue — and Levi's $350 smart jacket, which let users control their phones by swiping sensors on its sleeve... Seventeen consumer protection and tech advocacy groups cited Happiest Baby and Car Thing in a letter urging the FTC to create guidelines that ensure products retain core functionality without the imposition of fees that did not exist when the items were originally bought. The Times notes that the bassinets are often resold, so the subscription fees are partly to cover the costs of supporting new owners, according to Happiest Baby's vice president for marketing and communications. But the article three additional perspectives: "This new technology is actually allowing manufacturers to change the way the status quo has been for decades, which is that once you buy something, you own it and you can do whatever you want. Right now, consumers have no trust that what they're buying is actually going to keep working." — Lucas Gutterman, who leads the Public Interest Research Group's "Design to Last" campaign. "It's a shame to be beholden to companies' goodwill, to require that they make good decisions about which settings to put behind a paywall. That doesn't feel good, and you can't always trust that, and there's no guarantee that next week Happiest Baby isn't going to announce that all of the features are behind a paywall." — Elizabeth Chamberlain, sustainability director at iFixit. "It's no longer just an out-and-out purchase of something. It's a continuous rental, and people don't know that." — Natasha Tusikov, an associate professor at York University

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"Looking for a quick fix for their fast-growing electricity diets, tech giants are increasingly looking to strike deals with power plant owners to plug in directly," reports the Associated Press, "avoiding a potentially longer and more expensive process of hooking into a fraying electric grid that serves everyone else." (It can take up to four years to connect a data center to the grid, one data center trade group says in the article — years longer than it takes to build a new data center.) But the idea of bypassing the grid is "raising questions over whether diverting power to higher-paying customers will leave enough for others and whether it's fair to excuse big power users from paying for the grid." Front and center is the data center that Amazon's cloud computing subsidiary, Amazon Web Services, is building next to the Susquehanna nuclear plant in eastern Pennsylvania. The arrangement between the plant's owners and AWS — called a "behind the meter" connection — is the first such to come before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. For now, FERC has rejected a deal that could eventually send 960 megawatts — about 40% of the plant's capacity — to the data center. That's enough to power more than a half-million homes... [But the FERC's 2-1 rejection "was procedural. Recent comments by commissioners suggest they weren't ready to decide how to regulate such a novel matter without more study."] In theory, the AWS deal would let Susquehanna sell power for more than they get by selling into the grid... The profit potential is one that other nuclear plant operators, in particular, are embracing after years of financial distress and frustration with how they are paid in the broader electricity markets. Many say they have been forced to compete in some markets against a flood of cheap natural gas as well as state-subsidized solar and wind energy. Power plant owners also say the arrangement benefits the wider public, by bypassing the costly buildout of long power lines and leaving more transmission capacity on the grid for everyone else... Monitoring Analytics, the market watchdog in the mid-Atlantic grid, wrote in a filing to FERC that the impact would be "extreme" if the Susquehanna-AWS model were extended to all nuclear power plants in the territory. Energy prices would increase significantly and there's no explanation for how rising demand for power will be met even before big power plants drop out of the supply mix, it said.

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At December's "Microsoft Excel World Championship" in Las Vegas, "finance professionals fluent in spreadsheets were treated like minor celebrities," writes the New York Times, "as they gathered to solve devilishly complex Excel puzzles in front of an audience of about 400 people, and more watching an ESPN3 livestream." The Times notes that "many fans find out about the Excel championship through ESPN's annual obscure sports showcase, where it is sandwiched between competitions like speed chess and the World Dog Surfing Championships." But the contest's organizer envisions tournaments with "more spectators, bigger sponsors and a million-dollar prize" — even though this year's prize was $5,000 and a pro wrestling-style championship belt. The format for the finals was a mock-up of World of Warcraft, an online role-playing game. It required the 12 men (this particular nerdfest was mostly a guy thing) to design Excel formulas for tracking 20 avatars and their vital signs... To prepare, [competitor Diarmuid] Early adjusted the width of his Excel columns with the precision of a point guard lining up a 3-point shot. [Andrew] Ngai queued up a YouTube compilation of "focus music". After an announcer kicked off the 40-minute event — "Five, four, three, two, one, and Excel!" — the 12 players leaned over their keyboards and began plugging in formulas. One example: "=CountChar (Lower (D5),"W")" allowed one competitor, Michael Jarman, to figure out how many times the letter "W" appeared in a spreadsheet. ZDNet points out that there's a seven-hour livestream of the event that's "worth checking out for the opening theme song alone." The New York Times closes their article with a quote from super-fan Erik Oehm, a software developer from San Francisco who called the event "the Super Bowl for Excel nerds". Oehm watched excitedly from the front row as this year's winner — Michael Jarman — finally raised the championship belt overhead while someone dumped glitter on him. And then he said... "You'd never see this with Google Sheets. You'd never get this level of passion."

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"An underwater data cable between Sweden and Latvia was damaged early on Sunday," reports the Financial Times, "in at least the fourth episode of potential sabotage in the Baltic Sea that has caused concern in Nato about the vulnerability of critical infrastructure..." Criminal investigations have started in Latvia and Sweden, and a ship has been seized as part of the probes, according to Swedish prosecutors, who did not identify the vessel. Previous incidents have been linked to Russian and Chinese ships... The latest incident comes as the three Baltic states are preparing to disconnect their electricity systems from the former Soviet network in early February and integrate themselves into the continental European grid, with some fearing further potential disruption ahead of that. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have joined the EU and Nato since regaining their independence after their forced annexation by the Soviet Union, and see their switch to the European electricity system as their final integration into the west. KÄ(TM)stutis Budrys, Lithuania's foreign minister, said navigation rules in the Baltic Sea needed to be reviewed "especially when it comes to the use of anchors" and added there were now so many incidents that there was little chance they could all be accidents. Repair of data cables has tended to take much less time than that for gas or electricity connections, and the Latvian state radio and television centre said it had found alternative routes for its communications.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press: Perplexity AI has presented a new proposal to TikTok's parent company that would allow the U.S. government to own up to 50% of a new entity that merges Perplexity with TikTok's U.S. business, according to a person familiar with the matter... The new proposal would allow the U.S. government to own up to half of that new structure once it makes an initial public offering of at least $300 billion, said the person, who was not authorized to speak about the proposal. The person said Perplexity's proposal was revised based off of feedback from the Trump administration. If the plan is successful, the shares owned by the government would not have voting power, the person said. The government also would not get a seat on the new company's board. Under the plan, ByteDance would not have to completely cut ties with TikTok, a favorable outcome for its investors. But it would have to allow a "full U.S. board control," the person said. Under the proposal, the China-based tech company would contribute TikTok's U.S. business without the proprietary algorithm that fuels what users see on the app, according to a document seen by the Associated Press.

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Since launching in 2020, the nonprofit site RestofWorld.org has been covering tech news from 100 countries. And they've just announced the winners in their 2024 international photography contest. "From Cape Verde to Bhutan, we received 227 entries from over 45 countries around the world, featuring everything from sprawling mines to biometric facial scans." Like last year, the majority of the entries in our 2024 photography contest captured on-the-ground realities of how technology is transforming lives in every corner of the world. We received submissions from over 45 countries, showcasing a stunning variety of perspectives on the intersection of technology and daily life. Beyond striking visuals, the photographs tell us stories of how tech plays a role in local communities, from iris-scanning payment systems inside refugee camps to EV battery-powered music gatherings. The 227 entries we received from contestants — including from Mongolia, the Philippines, Argentina, and Jordan — not only celebrate these stories but reaffirm our commitment at Rest of World to challenge stereotypes about how people use technology in their daily lives. An "honorable mention" photo shows immigrants from Africa arriving on the Italian island of Lampedusa after a perilous boat journey. ("Upon their arrival, these refugees borrowed a smartphone from a bystander and started a video call to let their relatives know they survived the journey.") And the top photo shows a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent using a cellphone to collect facial scans from migrants entering the country from Mexico. ("After they make the crossing into the U.S., migrants are subjected to further data collection, including DNA samples.") Biometric data collection was a recurring theme. A photo from Jordan shows a Syrian boy paying for groceries with an iris scanner at a supermarket "run jointly by the World Food Programme and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees." Eye-scanning technology is being used there "to ensure people use only their own credit and not borrowed or stolen cards. After having their iris scanned, Syrian refugees living in the camp can make use of services such as health care and shopping, using just their eyes." Another recurring theme was energy. There's a lovely "honorable mention" photo from the Philippines showing two young people on a beach playing basketball "under the towering blades of the windmills in Bangu... Renewable energy has transformed this community, cutting household expenses and powering opportunities once thought to be out of reach." The third-place photo shows six children in a distant tent in "a mountainous, subarctic forest" in Mongolia" — all gathered around a laptop "to watch a documentary about a Norwegian reindeer herder" who had visited their region. ("Modern technology such as solar panels, car batteries, and the occasional Wi-Fi connection allows these families to stay connected with the world.") One photo shows a young boy carrying a solar panel down from the roof in a remote village in Jharkhand, India. Another photo documents the largest salt flat in Argentina, part of the so-called "lithium triangle" with parts of Chile and Bolivia. A salt miner says "They started looking for lithium there in 2010. We made them stop; it was hurting the environment and affecting the water. But now they are back and I am afraid. Everything we have could be lost." And a photo from Nigeria shows two people wearing traditional African attire but adorned with "goggles crafted from repurposed VHS tapes". RestofWorld says the goggles "represent how individuals and communities reclaim and reinterpret technology for art, commentary, and resilience. This practice reflects a community's ability to find new life in what others might discard, highlighting a deep relationship with both old and new technologies."

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