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This investment follows on from HALA’s impressive year-on-year growth that validates the robustness and scalability of its operating model, which is geared toward sustainable growth as well as playing a key role in its home market in supporting the Saudi Vision 2030 goal to significantly enhance the contribution of SMEs to GDP. HALA, Saudi Arabia’s leading fintech and provider of embedded financial services to micro, small and medium enterprises, has raised $157 million in a Series B investment round — officially one of the largest fintech Series B funding rounds in the Middle East. The funding round is led by…

Qualcomm just confirmed the naming for its next-gen flagship chipset, and it won’t exactly follow in the footsteps of last year’s Snapdragon 8 Elite. The upcoming chip will be called Snapdragon 8 Elite 5. But why skip four generations? Well, it seems Qualcomm is reverting to its original Snapdragon 8 series naming scheme, which began in 2021 with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. From then, we got the SD 8 Gen 2 in 2022, followed by the SD Gen 3 and last year’s SD 8 Elite, which would have been the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4. The upcoming Snapdragon 8 Elite…

Through its fiber-optic network, Algérie Telecom is now able to provide ultra-fast broadband services with speeds of up to 1.5 Gbps. Algérie Telecom  has announced that it has surpassed a major milestone, connecting 2.5 million customers to its Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) service. The announcement was made from Tlemcen, often referred to as the pearl of western Algeria. The operator highlighted that this achievement brings it closer to its mission of delivering high-quality internet experiences to users across the country. Through its fiber-optic network, Algérie Telecom is now able to provide ultra-fast broadband services with speeds of up to 1.5 Gbps. This…

Welcome back! Did you miss me? Yes, of course you did. There is a lot of “future of transportation” news to keep track of. Let’s jump in.  It’s comeback week, and not just because I have returned from vacation. I’m talking about the biennial IAA Mobility conference in Munich and the purposeful effort among German automakers to show the world it can still offer compelling, technologically advanced, and affordable vehicles. The subtext of the splashy event that started Tuesday: “Hey, China, we’re not out of the race.” VW Group, Mercedes, and BMW all showcased numerous new vehicles, including electric ones.…

The EarFun Clip is the latest pair of earbuds from the Chinese manufacturer, which has won many awards over the years for its audio products. The Clip uses an open-ear design, which should be appealing for those looking to avoid typical in-ear models. The EarFun Clip feature 10.8mm dynamic drivers with Bluetooth 6.0 connectivity and LDAC. They have a dual microphone design with AI background noise reduction and up to 10 hours of claimed battery life. All of it is in an interesting design that clips onto the back of your ears. Design True to their name, the earbuds have…

Google faces a new lawsuit accusing the company of illegally using news publishers’ content to create AI summaries that damage their business. The lawsuit comes from Penske Media Corporation (PMC), which owns industry publications such as Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Vibe, and Artforum. While Penske’s suit is the first to target Google and its parent company Alphabet over showing AI-generated summaries in search, both publishers and authors have sued other AI companies over related copyright concerns. Google also is also facing an antitrust complaint over AI Overviews in Europe. “As a leading global publisher, we have a…

Lenovo LOQ Tower 26ADR10 delivers powerful graphics! HomeComing Soon Gadget Flow EditorsLenovo LOQ Tower 26ADR10 (AMD)Meet the Lenovo LOQ Tower 26ADR10 (AMD), a 26L gaming desktop that pairs AMD Ryzen 8000 processors with RTX 50 Series graphics.High-Performance CPU: AMD Ryzen 8000 Series processors deliver fast frame rates and responsive multitasking, so games and apps run with ease under load.Next-gen graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs support ray tracing and DLSS to improve visuals and increase FPS in demanding titles.Cooling and modes: Whisper Concealed air duct and Fn+Q mode switching balance quiet and performance, keeping thermals low during long sessions.Upgradeable…

At the center of every empire is an ideology, a belief system that propels the system forward and justifies expansion – even if the cost of that expansion directly defies the ideology’s stated mission. For European colonial powers, it was Christianity and the promise of saving souls while extracting resources. For today’s AI empire, it’s artificial general intelligence to “benefit all humanity.” And OpenAI is its chief evangelist, spreading zeal across the industry in a way that has reframed how AI is built.  “I was interviewing people whose voices were shaking from the fervor of their beliefs in AGI,” Karen…

Apple’s new iPhone quartet is official and unsurprisingly it’s dominating our trending chart this week. The iPhone 17 Pro Max ended up as the most popular phone among them, followed by the iPhone Air and the vanilla iPhone 17. This puts the iPhone 17 Pro in the unenviable position of being the least popular among its siblings, but this week that’s still enough to be the fourth most popular device among the 14,000 members of our database. The Sony Xperia 10 VII, another newly announced phone, is best of the rest in fifth, followed by the Galaxy S25 FE in…

Carla Rover once spent 30 minutes sobbing after having to restart a project she vibe coded.  Rover has been in the industry for 15 years, mainly working as a web developer. She’s now building a startup, alongside her son, that creates custom machine learning models for marketplaces.  She called vibe coding a beautiful, endless cocktail napkin on which one can perpetually sketch ideas. But dealing with AI-generated code that one hopes to use in production can be “worse than babysitting,” she said, as these AI models can mess up work in ways that are hard to predict.  She had turned…