A decade ago, creating a successful online multiplayer game required a large company’s worth of expertise to handle networking, graphics, and marketing and distribution—the list goes on. This year, one of the top-selling PC games, Lethal Company, was developed and released by an individual known only as Zeekerss.
Zeekerss stands on the shoulders of giants, of course: They built their co-op sci-fi horror game using the sophisticated Unity game engine, and distributed it
As people insist on more privacy, and more legislators follow the examples of Europe and California, companies are facing a surge in compliance demands and data subject requests.
That’s hard enough for big companies, with sprawling landscapes of data, but it’s especially complicated for smaller businesses, which lack the kinds of professionals needed to manage a proper privacy program.
DataGrail helps organizations keep better track of their privacy responsib
Brex was already in the midst of a dramatic reinvention when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in March 2023. The spend management platform, founded in 2017, had spent the prior year pivoting from a focus on offering corporate credit cards to startups to a software-as-a-service model encompassing a more holistic spend-management platform designed for enterprise customers. But Brex didn’t hesitate to rapidly spin up solutions for fleeing SVB customers, increasing FDIC insurance on its busin
With more active satellites than ever orbiting Earth—more than 8,300 at last count—helping them dodge space junk and avoid collisions is an increasingly important sector of the space industry. El Segundo, California-based Slingshot Aerospace aims to be the definitive source for information on space situational awareness. “We are building the common operating picture for space,” says Audrey Schaffer, the company’s VP of strategy and policy. By pulling in data
Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) have revolutionized the pharmaceutical industry—they are used in immunotherapy to treat numerous illnesses, with high potency against emerging viruses. Since 2016, about 70% of all mAbs have been grown in the cell lines of Chinese hamster ovaries, which produce humanlike antibodies.
To make sure that no trace of these host cells remains in the final product, drug manufacturers rely on “spiking” studies that use live infectious viruse
In the space of just a year, text-to-video AI has improved hugely in the quality and usability of its output—so much so that synthetic video seems less like a gimmick and more like an eventuality. The New York-based startup Runway has made huge strides on the quality of video its models produce based on text prompts and other input.
In February 2023, Runway released its Gen-1 model, which could apply the composition and style of a sample image to an existing video. In March i
Anthropic, which was formed by a group of safety-conscious defectors from OpenAI, spent 2023 establishing itself as one of just a handful of envelope-pushing developers of commercial AI models.
The company raised almost $7 billion in 2023 (from Amazon and Google, among others), and last October it told investors that it was generating revenue at a $100 million annualized run rate. In July, the startup launched the second major release of its LLM, dubbed Claude 2, with improved perfo
During the 2023 strike, Hollywood actors demanded assurances that their digital likenesses not be used without their consent and without compensation. Metaphysic remains one of the leading tech companies providing movie studios and production houses with AI tools to manipulate (to age or de-age, for example) the faces of actors, but in September 2023 the company launched a new platform to give actors control over their digital likeness.
The platform, called Metaphysic Pro, can store
Forward-thinking companies recognize that digital investment must go further than machines and materials. To gain a competitive edge, they must focus on employees too.
A majority (86%) of manufacturing executives believe that smart factory solutions will be the primary drivers of competitiveness in the next five years. But it’s not just machines that are getting smarter. It’s people too. Already manufacturers are anticipating that the industrial metaverse could lead to
For much of the year, TikTok has been on the defensive.
On March 13, 2024, the House of Representatives voted to approve a bill that would force the short-form video app to be sold off from its Chinese parent company to non-Chinese owners or face a ban in the U.S. The Senate will still have to vote on the legislation, which received broad bipartisan support due to beliefs that TikTok creates risks to national security.
Meanwhile, Universal Music Group, one of the biggest record