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After a few years of funding frenzy, autonomous driving companies in China are experiencing a slowdown in investment. Some companies are still hauling in capital, though the era of bankrolling several hundred million dollars in a single round has mostly passed. Haomo.ai, an autonomous driving startup backed by Chinese automaker Great Wall Motor, has raised 100 million yuan, or $14 million, from a fresh round of funding, it said today. The investment is the first tranche of the company’s Series B…

In April 2023, a 54-year-old programmer named Gary Bowser was released from prison having served 14 months of a 40-month sentence. Good behaviour reduced his time behind bars, but now his options are limited. For a while he was crashing on a friend’s couch in Toronto. The weekly physical therapy sessions, which he needs to ease chronic pain, were costing hundreds of dollars every week, and he didn’t have a job. And soon, he would need to start sending cheques to Nintendo. Bowser owes the makers of Super Mario $14.5m…

Using more than 14M Chess960 games to find if there’s a variation that’s better than the othersIn this post, I analyze all the available Chess960 games played in Lichess. With this information, and using Bayesian A/B testing, I show that there are no starting positions that favor any of the players more than other positions.The original post was published here. All the images and plots, unless stated otherwise, are by the author.Photo by Hassan Pasha on UnsplashThe World Fischer Random Chess Championship recently took…

After years of outsourcing and offshoring manufacturing to countries with cheaper labour and bigger production ecosystems, the U.S. and Europe are on a mission to bring some of that industrial work back to its own shores. Today, a startup that believes it can help with that shift is announcing some funding. Robco, a Munich-based startup that has built a platform for designing low-cost modular robots for small and medium industrial businesses, has picked up €13 million (abut $13.8 million). The round — a Series A — is…

Back in 2019, Samsung Australia was taken to court by the The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) over misleading water resistance advertisement of its phones. The Korean tech giant repeatedly advertised several of its Galaxy S, Galaxy A and Galaxy Note phones as being suitable to use in pool and sea water in its marketing ads. Nearly three years later the Aussie court has ordered Samsung Australia to pay AUD 14 million (around $9.6 million) in fines for its misleading smartphone advertisements.…

Ayoken, an NFT marketplace for creatives, has raised $1.4 million pre-seed funding to enable users grow their revenue streams through digital collectibles. The startup’s marketplace, Ayokenlabs, will feature digital collectibles from musicians, sports brands and influencers from all-over the world. Ayoken founder and CEO, Joshua King, told TechCrunch that the marketplace is a bridge between fans and artists, and gives supporters a sense of ownership in the success of their idols. Through the NFT…