It lit up the 1970s with its nihilistic tale of a hippie band imploding in a trail of drugs, booze and violence. What can it tell us about the music business today? Writer David Hare and wild-child rocker Self Esteem plug in The first time Rebecca Lucy Taylor read David Hare’s 1975 play Teeth ’n’ Smiles, she says, her “mind was blown”. “I couldn’t believe it,” says the artist better known to music...
It lit up the 1970s with its nihilistic tale of a hippie band imploding in a trail of drugs, booze and violence. What can it tell us about the music business today? Writer David Hare and wild-child rocker Self Esteem plug in The first time Rebecca Lucy Taylor read David Hare’s 1975 play Teeth ’n’ Smiles, she says, her “mind was blown”. “I couldn’t believe it,” says the artist better known to music fans as Self Esteem. “The way I feel about my actual life is so mirrored in this play. It just mirrors what the music industry today is like.” In a sense, that’s a surprising thing to say. You could view Teeth ’n’ Smiles as something of a period piece. Set in 1969, it is the saga of a band imploding in a mass of drugs, alcohol and violence backstage at a Cambridge May ball – inspired, Hare says, by the experience of seeing a “grumpy, angry, miserable” Manfred Mann going through the motions at a similar event while he was a student at Jesus College. There is debate among the band’s members about the late-60s countercultural “acid dream”, and the attendant belief in rock music as a revolutionary force capable of inciting social change. But the play seems less a product of the era in which it is set than that in which it was written. It is soaked in the disillusionment and broiling discontent of the mid-70s, when the countercultural dream was unequivocally over. Continue reading...
[The content of this article has been produced by our advertising partner.] The Gewandhausorchester Leipzig – the world’s oldest continuously operating civic orchestra – grew out of that culture. When it arrives in For centuries, Leipzig has been a city where music mattered. Johann Sebastian Bach spent the last 27 years of his life there as the city’s music director. Richard Wagner was born there....
Stanford adjunct professor and successfully exited founder Zain Asgar just raised an $80 million Series A for a startup that solve the AI inference bottleneck problem in an astute way. The round was led by Menlo Ventures. The company, Gimlet Labs, has created what it claims is the first and only “multi-silicon inference cloud” which is software that allows an AI workload to be simultaneously run a...
Stanford adjunct professor and successfully exited founder Zain Asgar just raised an $80 million Series A for a startup that solve the AI inference bottleneck problem in an astute way. The round was led by Menlo Ventures. The company, Gimlet Labs, has created what it claims is the first and only “multi-silicon inference cloud” which is software that allows an AI workload to be simultaneously run across diverse types of hardware. It can split an AI app’s work across both traditional CPUs and AI-tuned GPUs, as well as high-memory systems. “We basically run across whatever different hardware that’s available,” Asgar told TechCrunch. A single agent may chain together multiple steps, and each “requires different hardware: Inference is compute-bound; decode is memory-bound; and tool calls are network-bound,” writes lead investor, Menlo’s Tim Tully, in a blog post about the funding. No chip yet does it all, but as new hardware gets rolled out, and aging GPUs get redeployed, “the multi-silicon fleet is ready — it’s just missing the software layer to make it work.” That’s what Tully believes Gimlet Labs offers. If the current deploy-more-compute trend continues, McKinsey estimates data center spending will tally nearly $7 trillion by 2030. Asgar says that apps are only using the existing hardware already deployed “somewhere between 15 to 30 percent” of the time. “Another way to think about this: you’re wasting hundreds of billions of dollars because you’re just leaving idle resources,” he said. “Our goal was basically to try to figure out how you can get AI workloads to be 10x more efficient than ever, today.” Techcrunch event Disrupt 2026: The tech ecosystem, all in one room Your next round. Your next hire. Your next breakout opportunity. Find it at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, where 10,000+ founders, investors, and tech leaders gather for three days of 250+ tactical sessions, powerful introductions, and market-defining innovation. Register now to save up to $400. Save up to $3...
There has been a lot of talk around building context for AI systems. In consumer software, we have seen startups being built around search, documents, and meetings. All of them want to capture context from your digital life, provide connections to other tools, and let you query all that data. Some tools went further. For instance, Rewind (which became Limitless and sold to Meta) and Microsoft Reca...
There has been a lot of talk around building context for AI systems. In consumer software, we have seen startups being built around search, documents, and meetings. All of them want to capture context from your digital life, provide connections to other tools, and let you query all that data. Some tools went further. For instance, Rewind (which became Limitless and sold to Meta) and Microsoft Recall aim to capture everything happening on your screen and help you remember it all. A new startup called Littlebird is trying a similar thing with a slightly different approach. While apps like Rewind store screenshots or some kind of visual data, Littlebird is “reading” the screen and storing the context in text format. The core idea behind the product is that since it is reading your screen all the time, you don’t need to provide additional context for productivity. The startup believes that while a lot of AI tools are trying to distract you, Littlebird can work in the background and can only appear when you want it to. Image Credits: Littlebird Image Credits:Littlebird When you set up Littlebird on your computer, you can customize which apps you want the app to ignore and not capture any context. The startup said that it automatically ignores password managers and sensitive fields in web forms like passwords and credit card details. You can opt to connect other apps like Gmail, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, and Reminders with the app, as well. The app lets you ask questions about your data, offering pre-generated prompts to get you started, such as “What have I been doing today?” or “What kind of emails are important to me?” In a couple of days of usage, I noticed that these prompts became more personalized as time went on. Littlebird also has an in-built Granola-like notetaker that uses system audio and runs in the background to capture transcription from meetings and create notes and action items based on that. When you open up a meeting in the detailed view, there’...
Andy Weir has done pretty well when it comes to adaptations. His first novel, The Martian, was turned into a movie in 2015, and the Ridley Scott-directed picture earned more than $600 million at the box office. And Project Hail Mary just had a huge opening weekend that puts it on track to be one of the year’s biggest movies. However, despite that success, Weir tells me that he does his best to kee...
Andy Weir has done pretty well when it comes to adaptations. His first novel, The Martian, was turned into a movie in 2015, and the Ridley Scott-directed picture earned more than $600 million at the box office. And Project Hail Mary just had a huge opening weekend that puts it on track to be one of the year’s biggest movies. However, despite that success, Weir tells me that he does his best to keep the idea of an adaptation out of his mind when he starts a new novel. “I try not to think about it at all,” he explains. The reason, according to Weir, is that the two mediums are just so different. That’s something he’s learned over the last decade, particularly when it comes to Project Hail Mary, which Weir served as a producer on. “I was intimately involved in every aspect of the production,” he explains. “I was there for the shoot, principal photography, I was involved in casting and picking directors, post-production and editing. I got to give notes on everything. The main reason that I’m a producer is because of the way that my contract is structured, but for the most part I tried to stay out of the way of the real producers who knew what they were doing.” That role gave him more insight into how films are made — on The Martian, he says, “they just gave me money and told me to go away” — but he says that his experience with both movies hasn’t changed how he approaches his writing process. Here’s how he explained it to me: When I’m writing a book — and this is advice I give to all authors — I don’t think about a movie adaptation. If you want to write a movie, write a screenplay. But if you want to write a book, write a book. And you should be focused on the reader’s experience while they’re reading your book. You shouldn’t be limiting yourself by what would make a good cinematic movie. You need to be focused on what makes a good literary book. Because there are a lot of things you can do in books that you can’t do in movies, and vice versa, so you should take advanta...
Epstein Cover-Up Deepens; FBI Officers Raise Alarm Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news, Fresh Justice Department files reveal a frantic document destruction operation at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan just days after Jeffrey Epstein’s 2019 death, adding fresh fuel to suspicions of elite protection and deep state obstruction. This latest bombshell, drawn from a Miami Hera...
Epstein Cover-Up Deepens; FBI Officers Raise Alarm Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news, Fresh Justice Department files reveal a frantic document destruction operation at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan just days after Jeffrey Epstein’s 2019 death, adding fresh fuel to suspicions of elite protection and deep state obstruction. This latest bombshell, drawn from a Miami Herald analysis of thousands of pages in the Epstein files, fits the pattern of irregularities we’ve exposed in our prior reporting. Less than a week after Epstein was found dead inside his cell on August 10, 2019, an inmate was ordered to take bags of shredded material to the jail’s rear gate and throw them in a dumpster on Thursday, August 15, and again on Friday, August 16. The sheer volume struck him as unusual. Bags of shredded documents at NY jail after Epstein’s death, officer tells FBI https://t.co/wMZlpaAzNl — Miami Herald (@MiamiHerald) March 21, 2026 “They are shredding everything,” the inmate told one of the guards, adding that he was asked to give the officials a hand with the shredding, with key records vanishing before review. A corrections officer at the detention facility called the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center that same night, a Friday, at 6:28 p.m. to report that he had “never seen this amount of bags of shredded documents coming out to be put in the dumpster at the rear gate of MCC.” The caller found it suspicious that an after-action team charged with investigating would be shredding huge amounts of paperwork with FBI, BOP and OIG officials in the building. A back gate corrections officer was also troubled by what he witnessed. In a memo to investigators three days later, on Monday, August 19, he wrote: “I believe that this conduct may be inappropriate for [an] investigative team to be shredding paperwork related to the investigation and you may want to investigate why BOP employees are destroying records.” “Can we take a look at the Dumpster ASA...
When stock market growth is scarce, investors often rotate into alternatives like cryptocurrency. However, the last few months haven't been kind to the crypto community, either. The price of Bitcoin (BTC +2.40%) has cratered 20% this year -- hovering around $70,500 per coin as of March 20. Nevertheless, digital asset analyst Geoffrey Kendrick of Standard Chartered recently said that Bitcoin could ...
When stock market growth is scarce, investors often rotate into alternatives like cryptocurrency. However, the last few months haven't been kind to the crypto community, either. The price of Bitcoin (BTC +2.40%) has cratered 20% this year -- hovering around $70,500 per coin as of March 20. Nevertheless, digital asset analyst Geoffrey Kendrick of Standard Chartered recently said that Bitcoin could be set up for explosive growth. Is now a good time to buy the dip in Bitcoin? What is Geoffrey Kendrick's forecast for Bitcoin? One of Kendrick's core observations about Bitcoin is that he sees volatility around the cryptocurrency as similar to growth stocks on the Nasdaq. Kendrick posits the idea that should technology companies report weak earnings in the coming quarter, further selling pressure could ensue and ultimately permeate to Bitcoin. He also notes that if the Federal Reserve chooses not to ease monetary policy, then investors may not be inclined to invest in riskier assets such as Bitcoin anytime soon. Given these factors, Kendrick's near-term forecast for Bitcoin is $50,000 -- implying roughly 32% downside from current levels. This makes sense as it is relatively in line with prior bottoms during drawdowns in recent years. However, the analyst thinks the current selling pressure is "shallower" compared to more dramatic crypto winters. Ultimately, Kendrick remains confident that by the end of the year, Bitcoin could witness a sharp rebound and surge to $100,000. What could fuel Bitcoin's price to $500,000? Bitcoin's biggest value proposition is its perception as a scarce asset. In total, there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins in circulation. These mechanics paint Bitcoin as rare. For this reason, many investors colloquially refer to Bitcoin as "digital gold." When it comes to other rare asset classes like art or collectibles, the most prized opportunities are often reserved for high-net-worth individuals. Bitcoin hasn't fully gone through this transformation...
PALO ALTO, Calif., March 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Startup Island TAIWAN Silicon Valley Hub (SV Hub), supported by Taiwan's National Development Council (NDC) and in partnership with StarFab and TAI1 AI Accelerator, led a delegation of 16 high-growth Taiwanese AI startups to NVIDIA GTC 2026, underscoring Taiwan's expanding role in the global AI supply chain and its deepening integration with the Si...
PALO ALTO, Calif., March 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Startup Island TAIWAN Silicon Valley Hub (SV Hub), supported by Taiwan's National Development Council (NDC) and in partnership with StarFab and TAI1 AI Accelerator, led a delegation of 16 high-growth Taiwanese AI startups to NVIDIA GTC 2026, underscoring Taiwan's expanding role in the global AI supply chain and its deepening integration with the Silicon Valley innovation ecosystem. Taiwan Startup Delegation in GTC 2026 As AI development increasingly converges across semiconductors, infrastructure, and application layers, Taiwan's presence at GTC 2026 reflects a broader industry shift: from hardware manufacturing leadership toward full-stack AI innovation. The delegation featured startups across key domains including digital twin, robotics, AI agents, and intelligent healthcare — areas closely aligned with NVIDIA's ecosystem and the next wave of enterprise AI adoption. Among them, digital twin startup MetAI (Met AI) and edge AI startup Spingence were selected for the NVIDIA Inception Program's featured showcase, while six Taiwanese startups were featured in the GTC Poster Gallery, engaging directly with global developers, enterprise partners, and investors. From Hardware Strength to Full-Stack AI: Taiwan's Ecosystem Comes into Focus A defining characteristic of Taiwan's GTC presence this year was the close collaboration between startups and established technology companies — a reflection of Taiwan's unique position in the AI value chain. Startups exhibited alongside major industry players including ASUS, AAEON, ADLINK, ASRock, Compal, Phison, Vecow, EverFocus, and EDOM Technology, demonstrating a vertically integrated ecosystem that spans from compute infrastructure to real-world AI applications. This "co-build" model — combining hardware scalability with agile software innovation — positions Taiwan as a critical enabler of next-generation AI deployment globally. "This has been an exciting experience for us," said Bob...
Europe’s reliance on bank-based funding prevents the continent from reaping the full benefits of innovation centering on artificial intelligence, according to European Central Bank Chief Economist Philip Lane . That’s why governments must urgently make progress on the long-envisaged savings and investments union, Lane said in a speech for delivery in Frankfurt, adding to arguments in favor of tigh...
Europe’s reliance on bank-based funding prevents the continent from reaping the full benefits of innovation centering on artificial intelligence, according to European Central Bank Chief Economist Philip Lane . That’s why governments must urgently make progress on the long-envisaged savings and investments union, Lane said in a speech for delivery in Frankfurt, adding to arguments in favor of tighter cooperation among the European Union’s 27 member states. “The bank-centered financial system of the euro area is not well aligned with the scale and nature of the AI opportunity,” Lane said. “Bank-based financing is structurally less suited to intangible, long-horizon investments, while alternative channels such as venture capital and private credit are too shallow in the euro area.” He added that “a deeper and more integrated capital market that can broaden the investor base for intangible-intensive projects, facilitate cross-border risk sharing and reduce the need for bank-based finance” is desirable. “As such, the AI technology shock serves to illustrate the urgency of delivering the European Union’s savings and investments union,” he said. The ECB has raised pressure on governments recently to complete the project that it claims would help address many of the bloc’s most urgent problems. President Christine Lagarde referenced it last week, telling reporters that “completing the savings and investments union is vital to fund innovation and support the green and digital transitions.” It was also part of a checklist the ECB sent to European leaders ahead of meeting last month to discuss how to strengthen the bloc in the face of relentless broadsides from the US. Trade prospects between the two regions remain uncertain, and the Iran is further damping growth. Lane argued that the “aggregate effects of AI on productivity, employment and inflation remain limited and uncertain at this stage.” He added that the implications for borrowing costs are just as impossible to pred...
Key Points Bitcoin's price has plummeted so far in 2026 -- trading well below highs witnessed late last year. Kendrick believes that further downside could be in store for Bitcoin investors in the near term. By year-end, however, Kendrick is forecasting Bitcoin to experience a meaningful rally. 10 stocks we like better than Bitcoin › When stock market growth is scarce, investors often rotate into ...
Key Points Bitcoin's price has plummeted so far in 2026 -- trading well below highs witnessed late last year. Kendrick believes that further downside could be in store for Bitcoin investors in the near term. By year-end, however, Kendrick is forecasting Bitcoin to experience a meaningful rally. 10 stocks we like better than Bitcoin › When stock market growth is scarce, investors often rotate into alternatives like cryptocurrency. However, the last few months haven't been kind to the crypto community, either. The price of Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) has cratered 20% this year -- hovering around $70,500 per coin as of March 20. Nevertheless, digital asset analyst Geoffrey Kendrick of Standard Chartered recently said that Bitcoin could be set up for explosive growth. Is now a good time to buy the dip in Bitcoin? Will AI create the world's first trillionaire? Our team just released a report on the one little-known company, called an "Indispensable Monopoly" providing the critical technology Nvidia and Intel both need. Continue » What is Geoffrey Kendrick's forecast for Bitcoin? One of Kendrick's core observations about Bitcoin is that he sees volatility around the cryptocurrency as similar to growth stocks on the Nasdaq. Kendrick posits the idea that should technology companies report weak earnings in the coming quarter, further selling pressure could ensue and ultimately permeate to Bitcoin. He also notes that if the Federal Reserve chooses not to ease monetary policy, then investors may not be inclined to invest in riskier assets such as Bitcoin anytime soon. Given these factors, Kendrick's near-term forecast for Bitcoin is $50,000 -- implying roughly 32% downside from current levels. This makes sense as it is relatively in line with prior bottoms during drawdowns in recent years. However, the analyst thinks the current selling pressure is "shallower" compared to more dramatic crypto winters. Ultimately, Kendrick remains confident that by the end of the year, Bitcoin could ...
If your goal is to retire comfortably, one of the best moves you can make this year is to claim your entire 401(k) match, or as much of it as possible. This could be worth thousands of dollars today, which is already a pretty nice bonus. But that's just the beginning. You'll invest that money, and it might sit in your 401(k) for decades before you take it out again. That can turn even a small $1,0...
If your goal is to retire comfortably, one of the best moves you can make this year is to claim your entire 401(k) match, or as much of it as possible. This could be worth thousands of dollars today, which is already a pretty nice bonus. But that's just the beginning. You'll invest that money, and it might sit in your 401(k) for decades before you take it out again. That can turn even a small $1,000 sum into something much bigger. How much could your 401(k) match be worth by retirement? Your 401(k) match is usually a percentage of your income. For example, if you qualify for a 3% dollar-for-dollar match and you make at least $33,000 per year, you'd qualify for a $1,000 employer match. However, that money is only yours if you put $1,000 into your 401(k) first. That can feel like a stretch if you don't have much cash to spare. But it could be a worthwhile investment. By claiming that $1,000 employer match, you're getting a 100% return on your investment (your $1,000 contribution turns into $2,000 with your employer's $1,000 match). And that doesn't factor in the investment earnings you'll accumulate between now and retirement. No one can predict how well their investments will perform over the long run, but the stock market's average annual return over the long term is 10%. If we use this as our baseline for how quickly your $1,000 401(k) match could grow, we get the following results: Time Invested How Much Your $1,000 Match Could Be Worth 5 years $1,611 10 years $2,594 15 years $4,177 20 years $6,728 25 years $10,835 30 years $17,449 35 years $28,102 40 years $45,259 That's a pretty wide range, and it shows that the longer your savings remain invested, the more they grow. That one $1,000 match, invested for 40 years, could be enough to cover a year's worth of retirement expenses, especially if it was paired with Social Security. If you consistently banked your 401(k) match every year, your savings would grow even faster. It does require some sacrifice in the present...
Getting AI agents to perform reliably in production — not just in demos — is turning out to be harder than enterprises anticipated. Fragmented data, unclear workflows, and runaway escalation rates are slowing deployments across industries. “The technology itself often works well in demonstrations,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst with Greyhound Research. “The challenge begins when it is aske...
Getting AI agents to perform reliably in production — not just in demos — is turning out to be harder than enterprises anticipated. Fragmented data, unclear workflows, and runaway escalation rates are slowing deployments across industries. “The technology itself often works well in demonstrations,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst with Greyhound Research. “The challenge begins when it is asked to operate inside the complexity of a real organization.” Burley Kawasaki, who oversees agent deployment at Creatio, and team have developed a methodology built around three disciplines: data virtualization to work around data lake delays; agent dashboards and KPIs as a management layer; and tightly bounded use-case loops to drive toward high autonomy. In simpler use cases, Kawasaki says these practices have enabled agents to handle up to 80-90% of tasks on their own. With further tuning, he estimates they could support autonomous resolution in at least half of use cases, even in more complex deployments. “People have been experimenting a lot with proof of concepts, they've been putting a lot of tests out there,” Kawasaki told VentureBeat. “But now in 2026, we’re starting to focus on mission-critical workflows that drive either operational efficiencies or additional revenue.” Why agents keep failing in production Enterprises are eager to adopt agentic AI in some form or another — often because they're afraid to be left out, even before they even identify real-world tangible use cases — but run into significant bottlenecks around data architecture, integration, monitoring, security, and workflow design. The first obstacle almost always has to do with data, Gogia said. Enterprise information rarely exists in a neat or unified form; it is spread across SaaS platforms, apps, internal databases, and other data stores. Some are structured, some are not. But even when enterprises overcome the data retrieval problem, integration is a big challenge. Agents rely on APIs and automat...