n this tech roundup, we cover four major stories headlines. Gmail introduces a new summary card for easier email management, and AI coding startup Poolside
secures a massive $500M investment from eBay, Nvidia, and others.
Meanwhile, Meta's smart glasses stir controversy as college students use them to expose personal information in real time. The EU is also demanding transparency from platforms like YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok regarding their content algorithms.
Dive in for all the details!
Gmail Is Introducing “Summary Cards” For Easy Email Actions, Including Tracking And Flight Check-Ins In a recent event, Google announced a new feature that will help their users save time when reading on their email accounts. As Apple prepares to launch several iOS 18 features that closely resemble those from Google, competition in the email market is intensifying.
To respond, Google announced this Wednesday several improvements for their Gmail . They will add a transformed “summary card” feature that will help users organize their emails and inboxes and have a better view over tracking packages, check-ins for flights, setting reminders, or other actions.
Google stated that this new and transformed feature will be able to have email verification of various information from all the user’s emails and they will appear in categories with an email icon such as Purchases, Events, Bills, and Travel. With this improvement, users won’t have to read through the email platform to find the needed information like bills, travel information, or other important things.
After the launch, the summary card will appear at the top of every message to offer fast access to information from the email platform, for example when your shipment is due to arrive, when the flight is scheduled to arrive, or information about your concert ticket.
At the bottom of this “summary card feature,” users can click on the blue buttons to add more actions for emails such as viewing an order or setting a reminder for the next bill and so much more.
This new feature is coming right before the launching of Apple Intelligence which seems to bring significant improvement in their Mail App. So, the “summary cards” will be a competition for the Apple Mail app, and it was already been launched yesterday October 2. During the entire month, Google will add gradually more summary cards as well as a “Happening Soon” option for those emails that are purchase-related.
Subscribe to our newsletter Poolside Which Is An Ai Coding Startup Has Raised $500 Million From Ebay, Chip Maker Nvidia, And Others (Poolside website) Poolside, the development platform that is AI-powered has managed to raise half a billion dollars in their new capital. This amount of cash came from a series of Series B led by Bain Capital Ventures and in turn has contributions from some big tech companies such as eBay and the chip maker Nvidia.
All of their contributions have raised for Poolside a total of $626 million startup investment and the Bloomberg reports state that the evaluation of the startup is sitting now at around $3 billion. According to TechCrunch , they stated back in June that the Startup Company was in the middle of a collection of funding more than $400 million with Bain Capital.
The Poolside Company has a base in Europe and also in the U.S. and was founded last year by the CEO Jason Warner and Eiso Kant who are both software engineers. Jason Warner is the previous CTO of GitHub and he also directed other engineering organizations from Canonical and Heroku. On the other hand, Kant has previously taken part in the founding of numerous developing startups such as the engineering analytics firm Athenian.
Also, Jason Warner worked on the development of the Copilot tool from GitHub that has Artificial Intelligence and in 2017 met Eiso Kant. In the next six years, these two have planned several tools that are based on artificial intelligence, which later became Poolside.
The Poolside company has developed new AI models that can be a significant help for tasks such as autocompleting a code or suggesting a code that can be relevant in a database. The primary customers of Poolside are mostly Global 2000 companies as well as public-sector agencies, but just a few of them have been publicly disclosed.
Jason Warner stated that the funding from Series B has managed to allow Poolside Company to take 10,000 Nvidia GPUs online to train their future models, and also these are set to consolidate all of the marketing and development efforts.
Even with all of the concerns about security, copyrights, and also reliability that are around these AI-powered assistive coding tools, many developers have expressed their excitement for them, and in a recent poll from GitHub, most respondents said that they already adopted some new AI and new tech tools in different forms. GitHub reported back in April that the Copilot toll has over 1.8 million paying users and more than 50,000 business customers and these numbers are probably even higher now.
College Students Used Meta’s Smart Glasses to Expose People's Information in Real Time (Meta) Two college students from Harvard University created a strange demonstration of how smart glasses can use the facial recognition feature to dox people almost instantly and their activities, phone numbers, and also their addresses. It should not be avoided the fact that the demo is using modern and also generally available technology such as the RayBan smart glasses from Meta along with public databases.
One of the college students, AnhPhy Nguyen posted a video that shows this technology right in action. This new technology, called I-XRAY is working with the Meta smart glasses along with their ability to do livestream video on Instagram.
During the livestream, a computer program is monitoring and using artificial intelligence power to dox people’s faces. After that, the photos are introduced in some public databases to find quickly everything from names and addresses to even relatives, and this information will be returned via a phone app.
In the demonstration video, the two students, Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, how they can identify with just these Ray Ban smart glasses several classmates or friends along with their addresses or relatives' names as they speak. But what is more terrifying is that Nguyen and Ardayfio show on demo how they can chat with strangers in public based only on these information provided by the technology.
Lately, facial recognition technology has become insanely accurate and the I-XRAY can put together several existing technologies. But the primary technology that it uses is PimEyes which was described by the New York Times as an “alarmingly accurate” face recognition technology.
But most of the concerns that were raised lately showed up right after it turned up that Clearview AI used a facial recognition technology that helped law enforcement.
Privacy has lately been a big concern about smart glasses, especially after Goole Glass did not have success because it recorded without consent in public spaces. It’s true that especially in the last decade, most people have become more comfortable with being filmed as a result of smartphones and TikTok.
Those Meta smart glasses that were used in the demonstration video looked like every other pair of glasses and it’s hard to tell if they have a camera or not. The Meta glasses include a privacy light that turns automatically when someone is recording a video.
It’s important to know that Meta encourages every user to respect these privacy policies and supports the idea of gesturing and using voice controls when recording or taking photos. But in reality, some people can choose to not follow these etiquette rules regardless of what Meta rules are.
EU is requesting information about content algorithms from YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok (Unsplash) This Wednesday the EU Commission requested some information from the social platforms YouTube , Snapchat , and TikTok about the parameters used in algorithms and their ability to recommend content to their users. The EU Regulations Commission has also some concerns about the impact that these platforms could have on amplifying some systemic risks as well as the mental health and protection of minors.
The EU Commission stated that these requests are made under the Digital Services Act “also concern the platforms’ measures to mitigate the potential influence of their recommender systems on the spread of illegal content, such as promoting illegal drugs and hate speech,”.
So now, social platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube will have to answer these commissions about how each algorithm works. According to DSA regulations, every online platform that has more than 45 million active users monthly must meet its strict and severe transparency requirements.
An EU official stated that this demand should be a warning for all platforms to change their algorithms and behaviors, for example, to let users hide various types of videos. It’s important to know that sites and platforms that will not provide documents until 15 November or will provide untrue information will face punishments from EU law and regulations.
But what platform is missing from these? Meta. The parent company of Facebook and Instagram is not yet under these requirements but back in May, the EU Regulations Commission initiated individual investigations to find out if these interfaces are supporting addictive behavior.
Also, the commission has pending inquiries for TikTok, the social media platform X ( formerly Twitter), and the Chineze-based retailer AliExpress. Last month, a Commission official stated that more and more searches are coming soon to find out more about the alleged DSA non-compliance.
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