Here’s a real gem that a reader sent me. Tomtoc is a maker of laptop bags and sleeves. Visit their homepage and, of course, you’ll get a dickover asking you to join their mailing list “for exclusive updates and get a chance to win a free tech pouch every month.” But here’s the ge…

Following up on the previous item today, re: content blockers and ad-blocking, I ran into a weird situation a few weeks ago with my column “John Ternus Should Reverse Apple’s Slide Down the Advertising Slippery Slope”. That article contains this sentence, in Markdown: And -- at t…

AI coding startup Cognition has acquired Poke, the AI assistant you text like a friend, in a deal valuing the startup in the low nine figures. The acquisition brings Poke’s conversational style and interaction model to Cognition’s coding agent Devin, reflecting a growing belief t…

For the first time in several quarters, General Catalyst in Q2 overtook Y Combinator when it came to participating in the most fintech deals of $5 million or more, per Crunchbase data. The quarter also marked the busiest one for General Catalyst since 2021 in terms of investing i…

Engineering leaders should build highly adaptable, vendor-agnostic infrastructure instead of relying on expensive, unpredictable proprietary hyperscalers, advises guest columnist Sumeet Vaidya, who says the foundational flexibility allows enterprises to safely pair AI agents with…

Enterprises deployed AI agents ahead of the controls needed to manage them — and they did it knowingly. That is the central finding across the five parallel surveys VentureBeat Research fielded in June, spanning every layer of the agentic stack. Now those enterprises are retrofit…