Mews raises €255M to accelerate AI and automation in hospitality
Mews raises €255M to accelerate AI and automation in hospitality

Amsterdam-based hospitality tech platform Mews has raised €255 million (about $300 million) in a Series D funding round as it pushes deeper into automation and AI-powered workflows for hotels around the world.  The round was led by EQT Growth with new …

Get ready for the AI ad-pocalypse
Get ready for the AI ad-pocalypse

I’ll confess, with no shame whatsoever, that I really love ads. Artsy ones, funny ones, weird ones, emotional ones – TV commercials were my childhood TikTok before any of us were using terms like “short-form video.” But like most creative things in my life, AI is sucking the joy out of it. And it’s only […]

Get stuff done by yelling at your phone
Get stuff done by yelling at your phone

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 113, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, please send hot cocoa to my freezing-cold house, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been reading about private garbage collectors and vintage […]

Gemini with Personal Intelligence is awfully familiar
Gemini with Personal Intelligence is awfully familiar

By lots of metrics, Gemini is winning. It has raced ahead of OpenAI, become scarily good at creating convincing imagery, and even won Apple’s business. So last week’s news that it was enabling something called Personal Intelligence felt like a victory lap. Personal Intelligence allows Gemini to reference past conversations and access your data in […]

ICYMI: the week’s 7 biggest tech stories from LG’s massive OLED TV news to glorious Whoop clones

Here’s the top news stories from Sony, LG, Spotify and more for January 24, 2026.

The Loch Capsule dishwasher is small, fast, and efficient — it even sanitizes gadgets
The Loch Capsule dishwasher is small, fast, and efficient — it even sanitizes gadgets

A dishwasher is a luxury item some people can’t live without. It’s one of the first major kitchen devices I bought just as soon as I could afford one, and the appliance I thought I’d miss most in my nomadic vanlife pursuits. Loch sent me its $459.99 / €459.99 countertop Capsule dishwasher to review in […]

Chromebooks train schoolkids to be loyal customers, internal Google document suggests
Chromebooks train schoolkids to be loyal customers, internal Google document suggests

Internal documents revealed as part of a child safety lawsuit hint at Google’s plan to “onboard kids” into its ecosystem by investing in schools. In this November 2020 presentation, Google writes that getting kids into its ecosystem “leads to brand trust and loyalty over their lifetime,” as reported earlier by NBC News. The heavily-redacted documents, […]

Congress doesn’t seem to know if the TikTok deal complies with its law
Congress doesn’t seem to know if the TikTok deal complies with its law

TikTok finally closed a deal meant to bring it into compliance with the law that should have banned it a year ago, and the lawmakers who passed that law still don’t seem to know what’s going on. The company announced Tuesday that its US service is now part of the separate TikTok USDS Joint Venture […]

Meta is stopping teens from chatting with its AI characters
Meta is stopping teens from chatting with its AI characters

Meta is “temporarily pausing” the ability for teens to chat with its AI characters as it develops a “new version” of the characters that will offer a “better experience.” The company made the announcement in an update to a blog post from October where the company had detailed more parental controls for teen AI use. […]