Multiple tornadoes were reported across Texas, Louisiana and Alabama Tuesday and Wednesday, and wind advisories warned of gusts in the central Appalachians and parts of the Southeast.
The Gulf Coast was hit hard Wednesday, with school closures, power outages, travel complications and building damage from the storms. One person, a 64-year-old woman, died in Mississippi after her oxygen machine stopped working after losing power in Scott County, according to Weather.com, citing Scott County Sheriff Chief Deputy Brad Ellis.
Storms were expected to spread across the eastern part of the Southeast as the system moves towards the Atlantic.
Wind is the largest source of renewable energy in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, but wind farms come with an environmental cost as wind turbines can wreak havoc on bird populations. Meet Spoor, the startup using AI to help wind farms mitigate that risk. Spoor is a software that uses machine learning to detect birds on video while also recording their movement and predicting their flight patterns.
Poshmark, the social commerce site that lets people buy and sell new and used items to each other, launched a paid marketing tool on Thursday, giving sellers the ability to promote their entire shop at once. Poshmark’s new feature, called “Promoted Closet,” uses machine learning to automatically promote individual product listings from a seller's entire inventory, identifying shoppers’ search terms and matching them with promoted items. Promoted Closet works like “cost per click” models on Etsy, Amazon, and Google Ads.
More money for the generative AI boom: Y Combinator-backed developer infrastructure startup Recall.ai announced Thursday it's raised a $10 million Series A funding round, bringing its total raised to over $12M. The startup has built infrastructure and a unified API that enables companies to access raw data from virtual meeting platforms like Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack Huddles, Zoom and even platforms with no API. With the video and audio data, users can build AI-powered meeting bots or apps such as sales coaching, meeting notetaker, or daily standup bots.
The biggest news stories this morning:
Apple brings eye tracking to recent iPhones and iPads, Bandai is finally rereleasing a beloved Tamagotchi from 2004, Android 15 will make it harder for phone thieves to steal your data.
Facebook and Instagram are under formal investigation in the European Union over child protection concerns, the Commission announced Thursday. The proceedings follow a raft of requests for information to parent entity Meta since the bloc's online governance regime, the Digital Services Act (DSA), started applying last August. The development could be significant as the formal proceedings unlock additional investigatory powers for EU enforcers, such as the ability to conduct office inspections or apply interim measures.
Spencer Gore has a battery startup. It’s still a massive market, having been surpassed by lithium-ion production capacity just a few years ago. By contrast, Gore’s company, Bedrock Materials, is using a chemistry that was invented about a decade ago.
Inflation cooled slightly in April, but the seasonally-adjusted Consumer Price Index has now risen 19.4% in the three-plus years since Biden took office.
Consumer protection groups around the European Union have filed coordinated complaints against Temu, accusing the Chinese-owned ultra low-cost e-commerce platform of a raft of breaches related to the bloc's Digital Services Act (DSA). Temu only launched in the region about a year ago but recently reported blasting past 75 million monthly users. For some reference, Temu's parent Pinduoduo reported revenues of nearly $35 billion for 2023, nearly double on the year prior; Temu was estimated to account for about 23% of that amount last year.