[ad_1] After moving to Taiwan and taking up scuba diving, I recently started shopping for an underwater camera. What began as a simple search quickly turned into an exploration of the rapidly shifting geography of consumer technology. There was a time when the answer would have been obvious: buy a GoPro.  The California company basically invented the action-camera category when it first launched in 2002. Twenty years later in 2022, GoPro still controlled an estimated 75% of the global market. But that...

[ad_1] On the morning of February 20, 2026, Juan Carlos Muñoz, then Chile’s minister of transportation and telecommunications, woke up to an email from the U.S. State Department. It informed him that his diplomatic visa had been canceled. The visas of Muñoz and two other Chilean government officials were revoked for activities that “compromised critical telecommunications infrastructure and undermined regional security in our hemisphere,” the notification said. At the time, the three officials were assessing a $500-million proposal by state-owned...

[ad_1] Stu Clott, an operations manager and part-time developer in San Diego, used to code with Claude. But he recently found a cheaper alternative: DeepSeek.  While an hourlong coding session would cost about $10 on Claude, the same work cost less than 50 cents on DeepSeek, Clott said. Over the past few weeks, he has used the Chinese model for everything from coding to personal counseling and building software to manage his family’s bank accounts.  “I laugh every time I...

[ad_1] At the end of every year, Spotify Wrapped takes over social media feeds, with users showing off the annual recap of their top music choices. Lately, these reviews have taken on a more international flavor — packed with K-pop and Latino rhythms that mirror the platform’s explosive overseas expansion and increasingly diverse artist catalog. Launched in 2008, Spotify today has about 761 million users, including 293 million subscribers, in 184 markets. Brazilian funk, K-pop, Afrobeats, and Urban Latino are...

[ad_1] As the U.S. and China battle for artificial intelligence supremacy, a fundamental divide in engineering philosophy could determine the winner. While American pioneers like OpenAI and Anthropic favor a closed-source approach — keeping their proprietary model code locked behind a commercial interface — Chinese AI labs are aggressively releasing open-source models. This strategy allows developers to download, inspect, and deeply customize the underlying code for free, rather than remaining dependent on an American tech giant’s ecosystem. Tiezhen Wang, former...

[ad_1] Poring over the SpaceX IPO prospectus, a recurring theme surfaces: the massive, quiet influence of Middle Eastern finance in the most ambitious IPO in history. Sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, their AI subsidiaries and the technology companies building data centers as part of these deals were all in the document.  SpaceX lists on Nasdaq June 12 at a $1.75 trillion valuation. The S-1, as the IPO filing is known, shows Elon Musk’s rocket...

[ad_1] Chinese upstart Spacesail is trying to steal SpaceX’s thunder.  State-backed Spacesail launched two satellites on a reusable rocket on June 1, just days before SpaceX’s $1.8 trillion listing on June 12, the largest public offering to date. Much of SpaceX’s valuation rests on Starlink, the satellite internet service, which has over 10 million customers across 100 countries. Spacesail appears to be deliberately targeting countries where Starlink has faced issues.” Starlink’s 7,000 satellites dominate internet service in virtually every market...

[ad_1] Take a moment to think about your day: How many things did you do online? Perhaps you made a call or two via WhatsApp. You sent at least one WhatsApp text. You might have looked up a restaurant, office, or other location on Google Maps, perhaps run a Google search, and used Gmail to send an email. You might have built a shopping cart on Amazon after spotting a brand while scrolling Instagram. Along the way, you may have...

[ad_1] Since the launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, AI has quickly changed how we work, how we learn, how we love, how we heal. It has also made a handful of companies such as Nvidia, Anthropic and OpenAI very powerful, and put the U.S. and China far ahead of every other country. What does this mean for everyone else? Is there a way to ensure a more equitable future? Last week, Rest of World hosted an event...

[ad_1] Electric cars swept the world last year, everywhere except the U.S. Global EV sales grew 20% in 2025 to exceed 20 million, with one in four new cars sold worldwide now electric, according to th International Energy Agency’s annual outlook, released on May 20. EV sales in the U.S., though, fell 2% last year, according to Cox Automotive’s Kelley Blue Book, the primary tracker of auto sales in the country. Rising fuel costs worldwide pushed consumers toward EVs at...