Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
In today's Techpresso:
📱 The world’s first actual smart phone
🤝 IBM buys Confluent in $11 billion deal
📺 Trump says Netflix’s huge deal for Warner Bros. ‘could be a problem’
🚫 X bans European Commission ad account after €120m fine
🤳 Leak suggests under-display Face ID for iPhone 18 Pro
⏱️ OpenAI says ChatGPT saves workers an hour a day
🎁 + 10 other news you might like
🧰 + 6 trending tools
📱 The world’s first actual smart phone LINK
ZTE showed off an engineering prototype of the Nubia M153 that fuses ByteDance’s Doubao AI agent directly into the Android OS to control the interface and manage multi-step task chains automatically.
The device uses a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip to run a local ZTE Nebula-GUI system that visually navigates screen menus, while the cloud-based Doubao model handles planning and semantics.
You can ask the assistant to book a Baidu Apollo robotaxi, and the software finds your location, opens the app, selects the correct destination, and confirms the ride without any input.
🤝 IBM buys Confluent in $11 billion deal LINK
IBM is paying $11 billion in cash to acquire data infrastructure company Confluent, a massive deal intended to bolster its automation offerings as businesses move their operations to the cloud.
Confluent offers a platform that helps enterprises manage streams of data in real time, a crucial task for companies deploying AI products that require significant back-and-forth processing for inferencing.
This latest deal comes shortly after the company acquired HashiCorp and partnered with Anthropic, marking a continued effort to deploy the Claude large language model into some of its products.
📺 Trump says Netflix’s huge deal for Warner Bros. ‘could be a problem’ LINK
President Trump told reporters that Netflix buying Warner Bros. Discovery might be a problem, noting that he intends to get personally involved in the regulatory approval process regarding the massive agreement.
The combined platform would account for 33 percent of the US streaming video market, beating Prime Video’s 21 percent share and likely enough to attract the antitrust division of the Justice Department.
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos reportedly visited the White House to downplay monopoly fears, even as unions worry the transaction could reduce theatrical distribution and Paramount considers launching a hostile bid to stop it.
🚫 X bans European Commission ad account after €120m fine LINK
X banned the European Commission's advertising account after the EC issued a €120 million fine against the platform for violating digital services regulations with its blue checkmark system.
The European Commission's first Digital Services Act fine called X's paid verification system deceptive because it makes users vulnerable to impersonation and scams, and criticized the ad repository for lacking transparency.
X's Head of Product claimed the ad account ban happened because the commission exploited the Ad Composer tool to artificially boost reach, not as retaliation for the fine itself.
🤳 Leak suggests under-display Face ID for iPhone 18 Pro LINK
A new leak claims Apple is actively testing under-display Face ID for the iPhone 18 Pro by using a spliced micro-transparent glass window built into the screen to hide components.
According to "Smart Pikachu", the design lets TrueDepth infrared sensors pass through the panel without distortion, a move that has seemingly prompted related suppliers to accelerate preparation for the potential production.
Analyst Ross Young suggests the device will feature a smaller pill-shaped hole rather than removing the Dynamic Island entirely, and the phone might launch in September alongside a new foldable iPhone.
⏱️ OpenAI says ChatGPT saves workers an hour a day LINK
OpenAI claims a new survey of 9,000 employees shows that its AI tools save workers between 40 and 60 minutes a day, with the biggest gains in engineering and data science.
These internal findings push back against recent studies from MIT and Harvard, which suggested that most organizations see zero return on their spending or produce shallow content researchers call workslop.
The data shows that employees in research and IT who do not hold technical roles logged a 36% increase in coding‑related messages over the past six months of using the tools.
Other news you might like
- Netflix gets outbid by Paramount as the battle for Warner Bros. Discovery goes hostileLINK
- Apple VP Johny Srouji considers departure after telling CookLINK
- Trump Moves to Centralize AI Oversight With Sweeping National OrderLINK
- ChatGPT Overtakes Amazon, X, Reddit, WhatsApp, and Wikipedia in VisitorsLINK
- OpenAI says it’s disabled ad-like app promotions in ChatGPTLINK
- Days before Australia's social media ban, teens race to find loopholesLINK
- 30 years after Microsoft went ‘all-in’ on the internet, the tech giant’s AI strategy echoes the pastLINK
- Meta offers EU users ad-light option in push to end investigationLINK
🧰 Trending tools
ACE Studio 2.0: an AI music workstation combining vocal synthesis, instrument generation, and full-song creation tools for solo creators producing complete tracks end-to-end.LINK
RightNow: a GPU-native code editor with cycle-accurate emulation, real-time profiling, and hardware-aware AI for writing and optimizing CUDA and GPU kernels efficiently.LINK
Marble: a collaborative content management dashboard with AI writing assistance, webhook integrations for automated publishing, and team workflow tools.LINK
CUDA 13.1: a parallel computing platform enabling developers to accelerate applications using NVIDIA GPUs for tasks like deep learning, scientific computing, and data processing.LINK
Beanvest Quality Investing: a research platform that screens and analyzes companies using quality investing metrics to help you find fundamentally strong businesses trading at reasonable valuations.LINK
email time capsules: a web app that schedules emails to be delivered to yourself at a future date you specify.LINK
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