By Rachit Agarwal Google is building a screen-less Fitbit band to rival Whoop, and it comes with an AI health coach powered by Gemini.

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By Deepti Pathak vivo is all set to launch the vivo V70 FE in the Indian market this week….
The post vivo V70 FE Leaks Reveal Price & Key Specifications in India appeared first on Fossbytes.

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By Adarsh Verma In my years of engineering, I have seen technological shifts come and go. But nothing has…
The post How to Integrate AI APIs Into Existing Software Applications: A Developer’s Guide appeared first on Fossbytes.

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By Alina Maria Stan The metaverse was supposed to be its own destination. You would put on a headset, enter a virtual world, and never need to think about the platform that brought you there. That was the pitch, anyway. Decentraland, one of the earliest and most persistent experiments in decentralised virtual worlds, appears to have reached a different […] This story continues at The Next Web

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By Cristian Dina Public blockchains operate as permissionless networks where anyone can send digital assets to any address at any time. This open architecture creates a fundamental technical challenge for compliance teams tracking the flow of funds. Digital assets rarely travel in straight lines. They often move through multiple intermediate wallets before reaching a final destination. This multi-hop […] This story continues at The Next Web

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By Vikhyaat Vivek Researchers at the University of Tartu are developing a smartwatch-like wearable that uses spectrometry to detect plastic particles in the human body without drawing blood.

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By Shikhar Mehrotra Tired of productivity tools that treat your data as their business model? Proton Workspace bundles everything from encrypted email to video calls under Swiss privacy law, and it costs less than you’d expect.

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By Nadeem Sarwar Nothing is reportedly planning to launch smart glasses with built-in cameras and a pair of AI-powered earbuds. Let’s hope they do it in their signature style.

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A group of European technology firms has launched a new open-source office suite aimed at offering a sovereign alternative to Microsoft Office.

Euro-Office consists of four core applications — a document editor, spreadsheet program, presentation tool, and PDF editor — and is built on the open-source OnlyOffice suite. It supports Microsoft Office file formats DOCX, PPTX and XLSX, as well as Open Document Format (ODF) files such as ODS, ODT and ODP.

Those involved include open-source productivity software vendor Nextcloud, cloud hosting provider Ionos, and Proton, a Swiss software-as-a-service provider that sells privacy-focused email and other productivity tools.

The Euro-Office initiative is driven by demand for a “complete sovereign, open-source, decentralized solution” among European organizations, Frank Karlitschek, CEO of Nextcloud, told Computerworld, amid a growing push for alternatives to US technology providers in the region.

“Europe needs to reduce its reliance on big tech — open source is an essential tool,” said Harald Wehnes, professor at the University of Würzburg Institute of Computer Science and speaker for the German Informatics Society’s Working Group on Digital Sovereignty.

Euro-Office is targeted at Europe’s “extremely dependent businesses and governments,” which largely rely on US technology providers, he said. “Customers are unhappy with current offerings and want a true European alternative.”

Karlitschek plans to introduce a new product based on Euro-Office into its Nextcloud Hub, he told Computerworld, though pricing and availability are yet to be confirmed.

Nextcloud currently provides productivity apps from OnlyOffice and Collabora as part of its Nextcloud Hub suite. Both have drawbacks, according to Karlitschek: Collabora’s software is built on LibreOffice, a fork of OpenOffice, and has usability limitations, he said. (Nextcloud will continue to offer Collabora as an option to customers, however, and some of Collabora’s code will be incorporated into Euro-Office software.) With regards to OnlyOffice, Karlitschek cited customer concerns about the owner company’s supposed roots in Russia.

Nextcloud, Proton, and Ionos have each allocated “two-digit” numbers of developers to development of Euro-Office, said Karlitschek, with others contributing on a slightly smaller scale.

It’s early days for the project — a preview version of the software is available now on GitHub, with a 1.0 release set for the summer — but Karlitschek said that initial priorities include development of mobile and desktop apps, as well as addressing document incompatibilities.

There are several reasons why organizations might wish to use an open-source productivity suite such as Euro-Office.

European organizations, particularly in public sector and regulated industries, are “evaluating an exit strategy from the US-owned productivity suites like Microsoft Office,” said Dario Maisto, senior analyst at Forrester.

“Organizations are mainly moved by a desire to improve their digital sovereignty posture, escape vendor lock-in, and have a ready alternative to avoid costly price increases from one enterprise agreement renewal to the other,” Maisto said.

The European Union recently launched an initiative intended to support the growth and sustainability of its open-source sector, while some member state governments have signalled intentions for wider open-source adoption.

Aerospace and defense sector organizations often need to inspect and certify code, Maisto said, particularly as geopolitical volatility increases. Whether this means a “deliberate choice for Euro-Office is a whole different discussion,” he said.

Gaining traction among end-user organizations will likely be challenging. An open-source implementation can be a significant undertaking for IT teams, said Maisto, particularly at the scale required to achieve cost savings versus proprietary tools.  A lack of advanced functionality such as Excel macros can be problematic for a subset of office workers.

He also cited the axiom “nobody was ever fired for choosing Microsoft.”

“While this attitude is changing, it will take time to instill a culture of — and trust in — open-source alternatives,” said Maisto.

Related reading:

Global uncertainty is reshaping cloud strategies in Europe

EU looks to bolster its open-source sector to counter US cloud dominance

EuroStack: Europe’s path to digital independence?

Local clouds shape Europe’s AI future

Source:: Computer World

By Shimul Sood Yes, seriously. That’s exactly what it says.

Source:: Digital Trends

It’s no big deal, you’d think, that researchers have found a way to reduce the computing requirements for one of the many steps involved in training an AI model to help robots manipulate simple geometric objects.

Yet such is the concern about the rising cost of powering data centers for AI applications that this one small and largely unremarkable finding prompted breathless headlines such as “100x Less Power: The Breakthrough That Could Solve AI’s Massive Energy Crisis.”

Don’t believe the hype

No-one’s disputing the researchers’ findings, but reports about them may be somewhat exaggerated: “The leap from the research conducted in the arXiv study to the conclusion in the associated news articles is the stuff of myth. It’s the kind of hype that Gartner warns clients to avoid,” said Gartner VP analyst Nader Henein.

The researchers, from Human-Robot Interaction Lab at Tufts University in the US and the Center for Vision, Automation, and Control in Vienna, Austria, compared the training cost and performance of vision-language-action (VLA) models with that of a neuro-symbolic architecture using PDDL-based symbolic planning, reporting the results in a paper, The Price Is Not Right: Neuro-Symbolic Methods Outperform VLAs on Structured Long-Horizon Manipulation Tasks with Significantly Lower Energy Consumption. The paper has been accepted for presentation at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

Yuri Goryunov, who is the CIO for consulting firm Acceligence, also questioned whether the study’s energy-saving findings are applicable to broader problems in the enterprise.

“The ‘100x less power’ headline is misleading. What the researchers actually showed is that a rule-based system uses less energy than a neural model on a single puzzle. And it was in simulation, with the rules hand-coded by experts in advance,” Goryunov said. “That’s not a breakthrough. That’s a calculator beating a supercomputer at arithmetic.”

Goryunov argued that “the savings disappear the moment you hit real-world complexity. Disparate data sources and messy inputs, ambiguous situations without clear rule sets, or actually any domain where the rules aren’t already obvious. And someone still has to write all those rules.”

The researchers did not respond to a request for comment — but they likely wouldn’t disagree with Goryunov. In their conclusion, they state, “These results highlight important trade-offs between end-to-end foundation-model approaches and structured reasoning architectures. For manipulation tasks governed by explicit procedural constraints, incorporating symbolic structure can yield substantial advantages in reliability, data efficiency, and energy consumption.”

Some of these discussed hypothetical new approaches to AI do have potential, Goryunov said, specifically citing research work done by Google. “Google’s approach is to make the AI we’re already running dramatically cheaper and faster. Tufts’ approach is to replace it with something architecturally different for a narrow class of tasks. From an enterprise standpoint, there’s no contest. You can deploy Google’s findings tomorrow through your existing model providers. Tufts requires you to rewrite your architecture, hand-code your domain rules, and hope your problem looks like a puzzle.”

The benefits of short-termism

Nathan Marlor, the head of data and AI at Irish consulting firm Version 1, said that even though the Tufts research may not have immediate applicability to enterprise IT deployments, it could impact pricing negotiations with hyperscalers.

“For enterprise IT there’s nothing to do here. Nobody’s building PDDL planners in-house. But the cost angle matters if you’re watching AI compute bills climb and vendors keep telling you the answer is more GPUs. This is one more reason to push back on that,” Marlor said. “If hybrid architectures prove out more broadly, it shows up downstream as cheaper inference and lower cloud bills. But that’s on the platform and hyperscalers to figure out and not enterprise IT teams.”

Another consultant, Brian Levine, executive director of FormerGov, agrees that the Tufts report could color how IT views future AI pricing.

Enterprise IT executives “should absolutely track this space, not because they’ll deploy these models next quarter, but because the economics of AI are getting even more volatile. Enterprises need to stay flexible with their AI vendors,” Levine said. “This market can pivot on a dime. Locking yourself into a single hyperscaler’s stack or a single model architecture is a recipe for regret when breakthroughs like this start to commercialize.” Levine advocated staying flexible and avoiding long-term obligations. “This is a reason to avoid overcommitting to any one vendor’s roadmap. The ground under AI is shifting faster than most procurement cycles. The winners will be the CIOs and orgs that build for portability, negotiate for flexibility, and assume that today’s state of the art may look outdated sooner than anyone expects.”

Source:: Computer World

By Hisan Kidwai When BGMI first came out, it was just another battle royale game that took pride in…
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By Hisan Kidwai Wireless headphones are a tricky business to get right simply because sound is a very personal…
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By Shikhar Mehrotra Samsung’s Hearapy app tackles travel nausea with a science-backed 60-second audio session, no pills, no side effects, just a precise bass tone.

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By Omair Khaliq Sultan The Beats Solo 4 is down to $119.99 at Amazon as part of the Big Spring Sale, a $80 saving off its $199.95 list price. That’s 40% off a pair of on-ear Bluetooth headphones that offer 50 hours of battery life, a lightweight build, and a tuning that’s more balanced than anything Beats has put […]

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By Callum Turner Interactive content now generates 52.6% higher engagement than static formats, with users spending significantly longer interacting with dynamic media and showing higher recall for brands that use it. In practical terms, that shift may have transformed expectations around how digital content should be produced, especially in commerce and B2B environments, where attention is often a […] This story continues at The Next Web

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By Alina Maria Stan The current wave of investment in artificial intelligence reflects one of the largest capital shifts in modern technology, yet questions around financial return remain central to how this growth is being interpreted. According to a report, global venture capital investment in AI firms reached over $258 billion in 2025, accounting for 61% of all global […] This story continues at The Next Web

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By Hisan Kidwai It’s no secret that 2025 was the golden age of budget phones. A year where you…
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By Deepti Pathak The story of Sung Jinwoo in Solo Leveling is characterized by his special power of creating…
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By Pranob Mehrotra Researchers have developed a new silicon-carbon battery design that can store up to nine times more energy while staying stable over time.

Source:: Digital Trends