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The Dutch government has imposed a “complete prohibition” on the acquisition of Solvinity, a Dutch cloud provider, by Kyndryl, the American IT infrastructure company spun out of IBM in 2021. The deal, valued at roughly €100 million, would have given a US-headquartered firm control over the platform that runs DigiD, the digital identity system used […] This story continues at The Next Web

  Drew Houston, the co-founder who built Dropbox from a Y Combinator demo into a company with more than 700 million registered users, is stepping down as chief executive. Ashraf Alkarmi, Dropbox’s current head of product, has been named co-CEO effective immediately. After a transition period, Houston will become executive chairman and Alkarmi will take […] This story continues at The Next Web

The proposal expected to be announced on Wednesday would leave Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper able to bid only for the remaining third of the bloc’s 2 GHz mobile-satellite band. The European Commission is preparing to reserve two-thirds of the bloc’s future mobile-satellite-services spectrum for European operators, leaving Starlink, Amazon’s Project Kuiper and other non-EU companies […] This story continues at The Next Web

Stord, a logistics technology company that helps retailers manage inventory, checkout, and fulfillment, has raised $250 million in a Series F round that values the company at $3 billion. The round was led by Strike Capital with participation from Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Franklin Templeton, Baillie Gifford, G Squared, and Bond. The funding doubles Stord’s valuation […] This story continues at The Next Web

  Elon Musk’s xAI has told employees to limit their contact with staff from Cursor , the AI coding startup that SpaceX has an option to acquire for $60 billion. The directive came from James Burnham, xAI’s general counsel and former chief lawyer at the Department of Government Efficiency, according to Bloomberg. Burnham sent guidelines to […] This story continues at The Next Web

Ferrari shares fell as much as 7 per cent in Milan trading on Monday, dropping to €290.55 and wiping roughly £3 billion from the company’s market cap. The sell-off came one day after the Italian carmaker unveiled the Luce, its first fully electric vehicle, at the Città dello Sport in Rome. The Luce is a four-door, […] This story continues at The Next Web

Spotify began testing a new content format on Tuesday: narrated long-form magazine articles, slotted in alongside audiobooks rather than podcasts. The launch announced from the company’s newsroom on Tuesday morning, includes more than 650 English-language pieces from a roster that runs through Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Vogue, Variety, Billboard, Vibe, GQ, WIRED, Vanity Fair and Pitchfork. […] This story continues at The Next Web

Felipe Sinisterra and Dave Wang, two ex-bankers, are booked out for the next two months teaching financial institutions to actually use the AI tools they have already bought. Felipe Sinisterra and Dave Wang, two former investment bankers, are charging banks and investment funds up to $25,000 a day to teach senior staff how to use […] This story continues at The Next Web

Quantinuum, the quantum-computing company majority-owned by Honeywell, is targeting a valuation of $12.7bn in its US IPO, according to a Reuters report on Tuesday, a level materially below the $20bn-plus figure that circulated earlier in May when the company filed its S-1. The new figure puts the IPO at roughly 27% above the $10bn pre-money valuation […] This story continues at The Next Web

The 24 hours since Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, have produced something unusual: a papal document being read in earnest by financial and policy capitals as a piece of tech-regulation analysis rather than a piece of theology. The text addresses governments, parliaments and the executives of the largest AI companies directly, […] This story continues at The Next Web

Over three decades, I’ve watched consumer behavior evolve across television, search, and social media. Each shift changed tactics, but not the underlying logic of decision-making. What I am watching happen right now is different. And I know I am not alone. Every seasoned marketing professional I speak to, whether they built their career in offline […] This story continues at The Next Web

Salesforce has a problem that no amount of marketing can fix. The company has built its entire narrative around Agentforce, its AI agent platform, and the numbers look impressive on paper: 29,000 deals closed, $800 million in annual recurring revenue, and a roadmap that promises to replace entire categories of human work. But Wall Street […] This story continues at The Next Web

The new standalone app sits on top of Facebook Groups, adds an AI tab called “Ask” and an admin assistant, and arrives the same month Mark Zuckerberg told staff he and Chris Cox had discussed whether they could build 50 new apps. Meta has released a new standalone app called Forum, without a launch event, […] This story continues at The Next Web

Wingtech Technology has filed a lawsuit against its own subsidiary, Nexperia, in a Chinese court. The case, lodged at the Dongguan Intermediate People’s Court, seeks at least 8 billion yuan, roughly $1.1 billion, in damages. It is the first major legal challenge to a European government’s forced seizure of a Chinese-owned chipmaker. The dispute centres […] This story continues at The Next Web

The chain is reverting to manual counts across North America, ending one of CEO Brian Niccol’s more visible technology bets and adding another data point to the file marked “enterprise AI pilots that did not survive contact with the real store.” Starbucks has retired the AI-powered inventory tool it rolled out across its North American […] This story continues at The Next Web

Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, has withheld its vote on the reappointment of John Elkann to Meta’s board of directors. The fund said it believes the Stellantis chairman and Exor CEO does not have enough time to devote to the role. Norges Bank Investment Management, which manages the $2.3 […] This story continues at The Next Web

The London-based beauty and wellness booking platform has joined the UK unicorn club at a $1bn-plus valuation, in a deal that lands while the broader SaaS complex is busy arguing about its own funeral. Fresha, the London-based booking and payments platform for salons and spas, has raised $80m from funds managed by KKR in a […] This story continues at The Next Web

Somewhere in your organisation right now, an employee is reusing a password they created in 2019. Another is sharing login credentials for a team account through a Slack DM. A third is storing client portal access in a browser’s built-in autofill, synced to a personal Google account your IT team does not control. None of […] This story continues at The Next Web

Shares jumped 12% as the Japanese industrial group opened a San Jose development base with Nvidia, Analog Devices, Microsoft, and Fujitsu, with its four-legged CORLEO mobility concept as the first showcase. Kawasaki Heavy Industries said on Friday it will partner with Nvidia and a handful of other US and Japanese firms on physical AI for robots, opening […] This story continues at The Next Web

BYD and Chery led a doubling of Chinese EV deliveries in April, even as Brussels keeps its tariff wall up and Stellantis quietly hands the keys to underused European plants. Chinese brands accounted for more than 15 per cent of Europe’s electric-vehicle sales in April, the first time the threshold has been crossed in a […] This story continues at The Next Web