Buying a used car can save you thousands of dollars compared to purchasing a new one, but it also comes with risks. A vehicle may look spotless on the outside and drive perfectly during a short test drive while hiding expensive mechanical or electrical problems beneath the surface.

Imagi announced a $4.5 million seed round, with investors including Brighteye Ventures, Day One Capital, and artist Wil.i.am. 

At Galaxy Unpacked 2026, Samsung introduced the Galaxy Watch9 and Watch Ultra2 with new health tools, brighter displays, and trail and diving features.

The post Samsung Galaxy Unpacked 2026 Introduces Galaxy Watch9 and Watch Ultra2 appeared first on TechRepublic.

I wanted a clock that, annoyingly, didn't seem to exist.

Since childhood, my bedside clocks have been a series of red, seven-segment LED clock-radio specials from Walmart or Target. They are invariably cheap, simple, and long-lived—but they require manual intervention at the start and end of Daylight Saving Time and whenever the power flickers. After a recent power flicker, as I found myself standing by the sideboard holding down "TIME" and mashing the "HOUR" button, frustration boiled over, and I thought to myself, "We're a quarter of the way through the 21st century. There has to be a better way!"

My perfect clock would be self-setting. It would offer auto-DST adjustment (or not, depending on how this bill fares!). It would manage drift and always show the exact sub-second time. It would show that time on a red seven-segment display—not blue, not green, not yellow, and absolutely not white. And I shouldn't have to install any privacy-destroying garbage apps to make it work.

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© Lee Hutchinson

Augmental has opened public US sales of its tongue-controlled MouthPad and released a beta of Vox, a new device built to handle hands-free dictation.

Several federal agencies are contributing toward the interdisciplinary research efforts.

As long as Paramount ends its distribution business with Universal, it can purchase Warner Bros. Discovery in Europe.

Apple is reportedly launching Apple Upgrade with Klarna, a leasing program for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch purchases in the US.

The post Apple Reportedly Launching ‘Apple Upgrade’ Leasing Program With Klarna appeared first on TechRepublic.

Jean Paoli has spent his career making documents readable by machines — first as a co-creator of XML, then helping build the file formats behind Microsoft Office. Now his Kirkland, Wash.-based startup, Docugami, is open-sourcing the technology at the heart of its business, betting it can become a standard way to turn documents into data that people and AI agents can trust. 

The company is releasing its technology, called DGML (short for Document Graph Markup Language), under Apache 2.0, a widely used open-source license, so other developers and companies can adopt it.

The idea is to turn it into a shared standard that no single company owns, much as XML became a common foundation across the tech industry. 

The move reflects a shift in where the value is created in AI. Docugami until now has made its money selling software that turns unstructured documents into usable data. It’s betting now that there’s more value in proving that data is trustworthy instead. 

How it works: Docugami is teaming up with Inveniam, a Detroit company whose software helps big investors keep tabs on the mountains of paperwork behind real estate and other hard-to-value assets. Inveniam will record a kind of digital fingerprint of each piece of DGML data on NVNM Chain, its blockchain built with Mantra, a crypto firm that Inveniam is acquiring.

That means, for example, that a single fact buried in a 200-page lease — such as the rental rate, a renewal option, or a default clause — can be verified on its own, without exposing the whole document. An investor, auditor, or AI agent can trace it to the page it came from. 

To work with documents, AI systems usually convert them into a simpler format first. DGML enters a growing field of contenders in that regard, competing with the popular Markdown format and DocLang, a new open standard for AI-ready documents backed by IBM, Nvidia and Red Hat.

The business model: This is a big move for a company of Docugami’s size, taking the 30-person startup in a new direction. Paoli is handing the industry the technology his team spent years building, and pinning the company’s future on a larger idea.

The plan is to make money not from the format itself but from the value of the trusted data. Once a company converts its leases or loans into DGML and anchors the key numbers on the blockchain, investors, lenders and auditors can pay to draw on that verified data.

Docugami will share in the revenue through its partnership with Inveniam. The company also stands to collect a small fee each time a piece of data is recorded on the chain. 

The company is giving away the DGML format and a working version of the software, but not everything. Paoli said the company is keeping some of its own technology private, including AI models it has fine-tuned to read documents, and could sell those or other tools to enterprises. 

“The business model of everybody is changing. And if you know any company where it’s not true, you need to tell me, because I haven’t met them yet,” Paoli said in an interview. 

Docugami has raised about $13 million to date, including a $10 million seed round in 2020 that drew the first investment in Grammarly’s history.

The partnership: Paoli met Patrick O’Meara, Inveniam’s CEO, a few months ago, through a former Microsoft colleague who had become one of O’Meara’s advisers. They quickly realized they had been working toward the same idea from different directions.

Inveniam, founded in 2017, helps big investors keep track of assets that are hard to value, like office towers, private loans and infrastructure. It monitors the documents behind those assets and flags changes as they happen, and its clients include some of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, according to O’Meara.

What it lacked was a consistent way to break those documents into verifiable pieces. That is what Docugami provides.

“We’re not putting the data itself on-chain, just a fingerprint of the document. Change one bit, one byte, one pixel, and the hash won’t match,” O’Meara said.

The blockchain comes from Mantra, a crypto company run by John Patrick Mullin. Inveniam invested $20 million in Mantra last year and has since agreed to acquire it outright. Mantra’s OM token collapsed in April 2025, erasing several billion dollars in value. 

Paoli said the project uses the underlying blockchain, not the token.

“Crypto as an industry has gone through a lot of changes in the last 18 to 24 months, and it’s growing up in a lot of ways. This is a real use case with fundamental value, not just pure speculation,” Mantra’s Mullin said in an interview. 

The result is a division of labor: Docugami turns documents into data, Inveniam verifies it and brings the customers, and Mantra provides the chain where the proof is recorded.

The DGML specification, sample documents and reference code are at dgml.io and on GitHub. 

Editor’s note: This story was updated after publication to correct the name of a competing document format, DocLang, and to note that Inveniam’s blockchain is called NVNM Chain.

Aurum PropTech is buying Housing.com in a $47.5 million all-stock deal, but the harder test will be integrating its platforms and customer data securely.

The post Aurum PropTech to Buy Housing.com From REA Group for $47.5M appeared first on TechRepublic.

TSMC reportedly plans chip manufacturing price increases of up to 10% in 2027 as rising costs and global expansion reshape semiconductor production.

The post TSMC Reportedly Plans Chip Manufacturing Price Hikes of Up to 10% appeared first on TechRepublic.

The rumors haven't left much to the imagination, but Samsung has unfurled its 2026 foldable lineup today. There are three models for the first time in Samsung's eight-gen foldable family, including the top-of-the-line Z Fold 8 Ultra. That phone is the successor to last year's Galaxy Z Fold 7, but the Z Fold 8 is new—the company's first wide-body foldable designed for media over multitasking. And then there's a new, thinner flip phone, plus a pair of smartwatches.

You can preorder Samsung's new hardware today, but the component shortage has made these already spendy product lines more expensive this year. Even the Z Flip 8 is now well over a grand, and the Ultra costs almost twice as much.

The Z Fold 8 Ultra has the same basic form factor as the last few Samsung tablet-style foldables. A 6.5-inch OLED on the outside is about the same ratio as a standard smartphone screen. Open it up, and you get an 8-inch display that's roughly twice as wide. That makes the main display close to square.

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In the latest twist on battlefield innovations, Ukraine has used both flying drone carriers and drone boats to send ground robots armed with weapons or explosives into battle.

The drone-assisted deployments have enabled slower wheeled robots to bypass tough terrain and Russian defenses, and to carry out an unusual robotic amphibious assault on a contested position. Such tactics also showcase the Ukrainian military’s ongoing experimentation with using drones and robots to offset a Russian military advantage in manpower while also sparing Ukrainian soldiers from making dangerous assaults.

On July 19, a Russian military Telegram channel posted a video showing a Ukrainian hexacopter drone carrying a ground robot suspended below by a cable, according to the Ukrainian government-run news platform United24. The Russian Telegram channel described the Ukrainian heavy bomber drone as deploying a four-wheeled ARK-1 robot armed with explosive anti-tank mines on the ground where it continued toward Russian military positions—and apparently generated plenty of outraged comments from pro-Kremlin social media users.

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© Dmytro Smolienko/ Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images

a16z Speedrun, Ada Ventures, and Snowball VC have invested in Cascade's $3.5 million seed round.

Raspberry Pi has supersized its Touch Display 2 with a new 10.1-inch model aimed at dashboards, entertainment systems, and other projects that need more room for prodding. The panel is designed for use cases such as touch-enabled information displays. This is the big brother to the 5-inch and 7-inch variants, with a resolution to match – 1,200 x 1,920 pixels are available on the native portrait display. The 10.1-inch panel supports 24-bit RGB color and ten simultaneous touch points, up from five on the smaller models. The in-plane switching, thin-film transistor, liquid crystal display also touts a black surface that acts as a magnet for greasy fingerprints. According to Raspberry Pi, the touch response time is a maximum of 35 ms, and its backlight brightness is 400 cd/m2 – not class-leading, but more than adequate at a list price of $80. The viewing angle is 85 degrees and, as with the other Touch Display 2 variants, there is a hefty bezel. The unit is 161.8 x 247.3 mm, while the actual active area is 135.4 mm x 216.6 mm. We'd expect integrators to use that bezel when mounting the screen in enclosures. Speaking of which, while there is a handy mounting point on the back for a Raspberry Pi, the device is only compatible with the Raspberry Pi 5 and Compute Modules (not included). Since the screen draws power from a pair of GPIO pins, you'll need an IO Board or similar to use it with a Compute Module. The need for the Pi 5 could cause some cooling issues – we've noted before how much heat the unit can generate when under load. According to Raspberry Pi, the justification for the requirement is all those extra pixels. A spokesperson told The Register: "The higher resolution of the new display requires four DSI lanes of data to communicate with the host Raspberry Pi, rather than the two used by previous Touch Displays. The newer display connector on Raspberry Pi 5 and our Compute Module IO Boards support this!" Otherwise, attaching a Pi 5 to the back of the unit and connecting it is ludicrously simple. There's just a ribbon cable and something for power (both provided in the box) before screwing the Pi to the risers with the included screws and firing up the unit… Which didn't work initially. Does this screen come pre-borked? No. It transpired that we needed to update the EEPROM on our Pi 5 – the firmware needs to be from February 2026 or later. After a swift sudo rpi-eeprom-update -a and a restart, we were in business. In use, the screen is bright and relatively responsive. It also needs to be kept well away from moisture, so consider the enclosure carefully in environments where that might be an issue. According to Raspberry Pi, "Raspberry Pi OS provides touchscreen drivers with support for ten-finger touch and an on-screen keyboard, giving you full functionality without the need to connect a keyboard or mouse," which is true. It would, however, be a stretch to call Raspberry Pi OS optimized for touch (even with the pop-up on-screen keyboard). If you're expecting to build yourself an iPad out of the box, you'll be disappointed. However, that would miss the point of the 10.1-inch Touch Display 2. It's designed for entertainment systems and information dashboards. The image is crisp, and the additional pixels will make for better clarity. Considering the cost of Pi computers nowadays, the requirement for a Pi 5 could be irritating. It not only runs hot, depending on workload, but adding a 2 GB variant to the system will almost double the price of the screen. The technical reason is understandable, but the requirement could still hit customers in the pocket. Still, as with the earlier models, the Touch Display 2 represents an easy way to get a touchscreen up and running with the diminutive computer. For use cases that require users to jab fingers at a multitouch screen, we'd recommend it. Just don't forget the EEPROM update – documented with the release, if not in the press kit – and spend hours as we did repeatedly reconnecting cables in search of life. ®

Apple has again announced an increase in the cost of its service in India. This time,...

The post Apple Raised Apple Music and Apple One Prices in India: Full Price List appeared first on Fossbytes.

The four-year-old firm's latest fund is 60% larger than its second vehicle announced 18 months ago.

Samsung Galaxy Watch AGEs Index offers blood sugar-related health insight without a CGM. Learn how it works, what it tracks, and who may benefit from using it.

The post Samsung Galaxy Watch Helps Track Blood Sugar Health Without a CGM appeared first on TechRepublic.

One of Rhode Island's most-wanted fugitives was arrested in New York last week after being on the run for more than 20 years, which was at least partially spent hiding as a biotech executive, according to Stat News.

In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing Monday, California-based Immix Biopharma noted that Richard Graydon was terminated Friday for "reasons unrelated to his activities at the Company."

It turns out, Richard Graydon was an alias for Ronald Fischer, a 70-year-old former anesthesiologist licensed in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, who fled amid his 2005 trial for first-degree sexual assault. Fischer was accused of raping a woman during a date on his yacht, Lion King.

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The Galaxy Card brings Samsung Wallet integration and 5% cash back on Samsung purchases.