Business, startups, deals and the latest news from across the technology industry.
Western Australia is seeking a partial refund of the A$166,000 it paid Deloitte for a 219-page cost-benefit analysis of a three-university merger. The report has misattributed references, repeats 55 times a Curtin name unused since 2010 and contains arithmetic gaps of A$260 million and A$311 million. Its strangest flaw: a compliance section claiming no AI … Read more
Corporate AI adoption is running into an unglamorous bottleneck: messy spreadsheets. A formula suggested by an AI assistant cannot rescue a poorly organized report, and a polished explanation can still conceal a wrong calculation. That is the premise behind a wave of subsidized training programs that pair Excel skills with practical AI use, funded through … Read more
Tesla has crossed a threshold that is simple to announce and hard to prove. In its third-quarter shareholder letter on October 21, the company said Optimus production had started at its Fremont, California factory on high-volume lines, calling the units “the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured.” Yet the same document’s capacity table lists … Read more
Airbnb is finally putting a ceiling on the checkout chore list. From 20 November 2026, hosts will generally be barred from requiring guests to perform tasks that demand significant time or effort — or that a professional cleaner would normally handle. The updated policy, published in the company’s help centre and surfaced through its host … Read more
Electronic Arts has confirmed that BioWare is closing and that early development of the next Mass Effect has been halted, ending a three-decade run for the studio behind Baldur’s Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age and one of the most celebrated role-playing trilogies ever built. Staff learned the news on October … Read more
OpenAI has expanded advertising inside ChatGPT to 26 additional countries, raising the platform’s stated availability to 89 markets. The rollout, announced on October 21, 2026, is concentrated in Latin America, Africa and Asia, and it arrives roughly eight months after the company began testing ads in the United States. For Spanish users, the service reality … Read more
Fiber-to-the-home is now the default fixed connection in Spain, but the speed debate is still shaped by marketing rather than real workloads. The CNMC’s statistics note, published on 23 September 2026, reported 18.3 million FTTH lines in July, within a fixed broadband market that passed 20 million lines for the first time. For most households, … Read more
Microsoft has closed the book on Publisher. The desktop publishing tool was withdrawn from Microsoft 365 in a staggered rollout that began on 1 October 2026, and subscribers can no longer use it to open or edit .pub documents. The Document Foundation, the organisation behind LibreOffice, has seized the moment to remind users that its … Read more
Meta has rewritten the commercial terms that bind every business, brand and publisher on its platforms, and the new wording reaches far beyond Facebook and Instagram feeds. From 30 October 2026, companies that advertise, sell or simply run a business Page will authorise Meta to send automated crawlers across the domains and pages “associated with” … Read more
Google is rearranging how its AI-generated search answers point outward, pushing source links closer to the top of the response and testing a dedicated slot for authoritative pages. Hema Budaraju, vice-president of product management at Google Search, set out five updates for AI Mode and AI Overviews on 15 October, presenting them as an invitation … Read more