Geeky international news on technology, business and culture.
Opinion: Ukraine is becoming a global defence tech powerhouse
17 September 2025 @ 2:00 pm
The full-scale war has reshaped priorities for Ukraine’s tech sector. Innovative military technologies and advanced defence solutions are not only essential for the country’s security — they’re also among the most promising vectors for business growth. Ukrainian defence tech is tested directly on the battlefield, under the most challenging conditions. These circumstances allow products to prove their effectiveness, attracting interest from international partners, investors, and allied countries looking to strengthen their own defence capabilities. From my position at the heart of Ukraine’s tech ecosystem, I’ve seen how quickly the sector has shifted towards defence — and how global attention is now…Startup wisdom: Why resilience is the most underrated metric in startup success
17 September 2025 @ 7:00 am
Startup wisdom is a new TNW series offering practical lessons from experts who’ve helped build great companies. This week, global traction strategist Nina Aziz Justin — founder of The Resilience Mentor — shares her approach to building resilience. In the startup world, we’re taught to obsess over metrics. Burn rate, CAC, MRR — they dominate the dashboards and drive the decisions. And yes, data matters. But there’s something quietly more essential that rarely gets the same spotlight: resilience. This piece offers a balanced perspective — one that holds space for both sides. While execution metrics are essential for traction and…Europe’s AI boom is leaving femtech behind
16 September 2025 @ 8:00 am
Left unchecked, Europe’s narrow focus on AI investment will come at the health of half its population. As venture capital floods disproportionately into the AI sector, women’s health innovation — the definition of essential infrastructure — is once again left fighting for scraps. In 2021, global femtech investment peaked at €1.89bn before plunging to just €1.1bn the next year, amid a tech funding apocalypse and capital making a headlong dash towards AI. Several factors contributed to this decline — broader market conditions, withering investor risk appetite, and natural sector maturation. But the surge in AI funding coinciding with a plunge…Founders’ takes: Why we need European AI employees
15 September 2025 @ 6:30 am
Founders’ takes is a new series featuring expert insights from tech leaders transforming industries with artificial intelligence. In this edition, Lucas Spreiter, founder of German startup Venta AI, shares his vision of AI employees. Artificial intelligence is about to enable the most dramatic shift of the century: the transition from human labour to AI labour. In the coming years, businesses won’t just use AI as a tool — they’ll employ AI as real colleagues, handling critical workflows end-to-end. That shift is inevitable. The real question is: whose employees will we be hiring? If Europe doesn’t catch up with the US and…Big business can still innovate — by adding startup leaders to the C-suite
12 September 2025 @ 8:00 am
Startups love hiring big business leaders into advisory and C-suite roles. These hires solve a common issue: as startups grow and look to compete with incumbents, they need some corporate talent to see them over the line. But big, established businesses have a different common issue. They’re too big, too established, and being outcompeted by the very companies that are hiring their talent. Right now, it’s the hare and the tortoise — but slow and steady isn’t winning the race this time. Established businesses need to take a page out of the startup playbook and hire for the C-suite from…Startup wisdom: How to break the cycle of meeting hangovers
10 September 2025 @ 6:05 am
Startup wisdom is a new TNW series offering practical lessons from experts who’ve helped build great companies. This week, Vivian Acquah, a certified inclusion strategist, workshop facilitator, and founder of Amplify DEI, shares her tips on ending meeting hangovers. So, you’re a leader. Your leadership involves managing a team while having both a defined direction and multiple essential goals that need completion. Your goal is to plan effectively and empower your team to achieve high performance. The truth is that team leadership extends beyond goal achievement. Leaders must handle the complex interpersonal situations that emerge when working with people. The speed…Founders’ takes: How AI is rewriting the playbook for investing
9 September 2025 @ 1:00 pm
Founders’ takes is a new series featuring expert insights from tech leaders transforming industries with artificial intelligence. In this edition, Cem Ötkün, CEO and co-founder of startup scouting platform Bounce Watch, shares his views on how AI is reshaping investing. Venture capital, once built on networks and narratives, is now undergoing a structural shift. AI is no longer a futuristic add-on to the investment process — it’s becoming an operating system. And for those investing in the opaque world of private markets, it’s not optional. It’s existential. The broken machinery behind the pitch Despite all the capital flowing through venture, much…Is Europe ready for self-driving cars?
9 September 2025 @ 9:00 am
In a recent interview with TNW, Jelle Prins, the mind behind Uber’s first app, shared his vision of a world transformed by autonomous vehicles. “Imagine getting into a car here in Amsterdam in the evening,” he mused, “and waking up the next morning in a mountain village in France for a day of snowboarding.” In his mind, self-driving is the next step in the evolution of mobility, and the question is not if but when it will land in Europe. He shared his vision for this future — and his plans to design proteins using AI — with TNW founder…This story continues at The TNW: Events and media signing out, 2006–2025
8 September 2025 @ 4:33 pm
We want to share an important update with our contributors and community. After the FT Group acquired a majority stake in TNW in 2019, the Covid-19 pandemic severely disrupted TNW’s core revenue stream. Despite significant efforts in the years since, no sustainable path to commercial viability was found. In light of this and the broader financial outlook, the TNW Board has had to make the difficult decision to close its Events & Media division. TNW Spaces will continue to operate as usual, but the media site will only publish new content until the end of September, and there will be…ThReclaiming the stack: Europe’s bid for digital sovereignty
5 September 2025 @ 6:10 am
The entanglement of tech and politics has become impossible to ignore — especially in the United States, where the lines between Silicon Valley and Washington are rapidly dissolving. At President Trump’s inauguration, the CEOs of Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet took prominent seats — even ahead of cabinet nominees — an unmistakable sign of how closely US tech giants are now intertwined with national policy agendas. Just days earlier, outgoing President Biden had warned of a rising “tech industrial complex.” This isn’t just symbolism. It reflects a broader shift: US tech firms are aligning themselves with a domestic industrial strategy that…
When it comes to their strategy in the fight with Democrats over government funding and another looming government shutdown, Republicans say just let Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) keep talking, reports The Hill.“I think he’s disconnected from the reality of what’s happening on the ground in a lot of places,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), told The Hill.“People don’t want dysfunction. They don’t want a government shutdown. They don’t want people taking a sta
NBC News reports President Donald Trump and his wife Melania Trump have two different tactics for dealing with the Epstein scandal plaguing their administration.“While the West Wing is mostly in a defensive posture when navigating the Epstein controversy, the East Wing has had a more direct approach to any material that mentions Melania Trump in the context of Epstein,” reports NBC. “The strategy stands out in what has otherwise been a reserved posture from the first lady and her team, who have been more selective about what they engage 
On September 5, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that in August, the United States had 4.3 percent unemployment. The U.S. is not in a recession, yet there are warning signs for the American economy.Job creation, according to the BLS, is weak. And major economists like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich fear that President Donald Trump's steep new tariffs will lead to "stagflation" — a painful combination of inflation, high unemployment and weak economic growth that the U.S. suffered in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
President Donald Trump's $15 million defamation suit against The New York Times is a "publicity stunt" designed to intimidate the media by targeting the First Amendment's freedom of the press, experts say. The lawsuit, filed in Florida on September 15, named four NYT reporters along with publisher Penguin Random House, alleges "malicious defamation" from media described as the "full-throated mouthpiece of the Democrat party.'The lawsuit specifically names NYT reporters Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner, Peter Baker and Michael S. Schmidt, whose articles are cited in it f
The New York Times reports Larry Ellison is already a major stakeholder in CBS and Paramount, but now he’s angling for the massive empire of CNN and HBO, as well as a major share of TikTok.“If all goes as anticipated, this tech billionaire, already one of the richest men in the world and a founder of Oracle, is poised, at 81, to become one of the most powerful media and entertainment moguls America has ever seen,” writes Puck cofounder William D. Cohan. The move has echoes of Rupert Murdoch buying up Fox News a generation ago and giving the Republican Party an exc
Jimmy Kimmel drew the wrath of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Brendan Carr in response to the late-night host's comments on the murder of MAGA activist and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and the suspect in his shooting: 22-year-old Utah resident Tyler Robinson. Kimmel argued that the suspect was part of the MAGA movement, not a leftist as President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and others on the far right are saying. The late-night host never condoned the killing in any way, but rather, argued that the suspect had a MAGA ideology rather than a leftist ideology.Disney, in response, 
History’s path is never linear. But its turns can be very sharp.It is rare to be able to identify the moment when we can say “this is the point at which everything changed”. So have we reached the point where we can say the United States is in a constitutional crisis? Has American democracy failed? Has the US descended into authoritarianism? If the answers to those questions weren’t clear already, they are now. Yes. It is happening. Right now. Not because of one incident, but a series of moments and choices, events within familiar historical structures, that are pushing the US over the edge. The assassination of Charlie Kir
When Charlie Kirk was assassinated, he was sitting under a tent that had “The American Comeback Tour” printed in huge letters across all four sides. It was the theme of his tour of college campuses, a tour run by his Turning Point organization that was, according to NBC News, early-funded by 10 morbidly rich right-wingers.The question is “America Comeback” to what?In 1981, when Ronald Reagan was sworn into officeFully two-thirds of Americans were
Donald Trump has sued the New York Times for, well, reporting on Trump.Rather than charging the Times with any specific libelous act, Trump’s lawsuit is just another of his angry bloviations.The lawsuit says he’s moving against "one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country, becoming a virtual ‘mouthpiece’ for the Radical Left Democrat Party.” And so on.At least he sued The Wall Street Journal’s parent company for something specific — reporting Trump’s birthday message to Jeffrey Epstein (which Trump continues to deny even though it showed up in the Epstein files).Last year, Trump sued ABC and its host George Stephanopoulos for having said t
In the week since prominent far-right activist Charlie Kirk was gunned down, President Donald Trump has been consistently blaming the American left for the shooting despite the lack of a clear ideological motive. Now, longtime Republican strategist Karl Rove is calling out efforts to politicize Kirk's death.Rove argued in a Wednesday op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that while the person charged with shooting Kirk should be fully prosecuted, it's equally important to not blame groups of people for his death. While Rove didn't specifically invoke Trump's name, he notably cautioned against efforts to use Kirk's murder as an excuse crack down on members of the political opposition — something Trump did