amsight, a German startup focused on data-driven process optimization, has completed a pre-seed funding round. The round includedA contributions from five investors: MBG Schleswig-Holstein and business angels Michael Wohlmuth, Alexander Flamboe, Andreas Berkau, and Michael Jonker. In addition to capital, the investors bring expertise spanning additive manufacturing, finance, and sales—providing value beyond funding. The investment will support the expansion of amsight’s sales and product development teams, as well as efforts to scale its platform and enter new markets. A second closing is planned, with participation open to investors with relevant experience in industrial digitalization and AM technologies. “This funding enables us to take the next big step,” said Dr.-Ing. Tim Wischeropp, Co-Founder and CEO of amsight. “Our mission is to bring data-driven transparency to additive manufacturing—streamlining processes, enhancing quality, and reducing material waste. We’re grateful for the strategic and financial backing of our investor group.” amsight team with its investors: Alexander Flamboe, Peter Lindecke, Raoul Dittmann, Tim Wischeropp, Simon Schauß, Andreas Berkau, Jonas Hansen (MBG SH), Michael Wohlmuth, Michael Jonker. Photo via amsight. Platform Overview amsight is developing a software platform that applies statistical methods and artificial intelligence to analyze production data from industrial 3D printing. By consolidating information from across the entire process chain and combining it with domain-specific knowledge, the software helps users detect root causes of defects, refine print parameters, and minimize waste. Engineered specifically for additive manufacturing environments, the platform offers seamless integration with existing production systems. Key features include real-time monitoring, detailed analytics, and end-to-end process transparency. Peter Lindecke (Co-Founder of amsight) testing the software. Photo via: amsight Milestones and Recognition Last year, amsight was named a winner in the Digital Innovation Startup Competition organized by Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK). The jury awarded amsight €7,000 and a coaching budget, recognizing its digital twin technology and its potential to improve cost-efficiency, quality, and resource use in additive manufacturing. New Defect Detection Tools 3D printing software and services company Materialise offers its AI-powered Process Control software for metal 3D printing. This tool allows users to control the quality of parts by analyzing data collected during additive manufacturing. Through this process, problematic parts can be located before the post-processing and quality inspection stages, which can add 30% to 70% to the costs of a final part.   Phase3D and Sigma Additive Solutions supported Materialise in the development of this software. They combined their supplementary data to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the 3D printing process.  Elsewhere, Californian metal 3D printer manufacturer Velo3D’s Assure Quality Assurance and Control System monitors the 3D printing process on its laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) Sapphire 3D printers. The tool offers live detection of defects and generates control and build report summaries.  Who won the 2024 3D Printing Industry Awards? Subscribe to the 3D Printing Industry newsletter to keep up with the latest 3D printing news. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, and subscribe to the 3D Printing Industry Youtube channel to access more exclusive content. Featured image shows amsight team with its investors: Alexander Flamboe, Peter Lindecke, Raoul Dittmann, Tim Wischeropp, Simon Schauß, Andreas Berkau, Jonas Hansen (MBG SH), Michael Wohlmuth, Michael Jonker. Photo via: amsight Paloma Duran Paloma Duran holds a BA in International Relations and an MA in Journalism. Specializing in writing, podcasting, and content and event creation, she works across politics, energy, mining, and technology. With a passion for global trends, Paloma is particularly interested in the impact of technology like 3D printing on shaping our future.

Fernando Higueras Underground Home | © Loreto Mellado, Flickr User Building is an art form, with many styles borrowing ideas and concepts from across human cultures and history. From hulking brutalist megastructures to humble teahouses, each building gives us a way to explore our culture and express what we find the most important. Yet, despite the sheer variety on offer, we do tend to stick to one connecting truth: if we live in it, it goes above ground. This makes sense, since building above ground is easier and it lets people see what they’ve invested in. It’s not the only option, however, with newer approaches taking a different direction, down. Building a home into the ground might bring to mind the Hobbit homes of Middle Earth, but the reality can be seriously worth considering, with more forward-thinking advantages than you might think. Underground Doesn’t Mean Darkness When we think of underground, we tend to imagine digging a hole, building something, and then covering it up. We see a bunker, hidden away from the world and invisible at a glance. This is one way of interpreting the idea, but more recent adaptions of this type of home see the home as more of a kind of artificial hill. An existing hilltop can be dug out, a home can be built on top, and the soil can then be placed overtop, recreating much of the hill’s original appearance. Taking this route means you can still include many of the traditional features that make a regular great. You can still include windows towards the sides for natural light, you can still add skylights, and you can still feature large doors for a better flow. In this way, we could see the soil and grass more as natural cladding, while the bones of the building are still traditional. Underground Can Offer Serious Advantages Working with and around nature plays an important part in modern living and home building. Both in creating a greener living space and protecting ourselves against more extreme weather patterns, underground homes can offer features that traditional homes cannot. Soil is a natural insulator, which can help keep homes cool during the summer, while keeping heat in during the winter. Being underground (at least if you’re up on a hill) will also protect from extreme weather events. Underground can be a perfect extension of green philosophies and technology, where solar power and natural wells can support low-impact living better than older techniques. People taking this approach might even use their yards or rooftops to grow vegetables, further supporting themselves into a more self-sufficient future. Costs Can Be Unpredictable No house build is ever cheap, but at least most builders and developers come with the backing of decades of experience. While many of the basics of underground homes are transferable from traditional setups, there are major disconnects here. Very few builders will know how to anticipate every challenge that building underground will represent, and this means you’ll have to overestimate your costs. Generally, we’d suggest at least 15% over your budget in reserve, as a start. Savings can then be aided by locking down sales of existing properties before your underground build starts. There are many traditional options here, but more modern digital approaches can also help secure your bankroll more easily and effectively. For example, if you’re thinking that I would like to sell my house for cash, these online systems offer serious advantages. Backed by the ability to sell in your own timeframe with no hidden fees, these systems can help secure everything you need before the hard digging and building work begins. With free cash offers covering properties across the UK, taking an approach like this is key to building confidence before you begin building houses. Underground homes aren’t yet on the radar for many people, but the ongoing advantages might become too much to ignore for anyone considering countryside living. For living a greener future while protecting yourself against what Mother Nature might throw out next, a comfy home like this could be the perfect fit. Plus, you’d get to use the excuse you’re too busy mowing your roof when you want to get out of something, which is almost worth the effort for the bizarre sentence alone. by ArchEyes Team Leave a comment

When Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) unveiled its expansion for The Broad last year, it continued the “veil and vault” concept the New York office introduced to the site in 2015. This week, shovels broke ground on the major addition to the Los Angeles art museum that brings the building’s interior surfaces to its facade. This week’s groundbreaking ceremony was attended by Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, Elizabeth Diller, The Broad founder and executive director Edythe Broad, and local politicians and business leaders. It comes not long after the passing of Ricardo Scofidio. DS+R first shared its vision for an addition to The Broad last March. The 55,000-square-foot expansion will contain newly acquired works by Lauren Halsey, David Hammons, Martin Puryear, Amy Sherald, and Hank Willis Thomas, among others. It will grow The Broad’s footprint by 70 percent from Grand Avenue to Hope Street. Elizabeth Diller attended the groundbreaking with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. (Courtesy The Broad) The expansion will match the existing museum’s height, albeit with a noticeably different material. “I consider these buildings to be siblings, not clones, with a shared DNA but expressing unique characteristics that enhance the visitor’s experience of the pair,” Diller shared in a recent statement. “By turning the vault inside out, the expansion will present new ways for visitors to directly engage with the art in smaller, more focused galleries or through serendipitous encounters with art in storage while preserving the intuitive logic of the original museum,” Diller added. The expansion is set to open in 2028, ahead of the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games. “As Los Angeles prepares to welcome the world for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games, there is no better time to celebrate the launch of The Broad expansion,” Mayor Bass noted at the groundbreaking.

All images courtesy of “The Promise of Spring” How Do You Honor an Artist? A Daughter Grapples with Continuing Her Mother’s Legacy April 10, 2025 ArtFilm Grace Ebert Anyone who’s stood to inherit a family business knows the difficulty of charting one’s own course. “Legacy is complicated,” says Violet Oliphant-O’Neill, the daughter of the wildly prolific artist Sarah Oliphant. “(When you have) parents who are successful, being their child is complicated.” Directed by Anna Louise Andersen, “The Promise of Spring” is an intimate portrait of a mother and daughter and the struggle of inheriting a parent’s passion. The film visits Oliphant Studios, which has painted backdrops gracing the covers of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and The New York Times and stood behind icons like Michelle Obama and Simone Biles, to name a few. It’s been in operation since 1978. Oliphant’s output is revered globally, but for her daughter, stepping into an essential role in the studio isn’t simple. The film follows the pair as they work together and unravels each of their journeys to art-making—Oliphant through a natural proclivity that began in childhood and Oliphant-O’Neill by way of her mother. As Andersen writes, the film grapples with “the tension between honoring family traditions and creating one’s own destiny.” Watch “The Promise of Spring of Above,” and find more from the filmmaker on Vimeo. Next article

Amid a plethora of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and model innovations, customer demonstrations and other cloud announcements at Google Cloud Next, Google this week debuted a new Google Unified Security (GUS) platform, delivering innovations across its steadily-growing cyber portfolio as it seeks to deliver better outcomes and integrate ever-more deeply with its customers’ security teams. One of the most keenly felt pain points for enterprise security leaders is the disconnected nature of the security product and services environment, with many organisations running huge numbers of complex point security solutions, leaving them with fragmented silos of data and a mixed up, even contradictory view of the threat landscape. This leaves them vulnerable and exposed to threat actors who know how to exploit these gaps. Google feels this pain too and, speaking to Computer Weekly ahead of the opening keynotes, Google vice president of security engineering Heather Adkins said that this had clearly motivated the development of the Unified Security platform. “I’m excited for customers because there are different things we now offer as a company,” said Adkins. “I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had over the past 20 years trying to put those things together.” At its core, GUS, brings together a range of security products and services including threat intelligence, security operations, cloud security and secure enterprise browsing, couples them to the capabilities it acquired in 2022 through Mandiant, and melds them into a converged solution powered by its Gemini AI. Google claims this lays the foundations for “superior security outcomes”, creating a single, scalable and searchable security data fabric that covers users’ entire attack surfaces, providing better visibility and quicker detection and response spanning networks, endpoints, the cloud, and other applications, all enriched with up-to-date Google Threat Intelligence and rendered more efficient with Gemini. “The unified product creates this unified data layer that you can query all the time,” said Adkins. “So if I’m a CISO and I read about [Chinese APT] Salt Typhoon in a magazine and I want to know if we are impacted, I can just ask. I don’t have to sort out a threat report and go and ask my SOC [Security Operations Centre] to dive in. “That’s the promise of this. You can completely change the workflows, whether you’re a CISO or a SOC analyst,” she said. IDC senior research director for security and trust, Michelle Abraham, said: "Google Unified Security represents a step forward in achieving better security outcomes with the integration of browser behavior, managed threat hunting, and security validation to strategically eliminate coverage gaps and simplify security management and threat detection and response. “This approach offers organisations a more holistic and streamlined defense against today's complex threat landscape,” she said. The scale and scope of what Google is bringing together with GUS is extensive, but with the spread of agentic AI across the enterprise predictably a big theme at Google Cloud Next, expectations at Google are high that the potential benefits of agents will extend to the cyber security realm. So says Google vice president of product management, Brian Roddy “I think customers are doing some interesting stuff with agentic AI,” he said. “Obviously people have started with things like customer support agents, but very quickly they are building tools that do deeper analysis, from tier one support to tier two and ultimately, tier three. “What we’re trying to do is in a similar vein, just on security. What are all those really toilsome tasks that make security professionals’ lives miserable? How do we make sure we take as much of that out of their lives as possible?” Some of Google’s biggest customers have already spent some time kicking the tires, and early customer feedback from these exercises seems broadly positive, said Roddy. “They really like this stuff. Some of the new tools that are in early use, things like the malware reverse engineering tool, that is something that is completely new, that I’m aware of, in terms of doing something that traditionally required years of experience,” he said. “If we can now do five to 10 times the amount of reverse engineering, that’s really bad news for the bad guys. We can stop a lot more attacks.” Google’s malware analysis agent is designed to investigate whether code is safe or harmful. It analyses potentially malicious code and is also able to create and execute scripts for deobfuscation, summarising its work and providing a final verdict. Early training exercises with this particular tool have produced some interesting results. Indeed, in one test run on a sample of the WannaCry ransomware worm that wrought havoc on the NHS in May 2017, the AI was able to find the ransomware’s kill switch and neuter it in a mere 34 seconds. It took Marcus Hutchins, the threat intel analyst who first uncovered the kill switch and used it to sinkhole the malware seven hours to achieve the same feat. Alongside the malware analysis agent which will go into preview for selected customers by the end of June, Google will also offer an alert triage agent to perform dynamic investigations on behalf of users. The triage agent will analyse the context of each alert, gather relevant information, and render a verdict on the alert, accompanied by a history of its evidence and decision-making processes. Google said the always-on agent will “vastly reduce” the manual work of tier one and two SOC analysts who may otherwise spend hours looking into hundreds of “dead end” alerts every day. “These are the first expert agents we’re introducing, there are many more coming,” said Peter Bailey, Google Cloud security vice president and general manager. “We see this as just a transformational way to run a TDIR [Threat Detection and Incident Response] pipeline far faster with far better outcomes.” Read more from Google Cloud Next Barbie doll manufacturer Mattel reveals how leaning on Google Cloud has enabled it to respond to customer feedback quicker and speed up its product development processes. Freshfields has enlisted the help of Google Cloud and its artificial intelligence portfolio to help streamline its processes, as its global chief innovation officer sets about empowering staff to confidently use AI in their everyday work.

Belkin's Connect Universal Pro Dock enhances your laptop's capabilities and overall experience while keeping things tidy and clean.

Here’s an interesting case of a company’s leadership getting very vocal about AI.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently outlined his vision for the company in an annual letter to shareholders, blending startup-style agility with the scale of a global giant. He addressed challenges, including artificial intelligence investments and internal culture shifts, and stressed the need to innovate quickly and cut inefficiencies to remain competitive in fast-moving markets. Jassy, who took over from founder Jeff Bezos in 2021, said he wants to run Amazon as if it were "the world's largest startup." The approach focuses on solving customer problems, encouraging invention, and giving employees ownership of their work. "Builders hate bureaucracy," Jassy wrote. "It slows them down, frustrates them, and keeps them from doing what they came here to do." He revealed that in his time, Amazon had solicited employee feedback on bureaucratic hurdles and implemented over 375 changes based on nearly 1,000 responses. Jassy also detailed Amazon's artificial intelligence strategy, noting that a large share of this year's $100 billion in capital spending will go toward AI projects – especially within the Amazon Web Services division. Amazon's push to embed AI across customer-facing products and internal systems makes AWS crucial to its AI goals. Healthcare was another focal point in Jassy's letter. He highlighted Amazon Pharmacy and One Medical as key growth areas and pledged to "iterate quickly" to expand both services. Jassy's tenure has brought major cultural and structural shifts to Amazon. In addition to cost-cutting efforts that led to tens of thousands of layoffs, he has enforced a return-to-office policy for corporate employees, rolling back the remote work flexibility introduced during the pandemic. // Related Stories Jassy emphasized key principles for maintaining Amazon's innovative edge. Speed was a recurring theme. "Speed is a leadership decision," he wrote, stressing that companies can move quickly without sacrificing quality by removing structural barriers and streamlining decision-making processes. He emphasized scrappiness as a key trait of effective teams, referencing Amazon's early days when small teams with limited resources developed services like Simple Storage Service and Elastic Compute Cloud. Jassy believes that fear of failure often stifles creativity, arguing that bold bets driven by customer obsession are key to achieving extraordinary results. "You rarely, if ever, change the world by doing the same thing as everyone else," he wrote. Ultimately, Jassy stressed that delivering tangible customer value is Amazon's most important success metric. Charisma or internal politics, he noted, should never take precedence over results when it comes to rewards or recognition.

JBL is one of the leading brands in the world of consumer tech and is renowned for producing everything from speakers and soundbars to wireless earbuds and headphones. Speaking of, we came across a fantastic offer on JBL cans earlier today while researching the top headphone deals:  Right now, when you purchase the JBL Live 770NC Wireless Headphones at Amazon, Best Buy, or Walmart, you’ll only pay $160. The full MSRP on this model is $200.  The JBL Live 770NC are a great pair of midrange ANC headphones that deliver a warm and bass-forward sound profile right out of the box. Fans of rock, rap, and other rhythmic genres will get a kick out of the kinetic default settings, but you’ll also be able to download the JBL Headphones app to choose a different audio preset or use the multi-band EQ to make your own sound profile!  Related When it comes to noise-canceling, the 770NC are top-notch. The robust ANC system reduces humming and droning from buses, planes, trains, and HVAC units and does a decent job at deadening workplace chit-chat. The beam-forming mic isn’t the best for taking phone calls, as it has a hard time cutting out background noise, but it’s a feature that’s available to you nonetheless.  You’ll also get up to 50 hours of battery life with ANC enabled, and just five minutes of recharging nets you an extra five playback hours. There’s also an auto-off timer for ensuring your headphones power down when not in use.  Save $40 when you purchase the JBL Live 770NC Wireless Headphones today, and be sure to take a look at our lists of the best Amazon deals and top Best Buy deals for even more discounts on JBL audio! Editors’ Recommendations

Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza direct an impressively raw, unsentimental combat drama about a group of Navy SEALs in Iraq.