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LEADING MEDIA AND TECH INVESTORS BET ON “TOLLBIT” – THE FIRST PLATFORM TO TACKLE THE NEW ECONOMICS OF CONTENT IN THE AI ERA

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Tech Founders Raise nearly $7M in Funding to Create a New Infrastructure that Allows AI Bots and Data Scrapers to Efficiently Pay for Website Content

TollBit will Benefit Publishing Industry, Tech Companies, and Consumers by Boosting Content Revenue, Protecting Quality Information, and Reducing Legal Uncertainty

NEW YORK, March 5, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — TollBit founders Olivia Joslin and Toshit Panigrahi today announced the company has raised $7M for their new platform aimed at addressing the shifting economics of web content in the age of AI. TollBit allows AI bots and data scrapers to pay websites directly to license their content. The technology allows websites to monetize data and content, monitor bot traffic to sites, and easily onboard AI and LLM partners. By providing a tech infrastructure,TollBit helps to establish clear guardrails to reduce the legal uncertainty of scraping. The system relies on tokens that are issued and validated by the platform to ensure every scrape is authorized and logged.

“We are seeing a fundamental shift in the economics of the Internet: as more consumers turn to AI to meet their needs, less eyeballs will reach websites. This trend inadvertently undercuts the financial health of the publishers and websites that reliable AI needs to thrive. AI agents and LLMs are only as good as the information they can access so this poses a massive threat to the entire ecosystem. TollBit is building the infrastructure to help power the Internet in this new era by ensuring publishers and content creators can be fairly paid for their work,” said Joslin and Panigrahi.

TollBit has raised initial funding from top investors with ties across digital media, tech, and AI. The round was led by Sunflower Capital and includes participation from AIX, Lerer Hippeau, Operator Collective, and Liquid 2 Ventures. Among other things, the funding will be used for the continued expansion of TollBit’s tech team.

Researchers have already raised concerns that AI companies may be running out of high quality content and data and many publishers see language models and web-enabled AI tools as an existential threat to website traffic.

“Modern AI agents rely on a steady stream of fresh and high-quality content and data to provide users with trustworthy and timely answers. We believe TollBit will be a key part of the future AI stack, providing a mechanism to incentivize and compensate publishers for the content and data they produce,” said Anthony Goldbloom, Partner at AIX.

“This disruption is coming for every industry. Any company that relies on traffic to a website or app will need to rethink their approach. User-generated and aggregated content sites will soon be impacted as AI products begin to be able to take actions on end-users’ behalf,” added Liu Jiang, Founder of Sunflower Capital.

“Our fund and leadership have spent decades managing and investing in legacy and digital media businesses, so we’ve seen the enormous impact technology has had on the sector,” said Ben Lerer, Managing Partner at Lerer Hippeau. “The incredible power of AI promises tremendous benefits to society, but we need to act swiftly to coalesce around a sustainable content model that satisfies both the supply and demand sides of the market. If we fail to establish systems-wide guardrails and incentivize rich content creation, the entire system will collapse – it’s the start of a sinkhole and we’re all at risk of falling in. TollBit’s solution benefits all parties, protecting world-class journalism, creative content, accurate data, and LLMs’ ability to mature and improve.”

TollBit is currently onboarding publishers to the platform. Learn more at https://tollbit.com/

About TollBit
TollBit offers AI bots and data scrapers an easy and compliant way to compensate websites directly for content. The platform seeks to address the new economics of content creation in the AI era by reducing the legal uncertainties of scraping and protecting the health of the entire content ecosystem.

About Sunflower
Sunflower Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm that partners with foundational infrastructure companies building for the modern enterprise. We specialize in B2B products with technical moats in categories like data and machine learning, developer tooling, cybersecurity, frontier tech, and more. Sunflower was founded by solo GP Liu Jiang, who has invested in companies including Athelas, Clay, DBT, Hadrian, Retool, Semgrep, Temporal, Vercel, Verkada and Warp.

About AIX
AIX Ventures is an AI-native, early-stage venture capital firm, founded in 2021 by Richard Socher and Shaun Johnson, that includes some of the world’s top AI practitioners: Pieter Abbeel, Anthony Goldbloom, and Christopher Manning. AIX Ventures invests in founders who are developing industry-changing AI technologies. Its portfolio includes HuggingFace, Perplexity, Weights & Biases, You.com, Chroma, and others. AIX Ventures is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area.

About Lerer Hippeau
Lerer Hippeau is an early-stage venture capital firm founded and operated in New York City. Our portfolio includes more than 400 leading enterprise and consumer businesses including Zipline, Guideline, MIRROR, Blockdaemon, K Health, Warby Parker, and ZenBusiness. We’re experienced operators who invest early and stay in our founders’ corners as they build iconic companies. Learn more at lererhippeau.com.

About Liquid 2
Liquid 2 is building the most valuable ecosystem at seed.  Founded in 2016 by Joe Montana, our ecosystem is defined by a network of deeply rooted connections with our founding advisors (Ron Conway, Jessica Livingston, Paul Graham), top-tier co-investors, and a portfolio of over 800 technology companies representing over $100B of combined enterprise value.  Liquid 2 invests $250K$1M in pre-seed and seed rounds and our portfolio includes Gitlab, Rippling, Jasper AI, Retool, Anduril, Applied Intuition, Remote, Solugen, Astranis, Stoke Space, Rappi, WhatNot, Modern Treasury, Athelas and many more.

About Operator Collective
Operator Collective is an early-stage B2B venture firm and community backed by tech’s most exceptional operators and top-tier institutions. OpCo brings together leaders who are critical to a startup’s success but largely absent from the venture ecosystem – senior operating executives from diverse backgrounds who have built the world’s most admired tech companies. Our proprietary platform enables portfolio founders to efficiently tap into 200+ active Operator LPs to help companies as they build and scale, reach potential customers, and connect with talent networks for potential executives, board members, and industry leaders.

For more information contact: press@tollbit.com

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SOURCE TollBit

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Huawei Launches Over 20 All-New Xinghe Intelligent Network Offerings to Amplify Industrial Intelligence

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SHANGHAI, Sept. 21, 2024 /CNW/ — During HUAWEI CONNECT 2024, Leon Wang, President of Huawei’s Data Communication Product Line, announced more than 20 all-new Xinghe Intelligent Network offerings globally at the summit themed “Xinghe Intelligent Network, Amplify Industrial Intelligence”. These purpose-built offerings contribute to an AI network ecosystem and help customers seize opportunities for intelligent development and maximize intelligent productivity.

With the development of AI technologies, the world is advancing from digital transformation to intelligent transformation. All industries are quickly adopting AI technologies to create new use cases, for example, self-driving cars, intelligent diagnosis and treatment, and intelligent train inspection. All of these are significantly improving the efficiency and experience of our work and daily lives.

The advent of the intelligent era is driving networks into intelligent ones. Huawei has been making joint efforts with partners to lead research and practices of intelligent networks. That’s why Huawei constantly upgrades its Xinghe Intelligent Network offerings to help customers grasp opportunities for intelligent development, build new intelligent network infrastructure, and maximize intelligent productivity in the intelligent era. Key highlights include the following:

Xinghe Intelligent Campus focuses on AI-enabled, experience-centric campus network construction, ensuring zero freezing for audio and video applications, zero degradation on services, and zero waiting for interactions.Xinghe Intelligent WAN introduces a wide range of intelligent technologies to intelligently schedule millions of flows and precisely optimize service experience.Xinghe Intelligent Fabric adopts the AI Turbo engine to improve network throughput, enhancing foundation model training efficiency.Xinghe Intelligent Network Security integrates AI technologies into network security detection, accurately and rapidly identifying threats.

To support network solutions in various scenarios, Huawei released more than 20 featured offerings globally. Examples include the industry’s first 100 Tbps fixed-form Ethernet data center switch, the industry’s first 51.2 Tbps liquid-cooled fixed-form data center switch, the industry’s first AI router, high-quality 10 Gbps campus switches and Wi-Fi 7 APs, Intelligent SASE Branch Security Solution, and the industry’s first IP Autonomous Driving Network Solution. All these offerings are designed to help customers with greater business returns.

As the intelligent era calls for intelligent networks, Huawei will continue to drive the development of intelligent networks and upgrade its Xinghe Intelligent Network products and solutions, ultimately helping global customers to stride towards the intelligent era and reap more benefits.

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SOURCE Huawei

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HUAWEI CONNECT 2024 | Huawei Unveils the Brand-New Xinghe Intelligent Fabric Solution, Powering the AI Era

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SHANGHAI, Sept. 21, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — At HUAWEI CONNECT 2024, over 300 industry leaders, experts, and scholars gathered for the data center network session themed “Xinghe Intelligent Fabric, Powering the AI Era.” The event featured discussions on the evolution and technological advancements of data center networks. During the session, Arthur Wang, President of Data Center Network Domain at Huawei’s Data Communication Product Line, introduced the newly upgraded Xinghe Intelligent Fabric solution. This cutting-edge solution aims to establish a data center network characterized by one map for intelligent operations and maintenance (O&M), one network for diverse computing, and one platform for simplified deployment, providing a robust network infrastructure to support enterprises’ digital and intelligent transformations.

In his keynote speech, Arthur Wang outlined the emerging trends in data center network development. He emphasized that in the AI era, data center networks require both a “brilliant brain” and “resilient bones.” The newly launched Xinghe Intelligent Fabric solution is designed to deliver a powerful network infrastructure tailored for the AI era, featuring:

One Map for Intelligent O&M: Zero Management Concerns

Huawei’s exclusive network digital map enables rapid cross-data center and cross-vendor fault identification within minutes. Additionally, the NetMaster network large model facilitates AI-driven O&M, eliminating manual intervention and ensuring zero management concerns.

One Network for Diverse Computing: Zero Service Interruptions

The Xinghe Intelligent Fabric supports various application scenarios, including intelligent computing, general-purpose computing, and storage. The innovative Network Scale Load Balancing (NSLB) algorithm increases network throughput to 95% and boosts AI training efficiency by over 10%. With the exclusive iReliable three-level fast switchover capability, it achieves sub-millisecond switchover, guaranteeing zero service interruptions.

One Platform for Simplified Deployment: Zero Configuration Errors

By employing digital twins to simulate networks in advance and verify configurations post-deployment, the solution ensures 100% accuracy in network changes. By harnessing network-security convergence capabilities, AI creates an intelligent security matrix to analyze millions of security policies, achieving zero configuration errors.

Looking ahead, Huawei will continue to collaborate with industry partners to enhance research and innovation in data center networks, promote intelligent upgrades, and create greater value for the industry.

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SOURCE Huawei

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Cultivating a Culture of Peace: International Day of Peace Statement by Education Cannot Wait Executive Director Yasmine Sherif

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NEW YORK, Sept. 21, 2024 /CNW/ — The longing for peace transcends time, geography and religion. Based on justice, human rights and universal values outlined in the UN Charter, a culture of peace brings us all together in our common agenda for humanity. We can only co-exist by aligning ourselves with such a world order.

On today’s International Day of Peace, we call on world leaders to end conflict and embrace a culture of peace as enshrined in the UN Charter and related international law.

As the UN General Assembly outlined in the Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace  a quarter of a century ago, this must include: “Respect for life, human rights and fundamental freedoms; the promotion of non-violence through education, dialogue and cooperation; commitment to peaceful settlement of conflicts; and adherence to freedom, justice, democracy, tolerance, solidarity, cooperation, pluralism, cultural diversity, dialogue and understanding at all levels of society and among nations.”

Educating for peace starts at home and continues in school through years of education. This takes place during the most formative years of a child learning about their identity, ethics, values, conscience, courage and compassion. Wherever there has been a failure in imparting on children the imperative for peace, the world is turned upside down. This is a global failure with no geographical boundaries.

Today, we live in a world of unprecedented violence, armed conflict and chaos. All the genuine and heartfelt commitments made in 1945 in the UN Charter seem to be fading away. Children and adolescents are the most vulnerable, the least protected, and the most impacted. They bear the brunt. 

Global conflicts killed three times as many children in 2023 than in the previous year, according to the United Nations. The number of forcibly displaced people reached an unprecedented 120 million in May 2024.

“In 2023, the United Nations verified a record 32,990 grave violations against 22,557 children in 26 conflict zones, a 35% increase from the previous year,” according to recent analysis by the UN.

We can end these violations and invest in a constructive co-existence globally. We can use our resources for education, rather than for wars. In classrooms around the world, girls and boys who have withstood the wrath of war can rebuild their hopes and their lives. Cultivating a culture of peace is possible. The financial resources exist. The choice as to how we use them is ours.

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SOURCE Education Cannot Wait

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