In India, buying a gun is a WhatsApp message away

4 March 2025 at 06:00

When Rahul, a gun seller from the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, first used WhatsApp to expand his customer base over a year ago, he was unsure of his...

Mexico’s new tariffs hit Shein — and millions of local resellers

Rest of World

By: Melissa Amezcua

3 March 2025 at 06:00

For years, Lucía’s biggest worry as a reseller of items sold on e-commerce platform Shein was keeping a stock of unsold clothes at her home in Mexico City. Now, her...

A Shein re-seller in her living room, which she uses as a working place for unpacking products.

Gulf of Mexico vs. Gulf of America: How digital maps display disputed names

Rest of World

By: Viola Zhou and Khadija Alam

28 February 2025 at 06:00

After U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as Gulf of America in January, some digital maps quickly made the change, at least for...

Africa’s startup funding crisis deepens as Mastercard Foundation exits top VC firm

Rest of World

By: Damilare Dosunmu

27 February 2025 at 06:00

Mastercard Foundation has pulled out of a commitment to invest $100 million in a leading African venture capital firm at a time when tech startups on the continent are struggling...

China wants tech companies to monetize data, but few are buying in

Rest of World

By: Lizzi C. Lee

26 February 2025 at 06:00

Chinese firms generate staggering amounts of data daily, from ride-hailing trips to online shopping transactions. A recent policy allowed Chinese companies to record data as assets on their balance sheets,...

China has recently allowed companies to count their data as a financial asset.

Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud

Rest of World

By: Damilare Dosunmu

25 February 2025 at 06:00

Nigerian entrepreneur Fara Ashiru built her fintech platform, Okra, on Amazon Web Services in 2020. She would pay AWS in dollars even as Okra earned in naira because American cloud...

Why one of the world’s major AI pioneers is betting big on Saudi Arabia

Rest of World

By: Anup Kaphle

24 February 2025 at 06:00

With a long track record of groundbreaking research, outspoken opinions, and grand visions, Jürgen Schmidhuber is a unique figure in the artificial intelligence world — equal parts scientist and provocateur....

Desperate for work, translators train the AI that’s putting them out of work

Rest of World

By: Kaya Genç

20 February 2025 at 06:00

Turkey’s sophisticated translators are moonlighting as trainers of artificial intelligence models, even as their profession shrinks with the rise of machine translations. As the models improve, these training jobs, too,...

Tired of spotty internet, Bolivians are smuggling in Starlink

Rest of World

By: William Wroblewski

13 February 2025 at 06:00

Last month, Darren Jason Watkins Jr., a popular American streamer, broadcast a visit to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia’s largest city. As his stream kept glitching, Watkins Jr., known...

On a ridge above La Paz, the Bolivian Space Agency’s headquarters in Amachuma is the main control center for the nation’s Túpac Katari 1 telecommunications satellite.

Syria just hosted its first international tech conference in 50 years

Rest of World

By: Danny Makki

12 February 2025 at 10:31

While much of the world was focused on a radical proposal by the U.S. president to transform the Middle East, a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and tech leaders gathered...

Speakers present at SYNC, the first tech conference in Syria in 20 years, February 8, 2025.

Students are doubling as cheap labor for Taiwan’s semiconductor factories

Rest of World

By: Hsiuwen Liu

12 February 2025 at 06:00

Before Dang Nhut Hao came to Taiwan, he knew nothing about semiconductors. Growing up in Dong Thap — a southern Vietnamese province on the Mekong Delta famous for its rice...

Pakistan’s electric rickshaws are accelerating the country’s EV revolution

Rest of World

By: Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

12 February 2025 at 06:00

Pakistan hurtled toward its electric future in 2024. In August, Chinese EV giant BYD said it would set up its first South Asian production plant in the country. Three months...

Chinese Temu sellers use fake U.S. postage labels to boost their profits

Rest of World

By: Viola Zhou

11 February 2025 at 06:00

Some Chinese Temu merchants are padding their profits by using counterfeit postage labels to trick the U.S. Postal Service into delivering packages for free. Posts on Chinese social media openly...

"High postage costs eat into the razor thin margins of small e-commerce shippers.

U.S. tariffs on China can’t slow the impact of Chinese imports worldwide

Rest of World

By: Rina Chandran

6 February 2025 at 08:44

When do the U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods go into effect? The Donald Trump administration imposed new tariffs on China this week, with an additional 10% levy on all Chinese...

Is Google Maps fatally misleading drivers in India? It’s complicated

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

5 February 2025 at 06:00

Earlier this week, an Indian politician urged the country’s Parliament to support homegrown alternatives to Google Maps — blaming the popular navigation app for fatal accidents. Incidents due to Google...

GPS maps in India can fail to account for the realities of the roads.

DeepSeek’s rise shows why China’s top AI talent is skipping Silicon Valley

Rest of World

By: Viola Zhou

5 February 2025 at 06:00

At the end of his internship at Nvidia in 2023, Zizheng Pan, a young artificial-intelligence researcher from China, faced a pivotal decision: stay in Silicon Valley with the world’s leading...

Engineers at DeepSeek have built a generative AI model for far less than competitors.

Indonesia, home to the world’s largest nickel reserves, struggles to achieve its EV dreams

Rest of World

By: Michelle Anindya

3 February 2025 at 06:00

Karawang county, located about 90 minutes by road from Jakarta, has been a major automotive hub in Indonesia for decades, housing factories of companies like Yamaha and Toyota. Last July,...

Brazil’s push for comprehensive AI regulation

Rest of World

By: Rest of World Staff

31 January 2025 at 06:00

This report is adapted from Rest of World’s recent feature “The global struggle over how to regulate AI,” written by Katie McQue, Laís Martins, Ananya Bhattacharya, and Carien du Plessis. ...

The statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Non-Western founders say DeepSeek is proof that innovation need not cost billions of dollars

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

30 January 2025 at 10:15

During a trip to India in 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sparked controversy when he said it was “hopeless” for a young team with less than $10 million to compete...

DeepSeek has been celebrated by some outside of Silicon Valley as an affordable alternative to ChatGPT

Meet Eva, the AI chatbot based on a woman in prison

Rest of World

By: Santi Carneri

30 January 2025 at 06:00

María Fretes, a Paraguayan social worker, had long wondered about the lives of imprisoned women in the country. Then, one day in November, many of her questions were answered by...

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