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OneWeb, a rival to Elon Musk’s Starlink internet satellite venture, is aiming to roll out coverage globally after successfully launching the final batch of satellites needed for its broadband service over the weekend.

The British startup launched an additional 36 satellites Sunday morning from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India, taking its total constellation so far to 618 satellites. The satellites launched 9 a.m. local time Sunday on an LVM3 rocket developed by India’s state-owned NewSpace India Limited.

While OneWeb has a few more satellites to deploy in May and June, it now has enough to deliver internet connectivity to any spot in the globe, according to company executives. The company hopes to offer its clients worldwide coverage by the end of the year.

“This means that we will be able to provide what has been missing for a long period of time: high-speed, low latency broadband connectivity onto every ocean-going vessel — yachts, maritime industry, oil rigs offshore — every aircraft will now be connected with a high speed, low latency connectivity,” OneWeb Chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal said on a call with reporters Monday morning.

“Desert, forest, mountain, Himalayas — hard-to-reach areas will all start to get covered.”

Barring a few ground stations which are yet to be established, Mittal said most of the “critical” Earth-based infrastructure for its network is now in play.

Founded in 2012, OneWeb wants to beam high-speed internet to the Earth from a network of low-Earth orbit satellites at an altitude of about 750 miles.

OneWeb plans to launch 648 satellites in total, of which 588 satellites are required for global coverage. The rest will serve as spares that can step in, in case some other satellites on the network go rogue.

OneWeb competes with a range of companies including Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Amazon and Inmarsat.

In July last year, it agreed a deal to combine with Eutelsat, the French satellite company. Management expects the merger to be finalized by the summer.

Following the deal’s completion, OneWeb plans to pursue a secondary listing on the London Stock Exchange.

The firm is up against some fierce competition. Starlink, the space internet unit of Musk’s SpaceX, has launched thousands of satellites to bring network connectivity to places with patchy internet.

Mittal said OneWeb had “some catching up to do” but added the firm is seeing “robust” demand from its target markets, which include North America, Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, Australia, Latin America and Africa.

The company, which is lossmaking, is currently generating revenue in the millions of dollars every month, according to Mittal. It expects to one day attract hundreds of millions of dollars of income.

Unlike Starlink, which sells broadband packages to consumers, OneWeb says it is targeting enterprise clients.

It has done deals with major telecoms firms including Australia’s Telstra and France’s Orange. By the end of March, OneWeb had 15 customers in total.

OneWeb was rescued from bankruptcy in a $1 billion financing package backed by the U.K. government and Indian telecommunications conglomerate Bharti Global.

In the face of numerous setbacks, including the inability to launch satellites from Russia following its invasion of Ukraine, OneWeb has continued to pull in hundreds of millions of dollars of investment from previous backers SoftBank to fuel its costly ambition of delivering from space.

“The promise I made to to British government has been realized,” Mittal said Monday.

The government holds a 20% stake in OneWeb and is its second-largest shareholder.

Following the transaction with Eutelsat, the government will retain some control through a “special share” that grants it a say on the location of future OneWeb launches and the national security safeguards the firm has in place.

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Jeff Bezos sells $737 million worth of Amazon shares

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Jeff Bezos sells 7 million worth of Amazon shares

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos leaves Aman Venice hotel, on the second day of the wedding festivities of Bezos and journalist Lauren Sanchez, in Venice, Italy, June 27, 2025.

Yara Nardi | Reuters

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos unloaded more than 3.3 million shares of his company in a sale valued at roughly $736.7 million, according to a financial filing on Tuesday.

The stock sale is part of a previously arranged trading plan adopted by Bezos in March. Under that arrangement, Bezos plans to sell up to 25 million shares of Amazon over a period ending May 29, 2026.

Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021 but remains chairman, has been selling stock in the company at a regular clip in recent years, though he’s still the largest individual shareholder. He adopted a similar trading plan in February 2024 to sell up to 50 million shares of Amazon stock through late January of this year.

Bezos previously said he’d sell about $1 billion in Amazon stock each year to fund his space exploration company, Blue Origin. He’s also donated shares to Day 1 Academies, his nonprofit that’s building a chain of Montessori-inspired preschools across several states.

The most recent stock sale comes after Bezos and Lauren Sanchez tied the knot last week in a lavish wedding in Venice. The star-studded celebration, which took place over three days and sparked protests from some local residents, was estimated to cost around $50 million.

Bezos is ranked third in Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index with a net worth of about $240 billion. He’s behind Tesla CEO Elon Musk at $363 billion and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at $260 billion.

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Google promotes ‘AI Mode’ on home page ‘Doodle’

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Google promotes ‘AI Mode’ on home page 'Doodle'

Google CEO Sundar Pichai addresses the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025.

Camille Cohen | AFP | Getty Images

The Google Doodle is Alphabet’s most valuable piece of real estate, and on Tuesday, the company used that space to promote “AI Mode,” its latest AI search product.

Google’s Chrome browser landing pages and Google’s home page featured an animated image that, when clicked, leads users to AI Mode, the company’s latest search product. The doodle image also includes a share button.

The promotion of AI Mode on the Google Doodle comes as the tech company makes efforts to expose more users to its latest AI features amid pressure from artificial intelligence startups. That includes OpenAI which makes ChatGPT, Anthropic which makes Claude and Perplexity AI, which bills itself as an “AI-powered answer engine.”

Google’s “Doodle” Tuesday directed users to its search chatbot-like experience “AI Mode”

AI Mode is Google’s chatbot-like experience for complex user questions. The company began displaying AI Mode alongside its search results page in March.

“Search whatever’s on your mind and get AI-powered responses,” the product description reads when clicked from the home page.

AI Mode is powered by Google’s flagship AI model Gemini, and the tool has rolled out to more U.S. users since its launch. Users can ask AI Mode questions using text, voice or images. Google says AI Mode makes it easier to find answers to complex questions that might have previously required multiple searches.

In May, Google tested the AI Mode feature directly beneath the Google search bar, replacing the “I’m Feeling Lucky” widget — a place where Google rarely makes changes.

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How a beer-making process is used to make cleaner disposable diapers

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How a beer-making process is used to make cleaner disposable diapers

Clean Start: Startup focuses on making diapers renewable

Disposable diapers are a massive environmental offender. Roughly 300,000 of them are sent to landfills or incinerated every minute, according to the World Economic Forum, and they take hundreds of years to decompose. It’s a $60 billion business.

One alternative approach has been compostable diapers, which can be made out of wood pulp or bamboo. But composting services aren’t universally available and some of the products are less absorbent than normal nappies, critics say.

A growing number of parents are also turning to cloth diapers, but they only make up about 20% of the U.S. market.

ZymoChem is attacking the diaper problem from a different angle. Harshal Chokhawala, CEO of ZymoChem, said that 60% to 80% of a typical diaper consists of fossil-based plastics. And half of that is an ingredient called super absorbent polymer, or SAP.

“What we have created is a low carbon footprint bio-based and biodegradable version of this super absorbent polymer,” Chokhawala said.

ZymoChem, with operations in San Leandro, California, and Burlington, Vermont, invented this new type of absorbent by using a fermentation process to convert a renewable resource — sugar — from corn into biodegradable materials. It’s similar to making beer.

“We’re at a point now where we’re very close to being at cost parity with fossil based manufacturing of super absorbents,” said Chokhawala.

The company’s drop-in absorbents can be added into other diapers, which makes it different from environmentally conscious companies like Charlie Banana, Kudos and Hiro, which sell their own brand of diapers.

ZymoChem doesn’t yet have a diaper product on the market. But Lindy Fishburne, managing partner at Breakout Ventures and an investor in the company, says it’s a scalable model.

“Being able to build and grow with biology allows us to unlock a circular economy and a supply chain that is no longer petro-derived, which opens up the opportunities of where you can manufacture and how you secure supply chains,” Fishburne said.

Other investors include Toyota Ventures, GS Futures, KDT Ventures, Cavallo Ventures and Lululemon.  The company has raised a total of $35 million.

The Lululemon partnership shows that it’s not just about diapers. ZymoChem’s bio-based materials can also be used in other hygiene products and in bio-based nylon. Lululemon recently said it will use it in some of its leggings, which were traditionally made with petroleum.

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