Technology & Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms were down across wide swathes of the world today. Facebook’s internal systems used by employees also went down.

Nearly every other major oil company has abandoned algae research after a flurry of investment at the start of the last decade yielded few results. It’s another example of how ExxonMobil appears to be on a divergent path from its peers. 

An all-women video game design studio hopes to bring a concept first hatched in a St. Joseph’s Academy classroom to the marketplace. 

Workers across the country are getting dressed up and commuting into the office after months of doing their jobs from home—only to be forced to attend Zoom meetings and send Slack messages from their desk as if they’d never left their living rooms because the delta variant of coronavirus is spreading fast. 

Less than one year after its launch, Baton Rouge-based tech startup I Hate Receipts has raised half of the $1.5 million it is targeting in its seed round of funding, and has signed a deal with online retail platform Shopify, which will expose potentially millions of users to the company’s app.

Local entrepreneurs have launched a cryptocurrency and are building a platform they say will allow investors to profit by picking up-and-coming athletes.

Baton Rouge-based IT firm Vinformatix is positioning itself for growth in the government contracting sector through a new, joint venture with The Parnin Group, an Alexandria, Virginia, consulting firm that specializes in working with governmental agencies.

With rental cars still in short supply, enterprising car owners are renting their vehicles out to travelers through Turo, an online carsharing marketplace, Axios reports. It could cause a shift in the rental car industry similar to what was seen when Airbnb took off. 

LSU construction management professors Yimin Zhu and Amirhosein Jafari are researching how new technology can be leveraged to create next-generation learning environments for architecture, engineering and construction engineering.

The spread of the delta variant has kept many of America’s office employees working from home and fueled a rise in surveillance technologies by employers.