VerSe raises $805 mln; Twitter begins testing edit button; Charles Darwin’s stolen notebooks returned

VerSe Innovation, a local language technology platform company in Bengaluru, has raised $805 million in fresh funding, the company said in a press release. This investment follows the $650 million the company raised last year, taking the total capital raised in the past year to about $1.5 billion. The investment is said to have valued VerSe at $5 billion. Twitter has begun testing an edit button allowing users to alter published tweets, and Hypebeast reports. The company revealed the news on Tuesday, saying that it’s been “working on an edit feature since last year.” Twitter went on to clarify that it didn’t get the idea from a poll, a reference to its newest stakeholder Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, who recently posted a poll asking users if they wanted an edit button. While the decision isn’t entirely up to Musk, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal retweeted his poll and added that “the consequences of this poll will be important,” according to Hypebeast. Microsoft has elevated its Garage project Journal, a note-taking app designed for styluses and pens, into a full-fledged product now called Microsoft Journal, the company said on Tuesday, The Verge reports. The app offers “a delightful freeform personal note-taking experience that lets you take notes and reason through ink,” Microsoft’s Renee Malone said in a blog post. The app lets you write and draw like many other note-taking apps, but it also supports gestures like scratching out words to erase them and circling words or phrases to select them. Journal can also be used to mark up PDFs, a popular feature, according to The Verge. Spending on AI systems in the Asia Pacific region will almost double from $17.6 billion in 2022 to around $32 billion in 2025, IDC said in a press release. Over the next five years, the banking industry will continue to invest the most in AI solutions, according to IDC. Hardware will be the leading technology, accounting for more than 49.8 percent of AI spending; the largest areas of investment will be in servers, accounting for more than 84 percent of total spending, while the rest will go toward storage, according to the release. Two notebooks that belonged to Charles Darwin that were reported stolen from Cambridge University's library have been returned, two decades after they disappeared, Associated Press reports. The notebooks, which include the 19th-century scientist's famous 1837 "Tree of Life" sketch, went missing in 2001 after being removed for photographing. At the time, staff believed they might have been misplaced. However, after searches of the library's collection of 10 million books, maps, and manuscripts failed to find the books, they were reported stolen to police in October 2020. Associated Press reports that Cambridge university said on Tuesday that the manuscripts were left in the library inside a pink gift bag, along with a note wishing the librarian a Happy Easter. Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds: https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds