
JBL Debuts Bar 1000 MK2 With Unique Twist on Night Mode
The Bar 1000 MK2 is a 7.1.4-channel Dolby Atmos soundbar that comes with a 10-inch wireless subwoofer. The speaker includes detachable rears you can place around the room, and the system's Night mode transforms these to become "fronts" -- the thinking is that as these rears are closer to your ears the sound is less likely to carry.
The system also boasts PureVoice 2.0, which analyzes the dialogue and boosts it, plus it includes the latest version of its beam-forming surround tech called MultiBeam 3.0.
The soundbar features compatibility with multiple streaming systems including Bluetooth and Wi-Fi with AirPlay 2, Spotify Connect and Roon Ready. You can control it with the JBL One App.
I reviewed the first models in its Bar systems back in 2020, and found that the soundbars took their rock and theater heritage seriously with plenty of deep bass. However, there is plenty of competition for high-end Atmos soundbars, including from JBL's parent company, Samsung.
The JBL Bar 1000 MK2 is available now for $1,199 while the other models in the Bar MK2 series will include:

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Forbes
6 minutes ago
- Forbes
Investigating Weather With New Satellites
It's no surprise to many of us that the world is facing unique kinds of weather challenges right now. Governments around the world are trying to get up to speed on information about changing weather and the life of the biosphere. In the U.S., The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA is responsible for much of this research. Among recent NOAA findings is that the United States has experienced 24 weather-related disasters causing over $1 billion dollars in damages, and that the country has been experiencing at least 10 of these a year for a decade. That's part of what has set the stage for ongoing efforts to improve our national response to the climate situation. The NOAA maintains various types of equipment and methods to analyze global weather and predict likely outcomes, while diagnosing the health of the planet. Citing increased disaster risk, the agency has established key goals including disaster response, recovery (restoring essential services and facilities) and mitigation of damage. But how does this work? What tools do we have at our disposal, and how does the public sector work with the private sector to address this? Innovating Weather Investigation Dan Slagen is CMO at a company that is helping to figure out what's happening at a global level. I covered the work of this startup before, in the context of what happens at Davos each year, and our 'under the dome' work with TCS, although the prior post had a bigger focus on deep space and market context. In a recent TED talk, Slagen reviewed more of what's happening with this type of research, and how the company is contributing to more granular understanding. He pointed out the value in observations with model training, inference and initialization, and reinforcement learning. 'Why is weather forecasting so hard?' Slagen asked. Answering his own question, Slagen suggested that there's a critical data problem that he called a 'lack of global coverage,' along with other 'coverage performance limitations.' But new satellites and deployment strategies may help. The Technology One of the interesting parts of Slagen's presentation, to me, was the enumeration of five kinds of data work that support operations. The first one is multi-spectrum imaging, and the second one is high-resolution imaging. These are pretty straightforward. The third one was new to me – It's called radio occultation. On Googling, it turns out that this is the study of planetary landscapes and infrastructure with remote sensing (check out this link from UCAR). Then there's a synthetic aperture radar, which according to the expert sources I reviewed, is a form of active remote sensing that uses the movement of the radar platform (like a satellite or plane) to simulate a large antenna — a "synthetic aperture" — which allows it to capture very high-resolution images. ChatGPT provides this step-by-step explanation of how it works, in plain English, using Wikipedia and government sources: In addition to the above four technologies, Slagen simply named 'telecom.' None of these, he suggested, is specifically designed for atmospheric 3-D research. A Government Directive 'NASA realized (the deficiency) years ago,' Slagen said, 'and they essentially said, 'look, whoever comes up with a new data architecture is going to completely give a step step function change to global weather forecasting forever.' went to work, building a microwave sounder satellite, and now has seven of these in orbit, having launched the most recent one from Cape Canaveral weeks ago. 'We're building a full-blown constellation that is the first commercial constellation on earth,' Slagen added, 'in order to 'see' weather for the first time.' Why is it important? One of Slagen's points is the collective cost of disasters; estimated at $1 billion every 13 days in the U.S. That keeps insurance adjusters busy. 'There are very few things on earth that affect all 8 billion people,' Slagen said. 'Weather just happens to be one of those things.' First of Its Kind As for Slagen's claim that is pioneering private sector work on microwave sounder satellites, when I googled, I also found resources for a similar project undertaken by Northrop Grumman, a publicly traded company on the NYSE. However, digging a little deeper, it appears that the firm created the tech for NOAA, so yes, technically, project represents that first fully private sector initiative of its kind. Watching the rest of the presentation, you can see how all of this contributes to robust weather data: Slagen shows us vibrant color pictures of weather activity, much of which, he explains, is new. We see storm movement in detail, and can forecast what's going to happen in our personal lives as weather events develop. That's a big value in a world where the weather seems to be constantly changing more and more often.


Forbes
6 minutes ago
- Forbes
AI Boom Fuels San Francisco Party Scene As People Seek Connection
Secret salons, oyster happy hours, coffee raves--San Francisco is back and basking in idyllic weather as rent increases jump to the highest in the nation. Streets are teeming with people racing to events, despite tech season being weeks away, when conferences like Dreamforce, Disrupt, TedAI and SF Tech Week take over the city. Much of the frenzy is being attributed to the AI gold rush with people returning to town to get a piece of the action, so over the past week I popped into several happenings to hear what everyone is talking about. Finding your tribe At AGI House, a sprawling Hillsborough mansion just outside of San Francisco, known for hosting tech celebrities like Google cofounder Sergey Brin and Grimes, dozens gathered for a garden gala featuring talks with industry luminaries OpenAI's chief strategy officer Jason Kwon and former OpenAI interim CEO Emmett Shear. It was as insider as it gets with a pulsing DJ set by Twitch cofounder Justin Kan, meticulously curated by AGI House founder Rocky Yu and Icons podcaster Melanie Uno. In the mix was Poshmark cofounder Manish Chandra who shared with me his views on the AI transformation. I asked, what will people do with their lives as AI frees up time, and more importantly how will they pay for it. He replied, 'I feel like we're moving to more and more abundance, even though the path to abundance always feels a little uncertain and dark." "When the dot com boom was crashing, it was impossible to find a job. Highway 101 was emptier than Covid. There were see-through buildings, literally no jobs, and people were throwing in the towel.' Trying times, he recalled. "I remember it from a personal perspective, because I had young kids and had to figure out how to survive.' He expressed how hard times bring out things that can transform you, whether you discover superpowers or connect with new people. 'Human connections deepen when times are tough,' he said. 'When times are good, people just kind of ignore each other.' He also said there have been far crazier boom and bust cycles that have come before, with companies giving away BMWs and other outrageous perks to attract engineers. 'In the nineties, technology was changing so fast, it felt like everything you were doing was going to become obsolete, literally every day," he said. 'Every 10 years, we predict the demise of Silicon Valley, and we feel like whatever the technology is coming is dooming humanity, and is more severe than last time. Yet here we all are thriving, sitting here this lovely evening.' Emmett Shear, now cofounder of Andreessen-backed AI alignment lab, Softmax, sat down with me to discuss how people can best keep their head straight during these times. He explained that in the seventies there was a seminal work authored by Alvin Toffler, called Future Shock, that explored the psychological disorientation that can occur as a result of rapid technological change. 'This feeling of overwhelm, that if things keep changing, I can't learn fast enough to keep up with the system," he said. "But the way you keep up is actually by giving up on trying to understand everything at that level of detail.' He then shared his barbell strategy for surviving the next five years. 'In a high variance environment where things can change a lot in unexpected ways, you should just YOLO big things that might work, because even if you fail, your tried-and-true plan could also fail. So there's no point playing it safe, might as well be ambitious,' he advised. 'On the other hand, as things get riskier, you'll need to build up safety and reliability support to counterbalance.' He said hunter-gatherers lived in the same situation we're wandering into, a world of forces more powerful than themselves and beyond their control. Not only was it spiritually, emotionally and intellectually beneficial to be in a tight community, but also economically sound. When you store meat from the hunt in the bellies of friends, they'll be around to help when you find yourself in a tough spot. Futureproofing AI bets Back in San Francisco, at a Michelin starred restaurant where the meal was served community style making dining optional, AI unicorn Honeybook gathered the press to discuss how AI is birthing a new breed of one person startups and solopreneurs. It was here I had a chance to talk with Jeff Crowe, managing partner of Norwest Venture Partners, who told me the story of a 20-year old founder that landed seed funding to create text-to-sheets, text-to-deck apps right before ChatGPT made it a feature. This led to the question, how can VCs futureproof bets to prevent obsolescense in the age of AI. He said the first thing to look at is product. If it's a thin wrapper around a core, it's hard to futureproof as the LLMs eat their way further into the application layer. 'It's how venture capital looked at personal software in the nineties and said what's the differentiation if Microsoft moves into the space. Thirty-plus years later, it's a similar phenomenon in AI products, where OpenAI, Anthropic and others keep adding functionality." As far as defensible moats, he looks for product capabilities not easily disruptable like those with domain-specific data, integration with large enterprise systems, and bespoke distribution tied to supply chain. If it's a product that's been around longer, he looks for how fast it's pivoting to AI, driving into core functionality as well as operations including development, customer support, sales, marketing, HR and finance. Because if operations aren't futureproofed, competitors can gain a superior cost structure and become more capital efficient and profitable. He looks to see whether customers are adapting because some are going to get accelerated, and others obliterated, with risks that have nothing to do with the core business. Lastly, he looks for a culture that's nimble and can move exceptionally quickly. A fan of young talent, Crowe believes hiring AI-natives is the best way to transform an organization, because their rate of change is less than a worker whose baseline is pre-AI. Embracing AI workers Across town, Initialized Capital was hosting its own press dinner, introducing their portfolio of agentic startups deploying digital workers. Runway cofounder Siqi Chen told me from the moment he launched his startup in 2020, he knew they'd never have more than 100 people, because they had early access to GPT-3 and knew they could scale faster with AI, than headcount. In contrast to Crowe's hiring strategy, Chen said, Runway is hiring only senior talent. 'The profile of how we hire is quite different today than it was even three or four years ago. It's staff or principal level only at this point, because junior stuff can basically be done by LLMs today." 'We're seeing non-technical people contribute on a technical level like never before-- tagging a robot to write the code for a bug--that's just magic," he said. Runway uses bots for everything, from qualifying leads to reviewing documents. One of Initialized other portco commented that they deployed AI in Slack for IT support under the name of Paul, not AI Paul. A bit head-spinning to think you can be chatting with an AI colleague and not know it, even if they are funny. Initialized Capital's managing partner Brett Gibson said it's the natural progression of where we're heading. I asked him whether this was the end of the app economy. He replied, 'Software is going to trend towards being generatable. There are going to be a lot of apps you still want a relationship with for a variety of reasons, because they have other people on them and you're collaborating, or perhaps the AI itself has a personality you want to interact with. It's not going away, it's just going to have to adapt.' And what about humans, I asked, what's next for humans? 'The one thing that makes me very hopeful is that if there's anything AI is very good at, it's personalized education. And so hopefully, that will be the path for those feeling left out. People should follow whatever they're interested in and curious about because a high agency person using high leverage tools are going to do something cool and that's valuable," he said. AI gets the last word Back at AGI House, hanging out with hashtag inventor Chris Messina, I asked what advice he would give Gen Alpha on where to focus their energies, considering how pandemic losers have become AI winners, with ballet dancers, hair stylists and bartenders the few trades AI can't replace. 'VCs are over, SAS is over, everything that's been going on for the last 10 or 15 years kind of doesn't really make sense anymore,' he replied. 'If you really want to invest in the future, it's about having a perspective, being able to bring people into that and creating movements.' Echoing what Chen said: "There's only one Mr. Beast--and so if you develop relationship as a brand, that becomes sustainable value because AI cannot replace brand. Or can it? ChatGPT, may have no defensible moat as an AI assistant, but as a cultural icon with an estimated 1 billion followers, it remains pretty much untouchable. Just like the city from which it came.
Yahoo
13 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Is This Fintech Stock Finally Too Big to Ignore?
With a market cap of $24.2 billion, SoFi Technologies (SOFI) is a fintech company that provides banking, lending, investing, and financial planning services through a single app. SoFi reported an exceptionally strong second quarter, with explosive growth in member acquisition, revenue, profitability, and platform capabilities. After delivering seven consecutive quarters of profitability and doubling down on a diversified, capital-light revenue model, SoFi is giving investors more reason to believe in its long-term growth potential. While SOFI stock has skyrocketed 52% year-to-date, compared to the S&P 500 Index's ($SPX) modest gain of 8.7%, it is still down 7% from its 52-week high. Let's find out if the stock is a buy now. More News from Barchart With UnitedHealth Under DOJ Investigation, Should You Buy, Sell, or Hold UNH Stock Now? Trump Won't Take Away Tesla's Subsidies. Does That Make TSLA Stock a Safe Buy Here? Can AMD Stock Hit $210 in 2025? Tired of missing midday reversals? The FREE Barchart Brief newsletter keeps you in the know. Sign up now! SoFi Reported Blockbuster Growth in Q2 In the second quarter, SoFi reported adjusted net revenue of $858 million, up 44% year-over-year (YoY), the company's fastest growth in over two years. Both member and product growth c'limbed by 34%, with fee-based revenue rising 72% to a record $378 million. SoFi added a record 850,000 new members in the second quarter, up 34% year over year, bringing its total membership to 11.7 million. It also added 1.3 million new products, a 34% increase, totaling 17 million products. Interestingly, 35% of new products were adopted by existing members, indicating strong cross-selling dynamics. YoY. Additionally, tangible book value increased by more than $1 billion, reaching $5.3 billion. Adjusted earnings increased from $0.01 per share the previous year to an outstanding $0.08 per share. These staggering numbers can be attributed to SoFi's diverse product ecosystem, rapid member and product growth, and an increasingly capital-light business model. SoFi's Loan Platform Business (LPB), which powers third-party originations and loan referrals, is growing rapidly. In the second quarter, LPB brought in $131 million in adjusted net revenue. In just one year, this segment has originated over $9.5 billion in loans and generated more than $500 million in high-margin, fee-based revenue. What is more interesting is that LPB is now larger than SoFi's original business (student loan refinancing). Management anticipates the Loan Platform's revenue could soon reach $1 billion. Despite being SoFi's oldest division, the Lending segment had its best quarter yet, generating $447 million in adjusted net revenue, up 32% year on year. The company's Financial Services and Technology segment generated $472 million, a 74% YoY increase, and now accounts for 55% of overall revenue. One of SoFi's quiet superpowers is its ability to fund loan originations with member deposits, lowering its cost of capital compared to many competitors. Total deposits increased by $2.3 billion to $29.5 billion, while total cash and equivalents stood at $2.7 billion at the end of the second quarter. In the Q2 earnings call, management discussed how SoFi is considering a bold move to tokenize its loans in the future. This aims to fractionalize ownership and allow investors to purchase loan assets in the same way that they would equities. If successful, it would increase SoFi loan accessibility, liquidity, and transparency. Driven by a stellar first half, SoFi raised its full-year guidance. Adjusted net revenue is expected to increase by 30% to $3.375 billion, driven by a 30% increase in new members of more than $3 million. Adjusted earnings per share could reach $0.31, up from $0.15 in 2024. Analysts who cover SoFi stock anticipate revenue and earnings in line with management's projections. Analysts expect revenue to rise by 21.9% to $4.1 billion in 2026, followed by a 76% increase in earnings to $0.53 per share. Trading at 41 times forward 2026 estimated earnings, SoFi stock appears expensive while also reflecting investors' confidence in the company's long-term growth potential. What Does Wall Street Say About SOFI Stock? Overall, Wall Street has rated SOFI stock a 'Hold.' Out of the 22 analysts covering the stock, five have a 'Strong Buy' recommendation, two rate it a 'Moderate Buy,' 10 suggest a 'Hold,' two analysts suggest a 'Moderate Sell,' and three recommend a 'Strong Sell.' The stock has surpassed its average price target of $16.63. However, the Street-high target price of $27 implies potential upside of 18% from current levels. The Bottom Line on SoFi Stock SoFi's second-quarter results show its position as a high-growth, tech-forward financial powerhouse. As CEO, Anthony Noto stated, 'Despite the significant growth we have achieved to date, we are just getting started.' With a clear focus on innovation, particularly in crypto, artificial intelligence (AI), and a member-first product ecosystem, SoFi is set for a stronger future, making it one of the best fintech stocks to buy now. That said, given that the stock is trading at a premium, cautious investors may prefer to build positions gradually around the $13 to $15 range to maintain a margin of safety. On the date of publication, Sushree Mohanty did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. This article was originally published on Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data