Latest news with #ANNA
Finextra
2 days ago
- Business
- Finextra
Anna Money taps Episode Six to expand SME business debit card offering
Episode Six, a leading global technology provider of enterprise-grade card issuing and ledger infrastructure, today announced the successful migration of ANNA Money's business debit card program. 0 ANNA Money, the UK-based mobile business banking account for startups, small businesses and sole traders, selected Episode Six to deliver a more reliable, scalable, and configurable platform that supports growing product needs, global expansion, and seamless integration. Business debit cards are core to ANNA Money's offering, giving customers a secure, convenient way to pay suppliers and make business-related purchases directly from their account. With Episode Six's modern card infrastructure, ANNA Money now offers its customers a business debit card that supports full use of all of ANNA Money's features. 'ANNA Money is a great example of what's possible when fintechs pair vision with the right infrastructure,' said John Mitchell, CEO and Co-Founder of Episode Six. 'By leveraging our platform, they've migrated to a sophisticated card platform to enhance the overall ANNA Money offering forto its business customers, at scale and with speed.' By leveraging Episode Six's modern card infrastructure, ANNA Money has seamlessly integrated virtual and physical card capabilities into its mobile-first business account experience. The high-performance platform enables real-time transaction visibility, instant card issuance, and flexible configuration of features and workflows, empowering ANNA Money to quickly adapt to evolving customer needs. 'We needed a partner with proven infrastructure and the agility to match our pace and expansion,' said Alex Kokovin, COO at ANNA Money. 'Episode Six delivered on all fronts, addressing the limitations we previously faced. Their technology allows us to offer business debit cards, deliver a seamless experience to our customers, and scale with confidence. We reviewed a large number of vendors and Episode Six stood out for their experience, agility, and proven ability to migrate live card programs successfully.' This go-live comes at a pivotal time as demand for modern card solutions continues to rise among SMEs in the UK. With this launch, Episode Six continues to expand its presence in the UK and Europe, supporting fintech leaders like ANNA Money with the infrastructure needed to scale, innovate, and grow.
New European
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
No, Greta Garbo didn't want to be alone
The suave 47-year-old said nothing. He simply picked up his fountain pen and drew a large rectangle on the back of an envelope in black ink to represent a billboard. And then, inside it, he wrote just two words: 'Garbo Talks!'. In less than five seconds, he had delivered an unimprovable marketing slogan. Frank Whitbeck was a big deal at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He had acted in and produced a few big films for the studio but by the late 1920s was in possession of a key to the executive washroom as chief of the gloriously titled 'Publicity/Exploitation Department.' Over the next two decades, he would feature as narrator in dozens of films and voice theatrical trailers for classics such as National Velvet and The Wizard of Oz, but it is what happened in a hitherto uninspiring meeting to discuss promotion for forthcoming major release Anna Christie that cements his place in movie history. Anna Christie featured MGM's (and, at that point, the world's) most bankable and fascinating movie star, Greta Garbo, in a film that would make or break her career. Warner Brothers had released The Jazz Singer two years earlier, 'talkies' were taking over and while MGM had begun to follow suit, they were worried that Garbo's Swedish accent would stop her making a successful transition from silent films. The actress shared their trepidation. At 2.30am on the day filming in sound began – October 14, 1929 – she called her young compatriot Wilhelm Sörenson and demanded he come round to her mansion on Chevy Chase Drive in Beverly Hills to drink coffee with her. At 6am, on their way to the studio, he heard a voice from underneath the rug beside him in the car. '[It was] the moving plaint of a little girl,' he recalled later. 'Oh, Sören, I feel like an unborn child just now.'' Yet the concerns of both studio and actress were laughably unnecessary. About 16 minutes into Anna Christie, the queen of working a pause and holding the attention of the audience enters a down-at-heel bar stage right, shoots a stare at the barkeeper and, clearly carrying heavy baggage both literal and metaphorical, slumps into a wooden chair. Pause. All eyes (and ears) on Garbo. ANNA: 'Gimme a whiskey. Ginger ale on the side… And don't be stingy, baby.' BARMAN: 'Shall I serve it in a pail?' ANNA: 'That suits me down to the ground.' Garbo's Anna Christie is very far from being a 'little girl' or any of the other characters she had become famous for playing during the silent era. As Robert Gottlieb, one of her many biographers, put it, she had been 'the prima donna, the vamp, the spy, the flaunter of furs and jewels, the doomed driver of an Hispano-Suiza, the murderess, the mistress of Deco'. For this part, the most important of her career, she was to play a cynical, shambolic, world-weary former prostitute seeking comfort from the bottom of a glass. The performance was sophisticated and acclaimed but almost lost to the reaction of an adoring audience finally putting a voice to the beautiful face they had already fallen in love with. The Herald Tribune gushed: 'Her voice is revealed as a deep, husky, throaty contralto that possesses every bit of that fabulous poetic glamour that has made this distant Swedish lady the outstanding actress of the motion picture world.' American film magazine Picture Play went route one with 'The voice that shook the world!' Anna Christie helped earn Garbo her an Academy Award nomination for best actress in 1930. By the time Grand Hotel was released in 1932 she was the top box-office draw in the world. Less than a decade later, at the age of just 36, she would shock the world once again by announcing a complete withdrawal from Hollywood and the high-profile celebrity lifestyle associated with it – a 'temporary retirement' that would last 49 years. As exhausted ballerina Grusinskaya in Grand Hotel, Garbo had delivered her most iconic line: 'I want to be alone'. It had been appropriated even before she retired as a shorthand explanation for her reluctance to give interviews and or be photographed in public, but now it survives as a de facto five-word epitaph and explanation for her incredible life and the sudden decision to turn her back on Hollywood. It lends her an enduring mystique, but is also key to a resurgence in her popularity among a new generation intrigued by the idea of one of the most glamorous and famous women in the world seemingly determined to reverse-engineer something like a normal life for herself. Add rumours about her private life (she never married but had a number of documented love affairs including one with silent-movie star John Gilbert and, it has been suggested, liaisons with several women including Marlene Dietrich, Billie Holiday and writer Mercedes de Acosta), her subsequent status as both an LGBTQ+ icon (her lead in Queen Christina, playing up her androgyny to the max, is now regarded as a gay cinema classic) and an exemplar of timeless style and it is not hard to detect a note of longing and loss in the title of Sky Arts' new documentary, Garbo: Where Did You Go?. British film-maker Lorna Tucker had access to home movie footage from one of Garbo's Swedish friends, archive phone calls and over 200 unpublished letters belonging to Garbo's great-nephew Scott Reisfield, who has also just written Greta Garbo and The Rise of the Modern Woman. It joins at least another five other biographies published since 2020 but both Tucker and Reisfield present us with an unfamiliar Garbo, one that challenges the 'I want to be alone' cliche. The documentary shows her relaxing and enjoying time with friends, larking about for the camera, guard dropped, being silly and enjoying life, while Reisfield's letters reveal the domestic Garbo talking about moving back to Sweden with her family and buying a farm, the emotional Garbo who writes a note to herself on the death of longtime intimate George Schlee in 1964 and the ambitious post-retirement Garbo talking of future acting roles and directing films. 'The whole 'Garbo is a recluse' meme was a media creation,' laughs the 67-year-old from his home in Colorado. 'Sure, she was private. But not in a JD Salinger kind of way… Yes, she did sometimes hold her hand up to ruin a paparazzi shot, but that then became the shot and the story around it would be: 'This is a woman who never goes out,' but she did go out.' Tucker agrees. 'She partied like mad but just at friends' houses,' the director points out. 'She was having a wild time, but in private.' Garbo hated the constant harassment that began in earnest on a trip to New York in 1931 (a development many consider to be the birth of paparazzi-style reportage) and was aware of but powerless to resist the vicious circle that came with it. The more she kicked back against the attention, the bigger the story, the more valuable the next photo, the more photographers chasing the money, the more coverage and column inches she received, the more famous she became. 'There were plenty of people who stalked Garbo,' claims Reisfield, 'And people who came to LA to marry her but there was no infrastructure, like there is in the current celebrity culture, to insulate her from that.' Unsurprisingly, perhaps, she soon became psychologically intimidated by crowds to the extent that it became an issue she needed to work through with psychiatrists. At the same time, chased everywhere by the world's press, she had nowhere to hide but, as both documentary and book are at pains to point out, just because she wanted to be alone it did not necessarily mean she shunned personal contact. In fact, there is still a debate in certain quarters about whether her signature line in Grand Hotel was actually 'I want to be let alone' rather than 'I want to be alone'. Garbo had mischievously suggested as much in an interview shortly after the film was released. 'There is all the difference,' she went on to add. The actress had no children but was very close to Scott's mother Gray Reisfield, her brother's daughter, who inherited her entire estate in 1990. 'I think of Garbo's presence in my life as like a bonus grandparent,' says her great-nephew now. 'I didn't have the relationship with her my mom had, which was much closer, but she would come to our house or we would meet her in New York. I have a whole bunch of memories of her doing cartwheels or walking with her so she was in my life over decades and you just get a sense of a person even as a kid. 'That gave me background knowledge that other biographers do not have in order to strip out certain bogus sources that cashed in by talking to the press back in the day but who were not necessarily telling the truth. That's when you get a different picture of Garbo. The real one.' It's the same person who emerges in the documentary: A woman tired of the studio ('MGM is pretty rotten'), its lack of artistic integrity ('Many of the directors here know nothing about emotional life') and, of course, the whole Hollywood machine ('They're marrying me for the 759th time, can you think of anything lower than the people who are in charge of this so-called art I'm part of?'). But not tired of life. To answer the question posed by Tucker's film, Garbo: Where Did You Go? directly, after she quit in 1941 she went wherever she could go to avoid the stalkers, fans and photographers. She moved to Manhattan in 1951, taking quarters in the Hotel Ritz Tower on Park Avenue and then Hampshire House before moving to the seven-room apartment at 450 East Fifty-Second Street in 1953 that she would call home for the rest of her life. Hidden in plain sight, she loved to go shopping behind a large pair of sunglasses and/or a hat. She threw herself into collecting art (and at one point owned three Renoirs) and expensive pieces of furniture including a carved Louis XV chair that lived next to a dime-store blow-up snowman in her apartment. She dated, maintained relationships and was still being propositioned at the age of 80. She holidayed extensively but always to places where she knew she could be herself. 'Her year had a pattern and she did similar things at the same time every year,' says Riesfield. 'So she would always go to Europe, in the 1950s it was mostly on the French Riviera but from 1960 on, even if she went to the Riviera for a couple of weeks, she then spent most of the fall in Klosters. She would always go to California or New Mexico and often Wisconsin because there was no media covering her there, but I think she thought of herself as more European than American, and then after that, maybe a citizen of the world.' It doesn't read much like a woman who has chosen isolation because she wants 'to be alone', does it? It reads more like the life of a modern and emancipated woman years ahead of her time and living life on her own terms with the financial freedom her own remarkable talent and hard work has earned. One story has it that a fan recognised her at a road junction in Manhattan in the late 1950s and asked: 'Are you Greta Garbo?' To which she simply replied, 'I was Greta Garbo'. Then, without waiting for either the signal or a response, she crossed the street. Garbo: Where Did You Go? is on Sky Arts, Freeview and streaming service NOW Bill Borrows is a journalist, feature writer and columnist
Daily Mail
09-05-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
Sex, cows and Diet Coke: The wacky questions Aussies are asking AI in private are revealed
A new artificial intelligence-powered tax bot is lifting the lid on the bizarre questions people are asking the technology in private. And it's weirder than you could possibly imagine. AI powered SME business account provider ANNA (Absolutely No Nonsense Admin) Money has launched an AI assistant. The assistant has been trained on over 100,000 pages of tax legislation and guidance. Since its launch, customers have asked the bot more than 30,000 questions, with around 500 being sent in daily. While many of those are standard tax-time fare, others have gone off track. Some of the real questions asked by customers include, 'How to do sex?', 'If I sell a cow, do I need to charge VAT?', 'Can I claim driving lessons for my cleaner?' Other questions included 'Is ice cream always a variable supply?' and 'Are horses considered company assets?' 'We trained it on everything from GST law to livestock accounting,' Anna Money CEO Ryan Edwards-Pritchard told Daily Mail Australia on Friday. 'But even we were surprised with further questions being about alpaca write-offs, wedding DJs, and whether 600 packs of Tim Tams count as a business expense.' 'That said, at least our AI assistant answered all of them. Instantly. No judgment. 'So if you've ever Googled "Can my dog's birthday party be tax-deductible?" you'll feel right at home, we've built the business account for you.' In 2018, ANNA launched a business debit card in the UK that emits a 'meow' sound through its mobile app whenever a transaction occurs. The company is also understood to be developing a card that 'woofs' which could soon be available to customers Down Under. 'Tax should be a little less painful,' Edwards-Pritchard said. 'Why not make it fun?' A recent study produced by the University of Melbourne, revealed that half of Australians, or 50 per cent, use AI regularly. However, it also found that Australians were less trusting in the technology, with only 30 per cent believing AI's benefits outweigh the risks. Aussies were also found to have lower AI literacy rates than other nations, with just 24 per cent reporting to have undertaken AI-related training or study.
Yahoo
26-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Why AleAnna, Inc. (ANNA) Is Up the Most So Far in 2025
We recently published a list of . In this article, we are going to take a look at where AleAnna, Inc. (NASDAQ:ANNA) stands against other energy stocks that are up the most so far in 2025. The energy sector has been volatile, and macro trends have led to fears of recession. The S&P 500 energy sector gained almost 9% from January till late March, but it has been dragged down by the broader market correction. Brent futures have hit lows and sent many energy stocks into a tailspin. Yet, there are still some energy stocks that have defied the odds and have delivered solid gains. Midstream companies have been exceptionally resilient, and renewables have also been a bright spot in the energy sector. Even during bear markets there are pockets of the market that perform exceptionally well. For instance, tech stocks have been in a bear market, but I recently identified in another article. For this article, I screened the best-performing energy stocks year-to-date. I will also mention the number of hedge fund investors in these stocks. Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter's strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 373.4% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 218 percentage points (). A miner with a pick-axe surveying a gas well, showing the human element of resource extraction. Number of Hedge Fund Holders In Q4 2024: 10 AleAnna, Inc. (NASDAQ:ANNA) is a natural gas resource company focused on delivering conventional and renewable natural gas supplies in Italy and Europe. The most important catalyst for the stock's surge in 2025 was the commencement of gas production at the Longanesi field on March 13, 2025, after the company secured all regulatory approvals. This milestone, combined with a multi-year gas sales agreement with Shell Energy Europe, provided AleAnna (NASDAQ:ANNA) with a significant new revenue stream. Natural gas prices in Europe have more than doubled over the past year, further boosting the company's potential cash flows and attracting investor attention. AleAnna (NASDAQ:ANNA) also completed three strategic acquisitions of renewable natural gas plant projects in Italy in 2024, which generated $1.4 million in electricity production revenue and expanded its renewable portfolio. ANNA stock is up 61.36% year-to-date. Overall, ANNA ranks 1st on our list of energy stocks that are up the most so far in 2025. While we acknowledge the potential of ANNA, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter time frame. There is an AI stock that went up since the beginning of 2025, while popular AI stocks lost around 25%. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than ANNA but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about this . READ NEXT: and . Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at . Sign in to access your portfolio
Forbes
14-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
TheStage AI Secures $4.5 Million Round To Revolutionize Neural Network Optimization
TheStage AI Elastic models In the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence landscape, one of the most persistent challenges has been the resource-intensive process of optimizing neural networks for deployment. While AI tools have automated countless tasks for developers, designers, and business professionals, AI engineers themselves have been left to manually fine-tune models — a process that can take months and consume significant GPU resources. Delaware-based TheStage AI is changing this paradigm with their innovative approach to neural network optimization. The startup recently announced a $4.5 million funding round to commercialize their Automatic NNs Analyzer (ANNA), a technology that promises to reduce optimization time from months to hours while making neural networks up to five times more cost-effective. The investment round attracted a roster of prominent backers including Mehreen Malik, Dominic Williams (DFINITY), Atlantic Labs (SoundCloud), Nick Davidov (DVC) and AAL VC. The startup has already attracted customers like and collaborated with Nebius, and brought on the Liberman brothers as advisors. "AI models excel at implementing ideas and logic that are difficult to express through traditional deterministic algorithms. When we deploy these AI models, we're bringing these ideas to life," said Kirill Solodskih, CEO and Co-Founder of TheStage AI. "We've created a service that allows AI engineers and developers to compress, package, and deploy models to any device as easily as copy and paste." TheStage AI founding team, from left to right: Azim Kurbanov, Kirill Solodskih and Ruslan ... More Aydarkhanov, Lead investor Mehreen Malik expressed confidence in the company's approach: "I look for people who have the horsepower to solve hard problems, the determination and ambition to build an enduring company for the long term, and the ability to explain a future and make it seem inevitable. Kirill had this in spades with an almost romanticised version of what a tool could do for machine learning architects." The startup has already attracted customers like and partnered with Nebius, among others. The timing for TheStage AI's solution appears opportune. According to McKinsey data, up to 70% of the cost of deploying AI systems stems from GPU infrastructure. This creates a significant barrier for AI startups and established enterprises alike, particularly as demand for inference processing grows. Despite speculation that new models like DeepSeek and the buzz around it, industry leaders are doubling down on infrastructure investments. Mark Zuckerberg has reinforced Meta's plans to invest up to $65 billion in infrastructure this year, noting that computational demand is shifting from training to inference — making AI applications smarter and more efficient at runtime. This shift comes amid rapid enterprise adoption of generative AI technologies. Deloitte's 2024 report shows that 74% of enterprises have already met or exceeded their generative AI initiatives, reflecting the technology's growing importance across sectors. At the core of TheStage AI's offering is ANNA (Automatic NNs Analyzer), a system that leverages discrete mathematics and AI to automatically optimize PyTorch models through advanced techniques including quantization, sparsification, and pruning. This approach creates models that meet specific requirements for size, latency, and quality without the months of manual tuning traditionally required. Through this technology, TheStage AI offers what they call "Elastic models" — a range of optimized versions of open-source models from smallest (XS) to largest (XL). This gives customers the flexibility to choose the optimal balance between quality, speed, and cost, adjustable with what the company describes as "a simple slider movement". The concept is comparable to how streaming platforms like YouTube offer different video qualities (360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p), with ANNA delivering a range of optimized models with different performance characteristics to match specific deployment scenarios. In its Model Library, TheStage AI currently offers several dozens of optimized models, including popular open-source solutions like Stable Diffusion, each optimized for different performance, speed, and cost requirements. They also provide automatic acceleration services for companies that customize or build their own models. Early collaborations have shown promising results. In a partnership with TheStage AI reportedly doubled performance and reduced processing time by 20% compared to PyTorch's compiler — significant improvements that translate directly to cost savings and better user experiences. Unlike competitors that lock users into proprietary hardware, TheStage AI offers flexibility in supporting a wide range of hardware setups. Their technology works across smartphones, custom on-premises GPUs, and cloud environments, integrating seamlessly with major cloud providers including AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. This hardware-agnostic approach addresses a key pain point for AI developers who often find themselves constrained by vendor-specific optimization solutions. TheStage AI is targeting two primary user groups: application developers seeking pre-optimized models for seamless integration into their products, and model builders requiring granular control for custom neural networks. This dual approach offers a significant competitive advantage over rivals that only provide ready-made solutions, effectively addressing the scaling challenges faced by startups that need to balance performance with cost as they grow. "We're essentially democratizing access to AI optimization," Solodskih explained in an interview. "Previously, only the largest tech companies could afford the expertise and compute resources needed to properly optimize models for deployment. We're making that capability available to companies of all sizes." TheStage AI was founded by four university friends Kirill Solodskih, Azim Kurbanov, Ruslan Aydarkhanov and Max Petriev with PhDs in mathematics and neuroscience, bringing over a decade of expertise in optimizing deep neural networks. The team has a robust research background, filing over 10 patents and publishing more than 15 papers, including an award-nominated study presented at CVPR and contributions at ECCV. Their expertise isn't merely theoretical. Prior to founding TheStage AI, the team worked together at Huawei, where they developed cutting-edge model compression and acceleration technologies that were integrated into the AI cameras of the P50 and P60 smartphones — devices known for their computational photography capabilities. This combination of academic research and practical implementation experience gives the team a unique perspective on the challenges of deploying AI in resource-constrained environments. For businesses deploying AI solutions, the potential impact of TheStage AI's technology is substantial. The difference between an optimized and unoptimized model can mean the difference between a viable product and one that's too expensive or slow to deploy at scale. Consider a startup developing an AI-powered feature for a mobile application. Without optimization, the model might require cloud processing, introducing latency and ongoing operational costs. With proper optimization, the same functionality could run directly on the device, improving user experience while reducing backend expenses. Similarly, for cloud-based AI services, optimization directly affects the cost structure. A model that runs five times more efficiently translates to an 80% reduction in computing costs — a difference that can determine whether a business model is sustainable. TheStage AI enters a market with established players in the AI optimization space, including companies like OctoML (acquired by NVIDIA in late 2024), Neural Magic (acquired by Red Hat in January this year), and offerings from larger cloud providers. However, most existing solutions require significant expertise to implement effectively or are tied to specific hardware platforms. The company's automated approach and hardware-agnostic strategy position it uniquely in this landscape, offering a more accessible solution for the growing number of businesses seeking to deploy AI capabilities. With $4.5 million in funding secured, TheStage AI is focused on expanding its Model Library and enhancing its automatic optimization capabilities. The company plans to use the funding to grow its engineering team and establish partnerships with additional cloud providers and hardware manufacturers. The long-term vision, according to background materials, is to create an ecosystem where AI deployment is as seamless as software deployment has become — where considerations of optimization are handled automatically, allowing developers to focus on the core functionality rather than the infrastructure requirements. As AI continues its rapid integration across industries, tools that reduce the friction of deployment will play an increasingly important role. TheStage AI's approach to automating one of the most technically challenging aspects of the AI development process positions it to potentially capture significant value in this evolving market. If successful, the company could help accelerate the broader adoption of AI technologies by removing one of the key bottlenecks in the development and deployment process — potentially bringing advanced AI capabilities to applications and services where they were previously impractical due to performance or cost constraints.
