Category: BREAKING NEWS

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Paul Simon’s Quiet Celebration Live Album Arrives Oct 9

Eight years ago, Paul Simon said goodbye. Now he’s saying something better: hello again.

On October 9, Simon releases “Paul Simon: The Quiet Celebration Concert,” a nearly two-hour live album capturing his return to touring after years away from the stage — and after coming to terms with hearing loss that could have ended his performing career for good. It arrives as a 3 LP vinyl set, a 2 CD set, and across all digital and streaming platforms via Owl Records and Legacy Recordings.

The immediate taste is already out: “Under African Skies,” a gorgeous duet with his wife Edie Brickell, is streaming now. And the full package looks like a landmark document of one of the most quietly remarkable comebacks in recent music history.

What the album captures

The recording was made at McCaw Hall in Seattle, near the close of the first U.S. leg of Simon’s Quiet Celebration tour — a 58-date run that drew praise from Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The album opens with a full live performance of “Seven Psalms,” the 33-minute continuous piece Simon released in 2023, composed and arranged specifically to be heard and seen live. From there it moves through reimagined classics, deep cuts, and fan favorites — two hours of a songwriter revisiting his own catalog with the curiosity of someone hearing it fresh.

A companion concert film, “A Quiet Celebration,” premiered on Disney+ and Hulu on June 26, giving fans a visual companion to the audio. But the album is the thing purists will reach for: Simon live, unadorned, doing what he does.

The music itself

For listeners who haven’t kept up: “Seven Psalms” is worth understanding on its own. The 2023 piece is a single 33-minute composition — one continuous flow of music that Simon wrote in a dreamlike burst and arranged specifically for live performance. Hearing it open this album isn’t a gimmick. It’s the thesis statement: this is an artist working at the height of his powers, not coasting on memory.

The rest of the set reimagines the catalog — not greatest-hits renditions frozen in amber, but new arrangements built for the musician Simon is now. For longtime fans, that’s the real draw. Anyone can play “Graceland” the way it sounded in 1986. Simon would rather find out what it sounds like in 2026, played by a man who had to relearn how to listen.

The comeback behind the concert

This tour was Simon’s first extended outing since 2018, when he embarked on what was billed as a farewell tour. In the years between, he confronted a hearing loss severe enough to make live performance feel impossible. Most artists would have stopped there. Simon instead rebuilt how he plays — new arrangements, new stage setups, new ways of hearing the music and his band.

In the concert film, he reflected on what the return has meant. “It’s enabled me to play with musicians again. I really missed it,” he said. “Everybody has enjoyed the experience so much, there’s been a feeling of camaraderie and elation that we were playing this piece of music that we were really interested in, and that had a significant effect on me. It made for one of the most extraordinary tours I’ve done — maybe the most joyous.”

Read that again: “maybe the most joyous.” At 84, after a career spanning six decades and more honors than fit on a shelf, Paul Simon is calling his comeback tour the most joyful of his life. That’s not a marketing line. That reads like a man who got something back that he thought was gone.

Why it lands right now

There’s a reason this story resonates beyond Simon’s fan base. It’s about adaptation — the very human art of finding a new way when the old way stops working. Simon didn’t pretend the hearing loss wasn’t happening, and he didn’t try to perform exactly as he did in 1975. He composed new music designed for how he hears now. He reimagined the old songs for the same reason. The result, by all accounts, is some of the most alive music of his career.

That spirit — joy after setback — is in short supply and high demand. October has plenty of chances to catch it in the air, from the masked disco party taking over Burg Perchtoldsdorf on Oct 9 to a packed week of live music and festivals around New York. Simon’s album is the weekend’s quiet anchor: proof that some of the best live music this fall comes from a man who almost couldn’t hear it.

Takeaways

Don’t miss the “Under African Skies” duet. It’s streaming now, and if the rest of the album matches it, the vinyl will sell out fast. Pre-orders are open.

The 3 LP set is the one for collectors. Nearly two hours of music means the vinyl edition will be a proper listening-room experience — and “Seven Psalms” as a continuous live piece deserves the full-side treatment.

The bigger lesson: Simon’s return is a template for anyone who’s been told their best years are behind them. Sometimes the adaptation becomes the art.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Behemoth Review: Pedro Pascal Shines in Tony Gilroy Drama

Fourteen years is a long time to wait. Tony Gilroy, the writer-director behind Michael Clayton and the creative force that elevated Andor into prestige television, has not directed a feature since 2012’s The Bourne Legacy. His return, Behemoth!, premiered October 2 as the centerpiece of the 64th New York Film Festival, and it was worth every year of the wait.

Searchlight Pictures opens the film theatrically on December 4, right in the heart of awards season. After watching the first reactions roll in from the NYFF premiere, that placement makes perfect sense. This is a film built for the season: a grown-up drama about music, family, and the people who make the movies sing.

A cellist’s homecoming

Pedro Pascal stars as Alex Serian, a renowned cellist and third-generation Hollywood studio musician who returns to Los Angeles to compose film scores and celebrate the artists who create them. Set against the world of music and movies, the story follows Alex as he confronts a fractured family history, a possible daughter he never knew, and the question of where he truly belongs.

Pascal stepped into the role after Oscar Isaac exited due to scheduling, and by all accounts, he made it his own. He described the script as a puzzle and threw himself into preparation with characteristic intensity. “The cello was the main character of my life for several weeks leading up to shooting,” he said. “I took it with me everywhere.” That commitment shows. The first reactions out of NYFF single out his performance as mesmerizing, the kind of lived-in, fully embodied work that reminds you why he became one of the most in-demand actors on the planet.

The ensemble around him is superb. Olivia Wilde plays Carol, a wealthy patron from Alex’s past. Eva Victor is Nadia, his old flame and fellow cellist. Will Arnett plays Alex’s brother Andy, in scenes reshot after David Harbour departed the project. Hank Azaria is Alex’s father Peter, JoBeth Williams his mother Ginnie, with Alexa Swinton as the 15-year-old pop prodigy who may be Alex’s daughter. It is a deep bench, and Gilroy gives everyone a moment to shine.

The music is the movie

Here is the boldest thing about Behemoth!: the score was written by nine of the most celebrated film composers alive. The Behemoth! Collective includes Michael Giacchino, James Newton Howard, Michael Abels, Emily Bear, Lukas Frank, Henry Jackman, Nami Melumad, Brandon Roberts, and Alan Silvestri. They wrote the scores for the fictional films Alex works on within the story. Then 303 AFM musicians in Los Angeles performed the on-screen musical sequences.

Read that again. Nine Oscar-caliber composers. Three hundred musicians. For a drama about a cellist.

It pays off enormously. Every review out of the festival, even the mixed ones, agrees the music is outstanding. The film is structured like a piece of music itself, intercutting present-day scoring sessions with flashbacks across Chicago, Dallas, and Los Angeles. Some critics found the time-jumping fussy. But when the music swells and Pascal is lost in a performance, the structure stops mattering. You feel it instead of following it.

Gilroy’s patient craft

What is most striking about Behemoth! is how unhurried it feels. At 124 minutes, Gilroy lets scenes breathe. He trusts his actors’ faces. He trusts the music. This is the work of a filmmaker who spent a decade and a half writing some of the most precise dialogue in television and came back to cinema with something to say about the people behind the curtain.

At the film’s press conference, Gilroy said he had “never wrote a character quite like this before.” You can feel that discovery in every scene. Alex Serian is not a hero or an antihero. He is a working musician, gifted and flawed, trying to make peace with his past while the orchestra tunes up around him. It is the kind of character the movies do not make enough of anymore.

The film also serves as a love letter to an invisible workforce. Session musicians are the unsung heroes of Hollywood, playing on scores heard by billions without ever being seen. Behemoth! puts them center stage, and the tribute lands because it comes from a filmmaker who clearly reveres the craft.

The verdict

Behemoth! is a warm, beautifully acted, musically glorious return for one of Hollywood’s finest filmmakers. Pascal delivers one of the best performances of his career, the score is a once-in-a-generation achievement, and Gilroy directs with the confidence of a man who waited until he had something worth saying.

Could the structure be tighter? Perhaps. But films this humane, this well-crafted, and this full of love for their subject do not come along often. When it opens December 4, go hear it in a theater with good sound. Your ears will thank you.

For more on this year’s prestige slate, read our take on Sorkin’s awards-season drama The Social Reckoning and Michelle Yeoh’s TIFF triumph in The Surgeon. And for a very different kind of December release, Johnny Depp’s haunted Ebenezer arrives just in time for the holidays.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Nvidia-Backed Firmus Plans $5.5B IPO at $30.6B Value

The Biggest AI Infrastructure IPO of the Year

The AI boom has a new kind of landmark deal. Australian data center operator Firmus plans an initial public offering of up to $5.5 billion, at a share price that values the company at about $30.6 billion. Reuters reported the details on October 5, citing a term sheet and people familiar with the matter.

If it lands, this will be the second-largest Australian-listed IPO on record, behind only Telstra’s $10 billion share sale in 1997. The bookbuild begins Tuesday, October 6, with the institutional close pulled forward to Thursday because investor indications have already come in well above the offering size. Trading on the Australian Securities Exchange is expected to start October 23, with the prospectus lodged October 12.

Bank of America, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Morgans are leading the deal. Firmus itself declined to comment.

Who Gets the Shares

Here is the detail that tells you how hot this is: roughly half of the IPO, including the over-allotment option, is earmarked for existing strategic and financial investors. The company’s disclosed backers include Nvidia, Coatue, Blackstone and Jane Street. According to reporting on the term sheet, Nvidia holds about 7.2 percent, Coatue around 8.4 percent, and Blackstone roughly 6.7 percent, and the allocation lets them top up at the listing price rather than watch their stakes dilute.

The valuation math is dizzying. Firmus raised a $2 billion strategic equity round in August, with Nvidia and Coatue making follow-on investments and Blackstone and Jane Street participating. That round valued the company at about $10.5 billion post-money. The IPO price of A$11 per share implies a valuation of about $30.6 billion. Nearly tripled in two months.

Some of the money is already spoken for in the physical world. Proceeds are earmarked for GPUs at the company’s first data center in Batam, Indonesia, part of a previously announced plan to deploy 170,000 Nvidia GPUs at the campus.

What Firmus Actually Builds

Firmus is not a software company. It does not train models or sell subscriptions. It builds the physical layer the models run on: modular AI data center platforms, designed for high-density compute, with proprietary cooling and power engineering.

The footprint tells the story. The company has a presence in Singapore, one of Southeast Asia’s primary interconnection hubs, and a facility in Melbourne that demonstrates its platform can scale inside Australia’s enterprise and government digital ecosystems. The IPO proceeds will fund a global rollout of the modular platforms, multi-gigawatt grid interconnections, expanded manufacturing for cooling modules, and next-generation high-bandwidth hardware.

That list is worth reading closely. Land, power rights, cooling innovation, specialized modular design: these are the bottlenecks of the AI era. Chips get the headlines, but a GPU without power, cooling, and a building around it is a paperweight. The companies that control the physical layer are emerging as the critical chokepoints of the whole supply chain. Nvidia’s 7.2 percent stake is the industry’s way of admitting it: the chipmaker needs world-class places to put its silicon, and it is buying into the companies that build them.

The Infrastructure Supercycle

The Firmus listing is arriving in the middle of a historic capital wave. Goldman Sachs just raised its year-end 2026 US data center capacity forecast to 64 gigawatts, and analysts estimate US power demand from data centers will grow 38 percent this year. A Bain analysis projects annual AI infrastructure spending could reach $1.5 trillion by 2031, which would require the industry to generate around $6 trillion in yearly revenue to justify it.

Those are the kinds of numbers that make a $30.6 billion valuation look like the beginning of a cycle, not the end of one. Every model launch, every agent platform, every robotics round like FieldAI’s $700 million raise ultimately cashes out in megawatts. Someone has to build the buildings.

There is tension in the story, and it is worth naming honestly. Data centers face growing public opposition over electricity demand and local impacts; only a fraction of Americans say they would welcome one in their community. Firmus’s modular, efficiency-focused approach is partly an answer to that: better cooling and higher density mean more compute per megawatt, which is the metric that matters to grids and neighbors alike.

The Takeaway

A $5.5 billion IPO for a company that builds buildings for computers sounds absurd until you remember what those buildings do. Every frontier model trains and runs inside exactly this kind of infrastructure, and the self-hosted trend IBM pushed this week only adds to the demand: the more companies want AI running in their own buildings, the more buildings need building.

The Firmus listing is the market putting a price on the pick-and-shovel layer of the AI gold rush. Thirty billion dollars, tripled in two months, with demand already above supply. The next few years will test whether the revenue can catch up with the concrete. But the direction is not in doubt: AI runs on power, and power runs on companies like this one.

If you want to know where AI goes next, watch the power contracts and the cooling patents, not just the benchmark charts. The $5.5 billion number is the headline. The multi-gigawatt grid interconnections are the story.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: New Ovarian Cancer Drug Shows 46% Response in Trial

Some of the best news in cancer medicine this week didn’t come from a giant trial or a famous drug. It came from a late-breaking session in Montreal, where Danish biotech Genmab presented results that could change the outlook for one of the hardest cancers to treat.

The drug is called rinatabart sesutecan — Rina-S for short. In Part C of the Phase 1/2 RAINFOL-01 trial, among 109 patients with platinum-resistant ovarian cancer, Rina-S achieved a confirmed objective response rate of 45.9%. Five patients had complete responses — no detectable cancer. The median duration of response was 12.1 months, with 51% of responders still responding at one year. The findings were presented at the International Gynecologic Cancer Society’s 2026 congress.

To understand why that matters, you need to know the audience. Platinum-resistant ovarian cancer means the cancer came back after — or despite — the standard platinum chemotherapy that is the backbone of treatment. Each relapse narrows the options. These were heavily pretreated patients running out of road. A 46% response rate in that population isn’t just good. It’s the kind of number that makes a room of oncologists go quiet.

What makes Rina-S different

Rina-S is an antibody-drug conjugate — essentially a guided missile. It combines an antibody that seeks out folate receptor alpha (FRα), a protein found on many ovarian cancer cells, with a topoisomerase I inhibitor payload that kills the cell once the drug is inside. The elegant part: it worked regardless of FRα expression levels. Patients with low expression — and even those whose tumors didn’t express the protein at all — saw antitumor activity. It also worked in patients who had already received mirvetuximab, the existing FRα-targeted therapy.

That breadth matters enormously. If a drug only helps patients with a specific biomarker profile, its reach is limited by testing and eligibility. A drug that works across the board changes the calculation for far more women.

It also says something about where cancer medicine is heading. Antibody-drug conjugates are having a moment across oncology because the concept is so clean: chemotherapy is powerful but indiscriminate, and ADCs give it a mailing address. Instead of flooding the body with poison and hoping the tumor gets the worst of it, you attach the poison to an antibody that delivers it straight to the cancer cell. Rina-S is one of the more promising examples of that idea working in a disease that badly needed one.

Elizabeth K. Lee, a study investigator and gynecologic oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, put it plainly: “Platinum-resistant ovarian cancer is a difficult-to-treat disease. As patients relapse and progress through successive lines of therapy, achieving durable clinical benefit becomes increasingly challenging, yet remains critically important.” She called the antitumor activity and durability “encouraging” — which, in oncologist-speak, is genuine excitement.

A good week for ovarian cancer research

Rina-S wasn’t the only promising headline out of the IGCS meeting. Separately, Agenus reported three-year follow-up data on its botensilimab-plus-balstilimab combination in recurrent ovarian cancer: an estimated 48% three-year survival rate, unchanged from the two-year mark, in a population where nearly three-quarters had platinum-resistant or refractory disease. A quarter of treated patients were alive and off all therapy at last follow-up.

Two very different approaches — a targeted drug conjugate and an immunotherapy combo — both showing durable benefit in the same disease, at the same meeting. That’s not a coincidence of timing. It’s a signal that ovarian cancer, long one of the most stubborn targets in oncology, is starting to yield — and 2026 is quietly becoming a hopeful year across medicine, from Alzheimer’s onward.

The road ahead

A few words of caution, because they matter. Rina-S is still investigational. These are Phase 1/2 results, and regulators will want to see larger confirmatory trials before approval. Side effects and long-term safety need the same careful scrutiny as the efficacy numbers. And ovarian cancer remains a brutal disease — promising trial results are not yet a cure.

But direction matters. A decade ago, a patient with platinum-resistant ovarian cancer had almost nothing to hope for. Now she has an expanding list: targeted conjugates, immunotherapy combos, and diagnostic advances like the breast-milk ctDNA test being developed to catch breast cancer earlier.

Takeaways

The hardest cancers are the right targets. Platinum-resistant ovarian cancer is one of oncology’s toughest rooms, and that’s exactly where the most meaningful wins happen.

Watch for the Phase 3. Rina-S will need confirmatory trials, but a 45.9% response rate with complete responses in this population is the kind of signal that gets fast-tracked.

Talk to your doctor, not the internet. If you or someone you love faces ovarian cancer, trial data like this is worth discussing with an oncologist — who can tell you what investigational options exist right now, not years from now.

Ovarian cancer takes roughly 200,000 lives worldwide every year. Numbers like 45.9% are how that toll starts to shrink — one late-breaking presentation at a time.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Best Things to Do in NYC This October: Halloween Parades, Food Festivals and Fall Fun

October might be the best month to be in New York City

Fall is in full swing, the streets are packed with festivals, and Halloween is right around the corner. Whether you’re into morning dance parties, Japanese street food, open-air art studios, or a good old-fashioned parade, there’s something happening nearly every weekend this month. Here’s what’s on the calendar.

Oct 10 — DAYBREAKER ALIVE at Brooklyn Bridge Park

The early-morning dance party returns to Brooklyn Bridge Park on October 10. Wake up, get outside, and dance it out as the sun comes up over the skyline. It’s the kind of morning that sets the tone for the whole weekend.

Oct 10 + 11 — JAPAN Fes

Japanese food, snacks, and street culture take over for two days on October 10 and 11. If you’ve been meaning to try something new from a vendor you’ve never heard of, this is your chance. And if food festivals are your thing, our roundup of 15 of the best pizza places in NYC will keep the theme going.

Oct 10, 17, 24 + 31 — Queens Night Market

The Queens Night Market keeps its Saturday run going through October 31. Four more Saturdays of food vendors from around the world, cheap eats, and a crowd that shows up hungry. Mark every one of those dates.

Oct 16–18 — Open House New York Weekend

One of the city’s best weekends for the curious: buildings, studios, and spaces that are usually closed to the public open their doors from October 16 to 18. Tours fill fast, so plan ahead.

Oct 17 — Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade

Dogs in costumes. That’s the whole pitch, and it’s perfect. The Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade returns October 17 in the East Village, and it’s one of the most purely joyful traditions in the city.

Oct 17–18 — Gowanus Open Studios

Brooklyn artists open their studios to the public on October 17 and 18. Wander Gowanus, meet the people making the work, and see the neighborhood’s creative scene up close.

Oct 23–25 — City of Gods Halloween Festival

Three days of Halloween programming from October 23 to 25. Details are still trickling out, but it’s one of the bigger Halloween events on the October calendar. Pair it with our guide to 20 haunted houses in and around NYC for the full spooky-season treatment.

Oct 24 — Bronx Halloween Parade

The 41st Annual Bronx Halloween Parade marches on October 24. Four decades in, this Bronx tradition is still going strong — costumes, music, and a whole borough celebrating.

Oct 31 — A triple-header of Halloween

October 31 is stacked. Three events land on Halloween day itself:

  • Halloween Harvest Festival at Socrates Sculpture Park — fall fun with a Halloween twist at the park in Astoria.
  • Village Halloween Parade — the famous march down Sixth Avenue, still the centerpiece of NYC Halloween.
  • House of Hallucinations at House of Yes — Bushwick’s House of Yes closes out the month with its signature Halloween night.

If you’re already planning ahead for what’s next, our list of 10 of the best Christmas events in NYC for the 2026 holidays is ready when you are.

Don’t sleep on October

This is the month when the city really shows off — food festivals, open studios, parades, and Halloween doing the heavy lifting at the end. Pick your weekends, grab your friends, and get out there. And for ideas this very week, check out what’s happening around NYC today too.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Avengers Doomsday: Marvel’s Biggest Gamble Yet Explained

December cannot come fast enough. Avengers: Doomsday, Marvel Studios’ next team-up epic, has already crossed $40 million in domestic advance ticket sales, shattering presale records nearly three months before release. For a franchise some pundits spent the last two years eulogizing, that is quite the answer.

The film reunites the Russo brothers, Joe and Anthony, with the Marvel Cinematic Universe for the first time since 2019’s Avengers: Endgame. Their return alone would be news. What they are building, though, is bigger than a reunion. It is a full-scale reimagining of what an Avengers movie can be.

Doctor Doom steps out of the shadows

The headline casting remains the boldest move Marvel has made in years. Robert Downey Jr., the man who built the MCU as Tony Stark, returns as Victor von Doom. The Russos have spoken about the emotional resonance of the choice: the most beloved hero in franchise history now wearing the mask of its most feared villain.

Recent comments from the directors have only deepened the intrigue. They hinted that Doom’s interest extends beyond Bruce Banner, lending weight to fan theories about the villain collecting MCU heroes, with Spider-Man’s name surfacing in speculation. Whether or not those theories pan out, Marvel is clearly playing a longer, stranger game than usual.

The studio has also been tidying up loose ends in public. When online speculation swirled about the roles of Captain Marvel and Thor, insiders moved quickly to address it. Marvel wants the conversation focused on Doom, and honestly, Doom is big enough to carry it.

The Encore strategy

One of the smartest things Marvel did this fall had nothing to do with Doomsday directly. The studio put Avengers: Endgame back in theaters as the Encore Edition, complete with new scenes, and it worked spectacularly. The re-release topped the domestic box office in late September, edging out Sony’s Resident Evil in its second weekend.

Those new scenes were not filler. Leaks and reports indicate they contain direct connective tissue to Doomsday, essentially turning a re-release into a stealth prequel. It is a clever piece of franchise management: remind audiences why they loved these characters, then hand them a reason to come back in December.

The Encore’s success also says something about theatrical appetite. A seven-year-old movie, even with new footage, does not top the box office unless audiences are genuinely hungry for the big-screen experience. Marvel read that hunger correctly.

A production like no other

The road to Doomsday has been anything but conventional. The Russos have been open about beginning production without a completed screenplay, a decision that raised eyebrows across the industry. It is a gamble, but it is worth remembering who is taking it: the directors of Winter Soldier, Civil War, Infinity War, and Endgame have earned the benefit of the doubt.

There are also reports that audiences may get to see the film two days before its official wide release, a sign of the confidence rippling through Disney’s distribution team. When a studio starts talking about early access for a December tentpole, it believes it has something special.

What it all means

Doomsday arrives at a fascinating moment for the genre. Marvel spent the last few years rebuilding, experimenting, and occasionally stumbling. Sony’s Spider-Man universe keeps expanding on its own track, as our coverage of Alan Ritchson’s Helldivers casting shows. DC is betting big on horror-tinged comic book films. The superhero landscape is crowded again, which makes Marvel’s return to its flagship team-up feel like a statement.

The $40 million presale figure is the number that matters most. Advance sales that strong, that early, do not happen for movies audiences feel lukewarm about. They happen for events. Doomsday is being treated as an event, and Marvel has spent the entire fall making sure it earns the title.

The verdict

Everything about Avengers: Doomsday suggests Marvel understands the assignment. Bring back the directors who defined the franchise’s peak. Cast the most shocking villain choice imaginable. Prime the audience with a record-breaking re-release. Then let December do the rest.

It is the biggest gamble the studio has taken since the original Avengers, and if the presales are any indication, it is about to pay off enormously. The MCU’s next chapter starts in weeks. We will be there opening night.

For more on the year’s biggest franchise plays, see our breakdown of Takashi Yamazaki’s giant-robot epic Grandgear and Sorkin’s Facebook sequel. Hollywood’s heavy hitters are all swinging for the fences this season.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: OneByZero Raises $20M to Take AI Into Enterprise Asia

The Hardest Step in Enterprise AI

Every large company now has an AI pilot program. Most of them also have a graveyard of AI pilots that never went anywhere.

That gap, between a promising demo and software running inside real workflows, is the hardest problem in enterprise AI. It is also the business that Singapore’s OneByZero just raised $20 million to solve.

The company announced on October 5 that it closed a $20 million Series A led by Jungle Ventures. It is OneByZero’s first external financing. The money will fund expansion across Asia Pacific, a new local team in Japan, and continued development of the company’s NEO platform and its AI agents.

What OneByZero Actually Does

OneByZero is not a model company. It does not train foundation models and it does not sell a chatbot subscription. It helps large enterprises integrate AI into the systems and workflows they already run: the finance department’s reconciliation process, the telecom’s customer operations, the retailer’s supply chain planning.

The company works with large enterprises in finance, telecommunications, and retail, and says it now operates across nine markets in Asia Pacific and the United States. The details of the customer list are not public, but the operating model is the interesting part. OneByZero puts engineers close to customers, working inside their workflows, rather than shipping generic software from a distance.

That forward-deployed model has a real trade-off. Engineers embedded with customers can build deeper integrations and higher switching costs, and they accumulate knowledge about how an industry’s work actually gets done. But it is more labor-intensive than selling pure SaaS, and it scales at the speed of hiring. The question investors are asking is the same one the whole enterprise AI market is asking: does close-in integration compound into something defensible, or does it just sell hours?

Why Asia, and Why Now

The geographic bet is deliberate. Asia Pacific’s largest enterprises are sitting on enormous operational complexity: multi-country supply chains, dense regulatory regimes, workforces that mix languages and systems. AI adoption there has lagged the US narrative, but the demand is real, and the companies that crack deployment in these environments build playbooks that are hard to copy.

Japan is the tell. OneByZero is building a local team there, which suggests the company has learned what every enterprise AI vendor eventually learns: in Japan, you do not sell software from a Singapore office. You show up.

The timing lines up with a broader shift. The enterprise conversation has moved from “which model is smartest” to “which vendor can get it into production.” IBM’s self-hosted coding platform made the same bet this week from the infrastructure side: the winner is whoever handles the unglamorous parts, security reviews, data residency, integration with the ancient system nobody wants to touch.

The Series A Market in 2026

Twenty million dollars is not a headline number in 2026, and that is part of the point. The mega-rounds get the press. FieldAI is reportedly raising $700 million. But the Series A tier is where the AI economy is actually being built: dozens of companies like OneByZero, raising real money to do the deployment work the labs cannot do.

Jungle Ventures is betting that OneByZero has crossed one of enterprise AI’s harder barriers: moving customers from experiments into production. In a market full of companies selling potential, a company selling working deployments at nine markets’ scale is a different animal.

The NEO platform and the AI agents the company is building deserve a watch. If OneByZero can productize what its engineers learn inside customer workflows, the labor-intensive model becomes an asset instead of a cost. Every deployment makes the next one faster. That is the flywheel the whole services-meets-software category is chasing.

The Takeaway

The AI industry loves to talk about intelligence. The money is increasingly flowing to something less glamorous: integration.

OneByZero’s $20 million raise is a bet that the bottleneck is not smarter models but better deployment, and that Asia Pacific’s enterprises will pay well for someone who does the hard part. It is the same lesson the agent infrastructure wave is teaching on the cloud side and agentic recruiting is teaching in HR. Pilots are cheap. Production is the product.

Watch the Japan expansion. If OneByZero plants a real team there and it works, the playbook is proven. And the graveyard of enterprise AI pilots gets one more resident rescued.

What Enterprises Should Actually Do

There is a practical lesson here for any company still stuck in pilot mode. The vendors worth betting on in 2026 are the ones who talk about your existing systems first and their models second. Ask them how they handle your data residency rules. Ask them who shows up when the integration breaks at 2 a.m. Ask them to name three customers in your industry who made it to production, and what broke along the way.

OneByZero is not the only company selling this promise, and Jungle Ventures’ check does not guarantee it delivers. But the thesis it represents is the healthiest one in enterprise AI right now: intelligence is abundant, and deployment is the scarce skill. The companies that master the scarce skill win the decade.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Brewers’ Walk-Off Win Stuns Padres in NLDS Game 2

Ninety-eight percent. That’s the win probability the Padres carried into the bottom of the ninth on Sunday night in Milwaukee. Three outs, one run to protect, the best closer in baseball on the mound. It was over.

It was not over.

The Milwaukee Brewers ripped up the script at American Family Field, storming back against San Diego closer Mason Miller for a stunning 4-3 walk-off victory in Game 2 of the National League Division Series. The Brewers now lead the best-of-five series 2-0, and the Padres — who looked like they owned October an inning earlier — head home with their season hanging by a thread.

The at-bat of the year

Jackson Chourio is 22 years old. Mason Miller throws 104 miles an hour. On paper, the bottom of the ninth was a mismatch.

Miller came in pumping pure gasoline — a 100 mph fastball to start the at-bat, then 102, then 104. Chourio fouled them off, staying alive, waiting for the one pitch he could do something with. It came on a 2-2 count: Miller went back to the heater, a 101.3 mph fastball up in the zone, and Chourio lined it right back through the middle. Christian Yelich and Sal Frelick came sprinting home. Ballgame.

Consider what Chourio beat. Miller had struck out 12 of the first 15 batters he faced this postseason, an MLB record. Chourio treated all that like a rumor.

A weekend of one-run drama

Sunday served up a doubleheader of thrillers across the National League. Earlier in the evening in Los Angeles, the Atlanta Braves edged the Dodgers 3-2 to even their series at one game apiece — and that win had its own fairy-tale casting.

The Braves saved ace Chris Sale for Game 3 and went with a bullpen game, opening with 32-year-old rookie Ray Kerr. Kerr grew up in the foster care system, worked at a 7-Eleven and cleaned movie theaters to make ends meet while playing junior college ball in Reno. All he did Sunday was fire 2 2/3 scoreless innings against the two-time defending champions. Then 21-year-old Didier Fuentes — the youngest pitcher in baseball — retired 11 straight Dodgers, the longest such streak by a reliever that young in postseason history. Michael Harris II, an Atlanta kid playing in his hometown’s rival stadium, went 3-for-5 with a triple and a double and supplied the offense.

Both NLDS games on Sunday were decided by a single run. It wasn’t even the only record-breaking playoff action this week — Arike Ogunbowale dropped 45 points to set a WNBA playoff record, and the White Sox completed their own sweep of the Astros for their first playoff win since 2005. The two ALDS matchups resumed Monday, with the White Sox already up 1-0 on the Guardians after their own shutout.

Why October baseball hits different

There’s a reason people say you can’t script October. The Brewers had no business winning that game — no business at all — and that’s precisely the point. A 98% win probability means it happens one time in fifty. It happened Sunday.

Don’t sleep on this Brewers team

Here’s what makes Milwaukee genuinely dangerous, beyond one walk-off: they were the best team in baseball all year. The Brewers finished 103-59, baseball’s best record, running away with the NL Central. This isn’t a lucky wild-card squad catching lightning in a bottle. It’s a machine that won all summer and just showed it can win ugly in October too.

And look at who’s doing it. Chourio is 22. Fuentes-style youth movements aside, this roster leans young and plays like it — aggressive on the bases, fearless at the plate, loose in the clubhouse. There’s a long baseball tradition of young teams getting hot in October and running the table. Milwaukee has the pitching, the lineup depth, and now the kind of momentum you can’t buy.

Baseball rewards this kind of stubbornness like nothing else in sports. A 104 mph fastball is the hardest thing in the game to hit. Chourio didn’t need to do it twice. He needed to do it once, in the ninth, against the best closer alive, and he did.

Takeaways

Keep swinging. Milwaukee’s dugout had every excuse to concede the ninth. They didn’t. The game’s not over until the last out, and sometimes the math is just wrong.

October makes heroes fast. Before Sunday, how many casual fans knew Jackson Chourio’s name? Now he’s the guy who beat Mason Miller at 101 mph with the season on the line. Legends get made in about ten seconds in this sport.

Watch Milwaukee. The Brewers finished with baseball’s best record at 103-59. Now they’re two wins from the NLCS, and they’re doing it with a 22-year-old and a 21-year-old doing the heavy lifting. The future, it seems, arrived early.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: The Mummy 4: Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz Reunite

Some reunions take a quarter century. Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz are filming The Mummy 4 right now in the UK, and the first set photos have fans of Universal’s adventure franchise losing their minds. After 25 years apart on screen, Rick and Evelyn O’Connell are back.

Fraser revealed to Canal+ that cameras started rolling on September 7, saying that returning feels like reuniting with an old friend. The photos tell the story: Weisz, 56, spotted outside the British Museum in a mustard-yellow polka-dot skirt, cropped brown jacket, and wide-brimmed hat, clutching a vintage leather briefcase and an old-fashioned transistor radio. Fraser, 57, was photographed days later at a former military base in Suffolk, in a black leather coat, filming what looks like a record-speed trials sequence with a silver-and-red rocket car.

This is not a reboot. This is a homecoming.

The gang’s all here

The legacy reunion goes far beyond the two leads. John Hannah is back as Jonathan Carnahan, Evelyn’s mischievous brother. Oded Fehr returns as Ardeth Bay, the Medjai warrior. Kevin J. O’Connor reprises Beni Gabor from the original film. New additions include Numan Acar and Michael Johnson.

That casting tells you exactly what kind of movie this is. Universal is not distancing itself from the franchise’s past; it is embracing it. The original 1999 film, released 27 years ago, turned Fraser and Weisz into adventure-movie royalty. The Mummy Returns followed in 2001. Weisz sat out the 2008 third chapter, with Maria Bello stepping in, and fans never quite forgave the swap. Now the original chemistry is back where it belongs.

The period details in the set photos offer clues about the timeline. The original was set in 1926, the third film jumped to 1947, and the costumes here suggest the early-to-mid 1950s. Rick and Evelyn, older, wiser, and presumably still bickering beautifully. There is something deeply satisfying about watching these characters age in real time alongside the actors who play them.

Radio Silence takes the helm

Behind the camera, Universal made an inspired choice. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the Radio Silence duo behind the recent Scream films and Ready or Not, are directing from a script by David Coggeshall. Producer Sean Daniel, who has worked on every installment since 1999, returns, with Fraser himself serving as executive producer.

Radio Silence understands exactly what this franchise needs. Their Scream work proved they can honor beloved legacy characters while delivering genuine scares and big crowd-pleasing moments. The Mummy films were always horror-adjacent: cursed priests, flesh-eating scarabs, supernatural dread wrapped in matinee adventure. A directing team fluent in both horror and fun is the perfect fit.

The franchise has grossed $1.8 billion worldwide, and Universal clearly wants this chapter to feel like an event. Moving the release date up from May 19, 2028, to October 15, 2027, is a statement of confidence. Studios do not move blockbusters forward seven months unless they like what they are seeing.

Why this reunion matters

Fraser’s career renaissance has been one of Hollywood’s best stories. From his Oscar win to his carefully chosen recent roles, he has rebuilt himself as one of the industry’s most beloved figures. Returning to Rick O’Connell, the role that made him a star, is not a step backward. It is a victory lap.

And Weisz never really left the cultural conversation, but her return as Evelyn rights a 17-year wrong. The Bello substitution in 2008 remains one of the franchise’s sore spots. Seeing Weisz back in period costume, briefcase in hand, outside the British Museum, feels like the timeline correcting itself.

There is a broader trend here too. Hollywood’s legacy sequels work when they respect what came before and bring back the people who made it special. The 24 Jump Street team reuniting Tatum and Hill for December 2027 follows the same playbook. Audiences do not just want the IP; they want the people.

What we still don’t know

Plot details remain tightly under wraps. Universal has not confirmed a final title, and beyond the inevitable tombs, curses, and marital banter, nobody outside the production knows what supernatural threat Rick and Evelyn will face. Given the 1950s setting, the Cold War era offers rich territory for an adventure story.

What we do know is enough. The cameras are rolling. The cast is back. The directors are right. And October 15, 2027, cannot come soon enough.

The verdict

The Mummy 4 is shaping up to be the legacy sequel done right: original stars, original producer, horror-savvy directors, and a studio confident enough to move the date up. Some franchises chase nostalgia. This one is earning it, one set photo at a time.

For more on Hollywood’s franchise renaissance, check out our coverage of Johnny Depp’s haunted Christmas tale Ebenezer and the holiday return of the Angry Birds flock. The old gangs are all getting back together, and honestly, we love to see it.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Brett Adcock’s Hark Launches This Week: AI for Everything

The Robot Guy Wants to Run Your To-Do List

Brett Adcock has spent the last few years building humanoid robots. Now he wants to handle your dinner reservations.

On October 4, the Figure founder and CEO posted on X that Hark, his personal AI company, will launch this week. The offer is aggressive: the first 100,000 registered users get the paid plan free. A waitlist is open now.

If you have not heard of Hark, you are not behind. The company operated in stealth for months and only surfaced publicly in late 2025, when Adcock revealed he had put $100 million of his own money into the project. Since then, it has grown into one of the most ambitious bets in consumer AI: a personal AI that remembers your preferences, works across the websites you use every day, and eventually connects to dedicated hardware built just for it.

What Hark Actually Is

Forget the chatbot comparison. Hark’s pitch is an AI that does things, not one that answers questions.

The clearest preview of that vision came on August 5, when the company showed off Hark Handoff, a research preview of its browser agent. Handoff drives a virtual computer: it opens a browser, clicks, scrolls, types, reads files, and runs terminal commands. The work it is aimed at is refreshingly ordinary: placing food orders, shopping online, booking restaurant tables, researching and arranging travel.

That last point is the design choice that matters. Handoff interacts with websites the way people do, clicking through real pages, instead of depending on each service to build a separate integration. That means it works with sites that have no public API. The trade-off is honest too: it also means Hark depends on websites that can change their layouts, block automated activity, or demand human verification checks. The company will be fighting that battle on every site it touches.

The longer-term vision is bigger. Hark’s manifesto describes a system that builds a rich, evolving understanding of its user, keeps persistent memory across conversations and tasks, and eventually connects to dedicated hardware built just for it.

The Money and the Team

Hark has funded this ambition at startup-superstar scale. The company has raised more than $700 million in Series A capital, and it assembled a team of 45 engineers and designers early on, including former Meta AI researchers and designers from Apple and Tesla. There is also a strategic thread running through Adcock’s empire: Hark’s models are already being trained on data from Figure’s robots, and the company secured a deal with Nvidia for thousands of GPUs for training.

Adcock will keep running Figure as CEO alongside Hark. The two companies are separate, with no announced plan to merge, but the overlap is obvious: robots that understand the physical world and personal AI that understands your life are two halves of the same idea.

Adcock says he now uses the product for everything. He did not say how long the free paid plan lasts for those first 100,000 users, or what exactly it includes. Details like that usually surface at launch.

Why Launch Week Matters

The consumer AI agent space has been all promise and very little product. Every demo video shows a flawless agent booking the perfect trip. Almost none of them survive contact with real websites, real edge cases, real CAPTCHAs.

That is exactly why a real launch matters. DigitalOcean spent last week packaging agent infrastructure into one monthly bill, because agents are getting serious enough that the machinery around them is a business. Metaview raised $60 million to put agents to work in recruiting. The agent economy is moving from slides to products. Hark is the first big bet that the consumer side can work too.

The 100,000-user free offer is the classic consumer playbook: remove every reason not to try it. Adcock is betting that once people hand their errands to an agent that remembers them, they will not go back to doing it themselves. He is probably right about the psychology. The question is whether the product is ready.

The Takeaway

Hark is either the start of the post-app era or a very expensive lesson in how hard the real web is. Both outcomes are interesting.

If you are one of the curious, the waitlist is open and the first 100,000 paid plans are free. If you are one of the skeptical, fair: a research preview in August is a long way from an agent you can trust with your credit card. The honest move is the same for both groups. Watch this week’s launch for one thing only: does it handle the boring stuff, reliably, on the websites people actually use?

That is the whole test. Agents that can answer hiring questions or move boxes in warehouses are already proving themselves in narrow lanes. Hark is trying the wide lane: everything, for everyone. Nobody has pulled that off yet. This week, we find out if the robot guy is the one who does.