Technology

YouVersion’s Verse of the Year reflects global trend of seeking peace through prayer

Published

1 year ago

December 2, 2024

Bible engagement data shows people call on God to overcome anxiety and daily struggles

OKLAHOMA CITY, Dec. 2, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — In a record year for app installs and daily use, YouVersion is seeing more people seek God through His Word and in prayer. Reflecting this trend, the YouVersion Verse of the Year is:

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.” Philippians 4:6

In a record year for app installs and daily use, the YouVersion Verse of the Year is Philippians 4:6.

With this Bible verse seeing higher engagement than any other verse this year, YouVersion Founder and CEO Bobby Gruenewald believes it shows that people are more likely to turn to God when they face anxiety and daily struggles.

“In many cases, our anxiety comes from holding onto worries that we aren’t meant to carry,” said Gruenewald. “To me, this verse being sought out the most this year is an illustration that our community is seeking God in prayer and choosing to trust Him to carry their burdens—and we’re seeing that supported in the data.”

Praying for Peace

In 2024, YouVersion saw increased interest in prayer around the world. Within the Bible App, people can share Prayers with their Friends, indicate that they prayed for others, and complete Guided Prayer sessions that connect people with God through Scripture and prayer prompts. All together, engagement with these YouVersion Prayer features went up by 46% this year compared to last year.

The words “prayer” and “peace” were among the top in-app search terms this year, two themes that we also see in the Verse of the Year. This year, YouVersion’s Prayer Team volunteers responded to prayer requests in 20 languages. Even as these requests came from different countries, there were many common themes, including prayers for finances, healing, family, marriage, and anxiety.

One of YouVersion’s more than 4,750 global partners, 24-7 Prayer International, is seeing a similar trend in prayer. In addition to its YouVersion Bible Plans, the ministry facilitates 24-7 Prayer Rooms that enable communities and churches in more than 65 countries to come together in person in an unbroken chain of prayer, every hour of the day and night. This year, they saw a 37% increase in the number of 24-7 Prayer Rooms they’re supporting.

“Throughout 2024, we have seen a rise in the number of people dedicating themselves to night and day prayer in different nations around the world,” said Carla Harding, International Director of Products for 24-7 Prayer International. “Our hope is that through continual prayer, the global church would be ignited in the presence of God and carry His love with greater compassion and power to the communities around them.”

Global Trends

Every month of 2024 is on the list of highest months in YouVersion history for both app installs and daily use. Across its Family of Apps—which includes Bible App, Bible App Lite, and Bible App for Kids—YouVersion saw an average of 11.2 million new device installs per month and about 14 million people engaging in the Bible every day.

This notable growth points to an increased hunger for God’s Word, which extends beyond YouVersion with partners like Tara-Leigh Cobble seeing similar trends. As the creator of “The Bible Recap”—which is a top-ranked daily podcast and the YouVersion Bible Plan with the most engagement this year—she’s also seeing more people engage with Scripture daily.

“Thanks in large part to our partnership with YouVersion, The Bible Recap community has expanded to every continent, impacting some of the most unreached people and places in the world,” said Cobble. “We’re seeing people in more countries and languages read, understand, and love God’s Word than ever before!”

Regional Momentum

With Bible engagement on the rise around the world, YouVersion is experiencing the fastest growth in daily use in Central Africa, Eastern Africa, and Latin America.

While daily Bible engagement is growing at the highest rates in Central Africa (54%) and Eastern Africa (56%), the entire continent is seeing increased daily Bible use compared to last year. Specifically, countries like South Sudan (82%), Angola (68%), Mozambique (55%), Guinea (50%), Nigeria (35%), and Algeria (35%), saw a rise in daily Bible use in 2024.

This year, Africa also saw the highest increase in daily use of the Bible App for Kids. With a 13% boost in daily use across the continent, Cote d’Ivoire (32%), Senegal (31%), and Nigeria (23%) had the biggest engagement spikes among kids in Africa this year. The Bible App for Kids, which is available in 70 languages, saw nearly 90 million Bible stories completed by children worldwide in 2024.

In Latin America, YouVersion has been intentional to add more partnerships and regionally-specific content over the last several years. As a result, YouVersion has seen steady momentum in Bible engagement across the region. This year, many countries across Latin America saw another surge in daily Bible use, including growth in Nicaragua (107%), Venezuela (74%), Bolivia (52%), Honduras (50%), Cuba (45%), and Argentina (30%).

With this sustained growth in Latin America, YouVersion is currently working to open a Regional Hub in Mexico City to further enhance the Bible experience for its Spanish-speaking community. Earlier this year, YouVersion launched its first-ever Regional Hub in Belo Horizonte, Brazil in support of the roughly 1 million Brazilians opening the Bible App every day. YouVersion’s goal for its Regional Hubs is to have a local team recruit content partners and churches to create a more authentic and regionally-relevant Bible experience that helps people better connect with God’s Word on a personal level.

“It’s encouraging to see people throughout the YouVersion Community, in every region of the world, engage with the Bible at such high levels,” said Gruenewald. “These Bible engagement trends highlight the commonalities that can be found throughout the global Church—in the struggles we face and in our need for God.”

For more information and visuals of the global YouVersion Community’s Bible engagement trends in 2024, visit www.youversion.com/2024bibletrends.

About YouVersion
Created by Life.Church, YouVersion designs free, biblically centered experiences that encourage and challenge people to seek God throughout each day. The YouVersion Family of Apps—including the Bible App, Bible App Lite, and Bible App for Kids—has been installed on more than 875 million devices worldwide. The Bible App offers a Bible experience in more than 2,170 languages and helps people deepen their relationship with God. Bible App Lite is optimized for offline use and helps people access God’s Word in markets with device and data limitations. Developed in partnership with OneHope, the Bible App for Kids helps children engage with the Bible through interactive animations and fun activities. For more information about YouVersion, visit youversion.com.

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SOURCE YouVersion

Technology

Bloomberg Introduces Spread-to-Benchmark Quoting for EUR and GBP Portfolio Trading Baskets

Published

15 hours ago

June 2, 2026

LONDON, June 2, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Bloomberg today announced the launch of Spread-to-Benchmark quoting and trading for Euro (EUR) and Sterling (GBP) denominated portfolio trades through its Portfolio Trading Basket Builder (PTBB). The new functionality expands the range of quoting protocols available for European credit portfolio trading and reflects growing client demand for spread-based execution workflows, alongside increased dealer support for the convention across EUR and GBP markets.

Spread-to-Benchmark quoting is a well-established protocol for USD credit portfolio trades and is used by market participants to evaluate and execute portfolio trades. By extending this workflow to EUR and GBP portfolio trades, Bloomberg enables clients and dealers to transact using a familiar spread-based methodology across additional credit markets.

The introduction of Spread-to-Benchmark quoting for EUR and GBP baskets reflects increased client interest in evaluating portfolio trades through a spread-based lens and the growing adoption of spread-based execution workflows in European credit markets. The workflow provides market participants with an additional framework for assessing the relationship between credit spread risk and underlying government bond yields when pricing and executing portfolio trades.

Additional Workflow Flexibility 
The workflow complements Bloomberg’s existing portfolio trading capabilities, which support the full range of market-standard quoting conventions, including Price, Yield, Spread-to-Benchmark and Spread based workflows that reference Bloomberg’s evaluated pricing service (BVAL). This gives clients flexibility to compare and execute portfolio trades using the quoting methodology that best aligns with their investment objectives, execution preferences and internal risk management processes.

“European credit clients continue to look for execution workflows that reflect how they evaluate risk and monitor portfolio trading outcomes,” said Harry Street, Global Head of Credit and Equities Trading Product at Bloomberg. “By expanding dealer support for Spread-to-Benchmark quoting for EUR and GBP baskets, Bloomberg is broadening the range of workflow options available to clients trading European credit portfolios.”

“Portfolio trading workflows in fixed income continue to become more sophisticated as institutional investors look for ways to evaluate execution quality in changing market conditions,” said Kevin McPartland, Head of Market Structure & Technology Research at Crisil Coalition Greenwich. “Spread-based quoting helps market participants more clearly distinguish between the impacts of credit spread and underlying rates movements when determining how best to execute a portfolio trade.”

Bloomberg’s Electronic Markets solutions are used by leading financial institutions to trade efficiently in over 175 markets around the world. More than 9,000 client firms use Bloomberg Electronic Markets to access industry-leading depth and breadth of liquidity across asset classes from over 800 dealers globally. Bloomberg Electronic Markets provides market participants with comprehensive solutions across the trading lifecycle, including robust price transparency, analytics, automation and execution, powered by Bloomberg’s high-quality, multi-asset class data and tools.

About Bloomberg
Bloomberg is a global leader in business and financial information, delivering trusted data, news, and insights that bring transparency, efficiency, and fairness to markets. The company helps connect influential communities across the global financial ecosystem via reliable technology solutions that enable our customers to make more informed decisions and foster better collaboration. For more information, visit Bloomberg.com/company or request a demo.

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SOURCE Bloomberg L.P.

Technology

Dr. Sunho Kang, a senior battery-technology executive with leadership experience at major global battery and EV manufacturers, joins TeraWatt Technology as Head of Product and Technology

Published

15 hours ago

June 2, 2026

SAN FRANCISCO, June 2, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — TeraWatt Technology Inc. (Headquartered in California, USA) is pleased to announce that Dr. Sunho Kang has joined the company as Head of Product and Technology.

Dr. Kang is a globally recognized battery-technology executive with more than 25 years of leadership experience spanning the United States, Asia, and Europe, and a distinguished track record of advancing innovations from laboratory research through gigafactory-scale production. He has held senior executive positions at world-leading organizations including Samsung SDI, Apple, and Volkswagen Group of America, and brings deep expertise in lithium-ion battery materials, cell engineering, and product industrialization across a broad range of applications, including electric vehicles and energy storage systems.

At TeraWatt, Dr. Kang will lead global product development and the commercialization of TeraWatt’s battery technology platform, aiming to accelerate the delivery of TeraWatt’s competitive products as well as the technology and commercialization roadmap including manufacturing scale-up.

Dr. Kang commented:

“I am thrilled to join TeraWatt Technology as Head of Product and Technology. TeraWatt’s innovative battery platform presents a tremendous opportunity to push the boundaries of lithium-ion technology, and I look forward to working with the team to accelerate product development and commercialization to deliver meaningful impact.”

TeraWatt Technology founder CEO Ken Ogata, Ph.D. commented:

“We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Kang as our Head of Product and Technology. His deep expertise in battery materials, cell engineering, and productization will be instrumental in accelerating TeraWatt’s product roadmap and technology leadership. Together with Dr. Kang, we will continue to drive our mission forward.”

About TeraWatt Technology Inc.
TeraWatt Technology Inc. is a California-based company that produces lightweight, high-power, and safe next-generation lithium-ion batteries.

Company Overview
Name: TeraWatt Technology Inc.
Representative: Co-founder and CEO Ken Ogata
Headquarters: 28 Geary St, Suite 650, San Francisco, CA 94108, United States
Founded: January 2020
Established: December 2019
URL: https://www.terawatt-technology.com/

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SOURCE TeraWatt Technology Inc.

Technology

Tencent Cloud and Soniox Announce Strategic Partnership: Combining Advanced Speech-to-Text (STT) Technology with Global Real-Time Infrastructure

Published

15 hours ago

June 2, 2026

HONG KONG, June 2, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Tencent Cloud, the cloud business of global technology company Tencent, today announced a strategic partnership with Soniox, a San Francisco-based speech AI company that specializes in developing high-accuracy, low-latency speech AI solutions. The collaboration integrates Soniox’s speech-to-text (STT) technology with Tencent Cloud’s Real-Time Communication (TRTC) enterprise-grade global infrastructure, enabling enterprises to build and deploy multilingual voice AI applications across 200+ countries and regions.

Elevating Enterprise Voice AI at a Global Scale

In enterprise voice AI deployments, latency directly affects user experience and application reliability. The integration of Soniox’s high-accuracy, low-latency STT with TRTC’s global transmission infrastructure reduces latency across the entire pipeline, creating a comprehensive end-to-end solution for enterprises deploying conversational AI applications worldwide.

Soniox is the voice platform for every language. Unlike legacy speech AI, which was built primarily for English-speakers, Soniox delivers native-speaker accuracy across 60+ languages. Its technology can handle mid-sentence language switching — a user can switch between English and Chinese in a single utterance, and Soniox will capture every word with complete accuracy. All of this works through a single API that works for both speech-to-text and text-to-speech.

By integrating TRTC, the partnership leverages an enterprise-grade real-time communication backbone featuring more than 3,200 global nodes, sub-300 ms worldwide latency, and advanced capabilities such as AI noise suppression and weak-network resilience. These capabilities enable conversational AI applications to operate reliably across diverse network environments, including regions such as Southeast Asia and Africa.

With the roll out of this partnership, developers can integrate the Soniox STT API directly within the Tencent Cloud console. Whether targeting English-speaking markets or supporting languages such as Arabic, Hindi, and Malay, enterprises can build global voice applications — including intelligent customer service, voice assistants, real-time translation, and meeting transcription — to address the demands of expansion into emerging markets and multilingual scenarios.

Wison Xie, Head of Product at Tencent RTC, stated: “Tencent RTC has always been committed to providing reliable real-time communication infrastructure for global enterprises. Our partnership with Soniox brings together our strengths in enterprise-grade audio transmission and Soniox’s advanced speech recognition technology. Together, we are making it easier for businesses to deploy accurate, low-latency voice AI applications across any language and any market.”

Klemen Simonic, CEO at Soniox Inc., stated “At Soniox, our mission is to help businesses understand every word, in any language, with native speaker accuracy and exceptional speed. Partnering with Tencent Cloud combines our speech AI with world-class real-time infrastructure, enabling enterprises to build voice AI experiences that scale globally with low latency and reliability.”

About Tencent Cloud:

Tencent Cloud, one of the world’s leading cloud companies, is committed to creating innovative solutions to resolve real-world issues and enabling digital transformation for smart industries. Through our extensive global infrastructure, Tencent Cloud provides businesses across the globe with stable and secure industry-leading cloud products and services, leveraging technological advancements such as cloud computing, Big Data analytics, AI, IoT, and network security. It is our constant mission to meet the needs of industries across the board, including the fields of gaming, media and entertainment, finance, healthcare, property, retail, travel, and transportation.

About Tencent RTC:

Tencent RTC provides real-time communication solutions, including audio/video calling, live streaming, and in-game voice. With enterprise-grade security, AI-powered enhancements, and a global network of over 3,200 nodes, Tencent RTC powers mission-critical communication for customers worldwide.

About Soniox:

Soniox is a next-generation voice AI company bringing about the end of English-first speech AI. Most people on the planet did not grow up speaking English and often mix languages mid-sentence; and yet legacy speech AI was built for just English. Soniox is different: native-speaker accuracy across 60+ languages, true mid-sentence language switching, and flawless alphanumeric recognition that legacy providers still can’t match. For developers building global apps, Soniox is the only option. Try it for yourself at soniox.com.

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SOURCE Tencent Cloud