Technology

Mozilla Foundation Brings Hollywood’s AI and IP Reckoning Into the Open

Published

14 hours ago

April 22, 2026

Los Angeles marks the latest, and most legally charged, stop in Mozilla Foundation’s global Imaginative Intelligences series.

LOS ANGELES, April 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The rules governing AI and creative ownership are being written right now in courtrooms, contract negotiations, and corporate boardrooms, and most of the artists whose work is on the line aren’t in the room. Mozilla Foundation intends to change that.

The global nonprofit is convening artists, filmmakers, legal scholars, and entertainment lawyers in Los Angeles on April 24 for Copyforward — a symposium co-presented with USC Gould School of Law’s Center for Sports, Entertainment, Media & Technology (SEMT) and USC’s AI for Media & Storytelling (AIMS), held as part of Flux Festival at Blum Gallery. The event reflects Mozilla Foundation’s bet that the future of AI and creativity will be decided in the rooms where communities of artists, legal thinkers, and technologists sit down together and put forward defiantly optimistic alternatives to the status quo.

Mozilla Foundation doesn’t arrive empty-handed. Copyforward builds directly on Mozilla Foundation’s Imaginative Intelligences work in Los Angeles. In early 2025, they worked with the Berggruen Institute to bring together 91 participants — musicians, filmmakers, gig workers, executives, academics, and creative technologists — across five assemblies held at the Bradbury Building and the historic Hearst Estate. What emerged was Hollywood’s 8 Rules for AI: a framework of design principles, developed by the creative community itself, centered on process over output, transparency, lineage and credit, and designing for the whole creative ecosystem — not just the platforms that profit from it. Copyforward puts that framework into direct conversation with the legal minds now shaping how IP law adapts to AI.

Ziyaad Bhorat, Vice President, Imagination & Strategic Growth, Mozilla Foundation, says, “Intellectual property frameworks are the hidden architecture of creative economies. They determine who participates, who benefits, and whose work becomes someone else’s asset. Most artists never see that layer until it’s already decided. AI has forced it into the open, and compressed what would have taken decades of legislative drift into a few years of litigation. Copyforward and Flux Festival are bets that putting artists, lawyers, and technologists in the same room now, before the rules calcify, is one of the few interventions that actually matters.”

“Mozilla has been in the intellectual property business since before most AI companies existed,” says Nabiha Syed, Executive Director, Mozilla Foundation. “The Mozilla Public License was an act of imagination as much as a legal document — a declaration that open, consent-forward terms could become the norm if enough people decided they should. That’s what we’re doing in Hollywood. We’re building the movement, and it’s one that puts people first.”

Flux Festival takes place April 24–25 at Blum Gallery in Los Angeles. Day One, Copyforward, brings together legal experts — including USC Gould School of Law Professor Doug Emhoff, studio lawyers, and guild representatives — with artists, filmmakers, and scholars to examine how AI is reshaping creative authorship, IP, and copyright. Day Two opens to the public with performances, screenings, and sensory exhibits from a lineup that includes Andrew Thomas Huang, Tender Claws, Samantha Gorman, and artist-director duo mots, recently featured in the Los Angeles Times, among more than 25 artists experimenting at the frontier of moving image and sound. Full program at https://flux.net/.

Los Angeles is one stop in a growing global series. Mumbai focuses on the origin of thought, and an exploration of AI, imagination, and the future of storytelling in one of the world’s most vital creative economies. Details can be found here.

About Mozilla Foundation’s Imaginative Intelligences
Imaginative Intelligences is a Mozilla Foundation series of artist-led assemblies in major cultural centers, co-created with local communities, partners, and cultural institutions. The series backs artist and worker agency, consent-forward norms, and local-first methods that travel. The Los Angeles edition, developed with the Berggruen Institute, produced Hollywood’s 8 Rules for AI — a community-authored framework for technology that strengthens, rather than erodes, human creativity.

About Mozilla Foundation
Mozilla Foundation is a global nonprofit dedicated to ensuring the internet remains open, inclusive, and equitable. Founded in 2003, it supports people-first technology through funding, advocacy, education, and research. Rooted in the open-source movement and guided by the Mozilla Manifesto, Mozilla Foundation focuses on critical issue areas like ethical data practices, healthy digital ecosystems and shifting digital power toward individuals and communities. Its work connects technologists, researchers, policymakers, and activists to reimagine and rebuild systems to serve the public good. With over two decades of global impact, Mozilla Foundation continues to lead the movement for a better technology future—powered by people, open by design and fueled by imagination. Learn more at mozillafoundation.org.

Media contact: press@mozillafoundation.org

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SOURCE Mozilla Foundation

Technology

X Square Robot Unveils New Embodied AI Model, Says Robots Will Arrive in Homes in 35 Days

Published

29 minutes ago

April 23, 2026

Backed by Alibaba, ByteDance, Xiaomi and Meituan, X Square Robot unveiled a next-generation embodied AI foundation model for home robots and said its first deployments in everyday households will begin within 35 days.

BEIJING, April 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — X Square Robot on Tuesday unveiled Wall-B, a new embodied AI foundation model designed for deployment in real-world homes, marking what the company described as a major step toward bringing general-purpose robots into daily family life.

At a launch event themed “Born to Bot, Bot to Family,” the company also introduced its World Unified Model (WUM) architecture, a training framework that combines vision, language, action and physical prediction within a single system from the outset. X Square said the model is intended to help robots operate in the far more unpredictable setting of a home, where tasks, layouts and interactions vary from moment to moment.

“Robots in factories and robots in homes are fundamentally different,” said Qian Wang, founder and CEO of X Square Robot. “In factories, they repeat the same action 10,000 times. In a home, they may need to perform 10,000 different actions, each in a different context. The real challenge is not repetition, but whether a robot can execute new, untrained actions in an unstructured environment.”

Wall-B is the company’s first full implementation of its World Unified Model architecture. Unlike modular systems that train perception, language and control separately, X Square Robot said World Unified Model optimizes those capabilities jointly from the very beginning. The company said that allows physical prediction — including force, friction and collision dynamics — to emerge as part of the model itself, rather than being layered on afterward.

“We train vision, language, action and prediction in the same network from day one,” said Wang Hao, chief technology officer of X Square. “Human infants do not learn to see, move and communicate in isolated stages. They learn by integrating perception and action at the same time, with constant feedback from the physical world. That is the principle behind our architecture.”

X Square Robot said the model was built on two core foundations. The first is a data strategy centered on real, non-staged home environments, aimed at exposing the system to the long tail of household scenarios — misplaced objects, temporary occlusion, unexpected obstacles and spontaneous human activity. The second is a physics-aware predictive mechanism that enables the robot to anticipate physical outcomes before taking action, rather than merely reacting after contact occurs.

Together, those elements are meant to narrow one of robotics’ hardest gaps: moving from controlled demos to reliable performance in live environments. The company said its work on physical robotic platforms has helped it accumulate practical experience in bridging simulation and reality across diverse operating conditions.

At the event, X Square demonstrated a series of live tasks. In one experience zone, a robot arranged flowers while adjusting its grip and motion in real time as stems shifted position under visual occlusion. The task was completed without pre-set trajectories, according to the company, and drew attention from both domestic and international media attending the event.

Even so, X Square acknowledged that the technology remains early. Wang said current systems can make mistakes that require remote intervention — such as placing slippers in the kitchen or pausing mid-task to process the next action. But he said the robots’ ability to operate continuously and generate new real-world data around the clock gives the system a path to rapid improvement.

That learning loop is central to the company’s next milestone: within 35 days, X Square plans to place its robots into everyday homes, underscoring the company’s long-term commitment to the home robotics sector.

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Technology

Manhattan Associates Announces Latest Enhancements for Retailers

Published

29 minutes ago

April 23, 2026

SYDNEY, April 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Manhattan Associates (NASDAQ: MANH), the global leader in supply chain commerce with unmatched AI capabilities, today announced major enhancements to Manhattan Active® Omni. These innovations are designed to help retailers maximise in-store and online sales while delivering best-in-class customer experiences across all touchpoints. New capabilities include embedded agentic AI for store associates and customer service teams, real-time sales, and fulfilment insights delivered natively within the user experience, and brand-new capabilities focused on maximising both revenue and profit when shipping from stores.

Manhattan announced commercial availability of three new AI agents, a Store Associate Agent, a Contact Centre Agent, and an OMS Configuration Agent, all available within the Manhattan Active Omni user interface, to support retailers’ selling and service teams. Using a natural language interface, these agents deliver immediate, actionable insights into store activity, sales trends, inventory, returns, and customer behaviour, helping associates and customer service teams resolve issues faster and provide more personalised support.

“Retailers are under constant pressure to move faster, operate smarter, and deliver seamless experiences across every touchpoint,” said Brian Kinsella, SVP of Product Management at Manhattan Associates. “Our latest updates reflect Manhattan’s ongoing commitment to delivering cutting edge artificial intelligence within our applications. Whether it’s the myriad machine learning algorithms present for years or our new Agentic AI and Fulfilment Simulation capabilities, we’ve long believed true AI needs to live within rather than alongside our applications. We’re proud to partner with a number of world class retailers on the design and development of these breakthrough technologies.”

Along with the newly announced agentic AI innovations, Manhattan Active® Point of Sale continues to advance with Customer Facing Display, a powerful new enhancement that brings shoppers into the checkout experience. Customers can view their cart in real time, attach their loyalty information to a transaction, enter shipping details, and choose how they’d like to receive their receipt, all from a dedicated display. Retailers can also capture additional customer input, ensuring greater accuracy and faster transactions at the point of sale, bridging the gap between associates and shoppers, and delivering a smoother, more engaging checkout experience.

Additionally, the Fulfilment Optimisation Simulation engine enables enterprises to model and compare alternative fulfilment strategies by balancing cost, speed, service level, and margin. It provides data-driven insights into split shipments, total fulfilment costs, location-level distribution, and key KPIs using a consistent set of orders for each strategy. Users can easily adjust optimisation rules, rerun simulations, and compare results side-by-side to understand the true impact of each change. The engine also supports “what if” scenario planning – allowing teams to anticipate constraints, evaluate operational shifts, and analyse trade-offs in a fully self-serve manner. By replaying historical or selected orders, businesses can continuously optimise fulfilment, uncover new savings, and drive meaningful performance improvements.

Together, these innovations reflect Manhattan’s continued focus on delivering practical, enterprise-ready advancements that help retailers move faster and operate with greater confidence.

Receive up-to-date product, customer and partner news directly from Manhattan on LinkedIn.

ENDS

ABOUT MANHATTAN ASSOCIATES:

Manhattan Associates is a global technology leader, providing supply chain and omnichannel commerce solutions with unmatched AI capabilities. We design, build and offer best-in-class, AI-powered, cloud-based solutions that drive resilience and efficiency for businesses. We enable enterprises to uniquely unify front-end sales with back-end supply chain execution.

Our commitment to innovation, cloud-native platform and API-first architecture create simpler experiences and faster paths to value for our customers. We empower them to preempt and react to emerging trends and global disruptions with technical expertise and operational confidence, transforming challenges into competitive advantage. For more information, please visit www.manh.com.

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SOURCE Manhattan Associates

Technology

Global Telecom Leaders to Convene in Singapore for Definitive Summit on AI-Native Transformation and Industry Reinvention

Published

29 minutes ago

April 23, 2026

SINGAPORE, April 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Twimbit, the global research and advisory firm, has finalized the strategic agenda for the Twimbit Telecom Summit & Awards 2026, scheduled for 21 May 2026 at the Capitol Theatre, Singapore. This high-level forum serves as a catalyst for addressing the shift toward AI-native architectures and digital sovereignty.

As the telecommunications sector moves beyond traditional connectivity toward a ‘Techco’ model, the 2026 summit will provide a framework for navigating margin pressure through structural innovation, with insights on ROIC growth, EBITDA optimization, and the integration of generative technologies into core business functions.

Architects of the Industry: Featured Perspectives

The 2026 summit features a curated lineup of visionaries redefining the telecom blueprint:

Soma Velayutham, VP Telecoms & AI, NvidiaWong Soon Nam, Chief Planning and Transformation Officer, TelekomselRajesh Chandiramani, CEO, ComvivaVikram Sinha, CEO, Indosat Ooredoo HutchisonAayush Bhatnagar, Chief Technology Development Officer, JioUlf Ewaldsson, Advisor, Indosat (Former President of Technology, T-Mobile)Juhi McClelland, Managing Partner, IBM Consulting APACManoj Menon, Founder & CEO, Twimbit

Strategic Forum: The Telecom Summit (08:00 – 14:35)

Designed as a high-impact leadership forum, the morning sessions will address three critical levers for telco success in 2026:

Accelerating the AI-Native Core: Leveraging generative AI to rebuild network operations and customer service modelsDigital Sovereignty & Infrastructure: Navigating data residency and localized AI infrastructure for competitive advantageGrowth Engineering & Customer Experience: Implementing high-touch service philosophies to drive customer lifetime value

The Recognition Gala: Twimbit Telecom Awards (17:00 – Late)

The day concludes with a prestigious black-tie awards ceremony, celebrating organisations and leaders demonstrating innovation and strategic transformation, using Twimbit’s proprietary research frameworks across Asia-Pacific.

Strategic Partnerships and Support

The event is supported by industry leaders. F5 joins as Strategic Partner, while Nokia and Comviva serve as Gold Sponsors, highlighting the role of secure infrastructure, customer experience, and digital financial solutions.

“We are at a point where incremental change is no longer sufficient,” said Manoj Menon, Founder & CEO of Twimbit. “This summit is about the reinvention of the telecom business model and providing a roadmap for leaders to architect the next era of digital intelligence.”

About Twimbit

A global tech and advisory firm powering customer success through research, innovation and community, Twimbit provides actionable insights that fuel innovation and growth through its proprietary research platform.

Media Contacts:
Vansh Sehgal
vansh@twimbit.com

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