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Stellantis, the world’s fourth-largest carmaker, named Italian auto executive Antonio Filosa as its new chief executive officer Wednesday, replacing Carlos Tavares, who resigned under pressure last year.Filosa, who is currently Stellantis’ chief operating officer for the Americas and chief quality officer, takes the post effective June 23, when he is expected to announce his leadership team.The move returns the running of Stellantis, created from the 2021 merger of France’s PSA Peugeot with Italian-US carmaker Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, to Italian hands after three years under Tavares, who previously served as Peugeot’s top executive. John Elkann, heir to the Fiat-founding Agnelli family, remains chairman.Elkann praised Filosa’s “deep understanding of our company, including its people, who he views as our core strength, and of our industry.”Robert Peugeot said the board’s choice was unanimous, calling Filosa a “natural choice” due to his leadership track record and knowledge of the business and “the complex dynamics facing our industry.”Filosa joined Fiat in 1999, spending much of his career in Latin America where held positions from plant manager to head of purchasing and later chief operating officer. He was credited with making the Fiat brand the regional market leader and boosting the market share of the Peugeot, Citroen, Ram and Jeep brands.He was promoted to chief operating officer of the Americas in 2024 in an executive shakeup as sales slumped in North America, its main source of profits.Stellantis has been lagging globally in the transition to electric powertrains and facing stiff Chinese competition. Analysts also have said Stellantis, with 14 brands, is yoked by too many under-performers, including Maserati and Chrysler. Colleen Barry, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
I can tell you the exact moment when a new browser called Deta Surf clicked for me.I was getting a demo from Deta cofounder Max Eusterbrock, and he showed me how Surf can take screenshots of web pages and add them to a digital pinboard. But unlike a standard screenshot, this one contained a link to jump back to the web page it came from, and its content was searchable from Surfs menu system.Aha, I thought. Too often, Ill open dozens of tabs on a certain topic, only to forget which page had the quote or chart I was looking for. Surf solves that problem by making it easier to revisit what youve researched. Its as if a browser was built around the idea of bookmarking, instead of the other way around.Its still early days for Deta Surf, which is launching a public alpha today after months of being invite-only. The software has all kinds of rough edges and can feel like its trying to do too much, and theres also no mobile app and no business model yet. Id caution against getting too invested in it.But as a tool for short-term research that involves wrangling a lot of web page content, its one of the most interest concepts Ive seen. Beyond basic bookmarksOn the surface, Deta Surf borrows some ideas from other power user browsers such as Vivaldi, Arc, and SigmaOS. It supports both vertical or horizontal tabs, and you can arrange tabs into separate workspaces, which Surf calls Contexts.[Screenshot: Jared Newman]But Surf also lets you save web pages to a My Stuff menu, which is a powerful spin on the standard browser bookmarks folder. Every tab has a button for saving the page to My Stuff, but you can also use Surfs screenshot tool ((nvoked with Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+1) to save snippets of web pages with your own annotations.The My Stuff menu supports more than just web page content. You can also import images and PDF files from your computer, and theres a built-in notepad for adding freeform thoughts.Everything you save to My Stuff is searchable, and not just by title. Surf also indexes the full content of web pages along with the text of screenshots and PDF files, so you find specific words or phrases. The result is a feeling of finally being able to close inactive browser tabs, because Surf provides an easier way to reference them later.My favorite organizational feature, though, is the Desktop view, where you can rearrange and resize any the items youve saved to My Stuff alongside any number of sticky text notes. Its a neat way to visualize all the different things youve been researching on a single canvas.Yes, of course theres also AILike lots of other startups, Deta is finding ways to bring AI into its browser as well.Some AI features are similar to those of other AI-powered browsers. Theres an Ask this Tab button that can summarize and answer questions about the current page (including YouTube videos). You can highlight text on web pages to translate, rephrase, or ask follow-up questions.[Screenshot: Jared Newman]The more interesting use of AI involves interacting with what youve saved in My Stuff. By clicking the Ask Context button, you can ask Surf to summarize details from across your documents or ask for supplemental information.These AI queries then feed back into Surfs notepad feature, essentially helping to organize or build upon your research. Its kind of like what Google is doing with NotebookLM, but built around what youre already looking up in your browser.[Screenshot: Jared Newman]Eusterbrock also showed me a more ambitious Surflets feature, which can turn data from web pages into interactive visuals. If you were comparing web browsers, for instance, you could open up a bunch of pages that explain various browser features, then ask Surf to create an interactive chart comparing them.Expect things to breaka lotWhile Deta Surf is brimming with smart ideas about what a desktop browser could do, I wouldnt say it all comes together the way it should.For one thing, its just a lot to take in. Between the My Stuff menu, the Desktop, and all your open browser tabs, youve essentially got three different organizational surfaces to work with, and they multiply each time you create a new Context. My gut feeling is that the Desktop and My Stuff features should be streamlined into a single menu system for organizing and managing your research.[Image: Deta Surf]Surfs AI features can be cumbersome to use as well. Deta has stuck AI buttons into seemingly every corner of its interface, but they all flow back to a notepad that opens in a sidebar menu. Ive continually run into issues clicking the correct button to generate an AI response, and the latest build seems to have hidden the option to switch between large language models.The biggest issue, though, is that a lot of things just dont work properly. In my time with Surf, Ive dealt with disappearing bookmarks, information that appears in the wrong Context, and web searches that get truncated after typing them in the address bar.Surfs AI answers are even less reliable. For instance, I asked the browser to provide links to YouTube backing tracks for a list of sheet music in a Google Drive folder, and none of its generated links worked. Ive also had responses that dont accurately reflect whats in my notes and appear to be hallucinated, and Ive yet to successfully generate a single Surflet on my own.Meanwhile, I cant bring in my workflow from other browsers, because Surf doesnt work with most browser extensions (password managers are the exception) and doesnt support bookmarklets. The lack of a mobile app means I cant send pages into Surf from my phone, either.Deta is clearly moving fast and breaking things in search of what sticks, and thats totally understandable for an alpha product, but it makes for rough sailing if youre trying to use it as an everyday browser. What to expectEusterbrock acknowledges that a lot of what comprises Surf today is subject to change. Eventually the company wants to charge for things like cross-platform sync and collaboration, but it plans to spend the rest of the year nailing down the core product.Deta had already shifted gears a couple of times before developing Surf. The Berlin-based startup began as a free web app deployment platform for indie developers, then tried spinning that product into a wildly ambitious online operating system with its own set of interconnected apps, called Deta Space, which raised around $3 million, according to Pitchbook.[Screenshot: Jared Newman]It was a neat idea, but its parallel universe of apps lacked immediate appeal to end users, so Deta pivoted to building a browser instead. The core idea is still that you should be able to search and contextualize across your entire online workflow, but the browser allows Deta to work with existing web apps and sites instead of trying to build its own. (Deta killed off Space and deleted users data last year.)The resulting product is more immediately compelling than Detas previous efforts, but it comes with the same risk of getting shut down if things dont work out, and there are few examples of startups turning wildly ambitious browser into thriving businesses. The most notable startup in the space, The Browser Company, gave up on developing its ambitious Arc browser for desktops and is now pivoting to something much simpler.Still, I hope Deta Surf proves the exception to the rule. As a way to actually make sense of your browser tabs and the research you do around them, theres nothing else like it.
Category:
E-Commerce
Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Tuesday signed into law a bill requiring Apple and Alphabet’s Google to verify the age of users of their app stores, putting the second-most-populous U.S. state at the center of a debate over whether and how to regulate smartphone use by children and teenagers. The law, effective on January 1, requires parental consent to download apps or make in-app purchases for users aged below 18. Utah was the first U.S. state to pass a similar law earlier this year, and U.S. lawmakers have also introduced a federal bill. Another Texas bill, passed in the state’s House of Representatives and awaiting a Senate vote, would restrict social media apps to users over 18. Age limits and parental consent for social media apps are among the few areas of wide U.S. consensus, with a Pew Research poll in 2023 finding that 81% of Americans support requiring parental consent for children to create social media accounts and 71% support age verification before using social media. The effect of social media on children’s mental health has become a growing global concern, with dozens of U.S. states suing Meta Platforms and the U.S. Surgeon General issuing an advisory on safeguards for children. Australia last year banned social media for children under 16, with other countries such as Norway also considering new rules. How to implement age restrictions has caused a conflict between Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, and Apple and Google, which own the two dominant U.S. app stores. Meta, along with social media companies Snap and X, applauded the passage of the bill. “Parents want a one-stop shop to verify their child’s age and grant permission for them to download apps in a privacy-preserving way. The app store is the best place for it, and more than one-third of US states have introduced bills recognizing the central role app stores play,” the companies said. Kathleen Farley, vice president of litigation for the Chamber of Progress, a group backed by Apple and Alphabet, said the Texas law is likely to face legal challenges on First Amendment grounds. “A big path for challenge is that it burdens adult speech in attempting to regulate children’s speech,” Farley told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday. “I would say there are arguments that this is a content-based regulation singling out digital communication.” Child online safety groups that backed the Texas bill have also long argued for app store age verification, saying it is the only way to give parents effective control over children’s use of technology. “The problem is that self-regulation in the digital marketplace has failed, where app stores have just prioritized the profit over safety and rights of children and families,” Casey Stefanski, executive director for the Digital Childhood Alliance, told Reuters. Apple and Google opposed the Texas bill, saying it imposes blanket requirements to share age data with all apps, even when those apps are uncontroversial. “If enacted, app marketplaces will be required to collect and keep sensitive personal identifying information for every Texan who wants to download an app, even if its an app that simply provides weather updates or sports scores,” Apple said in a statement. Google and Apple each has its own proposal that involves sharing age range data only with apps that require it, rather than all apps. “We see a role for legislation here,” said Kareem Ghanem, senior director of government affairs and public policy at Google, told Reuters. “It’s just got to be done in the right way, and it’s got to hold the feet of Zuckerberg and the social media companies to the fire, because it’s the harm to kids and teens on those sites that’s really inspired people to take a closer look here and see how we can all do better.” Stephen Nellis, Reuters
Category:
E-Commerce
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