Contactless payments are great, but have you ever paid for your coffee with a magic wand?

Cash App, the digital payments service run by Block, has just launched the Cash App Wand – a pearlescent, star-shaped, NFC-enabled keychain accessory that lets you tap to pay at any contactless terminal. Yes, it is a real product that costs $25, and it is available right now for Cash App Card holders to buy in the app.

So how does this magical wand work?

The Cash App Wand is the first product under a new hardware line called Cash App Tags. Tags are NFC-enabled physical devices that require no Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connection to function. To set one up, you simply hold it to the back of your phone, and it links directly to your Cash App account.

After that, it works exactly like a debit card, except it clips onto your keychain or handbag like a charm bracelet. Block’s hardware lead Thomas Templeton says the whole idea is to make payments feel visible, fun, and expressive again.

He points out that digital payments have made buying things almost invisible, and even Cash App’s own cards spend 90% of their time sitting in people’s pockets. Cash App wants the wand to be the first thing you reach for when it is time to pay.

Advertisement

This is just the beginning of Cash App Tags

The wand is the first of many quirky tap-to-pay hardware designs coming down the line. Limited runs of new Cash App Tag designs will drop to Cash App cardholders in the coming weeks, with general availability opening up later this summer.

Whether you need a wand to pay for your morning coffee or just want to feel like a wizard at the checkout counter, Cash App has you covered.

And if a magic wand wasn’t enough to make you spend more money, Google is also making online checkout faster and easier than ever by removing OTP and replacing it with a simple biometric check.

The Nintendo Switch 2 is my favorite gaming handheld right now, but its battery life is still a weak point compared to older Switches. Belkin’s new $100 battery pack and grip combo accessory, called the Charging Grip, solves some of the battery issues and even handheld comfort. But it makes the Switch 2 a lot bigger in the process.

I’ve been trying an early review sample of the Charging Grip over the last week, and there’s stuff I appreciate. The 10,000-mAh battery has an LED screen to show charge amount, and generally resembles the battery that also came in an already-available battery pack-embedded Belkin Switch 2 case. 

This time, the battery sticks onto the Switch 2 itself. A snap-on plastic shell has a magnetic panel the battery snaps onto, and then a little USB cable pops into the top to charge at 30W. The case I’m trying is black, but it also comes in lilac and olive. Belkin promises 1.5 Switch 2 recharges with the battery. So far, it’s been a helpful way to top off the Switch 2 over a day without redocking or plugging in.

The plastic shell feels a bit flimsy, although it’s at least a little more protection for the Switch 2 body. There’s a cut-out on the back for the Switch 2’s kickstand to pop out.

Two large Joy-Con controller grips come in the package, sliding on easily and locking in place. The rubbery texture and their overall size does make holding the Switch 2 feel more comfy to me, more like the generous size of Steam Deck and Windows gaming handhelds.

But the overall battery-plus-grip cosmetic change to the Switch 2 bulks it up a ton. It can still prop up with a kickstand on a table, and can technically narrowly slide into the dock without removing the grip case. But it definitely won’t fit into regular Switch 2 carry cases, although Belkin’s selling a new shoulder-carry travel bag for that.

One of my favorite parts of the Switch 2 versus Windows handhelds is how much more compact it is, and unfortunately Belkin’s grip case erases that advantage. But if you’re looking for a battery boost and a comfier grip no matter the cost or size, this might be for you.

A new series of images claiming to be the iPhone 18 Pro chassis have been leaked, showing black, blue, and dark cherry red.

It’s always suspicious when a leaker has just a single image of a purported device, but now a series of shots have shown off most of the colors expected for the iPhone 18 Pro.

On Yeux1122’s blog, fellow leaker Lanzk claims to have samples of the aluminum frame for the iPhone 18 Pro. They comprise the back and sides of the phone, and appear to be stamped with “2026” plus some unclear Chinese-language markings.

Dark Cherry looks ever more certain to be one of the iPhone 18 Pro’s colors – image credit: Lanzk

Advertisement

The leaker has shown off one Dark Cherry frame, two black ones, and three of the light blue version. There’s no distinguishable difference between the units when two or three are displayed.

There’s no indication of the source of the components. However, each of the black and light blue ones shown have a small plastic bag that appears to contain a SIM-card tray.

That would suggest that, however they got to the leaker, they may have come from manufacturers in China. There are other countries that still require a physical SIM card, however.

Even if the leak is as accurate as it appears, it may not be the complete set of colors due to be unveiled for the iPhone 18 Pro, and iPhone 18 Pro Max. While the current iPhone 17 Pro ships in three colors, previous rumors have said that the iPhone 18 Pro will return to the norm of having four.

Those four are the ones shown in this leak plus a light silver. If reports correct and there will be a Dark Cherry option, it’s predicted to become a hit just as the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s Cosmic Orange has been.

Black version of the same frame part – image credit: Lanzk

However, some users will be more pleased at the return of a black option. That was last seen with 2024’s iPhone 16 Pro.

In the course of this review, we examined the image in depth. While there was no EXIF data to speak of, there generally isn’t and that’s not a sign of a fake.

There are none of the hallmarks of a photo edit, or generative AI having fabricated the images. The chassis’ internal protrusions are not identical to that of the iPhone 17 Pro, either. We think these are the real thing, unlike data gathered from case manufacturers.

That all said, leaker Lanzk has not previously reported on iPhone colors. However, they have leaked accurately about Apple’s plans for what would ultimately become the MacBook Neo.

The big names in the artificial intelligence industry don’t always get along. We’ve seen lawsuits between AI companies and intense rivalries between leaders that turn into all-out feuds. But it seems that they generally agree on at least one thing: AI should not be used to create biological weapons.

CEOs of some of the world’s leading AI companies signed a public letter this week urging governments to address the risks that could come from bad actors using their technology. The letter encourages Congress to enact laws to improve the tracking of synthetic DNA sequences that could be used to create biological weapons. 

Signed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Alexandr Wang, Microsoft AI’s Mustafa Suleyman, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis and other scientists and AI lab leaders, the letter suggested legislation to require companies that sell synthetic DNA and manufacturers of synthesis machines to thoroughly check “sequences of concern and to verify customer legitimacy before shipping orders.”

The letter, also signed by leaders in the synthetic DNA industry and experts in national security, makes it clear that AI accelerates the threat of biosecurity threats.

“While the issue is not new, the pace of progress in artificial intelligence is. AI systems now outperform Ph.D-level virologists on questions about highly technical laboratory procedures in their own domains of expertise,” the letter states. 

“AI systems are improving rapidly, and alongside incredible benefits to science and medicine, there is a real possibility that the knowledge barriers which have historically prevented bad actors from obtaining biological weapons will meaningfully erode.”

The letter has a distinct sense of urgency, requesting that lawmakers implement guardrails swiftly. “This is a rare moment of agreement across stakeholders that are often at odds,” it reads. “We hope policymakers will meet it with decisive action.”

It more than doubles your gaming time while giving you a better grip.

Generalist hopes to make ‘general intelligence’ robotics a reality.

US AI robotics company Generalist has raised $400m at a reported $2bn valuation to accelerate its plans towards achieving “physical” artificial general intelligence (AGI).

The round was led by Radical Ventures, with participation from Nvidia’s venture arm NVentures, Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions, World Labs founder and leading AI expert Fei-Fei Li, and Zoom CEO Eric Yuan.

Other participants include 8VC, Union Square Ventures, Hanabi Capital, Norwest, Boldstart Ventures, Spark Capital, NFDG and serial entrepreneur Naval Ravikant.

With a team of AI and robotics experts with experience across Big Tech, Generalist hopes to make “general intelligence” robotics a reality.

The company was founded in 2024 by former DeepMind scientists Pete Florence, Andy Zheng, and former Boston Dynamics roboticist and Harvard machine learning scientist Andrew Barry.

Generalist launched its Gen-0 class of AI models last November, which it said was trained on an “unprecedented” scale of real-world data. The company said the model proved that physical experience and larger models could predictably produce more capable systems.

In April, it launched Gen-1, which showed commercial viability, it added. Gen-1 was three-times faster than similar state-of-the-art models, showcasing 99pc reliability on diverse tasks and demonstrated the ability to learn new and complex physical skills, according to Generalist.

“Scaling robot learning creates better models, better models can do more useful physical work, and data from real businesses drives the next generation of more capable models,” the company said in a statement.

The new funding will allow Generalist to continue “scaling robot learning”, including building new models, scaling its physical data engine, expanding compute and training infrastructure and working with industries for commercialisation.

“Our goal is not to tie ourselves to any single method or label. Our goal is to build whatever is needed to make physical AGI real,” said the company.

The exact definition of AGI is difficult to pin down. According to Google, AGI refers to the hypothetical intelligence of a machine that allows it to “understand” or “learn” intellectual tasks that humans can, while IBM calls it the “abstract goal of AI development”, where human intelligence can be replicated by machines or software.

Robotics rise

The robotics industry has gained renewed energy in recent years, fuelled by AI. For the world’s biggest chipmaker Nvidia, robotics represents the biggest market for potential growth after AI.

Last month, Meta acquired US start-up Assured Robot Intelligence to reportedly pursue its plans for humanoid robotic hardware to help with household chores, and Amazon made its own robotics-related acquisition with Fauna Robotics in March.

Meanwhile, Alphabet’s robotics software R&D company Intrinsic joined Google to work in close proximity with DeepMind, as well as tap into Google’s Gemini AI models and cloud services.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

AI apps led App Store growth in 2025, with the entire ecosystem garnering $1.4 trillion in payouts. Apple’s take of that is only 10%, assuming you agree with how they count.

Every year, typically right before WWDC, Apple releases a study showing how the App Store has fared over the prior year. In 2025, the App Store facilitated more than $1.4 trillion in developer billings. And, it said that the App Store ecosystem has tripled in size since 2019.

“Developers are the heartbeat of the App Store, and this year’s incredible milestone is a testament to their boundless creativity,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook.

“We are deeply committed to providing developers with the tools, technologies, and trusted platforms they need to build for the future,” Cook added. “Together, developers are creating apps that enrich the lives of users around the world.”

Commission eligible and ineligible revenue

Apple notes that for more than 90 percent of the billings and sales, Apple did not receive a commission. That means that most apps are making money outside of the App Store.

The study reports that 90% of App Store sales are commission-free. The study lists this number as $1,437 billion, or what most people, and Apple, generally call $1.4 trillion.

Image credit: Apple & Analysis Group

Interestingly, Apple counts digital goods and services purchased outside the App Store as sales that are not eligible for commissions, but still in the $1.4 trillion total. These include subscriptions to Hulu, Audible, Spotify, and the New York Times.

It’s hard to understand where exactly Apple fits into this. If a person purchases a subscription to, say, YouTube Premium outside of the App Store, but watches it on their Apple TV, does that count in this number?

The methodology mentioned in the study isn’t helpful, either. It reads:

“Sales and distribution of digital goods and services can occur through the App Store in the form of paid app downloads and in-app purchases, through linking out to webstores where content is consumed in-app but payments are made outside of the App Store, or through the sale of digital content and subscriptions from multi-platform apps that allow for the use and consumption of the app, both in the App Store ecosystem and elsewhere.”

It’s unclear whether the data includes purchases made after a user manually enters a website address to buy digital goods, or only purchases made through links accessed via buttons in the app.

The study also doesn’t say where it gets its data, really. A small line reads “data sources include data from Apple, app analytics companies, market research firms, and individual companies.”

So the digital goods and services section is a bit hard to parse. And it accounts for about 10.3% of Apple’s total $1.4 trillion revenue figure, or $149 billion.

Other sources of revenue include physical goods and services, such as buying items on Amazon or ordering delivery through Instacart. Lastly, it mentions in-app advertising revenue, including ads displayed on TikTok, Instagram, and in games.

AI market saturation

This year, Apple is placing special emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI), claiming that apps featuring consumer-facing AI have seen four times the growth of their non-AI counterparts. This specifically refers to the top 100 apps, of which 40 currently have some form of consumer-facing AI.

Of course, it’s hard to tell if AI was the primary growth driver or if the most popular apps were going to integrate AI regardless.

For example, 99% of Fortune 500 companies were using AI in some capacity in 2025. Customer service saw a 2199% growth increase between January 2025 and January 2026.

Global growth, by region

The App Store saw growth worldwide in 2025. And in some regions, that growth has exploded in the last several years.

According to the study, billings and sales facilitated by the App Store have more than doubled in China in the last six years. In that same time period, it’s more than tripled in the U.S. and Europe.

Image credit: Apple & Analysis Group

Globally, physical goods and services accounted for the majority of all sales made in the App Store.

However, sales differed a little across regions. For example, travel was the second-largest category of spending in physical goods and services in the U.S., Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Brazil.

However, in Korea, food delivery was the second most popular. In the Chinese market, grocery and food delivery rounded out the top three slots.

Apple’s investment in developers

In 2025, Apple hosted thousands of developers at its developer centers. There are more than 20 Apple Developer Academies around the world, including Brazil, Indonesia, Italy, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and the U.S.

Apple plans to open a Developer Center in Berlin sometime in 2026.

WWDC 2026 kicks off on June 8, allowing Apple to connect with developers and offer the first look at what tools and technologies will be available for the upcoming Apple operating system lineup.

Developers and students will have access to more than 100 new video sessions about tools, technologies, and design. They will also be invited to participate in Group Labs and join conversations in the Apple Developer Forums.

Every new AI agent your team deploys starts from scratch: no memory of how the business works, where data lives, or what rules apply. And as agentic coding tools spin up applications faster than anyone can govern them, each one risks becoming another silo outside your data layer entirely. Microsoft is addressing both problems directly at Build 2026.

According to VentureBeat’s VB Pulse’s Q1 2026 RAG Infrastructure Market Tracker, hybrid retrieval intent among 100-plus employee organizations tripled from 10.3% in January to 33.3% in March, a signal that enterprises have moved past expanding RAG coverage and are now focused on the architecture underneath it. Shared business context is the part retrieval does not solve.

On the context side, Microsoft is expanding Fabric IQ, its existing business data context layer, into a broader unified system called Microsoft IQ, adding three additional context sources covering how the organization works, what it knows and real-time global signals from the web, so any agent can tap all four as a single foundation. On the application side, Rayfin, a new open-source SDK and CLI, deploys agent-built applications directly to Fabric as a governed production backend, routing application data into the same platform rather than spinning up new silos.

Amir Netz, CTO of Microsoft Fabric, reached for a film analogy to explain where the data platform fits. The green screen of cascading code in “The Matrix” wasn’t atmosphere, it was the layer that built the world Agent Smith operated in.

“Our job in the world of data is creating reality for agents based on data,” Netz told VentureBeat.

Microsoft IQ unifies four context sources into a single agent foundation

Microsoft IQ brings together four context sources that until now existed separately, designed so a developer can connect a new agent to all four in a single integration step.

Work IQ. Captures how the organization operates day to day, drawing on email, documents, meetings and schedules to give agents an understanding of people, teams and workflows.

Foundry IQ. Manages institutional knowledge, curating and indexing knowledge bases so agents understand what it means to work within the organization, what rules apply and what procedures to follow.

Fabric IQ. Models the live operational state of the business through data, defining entities, relationships and business rules grounded in real-time signals from Fabric Real-Time Intelligence. Ontologies, the layer that captures that operational context, are expected to reach GA in the coming months.

Web IQ. Adds real-time global context from the web, giving agents a current picture of the world outside the organization alongside its internal data.

“The agents are going to become highly informed virtual employees,” Netz said. “That’s where the world is heading.”

Rayfin routes agent-built applications into the same data foundation

Building shared context solves one half of the problem. The other is what happens when agents start generating applications. Every new app needs a backend, and without a governed deployment path each one creates a new data silo outside the context layer entirely.

Rayfin provides an enterprise-grade back end and deploys agent-built applications directly to Fabric, so application data lands in Microsoft OneLake by default and feeds back into the Microsoft IQ context layer rather than accumulating outside it.

Microsoft positions Rayfin against Supabase and Neon, the Postgres-compatible backends that agentic coding tools default to. The differentiator is governance: Rayfin routes the entire application fleet through Fabric’s unified data and compliance layer rather than creating isolated silos.

Netz described the relationship as bidirectional. The agent building a Rayfin application draws from the organization’s ontology. The data that application generates then enriches that ontology for the next agent.

Every major data platform is chasing the same answer, but execution is unproven

Microsoft is not the only platform building a shared context layer for agents. Snowflake announced its own context capabilities this week with semantic capabilities. Pinecone has its Nexus platform that expands the vector database to become a knowledge engine and Redis has developed its Iris context and memory platform.

Microsoft’s approach further reinforces the trend that RAG and model availability aren’t the issue anymore.

“Fabric IQ and Rayfin are important because the enterprise AI challenge is no longer just about the model availability,” Robert Kramer, managing partner at KramerERP told VentureBeat. “The real question is whether Microsoft simplifies execution and strengthens trust or adds another layer to an already complex environment.”