"I don't kill anyone who doesn't deserve it," says Sam (Ben Whishaw), the self-described "triggerman"--hit man--in the new Netflix spy thriller Black Doves. Sam, like the series' other main character, Helen (not her real name, played by Keira Knightley), works for Black Doves' eponymous organization. They are spies, more or less, but spies for hire, and when you get right down to it, most of Sam's gigs seem to be carrying out hits for drug dealers. Sam isn't the only hit man featured in a sleek, starry TV thriller this winter. On Peacock, Eddie Redmayne plays Alex in a new adaptation of Frederick Forsyth's 1971 novel The Day of the Jackal.

After decades of serving as the named inspiration for the beloved franchise The Legend of Zelda, the series' titular princess is finally getting her own game. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, releasing September 26 for Nintendo Switch, gives Zelda her very own hero's journey after Link goes missing. But it does not, sadly, give her her own sword. Players have been clamoring for Hyrule's favorite princess to take the lead in a Zelda game for years now, or at least to be playable in games like Tears of the Kingdom. Excitement around Zelda's triumph was immediately evident on X after Nintendo announced the game Tuesday during one of its Direct presentations.

Gorillaz may be the most famous example of a virtual band, at least in the west. Elsewhere, virtual idol Hatsune Miku is omnipresent, her personality projected on to her by fans. Four-piece outfit OFK are different: before you've heard a note of their music, you're going to find out exactly who they are. The band itself is not real – it is an invention of the songwriters, composers and game designers working together at LA developer Team OFK – but the music is, and this is a novel and intriguing way to experience it. We Are OFK is a band biopic delivered over five animated episodes.

In a recent development, Neptune.ai, which builds developer tools for machine learning practitioners, raised $8 million in a Series A funding. The financing round was led by global VC firm Almaz Capital also invested recently in Refurbed and Minut, alongside participation from previous investors btov Partners, Rheingau Founders, and TDJ Pitango. With the latest funding, the total investment raised by Neptune.ai is close to $13 million since its inception. The startup will use the latest investment to deliver an even better experience for developers by rapidly expanding its product and engineering teams across Europe. Neptune's platform is used the most by machine learning engineers and corporate customers of over 100 paying companies, including The New Yorker, InstaDeep and Roche.

Robotics is one of the top emerging technologies of the modern era. At present, multiple robots are serving various industries like automobile, manufacturing, retail, and many more. Multiple robotics start-ups are coming up with innovative and unique robotic products and services to serve customers efficiently, especially, post-pandemic. Different investment companies are now investing in the field at different stages, right from seed funding and angel investors that help start an idea or buy private equities in well-established firms. Tech investors are looking for opportunities for effective investment in robotics through multiple Series A, B, C, etc. for sufficient funding in robotics for the nearby future. This article features the top 10 best robotics funding in the first quarter of 2022.

TruEra, a startup that offers an AI quality management solution to optimize, explain and monitor machine learning models, today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series B round led by Menlo Ventures. Existing investors Greylock Partners, Wing Venture Capital (which led its $12 million Series A round in late 2020), Harpoon Ventures, Conversion Capital, the Data Community Fund, as well as new investors Forgepoint Capital and the B Capital Group's Ascent Fund also participated in this round. In total, TruEra has now raised $42.3 million. "We believe that the next big challenge in AI is the quality challenge," TruEra CEO and co-founder Will Uppington said. "AI is at an inflection point: lots of opportunities but also a lot of challenges to make AI actually work in the enterprise. And we think that's the major issue that's preventing AI systems from getting into real-world use and actually delivering on KPIs."

Selector, an AIOps, analytics and observability platform provider, has announced it raised $28 million in a Series A funding round, bringing its total funding to $33 million. Selector will use these new funds for its market strategy and expansion in North America and investment in R&D. AIOps technology uses artificial intelligence to automate IT operations. According to a report by Allied Market Research, the AIOps market was valued at $26.33 billion in 2020 and will grow to $644.96 billion by 2030. Datanami has previously reported on the white-hot AIOps and observability market driven by IT professionals buried in metric, event, log, and trace (MELT) data from increasingly complex applications and pipelines.

Around half of the traffic online comes from bots. So it is crucial to manage bots since both malicious and helpful bot exists on the Internet. In 2021, around $261M has been invested in best-of-breed bot management technology. Analysts have predicted that the bot management market is set to grow rapidly. In Forrester Analytics: Application Security Solutions Forecast, 2020 To 2025 (Global), Forrester predicts that the application security solutions market will grow from $4.7B in 2019 to $12.9B by 2025 and that bot management will overtake traditional Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions.

Once an industry with long development cycles, the automotive space is being upended by China's tech giants. One can hardly keep up with all the new electric vehicle brands that come out of the country nowadays. Jidu, an electric carmaking company founded by Baidu and its Chinese auto partner Geely only a year ago, said Wednesday it has banked nearly $400 million in a Series A funding round. The new injection, bankrolled by Baidu and Geely, which owns Volvo, is a boost to the $300 million initiation capital that Jidu closed last March. The proceeds will speed up Jidu's R&D and mass production process and allow it to showcase its first concept "robocar" -- which it classifies as an automotive robot rather than a car -- at the Beijing auto show in April.

Professional speedrunners and Metroid fans have already cracked open the game, finding what's called "sequence breaks" in which players discover new ways to navigate the planet and earn power-ups to access more areas of the map at earlier points in the game. While I'm still chasing a run under four hours, players like Samura1man, a Finnish speedrunner, have beaten the game in under an hour and a half and are still finding new ways to shave off time. Just on Monday, Samura1man achieved what was then the world record, beating "Dread" in one hour and 27 minutes. That record was beaten by approximately half a minute later that same day. On YouTube, his latest run clocks in at one hour, 26 minutes and 9 seconds.