Federal Trade Commission hit Razer a $1.1 million wonderful was imposed on Tuesday. The ruling found that the gaming accessory manufacturer misled consumers by claiming that its eye-catching Zephyr mask was N95 certified.

“In the midst of a global pandemic, these companies falsely claimed that their face mask was equivalent to an N95-certified respirator,” Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Projections, noted in an announcement. “The FTC will continue to hold accountable companies that use false and unsubstantiated claims to target consumers making decisions about their health and safety.”

Predictably, Razer countered the committee’s claims.

“We disagree with the FTC’s allegations and have not admitted any wrongdoing as part of the settlement,” an organization representative said in an announcement to TechCrunch. “It was never our intention to mislead anyone, and we have now decided to settle this matter to avoid diverting attention and disrupting legal proceedings while continuing to deal with creating great products for gamers. Razer cares deeply about our community and is all the time committed to delivering technology in recent and relevant ways.

The company then suggested that the criticism had been upheld, adding that it had done every little thing in its power to refund customers and end sales of the Zephyr.

“The Razer Zephyr is designed to offer the community a different and innovative face covering option,” it notes. “The FTC’s claims against Razer related to limited portions of certain statements about Zephyr. “Over two years ago, Razer proactively notified customers that the Zephyr was not an N95 mask, stopped sales, and refunded customers.”

The FTC also officially bans the sale of masks and “making COVID-related false health claims or unsubstantiated health claims about protective health equipment.” It goes a step further: “prohibits (prohibits) defendants from presenting the health benefits, performance, effectiveness, safety, or side effects of protective goods and services (as defined in the proposed order) unless they have competent and credible scientific evidence to support the claims made.” “

The filing suggests that Razer intentionally deceived consumers by telling them that a $100 mask would protect against Covid-19. The virus was definitely highly regarded when the product first launched in October 2021.

The ordinance is currently awaiting approval and signature of a District Court judge.

When Joanna Strober was about 47 years old, she stopped sleeping. Although sleep loss is a common symptom of perimenopause, she first needed to go to multiple doctors, similar to driving 45 minutes from San Francisco to pay $750 out of pocket, to get a diagnosis and appropriate treatment.

“That feeling of ‘wow, I’ve really suffered unnecessarily over the last year’ really stuck with me,” Strober said in a recent episode of Podcast Found on TechCrunch. “I started talking to all my friends and trying to understand what was happening to them, and it became clear that perimenopause and menopause were serious. This hits women like a pile of bricks. It has many different symptoms and very few providers are trained to care for this population.”

This realization inspired Strober to launch Midi Health, a telehealth platform designed to serve midlife women by connecting them with healthcare providers trained in the symptoms and coverings of perimenopause and menopause.

Despite her “aha” moment, Strober explained why she couldn’t launch her startup instantly. She said Midi would not have existed if the U.S. government hadn’t modified regulations around telehealth and access to care during the pandemic. Strober said that because of changes in digital health, the company was capable of launch a platform that gives women with care as a substitute of having to depend on in-person care.

“It was a very exciting discovery to understand that this problem, which has existed for a long time, could finally be solved through telehealth,” Strober said. “And that’s why I wanted to start this company.”

Strober said Midi operates a little in another way than many other digital health firms which have sprung up in the wake of the pandemic. She said Midi was not created as a digital avenue through which users could get one-off care or treatment as quickly as possible, like many other firms of the same era, but relatively as a platform where women built long-term relationships with women. suppliers who make them feel noticed.

This approach can also be why Strober believes Midi has been capable of proceed to grow and lift VC funding as VCs have lost interest in the category. The company recently raised a $60 million B round led by Emerson Collective, with participation from Google Ventures, SteelSky Ventures and Muse Capital, amongst others. This round brings the company’s total funding to $99 million.

According to. digital health startups raised $13.2 billion globally in 2023 CB Insights data. This represents a decline of 48% in comparison with 2022, to $25.5 billion, and a decline of 75% in comparison with 2021, when a record amount of $52.7 billion was invested.

“I think too few telehealth companies haven’t thought about long-term customer relationships,” Strober said. “We see ourselves as constructing a trustworthy brand in the healthcare industry. Our brand is due to this fact skilled women’s care. We have to offer you such amazing care that you’ll come back to us repeatedly. That’s what women do.”

Midi shouldn’t be Strober’s first digital health startup, and she or he shared how her past experience constructing Kurbo Health, a startup focused on childhood obesity before digital health even existed, influenced her decisions to construct Midi. She also shared how her previous life as a enterprise capitalist also played a role in her approach to business.

With this latest round of funding, Midi looks forward to expanding care in areas covered by perimenopause and menopause, including sexual well-being, hair and skincare, and testosterone access.

“People keep asking, when do you get out of perimenopause and menopause?” Strober said. “But perimenopause and menopause are a big market. So we’re working a lot to understand what women’s health needs are at this time in their lives and how we can address those concerns appropriately.”

Pour one out for CodeWhisperer, Amazon’s AI-powered assistive coding tool. As of today, it’s kaput – in a way.

CodeWhisperer is now available Q-programmera part of Amazon’s Q family of business-oriented generative AI chatbots, which also includes the newly announced Q Business. Available via AWS, Q Developer helps with among the tasks developers perform of their every day work, akin to debugging and updating applications, troubleshooting, and performing security scans – very similar to CodeWhisperer did.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Doug Seven, CEO and director of AI developer experience at AWS, suggested that CodeWhisperer was a minor branding failure. Third party metrics reflect the identical; even with a free tier, CodeWhisperer has struggled to match the momentum of its fundamental rival GitHub Copilot, which has over 1.8 million paying individual users and tens of hundreds of enterprise customers. (Bad first impressions it definitely didn’t help.)

“CodeWhisperer is where we started (code generation), bbut we really wanted to have a brand and name that fit a broader set of use cases,” Seven said. “You can take into consideration Q Developer as an evolution of CodeWhisperer into something much broader.”

To do that, Q Developer can generate code, including SQL, a programming language commonly used to create and manage databases, in addition to test that code and help transform and deploy recent code developed based on developer queries.

As with Copilot, customers can tune Q Developer of their internal code bases to enhance the accuracy of the tool’s programming recommendations. (The now deprecated CodeWhisperer also offered this selection.) And with a capability called Q Agents, Developer can autonomously do things like deploy features and document and refactor (i.e. restructure) code.

Ask Q Developer to “create an ‘add to favorites’ button in my app” and Q Developer will analyze your app’s code, generate recent code if obligatory, create a step-by-step plan, and test your code app before implementing proposed changes. Developers can review and iterate the plan before Q implements it, linking steps together and applying updates to the obligatory files, code blocks, and test suites.

“Behind the scenes, Q Developer actually runs the development environment to work on the code,” Seven said. “So in the case of Q feature development, the Developer takes the entire code repository, creates a branch of that repository, parses the repository, does the work it was asked to do, and returns those code changes to the developer.”

Amazon says agents also can automate and manage code update processes because Java conversions are already available (specifically Java 8 and 11 built with Apache Maven to Java 17) and .NET conversions coming soon. “Q Developer analyzes the code – looking for anything that needs updating – and makes all those changes before returning it to the developer for review and approval,” Seven added.

In my opinion, Agents is very just like GitHub’s Copilot Workspace, which similarly generates and deploys roadmaps for bug fixes and recent software features. And – as with Workspace – I’m not entirely convinced that this more autonomous approach can solve the issues related to AI-based coding assistants.

GitClear’s evaluation of over 150 million lines of code committed to project repositories over the past few years found that The co-pilot generated more code errors pushed to code bases. Elsewhere, security researchers warn that Copilot and similar tools can do that amplify existing bugs and security issues in software projects.

This is not surprising. AI-powered coding assistants seem impressive. But they’re trained in existing code, and their suggestions reflect patterns in other developers’ work – work that will be seriously flawed. Assistants’ guesses cause errors which can be often difficult to detect, especially when developers – who adopt AI coding assistants great numbers — put aside for evaluation by assistants.

In a less dangerous area beyond coding, Q Developer can aid you manage your organization’s cloud infrastructure on AWS – or at the very least get the data you should manage it yourself.

Q Developer can fulfill requests akin to “List all my Lambda functions” and “List my resources located in other AWS regions.” Currently in preview, the bot also can generate (but not execute) AWS CLI commands and answer AWS cost-related questions akin to “What were the top three highest-cost services in the first quarter?”

Image credits: Amazon

So how much do these generative AI conveniences cost?

Q Developer is available without spending a dime on AWS Console, Slack, and IDEs akin to Visual Studio Code, GitLab Duo, and JetBrains – but with limitations. The free version doesn’t allow customization of custom libraries, packages and APIs and defaults to a knowledge collection scheme for users. It also imposes monthly limits of a maximum of 5 Agent tasks (e.g. feature deployment) per thirty days and 25 requests for AWS account resources per thirty days. (I find it surprising that Amazon places a limit on the questions you possibly can ask about its own services, but here we’re.)

The premium version of Q Developer, Q Developer Pro costs $19 per thirty days per user and provides higher usage limits, user and policy management tools, single sign-on, and – perhaps most significantly – mental property guarantee.

Image credits: Amazon

In many cases, the models underlying code generation services akin to Q Developer are trained on copyrighted or restrictively licensed code. Vendors say fair use protects them when models have been consciously or unconsciously developed using copyrighted code – but not everyone agrees. GitHub and OpenAI are there defendant In class movement which accuses them of copyright infringement by allowing Copilot to return licensed code snippets without attribution.

Amazon says it’ll defend Q Developer Pro customers against claims that the service infringes a 3rd party’s mental property rights so long as they permit AWS to regulate its defense and resolve “as AWS deems appropriate.”