Fora raised a $60M Series D at a $1 billion valuation, led by Forerunner and Tactile Ventures. The platform lets anyone become a travel advisor and hands them the tooling to run it, plus an AI assistant, Via, that handles the tedious research and itineraries. Advisors have booked $3B in travel, and the pace is accelerating: three years for the first billion, five months for the third. (TechCrunch)

Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, the largest open-weight model ever at roughly 2.8 trillion parameters with a 1-million-token context window. Moonshot claims it performs competitively with Anthropic's Fable 5 and beats older flagships, with open weights promised by July 27. For builders, an open model at this tier means a cheaper, customizable alternative to the closed labs. (VentureBeat)

ManpowerGroup shares surged about 32% after the staffing giant returned to profit and beat on revenue at $4.9 billion, with stronger demand in the US and parts of Europe. Guidance for next quarter came in ahead of expectations too. When the world's biggest hiring firm rebounds this hard, it's an early signal the labor market is loosening up again. (Yahoo Finance)

Netflix reported $12.56 billion in revenue, up 13%, with profit climbing to $3.40 billion on membership growth, pricing, and ads. Engagement is "healthy," the company says, but the stock slid more than 8% after hours as investors wanted a bigger forecast. The lesson for every founder: at a certain scale, beating expectations stops being enough. (CNBC)

NetApp acquired DataPelago, whose engine processes data right where it's stored instead of copying it to a separate cluster. The company claims that cuts infrastructure costs up to 80% and runs up to 10x faster. The pitch matters because moving and duplicating data is the quiet bottleneck slowing most enterprise AI projects to a crawl. (NetApp)

Every August, Earth plows through the debris trail of comet Swift-Tuttle, and bits of it slam into our atmosphere at 37 miles per second. It's called the Perseids, and it's the meteor shower most Americans have actually seen. This year is the good one: the peak lands on a new moon, so there's no moonlight washing out the show.

The Perseids peak overnight on August 12 into the morning of August 13, with the best window running 1 a.m. to 4 a.m. local time in any US time zone. Under a dark, moonless sky, watchers regularly count 90 or more meteors an hour. The new moon on August 12 is what makes 2026 special, dark skies turn a decent show into a great one.

You don't need a telescope, just distance from city lights. Two standout Dark Sky Parks: Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado, where meteors streak over towering dunes, and Cherry Springs State Park, Pennsylvania, the East Coast's best window to truly black skies. No national park within reach? Getting even 30 to 60 minutes outside your nearest city, away from streetlights, gets you meaningfully more than your backyard.

Give your eyes 20 to 30 minutes to adjust and skip your phone screen, that's the mistake most people make. Lie back, look up and out (not straight at the radiant), and let the wide sky do the work. Check the forecast the day before, since clear skies matter more than location. Start planning at nps.gov for the Dark Sky parks, or find a spot near you at darksky.org.

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