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Tech brands celebrating Pride month

LGBTQ+ rights are human rights

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This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, a series of protests widely regarded as the historic event that ignited the gay liberation movement and the first Pride parade in 1970.

A lot of companies are joining in this year’s celebration by changing their logos or selling limited edition merchandise to show their support for the LGBTQ+ community, but being an ally doesn’t stop at plastering a rainbow on everything and using #Pride online for the month of June. Here, we have compiled a list of tech brands who have taken concrete steps in creating equal opportunities for everyone and a more inclusive culture, not just this month but all year round:

Apple

Apple released a new watch band and watch face for the Apple Watch at the Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) this year in celebration of Pride. A portion of its proceeds will be donated to LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations including Encircle, Gender Spectrum, and the National Center for Transgender Equality.

Apart from Pride merch, Apple has long supported inclusion and diversity by hiring and advocating on behalf of underrepresented minorities, including LGBTQ+ people. For this, the company has been receiving a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign’s (HRC) Corporate Equality Index for 16 years now — a benchmarking tool on corporate policies and practices pertinent to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer employees.

Dell

 

Since 2002 Dell has been actively participating in and leading initiatives that support the LGBTQ+ community that the HRC’s Corporate Equality Index also deems the company as one of the best places to work for LGBT equality. The company provides healthcare benefits to its LGBTQ+ employees including parental leave, adoption assistance, and gender transition toolkit.

Dell is an active sponsor of Out & Equal Workplace Advocates, a nonprofit organization that partners with Top Fortune 500 companies in building resources and hosting events to help other companies around the globe in achieving lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender workplace equality. This year, Dell also hosted a Pride month training for its Nashville office to help its employees become better allies to the community.

Google

June 4 Google Doodle is a celebration of 50 years of Pride, created by Doodler Nate Swinehart who says, “working on this Doodle was a very personal project for me. As a member of the LBGTQ+ community, I am very familiar with the struggle of feeling included, accepted, and that I am a ‘part’ of this world.” Google also put up Pride Forever, which aims to preserve LGBTQ+ history for future generations by extending the Stonewall National Monument from its physical location in New York City to a digital experience that anyone can access on pride.google.com.

Apart from programs that support minorities, Google has Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) comprised of LGBT Googlers and their allies called Gayglers, as well as Trans at Google that seeks to ensure that the company’s products and policy stances are inclusive of all gender identities and expressions.

Instagram

Instagram recognizes that many of its users are members of the LGBTQ+ community. To celebrate Pride this year, the platform will display relevant hashtags in a rainbow gradient including #lgbtq, #bornperfect, and #pride2019 for a month. Using the hashtags in Stories will also turn the story ring into rainbow instead of Instagram’s gradient.

Instagram is updating gender options for users as well, “to be more inclusive and reflective of how people self-identify today.” There is also an LGBTQ+ teen guide on online well-being and self-care that Instagram created with The Trevor Project.

Lyft

Like Instagram, Lyft now offers a range of pronoun options to support transgender and non-binary riders. For transitioning drivers, Lyft provides them assistance with changing the name and gender designation on their driver’s license together with the National Center for Transgender Equality. Through its Round Up & Donate feature has donated over $5 million to HRC and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Lyft also has a Gender Inclusion & Affirmation policy created by members of the company’s LGBTQ+ employee resource group, LyftOUT, that lays out comprehensive protections and benefits for its employees.

Microsoft

Later this month Microsoft is releasing a Surface Pro Pride Type Cover designed with and for the LGBTQ+ community, and donating US$ 100,000 to nonprofits in celebration of Pride. For its employees Microsoft has implemented anti-discrimination policies and benefits since 1989. In 1993, they were one of the first companies in the world to offer employee benefits to same-sex partners. Microsoft is also one of the companies that’s received a perfect score from HRC’s Corporate Equality Index.

To quote Microsoft, “we’ve come far in the last 50 years after Stonewall, but we haven’t gone far enough.” In many countries where tech companies operate, being queer is still a crime and LGBTQ+ rights are still not recognized.

It takes more than just hearing voices of the community to make the world more inclusive and non-discriminatory — individual allies and corporations play a big role in amplifying the movement. Let’s celebrate Pride not just by buying rainbow products that donate to a good cause or using hashtags this month, but also by eliminating bias in everything that we do and pushing for equal rights in the workplace and local communities until we no longer have to.

Happy Pride!

Enterprise

Chimelong’s newest attraction might be the robots themselves

The future of travel is here, and it knows tai chi!

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Imagine checking into a theme park and greeting a humanoid robot. A few hours later, you watch one perform tai chi. Another challenges you to table tennis. Yet another helps you navigate to the next attraction. By nightfall at your hotel, robots enhance the experience again.

This vision drives the latest collaboration between AGIBOT and Chimelong Group. Together, they brought over 300 robots to Chimelong Spaceship Park in Zhuhai, China.

This launch represents a massive real-world application of embodied AI in tourism. AGIBOT and Chimelong integrated these robots across entertainment, education, visitor services, retail, and hospitality. They act as active participants rather than remaining confined to a single demonstration area.

The timing celebrates a notable milestone, too. During the launch, Chimelong received the 20,000th robot to roll off AGIBOT’s production line.

Your next theme park companion could be a robot

At Chimelong Spaceship Park, robots act as part of the total visitor experience. Guests don’t just stop to watch them from afar.

Some take on entertainment roles by performing martial arts, gymnastics, and tai chi. Others interact directly with guests through table tennis and hands-on manipulation challenges.

Designers also created robots for the quieter moments of a park day. They answer questions, introduce exhibits, and guide visitors through designated areas.

In retail settings, robots assist shoppers with their purchases. Meanwhile, hotel deployments place them in guest-facing roles to welcome visitors and hold multi-turn conversations.

Consequently, your trip involves encountering robots in several different contexts. The journey stretches seamlessly from your park arrival to your hotel return.

When the robots become part of the show

Theatrical applications are perhaps the easiest to picture. AGIBOT and Chimelong incorporate robots into live performances alongside human actors, music, and lighting.

Rather than treating a humanoid robot as a mere technological curiosity onstage, creators coordinate multiple robots into fluid routines.

Elsewhere, visitors engage with robots through games and educational activities. This creates a highly interactive, hands-on introduction to embodied AI.

Theme parks offer a perfectly fitting setting for this technology. Parks historically excel at making technology disappear into the magic. Engineers design animatronics, immersive environments, special effects, and automated rides to serve the story.

Humanoid robots push this idea into new territory. They communicate, navigate physical spaces, respond to people, and adapt to different settings with ease.

A robot-filled day does not stop at the park gates

The collaboration naturally extends into Chimelong’s hospitality operations.

Robots welcome hotel guests, hold complex conversations, and offer highly personalized interactions. This introduces an interesting possibility for resorts. Technology can now follow visitors beyond the main attraction and enhance the broader destination.

Travelers will soon experience trips where the boundaries between attraction, service, and technology blur entirely.

A robot might serve as your tour guide. Next, you could watch a robotic entertainment performance. Finally, a mechanical host could wait downstairs in your hotel lobby.

Potentially, the robot you meet in one area connects directly to the wider system operating backstage.

Making hundreds of robots work together

Deploying over 300 robots into a busy tourism destination requires massive coordination.

AGIBOT, Chimelong, and China Mobile established a dedicated 5G network. This ensures stable connectivity across high-traffic areas. The team uses centralized coordination to manage robots moving through various park and hotel environments.

Comprehensive operational systems also handle network security, privacy protection, charging, and fire safety.

Guests easily overlook this infrastructure while watching a robot perform tai chi. Yet, this backend framework remains one of the most fascinating aspects of the project. A theme park represents a highly complicated environment. Thousands of people constantly move through spaces shifting rapidly from one experience to another.

Making robots useful here means teaching them to embody the destination itself.

The beginning of a bigger experiment

AGIBOT and Chimelong are establishing a joint research institute for embodied AI in tourism.

This institute will explore new applications, operating models, and technologies. Researchers will draw directly from the experience of this massive deployment. The first project phase lays the groundwork to expand robot usage across all Chimelong properties.

For now, the appeal remains fairly simple. Creators build theme parks on the promise of making ordinary life feel extraordinary.

Chimelong bets that humanoid robots will increasingly spark that exact magic.

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Enterprise

AGIBOT just topped the medal table at the World Humanoid Robot Games

The robots that did it are already clocking in at real factories.

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AGIBOT entered its first World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing on August 26 and walked away with a dominant victory.

The company claimed 18 gold, 16 silver, and 12 bronze medals, securing 46 total podium finishes and topping both the gold and overall medal standings.

Designed to stress-test humanoid machines in sports, fine manipulation, and real-world duties, the Games evaluated robots across events ranging from martial arts to hotel service and emergency response.

AGIBOT swept through these categories, earning top spots in motion control, obstacle racing, and daily practical tasks.

The true triumph lies in what remained unchanged on competition day. AGIBOT fielded its standard production lineup, including the OmniHand, G2, A3, and X2.

None of these units were custom-built to win medals, as every machine came straight from active commercial deployments.

Precision and agility straight off the assembly line

The OmniHand reached the finals in all eight dexterous manipulation events and brought home seven gold medals.

It aced delicate challenges like Block Building, Powder Weighing, and Bean Picking with Tweezers, proving that fine motor control matters just as much as raw power.

In motion control, the AGIBOT X2 captured gold in the 100m obstacle race while adding silver and bronze in the 400m sprint.

Meanwhile, the AGIBOT A3 secured gold in Tai Chi. The X2 competed in its standard commercial configuration without any hardware modifications.

Powering the X2 is AGIBOT’s proprietary AGILE framework, short for AgiBot Generative Intelligent Locomotion Engine.

This system blends real-time environmental perception with autonomous decision-making to navigate sudden obstacles and changing terrain.

By combining precise parameter identification with seamless simulation-to-reality transfer, the framework maintains rock-solid stability when transitioning from code to physical ground.

Proven intelligence on actual factory floors

AGIBOT earned five golds in real-world scenarios, dominating tasks across library operations, hotel services, and emergency response.

The G2 robot behind these wins is the exact same model currently operating on factory floors for manufacturers like Longcheer and SAIC.

Its operational intelligence stems from AGIBOT’s ViLLA embodied foundation model GO, the world model GE, and its RW-RL system. These combined technologies sharpen perception and planning inside unpredictable work environments.

While the 46-medal tally commands headlines, the deeper story is that mass-produced robots won without special modifications.

AGIBOT proves that general-purpose intelligence paired with commercial hardware can adapt across varied scenarios. Embodied AI is finally stepping out of isolated lab demos and into consistent, repeatable work where it matters most.

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Enterprise

Cebu Pacific becomes 1st SEA low-cost carrier with Starlink Wi-Fi

Rollout expected to begin in 2027

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Cebu Pacific has introduced Starlink, making it the first low-cost airline in Southeast Asia to bring Wi-Fi in the sky for passengers.

The rollout is expected to begin in 2027. Starlink delivers an unparalleled broadband experience inflight, with high-speed, low-latency Wi-Fi capable of HD streaming, online gaming, productivity and more.

Beyond enhancing the passenger experience, Starlink will also support improved operational connectivity for Cebu Pacific’s flight crews and operational teams. This enables better operational efficiency.

The collaboration is a significant milestone for Philippine aviation. The rollout forms part of Cebu Pacific’s continued investment in customer experience and digital innovation.

As part of the partnership, Cebu Pacific and Indigo Partners portfolio airlines, Wizz Air, and JetSMART expect to install Starlink on over 1,000 aircraft.

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