Delawareans, rejoice: Your state may be small, but it beat out all 49 others (and Washington, DC) in a new ranking of EV charging infrastructure.

The latest EV index developed by location data company HERE Technologies and automotive research firm SBD Automotive is based on four metrics that define the public EV charging experience: How far a driver has to go to find a public charger; how quickly they can charge; the number of EVs on the road compared to combustion engine vehicles; and the likelihood of being able to find an unoccupied charge point.

After coming in 15th last year, Delaware soared to the top of this year’s list. Rounding out the top five were DC, Massachusetts and Nevada tied for third, and Connecticut. Minnesota, Nebraska, Idaho, Arkansas, and Alaska ranked lowest. Los Angeles scored highest of all metro areas.

One of the metrics used to assemble the index is the ratio of EVs to public chargers; researchers have deemed the optimal number to be between nine and 10 EVs per charger, though the exact number is different for each state. This year, just three states (Vermont, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island) and DC had the “ideal” ratio.

“If you have too many EVs, then you’ve got too many people trying to charge at one individual charge point,” Robert Fisher, domain principal for electrification at SBD, told Tech Brew. “If you have too many chargers, then you have the opposite problem. There’s not enough demand, and those charge point operators can’t make a profit. If they can’t make a profit, then of course the business viability decreases.”

Keep reading here.—JG

Software outages are not a laughing matter. They cause serious headaches across all industries and hit businesses where it hurts most: the wallet. There’s an urgent need to bring software deployments to the modern age and minimize risk.

That’s where LaunchDarkly’s Risk Assessment Meter comes in. It can help you assess your software deployment risk so you can stay prepped for the busiest travel and retail seasons of the year.

Here’s how it works: You’ll answer a few questions about your release process, and the Risk Assessment Meter will measure your responses against insights based on LaunchDarkly’s expertise around streamlining and securing software releases.

Then, based on how you describe your release cadence and strategy, the Risk Assessment Meter can evaluate your risk level and provide follow-up steps for improving your software releases.

Stay safe out there.

With less than two months to go until US voters head to the polls, hypotheticals about AI’s role in election-related misinformation may be starting to get real.

Donald Trump’s campaign and at least one prominent billionaire backer have taken a shine to AI-generated political images, and the Department of Justice is warning that the Russian government is tapping the tech to further its efforts to influence the election.

Meanwhile, initiatives to crack down on election-related deepfakes have stepped up as well. California passed a trio of new bills that would further restrict the creation and distribution of synthetic media in the state, and Google is also strengthening its election content policies.

As the first US presidential race since hyperrealistic AI imagery and text have become mainstream, some experts have dubbed the 2024 contest the “AI election” and warned that tools could allow disinformation purveyors to operate at a bigger scale. There has been some debate, however, about the extent to which those predictions have come to pass.

Here’s a quick recap of some recent events surrounding AI and the election.

Keep reading here.—PK

As internet access grows, so do job opportunities, according to new data from web hosting company GoDaddy.

The domain registrar’s research arm, Venture Forward, teamed up with economists at the UCLA Anderson Forecast to analyze state and local economic activity alongside web-hosting data, ultimately returning a composite score for the robustness of online business in a given area, Alexandra Rosen, global head of Venture Forward, told Tech Brew.

The most recent results, released Tuesday, revealed that “digital infrastructure improvement created nearly 300,000 jobs nationwide between April 2020 and March 2024,” GoDaddy said in an email via PR rep Milan Penny.

The data showed that Southern states, “in particular, have seen unparalleled growth in micro-business activity and job creation due to improvements in digital infrastructure,” the company said, including in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Mississippi, added Rosen.

The cumulative effect in the data partnership has given analysts a broader lens to identify digital business trends and to pinpoint the effects of internet infrastructure growth, according to Rosen.

“We went from being able to say that one entrepreneur at a county level creates about two jobs or more, to this year, we said they actually create seven jobs,” she told us. “Until we had this many years of data, [we hadn’t] been able to stay that before: That digital infrastructure, combined with skills of how you use it, creates these trends.”

Keep reading here.—KG