Financial News News: 29 July 2025 - 1 August 2025

November 18, 2025, 10:58 PM EST. John Hancock's Vitality Plus program lets members earn points for regular exercise to lower monthly payments on an Apple Watch (SE, Series 11, Ultra 3). New customers pay an initial $25 plus tax, then the balance is split over 24 months; more activity means a cheaper plan. To participate: register your Vitality account, complete the Vitality Health Review (VHR), and order the watch. Higher-end models may require a supplemental first payment. Points are earned with a standard workout (20 points/day) or an advanced workout (30 points/day). Milestones include 0, 240, 360, and 500 points, with 500 points yielding a $0.00 monthly payment. Availability is limited to Vitality Plus life insurance customers.

November 18, 2025, 10:56 PM EST. Millions of ChatGPT users faced access issues after a Cloudflare outage disrupted the service. Cloudflare acknowledged the fault, traced to a latent bug in a bot-mitigation service following a routine configuration change, and said it was working to restore reliability. The disruption hit India and other markets, underlining how dependencies on global networks can ripple across popular apps. While users cannot fix the problem themselves, the article notes fallback options like Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, DeepSeek AI, and Grok. Cloudflare's CTO apologized for the impact and explained the incident, stressing the importance of robust failover as the company works to prevent recurrence.

November 18, 2025, 10:50 PM EST. DJI has globally launched the Osmo Action 6, following its China debut. The camera introduces an industry-first variable aperture (F/2.0-F/4.0) paired with a 1/1.1-inch square sensor, 40% larger than the Action 5, and up to 13.5 stops of dynamic range. The sensor enables 4K at 120p recording and adds 4K Free Cut, a crop-later mode for reframing into 4:3, 16:9, or 9:16. Stabilization is upgraded with RockSteady 3.0+, HorizonBalancing, and HorizonSteady. Battery life reaches up to 240 minutes at 1080p/24fps with a 1950 mAh cell; 52-minute fast charge with a 30W charger; optional 4900 mAh extended pack. Wireless OsmoAudio links to two DJI mics; dual screens include a 1.46" front and a 2.5" rear OLED.

November 18, 2025, 10:48 PM EST. Google today released Gemini 3, its most capable foundation model yet, available via the Gemini app and AI search. A deeper variant, Gemini 3 Deepthink, will launch to the Google AI Ultra subscribers after safety testing. Early benchmarks show a new high on Humanity's Last Exam with a score of 37.4 (surpassing GPT-5 Pro at 31.64) and a leadership position on LMArena for user satisfaction. Google says the Gemini app has more than 650 million monthly active users and 13 million developers have used the model in their workflows. The release also introduces Antigravity, a multi-pane, agentic coding interface that blends a ChatGPT-style prompt window with a terminal and browser, enabling the agent to assist across editors and workflows.

November 18, 2025, 10:46 PM EST. Google unveiled Gemini 3, its latest AI model, eight months after Gemini 2.5, promising users less prompting for complex queries. The upgrade will be integrated across the Gemini app, AI Mode, AI Overviews, and Google's enterprise tools, with rollout starting for select subscribers and expanding in the coming weeks. Google says Gemini 3 is better at grasping depth, context, and intent, aiming to deliver what you need with minimal prompts. The company also introduced a new agent platform called Google Antigravity, designed for developers to code at a higher, task-oriented level. Alphabet emphasizes heavy infrastructure and capital expenditures as rivals race to add enterprise-ready AI features, alongside OpenAI's GPT-5 updates.