eStreamly offers business-to-business video commerce software to enable livestreams and videos to be shoppable across platforms.
X, the company formerly known as Twitter, is launching a dedicated TV app for videos uploaded to the social network soon. X CEO Linda Yaccarino announced on Tuesday that the new app will bring “real-time, engaging content to your smart TVs.” The app’s interface looks quite similar to YouTube’s, as seen in a teaser video shared by Yaccarino.
The app will feature a trending video algorithm that is designed to help users stay updated with tailored popular content, along with AI-powered topics that will organize videos by subject. The app will also support cross-device viewing, which means you can start watching a video on your phone and then continue watching it on your TV.
Yaccarino says the app will feature enhanced video search and be available on “most smart TVs.” Although there isn’t an official launch date for the app, the executive says it will be available “soon.”
From the small screen to the big screen X is changing everything. Soon we’ll bring real-time, engaging content to your smart TVs with the X TV App. This will be your go-to companion for a high-quality, immersive entertainment experience on a larger screen. We’re still building it… pic.twitter.com/QhG6cVDpZ8
The upcoming app launch is part of Yaccarino’s efforts to turn the social media site into a free-speech “video first” platform. The social network currently features an original show hosted by former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and another by former Fox Sports host Jim Rome. Last month, Musk canceled a talk show deal with former CNN anchor Don Lemon after he was interviewed for the first episode of the show.
The announcement comes a week after Truth Social, the social media platform owned by Donald Trump’s media company, also unveiled its plans to launch a live TV streaming platform. The platform will focus on “news networks” and “religious channels,” along with “content that has been canceled” or “is being suppressed on other platforms and services,” the company had said.
The Twitter for Android client was "a demo app that Google had created and gave to us," says Particle co-founder and ex-Twitter employee Sara Beykpour.
Substack is launching the ability for writers to paywall their entire Chat or specific threads to paid or founding members only, the company announced on Wednesday. The rollout of the new feature comes 18 months after Substack launched Chat as a way for writers to communicate directly with their loyal readers. The company believes paywalled […]
Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter in the fall of 2022, the market for Twitter alternatives has been saturated with would-be competitors ranging from smaller startups to open source apps to well-funded efforts like Threads from Instagram. But there’s one overlooked Twitter/X alternative that’s been growing right under our collective noses: LinkedIn. As of March, LinkedIn’s […]
Biz Stone, a Twitter co-founder, is among those who have joined the board of directors of Mastodon’s new U.S. nonprofit, Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko announced over the weekend. Mastodon’s service, an open source, decentralized social network and rival to Elon Musk’s X, has gained increased attention following the Twitter acquisition as users sought alternatives to […]
Threads, the Twitter/X rival from Meta, is growing at a stable pace. The social network now has more than 150 million monthly active users — up from 130 million in February — Mark Zuckerberg mentioned during the company’s Q1 2024 earnings call. Since the last quarterly earnings call, Threads has notably taken steps toward integrating […]
X, the company formerly known as Twitter, is launching a dedicated TV app for videos uploaded to the social network soon. X CEO Linda Yaccarino announced on Tuesday that the new app will bring “real-time, engaging content to your smart TVs.” The app’s interface looks quite similar to YouTube’s, as seen in a teaser video […]
Over the weekend, another social media platform exploded into the fray: AirChat. The app is like a combination of Twitter and Clubhouse. Instead of typing a post, you speak it. The app quickly transcribes what you say, and as your followers scroll through their feed, they’ll hear your voice alongside the transcription. Built by AngelList […]
Tesla has spent around $200,000 on advertising through February on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, after the CEO caved to shareholder pressure last year and said his company would “try a little advertising.” Since then, Tesla ads have showed up in places like Google search results and on YouTube. But it was also increasingly […]
Substack is adding new capabilities to its Twitter-like Notes feature that bring it more in-line with the social network now known as X. The company announced on Tuesday that users can now post videos directly to Notes in the Substack app and on the web. Users can now also embed Notes on external webpages. The […]
Elon Musk is planning to charge new X users a small fee to enable posting on the social network and to curb the bot problem. In reply to an X account that posted about changes on X’s website, Musk said charging a small fee to new accounts was the “only way” to stop the “onslaught […]
Last year, Elon Musk’s social network X (formerly known as Twitter) rolled out a feature for paid users to hide their blue checkmarks from others after the checks became primarily a paid feature. Now, the company is making another U-turn: It’s sending notifications to users warning that the feature will go away soon. As with […]
X, formerly Twitter, is rolling out support for passkeys, a new and more secure login method compared with traditional passwords, to all iOS users globally. The option debuted in January, but only for iOS users in the U.S. In an update to the X @Safety account on Monday, the company shared that passkeys are now […]
For just a brief moment, this was the internet at its best. I stared at a vase of dried out Trader Joe’s flowers, rumbling on my table for maybe 30 seconds, but I was too shocked to even process what was happening. Then I saw the tweets (which, in this moment of shock, I refuse […]
X is warning users they may see a reduction in their follower counts as the company attempts to clear the network of some spammers and bots in a large sweep. Via an announcement published by X’s Safety account, the company on Thursday will begin a “significant, proactive initiative” to eliminate accounts that violate X’s rules […]
X is giving free blue checks to users who have more than 2,500 “verified” followers, which are people who subscribe to X Premium. Popular posters will get a blue check, but not everyone is happy about it: People are now frantically posting to make it clear that they didn’t buy a blue check, but rather […]
Welcome to Elon Musk’s Twitter (now X), where the rules are made up and the check marks don’t matter. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO announced his bid to buy Twitter in April 2022, zealously driven to rid the platform of spam bots and protect free speech; now, it’s the one-year anniversary since he made his […]
Two weeks ago, TechCrunch broke the news that LinkedIn was getting into games, helping users “deepen relationships” through puzzle-based interactions. And on Wednesday, TechCrunch reported that the Microsoft-owned social network was experimenting with short-form videos. It’s as if LinkedIn is targeting a whole new “type” of user — one caught in limbo somewhere between two […]
Following Elon Musk’s xAI’s move to open source its Grok large language model earlier in March, the X owner on Tuesday said that the company formerly known as Twitter will soon offer the Grok chatbot to more paying subscribers. In a post on X, Musk announced Grok will become available to Premium subscribers this week, […]
Threads, the Twitter-like app from Instagram, is adding live scores for sports games. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Friday that Threads has started testing live scores for NBA games, and that the platform plans to add support for additional leagues in the future. The launch of the feature comes as Threads continues to take […]
Social network X (formerly Twitter) launched new top-up packs for its developer API program on Tuesday. These paid upgrades will allow developers to fetch roughly 10,000 posts for $100 if they hit their existing tier’s limit midway through the month. Last year, Elon Musk curtailed free API access and released new paid tiers with the […]
Threads, the Twitter-like app from Instagram, is rolling out its “trending now” feature widely to all users in the U.S. The official rollout comes a month after the app started testing the feature with a select number of users in the country. Trending topics are available on the search page and in the app’s For […]
Don Lemon announced on Wednesday that X owner Elon Musk has canceled the deal for his upcoming talkshow on the platform. Lemon, a former CNN anchor, says Musk terminated the partnership hours after he interviewed the multibillionaire for the first episode of the show. “Elon Musk has canceled the partnership I had with X, which […]
Decentralized Twitter/X rival Bluesky announced on Tuesday that it’s open sourcing Ozone, a tool that lets individuals and teams collaboratively review and label content on the network. The company plans to open up the ability for individuals and teams to run their own independent moderation services later this week, which means users will be able to […]
Decentralized Twitter/X rival Bluesky is adding to its ranks by scooping up a member of its developer community. London-based software engineer Samuel Newman, who built the well-received third-party Bluesky client Graysky, is joining the startup, where he will now help develop Bluesky’s official app along with the rest of the front-end team. Given his change […]
Text-generating AI is one thing. But AI models that understand images as well as text can unlock powerful new applications.
Take, for example, Twelve Labs. The San Francisco-based startup trains AI models to — as co-founder and CEO Jae Lee puts it — “solve complex video-language alignment problems.”
“Twelve Labs was founded … to create an infrastructure for multimodal video understanding, with the first endeavor being semantic search — or ‘CTRL+F for videos,’” Lee told TechCrunch in an email interview. “The vision of Twelve Labs is to help developers build programs that can see, listen and understand the world as we do.”
Twelve Labs’ models attempt to map natural language to what’s happening inside a video, including actions, objects and background sounds, allowing developers to create apps that can search through videos, classify scenes and extract topics from within those videos, automatically summarize and split video clips into chapters, and more.
Lee says that Twelve Labs’ technology can drive things like ad insertion and content moderation — for instance, figuring out which videos showing knives are violent versus instructional. It can also be used for media analytics, Lee added, and to automatically generate highlight reels — or blog post headlines and tags — from videos.
I asked Lee about the potential for bias in these models, given that it’s well-established science that models amplify the biases in the data on which they’re trained. For example, training a video understanding model on mostly clips of local news — which often spends a lot of time covering crime in a sensationalized, racialized way — could cause the model to learn racist as well as sexist patterns.
Lee says that Twelve Labs strives to meet internal bias and “fairness” metrics for its models before releasing them, and that the company plans to release model-ethics-related benchmarks and data sets in the future. But he had nothing to share beyond that.
Mockup of API for fine tuning the model to work better with salad-related content. Image Credits: Twelve Labs
“In terms of how our product is different from large language models [like ChatGPT], ours is specifically trained and built to process and understand video, holistically integrating visual, audio and speech components within videos,” Lee said. “We have really pushed the technical limits of what is possible for video understanding.”
Google is developing a similar multimodal model for video understanding called MUM, which the company’s using to power video recommendations across Google Search and YouTube. Beyond MUM, Google — as well as Microsoft and Amazon — offer API-level, AI-powered services that recognize objects, places and actions in videos and extract rich metadata at the frame level.
But Lee argues that Twelve Labs is differentiated both by the quality of its models and the platform’s fine-tuning features, which allow customers to automate the platform’s models with their own data for “domain-specific” video analysis.
On the model front, Twelve Labs is today unveiling Pegasus-1, a new multimodal model that understands a range of prompts related to whole-video analysis. For example, Pegasus-1 can be prompted to generate a long, descriptive report about a video or just a few highlights with timestamps.
“Enterprise organizations recognize the potential of leveraging their vast video data for new business opportunities … However, the limited and simplistic capabilities of conventional video AI models often fall short of catering to the intricate understanding required for most business use cases,” Lee said. “Leveraging powerful multimodal video understanding foundation models, enterprise organizations can attain human-level video comprehension without manual analysis.”
Since launching in private beta in early May, Twelve Labs’ user base has grown to 17,000 developers, Lee claims. And the company’s now working with a number of companies — it’s unclear how many; Lee wouldn’t say — across industries including sports, media and entertainment, e-learning and security, including the NFL.
Twelve Labs is also continuing to raise money — and important part of any startup business. Today, the company announced that it closed a $10 million strategic funding round from Nvidia, Intel and Samsung Next, bringing its total raised to $27 million.
“This new investment is all about strategic partners that can accelerate our company in research (compute), product and distribution,” Lee said. “It’s fuel for ongoing innovation, based on our lab’s research, in the field of video understanding so that we can continue to bring the most powerful models to customers, whatever their use cases may be … We’re moving the industry forward in ways that free companies up to do incredible things.”
News About Twelve Labs is building models that can understand videos at a deep level
Intel and other tech heavyweights say they'll work together to build open generative AI tools for businesses, as part of a new Linux Foundation organization.
Well before President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act into law back in August 2022, Intel has been a cornerstone of U.S. efforts to increase domestic chip manufacturing. This morning, the White House announced an agreement with the Department of Commerce that would deliver the silicon giant up to $8.5 billion to shore […]
Over the past couple of years, Nvidia, by far the largest AI chipmaker, has ramped up its investments in startups that propel it deeper into the AI space. According to S&P Global and Crunchbase, the funding and investment database, Nvidia’s startup investments jumped 280% year-over-year from 2022 to 2023, with the company and its VC […]
Intel, intent on making bigger moves in the market for AI-powered enterprise software, is spinning out a new platform company with the backing of Boca Raton, Florida–based asset manager and investor DigitalBridge. Called Articul8 AI (an awkward abbreviation of “Articulate AI”), the new entity builds off a proof-of-concept from an Intel collaboration with Boston Consulting […]
Text-generating AI is one thing. But AI models that understand images as well as text can unlock powerful new applications. Take, for example, Twelve Labs. The San Francisco-based startup trains AI models to — as co-founder and CEO Jae Lee puts it — “solve complex video-language alignment problems.” “Twelve Labs was founded … to create […]
Talk about old news: The European Union has reimposed a fine (totalling €376.36 million) on Intel for antitrust violations dating back decades. Veteran tech watchers may recall the chipmaker was slapped with a much bigger fine, of over a billion euros, by the EU back in 2009 which found Intel had abused its dominance in […]
Two weeks after Intel said it would cancel its plan to acquire Tower Semiconductor for $5.4 billion amidst pushback from regulators, the two companies intend to work together anyway. Intel today said that it would provide foundry services and 300mm manufacturing capacity to Tower. As part of the deal, Tower would use Intel’s plant in […]
In 2021, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger announced a comprehensive modernization strategy he dubbed IDM (integrated device manufacturing) 2.0. As part of that vision, the company announced a $20 billion investment to build two new Fabs (chip manufacturing facilities) in Arizona along with plans to increase capacity in other parts of the U.S. and Europe. In […]
Intel has called time on its plan to acquire contract chipmaker Tower Semiconductor, citing its inability “to obtain in a timely manner the regulatory approvals required under the merger agreement.” Chip giant Intel first announced it was planning to buy the Israeli company for $5.4 billion way back in February last year, a move designed […]
In January, when Intel reported one of its worst financial quarters in years, the chip giant worked to keep up investor confidence by holding its dividend steady at $0.365/share. Less than a month later, it’s singing a very different tune. The company today announced that it was revising its dividend to $0.125 per share, down […]
Intel is taking a more subdued approach to CES these days — forgoing a splashy event staged in a big hotel showroom in the wake of COVID-19. It is also pursuing a wider change in PR strategy after years of making bullish investments in next-generation tech like drones and moonshots like Volocopter and using them […]
Increasingly, as Moore’s law rears its ugly head, computer chip developers are adopting “chiplet” architectures to scale their hardware’s processing power. Chiplets are Lego-like integrated circuit blocks designed to work with other, similar chiplets to form complex, stackable chips that boost performance while maintaining a similar physical footprint. Chiplets offer a number of advantages over […]
In pursuit of faster and more efficient AI system development, Intel, Arm and Nvidia today published a draft specification for what they refer to as a common interchange format for AI. While voluntary, the proposed “8-bit floating point (FP8)” standard, they say, has the potential to accelerate AI development by optimizing hardware memory usage and […]
Nvidia, the world’s largest maker of artificial intelligence chips, is at the heart of a new round of U.S. tech sanctions targeting China. Nvidia noted in an SEC filing that the U.S. government had imposed new export restrictions on two of its most advanced AI chips to China, including Hong Kong, its second-largest market after […]
After initial setbacks with its earlier iteration, the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 sailed through both chambers of Congress early this week. The bill, which held uncharacteristically broad bipartisan support, hit some unexpected roadblocks in its last 24 hours in Congress, but still managed a wide margin of victory at 64-33 in the Senate […]
Intel's choice to build a $20 billion chip fabrication facility in Columbus, Ohio, along with the passage of the CHIPS Act, could set the stage for a startup ecosystem boost.
Following a strong showing of bipartisan support in the Senate, the CHIPS Act staved off last minute attempts by the GOP House leadership to derail its passage. Congress’ lower chamber approved the $280 billion bill by a vote of 243-to-187. Twenty-four House Republicans backed the act, which is destined for the desk of staunch proponent, […]
Patent trolling, critics say, is guided by one principle alone: money. Yet tackling it remains a complex task with many angles. Today, a consortium called LOT — set up to help improve how the tech world and the IP industry at large, handle trolling — is launching a new front in its efforts. It’s formed […]
The U.S. Senate voted in favor of advancing the CHIPS bill through cloture, or bypassing the filibuster stage, on Tuesday to bolster local semiconductor manufacturing. The bipartisan bill, once it passes the formal vote, will pave the way for providing nearly $280 billion in various incentives for U.S-based chip making. The bill, popularly known as […]
Intel’s ongoing push to regain traction in chip manufacturing scored a nice vote of confidence this week, as Taiwan’s MediaTek agreed to a “strategic partnership” with the company. The deal finds MediaTek utilizing the Intel Foundry Services process to produce future chips, as the company looks to broaden its global manufacturing footprint. Intel has been […]
It’s been a long time coming, but Google Cloud today announced its first Arm-based VMs, following AWS, with its Graviton instances, and Azure, which also recently launched Arm VMs. But while AWS built its own custom chips, Google Cloud is following Azure’s lead here by using chips from Ampere. These new VMs, which are now […]
Deci, a startup company with 50 employees who are developing a platform to build and optimize AI-powered systems, today announced that it closed a $25 million Series B financing round led by Insight Partners with participation from Square Peg, Emerge, Jibe Ventures, Fort Ross Ventures and ICON that brings the company’s total raised to $55.1 […]
The European Union is considering how to respond to a major blow to its antitrust enforcement after a court in Luxembourg sided with chipmaker Qualcomm — which had been appealing a €997 million ($1 billion+) fine the EU levied against it back in 2018. At the time, the bloc’s competition regulator concluded Qualcomm had abused […]
There are few things politicians love more than a ceremonial groundbreaking. They get to stand there in a hard hat and suit, surrounded by C-level executives, shoveling a pile of symbolic dirt. Pomp and circumstance aside, the true value in such an event are all of the things they’ve come to represent jobs, innovation, domestic […]
There may be some irony in upgrading a laptop designed around the principles of user repairability/upgradeability. Though certainly Framework isn’t expecting too many folks who purchased last year’s model to replace their system with the latest and greatest. The company says this round’s updates are mostly based around user feedback from the product’s first generation, […]
Google Cloud is holding its annual Security Summit this week and unsurprisingly, the company used the event to launch a few new security features. This year, the announcements focus on software supply chain security, Zero Trust and tools for making it easier for enterprises to adopt Google Cloud’s security capabilities. It’s no surprise that software […]
Tech giants including Amazon, Google and Microsoft have pledged millions of dollars to bolster the security of open source software. The pledge was made during a meeting in Washington, DC last week, which saw open source leaders, headed up by the Linux Foundation and the Open Source Software Security Foundation (OpenSSF), share their plans for […]
At its I/O developer conference, Google today announced the launch of Flutter 3, the latest version of its open source, multiplatform UI development framework for building natively compiled applications. It’s been about four years since the company first launched a beta of Flutter 1.0. At the time, the team’s focus was mostly on helping developers […]
Telegram is rolling out a bunch of upgrades as part of its January feature drop including “view-once” video and audio messages, the ability to pause recording while sending a video or an audio message, and new read-time controls.
The app introduced “view-once” photos and videos in one-on-one chats in September 2023. Now, the company is extending this feature to voice and video messages. Users can hit the mic icon to start recording and then pull up to tap on the “view-once” icon to allow the recipient to hear the voice message or look at the video message just once.
Additionally, Telegram is rolling out the ability to pause and resume recording for voice and video messages through the same menu.
Telegram is also adding a way for people to see when the recipient reads your message in one-on-one private chats. You can turn this feature off in the settings.
The company is also introducing some new features for paid users. Now, premium users can hide their read time but still can look at someone else’s read time if they share it publicly.
Plus, paid users can pick who can send them messages first. They can select either “Everyone” or “My Contacts and Premium User.”
WhatsApp is updating its mobile apps for a fresh and more streamlined look, while also introducing a new “darker dark mode,” the company announced on Thursday. The messaging app says that over the years, it has primarily focused on adding utility to the app and that while the product continues to grow, its design needs […]
WhatsApp is introducing a new way for people to organize events in Communities, the company announced on Wednesday. The feature makes it easier to plan get-togethers and events directly in WhatsApp, whether it’s setting up a PTA meeting or a birthday dinner. Anyone can create an event that others can respond to, so everyone else […]
Meta’s making several big moves today to promote its AI services across its platform. The company has upgraded its AI chatbot with its newest large language model, Llama 3, and it is now running it in the search bar of its four major apps (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp) across multiple countries. Alongside this, the […]
For those who use WhatsApp more like an inbox, the app will now become more useful. WhatsApp on Tuesday announced a handful of new chat filters for the app to access certain types of messages easily: All, Unread and Groups. The “All” filter is selected by default and shows you an unfiltered version of your […]
Meta has confirmed to TechCrunch that it is testing Meta AI, its large language model-powered chatbot, with WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger users in India and parts of Africa. The move signals how Meta plans to tap massive user bases across its various apps to scale its AI offerings. The social media giant has been scrambling […]
For the second time in just over a month, Meta’s apps, including WhatsApp, and to some extent, Messenger and Instagram, faced outages and intermittent issues. While it’s rare for services as large as those operated by Meta to go down entirely, Meta’s status page detailed disruptions to key business services, including its Ads Manager, Messenger […]
Telegram Business introduces options like a customized start page, plus the ability to set business hours, use preset replies, greeting and away messages, chatbots, tags for chats, and more.
WhatsApp announced Thursday that users can now pin up to three messages in a chat to access them easily. Until now, users could pin only one message on top of a conversation with a contact or a group. Both Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and WhatsApp head Will Cathcart announced this feature on their respective WhatsApp […]
Telegram founder Pavel Durov announced Wednesday that users on the chat app with personal accounts can now convert them into business accounts by paying a monthly fee. This gives users the ability to list information such as location and opening hours, which might be helpful for small cafes and shop owners. Some of the other […]
Meta today is offering more details about how it plans to make its messaging apps, WhatsApp and Messenger, interoperable with third-party messaging services, as required by the new EU law, the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The company had earlier shared that engaging with third-party chats would be an opt-in experience for users, given that the […]
WhatsApp announced today that it is rolling out a “search by date” function for individual and group chats on Android devices. The feature has been available on other platforms, including iOS, Mac desktop and WhatsApp Web. Mark Zuckerberg shared the announcement on his WhatsApp channel with a video of him searching for an old chat […]
WhatsApp said today it is rolling out a number of new formatting options on the app, including bulleted lists, numbered lists, block quotes and inline code. The company said these formatting features are available to users across platforms on iOS, Android, web and Mac. Apart from being used fully in one-on-one and group communications, these […]
A month away from the Digital Markets Act (DMA) deadline, WhatsApp is preparing to allow other messaging networks in its app. In an interview with Wired, Dick Brouwer, an engineering director at WhatsApp, said that the company is ready to offer interoperability on the platform with over 2 billion users. “There’s real tension between offering […]
Telegram is rolling out a bunch of upgrades as part of its January feature drop including “view-once” video and audio messages, the ability to pause recording while sending a video or an audio message, and new read-time controls. The app introduced “view-once” photos and videos in one-on-one chats in September 2023. Now, the company is […]
WhatsApp is upgrading its broadcasting feature Channels with new abilities such as voice updates, polls and additional admins. The company said Channel owners can now voice updates to followers. This could be great for engagement, especially for folks with podcasts, who can put out teasers from episodes. WhatsApp noted that its 2 billion user base […]
Anyone who knows your WhatsApp number can figure out if you are only using the mobile app, or its companion web or desktop apps, a security researcher found. Tal Be’ery, the co-founder and CTO of crypto wallet maker ZenGo, found that it’s possible to determine whether a user on WhatsApp is using more than just […]
WhatsApp announced today that it’s launching a new feature on iOS that lets users create, edit and share their own stickers. With this new feature, you can turn your photos into stickers or personalize existing stickers. You no longer have to drag-and-drop images from your photo gallery or use third-party apps to create custom stickers, […]
WhatsApp is rolling out the ability to pin chats within one-on-one and group conversations. The company said users can pin all kinds of conversations, including text, polls, images and emojis. However, users can pin only one chat at a time. The Meta-owned chat app mentioned that you can pin a chat by long-pressing on a […]
While today’s bigger news from the world of Meta’s messaging apps was the rollout of end-to-end encryption in Messenger, the company is also bringing another useful feature to its WhatsApp users: disappearing voice messages. The new feature will allow users to send a voice message that can only be listened to once before it disappears, […]
Earlier this year, Meta introduced a set of AI characters, including those based on real-life celebs including the likes of Paris Hilton, MrBeast, Kendall Jenner, Tom Brady, Charli D’Amelio, Snoop Dog and others, which users could chat with across Meta’s apps. Today, the company announced its 28 AI characters are fully rolled out across the […]
Telegram announced new features related to channels including better discovery of similar channels, emoji customization for reactions and stats for stories to compete better with WhatsApp. The Meta-owned platform rolled out its broadcast channels feature globally in September. When a user joins a new Telegram channel, the app will now suggest similar channels they can […]
WhatsApp is rolling out a new “secret codes” feature that adds another layer of privacy to your locked conversations on the messaging platform. The app launched locked chats earlier this year to help people hide sensitive conversations, and is now adding a way to further protect those chats and make them harder to find if […]
WhatsApp is rolling out a new Discord-like voice chat feature for large groups, the Meta-owned company announced on Monday. The new feature is designed to be less disruptive than a group call, which rings every member in a group. Voice chats are started quietly without any ringing involved with an in-chat bubble that you tap […]
WhatsApp’s cat-and-mouse game with ads continues. While the company is not planning to show ads in the main inbox, it could still show ads in Status — the app’s Stories-like feature — and channels. In an interview with Brazilian media, WhatsApp’s head Will Cathcart said the company is not planning to show any ads in […]
Your favorite messaging and calling app could reveal your IP address to the person on the other end of a call. And that, essentially, is because most chat apps default to using peer-to-peer connections — meaning you and the person you’re talking to connect directly to each other — to improve the quality of the […]
Meta is doubling down on business messages for revenue generation, as Mark Zuckerberg indicated during the company’s earnings call for Q3 2023. Zuckerberg said that the company is looking to tap into generative AI-based bots for businesses for use cases like customer support. The Meta CEO said that users and businesses are interacting more than […]
The availability of Large Language Models (LLMs) has made it easier for developers to make chatbots. Large companies such as OpenAI, Google and Microsoft have made ChatGPT, Bard and Bing Chat widely available. However, non-tech affluent audiences might not be aware of some of these bots. Spain-based Luzia is trying to introduce AI chatbot tech […]
WhatsApp announced today that it is rolling out the ability for users to use two accounts simultaneously. That means you can switch between two accounts in the same WhatsApp instance. Mark Zuckerberg announced the feature on his Facebook page and said the feature is coming soon to users on Android. Historically, people had to carry […]
WhatsApp is introducing support for passkeys on Android, the Meta-owned messaging service has announced. With this change, users will no longer have to deal with SMS two-factor authentication as they can instead use their face, fingerprint or PIN to unlock their account. After initially testing passkey support in beta, WhatsApp is now starting to roll […]
Google has announced that its Bard AI chatbot can now answer questions about YouTube videos. Although Bard already had the ability to analyze YouTube videos with the launch of the YouTube Extension back in September, the chatbot can now give you specific answers about queries related to the content of a video.
“We’re taking the first steps in Bard’s ability to understand YouTube videos,” the company wrote on Bard’s updates page. “For example, if you’re looking for videos on how to make olive oil cake, you can now also ask how many eggs the recipe in the first video requires. We’ve heard you want deeper engagement with YouTube videos. So we’re expanding the YouTube Extension to understand some video content so you can have a richer conversation with Bard about it.”
Before this latest update, the YouTube Extension for Bard could only be used to find specific videos. For instance, you could ask the chatbot to find you funny videos. Now, you can ask the chatbot specific questions about the content of videos. Say you’re watching a travel video and see a place you really like, you can ask Bard where the place is located.
The announcement comes two weeks after YouTube started to experiment with new generative AI features, including an AI conversational tool that answers questions about YouTube’s content, along with a new feature that summarizes topics in the comments of a video.
The conversational tool’s responses are generated by large language models that leverage information from YouTube and the web. Users can ask questions about the video they’re currently viewing, and the conversation with the AI happens as the video plays. The comments summarizer tool leverages generative AI to organize the topics of discussion in comment sections to give users an overview of what people have been saying.
The update also comes as Google opened up access to Bard to teens in most countries around the world. The search giant said in a blog post that teens can use the tool to “find inspiration, discover new hobbies and solve everyday problems.” Teens can ask Bard about important topics, like which universities to apply to, or about more fun topics, like how to learn a new sport.
Google Bard is no more. Almost exactly a year after first introducing its (rushed) efforts to challenge OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the company is retiring the name and rebranding Bard as Gemini, the name of its family of foundation models. More importantly, though, it is also now launching Gemini Ultra, its most capable large language model yet. […]
Google has announced that its Bard AI chatbot can now answer questions about YouTube videos. Although Bard already had the ability to analyze YouTube videos with the launch of the YouTube Extension back in September, the chatbot can now give you specific answers about queries related to the content of a video. “We’re taking the […]
As we reported earlier, Google’s AI chatbot Bard has finally launched in the European Union. We understand it did so after making some changes to boost transparency and user controls — but the bloc’s privacy regulators remain watchful and big decisions on how to enforce the bloc’s data protection law on generative AI remain to […]
When Google launched its Bard AI-chatbot, it didn’t compare all that favorably to the likes of Bing Chat and ChatGPT. Indeed, the launch was a bit of a disaster, with a Google ad featuring a wrong answer by Bard, briefly tanking the company’s stock by 8%. Today, at its I/O developer conference, Google is hoping […]
YouTube this morning introduced a new app for creators, YouTube Create, that will offer a suite of easy-to-use, free tools that will allow them to make both Shorts and longer videos. The tool aims to address some of the challenges creators face, including the editing process and the ability to leverage creative tools, including things like stickers, GIFs and effects.
The company said it consulted with 3,000 creators on the development of the new app and designed it according to their feedback.
To use the tool, creators would add their clips, then choose from a range of editing tools to begin creating their video. With the app, they can do things like preview splits and trim their clips as they’re putting together a video. There are also thousands of stickers, GIFs, and a set of effects available within the app.
Image Credits: YouTube
In addition, the app will provide access to YouTube’s library of royalty-free tracks, so creators can choose from thousands of songs to complement their videos. All these songs are copyright-safe, so creators can monetize their videos without worry, the company says. Plus, the tool will match the beats of the song to the video clips to keep everything in sync — a feature popularized by TikTok.
Image Credits: YouTube
The app can also do audio cleanup to remove unwanted background sounds, automatically generate captions that can be added to the video with a tap of a button, and export the final product to the creator’s YouTube channel.
The idea to offer a separate app for creation is popular among the creator community. Despite the numerous built-in effects on TikTok, for example, many creators turn to ByteDance’s other creative app CapCut to prepare their TikTok videos.
The new app, initially available for Android, is launching into beta starting today across eight markets worldwide (the U.S., Germany, France, United Kingdom, Indonesia, India, Korea, and Singapore).
The company says it will continue to expand the app with more features and bring it to more creators over time.
News About YouTube debuts a new app, YouTube Create, for editing videos, adding effects and more
YouTube TV has announced that its multiview feature for watching four streams at once is now available on Android phones and tablets. The Android launch comes two months after YouTube TV rolled out the feature to iPhones and iPads. The feature, which first launched in March 2023, is aimed at sports viewers who want to […]
TikTok is testing the ability for users to upload 60-minute videos, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. The feature is available to a limited group of users in select markets, and TikTok says it doesn’t have any immediate plans to make the feature available widely. The feature, which was first spotted by social media […]
Humane AI raised more than $230 million before it even shipped a product. And when it finally released its Ai Pin — which costs $699 plus a $24 monthly subscription — pretty much every tech reviewer came to the same disappointing realization: This much-hyped product, which promises to disrupt the smartphone’s dominance, is not very […]
YouTube’s comments section, historically, has had a bad reputation, but a change rolling out could prevent kids from wading into the comments cesspool. In an email to parents who supervise a child’s account, the company announced the introduction of a “read-only” comments option on their child’s supervised experience on YouTube. The feature will roll out […]
Google is shutting down its Podcasts app in the U.S. in a matter of days. The company has begun warning the app’s users they will need to migrate their subscriptions to YouTube Music by April 2 to follow and stream their favorite shows going forward. Users who don’t make the move immediately will still have […]
With TikTok potentially poised for a U.S. ban, YouTube is touting how well its own TikTok competitor, YouTube Shorts, is paying off for creators. The company on Thursday said its short-form video platform now averages over 70 billion daily views and over 25% of channels in YouTube’s Partner Program monetize their videos through revenue-sharing on […]
In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project designed to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers. The goal was to understand users’ behavior and help Facebook compete with Snapchat, according to newly unsealed court documents. Facebook called this “Project Ghostbusters,” in a clear reference to Snapchat’s ghost-like logo. […]
YouTube is now requiring creators to disclose to viewers when realistic content was made with AI, the company announced on Monday. The platform is introducing a new tool in Creator Studio that will require creators to disclose when content that viewers could mistake for a real person, place or event was created with altered or […]
Update: The outages have been resolved as of around 3:00 p.m. ET. A Google spokesperson told TechCrunch that there was a surge in traffic beginning at around 10:25 a.m. ET, which correlated with an unrelated service disruption. Though the spokesperson didn’t specify further details, that timing lines up with a major outage at Meta, where […]
YouTube Create, Google’s standalone mobile app aimed at creators, which helps them produce both Shorts and longer videos, is expanding to a broader set of markets after last fall’s launch into beta testing. The app was initially available on Android in the U.S. and a handful of other select markets, but today will become available […]
YouTube is changing the design for creators’ channels on the big screen, the company announced today. The changes include more accessible action buttons, like “Subscribe,” a more modern design and other tweaks that were first introduced for artists’ pages last fall. At the time, YouTube said that artist pages were part of a larger YouTube […]
Nielsen today released its January report on viewing usage across linear TV and streaming, which revealed that YouTube is once again the overall top streaming service in the U.S., with 8.6% of viewing on television screens. Netflix, meanwhile, saw 7.9% of TV usage. The new data points to YouTube’s dominance in the TV streaming arena […]
YouTube is introducing the ability for users to incorporate or “remix” a music video in their short-form videos, called Shorts, as the company continues to challenge TikTok. Given that YouTube has something that TikTok doesn’t, which is a vast library of official music videos, it makes sense for the platform to leverage it to advance […]
Podcast creators can now submit their RSS feed to YouTube and YouTube Music, the company revealed in a video uploaded to its Creator Insider channel. It was previously announced in August that support was coming for RSS feeds. The functionality was available as an invite-only beta test last year. The move to embrace RSS feeds […]
Apple’s Vision Pro headset is set to release for consumers today, but YouTube is not currently building a dedicated app for the device. To fill that void, Christian Selig, the developer who made Apollo for Reddit client, has made a Vision Pro app for YouTube called Juno. The app costs $5 for a one-time purchase and […]
Google said today that YouTube now has more than 100 million paid users across YouTube Music and YouTube Premium. This number is up from the 80 million paid users the company mentioned in November 2022. Earlier this week, during its Q4 2023 earnings call, Sundar Pichai said that Google’s subscription business — which includes YouTube’s […]
Social media apps can rise quickly and burn out just as fast, but taking a step back and looking at those trends on a longer timeline offers a better glimpse at the big picture. The Pew Research Center’s latest report on Americans’ social media habits is out, rounding up social media usage trends among U.S. […]
Link-in-bio company Linktree announced new features today, including link scheduling, archiving and the ability to automatically fetch your latest video from YouTube and TikTok. Linktree now lets users schedule a link to go live on the page at a certain date and time. They can also choose from multiple time zones to align their drop […]
No wonder YouTube launched Shorts. A new study of children’s online habits found that children ages 4 through 18 spent a global average of 112 minutes daily on TikTok’s short video app in 2023, an increase from 107 minutes the year prior. And although YouTube remains the world’s biggest streaming app among this demographic, kids […]
TikTok is coming for YouTube. The company has been spotted testing the ability for users to upload 30-minute videos, signaling a significant move away from the short-form video format that made it popular. Social media consultant Matt Navarra spotted the new option in the iOS beta version of the app in the U.K. Navarra told […]
YouTube is following in Netflix’s footsteps as it decides not to release a dedicated app for the Apple Vision Pro’s upcoming launch. Like Netflix subscribers, viewers will have to go to the web browser version if they want to watch YouTube videos. “We’re excited to see Vision Pro launch, and we’re supporting it by ensuring […]
Yet another series of layoffs has hit Google, this time at its video-sharing platform, YouTube. The company will eliminate 100 employees, a spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch. Last week, Google laid off more than 1,000 workers across several divisions, including engineering, services and voice-activated product Google Assistant. “As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s […]
YouTube announced today that it’s making it easier to find accurate life-saving information about basic first aid and emergency care with the launch of its new First Aid Information Shelves. The new shelves will be pinned to the top of search results and will feature videos from credible health organizations like Mass General Brigham. The […]
YouTube is updating its harassment and cyberbullying policies to clamp down on content that “realistically simulates” deceased minors or victims of deadly or violent events describing their death. The Google-owned platform says it will begin striking such content starting on January 16. The policy change comes as some true crime content creators have been using […]
The top YouTuber in the U.S., MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson) co-founded the new analytics platform ViewStats, which is now available in beta. Similar to tools like Social Blade, ViewStats uses the YouTube API to unveil detailed stats about channels that both creators and their fans can see. MrBeast didn’t become one of the highest-earning creators of […]
YouTube’s first viral scandal took place in what we believed was a 16-year-old girl’s bedroom. In 2006, homeschooled teenager Bree Avery vlogged about her life under the username Lonelygirl15, chronicling her supposedly boring life. But as the videos got more and more outlandish — her parents turned out to be part of a blood-harvesting cult? […]
Google launched today a new feature for Classroom that allows teachers to turn any YouTube video into an interactive assignment by inserting questions for their students to answer throughout the viewing experience. With the interactive questions feature, teachers can create open-ended or multiple-choice questions, provide feedback on answers and access a dashboard of key insights […]
Most people don’t watch corporate training videos — or, in cases where the training’s mandatory, don’t give them their full attention. According to a recent poll from Kaltura, the video tech provider, 75% of staffers admit to skimming through training videos, watching them without sound or listening to them while multitasking.
So, given that training videos aren’t cheap to produce, is there a way to make them more engaging and thus less of a money sink? Dominik Mate Kovacs, the co-founder and CEO of Colossyan, thinks there is — and it involves generative AI.
Colossyan taps AI to generate workplace learning videos, remixing, re-animating and editing footage of one of several virtual avatars against changeable backdrops. Users can enter a script to have it “read” aloud by Colossyan’s text-to-speech (TTS) engine, which also translates the script into over 70 languages.
Image Credits: Colossyan
“To generate a video with Colossyan’s AI video platform, all you have to do is input a script and select from a diverse range of avatars,” Kovacs told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Any company can create a video about almost anything efficiently, without the need for conventional filming resources.”
Kovacs founded Colossyan in 2020 after leaving Defudger, a deepfakes detection platform, which he helped to co-launch. An engineer and data scientist by training, Kovacs says that he was inspired to start Colossyan by the budding corporate interest in GenAI.
“Enterprises are leveraging AI in diverse areas such as IT automation, customer care and digital labor — highlighting the broad applicability and potential impact of AI technologies in streamlining operations and enhancing service delivery,” Kovacs said. “The barriers to AI adoption, such as limited AI skills and data complexity, are significant yet surmountable challenges that many organizations are actively working to overcome.”
For the heck of it, I gave Colossyan’s platform, which offers a free trial, a go to see if I could make a training video that’d successfully hold the attention of my ADHD brain — admittedly a high bar. The avatars were a bit too stiff and cartoonish for my liking and the TTS engine too robotic, at least compared to some of the more sophisticated GenAI tools out there (e.g., ElevenLabs). But I’ve certainly seen worse corporate videos.
Colossyan also doesn’t generate videos as quickly as I’d expect — a 38-second clip takes ~11 minutes. Granted, that’s a lot faster than creating trainings from scratch. But frankly, faced with the prospect of generating more than a handful of videos for whatever purpose, I’d be tempted to go the PowerPoint or Canva route instead.
I’m not Colossyan’s target market, of course. And it seems that several household brands are happy to pay for a subscription to Colossyan as it exists today, including Novartis, Porsche, Vodafone, HPE and Paramount, claims Kovacs.
Kovacs attributes the customer traction to features like integrations with learning management systems and a “conversation mode” that allows two avatars to hold a dialogue with each other. He doesn’t deny that there’s a fair amount of competition in the GenAI video space — see CommonGround, Synthesia and Surge plus solutions from tech giants like Microsoft — but he thinks that Colossyan’s focus on “interactivity and engagement,” as he puts it, will continue to set the platform apart.
Perhaps he’s right. Colossyan today announced that it raised $22 million in a funding round led by Lakestar with participation from Launchub, Day One Capital and Emerge Education. The proceeds will be put toward tripling Colossyan’s headcount across its New York, London and Budapest offices, Kovacs says, and developing new capabilities like branching videos and knowledge checks.
“For C-suite and IT department leaders, our platform represents a scalable, cost-efficient solution to training and development challenges,” he added.
News About Colossyan uses GenAI to create corporate training videos
Engineers Adam Keating and Jeremy Andrews were tired of using spreadsheets and screenshots to collab with teammates — so they launched a startup, CoLab, to build a better way. The two met as undergraduates at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where they studied mechanical engineering together. While they were completing their last internships prior to graduating […]
Call centers are embracing automation. There’s debate as to whether that’s a good thing, but it’s happening — and quite possibly accelerating. According to research firm TechSci Research, the global market for contact center AI could grow to nearly $3 billion in 2028, from $2.4 billion in 2022. Meanwhile, a recent survey found that around […]
Close to a decade ago, brothers Aviv and Matteo Shapira co-founded a company, Replay, that created a video format for 360-degree replays — the sorts of replays that have become part and parcel of major sports broadcasts. Replay caught the attention of Intel, which acquired the company in 2016 for a reported $175 million, and […]
U.K.-based small launch developer Orbex got another boost from the Scottish National Investment Bank and other investors as it gears up for its first orbital launch, though that mission still does not have a set date. Founded in 2015, Orbex is one of a handful of firms racing to develop the next generation of European […]
Tim Goltser and Curtis Mason have been building things together since high school, when the two were the co-captains of their school’s robotics team. In college, Goltser and Mason teamed up to create an app — Hang, for scheduling hangouts with friends — with Sean Doherty, who Mason had met while an undergrad at Boston […]
The long-term goal with Rivos is to build chips primarily for servers that can handle intensive data analytics and AI workloads, including generative AI workloads.
A new report from Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) found that global investment in AI fell for the second year in a row in 2023.
Companies that offer role referral bonuses do so with the assumption that their employees know their work culture — and a role’s requirements — best. But what if companies were to open up those referral bonuses to people outside the organization? That’s the idea behind Draftboard, co-founded by Zach Roseman, the former CEO of mobile […]
NoSQL database Aerospike today announced that it has raised a $109 million Series E round led by Sumeru Equity Partners. Existing investor Alsop Louie Partners also participated in this round. In 2009, the company started as a key-value store with a focus on the adtech industry; Aerospike has since diversified its offerings quite a bit. […]
Home From College, a career platform for young professionals and college students looking for their first job or internship, announced Wednesday that it raised $5.4 million in a seed round led by GV (formerly Google Ventures). The new capital will go toward building out the platform’s main offering, “Gig,” a marketplace for companies to list […]
Available in "soft launch," Read's new capability connects to Gmail, Outlook and Slack as well as videoconferencing platforms to learn topics that might be relevant to you.
A few years ago, Darren Shimkus, ex-president of Udemy, had a conversation with Dennis Yang about skills building. Shimkus was of the belief that building skills in the corporate sector was a difficult, but not intractable, challenge — one that could perhaps be solved with the right technology. He brought it up to Yang, who […]
Using Quadratic, users can bring in hundreds of thousands of rows of data, write analyses in their preferred programming language and share the results with outside stakeholders.
The funding climate for AI chip startups, once as sunny as a mid-July day, is beginning to cloud over as Nvidia asserts its dominance. According to a recent report, U.S. chip firms raised just $881 million from January 2023 to September 2023 — down from $1.79 billion in the first three quarters of 2022. AI […]
If the 2023 crypto venture landscape was an ice-cold pot of water, the first quarter of 2024 is the part where the bubbles start to form right before water boils, Tom Schmidt, a partner at Dragonfly Capital, said to TechCrunch. And he’s not wrong: $2.52 billion in total capital has been raised across the crypto […]
Metaview integrates with apps, phone systems, videoconferencing platforms and tools like Calendly and GoodTime to automatically capture the content of interviews.
As the crypto space heats back up, so has funding for new startups. 0G Labs, a web3 infrastructure firm,” has raised $35 million in a pre-seed round, the team exclusively told TechCrunch. If $35 million sounds like a lot for a pre-seed round, it really is. “In order to build the basic technology, we wanted […]
Noisy recordings of interviews and speeches are the bane of audio engineers’ existence. But one German startup hopes to fix that with a unique technical approach that uses generative AI to enhance the clarity of voices in video. Today, AI-coustics emerged from stealth with €1.9 million in funding. According to co-founder and CEO Fabian Seipel, […]
Rails, a decentralized crypto exchange, has raised $6.2 million in attempts to fill the void FTX left behind after crashing in 2022, the startup’s co-founder and CEO Satraj Bambra exclusively told TechCrunch. It is currently in the early stages of launching an offshore service in select crypto-friendly countries, which does not include the U.S. The […]
The job of so-called “solutions professionals” — people like sales engineers, solutions architects and consultants — revolves around pitching complex enterprise tech to potential customers. It’s important work. But despite this being the case, rarely are solutions teams adequately staffed and resourced, according to entrepreneur Dan Chen. “Solutions teams bring technical credibility to the selling […]
ShopMy, a marketing platform for content creators to connect with brands and monetize their content, announced that it raised $18.5 million. The company will use the money to help scale its network of 40,000 creators, including Alix Earle, the latest “It Girl” on the internet with more than 10 million followers on TikTok and Instagram. […]
Company
Fabric Video by Gunzoo | Gnzo
Gnzo develops applications that allow users to play multiple videos on one screen at the same time.
Apple rolled out iOS 17.2 today, giving iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max users the ability to record spatial videos. The new feature lets users film in three dimensions and experience their favorite memories and special moments on Apple Vision Pro, the upcoming mixed-reality headset.
In order to create a three-dimensional video, Apple explains that the iPhone uses both the main and ultrawide cameras when recording. This is then saved as a single file within a new album in the Photos app titled “Spatial.” The videos will also sync across devices with iCloud. Spatial videos are captured in 1080p resolution at 30 frames per second.
Spatial video recording can be enabled in Settings by toggling on “Spatial Video for Apple Vision Pro” in the Camera section under Formats. Apple suggests holding the iPhone in landscape orientation for optimal results.
Spatial videos can be viewed on all iPhones and other devices; however, they’ll appear as regular, 2D videos.
Image Credits: Apple
The new feature allows users to record videos that Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Greg Joswiak, describes as “magical” and “setting a new bar for what’s possible.” While that’s marketing speak, it’s a differentiator for Apple’s high-end iPhone, and will deepen users’ connections with Apple’s latest product, the AR/VR headset, launching next year.
“iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max feature the most powerful camera systems we’ve ever developed, including the best video quality in any smartphone. And now, we’re setting a new bar for what’s possible, enabling users to record special moments just as they happened,” Joswiak said in a statement.
Apple devoted a full event to iPad last Tuesday, roughly a month out from WWDC. From the invite artwork to the polarizing ad spot, Apple was clear — the event was all about iPads. Most of the rumors proved true: Apple introduced a new iPad Pro (with a new M4 chip), iPad Air, the Pencil […]
Apple and Google announced on Monday that iPhone and Android users will start seeing alerts when it’s possible that an unknown Bluetooth device is being used to track them. The two companies have developed an industry standard called “Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers.” Starting Monday, Apple is introducing the capability in iOS 17.5 and Google is […]
It’s been a busy weekend for union organizing efforts at U.S. Apple stores, with the union at one store voting to authorize a strike, while workers at another store voted against forming a union. Back in 2022, workers in Towson, Maryland, became the first formally recognized union at an Apple retail store. That union, which […]
Welcome to Week in Review: TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the week’s biggest news. This week Apple unveiled new iPad models at its Let Loose event, including a new 13-inch display for the iPad Air, as well as Tandem OLED and a new M4 chip for the iPad Pro. But its ad for the new iPad Pro […]
Apple’s iPad event had a lot to like. New iPads with new chips and new sizes, a new Apple Pencil, and even some software updates. If you are a big fan of Apple hardware, well, it was probably a good day. Now you can get an updated and thinner iPad Pro, if that’s your jam. […]
We’re still well over a month out from WWDC, but Apple went ahead and snuck in another event. On Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. PT/10 a.m. ET, the company is set to unveil the latest additions to the iPad line. According to the rumor mill, that list includes: a new iPad Pro, iPad Air, […]
At its iPad-focused event, Apple announced a new and improved Magic Keyboard, its keyboard accessory for iPad. The Magic Keyboard has been “completely redesigned” to be much thinner and lighter, Apple says, and now includes a function row for quick access to controls like screen brightness, volume adjustment and play/pause. Beyond that, the new Magic […]
Apple isn’t yet ready to unveil its broader AI strategy — it’s saving that for its Worldwide Developer Conference in June — but the tech giant did make sure to mention AI technologies across its device lineup at its iPad event on Tuesday. The company touted a new iPad Air as “an incredibly powerful device […]
Today is Apple iPad Event day, and we bring you all the iPad goodness you can stand, including if some of the rumors are true of what’s coming, like a new iPad Pro, iPad Air, Apple Pencil and a keyboard case. Didn’t have time to watch? That’s ok — we summed up the most important […]
Apple just updated its two high-end tablets: the iPad Air and the iPad Pro. While the entry-level iPad didn’t receive an update, the company lowered its price, too. And of course, yes, the iPad mini is still around. So we thought it would be a good opportunity to look at the iPad lineup and understand […]
The latest version of Final Cut Pro introduces a new feature to speed up your shoot: Live Multicam. It’s a bold move from Apple, transforming your iPad into a multicam production studio, enabling creatives to connect and preview up to four cameras all at once, all in one place. From the command post, directors can […]
At its iPad event today, Apple announced its new iPad Pro tablets, powered by its new M4 chips, the fourth generation of its custom SoCs. The new chips feature a new display engine, as well as a significantly updated CPU and GPU cores. The base M4 chips come with up to 10 CPU and 10 […]
Shocking as it may seem, it’s been nearly a decade since the first Apple Pencil was announced, way back in 2015. The stylus hasn’t seen much in the way of updates since then. The most significant arrived in 2018, bringing magnetic charging to the line. Last year, meanwhile, saw the arrival of a less expensive […]
Yeah, you can put an OLED screen in an iPad, but then you lose the brightness that iPad Pro users are used to. What is a poor computer maker to do? You stack two of them, of course. “We’ve always envisioned iPad as a magical sheet of glass,” said John Ternus, SVP, Hardware Engineering, during […]
Apple announced new iPads — two iPad Air models and the iPad Pro with M4 processor — at its “Let Loose” event on Tuesday. However, one of the important updates for people who take a lot of video calls was Apple shifting the camera to the landscape edge. Until now, the camera on the iPad […]
As anticipated, Apple’s iPad Pro was the star of Tuesday’s “Let Loose” event. The arrival of the seventh-generation device marks the first major upgrade to the premium tablet since 2022. “We’re not only going to push the limits of iPad,” Apple SVP John Ternus noted during the event, “we’re going to crush them.” The new […]
Apple is refreshing its iPad lineup on Tuesday, which is a bit overdue, as the previous iPad Air was announced more than two years ago. The most important addition to the new iPad Air is that it now comes in two sizes: 11 and 13 inches. This display is still an LED display; if you […]
So far, the biggest surprise about May 7’s “Let Loose” event is that it’s happening at all. We’re just over a month out from Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference, and yet the company determined there was enough news to warrant a stand-alone event. iPads (including the iPad Pro and iPad Air) will be the focus, […]
Despite spending more than $100 billion on R&D over the last five years, Apple isn't planning to spin up too many new data centers to run or train AI models.
Apple finally updated its App Store guidelines to allow global developers to host retro game emulators on iOS. Now, you don’t need to jailbreak your iPhone or download any sketchy software — you can get a sophisticated emulator right in the palm of your hand for free on the App Store. No one is more […]
Video game emulator Delta’s decade-long struggle against the iOS App Store began with a school-issued TI-84 calculator. When Riley Testut was a sophomore in high school, he showed his friends how to load illicit software onto their bulky graphing calculators. Such behavior was generally discouraged at school, but he wasn’t plotting to cheat on a […]
Spotify’s slow movement to put lyrics behind its paid service wall in its music service are about as popular as you would expect. Precise details of the update are evolving but what we can say at this point is that it seems that Spotify has a new feature up its sleeve to try and get […]
Apple’s chief financial officer Luca Maestri challenged investor worries over an 8% drop in China revenue by noting that sales in other emerging markets are growing. “When we start looking at places like India, like Saudi, like Mexico, Turkey, Brazil…and Indonesia, the numbers are getting large, and we’re very happy because these are markets where […]
Apple on Thursday reported a 10% drop in iPhone sales for the second fiscal quarter, dropping from $51.33 billion to $45.96 billion, year-over-year. The slowdown was fueled, in part, by an 8% drop in China. Apple’s slow adoption of AI versus competitors like Google and Microsoft likely played a role in consumers’ decision to hold […]
After many users complained about their alarms ringing silently on iPhones, Apple told TechCrunch that it is aware of the issue and is working on a fix. Serpately, Wall Street Journal reporter Joanna Stern and NBC correspondent Emilie Ikeda said that Apple confirmed that it is working on an issue of some users’ alarms not […]
Apple’s App Store isn’t always as trustworthy as the company claims. The latest example comes from RockAuto, an auto parts dealer popular with home mechanics and other DIYers, which is upset that a fake app masquerading as its official app has not been removed from the App Store, despite numerous complaints to Apple. RockAuto co-founder […]
TikTok is testing the ability for users to upload 60-minute videos, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. The feature is available to a limited group of users in select markets, and TikTok says it doesn’t have any immediate plans to make the feature available widely.
The feature, which was first spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra, marks a shift from TikTok’s original format. The app allowed users to upload 15-second videos at launch, but TikTok has been increasing that limit over the past few years. While the company rose to popularity for its short-form video format, it has slowly been embracing long-form content to take on one of its biggest competitors: YouTube.
TikTok says that while creators can weave multipart stories together by telling viewers to go to part two or more of a story, it often hears from creators who want more time for things like cooking demos, beauty tutorials, educational lesson plans, comedic sketches and more.
The purpose of the increased time limit is to give creators the opportunity to experiment with new or expanded types of content with more flexibility, the company says. Of course, this puts TikTok in even more direct competition with YouTube. By giving creators the ability to upload 60-minute videos on TikTok, the company is likely hoping that creators who normally post their content on YouTube will also post their videos on its platform.
The expanded time limit could also allow for a new type of content to be posted on TikTok, which is full episodes of TV shows.
Last year, Peacock made episode one of “Killing It” available to watch for free on TikTok, but it was broken up into five parts. If TikTok launches the 60-minute upload limit videos, networks would no longer have to break up an episode into multiple parts.
Many networks already upload the first episode of a TV show on YouTube to attract new viewers, and with this expanded time limit, they could do the same on TikTok. Networks are already using TikTok to reach viewers, and the expanded upload time limit could entice them to share more content on TikTok.
While not everyone would be interested in watching longer content on TikTok, the company has been seeking to enhance the viewing experience for users who are watching long-form content. For instance, the company has been testing a horizontal full-screen mode and video-scrubbing thumbnails. It also rolled out a feature last year that lets you fast-forward videos by holding down the right side of a video.
As with any test feature, it’s unknown when or if TikTok plans to launch the 60-minute video upload option widely.
News About TikTok tests 60-minute video uploads as it continues to take on YouTube
YouTube TV has announced that its multiview feature for watching four streams at once is now available on Android phones and tablets. The Android launch comes two months after YouTube TV rolled out the feature to iPhones and iPads. The feature, which first launched in March 2023, is aimed at sports viewers who want to […]
TikTok is testing the ability for users to upload 60-minute videos, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. The feature is available to a limited group of users in select markets, and TikTok says it doesn’t have any immediate plans to make the feature available widely. The feature, which was first spotted by social media […]
Humane AI raised more than $230 million before it even shipped a product. And when it finally released its Ai Pin — which costs $699 plus a $24 monthly subscription — pretty much every tech reviewer came to the same disappointing realization: This much-hyped product, which promises to disrupt the smartphone’s dominance, is not very […]
YouTube’s comments section, historically, has had a bad reputation, but a change rolling out could prevent kids from wading into the comments cesspool. In an email to parents who supervise a child’s account, the company announced the introduction of a “read-only” comments option on their child’s supervised experience on YouTube. The feature will roll out […]
Google is shutting down its Podcasts app in the U.S. in a matter of days. The company has begun warning the app’s users they will need to migrate their subscriptions to YouTube Music by April 2 to follow and stream their favorite shows going forward. Users who don’t make the move immediately will still have […]
With TikTok potentially poised for a U.S. ban, YouTube is touting how well its own TikTok competitor, YouTube Shorts, is paying off for creators. The company on Thursday said its short-form video platform now averages over 70 billion daily views and over 25% of channels in YouTube’s Partner Program monetize their videos through revenue-sharing on […]
In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project designed to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers. The goal was to understand users’ behavior and help Facebook compete with Snapchat, according to newly unsealed court documents. Facebook called this “Project Ghostbusters,” in a clear reference to Snapchat’s ghost-like logo. […]
YouTube is now requiring creators to disclose to viewers when realistic content was made with AI, the company announced on Monday. The platform is introducing a new tool in Creator Studio that will require creators to disclose when content that viewers could mistake for a real person, place or event was created with altered or […]
Update: The outages have been resolved as of around 3:00 p.m. ET. A Google spokesperson told TechCrunch that there was a surge in traffic beginning at around 10:25 a.m. ET, which correlated with an unrelated service disruption. Though the spokesperson didn’t specify further details, that timing lines up with a major outage at Meta, where […]
YouTube Create, Google’s standalone mobile app aimed at creators, which helps them produce both Shorts and longer videos, is expanding to a broader set of markets after last fall’s launch into beta testing. The app was initially available on Android in the U.S. and a handful of other select markets, but today will become available […]
YouTube is changing the design for creators’ channels on the big screen, the company announced today. The changes include more accessible action buttons, like “Subscribe,” a more modern design and other tweaks that were first introduced for artists’ pages last fall. At the time, YouTube said that artist pages were part of a larger YouTube […]
Nielsen today released its January report on viewing usage across linear TV and streaming, which revealed that YouTube is once again the overall top streaming service in the U.S., with 8.6% of viewing on television screens. Netflix, meanwhile, saw 7.9% of TV usage. The new data points to YouTube’s dominance in the TV streaming arena […]
YouTube is introducing the ability for users to incorporate or “remix” a music video in their short-form videos, called Shorts, as the company continues to challenge TikTok. Given that YouTube has something that TikTok doesn’t, which is a vast library of official music videos, it makes sense for the platform to leverage it to advance […]
Podcast creators can now submit their RSS feed to YouTube and YouTube Music, the company revealed in a video uploaded to its Creator Insider channel. It was previously announced in August that support was coming for RSS feeds. The functionality was available as an invite-only beta test last year. The move to embrace RSS feeds […]
Apple’s Vision Pro headset is set to release for consumers today, but YouTube is not currently building a dedicated app for the device. To fill that void, Christian Selig, the developer who made Apollo for Reddit client, has made a Vision Pro app for YouTube called Juno. The app costs $5 for a one-time purchase and […]
Google said today that YouTube now has more than 100 million paid users across YouTube Music and YouTube Premium. This number is up from the 80 million paid users the company mentioned in November 2022. Earlier this week, during its Q4 2023 earnings call, Sundar Pichai said that Google’s subscription business — which includes YouTube’s […]
Social media apps can rise quickly and burn out just as fast, but taking a step back and looking at those trends on a longer timeline offers a better glimpse at the big picture. The Pew Research Center’s latest report on Americans’ social media habits is out, rounding up social media usage trends among U.S. […]
Link-in-bio company Linktree announced new features today, including link scheduling, archiving and the ability to automatically fetch your latest video from YouTube and TikTok. Linktree now lets users schedule a link to go live on the page at a certain date and time. They can also choose from multiple time zones to align their drop […]
No wonder YouTube launched Shorts. A new study of children’s online habits found that children ages 4 through 18 spent a global average of 112 minutes daily on TikTok’s short video app in 2023, an increase from 107 minutes the year prior. And although YouTube remains the world’s biggest streaming app among this demographic, kids […]
TikTok is coming for YouTube. The company has been spotted testing the ability for users to upload 30-minute videos, signaling a significant move away from the short-form video format that made it popular. Social media consultant Matt Navarra spotted the new option in the iOS beta version of the app in the U.K. Navarra told […]
YouTube is following in Netflix’s footsteps as it decides not to release a dedicated app for the Apple Vision Pro’s upcoming launch. Like Netflix subscribers, viewers will have to go to the web browser version if they want to watch YouTube videos. “We’re excited to see Vision Pro launch, and we’re supporting it by ensuring […]
Yet another series of layoffs has hit Google, this time at its video-sharing platform, YouTube. The company will eliminate 100 employees, a spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch. Last week, Google laid off more than 1,000 workers across several divisions, including engineering, services and voice-activated product Google Assistant. “As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s […]
YouTube announced today that it’s making it easier to find accurate life-saving information about basic first aid and emergency care with the launch of its new First Aid Information Shelves. The new shelves will be pinned to the top of search results and will feature videos from credible health organizations like Mass General Brigham. The […]
YouTube is updating its harassment and cyberbullying policies to clamp down on content that “realistically simulates” deceased minors or victims of deadly or violent events describing their death. The Google-owned platform says it will begin striking such content starting on January 16. The policy change comes as some true crime content creators have been using […]
The top YouTuber in the U.S., MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson) co-founded the new analytics platform ViewStats, which is now available in beta. Similar to tools like Social Blade, ViewStats uses the YouTube API to unveil detailed stats about channels that both creators and their fans can see. MrBeast didn’t become one of the highest-earning creators of […]
YouTube’s first viral scandal took place in what we believed was a 16-year-old girl’s bedroom. In 2006, homeschooled teenager Bree Avery vlogged about her life under the username Lonelygirl15, chronicling her supposedly boring life. But as the videos got more and more outlandish — her parents turned out to be part of a blood-harvesting cult? […]
Google launched today a new feature for Classroom that allows teachers to turn any YouTube video into an interactive assignment by inserting questions for their students to answer throughout the viewing experience. With the interactive questions feature, teachers can create open-ended or multiple-choice questions, provide feedback on answers and access a dashboard of key insights […]
Kaiber, the generative AI creative studio behind the music videos of popular artists Kid Cudi and Linkin Park, announced today the launch of its new mobile app to give creators, musicians and artists a range of AI tools, including text-to-video, image-to-video and video-to-video.
Founded in 2022, Kaiber leverages various open source projects like AnimatedDiff, Automatic1111, ControlNet and Deforum, among others. It also touts a proprietary layer of technology to fuse it all together into one artistic tool.
Like other AI video generators (Runway, Meta’s Make-A-Video and Google’s Imagen Video), Kaiber allows users to either upload images/videos or type in their own ideas to generate animated content.
Kaiber offers two types of animation style — “Flipbook,” a frame-by-frame effect, or “Motion,” a fluid style where content smoothly transitions between frames. Users can describe how they want the video to look or select from Kaiber’s pre-prompted subjects and styles.
Kaiber allows users to customize the camera movement, whether they want the animation to zoom in/out, rotate clockwise or counterclockwise or move up, down, left or right. There are also different aspect ratios, depending on which platform the creator wants to upload the video. For instance, 16:9 for YouTube, 9:16 for TikTok and 1:1, 3:4 or 4:3 for Instagram. The longest video duration allowed is eight minutes, but the company plans to support longer videos in the future. Videos take 30 minutes to generate.
Image Credits: Kaiber
Additionally, users can add their own music, making the app an affordable alternative for independent artists who don’t want to pay an animation studio hundreds of thousands of dollars for just one video. Plus, Kaiber includes an Audio Reactivity feature, meaning the output responds to whatever audio the user uploads.
“Our mobile app brings Kaiber’s core capabilities — such as text-to-video, image-to-video and video-to-video — into a compact, user-friendly format,” co-founder and CEO Victor Wang told TechCrunch.
Wang added, “While some advanced tools like comprehensive storyboarding and specific text-to-video models remain web-exclusive, customers should expect feature parity very soon.”
Alongside the app launch, Kaiber has partnered with three independent artists to launch a “Create with” feature, which is exclusive to the mobile experience. Users can create content using music and generative AI styles catered to each artist.
Notably, one artist is the co-founder and CTO of the company — Eric Gao, whose stage name is Oksami. He has over 53,000 Spotify listeners and nearly 58,000 YouTube subscribers. Users can sample four of his most popular songs, including Midnight Diner, which has over 1 million streams on Spotify. The two other artists featured on the app are Yung Bae and August Kamp.
Regarding commercial rights, creators who pay for an account own the videos they make. Users with free accounts get a Commons Noncommercial 4.0 Attribution International License, meaning they have permission to use the content but can’t sell it. Videos made with a free account will come with the Kaiber logo watermark.
Kaiber also offers an affiliate program, which lets creators earn a 10% commission on subscription referrals. Affiliates continue to earn commission for as long as a referred customer remains a subscriber.
Kaiber’s app is available on iOS and Android devices. There are three subscription tiers: Explorer ($5/month for 300 credits), Pro ($15/month for 1,000 credits) and Artist ($30/month for 2,500 credits). One credit equals a one-second-long video. However, the credit cost also varies depending on which feature is being used. There’s also a seven-day free trial that comes with 100 credits.
“Our core thesis is that the creative process is hard,” co-founder and head of creative Jacky Lu told us. “But the creative process has common denominators across all modalities like music, video, images and other forms of art — humans make stuff in similar patterns. And to make the best art, we need intuitive and simple tools and the ability to be inspired by others. Now with gen AI, we can make art with others and with machines.”
Kaiber came out of beta this past May with over 2 million users. Now, the company touts more than 5 million sign-ups. Kid Cudi’s AI-powered lyric videos and Linkin Park’s AI music video helped put Kaiber’s name on the map, along with a viral TikTok trend called “Astral Jump.” The company’s studio technology offering — Kaiber Studios — has supported over 2 million artists with generative audio and video, including Grimes, Wu-Tang Clan, Money Man, Don Diablo and Mike Shinoda.
Kaiber is entirely bootstrapped. In the first few months of launching, the company reported seven figures in gross revenue.
Wang and Gao are childhood best friends whose mothers immigrated to America from Shanghai together. They started their first startup, Secret Garden, in February 2022 as a response to the web3 NFT craze. The company’s first sale grossed $1.2 million, profiting around $300,000, enough to seed the business. Unfortunately, however, the FTX crash wiped out Secret Garden’s funds, and they had no choice but to fold.
“The FTX.us crash tested our resilience, but our determination only grew stronger, leading to the birth of Kaiber from the ashes of Secret Garden,” Wang said. “It’s a narrative of overcoming adversity, fueled by passion and an unwavering belief in the transformative power of AI in the music and visual arts.”
OpenAI’s Superalignment team, responsible for developing ways to govern and steer “superintelligent” AI systems, was promised 20% of the company’s compute resources, according to a person from that team. But requests for a fraction of that compute were often denied, blocking the team from doing their work. That issue, among others, pushed several team members […]
OpenAI has reached a deal with Reddit to use the social news site’s data for training AI models. In a blog post on OpenAI’s press relations site, the company said that the Reddit partnership will provide it access to “real-time, structured and unique content” — e.g. posts and replies — from Reddit, allowing its tools […]
Google’s going all in on AI — and it wants you to know it. During the company’s keynote at its I/O developer conference on Tuesday, Google mentioned “AI” more than 120 times. That’s a lot! But not all of Google’s AI announcements were significant per se. Some were incremental. Others were rehashed. So to help […]
Mike Krieger, one of the co-founders of Instagram and, more recently, the co-founder of personalized news app Artifact (which TechCrunch corporate parent Yahoo recently acquired), is joining Anthropic as the company’s first chief product officer. As CPO, Krieger will oversee Anthropic’s product engineering, management and design efforts, Anthropic says, as the company works to expand […]
Chang She, previously the VP of engineering at Tubi and a Cloudera veteran, has years of experience building data tooling and infrastructure. But when She began working in the AI space, he quickly ran into problems with traditional data infrastructure — problems that prevented him from bringing AI models into production. “Machine learning engineers and […]
On the heels of OpenAI announcing the latest iteration of its GPT large language model, its biggest rival in generative AI in the U.S. announced an expansion of its own. Anthropic said Monday that Claude, its AI assistant, is now live in Europe with support for “multiple languages,” including French, German, Italian and Spanish across […]
OpenAI announced a new flagship generative AI model on Monday that they call GPT-4o — the “o” stands for “omni,” referring to the model’s ability to handle text, speech, and video. GPT-4o is set to roll out “iteratively” across the company’s developer and consumer-facing products over the next few weeks. OpenAI CTO Mira Murati said […]
AI startup Anthropic is changing its policies to allow minors to use its generative AI systems — in certain circumstances, at least. Announced in a post on the company’s official blog Friday, Anthropic will begin letting teens and preteens use third-party apps (but not its own apps, necessarily) powered by its AI models so long […]
Autonomous, AI-based players are coming to a gaming experience near you, and a new startup, Altera, is joining the fray to build this new guard of AI agents. The company announced Wednesday that it raised $9 million in an oversubscribed seed round, co-led by First Spark Ventures (Eric Schmidt’s deep-tech fund) and Patron (the seed-stage fund […]
Microsoft has reaffirmed its ban on U.S. police departments from using generative AI for facial recognition through Azure OpenAI Service, the company’s fully managed, enterprise-focused wrapper around OpenAI tech. Language added Wednesday to the terms of service for Azure OpenAI Service more clearly prohibits integrations with Azure OpenAI Service from being used “by or for” […]
Samsung Electronics said on Tuesday that its operating profit surged more than 930% in the first quarter of 2024, driven by soaring demand for its servers, memory chips and storage used in AI applications. The company, which struggled in 2023 as the macroeconomic slowdown hurt demand for its products, said its memory chip business returned to […]
As data access becomes increasingly tied to business success, making data available to all business users, regardless of their data-wrangling skills, has grown in importance. The founders of Seam, an early-stage startup, experienced the need to make data more accessible firsthand when they were at Okta, and decided to launch a company to solve this […]
Google’s trying to make waves with Gemini, its flagship suite of generative AI models, apps and services. So what is Gemini? How can you use it? And how does it stack up to the competition? To make it easier to keep up with the latest Gemini developments, we’ve put together this handy guide, which we’ll […]
What’s the next big thing in enterprise automation? If you ask the tech giants, it’s agents — driven by generative AI. There’s no universally accepted definition of agent, but these days the term is used to describe generative AI-powered tools that can perform complex tasks through human-like interactions across software and web platforms. For example, […]
OpenAI’s video generation tool Sora took the AI community by surprise in February with fluid, realistic video that seems miles ahead of competitors. But the carefully stage-managed debut left out a lot of details — details that have been filled in by a filmmaker given early access to create a short using Sora. Shy Kids […]
All-around, highly generalizable generative AI models were the name of the game once, and they arguably still are. But increasingly, as cloud vendors large and small join the generative AI fray, we’re seeing a new crop of models focused on the deepest-pocketed potential customers: the enterprise. Case in point: Snowflake, the cloud computing company, today […]
AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing business, wants to become the go-to place companies host and fine-tune their custom generative AI models. Today, AWS announced the launch of Custom Model Import (in preview), a new feature in Bedrock, AWS’ enterprise-focused suite of generative AI services. The feature lets organizations import and access their in-house generative AI models […]
Firefly, Adobe’s family of generative AI models, doesn’t have the best reputation among creatives. The Firefly image-generation model in particular has been derided as underwhelming and flawed compared to Midjourney, OpenAI’s DALL-E 3, and other rivals, with a tendency to distort limbs and landscapes and miss the nuances in prompts. But Adobe is trying to […]
Hugging Face has published a new leaderboard and benchmark for evaluating generative AI models on health-related tasks and questions.
Apple’s brand-new Vision Pro headset has lost one of its competitive advantages over rivals, as Meta announced today that it, too, will add support for spatial video playback on its more affordable Meta Quest. Spatial video, also known as stereoscopic videos, are videos Apple customers themselves can film with any iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max. Support for the feature rolled out with the release of iOS 17.2 in December, letting users film in three dimensions, so they could later relive their favorite memories through Apple’s mixed-reality headset.
While Meta’s adoption of the feature is a win for Apple in making spatial video more of a standard for 3D recordings, it also makes Meta’s headset more competitive with Apple’s Vision Pro. Starting at $3,500, but costing closer to $4,600 with the necessary add-ons and accessories, as The New York Times reports, Apple’s headset is out of reach for many consumers. Meta’s Quest line-up, by comparison, has lower-cost options including the currently $250 Quest 2, $500 Quest 3 and $1,000 Quest Pro.
Apple’s spatial video will be supported on Meta Quest devices via the v62 software update that’s beginning to roll out now, Meta says. Afterward, customers will be able to upload their spatial video recordings to their Meta headset using the Quest mobile app, allowing them to experience their memories in 3D. Meta says the uploaded content will be converted for playback on the Meta Quest hardware and stored in the cloud, and users will be able to select the videos from the “Files” menu when they want to watch them.
In addition, users will be able to manage their videos from the Meta Quest mobile app gallery or the new spatial videos section of the Files menu on your headset. Meta also created some demo videos that customers can view to get a taste of the experience, even if they don’t own an iPhone 15 Pro device.
Other improvements in the coming update include support for external gamepads, including PlayStation, Xbox and others. PlayStation 5 DualSense Wireless Controllers and PlayStation 4 DualShock will also gain enhanced support, Meta says. The gamepad can connect both via Bluetooth or USB-C and can be used with games like Halo Infinite or Forza Horizon 5 with the Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta) App. (The latter requires a supported headset and an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate membership.)
Facebook livestreaming is also now available to all Meta Quest users, after its original release in the v56 update, the company noted. Users will be able to “go live” from the Camera icon in the Universal Menu, so they can stream their VR activities to their friends. Those streaming to YouTube will now also see their chats while livestreaming with the new update.
Plus, Meta Quest users will now be able to perform common actions by looking down at their palm and then performing a simple gesture — like a short pinch to show and hide the Universal Menu or a long pinch to recenter the display. This change is likely Meta’s response to Vision Pro’s navigation capabilities, which include operating the device by hand, voice or by sight (eye tracking).
The timing of Meta’s support for spatial video is interesting, coming one day before the public launch of Apple’s Vision Pro. The addition is a mixed bag for Apple — it will make iPhone 15 Pro devices a more compelling buy if spatial videos can be viewed on other VR devices. But it could also potentially sour customers on spending big bucks on the Vision Pro, if they already have a Meta Quest headset or are in the market for new VR gear. While Apple’s Vision Pro may offer better video quality than lower-end devices, it remains to be seen how many customers are willing to pay for the upgrade.
A few months after its launch, how is Apple’s Vision Pro faring? The company’s ambitious bet on computers that nestle on your face instead of sit on your desk made a huge splash when it was announced and later released. However, the hype has since seemingly come back down to Earth. I am a long-term […]
Much like the headset for which they were designed, Apple’s Personas are very much a work in progress. The original version of the beta avatars were — is “nightmarish” too strong a word? A subsequent update has made them more palatable and truer to life, and Apple says it’s continuing to work on the 3D […]
With the Vision Pro finally available, many consumers are curious about Apple’s AR/VR headset and the apps that come with it. While some are from companies you recognize — Disney+, Max, TikTok, Zoom, Reddit and others — there are plenty of independent developers that launched visionOS-optimized apps. From spatial puzzle games to an app where […]
Hey. Sorry to call you out of the blue. No, no, nothing serious. I’m fine. I wanted to apologize for freaking you out last time. I wasn’t myself. But I’ve changed. Honestly, I don’t even know who I was back then. It was all very new. I’ve been working on myself, and I think the […]
Apple released VisionOS 1.1 on Thursday with the most notable feature being improved personas of users. Specifically, the new update improves hair and makeup appearance, neck and mouth representation, and rendering of the eyes for EyeSight, which lets others see your eyes when you’re wearing the headset. Additionally, users can also now set up their […]
Out of the box, Apple’s Vision Pro doubles as a 4K Mac virtual display, allowing you to extend an existing Mac desktop to the device’s spatial computing environment. A new app called Splitscreen takes things a step further, by allowing you to add a second macOS display to your Vision Pro — even if it […]
Few joys in this cold world can match cracking open a new comic on a lazy Sunday morning. Nothing to do, nowhere to be — just you, a mug of coffee and some sequential art. Not much has fundamentally changed about the American comic book since publishers began collecting newspaper strips as bound volumes in […]
Over the past week, a number of people have reported returning their Vision Pros for a number of reasons, including issues around headset comfort and sickness. Returns are par for the course with any nascent technology. No matter how polished a first-generation product is upon release, there’s a very real sense in which it serves […]
TikTok has launched a native and “reimagined” app on the Apple Vision Pro, the company announced on Thursday. The Vision Pro launched on February 2 and already has over 1,000 apps specifically designed for the new device, and now one of the most popular social platforms is one of them. Although you could watch TikTok […]
Mark Zuckerberg may be laughing off the competition in the AR/VR headset market, but Apple’s Vision Pro is gaining traction — with developers, at least. On Tuesday, Apple senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, Greg Joswiak, announced on X that the company’s “spatial computing” headset now has more than 1,000 apps designed specifically to take […]
Mark Zuckerberg tried Apple’s Vision Pro headset and his verdict is that the Meta Quest 3 is a better product. Shocking, right? In a video posted on his Instagram account, recorded with Quest 3’s passthrough, the Meta CEO said before trying out the headset that he thought the Quest 3 would provide better value to […]
Apple’s Vision Pro offers consumers a new way to interact with apps via spatial computing, but it also offers app developers a way to generate revenue without subscriptions. According to a recently released report from app intelligence firm Appfigures, over half of Vision Pro-only apps (52%) are paid downloads — a surprising percentage given that […]
It’s been hard to avoid news about the Apple Vision Pro, the company’s entry into the virtual reality market, in recent days. It was officially released on Friday to much fanfare, but how will it fare in the enterprise? It’s way too early to say, but the company is doing everything possible to make it […]
In 2000, Paradox Press published “Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form.” The book was Scott McCloud’s follow-up to his seminal 1993 work, “Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art.” Where the earlier title explored the history and visual language of sequential art, the second volume finds the medium at a crossroads. The […]
Apple releases its ambitious Vision Pro headset to consumers today, February 2. There are over 600 apps and games currently available on the visionOS store, with more to come. Although Netflix and YouTube aren’t launching dedicated apps, there are still a lot of apps that could be great to start the Vision Pro journey with — […]
The much-hyped Apple Vision Pro headset has begun arriving for those who preordered it, or is available for a test drive for those wanting to give it an in-person demo. Billed as the future of spatial computing, the AR/VR headset might not be for everyone based on its hefty $3,499 price tag and lack of […]
Apple’s Vision Pro headset is set to release for consumers today, but YouTube is not currently building a dedicated app for the device. To fill that void, Christian Selig, the developer who made Apollo for Reddit client, has made a Vision Pro app for YouTube called Juno. The app costs $5 for a one-time purchase and […]
Last night, I fell asleep under the stars, the chirp of crickets intermingling with the old radiator’s whistle off in the distance. I just finished an episode of Justified: City Primeval on the big screen. It was a constant 68 degrees, but I tucked myself into the duvet, nonetheless. For tonight, I’m thinking the surface […]
At its WWDC 2023 conference, Apple took the wraps off the Vision Pro, its long-rumored augmented reality (AR) headset. The Vision Pro is one of Apple’s most ambitious products to date — one year in the making and packed with technology, including a new operating system, visionOS, that might just warrant the sky-high price tag. […]
Apple’s brand-new Vision Pro headset has lost one of its competitive advantages over rivals, as Meta announced today that it, too, will add support for spatial video playback on its more affordable Meta Quest. Spatial video, also known as stereoscopic videos, are videos Apple customers themselves can film with any iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone […]
The pace is picking up for the Apple Vison Pro apps ahead of the spatial computing device’s Friday launch as developers ready their apps for the new platform. While just last week, only 150-plus apps had been specifically designed for the Vision Pro so far, according to a third-party analysis of the App Store, Apple […]
It’s Friday, February 2, 2024. Today is the day. You’ve been eyeing the Vision Pro since Tim Cook stepped onstage with the product at last year’s WWDC. Longer than that, really, if you factor in the years of rumors, leaks and renderings. The price wasn’t anywhere near what you had hoped, but it’s a first-gen product. […]
A day after reporters published their first hands-on review of Apple’s Vision Pro, the technology giant released its first security patch for the mixed reality headset to fix a vulnerability that “may have been exploited” by hackers in the wild. On Wednesday, Apple released visionOS 1.0.2, the software that runs on the Vision Pro, with […]
More than anything, Apple’s Vision Pro is a beginning. There are moments while using it that feel like a porthole into a different world and — just maybe — the future. It’s imperfect, sure, but it’s an undeniable accomplishment after so many decades of extended reality false starts. Using the headset for even a few […]
Ahead of the launch of Apple’s Vision Pro on Friday, Zoom revealed today its upcoming visionOS app, which is set to release on February 2. The new app brings capabilities such as “persona” support for users to use a digital avatar during calls, 3D object sharing, its chat feature “Team Chat” and more. Apple’s Persona […]
Apple’s Vision Pro launch resembles its Apple Watch debut in more ways than one, but to me the most telling similarity is in the marketing approach. Apple has striven to distance the Vision Pro from the existing crop of virtual reality (and even mixed reality) devices — many of which are objective failures — by […]
YouTube is following in Netflix’s footsteps as it decides not to release a dedicated app for the Apple Vision Pro’s upcoming launch. Like Netflix subscribers, viewers will have to go to the web browser version if they want to watch YouTube videos. “We’re excited to see Vision Pro launch, and we’re supporting it by ensuring […]
Update: The Vision Pro is now available for preorder on Apple’s site for $3,500. Apple has also offered a better look with a 10-minute “guided tour” of the device. It’s set to start shipping February 2. “Avatar” first arrived in theaters in 2009. It was a technological marvel that gave audiences one of the most […]
The year is off to a quick start in terms of new product launches and availability, even leaving aside the usual mid-tier smorgasbord that is CES. Apple just started pre-sales of its Vision Pro mixed reality headset, with shipments beginning in early February; meanwhile, Samsung debuted the next generation of the only viable iPhone competitor […]
Last week, WhatsApp announced it was adding support for HD photos, allowing the messaging app users the option to preserve the high-def resolution of the phones they wanted to share with friends and family. At the time, the company said support for HD videos was coming soon. Today, the company confirmed with TechCrunch that HD video support is now rolling out to both iOS and Android users.
Similar to the HD photos feature, the HD videos feature gives customers the choice to share high-def videos across WhatsApp. Previously, high-def videos would have been compressed to 480p, as per the app’s prior resolution limit. Now, users can opt to send their video in HD, but only up to 720p.
The process here is the same as for sharing HD photos.
After selecting the video or videos you want to share, you’ll tap the new HD button on the top of the screen. A dialog box will appear where you can confirm if you want to share in Standard Quality or HD Quality and will show the associated file sizes. You then press send to share the video as usual.
Images and videos shared on WhatsApp are protected with the company’s end-to-end encryption.
The recipient will see a small HD badge on the video shared in the app that lets them know you’ve shared in HD. This lets them decide if they have the storage space or bandwidth available to view the video you’ve shared in HD quality at the time.
The feature is rolling out now so if you don’t have it yet, you should soon.
Last week, WhatsApp announced it was adding support for HD photos, allowing the messaging app users the option to preserve the high-def resolution of the phones they wanted to share with friends and family. At the time, the company said support for HD videos was coming soon. Today, the company confirmed with TechCrunch that HD […]
Austin-based video startup latakoo has a funny name (it's some kind of lark), but a great idea: make it easier to transfer HD video. Built by a group of journalists and technologists to solve the real-world problem of video-sharing in the newsroom environment, the company has already attracted 40 paying customers, including many TV station groups. With latakoo's tool called Flight, videographers can quickly compress and upload large video files in a matter of minutes. Those videos are stored in latakoo's Web-based cloud application, and can be privately shared with colleagues who can download the file on their end in a smaller, more compressed format.
Japan's second biggest telecommunications company KDDI is working on optimizing HD video streaming quality on smaller screens. Specifically, KDDI's R&D Labs are working on making it easier to view HD content originally intended for larger screens on mobile displays.
Japan's biggest business daily, The Nikkei, is reporting that NEC has developed a technology that makes it possible to quickly change low-res analog video to HD video. According to NEC, the existing solutions out there require one full month to convert one hour of analog video images into HD images.
I've been using the Zi6, Kodak's answer to the Mino and other pocketcams, since its release and other than pretty awful low-light performance, I've been really happy with it. So I'm happy to hear they're releasing an upgraded version that looks cooler, probably performs better, and is weather-resistant to boot.
Image credit: Benni Diez at Reduser.net forums For the last couple weeks, Jim Jannard of RED Camera has been teasing everybody on the REDuser forums with vague promises and outrageous claims of revolutionizing the industry. Skepticism would be the natural response, but after the original RED One camera turned the industry on its head in […]
There’s a fun and functional countdown over at Red.com that suggests, if I am not mistaken, that the new RED products will be revealed at 9AM tomorrow on the East Coast — 6AM my time, great. Check out our previous teaser posts for the mysterious renders that RED head Jim Jannard has been posting.
Another taste. You may be getting tired of these little peeks, but I think they’re just dandy. Looks like a couple XLR ports (labeled “Push” probably because they’re inset and you can’t reach the release), some video outs and some sort of proprietary connector on the right. I’m wondering whether these pics are from some […]
http://i477.photobucket.com/player.swf?file=http://vid477.photobucket.com/albums/rr134/jamesmel9/DSC_0012.flv I was certainly impressed by the D90’s videos a few weeks ago, but it seems that the rolling shutter issues created by the way data is pulled from the sensor make much of the video completely ridiculous — as some have noticed. Jelly motion! RED ONE’s (the forums for which had this video) sensor […]
These camcorders, descended from the same breed as the original best-in-show HV20, are the latest update to the Vixia line of Canon 1080p hi-def camcorders. A few months ago the HF10 (the flash-based update to the HV20) wowed reviewers and now this refresh offers what actually turns out to be a relatively minor update according […]
We’ve covered Vudu extensively at CG so I don’t need to go into details on what it is and what it does. All you need to know is that Vudu is scared of Apple and the Apple TV so they dropped the price of the VOD box to $295. If you purchased one within the […]
The SIA show is something I’ve been looking forward to for a few months, while it isn’t the Surf Expo, the Summer Snowdown will quench my outdoorsy action sport needs. There was a ton of cool stuff that I’ll be throwing down as quickly as my phalanges will let me, so stay tuned because there’s […]
Here’s a beautiful little package that packs a ton of power. For $500, you can score a Canon PowerShot TX1, a sort-of hybrid device that’s compact and records HD video and takes 7.1MP photos. Aside from a spectacular price tag, this baby can do 720p video, 10x optical zoom, multiple shooting modes, image stabilization, 115,000-pixel […]
If you’re going to be in Japan this week, I suggest that you head over to Chiba to visit this year’s Ceatec. Ceatec is Japan’s largest electronics show and this year should be a pretty exciting event. Sony is set to open the show with some sort of new Blu-ray product that they’re not telling […]
It’s been accused of being Vaporware, but the Red One has now been officially unveiled, and pre-orders are available. For those not in-the-know, the Red One is the first camera by Red, the digital video company founded by Oakley’s creator James Jannard. What makes the Red so amazing is that Jannard, being an optical aficionado, […]
Sony has added a new HDV camcorder to the low end of its high end models. The HDR-FX7 wields three CMOS imaging censors instead of the typical three CCDs and it is capable of improved slow motion and low light recordings. It features connectivity for HDMI and RCA. The FX7 also weighs 3.63lbs–40% less than […]
Generative AI has captured the public imagination with a leap into creating elaborate, plausibly real text and imagery out of verbal prompts. But the catch — and there is often a catch — is that the results are often far from perfect when you look a little closer.
Now, Synthesia — one of the ambitious AI startups working in video, specifically custom avatars designed for business users to create promotional, training and other enterprise video content — is releasing an update that it hopes will help it leapfrog over some of the challenges in its particular field. Its latest version features avatars — built based on actual humans captured in their studio — which provide more emotion, better lip tracking and what it says are more expressive natural and human movements when they are fed text to generate videos.
The release comes on the heels of some impressive progress for the company to date. Unlike other generative AI players like OpenAI, which has built a two-pronged strategy — raising huge public awareness with consumer tools like ChatGPT while also building out a B2B offering, with its APIs used by independent developers as well as giant enterprises — Synthesia is leaning into the approach that some other prominent AI startups are taking.
Similar to Perplexity’s focus on really nailing generative AI search, Synthesia is focused on really nailing how to build the most humanlike generative video avatars possible. More specifically, it is looking to do this only for the business market and use cases like training and marketing.
That focus has helped Synthesia stand out in what has become a very crowded AI market that runs the risk of getting commoditized when hype settles down into more long-term concerns like ARR, unit economics and operational costs attached to AI implementations.
Synthesia describes its new Expressive Avatars, the version being released Thursday, as a first of their kind: “The world’s first avatars fully generated with AI.” Built on large, pretrained models, Synthesia says its breakthrough has been in how they are combined to achieve multimodal distributions that more closely mimic how actual humans speak.
These are generated on the fly, Synthesia says, which is meant to be closer to the experience we go through when we speak or react in life. This stands in contrast to how a lot of AI video tools based around avatars work today: Typically these are actually many pieces of video that get quickly stitched together to create facial responses that line up, more or less, with the scripts that are fed into them. The aim is to appear less robotic and more lifelike.
Previous version:
New version:
As you can see in the two examples here, one from Synthesia’s older version and the one being released Thursday, there is still a ways to go, something CEO Victor Riparbelli himself also admits.
“Of course its not 100% there yet, but it will be very, very soon, by the end of the year. It’ll be so mind blowing,” he told TechCrunch. “I think you can also see that the AI part of this is very subtle. With humans there’s so much information in the tiniest details, the tiniest, like, movements of our facial muscles. I think we could never sit down and describe, ‘Yes you smile like this when you’re happy, but that is fake, right?’ That is such a complex thing to ever describe for humans, but it can be [captured in] deep learning networks. They’re actually able to figure out the pattern and then replicate it in a predictable way.” The next thing it’s working on, he added, is hands.
“Hands are, like, super hard,” he said.
The focus on B2B also helps Synthesia anchor its messaging and product more on “safe” AI usage. That is essential, especially with the huge concern today over deepfakes and using AI for malicious purposes like misinformation and fraud. Even so, Synthesia hasn’t managed to avoid controversy on that front altogether. Synthesia’s tech has previously been misused to produce propaganda in Venezuela and false news reports promoted by pro-China social media accounts.
The company noted that it has taken further steps to try to lock down that usage. Last month, it updated its policies, it said, “to restrict the type of content people can make, investing in the early detection of bad faith actors, increasing the teams that work on AI safety, and experimenting with content credentials technologies such as C2PA.”
Despite those challenges, the company has continued to grow.
Synthesia was last valued at $1 billion when it raised $90 million. Notably, that fundraise was almost a year ago, in June 2023.
Riparbelli said in an interview earlier this month that there are currently no plans to raise more, although that doesn’t really answer the question of whether Synthesia is getting proactively approached. (Note: We are very excited to have the actual human Riparbelli speaking at an event of ours in London in May, where I’m definitely going to ask about this again. Please come if you’re in town.)
What we do know for sure is that AI costs a lot of money to build and run, and Synthesia has been building and running a lot.
Prior to the launch of Thursday’s version some 200,000 people have created more than 18 million video presentations across some 130 languages using Synthesia’s 225 legacy avatars, the company said. (It does not break out how many users are on its paid tiers, but there are a lot of big-name customers including Zoom, the BBC, DuPont and more, and enterprises do pay.) The startup’s hope, of course, is that with the new version getting pushed out, those numbers will go up even more.
News About Watch it and weep (or smile): Synthesia’s AI video avatars now feature emotions
Its latest version features avatars that provide more emotion, better lip tracking, and what Synthesia says are more expressive natural and human movements when they are fed text to generate videos.
One of the more unexpected products to launch out of the Microsoft Ignite 2023 event is a tool that can create a photorealistic avatar of a person and animate that avatar saying things that the person didn’t necessarily say. Called Azure AI Speech text-to-speech avatar, the new feature, available in public preview as of today, lets […]
Roblox has been around for a long time. The online game platform first launched in 2006 — just two years after vanilla World of Warcraft hit (the first time) and three years after Second Life, a now-ancient vision of the interconnected, avatar-based digital worlds around which Mark Zuckerberg would go on to rebrand Facebook. We […]
As part of the v57 software update for Meta Quest headsets, the company announced Monday a bevy of new features — including more avatar customization options, an unsend message feature, group links, free-form locomotion ability in Horizon Home and a rebranded Explore feed. Meta also made improvements to video recording, multitasking and more. Starting today, […]
Meta announced today that users can now use their avatars to answer and make video calls on Instagram and Messenger. The company says the new functionality will allow users to take part in video calls in instances where they’re not camera-ready. The result is an animated video call where you and your friends are looking […]
VTubers — online personalities who use motion-capture-powered manga- and anime-inspired avatars to interact with the world alongside games, over YouTube, and in other places — have become big business, with the most popular of them collectively racking up hundreds of millions of hours of viewership in a month, along with loyal fan bases, lucrative sponsorships […]
Is the tedium of videoconferencing getting you down? Fret not. You’ll be pleased to know that, if you’re a Teams users, avatars are now generally available for all Microsoft 365 Business and Enterprise licenses starting this week in the Teams desktop app on Windows and Mac. Hurrah. Microsoft notes that avatars for Microsoft Teams “offer […]
WhatsApp has started rolling out 3D avatars for its users around the globe that can be used as profile photos or custom stickers — months after their debut on Instagram, Facebook and Messenger. On Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook that avatars are coming to WhatsApp. The announcement follows a months-long beta testing […]
The trials and tribulations that a giant company like Meta (née Facebook) has been facing in overcoming skepticism, creating user interest (let alone revenue) and building quality experiences for its all-in metaverse vision highlights just how much work lies ahead for any company working in mixed reality. Today, a startup in that bigger ecosystem, which […]
Facebook Avatars, which lets users customize a virtual lookalike of themselves for use as stickers in chat and comments, is now available in India, the social juggernaut’s biggest market by user accounts. The American firm said Tuesday it had launched Avatars to India as more social interaction moves online amid a nationwide lockdown in the […]
Facebook’s Avatars feature, which lets you customize a virtual lookalike of yourself for use as stickers in comments and Messenger chats, is today launching in the U.S. Essentially Facebook’s version of Snap’s Bitmoji, Avatars were first introduced last year and have been since made available in Australia, New Zealand, Europe and Canada. Based on early feedback, […]
If you were the star of every show, would you watch more mobile television? Snapchat is betting that narcissism drives resonance for its new weekly videos that put you and your friends’ customizable Bitmoji avatars into a flurry of silly animated situations. Bitmoji TV premieres on Saturday morning, and it’s remarkably funny, exciting and addictive. […]
Snapchat’s most popular yet under-exploited feature is finally getting the spotlight in 2020. Starting in February with a global release, your customizable Bitmoji avatar will become the star of a full-motion cartoon series called Bitmoji TV. It’s a massive evolution for Bitmoji beyond the chat stickers and comic strip-style Stories, where they were being squandered […]
Ditch those generic emoji. Facebook’s new Avatars feature lets you customize a virtual lookalike of yourself for use as stickers in chat and comments. Once you personalize your Avatar’s face, hair, and clothes, they’ll star in a range of frequently updated stickers conveying common emotions and phrases. From Likes to Reactions to Avatars, you could […]
Want your video game character to look just like you? Soon you’ll be able to scan an in-game code with Snapchat to play as your personalized Bitmoji avatar on PC, console and mobile games. Today Snapchat announced its new Bitmoji for Games SDK that will let hand-selected partners integrate 3D Bitmoji as a replacement for […]
Want to star in your favorite memes and movie scenes? Upload a selfie to Morphin, choose your favorite GIF and your face is grafted in to create a personalized copy you can share anywhere. Become Tony Stark as he suits up like Iron Man. Drop the mic like Obama, dance like Drake or slap your […]
Genies is emerging as the top competitor to Snapchat’s wildly popular Bitmoji as Facebook, Apple and Google have been slow to get serious about personalized avatars. More than one million people have customized dozens of traits to build a realistic digital lookalike of themselves from over a million possible permutations. When Genies launched a year […]
Hidden inside the code of Facebook’s Android app is an unreleased feature called Facebook Avatars that lets people build personalized, illustrated versions of themselves for use as stickers in Messenger and comments. It will let users customize their avatar to depict their skin color, hair style and facial features. Facebook Avatars is essentially Facebook’s version […]
Facebook wants you to look and move like you in VR, even if you’ve got a headset strapped to your face in the real world. That’s why it’s building a new technology that uses a photo to map someone’s face into VR, and sensors to detect facial expressions and movements to animate that avatar so […]
Now you can customize your Snapchat Bitmoji avatar with 40 skin tones, 50 hair colors, 50 hair treatment options and more so it looks just like you no matter what you look like. Today Snapchat launches Bitmoji Deluxe, a more configurable version of its cartoony avatars that embraces the growing diversity of its users. The […]
"We plan on making Bitmoji obsolete," says Akash Nigam, CEO of Genies. Bragging about beating one of the world's top apps before his has even launched is emblematic of Nigam's and Genies' brash style. But with $15 million in funding at a valuation over $100 million, top investors like NEA and Hollywood royalty like CAA are buying into the avatar startup.
Your Facebook profile used to be the online version of "you". But over the past year, Bitmoji has usurped Facebook to become the preferred way to share your identity over the web.
The Facebook profile assembles a collection of text and real-world photos into a fixed set of poses, making it more of a snapshot of the offline you ported into the digital realm rather than a vision of you purposefully designed for the Internet. It worked well enough for the desktop era when we asynchronously stalked each other's online representations and had the time and screen space to consume a lot of information.
Virtual reality is often a technology that can lead to some deep existential questions related to who we are and what makes us human. These questions are especially poignant as startups grapple with how humans are going to represent themselves online in VR worlds. Loom.ai is aiming to crack this problem by making it as […]
When you’re in virtual reality and start associating your limb and head movements with your onscreen avatar, that digital recreation really becomes an extension of who you are. ObEN is a startup launching out of HTC’s new Vive X accelerator that is hoping to craft a more complete digital version of its users so that […]
How best to represent a person in virtual space? A square with their avatar picture on it? Too Slack. A custom face crafted with a million sliders? Too Second Life. A 3D scan of their face? Too "Lawnmower Man." Then perhaps... a cartoon representation of the headset the user is wearing, with giant googly eyes on the front? You, my friend, are crazy like a fox.
The mobile messaging space is exploding with ever more colourful ways to communicate, augmenting the basics of text and voice -- whether that's stickers, one-to-many video chats or the ability to leave random missives for strangers. Zoobe, a Berlin-based startup, has another cutesy option to add to the pile: cartoon avatars that animate your voice message so you can ramp up the kawaii.
How many of you modeled your Xbox 360 avatar after yourself? Plenty of you, I'm sure. Not me, no. (Gotta be different.) My avatar, picture here, is named—yes, he has a name—Detective Bashyourbrainsin. He's my idea of a rogue 1970s New York City police officer.
The video is totally SFW, but you might lose a few brain cells by watching it PlayStation Home for the PS3 could be the absolute dumbest thing ever produced in the history of human civilization. (Penny-Arcade doesn’t like it either, and their voice carries the same weight as Walter Cronkite’s did during the Vietnam War.) […]
The upcoming NXE update will feature the controversial avatar feature (you know, the one that makes me barf), but you’ve got to have either a HDD or 256MB card installed to take advantage of it. If you’ve got one of those pansy 64MB cards or (shudder) a naked Core system, you’ll be SOL, my friends. […]
Fire up Xbox Live for a “glimpse” of the upcoming New Xbox Experience, Microsft’s latest update to the Xbox System Software. The Avatars are still lame, sure, but the enhanced multimedia options are a welcome treat.
Amazon Prime Video is said to be downsizing its Africa and Middle East operations in a move that will affect teams in the two regions; according to a report in Deadline, the company will instead focus on European originals.
Following the changes, Prime Video will stop contracting originals in Africa and Middle East markets. However, shows given the go-ahead will continue as planned.
Additionally, the company plans to split the European team into two groups: the EU Established to focus on the U.K., Germany, Italy, France, and Spain markets and the EU Emerging to oversee operations in Benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg), the Nordics, and Central and Eastern Europe, the report said.
“We’ve been carefully looking at our business to ensure we continue to prioritize our resources on what matters most to customers. I have carefully evaluated our structure in the region and decided to make some adjustments to our operating model to rebalance and pivot our resources to focus on the areas that drive the highest impact and long-term success,” said Prime Video Europe VP Barry Furlong, according to an email to staff quoted by Variety.
“I have listened and considered the feedback received across the teams over the past 12 months; I believe these changes will improve the operational running of our multi-territory business and allow us to be more agile and focused,” Furlong said.
In a sharp turn of events, the shakeup comes months after Prime Video claimed to have laid out a strategy to become the biggest video streaming player in Africa after it signed multi-year licensing agreements with production companies and set up teams in Nigeria and South Africa.
It’s interesting to note that Amazon Prime Video entered the African market in 2016 as part of its global expansion to over 200 countries, presenting substantial competition to Netflix’s simultaneous global launch. Until about 18 months ago, the service in the region lacked local-language interfaces, subtitling, and original content offerings commonly found in more developed markets. Launching the localized version in Nigeria marked a significant step in catering to the preferences and expectations of the African audience.
As Africa’s third-largest video streaming platform, Amazon Prime Video aimed to strengthen its subscriber base in emerging markets by launching localized plans. While similar plans were introduced in South Africa, the platform had not commissioned any original content in the Middle East. The strategy included increased investment in local production, unveiling slates of localized originals, and offering discounted Amazon Prime memberships to customers.
The platform’s foray into Africa for original and licensed content garnered attention and success, with movies such as “Breath of Life” and Jade Osiberu’s “Gangs of Lagos” achieving critical acclaim and commercial success, respectively. At its peak, Prime Video had over 600,000 subscribers in Africa, according to Digital TV Research, with plans to add 1.5 million new subscribers over the next four years.
Prime Video’s withdrawal from producing local content leaves a significant void in the streaming landscape, where competing platforms are vying for Africa’s projected 15 million video-on-demand subscribers by 2026. As such, the new development could reshape the dynamics of the region’s streaming industry as platforms dedicated to creating local content, mainly Showmax, Netflix, and Canal+, capitalize on Prime Video’s reduced presence and potentially gain market share in the ongoing streaming war for African content and viewership.
Updated to correct that the news was first reported by Deadline.
News About Amazon Prime Video is discontinuing support for local originals in Africa and Middle East
It is estimated that about 2 billion people, especially those in lower- and middle-income countries, lack access to quality and affordable essential medicines. The situation is exacerbated by low-quality or even killer counterfeit drugs that fill the gap. This shortfall means diseases that are otherwise treatable or preventable end up causing distress and even death. This is the […]
Jumia’s revenue and gross merchandise volume showed growth despite a decrease in quarterly active customers, according to its Q1 2024 report. Revenue increased by 19% year-over-year (57% in constant currency) to $48.9 million, while GMV surged by 5% year-over-year (39% in constant currency) to $181 million. The quarterly active customers of the African e-tailer, on […]
Two years after announcing plans, Amazon’s highly awaited e-commerce entry into sub-Saharan Africa has finally come to pass. On Tuesday, the tech giant launched its marketplace in South Africa. South Africa is the e-commerce giant’s first marketplace in the sub-Saharan region (it already has an operation out of Egypt following the acquisition of Souq in […]
The logistics industry in Nigeria, like any informal sector, struggles with poor infrastructure and other inefficiencies, making it difficult for businesses — both large and small — to move and store goods. Many startups have tackled middle-mile and last-mile delivery challenges, but one untapped area is providing an end-to-end fulfillment solution. Renda, a three-year-old startup, […]
Productive Use of Renewable Energy (PURE) technologies, especially those in the solar irrigation and cold chain segment, saw increased investor interest last year, despite a 43% funding slump recorded in the global off-grid solar sector. The global association for the off-grid solar energy industry, GOGLA, says PURE technologies raised $65 million in 2023, double the […]
Food is significant to Nigerians, with households spending nearly 60% of their income on it, the highest globally, according to official reports. This strong affinity for food, coupled with the rise of online shopping, sets the stage for Nigeria’s food delivery market to potentially reach $2 billion to $3 billion by 2032. But despite the […]
Kubik, a plastic upcycling startup, has raised a $1.9 million seed extension, months after announcing initial equity investment. The startup’s latest investment is from African Renaissance Partners, an East African venture capital firm; Endgame Capital, an investor with a bias for technologies around climate change; and King Philanthropies, a climate and extreme poverty investor. The […]
Madica, an investment program launched by U.S.-based investor Flourish Ventures to back pre-seed startups in Africa, plans to invest in up to 10 ventures by the end of the year, ramping up its funding efforts after closing three initial deals. Madica disclosed the plans to TechCrunch, indicating accelerated investing in the coming year as it […]
Venture capital activity in Africa has shown resilience over the past six months, with major firms on the continent closing their funds despite the ongoing funding winter. In the latest development, TLcom Capital, an African VC firm with offices in Lagos and Nairobi and a focus on early-stage startups, has concluded fundraising for its second […]
Kenyan B2B e-commerce company MarketForce is winding down its B2B e-commerce business that served informal merchants (mom-and-pop stores) after a turbulent two-year period that saw it scale down operations severely. The shutdown of the B2B e-commerce arm dubbed RejaReja comes months after MarketForce withdrew the service from all its markets, including Nigeria and Kenya, save […]
Amira Rasool founded The Folklore in 2018 to help fashion brands from emerging markets like Africa, Asia and The Caribbean tap into the international market. In 2022, the startup introduced The Folklore Connect, a B2B marketplace and wholesale management software for brands to sell to partner global retailers like Nordstrom, after it shifted from sourcing […]
The African tech ecosystem, buffeted by huge potential but also lots of economic, political and social instabilities, is no stranger to major drama affecting even its most promising-looking startups. But recently, LemFi, the Nigeria-based fintech that provides money transfer services to African migrants, is shaping up as an example of a bounce-back — and a […]
Since 2015, Pula, an insurtech based in Kenya, has been keen on enhancing the access to agricultural insurance by small-holder farmers across emerging markets, shielding them against losses from pests, diseases and/or extreme weather events like floods and droughts. So far, the insurtech has supported 15.4 million farmers in Africa, Asia and Latin America to […]
Verod-Kepple Africa Ventures (VKAV) plans to back up to 21 growth-stage companies across the continent after closing its first fund at $60 million. The pan-African VC hit the milestone following fresh backing from new investors including Nigeria’s SCM Capital (formerly Sterling Capital Markets Limited), Taiyo Holdings and C2C Global Education Japan. The latest capital injection […]
Climate tech VC Satgana has reached a final close of its first fund, which aims to back up to 30 early-stage startups in Africa and Europe. The VC firm reached a final close of €8 million ($8.6 million) following commitments from family offices and high-net-worth individuals, including Maurice Lévy of the Publicis Groupe, and Back […]
VNV Global, a Swedish investment firm that backs startups in mobility, health and marketplaces, slashed the value of its holding in Wasoko, an African B2B e-commerce startup, by 48%, according to its annual report for 2023. In the report, VNV set Wasoko’s fair value at around $260 million as of December 2023, the month that Wasoko […]
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech (formerly The Interchange)! This week, we’re looking at some hot fintech startups in Africa, how Mint’s closure has been Copilot’s gain and why VCs have doubled down on a particular expense management startup. To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important fintech stories delivered to your inbox every Sunday […]
Globally, a third of the food produced is lost or wasted, and in Kenya, that figure stands between 20% and 40%. For Kenya, unlike the developed world, food loss, not waste, is the greater problem, with small-scale farmers, who account for 75% of the total agricultural output in the country, facing a myriad of challenges, […]
Payments company Nala pivoted to offer remittance service in 2021, tapping the growing money transfer market in Africa, and demand for reliable and affordable services. Nala founder Benjamin Fernandes said they intended to build their products on this premise right from the outset. Over the last two years, the Tanzanian fintech, through its consumer fintech […]
Moove, an African mobility fintech that offers vehicle financing to ride-hailing and delivery app drivers, has raised $100 million in a funding round as it plots expansion into new markets. Moove did not say who is leading the round, but sources close to the deal confirmed to TechCrunch that Uber led the Series B round, […]
African financial institutions typically scale their solutions using a mix of local and foreign tech. Appzone is one of the standout local fintech software providers for banks and fintechs, providing better pricing and flexibility. For over a decade, the Nigeria-based Appzone has functioned as an enabler (at payment rails and core infrastructure) within banking and […]
Save for fintech and clean tech, B2B e-commerce and retail was the leading destination for venture capital dollars over the last five years. The premise of digitizing the continent’s mom-and-pop convenience stores and offering various solutions to streamline logistics and procurement processes saw hundreds of millions of dollars flood the segment, particularly during the venture […]
Youverify, a Nigerian provider of identity verification and anti-money laundering (AML) solutions for banks and startups, secured a $2.5 million investment from Elm, which specializes in offering ready-made and customized digital solutions to public and private institutions in Saudi Arabia. The pre-Series A investment from Elm also includes a strategic partnership to help Youverify streamline […]
Nigeria is actively seeking information from Binance regarding its top 100 users in the country and all transaction history spanning the past six months, according to a Financial Times report. This news overlaps with the revelation of the names of the two executives from the cryptocurrency exchange who were detained two weeks ago: Tigran Gambaryan, […]
MDaaS Global, a Nigerian health tech company that operates a network of tech-enabled diagnostic centers across the country, has secured $3 million in pre-Series A funding. The round was led by Aruwa Capital and Newton Partners, the latter of which was the lead investor in the health tech’s $2.3 million seed extension in 2021. MDaaS […]
Saudi Arabia is poised to become one of the largest global construction hubs, owing to its trillion-dollar infrastructure and the real estate projects that are underway in the country. Yet even as the sector in the country continues to expand exponentially, it remains entrenched in traditional practices, leading to project interruptions and increased costs, says […]
Binance will discontinue its naira (NGN) services in response to heightened regulatory scrutiny in Nigeria, it said in a blog post today. The cryptocurrency exchange will begin delisting any existing NGN spot trading pairs by Thursday, March 7. It advised users to withdraw, trade or convert their NGN assets into crypto before the service discontinuation. […]
As remote work becomes increasingly prevalent, organizations globally are adapting, especially regarding onboarding procedures for new employees and navigating cross-border payment complexities. This new age of work has led to a surge in demand for startups that provide human resources (HR), payroll and compliance tools to help businesses hire remotely. RemotePass, one such business out of […]
HR startup Deel said it is acquiring Africa's PaySpace in a deal that marks its largest acquisition to date.
In the wake of Universal Music Group’s (UMG) public spat with TikTok, which saw the label pulling its full catalog from the video app earlier this year, the company is doubling down on its deal with Spotify. On Thursday, UMG announced an expansion of its strategic relationship with the streaming music service that will focus on “music discovery and social interaction” as well as enhanced fan experiences. The addition of music videos is included among these new features in the U.S.
Spotify recently announced its plans to support music videos, saying in March it would test the option in beta in 11 select markets — which, at the time, didn’t include the U.S. Instead, the feature was to be supported in Brazil, Colombia, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya, the Netherlands, Poland, the Philippines, Sweden and the U.K., the company said.
With the UMG deal, U.S. users will also have the option of watching music videos instead of just streaming audio. The companies didn’t state what portion of UMG’s catalog would be offered as videos, nor did it name specific high-profile artists whose videos would be included.
Universal Music Publishing Group, however, includes a number of popular artists like Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande, Bad Bunny, The Weeknd, SZA, Drake, Harry Styles, Kendrick Lamar, Adele and others. That catalog of 4 million songs was also pulled from TikTok after UMG failed to renew its agreement with the video app.
To watch videos, Spotify users can access a new “Switch to Video” option from the app’s Now Playing Screen. Plus, if you rotate your phone to landscape mode, you can watch the video full-screen.
As a part of the new agreement, Spotify will introduce new promotional and social features to help artists generate excitement around their new releases. For instance, UMG artists will be able to share teasers of upcoming songs and users will be able to pre-save music before a new release.
The companies will explore other collaborations on features over time, with further details still to come, UMG said in an announcement.
“UMG has consistently been a progressive partner on behalf of their artists and songwriters, contributing to our product development efforts of experimental tools and adopting them early to help artists stand out,” said Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek, in a statement. “The forthcoming features will put more power in the hands of artists and their teams to help them authentically express themselves, efficiently promote their work, and better monetize their art,” he added.
The timing of the deal, of course, is notable given the drama around TikTok. In addition to facing a possible U.S. ban, the short-form video app and UMG were unable to come to an agreement over TikTok’s use of UMG’s music. As a result, TikTok had to remove some 3 million songs owned or distributed by UMG by January 31, 2024. Later, it also had to remove more songs that contained compositions controlled by UMG — that is, songs written or co-written by a songwriter signed to Universal Music Publishing Group.
By partnering with Spotify, UMG still has a way to promote its music to fans, even if its artists lose the ability to market themselves on TikTok. In previous years, the loss of UMG’s music would have been a larger blow to TikTok, but given the app’s move away from lip-syncing and dancing videos to more vlogs and long-form content, not to mention its controversial e-commerce push, the impact may not be as profound.
News About After spat with TikTok, UMG expands Spotify partnership to include music videos and more
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Social network X, formerly known as Twitter, has introduced Community Notes for videos. Community Notes is an existing program for crowdsourced moderation. The Elon Musk-owned platform announced that notes by contributors attached to a video will show up in all posts with that video.
“Notes written on videos will automatically show on other posts containing matching videos. A highly-scalable way of adding context to edited clips, AI-generated videos, and more,” the company said in a post.
Not just for images anymore — introducing notes on videos!
Notes written on videos will automatically show on other posts containing matching videos. A highly-scalable way of adding context to edited clips, AI-generated videos, and more. Available to all Top Writers 🏅 https://t.co/s92XoA1SZ9pic.twitter.com/I2JF4NQZ9q
Eligible contributors can select the option “About the video in this post, and should appear on all posts including this video” to add notes about a clip.
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Tavus, a four-year-old generative AI startup that helps companies create digital “replicas” of individuals for automated personalized video campaigns, has confirmed a fresh $18 million in funding and revealed that it’s opening its platform for third parties to integrate their software with the company’s technology.
Reports emerged back in August that Tavus had raised “about $18 million,” but details were scant. The company has now confirmed to TechCrunch that it has indeed raised $18 million in a Series A round led by Scale Venture Partners — an early-stage VC that has previously backed the likes of Box, HubSpot, and DocuSign. Other notable investors include Sequoia, which led Tavus’ $6.1 million seed round last year, which participated alongside Y Combinator (YC) and HubSpot.
The generative AI movement is best exemplified by text-based search engines like ChatGPT and text-to-image models such as DALL-E, which OpenAI is in the midst of combining into a single all-singing platform. But if the past few months have been anything to go by, generative AI could be on the cusp of another minor revolution, with video taking center stage.
Tavus, for its part, works with its clients to create replicas of individuals through voice and face cloning. The idea is that sales and marketing teams can use Tavus to send personalized videos to prospects at scale, or maybe a product team can create individualized walkthrough videos for onboarding new customers — all via simple text-based prompts that leverage the previously created digital replica. And by integrating Tavus with third-party systems such as Salesforce or Mailchimp, companies can automate much of this — for instance, a customer who completes an online form requesting further information on a product can be emailed a video instantly, with a sales rep addressing the prospect by name and explaining the next steps.
Tavus has managed to secure some fairly big-name customers in its short life so far, including Salesforce and Facebook’s parent Meta, which co-founder and CEO Hassaan Raza said are using the platform to upsell to their respective B2B customers through personalized demo videos.
Tavus as a platform
So far, Tavus has been served via a SaaS app, through which customers create their own AI video templates. The onboarding process requires an individual, such as the CEO or sales executive, to record a 15-minute video based on a script provided by Tavus.
Tavus’ cloning in action. Image Credits: Tavus
This is then used to train the AI, after which the user goes to a web editor and selects which parts of the video they wish to personalize by defining the variables — such as location, executive name, company, or product. By tying Tavus into their CRM system, companies can tweak each of these variables to suit a particular customer segment, such as those who have expressed an interest in a particular product.
Editing variables. Image Credits: Tavus
Companies can create hundreds of these replicas with different personnel involved, replete with different backgrounds for different target markets.
Through the in-app editor, it’s possible to generate any number of different scripts to attach to each use case — without having to re-record any of the original video.
Tavus’ different avatars. Image Credits: Tavus
While this core SaaS product isn’t going away, Tavus is today lifting the lid on a new turbo-charged version of its technology alongside the first installment of a suite of developer APIs that allow third parties to integrate Tavus into their own applications.
Replicate
The first facet of Tavus’ new developer platform to arrive is its “replica API,” which is all about creating “photo-realistic” digital replicas replete with text-to-video generation. With this, a company can replicate a person (e.g., head of marketing or CEO) using a new proprietary model created by Tavus dubbed “Phoenix,” which is based on a deep learning method called neural radiance field (NeRF). This can generate a 3D construct of a person from 2D images in just a couple of minutes.
“It essentially allows you to create entire videos with just two minutes of training data, which is a big leap forward from how we were previously doing the personalization at scale,” Raza told TechCrunch. “And so now all you have to do is record two minutes of training data, and it’ll create a full replica of you. And once you have replica, you can make as many videos as you want — from one, two, or a thousand scripts.”
Simulation showing how Tavus maps a users face to create a realistic replica. Image Credits: Tavus
Output: Tavus’ Phoenix model constructs a 3D model using 2D video input via NeRF. Image Credits: Tavus
The inaugural replica API leans on the entire functionality of the Phoenix model and captures an individual’s facial motion, including cheeks, nose, eyebrows, and lips.
“Moving your entire face drives realism, naturalness and quality — when you talk, your face expresses emotion beyond your lips moving,” Raza explained. “If you want to generate an entire video from a script — where you are speaking, one that looks natural and is incredibly high quality — you’d want to use the replica API.”
However, Tavus is also developing a number of additional APIs, including one specifically for lip-syncing, one for dubbing, and one for running mass, personalized video campaigns.
The lip-sync API will have a “lower entry cost,” according to Raza, and is better for situations where a “high degree of quality and realism is not necessary.”
The dubbing API, meanwhile, also uses the lip-sync model but includes multilanguage voice cloning, too, meaning a monolinguistic user can send out video campaigns in any number of languages using their own voice. In this instance, given that most of the video will remain the same, the API enables simple replacement of lip movements to align with the different sounds coming from the user’s mouth. This could prove useful for the creators of a video-editing software suite, for example, where they wish to enable their users to add lip-syncing, editing, and dubbing to their videos.
And then the video campaign API basically bundles the replica API alongside a swathe of additional tooling — such as hosting, variable mapping, thumbnails, and analytics — for those looking to launch large-scale video campaigns.
“We’re bringing the ability for any developer to provide an end-to-end video campaign experience out of the box, within their own solutions,” Raza said. “Whereas the replica and lip-sync APIs are more ‘model-as-a-service,’ the campaign API gives you tools to build an AI video campaign platform easily.”
Raza remained coy on who some of the early users of the Tavus platform are, but he did say that it’s “working with one of the largest video platforms” for customer engagement. “They’re looking to bring this to their millions of customers that are already using their platform to create video on a daily basis,” Raza said.
Deepfake dilemma
Instinctively, platforms such as Tavus are ripe for misuse — after all, what’s stopping anyone from uploading a preexisting video to create a digital replica? Deepfakes are indeed a growing concern in the burgeoning AI movement, but Raza says they have checks in place to avert chicanery. For instance, when a user submits their two minutes of training footage, they also have to submit a specific verbal consent statement, which is then aligned to the audio in the training footage to ensure there is a match.
“We run these checks automatically, and then do a human check for every replica that makes it through the automated checks to ensure safety,” Raza said.
It’s easy to see how that might work with Tavus as a stand-alone SaaS app, but now that it’s a platform accessed by any number of companies via an API, who is in control of verification then? Well, as it turns out, Tavus is — the company wants to keep its hands on the verification wheel, even when it’s merely providing the engine for third-party developers.
“We run the same checks, and assume responsibility for verifications with [the] API as well,” Raza continued.
Extending reality
While OpenAI has become almost the public face of generative AI, there is more than enough room for different players bringing something different to the mix. Indeed, while DALL-E and OpenAI’s recently released Sora model are mostly about helping people create visuals from text prompts, Raza says Tavus’ raison d’être is more about “extending” a person’s own reality.
“We see a future where everyone wants to have a digital replica of themselves; they control that and they have full authority over that,” Raza said. “And it’s gonna be important that it actually ends up capturing more and more of your personality, more and more of your gestures and traits. That’s how we see things going forward — there will be the models that create things that don’t exist, and then there’ll be the models that extend your reality.”
With $18 million in the bank, Raza said that the recent cash injection will be used to “fuel the fire that’s already burning” at Tavus towers.
“We’re an AI research company, so we want to be able to continue development on newer models like Phoenix,” Raza said. “But then also just sustain our growth, we’ve had a ton of demand continuously. And we want to be able to continuously hire on our machine learning and engineering teams to support our developer and SaaS customers.”
News About Generative AI video startup Tavus raises $18M to bring face and voice cloning to any app
Tavus, a four-year-old generative AI startup that helps companies create digital “replicas” of individuals for automated personalized video campaigns, has confirmed a fresh $18 million in funding and revealed that it’s opening its platform for third parties to integrate their software with the company’s technology. Reports emerged back in August that Tavus had raised “about […]
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A group of Japanese scientists from Kyushu University has successfully turned mouse skin cells into baby mice without the use of egg cells. The technology skips over the usual method of fertilizing egg cells with sperm and instead uses a method to grow the cells with the necessary chromosomal pairs needed for life to begin. This is the […]
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Now it’s experimenting with more ways to connect consumers to products creators are showcasing in their videos with the new releases. With the timestamps feature, creators will be able to make the shopping button appear at the relevant points in their video — like when they’re showing off a favorite gadget or beauty product, for example. YouTube tested the feature in the U.S. last month and found that people who saw these timestamps clicked on tagged products twice as often. The feature is only available on long-form content, not Shorts, however. And video must be at least a minute long with a maximum of 30 seconds between timestamps, YouTube says.
The company is also adding new tools to tag affiliate products across the creator’s video library in bulk, based on products added to the video’s description. To use this feature, creators will access the Shopping tab in YouTube Studio to see a list of their videos with products mentioned in the description. From there, they can click the videos they want to tag, make adjustments, then click “Save” to complete the process. The feature will allow creators to quickly monetize videos from their back catalog that are still seeing high views with little effort, the company notes.
Image Credits: YouTube
Though not available today, YouTube is also teasing new insights and analytics for affiliate products that will allow creators to see things like sales metrics, orders, offer clicks and impressions from Studio’s “Analytics” tab under “Revenue” then “Affiliate program.”
The changes come as TikTok is ramping up its own e-commerce features in the U.S., which include a dedicated shop tab on the home screen, live video shopping, shoppable ads and affiliate programs for creators.
YouTube TV has announced that its multiview feature for watching four streams at once is now available on Android phones and tablets. The Android launch comes two months after YouTube TV rolled out the feature to iPhones and iPads. The feature, which first launched in March 2023, is aimed at sports viewers who want to […]
TikTok is testing the ability for users to upload 60-minute videos, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. The feature is available to a limited group of users in select markets, and TikTok says it doesn’t have any immediate plans to make the feature available widely. The feature, which was first spotted by social media […]
Humane AI raised more than $230 million before it even shipped a product. And when it finally released its Ai Pin — which costs $699 plus a $24 monthly subscription — pretty much every tech reviewer came to the same disappointing realization: This much-hyped product, which promises to disrupt the smartphone’s dominance, is not very […]
YouTube’s comments section, historically, has had a bad reputation, but a change rolling out could prevent kids from wading into the comments cesspool. In an email to parents who supervise a child’s account, the company announced the introduction of a “read-only” comments option on their child’s supervised experience on YouTube. The feature will roll out […]
Google is shutting down its Podcasts app in the U.S. in a matter of days. The company has begun warning the app’s users they will need to migrate their subscriptions to YouTube Music by April 2 to follow and stream their favorite shows going forward. Users who don’t make the move immediately will still have […]
With TikTok potentially poised for a U.S. ban, YouTube is touting how well its own TikTok competitor, YouTube Shorts, is paying off for creators. The company on Thursday said its short-form video platform now averages over 70 billion daily views and over 25% of channels in YouTube’s Partner Program monetize their videos through revenue-sharing on […]
In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project designed to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers. The goal was to understand users’ behavior and help Facebook compete with Snapchat, according to newly unsealed court documents. Facebook called this “Project Ghostbusters,” in a clear reference to Snapchat’s ghost-like logo. […]
YouTube is now requiring creators to disclose to viewers when realistic content was made with AI, the company announced on Monday. The platform is introducing a new tool in Creator Studio that will require creators to disclose when content that viewers could mistake for a real person, place or event was created with altered or […]
Update: The outages have been resolved as of around 3:00 p.m. ET. A Google spokesperson told TechCrunch that there was a surge in traffic beginning at around 10:25 a.m. ET, which correlated with an unrelated service disruption. Though the spokesperson didn’t specify further details, that timing lines up with a major outage at Meta, where […]
YouTube Create, Google’s standalone mobile app aimed at creators, which helps them produce both Shorts and longer videos, is expanding to a broader set of markets after last fall’s launch into beta testing. The app was initially available on Android in the U.S. and a handful of other select markets, but today will become available […]
YouTube is changing the design for creators’ channels on the big screen, the company announced today. The changes include more accessible action buttons, like “Subscribe,” a more modern design and other tweaks that were first introduced for artists’ pages last fall. At the time, YouTube said that artist pages were part of a larger YouTube […]
Nielsen today released its January report on viewing usage across linear TV and streaming, which revealed that YouTube is once again the overall top streaming service in the U.S., with 8.6% of viewing on television screens. Netflix, meanwhile, saw 7.9% of TV usage. The new data points to YouTube’s dominance in the TV streaming arena […]
YouTube is introducing the ability for users to incorporate or “remix” a music video in their short-form videos, called Shorts, as the company continues to challenge TikTok. Given that YouTube has something that TikTok doesn’t, which is a vast library of official music videos, it makes sense for the platform to leverage it to advance […]
Podcast creators can now submit their RSS feed to YouTube and YouTube Music, the company revealed in a video uploaded to its Creator Insider channel. It was previously announced in August that support was coming for RSS feeds. The functionality was available as an invite-only beta test last year. The move to embrace RSS feeds […]
Apple’s Vision Pro headset is set to release for consumers today, but YouTube is not currently building a dedicated app for the device. To fill that void, Christian Selig, the developer who made Apollo for Reddit client, has made a Vision Pro app for YouTube called Juno. The app costs $5 for a one-time purchase and […]
Google said today that YouTube now has more than 100 million paid users across YouTube Music and YouTube Premium. This number is up from the 80 million paid users the company mentioned in November 2022. Earlier this week, during its Q4 2023 earnings call, Sundar Pichai said that Google’s subscription business — which includes YouTube’s […]
Social media apps can rise quickly and burn out just as fast, but taking a step back and looking at those trends on a longer timeline offers a better glimpse at the big picture. The Pew Research Center’s latest report on Americans’ social media habits is out, rounding up social media usage trends among U.S. […]
Link-in-bio company Linktree announced new features today, including link scheduling, archiving and the ability to automatically fetch your latest video from YouTube and TikTok. Linktree now lets users schedule a link to go live on the page at a certain date and time. They can also choose from multiple time zones to align their drop […]
No wonder YouTube launched Shorts. A new study of children’s online habits found that children ages 4 through 18 spent a global average of 112 minutes daily on TikTok’s short video app in 2023, an increase from 107 minutes the year prior. And although YouTube remains the world’s biggest streaming app among this demographic, kids […]
TikTok is coming for YouTube. The company has been spotted testing the ability for users to upload 30-minute videos, signaling a significant move away from the short-form video format that made it popular. Social media consultant Matt Navarra spotted the new option in the iOS beta version of the app in the U.K. Navarra told […]
YouTube is following in Netflix’s footsteps as it decides not to release a dedicated app for the Apple Vision Pro’s upcoming launch. Like Netflix subscribers, viewers will have to go to the web browser version if they want to watch YouTube videos. “We’re excited to see Vision Pro launch, and we’re supporting it by ensuring […]
Yet another series of layoffs has hit Google, this time at its video-sharing platform, YouTube. The company will eliminate 100 employees, a spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch. Last week, Google laid off more than 1,000 workers across several divisions, including engineering, services and voice-activated product Google Assistant. “As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s […]
YouTube announced today that it’s making it easier to find accurate life-saving information about basic first aid and emergency care with the launch of its new First Aid Information Shelves. The new shelves will be pinned to the top of search results and will feature videos from credible health organizations like Mass General Brigham. The […]
YouTube is updating its harassment and cyberbullying policies to clamp down on content that “realistically simulates” deceased minors or victims of deadly or violent events describing their death. The Google-owned platform says it will begin striking such content starting on January 16. The policy change comes as some true crime content creators have been using […]
The top YouTuber in the U.S., MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson) co-founded the new analytics platform ViewStats, which is now available in beta. Similar to tools like Social Blade, ViewStats uses the YouTube API to unveil detailed stats about channels that both creators and their fans can see. MrBeast didn’t become one of the highest-earning creators of […]
YouTube’s first viral scandal took place in what we believed was a 16-year-old girl’s bedroom. In 2006, homeschooled teenager Bree Avery vlogged about her life under the username Lonelygirl15, chronicling her supposedly boring life. But as the videos got more and more outlandish — her parents turned out to be part of a blood-harvesting cult? […]
Google launched today a new feature for Classroom that allows teachers to turn any YouTube video into an interactive assignment by inserting questions for their students to answer throughout the viewing experience. With the interactive questions feature, teachers can create open-ended or multiple-choice questions, provide feedback on answers and access a dashboard of key insights […]
Apple has quietly acquired a Mountain View-based startup, WaveOne, that was developing AI algorithms for compressing video.
Apple wouldn’t confirm the sale when asked for comment. But WaveOne’s website was shut down around January, and severalformeremployees, including one of WaveOne’s co-founders, now work within Apple’s various machine learning groups.
WaveOne’s former head of sales and business development, Bob Stankosh, announced the sale in a LinkedIn post published a month ago.
“After almost two years at WaveOne, last week we finalized the sale of the company to Apple,” Stankosh wrote. “We started our journey at WaveOne, realizing that machine learning and deep learning video technology could potentially change the world. Apple saw this potential and took the opportunity to add it to their technology portfolio.”
WaveOne was founded in 2016 by Lubomir Bourdev and Oren Rippel, who set out to take the decades-old paradigm of video codecs and make them AI-powered. Prior to joining the venture, Bourdev was a founding member of Meta’s AI research division, and both he and Rippel worked on Meta’s computer vision team responsible for content moderation, visual search and feed ranking on Facebook.
Where it concerns standard algorithms for compressing and decompressing video, the compression happens on the content provider’s side (e.g. YouTube servers), while end-users’ machines handle the decompressing. It’s an effective approach, but new codecs require new hardware specially built to accelerate compression or decompression, making improvements slow to propogate.
Image Credits: WaveOne
WaveOne’s main innovation was a “content-aware” video compression and decompression algorithm that could run on the AI accelerators built into many phones and an increasing number of PCs. Leveraging AI-powered scene and object detection, the startup’s technology could essentially “understand” a video frame, allowing it to, for example, prioritize faces at the expense of other elements within a scene to save bandwidth.
WaveOne also claimed that its video compression tech was robust to sudden disruptions in connectivity. That is to say, it could make a “best guess” based on whatever bits it had available, so when bandwidth was suddenly restricted, the video wouldn’t freeze; it’d just show less detail for the duration.
WaveOne claimed its approach, which was hardware-agnostic, could reduce the size of video files by as much as half, with better gains in more complex scenes.
Investors saw the potential, apparently. Prior to the Apple acquisition, WaveOne attracted $9 million from backers including Khosla Ventures, Vela Partners, Incubate Fund, Omega Venture Partners and Blue Ivy.
So what might Apple want with an AI-powered video codec? Well, the obvious answer is more efficient streaming. Even minor improvements in video compression could save on bandwidth costs, or enable services like Apple TV+ to deliver higher resolutions and framerates depending on the type of content being streamed.
YouTube’s already doing this. Last year, Alphabet’s DeepMind adapted a machine learning algorithm originally developed to play board games to the problem of compressing YouTube videos, leading to a 4% reduction in the amount of data the video-sharing service needs to stream to users.
Perhaps we’ll see similar innovations from the Apple-owned WaveOne team soon.
News About Apple acquired a startup using AI to compress videos
Samsung Medison, a medical device unit of Samsung Electronics that specializes in developing diagnostic imaging devices, said on Wednesday it plans to acquire Sonio, a Paris-based startup that makes AI-powered software for ultrasound workflows, for about $92.7 million (KRW 126 billion). The French startup’s AI assistant is aimed at helping obstetricians and gynecologists with the evaluation and […]
Nvidia is acquiring Run:ai, a Tel Aviv-based company that makes it easier for developers and operations teams to manage and optimize their AI hardware infrastructure. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed publicly, but two sources close to the matter tell TechCrunch that the price tag was $700 million. CTech reported earlier this morning the […]
Webflow, a web design and hosting platform that’s raised over $330 million at a $4 billion valuation, is expanding into a new sector: marketing optimization. Today, Webflow announced that it acquired Intellimize, a startup leveraging AI to personalize websites for unique visitors. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. But a source familiar with the […]
DataStax made a name for itself by commercializing the open source Apache Cassandra NoSQL database, but these days, the company’s focus is squarely on using its database chops to build a “one-stop GenAI stack.” One of the first building blocks for this was to bring vector search capabilities to its hosted Astra DB service last […]
Redis, the popular in-memory data store, is switching away from the open source three-clause BSD license. Instead, in a move that is clearly aimed to prevent the large cloud providers from offering free alternatives to Redis’ own hosted services, Redis will now be dual-licensed under the Redis Source Available License (RSALv2) and Server Side Public […]
Sensor Tower, a leading app analytics firm, is acquiring rival Data.ai in a move that consolidates the mobile intelligence industry, creating a powerhouse that could dominate the sector and provide aggressively competitive insights into the app economy. Sensor Tower and Data.ai help businesses and developers gain insight into how mobile apps are performing — offering […]
Apple has added another AI startup to its acquisition list with Canada-based DarwinAI, which specializes in vision-based tech to observe components during manufacturing to improve efficiency, Bloomberg reported. While Apple and DarwinAI haven’t announced this deal, several members of the startup’s team joined Apple’s machine learning teams in January, as per their LinkedIn profiles. DarwinAI […]
Zscaler, a cloud security company with headquarters in San Jose, California, has acquired cybersecurity startup Avalor 26 months after its founding, reportedly for $310 million in cash and equity. In a press release announcing the news, Zscaler founder and CEO Jay Chaudhry said that the deal would expand Zscaler’s platform with capabilities including streamlined reporting of […]
Cycode is a well-funded startup that offers an end-to-end application security posture management platform — that is, a tool that continuously scans code (and the libraries it relies on) for potential security vulnerabilities throughout the software development life cycle and then helps remediate those issues. Today, the company announced that it has acquired Bearer, a […]
Groq, a startup developing chips to run generative AI models faster than conventional hardware, has an eye toward the enterprise — and public sector. Today, Groq announced that it’s forming a new division — Groq Systems — focused on greatly expanding its customer and developer ecosystem. Within Groq Systems’ purview is serving organizations, including government […]
1Password, the AgileBits-owned password management software developer, today announced that it has acquired Kolide, an endpoint security platform, for an undisclosed amount. According to 1Password CEO Jeff Shiner, Kolide founder and CEO Jason Meller and all of Kolide’s 30 employees will join 1Password “as an intact team.” Meller has taken on the role of VP […]
Sometimes, to move fast you don’t need to break things — you just need to acquire them. So it is with Nuview, a startup aiming to map the world from space using lidar, which announced today its acquisition of analytics platform Astraea. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. In a recent interview, Nuview […]
It’s M&A season in a tough tech jobs market. This morning, Beamer, a Boulder, Colorado-based company developing tools for businesses to reach users through their apps (e.g. via push notifications), announced that it’s acquiring Userflow, a user onboarding software startup, for $60 million. Beamer CEO Satya Ganni says that the purchase, which is being financially […]
Tiger Global and a16z-backed productivity company ClickUp has acquired the calendar app Hypercal to boost its platform offering, TechCrunch has learned. As part of the acquisition, the app’s founder Ricardo Clerigo is also joining ClickUp as Head of Calendar. U.K.-based Hypercal was founded in 2022 as an app for Mac and offered integration with different […]
Amazon has ended its bid to acquire iRobot, the maker of robotic vacuums, after running up against headwinds with European regulators. Amazon and iRobot have opted to mutually terminate their previously announced acquisition agreement, under which Amazon would’ve purchased iRobot for ~$1.7 billion in cash (or slightly lower). In a press release, the companies said […]
Chronosphere, a startup that offers a cloud native observability platform, today announced that it has acquired Calyptia. While the company itself may not be a household name, Calyptia was founded by the creators of the Fluent Ecosystem, which includes the popular open source observability projects like data collector Fluentd and metrics processor and forwarder Fluent […]
Okta, the identity and access management company, is acquiring security firm Spera. Anticipated to close during the fiscal first quarter beginning in early February, the Spera acquisition will build on Okta’s existing identity threat detection and response (ITDR) capabilities, Okta says, while equipping customers with tech to “elevate their identity security, posture management and identify, […]
Airbnb has acquired a secretive new AI startup, GamePlanner.AI, the company announced this morning. CNBC reports that the purchase price was around $200 million, a figure that TechCrunch was unable to confirm at publication time. GamePlanner was co-founded by Adam Cheyer and Siamak Hodjat. Cheyer famously helped co-launch the startup Siri, which Apple acquired and […]
Ford is buying and burying Auto Motive Power, or “AMP” for short, to bolster its charging, battery management and power conversion tech. The secretive energy startup once claimed to power “most of the world’s top electric OEMs,” though as far as we can tell it never disclosed its customers publicly. Following the deal, Los Angeles-based […]
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom are joined by Abhi Ramesh, the founder and CEO at Misfits Market, the e-commerce site where customers can buy ugly or off-looking produce, meat or seafood in an effort to reduce food waste. Ramesh talked about: How he […]
WordPress.com and Tumblr owner Automattic is adding another company to its portfolio with today’s news that it has acquired the all-in-one messaging app Texts.com for $50 million. The app brings all your messaging apps together in a single dashboard, including iMessage, Slack, WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, Messenger, LinkedIn, Signal, Discord and X, with plans for more […]
AMD yesterday acquired Nod.ai, an open source AI software provider, as the chipmaker looks to bolster its efforts to build an ecosystem of AI development tools, libraries and models around its hardware. The acquisition is expected to close this quarter, CNBC reports. AMD didn’t disclose the details of the transaction. In a press release, AMD […]
Following rumors that it was exploring the sale of its weather business as part of a move to streamline operations, IBM says that it’s found a buyer for The Weather Company, the weather forecasting and information company it acquired in 2015. Francisco Partners, the private equity firm, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire The […]
OpenAI, the AI company behind the viral AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT, has acquired Global Illumination, a New York–based startup leveraging AI to build creative tools, infrastructure and digital experiences. It’s OpenAI’s first public acquisition in its roughly seven-year history. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. “We’re very excited for the impact they’ll have here at […]
Roper Technologies, a lesser-known company that creates engineering products for niche markets, this morning announced that it acquired Syntellis Performance Solutions, a provider of enterprise performance management software, for $1.25 billion. The transaction includes a $135 million tax benefit and will result in Syntellis’ performance management and data solutions being combined with Roper’s healthcare finance […]
Observability and security platform Dynatrace today announced that it plans to acquire Rookout, a Tel Aviv-based observability startup that focuses on helping developers troubleshoot and debug their code in production. Publicly traded Dynatrace already offers a comprehensive suite of observability tools, but the addition of Rookout will allow it to expand these services with code-level […]
eBay announced today that it has closed its acquisition of Certilogo, a company that provides AI-powered apparel and fashion goods digital IDs and authentication. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The Milan-based company will continue to be led by CEO Michele Casucci. Certilogo uses digital technology to help brands manage the lifecycle […]
DigitalOcean, the cloud hosting business, today announced that it’s agreed to acquire Paperspace, a New York-based cloud computing and AI development startup, for $111 million in cash. DigitalOcean CEO Yancey Spruill says that Paperspace’s infrastructure and tooling, once integrated with DigitalOcean’s products, will enable customers to more easily test, develop and deploy AI applications. As […]
Infrastructure automation company HashiCorp today announced that it has acquired code security startup BluBracket. Founded by the team behind Vera Security, BluBracket raised a $12 million Series A round led by Evolution Equity partners in 2021. The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition. HashiCorp’s security play so far has focused on […]
Lux, the startup and makers of the popular pro photography app Halideandothers, is venturing into video. The team today announced its plans to debut a new app, Kino, arriving in roughly two months’ time, that will allow iPhone users to work with video in a more professional capacity.
The Lux team additionally confirms that last fall’s launch of Log video support, which Lux co-founder Ben Sandofsky says is to “videomakers as RAW is to photographers,” inspired the team to build the new app for video.
“Since we launched Halide in 2017, one of our top questions from users has been ‘When are you going to add video capture?'” says Sandofsky in an announcement video. The company’s well-received Halide app had originally capitalized on the iPhone’s support for RAW photography to win an Apple Design Award and gain it many fans, who have now been clamoring for video support in Halide.
“I’m really excited to today announce: never. Halide is never going to be able to capture video,” Sandofsky teases.
Instead, the company is developing a new app for this purpose called Kino. The reason to build this as a separate app, beyond being able to monetize the feature as an additional product, has to do with the use cases for the two products. Halide is focused on the pro photography market while Kino will focus on pro videography, so presumably will have a host of additional features that could lead to clutter if included in the Halide app.
Sandofsky says the team has a deadline of February to ship it, as he will soon be a father. So, he explains, “We thought it would be fun this time to take you along this insane journey.”
That means, instead of building in secret followed by a splashy launch, the team at Lux will take users behind the scenes of app building as they weigh things like engineering problems and design considerations that go into developing Kino.
Much more isn’t yet known about what Kino will include or when, exactly, it will arrive, but it’s likely to be another well-built app, considering the startup’s track record for iPhone photography.
News About The makers of pro photography app Halide venture into video with Kino, due this February
Apple finally updated its App Store guidelines to allow global developers to host retro game emulators on iOS. Now, you don’t need to jailbreak your iPhone or download any sketchy software — you can get a sophisticated emulator right in the palm of your hand for free on the App Store. No one is more […]
Apple’s chief financial officer Luca Maestri challenged investor worries over an 8% drop in China revenue by noting that sales in other emerging markets are growing. “When we start looking at places like India, like Saudi, like Mexico, Turkey, Brazil…and Indonesia, the numbers are getting large, and we’re very happy because these are markets where […]
Phone cameras have evolved a lot, with image processing becoming increasingly important and granular controls to help users tweak their images. Despite that, many people are still fond of old-school photography styles and techniques. Developer Alex Fox wanted to focus on that nostalgia while building the Mood.camera app. The iPhone app lets you switch between […]
A crypto wallet maker claimed this week that hackers may be targeting people with an iMessage “zero-day” exploit — but all signs point to an exaggerated threat, if not a downright scam. Trust Wallet’s official X (previously Twitter) account wrote that “we have credible intel regarding a high-risk zero-day exploit targeting iMessage on the Dark […]
Apple’s stance on the right to repair has now become more accommodative, with the company now supporting used parts for iPhone 15 repairs that can include the camera, display and battery. Components that did not require “configuration,” TechCrunch reports, already worked in a similar fashion. While Apple’s move is welcome to many, it does answer […]
On Thursday, Apple announced that it has opened its iPhone repair process to include used components. Starting this fall, customers and independent repair shops will be able to fix the handset using compatible components. Components that don’t require configuration (such as volume buttons) were already capable of being harvested from used devices. Today’s news adds […]
Nothing lasts forever. Nowhere is the truism more apt than in consumer tech. This is a land inhabited by the eternally restless — always on the make for the next big thing. The smartphone has, by all accounts, had a good run. Seventeen years after the iPhone made its public debut, the devices continue to […]
Apple SVP Greg “Joz” Joswiak just confirmed via the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that the company’s annual World Wide Developer Conference is set for June 10-14. In what is no doubt a nod to the company’s artificial intelligence ambitions, the exec is promising that the event will be “Absolutely Incredible.” Mark your […]
The U.S. Department of Justice is suing Apple over allegedly monopolistic smartphone practices. The federal agency is not alone in the matter, bringing 15 states and the District of Columbia into the mix as well. Apple, as you might imagine, disputes the allegations. Potential impacts are myriad, from consumer messaging to smartphones to smart watches. […]
The United States Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple earlier today. The suit touches on several (allegedly) anticompetitive practices. But one category in particular caught our attention as the DOJ spends quite a bit of time talking about “green bubbles” and “blue bubbles.” When an iPhone user sends a message to another […]
The U.S. Department of Justice plus attorneys general from 16 states and the District of Columbia sued Apple for antitrust this morning in federal court. The suit alleges that the company has a monopoly in the premium smartphone market and uses a variety of illegal tactics to perpetuate that monopoly. Leaving aside the details of […]
MacPaw, the developer of popular Mac and iOS apps, has released a new iPhone app called CleanMyPhone, which helps users free up storage by removing duplicate photos and other unwanted images. The app is divided into three main tabs: declutter, organize and network. Declutter detects and scans your photo library on your local device to […]
Apple’s long-term bet on India is beginning to pay dividends. The company’s revenue in India jumped 42% year-on-year in 2023 to $8.7 billion, Morgan Stanley wrote in a note on Friday. The iPhone shipments in India grew 39% year-on-year in 2023 to 9.2 million units, making it iPhone’s fifth largest smartphone market. India’s iPhone business […]
Last week’s Vision Pro release shed some fascinating light on Apple’s generally top secret development process. A Vanity Fair interview with Tim Cook detailed — in part — what a long and heavy lift it took to get the company’s first headset off the ground. The Apple CEO gave an early iteration of the device […]
Government hackers last year exploited three unknown vulnerabilities in Apple’s iPhone operating system to target victims with spyware developed by a European startup, according to Google. On Tuesday, Google’s Threat Analysis Group, the company’s team that investigates nation-backed hacking, published a report analyzing several government campaigns conducted with hacking tools developed by several spyware and […]
In 2019, Apple announced it would start sending some security researchers a “special” version of the iPhone designed to be used to find vulnerabilities, which could then be reported to Apple so the company could fix them. In 2020, the company started shipping the devices, which are designed to have some security features disabled, making […]
Apple’s upcoming iOS 18 software update may be “the biggest” in the company’s history, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. iOS 18 is expected to be announced at Apple’s annual WWDC event in June. “I’m told that the new operating system is seen within the company as one of the biggest iOS updates–if not the biggest–in […]
The Browser Company launched the Arc’s first iPhone companion app last year, allowing users to save links for consumption on the desktop application later. The startup has now released a new mobile app, called Arc Search, that aims to focus on the search experience. The marquee AI-powered feature of the app, “Browse for me,” returns […]
Apple has had support for eSIM since the iPhone Xs/XR, but it has gone all in by ditching the physical SIM card slot for iPhones from version 14 and later sold in the U.S. While models sold in other countries will have support for both physical and virtual SIM, Apple could eventually remove the SIM […]
Apple released a new version of iOS yesterday with a handful of new features, such as collaborative playlists in Apple Music and a new Unity wallpaper for Black History Month. Another interesting new feature in iOS 17.3 is something called “stolen device protection.” It is disabled by default and I encourage iPhone users to turn […]
The iPhone 15 and its many iterations comprised more than half of Apple’s Q4 smartphone shipments of nearly 2.8 million units in India, Canalys said in its quarterly report. The handset has seen remarkable success in India as Apple pushed the latest models during the festive sales, which occur across online and offline channels in […]
Google today issued an open letter voicing support of pending Oregon right to repair legislation. The note, penned by Devices and Services Director of Operations Steven Nickel, calls the proposal “a compelling model for other states to follow.” Google also used the opportunity to issue a white paper aimed at connecting repairability claims with its […]
X user Seanathan Bates documented how he had found an iPhone on the side of the road that came from an Alaska Airlines passenger and had seemingly survived the 16,000-foot drop "perfectly intact."
Clicks Technology is today unveiling the Clicks creator keyboard for the iPhone. It’s less “the future” than an unpleasant glance back to a world we thought we had left behind, in a nostalgia-tinged flashback to the days of BlackBerry and Nokia, where pressing physical buttons was the pinnacle of mobile communication. “We use keyboards on […]
When it launched last April, Self Service Repair marked a shift for Apple. The company’s longtime policy of deferring to in-house “Geniuses” softened, as right-to-repair momentum had been building among users and legislators alike. The program — which includes online instructions, parts and rentable tools — arrived with support for the iPhone 12, 13 and […]
Last year, Apple launched a special new protection for at-risk users — such as journalists and activists — called Lockdown Mode, designed to limit some regular iPhone, iPad, Mac and Watch features with the goal of minimizing the possibility of a successful cyberattack. A year later, Apple said it is not aware of any successful […]
Lux, the startup and makers of the popular pro photography app Halide and others, is venturing into video. The team today announced its plans to debut a new app, Kino, arriving in roughly two months’ time, that will allow iPhone users to work with video in a more professional capacity. The news follows advances in […]
Apple plans to add support for the RCS standard on iOS next year, the iPhone-maker said Thursday in a major reversal that would resolve the widespread issue of compatibility in text messaging between iPhones and Android smartphones, but stopped short of eliminating what is known colloquially as the “green bubble” dread. Apple’s longstanding unwillingness to support […]
Apple CEO Tim Cook pushed back a bit at the notion that the company was behind in AI on yesterday’s Q4 earnings call with investors, as he highlighted technology developments that Apple had made recently that “would not be possible without AI.” Specifically, the exec pointed to new iOS 17 features like Personal Voice and […]
The India-made iPhone is projected to account for 12% to 14% of Apple’s global iPhone shipments in 2023, according to a leading analyst, who further anticipates that the importance of the South Asian market to Apple will notably rise in the coming year. Ming-Chi Kuo of TF International Securities said Wednesday that Apple, contingent on […]
Google’s upgrading its image-generation tech to keep apace with rivals.
At the company’s I/O developer conference in Mountain View on Tuesday, Google announced Imagen 3, the latest in the tech giant’s Imagen generative AI model family.
Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, Google’s AI research division, said that Imagen 3 more accurately understands the text prompts that it translates into images versus its predecessor, Imagen 2, and is more “creative and detailed” in its generations. In addition, the model produces fewer “distracting artifacts” and errors, he said.
“This is [also] our best model yet for rendering text, which has been a challenge for image-generation models,” Hassabis added.
To allay concerns around the potential to create deepfakes, Google says that Imagen 3 will use SynthID, an approach developed by DeepMind to apply invisible, cryptographic watermarks to media.
Sign-ups for Imagen 3 in private preview are available in Google’s ImageFX tool, and Google says the model will “come soon” to devs and corporate customers using Vertex AI, Google’s enterprise generative AI development platform.
Google typically doesn’t reveal much about the source of the data it uses to train its AI models — and this time was no exception. There’s a reason for that. Much of the training data comes from public sites, repositories and datasets around the web. And some of that training data, specifically the copyrighted data scraped without permission from content creators, is a source of IP-related lawsuits.
Google’s web publisher controls allow webmasters to prevent the company from scraping data, including photos and videos, from their websites. But Google doesn’t offer an “opt-out” tool, and — unlike some of its rivals — the company hasn’t committed to compensating rights holders for their (in some cases unknowing) contributions to the training datasets.
The lack of transparency isn’t surprising. But it is disappointing — especially from a company with resources like Google’s.
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News About Google’s image-generating AI gets an upgrade
Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review. This week had two major events from OpenAI and Google. OpenAI’s spring update event saw the reveal of its new model, GPT-4o, which has voice and vision capabilities that can turn ChatGPT into a virtual assistant seemingly aspiring to be “Her.” Hot off OpenAI’s tail, Google’s I/O conference […]
As part of 2024’s Accessibility Awareness Day, Google is showing off some updates to Android that should be useful to folks with mobility or vision impairments. Project Gameface allows gamers to use their faces to move the cursor and perform common click-like actions on desktop, and now it’s coming to Android. The project lets people […]
Back in February, Google paused its AI-powered chatbot Gemini’s ability to generate images of people after users complained of historical inaccuracies. Told to depict “a Roman legion,” for example, Gemini would show an anachronistic group of racially diverse soldiers while rendering “Zulu warriors” as stereotypically Black. Google CEO Sundar Pichai apologized, and Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of […]
Google’s going all in on AI — and it wants you to know it. During the company’s keynote at its I/O developer conference on Tuesday, Google mentioned “AI” more than 120 times. That’s a lot! But not all of Google’s AI announcements were significant per se. Some were incremental. Others were rehashed. So to help […]
The company said it is increasing the on-device capability of its Google Play Protect system to detect fraudulent apps trying to breach sensitive permissions.
As Google revamps itself for the AI era, offering AI overviews within its search results, the company is introducing a new way to filter for just text-based links. With the new “Web” filter that appears at the top of the results page, users will be able to filter for text links the way they can […]
It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during Google I/O 2024 (by its own count). CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap up the presentation, cheekily stating that the company was doing the “hard work” of counting for us. No surprise, of course, that the topic took […]
Apple and Google announced on Monday that iPhone and Android users will start seeing alerts when it’s possible that an unknown Bluetooth device is being used to track them. The two companies have developed an industry standard called “Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers.” Starting Monday, Apple is introducing the capability in iOS 17.5 and Google is […]
India’s mobile payments regulator is likely to extend the deadline for imposing market share caps on the popular UPI (unified payments interface) payments rail by one to two years, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), a special unit of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), plans to […]
Google has found a way to bring a variation of its clever “Circle to Search” gesture to iPhone users. The new interaction, launched in January, allows Android users to search from anywhere on their device by circling, highlighting, scribbling or tapping, making it easier to engage with Google Search from any screen. Of course, a […]
Google DeepMind has taken the wraps off a new version of AlphaFold, their transformative machine learning model that predicts the shape and behavior of proteins. AlphaFold 3 is not only more accurate, but predicts interactions with other biomolecules, making it a far more versatile research tool — and the company is putting a limited version […]
On Wednesday, Google launched its digital wallet in India with local integrations, nearly two years after the app was relaunched as a digital wallet platform in the U.S. As TechCrunch exclusively reported last month, Google Wallet will operate in India alongside the existing Google Pay app, which will remain the company’s payments app in the country. Google had replaced its […]
The new filing, along with Epic's proposal, will help to inform Judge James Donato in a hearing scheduled on May 23 about what actions to take next to put Google’s power in check.
Ahead of the U.S. presidential election, Google is bringing passkey support to its Advanced Protection Program (APP), which is used by people who are at high risk of targeted attacks, such as campaign workers, candidates, journalists, human rights workers, and more. APP traditionally required the use of hardware security keys, but soon users can enroll […]
Google’s trying to make waves with Gemini, its flagship suite of generative AI models, apps and services. So what is Gemini? How can you use it? And how does it stack up to the competition? To make it easier to keep up with the latest Gemini developments, we’ve put together this handy guide, which we’ll […]
Google is testing a new “Speaking practice” feature in Search that helps users improve their conversational English skills. The company told TechCrunch that the feature is available to English learners in Argentina, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Mexico and Venezuela who have joined Search Labs, its program for users to experiment with early-stage Google Search experiences. The […]
The location-sharing app iSharing, which has 35 million users, fixed vulnerabilities that exposed users' personal information and precise location data.
MrBeast made over $263,000 in ad revenue from posting his latest video on X, but the YouTube icon says he thinks this number is “a bit of a facade.”
“Advertisers saw the attention it was getting and bought ads on my video (I think) and thus my revenue per view is prob higher than what you’d experience,” MrBeast said in an tweet X post.
MY FIRST X VIDEO MADE OVER $250,000! 😲
But it’s a bit of a facade. Advertisers saw the attention it was getting and bought ads on my video (I think) and thus my revenue per view is prob higher than what you’d experience pic.twitter.com/nViVpZbWBb
Since taking over Twitter (now X), Elon Musk has tried to lure creators to the platform with new ways to earn money, like earning a share of ad revenue from their posts. And perhaps the best thing Musk could do to get creators to take the platform seriously is to woo internet megastar MrBeast, who has more subscribers than any other individual on YouTube.
Luckily for Musk, MrBeast is a fan of his — but, business comes first. When Musk (sort of?) asked the 25-year-old creator to post his videos on X, he replied, “My videos cost millions to make and even if they got a billion views on X it wouldn’t fund a fraction of it . . . I’m down though to test stuff once monetization is really cranking!”
Apparently, monetization is “really cranking” now, because MrBeast posted a 16-minute video last week, saying he was “curious how much ad revenue a video on X would make.”
After a week, MrBeast shared a screenshot showing that the video got over 156 million impressions, 5 million engagements, and $263,655 in ad revenue.
Throughout MrBeast’s test, though, some users raised concern that the video was being treated by X as though it were an advertisement, which could possibly juice engagement. Maybe that’s what the YouTuber means when he calls his monetization success “a facade.”
this has shown up in my feed maybe 7 times now
it is both missing the post time next to the username (indicative of a normal user post) and the Ad indicator on the top right
so is there a third, secret type of post you get when you’re a YouTuber and Elon wants you to post here? pic.twitter.com/ESNKognTuk
— █̶̳̘͛̄̃͒̄̃͜█̴͇̱̅͒̅█̵̻̣̝͒̈̄̈͝͝█̴̞̜̻̝͍̂̽͜ (@SHL0MS) January 19, 2024
TechCrunch reported in September that X was running unlabeled ads in users’ feeds; then, an ads watchdog filed a complaint with the FTC over the ongoing, unlabeled ads issue. Ryan Broderick hypothesized that videos might be wrongly labeled as ads if a pre-roll ad plays before the video, but this still causes a lot of confusion on the user end. A representative from X did not respond for comment.
The European Union has deepened the investigation of Elon Musk-owned social network, X, that it opened back in December under the bloc’s online governance and content moderation rulebook, the Digital Services Act (DSA). Confirmed breaches of the regime could be expensive for Musk, since enforcers are empowered to issue fines of up to 6% of a company’s […]
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that lidar sensors are a “crutch” for autonomous vehicles. But his company has bought so many from Luminar that Tesla is now the lidar maker’s top customer. Tesla accounted for “more than 10%” of Luminar’s revenue in the first quarter of 2024, or a little more than $2 million, […]
Tesla has gutted its charging team in a new round of layoffs, despite recently winning over major automakers like Ford and General Motors and making its connector the de facto standard in North America. Tesla’s Supercharger network has long been seen as one of its greatest competitive advantages. It’s widely available, has far better uptime […]
TechCrunch recently broke the news that Elon Musk’s xAI is raising $6 billion at a pre-money valuation of $18 billion. The deal hasn’t closed yet, so the numbers could change. But it sounds like Musk is making an ambitious pitch to investors about his 10-month-old startup — a rival to OpenAI, which he also co-founded […]
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration closed a long-standing investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot driver assistance system after reviewing hundreds of crashes involving its misuse, including 13 that were fatal and “many more involving serious injuries.” At the same time, NHTSA is opening a new investigation to evaluate whether the Autopilot recall fix that Tesla implemented […]
xAI, Elon Musk’s 10-month-old competitor to the AI phenom OpenAI, is raising $6 billion on a pre-money valuation of $18 billion, according to one trusted source close to the deal. The deal — which would give investors one quarter of the company — is expected to close in the next few weeks unless the terms […]
Tesla’s been undergoing some major changes, and now we have a sense of why: The company says it is upending its product roadmap because of “pressure” on EV sales. The new and accelerated plan now includes “more affordable models” that the company claims will be launched next year. Or if Tesla CEO Elon Musk is […]
Tesla profits fell 55% to $1.13 billion in the first quarter from the same year-ago period as a protracted EV price-cutting strategy and “several unforeseen challenges” cut into the automaker’s bottom line. Tesla reported revenue of $21.3 billion in the first quarter, a 9% drop from the first quarter of 2023. Analysts polled by Yahoo Finance […]
Tesla investors, still digesting a 43% drop in share price since the beginning of the year, are gearing up for what will likely be unimpressive financial results for the first quarter and a shift in priorities for CEO Elon Musk, who is making more moves to go “balls to the wall for autonomy.” Tesla is expected to […]
Tesla is not having a good start to the week. In its defense, it didn’t have a very good end to last week, either. Today the news is that recent price cuts have irked Tesla investors, who sent its shares off around 4% in early trading today. Those losses have extended Tesla’s total share-price declines […]
Tesla has spent around $200,000 on advertising through February on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, after the CEO caved to shareholder pressure last year and said his company would “try a little advertising.” Since then, Tesla ads have showed up in places like Google search results and on YouTube. But it was also increasingly […]
Tesla has ended discounts on inventory across its electric vehicle lineup — even as sales for EVs have flagged — as part of a larger and vague plan by CEO Elon Musk to “streamline the whole Tesla sales and delivery system.” “It has become complex and inefficient,” Musk wrote in a post on X, the […]
Tesla’s layoffs and executive departures took a bite out of its share price this week. The well-known electric vehicle company shed around 10% of its staff, impacting an estimated 14,000 people or more. Two well-known executives also decided it was time to move on. In response to the news, shares of Tesla lost ground. The […]
Tesla management told employees Monday that the recent layoffs — which gutted some departments by 20% and even hit high performers — were largely due to poor financial performance, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The layoffs were announced to staff just a week before Tesla is scheduled to report its first-quarter earnings. […]
Elon Musk is planning to charge new X users a small fee to enable posting on the social network and to curb the bot problem. In reply to an X account that posted about changes on X’s website, Musk said charging a small fee to new accounts was the “only way” to stop the “onslaught […]
Two high-profile executives have departed Tesla the same day that the electric automaker laid off thousands of workers, TechCrunch has confirmed. Drew Baglino, Tesla’s SVP of Powertrain and Energy, and Rohan Patel, VP of Public Policy and Business Development, have left the company, Patel told TechCrunch. Patel said he decided to leave because of “[b]ig […]
Social network X is rolling out access to xAI’s Grok chatbot to Premium tier subscribers after Elon Musk announced the expansion to more paid users last month. The company said on its support page that only Premium and Premium+ users can interact with the chatbot in select regions. Last year, after Musk’s xAI announced Grok, […]
Just hours after Elon Musk claimed Reuters was “lying” about Tesla’s plans to ditch its $25,000 low-cost EV and instead focus all its efforts on a robotaxi, the Tesla CEO announced on X that he would reveal said robotaxi in an event on August 8. The announcement comes as Tesla EV sales have lagged and […]
X is warning users they may see a reduction in their follower counts as the company attempts to clear the network of some spammers and bots in a large sweep. Via an announcement published by X’s Safety account, the company on Thursday will begin a “significant, proactive initiative” to eliminate accounts that violate X’s rules […]
Welcome to Elon Musk’s Twitter (now X), where the rules are made up and the check marks don’t matter. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO announced his bid to buy Twitter in April 2022, zealously driven to rid the platform of spam bots and protect free speech; now, it’s the one-year anniversary since he made his […]
Following Elon Musk’s xAI’s move to open source its Grok large language model earlier in March, the X owner on Tuesday said that the company formerly known as Twitter will soon offer the Grok chatbot to more paying subscribers. In a post on X, Musk announced Grok will become available to Premium subscribers this week, […]
A federal judge sided against Elon Musk today, dismissing a lawsuit brought by Musk and X that targeted a nonprofit that researches online hate. X sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) last year, accusing the group of spreading misleading claims after it published a series of unflattering reports about hate and extremism on […]
Social network X (formerly Twitter) launched new top-up packs for its developer API program on Tuesday. These paid upgrades will allow developers to fetch roughly 10,000 posts for $100 if they hit their existing tier’s limit midway through the month. Last year, Elon Musk curtailed free API access and released new paid tiers with the […]
Elon Musk’s xAI released its Grok large language model as “open source” over the weekend. The billionaire clearly hopes to set his company at odds with rival OpenAI, which, despite its name, is not particularly open. But does releasing the code for something like Grok actually contribute to the AI development community? Yes and no. […]
Elon Musk’s xAI has open sourced the base code of Grok AI model, but without any training code. The company described it as the 314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Expert model on GitHub. In a blog post, xAI said that the model wasn’t tuned for any particular application such as using it for conversations. The company noted […]
SpaceX requires employees to agree to some unusual terms related to their stock awards, which have a chilling effect on staff, according to sources and internal documents viewed by TechCrunch. That includes a provision that allows SpaceX the right to purchase back vested shares within a six-month period following an employee leaving the company for […]
SpaceX is continuing to make progress on the development of Starship, the largest rocket ever built, with the third test flight Thursday accomplishing considerably more than the previous two tests. The 400-foot-tall Starship rocket lifted off from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in southeastern Texas at 8:25 a.m. local time. Although SpaceX has been developing Starship for […]
The Oversight Board, the external advisory group that Meta created to review its moderation decisions on Facebook and Instagram, issued a decision on Monday concerning a doctored seven-second video of President Biden that made the rounds on social media last year.
The original video showed the president accompanying his granddaughter Natalie Biden to cast her ballot during early voting in the 2022 midterm elections. In the video, President Biden pins an “I Voted” sticker on his granddaughter and kisses her on the cheek.
A short, edited version of the video removes visual evidence of the sticker, setting the clip to a song with sexual lyrics and looping it to depict Biden inappropriately touching the young woman. The seven-second clip was uploaded to Facebook in May 2023 with a caption describing Biden as a “sick pedophile.”
In its decision, issued Monday, the Oversight Board agrees with Meta’s choice to leave the video online but calls the relevant policy “incoherent.” Meta’s Oversight Board announced that it would take on the case last October after a Facebook user reported the video and ultimately escalated the case when the platform declined to remove it.
“As it stands, the policy makes little sense,” Oversight Board co-chair Michael McConnell said. “It bans altered videos that show people saying things they do not say, but does not prohibit posts depicting an individual doing something they did not do. It only applies to video created through AI, but lets other fake content off the hook.”
McConnell also pointed to the policy’s failure to address manipulated audio, calling it “one of the most potent forms of electoral disinformation.” While the board’s decision to keep the video online is technically binding,
The Oversight Board’s decision argues that instead of focusing on how a particular piece of content was created, Meta’s rules should be guided by the harms they are designed to prevent. Any changes should be implemented “urgently” in light of global elections, according to the decision, but technically only the board’s decision whether content stays or goes is binding.
Meta created the Oversight Board in 2020. By then, the company still known as Facebook had endured years of scrutiny over the proliferation of disinformation, extremism and other dangerous content on its platforms. While the board can issue final decisions about the individual content moderation cases it reviews — assuming that Meta continues to agree to implement them — the company has only committed to “consider” deeper recommendations to change Facebook and Instagram’s rules.
Beyond expanding its manipulated media policy, the Oversight Board suggested that Meta add labels to altered videos flagging them as such instead of relying on content takedowns initiated by fact-checkers, a process the group criticizes as “asymmetric depending on language and market.” By labeling more content rather than taking it down, the Oversight Board believes that Meta can maximize freedom of expression, mitigate potential harm and provide more context and information for users.
In a statement to TechCrunch, a Meta spokesperson confirmed that the company is “reviewing the Oversight Board’s guidance” and will issue a public response within 60 days.
As the Oversight Board noted when it accepted the Biden “cheap fake” case, Meta stood by its decision to leave the altered video online because its policy on manipulated media — misleadingly altered photos and videos — only applies when AI is used or when the subject of a video is portrayed saying something they didn’t say.
The manipulated media policy, designed with deepfakes in mind, applies only to “videos that have been edited or synthesized… in ways that are not apparent to an average person, and would likely mislead an average person to believe.”
Meanwhile, the altered video continues to circulate on X, formerly Twitter. Last month, a verified X account with 267,000 followers shared the clip with the caption “The media just pretend this isn’t happening.” The video has more than 611,000 views.
The Biden video isn’t the first time that the Oversight Board has instructed Meta to go back to the drawing board for its rules. When the group weighed in on Facebook’s decision to ban former President Trump, it decried the “vague, standardless” nature of the indefinite punishment while ultimately agreeing with the choice to suspend his account. The Oversight Board has generally urged Meta to provide more detail, consistency and transparency in its platform policies, across cases.
The Oversight Board first lumbered into action in late 2020, missing an opportunity for relevance during that year’s U.S. election and attracting skepticism over its unavoidable ties to the company it was created to audit. Ultimately, Meta gets to decide whether it listens to the Oversight Board or not, even as the entity works as a useful shield against political criticism of its content moderation processes.
Critics of Meta’s policy-making experiment have dismissed the self-designed review board as too little, far too late.
Meta may have a standardized content moderation review system in place now, but misinformation and other dangerous content moves more quickly than that appeals process — and much more quickly than the world could have imagined just two U.S. general election cycles ago.
Researchers and watchdog groups are bracing for an onslaught of misleading claims and AI-generated fakes as the 2024 presidential race ramps up. But even as new technologies enable dangerous falsehoods to scale, social media companies have quietly slashed their investments in trust and safety and turned away from what once appeared to be a concerted effort to stamp out misinformation.
“The volume of misleading content is rising, and the quality of tools to create it is rapidly increasing,” McConnell said.
India’s Election Commission has issued an advisory to all political parties, urging them to refrain from using deepfakes and other forms of misinformation in their social media posts during the country’s ongoing general elections. The move comes after the constitutional body faced criticism for not doing enough to combat such campaigns in the world’s most […]
Whether you love or hate celebrity culture, the Met Gala is an event. Those less jaded among us get to see all of the biggest stars take their boldest fashion risks of the year; unlike an award show, it’s an event that encourages avant-garde extravagance. And if you find the whole thing vapid, then you […]
This year, billions of people will vote in elections around the world. We will see — and have seen — high-stakes races in more than 50 countries, from Russia and Taiwan to India and El Salvador. Demagogic candidates — and looming geopolitical threats — would test even the most robust democracies in any normal year. […]
Hundreds in the artificial intelligence community have signed an open letter calling for strict regulation of AI-generated impersonations, or deepfakes. While this is unlikely to spur real legislation (despite the House’s new task force), it does act as a bellwether for how experts lean on this controversial issue. The letter, signed by more than 500 […]
Tech companies are pledging to fight election-related deepfakes as policymakers amp up pressure. Today at the Munich Security Conference, vendors including Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon, Adobe and IBM signed an accord signaling their intention to adopt a common framework for responding to AI-generated deepfakes intended to mislead voters. Thirteen other companies, including AI startups OpenAI, […]
Spurred by the growing threat of deepfakes, the FTC is seeking to modify an existing rule that bans the impersonation of businesses or government agencies to cover all consumers. The revised rule — depending on the final language, and the public comments that the FTC receives — might also make it unlawful for a GenAI […]
Fake porn of Taylor Swift. Photorealistic — but fictionalized — images of Gaza. The list of disconcerting deepfakes goes on, and — as deepfake-creating tools grow easier and cheaper to use — the waves of fakes are coming faster and fiercer. According to a recent Pew Center poll, about two-thirds of Americans (66%) say they […]
The Oversight Board, the external advisory group that Meta created to review its moderation decisions on Facebook and Instagram, issued a decision on Monday concerning a doctored seven-second video of President Biden that made the rounds on social media last year. The original video showed the president accompanying his granddaughter Natalie Biden to cast her […]
Nonconsensual deepfake porn of Taylor Swift went viral on X this week, with one post garnering more than 45 million views, 24,000 reposts and hundreds of thousands of likes before it was removed. The pop star has one of the world’s most dedicated, extremely online, and incomprehensibly massive fanbases. Now, the Swifties are out for […]
As deepfakes proliferate, their ability to mislead and sow distrust is becoming of major concern to security experts — and the general public. A recent survey from McAfee found that the vast majority of Americans (84%) are worried about how deepfakes will be used in 2024, particularly where it concerns elections and addresses given by […]
Sony is breaking new ground in the ongoing NFTs and content authenticity saga. At CES 2024 in Las Vegas, the conglomerate known for its electronics, gaming, and entertainment products has announced the development of an in-camera digital signature technology, which effectively creates a “birth certificate” for images captured with their devices, thereby verifying the origin […]
As if still-image deepfakes aren’t bad enough, we may soon have to contend with generated videos of anyone who dares to put a photo of themselves online: with Animate Anyone, bad actors can puppeteer people better than ever. The new generative video technique was developed by researchers at Alibaba Group’s Institute for Intelligent Computing. It’s […]
India is drafting rules to detect and limit the spread of deepfake content and other harmful AI media, a senior lawmaker said Thursday, following reports of proliferation of such content on social media platforms in recent weeks. Ashwini Vaishnaw, India’s IT Minister, said the ministry held meetings with all large social media companies, industry body […]
One of the more unexpected products to launch out of the Microsoft Ignite 2023 event is a tool that can create a photorealistic avatar of a person and animate that avatar saying things that the person didn’t necessarily say. Called Azure AI Speech text-to-speech avatar, the new feature, available in public preview as of today, lets […]
YouTube today announced how it will approach handling AI-created content on its platform with a range of new policies surrounding responsible disclosure as well as new tools for requesting the removal of deepfakes, among other things. The company says that, although it already has policies that prohibit manipulated media, AI necessitated the creation of new […]
U.K.-based startup Yepic AI claims to use “deepfakes for good” and promises to “never reenact someone without their consent.” But the company did exactly what it claimed it never would. In an unsolicited email pitch to a TechCrunch reporter, a representative for Yepic AI shared two “deepfaked” videos of the reporter, who had not given […]
Google is testing a powerful new translation service that redubs video in a new language while also synchronizing the speaker’s lips with words they never spoke. It could be very useful for a lot of reasons, but the company was upfront about the possibility of abuse and the steps taken to prevent it. “Universal Translator” […]
Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of South Park and various other media over the years, have raised $20 million to continue work on their professional deepfake studio for creators, Deep Voodoo. The company got its start during the media shutdown of 2020, when the pandemic prevented most travel and on-set productions. Parker and Stone […]
Rephrase.ai, a self-described synthetic media production platform, today announced that it raised $10.6 million in a Series A round led by Red Ventures with participation from Silver Lake and 8VC. CEO Ashray Malhotra says that the plan is to put the new cash toward expanding headcount with a particular focus on Rephrase’s engineering, data science, […]
A red-headed woman stands on the moon, her face obscured. Her naked body looks like it belongs on a poster you’d find on a hormonal teenager’s bedroom wall — that is, until you reach her torso, where three arms spit out of her shoulders. AI-powered systems like Stable Diffusion, which translate text prompts into pictures, […]
A new open source AI image generator capable of producing realistic pictures from any text prompt has seen stunningly swift uptake in its first week. Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion, high fidelity but capable of being run on off-the-shelf consumer hardware, is now in use by art generator services like Artbreeder, Pixelz.ai and more. But the […]
DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s powerful text-to-image AI system, can create photos in the style of cartoonists, 19th century daguerreotypists, stop-motion animators and more. But it has an important, artificial limitation: a filter that prevents it from creating images depicting public figures and content deemed too toxic. Now an open source alternative to DALL-E 2 is on […]
Hello and welcome back to Week in Review, where we recap the biggest stories from the week. If you want this in your inbox every Saturday, sign up here. Greg Kumparak is still on vacation, but not to worry! He’ll be back at the helm next week to bring you our biggest stories. Until then, […]
A lot of people are worried about the prospect of competing with AI for their jobs, but this probably isn’t what they were expecting. The FBI has warned of an uptick in cases where “deepfakes” and stolen personal information are being used to apply for jobs in the U.S. — including faking video interviews. Don’t […]
Google has banned the training of AI systems that can be used to generate deepfakes on its Google Colaboratory platform. The updated terms of use, spotted over the weekend by Unite.ai and BleepingComputer, includes deepfakes-related work in the list of disallowed projects. Colaboratory, or Colab for short, spun out from an internal Google Research project […]
To understand what's happening, but also what's coming if synthetic data does get more broadly adopted, we talked to various CEOs and VCs over the last few months.
Early last year OpenAI showed off a remarkable new AI model called DALL-E (a combination of WALL-E and Dali), capable of drawing nearly anything and in nearly any style. But the results were rarely something you’d want to hang on the wall. Now DALL-E 2 is out, and it does what its predecessor did much, […]
While mainstream social networks like Facebook and Instagram have had their services blocked by state authorities in Russia in recent days, as the Kremlin seeks total control of the narrative around the war in Ukraine, Reface, a Ukraine-based face-swapping app, has voluntarily pulled its app out of Russia. After Putin ordered his troops to invade […]
Meta removed an altered video falsely depicting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky ordering troops to surrender Wednesday. The video is the latest alarming milestone in the parallel information war accompanying Russia’s brutal invasion of neighboring Ukraine, but it was a moment that Ukraine’s government and social media companies appear to have been prepared for. Meta Head […]
Organizations today rely on a growing number of apps to get work done. According to Statista, in 2022, companies were licensing an average of 130 software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps, up from just eight in 2015.
What that means for employees, generally, is more work — more work getting up to speed with the various tools, reading documentation and completing tutorials, and even prepping for certifications, in some cases. A recent poll from Okta, the IT services management company, suggests that “app overload” is a top productivity blocker, with 26% of employees responding to the survey saying that it makes them less efficient at work.
A partial solution, believes Yoav Einav, a Belmont-based entrepreneur, is a tool that lets users create visual documentation — videos, mainly — for software onboarding. Einav is the co-founder and CEO of Guidde, which leverages generative AI to automatically create embeddable video clips that instruct on how to use different web-based software apps.
Image Credits: Guidde
Einav founded Guidde in 2020 alongside Dan Sahar. Both previously led product teams in data, machine learning operations and cybersecurity at companies like Qwilt, an open edge cloud startup, and Iguazio, a data management and orchestration platform.
“Guidde was founded in order to address a glaring gap Sahar and I experienced, which is how to enable users to be productive and drive engagement in business-to-business applications,” Einav told TechCrunch in an email interview. “This was exacerbated as companies shifted to more hybrid and remote work, causing onboarding and training to be severely hampered.”
Guidde works by capturing a user’s in-app activity through a Chrome extension, then transforming the recording using AI, automation and contextual analysis to create a video with an “AI-generated storyline,” as Einav describes it. Guidde-created videos can optionally feature an AI-generated voice in a desired language, background music and tags (which the platform automatically generate) that highlight key parts of a software workflow.
“Video creation today is fragmented, lengthy and challenging — it typically involves multiple tools, multiple people and entails sometimes weeks of work to produce even a single video,” Einav said. “Guidde fuses multiple point-products with the power of AI to establish a single platform that allows anyone in an organization to create, edit, publish and analyze video and documentation for any software in minutes.”
I was a little skeptical of Guidde’s claims, I must say, given generative AI’s tendency to fail at even the most basic use cases. But in my brief testing, the platform delivered on its promises, more or less.
Once the requisite Chrome extension installs, you can begin recording the process or workflow you wish to capture for a documentation video. Ingesting the finished recording, Guidde automatically splits it into labeled chapters — each with a description — based on actions taken during the recording, like button presses and browser tab switches, and generates an intro and outro voiceover.
Were I in the business of crafting a lot of SaaS tutorials, I could see myself using Guidde regularly — at least as a starting point. The AI isn’t perfect, but fortunately, any generated labels and descriptions can be edited before a video’s published.
Guidde also offers a streamlined video editing suite with effects like motion transitions, frame timing adjustment and cropping. If the platform’s synthetic voice options don’t suit a customer’s fancy, they can record their own to pair with the instructions in the video.
“We believe that we’ve found a nascent sweet spot at the intersection between PowerPoint and Loom that combines the simplicity of presentations and the engagement of video, so we appeal to the majority of enterprises where PowerPoint is a daily tool they’ve used for years but async video still isn’t heavily used,” Einav said. “Many teams that use Guidde often replace legacy desktop tools such as Camtasia, which they use for technical video production.”
Now, Guidde might not be able to convince every prospective corporate customer that its video creation platform, which is priced at $35 per user per month for medium-to-large-sized teams, is a worthwhile investment. According to a 2019 Kultura survey, 67% of employees admit to not giving in-house training videos their full attention, instead skimming the videos or listening to them while doing something else.
On the other hand, perhaps that’s Guidde’s selling point. If staffers aren’t watching videos that closely, why should employers spend a lot of time, energy and money producing them?
“We’ve held hundreds of conversations with employees across organizations large and small over the past two years,” Einav said. “Time and time again we heard the same issues: Many people hate recording their own voice and aren’t skilled at it … subject-matter experts often aren’t the ones creating content … [and] content lacks consistency and finish since each person uses a different look and feel, environment, voice and so on … We dove into the issues they faced today [and tried to solve them].”
Image Credits: Guidde
Guidde appears to have gained a following, with a customer base that stands around 500 brands — including Payoneer, Redis and LiveNation — with “tens of thousands” of users combined. Revenue grew by more than 500% between last year and this year, meanwhile, Einav claims.
VCs see potential. Guidde today announced that it raised $11.6 million in a Series A funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners with participation from Entree Capital, Honeystone Ventures, Crescendo Ventures and Tiferes Ventures, bringing the company’s total raised to $15.6 million.
Guidde plans to use the new capital to expand its engineering and data science departments while growing its go-to-market team, Einav says. The startup has 17 employees at present, and aims to nearly double that number by the end off 2024.
News About Guidde’s AI automatically generates software documentation videos
Engineers Adam Keating and Jeremy Andrews were tired of using spreadsheets and screenshots to collab with teammates — so they launched a startup, CoLab, to build a better way. The two met as undergraduates at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where they studied mechanical engineering together. While they were completing their last internships prior to graduating […]
Call centers are embracing automation. There’s debate as to whether that’s a good thing, but it’s happening — and quite possibly accelerating. According to research firm TechSci Research, the global market for contact center AI could grow to nearly $3 billion in 2028, from $2.4 billion in 2022. Meanwhile, a recent survey found that around […]
Close to a decade ago, brothers Aviv and Matteo Shapira co-founded a company, Replay, that created a video format for 360-degree replays — the sorts of replays that have become part and parcel of major sports broadcasts. Replay caught the attention of Intel, which acquired the company in 2016 for a reported $175 million, and […]
U.K.-based small launch developer Orbex got another boost from the Scottish National Investment Bank and other investors as it gears up for its first orbital launch, though that mission still does not have a set date. Founded in 2015, Orbex is one of a handful of firms racing to develop the next generation of European […]
Tim Goltser and Curtis Mason have been building things together since high school, when the two were the co-captains of their school’s robotics team. In college, Goltser and Mason teamed up to create an app — Hang, for scheduling hangouts with friends — with Sean Doherty, who Mason had met while an undergrad at Boston […]
The long-term goal with Rivos is to build chips primarily for servers that can handle intensive data analytics and AI workloads, including generative AI workloads.
A new report from Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) found that global investment in AI fell for the second year in a row in 2023.
Companies that offer role referral bonuses do so with the assumption that their employees know their work culture — and a role’s requirements — best. But what if companies were to open up those referral bonuses to people outside the organization? That’s the idea behind Draftboard, co-founded by Zach Roseman, the former CEO of mobile […]
NoSQL database Aerospike today announced that it has raised a $109 million Series E round led by Sumeru Equity Partners. Existing investor Alsop Louie Partners also participated in this round. In 2009, the company started as a key-value store with a focus on the adtech industry; Aerospike has since diversified its offerings quite a bit. […]
Home From College, a career platform for young professionals and college students looking for their first job or internship, announced Wednesday that it raised $5.4 million in a seed round led by GV (formerly Google Ventures). The new capital will go toward building out the platform’s main offering, “Gig,” a marketplace for companies to list […]
Available in "soft launch," Read's new capability connects to Gmail, Outlook and Slack as well as videoconferencing platforms to learn topics that might be relevant to you.
A few years ago, Darren Shimkus, ex-president of Udemy, had a conversation with Dennis Yang about skills building. Shimkus was of the belief that building skills in the corporate sector was a difficult, but not intractable, challenge — one that could perhaps be solved with the right technology. He brought it up to Yang, who […]
Using Quadratic, users can bring in hundreds of thousands of rows of data, write analyses in their preferred programming language and share the results with outside stakeholders.
The funding climate for AI chip startups, once as sunny as a mid-July day, is beginning to cloud over as Nvidia asserts its dominance. According to a recent report, U.S. chip firms raised just $881 million from January 2023 to September 2023 — down from $1.79 billion in the first three quarters of 2022. AI […]
If the 2023 crypto venture landscape was an ice-cold pot of water, the first quarter of 2024 is the part where the bubbles start to form right before water boils, Tom Schmidt, a partner at Dragonfly Capital, said to TechCrunch. And he’s not wrong: $2.52 billion in total capital has been raised across the crypto […]
Metaview integrates with apps, phone systems, videoconferencing platforms and tools like Calendly and GoodTime to automatically capture the content of interviews.
As the crypto space heats back up, so has funding for new startups. 0G Labs, a web3 infrastructure firm,” has raised $35 million in a pre-seed round, the team exclusively told TechCrunch. If $35 million sounds like a lot for a pre-seed round, it really is. “In order to build the basic technology, we wanted […]
Noisy recordings of interviews and speeches are the bane of audio engineers’ existence. But one German startup hopes to fix that with a unique technical approach that uses generative AI to enhance the clarity of voices in video. Today, AI-coustics emerged from stealth with €1.9 million in funding. According to co-founder and CEO Fabian Seipel, […]
Rails, a decentralized crypto exchange, has raised $6.2 million in attempts to fill the void FTX left behind after crashing in 2022, the startup’s co-founder and CEO Satraj Bambra exclusively told TechCrunch. It is currently in the early stages of launching an offshore service in select crypto-friendly countries, which does not include the U.S. The […]
The job of so-called “solutions professionals” — people like sales engineers, solutions architects and consultants — revolves around pitching complex enterprise tech to potential customers. It’s important work. But despite this being the case, rarely are solutions teams adequately staffed and resourced, according to entrepreneur Dan Chen. “Solutions teams bring technical credibility to the selling […]
ShopMy, a marketing platform for content creators to connect with brands and monetize their content, announced that it raised $18.5 million. The company will use the money to help scale its network of 40,000 creators, including Alix Earle, the latest “It Girl” on the internet with more than 10 million followers on TikTok and Instagram. […]
Uber Eats is launching a TikTok-like short-form video feed to boost discovery and help restaurants showcase their dishes. Uber Eats’ senior director of Product, Awaneesh Verma, told TechCrunch exclusively in an interview that the new feed is being tested in New York, San Francisco and Toronto. The company plans to launch the feed worldwide in the future.
With this launch, Uber Eats now joins numerous other popular apps that have launched their own short-form video feeds following TikTok’s rise in popularity, including Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and Netflix to name a few. TechCrunch also recently learned that LinkedIn has started experimenting with its own TikTok-like feed.
The new Uber Eats short-form videos are visible in carousels placed across the app, including the homescreen. Once you click on a video preview, you will enter into a vertical feed of short-form content that you can swipe through. You will only see content from restaurants that are close enough to deliver to you.
Verma says the feed is designed to replicate the experience of being in a restaurant in person and seeing people preparing food and being inspired to try something new. As you swipe through the feed, you may come across a video of an ice cream shop preparing a Nutella milkshake, or a video of an Indian restaurant packing rice separately from curry so it doesn’t get soggy by the time it gets delivered to your house.
“The early data shows people are much more confident trying new dishes and trying things that they otherwise wouldn’t have,” Verma said. “Even little things like being able to see texture, and the details of what a portion size looks like, or what’s in a dish, has been really inspiring for our users.”
Image Credits: Uber Eats
Uber Eats notes that the videos aren’t ads, as the company isn’t charging merchants for the content placements.
Many restaurants run social media accounts on apps like Instagram and TikTok to reach new customers and showcase their food using short-form videos. By allowing merchants to share short-form videos directly in the Uber Eats app, the company is helping restaurants reach customers directly as they decide what to order. As for consumers, many people already use social media to discover new places and dishes to try, so Uber Eats likely hopes that its new feed will encourage users to try to find inspiration directly within its own app.
Some users might not see the launch as a welcome addition to the app, as they may feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of different short-form video feeds in popular apps. While it may make sense to have short-form video feeds in entertainment and social media apps, the introduction of one in a food-delivery app may not be a favorable choice for some.
Verma also shared that in order to further support merchants, the company has revamped its Uber Eats Manager software and added personalized growth recommendations. The software is now capable of encouraging restaurants to grow their business by doing things like running a promotion on a certain dish or adding photos to menu listings.
In addition, the company is going to launch an entirely new app for restaurant managers this summer that is designed to make it easier for restaurants to be more proactive on the go. For instance, the app could alert a restaurant manager that their store is having issues or that they may want to boost sales with new ads.
Uber Eats announced on Monday that it now has more than 1 million merchants around the world on its platform, across 11,000 cities in six continents.
News About Uber Eats launches a TikTok-like video feed to boost discovery
TikTok is testing the ability for users to upload 60-minute videos, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. The feature is available to a limited group of users in select markets, and TikTok says it doesn’t have any immediate plans to make the feature available widely. The feature, which was first spotted by social media […]
TikTok is suing the United States government in an effort to block a law that would ban TikTok if its parent company, ByteDance, fails to sell it within a year. The lawsuit, which was filed on Tuesday, argues that the bill violates the U.S. Constitution. TikTok argues that the law violates the U.S. Constitution’s commitment […]
Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje’s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Musk’s 10-month-old baby, xAI, is closing in on a whoppin’ $6 billion funding round. The social network X, née Twitter — also part of Elon’s tech […]
Users on TikTok can once again create music clips using tracks from Universal Music Group’s catalog, which features some of the biggest names in music today: Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, and Ariana Grande. That’s because, after months of fighting, the social media platform and Universal Music Group (UMG) have finally called a truce with a […]
Twitch is officially rolling out its new TikTok-like discovery feed to all users this week, the company announced on Tuesday. The new feed, which is launching as a tab within the Twitch iOS and Android apps, allows viewers to scroll through bite-sized bits of content to discover new streamers. The official launch follows Twitch’s earlier […]
President Joe Biden signed a bill on Wednesday that could ban TikTok — for real this time. After so many false starts and stops, some creator economy founders and their clients are rolling their eyes. They’ve been through this before. “I think two years ago, this would have been devastating,” Karat Financial co-founder and co-CEO […]
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Ticktock, TikTok: It’s been a wild week for TikTok. Even as the company starts testing its Twitter competitor in certain markets and launches its luxury secondhand shop […]
As part of its Q1 2024 earning release, Snap revealed that total watch time on its TikTok competitor, Spotlight, increased more than 125% year-over-year. Snapchat launched the TikTok-like feed in late 2020 as a way to compete with the rising popularity of TikTok. The company is touting the success of its short-from video feed a […]
As a TikTok ban gets closer to becoming a reality in the United States, it might be time to start thinking about other platforms to adopt early in case you need to fill the void left by the popular app, especially as recent reports have suggested that ByteDance would prefer to shut down TikTok rather […]
Social media platform TikTok says that a bill banning the app in the U.S. is “unconstitutional” and that it will fight this latest attempt to restrict its use in court. The bill in question, which President Joe Biden signed Wednesday, gives Chinese parent company ByteDance nine months to divest TikTok or face a ban on […]
President Joe Biden signed the bill this week that could ban TikTok from the U.S. if its parent company ByteDance doesn’t sell the platform. According to young political content creators, the ban could decimate Gen Z’s access to political news and information. “An unfortunately large amount of 18- to 24-year-olds find out information about local […]
On April 24, U.S. President Joe Biden signed a bill that would ban TikTok if its owner ByteDance doesn’t sell the app. The bill requires ByteDance to secure a deal within nine months, with a 90-day extension available to close it. After this deadline, the U.S. will bar app stores from listing the app. TikTok […]
TikTok faces an uncertain fate in the U.S. once again. A bill including a deadline for TikTok parent company Bytedance to divest within nine months or face a ban on app stores to distribute the app in the U.S., was signed by President Joe Biden on Wednesday as part of broader legislation including military aid […]
President Biden has signed a bill that would ban TikTok if its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, fails to sell it within a year. The bill, which includes aid for Ukraine and Israel, was passed by the U.S. Senate in a 79-18 vote late Tuesday after the House passed it with overwhelming majority over the weekend. […]
TikTok Shop, TikTok’s social commerce marketplace, is launching a secondhand luxury category in the U.K., putting it in closer competition with The RealReal, Vestiaire Collective, Depop, Poshmark, and Mercari, among others. The offering has already existed in TikTok Shop U.S. for over six months. The new category allows customers in the U.K. to purchase pre-owned […]
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill this afternoon that would require TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the popular social media app or see it banned in the United States. Efforts to ban TikTok go back to the Trump administration, but the issue has been revived in recent months. The House already passed a […]
TikTok is rolling out its Instagram competitor, TikTok Notes, in select markets. The app is available on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store in Canada and Australia, the company said. The company said on X that it is in the “early stage” of the app’s rollout and that the app is “a dedicated […]
TikTok said today that it has partnered with ticketing company AXS to sell tickets for events worldwide. The ByteDance-owned app is introducing this feature in the U.S., U.K., Sweden and Australia at launch. Users in these regions can tap on the events highlighted in videos or on artists’ profiles to buy tickets through AXS. TikTok […]
After 10 weeks of being absent from the platform, Taylor Swift’s music has returned to TikTok — or at least her more recent songs and “Taylor’s Version” cuts, since she owns those masters. Taylor Swift’s music, and music from all artists signed to Universal Music Group, was pulled from TikTok when the two parties were […]
The internet’s mega-platforms are slowly merging into a great blob of sameness, and even the hottest companies in the world are not immune from the trend. TikTok’s winning strategy to focus on short-form, vertical video has found fans amongst other internet platforms, and now TikTok is taking a page from its rival, books, reportedly borrowing […]
TikTok’s upcoming Instagram competitor app for sharing photos could be named TikTok Notes, according to screenshots posted by users. TikTok also confirmed the app was in development. Over the last few days, TikTok users have been getting pop-up notifications about a new TikTok Notes app to share photos. The notification says that the company is […]
Uber Eats is launching a TikTok-like short-form video feed to boost discovery and help restaurants showcase their dishes. Uber Eats’ senior director of Product, Awaneesh Verma, told TechCrunch exclusively in an interview that the new feed is being tested in New York, San Francisco and Toronto. The company plans to launch the feed worldwide in […]
In addition, it says that over 7 million U.S. businesses rely on TikTok and that 224,000 jobs were supported by small business activity on the platform in 2023.
As TikTok continues to face increased pressure in the U.S. and the U.K., the company is signaling its commitment to fostering educational content on its app. The company announced on Tuesday that it’s expanding its dedicated STEM feed across Europe, starting in the U.K. and Ireland, after first launching it in the U.S. last year. […]
In March, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that could force ByteDance to divest TikTok or face a ban in U.S. app stores. Much of the related discussion and debate has centered around American data security and speech rights, but a potential move also highlights something else: TikTok is growing its focus […]
Google’s gunning for OpenAI’s Sora with Veo, an AI model that can create 1080p video clips around a minute long given a text prompt.
Unveiled on Tuesday at Google’s I/O 2024 developer conference, Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including shots of landscapes and time lapses, and make edits and adjustments to already generated footage.
“We’re exploring features like storyboarding and generating longer scenes to see what Veo can do,” Demis Hassabis, head of Google’s AI R&D lab DeepMind, told reporters during a virtual roundtable. “We’ve made incredible progress on video.”
Veo builds on Google’s preliminary commercial work in video generation, previewed in April, which tapped the company’s Imagen 2 family of image-generating models to create looping video clips.
But unlike the Imagen 2-based tool, which could only create low-resolution, few-seconds-long videos, Veo appears to be competitive with today’s leading video generation models — not only Sora, but models from startups like Pika, Runway and Irreverent Labs.
In a briefing, Douglas Eck, who leads research efforts at DeepMind in generative media, showed me some cherry-picked examples of what Veo can do. One in particular — an aerial view of a bustling beach — demonstrated Veo’s strengths over rival video models, he said.
“The detail of all the swimmers on the beach has proven to be hard for both image and video generation models — having that many moving characters,” he said. “If you look closely, the surf looks pretty good. And the sense of the prompt word ‘bustling,’ I would argue, is captured with all the people — the lively beachfront filled with sunbathers.”
Veo was trained on lots of footage. That’s generally how it works with generative AI models: Fed example after example of some form of data, the models pick up on patterns in the data that enable them to generate new data — videos, in Veo’s case.
Where did the footage to train Veo come from? Eck wouldn’t say precisely, but he did admit that some might’ve been sourced from Google’s own YouTube.
“Google models may be trained on some YouTube content, but always in accordance with our agreement with YouTube creators,” he said.
The “agreement” part may technically be true. But it’s also true that, considering YouTube’s network effects, creators don’t have much choice but to play by Google’s rules if they hope to reach the widest possible audience.
Reporting by The New York Times in April revealed that Google broadened its terms of service last year in part to allow the company to tap more data to train its AI models. Under the old ToS, it wasn’t clear whether Google could use YouTube data to build products beyond the video platform. Not so under the new terms, which loosen the reins considerably.
Google’s far from the only tech giant leveraging vast amounts of user data to train in-house models. (See: Meta.) But what’s sure to disappoint some creators is Eck’s insistence that Google’s setting the “gold standard,” here, ethics-wise.
“The solution to this [training data] challenge will be found with getting all of the stakeholders together to figure out what are the next steps,” he said. “Until we make those steps with the stakeholders — we’re talking about the film industry, the music industry, artists themselves — we won’t move fast.”
Yet Google’s already made Veo available to select creators, including Donald Glover (AKA Childish Gambino) and his creative agency Gilga. (Like OpenAI with Sora, Google’s positioning Veo as a tool for creatives.)
Eck noted that Google provides tools to allow webmasters to prevent the company’s bots from scraping training data from their websites. But the settings don’t apply to YouTube. And Google, unlike some of its rivals, doesn’t offer a mechanism to let creators remove their work from its training data sets post-scraping.
I asked Eck about regurgitation, as well, which in the generative AI context refers to when a model generates a mirror copy of a training example. Tools like Midjourney have been found to spit out exact stills from movies including “Dune,” “Avengers” and “Star Wars” provided a time stamp — laying a potential legal minefield for users. OpenAI has reportedly gone so far as to block trademarks and creators’ names in prompts for Sora to try to deflect copyright challenges.
So what steps did Google take to mitigate the risk of regurgitation with Veo? Eck didn’t have an answer, short of saying the research team implemented filters for violent and explicit content (so no porn) and is using DeepMind’s SynthID tech to mark videos from Veo as AI-generated.
“We’re going to make a point of — for something as big as the Veo model — to gradually release it to a small set of stakeholders that we can work with very closely to understand the implications of the model, and only then fan out to a larger group,” he said.
Eck did have more to share on the model’s technical details.
Eck described Veo as “quite controllable” in the sense that the model understands camera movements and VFX reasonably well from prompts (think descriptors like “pan,” “zoom” and “explosion”). And, like Sora, Veo has somewhat of a grasp on physics — things like fluid dynamics and gravity — which contribute to the realism of the videos it generates.
Veo also supports masked editing for changes to specific areas of a video and can generate videos from a still image, a la generative models like Stability AI’s Stable Video. Perhaps most intriguing, given a sequence of prompts that together tell a story, Veo can generate longer videos — videos beyond a minute in length.
That’s not to suggest Veo’s perfect. Reflecting the limitations of today’s generative AI, objects in Veo’s videos disappear and reappear without much explanation or consistency. And Veo gets its physics wrong often — for example, cars will inexplicably, impossibly reverse on a dime.
That’s why Veo will remain behind a waitlist on Google Labs, the company’s portal for experimental tech, for the foreseeable future, inside a new front end for generative AI video creation and editing called VideoFX. As it improves, Google aims to bring some of the model’s capabilities to YouTube Shorts and other products.
“This is very much a work in progress, very much experimental … there’s much more left undone than done here,” Eck said. “But I think this is sort of the raw materials for doing something really great in the filmmaking space.”
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News About Google Veo, a serious swing at AI-generated video, debuts at Google I/O 2024
This latest release, one of many announcements from the Google I/O 2024 developer conference, focuses on improved battery life and other performance improvements, like more efficient workout tracking.
The company said it is increasing the on-device capability of its Google Play Protect system to detect fraudulent apps trying to breach sensitive permissions.
Gemini, the company's family of generative AI models, will enhance the smart TV operating system so it can generate descriptions for movies and TV shows.
It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during Google I/O 2024 (by its own count). CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap up the presentation, cheekily stating that the company was doing the “hard work” of counting for us. No surprise, of course, that the topic took […]
Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including shots of landscapes and timelapses, and make edits and adjustments to already-generated footage.
Veo can generate few-seconds-long 1080p video clips given a text prompt.
Elon Musk has announced that X, formerly Twitter, will be bringing video to Spaces, the social network’s live audio conversation feature. Musk said X plans to launch the feature by the end of the year, but “certainly by early next year.”
“From a feature standpoint, we are working on adding video to Spaces,” Musk said. “It’ll just be a simple thing where you can turn the video on or off.”
Musk went on to note that if there is more than one speaker on a Spaces session, the video feed will switch to whichever person is currently speaking, similar to the way Google Meet or other video conferencing platforms display the current speaker.
“It’s helpful to see people’s body language as they speak… It conveys more information if you can see their face and their body language if they wish to,” Musk said.
By bringing video to Spaces, X likely hopes that it will be a way for users to further engage with their audience on the social network without having to go to a third-party platform.
It’s worth noting that X launched a new feature over the summer that allows users to broadcast live video on the social network. The feature is pretty similar to the live video streaming offerings from other platforms, like Facebook Live and Instagram Live.
When Spaces was introduced back in 2021, the feature was seen as a direct competitor of Clubhouse, which gained popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since Musk’s takeover of the social network, he hasn’t made any major changes to Spaces, other than renaming the feature from Twitter Spaces to X Spaces. Now, Musk and X are ready to move Spaces beyond audio-only conversations.
Musk made the announcement during a Spaces session hosted yesterday by Mario Nawfal. The Spaces also included Andrew Tate, Vivek Ramaswamy, Alex Jones and other controversial figures. Musk appeared on the Spaces session after X reinstated Alex Jones’ account on the platform following a user poll. Jones is infamous for peddling conspiracies about the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, which claimed 28 lives.
The Twitter for Android client was "a demo app that Google had created and gave to us," says Particle co-founder and ex-Twitter employee Sara Beykpour.
Substack is launching the ability for writers to paywall their entire Chat or specific threads to paid or founding members only, the company announced on Wednesday. The rollout of the new feature comes 18 months after Substack launched Chat as a way for writers to communicate directly with their loyal readers. The company believes paywalled […]
Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter in the fall of 2022, the market for Twitter alternatives has been saturated with would-be competitors ranging from smaller startups to open source apps to well-funded efforts like Threads from Instagram. But there’s one overlooked Twitter/X alternative that’s been growing right under our collective noses: LinkedIn. As of March, LinkedIn’s […]
Biz Stone, a Twitter co-founder, is among those who have joined the board of directors of Mastodon’s new U.S. nonprofit, Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko announced over the weekend. Mastodon’s service, an open source, decentralized social network and rival to Elon Musk’s X, has gained increased attention following the Twitter acquisition as users sought alternatives to […]
Threads, the Twitter/X rival from Meta, is growing at a stable pace. The social network now has more than 150 million monthly active users — up from 130 million in February — Mark Zuckerberg mentioned during the company’s Q1 2024 earnings call. Since the last quarterly earnings call, Threads has notably taken steps toward integrating […]
X, the company formerly known as Twitter, is launching a dedicated TV app for videos uploaded to the social network soon. X CEO Linda Yaccarino announced on Tuesday that the new app will bring “real-time, engaging content to your smart TVs.” The app’s interface looks quite similar to YouTube’s, as seen in a teaser video […]
Over the weekend, another social media platform exploded into the fray: AirChat. The app is like a combination of Twitter and Clubhouse. Instead of typing a post, you speak it. The app quickly transcribes what you say, and as your followers scroll through their feed, they’ll hear your voice alongside the transcription. Built by AngelList […]
Tesla has spent around $200,000 on advertising through February on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, after the CEO caved to shareholder pressure last year and said his company would “try a little advertising.” Since then, Tesla ads have showed up in places like Google search results and on YouTube. But it was also increasingly […]
Substack is adding new capabilities to its Twitter-like Notes feature that bring it more in-line with the social network now known as X. The company announced on Tuesday that users can now post videos directly to Notes in the Substack app and on the web. Users can now also embed Notes on external webpages. The […]
Elon Musk is planning to charge new X users a small fee to enable posting on the social network and to curb the bot problem. In reply to an X account that posted about changes on X’s website, Musk said charging a small fee to new accounts was the “only way” to stop the “onslaught […]
Last year, Elon Musk’s social network X (formerly known as Twitter) rolled out a feature for paid users to hide their blue checkmarks from others after the checks became primarily a paid feature. Now, the company is making another U-turn: It’s sending notifications to users warning that the feature will go away soon. As with […]
X, formerly Twitter, is rolling out support for passkeys, a new and more secure login method compared with traditional passwords, to all iOS users globally. The option debuted in January, but only for iOS users in the U.S. In an update to the X @Safety account on Monday, the company shared that passkeys are now […]
For just a brief moment, this was the internet at its best. I stared at a vase of dried out Trader Joe’s flowers, rumbling on my table for maybe 30 seconds, but I was too shocked to even process what was happening. Then I saw the tweets (which, in this moment of shock, I refuse […]
X is warning users they may see a reduction in their follower counts as the company attempts to clear the network of some spammers and bots in a large sweep. Via an announcement published by X’s Safety account, the company on Thursday will begin a “significant, proactive initiative” to eliminate accounts that violate X’s rules […]
X is giving free blue checks to users who have more than 2,500 “verified” followers, which are people who subscribe to X Premium. Popular posters will get a blue check, but not everyone is happy about it: People are now frantically posting to make it clear that they didn’t buy a blue check, but rather […]
Welcome to Elon Musk’s Twitter (now X), where the rules are made up and the check marks don’t matter. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO announced his bid to buy Twitter in April 2022, zealously driven to rid the platform of spam bots and protect free speech; now, it’s the one-year anniversary since he made his […]
Two weeks ago, TechCrunch broke the news that LinkedIn was getting into games, helping users “deepen relationships” through puzzle-based interactions. And on Wednesday, TechCrunch reported that the Microsoft-owned social network was experimenting with short-form videos. It’s as if LinkedIn is targeting a whole new “type” of user — one caught in limbo somewhere between two […]
Following Elon Musk’s xAI’s move to open source its Grok large language model earlier in March, the X owner on Tuesday said that the company formerly known as Twitter will soon offer the Grok chatbot to more paying subscribers. In a post on X, Musk announced Grok will become available to Premium subscribers this week, […]
Threads, the Twitter-like app from Instagram, is adding live scores for sports games. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Friday that Threads has started testing live scores for NBA games, and that the platform plans to add support for additional leagues in the future. The launch of the feature comes as Threads continues to take […]
Social network X (formerly Twitter) launched new top-up packs for its developer API program on Tuesday. These paid upgrades will allow developers to fetch roughly 10,000 posts for $100 if they hit their existing tier’s limit midway through the month. Last year, Elon Musk curtailed free API access and released new paid tiers with the […]
Threads, the Twitter-like app from Instagram, is rolling out its “trending now” feature widely to all users in the U.S. The official rollout comes a month after the app started testing the feature with a select number of users in the country. Trending topics are available on the search page and in the app’s For […]
Don Lemon announced on Wednesday that X owner Elon Musk has canceled the deal for his upcoming talkshow on the platform. Lemon, a former CNN anchor, says Musk terminated the partnership hours after he interviewed the multibillionaire for the first episode of the show. “Elon Musk has canceled the partnership I had with X, which […]
Decentralized Twitter/X rival Bluesky announced on Tuesday that it’s open sourcing Ozone, a tool that lets individuals and teams collaboratively review and label content on the network. The company plans to open up the ability for individuals and teams to run their own independent moderation services later this week, which means users will be able to […]
Decentralized Twitter/X rival Bluesky is adding to its ranks by scooping up a member of its developer community. London-based software engineer Samuel Newman, who built the well-received third-party Bluesky client Graysky, is joining the startup, where he will now help develop Bluesky’s official app along with the rest of the front-end team. Given his change […]
YouTube is running a new test to auto-generate video summaries with the use of AI. As noted on the support page, the summaries have begun appearing on the watch and search pages, but are only available for a limited number of English-language videos and viewers.
The video platform explains that the AI auto-generated summaries provide a quick overview of a video, letting the user decide if it’s the right one for them. However, YouTube also notes, “While we hope these summaries are helpful and give you a quick overview of what a video is about, they do not replace video descriptions (which are written by creators!).”
No screenshots of the experiment were shared, so we’re not sure how viewers will differentiate a user-created video summary from one that was written by AI.
AI-powered YouTube video summarizer tools already exist, including Clipnote.ai, Skipit.ai and Scrivvy, among others. However, some YouTube creators say these tools fail to summarize longer videos.
“On my longer videos, it was complete nonsense,” wrote one Reddit user about Clipnote.ai. “It mostly just copied the first lines of what I had in my description. It basically served zero purpose. I was just curious to see if it could write a better description than I did, but it sadly performed horribly.”
Overall, it’s too early to tell how the AI summaries will affect YouTube creators and if it’ll actually help write their video summaries. But we’re curious to see how well the newest experiment performs and if it gets a wider rollout.
YouTube TV has announced that its multiview feature for watching four streams at once is now available on Android phones and tablets. The Android launch comes two months after YouTube TV rolled out the feature to iPhones and iPads. The feature, which first launched in March 2023, is aimed at sports viewers who want to […]
TikTok is testing the ability for users to upload 60-minute videos, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. The feature is available to a limited group of users in select markets, and TikTok says it doesn’t have any immediate plans to make the feature available widely. The feature, which was first spotted by social media […]
Humane AI raised more than $230 million before it even shipped a product. And when it finally released its Ai Pin — which costs $699 plus a $24 monthly subscription — pretty much every tech reviewer came to the same disappointing realization: This much-hyped product, which promises to disrupt the smartphone’s dominance, is not very […]
YouTube’s comments section, historically, has had a bad reputation, but a change rolling out could prevent kids from wading into the comments cesspool. In an email to parents who supervise a child’s account, the company announced the introduction of a “read-only” comments option on their child’s supervised experience on YouTube. The feature will roll out […]
Google is shutting down its Podcasts app in the U.S. in a matter of days. The company has begun warning the app’s users they will need to migrate their subscriptions to YouTube Music by April 2 to follow and stream their favorite shows going forward. Users who don’t make the move immediately will still have […]
With TikTok potentially poised for a U.S. ban, YouTube is touting how well its own TikTok competitor, YouTube Shorts, is paying off for creators. The company on Thursday said its short-form video platform now averages over 70 billion daily views and over 25% of channels in YouTube’s Partner Program monetize their videos through revenue-sharing on […]
In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project designed to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers. The goal was to understand users’ behavior and help Facebook compete with Snapchat, according to newly unsealed court documents. Facebook called this “Project Ghostbusters,” in a clear reference to Snapchat’s ghost-like logo. […]
YouTube is now requiring creators to disclose to viewers when realistic content was made with AI, the company announced on Monday. The platform is introducing a new tool in Creator Studio that will require creators to disclose when content that viewers could mistake for a real person, place or event was created with altered or […]
Update: The outages have been resolved as of around 3:00 p.m. ET. A Google spokesperson told TechCrunch that there was a surge in traffic beginning at around 10:25 a.m. ET, which correlated with an unrelated service disruption. Though the spokesperson didn’t specify further details, that timing lines up with a major outage at Meta, where […]
YouTube Create, Google’s standalone mobile app aimed at creators, which helps them produce both Shorts and longer videos, is expanding to a broader set of markets after last fall’s launch into beta testing. The app was initially available on Android in the U.S. and a handful of other select markets, but today will become available […]
YouTube is changing the design for creators’ channels on the big screen, the company announced today. The changes include more accessible action buttons, like “Subscribe,” a more modern design and other tweaks that were first introduced for artists’ pages last fall. At the time, YouTube said that artist pages were part of a larger YouTube […]
Nielsen today released its January report on viewing usage across linear TV and streaming, which revealed that YouTube is once again the overall top streaming service in the U.S., with 8.6% of viewing on television screens. Netflix, meanwhile, saw 7.9% of TV usage. The new data points to YouTube’s dominance in the TV streaming arena […]
YouTube is introducing the ability for users to incorporate or “remix” a music video in their short-form videos, called Shorts, as the company continues to challenge TikTok. Given that YouTube has something that TikTok doesn’t, which is a vast library of official music videos, it makes sense for the platform to leverage it to advance […]
Podcast creators can now submit their RSS feed to YouTube and YouTube Music, the company revealed in a video uploaded to its Creator Insider channel. It was previously announced in August that support was coming for RSS feeds. The functionality was available as an invite-only beta test last year. The move to embrace RSS feeds […]
Apple’s Vision Pro headset is set to release for consumers today, but YouTube is not currently building a dedicated app for the device. To fill that void, Christian Selig, the developer who made Apollo for Reddit client, has made a Vision Pro app for YouTube called Juno. The app costs $5 for a one-time purchase and […]
Google said today that YouTube now has more than 100 million paid users across YouTube Music and YouTube Premium. This number is up from the 80 million paid users the company mentioned in November 2022. Earlier this week, during its Q4 2023 earnings call, Sundar Pichai said that Google’s subscription business — which includes YouTube’s […]
Social media apps can rise quickly and burn out just as fast, but taking a step back and looking at those trends on a longer timeline offers a better glimpse at the big picture. The Pew Research Center’s latest report on Americans’ social media habits is out, rounding up social media usage trends among U.S. […]
Link-in-bio company Linktree announced new features today, including link scheduling, archiving and the ability to automatically fetch your latest video from YouTube and TikTok. Linktree now lets users schedule a link to go live on the page at a certain date and time. They can also choose from multiple time zones to align their drop […]
No wonder YouTube launched Shorts. A new study of children’s online habits found that children ages 4 through 18 spent a global average of 112 minutes daily on TikTok’s short video app in 2023, an increase from 107 minutes the year prior. And although YouTube remains the world’s biggest streaming app among this demographic, kids […]
TikTok is coming for YouTube. The company has been spotted testing the ability for users to upload 30-minute videos, signaling a significant move away from the short-form video format that made it popular. Social media consultant Matt Navarra spotted the new option in the iOS beta version of the app in the U.K. Navarra told […]
YouTube is following in Netflix’s footsteps as it decides not to release a dedicated app for the Apple Vision Pro’s upcoming launch. Like Netflix subscribers, viewers will have to go to the web browser version if they want to watch YouTube videos. “We’re excited to see Vision Pro launch, and we’re supporting it by ensuring […]
Yet another series of layoffs has hit Google, this time at its video-sharing platform, YouTube. The company will eliminate 100 employees, a spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch. Last week, Google laid off more than 1,000 workers across several divisions, including engineering, services and voice-activated product Google Assistant. “As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s […]
YouTube announced today that it’s making it easier to find accurate life-saving information about basic first aid and emergency care with the launch of its new First Aid Information Shelves. The new shelves will be pinned to the top of search results and will feature videos from credible health organizations like Mass General Brigham. The […]
YouTube is updating its harassment and cyberbullying policies to clamp down on content that “realistically simulates” deceased minors or victims of deadly or violent events describing their death. The Google-owned platform says it will begin striking such content starting on January 16. The policy change comes as some true crime content creators have been using […]
The top YouTuber in the U.S., MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson) co-founded the new analytics platform ViewStats, which is now available in beta. Similar to tools like Social Blade, ViewStats uses the YouTube API to unveil detailed stats about channels that both creators and their fans can see. MrBeast didn’t become one of the highest-earning creators of […]
YouTube’s first viral scandal took place in what we believed was a 16-year-old girl’s bedroom. In 2006, homeschooled teenager Bree Avery vlogged about her life under the username Lonelygirl15, chronicling her supposedly boring life. But as the videos got more and more outlandish — her parents turned out to be part of a blood-harvesting cult? […]
Google launched today a new feature for Classroom that allows teachers to turn any YouTube video into an interactive assignment by inserting questions for their students to answer throughout the viewing experience. With the interactive questions feature, teachers can create open-ended or multiple-choice questions, provide feedback on answers and access a dashboard of key insights […]
OpenAI, following in the footsteps of startups like Runway and tech giants like Google and Meta, is getting into video generation.
OpenAI today unveiled Sora, a generative AI model that creates video from text. Given a brief — or detailed — description or a still image, Sora can generate 1080p movie-like scenes with multiple characters, different types of motion and background details, OpenAI claims.
Sora can also “extend” existing video clips — doing its best to fill in the missing details.
“Sora has a deep understanding of language, enabling it to accurately interpret prompts and generate compelling characters that express vibrant emotions,” OpenAI writes in a blog post. “The model understands not only what the user has asked for in the prompt, but also how those things exist in the physical world.”
Now, there’s a lot of bombast in OpenAI’s demo page for Sora — the above statement being an example. But the cherry-picked samples from the model do look rather impressive, at least compared to the other text-to-video technologies we’ve seen.
For starters, Sora can generate videos in a range of styles (e.g., photorealistic, animated, black and white) up to a minute long — far longer than most text-to-video models. And these videos maintain reasonable coherence in the sense that they don’t always succumb to what I like to call “AI weirdness,” like objects moving in physically impossible directions.
Check out this tour of an art gallery, all generated by Sora (ignore the graininess — compression from my video-GIF conversion tool):
Image Credits: OpenAI
Or this animation of a flower blooming:
Image Credits: OpenAI
I will say that some of Sora’s videos with a humanoid subject — a robot standing against a cityscape, for example, or a person walking down a snowy path — have a video game-y quality to them, perhaps because there’s not a lot going on in the background. AI weirdness manages to creep into many clips besides, like cars driving in one direction, then suddenly reversing or arms melting into a duvet cover.
Image Credits: OpenAI
OpenAI — for all its superlatives — acknowledges the model isn’t perfect. It writes:
“[Sora] may struggle with accurately simulating the physics of a complex scene, and may not understand specific instances of cause and effect. For example, a person might take a bite out of a cookie, but afterward, the cookie may not have a bite mark. The model may also confuse spatial details of a prompt, for example, mixing up left and right, and may struggle with precise descriptions of events that take place over time, like following a specific camera trajectory.”
OpenAI’s very much positioning Sora as a research preview, revealing little about what data was used to train the model (short of ~10,000 hours of “high-quality” video) and refraining from making Sora generally available. Its rationale is the potential for abuse; OpenAI correctly points out that bad actors could misuse a model like Sora in myriad ways.
OpenAI says it’s working with experts to probe the model for exploits and building tools to detect whether a video was generated by Sora. The company also says that, should it choose to build the model into a public-facing product, it’ll ensure that provenance metadata is included in the generated outputs.
“We’ll be engaging policymakers, educators and artists around the world to understand their concerns and to identify positive use cases for this new technology,” OpenAI writes. “Despite extensive research and testing, we cannot predict all of the beneficial ways people will use our technology, nor all the ways people will abuse it. That’s why we believe that learning from real-world use is a critical component of creating and releasing increasingly safe AI systems over time.”
News About OpenAI’s newest model Sora can generate videos — and they look decent
OpenAI’s Superalignment team, responsible for developing ways to govern and steer “superintelligent” AI systems, was promised 20% of the company’s compute resources, according to a person from that team. But requests for a fraction of that compute were often denied, blocking the team from doing their work. That issue, among others, pushed several team members […]
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. By the way, TechCrunch plans to launch an AI newsletter […]
OpenAI has reached a deal with Reddit to use the social news site’s data for training AI models. In a blog post on OpenAI’s press relations site, the company said that the Reddit partnership will provide it access to “real-time, structured and unique content” — e.g. posts and replies — from Reddit, allowing its tools […]
Engineers Adam Keating and Jeremy Andrews were tired of using spreadsheets and screenshots to collab with teammates — so they launched a startup, CoLab, to build a better way. The two met as undergraduates at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where they studied mechanical engineering together. While they were completing their last internships prior to graduating […]
Google’s going all in on AI — and it wants you to know it. During the company’s keynote at its I/O developer conference on Tuesday, Google mentioned “AI” more than 120 times. That’s a lot! But not all of Google’s AI announcements were significant per se. Some were incremental. Others were rehashed. So to help […]
Mike Krieger, one of the co-founders of Instagram and, more recently, the co-founder of personalized news app Artifact (which TechCrunch corporate parent Yahoo recently acquired), is joining Anthropic as the company’s first chief product officer. As CPO, Krieger will oversee Anthropic’s product engineering, management and design efforts, Anthropic says, as the company works to expand […]
AI startup Anthropic is changing its policies to allow minors to use its generative AI systems — in certain circumstances, at least. Announced in a post on the company’s official blog Friday, Anthropic will begin letting teens and preteens use third-party apps (but not its own apps, necessarily) powered by its AI models so long […]
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. By the way, TechCrunch plans to launch an AI newsletter […]
The appetite for alternative clouds has never been bigger. Case in point: CoreWeave, the GPU infrastructure provider that began life as a cryptocurrency mining operation, this week raised $1.1 billion in new funding from investors including Coatue, Fidelity and Altimeter Capital. Reportedly valuing the startup at $19 billion post-money, the new financing brings CoreWeave’s total […]
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. By the way — TechCrunch plans to launch an […]
Despite spending more than $100 billion on R&D over the last five years, Apple isn't planning to spin up too many new data centers to run or train AI models.
Microsoft has reaffirmed its ban on U.S. police departments from using generative AI for facial recognition through Azure OpenAI Service, the company’s fully managed, enterprise-focused wrapper around OpenAI tech. Language added Wednesday to the terms of service for Azure OpenAI Service more clearly prohibits integrations with Azure OpenAI Service from being used “by or for” […]
During its Team ’24 conference in Las Vegas, Atlassian today launched Rovo, its new AI assistant. Rovo can take data from first- and third-party tools and make it easily accessible through a new AI-powered search tool and other integrations into Atlassian’s products. The most interesting part, though, may be the new Rovo Agents, which can […]
Sam's Club customers who pay either at a register or through the Scan & Go mobile app can now walk out of the store without having their purchases double-checked.
TechCrunch recently broke the news that Elon Musk’s xAI is raising $6 billion at a pre-money valuation of $18 billion. The deal hasn’t closed yet, so the numbers could change. But it sounds like Musk is making an ambitious pitch to investors about his 10-month-old startup — a rival to OpenAI, which he also co-founded […]
What’s the next big thing in enterprise automation? If you ask the tech giants, it’s agents — driven by generative AI. There’s no universally accepted definition of agent, but these days the term is used to describe generative AI-powered tools that can perform complex tasks through human-like interactions across software and web platforms. For example, […]
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How many of you modeled your Xbox 360 avatar after yourself? Plenty of you, I'm sure. Not me, no. (Gotta be different.) My avatar, picture here, is named—yes, he has a name—Detective Bashyourbrainsin. He's my idea of a rogue 1970s New York City police officer.
