Six months on from its launch, Subsets has already claimed some decent customers including the New York Times’-owned Athletic and Danish newspaper Børsen.
The media businessWhile Subsets could be applied to any subscription business, it’s currently focused on the digital media vertical.
Subsets allows non-technical teams to run retention “experiments” on subsets (hence the company name) of their subscriber base, to see what actions might lead a customer to staying on-board.
These experiments might be a series of push notifications or email offering a subscription discount, or perhaps a free upgrade to unlock new features.
Aside from lead backers Upfin and YC, Subsets’ pre-seed round included investments from a slew of institutional and angel investors including Cuesta Labs; Sandhill Markets; and Peakon founder Phillip Chambers.
The Supreme Court could decide the future of content moderation — or it could puntThe Supreme Court is considering the fate of two state laws that limit how social media companies can moderate the content on their platforms.
The two laws were both crafted by Republican lawmakers to punish social media companies for their perceived anti-conservative bias.
“Supreme Court cases can fizzle in this way, much to the frustration in most cases to other parties,” Barrett said.
“It’s clear that the Supreme Court needs to update its First Amendment jurisprudence to take into account this vast technological change,” Barrett said.
“… The Supreme Court often lags behind society in dealing with these kinds of things, and now it’s time to deal with it.”
BLKFAM considers its platform the first and only Black-owned and Black-focused family streaming service.
The company’s goal is to serve Black audiences who often feel misrepresented/underrepresented in mainstream media even though it’s the demographic that watches the most TV.
According to Nielsen, Black audiences consume over 81 hours of media on a weekly basis.
BLKFAM aims to release content that “entertains, educates, and celebrates Black American family-friendly content,” the company wrote in its press release.
BLKFAM is now available on Amazon Prime Video Channels, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Roku, YouTube TV, Samsung Smart TVs, Vizio, LG, and iOS and Android devices.
When it was first unveiled in the summer of 2021, Xiaomi’s CyberDog designed was best described as a more nightmarish version of Boston Dynamics’ Spot.
Announced this past summer, CyberDog 2 looks a bit more friendly than its predecessor.
The robot dog is still no Sony Aibo.
Watching it do its little dance really did remind me of a scaled down version of Boston Dynamics’ familiar robot.
The above video also suggests that the robot dog might one day replace the real thing, owing to its ability to speak back.
Networking app BeScene launches today to bring filmmakers and other creatives (actors/actresses, animators, cinematographers, costume designers, directors, editors, producers, production assistants, script coordinators, writers and so forth) a Tinder-like experience to help build connections within the entertainment industry.
“The simplicity and familiarity allow each user to find what they need quickly and in a way that is meaningful: through real human connections,” Armistead says.
Former Tinder executives attempted a similar strategy in 2018 with a networking app called Ripple, which uses the familiar swipe mechanism to match professionals with each other.
HUSSLUP, another like-minded networking app for the film biz, also has a swipe feature, however, it’s more aligned with LinkedIn since it provides job search and posting capabilities.
While BeScene hasn’t raised any external funding yet, the company gathered $250,000 from friends and family in 2022.
In a 758-word letter, content of which was reviewed by TechCrunch, Raveendran claimed that the shareholders violated several “essential” local rules.
Raveendran claimed in the letter that the extraordinary general meeting lacked the minimum quorum and failed to win majority support for proposed resolutions.
Raveendran claimed the EGM was convened without adhering to the procedures set out by law and only 35 of Byju’s 170 total shareholders attended, representing around 45% ownership in the company.
The rights issue resets the startup’s valuation, once at $22 billion, to about $25 million.
“Our rights issue has seen an overwhelming response.
Reddit’s long-awaited IPO is nearing, promising to be the largest social media IPO since Pinterest.
Meanwhile, Mastodon, and the wider network of apps connected to the “Fediverse” as the decentralized social web is called, has a combined 17.2 million users.
Just as some Twitter users broke away to join decentralized alternatives, once they became viable alternatives, Reddit users could also do the same.
If Meta fears the power of decentralized social networks enough to join the movement, surely Reddit is not immune?
Seeing their demands ignored and overridden could eventually drive them to find new homes on decentralized social media, where they would maintain control over their communities and user data.
This week, the Financial Times reported the EC will issue its first-ever fine against the tech giant for allegedly breaking EU law over competition in the streaming music market.
It reads:We’re happy to support the success of all developers — including Spotify, which is the largest music streaming app in the world.
In the case of the EU complaint, the concern is that Apple’s App Store distorts completion in the music streaming market.
“There are other rivals to Apple Music — there are Deezer, there are Soundcloud.
A rep for the EC declined to comment on news related to Spotify’s complaint or any pending fines.
Stability has announced Stable Diffusion 3, the latest and most powerful version of the company’s image-generating AI model.
Sora, OpenAI’s impressive video generator, apparently works on similar principles (Will Peebles, co-author of the paper, went on to co-lead the Sora project).
(Anthropic, for its part, has not focused on image or video generation publicly, so it isn’t really part of this conversation.)
Stable Diffusion seems to want to be the white label generative AI that you can’t do without, rather than the boutique generative AI you aren’t sure you need.
Interestingly, the company has put safety front and center in its announcement, stating:We have taken and continue to take reasonable steps to prevent the misuse of Stable Diffusion 3 by bad actors.
Adults on TikTok lean camera-shy, a new study from Pew Research Center suggests.
From the TikTok research, the top 25% most active posters were responsible for 98% of all public videos.
The study also found that age wasn’t necessarily a factor in assessing adults’ TikTok posting habits.
Another finding showed that 85% of TikTok users say they find the content on their For You page to be at least somewhat interesting.
This research arrives as a third of U.S. adults say that they use TikTok; among the 18- to 34-year-old demographic, that percentage jumps to 56%.
