Ms. Rachel isn’t a household name, but if you spend a lot of time with toddlers, she might as well be a rockstar.
Ms. Rachel – a music teacher named Rachel Accurso – decided to use her platform for good.
And for a full-time content creator and graduate student in early childhood education, that’s not much time to record 500 personalized videos.
However, Cameo was aware of Ms. Rachel’s highly popular fundraiser, since Cameo posted about it on X.
Given that Ms Rachel intended to fulfill her Cameo requests, it’s unclear why Cameo didn’t grant her additional time to do so in the first place, rather than refunding buyers.
Newsletter platform Substack is introducing the ability for writers to send videos to their subscribers via Chat, its direct messaging feature, the company announced on Wednesday.
The rollout of video in Chat comes two months after the newsletter platform brought videos to Notes, its X/Twitter copycat that lets users share short-form content.
To share a video in Substack Chat, writers can open a new chat and click on the plus icon in the bottom left corner.
Substack also provides the option to add a caption, put the video behind a paywall, as well as email subscribers about the video.
Additionally, writers who allow subscribers to start their own chat threads will now also be able to share their own videos.
India’s election overshadowed by the rise of online misinformation Greater internet penetration and the rise of "cheapfakes" since the last general election in 2019 pose new challengesAs India kicks off the world’s biggest election, which starts on April 19 and runs through June 1, the electoral landscape is overshadowed by misinformation.
Misinformation is not just a problem for election fairness — it can have deadly effects, including violence on the ground and increase hatred for minorities.
“Ever since social media has been thriving, there is a new trend where you use misinformation to target communities,” he said.
The country’s vast diversity in language and culture also make it particularly hard for fact-checkers to review and filter out misleading content.
Moreover, just before the Indian election, Meta reportedly cut funding to news organizations for fact-checking on WhatsApp.
Don’t blame MKBHD for the fate of Humane AI and Fisker Famed YouTuber Marques Brownlee makes a splash not for what he said — but for howHumane AI raised more than $230 million before it even shipped a product.
“It was really hard to come up with a title for this video,” Brownlee says in the video itself, which currently has over 5 million views.
The actual review was fair and balanced.”An underdog worth $800 millionCritics of MKBHD’s video are operating as though Humane AI is an underdog in the space.
In the month preceding the MKBHD review, federal safety regulators began investigating the Fisker Ocean for complaints about the brakes not working well.
The Humane AI pin was widely panned across the tech review board, but the only person receiving outsized and long-lasting criticism for his review is MKBHD, a Black man.
Truth Social, the social media platform owned by Donald Trump’s media company, has announced plans to launch a live TV streaming platform.
The streaming service will launch in three phases.
The company first plans to introduce Truth Social’s CDN (content delivery network) for streaming to the Truth Social app for Android, iOS and the web.
Next, Truth Social plans to release over-the-top (“OTT”) streaming apps for phones, tablets and other devices.
Truth Social went public last month after shareholders approved a merger of TMTG and Digital World Acquisition, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).
Spotify isn’t the only one to dabble with AI playlists — on Tuesday, Amazon announced it would do the same.
Amazon Music is now testing Maestro, an AI playlist generator, allowing U.S. customers on both iOS and Android to create playlists using spoken or written prompts, which can even contain emojis.
Amazon suggests that in addition to emojis, customers can write prompts that include activities, sounds, or emotions.
While Spotify’s AI generator is starting its tests in the U.K. and Australia, Amazon’s product is launching to a “subset” of free Amazon Music users, as well as Prime customers and Unlimited Amazon Music subscribers on iOS and Android in the U.S. for the time being.
To access Maestro, users will need the latest version of the Amazon Music mobile app and will tap on the option for Maestro on their home screen.
Now that humanoids are all the rage in the robotics industry, Boston Dynamics on Tuesday officially retired theirs.
Boston Dynamics has been focused on commercializing technologies for a number of years now.
Boston Dynamics was, of course, well ahead of the current humanoid robotics curve.
Another wrinkle in today’s news is that, as of February, Boston Dynamics was still showcasing Atlas’ capabilities.
Meantime, in lieu of a gold watch, Boston Dynamics is offering up a video featuring some of Atlas’ greatest hits and most spectacular falls.
Amazon is trying to keep live shopping relevant with the launch of an “Amazon Live” FAST (free ad-supported TV) channel on Prime Video and Freevee.
Previously only available as a feature on desktop, mobile, and Fire TV, the new live channel will give customers in the U.S. more ways to engage with interactive, shoppable content.
Viewers can browse and buy the items influencers show off by using the Amazon Shopping app on their mobile device.
Amazon Live launched in 2019 as a QVC-like shopping experience to help brands get their products discovered and for talent to interact with fans.
According to the company, more than 1 billion customers in the U.S. and India streamed Amazon Live’s shoppable videos in 2023 alone.
A new social media app called Indaband lets musicians and vocalists collaborate with others and make music with people all over the world.
You can record and mix unlimited video tracks in different sessions using the app’s multi-track video studio and share them with your community.
The app is the brainchild of CEO Daniel Murta, CTO Andrews Medina, Head of Engineering Helielson Santos and Design Leader Emerson Farias.
They all used to get together to play music during happy hours after work, and once the pandemic hit, they came up with the idea for Indaband so they could still play music together while in quarantine.
Circles will allow users to build their own communities on the app and possibly even hold live events.
Offered as an answer of sorts to OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Imagen 2 and models from the growing number of startups in the nascent generative AI video space, Adobe’s model — a part of the company’s expanding Firefly family of generative AI products — will make its way into Premiere Pro, Adobe’s flagship video editing suite, sometime later this year, Adobe says.
Like many generative AI video tools today, Adobe’s model creates footage from scratch (either a prompt or reference images) — and it powers three new features in Premiere Pro: object addition, object removal and generative extend.
The lack of release time frame on the video model doesn’t instill a lot of confidence that it’ll avoid the same fate.
And that, I’d say, captures the overall tone of Adobe’s generative video presser.
Adobe’s clearly trying to signal with these announcements that it’s thinking about generative video, if only in the preliminary sense.
