Google on Thursday said it is rolling out NotebookLM, its AI-powered note-taking assistant, to over 200 new countries, nearly six months after opening its access in the U.S.
The list of countries that NotebookLM now supports includes Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, and the U.K., as well as 208 other countries and territories.
It uses AI to help generate summaries and answer questions from documents, transcripts, notes and other sources that users can upload.
Some early users of NotebookLM in the U.S. anticipated it would support traditional note-taking apps, including Evernote and Google Keep.
Gemini 1.5 Pro also lets NotebookLM have up to 50 sources in each notebook, with 500,000 words per source.
Chasing after other popular services in the market such as those from OpenAI, Mark Zuckerberg claimed today that Meta AI is possibly the “most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use.”Meta first rolled out Meta AI in the U.S. last year.
Meta said that it plans to keep Meta AI in test mode in India.
New featuresUsers could already ask Meta AI for writing or recipe suggestions.
Plus, they can ask Meta AI to animate an image or turn an image into a GIF.
All AI things everywhere at onceMeta is adopting the approach of having Meta AI available in as many places as it can.
Inside LemFi’s play to be fintech to the Global South diaspora First, the Nigerian startup focused on migrants from Africa.
These events spotlight the company’s growing influence in Africa’s remittance market, fuelled by a $33 million Series A funding round and the launch of services in the U.S. corridor, both announced last August.
LemFi later expanded to serve other African diaspora communities in the country before entering the U.K. market in 2021 by acquiring RightCard for $2.5 million.
Additionally, Daiyaan Alam, formerly leading partnerships at Delivery Hero subsidiary Foodpanda in Pakistan, is spearheading LemFi’s expansion efforts into Pakistan and South Asia.
They join Allen Qu, former COO at Chinese-backed African fintech OPay, who leads the fintech’s growth among the Chinese diaspora.
Since 2022, Youverify has expanded its real-time business verification coverage to 145 jurisdictions across 48 countries.
Across these countries, Youverify processes 4 million monthly applications for over 3,500 businesses with 800 active clients.
Additionally, the platform’s capacity to verify IDs has expanded from 400 million to 5 billion people — as well as 600 million businesses across various industries such as gaming, travel, healthcare, and telecommunications.
“Individuals and businesses can verify their identity, registration status and ownership using their government data through Youverify.
In addition, we launched our anti-money laundering and risk classification product to address some of these industries,” the CEO noted.
Here’s the full list of countries where you’ll find music videos starting today: Brazil, Colombia, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya, Netherlands, Poland, Philippines, Sweden and UK.
In addition to living in one of those countries, music videos also require an active premium subscription.
Instead of searching for music videos directly or browsing videos in a separate section of the app, music videos can be started from the “Now Playing” screen.
With music videos, Spotify is adding more video content to its app, beyond Clips (short videos of artists talking to fans) and Canvas (looping album artworks).
Apple Music also has music videos in a separate section on each artist page.
TikTok is expanding its Effect Creator Rewards monetization program to more regions and lowering its payout threshold, the company announced today.
The program, which launched in May 2023, rewards creators for the effects they make through TikTok’s AR development platform, Effect House.
TikTok is also updating the program’s payout model, as creators will now only receive rewards for effects used in public videos.
Effect Creator Rewards is now available in a total of 53 regions.
Previously, creators needed an effect to have been used in 200,000 qualified videos within 90 days for the effect to start collecting rewards.
On Tuesday, the HR startup announced it is acquiring African-based payroll and HR software and services company PaySpace in a deal that marks its largest acquisition to date.
Financial terms of the PaySpace acquisition were not disclosed.
Separately, San Francisco-based Deel also revealed Tuesday that it has crossed $500 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), organically, outside of this acquisition.
With the various buys, Deel claims that it now owns the full HR stack — entities, local teams (legal, HR payroll), and local payroll engines — across six continents.
Theirs is one of the best technologies we’ve ever seen … We had to do a lot of convincing.”In a written statement, PaySpace Director Clyde van Wyk said: “Like PaySpace, Deel strives to evolve its offering through disruption.
The company’s iPhone revenue in India jumped 42% year-on-year in 2023 to $8.7 billion, Morgan Stanley wrote in a note on Friday.
India’s iPhone business is now larger than any standalone country in the European Union, Morgan Stanley added.
This compares to China iPhone shipments, which represented 20% of iPhone shipments and revenue in CY23 (down 1-2 points Y/Y, respectively),” the analysts wrote.
The average iPhone sold in India last year had around 260GB of memory, a 26% increase over 2022, Morgan Stanley said.
Morgan Stanley estimates the tech giant’s India revenue will reach $40 billion by 2032.
TikTok launches its ‘Add to Music app’ feature available in over 160 countriesTikTok announced today that it is launching its “Add to Music app” feature, which lets users add a song playing on a clip to services like Apple Music and Spotify, in 163 new countries.
The function lets users add the song to Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Spotify depending on the availability in the region.
They can tap on the button and select the music service of their choice the first time.
Last year, ByteDance launched its music service TikTok Music in Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Singapore, and Indonesia.
The company added it is is working on making the Add to Music App feature available to TikTok Music users soon.
Instagram said today that it is expanding its marketplace tool to connect brands with creators for paid partnerships or ads in eight new countries.
Meta added that apart from making the platform available to the brands in these eight countries, it will also invite Chinese export brands to connect with creators outside of China.
Marketers can approach creators for a paid partnership or even a partnership ad, which allows advertisers to boost organic content as ads.
On the marketplace, Meta helps brands match with relevant creators for a particular marketing campaign through its machine learning algorithm.
Instagram’s rivals like Snap, YouTube, and TikTok all offer creator marketplace functionality.
