Clay Canning had an idea while in high school: smartphone screen protectors that featured logos, right on the screen.
“In December 2022, I resigned from my job to pursue building Screen Skinz with Clay full time.”Now, Screen Skinz can officially announce the closing of a $1.5 million seed round led by South Loop Ventures and Abo Ventures.
The company produces custom, patent-pending phone screen protectors that feature personalized logos or slogans that are visible when the phone screen is black and then disappear when the phone is in use.
The latest fundraise allowed Screen Skinz to move manufacturing from Asia to the U.S., allowing it to more easily control its supply chain.
Screen Skinz next has some partnerships lined up and is focused on customer acquisition and deepening licensing relationships.
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.
Spotify is working on mixing tools that would allow users to remix songs on the streaming service, according to screenshots captured by tech veteran and app researcher Chris Messina.
The screenshots indicate that the mixing tools would be available under a new “Music Pro” premium subscription tier.
While Spotify’s mixing tools can’t get rid of this issue altogether, they could help remedy it to a certain extent.
It’s not surprising that Spotify is developing mixing tools, especially as sped-up songs and mashups are having a moment thanks to TikTok.
According to TikTok’s 2023 year-end report, the most popular songs on the app were sped-up remixes of songs.
Meta announced on Tuesday it’s rolling out the ability for Messenger users to create shared albums in chats, send photos in high-definition, and share larger files up to 100MB in size.
With these new features, Messenger is targeting people who tend to create shared albums or share HD images via services like Google Drive.
Now, users can create albums of photos and videos in group chats, whether it’s to organize photos of a recent spring break or grandma’s 80th birthday celebration.
The launch of the new feature follows Meta’s rollout of support for HD photos on WhatsApp back in September 2023.
The new features are rolling out on mobile to all Messenger users.
On Tuesday at the Google Cloud Next customer conference in Las Vegas, Google introduced a new AI-fueled video creation tool called Google Vids.
At Google Cloud Next, we’re unveiling Google Vids, a brand new, AI-powered video creation app for work,” Aparna Pappu, VP & GM at Google Workspace said, introducing the tool.
Examples of the kinds of videos people are creating with Google Vids include product pitches, training content or celebratory team videos.
Like most generative AI tooling, Google Vids starts with a prompt.
Along the way colleagues can comment or make changes, just as with any Google Workspace tool.
Brands want to use generative AI to personalize their marketing efforts — but they are also deathly afraid of AI going off message and ruining their brand.
At its annual Summit conference in Las Vegas, Adobe today announced GenStudio, a new application that helps brands create content and measure its performance, with generative AI — and the promise of brand safety — at its center.
Adobe wants GenStudio, which it first previewed last September, to be an end-to-end solution to help marketers tailor their content to different channels and audience segments.
That, of course, is where generative AI comes in, since it can speed up content creation dramatically.
The tools also continuously checks that anything a user creates in GenStudio is within a brand’s guidelines.
TigerEye CEO Tracy Young and her husband and CTO Ralph Gootee helped build their previous startup, PlanGrid, into a $100 million ARR business before selling it to Autodesk for $850 million in 2018.
Yet in spite of that success, they always felt they left business on the table because of an inability to forecast business changes accurately.
“TigerEye is a business simulation engine that helps companies predict their future,” Young told TechCrunch.
The couple was advising other startups at Y Combinator in 2021 when they decided it was time to build TigerEye.
The following year, they brought a bunch of the core members of the PlanGrid team back together and started working on the problem.
Roblox is introducing two new AI technologies to reduce the time it takes to create avatars and 3D models, the company announced on Monday.
Once a creator select the new feature, Roblox will run a number of tests over an asset and automatically rig, cage, segment and skin 3D models.
The second feature is called “Texture Generator,” and enables creators to quickly change the look of 3D objects using plain language text prompts.
For example, you can enter a text prompt to create texture for a 3D wooden treasure chest.
With Texture Generator, Roblox is enabling creators to do the same thing within 15 to 30 seconds.
Amazon launched generative AI-powered features last year to help sellers quickly create listings by entering just a few words about the product.
The company is now making it easier for sellers to create listings if an item is already listed on their website.
The e-commerce giant’s new tool uses AI to parse details from an item’s URL on another site and create an Amazon listing.
In the latest announcement, Amazon said more than 100,000 sellers have tried generative AI tools.
Last year, Google launched a tool related to product imaginary and eBay introduced a feature that generated listings from product images.
The company’s vision for moderation is a stackable ecosystem of services, which is why it will start allowing users to install filters from independent moderation services on top of what Bluesky already requires.
For example, someone could create a moderation service that blocks images of spiders on the network.
Bluesky says installing filters from independent moderation services will be as easy as following another account.
People running moderation services will be able to set custom labels and determine what they do.
Moderation services aren’t tied to individual accounts, so multiple people can manage them together.
