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.
Apple today is continuing its investment in sports and subscriptions business with the launch of a new app for iPhone users, Apple Sports.
While the app itself is free to use, it can help Apple direct customers to its other subscription offerings in live sports, via its Apple TV app where users can watch live games from Apple and their other apps.
Last year it also began offering the MLS Season Pass through the Apple TV app, for $14.99 per month or $99 per season.
Sports can help Apple to grow its services revenue, which hit a record of $22.3 billion in the fourth quarter, encompassing areas of Apple’s business including Apple TV+, Apple Music, iCloud, the App Store, advertising and more.
Apple TV+ subscribers can add MLS Season Pass at a discounted rate of $12.99 per month or $79 per season.
Microsoft, Amazon and Meta are among the top brands whose apps are available on the Indian fintech PhonePe’s Indus Appstore, an app store for the Android mobile operating system, launched Wednesday in challenge to Google’s monopoly in its largest market by users.
To fight Google Play Store, PhonePe has armed Indus Appstore with a range of unique and personalized features and developer-friendly terms.
Indus Appstore supports 12 regional languages (as well as English) and round the clock support service.
PhonePe is making the app store available to download to consumers from its website.
“Indus Appstore embodies our commitment to building a truly inclusive digital ecosystem where every Indian user feels at home.”Ivan Mehta contributed to this report.
Barely a week after launching the latest iteration of its Gemini models, Google today announced the launch of Gemma, a new family of lightweight open-weight models.
To get started with Gemma, developers can get access to ready-to-use Colab and Kaggle notebooks, as well as integrations with Hugging Face, MaxText and Nvidia’s NeMo.
While Google highlights that these are open models, it’s worth noting that they are not open-source.
Indeed, in a press briefing ahead of today’s announcement, Google’s Janine Banks stressed the company’s commitment to open source but also noted that Google is very intentional about how it refers to the Gemma models.
“[Open models] has become pretty pervasive now in the industry,” Banks said.
The new update has a scan feature, which lets users scan a physical document and import the text to listen to it later.
The company is introducing a feature to let users read their emails by integrating their Gmail accounts.
The app can also help users import their PDF attachments into the Speechify app.
For instance, read later app Pocket, which is owned by Mozilla, has an in-app text-to-speech feature.
Speechify wants to stand out in this market and wants to become a one-stop shop for anyone thinking about reading experiences by offering all kinds of integrations.
OpenAI releases Sora, a credit score–based dating app launches and an anti-Tesla ad comes under fireWelcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter covering noteworthy happenings in the tech industry.
This week, OpenAI stunned the blogosphere with the release of Sora, a new AI model that can generate videos in impressively high fidelity.
Elsewhere, startup Score released a dating app exclusive to people with good to excellent credit scores.
Google upgrades Gemini: Google expanded the range of its Gemini AI models available to developers across its platforms.
And it’s previewed a new Gemini model capable of analyzing whole books, hours-long audio and hour-long videos.
The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is launching a formal probe into the proposed merger between Vodafone and Three UK.
That is some 18 months form when they first revealed their plans back in June.
It’s not entirely clear how that might impact this latest merger attempt, but Smith reckons that deal is as good as dead, regardless of what any court might subsequently find.
“The previous Three/O2 merger is still technically going through the EU courts, but that deal is long since dead in reality,” Smith said.
“We strongly believe that the proposed merger of Vodafone and Three will significantly enhance competition by creating a combined business with more resources to invest in infrastructure to better compete with the two larger converged players,” Vodafone UK CEO Ahmed Essam said in a statement.
E-commerce site Etsy today launched “Gift Mode,” a new AI-powered feature to match you with tailored gift ideas based on specific preferences.
Gift Mode is essentially an online quiz that asks about who you’re shopping for (sibling, parent, child), the occasion (birthday, anniversary, get well), and the recipient’s interests.
At launch, the feature has 15 interests to choose from, including crafting, fashion, sports, video games, pets, and more.
It then generates a series of gift guides inspired by your choices, pulling options from the over 100 million items listed on the platform.
Etsy hopes Gift Mode will relieve the stress that comes with selecting the perfect present.
OnePlus launched the OnePlus 12 series globally today, bringing an R-series device to North America and Europe for the first time.
The company also launched the $99 OnePlus Buds 3 wireless buds apart from the OnePlus 12 (starting at $799) and the OnePlus 12R (starting at $499).
Last year, OnePlus launched just the $699 OnePlus 11 in the U.S., while the OnePlus 11R was limited to India and China.
The OnePlus 12 boasts a 6.82-inch 1440p display with the company claiming it reaches up to 4,500 nits of brightness.
OnePlus is opting for a triple camera setup in the OnePlus 12 with a 50-megapixel Sony LYT-808 sensor, which has a f/1.6 aperture.
The trouble is, many of these models — if not most — were trained on artwork without artists’ knowledge or permission.
And while some vendors have begun compensating artists or offering ways to “opt out” of model training, many haven’t.
Another, Kin.art, uses image segmentation (i.e., concealing parts of artwork) and tag randomization (swapping an art piece’s image metatags) to interfere with the model training process.
“We prevent your artwork from being inserted in the first place.”Now, Kin.art has a product to sell.
While the tool is free, artists have to upload their artwork to Kin.art’s portfolio platform in order to use it.
