LinkedIn quietly started to post information describing its new Premium Company Page six days ago.
Pricing for premium company pages is not immediately disclosed, but it appears admins of pages that are eligible for it can see it.
The Premium Company Page subscription in some ways will look very familiar, in that it taps into well-known LinkedIn mechanics.
Testimonials, which LinkedIn has really promoted as a feature on profile pages for individuals, also get a push here: admins can display these prominently at the top of their premium pages.
Last but not least, with LinkedIn big on verification lately, and here too a Page can get a golden badge with a premium subscription.
Last year, Elon Musk-owned social network X rolled out a feature for paid users to hide their checkmarks from others.
Just like a lot of decisions taken by X, there is no definite timeline as to when the hide your checkmark feature will go away.
I liked being a X Premium subscriber, but I didn't like the dumb checkmark.
pic.twitter.com/9vfarfOySV — Haje (@Haje) April 11, 2024BREAKING: #X seems to be removing the ability to hide the verification checkmark!
The company also started offering its Premium subscription to these users and Premium+ subscription to users with more than 5,000 verified followers.
Social network X is rolling out access to xAI’s Grok chatbot to Premium tier subscribers after Elon Musk announced the expansion to more paid users last month.
The company said on its support page that only Premium and Premium+ users can interact with the chatbot in select regions.
Last year, after Musk’s xAI announced Grok, it made the chatbot available to Premium+ users — people who are paying $16 per month or a $168 per year subscription fee.
Earlier this week, X rolled out a new explore view inside Grok where the chatbot summarizes trending news stories.
Last month, xAI open-sourced Grok but without any training data details.
X is giving blue checks to influential users (which is what blue checks were supposed to be all along)X is giving free blue checks to users who have more than 2500 “verified” followers (or, people that subscribe to X Premium).
So, basically this means that if you are a popular poster, you will get a blue check.
This also means that these lucky people are frantically posting to make it clear that they didn’t buy a blue check — the blue check was foisted upon them.
Back in days of yore, Twitter’s blue check indicated that a user was influential in some way.
Back then, blue checks actually helped us determine if public figures are who they say they are.
Spotify announced on Tuesday that it’s bringing its free audiobooks perk to Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand.
Users in these markets will be able to access 15 hours of free monthly audiobook listening time.
Spotify says users have listened to more than 150,000 titles since the free service’s launch last November.
If you run out of listening hours, you can purchase additional 10-hour allocations for CAD $14.99, IRE €12.99, and NZD $19.99.
Spotify recently launched a $9.99 per month plan that allows its free users to access its audiobooks collection in the U.S.
Telegram Business will likely give Premium another bump as it offers tools and features that can be used by business customers without needing to know how to code.
Similar to features available on WhatsApp, Telegram Business will offer “quick replies,” which are shortcuts to preset messages that support formatting, links, media, stickers and files.
Business customers can also add Telegram bots, including those from other tools or AI assistants, to answer messages on their behalf.
The company said more features will roll out to Telegram Business in future updates.
(They can be found under Settings > Telegram Business in the app.)
Following Elon Musk’s xAI’s move to open source its Grok large language model earlier in March, the X owner on Tuesday said that the company formerly known as Twitter will soon offer the Grok chatbot to more paying subscribers.
In a post on X, Musk announced Grok will become available to Premium subscribers this week, not just those on the higher-end tier, Premium+, as before.
Previously, Grok was only available to Premium+ subscribers, at $16 per month or a hefty $168 per year.
Most notably, Grok has the ability to access real-time X data — something rivals can’t offer.
Of course, the value of that data under Musk’s reign may be diminishing if X is losing users.
Proton Mail, the end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) email service from Swiss company Proton, is now officially available via a dedicated desktop app some three months after debuting in beta.
However, despite previous claims that the client would be available to all Proton Mail users in early 2024, the company has decided to restrict it to paying users.
In related news, Proton is also making its email service available via a standalone Linux desktop app, launching today in beta.
It’s worth noting that while Proton Mail has been available to desktop users from the company’s inception, initially through the browser and more recently a “bridge” which opened up access to Proton Mail through third-party desktop clients such as Apple Mail and Outlook, today’s news brings a dedicated Windows and MacOS app to the fray.
This means that emails can be cached and accessed when offline, while users can funnel into Proton Mail directly from the MacOS dock or Windows Start menu.
X announced a new long-form post format called Articles today.
The feature, which is only available to Premium+ subscribers and verified organizations, lets users publish posts with text formatting, other X posts, and embedded videos and images — akin to a post on a WordPress-like content management system or an article on Medium.
Last year, the Elon Musk-owned social network increased the limit for long posts to 25,000 characters for paying users.
And yet, in July 2023, Musk noted that the company is working on a way for creators to post long-form articles with mixed media.
Musk has long pushed creators like MrBeast and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson to post on X directly.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov announced Wednesday that users on the chat app with personal accounts can now convert them into business accounts by paying a monthly fee.
Some of the other features for business accounts involve organizing chats with color labels, using automatic greetings or away messages, and shortcuts for quick replies.
On his channel, Durov said that Telegram plans to launch more business features this month including a way to integrate AI-powered chatbots for customer service.
“Telegram Business accounts will be able to seamlessly add chatbots as their invisible secretaries to respond to all or certain chats.
Telegram is trying to compete with WhatsApp Business, which crossed the mark of 200 million monthly active users last year, with these new features.
