You could open up the TikTok app and snap a picture of it to find similar items available for purchase on TikTok Shop.
The ability to use image search for shopping is something that Google has offered for years with Google Lens, its visual search tool.
TikTok recently revealed that TikTok Shop now has more than 15 million sellers worldwide, including over 500,000 in the U.S.
It spent more than $400 million on platform safety and created a team of more than 7,500 people to help keep TikTok Shop safe.
TikTok has been betting big on e-commerce, as it sees TikTok Shop as its next big potential revenue source.
Meta is quietly rolling out a new “Communities” feature on Messenger, the company confirmed to TechCrunch.
The rollout comes as Meta introduced Communities on WhatsApp back in 2022.
They could create dedicated group chats for topics like upcoming events, security alerts, trash pickup schedules, and more.
Although the feature works similarly to Communities on WhatsApp, Meta says there is one key differentiator, which is the fact that Messenger Communities are connected to Facebook’s social graph.
On a help page, Meta says Communities on Messenger are designed for more public conversations when compared to Facebook groups.
Meta on Thursday said it is rolling out its Meta Verified program for WhatsApp Business users in Brazil, India, Indonesia and Colombia, and eventually to more countries.
The plan also lets businesses use their WhatsApp Business account from multiple devices.
Until now, WhatsApp Business users had to use their personal phone numbers to service customer calls.
With more than 200 million monthly users on WhatsApp Business, Meta is trying to build a full suite of solutions that businesses can tap for communicating with their customers.
The company said existing commerce and payment services only cater to the top 200 million users.
Spotify is building on its AI DJ feature, adding a new AI-powered playlist feature.
Spotify’s AI work nests into its other efforts to differentiate its service from rivals like Apple Music and offerings from Amazon.
Starting in just a few countries, the new AI playlist feature will roll out to more markets over time.
Some Spotify users have complained that the rollout of new products can take longer than they want to reach their home market, it’s worth noting.
But for those of us who aren’t mega-ChatGPT users, AI can seem ever so slightly remote from our regular existence.
Google continues rolling out Gemini to different products as today the company announced that Android Studio’s bot is getting upgraded with Gemini Pro.
In May 2023, during the Google IO developer event, the company first introduced Studio Bot powered by the PaLM-2 foundation model.
The company is rolling out Gemini in Android Studio in over 180 countries for the Android Studio Jellyfish version.
Just like the Studio Bot, the new Gemini bot lives in the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and developers can ask coding-related questions.
The company said users can easily access the Gemini API starter template through Android Studio to add generative AI-powered features to their apps.
Weeks before the national elections in India, Elon Musk-owned X said it is rolling out support for posting Community Notes — the company’s crowd-sourced fact-checking program — in the key overseas market.
The first set of contributors from India will start posting notes from today and more will be accepted over time, X said.
Community Notes now active on India!
Over time, the company has allowed members from different countries to start posting Community Notes to provide local context better.
India was one of the last major markets where Community Notes had not previously expanded.
Pinterest rolls out its ‘body type ranges’ tool to the USPinterest announced today that its tool for filtering searches by different body types has officially rolled out to users in the U.S.
To use the feature, users can type into the search bar and select the “Body Types” option to see four different body types at the top of the results page.
If a user selects the same option twice, the body type selection can be saved to their device.
Pinterest’s body type ranges feature is currently only available for women’s fashion and wedding ideas.
When testing the feature, Pinterest saw that users who used the tool had a 66% higher engagement rate per session, Pinterest chief product officer Sabrina Ellis shares.
Bitcoin jumped and Coinbase’s app crashed, while Aptos eyes Hong Kong and Telegram rolls out rewards with TONWelcome to TechCrunch Crypto, formerly known as Chain Reaction.
This week in web3Crunching numbersThis week the crypto market was very hyped up as the two biggest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, bitcoin and ether, both jumped about 23.6% and 18%, respectively, on the week, according to CoinMarketCap data.
The total crypto market cap increased 19.4% over a seven-day period to $2.34 trillion.
Our favorite ‘Crypto Twitter’ postICYMI, last week a lot of crypto people were tweeting about emails from Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin.
In June 2022, Magic Eden raised $130 million in a Series B round that granted it unicorn status.
Google releases new open LLMs, Rivian lays off staff and Signal rolls out usernamesWelcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter covering noteworthy happenings in the tech industry.
This week, Google launched two new open large language models, Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B, in its continued bid for generative AI dominance.
The company, which describes the LLMs as “inspired by Gemini,” its flagship family of GenAI models, made each available for commercial and research usage.
Change Healthcare hit: Change Healthcare, one of the largest healthcare tech companies in the U.S., confirmed that a cyberattack on its systems occurred recently.
YouTube triumphant: YouTube dominates TV streaming in the U.S., per Nielsen’s latest report.
YouTube is changing the design for creators’ channels on the big screen, the comapny announced today.
The update is rolling out to all creators today, but may take a few weeks to appear to all viewers, the comapny told TechCrunch.
The changes impact the channel pages on TV only, it noted.
Creators will likely respond positively to changes that help boost their subscriber numbers and better showcase their content on the big screen.
The company is in competition with traditional TV and streamers like Netflix on TVs, but also with newcomers like TikTok, which launched its own TV app in late 2021.
