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TikTok expands its premium ad slots despite potential U.S. ban | TechCrunch

May 2, 2024 9:19 PM0


In an effort to capture more ad dollars, despite the looming U.S. ban, TikTok is introducing new advertising products and opportunities that will allow marketers to better control what sort of content their ads appear against.

The company says it will use generative AI to curate trending, brand-safe content; expand its selection of “tentpole” moments, like the Paris Olympics and Met Gala; and allow advertisers to buy slots with specific networks and content offerings.

The company introduced the “Pulse Premiere” ad slot last year, and it is now adding new partners to it. The offering focuses on bringing in more premium ad dollars by letting advertisers position their ads directly after publisher and media content in over a dozen categories including lifestyle, sports, entertainment and education. The ads would appear on content from select publishers on the app’s ‘For You’ feed.

The slot is meant to appeal more to TV advertisers who are used to being able to buy ads that run alongside specific programs.

TikTok had earlier partnered with companies like NBCU, Condé Nast, DotDash Meredith, BuzzFeed, Hearst Magazines, Major League Soccer, UFC, Vox, and others. Now, it is adding Paramount Global and NHL to its list of Premiere partners.

The former partnership gave advertisers the option to buy ads that run alongside content from, for example, NBCU — think Saturday Night Live, America’s Got Talent, TODAY Show, Bravo, and others. The new partnership with Paramount Global, for instance, will let advertisers place ads against content from MTV, CBS Sports, The Daily Show, Entertainment Tonight, and more.

TikTok said it will also work with Nielsen ONE Ads and iSpot.tv to give advertisers the ability to measure how their TikTok ads add “incremental and complementary reach” to their TV campaigns, the company said.

TikTok is presenting these new ad options at this year’s IAB NewFronts 2024, where a number of media companies and social apps market themselves to advertisers. TikTok took the opportunity to share some stats on its ad offerings’ success, noting, for example, that the TikTok Pulse suite — which guarantees ads next to the top 4% of trending videos, seasonal moments, or premium content — increases ad recall by 9.8%.

The company also touted its ability to reach users who may not have seen TV ads, saying that 58% of all TikTok campaign impressions reached a unique audience “unexposed” to the TV portion of the campaign. Plus, it said advertisers who added TikTok to their TV campaigns reached an additional 22% of their audience.

TikTok’s announcement is seemingly business as usual for the company, since it represents deals that were finalized long before the U.S. ban went through, but the fate of the app’s future in the country is uncertain. Though the company’s parent, ByteDance, has vowed to fight the ban, it has also threatened to pull out of the country rather than divest. Obviously, that would not be great for its ability to bring in ad dollars.

Biden signs bill that would ban TikTok if ByteDance fails to sell the app

TikTok partners with top publishers on its new premium and brand-safe ad slot, ‘Pulse Premiere’


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Anthropic launches new iPhone app, premium plan for businesses | TechCrunch

May 2, 2024 3:54 AM0


Anthropic, one of the world’s best-funded generative AI startups with $7.6 billion in the bank, is launching a new paid plan aimed at enterprises, including those in highly regulated industries like healthcare, finance and legal, as well as a new iOS app.

Team, the enterprise plan, gives customers higher-priority access to Anthropic’s Claude 3 family of generative AI models plus additional admin and user management controls.

“Anthropic introduced the Team plan now in response to growing demand from enterprise customers who want to deploy Claude’s advanced AI capabilities across their organizations,” Scott White, product lead at Anthropic, told TechCrunch. “The Team plan is designed for businesses of all sizes and industries that want to give their employees access to Claude’s language understanding and generation capabilities in a controlled and trusted environment.”

The Team plan — which joins Anthropic’s individual premium plan, Pro — delivers “greater usage per user” compared to Pro, enabling users to “significantly increase” the number of chats that they can have with Claude. (We’ve asked Anthropic for figures.) Team customers get a 200,000-token (~150,000-word) context window as well as all the advantages of Pro, like early access to new features.

Image Credits: Anthropic

Context window, or context, refers to input data (e.g. text) that a model considers before generating output (e.g. more text). Models with small context windows tend to forget the content of even very recent conversations, while models with larger contexts avoid this pitfall — and, as an added benefit, better grasp the flow of data they take in.

Team also brings with it new toggles to control billing and user management. And in the coming weeks, it’ll gain collaboration features including citations to verify AI-generated claims (models including Anthropic’s tend to hallucinate), integrations with data repos like codebases and customer relationship management platforms (e.g. Salesforce) and — perhaps most intriguing to this writer — a canvas to work with team members on AI-generated docs and projects, Anthropic says.

In the nearer term, Team customers will be able to leverage tool use capabilities for Claude 3, which recently entered open beta. This allows users to equip Claude 3 with custom tools to perform a wider range of tasks, like getting a firm’s current stock price or the local weather report, similar to OpenAI’s GPTs.

“By enabling businesses to deeply integrate Claude into their collaborative workflows, the Team plan positions Anthropic to capture significant enterprise market share as more companies move from AI experimentation to full-scale deployment in pursuit of transformative business outcomes,” White said. “In 2023, customers rapidly experimented with AI, and now in 2024, the focus has shifted to identifying and scaling applications that deliver concrete business value.”

Anthropic talks a big game, but it still might take a substantial effort on its part to get businesses on board.

According to a recent Gartner survey, 49% of companies said that it’s difficult to estimate and demonstrate the value of AI projects, making them a tough sell internally. A separate poll from McKinsey found that 66% of executives believe that generative AI is years away from generating substantive business results.

Image Credits: Anthropic

Yet corporate spending on generative AI is forecasted to be enormous. IDC expects that it’ll reach $15.1 billion in 2027, growing nearly eightfold from its total in 2023.

That’s probably generative AI vendors, most notably OpenAI, are ramping up their enterprise-focused efforts.

OpenAI recently said that it had more than 600,000 users signed up for the enterprise tier of its generative AI platform ChatGPT, ChatGPT Enterprise. And it’s introduced a slew of tools aimed at satisfying corporate compliance and governance requirements, like a new user interface to compare model performance and quality.

Anthropic is competitively pricing its Team plan: $30 per user per month billed monthly, with a minimum of five seats. OpenAI doesn’t publish the price of ChatGPT Enterprise, but users on Reddit report being quoted anywhere from $30 per user per month for 120 users to $60 per user per month for 250 users. 

“Anthropic’s Team plan is competitive and affordable considering the value it offers organizations,” White said. “The per-user model is straightforward, allowing businesses to start small and expand gradually. This structure supports Anthropic’s growth and stability while enabling enterprises to strategically leverage AI.”

It undoubtedly helps that Anthropic’s launching Team from a position of strength.

Amazon in March completed its $4 billion investment in Anthropic (following a $2 billion Google investment), and the company is reportedly on track to generate more than $850 million in annualized revenue by the end of 2024 — a 70% increase from an earlier projection. Anthropic may see Team as its logical next path to expansion. But at least right now it seems Anthropic can afford to let Team grow organically as it attempts to convince holdout businesses its generative AI is better than the rest.

An Anthropic iOS app

Anthropic’s other piece of news Wednesday is that it’s launching an iOS app. Given that the company’s conspicuously been hiring iOS engineers over the past few months, this comes as no great surprise.

The iOS app provides access to Claude 3, including free access as well as upgraded Pro and Team access. It syncs with Anthropic’s client on the web, and it taps Claude 3’s vision capabilities to offer real-time analysis for uploaded and saved images. For example, users can upload a screenshot of charts from a presentation and ask Claude to summarize them.

Image Credits: Anthropic

“By offering the same functionality as the web version, including chat history syncing and photo upload capabilities, the iOS app aims to make Claude a convenient and integrated part of users’ daily lives, both for personal and professional use,” White said. “It complements the web interface and API offerings, providing another avenue for users to engage with the AI assistant. As we continue to develop and refine our technologies, we’ll continue to explore new ways to deliver value to users across various platforms and use cases, including mobile app development and functionality.”


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

India's JioCinema launches Rs 29 premium tier featuring ad-free, 4K viewing | TechCrunch

April 25, 2024 1:15 AM0


JioCinema introduced a new monthly subscription plan on Thursday, with the lowest tier costing just 35 cents. The revamp in the pricing strategy comes as the market-leading service seeks to exert greater pressure on rivals including Netflix and Prime Video.

The service — backed by Asia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani — introduced two monthly tiers: Rs 89 ($1), featuring support for four simultaneous screen access, and Rs 29, with single-screen access. Apart from the simultaneous viewing, both tiers offer identical features, including an ad-free experience, the ability to stream in 4K, and download for offline viewing.

JioCinema Premium subscribers will be able to enjoy the ad-free experience across the platform, including the ongoing popular cricket tournament, the Indian Premier League, a spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch. JioCinema Premium also includes access to everything else on the platform, which includes a vast library of content from Peacock, HBO, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery.

JioCinema had launched an annual premium tier with the international catalog at 999 Indian rupees last year. Viacom18 is discontinuing the earlier tier, and those who had subscribed to it will be automatically switched over to the new plan, according to a spokesperson.

The service will also continue to offer ad-supported streaming of the cricket tournament at no charge, the spokesperson added.

“The introduction of JioCinema Premium breaks the numerous cost and quality barriers that exist in accessing premium entertainment,” said Kiran Mani, CEO of Viacom18 Digital, in a statement. “With 4K streaming, best-in-class audio, offline viewing and no device restriction all at a customer-centric pricing is sure to democratise access to quality entertainment for all of India.”

This is a developing story. More to follow.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Y Combinator alum Matterport is being bought by real estate juggernaut Costar at a 212% premium | TechCrunch

April 23, 2024 7:11 PM0


Digital twin platform Matterport has agreed to be acquired by one of its customers, Costar, in a cash-and-stock deal of $5.50 per share that gives it an enterprise valuation of about $1.6 billion. Matterport’s tech helps companies create digital replicas of physical spaces.

Costar’s offer represents a premium of a whopping 212% over Matterport’s last closing share price before the deal was announced on April 22.

The deal looks like a fortunate turn of events for Matterport, whose shares had been trading below the $5 mark since August 2022 as the company struggled to meet investors’ expectations for subscriber growth amid a sluggish real estate market and a wider macroeconomic slowdown. Matterport’s stock was trading below $2 per share before the transaction was disclosed.

The company has been trying to improve its profitability over the past year, too, according to its 2023 financial statements. However, investors haven’t been happy with the company, whose shares have been struggling since it went public via a SPAC deal in 2021, which Bloomberg reported valued Matterport at around $2.9 billion.

Matterport’s shares were trading at $4.76 before the bell on Tuesday — slightly below the $5.50 deal price, which indicates investors may be wary of the deal getting blocked by regulators, or they may be hedging their bets to account for a possible decline in Costar’s stock, since the deal has a share-based component, too. Costar’s shares, however, are up slightly since the announcement, indicating that its investors are happy with the potential benefits of the deal.

Matterport quickly rose to prominence from its start in 2011, making 3D imaging cameras, spawning out of the Microsoft Kinect hacker scene and going on to join Y Combinator’s Winter 2012 batch. Its services gained significant traction in the real estate space despite competition from alternatives such as Cupix, Giraffe360 and Zillow 3D Home.

Digital twin technology has applications in construction tech and insurtech, but demand from real estate players is particularly salient, as the pandemic accelerated the switch from in-person viewings to virtual tours, both for commercial and for residential properties.

Early-mover advantage aside, the company’s later decisions likely played an equally important role as the market evolved. It diversified into helping clients create virtual tours even with smartphones. And the addition of AI with its in-house solution, Cortex, added more differentiation to its offering, leveraging its data to generate 3D digital twins supporting additional labels such as property dimensions.

Matterport’s leadership changed over the years. Its current CEO, former eBay chief product officer RJ Pittman, took the reins in 2018 — but its fundraising trajectory was fairly smooth. Over its first decade, it raised successive rounds of funding for a total of $409 million, followed by its public debut in 2021.

Matterport raises $48M to ramp up its 3D imaging platform

“Costar Group and Matterport have nearly identical mission statements of digitizing the world’s real estate,” Costar’s founder and CEO, Andy Florance, said in a statement.

CoStar, which has a market cap of $34.84 billion, is a real estate heavyweight that operates marketplaces such as Apartments.com, Homes.com and LoopNet (for commercial real estate). This gives it direct insights into the value that Matterport can add for its end users.

In March 2024, Costar wrote in a press release, “there were over 7.4 million views of Matterport 3D Tours on Apartments.com, with consumers spending 20% more time viewing an apartment listing when Matterports were available.” The company now plans to incorporate Matterport’s virtual tours (“Matterports”) on Homes.com.

Taking to the stage at a real estate event shortly after the announcement, Florance reportedly said that allowing home buyers to view properties with their own furniture, for instance, will allow agents to provide more value and promote their brands.

It will be worth tracking what happens to Matterport’s activities beyond real estate, such as its partnership with Facebook  to help researchers train robots in virtual environments.

The deal is subject to regulatory approvals, but this is more than an asterisk: In 2020, Costar’s attempt to acquire RentPath was derailed by an FTC antitrust lawsuit, and RentPath was instead bought by Redfin in 2021.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Chrome Enterprise goes Premium with new security and management features | TechCrunch

April 18, 2024 1:13 AM0


At its Google Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas, Google on Tuesday extended its Chrome Enterprise product suite with the launch of Chrome Enterprise Premium.

Google has long offered an enterprise-centric version of its Chrome browser. With Chrome Enterprise, IT departments get the ability to manage employees’ browser settings, the extensions they install and web apps they use, for example. More importantly, though, they also get a number of new security controls around data loss prevention, malware protection, phishing prevention and the Zero Trust access to SaaS apps.

Chrome Enterprise Premium, which will cost $6/user/month, mostly extends the security capabilities of the existing service, based on the insight that browsers are now the endpoints where most of the high-value work inside a company is done.

“Authentication, access, communication and collaboration, administration, and even coding are all browser-based activities in the modern enterprise,” Parisa Tabriz, Google’s VP for Chrome, wrote in Tuesday’s announcement. “Endpoint security is growing more challenging due to remote work, reliance on an extended workforce, and the proliferation of new devices that aren’t part of an organization’s managed fleet. As these trends continue to accelerate and converge, it’s clear that the browser is a natural enforcement point for endpoint security in the modern enterprise.”

These new features include additional enterprise controls to enforce policies and manage software updates and extensions, as well as new security reporting features and forensic capabilities that can be integrated with third-party security tools. Chrome Enterprise Premium takes Zero Trust a step further with context-aware access controls that can also mitigate the risk of data leaks. This includes approved applications and those that were not sanctioned by the IT department.

“With Chrome Enterprise Premium, we have confidence in Google’s security expertise, including Project Zero’s cutting-edge security research and fast security patches. We set up data loss prevention restrictions and warnings for sharing sensitive information in applications like generative AI platforms and noticed a noteworthy 50% reduction in content transfers,” said Nick Reva, head of corporate security engineering at Snap.

The new service is now generally available.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

LinkedIn tests Premium Company Pages, with AI and marketing tools to grow audiences | TechCrunch

April 17, 2024 5:51 PM0


LinkedIn — the social platform that targets the working world — has quietly started testing another way to boost its revenues, this time with a new service for small and medium businesses. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that it is working on a new LinkedIn Premium Company Page subscription, which — for fees that appear to be as steep as $99/month — will include AI to write content and new tools to grow follower counts, among other features to raise the profiles of the company using them.

The move is significant because it underscores how Microsoft-owned LinkedIn continues to diversify its business model — while also trying to make itself more useful overall. LinkedIn has for years been the butt of many a joke about how it can feel like a cesspool of shameless self-promotion, or (cue nervous laughter) creepy when you realise the amount of data it can gather about what you do on there.

But as others have pointed out, LinkedIn has a prime opportunity right now. With so many changes underfoot on other social platforms and search engines — where advertising and other algorithms dictate what users discover, and disinformation runs riot — LinkedIn has been looking to carve out a safer space, a place to have a social profile of record for the professionals and prosumers out there.

LinkedIn quietly started to post information describing its new Premium Company Page six days ago. The posts got almost no notice, but we stumbled on it ourselves, and it seems a marketing consultant did, too. Now, LinkedIn has confirmed the details to TechCrunch.

“We’re always exploring new ways to enhance our customers’ experience and assist them in achieving their business goals. Currently, we’re testing a new offering with small-to-medium business customers, called Premium Company Page, which is designed to help them attract customers, build credibility, and stand out to their audience. We look forward to sharing more soon,” said Suzi Owens, senior director of communications at LinkedIn, in a statement.

Pricing for premium company pages is not immediately disclosed, but it appears admins of pages that are eligible for it can see it. This marketing consultant notes that the fees start at $99.99 per month per Page, reducing to $839.88 per Page for an annual subscription.

This new premium company page is the latest in a growing list of premium offerings that LinkedIn has crafted for organizations on the platform, mirroring the different usage and pricing tiers that it has built out for individuals and recruiters using the platform.

Other business-focused tiers include Premium Career for people on the job hunt, Premium Business for business intelligence, Sales Navigator for sales teams, Recruiter tiers for sourcing and hiring talent and LinkedIn Learning for professional development.

Taken together, Premium services are very big business for the company. In March, the company announced that Premium user subscriptions grew 25% year-on-year to $1.7 billion in 2023. Overall, the company made $15 billion that year, with its recruiting business accounting for $7 billion of that.

The Premium Company Page subscription in some ways will look very familiar, in that it taps into well-known LinkedIn mechanics.

Admins for the pages can review recent visitors — if those visitors have not turned off the privacy setting, that is. (Public service reminder: it’s on by default.) This can be used to subsequently invite those visitors to follow the page, regardless of their degree of connection (that previously would have been impossible to do for casual visitors who are not already connected within one degree of the company). Admins can also create “call to action” buttons with contact or website details displayed prominently at the top of the Page. 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.

The AI writing help, meanwhile, becomes one of the latest ways that LinkedIn is weaving more AI assistance into the platform, something it started to introduce last year, tapping Microsoft’s ties to OpenAI.

Last but not least, with LinkedIn big on verification lately, and here too a Page can get a golden badge with a premium subscription.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

X makes Grok chatbot available to premium subscribers | TechCrunch

April 16, 2024 2:52 PM0


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. With the latest update, users paying $8 per month can access the chatbot.

Users can chat with Grok in a “Regular mode” or a “Fun mode.” Just like any other large language model (LLM) product, Grok shows labels indicating that the chatbot would return inaccurate answers.

We have already seen some examples of that. Earlier this week, X rolled out a new explore view inside Grok where the chatbot summarizes trending news stories. Notably, Jeff Bezos and Nvidia-backed Perplexity AI also summarizes news stories.

However, Grok seems to go one step further than just summarizing stories by writing headlines. As Mashable wrote, the chatbot wrote a fake headline saying “Iran Strikes Tel Aviv with Heavy Missiles.”

Musk likely wants more people to use the Grok chatbot to rival other products such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini or Anthropic’s Claude. Over the last few months, he has been openly critical of OpenAI’s operations. Musk even sued the company in March over the “betrayal” of its nonprofit goal. In response, OpenAI filed papers seeking the dismissal of all of Musk’s claims and released email exchanges between the Tesla CEO and the company.

Last month, xAI open sourced Grok but without any training data details. As my colleague Devin Coldewey argued, there are still questions about whether this is the latest version of the model and if the company will be more transparent about its approach to the development of the model and information about the training data.

Why Elon Musk’s AI company ‘open-sourcing’ Grok matters — and why it doesn’t




Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Spotify brings its audiobooks perk for Premium users to Canada, Ireland and New Zealand | TechCrunch

April 13, 2024 5:31 AM0


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 also announced that it’s expanding its audiobooks catalog from 200,000 to 250,000 titles. The perk is already available in the U.S., U.K. and Australia.

The expansion comes two months after Spotify said its audiobooks service is the second-largest audiobook provider behind Amazon-owned Audible. Spotify says users have listened to more than 150,000 titles since the free service’s launch last November.

Audiobooks can be found in the Home feed of the Spotify app or via the search tab. Any audiobook marked as “Included in Premium” can be listened to with a Spotify Premium subscription. You can track your listening hours in the settings of your Spotify app. 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. The plan, which includes 15 hours of listening, gives Spotify a way to compete with Audible by targeting users who aren’t as interested in its music service. While Audible’s $14.95 per month subscription gives users one credit to buy a title, Spotify’s $9.99 plan allows users to listen to 15 hours across its catalog, which is often enough time to listen to more than one audiobook.

Spotify’s Audiobooks will get their own ‘Countdown Pages’ to tease upcoming new releases


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

X is removing ability to hide checkmarks for premium users | TechCrunch

April 12, 2024 10:28 AM0


Last year, Elon Musk-owned social network X rolled out a feature for paid users to hide their checkmarks from others. Now, the company is sending notifications to users saying that the feature will go away soon.

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.

Last week, the company removed the section describing how to hide the checkmark feature from the X Premium support page before sending notifications to users. The feature wasn’t available to the basic tier of subscribers.

“As a Premium or Premium+ subscriber, you can choose to hide your checkmark on your account. The checkmark will be hidden on your profile and posts. The checkmark may still appear in some places, and some features could still reveal that you have an active subscription,” the description read.

Earlier this month, the social network started handing out blue checkmarks to influential users with more than 2,500 “verified” followers. The company also started offering its Premium subscription to these users and Premium+ subscription to users with more than 5,000 verified followers.

Last year, Musk removed the legacy verification checkmark after introducing a subscription program for it. However, the company soon reinstated the blue checkmark for top accounts. Essentially, the verification program is headed back to where it started — verifying notable people.




Software Development in Sri Lanka

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