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French unicorn Mirakl is announcing its third acquisition in three years with the acquisition of Adspert, a German adtech startup focused on e-commerce advertising. Mirakl isn’t disclosing the terms of the acquisition, but the entire Adspert team of 30 employees will join Mirakl. As a reminder, Mirakl originally started as a software solution to add

The future of audiobooks and AI’s impact on the publishing industry were points of discussion for HarperCollins, whose CEO, Brian Murray, spoke at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference on Tuesday. During the event, the exec praised Spotify’s entry into the audiobooks market and detailed its future growth plans in the space. He also

YouTube announced on Tuesday that its auto-dubbing feature, which allows creators to generate translated audio tracks for their videos, is now rolling out to hundreds of thousands more channels.  YouTube first introduced its AI-powered auto-dubbing tool at Vidcon last year, which was only being tested with a limited group of creators. This tool could help

Attention, players. You are about to compete in a new challenge—but first, do you know how to speak Korean? In preparation for Season Two of “Squid Game,” one of Netflix’s most popular Korean thriller series, the streaming giant announced on Tuesday that it has teamed up with the language learning app Duolingo to help viewers

X, the Elon Musk-owned social network previously known as Twitter, quietly added a new image generator to its Grok assistant this past Saturday. Then, it removed it. Now, it’s bringing it back — and officially announcing it. The image generator, called Aurora, was developed by Musk’s AI company, xAI, and trained on billions of examples from the

Spotify has officially discontinued Car Thing, its in-car streaming device, with all units now disabled, the company confirmed to TechCrunch.  Earlier today, an X user noticed that their Car Thing is indeed no longer functioning, displaying a message that it’s “no longer operational,” along with a reminder of the refund terms valid until January 14,

It appears that users in the EU and UK won’t get access to Sora — OpenAI’s video generation model — at launch. A newly published help page on OpenAI’s website listing the supported regions for Sora “on web and mobile” omits all EU countries. On the page, OpenAI notes that accessing Sora outside the territories

Google’s video generator is coming to a few more customers — Google Cloud customers, to be precise. On Tuesday, Google announced that Veo, its AI model that can generate short video clips from images and prompts, will be available in private preview for customers using Vertex AI, Google Cloud’s AI development platform. Google says that

Amazon Music announced on Tuesday the launch of 2024 Delivered, a new personalized yearly recap feature inspired by Spotify’s popular Wrapped experience. The feature delivers a summary of your listening habits, including your top artists, songs, genres, and more.  To see your 2024 Delivered, open the Amazon Music app on your iOS or Android device

Celeb greetings app Cameo is pivoting to creators with a new product called CameoX. The company became a pandemic hit, as people stuck at home marked various celebrations, like birthdays and graduations, with celebrity shout-outs. It became a tech unicorn valued at $1 billion, but as life returned to normal, Cameo was hit with multiple

Perplexity, the AI-powered search engine, is expanding its publisher program, with the LA Times, Adweek, Mexico News Daily, and a dozen other news outlets signing up. Publishers will share in revenue generated by ads on Perplexity, and receive metrics to track their content’s performance — as long as they don’t withdraw. “We would not be

At its re:Invent conference on Tuesday, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing division, announced a new family of multimodal generative AI models it calls Nova. There are four text-generating models in total: Micro, Lite, Pro, and Premier. Micro, Lite, and Pro are available Tuesday to AWS customers, while Premier will arrive in early 2025,

DeepMind, Google’s AI research org, has unveiled a model that can generate an “endless” variety of playable 3D worlds. Called Genie 2, the model — the successor to DeepMind’s Genie, which was released earlier this year — can generate an interactive, real-time scene from a single image and text description (e.g. “A cute humanoid robot

After weeks of anticipation, some Spotify users are left underwhelmed by the streamer’s personalized year-in-review feature, Spotify Wrapped — with many even going so far as to call it “boring” or a “flop.” Chief among the complaints are that Spotify prioritized the inclusion of an AI podcast for Wrapped over the other, clever and creative

Spotify Wrapped, the streamer’s highly anticipated annual listening recap, has arrived. In addition to its usual personalized summary detailing your favorite artists, songs, podcasts, and more, the company this year is introducing two new features, including most notably, an AI-powered podcast of your 2024 Wrapped created with Google’s AI summarization tool, NotebookLM. Spotify is also

“I’m trying to find holiday gifts for my sisters. I open a bunch of tabs, I want my wife’s advice.” That’s Browser Company CEO, Josh Miller, in his company’s latest ad for its new AI browser, Dia. Consulting your spouse to find gifts for your siblings is a pure — and dare I say, sweet

Walmart just closed its acquisition of popular television maker Vizio in an effort to boost its advertising business. The acquisition was initially reported back in February; however, it took a few months to complete due to the waiting period under federal regulations.  The all-cash deal is valued at $2.3 billion.  With this strategic move, Walmart

World Labs, the startup founded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, has unveiled its first project: an AI system that can generate video game-like, 3D scenes from a single image. Lots of AI systems can turn a photo into 3D models and environments. But World Labs’ scenes are unique in that they’re interactive — and modifiable.

A group of Canadian news and media companies filed a lawsuit Friday against OpenAI, alleging that the ChatGPT maker has infringed their copyrights and unjustly enriched itself at their expense. The companies behind the lawsuit include the Toronto Star, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Globe and Mail, and others who seek to win monetary damages

As more publishers cut content licensing deals with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, a study put out this week by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism — looking at how the AI chatbot produces citations (i.e. sources) for publishers’ content — makes for interesting, or, well, concerning, reading. In a nutshell, the findings suggest publishers remain at the

Spotify will no longer allow developers building third-party apps with its Web API to access several features within the music streaming platform, such as song and artist recommendations, the company announced in a developer blog post on Wednesday. The company appears to be limiting third-party developers from building AI apps using data from Spotify listeners.

The long-standing feud between rappers Drake and Kendrick Lamar is heating up. Drake — via a business entity called Frozen Moments LLC — filed a petition yesterday in a New York Supreme Court accusing distributor Universal Music Group (UMG) of artificially inflating the popularity of “Not Like Us,” Lamar’s recently released “diss” track directed at

Spotify on Tuesday introduced a new set of tools for authors and publishers distributing their audiobooks on its platform with the launch of Spotify for Authors. Similar to its existing efforts, Spotify for Artists and Spotify for Creators (previously Podcasters), Spotify for Authors will allow writers and publishers to track insights and analytics about their

The Onion, a satirical publication, won a bankruptcy auction earlier this month to purchase conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ website, InfoWars, and other related assets. However, that sale is now in limbo after a federal judge temporarily halted the deal. On Monday, Elon Musk threw yet another wrench in the works, objecting to the transfer of

A group appears to have leaked access to Sora, OpenAI’s video generator, in protest of what they’re calling duplicity and “art washing” on OpenAI’s part. On Tuesday, the group published a project on the AI dev platform Hugging Face seemingly connected to OpenAI’s Sora API, which isn’t yet publicly available. Using their authentication tokens —

With global content consumption rising and demand for non-English content surpassing that for English movies and shows, IMAX is leveraging AI to scale localization on its original content. The entertainment and media industry grew 5% to $2.8 trillion in 2023, according to a report by PwC. The industry is expected to continue its expansion, though

Want to keep up with what everyone’s talking about on alternative social media sites like Bluesky and Mastodon, but don’t have time to constantly scroll through their respective apps? A newly launched link aggregation service called Sill may be able to help. The service is similar to the older startup Nuzzel, which was ultimately acquired

Brightcove, a cloud platform that helps businesses manage and monetize video content, is being taken private by Italian technology company Bending Spoons in an all-cash deal valued at $233 million. The transaction prices Brightcove at $4.45 per share, translating to a 90% premium on its 60-day average. Founded out of Boston in 2004, Brightcove develops

It’s not exactly a secret that Apple has explored the possibility of building a television. Before his death in 2011, co-founder Steve Jobs famously told biographer Walter Isaacson that he’d “finally cracked it,” but no full-fledged Apple TV (as opposed to the Apple TV set-top box) has emerged in the years since. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman

It may be hard to remember, but George Clooney and Brad Pitt co-starred in a movie, “Wolfs,” that Apple released just two months ago. On Friday, the film’s writer and director Jon Watts said Friday that a sequel is no longer happening; in a follow-up interview with Deadline, he explained that he “no longer trusted