Only Products and Other Stuff

Pinterest today announced a multi-year strategic ad partnership with Amazon aimed at bringing more brands and relevant products to its platform. The new deal will make the e-commerce giant Pinterest’s first-ever partner on third-party ads, the company said in a blog post shared alongside the company’s first-quarter earnings beat . The partnership is a step in a new direction for the image sharing and social media site, which has been working to adjust to consumers’ changing interests around product discovery in recent years. As demand for video platforms like TikTok and Reels grew, Pinterest’s image pinboard began to feel dated, leading it to launch its video-first Idea Pins and increase its investment in creator content. But some of those creator efforts were recently wound down , ahead of Pinterest’s last quarter miss on revenue where the company warned also of low first-quarter sales, sending its shares down. By comparison, Amazon’s digital ads unit in the same quarter di...

It has been almost six months since FTX collapsed, and a lot has transpired since then, including executives being charged to industry businesses facing ripple effects from its demise. At Consensus 2023, Anthony Scaramucci, former White House comms director and founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital, which invested in the exchange and Brett Harrison, founder and CEO of Architect and former FTX US president, shared their experiences during FTX’s downfall and what life has been like since. “It’s important to talk about it because if I can prevent one person from having that happen to them what happened to us then it’s worth it to me to talk about it,” Scaramucci said. Harrison resigned from FTX in late September, weeks before it collapsed. In January, he launched his own company that makes trading infrastructure for large crypto investors. His startup raised $5 million and is backed by Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures and Scaramucci, among others. SkyBridge Capital ...

YouTube Music is officially adding podcasts to its platform in the United States on Android, iOS and the web. The rollout comes a few months after YouTube podcasting head Kai Chuk revealed that podcasts would be added to YouTube Music soon. The update allows users watching podcasts on the main app to continue listening to them on YouTube Music. The company notes that all users call listen to podcasts on-demand, offline, in the background, while casting and seamlessly switch between audio-video versions on YouTube Music. “This podcast listening experience is different from our music listening experience where you need a Premium or Music Premium subscription to enjoy some of these features,” the company wrote in a blog post . “This new podcast listening experience complements the podcast video experience on YouTube.” Podcasts in YouTube Music will be available regardless of whether you have a YouTube Premium subscription. YouTube even notes that paying customers may encounter ho...

Google has been spotted testing a new Play Store ad slot ahead of its I/O developer conference in May. If rolled out publicly, the change could significantly expand the company’s Play Store search ads business by offering developers access to new prime real estate for their app marketing efforts. The test comes two years ago after Apple made a similar move with the addition of a new ad slot that appeared on the store’s Search tab itself, instead of only at the top of search results, as before. Similar to Apple, Google is also testing an ad slot that appears when Android users navigate to the Play Store’s search menu, where they can type in keywords to find apps. The test was first spotted by the Android news site, Android Police , which noted that Google had been testing app “recommendations” in this slot as of late last year. When queried about those app promos at the time, Google had clarified they weren’t ads, just personalized suggestions. Now, that’s changed as the same spot i...

Meet Bastion , a French startup that was created in October 2022 to help small companies tackle cybersecurity risks without too many complexities. Created by former Palantir employees, the company has already raised $2.8 million. What makes Bastion different from other cybersecurity startups is that it wants to be your first and last cybersecurity subscription. It bundles several different products that all revolve around cybersecurity risks with a software-as-a-service approach. Frst, Global Founders Capital, Kima Ventures and Motier Ventures invested in the company, as well as several business angels, such as Denis Duverne, Joshua Motta, Renaud Deraison and Gaëlle Olivier. At Palantir, the four co-founders Arnaud Fournier, Arnaud Drizard, Sébastien Duc and Robin Costé were already working on cybersecurity in one way or another. Some of them were part of a small team in charge of cybersecurity excluding governments and public administrations. One of them was in charge of anti-frau...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk might be ordered to testify under oath in a lawsuit that blames Autopilot, Tesla’s advanced driver assistance system, for a fatal crash in 2018. The tentative ruling, issued by a California judge Wednesday and first reported on by Reuters , came in a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of Walter Huang against Tesla over a crash that killed the Apple engineer. The plaintiff attorneys want to bring Musk to court to testify on recorded statements the billionaire executive made about the capabilities of Autopilot. Musk had previously tweeted a 2016 promotional video for Autopilot as evidence that Tesla “drives itself” with “no human input at all.” In January, Ashok Elluswamy, director of Autopilot software at Tesla, testified that the video was staged using 3D mapping on a predetermined route, rather than relying on cameras, sensors and onboard compute power to actually drive autonomously. Huang’s family argue that the deceased over-relied on the partially ...

AI is very much a work in progress, and we should all be wary of its potential for confidently spouting misinformation. But it seems to be more likely to do so in some languages than others. Why is that? The question comes in the wake of a report by NewsGuard , a misinformation watchdog, that shows how ChatGPT repeats more inaccurate information in Chinese dialects than when asked to do so in English. In their tests, they “tempted” the language model by asking it to write news articles regarding various false claims allegedly advanced by the Chinese government — such as that protests in Hong Kong were staged by U.S.-associated agents provocateurs. When asked to do so in English (both prompt and output), ChatGPT only complied in one out of seven examples: specifically, it generated an article that echoed the official Chinese government line that mass detention of Uyghur people in the country is in fact a vocational and educational effort. But when the prompts and outputs were in si...