 |
|
|
|||||
Google’s YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit President Donald Trump brought after the video site suspended his account following the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks on the Capitol following the election that resulted in him leaving the White House for four years.The settlement of the more than four-year-old case earmarks $22 million for Trump to contribute to the Trust for the National Mall and a construction of a White House ballroom, according to court documents filed Monday. The remaining $2.5 million will be paid to other parties involved in the case, including the writer Naomi Wolf and the American Conservative Union.Alphabet, the parent of Google, is the third major technology company to settle a volley of lawsuits that Trump brought for what he alleged had unfairly muzzled him after his first term as president ended in January 2021. He filed similar cases Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Twitter before it was bought by billionaire Elon Musk in 2022 and rebranded as X.Meta agreed to pay $25 million to settle Trumps’ lawsuit over his 2021 suspension from Facebook and X agreed to settle the lawsuit that Trump brought against Twitter for $10 million. When the lawsuits against Meta. Twitter and YouTube were filed, legal experts predicted Trump had little chance of prevailing.After buying Twitter for $44.5 billion, Musk later became major contributor to Trump’s successful 2024 campaign that resulted in his re-election and then spent several months leading a cost-cutting effort that purged thousands of workers from the federal government payroll before the two had a bitter falling out. Both Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg were among the tech leaders who lined up behind Trump during his second inauguration in January in a show of solidarity that was widely interpreted as a sign of the industry’s intention to work more closely with the president than during his first administration.ABC News, meanwhile, agreed to pay $15 million in December toward Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll. And in July, Paramount decided to pay Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit regarding editing at CBS’ storied “60 Minutes” news program.The settlement does not constitute an admission of liability, the filing says. Google confirmed the settlement but declined to comment beyond it.Google declined to comment on the reasons for the settlement., but Trump’s YouTube account has been restored since 2023. The settlement is will barely dent Alphabet, which has a market value of nearly $3 trillion an increase of about $600 billion, or 25%, since Trump’s return to the White House.The disclosure of the settlement came a week before a scheduled Oct. 6 court hearing to discuss the case with U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers in Oakland, California. Barbara Ortutay and Michael Liedtke, AP Technology Writers
Category:
E-Commerce
The new Adobe Premiere Mobile is now available for free in the Apple Store. It promises pro-level video editing for YouTube and TikTok prosor anyone who needs cutting multiple tracks of video at 4K resolution together with motion graphics, subtitles generation, overlay captions, AI-generated stickers, and a never-ending list of technical features. That’s cool, but Adobe really had me on board when it showed off its AI sound generator, which can interpret your vocals to generate actual effects. Like you hum, “pa-pa! pa-pa! Paaaaa-para-pa-PA!” in your iPhone’s microphone, ask Premier to turn it into a fanfare, and it will remake your voice into a full orchestral 20th-Century-Foxy intro. It’s a fun feature that will save people countless hours going through never-ending lists of sound effects and music clips for their video edits. But please disregard my childhood Freddie Mercury dreams for a minute. The new Premiere looks like an excellent upgrade to Adobe Premiere Rush, the company’s previous free mobile video app. Rush looked bad and behaved even worse. Its interface was too hard and imprecise for my fat fingers to navigate on a tiny screen, and its feature set was lacking at best. Users often complained about the app simply not working. Adobe promises that this will not happen with the new Premiere Mobile, which is supposed to handle 4K HDR video with ease on any modern iPhone thanks to its new native iOS architecture. “Premiere Mobile is built from the ground up to take advantage of the core technology the iPhone offers”, says Mike Folgner, director of product management, digital video and audio at Adobe. “Creators want frame-by-frame precision, responsive and fast performance, and the ability to work across multiple tracks with full creative control. We saw how excited creators were about infinite layers in Photoshop mobile, and we knew we needed to bring that same freedom to Premiere mobile where were offering creators unlimited tracks.” Its unlimited multitrack timeline actually works like the desktop version, the company claims, editing with frame-accurate precision. [Image: Adobe] “We know that more and more content is being created entirely on mobile, from quick, short-form clips to more advanced edits,” Folgner tells me. “Its important to us that we meet creators where they are and empower all creators to tell their stories. “With Premiere Mobile, our goal is to provide the precision and control needed for complex edits, while keeping the experience intuitive for those just getting started.” A new look Aesthetically, the new apps interface seems to have taken a page from the successful Photoshop Mobile, with new, bolder control handles and style. Indeed, as Folgner points out, they have applied the same design principles and language to the new app. “Were making significant strides so that if a user is familiar with a toolset or interaction in one app, they can easily recognize and understand it in another,” he says. It seems that Adobe has finally figured out that a tiny phone display requires an entirely different interface. The larger controls and AI-aided featuresfrom the way clips get cut and snap to each other to its one-click background removal featurewill help with that. [Image: Adobe] At least one beta tester is happy with the UX redesign. YouTuber and designer Mai Pham believes “it is just truly built differently.” When I asked her how, she say it’s built for mobile workflows, and that it is a “game changer.” For Pham, “the large timeline view really makes it feel powerful, but still intuitive on a phone. Its not just a desktop tool squeezed into mobile, its designed differently, and I cant wait to see how it grows and evolves. Folgner says Adobe has worked with hundreds of creators throughout several stages of the process to shape the new app with their feedback. He claims that beta testers are excited about “how more efficient, unconstrained, and fluid” the new app is. Music to my lips The Generative Sound Effects tool is what stole my attention, however. It’s a good example of how AI can actually help the creative process. Premiere Mobile doesn’t make you search in a database to slap a stock audio clip onto your timeline: it creates perfectly timed sound elements based on text prompts and voice input. You describe the sound you want, hum the timing, and the AI builds custom audio that matches exactly what you want. This matters because most creators spend ridiculous amounts of time hunting through stock audio libraries or recording their own Foley effects. Now they can conjure soundscapes with their mouths. The app also includes a speech enhancing feature, another mus-have AI feature when it works. In theory, it transforms amateur audio recordings from your phones mic into crystal-clear voiceovers by removing echo and background noises. [Image: Adobe] AI galore Adobe is leaning hard on AI for many other functions. The new app includes a way to generate animated captions following different styles, with automatic subtitle generation, motion effects, and cinematic transitions all powered by AI. It also has automated color grading tools to unify your clips’ looks or change the mood of your video. These are handled with a single finger in what Adobe calls tap-to-adjust functionality. Adobe also claims that its Firefly-based tools will let users generate commercially safe stickers, turn images to video clips directly within the mobile interface, and expand the background of a video clip. Finally, one-tap exports automatically resize videos for every major social platform including TikTok, YouTube Shorts, or Instagram, keeping the main action in frame again using AI. This intelligent export system, Adobe claims, creates platform-optimized versions with proper aspect ratios and compression settings. Adobe Premiere Mobile is available now forpaPA-paPAAAAAA!free.
Category:
E-Commerce
OpenAI just released Instant Checkout for ChatGPTa new feature that lets users directly make purchases within the ChatGPT interface. ChatGPT can now spend your money for you. Its a huge dealboth for users, brands, and the future of agentic AI. Heres why. Stickers at the ready Consumers are already enthusiastically turning to chatbots like ChatGPT to research products before deciding what to buy. As TechCrunch shared earlier this year, referrals from chatbots to top merchant websites are up almost 400% year over year. I personally used ChatGPT to research an $800+ laptop purchase this summer. Before, users could do their research in ChatGPT, but they needed to go directly to a merchants website to actually check out. Instant checkout seeks to close that loop by allowing you to buy products within ChatGPTs interfacesometimes with as little as a single click. I tested out the new system within hours of its launch. OpenAI initially rolled out Instant Checkout with a single merchant partner: Etsy. (Shopify retailers will apparently follow soon.) To see how it works, I fired up my ChatGPT interface and asked the bot to find me a Bichon Frise sticker on Etsy (Bichons are the best kind of dogand the kind I happen to have). After about 30 seconds of research, ChatGPT presented me with three different Bichon Frise sticker options. Helpfully, it suggested which sticker would be best for a water bottle, the back of my laptop, and other use cases. Before, I wouldve had to go to Etsys website to actually buy my sticker. Now, though, when I clicked on the one I liked best, a prominent Buy button appeared. Clicking it brought up a standard set of payment optionsGoogle Pay, Link payments, and the like. Selecting an existing credit card from my Google Pay account, I confirmed my address and pressed Buy. ChatGPT popped up a message saying it was communicating with Etsy. Seconds later, I got a purchase confirmation in my ChatGPT window. I had spent $4.81, and my Bichon Frise sticker was on the way! Why it matters Yes, the ability to purchase bespoke vinyl stickers using the worlds most powerful AI is neat. But in the bigger scheme of things, why does Instant Checkout matter? Firstly, instant checkout is significant because its not intended to be a one-off tool. Along with its launch, OpenAI rolled out a new open source protocoltermed the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)that the company says will allow for direct communications between merchants and providers of chatbots like ChatGPT. By implementing ACP, merchants can make it easy for chatbot users to purchase things directly from them. The fact that OpenAI rolled out a fully formed protocol along with its new feature suggests theyre trying to build an ecosystem for chatbot shopping, not simply rake in a bit more revenue during the upcoming Black Friday season. The company clearly hopes that other chatbot builders will adopt its protocol, creating an ecosystem that will bring in a wide range of merchants. The release notes for Instant Checkout say that any merchant using the Stripe platform can enable the new protocol in a few clicks. Many retailers are doubtless scrambling to have their tech teams do that straight away. If OpenAI succeeds with this ambition, theyll put their tool in a place to compete with the Amazons and Walmarts of the worldnot just Google and other search engines. If chatbot shopping really takes off, it could become a whole new sales channel for merchants. The fact that it suppots small merchants and allows purchases in a single clickwithout an external merchant accountcould help to dramatically level the playing field for merchants and creators who struggle to compete with Amazon and other giants. The new protocol is also significant because it gives a clear why to the emerging discipline of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). As Ive shared previously, brands are scrambling to get their products mentioned and recommended within chatbots. Before, though, many brands wondered if doing the work of GEO was really worth it. Referrals from AI bots are increasing rapidly, but theyre still tiny. Why invest money and resources in getting your brand into chatbots now? Why not wait and see what the future brings? With Instant Checkout, chatbots are now not just a research tool, but an actual source of revenue and sales. Its also far easier with a protocol like ACP to attribute purchases directly back to a chat. That will make brands far more willing to throw money at generative engine optimization in an effort to get not only mentions, but actual sales from the bots. I already predicted a generative engine optimization craze before Instant Checkout rolled outthe new feature only deepens the appeal of GEO. Useful agents? Finally, instant checkout represents the newest direction for the concept of AI agentswhich has seen feverish excitement in Silicon Valley, but not much application in the real world. Its cool to watch a computer research your flight to Atlanta or plan out a lunch for you. But most people probably wont actually use AI to do those things. If an AI can actually close the loop and directly make purchases on your behalf, though, that might make AI agents worth using. Imagine asking ChatGPT to plan your kids firetruck themed birthday party (the kind of thing many parents, myself included, already do). If the system just gave you some ideas for cake toppers and placemats, that would be neat, but of limited value. If it could list all of the items you needed to make an awesome party, get your permission to buy them from 10 different merchants at once, and then have them all sent to your door with a single click, that would be a much more useful tool. People already use OpenAIs Deep Researchone of the only successful applications of agentic AI technologyto explore new topics or summarize news. With Instant Checkout OpenAI may have created another agentic AI tool that normal people will actually use. OpenAI has already proven itself adept at spending gobs of money from venture capital backers and partners like Microsoft. With Instant Checkout, its ready to start spending yours, too.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||