Apps

Gopuff launches scheduled deliveries, gifting and in-store pickup • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 19, 2022Posted in Apps, goPuff, grocery delivery, on-demand delivery, Startups, TransportationNo Comments

Rapid grocery deliver startups like Getir, Gopuff and Gorillas, once heralded as the next big thing in on-demand ordering, are running up against logistical challenges that might very well be insurmountable. Even faced with competition and sky-high operating costs, though, they’re taking what steps they can to stick around. Case in point, Gopuff today launched features aimed at eliminating some of the platform’s biggest pain points, like the inability to schedule orders ahead or pick up orders from nearby stockrooms. Starting today, Gopuff customers can place an order when the Gopuff marketplace closes — the exact hours depend on the market — to have Gopuff deliver the order as soon as it reopens. (Needless to say, this doesn’t apply to locations where Gopuff delivers 24/7.) Alternatively, customers can schedule an order in advance for a specific date and time, similar to most major food delivery apps, or arrange for an order to be picked up where Gopuff offers retail and in-store shopping. The in-store shopping experience remains rather limited. According to Gopuff, only in BevMo! outlets — recall that Gopuff acquired BevMo!, the alcohol retailer, for $350 million in 2020 — and locations in New York City is shopping in-store an option. Strictly pickup of online orders will be offered at “many” locations, however, Gopuff says (it’s unclear just how many), with the hours mirroring that of in-app ordering. Gopuff is also introducing gifting, which will allow customers to add gifts to their cart for recipients both on and off the platform. Once they enter the recipient’s address, name and phone number and a gift message, both the gift recipient and the sender will receive a text message confirming a gift order is being prepared. The recipient will also receive SMS alerts when the order is close by, delivered or canceled. Somewhat concerningly, Gopuff didn’t respond to ZebethMedia’s question about whether gift recipients’ information will be retained for marketing or other purposes. Gopuff, like many app-based products and services, collects a broad swath of personal information that it reserves the right to use for ad targeting and promoting its subscription services, as well as sharing with third parties including business partners and “affiliates and subsidiaries.” The new features are only available via the latest Gopuff app (version 8.1.0), the company notes, which began rolling out nationwide this morning. While Gopuff has partnerships with Uber and Just Eat Takeaway to make its inventory perusable through Uber Eats and Grubhub, respectively, the company says that customers using those platforms won’t be able to take advantage of order scheduling, gifting and pick-up — despite the fact that Uber Eats and Grubhub support those features for most other businesses. Gopuff has had a rough go of it lately, no pun intended. Originally intending to IPO as soon as mid-2022 after tapping ex-Disney CEO Bob Iger as an advisor and investor, Gopuff this summer pulled out of Spain, one of its markets, to slash costs, and laid off 10% of its global workforce. Further cuts hit Gopuff in October — mainly affecting various customer service departments — as the startup reportedly looked to secure a credit line as high as $300 million to buffet against inflationary headwinds.

Jumia to cut products and overheads as new management chase profits • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 18, 2022Posted in africa, Apps, Commerce, jumiaNo Comments

Last Monday, Jumia co-founders Sacha Poignonnec and Jeremy Hodara resigned from their roles as co-CEOs, just ten days before the company’s third-quarter 2022 financial report. The end of their tenure, therefore, marked the first time a new face — Francis Dufay, the ex-chief at Jumia Ivory Coast and now acting CEO of Jumia — took charge of the investor briefing. On the call, Dufay was quick to emphasize why the e-commerce giant’s supervisory board decided to install new management, stressing that Jumia’s approach to turning a profit after half a decade of successive losses on the NYSE (as Africa’s first publicly traded company) required more deliberate execution and a return to basic e-commerce fundamentals. Jumia’s third-quarter report showed a glimpse into what this new approach could offer. For instance, the company’s operating loss and adjusted EBITDA loss fell double-digits year-over-year. Its operating loss declined 33% from $64 million to $43.2 million, while adjusted EBITDA losses were trimmed 13% from $52.5 million to $45.5 million; their lowest level in six quarters. This reduction in losses is driven by a material decline in marketing costs in the form of sales and advertising expenses, which decreased 31.5% from $24 million to $16.4 million year-over-year, and an improved monetization plan that saw gross profit increase of 29.2% within the same period. “We want to significantly improve our unit economics and create the right fundamentals for long-term growth. In the past, we’ve seen a lot of growth as a function of marketing, and promotional events, which then, as a consequence, lead to the alteration of our economics,” Dufay told ZebethMedia in an interview discussing Jumia’s new strategy. “This is not the way we want to see the future. And we believe that we have lots of success cases across our countries that show that we can grow and improve economics simultaneously.” Dufay said he wants Jumia to become a more attractive platform for its third-party vendors to sell on. One way Jumia plans to achieve this is to move away from monetization shortcuts it took in the past where it increased commissions for sellers’ services (for instance, it charges 20-25% for fashion items and 5-10% for electronic items). Instead, the company intends to generate new revenues through value-add such as advertising solutions and building a stronger local supply of goods. The latter, Dufay adds, is particularly important as Jumia battles local currency depreciation from its main markets: Nigeria, Egypt and Ivory Coast), which impacts its e-commerce business. According to the Q3 2022 report, the Nigerian Naira, Egyptian Pound and West African CFA depreciated by 5%, 14% and 13% respectively against the dollar during the nine-month period ending September 30, 2022, compared to the same period of 2021. Many companies around the world are dealing with the impacts of currency fluctuations. Jumia is a good example of the issue, with its revenues coming in at $50.5 million for Q3 2022, a figure that would have been $56.6 million if global currencies had held steady over the last year. “The volatility in foreign currencies has a big impact on us. Most importantly, it impacts the supply on the market and makes it harder for all retailers, including Jumia, to get the right supply at the right time to sell to customers,” said Dufay. “In several countries, for example, we have seen that governments have taken action to protect their currencies which often involves putting very big constraints on customs [which] inevitably impacts the kind of supply that we manage to bring to the website. But we believe that we are laying out the right plan to mitigate that, one of which is focusing a lot on capturing local supply from distributors and vendors, which is something very critical across all markets. Doing well on that part will help us mitigate the current macroeconomic situation.” As Jumia restructures its local supply chain, it’s scaling back some of its offerings that haven’t made a good return on investments across its eleven markets. Dufay added: “These are projects we don’t feel are adding the right value to our ecosystem, to our customers and vendors and the platform.” However, some of these product lines will continue to operate in a few markets. These include Jumia’s logistics-as-a-service platform, which launched some quarters back and at some point moved 3.5 million packages (still active in Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Morocco), and First Party grocery e-commerce (active in Nigeria and Ivory Coast). Jumia Prime, on the other hand, has been paused indefinitely. Launched in 2019, Jumia Prime was pitched as a subscription-based delivery service providing customers with free shipping on its marketplace. The product, modeled after Amazon Prime, was one of Jumia’s main user acquisition strategies, and while there are more than 3.1 million quarterly active customers on the platform (Q3 2022), it turns out this traction, and the volume of business Prime brought in compared to the level of investment it received, fell short of the company’s targets. According to Jumia, it’s discontinuing Jumia Prime because “it was too early in the adoption curve to push such a product” and it’s relieving the team in a broader effort to reduce the company’s General & Administrative (G&A) expense. Jumia’s G&A expenses, excluding share-based compensation, reached $28.3 million in Q3 2022, up 12% year-over-year. While the company implemented hiring freezes earlier this year, it intends to cut more staff costs and downsize in several areas, said Dufay. The number one corporate priority is to enact changes in the Dubai office, where most of the former management team was based, including the former co-CEOs. A handful of contracts have been terminated already (Dufay didn’t disclose how many) while those who still have roles at the company are relocating to various African offices as Jumia attempts to distribute its leadership across the continent. Jumia is also preparing to make significant changes and reduce staff size on a case-by-case basis in each of its markets by the end of the year. “We’re trying to be very clear

Daylight, the LGBTQ+ neobank, raises cash to launch subscription plan for family planning • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 18, 2022Posted in Anthemis Group, Apps, Bank, citi ventures, daylight, Fintech, funding, Gaingels, Kapor Capital, lgbtq, neobank, queer, startup, StartupsNo Comments

A day after a bill that would codify same-sex marriage in the U.S. cleared a key hurdle in the Senate, Daylight, a digital bank that pitches itself as LGBTQIA+-friendly, closed a $15 million Series A round led by Anthemis Group with participation from CMFG Ventures, Kapor Capital, Citi Ventures and Gaingels. Daylight Co-founder and CEO Rob Curtis says that the new capital will be used to, in his words, “build the financial products and services to help queer people live their best lives” — starting with a subscription plan called Daylight Grow designed to help prospective queer families with financial planning. “There are over 30 million LGBTQ+ Americans with a spending power of around $1 trillion and yet the community lacks access to the suite of products and services they need to live their best lives,” Curtis told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “Daylight was created with a single mission: to build the financial products and services to help queer people live their best lives.” Curtis co-launched Daylight with Billie Simmons, a trans woman, and Paul Barnes-Hoggett in early 2020. Prior to starting Daylight, Curtis worked for several organizations supporting the LGBTQ+ lifestyle and causes, including Gaydar, a dating site for gay and bisexual men. He also co-founded Squad Social and Helsa Helps, startups aiming to improve access to mental health for members in the LGBTQ+ community. Daylight is a part of wave of recent neobanks — bank-like fintech companies that operate online, without physical branch networks — organized around aspirational causes and missions. Rapper Killer Mike’s Greenwood aims to help Black and Latinx communities build generational wealth. Majority, which launched the same year as Greenwood (2020), seeks to build banking tools and resources for immigrants. Purpose Banking, Aspiration and One all promise to never let deposits fund fossil fuels. Image Credits: Daylight With the wealth of ethics-forward fintechs out there, why found a neobank for LGBTQ+ people? According to Curtis, most mainstream banking products simply weren’t designed with U.S.-based queer folks in mind. (Pride Bank, a neobank with similarly queer-forward branding, is based in Brazil.) For example, Daylight provides debit cards with customers’ chosen names, which aren’t always the same as what’s on their ID. It offers members 10% cash back every time they spend with a queer and allied business that Daylight has partnered with. And it offers guided goals for gender-affirming procedures like top surgery and facial feminization. Beyond cash management features like a checking account, free ATMs and the ability for members to get paid two days early, Daylight hosts communities where customers can ask questions around “queer financial literacy,” such as family planning, in what Curtis claims is a safe and supportive environment. “At Daylight, our mission has always been to break down the financial barriers that hold LGBTQ+ people back … In this post-Dobbs world, Daylight’s commitment to supporting queer families has never been more necessary,” Curtis said, referring to the Supreme Court case that legalized abortion bans in the U.S. and opened the door to legal challenges of marriage equality. Certainly, members of the LGBTQ+ community face fiscal challenges that many cisgender, straight adults never do. Some suffer the consequences of being kicked out of their homes by unaccepting parents. Others find themselves on the hook for HIV/AIDS treatment, hormone therapy and fertility procedures. Most queer people gravitate toward pricey metro areas because they’re more accepting and progressive, and many queer people lack a safety net — whether because they lack family support or don’t have children who can take care of them. For those reasons and others, LGBTQ+ people frequently earn less, live in poverty and have less in pension savings than their cisgender counterparts. The situation for transgender people is particularly dire, with the poverty rate for the transgender community in the U.S. averaging around 30% — close to double the rate of cisgender adults — according to a 2019 study from the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute. Transgender people are also twice as likely to be unemployed and four times as likely to have a household income below $10,000; the 2021 U.S. federal poverty was $12,880. The aforementioned Daylight Grow isn’t a cure-all, but targets the major hurdles many queer couples encounter in starting a family. This is a significant portion of Daylight’s customers. A recent poll by the Family Equality Council found that nearly two-thirds of LGBTQ millennials — 63% — are considering becoming parents for the first time or expanding their family. Image Credits: Daylight When the product launches in early 2023, Simmons says that Daylight Grow will offer a personalized “family creation plan” covering financial, legal and logistical milestones tailored to individual states and needs, “family planning concierges” to provide financial advice and logistical support, a “family-building marketplace” with vetted family attorney networks and recommendations for IVF and surrogacy clinics, and in-person financial and fertility education events. “Family creation is a major life event for queer people and the challenges we face are increasingly more complex than those for non-LGBTQ people,” Simmons told ZebethMedia via email. “The launch of Daylight Grow will help queer people navigate through the complex legal and financial challenges involved with starting a family, making it faster and easier to start a family, and unlocking critical intergenerational wealth for our community.” Daylight Grow will also offer access to family-building loans, a potential game-changer for queer customers who’ve dealt with discrimination from traditional banks. According to a 2019 study, same-sex borrowers were 73% more likely to be denied a mortgage or be approved for a mortgage at a higher-than-average interest rate. Daylight plans to offer hundreds of free Grow subscriptions to low-income, marginalized families in states where LGBTQ+ rights are under significant legal attack, Curtis said. Which states — and Grow’s pricing — are still being decided. Daylight has raised $20 million in capital to date. Curtis wouldn’t answer questions about revenue and hiring plans, preferring, at least for now, to keep the focus on the company’s core mission.

New Twitter accounts will have to wait 90 days before buying a subscription • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 18, 2022Posted in Apps, elon buys twitter, Twitter, twitter blue, verificationNo Comments

Twitter has published a policy change saying that newly-created Twitter accounts will have to wait 90 days before being allowed to subscribe to the new Twitter Blue plan and get verified. This is likely to avoid impersonation and spam from verified accounts. “Newly created Twitter accounts will not be able to subscribe to Twitter Blue for 90 days. We may also impose waiting periods for new accounts in the future at our discretion without notice,” the company said on its FAQ page about Twitter Blue. Prior to this, the Elon Musk-led company just said that new accounts created after November 9 won’t be able to purchase the $8 Twitter subscription plan. Twitter Blue terms on Nov 10 noting accounts created after Nov 9 can’t sign up for Twitter Blue. Image Credits: Twitter The old terms were published during the rushed rollout of Twitter Blue, which caused havoc and a barrage of verified accounts started impersonating brands, celebrities, and athletes. Because of fake verified accounts tweeting misinformation, shares of companies like Eli Lilly and Lockheed Martin took a dip. To avoid impersonation, the company has prohibited verified users from changing their names. Earlier this week, Musk said that paid accounts will lose the verified checkmark until the social network confirms that the new name follows its rules. However, the company hasn’t made any formal policy around that. With new release, changing your verified name will cause loss of checkmark until name is confirmed by Twitter to meet Terms of Service — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 15, 2022 Twitter is in the soup with the new paid plan. On the one hand, Musk has promised that subscribers will get prominence on the notification tab, replies, and searches — the company briefly moved the verified notification tab’s position to place it before all notifications too. On the other hand, after assessing the initial results from the verification rollout, it clearly has to thwart spam and impersonation to prevent more advertisers from leaving the platform. As a result, Musk paused the rollout of Twitter Blue last week. He also promised to relaunch the relaunched Twitter Blue program on November 29, but in Elonverse things can change rather quickly.

Facebook is removing several information fields from profiles, including religious and political views • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 17, 2022Posted in Apps, Facebook, meta, SocialNo Comments

Facebook is notifying users that it will remove four information fields from profiles starting next month. These fields include religious views, political views, addresses and the “Interested in” field, which indicates a user’s sexual orientation. The change will go into effect on December 1. A spokesperson for the company told ZebethMedia in an email that the reason behind the change is to make the social network easier to use. “As part of our efforts to make Facebook easier to navigate and use, we’re removing a handful of profile fields: Interested In, Religious Views, Political Views, and Address,” the the spokesperson said in a statement. “We’re sending notifications to people who have these fields filled out, letting them know these fields will be removed. This change doesn’t affect anyone’s ability to share this information about themselves elsewhere on Facebook.” The change was first spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra, who tweeted a screenshot of the notice being sent to users who have these fields filled out. The notice indicates that users’ other information will remain on their profiles, along with the rest of their contact and basic information. Facebook’s decision to get rid of these specific profile fields is part of its efforts to streamline its platform, which currently consists of several features that are somewhat outdated. It’s worth noting that the information fields that Facebook is choosing to remove are ones that other major social networks don’t offer. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok have simple bios that let users share a little bit about themselves without going to specific details, such as political or religious views. In the past, people may have been interested in filling out their profiles with additional information, but as privacy infringements have come to light, users may no longer want to share extra details about themselves online. The news comes as Meta laid off 11,000 workers, which is about 13% of its workforce last week. The layoffs came amid a tough time for Meta, which provided lukewarm guidance last month October regarding its upcoming fourth-quarter earnings. The layoffs marked the most significant job cuts in the tech giant’s history.

WhatsApp broadens in-app features to help users browse and find businesses • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 17, 2022Posted in Apps, Commerce, eCommerce, meta, Social, WhatsApp, whatsapp businessNo Comments

WhatsApp is introducing new Yellow Pages-like features to help users find businesses from within the instant messaging app, part of the Meta-owned platform’s growing attempts to make deeper inroads with e-commerce. The encrypted messaging service, used by over 2 billion users worldwide, said on Thursday that it’s expanding a feature called ‘Directory’ to all users in the key overseas market of Brazil to help them browse and discover local small businesses in their neighborhoods. The nationwide rollout follows WhatsApp testing the directory feature in Sao Paulo last year. WhatsApp is also introducing the ability to find larger businesses from within the app. The feature – rolling out in several markets (Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Mexico and the U.K.), a spokesperson told ZebethMedia – will allow users to browse businesses by category such as banking, food and drink and travel as well as by their names. The feature, called ‘Business Search,’ aims to help individuals avoid having to spend time looking for phone numbers of businesses from their websites and keying in and saving those details to their phone contacts, the company said at a WhatsApp-focused business summit in Brazil. The new features underscore WhatsApp’s growing attempts to turn the behemoth messaging app into a commerce engine, one of its largest bets to generate revenue from the otherwise free service. The company disclosed in the quarterly earnings last month that the click-to-WhatsApp ads business had grown 80% year-over-year and was on track to generate $1.5 billion in annual revenue. “We want to make it easier for people to get more done on WhatsApp,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the summit. “Part of that is building better ways to engage with businesses. And while millions of businesses in Brazil use it for chat, we haven’t made it easy to discover businesses or buy from them, so people end up having to use work-arounds. The ultimate goal here is to make it so you can find, message and buy from a business all in the same WhatsApp chat.” Brazil, the most populous nation in Latin America, is a key region for WhatsApp. The platform, which has amassed over 120 million users in Brazil, has chosen the South American market for testing several new business offerings. WhatsApp last year introduced a payments-to-merchant service in Brazil, in what was briefly a world-first feature for WhatsApp. It rolled back the functionality shortly afterwards following the local central bank stating that adequate risk and regulatory tests were needed to be undertaken first. Brazil’s monetary authority said at the time that its decision would “preserve an adequate competitive environment, that ensures the functioning of a payment system that’s interchangeable, fast, secure, transparent, open and cheap.” The encrypted messaging platform, which received the approval to operate peer-to-peer payments in the nation last year, said it’s still waiting for the regulatory clearance on merchant payments. But that’s not stopping it from continuing some development work. Payments giant Cielo, multinational Fiserv, merchants acquirer Getnet, payments platform Mercado Pago and credit and debit cards player Rede have built the technical integration with WhatsApp and many of them are participating in production testing, Meta-owned unit said. “If you run a business in Brazil, that means people will be able to find you, contact you and purchase from you all in one WhatsApp chat, and we’re working to bring this experience to more countries in the coming months too,” Zuckerberg said. “This is the next step for business messaging and I’m looking forward to hearing about the opportunities this unlocks for all of you.”

Speak lands investment from OpenAI to expand its language learning platform • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 17, 2022Posted in Apps, funding, language learning, OpenAI Startup Fund, Robotics & AI, SPEAK, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Speak, an English language learning platform with AI-powered features, today announced that it raised $27 million in a Series B funding round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, with participation from Lachy Groom, Josh Buckley, Justin Mateen, Gokul Rajaram and Founders Fund. Notably, Speak is the third startup in which OpenAI, the AI lab closely aligned with Microsoft, has publicly invested through its fund — the others being Descript and Mem. OpenAI Startup Fund participants receive early access to new OpenAI systems and Azure resources from Microsoft in addition to capital. “We are very excited to partner with the outstanding team at Speak, who are well-positioned to deliver on this powerful application of generative AI — making language learning effective and accessible,” Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s COO and the manager of the OpenAI Startup Fund, said in a statement. “Speak has the potential to revolutionize not just language learning, but education broadly, and this aligns with the OpenAI Startup Fund’s goal of accelerating the impact of powerful AI to improve people’s lives.” Speak was founded in 2016 by Connor Zwick and Andrew Hsu, both of whom had an acute interest in AI from an early age. Hsu has a health background, having completed a neuroscience PhD at Stanford before joining Zwick to co-launch Speak. Zwick came from the edtech industry — he sold his first startup, the flashcard app Flashcards+, to Chegg in 2013 after dropping out of Harvard. Zwick and Hsu met through The Thiel Fellowship originally, Hsu being in the first cohort and Zwick in the second. (Note that Founders Fund, which Thiel co-founded, pledged cash toward Speak’s Series B.) Prior to starting Speak, the two spent a year studying and researching machine learning and developing accent detection algorithms using YouTube videos as training data. “Most language learning software can help with the beginning part of learning basic vocabulary and grammar, but gaining any degree of fluency requires speaking out loud in an interactive environment,” Zwick told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “To date, the only way people can get that sort of practice is through human tutors, which can also be expensive, difficult and intimidating.” Image Credits: Speak Speak’s solution is a collection of interactive speaking experiences that allow learners to practice conversing in English. Through the platform, users can hold open-ended conversations with an “AI tutor” on a range of topics while receiving feedback on their pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. The premise might sound like Duolingo and some of the other AI-powered language learning apps out there, such as Yanadoo, ELSA and Loora. But Zwick insists that Speak’s AI tech is superior to most. “Under the hood, we combine the latest from OpenAI with in-house models to deliver the best performance across speech recognition, speech generation and conversation generation,” he said. “We’re able to provide feedback on things like pronunciation and more natural vocabulary and syntax using [our] models … We are accumulating a substantial data set of second-language labeled speaking examples, which enables us to uniquely deliver state-of-the-art speech models for foreign accented speakers.” Whether that’s true is up for debate. Speak didn’t provide any empirical data showing its platform outperforms rivals. But what Speak does demonstrably have is early momentum. It’s one of the top education apps in Korea on the iOS App Store, with over 15 million lessons started annually, 100,000 active subscribers and “double-digit million” annual recurring revenue. Speak offers auto-renewing monthly and annual subscriptions, both of which provide access to courses, electives and review content in addition to the AI-guided practice sessions. For Speak’s next act, the company plans to expand to new languages and markets, including Japan, and invest in features that leverage text-generating models like OpenAI’s GPT-3. “The pandemic accelerated remote work and the expansion of global, distributed teams, meaning there’s even more demand for people around the world to speak the same language. It’s also driven demand for new solutions more oriented around remote or programmatic experiences as opposed to in-person instruction.” Zwick added. “Speak has remained fairly lean and has multiple years of runway enabling it to control its own destiny regardless of the fundraising environment over the next few years.” Currently, Speak has 40 employees across offices in San Francisco (its headquarters), Seoul and Ljubljana, Slovenia. Zwick says that the new funding, which brings Speak’s total raised to “just over” $47 million, will be put toward expanding the company’s engineering, machine learning, product, marketing, content and operations departments.

TikTok begins testing an early version of its platform research API • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 17, 2022Posted in Apps, Social, TikTokNo Comments

Earlier this year, TikTok announced that it’s developing a research API to improve access to public and anonymized data about content and activity on its app. Now, the company says it’s ready to make a beta version of its platform research API available and has asked members of its Content and Safety Advisory Councils to test an early version of the API. “To get started, we’ve asked members of our Content and Safety Advisory Councils with expertise in misinformation, violent extremism, hateful behavior, and emerging technologies to test an early version of our platform research API,” TikTok said in a blog post. “They’ll have access to public data as we gather their feedback on usability and the overall experience. We’re dedicated to hearing and incorporating feedback from testers and creating an API that will meet the needs of the scientific community while respecting the privacy of our community.” At the time of the initial announcement, TikTok said researchers currently don’t have an easy way to assess content or conduct tests on its platform, which is why it saw the need for a research API. In addition to the platform research API, TikTok is developing a content moderation API. The company plans to share more details in the coming months. The moderation system API will give select researchers a way to evaluate TikTok’s content moderation systems and examine existing content on the app. Researchers will also be able to upload their own content to see how different types of content are either permitted, rejected or passed to moderators for further evaluation. TikTok’s update on its research API work comes amid renewed calls from FCC commissioner Brendan Carr to ban the app. This wasn’t the first time Carr voiced this idea. After BuzzFeed News reported data improprieties implied by leaked internal communications, Carr wrote in June to Apple and Google calling the app an “unacceptable national security risk” and asking the companies to remove it from their app stores.

Google rolls out new features across Maps, Search and Shopping • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 17, 2022Posted in Apps, Google, google search, Google Shopping, Google-MapsNo Comments

Google announced today that it’s introducing a slew of new Maps, Search and Shopping features. The company revealed majority of the new features during its Search On event in September and is now starting to roll them out to users. Search Starting today, users will be able to use Search to find their favorite dish at a restaurant near them. For example, you can search “truffle mac and cheese near me” to see which nearby restaurants carry the dish on their menu. Once you find a specific dish that you’re looking for, you can get more information about its price, ingredients and more. Another new Search functionality lets you use Google’s multisearch feature to find specific food near you. Say you see something tasty looking online, but don’t know what it is or where to find it. You can now use Lens in the Google app for Android or iOS to snap a picture or take a screenshot of a dish and add the words “near me” to find a place that sells it nearby. Image Credits: Google Later this year, Google is going roll out an update to its Lens AR Translate capabilities so users can more seamlessly translate text on complex backgrounds. Instead of covering up the original text like it currently does, Google is going to erase the text and re-create the pixels underneath with an AI-generated background, and then overlay the translated text on top of the image. Maps As for the new Maps features, Google is launching a new visual search experience called Live View in London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, San Francisco and Tokyo. “Say you’re visiting New York with plans to knock out your holiday shopping and catch up with friends,” Google says in a blog post. “Lift your phone and tap on the camera icon in the search bar to see nearby stores and other places like coffee shops, banks and ATMs. With AR-powered directions and arrows, you can see what direction they’re in and how far away they are — and even spot places that aren’t in your immediate view (like a clothing store around the block) to get a true sense of the neighborhood at a glance.” If you want to find other places, you can tap on categories to explore what restaurants, bars, dessert shops, parks and transit stations are nearby. In addition to displaying information about where places are, users will be able to see key information about each spot overlaid, such as whether the location is busy, if its open, what the price range is, etc. Image Credits: Google Another new Maps feature makes it easier for EV owners to find the best charging station for their vehicle. Now, you can search for “EV charging stations” and select the “fast charge” filter. You can also filter for stations that offer your EV’s plug type. Google also announced that it’s expanding its “accessible places” feature globally after initially launching it in the U.S., Australia, Japan and the U.K. in 2020. The feature is designed to help people determine whether a place is wheelchair accessible. You can turn on the “accessible places” setting in the app, after which you will start to see a wheelchair icon on places that are wheelchair accessible. You’ll be able to see if a place has accessible seating, restrooms and parking. Google notes that the feature can also be helpful if you want to avoid stairs because you have a stroller or are using a cart. Shopping Google has announced a new AR shopping feature that is designed to make it easier to find your exact foundation match. The company says its new photo library features 148 models representing a diverse spectrum of skin tones, ages, genders, face shapes, ethnicities and skin types. As a result, it should be easier for shoppers to better visualize what different products will look like on them. Image Credits: Google “Here’s how it works: Search for a foundation shade on Google across a range of prices and brands, like ‘Armani Luminous Silk Foundation’,” Google explained in a blog post. “You’ll see what that foundation looks like on models with a similar skin tone, including before and after shots, to help you decide which one works best for you. Once you’ve found one you like, just select a retailer to buy.” Users can now also shop for shoes using AR. You can start exploring shoes from brands like Saucony, VANS and Merrell starting today. The feature will be compatible with more brands in the future, Google says. You can start by searching for a sneaker type, such as “Shop blue VANS sneakers” and tap “View in my space.” Then, you’ll be able to spin, zoom and see the shoes in your space to make it easier to see if you like the color, laces, tread, etc.