It’s Friday (or should I say, Free-yay.) You made it. Pat yourself on the back – then read the rest of this issue of Week in Review, businessroundups.org’s newsletter summarizing the past seven days in tech (sign up here to get it delivered straight to your inbox every Saturday). I’ll be your WiR emcee for the next few weeks until Greg returns from parental leave. God knows I don’t have his humor, but I’ll try to make it up with spunk. Take it easy, please.
First of all, I’m contractually obligated (not really…but maybe?) to highlight businessroundups.org’s upcoming events this calendar year.
businessroundups.org Live is taking a special (virtual) trip to Boston for City Spotlight: Boston on February 27, and it’s completely free. That’s right – free! No excuses for skipping this one. In addition to City Spotlight, TC will be back in Boston in April for Early Stage, with expert-led sessions on growing a — you guessed it — early-stage business. Finally, mark your calendar for businessroundups.org Disrupt 2023, which will take place in San Francisco from September 19-21. It will be one to remember.
Now that the PSAs are out of the way, let’s move on to the roundup:
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Erase your mistakes: One of Google Pixel’s best photo editing features, “Magic Eraser”, is now making its way to other Android and iOS devices. But it won’t be free. This week, Google announced that the popular tool, which uses AI to remove unwanted content from images, will be available to Google One subscribers and existing Pixel owners. Google One subscribers also receive a handful of other editing tools, such as a new HDR video effect, exclusive collage styles, and more.
Facebook Prison: Sarah reports that Meta will reform its fines system based on the recommendations of the Oversight Board, the independent body of experts, academics, civic leaders and lawyers who now weigh in on Meta’s appeal decisions. The social network says it will reshape its system to focus less on penalizing users by limiting their ability to post and more on explaining the reasoning behind content removal, which the social network says will be fairer and more effective. way will be to moderate content on its platform.
TikTok in cars: TikTok is making its way into vehicles, starting with the new Mercedes-Benz E-Class coming to market in fall 2023. The car’s recently updated MBUX infotainment system, which will have a “superscreen” spanning the entire dashboard, will allow drivers to click on the TikTok app and watch videos when the vehicle is parked. How’s that for TikTok overload?
AI in my Spotify: Spotify launched a new AI feature called “DJ” this week to better personalize the music listening experience for its users. Similar to a radio DJ, Spotify’s DJ feature delivers a curated selection of music alongside AI-powered spoken commentary about the songs and artists you like, using what Spotify says is a “stunningly realistic voice.” Neat!
price drop: Netflix has slashed its subscription fees in more than 100 territories over the past week as customers continue to consider which streaming services to keep amid price hikes. The company has come under fire lately after rolling out password sharing rules to Canada, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain, but another possible reason for the price drop is to outperform competitors like Paramount+, Apple TV+ , Disney+ and Hulu.
Military Secrets: On Monday, the US Department of Defense secured an exposed server that had been distributing internal US military emails to the open internet for the past two weeks. The server was hosted on Microsoft’s Azure government cloud for Department of Defense customers, which uses servers that are physically separate from other commercial customers and as such can be used to share sensitive but unclassified government data.
Calculate by OpenAI: OpenAI is quietly launching a new developer platform that allows customers to run the company’s newer machine learning models, such as GPT-3.5, on dedicated capacity. In screenshots of documentation posted to Twitter by early access users, OpenAI describes its forthcoming offering, called Foundry, as “designed for advanced customers with larger workloads.”
YouTube becomes multilingual: YouTube announced this week that it is rolling out support for multilingual audio tracks, allowing creators to add dubbing to their new and existing videos, helping them reach international audiences. The company says the technology to support multilingual audio tracks was built in-house at YouTube, but creators must work directly with third-party dubbing providers to create their audio tracks.
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Here’s your weekly reminder that businessroundups.org has a diverse selection of podcasts for your listening pleasure. Continue this week The businessroundups.org Podcast, Hey before boarding Darrell to talk to Taylor about the Supreme Court cases that could change the internet as we know it. On Chain reaction, Jaquelyn interviewed Alex Adelman, the co-founder and CEO of Lolli, a bitcoin rewards app that allows people to earn bitcoin or cash back when they shop online or in person at more than 10,000 stores. The Found it crew spoke with Michael Chime, the co-founder and CEO of Prepared, which is leading the charge on modernizing 911 calls by providing access to video and photos. And past by Equitythe gang covered trends such as the possible return of IPOs and accelerators that support laid-off tech worker startups.
