Tag Archives: TechCrunch

Google-backed DotPe, which helps businesses in India go online and sell digitally, is in advanced stages of talks to raise about $50 million in a new financing round, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. Temasek, the Singapore state-owned investment firm, is finalizing deliberations to lead the investment in the Gurgaon-headquartered startup, the source said, requesting anonymity as the details are private. Terms of the investment could change and the… Source link

The UK’s competition watchdog has just announced another investigation into Google over potential antitrust abuses around adtech. This is the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) second probe of Google’s adtech practices — after said it would investigate an ad deal between Google and Facebook referred to internally as ‘Jedi Blue’, back in March. (That deal also features in a major antitrust complaint against Google’s adtech over the pond, led by the US State of… Source link

Google Photos is beginning to introduce new Real Tone filters this week, Google announced. The new filters are rolling out on Android, iOS and the web and can be accessed in the ‘Filters’ tab in Google Photos’ image editor. The company says the new Real Tone filters were designed by “professional image makers” to accurately represent various skin tones in photos. “These filters were designed by professional image makers to work well across skin tones,… Source link

Google is starting to gradually roll out ads in YouTube Shorts around the world, the company announced at its Marketing Live event this week. The official launch comes as the company has been experimenting with ads in YouTube Shorts since last year. Starting this week, video action campaigns and app campaigns will automatically scale to YouTube Shorts. The company says later this year, advertisers will be able to connect their product feed to their campaigns and… Source link

A group of more than 40 Democratic members of Congress has urged Google to stop collecting and retaining “unnecessary” location data over fears it could be used to identify people seeking abortions. The letter was sent to Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google’s parent company Alphabet, ahead of the anticipated reversal of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 legal case that guaranteed a person’s constitutional right to abortion. If repealed, individual states… Source link

After being delayed for months, it’s about time that Google rolls out its personalized profiles for Google TV.  According to the company, users will get profiles “over the next few weeks.” In October, Google TV announced profiles that will give each user their own tailored recommendations, watchlists and personalized Google Assistant answers. While this was initially supposed to be available for users at the end of 2021, the update is finally launching. Once… Source link

Google has been working to better integrate its visual search tools from Google Lens into its browser to enable new types of searches that can identify what you see, not just search for things you type. Today, Google is rolling out a new way to use Google Lens on the desktop. Instead of opening a new tab to perform a search, you’ll be able to use Lens on the same page in your Chrome browser to do things like translating an image’s text, identifying an object in an image, or getting… Source link

Google Maps’ Street View feature was created 15 years ago, and since then, has added more than 220 billion Street View images from over 100 countries and territories. Many of us have taken advantage of its capabilities, especially scoping out unknown locations before heading there in person. To celebrate the anniversary, the company announced upgrades today, including a feature on its iOS and Android apps that will display historical Street View imagery right on… Source link

The AI world is still figuring out how to deal with the amazing show of prowess that is DALL-E 2’s ability to draw/paint/imagine just about anything… but OpenAI isn’t the only one working on something like that. Google Research has rushed to publicize a similar model it’s been working on — which it claims is even better. Imagen (get it?) is a text-to-image diffusion-based generator built on large transformer language models that… okay, let’s slow down and unpack that real… Source link

Epic Games isn’t just fighting the app stores over the right to process its own in-app payments in its popular game Fortnite, it’s also taken up its antitrust legal battle with the tech giants via Bandcamp, the internet music company Epic acquired in March. The following month, Epic filed an injunction asking for the right to allow Bandcamp to continue operating as usual instead of being forced to adopt Google’s own payments system as is now required via a policy change, or risk… Source link