Global News Wire reports: “Menlo Ventures, a leading venture capital firm investing at the forefront of AI, announced its first cohort of 18 companies backed by the $100 million Anthology Fund today. Launched in partnership with Anthropic to accelerate AI-first innovation, the fund has received thousands of applications from entrepreneurs worldwide since its July announcement.”
The Verge reports: “Instagram is planning to introduce a generative AI editing feature next year that will allow users to “change nearly any aspect of your videos.” The tech is powered by Meta’s Movie Gen AI model according to a teaser posted by Instagram head Adam Mosseri, and aims to provide creators with more tools to help transform their content and bring their ideas to life without extensive video editing or manipulation skills.”
Music Business Worldwide reports: “San Francisco-based blockchain-powered music platform Audius has struck a multi-territory licensing agreement with the International Copyright Enterprise (ICE). Audius says that the deal “establishes a pathway for more than 330,000 rights holders to receive royalties where their music is used on Audius across a broad territorial footprint, including sub-Saharan Africa and Asia Pacific”.”
TechCrunch reports: “A young startup that emerged from stealth less than two months ago with big-name backers and bigger ambitions is returning to the spotlight. Decart is building what its CEO and co-founder Dean Leitersdorf (pictured above, right) describes as “a fully vertically integrated AI research lab,” alongside enterprise and consumer products based on the lab’s work.”
Variety reports: “Max is jumping on the year-in-review bandwagon and releasing its own Spotify Wrapped-esque marketing campaign revealing subscribers’ personal viewing habits throughout the year. Launching Thursday, the “Max Rewind” offering will be pushed out across all adult profiles on the Warner Bros. Discovery-owned streamer through in-app notifications.”
Engadget reports: “PlayStation Lead Architect Mark Cerny is back again to explain the nitty-gritty details of how the PlayStation 5 Pro achieves its various graphical improvements. Cerny first introduced the PS5 Pro in September and in a new 37-minute video, he gets into how the Pro’s improved GPU uses tech from AMD and announces a “deeper collaboration” between Sony and the chip maker.”
VGC reports: “Apple has announced the most downloaded games of the year across iPhone, iPad and Apple Arcade. Its download charts for 2024 have been localised for players in over 30 countries, but below you’ll find the US rankings for free and paid games on iPhone and iPad, plus the most popular games available on its Arcade subscription service.”
Music Business Worldwide reports: “Virgin Music Group, the global independent music division of Universal Music Group, announced today it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Downtown Music Holdings LLC (Downtown) for cash consideration of $775 million (approximately €737 million). The acquisition, which is subject to regulatory approvals, is expected to close in the second half of 2025.”
VentureBeat reports: “On the ninth day of its holiday-themed stretch of product announcements known as “12 Days of OpenAI,” OpenAI is rolling out its most advanced model, o1, to third-party developers through its application programming interface (API). This marks a major step forward for devs looking to build new advanced AI applications or integrate the most advanced OpenAI tech into their existing apps and workflows, be they enterprise or consumer-facing.”
TechCrunch reports: “Social magazine app maker Flipboard is reinventing itself for the new era of the open social web. While the company’s original app allowed users to collect content from blogs, news websites, and traditional social media services like Facebook and Twitter in order to create curated magazines, its new app called Surf, launching into invite-only beta today, will instead allow users to browse and explore the open social web.”
