| If you're finding value in our Creator Economy newsletter, I encourage you to consider subscribing to The Information. It contains exclusive reporting on the most important stories in tech. Save up to $250 on your first year of access. Hello—and Happy Birthday to me! 🎈 Creators sometimes have trouble sifting through their vast libraries of videos to find a specific clip or sponsorship. A new artificial intelligence startup is developing new products to quickly surface those visual moments. IJW, which stands for It Just Works, plans to unveil its first offering, StarZero, on Sunday at the 1 Billion Followers Summit, a creator conference in Dubai. The product, which the startup began testing with select users in August after its founding earlier last year, allows creators to search their YouTube, TikTok and Facebook libraries for specific video clips, such as those that show a Roomba vacuum, or videos with a certain style of shot, like drone footage of a yacht. Users can also search for colors, text on the screen, logos and faces, among other options. They will also be able to upload other videos to StarZero, such as their unedited footage, livestreams or podcasts, and search through them. The tool could also be useful to advertisers who want to search creators' videos for mentions of their brand or to look at past sponsorships. "This is the first step in a series of products we're building that are designed specifically to empower creators to do more with what they already have," said IJW CEO and co-founder Paul Robert Cary in an interview. It's competing with startups such as Twelve Labs, which develops video-analyzing models, and Coactive, which uses multimodal AI to help companies identify visual data and video footage. (See our Generative AI Database for more.) IJW uses open-source models, including from Meta Platforms and Apple, and develops its AI agents on top of Google's Gemini. Cary said Gemini is the "go-to choice" for video language models. "I don't think other companies really appreciate just how far ahead Gemini is on multi-modal [capabilities]," he said. "We fine tune where necessary, and then we train from scratch models where necessary," Cary said. "We're not trying to be a foundational model company." The startup is in the process of raising its pre-seed angel round. Cary says it has more than $1.3 million in commitments from investors including StemAI.vc; Google DeepMind alumni; Max Crown, the co-founder of crypto startup MoonPay; Colin Behr, general manager of mobile game giant AppLovin, and Justin Stebbins, a partner at VC and PE firm Northgate Capital, who invested in a personal capacity. News of the funding or the startup's product plans haven't been previously reported. Next, the startup plans to expand its search capabilities to look for specific emotions or similar moments, say when creators have looked surprised or to identify how a creator typically structures an unboxing video. The startup also plans to allow creators to generate new clips based on text, image or video prompts. For example, a creator could generate a short-form version of a longer video in their typical content style or edit out objects in existing footage, which could compete with existing AI video generation startups such as Runway. Cary, along with his co-founders Radu-Sebastian Amarie and Stefan-Gabriel Muscalu, previously sold AI video editing startup Kamua in November 2021 to Jellysmack, a startup best known for repackaging creators' videos across social networks. Cary and Amarie were co-founders of Kamua, while Muscalu was their second employee. The five-person startup operates remotely, but has an engineering headquarters in Bucharest, Romania. IJW doesn't have aggressive hiring goals, and instead plans to "build more agents than hire people," Cary said. For example, it plans to use chatbots to help with answering questions from creators about what the product can and can't do. Cary said the company's business model is still TBD, but it could include a profit-sharing agreement with creators and brands who use the product, rather than charging them a subscription fee. Here's what else is going on… See The Information's Creator Economy Database for an exclusive list of private companies and their investors. Whatnot, a live shopping startup, announced a $265 million Series E funding round that values the company at nearly $5 billion, up from $3.7 billion in 2022. Greycroft, DST Global and Avra Capital co-led the round. Instagram shut down a program that allowed creators to earn money from ads placed on their profiles, Business Insider reported. Streamlabs, Logitech's livestreaming software company, announced an AI agent that creators can use to help host live streams. The Washington Post laid off staffers in business operations, including public relations employees, saying the paper would focus on promoting its individual journalists rather than its stories and journalism. "Talent-driven journalism is the future of media, and personalities and creators will lead the way," said communications chief Kathy Baird. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri addressed new policy updates at parent Meta Platforms, including the end of its fact-checking program, in a video aimed at creators on Wednesday, He said the changes should mean that Instagram makes "far less mistakes in terms of taking content down" and signaled the updates are good news for political influencers. Meta will now show recommendations for political content across its apps, including on Threads, which initially shunned politics and news. "If you're a creator that likes to post about political content, this should mean you should feel comfortable doing so on any of our platforms," Mosseri said. Cameron Dallas is hiring a co-CEO, as well as agents, for his talent agency DGA, which stands for Dallas Global Agency, which he launched in November. "I'm tired of hearing creators say the same thing over and over again 'I never get brand deals,'" the long-time creator wrote on LinkedIn. Alexa Youssefian and Daniel-Yaw Miller are now vice presidents at Upland Workshop, an advisory and communications firm whose clients include Lebron James. Youssefian, who previously worked at TikTok in corporate communications, will focus on the creator economy, while Miller, who worked at The Business of Fashion, will focus on sports. Ayomi Samaraweera is now leading internal communications at productivity software company Notion. She also announced she shut down her startup Canopy, a social app similar to Blind where creators could chat with each other and share information. Thank you for reading the Creator Economy Newsletter! I'd love your feedback, ideas and tips: kaya@theinformation.com. If you think someone else might enjoy this newsletter, please pass it forward or they can sign up here: https://www.theinformation.com/newsletters/creator-economy | 
0 comentários:
Postar um comentário