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| Hi Insiders! Here's today's top Tech stories: - Microsoft will launch an AI assistant for Office apps and Windows.
- Cisco is buying cybersecurity firm Splunk for $28B.
- Snapchat now claims over 5 million paid subscribers, up from 4 million in June.
If you find this newsletter helpful, please share it with your friends and colleagues. Thank you! Beth
p/beth-duckett | |
| 1 | | Microsoft has unveiled its new AI assistant for Windows and Office, in addition to introducing two brand-new Surface laptops. During its September event today, Microsoft said that the AI assistant Copilot will launch for Windows 11 users on September 26 and for Microsoft 365 enterprise customers on November 1. More: - Copilot, powered by GPT-4, allows users to generate content by typing in text prompts.
- The rebranded "Microsoft Copilot in Windows" will serve as a personal assistant alongside the search bar on the Windows taskbar.
- For Office, Microsoft will charge $30 per user per month for business accounts to access Copilot across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and other 365 apps.
- The tool enables users to access both web data and internal company information for tasks like slideshow creation, spreadsheet analysis, and document summaries.
Surface announcements: - Microsoft also debuted its Surface Laptop Studio 2, starting at $1,999, with Intel's 13th Generation i7 H-class chips, Nvidia RTX 4050 or RTX 4060 GPUs, and an Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU).
- The Surface Laptop Go 3 for consumers, starting at $799, is powered by a 12th-generation Intel Core i5 processor with Intel Iris Xe graphics and offers an 88% performance boost compared to its predecessor.
Q: Do you think Microsoft's AI assistant will improve Windows and Office productivity and experiences for users? Share your thoughts and join the conversation here. |     | |
| 2 | | Cisco Systems has agreed to acquire Splunk, an analytics and cybersecurity firm, for $28B in cash. The acquisition, which would be Cisco's largest to date, is expected to make the combined Cisco-Splunk entity one of the world's largest software companies, bolstering Cisco's recurring revenue and AI initiatives. More: - Cisco will pay $157 per share in cash, representing a 31% premium over Splunk's closing price on Wednesday.
- The deal reflects Cisco's strategy of shifting away from hardware sales and toward software and services under CEO Chuck Robbins.
- In a statement, Robbins said the acquisition will help Cisco to build the "next generation of AI-enabled security and observability."
- The acquisition is expected to be finalized by Q3 2024, subject to regulatory approval. Cisco faces a $1.48B termination fee if the deal fails.
Zoom out: - Splunk offers software for IT and security operations data monitoring. Cisco sells network equipment (routers, switches) and provides security services and software products.
- In 2022, Cisco made a $20B+ offer for Splunk, which failed to come to fruition. The two companies already have a data security partnership.
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| 3 | | Snapchat said its paid subscription service, Snapchat+, has now surpassed 5 million subscribers, up from 4 million in June and 3 million in April. At $4 a month, 5 million users would bring in around $240M annually, a fraction of Snap's $4.6B in revenue last year. 
Details: Snapchat+ was launched in June 2022 amid the slowdown in ad revenue across social media. Snap's push into AI and AR technology has led to the growth of the subscription service over the past year. While Snapchat+ contributes modestly to the company's annual sales, its revenue has helped offset investments in new features, including custom app themes, app icons, pinned conversations, improved Stories tools, and initial access to Snap's chatbot and AI selfie generator. What brands should care: Snap's subscription service is outperforming X Premium, which has sold roughly 1 million subscriptions, as per research by programmer Travis Brown. While X, owned by Elon Musk, claims 550 million monthly active users, Snapchat reports 397 million daily active users. | | | |
| 4 | Meta is now allowing Facebook users to create up to four additional profiles and switch between them without the need to log in and out. The extra profiles are attached to a user's main Facebook account. More: - Meta pitched the new feature as a way for users to separate personal and professional relationships and "organize who you share with and what content you see for the various parts of your life."
- The added profiles are accessible from a menu on the user's profile pic on the bottom right of the toolbar.
- Facebook's Messenger app will not support the added profiles, which also must adhere to Facebook's policies barring misrepresentation of age or location.
- The global rollout of the feature begins today and will extend over the next few months.
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| 5 | YouTube announced a mobile editing app for creators to make and edit Shorts and longer videos. YouTube Create has launched in beta for Android across eight markets, with iOS support coming in 2024. More: - The app offers video editing capabilities such as trimming, cropping, and speed adjustments, with a variety of transitions and visual effects.
- Users can access a library of emojis, stickers, GIFs, and fonts, as well as royalty-free music tracks and sound effects.
- YouTube Create is now available in an Android beta in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, South Korea, Indonesia, India, and Singapore.
- The move follows TikTok's strategy of offering the separate video editing app CapCut.
Zoom out: - In addition, YouTube is introducing AI-powered features like "Dream Screen" for AI-generated backgrounds in Shorts and AI-driven video topic suggestions.
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| 6 | | OpenAI announced DALL-E 3, the latest version of its AI image generator, which is being integrated with ChatGPT. OpenAI released Dall-E 2 publicly last year. DALL-E 3 reportedly renders better-quality images, especially with longer prompts, and can better handle complex content like text and human hands. More: - The new tool is now in early testing with a limited group of users.
- Starting in October, paid premium and enterprise ChatGPT users will be able to prompt the chatbot and receive DALL-E-3-generated images within the app.
- DALL-E 3 will also become available to research labs and API customers this fall.
- Unlike DALL-E 2 and the original DALL-E, there's no confirmation about a free web tool release.
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- Unity Software Inc. is adjusting its controversial pricing strategy in response to criticism from the gaming community, setting a 4% revenue cap for customers with earnings exceeding $1M.
- Microsoft's GitHub is expanding the availability of its AI-powered coding chatbot, Copilot Chat, to more users.
- Stanford University has announced that it would return all the donations it received from the bankrupt crypto exchange FTX and its affiliates.
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 | AI and technology writer | | Beth is the writer of Inside's AI and Tech newsletters, with a career spanning journalism and editing since 2007. She has written for publications including The Arizona Republic, USA Today, and others, and authored a book on the solar industry in 2016. Reach out to her at Beth.Duckett@yahoo.com. | | This newsletter was edited by Eduardo Garcia | |
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