Zoom, which became a lifeline for remote workers during the pandemic, says it has a clear rationale for why it’s calling some workers back to the office twice a week: To build collaborative products for the new ways of working, employees need to experience the pain firsthand.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/05/zoom-return-to-office-hybrid-remote-work/
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Canva is releasing Magic Studio — a new suite of AI-powered design tools that aim to make content creation more accessible to everyone, regardless of previous design experience. Canva describes Magic Studio as “the world’s most comprehensive AI-design platform” for organizations and individual users, providing a host of new tools for automating labor-intensive tasks like converting designs into other media formats or instantly editing images through generative AI.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/4/23902794/canva-magic-studio-ai-design-new-tools
Adobe is entering a partnership with Google and offering a free three-month trial to both Photoshop on the web and an Express Premium plan to those who purchase one of the new Chromebook Plus devices. Up until recently, it wasn’t possible to run Photoshop on ChromeOS because important executable files couldn’t be installed.
https://www.techradar.com/computing/chromebooks/chromebook-plus-buyers-will-get-a-free-trial-of-the-new-web-based-photoshop
Google is sending Jamboard on its way to the company's ever-growing graveyard full of products and services that didn't quite work out. To continue giving teams that use its tools access to a collaborative digital whiteboard, Google is integrating FigJam, Lucidspark and Miro across its Workspace.
https://www.engadget.com/google-is-sunsetting-its-collaborative-jamboard-app-101658315.html
Meta’s annual Connect conference started today, and this means lots of new hardware.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/27/meta-connect-2023-quest-3-vr-everything-you-need-to-know/
Reddit has unveiled plans to pay its top contributors cash for popular posts, starting in the US on Tuesday. The social media site will split revenue with people who are awarded "gold" by other users, who pay a fee.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66925550
Elon Musk’s Neuralink is set to begin human trials, and the company is announcing that it’s looking for human applicants to test its controversial brain-computer interface. “The PRIME Study (short for Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface)…aims to evaluate the safety of our implant (N1) and surgical robot (R1) and assess the initial functionality of our BCI for enabling people with paralysis to control external devices with their thoughts,” the company wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxjp9q/neuralink-monkey-deaths-human-trials