Happy Thursday! TikTok just announced a deal to feature its popular content on Redbox’s DVD rental kiosks around the US. Am I the only one who’s shocked to hear that DVD rental kiosks are a thing!? 😮

🌶 Daily highlight 🌶

Shopify unveiled Sidekick, an AI assistant for merchants. Sidekick is an AI chatbot that sits within Shopify’s core interface - it’s key functionality is to answer merchant questions by analyzing sales trends, providing data analysis, and applying basic reasoning to generate insights 🔎

Sidekick can also update merchants stores, such as by applying discounts on all items in a store.

I’m very bullish on AI use cases that help customers make sense of complex first-party data. There’s a lot of debate around whether the chatbot UI will stay relevant as AI progresses, but for this use case it’s a clear slam dunk 🏀

♨️ Latest launches

Big tech

• Google Play lets developers add NFTs into mobile games

• GitHub launches passkeys in public beta

• Meta adds multi-post threads to it’s Threads app

• Meta lets users make video calls as their avatars

• Coinbase Wallet goes multiplayer with a messaging feature

• Microsoft Xbox ships reactive voice chat moderation

General and early-stage

• Bumble ships a Barbie and Ken themed dating coach feature

• Proton launches its cloud storage device on desktop

• Kakao unveils an AI image generation product

• Quora adds doc uploads and enhanced context windows to Poe

• Daye launches a virtual clinic for period pain

🔍 Other good finds

• Evolving. How a PM director adjusted to having kids

• Good times. App spend hits record growth after weak 2022

• Thin crust. Domino’s strikes deal to list it’s menu on UberEats

🧈 Twitter nugget

Thanks for reading! If you've got any comments or feedback, please hit reply - I'd love to hear from you :)

- Amol