Two years after launching in the U.S., TikTok Shop has a reported $19 billion in quarterly sales, rivaling the sales performance of eBay, which still leads by about a billion dollars, according to third-part TikTok analytics tool EchoTik. After getting off to what seemed to be a rocky start, the fact that it took only 24 months for TikTok Shop to became competitive with the 30-year-old eBay is drawing notice. A TikTok representative said TikTok Shop’s live-stream shopping segments were up 72 percent year-over-year as of September, with sales up by 120 percent as of June. Live-stream shopping is only one aspect of TikTok Shop. Others include shoppable videos, a marketplace and creator storefronts.  Continue reading TikTok Shop Reports $19 Billion Sales Quarter, Rivaling eBay

Sony Group reported a strong quarter ending September 30, with its semiconductor unit reaching an operating profit of nearly $900 million, up almost 50 percent year-over-year as the company’s most profitable segment for the quarter. The music group was another bright spot, with sales up 21 percent to $3.51 billion, and operating income a healthy $749 million. Consumer electronics and gaming were softer sectors. But overall revenue of $20.14 billion far surpassed the expected $19.36 billion, prompting Sony to raise its forecast by 3 percent. The company also announced a repurchase plan for $648 million worth of stock. Continue reading Sony’s Latest Quarter Beats Estimates Led by Music, Imaging

Amazon Q3 revenue was up 13 percent to $180.2 billion in the third quarter, compared with $158.9 billion in 2024. The AWS group that includes AI saw sales increase 20 percent year-over-year to $33 billion. The company reported that gross profit increased 38 percent to $21.2 billion for the quarter, due largely to consumer spending online and the demand for cloud computing. Amazon is the dominant player in the cloud space with about 30 percent of global share. However, investors have been cautious about AWS, which accounted for 65 percent of the company’s total operating income in Q3. Since 2022, competition has heated up with OpenAI’s ChatGPT signing on with Microsoft Azure. Continue reading AWS, Cloud and AI Help Drive Impressive Quarter for Amazon

Meta Platforms shares fell by more than 7 percent despite record revenue of $51.2 billion in an adverse reaction to accelerated AI spending. Sales were up 26 percent year-over-year, but net income of $2.7 billion was far below analysts’ expectations. The company attributed the net income miss to accounting changes resulting from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act even as it advised analysts of “aggressive” capital expenditure increases to come. Meta’s 2025 capital expenditure forecast grew from the existing estimate of $66 billion to $72 billion. Most of that will be spent on data centers and researchers, Meta said, indicating 2026 capex would be “notably larger” and could reach as high as $100 billion. Continue reading Meta Reports Sales Increase, Record Revenue of $51.2 Billion

Square has introduced Square Bitcoin, an integrated bitcoin payments and wallet solution catering to businesses of all sizes. Consisting of bitcoin payments and bitcoin conversions, Square Bitcoin allows sellers to accept bitcoin payments “with zero processing fees,” the company says. Card sales can be automatically converted to bitcoin, and managed alongside traditional business finances — all within the ecosystem of Square, Block’s merchant payments platform. The news was announced at Square Releases, a biannual showcase for new products and features. Square also introduced AI-powered voice ordering for restaurants, and local insights from LLMs. Continue reading Square Launches Bitcoin Wallet System for Local Businesses

Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia reported its sales were $46.7 billion for the most recent quarter, marking 56 percent growth over the same period last year and up 6 percent sequentially. Profit rose more than 59 percent to $26.42 billion. The results, which surpassed estimates, reassured global analysts and investors that AI infrastructure spending remains strong, easing — though not erasing — anxieties about an AI bubble. This summer, the chipmaker became the first company to exceed a market cap of $4 trillion, and it is considered a global barometer for the overall health of the artificial intelligence sector. Continue reading Nvidia Announces Continued Growth, $26 Billion in Q2 Profit

ElevenLabs is bringing its powerful AI voice tools to mobile. Previously, the company’s apps and voice libraries were only available via the Web. Now iOS and Android users can tap ElevenLabs tech on the go with a “faster, intuitive, more powerful experience built natively for mobile” rather than awkwardly through a mobile browser. Combining mobility with creativity, the app lets users create realistic voiceovers for social media or narrate video using ElevenLabs’ text-to-speech models — including Eleven v3, now in alpha, which lets users fine-tune vocalizations using tags. The company has also introduced a new voice assistant, 11ai. Continue reading ElevenLabs Text-to-Voice AI Tools Now Available for Mobile

TikTok is reporting that TikTok Shop’s U.S. sales have increased 120 percent in 2025 compared to the same period last year. However, this announcement was made as reports surfaced that TikTok owner ByteDance is disappointed that the U.S. performance of TikTok Shop is falling far short of its original tenfold growth goal to $17.5 billion in 2025. The company reportedly moved to “drastically lower that objective” prior to touting its performance this month. Meanwhile, President Trump recently extended the deadline for ByteDance to sell the U.S. operations of TikTok, pushing the cutoff to September 17. Continue reading TikTok Shop’s U.S. Sales Improve but Still Fall Short of Goals

Apple had a legal setback last week when a federal judge in California ruled in favor of Epic Games, which sued the tech giant for violating a court order to stop demanding commission fees for purchases outside of the Apple App Store. In a ruling last week, Apple was found to be in “willful violation” of a 2021 injunction prohibiting it from anticompetitive practices involving pricing. U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers went so far as to refer the case to prosecutors for a possible criminal investigation. Apple has already filed a notice of appeal. Continue reading Stakes Escalate for Apple as Epic Scores Lower Court Victory

Microsoft has “tapped on the brakes” of its spending on artificial intelligence, reducing capital expenses by more than $1 billion in the first three months of 2025. But after 10 straight quarters of increased AI outlay, momentum continues to propel the sector forward with new data center commitments in 16 countries and the expansion of the Phi small language family with the debut of Phi-4 (that supports text, visual and voice inputs). The moves come on the heels of $70 billion in sales for the first three months of 2025, when profits were up 18 percent to $25.8 billion. Continue reading Microsoft Reduces Spending on AI but Momentum Continues

D-ID has launched two new types of AI-powered avatars: Premium+ and Express. The company’s video-to-video avatar tools aim to provide personal look-alikes that can sub for their creators in uses ranging from instructional videos to business presentations, offloading on-camera duties in areas including sales, marketing and customer support. “Premium+ Avatars can generate hyper-realistic digital humans that are indistinguishable from real people and will serve as the foundation for fully interactive digital agents revolutionizing how brands communicate,” while Express Avatars can rapidly generate serviceable avatars “from just one minute of source footage.” Continue reading D-ID’s New Business-Use Avatars Can Converse in Real Time

Revenue reached an all-time high for Apple’s most recent quarter as iPhone sales experienced an uptick due in part to consumer excitement for the arrival of Apple Intelligence, the company’s heavily advertised set of AI tools. Total sales reached $94.9 billion for the quarter, up 6 percent year-over-year and exceeding the $94.5 billion that financial analysts had predicted. The company’s iPhone business reported sales of $46.2 billion, following disappointing consecutive quarters in the first half of the year. The AI boom resulted in strong quarters for other Big Tech leaders including Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms and Microsoft. Continue reading Jump in iPhone Business Results in Record Quarter for Apple

Nvidia has had another impressive quarter. Record revenue of $30 billion in Q2 was up 122 percent from a year ago, while data center revenue of $26.3 billion marked a 154 percent increase from the same period in 2023. The performance was seen by many as an assurance of AI’s staying power, although others raised concern that if the AI companies buying chips do not start generating profits soon, the sugar high of the two-year AI boom could precede a crash. Nvidia took the occasion to tout its next-generation Blackwell chips, reassuring investors that a mid-production “tweak” would not delay release. Continue reading AI Boom Continues to Drive Strong Nvidia Revenue and Profit

Roku has applied for a patent on technology that is said to be able to display ads over any device plugged into your television. According to reports, the patent application describes a system that interacts with devices connected to TVs via HDMI, which could include everything from cable boxes, DVD or Blu-ray players, game consoles, PCs or other video-streaming devices. The patent, filed by Roku in August 2023, was published three months later, but still hasn’t been granted. The idea is to have even more ways to display ads when consumers aren’t actively streaming content. Roku already does so on its screensaver and home screen. Continue reading Roku Unveils Tech to Show Ads on All TV Connected Devices

U.S. recorded music revenue grew 8 percent in 2023, to an estimated record high of $17.1 billion at retail. It was the eighth consecutive year of growth, according to the RIAA, which says streaming continued to be the biggest driver, notching new heights of paid subscriptions, robust growth in ad-supported listening, and healthy increased contributions from new platforms. Streaming accounted for 84 percent of retail revenue, at $14.4 billion including from 96.8 million paid subscriptions. On the supply-side, wholesale revenue grew 7 percent to $11 billion, also a record. Continue reading Streaming Drives U.S. Recorded Music to Record $17 Billion