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Den of Geek RT hat einen Link geteilt

2025-05-13 16:35:44 ·

Final Destination: Bloodlines Review – Death’s Welcome Return

It’s been 25 years since the original Final Destination film hit screens and began terrorizing audiences with its deeply memorable (and memeable) Rube Goldberg-like murder tableaus, which get more and more intricate and anxiety-inducing as the franchise goes on.
Yet it’s somehow been 14 years since the last entry into the series—the campy, fun, and sort-of-prequel Final Destination 5—and with the appetite for inventive horror as ravenous as ever, and chaos all around us in 2025, we seem perfectly primed for another entry into the series.
Final Destination: Bloodlines thus begins like every other installment in the series: with a terrible disaster.
Intriguingly though, this time it’s one that happened decades before the events of the majority of the film.
It is in this context we meet Iris (Brec Bassinger), a young woman who after being proposed to on the top of the immense Skyview Tower defies Death with a horrific premonition that allows her to save the lives of hundreds of people who would have fallen and been burnt alive had Iris not alerted the would-be victims.
These setpieces are iconic— like the generation-traumatizing log truck in Final Destination 2 or Mary Elizabeth Winstead versus a rollercoaster in the third installment—so the first new one in 14 years is highly anticipated to say the least.
And Bloodlines delivers, as the aesthetically pleasing practical set adds an epic scope to the opening and it manages to feature one of the film’s most horrifying moments that will send shivers up the spines of even the hardiest audience member.
It’s an opening that showcases the love and care that directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein channel throughout the film, with easter eggs aplenty, deep cut references, and some expansive new lore that impacts characters both old and new.
Afterward the film pivots to the still-kicking legacy sequel/requel trend and recenters itself around a new family.
Thanks to the return of Tony Todd and an expansion of his fan-favorite character William Bludworth, there’s connective tissue to the past.
The directors weave that near seamlessly in with the central plot which follows Iris’ family in the modern day as Death finally catches up with them.
Our would-be final girl is Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) who has been dreaming about Iris’ premonition and immediately throws herself into solving the gory family mystery that has presented itself.
Along for the ride is her brother Charlie (Teo Briones) and the pair have great chemistry, working as leads that you can actually root for.
Along with a new cast of soon-to-be dead family members the film also introduces Iris’ long relationship with Death.
Here we get an expansion in our understanding of Death, who has an almost playfully antagonistic relationship with the woman who managed to escape its grasp all those decades ago.
Some of the movie’s best and most unique scenes come from the push and pull between the pair, and Gabrielle Rose’s brilliant performance as the older Iris.
Bloodlines also acts as a send off to legendary Candyman star and genre movie icon, Todd, who has been the sinewy heart of every entry into the Final Destination
Todd gives his all, creating a rare and powerful heartfelt moment in the midst of the carnage.
And Lipovsky and Stein bring that carnage to life beautifully.
There are deaths here that will go down as some of the most terrifying in franchise history, as well as some of its biggest laughs.
It’s a balance that makes the movie a perfect popcorn flick that you just have to see on the big screen.
After all, if someone is going to get (SPOILER) by a (SPOILER) in their (SPOILER), don’t you want to see that and every other gruesome death as big as possible?
Speaking of big screens, the film was shot for IMAX, and the directors have a ton of fun playing with the ratio and what it can tell us about how deep into the peril we and the characters are.
Likewise it features a big ensemble cast, meaning we get more death and destruction and casting director Tiffany Mak deserves a big shout out, as the chemistry is strong.
We also get some instant new franchise classic characters like Erik (Richard Harmon), Stefani and Charlie’s burnout cousin who works at a sharps-filled tattoo shop.
Why yes that setting will become important later in a sequence that left my audience gagging in the best possible way.
Final Destination has always been one of the best horror franchises and this is a return that will not only please old fans but will also introduce and terrorize an entirely new audience into discovering these absolutely wild movies that are still going strong 25 years after the first entry.
Thanks to an array of talent behind the screen—including Scream VI’s Guy Busick and the MCU Spider-Man’s Jon Watts—this is a witty, hilarious, and grotesque start to the summer blockbuster season.
Final Destination: Bloodlines is out in theaters on May 16.
Learn more about Den of Geek’s review process and why you can trust our recommendations here.
Join our mailing list
Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!

Source: https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/final-destination-bloodlines-review/" style="color: #0066cc;">https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/final-destination-bloodlines-review/
#final #destination #bloodlines #review #deaths #welcome #return

Final Destination: Bloodlines Review – Death’s Welcome Return
It’s been 25 years since the original Final Destination film hit screens and began terrorizing audiences with its deeply memorable (and memeable) Rube Goldberg-like murder tableaus, which get more and more intricate and anxiety-inducing as the franchise goes on. Yet it’s somehow been 14 years since the last entry into the series—the campy, fun, and sort-of-prequel Final Destination 5—and with the appetite for inventive horror as ravenous as ever, and chaos all around us in 2025, we seem perfectly primed for another entry into the series. Final Destination: Bloodlines thus begins like every other installment in the series: with a terrible disaster. Intriguingly though, this time it’s one that happened decades before the events of the majority of the film. It is in this context we meet Iris (Brec Bassinger), a young woman who after being proposed to on the top of the immense Skyview Tower defies Death with a horrific premonition that allows her to save the lives of hundreds of people who would have fallen and been burnt alive had Iris not alerted the would-be victims. These setpieces are iconic— like the generation-traumatizing log truck in Final Destination 2 or Mary Elizabeth Winstead versus a rollercoaster in the third installment—so the first new one in 14 years is highly anticipated to say the least. And Bloodlines delivers, as the aesthetically pleasing practical set adds an epic scope to the opening and it manages to feature one of the film’s most horrifying moments that will send shivers up the spines of even the hardiest audience member. It’s an opening that showcases the love and care that directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein channel throughout the film, with easter eggs aplenty, deep cut references, and some expansive new lore that impacts characters both old and new. Afterward the film pivots to the still-kicking legacy sequel/requel trend and recenters itself around a new family. Thanks to the return of Tony Todd and an expansion of his fan-favorite character William Bludworth, there’s connective tissue to the past. The directors weave that near seamlessly in with the central plot which follows Iris’ family in the modern day as Death finally catches up with them. Our would-be final girl is Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) who has been dreaming about Iris’ premonition and immediately throws herself into solving the gory family mystery that has presented itself. Along for the ride is her brother Charlie (Teo Briones) and the pair have great chemistry, working as leads that you can actually root for. Along with a new cast of soon-to-be dead family members the film also introduces Iris’ long relationship with Death. Here we get an expansion in our understanding of Death, who has an almost playfully antagonistic relationship with the woman who managed to escape its grasp all those decades ago. Some of the movie’s best and most unique scenes come from the push and pull between the pair, and Gabrielle Rose’s brilliant performance as the older Iris. Bloodlines also acts as a send off to legendary Candyman star and genre movie icon, Todd, who has been the sinewy heart of every entry into the Final Destination Todd gives his all, creating a rare and powerful heartfelt moment in the midst of the carnage. And Lipovsky and Stein bring that carnage to life beautifully. There are deaths here that will go down as some of the most terrifying in franchise history, as well as some of its biggest laughs. It’s a balance that makes the movie a perfect popcorn flick that you just have to see on the big screen. After all, if someone is going to get (SPOILER) by a (SPOILER) in their (SPOILER), don’t you want to see that and every other gruesome death as big as possible?   Speaking of big screens, the film was shot for IMAX, and the directors have a ton of fun playing with the ratio and what it can tell us about how deep into the peril we and the characters are. Likewise it features a big ensemble cast, meaning we get more death and destruction and casting director Tiffany Mak deserves a big shout out, as the chemistry is strong. We also get some instant new franchise classic characters like Erik (Richard Harmon), Stefani and Charlie’s burnout cousin who works at a sharps-filled tattoo shop. Why yes that setting will become important later in a sequence that left my audience gagging in the best possible way. Final Destination has always been one of the best horror franchises and this is a return that will not only please old fans but will also introduce and terrorize an entirely new audience into discovering these absolutely wild movies that are still going strong 25 years after the first entry. Thanks to an array of talent behind the screen—including Scream VI’s Guy Busick and the MCU Spider-Man’s Jon Watts—this is a witty, hilarious, and grotesque start to the summer blockbuster season. Final Destination: Bloodlines is out in theaters on May 16. Learn more about Den of Geek’s review process and why you can trust our recommendations here. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! Source: https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/final-destination-bloodlines-review/ #final #destination #bloodlines #review #deaths #welcome #return

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Final Destination: Bloodlines Review – Death’s Welcome Return

It’s been 25 years since the original Final Destination film hit screens and began terrorizing audiences with its deeply memorable (and memeable) Rube Goldberg-like murder tableaus, which get more and more intricate and anxiety-inducing as the franchise goes on. Yet it’s somehow been 14 years since the last entry into the series—the campy, fun, and sort-of-prequel Final Destination 5—and with the appetite for inventive horror as ravenous as ever, and chaos all around us in 2025, we seem perfectly primed for another entry into the series. Final Destination: Bloodlines thus begins like every other installment in the series: with a terrible disaster. Intriguingly though, this time it’s one that happened decades before the events of the majority of the film. It is in this context we meet Iris (Brec Bassinger), a young woman who after being proposed to on the top of the immense Skyview Tower defies Death with a horrific premonition that allows her to save the lives of hundreds of people who would have fallen and been burnt alive had Iris not alerted the would-be victims. These setpieces are iconic— like the generation-traumatizing log truck in Final Destination 2 or Mary Elizabeth Winstead versus a rollercoaster in the third installment—so the first new one in 14 years is highly anticipated to say the least. And Bloodlines delivers, as the aesthetically pleasing practical set adds an epic scope to the opening and it manages to feature one of the film’s most horrifying moments that will send shivers up the spines of even the hardiest audience member. It’s an opening that showcases the love and care that directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein channel throughout the film, with easter eggs aplenty, deep cut references, and some expansive new lore that impacts characters both old and new. Afterward the film pivots to the still-kicking legacy sequel/requel trend and recenters itself around a new family. Thanks to the return of Tony Todd and an expansion of his fan-favorite character William Bludworth, there’s connective tissue to the past. The directors weave that near seamlessly in with the central plot which follows Iris’ family in the modern day as Death finally catches up with them. Our would-be final girl is Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) who has been dreaming about Iris’ premonition and immediately throws herself into solving the gory family mystery that has presented itself. Along for the ride is her brother Charlie (Teo Briones) and the pair have great chemistry, working as leads that you can actually root for. Along with a new cast of soon-to-be dead family members the film also introduces Iris’ long relationship with Death. Here we get an expansion in our understanding of Death, who has an almost playfully antagonistic relationship with the woman who managed to escape its grasp all those decades ago. Some of the movie’s best and most unique scenes come from the push and pull between the pair, and Gabrielle Rose’s brilliant performance as the older Iris. Bloodlines also acts as a send off to legendary Candyman star and genre movie icon, Todd, who has been the sinewy heart of every entry into the Final Destination Todd gives his all, creating a rare and powerful heartfelt moment in the midst of the carnage. And Lipovsky and Stein bring that carnage to life beautifully. There are deaths here that will go down as some of the most terrifying in franchise history, as well as some of its biggest laughs. It’s a balance that makes the movie a perfect popcorn flick that you just have to see on the big screen. After all, if someone is going to get (SPOILER) by a (SPOILER) in their (SPOILER), don’t you want to see that and every other gruesome death as big as possible?   Speaking of big screens, the film was shot for IMAX, and the directors have a ton of fun playing with the ratio and what it can tell us about how deep into the peril we and the characters are. Likewise it features a big ensemble cast, meaning we get more death and destruction and casting director Tiffany Mak deserves a big shout out, as the chemistry is strong. We also get some instant new franchise classic characters like Erik (Richard Harmon), Stefani and Charlie’s burnout cousin who works at a sharps-filled tattoo shop. Why yes that setting will become important later in a sequence that left my audience gagging in the best possible way. Final Destination has always been one of the best horror franchises and this is a return that will not only please old fans but will also introduce and terrorize an entirely new audience into discovering these absolutely wild movies that are still going strong 25 years after the first entry. Thanks to an array of talent behind the screen—including Scream VI’s Guy Busick and the MCU Spider-Man’s Jon Watts—this is a witty, hilarious, and grotesque start to the summer blockbuster season. Final Destination: Bloodlines is out in theaters on May 16. Learn more about Den of Geek’s review process and why you can trust our recommendations here. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!

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NVIDIA RT hat einen Link geteilt

2025-05-13 15:45:26 ·

NVIDIA Partners Showcase Cutting-Edge Robotic and Industrial AI Solutions at Automate 2025
As the manufacturing industry faces challenges — such as labor shortages, reshoring and inconsistent operational strategies — AI-powered robots present a significant opportunity to accelerate industrial automation.
At Automate, the largest robotics and automation event in North America, robotics leaders KUKA, Standard Bots, Universal Robots (UR) and Vention are showcasing hardware and robots powered by the NVIDIA accelerated computing, Omniverse and Isaac platforms — helping manufacturers everywhere automate and optimize their production lines.
Deepu Talla, vice president of robotics and edge AI at NVIDIA, delivered a keynote on physical AI and industrial autonomy.
“The manufacturing industry is experiencing a fundamental shift, with industrial automation and AI-powered robots increasingly changing how warehouses and factories operate worldwide,” said Deepu Talla, vice president of robotics and edge AI at NVIDIA.
“NVIDIA’s three-computer architecture — enabling robot training, simulation and accelerated runtime — is empowering the entire robotics ecosystem to accelerate this shift toward software-defined autonomous facilities.”
Synthetic Data Generation Blueprint Speeds Up Robot Development Pipelines
Embodied AI systems, which refers to the integration of AI into physical systems, must be trained with real-world data — traditionally a complex and resource-intensive process.
Each robot typically needs its own custom dataset due to differences in hardware, sensors and environments.
Synthetic data offers a powerful alternative.
NVIDIA Isaac Lab 2.1 — the latest version of the open-source robot learning framework, announced at Automate — provides developers with tools to accelerate the robot training process using the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Blueprint for synthetic motion generation.
Built on NVIDIA Omniverse, a physical AI simulation platform, and NVIDIA Cosmos world foundation models, the blueprint provides a reference workflow for creating vast amounts of synthetic and robot manipulation data, making it easier and faster to train robots, like manipulators and humanoids, for a variety of tasks.
NVIDIA showcases the synthetic manipulation motion generation blueprint.
Robotics Leaders Harness NVIDIA Technologies for Industrial AI
Image courtesy of UR.
Robotics leaders are building next-generation robots, tapping into NVIDIA technologies to train, power and deploy physical AI in industrial settings.
Universal Robots, a leader in collaborative robotics, introduced UR15, its fastest collaborative robot yet, featuring improved cycle times and advanced motion control.
Using UR’s AI Accelerator — developed on the NVIDIA Isaac platform’s CUDA-accelerated libraries and AI models, and NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin — manufacturers can build AI applications to embody intelligence into cobots.
Vention, a manufacturing automation company, announced MachineMotion AI, an automation controller designed to unify motion, sensing, vision and AI.
The system taps into the NVIDIA Jetson platform for embedded computing and NVIDIA Isaac’s CUDA-accelerated libraries and models, enabling compute-intensive AI tasks such as real-time vision processing, bin-picking and autonomous decision-making.
This technology shows the value AI brings to the manufacturing floor for practical deployment of robotic solutions.
Standard Bots, a robotics developer, unveiled its manipulator, a 30kg-payload, 2m-reach robot that can be used for heavy-duty tooling and moving large objects in the automotive, aerospace and logistics industries.
With NVIDIA Isaac Sim, a reference application built on Omniverse, robots can be taught tasks through demonstrations, eliminating the need for traditional coding or programming to free up developers for higher-value tasks.
Standard Bots also announced teleoperation capabilities via a tablet device, which can efficiently collect training data.
KUKA, a leading supplier of intelligent automation solutions, unveiled its KR C5 Micro-2, a small robot controller integrated with an NVIDIA Jetson extension for AI-ready applications.
It will provide future KUKA robots with better AI vision and AI-based control tasks powered by NVIDIA’s software stack.
NVIDIA Brings Software to Deploy AI Agents in Factories and Warehouses
In addition to robots, manufacturers everywhere are increasingly turning to AI agents capable of analyzing and acting upon ever-growing video data.
The NVIDIA AI Blueprint for video search and summarization (VSS), part of the NVIDIA Metropolis platform, combines generative AI, large language models, vision language models and media management services to deploy visual AI agents that can optimize processes, such as visual inspection and assembly, and enhance worker safety in factories and warehouses.
This helps eliminate manual monitoring and enables rapid processing and interpretation of vast amounts of video data, helping businesses drive industrial automation and make data-driven decisions.
Developers can now use their own video data to try the AI Blueprint for VSS in the cloud with NVIDIA Launchable.
Industry leaders are using the blueprint for VSS to enable advanced video analytics and computer vision capabilities across domains.
At Automate, Siemens will be showcasing its Industrial Copilot for Operations, a generative AI-powered assistant that optimizes workflows and enhances collaboration between humans and AI.
Using the tool, shop floor operators, maintenance engineers and service technicians can receive machine instructions and guidance quicker, using natural language.
The copilot uses NVIDIA accelerated computing and NVIDIA NIM and NeMo Retriever microservices from the AI Blueprint for VSS to add multimodal capabilities.
Connect Tech, an edge computing company, is analyzing drone footage with the blueprint for VSS running on NVIDIA Jetson edge devices to enable real-time Q&A and zero-shot detections for hazards like fires or flooding in remote areas.
DeepHow, a generative AI-powered video training platform provider, is using the blueprint to create smart videos that capture key workflows and convert them into structured training content, improving shop floor operator efficiency.
InOrbit.AI, a software platform for robot orchestration, will showcase its latest improvements in InOrbit Space Intelligence, which harnesses physical AI, computer vision and the VSS blueprint to analyze robot operations and optimize real-world workflows.
And KoiReader Technologies, a provider of vision and generative AI-powered automation solutions, is using the blueprint to enable true real-time operational intelligence from events occurring in supply chain and manufacturing environments.
Explore the following talks to connect with NVIDIA and its partners at Automate:
Industrial Autonomy in the Era of Physical AI — a keynote delivered by Talla
AI to Make Human Operators Better: Leveraging Generative AI for Enhanced Worker Training and Assistance — featuring Alvin Clarke, senior developer relations manager at NVIDIA, and Sivakumar Lakshmanan, CEO of DeepHow
AI Everywhere: How Intelligent Systems Are Reshaping Industrial Automation — a panel discussion featuring Christi DeCuir, senior director of robotics strategic alliances at NVIDIA
Unlocking Interoperable Digital Twins for Smart Factory Innovation — featuring Heiko Wenezel, head of Omniverse segment sales at NVIDIA
Accelerate AI-powered Automation: Vention’s Journey With NVIDIA — featuring Yichao Pan, product manager of Isaac Manipulator at NVIDIA, Francois Giguère, chief technology officer at Vention, and Jimmy Li, research scientist at Vention
The Automate Startup Challenge — an event sponsored by NVIDIA and Microsoft, spotlighting early-stage robotics and automation companies as they pitch their solutions to a panel of industry experts
Learn more about NVIDIA’s latest work in robotics and industrial AI at Automate, running through May 15.

Source: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/robotics-industrial-ai-automate/" style="color: #0066cc;">https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/robotics-industrial-ai-automate/
#nvidia #partners #showcase #cuttingedge #robotic #and #industrial #solutions #automate

NVIDIA Partners Showcase Cutting-Edge Robotic and Industrial AI Solutions at Automate 2025
As the manufacturing industry faces challenges — such as labor shortages, reshoring and inconsistent operational strategies — AI-powered robots present a significant opportunity to accelerate industrial automation. At Automate, the largest robotics and automation event in North America, robotics leaders KUKA, Standard Bots, Universal Robots (UR) and Vention are showcasing hardware and robots powered by the NVIDIA accelerated computing, Omniverse and Isaac platforms — helping manufacturers everywhere automate and optimize their production lines. Deepu Talla, vice president of robotics and edge AI at NVIDIA, delivered a keynote on physical AI and industrial autonomy. “The manufacturing industry is experiencing a fundamental shift, with industrial automation and AI-powered robots increasingly changing how warehouses and factories operate worldwide,” said Deepu Talla, vice president of robotics and edge AI at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA’s three-computer architecture — enabling robot training, simulation and accelerated runtime — is empowering the entire robotics ecosystem to accelerate this shift toward software-defined autonomous facilities.” Synthetic Data Generation Blueprint Speeds Up Robot Development Pipelines Embodied AI systems, which refers to the integration of AI into physical systems, must be trained with real-world data — traditionally a complex and resource-intensive process. Each robot typically needs its own custom dataset due to differences in hardware, sensors and environments. Synthetic data offers a powerful alternative. NVIDIA Isaac Lab 2.1 — the latest version of the open-source robot learning framework, announced at Automate — provides developers with tools to accelerate the robot training process using the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Blueprint for synthetic motion generation. Built on NVIDIA Omniverse, a physical AI simulation platform, and NVIDIA Cosmos world foundation models, the blueprint provides a reference workflow for creating vast amounts of synthetic and robot manipulation data, making it easier and faster to train robots, like manipulators and humanoids, for a variety of tasks. NVIDIA showcases the synthetic manipulation motion generation blueprint. Robotics Leaders Harness NVIDIA Technologies for Industrial AI Image courtesy of UR. Robotics leaders are building next-generation robots, tapping into NVIDIA technologies to train, power and deploy physical AI in industrial settings. Universal Robots, a leader in collaborative robotics, introduced UR15, its fastest collaborative robot yet, featuring improved cycle times and advanced motion control. Using UR’s AI Accelerator — developed on the NVIDIA Isaac platform’s CUDA-accelerated libraries and AI models, and NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin — manufacturers can build AI applications to embody intelligence into cobots. Vention, a manufacturing automation company, announced MachineMotion AI, an automation controller designed to unify motion, sensing, vision and AI. The system taps into the NVIDIA Jetson platform for embedded computing and NVIDIA Isaac’s CUDA-accelerated libraries and models, enabling compute-intensive AI tasks such as real-time vision processing, bin-picking and autonomous decision-making. This technology shows the value AI brings to the manufacturing floor for practical deployment of robotic solutions. Standard Bots, a robotics developer, unveiled its manipulator, a 30kg-payload, 2m-reach robot that can be used for heavy-duty tooling and moving large objects in the automotive, aerospace and logistics industries. With NVIDIA Isaac Sim, a reference application built on Omniverse, robots can be taught tasks through demonstrations, eliminating the need for traditional coding or programming to free up developers for higher-value tasks. Standard Bots also announced teleoperation capabilities via a tablet device, which can efficiently collect training data. KUKA, a leading supplier of intelligent automation solutions, unveiled its KR C5 Micro-2, a small robot controller integrated with an NVIDIA Jetson extension for AI-ready applications. It will provide future KUKA robots with better AI vision and AI-based control tasks powered by NVIDIA’s software stack. NVIDIA Brings Software to Deploy AI Agents in Factories and Warehouses In addition to robots, manufacturers everywhere are increasingly turning to AI agents capable of analyzing and acting upon ever-growing video data. The NVIDIA AI Blueprint for video search and summarization (VSS), part of the NVIDIA Metropolis platform, combines generative AI, large language models, vision language models and media management services to deploy visual AI agents that can optimize processes, such as visual inspection and assembly, and enhance worker safety in factories and warehouses. This helps eliminate manual monitoring and enables rapid processing and interpretation of vast amounts of video data, helping businesses drive industrial automation and make data-driven decisions. Developers can now use their own video data to try the AI Blueprint for VSS in the cloud with NVIDIA Launchable. Industry leaders are using the blueprint for VSS to enable advanced video analytics and computer vision capabilities across domains. At Automate, Siemens will be showcasing its Industrial Copilot for Operations, a generative AI-powered assistant that optimizes workflows and enhances collaboration between humans and AI. Using the tool, shop floor operators, maintenance engineers and service technicians can receive machine instructions and guidance quicker, using natural language. The copilot uses NVIDIA accelerated computing and NVIDIA NIM and NeMo Retriever microservices from the AI Blueprint for VSS to add multimodal capabilities. Connect Tech, an edge computing company, is analyzing drone footage with the blueprint for VSS running on NVIDIA Jetson edge devices to enable real-time Q&A and zero-shot detections for hazards like fires or flooding in remote areas. DeepHow, a generative AI-powered video training platform provider, is using the blueprint to create smart videos that capture key workflows and convert them into structured training content, improving shop floor operator efficiency. InOrbit.AI, a software platform for robot orchestration, will showcase its latest improvements in InOrbit Space Intelligence, which harnesses physical AI, computer vision and the VSS blueprint to analyze robot operations and optimize real-world workflows. And KoiReader Technologies, a provider of vision and generative AI-powered automation solutions, is using the blueprint to enable true real-time operational intelligence from events occurring in supply chain and manufacturing environments. Explore the following talks to connect with NVIDIA and its partners at Automate: Industrial Autonomy in the Era of Physical AI — a keynote delivered by Talla AI to Make Human Operators Better: Leveraging Generative AI for Enhanced Worker Training and Assistance — featuring Alvin Clarke, senior developer relations manager at NVIDIA, and Sivakumar Lakshmanan, CEO of DeepHow AI Everywhere: How Intelligent Systems Are Reshaping Industrial Automation — a panel discussion featuring Christi DeCuir, senior director of robotics strategic alliances at NVIDIA Unlocking Interoperable Digital Twins for Smart Factory Innovation — featuring Heiko Wenezel, head of Omniverse segment sales at NVIDIA Accelerate AI-powered Automation: Vention’s Journey With NVIDIA — featuring Yichao Pan, product manager of Isaac Manipulator at NVIDIA, Francois Giguère, chief technology officer at Vention, and Jimmy Li, research scientist at Vention The Automate Startup Challenge — an event sponsored by NVIDIA and Microsoft, spotlighting early-stage robotics and automation companies as they pitch their solutions to a panel of industry experts Learn more about NVIDIA’s latest work in robotics and industrial AI at Automate, running through May 15. Source: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/robotics-industrial-ai-automate/ #nvidia #partners #showcase #cuttingedge #robotic #and #industrial #solutions #automate

BLOGS.NVIDIA.COM

NVIDIA Partners Showcase Cutting-Edge Robotic and Industrial AI Solutions at Automate 2025

As the manufacturing industry faces challenges — such as labor shortages, reshoring and inconsistent operational strategies — AI-powered robots present a significant opportunity to accelerate industrial automation. At Automate, the largest robotics and automation event in North America, robotics leaders KUKA, Standard Bots, Universal Robots (UR) and Vention are showcasing hardware and robots powered by the NVIDIA accelerated computing, Omniverse and Isaac platforms — helping manufacturers everywhere automate and optimize their production lines. Deepu Talla, vice president of robotics and edge AI at NVIDIA, delivered a keynote on physical AI and industrial autonomy. “The manufacturing industry is experiencing a fundamental shift, with industrial automation and AI-powered robots increasingly changing how warehouses and factories operate worldwide,” said Deepu Talla, vice president of robotics and edge AI at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA’s three-computer architecture — enabling robot training, simulation and accelerated runtime — is empowering the entire robotics ecosystem to accelerate this shift toward software-defined autonomous facilities.” Synthetic Data Generation Blueprint Speeds Up Robot Development Pipelines Embodied AI systems, which refers to the integration of AI into physical systems, must be trained with real-world data — traditionally a complex and resource-intensive process. Each robot typically needs its own custom dataset due to differences in hardware, sensors and environments. Synthetic data offers a powerful alternative. NVIDIA Isaac Lab 2.1 — the latest version of the open-source robot learning framework, announced at Automate — provides developers with tools to accelerate the robot training process using the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Blueprint for synthetic motion generation. Built on NVIDIA Omniverse, a physical AI simulation platform, and NVIDIA Cosmos world foundation models, the blueprint provides a reference workflow for creating vast amounts of synthetic and robot manipulation data, making it easier and faster to train robots, like manipulators and humanoids, for a variety of tasks. NVIDIA showcases the synthetic manipulation motion generation blueprint. Robotics Leaders Harness NVIDIA Technologies for Industrial AI Image courtesy of UR. Robotics leaders are building next-generation robots, tapping into NVIDIA technologies to train, power and deploy physical AI in industrial settings. Universal Robots, a leader in collaborative robotics, introduced UR15, its fastest collaborative robot yet, featuring improved cycle times and advanced motion control. Using UR’s AI Accelerator — developed on the NVIDIA Isaac platform’s CUDA-accelerated libraries and AI models, and NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin — manufacturers can build AI applications to embody intelligence into cobots. Vention, a manufacturing automation company, announced MachineMotion AI, an automation controller designed to unify motion, sensing, vision and AI. The system taps into the NVIDIA Jetson platform for embedded computing and NVIDIA Isaac’s CUDA-accelerated libraries and models, enabling compute-intensive AI tasks such as real-time vision processing, bin-picking and autonomous decision-making. This technology shows the value AI brings to the manufacturing floor for practical deployment of robotic solutions. Standard Bots, a robotics developer, unveiled its manipulator, a 30kg-payload, 2m-reach robot that can be used for heavy-duty tooling and moving large objects in the automotive, aerospace and logistics industries. With NVIDIA Isaac Sim, a reference application built on Omniverse, robots can be taught tasks through demonstrations, eliminating the need for traditional coding or programming to free up developers for higher-value tasks. Standard Bots also announced teleoperation capabilities via a tablet device, which can efficiently collect training data. KUKA, a leading supplier of intelligent automation solutions, unveiled its KR C5 Micro-2, a small robot controller integrated with an NVIDIA Jetson extension for AI-ready applications. It will provide future KUKA robots with better AI vision and AI-based control tasks powered by NVIDIA’s software stack. NVIDIA Brings Software to Deploy AI Agents in Factories and Warehouses In addition to robots, manufacturers everywhere are increasingly turning to AI agents capable of analyzing and acting upon ever-growing video data. The NVIDIA AI Blueprint for video search and summarization (VSS), part of the NVIDIA Metropolis platform, combines generative AI, large language models, vision language models and media management services to deploy visual AI agents that can optimize processes, such as visual inspection and assembly, and enhance worker safety in factories and warehouses. This helps eliminate manual monitoring and enables rapid processing and interpretation of vast amounts of video data, helping businesses drive industrial automation and make data-driven decisions. Developers can now use their own video data to try the AI Blueprint for VSS in the cloud with NVIDIA Launchable. Industry leaders are using the blueprint for VSS to enable advanced video analytics and computer vision capabilities across domains. At Automate, Siemens will be showcasing its Industrial Copilot for Operations, a generative AI-powered assistant that optimizes workflows and enhances collaboration between humans and AI. Using the tool, shop floor operators, maintenance engineers and service technicians can receive machine instructions and guidance quicker, using natural language. The copilot uses NVIDIA accelerated computing and NVIDIA NIM and NeMo Retriever microservices from the AI Blueprint for VSS to add multimodal capabilities. Connect Tech, an edge computing company, is analyzing drone footage with the blueprint for VSS running on NVIDIA Jetson edge devices to enable real-time Q&A and zero-shot detections for hazards like fires or flooding in remote areas. DeepHow, a generative AI-powered video training platform provider, is using the blueprint to create smart videos that capture key workflows and convert them into structured training content, improving shop floor operator efficiency. InOrbit.AI, a software platform for robot orchestration, will showcase its latest improvements in InOrbit Space Intelligence, which harnesses physical AI, computer vision and the VSS blueprint to analyze robot operations and optimize real-world workflows. And KoiReader Technologies, a provider of vision and generative AI-powered automation solutions, is using the blueprint to enable true real-time operational intelligence from events occurring in supply chain and manufacturing environments. Explore the following talks to connect with NVIDIA and its partners at Automate: Industrial Autonomy in the Era of Physical AI — a keynote delivered by Talla AI to Make Human Operators Better: Leveraging Generative AI for Enhanced Worker Training and Assistance — featuring Alvin Clarke, senior developer relations manager at NVIDIA, and Sivakumar Lakshmanan, CEO of DeepHow AI Everywhere: How Intelligent Systems Are Reshaping Industrial Automation — a panel discussion featuring Christi DeCuir, senior director of robotics strategic alliances at NVIDIA Unlocking Interoperable Digital Twins for Smart Factory Innovation — featuring Heiko Wenezel, head of Omniverse segment sales at NVIDIA Accelerate AI-powered Automation: Vention’s Journey With NVIDIA — featuring Yichao Pan, product manager of Isaac Manipulator at NVIDIA, Francois Giguère, chief technology officer at Vention, and Jimmy Li, research scientist at Vention The Automate Startup Challenge — an event sponsored by NVIDIA and Microsoft, spotlighting early-stage robotics and automation companies as they pitch their solutions to a panel of industry experts Learn more about NVIDIA’s latest work in robotics and industrial AI at Automate, running through May 15.

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Adobe Creative Cloud RT hat einen Link geteilt

2025-05-13 14:25:02 ·

#333;">Innovative Workflows for Future-proof Designers | Adobe Creative Cloud
Supercharge your graphic asset creation with a smarter workflow that blends expert-level design techniques with the latest AI-powered tools.
In this advanced session, designer and author Kladi Vergine combines the precision of traditional Photoshop and Illustrator workflows with the power of generative AI to help you build a more efficient, creative, and sophisticated approach to design development.

Perfect for intermediate and professional designers, this session is designed to show you how to integrate generative AI seamlessly into your workflow to enhance (not replace) your creative process, reduce production time, and automate repetitive tasks without sacrificing creativity or control.

You’ll learn how to:

Build flexible, scalable brand elements across Photoshop and Illustrator
Combine traditional tools with AI to amplify creativity and efficiency
Automate tedious tasks while maintaining creative control
Master advanced workflows to streamline your process and produce professional results faster
Subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud: https://adobe.ly/48Y1QJ1" style="color: #0066cc; text-decoration: none;">https://adobe.ly/48Y1QJ1
Learn more about Creative Cloud: https://adobe.ly/3RTndnp" style="color: #0066cc; text-decoration: none;">https://adobe.ly/3RTndnp
About Adobe Creative Cloud:
Unlocking creative potential goes beyond tools – it's about cultivating inspiration, fostering innovation, and mastering artistic expression.
On the Adobe Creative Cloud YouTube channel, discover stories, concepts, and trends that ignite your creativity.
We are your hub for creativity, connecting you with Adobe channels for detailed tutorials and product insights.

Adobe® Creative Cloud™ brings together everything you need to create your greatest work.
One membership gives you access to all Adobe professional creative desktop applications, plus new features as soon as they're available.
Cloud storage ensures file access anywhere, even on mobile, streamlining concept sharing.
Cloud-based services let you build websites, mobile apps, and content for any medium/device.
With Behance integration, you can publish your portfolio on your own URL and plug into the world's largest creative community to get inspired, get feedback, and find new opportunities.
Connect with Adobe Creative Cloud:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/creativecloud" style="color: #0066cc; text-decoration: none;">https://twitter.com/creativecloud
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/adobe-creative-cloud/" style="color: #0066cc; text-decoration: none;">https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/adobe-creative-cloud/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/adobecreativecloud" style="color: #0066cc; text-decoration: none;">https://www.facebook.com/adobecreativecloud
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adobecreativecloud/" style="color: #0066cc; text-decoration: none;">https://www.instagram.com/adobecreativecloud/
#Adobe #AdobeYouTube #AdobeCreativeCloud
#666;">المصدر: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBJOlk2jjqc" style="color: #0066cc; text-decoration: none;">www.youtube.com
#0066cc;">#innovative #workflows #for #futureproof #designers #adobe #creative #cloud #supercharge #your #graphic #asset #creation #with #smarter #workflow #that #blends #expertlevel #design #techniques #the #latest #aipowered #toolsin #this #advanced #session #designer #and #author #kladi #vergine #combines #precision #traditional #photoshop #illustrator #power #generative #help #you #build #more #efficient #sophisticated #approach #development #perfect #intermediate #professional #designed #show #how #integrate #seamlessly #into #enhance #not #replace #process #reduce #production #time #automate #repetitive #tasks #without #sacrificing #creativity #control #youll #learn #flexible #scalable #brand #elements #across #illustratorcombine #tools #amplify #efficiencyautomate #tedious #while #maintaining #controlmaster #streamline #produce #results #fastersubscribe #hrefhttpsadobely48y1qj1 #stylecolor #0066cc #textdecoration #nonehttpsadobely48y1qj1a #about #hrefhttpsadobely3rtndnp #nonehttpsadobely3rtndnpa #cloudunlocking #potential #goes #beyond #it039s #cultivating #inspiration #fostering #innovation #mastering #artistic #expressionon #youtube #channel #discover #stories #concepts #trends #ignite #creativitywe #are #hub #connecting #channels #detailed #tutorials #product #insightsadobe #brings #together #everything #need #create #greatest #workone #membership #gives #access #all #desktop #applications #plus #new #features #soon #they039re #availablecloud #storage #ensures #file #anywhere #even #mobile #streamlining #concept #sharingcloudbased #services #let #websites #apps #content #any #mediumdevicewith #behance #integration #can #publish #portfolio #own #url #plug #world039s #largest #community #get #inspired #feedback #find #opportunitiesconnect #cloudtwitter #hrefhttpstwittercomcreativecloud #nonehttpstwittercomcreativeclouda #linkedin #hrefhttpswwwlinkedincomshowcaseadobecreativecloud #nonehttpswwwlinkedincomshowcaseadobecreativeclouda #facebook #hrefhttpswwwfacebookcomadobecreativecloud #nonehttpswwwfacebookcomadobecreativeclouda #instagram #hrefhttpswwwinstagramcomadobecreativecloud #nonehttpswwwinstagramcomadobecreativeclouda #adobeyoutube #adobecreativecloud

Innovative Workflows for Future-proof Designers | Adobe Creative Cloud
Supercharge your graphic asset creation with a smarter workflow that blends expert-level design techniques with the latest AI-powered tools. In this advanced session, designer and author Kladi Vergine combines the precision of traditional Photoshop and Illustrator workflows with the power of generative AI to help you build a more efficient, creative, and sophisticated approach to design development. Perfect for intermediate and professional designers, this session is designed to show you how to integrate generative AI seamlessly into your workflow to enhance (not replace) your creative process, reduce production time, and automate repetitive tasks without sacrificing creativity or control. You’ll learn how to: Build flexible, scalable brand elements across Photoshop and Illustrator Combine traditional tools with AI to amplify creativity and efficiency Automate tedious tasks while maintaining creative control Master advanced workflows to streamline your process and produce professional results faster Subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud: https://adobe.ly/48Y1QJ1 Learn more about Creative Cloud: https://adobe.ly/3RTndnp About Adobe Creative Cloud: Unlocking creative potential goes beyond tools – it's about cultivating inspiration, fostering innovation, and mastering artistic expression. On the Adobe Creative Cloud YouTube channel, discover stories, concepts, and trends that ignite your creativity. We are your hub for creativity, connecting you with Adobe channels for detailed tutorials and product insights. Adobe® Creative Cloud™ brings together everything you need to create your greatest work. One membership gives you access to all Adobe professional creative desktop applications, plus new features as soon as they're available. Cloud storage ensures file access anywhere, even on mobile, streamlining concept sharing. Cloud-based services let you build websites, mobile apps, and content for any medium/device. With Behance integration, you can publish your portfolio on your own URL and plug into the world's largest creative community to get inspired, get feedback, and find new opportunities. Connect with Adobe Creative Cloud: Twitter: https://twitter.com/creativecloud LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/adobe-creative-cloud/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/adobecreativecloud Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adobecreativecloud/ #Adobe #AdobeYouTube #AdobeCreativeCloud
المصدر: www.youtube.com
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Innovative Workflows for Future-proof Designers | Adobe Creative Cloud

Supercharge your graphic asset creation with a smarter workflow that blends expert-level design techniques with the latest AI-powered tools. In this advanced session, designer and author Kladi Vergine combines the precision of traditional Photoshop and Illustrator workflows with the power of generative AI to help you build a more efficient, creative, and sophisticated approach to design development. Perfect for intermediate and professional designers, this session is designed to show you how to integrate generative AI seamlessly into your workflow to enhance (not replace) your creative process, reduce production time, and automate repetitive tasks without sacrificing creativity or control. You’ll learn how to: Build flexible, scalable brand elements across Photoshop and Illustrator Combine traditional tools with AI to amplify creativity and efficiency Automate tedious tasks while maintaining creative control Master advanced workflows to streamline your process and produce professional results faster Subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud: https://adobe.ly/48Y1QJ1 Learn more about Creative Cloud: https://adobe.ly/3RTndnp About Adobe Creative Cloud: Unlocking creative potential goes beyond tools – it's about cultivating inspiration, fostering innovation, and mastering artistic expression. On the Adobe Creative Cloud YouTube channel, discover stories, concepts, and trends that ignite your creativity. We are your hub for creativity, connecting you with Adobe channels for detailed tutorials and product insights. Adobe® Creative Cloud™ brings together everything you need to create your greatest work. One membership gives you access to all Adobe professional creative desktop applications, plus new features as soon as they're available. Cloud storage ensures file access anywhere, even on mobile, streamlining concept sharing. Cloud-based services let you build websites, mobile apps, and content for any medium/device. With Behance integration, you can publish your portfolio on your own URL and plug into the world's largest creative community to get inspired, get feedback, and find new opportunities. Connect with Adobe Creative Cloud: Twitter: https://twitter.com/creativecloud LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/adobe-creative-cloud/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/adobecreativecloud Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adobecreativecloud/ #Adobe #AdobeYouTube #AdobeCreativeCloud

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Ars Technica RT hat einen Link geteilt

2025-05-13 14:14:13 ·

#333;">Ana de Armas is caught in Wick’s crosshairs in final Ballerina trailer

en pointe

Ana de Armas is caught in Wick’s crosshairs in final Ballerina trailer
"When you think of me, you should think of fire.
Risen from ashes, again and again."

Jennifer Ouellette

–

May 13, 2025 10:08 am

|
0

Credit:

Lionsgate Entertainment

Credit:

Lionsgate Entertainment

Story text
Size
Small
Standard
Large
Width
*
Standard
Wide
Links
Standard
Orange
* Subscribers only
  Learn more
One last trailer for From the World of John Wick: Ballerina.

We're about three weeks out from the theatrical release of From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, starring Ana de Armas.
So naturally Lionsgate has released one final trailer to whet audience appetites for what promises to be a fiery, action-packed addition to the hugely successful franchise.
(Some spoilers for 2019's John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum.)
Chronologically, Ballerina takes place during the events of John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum.
As previously reported, Parabellum found Wick declared excommunicado from the High Table for killing crime lord Santino D'Antonio on the grounds of the Continental.
On the run with a bounty on his head, he makes his way to the headquarters of the Ruska Roma crime syndicate, led by the Director (Anjelica Huston).
The Director also trains young girls to be ballerina-assassins, and one young ballerina (played by Unity Phelan) is shown rehearsing in the scene.
That dancer, Eve Macarro, is the main character in Ballerina, now played by de Armas.
Huston returns as the Director, Ian McShane is back as Winston, and Lance Reddick makes one final (posthumous) appearance as the Continental concierge, Charon.
New cast members include Gabriel Byrne as the main villain, the Chancellor, who turns an entire town against Eve; Sharon Duncan-Brewster as Nogi, Eve's mentor; Norman Reedus as Daniel Pine; and Catalina Sandino Moreno and David Castaneda in as-yet-undisclosed roles.
The first trailer was released last September and focused heavily on Eve's backstory: Having been orphaned, she chose to train with the Ruska Roma in hopes of avenging her father's brutal death.
Wick only made a brief appearance, but he had more screen time in the second trailer, released in March, in which the pair face off in an atmospheric wintry landscape.
This final trailer opens with Eve looking up while directly in Wick's crosshairs.
Much of the ensuing footage isn't new, but it does show de Armas to her best deadly advantage as she takes on combatant after combatant in true John Wick style.
Her vow: "This isn't done until they're dead."
From the World of John Wick: Ballerina hits theaters on June 6, 2025.
Jennifer Ouellette
Senior Writer
Jennifer Ouellette
Senior Writer
Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series.
Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M.
Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

0 Comments

#666;">المصدر: https://arstechnica.com/culture/2025/05/ana-de-armas-is-caught-in-wicks-crosshairs-in-final-ballerina-trailer/" style="color: #0066cc; text-decoration: none;">arstechnica.com
#0066cc;">#ana #armas #caught #wicks #crosshairs #final #ballerina #trailer #pointe #quotwhen #you #think #should #firerisen #from #ashes #again #and #againquot #jennifer #ouellette #may #credit #lionsgate #entertainment #story #textsizesmallstandardlargewidth #standardwidelinksstandardorange #subscribers #only #learn #more #one #last #for #the #world #john #wick #we039re #about #three #weeks #out #theatrical #release #starring #armasso #naturally #has #released #whet #audience #appetites #what #promises #fiery #actionpacked #addition #hugely #successful #franchisesome #spoilers #2019039s #chapter #parabellumchronologically #takes #placeduring #events #parabellumas #previously #reported #parabellum #found #declared #excommunicado #high #table #killing #crime #lord #santino #d039antonio #grounds #continentalon #run #with #bounty #his #head #makes #way #headquarters #ruska #roma #syndicate #led #director #anjelica #hustonthe #also #trains #young #girls #ballerinaassassins #played #unity #phelan #shown #rehearsing #scenethat #dancer #eve #macarro #main #character #now #armashuston #returns #ian #mcshane #back #winston #lance #reddick #posthumous #appearance #continental #concierge #charonnew #cast #members #include #gabriel #byrne #villain #chancellor #who #turns #entire #town #against #sharon #duncanbrewster #nogi #eve039s #mentor #norman #reedus #daniel #pine #catalina #sandino #moreno #david #castaneda #asyetundisclosed #rolesthe #first #was #september #focused #heavily #backstory #having #been #orphaned #she #chose #train #hopes #avenging #her #father039s #brutal #deathwick #made #brief #but #had #screen #time #second #march #which #pair #face #off #atmospheric #wintry #landscapethis #opens #looking #while #directly #wick039s #crosshairsmuch #ensuing #footage #isn039t #new #does #show #best #deadly #advantage #combatant #after #true #styleher #vow #quotthis #done #until #they039re #deadquotfrom #hits #theaters #june #2025jennifer #ouellettesenior #writerjennifer #writer #senior #ars #technica #particular #focus #where #science #meets #culture #covering #everything #physics #related #interdisciplinary #topics #favorite #films #seriesjennifer #lives #baltimore #spouse #physicist #sean #mcarroll #their #two #cats #ariel #caliban #comments

Ana de Armas is caught in Wick’s crosshairs in final Ballerina trailer
en pointe Ana de Armas is caught in Wick’s crosshairs in final Ballerina trailer "When you think of me, you should think of fire. Risen from ashes, again and again." Jennifer Ouellette – May 13, 2025 10:08 am | 0 Credit: Lionsgate Entertainment Credit: Lionsgate Entertainment Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more One last trailer for From the World of John Wick: Ballerina. We're about three weeks out from the theatrical release of From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, starring Ana de Armas. So naturally Lionsgate has released one final trailer to whet audience appetites for what promises to be a fiery, action-packed addition to the hugely successful franchise. (Some spoilers for 2019's John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum.) Chronologically, Ballerina takes place during the events of John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum. As previously reported, Parabellum found Wick declared excommunicado from the High Table for killing crime lord Santino D'Antonio on the grounds of the Continental. On the run with a bounty on his head, he makes his way to the headquarters of the Ruska Roma crime syndicate, led by the Director (Anjelica Huston). The Director also trains young girls to be ballerina-assassins, and one young ballerina (played by Unity Phelan) is shown rehearsing in the scene. That dancer, Eve Macarro, is the main character in Ballerina, now played by de Armas. Huston returns as the Director, Ian McShane is back as Winston, and Lance Reddick makes one final (posthumous) appearance as the Continental concierge, Charon. New cast members include Gabriel Byrne as the main villain, the Chancellor, who turns an entire town against Eve; Sharon Duncan-Brewster as Nogi, Eve's mentor; Norman Reedus as Daniel Pine; and Catalina Sandino Moreno and David Castaneda in as-yet-undisclosed roles. The first trailer was released last September and focused heavily on Eve's backstory: Having been orphaned, she chose to train with the Ruska Roma in hopes of avenging her father's brutal death. Wick only made a brief appearance, but he had more screen time in the second trailer, released in March, in which the pair face off in an atmospheric wintry landscape. This final trailer opens with Eve looking up while directly in Wick's crosshairs. Much of the ensuing footage isn't new, but it does show de Armas to her best deadly advantage as she takes on combatant after combatant in true John Wick style. Her vow: "This isn't done until they're dead." From the World of John Wick: Ballerina hits theaters on June 6, 2025. Jennifer Ouellette Senior Writer Jennifer Ouellette Senior Writer Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban. 0 Comments
المصدر: arstechnica.com
#ana #armas #caught #wicks #crosshairs #final #ballerina #trailer #pointe #quotwhen #you #think #should #firerisen #from #ashes #again #and #againquot #jennifer #ouellette #may #credit #lionsgate #entertainment #story #textsizesmallstandardlargewidth #standardwidelinksstandardorange #subscribers #only #learn #more #one #last #for #the #world #john #wick #we039re #about #three #weeks #out #theatrical #release #starring #armasso #naturally #has #released #whet #audience #appetites #what #promises #fiery #actionpacked #addition #hugely #successful #franchisesome #spoilers #2019039s #chapter #parabellumchronologically #takes #placeduring #events #parabellumas #previously #reported #parabellum #found #declared #excommunicado #high #table #killing #crime #lord #santino #d039antonio #grounds #continentalon #run #with #bounty #his #head #makes #way #headquarters #ruska #roma #syndicate #led #director #anjelica #hustonthe #also #trains #young #girls #ballerinaassassins #played #unity #phelan #shown #rehearsing #scenethat #dancer #eve #macarro #main #character #now #armashuston #returns #ian #mcshane #back #winston #lance #reddick #posthumous #appearance #continental #concierge #charonnew #cast #members #include #gabriel #byrne #villain #chancellor #who #turns #entire #town #against #sharon #duncanbrewster #nogi #eve039s #mentor #norman #reedus #daniel #pine #catalina #sandino #moreno #david #castaneda #asyetundisclosed #rolesthe #first #was #september #focused #heavily #backstory #having #been #orphaned #she #chose #train #hopes #avenging #her #father039s #brutal #deathwick #made #brief #but #had #screen #time #second #march #which #pair #face #off #atmospheric #wintry #landscapethis #opens #looking #while #directly #wick039s #crosshairsmuch #ensuing #footage #isn039t #new #does #show #best #deadly #advantage #combatant #after #true #styleher #vow #quotthis #done #until #they039re #deadquotfrom #hits #theaters #june #2025jennifer #ouellettesenior #writerjennifer #writer #senior #ars #technica #particular #focus #where #science #meets #culture #covering #everything #physics #related #interdisciplinary #topics #favorite #films #seriesjennifer #lives #baltimore #spouse #physicist #sean #mcarroll #their #two #cats #ariel #caliban #comments

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Ana de Armas is caught in Wick’s crosshairs in final Ballerina trailer

en pointe Ana de Armas is caught in Wick’s crosshairs in final Ballerina trailer "When you think of me, you should think of fire. Risen from ashes, again and again." Jennifer Ouellette – May 13, 2025 10:08 am | 0 Credit: Lionsgate Entertainment Credit: Lionsgate Entertainment Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more One last trailer for From the World of John Wick: Ballerina. We're about three weeks out from the theatrical release of From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, starring Ana de Armas. So naturally Lionsgate has released one final trailer to whet audience appetites for what promises to be a fiery, action-packed addition to the hugely successful franchise. (Some spoilers for 2019's John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum.) Chronologically, Ballerina takes place during the events of John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum. As previously reported, Parabellum found Wick declared excommunicado from the High Table for killing crime lord Santino D'Antonio on the grounds of the Continental. On the run with a bounty on his head, he makes his way to the headquarters of the Ruska Roma crime syndicate, led by the Director (Anjelica Huston). The Director also trains young girls to be ballerina-assassins, and one young ballerina (played by Unity Phelan) is shown rehearsing in the scene. That dancer, Eve Macarro, is the main character in Ballerina, now played by de Armas. Huston returns as the Director, Ian McShane is back as Winston, and Lance Reddick makes one final (posthumous) appearance as the Continental concierge, Charon. New cast members include Gabriel Byrne as the main villain, the Chancellor, who turns an entire town against Eve; Sharon Duncan-Brewster as Nogi, Eve's mentor; Norman Reedus as Daniel Pine; and Catalina Sandino Moreno and David Castaneda in as-yet-undisclosed roles. The first trailer was released last September and focused heavily on Eve's backstory: Having been orphaned, she chose to train with the Ruska Roma in hopes of avenging her father's brutal death. Wick only made a brief appearance, but he had more screen time in the second trailer, released in March, in which the pair face off in an atmospheric wintry landscape. This final trailer opens with Eve looking up while directly in Wick's crosshairs. Much of the ensuing footage isn't new, but it does show de Armas to her best deadly advantage as she takes on combatant after combatant in true John Wick style. Her vow: "This isn't done until they're dead." From the World of John Wick: Ballerina hits theaters on June 6, 2025. Jennifer Ouellette Senior Writer Jennifer Ouellette Senior Writer Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban. 0 Comments

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2025-05-13 13:47:29 ·

#333;">Why one obscure app could help crumble Meta’s empire
If the question, “Who is Meta’s biggest rival?” were on a Family Feud survey, TikTok would likely be the winning answer.
In the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case against the Facebook and Instagram owner, the government’s response probably wouldn’t even make the top 10: a small blockchain-based platform called MeWe.
MeWe looks a fair amount like Facebook at first glance, except that you make an account using the Frequency blockchain — which the company explains is a decentralized protocol that lets you move your social connections to other (mostly hypothetical at this point) apps that support Frequency.
The company says 20 million users have joined, but when I make a MeWe account and log in, I scroll through my autopopulated feed and think, “Who are these people?” I search for a few of my Verge colleagues, figuring if anyone has tried this obscure app, it might be one of them, but I come up short.
I try some public figures: Tim Cook? Jeff Bezos? Mark Zuckerberg? There are some accounts with these names, but it seems unlikely they’re the ones I have in mind.The claim that MeWe is a closer competitor to Facebook and Instagram than TikTok might be baffling if you’re not steeped in antitrust law or the specifics of the FTC’s complaint.
Meta CEO Zuckerberg testified he hadn’t even heard of the app before this case was filed.
But the FTC has spent the past three weeks laying out its logic.
Using Meta’s own internal discussions about how it views itself and its competition, it says that Meta has historically, and to this day, competed in a market for connecting with friends and family online — and when it saw its dominance in that space threatened by the rise of Instagram and WhatsApp, it bought them to squash the competition.Whether Judge James Boasberg buys this could determine who wins the case — if the FTC can also show that Meta acted illegally through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp to solidify its alleged monopoly power.Antitrust law is supposed to ensure fair competition, which usually means that people have options for a useful class of goods and services — what’s known as a relevant market.
The FTC says that here, that market is “personal social networking services,” or PSNs: spaces where a core purpose is helping people connect with friends and family.
While there are many online platforms that overlap with Meta’s services, the FTC argues that virtually none of them serve that market.
If internet users want to find and hang out with people they know — as opposed to, say, watching influencers or making work connections — then it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s way or… in the government’s telling, Snapchat, BeReal, and MeWe.
Beyond that core definition, PSNs have some other unique features and norms: The apps feature a social graph of users’ friends and family connections, as opposed to mapping users primarily based on their interests.
Users can look up and find people they know in real life.
And they come to the app to share personal updates with those people.Facebook and Instagram increasingly display videos and photos from influencers and celebrities, but the FTC argues personal social networking remains a core service.
It used Instagram chief Adam Mosseri’s testimony to most clearly make this point.
In that testimony as well as posts to his own Instagram account, Mosseri said that it’s still important for the app to connect users with their friends.
The FTC argues that even if that use case is a smaller portion of what Meta’s apps do these days, it’s still a significant need users have that can virtually only be fulfilled by Facebook and Instagram.
While someone might connect with people they know in real life on LinkedIn, they likely won’t primarily share personal updates there.
And while they also could follow and interact with people they know on TikTok or YouTube, they’re more likely to passively watch videos from people they don’t.Meta says this is an entirely wrong way to think about it.
Social media platforms compete for users’ time and attention, so whether a particular app is squarely aimed at so-called friends and family sharing is beside the point.
Facebook and Instagram have evolved to show more content from people like influencers, shifting further from the use case the FTC says Meta has illegally dominated.
The company has already landed some important points that could help its case, and it will get more time to push back on the agency’s framing when it calls its own witnesses in the coming weeks.But as the FTC’s case-in-chief continues into its fifth week, its argument for Meta’s dominance is becoming a lot clearer.Why do people use Facebook?When defining a market, each side is trying to answer a key question: why are people choosing one particular company’s product? A lot of goods and services compete with each other in some sense, but this doesn’t mean they serve the same niche.
In the case of sodas, for example, “you could buy lemon-lime, but many people would never see that as a close substitute for buying Coke or Pepsi,” says George Washington Law professor and former FTC Chair Bill Kovacic.
In the tech world, Netflix has claimed its biggest competitors are Fortnite and sleep — but those comparisons probably wouldn’t stand up in court.The FTC says that outside of Facebook and Instagram, only apps like Snapchat and MeWe can fulfill a users’ desire to broadcast personal updates with friends and family online.
To make its case, it brought in a string of executives from other social media companies to explain why their apps can’t quite scratch the same itch for users.
Strava’s former VP of connected partnerships Mateo Ortega testified that sure, users of the fitness-tracking social media app could share baby photos on the platform, but they probably wouldn’t unless it was in a running stroller.
“It’s all about fitness, and while you can post other stuff, it just doesn’t seem as relevant,” he said.
“You could buy lemon-lime, but many people would never see that as a close substitute for buying Coke or Pepsi”Pinterest’s former head of user growth Julia Roberts testified that users who come to Pinterest “expecting it to be like other social media apps … tend to be confused about how to use the product.” That’s because the app is so much not about connecting with other people that it works much differently from other social media platforms.
Pinterest is more about finding things users are interested in, she said, so “following is not a big part of the Pinterest experience.”TikTok has a tab where users can watch videos from their friends — identified as people who mutually follow each other.
But head of operations Adam Presser testified only about 1 percent of videos watched on the platform are there.
The company doesn’t think of itself as competing with Meta’s apps for personal social networking, he testified.
And even though side-by-side screenshots of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts look identical, Presser said, “when you click out of this view for these other platforms, you would get to essentially what I think of as their core business,” which for Instagram, includes a feed and stories that often contain at least some content from family and friends.At times, Meta’s cross-examination of rival company executives showed the limits of apps’ similarities.
When questioning Apple director of product marketing Ronak Shah, Meta sought to show that group chats in Apple’s messaging feature could serve as a social media feed for friends and family sharing.
But Shah testified that feed would be limited to 32 people at most, and users can’t just look up each others’ profiles like they would on social platforms.
Still, Meta pointed out, Apple’s messages app is listed under social media on its own app store.However, Meta also made important arguments about why the judge should question the FTC’s framing.
It pointed out that some documents from TikTok and YouTube owner Google claiming their products are very different from Meta’s were submitted to foreign officials to try to avoid getting drafted into potentially frustrating regulations.
It also pointed out when TikTok briefly went dark in the US ahead of a (now-aborted) ban, users flocked to Meta apps, showing consumers see it as a substitute on at least some level.
That’s because, Meta argued, competition for users is really about winning their time and attention.Companies can “sometimes make mistakes.
They misjudge who their users are”But X VP of product Keith Coleman testified it’s not that useful to think about competition this way.
Instead, “it’s much more helpful to understand what people are trying to accomplish in their lives and to try to help them accomplish that.” Under former CEO Jack Dorsey, then-Twitter leaned into focusing on news and users’ interests, Coleman testified, because that’s why people were coming to the platform.
Coleman was later surprised at how his own website characterized the product in its help center as a “service for friends, family, and coworkers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages.” “I can’t believe that’s on the website,” he said.
“That’s pretty wacky.”This point was “a caution that not everything a company writes down or says is necessarily decisive in establishing what the boundary of a market is,” Kovacic said.
Companies can “sometimes make mistakes.
They misjudge who their users are.”There are real ramifications for internet users here.
Going back to Netflix’s comparisons, if the streaming video service went down, some people would probably be happy to play a video game or get a few hours of shut-eye instead.
But others would be frustrated that they couldn’t watch a movie, which is why it’s good that Hulu, HBO, and Amazon Prime Video also exist.
The FTC’s argument isn’t that Meta owns the only social apps on the internet, it’s that the company faces little competition for a service many people specifically want — so the fact that you probably don’t know anyone using MeWe is sort of the point.How will the judge decide?Ultimately, Boasberg’s market definition — whether it’s Meta’s, the FTC’s, or his own — will come down to a few things: how Meta views itself, how competitors see it, and his own intuition, says Kovacic.
”Notice how much the FTC has been questioning Meta witnesses on the basis of its own internal documents,” he says.
“Does the story in the courtroom match the story of your own internal documents?” So far, the documents have shown that Meta has clocked that at least some portion of users come to its products to connect with family and friends, but also that the rise of TikTok has had it looking over its shoulder.
In September 2020, Meta told its board that Instagram revenue would be “meaningfully lower” than planned in the second half of the fiscal year because TikTok was drawing users’ attention.
But other internal documents have shown Meta’s well aware that at different points in time, users have come to its apps to connect with family and friends, and worriedly took note of other apps entering that space.
In a 2018 presentation, Meta found that the highest percentage of surveyed users said they come to Facebook, Instagram, and Snap to “see daily casual moments” and “see special moments.” By contrast, users came to Twitter’s feed for news and YouTube’s for entertainment.
And even as Instagram expands into entertainment, the FTC notes that it still advertises its sign-up page as a place to “see photos and videos from your friends.”“Instagram will always need to focus on friends”In a 2018 email, Zuckerberg told Mosseri that “Instagram will always need to focus on friends.” And even though a lot has changed in the social media landscape since then, Mosseri testified that to this day on the app, “friends are an important part of the experience.” Even though users may share fewer of their own updates on Facebook and Instagram, Mosseri admitted that two friends talking in the comments of a public figure’s post counts as an interaction between friends — and one that Instagram actively tries to facilitate.Meta has argued that this special focus on friends and family sharing makes up a shrinking portion of its offerings as it works to compete with fierce rivals like TikTok.
But the FTC says it’s still significant enough to monopolize.
It’s a scenario that came up in another major tech monopolization case, Kovacic says: the late-1990s lawsuit US v.
Microsoft.
In that case, Microsoft argued the Justice Department was ignoring how computing would soon move beyond the personal computer to the Internet of Things, meaning it couldn’t truly lock up the computing ecosystem as much as the government alleged.“Judge Jackson in the Microsoft case said, yeah, those things are happening, but not happening fast enough to deny you real market power in this PC and laptop-based market that the Justice Department is emphasizing,” Kovacic says.Still, he adds, a market niche can at some point become so small that it’s no longer significant in the eyes of antitrust law.
“You can have a process of change that ultimately renders the market segment unimportant,” he says.
“And the hard task of analysis for the judge is to say, has it already happened?”See More:
#666;">المصدر: https://www.theverge.com/antitrust/665308/meta-ftc-antitrust-trial-market-definition-tiktok-mewe-snap" style="color: #0066cc; text-decoration: none;">www.theverge.com
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Why one obscure app could help crumble Meta’s empire
If the question, “Who is Meta’s biggest rival?” were on a Family Feud survey, TikTok would likely be the winning answer. In the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case against the Facebook and Instagram owner, the government’s response probably wouldn’t even make the top 10: a small blockchain-based platform called MeWe. MeWe looks a fair amount like Facebook at first glance, except that you make an account using the Frequency blockchain — which the company explains is a decentralized protocol that lets you move your social connections to other (mostly hypothetical at this point) apps that support Frequency. The company says 20 million users have joined, but when I make a MeWe account and log in, I scroll through my autopopulated feed and think, “Who are these people?” I search for a few of my Verge colleagues, figuring if anyone has tried this obscure app, it might be one of them, but I come up short. I try some public figures: Tim Cook? Jeff Bezos? Mark Zuckerberg? There are some accounts with these names, but it seems unlikely they’re the ones I have in mind.The claim that MeWe is a closer competitor to Facebook and Instagram than TikTok might be baffling if you’re not steeped in antitrust law or the specifics of the FTC’s complaint. Meta CEO Zuckerberg testified he hadn’t even heard of the app before this case was filed. But the FTC has spent the past three weeks laying out its logic. Using Meta’s own internal discussions about how it views itself and its competition, it says that Meta has historically, and to this day, competed in a market for connecting with friends and family online — and when it saw its dominance in that space threatened by the rise of Instagram and WhatsApp, it bought them to squash the competition.Whether Judge James Boasberg buys this could determine who wins the case — if the FTC can also show that Meta acted illegally through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp to solidify its alleged monopoly power.Antitrust law is supposed to ensure fair competition, which usually means that people have options for a useful class of goods and services — what’s known as a relevant market. The FTC says that here, that market is “personal social networking services,” or PSNs: spaces where a core purpose is helping people connect with friends and family. While there are many online platforms that overlap with Meta’s services, the FTC argues that virtually none of them serve that market. If internet users want to find and hang out with people they know — as opposed to, say, watching influencers or making work connections — then it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s way or… in the government’s telling, Snapchat, BeReal, and MeWe. Beyond that core definition, PSNs have some other unique features and norms: The apps feature a social graph of users’ friends and family connections, as opposed to mapping users primarily based on their interests. Users can look up and find people they know in real life. And they come to the app to share personal updates with those people.Facebook and Instagram increasingly display videos and photos from influencers and celebrities, but the FTC argues personal social networking remains a core service. It used Instagram chief Adam Mosseri’s testimony to most clearly make this point. In that testimony as well as posts to his own Instagram account, Mosseri said that it’s still important for the app to connect users with their friends. The FTC argues that even if that use case is a smaller portion of what Meta’s apps do these days, it’s still a significant need users have that can virtually only be fulfilled by Facebook and Instagram. While someone might connect with people they know in real life on LinkedIn, they likely won’t primarily share personal updates there. And while they also could follow and interact with people they know on TikTok or YouTube, they’re more likely to passively watch videos from people they don’t.Meta says this is an entirely wrong way to think about it. Social media platforms compete for users’ time and attention, so whether a particular app is squarely aimed at so-called friends and family sharing is beside the point. Facebook and Instagram have evolved to show more content from people like influencers, shifting further from the use case the FTC says Meta has illegally dominated. The company has already landed some important points that could help its case, and it will get more time to push back on the agency’s framing when it calls its own witnesses in the coming weeks.But as the FTC’s case-in-chief continues into its fifth week, its argument for Meta’s dominance is becoming a lot clearer.Why do people use Facebook?When defining a market, each side is trying to answer a key question: why are people choosing one particular company’s product? A lot of goods and services compete with each other in some sense, but this doesn’t mean they serve the same niche. In the case of sodas, for example, “you could buy lemon-lime, but many people would never see that as a close substitute for buying Coke or Pepsi,” says George Washington Law professor and former FTC Chair Bill Kovacic. In the tech world, Netflix has claimed its biggest competitors are Fortnite and sleep — but those comparisons probably wouldn’t stand up in court.The FTC says that outside of Facebook and Instagram, only apps like Snapchat and MeWe can fulfill a users’ desire to broadcast personal updates with friends and family online. To make its case, it brought in a string of executives from other social media companies to explain why their apps can’t quite scratch the same itch for users. Strava’s former VP of connected partnerships Mateo Ortega testified that sure, users of the fitness-tracking social media app could share baby photos on the platform, but they probably wouldn’t unless it was in a running stroller. “It’s all about fitness, and while you can post other stuff, it just doesn’t seem as relevant,” he said. “You could buy lemon-lime, but many people would never see that as a close substitute for buying Coke or Pepsi”Pinterest’s former head of user growth Julia Roberts testified that users who come to Pinterest “expecting it to be like other social media apps … tend to be confused about how to use the product.” That’s because the app is so much not about connecting with other people that it works much differently from other social media platforms. Pinterest is more about finding things users are interested in, she said, so “following is not a big part of the Pinterest experience.”TikTok has a tab where users can watch videos from their friends — identified as people who mutually follow each other. But head of operations Adam Presser testified only about 1 percent of videos watched on the platform are there. The company doesn’t think of itself as competing with Meta’s apps for personal social networking, he testified. And even though side-by-side screenshots of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts look identical, Presser said, “when you click out of this view for these other platforms, you would get to essentially what I think of as their core business,” which for Instagram, includes a feed and stories that often contain at least some content from family and friends.At times, Meta’s cross-examination of rival company executives showed the limits of apps’ similarities. When questioning Apple director of product marketing Ronak Shah, Meta sought to show that group chats in Apple’s messaging feature could serve as a social media feed for friends and family sharing. But Shah testified that feed would be limited to 32 people at most, and users can’t just look up each others’ profiles like they would on social platforms. Still, Meta pointed out, Apple’s messages app is listed under social media on its own app store.However, Meta also made important arguments about why the judge should question the FTC’s framing. It pointed out that some documents from TikTok and YouTube owner Google claiming their products are very different from Meta’s were submitted to foreign officials to try to avoid getting drafted into potentially frustrating regulations. It also pointed out when TikTok briefly went dark in the US ahead of a (now-aborted) ban, users flocked to Meta apps, showing consumers see it as a substitute on at least some level. That’s because, Meta argued, competition for users is really about winning their time and attention.Companies can “sometimes make mistakes. They misjudge who their users are”But X VP of product Keith Coleman testified it’s not that useful to think about competition this way. Instead, “it’s much more helpful to understand what people are trying to accomplish in their lives and to try to help them accomplish that.” Under former CEO Jack Dorsey, then-Twitter leaned into focusing on news and users’ interests, Coleman testified, because that’s why people were coming to the platform. Coleman was later surprised at how his own website characterized the product in its help center as a “service for friends, family, and coworkers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages.” “I can’t believe that’s on the website,” he said. “That’s pretty wacky.”This point was “a caution that not everything a company writes down or says is necessarily decisive in establishing what the boundary of a market is,” Kovacic said. Companies can “sometimes make mistakes. They misjudge who their users are.”There are real ramifications for internet users here. Going back to Netflix’s comparisons, if the streaming video service went down, some people would probably be happy to play a video game or get a few hours of shut-eye instead. But others would be frustrated that they couldn’t watch a movie, which is why it’s good that Hulu, HBO, and Amazon Prime Video also exist. The FTC’s argument isn’t that Meta owns the only social apps on the internet, it’s that the company faces little competition for a service many people specifically want — so the fact that you probably don’t know anyone using MeWe is sort of the point.How will the judge decide?Ultimately, Boasberg’s market definition — whether it’s Meta’s, the FTC’s, or his own — will come down to a few things: how Meta views itself, how competitors see it, and his own intuition, says Kovacic. ”Notice how much the FTC has been questioning Meta witnesses on the basis of its own internal documents,” he says. “Does the story in the courtroom match the story of your own internal documents?” So far, the documents have shown that Meta has clocked that at least some portion of users come to its products to connect with family and friends, but also that the rise of TikTok has had it looking over its shoulder. In September 2020, Meta told its board that Instagram revenue would be “meaningfully lower” than planned in the second half of the fiscal year because TikTok was drawing users’ attention. But other internal documents have shown Meta’s well aware that at different points in time, users have come to its apps to connect with family and friends, and worriedly took note of other apps entering that space. In a 2018 presentation, Meta found that the highest percentage of surveyed users said they come to Facebook, Instagram, and Snap to “see daily casual moments” and “see special moments.” By contrast, users came to Twitter’s feed for news and YouTube’s for entertainment. And even as Instagram expands into entertainment, the FTC notes that it still advertises its sign-up page as a place to “see photos and videos from your friends.”“Instagram will always need to focus on friends”In a 2018 email, Zuckerberg told Mosseri that “Instagram will always need to focus on friends.” And even though a lot has changed in the social media landscape since then, Mosseri testified that to this day on the app, “friends are an important part of the experience.” Even though users may share fewer of their own updates on Facebook and Instagram, Mosseri admitted that two friends talking in the comments of a public figure’s post counts as an interaction between friends — and one that Instagram actively tries to facilitate.Meta has argued that this special focus on friends and family sharing makes up a shrinking portion of its offerings as it works to compete with fierce rivals like TikTok. But the FTC says it’s still significant enough to monopolize. It’s a scenario that came up in another major tech monopolization case, Kovacic says: the late-1990s lawsuit US v. Microsoft. In that case, Microsoft argued the Justice Department was ignoring how computing would soon move beyond the personal computer to the Internet of Things, meaning it couldn’t truly lock up the computing ecosystem as much as the government alleged.“Judge Jackson in the Microsoft case said, yeah, those things are happening, but not happening fast enough to deny you real market power in this PC and laptop-based market that the Justice Department is emphasizing,” Kovacic says.Still, he adds, a market niche can at some point become so small that it’s no longer significant in the eyes of antitrust law. “You can have a process of change that ultimately renders the market segment unimportant,” he says. “And the hard task of analysis for the judge is to say, has it already happened?”See More:
المصدر: www.theverge.com
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Why one obscure app could help crumble Meta’s empire

If the question, “Who is Meta’s biggest rival?” were on a Family Feud survey, TikTok would likely be the winning answer. In the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case against the Facebook and Instagram owner, the government’s response probably wouldn’t even make the top 10: a small blockchain-based platform called MeWe. MeWe looks a fair amount like Facebook at first glance, except that you make an account using the Frequency blockchain — which the company explains is a decentralized protocol that lets you move your social connections to other (mostly hypothetical at this point) apps that support Frequency. The company says 20 million users have joined, but when I make a MeWe account and log in, I scroll through my autopopulated feed and think, “Who are these people?” I search for a few of my Verge colleagues, figuring if anyone has tried this obscure app, it might be one of them, but I come up short. I try some public figures: Tim Cook? Jeff Bezos? Mark Zuckerberg? There are some accounts with these names, but it seems unlikely they’re the ones I have in mind.The claim that MeWe is a closer competitor to Facebook and Instagram than TikTok might be baffling if you’re not steeped in antitrust law or the specifics of the FTC’s complaint. Meta CEO Zuckerberg testified he hadn’t even heard of the app before this case was filed. But the FTC has spent the past three weeks laying out its logic. Using Meta’s own internal discussions about how it views itself and its competition, it says that Meta has historically, and to this day, competed in a market for connecting with friends and family online — and when it saw its dominance in that space threatened by the rise of Instagram and WhatsApp, it bought them to squash the competition.Whether Judge James Boasberg buys this could determine who wins the case — if the FTC can also show that Meta acted illegally through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp to solidify its alleged monopoly power.Antitrust law is supposed to ensure fair competition, which usually means that people have options for a useful class of goods and services — what’s known as a relevant market. The FTC says that here, that market is “personal social networking services,” or PSNs: spaces where a core purpose is helping people connect with friends and family. While there are many online platforms that overlap with Meta’s services, the FTC argues that virtually none of them serve that market. If internet users want to find and hang out with people they know — as opposed to, say, watching influencers or making work connections — then it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s way or… in the government’s telling, Snapchat, BeReal, and MeWe. Beyond that core definition, PSNs have some other unique features and norms: The apps feature a social graph of users’ friends and family connections, as opposed to mapping users primarily based on their interests. Users can look up and find people they know in real life. And they come to the app to share personal updates with those people.Facebook and Instagram increasingly display videos and photos from influencers and celebrities, but the FTC argues personal social networking remains a core service. It used Instagram chief Adam Mosseri’s testimony to most clearly make this point. In that testimony as well as posts to his own Instagram account, Mosseri said that it’s still important for the app to connect users with their friends. The FTC argues that even if that use case is a smaller portion of what Meta’s apps do these days, it’s still a significant need users have that can virtually only be fulfilled by Facebook and Instagram. While someone might connect with people they know in real life on LinkedIn, they likely won’t primarily share personal updates there. And while they also could follow and interact with people they know on TikTok or YouTube, they’re more likely to passively watch videos from people they don’t.Meta says this is an entirely wrong way to think about it. Social media platforms compete for users’ time and attention, so whether a particular app is squarely aimed at so-called friends and family sharing is beside the point. Facebook and Instagram have evolved to show more content from people like influencers, shifting further from the use case the FTC says Meta has illegally dominated. The company has already landed some important points that could help its case, and it will get more time to push back on the agency’s framing when it calls its own witnesses in the coming weeks.But as the FTC’s case-in-chief continues into its fifth week, its argument for Meta’s dominance is becoming a lot clearer.Why do people use Facebook?When defining a market, each side is trying to answer a key question: why are people choosing one particular company’s product? A lot of goods and services compete with each other in some sense, but this doesn’t mean they serve the same niche. In the case of sodas, for example, “you could buy lemon-lime, but many people would never see that as a close substitute for buying Coke or Pepsi,” says George Washington Law professor and former FTC Chair Bill Kovacic. In the tech world, Netflix has claimed its biggest competitors are Fortnite and sleep — but those comparisons probably wouldn’t stand up in court.The FTC says that outside of Facebook and Instagram, only apps like Snapchat and MeWe can fulfill a users’ desire to broadcast personal updates with friends and family online. To make its case, it brought in a string of executives from other social media companies to explain why their apps can’t quite scratch the same itch for users. Strava’s former VP of connected partnerships Mateo Ortega testified that sure, users of the fitness-tracking social media app could share baby photos on the platform, but they probably wouldn’t unless it was in a running stroller. “It’s all about fitness, and while you can post other stuff, it just doesn’t seem as relevant,” he said. “You could buy lemon-lime, but many people would never see that as a close substitute for buying Coke or Pepsi”Pinterest’s former head of user growth Julia Roberts testified that users who come to Pinterest “expecting it to be like other social media apps … tend to be confused about how to use the product.” That’s because the app is so much not about connecting with other people that it works much differently from other social media platforms. Pinterest is more about finding things users are interested in, she said, so “following is not a big part of the Pinterest experience.”TikTok has a tab where users can watch videos from their friends — identified as people who mutually follow each other. But head of operations Adam Presser testified only about 1 percent of videos watched on the platform are there. The company doesn’t think of itself as competing with Meta’s apps for personal social networking, he testified. And even though side-by-side screenshots of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts look identical, Presser said, “when you click out of this view for these other platforms, you would get to essentially what I think of as their core business,” which for Instagram, includes a feed and stories that often contain at least some content from family and friends.At times, Meta’s cross-examination of rival company executives showed the limits of apps’ similarities. When questioning Apple director of product marketing Ronak Shah, Meta sought to show that group chats in Apple’s messaging feature could serve as a social media feed for friends and family sharing. But Shah testified that feed would be limited to 32 people at most, and users can’t just look up each others’ profiles like they would on social platforms. Still, Meta pointed out, Apple’s messages app is listed under social media on its own app store.However, Meta also made important arguments about why the judge should question the FTC’s framing. It pointed out that some documents from TikTok and YouTube owner Google claiming their products are very different from Meta’s were submitted to foreign officials to try to avoid getting drafted into potentially frustrating regulations. It also pointed out when TikTok briefly went dark in the US ahead of a (now-aborted) ban, users flocked to Meta apps, showing consumers see it as a substitute on at least some level. That’s because, Meta argued, competition for users is really about winning their time and attention.Companies can “sometimes make mistakes. They misjudge who their users are”But X VP of product Keith Coleman testified it’s not that useful to think about competition this way. Instead, “it’s much more helpful to understand what people are trying to accomplish in their lives and to try to help them accomplish that.” Under former CEO Jack Dorsey, then-Twitter leaned into focusing on news and users’ interests, Coleman testified, because that’s why people were coming to the platform. Coleman was later surprised at how his own website characterized the product in its help center as a “service for friends, family, and coworkers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages.” “I can’t believe that’s on the website,” he said. “That’s pretty wacky.”This point was “a caution that not everything a company writes down or says is necessarily decisive in establishing what the boundary of a market is,” Kovacic said. Companies can “sometimes make mistakes. They misjudge who their users are.”There are real ramifications for internet users here. Going back to Netflix’s comparisons, if the streaming video service went down, some people would probably be happy to play a video game or get a few hours of shut-eye instead. But others would be frustrated that they couldn’t watch a movie, which is why it’s good that Hulu, HBO, and Amazon Prime Video also exist. The FTC’s argument isn’t that Meta owns the only social apps on the internet, it’s that the company faces little competition for a service many people specifically want — so the fact that you probably don’t know anyone using MeWe is sort of the point.How will the judge decide?Ultimately, Boasberg’s market definition — whether it’s Meta’s, the FTC’s, or his own — will come down to a few things: how Meta views itself, how competitors see it, and his own intuition, says Kovacic. ”Notice how much the FTC has been questioning Meta witnesses on the basis of its own internal documents,” he says. “Does the story in the courtroom match the story of your own internal documents?” So far, the documents have shown that Meta has clocked that at least some portion of users come to its products to connect with family and friends, but also that the rise of TikTok has had it looking over its shoulder. In September 2020, Meta told its board that Instagram revenue would be “meaningfully lower” than planned in the second half of the fiscal year because TikTok was drawing users’ attention. But other internal documents have shown Meta’s well aware that at different points in time, users have come to its apps to connect with family and friends, and worriedly took note of other apps entering that space. In a 2018 presentation, Meta found that the highest percentage of surveyed users said they come to Facebook, Instagram, and Snap to “see daily casual moments” and “see special moments.” By contrast, users came to Twitter’s feed for news and YouTube’s for entertainment. And even as Instagram expands into entertainment, the FTC notes that it still advertises its sign-up page as a place to “see photos and videos from your friends.”“Instagram will always need to focus on friends”In a 2018 email, Zuckerberg told Mosseri that “Instagram will always need to focus on friends.” And even though a lot has changed in the social media landscape since then, Mosseri testified that to this day on the app, “friends are an important part of the experience.” Even though users may share fewer of their own updates on Facebook and Instagram, Mosseri admitted that two friends talking in the comments of a public figure’s post counts as an interaction between friends — and one that Instagram actively tries to facilitate.Meta has argued that this special focus on friends and family sharing makes up a shrinking portion of its offerings as it works to compete with fierce rivals like TikTok. But the FTC says it’s still significant enough to monopolize. It’s a scenario that came up in another major tech monopolization case, Kovacic says: the late-1990s lawsuit US v. Microsoft. In that case, Microsoft argued the Justice Department was ignoring how computing would soon move beyond the personal computer to the Internet of Things, meaning it couldn’t truly lock up the computing ecosystem as much as the government alleged.“Judge Jackson in the Microsoft case said, yeah, those things are happening, but not happening fast enough to deny you real market power in this PC and laptop-based market that the Justice Department is emphasizing,” Kovacic says.Still, he adds, a market niche can at some point become so small that it’s no longer significant in the eyes of antitrust law. “You can have a process of change that ultimately renders the market segment unimportant,” he says. “And the hard task of analysis for the judge is to say, has it already happened?”See More:

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Why one obscure app could help crumble Meta’s empire