Lensa AI is a photo editing app which has shot up in popularity due to the launch of its Magic Avatars, which use a generative image system to create unique digital avatars based on selfies uploaded to the app. Users upload 10 to 20 selfies to the app and for $7.99 Lensa will create a pack of 50 images, with various art styles and backgrounds. The app also offers retouching and other editing services, with subscription fees starting at $35.99 for a year of access. Magic Avatars have drawn in ...| Business of Apps
Character.ai is one of the many AI chatbots to explode in popularity, as the success of ChatGPT has led millions of people to find alternative chatbots offering different experiences. In character.ai’s case, it has built a library of personalities, each with their own distinct way of interacting with users. This can come in the form of a purpose, such as a trip planner or language teacher, a famous dead person such as Albert Einstein or Elvis Presley, or as an interactive story, like a dete...| Business of Apps
Expedia was one of the many .com travel websites launched in the mid-1990s, the brainchild of internet entrepreneur Rich Barton, who would go on to found Zillow and Glassdoor. Barton was working for Microsoft at the time and incubated the project inside the tech giant, launching in 1996. Three years later, Expedia was spun off by Microsoft into a public company, with Barton as the CEO. With the dotcom crash of 2000, many recent IPOs fell victim to huge drops in stock market value. American ho...| Business of Apps
The hunt for the next evolution of the search engine has been ongoing for over a decade, but nothing has been able to even nudge Google’s dominance. The latest attempt and by far the most conceivable alternative is generative AI chatbots, which take all of the relevant links and data from the web and simplify it to a single answer. Perplexity is one of these chatbots aiming to be the next Google. Launched in August 2022, Perplexity was one of the first to use up-to-date data from the web, a...| Business of Apps
In 2008, Milda Mitkute was moving house in Lithuania and wanted to give away some clothes. So Justas Janauskas built a website to distribute clothes to friends, and Vinted was founded. Four years later a mobile app was launched which allows users to buy, sell or swap clothing and communicate on forums. The company quickly expanded into Germany and is now available in 20 countries, with plans to reach Finland later in 2023. It now has more than 1200 employees headed by CEO Thomas Plantenga. Or...| Business of Apps
Ecommerce marketplace app Shopee started life out as a customer-to-customer marketplace, in the same vein as eBay, but over the past few years has remodelled itself as a b2c marketplace. That switch to a b2c hybrid model has netted Shopee a lot of customers, especially in the Southeast Asia region where it is the most popular ecommerce platform by some margin. It also offers services in East Asia and Latin America. Shopee has managed to surpass Amazon and other ecommerce marketplaces in this ...| Business of Apps