Author: Geek Planet

Google may soon give one of the best features in Pixel phones a bigger spotlight. The company is working on a dedicated app for Now Playing, the built-in tool that automatically identifies songs playing nearby. This Shazam-like feature shows the song title and artist right on the lock screen and saves a history of tracks your phone has recognized. The key appeal has always been that it runs on the device, meaning songs are identified locally without sending audio clips to the cloud. For Pixel users, Now Playing currently runs as a background service tucked inside Android System Intelligence. It’s…

TripleLift, the self-styled creative supply-side platform, implemented significant layoffs late last week, as the industry prepares itself for a more lean second half of the year.  Digiday was unable to precisely quantify the scale of the cutbacks, with the company unable to comment on Digiday’s clarification request by press time, although sources indicate the number of roles impacted by the cuts is likely in the mid-to-high double-digits. Prior to the official revelation of the reduction-in-force, TripleLift’s homepage stated that it had “400+ talented workers.”  The latest round of layoffs is understood to have impacted all departments at the SSP across…

AI agents are everywhere right now. They write emails, draft code, summarise documents, and promise to make work faster and smarter. From boardrooms to classrooms, the hype makes it sound like artificial intelligence has already become a daily work companion for most people, even as studies suggest AI is still not quite ready for everyday office work. A new Gallup survey suggests the reality inside workplaces is quite different. According to Gallup’s latest Workforce survey, only 12% of employed adults in the US say they use AI every day at work. About one quarter use it frequently, meaning a few…

AI platform wars are about to become the browser wars and advertising will be a key battleground. OpenAI and Perplexity, two of the biggest players in alternative AI, are making browsers central to their next act. It’s a natural, albeit seminal, move for both companies — one that will have major implications for how advertising is sold, served and measured in an AI-first internet.  But before the speculation takes off, here’s what’s real. First, Perplexity launched its browser, Comet, last week to subscribers of its $200 per month Max plan and a handful of investors. Then OpenAI’s own plan for…

There was a time when landing on the first page of Google meant you were in business. Traffic followed, strategies scaled, and entire models were built on the back of those clicks.That foundation is cracking. The era of “Google Zero” — industry shorthand for a world where Google keeps users inside its own walls — is here. At the center of it: AI Overviews. Years of SEO strategy are now colliding with a system dishes to answer, not refer. The result: for many publishers traffic is slowing — and in some cases falling off entirely. Here’s where things stand.  What…

Samsung has uploaded yet another Galaxy S26 teaser, offering a glimpse of how the Privacy Display feature could work. It is a 15-second video published via the company’s official YouTube channel. In the teaser, we can see a girl sitting in the subway, reading the third chapter of a fictional novel. She is holding the phone above her lap, which naturally makes the screen accessible from either side. From Flex Magic panel to zero-peeking mode However, when the people sitting around her try to peek at the screen, it goes all black. What’s interesting is that the teaser appears to…

Shopify is drawing a line in the sand on agentic AI — a type of bot that autonomously completes tasks on its own, without human inputs — with new language across merchant websites that appears aimed at blocking agentic AI systems.  Shopify now includes a warning in the code that powers merchant storefronts, telling bots what they can and can’t do. The message appears in each site’s robots.txt file — a standard tool websites use to give instructions to automated crawlers like search engines. The new line states: “Automated scraping, ‘buy-for-me’ agents, or any end-to-end flow that completes payment without…

If you’ve ever tried to move the cursor in a text field on an Android phone, you’ll know how frustrating it can be to place it exactly where you want it. Gboard helps a little with its glide feature, which lets you press and hold the spacebar and then swipe left or right to adjust the cursor’s position. But even this solution is not perfect. You can easily overshoot the mark while swiping on the spacebar, and the gesture doesn’t let you move up or down through longer blocks of text. Now, Google appears to be working on a new…

NEXTGEAR is betting that not everyone wants their desktop’s guts on display all day. The new NEXTGEAR Clear Shift builds are designed to go from full-on showcase lighting to a calmer look, so the inside doesn’t dominate your desk setup. It’s the same see-through appeal, just with a built-in escape hatch. Hit the switch and the vibe changes. The case still leans hard into the display trend with dual glass panels and a pillar-less layout that keeps the view wide open when you want it. Stock RGB fans signal the point, this is meant to be seen. Mouse Computer is…

What began as a supposed rebellion against traditional media is now increasingly modeled after it — the creator economy — complete with middlemen, agency layers, and bundled tech stacks promising growth, monetization, and brand safety. In other words: business as usual. Around a third (33%) of U.K. marketers spend between £746,000 and £2.3 million per year on creator marketing, while 34% of U.S. marketers spend between $1 million and $3 million, annually, according to data from Billion Dollar Boy. Furthermore, 37% of U.S. marketers invest more than $3 million in creator marketing, compared to just 19% of U.K. marketers, per…