About
NetChoice is a trade association fighting for free speech and free enterprise online. This page is a new education project of NetChoice’s.
The goal of our Tech Competition webpage is to show how the abundance of competition in the tech industry benefits consumers through new exciting services, and market signals pushing businesses to constantly innovate and improve their offerings to their customers. We’ll keep this page updated frequently with news and facts that highlight the prevalence and impact of vigorous competition in U.S. tech markets.
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Posts
Tech Competition is Helping Americans. Here's How.
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Friday • July 12, 2024
Amazon’s AI shopping assistant rolls out to all users in the US
Rufus Will Answer Questions About Shopping and Also Politics
Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, Rufus, is rolling out to all users in the US on Amazon’s mobile app. You can pull up the shopping assistant by tapping the orange and blue icon in the right corner of the app’s navigation bar, where Rufus can answer questions, draw comparisons between items, and give you updates on your order.
Amazon first introduced Rufus in February but only made it available to a small group of users. Rufus uses Amazon’s product listing details, reviews, and community Q&As, along with some information from the web, to inform its answers.
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Thursday • July 11, 2024
Amazon Ads Offering Expands To Non-Marketplace Sellers
Sponsored Display is a Lead-Generation Feature for Businesses That Do Not Sell in the Amazon Store
Amazon Ads launched a beta for businesses allowing businesses that do sell products on its platform to generate leads through display ads across its network. Jeffrey Cohen, Amazon Ads Tech Evangelist, announced the rollout on Wednesday on his LinkedIn page. Sponsored Display is a lead-generation feature for businesses that do not sell in the Amazon store.
It captures shopper intent, those who have shown interest in a brand or product. The feature is built into the ad experience, helping brands not selling on the network to collect customer leads. Through lead-generation ads, Cohen explains, “customers can engage with ads to sign up for information directly in the ad creative. Customers will not be diverted from the website where they interact with the ad.”
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Thursday • June 27, 2024
TikTok Goes After Amazon Prime Day With Exclusive Brand Deals
When TikTok Launched Shop, it Quickly Became a Clear Rival to Online Retailers Temu, Shein, and Amazon
TikTok is challenging Amazon Prime Day next month with “Deals For You Days,” the social-media company’s own U.S. sales event that will feature savings on thousands of products from brands and retailers like L’Oréal Paris, Our Place, Too Faced and Zwilling USA.
Beginning July 9, the sales event will feature deals exclusively on TikTok Shop, with merchants and creators participating in content challenges for short video and TikTok Live shopping events “where they can interact directly with their followers and share their favorite products and best-sellers,” the company said in a recent statement.The Live shopping events are indicative of TikTok’s Chinese doppelganger app Douyin, on which live-streams mark its biggest revenue driver, and will offer exclusive discounts on trending brands like Benefit Cosmetics and COOLA, as well as viral creators like Simply Mandys and Canvas Beauty founder Stormi Steele.
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Thursday • June 20, 2024
Daydream rakes in $50M seed funding to build an AI-powered search engine suited for e-commerce
Daydream Focuses on Providing Personalized Shopping Results by Using Generative AI
The company plans to offer up the platform in beta to consumers in the U.S. this fall, and will concentrate on the fashion vertical for the time being. It has already onboarded more than 2,000 brands, including Net-A-Porter, Altuzarra, Jimmy Choo, Doen, Alo Yoga and La DoubleJ.
Daydream essentially lets one search for products using natural language and image recognition — think queries like “I’m going to a wedding in Costa Rica in the summer, and I need some suggestions of what to wear.” You can even upload an image of a piece of clothing and provide an additional filter with conversational language, such as “I want this in blue.”
Forerunner Ventures and Index Ventures co-led the round, which also saw participation from Google Ventures and True Ventures. The startup did not disclose its valuation.
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Tuesday • June 11, 2024
TikTok comes for Google as it quietly rolls out image search capabilities in TikTok Shop
TikTok Appears to be Interested in Challenging Google’s Dominance in Search
The feature, which was first spotted by X user Jonah Manzano, is available to all users in the United States and Southeast Asia. Users who have access to the new feature will see it in the form of a camera icon in the search bar in TikTok Shop.
Say you’re at a restaurant and really like the plate you’re served on. You could open up the TikTok app and snap a picture of it to find similar items available for purchase on TikTok Shop. Or say you’re online shopping and find a top you like that’s too expensive. You could save the image and then upload it to find something similar with a cheaper price tag.
While you have always been able to search for specific items on TikTok Shop, you no longer have to rely on textual descriptions. The ability to use image search for shopping is something that Google has offered for years with Google Lens, its visual search tool. Image search is also currently offered by Amazon, another tech giant that TikTok is looking to compete with.
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Wednesday • June 5, 2024
eBay debuts AI-powered background tool to enhance product images
eBay’s Background-Enhancement Tool Could Benefit Sellers Who Lack the Equipment or Skills to Take Professional-Looking or High-Quality Photos
eBay’s newest AI feature allows sellers to replace image backgrounds with AI-generated backdrops. The tool is now available for iOS users in the U.S., U.K., and Germany. It’ll gradually roll out to Android users over the coming months.
Following in Amazon’s and Google’s footsteps, the e-commerce company announced on Tuesday the launch of its new AI-powered background-enhancement tool, which automatically removes image backgrounds and replaces them with a backdrop of your choosing, such as having the product sit on a fancy-looking tabletop or a colorful background that reflects your specific brand. Amazon and Google released similar tools for advertisers last year, letting brands leverage generative AI to create new product imagery.
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