Walmart has agreed to pay $100 million to settle a lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over deceptive pay practices within its Spark Driver service, which uses gig workers to deliver online orders from local stores to customers. The retailer was accused of misleading drivers about their potential base …

Marketing is one of the few operations no industry can afford to ignore, which is why we have a veritable host of AI-powered marketing tools being shoved into marketers’ faces today. All the social platforms, from Facebook and Instagram to TikTok, and major incumbents like Microsoft and Google, to content-generation …

Only days after Spotify announced its foray into physical book sales, which included an audiobook feature that lets you sync your listening and your offline reading progress, Amazon-owned Audible has launched a feature that brings e-books together with audiobooks. The company announced on Wednesday an “immersion reading” feature in the …

Etsy is selling Depop, a secondhand clothing app popular with Gen Z and millennials, to eBay for $1. 2 billion in cash, the company announced on Wednesday. Etsy says the deal will allow it to focus on its own marketplace. The deal comes nearly five years after Etsy acquired Depop …

India’s government has partnered with China’s Alibaba. com on an export-focused program aimed at helping startups and small businesses reach overseas buyers. The move highlights New Delhi’s selective engagement with Chinese-linked tech platforms years after it imposed sweeping bans on consumer apps and games. This week, the Indian government’s Startup …

Airbnb says its custom-built AI agent is now handling roughly a third of its customer support issues in North America, and it’s preparing to roll out the feature globally. If successful, the company believes that in a year’s time, more than 30% of its total customer support tickets will be …

Web hosting company WP Engine has filed an amended complaint with brow-raising new allegations in its ongoing legal battle with WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg and his company Automattic (WordPress. com’s parent company). The company now claims that Mullenweg intended to target 10 different hosting companies with royalty payments for their …

After a particularly poor performance on its fourth-quarter earnings, Pinterest CEO Bill Ready attempted to favorably compare the digital pinboarding site to the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT. Trying to highlight its potential as a unique search destination, Ready asserted that the site sees larger search volume than ChatGPT. According to …

The fake goods crisis cuts two ways. Luxury brands lose more than $30 billion a year to counterfeits, while buyers in the booming $210 billion second-hand market have no reliable way to verify that what they’re purchasing is genuine. Veritas wants to solve both problems with a solution that combines …