😤 Canva buys Adobe competitor

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TOP STORY
🤑 Canva Acquires “Affinity,” an Adobe Creative Cloud Competitor

This week, Canva (everyone’s favorite free design tool) acquired Affinity for $380 million, positioning itself as a legitimate competitor to Adobe's Creative Cloud suite.

Affinity, known for its advanced photo editing, design, and publishing tools, joins Canva's growing portfolio.

• Affinity Designer → Adobe Illustrator competitor.

• Affinity Photo → Adobe Lightroom competitor.

• Affinity Publisher → Adobe InDesign competitor.

The acquisition is part of Canva's strategic expansion.

Canva previously acquired visual AI platform Kaleido.ai and stock footage sites Pexels and Pixabay to enhance its cloud-based design services.

Affinity is popular for its one-time purchase model, a stark difference from Adobe's subscription-based pricing structure.

So it’s natural that customers were upset with this acquisition…

Following the uproar, both companies have pledged to uphold four key commitments to their community.

They’re now proposing to maintain fair, transparent, and affordable pricing, including the continuation of Affinity's perpetual (one-time) license model and the possibility of introducing an optional subscription model for those interested.

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TECHNOLOGY
👀 The Biggest Features & Announcements from “Adobe Summit 2024”

Adobe Summit 2024, a conference for creative business professionals, took place this week.

Here are the main announcements from the event 👇️ 

1) Structure Reference

Adobe Firefly has a new “Structure Reference” feature, which allows users to easily apply existing image structures to generate multiple variations.

2) Adobe GenStudio

Adobe unveiled GenStudio, a platform for marketers. This platform allows you to oversee content creation, management, campaign execution, and analytics.

3) Adobe Firefly Services

Adobe debuted Firefly Services, a service offering over 20 new APIs and tools from Creative Cloud.

This service empowers enterprise developers to create faster content and develop custom models.

In addition, the “Sneaks” session showcased upcoming projects…

*Here is a quick recap of what’s coming soon:

• Project Perfect Plays: Uses AI to generate marketing playbooks and campaign strategies quickly.

• Project Get Personal: Creates personalized images for customers using AI.

• Project Ready Click Go: Builds complete digital experiences in minutes with AI.

• Project Brand Slam: Ensures marketing assets comply with brand guidelines using AI.

• Project Promo Mojo: Matches marketers with influencers and integrates brand messages into content using AI.

• Project Mighty Micro: Generates personalized microsites for B2B buying groups with AI.

• Project Infograph It: Streamlines infographic creation with AI-recommended design elements.

*Click on the links above to view the full video demos.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
🤖 HeyGen Introduces “Avatar in Motion 1.0,” Make Your AI Avatar Move

HeyGen is a video platform that enables you to create product demos, educational videos, marketing ads, and other content with AI.

They are most known for their “AI Avatars” feature, where you can create an AI clone of yourself, mimicking your appearance and voice (and even dubbing your voice in different languages 🤯).

This week, they showed a demo of “Avatar in Motion 1.0.” The video you see below is 100% made by AI; the audio, the video, the sounds, everything.

📰 Other news you might’ve missed:

• OpenAI unveils new short films created with its text-to-video model, “Sora.”

• Suno AI, a text-to-music tool, released its new v3 model.

• Krea AI now allows you to create high-quality AI images in real time.

• Blender has launched “Blender Extensions,“ a new official asset store where everything is free.

• ElevenLabs made four new updates to its Dubbing Studio.

• OpenAI is rolling out inpainting for DALL•E 3.

• OpenAI teased "Voice Engine," a model that transforms text and a 15-second audio clip into speech mimicking the original speaker's voice.