Dubai-based flower and gift marketplace Udora (formerly Flowwow) has raised $10 million from unnamed investors, Finsmes reports.

The funds will be used to expand the product catalog, scale, and technological development, including AI personalization tools.

In Thailand they want to reduce marketplace commissions.

The Thai government has once again taken up the issue of marketplace commissions. Local authorities believe that a 30% GP is too much. A more reasonable level is considered to be 10-15%.

The explanation is simple: it is necessary to reduce the burden on local sellers, especially small businesses. In other words, they are not discussing the beautiful formula of “developing digital trade,” but rather the specific issue of how much the marketplace takes from the seller's turnover.

It is interesting that Thailand has already started to look separately at the behavior of e-commerce platforms. Since March 2026, there are rules that cover unjustified commissions, advertising payments, logistics, payment fees, the influence of algorithms, and other ways of putting pressure on sellers.

T-giants are facing serious inflation, according to Bloomberg.

Microsoft expects that rising component prices will increase its annual capital expenditures by $25 billion, to $190 billion.

Meta raised the average value of the projected capital expenditure range by $10 billion, mainly due to changes in the cost of components, especially memory chips.

The shares of AI equipment suppliers are growing faster than the shares of most of their major customers, according to Bloomberg.

The rapidly increasing costs of AI infrastructure are creating a phenomenon known as "chipflation." In addition to IT giants, it will also affect ordinary consumers of consumer electronics.

Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI in business adoption for the first time.

According to a fresh index by Ramp, which analyzes the spending of more than 50 thousand US businesses, Anthropic's share reached 34.4% in April, while OpenAI fell to second place with a result of 32.3%.

Ramp economists note that the AI market remains abnormally volatile. Businesses easily switch providers based on the current value of tokens and the performance of models. Anthropic's leadership may be threatened due to a shortage of computing power and an increasing interest from companies in free open-source solutions.

This is the first time in the industry's history that a competitor has successfully displaced the market leader in just a few months.

Telegram has launched AI-powered sticker search.

Telegram has launched an AI-powered sticker and emoji search. The new feature is available in 36 languages, including Russian.

The algorithm analyzes a database of over 100 million user-generated emojis and stickers. Now, users don't need to remember the names of specific packs - the AI reads the meaning of the query and provides relevant sets based on the context of the message.

The feature is already available to all users in the latest versions of the app.

Samsung is negotiating with the workers' union to prevent a giant strike of 50,000 people.

The Government of the Republic of Korea joined the efforts to resolve the dispute. According to the Yonhap news agency, the court partially limited the forms of the Samsung Electronics trade union strike and imposed fines for violating the restrictions.

The workers were forbidden to interfere with the operation of safety facilities and "damage prevention."

The union itself demands the abolition of the bonus ceiling and the allocation of 15% of operating profit to employee benefits. The strike is scheduled to last 18 days and begin on May 21.

3 million people watch AI robot compete with a human in the speed of sending parcels.

The company that produces humanoid robots Figure AI held a live broadcast, collecting 3 million views. The man and the robot had to detect the parcel, recognize the barcode, forward the package. The broadcast lasted 10 hours, the man ate and rested, the robot did not stop. The live employee forwarded more than 200 parcels.

Some experts believed that robots are not yet ready for such autonomous work. However, we are not sure that the employees of logistics centers can relax. According to the comments, some of the viewers were addicted to robotic ASMR and did not follow the competition itself.

LinkedIn will start fighting low-quality AI content.

Faceless AI publications, auto-generated comments, and clickbait videos that users use to inflate their reach will be targeted. According to Vice President of Product Laura Lorenzetti, the company's goal is not to completely ban AI, but to remove posts that do not provide real value from recommendations.

An "AI vs. AI" approach will be used to filter content. Special algorithms will analyze the originality of thoughts in posts and identify template speech patterns, and live editors will help train the model. Posts generated by robots will no longer be recommended to third-party users, although the author's direct contacts and followers will still see them.

According to a study by Graphite for the first quarter of 2026, the number of AI-generated articles on the network has reached the same level as the number of human-written articles.

👜 “Puffy tote bags” are trending on Amazon as the new everyday carry-all

Soft oversized tote bags are increasingly appearing in Amazon’s “customer-loved” and bestseller rankings (one example: the BAGSMART Puffy Tote Bag with near-5★ ratings).

What’s driving demand:
— lightweight design
— “city + travel” versatility
— one-bag-for-everything format

Why it’s trending:
Shoppers are looking for soft bags that work for the office, gym, flights, and daily use — where weight, storage pockets, and easy cleaning matter more than luxury aesthetics.

What sellers should focus on:
• materials and stitching quality
• internal pocket organization
• color variations
• lifestyle photos showing laptop/storage capacity

AI fighters have stuck fake OpenAI ads on London's Underground.

The stunt was carried out by street artist Darren Cullen. The posters are a carbon copy of OpenAI's minimalist black-and-white design and logo, but contain satirical text: "Yes, we've created a machine that advises teenagers to commit suicide. But it can also help them with their homework."

OpenAI is currently suing the family of 16-year-old Adam Rain. The student started using ChatGPT for academic purposes, but over time, he began to trust the chatbot as a friend and share his personal experiences. When the teenager developed suicidal thoughts, the algorithm discouraged him from telling his parents about his depression and eventually provided detailed instructions on how to commit suicide.

The company's lawyers are shifting the blame to the deceased individual and citing violations of the service's usage guidelines.

Alibaba has released a translator that clones your voice in real time.

Alibaba has introduced the Qwen3.5-LiveTranslate model for simultaneous translation. It supports 3500+ language pairs, understands and writes in 60 languages, and provides voice output in 29 languages.

The main feature is voice cloning. The model retains the speaker's intonation and tone in the target language in real time, instead of switching to a synthetic voice.

It also has the ability to see the screen and take into account the context of the image, eliminating ambiguities in translation.

Custom hot words: you can upload your own dictionary of brands, names, and terminology, and the model will prioritize them during transcription.

It is designed for developers who want to integrate native translation into their products without noticeable latency.

Apple has removed 1,213 apps from the AppStore at the request of the Russian authorities.

Apple regularly reports the number of requests it receives from various countries for personal data and app removal.

In 2025, 1,213 apps were removed, with the majority of them being removed at the request of Roskomnadzor.

This is an all-time record, followed by Vietnam (335 apps), China (196), South Korea (108), India (54), and the United States (39).

The US judicial system is facing the threat of collapse due to the influx of AI-generated lawsuits.

According to a study by scientists from MIT and the University of Southern California, almost 18% of lawsuits filed by citizens without professional lawyers now contain text generated by neural networks. As a result, the volume of court records per case increased by an average of 64% in the first six months.

The availability of language models has led to a sharp increase in the number of civil lawsuits filed by individuals who previously lacked the means to hire legal representation. In the United States, the percentage of such filings has skyrocketed from 11% to a record-breaking 16.8%. Federal judges have described this phenomenon as an "existential threat to the system," as court officials are spending their time reading and processing vast amounts of nonsensical documents generated by chatbots. Statistics show that plaintiffs without lawyers end up losing in 96% of cases.

🧸 Nostalgic toys are surging again (Pinterest trend signal)

— Pinterest’s 2026 trend report points to a strong comeback of “childhood” toys.
— Demand is driven by collectible drops, recognizable retro shapes, and giftable bundles.
— Visual identity matters: shoppers buy what they can spot in 1 second.

👉 Seller takeaway: test “nostalgia” SKUs as bundles/limited variants and invest in clean hero images + packaging shots.

Источник: Mercury News

The Shein scandal: the marketplace was accused of stealing prints from indigenous peoples, along with photos of their families.

A Canadian company based in Winnipeg, which uses indigenous (Indian) motifs in its clothing, accuses Shein of stealing 20 designs. According to the CEO, some of the designs were copied along with the company's name and the year it was founded.

The photos on the cards were posed by indigenous residents of Winnipeg. The company's founder, Michelle Cameron, claims that her five years of work have been stolen, including photos of her daughter posing for the brand. Shein quickly removed the ads from the platform and launched an internal investigation. Cameron responded by waiting for an apology.

In the United States, a man bought a $640 watch as a gift for his wife, but there was a mistake on the dial: instead of Trump, it read Rump.

AI girls helped an Ohio resident sell special equipment.

The man tried to do this for a very long time, but there were no customers. Then he used Midjourney to add top models to the photo of the product, leaving the old text.

So the click-through rate (CTR) increased by about 40 times, and the excavator suddenly became one of the most viewed lots on the website with ads.

🇪🇺 EU fines Temu €200 million under the Digital Services Act

• Regulators say Temu failed to do enough to prevent the sale of illegal and potentially unsafe products on its platform.
• The €200 million penalty is one of the first major enforcement actions under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA).
• Temu will now be required to strengthen risk assessments, content moderation, and transparency measures for consumers.

Seller takeaway:
Compliance and the ability to prove product origin are becoming major competitive advantages in the European market. As regulations tighten, sellers with proper documentation, traceable supply chains, and transparent operations will be in a stronger position.

Remote work has proven to be more dangerous for Zomer's careers than artificial intelligence.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York called remote work the main reason for the hiring problems among young professionals. In March 2026, the unemployment rate among university graduates under the age of 29 increased to 5.6%. According to economists, companies' transition to remote work has contributed to 64% of this increase.

Employers are reluctant to hire inexperienced employees for remote positions due to the challenges of training them in isolation. With senior colleagues absent from the office, there is a lack of expertise transfer, leading companies to prioritize older candidates with more experience.

AI's role remains secondary, although in April, American companies reduced a record-breaking 21,900 employees due to the implementation of neural networks.

In China, advertising posters for the 1688.com platform (Alibaba for the domestic market) encourage students to go out and trade on the platform instead of getting a job after graduation.