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This week in TechCrunch Experts: Don’t blow your Q1 2022 marketing budget

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The TechCrunch Experts program had an active week!

Joey Noble, community manager for Demand Curve, returned with a teardown of Customer.io’s homepage with insights you can apply to your own company’s website, and Jonathan Martinez shared his essentials for creating an optimal growth marketing tech stack.

With the new year almost upon us, I interviewed several of the experts we’ve identified through the Experts program and asked each of them how they’d manage a small Q1 2022 marketing budget, and on Wednesday, Senior Editor Walter Thompson hosted a Twitter Space with Octane.ai co-founder Ben Parr to discuss using zero-party data for personalization.

Our coverage this week also includes notes on how DevOps efforts are supporting recent and upcoming trips to space. Find a full recap below.

Software consulting

DevOps transformation: Taking edge computing and continuous updates to space: Fred Simon, co-founder and chief data scientist at JFrog, wrote about the field’s contributions in the past two years to space exploration.

“One of the great revelations of the new space industry is that it’s being eaten alive by software,” says Simon. “Software is getting smarter, better and easier to update; however, the amount of compute power needed to execute software commands in space is growing exponentially.”

There are plans to launch as many as 40,000 satellites in the next few years, but how do we transform the way we continually update software that runs in space?

My personal view is that we need to create a new way of performing continuous delivery and continuous updates in space. On Earth, many organizations use an orchestrator to handle the continuous update processes — automated configuration, management and coordination of systems, apps and services to help IT teams manage complex tasks and workflows efficiently. As of now, there is no equivalent to this for use with satellites in space, and those that exist are extremely limiting.

Consultant: Emit Knowledge
Recommended by: Envoice
Testimonial: “We were able to focus on growing the business while Emit Knowledge has helped us to build and manage the product from idea to delivery.”

Growth marketing

(TechCrunch+) Growth marketing experts survey: How would you spend a $25,000 budget in Q1 2022?: Miranda Halpern spoke with seven marketers that we’ve come to know through our TechCrunch Experts program. The question each expert was asked to answer was, “If you only had a $25,000 marketing budget for Q1 2022, how would you spend it?” Read the full article to see how these marketers break down their “budget.”

A lean startup’s growth marketing tech stack: Without a robust marketing growth stack, startups can’t easily integrate the myriad work that goes into building a customer base. According to paid acquisition expert Jonathan Martinez, here are its main components:

  • Customer data platform (CDP).
  • Mobile measurement partner (MMP).
  • Data warehouse.
  • Business intelligence tool (BI).
  • Customer engagement tools.
  • A/B testing/experimentation tools.
  • Acquisition mediums.

“Think of these tools as the parts of a car, where the customer data platform acts as the engine and the other tools are the parts hooked up to the engine.”

Demand Curve: How Customer.io’s homepage converts readers into customers: Joey Noble, Demand Curve’s community manager, is back this week with another teardown (check out last week’s teardown here). This week, Noble focused on Customer.io and provides tips for you to apply to your own website. Noble says, “A general framework for writing a good header: If a visitor reads only your header, they should still know who you are and why they should use your product.”

Marketer: PVTSEO
Recommended by: Flynax
Testimonial: “[With their help] we successfully reached the audience, got the higher positions on SERPs, which brought us revenue.”

Marketer: Eli Schwartz
Recommended by: Anonymous at a16z
Testimonial: “All of my portfolio companies had been pouring money into consultants that were not driving results and now we have altered the way we approach SEO and are driving toward revenue and product.”

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This will enable developers to use the on-device model to power their own AI features.

Google is building its Gemini Nano AI model into Chrome on the desktop

It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during Google I/O 2024 (by its own count). CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap…

Google mentioned ‘AI’ 120+ times during its I/O keynote

Firebase Genkit is an open source framework that enables developers to quickly build AI into new and existing applications.

Google launches Firebase Genkit, a new open source framework for building AI-powered apps

In the coming months, Google says it will open up the Gemini Nano model to more developers.

Patreon and Grammarly are already experimenting with Gemini Nano, says Google

As part of the update, Reddit also launched a dedicated AMA tab within the web post composer.

Reddit introduces new tools for ‘Ask Me Anything,’ its Q&A feature

Here are quick hits of the biggest news from the keynote as they are announced.

Google I/O 2024: Here’s everything Google just announced

LearnLM is already powering features across Google products, including in YouTube, Google’s Gemini apps, Google Search and Google Classroom.

LearnLM is Google’s new family of AI models for education

The official launch comes almost a year after YouTube began experimenting with AI-generated quizzes on its mobile app. 

Google is bringing AI-generated quizzes to academic videos on YouTube

Around 550 employees across autonomous vehicle company Motional have been laid off, according to information taken from WARN notice filings and sources at the company.  Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported…

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The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

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Google Play has a new discovery feature for apps, new ways to acquire users, updates to Play Points, and other enhancements to developer-facing tools.

Google Play preps a new full-screen app discovery feature and adds more developer tools

Soon, Android users will be able to drag and drop AI-generated images directly into their Gmail, Google Messages and other apps.

Gemini on Android becomes more capable and works with Gmail, Messages, YouTube and more

Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including shots of landscapes and timelapses, and make edits and adjustments to already-generated footage.

Google Veo, a serious swing at AI-generated video, debuts at Google I/O 2024

In addition to the body of the emails themselves, the feature will also be able to analyze attachments, like PDFs.

Gemini comes to Gmail to summarize, draft emails, and more

The summaries are created based on Gemini’s analysis of insights from Google Maps’ community of more than 300 million contributors.

Google is bringing Gemini capabilities to Google Maps Platform

Google says that over 100,000 developers already tried the service.

Project IDX, Google’s next-gen IDE, is now in open beta

The system effectively listens for “conversation patterns commonly associated with scams” in-real time. 

Google will use Gemini to detect scams during calls

The standard Gemma models were only available in 2 billion and 7 billion parameter versions, making this quite a step up.

Google announces Gemma 2, a 27B-parameter version of its open model, launching in June

This is a great example of a company using generative AI to open its software to more users.

Google TalkBack will use Gemini to describe images for blind people

Google’s Circle to Search feature will now be able to solve more complex problems across psychics and math word problems. 

Circle to Search is now a better homework helper

People can now search using a video they upload combined with a text query to get an AI overview of the answers they need.

Google experiments with using video to search, thanks to Gemini AI

A search results page based on generative AI as its ranking mechanism will have wide-reaching consequences for online publishers.

Google will soon start using GenAI to organize some search results pages

Google has built a custom Gemini model for search to combine real-time information, Google’s ranking, long context and multimodal features.

Google is adding more AI to its search results

At its Google I/O developer conference, Google on Tuesday announced the next generation of its Tensor Processing Units (TPU) AI chips.

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Google is upgrading Gemini, its AI-powered chatbot, with features aimed at making the experience more ambient and contextually useful.

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Veo can generate few-seconds-long 1080p video clips given a text prompt.

Google’s image-generating AI gets an upgrade

At Google I/O, Google announced upgrades to Gemini 1.5 Pro, including a bigger context window. .

Google’s generative AI can now analyze hours of video