Business Highlights

In the days leading up to President Trump’s inauguration, he and his family launched a new memecoin, much to the concern of some in the crypto industry. While it’s no secret that President Donald Trump and his administration are expected to offer an easier time for crypto companies over the next four years, some within the sector are concerned about the new president’s personal stake.

The startup company ‘Friend’ which offers an AI-powered necklace pendant that aims to be a companion has delayed the first lot of shipments until Q3. The company announced the ‘AI Friend’ in July of last year, with pre-orders available at the time for $99. While the hope was to have shipped in Q1 of this year, the founder Avi Schiffman took to X on Monday to share an update and stated he still had “refinements to do.” “However, we are nearly there.

I like Roman history and am partial to the odd Gladiator movie as well. I’m fortunate to live in a city that once, way back in AD 79 had a Roman presence and traces of old forts and granaries still exist. Of course, nowadays its surrounded by cultural heavyweights such as Starbucks and a nearby Peaky Blinders-themed cocktail bar, but if you close your eyes you can still hear the stomp of boots.

The digital collectible card game Marvel Snap is officially back up and running, after it faced a ‘temporary outage.’ The game’s developer said the downtime was a “surprise to us and wasn’t planned,” but it happened on the same day that the ByteDance-owned TikTok app was banned for a number of hours. Marvel Snaps’ current publisher, Nuverse, is owned by the same parent company as the short-form video platform which has experienced major uncertainty over the last several months. In a post on Monday evening, the developer Second Dinner posted an update and declared the game back online. MARVEL SNAP is back online in the U.

After a brief period of TikTok being unavailable to those in the US, President Trump signed an executive order pausing the law banning the China-owned social media app. Upon returning to the White House on Monday, January 20, President Trump signed dozens of executive orders, including one to pause the law that sought to ban TikTok and provided a liability shield to business partners of the app.

On the same day that TikTok was banned for several hours, Instagram announced a new video editing app named Edits. This is an entirely new app, rather than it being an add-on feature, with the head of Instagram Adam Mosseri describing it as being “a full suite of creative tools.” The premise is similar to other video editing tools, with the focus being on people who use their phone to create short form videos. In the announcement video, Mosseri explains what makes Edits different from the others: “Edits is more than a video editing app; it’s a full suite of creative tools. Creators can share drafts with others in Instagram’s new Edits app Adam Mosseri video on Instagram “There will be a dedicated tab for inspiration, another for keeping track of early ideas, a much higher-quality camera (which I used to record this video), all the editing tools you’d expect, the ability to share drafts with friends and other creators, and — if you decide to share your videos on Instagram — powerful insights into how those videos perform.” The sharing of drafts could be beneficial to those who work with brands and businesses and require sign-off before publishing. The video sharing the details of the currently incomplete tool came on the day that the ByteDance-owned TikTok faced a few hours of a ban, before it reappeared.