Apps
Spotify is redesigning their Free version with more features
Finally, some on-demand!
Spotify Free users are in for a treat. The music streaming service is gearing up to redesign their free version with more features.
For weeks, leaks and rumors have teased upcoming changes to Spotify’s business model. From plans for a smart speaker to their own voice assistant, Spotify’s future is as hazy as the stock market.
To add to the mire of updates, users are reporting rollouts of a new free version over the last few days. Among other notable changes, the redesign allows users to play songs on demand from selected playlists.
Before the redesign, the free version’s biggest difference from the premium is the inability to play songs on demand. Free users had to settle for shuffle mode. The new feature adds the ability but only for more popular playlists such as the “Gold Edition” playlist.
The new design now also displays an individual songs album art while they are playing. Album art displays were another feature exclusive to the premium version.
It also sports several quality-of-life redesigns. For example, Spotify now displays genres with smaller icons, prompting more content on one page. Previously, genres showed with larger “album arts” and genre-specific icons. (This subtler change also made it to the new Premium version.)
Spotify has yet to release an official announcement regarding the new redesign. They have also haven’t revealed any notable feature upgrades for Premium users. However, rollouts are slowly making their way to devices now.
Meta does not have the most stellar of reputations. Despite offering the world’s most popular social media platforms, the company, through its various experiments throughout the years, continuously proves that it has other priorities than just providing the best for its users. Today, another reported experiment wants to take Meta to a new market that its users might fall into: the prediction market.
If you haven’t heard of the prediction market, consider yourself lucky. These apps, such as Kalshi, are basically just gambling platforms without the glitz of playing cards or the rigor of the stock market. Users gamble on mundane circumstances like the weather and more serious ones like war.
Today, as reported by The New York Times, Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly asking Meta to develop a prediction app of its own. Interestingly, the experimental app, supposedly called Arena, will use virtual points, rather than real money. However, Meta has not ruled out real money — and hence, real gambling — in the future.
Meta is entering the industry at an extremely volatile time. The world is starting to crack down on prediction markets. Some users, for example, have been accused of using insider information to get easy wins on these platforms. Some markets have also accused these platforms of subverting anti-gambling laws.
SEE ALSO: Meta adds subscriptions for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp
Apps
foodpanda relaunches cult-favorite roast chicken brand after 8 years of persistent search queries
Heritage chain Andok’s returns to the platform, driven entirely by long-term user analytics.
In the world of e-commerce and food delivery, platform algorithms usually dictate what consumers see. But occasionally, consumer behavior is so relentless that it shapes the platform’s strategy.
In a move driven entirely by long-term user analytics, foodpanda has officially relaunched Andok’s, one of the Philippines’ most iconic heritage rotisserie chains, back onto its platform after an eight-year absence.
The search bar as a digital wishlist
The decision to ink the partnership wasn’t just a marketing play. It was a response to an ongoing data anomaly. Despite being offline from the foodpanda platform for eight years, Andok’s consistently ranked as one of the most-searched merchants on the app.
Year after year, users treated the empty search results page as an unofficial wishlist. This persistent search intent gave foodpanda a clear, data-backed signal of pent-up demand.
Prior to the official digital rollout, teaser campaigns on social media validated this demand, generating thousands of organic interactions from users anticipating the return.
Bridging heritage flavor with digital infrastructure
For foodpanda, onboarding a merchant with this level of built-in demand fits its broader strategy of marketplace optimization and hyper-local network expansion, turning a heritage brand into another data point for how legacy retail plugs into delivery infrastructure.
For Andok’s, the integration works as a fast track to digital scale. A legacy quick-service chain skips years of independent app development and reaches customers already using foodpanda’s existing logistics network, on a platform they already check daily.
Andok’s built its following on charcoal spit-roasted chicken, a slow-cooked technique that’s stayed largely unchanged since the brand’s early days, alongside seasoned grilled pork belly.
More recently, the Dokito line extended that following into crispy fried chicken and chicken burgers, broadening the brand’s appeal beyond its original rotisserie format and giving foodpanda a menu with both heritage pull and everyday fast-food convenience.
Apps
Turn conversations into completed work: Zoom launches ZoomMate
Agentic AI work surface to help people move from conversation to execution
Zoom has officially announced ZoomMate, an agentic AI work surface to help people move from workplace conversations to execution without losing context along the way.
It will be offered in ZoomMate Basic (free) and ZoomMate which is priced starting at US$ 16.67 per month.
Unlike AI tools that solely rely on prompts or manual context, ZoomMate understands what was discussed to generate grounded, relevant outputs directly from meeting context.
The feature connects live conversational context to agentic search, workflow execution, custom agents, and AI content creation. It helps users overcome the friction introduced by fragmented tools and incomplete workflow by surfacing information across Zoom and connected business systems.
This creates deliverables from meeting and enterprise context, like presentations, documents, and spreadsheets. It also coordinates follow-though across workflows without switching tools.
ZoomMate capabilities
ZoomMate introduces advanced agentic AI capabilities that help teams move from insight to completion.
Agentic Search
With agentic search, it brings enterprise knowledge to every conversation. ZoomMate can search across Zoom, the web, and third-party systems to find the most relevant information for a project, account, ticket, policy, or business question.
Connecting to data sources such as ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Workday, and indexing across users’ integrated enterprise systems allows for surfacing information from enterprise files.
This includes customer records, open issues, service tickets, knowledge articles, project updates, files, and other business content.
Moreover, relevant context from Zoom Meetings, Phone, Chat, and other connected platforms, including Google and Microsoft, can be directly integrated into the flow of work.
Orchestrate
The next step is ZoomMate’s agentic layer enables proactive coordination and execution across systems, combining AI workflows with intelligent agents that can act, learn, and adapt within enterprise environments.
Agents can monitor ongoing projects, identify steps from meeting context, and automatically initiate follow-up actions for continuity.
Aside from that, ZoomMate can coordinate real-time task execution and can schedule events across Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook.
Moreover, it updates records, creates follow-up tasks, drafts customer communications, and triggers onboarding or support workflows.
Complete
Lastly, ZoomMate turns meetings into finished work. It automatically creates presentations, documents, spreadsheets, reports, and project plans from meeting conversations and enterprise context so teams can move from discussion to execution faster.
It leverages Zoom’s AI Productivity Suite to update deliverables as decisions evolve, keeping plans, documents, and other outputs current in real time without manual syncing.
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