These are the news items that drew my attention in the last week:

CEWE. Surging stock price. CEWE’s stock price is at an all-time high. As of this writing, the Germany-based photo print product giant's stock price is around €129 — 58% over its €82 low in October. The company's investors must be more than pleased with CEWE’s holiday season performance and optimistic about what will happen when CEWE's European retail partners are back in full swing post-pandemic.

Facebook. Concern about its Instagram for kids plans. 44 state and territory attorneys general sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, urging him to abandon plans for an Instagram-like platform designed for children younger than 13 years old. The letter cited a range of concerns, including mental health effects, increased cyberbullying, child predators, and more. Read the letter here.

EyeQ. Adding AI, one step at a time. Last week I had the pleasure of presenting my thoughts on the adoption of AI in the imaging world at Gary Pageau’s Pro Imaging Connect virtual conference, coupled with interviewing industry image enhancement veteran, Brad Malcolm, CEO of EyeQ, the company behind the Perfectly Clear image enhancement solutions.

His main message: don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater when implementing AI. Perfectly Clear will start by leveraging AI scene detection in its existing image enhancement products. Next will be a real-time video enhancement solution based on AI to do the heavy lifting required for video. Later this year EyeQ will upgrade its photo enhancement solution by more fully integrating their existing image enhancement algorithms with AI-based image enhancement.

Snap. Launching Creator Marketplace. Snap is planning to launch a Creator Marketplace, which will make it easier for businesses to find and partner with Snapchat creators, including Lens creators, AR creators, developers, and later, prominent Snapchat creators known as Snap Stars. Initially, the marketplace is intended to make it easier for businesses to find creators who can help them build AR experiences. By next year Snap intends to expand its marketplace beyond AR to support all Snap Creators.

Oct. 19-20: Visual 1st 2021

Oct. 21: DIY Video Ecosystem Summit

Oct. 28: Meet & Greet,

Check out our newly updated DIY Video Creation Apps report

ByteDance. When TikTok is not big enough. ByteDance has not only successfully challenged Facebook and Snapchat through TikTok, but the company has also set its eyes on the $1.7 trillion Chinese e-commerce market, i.e. by taking on Alibaba. It’s not a goal coming out of thin air. Last year, the company already sold $26 billion worth of make-up, clothing and other merchandise, achieving in its maiden year what Alibaba’s Taobao took six years to accomplish. Fascinating article on Bloomberg.

YouTube Shorts. Joining the grow-by-paying-the-creators fray. YouTube is giving its TikTok competitor, YouTube Shorts (which is has started to roll out in the US after beta-testing in India), an injection of cash to help it better compete with its established rivals. The company introduces the YouTube Shorts Fund, a $100 million fund that will pay, over the course of 2021 and 2022, YouTube Shorts creators for their most viewed and most engaging content.

[Snap has been paying $1 million per day to creators for their top-performing videos on Spotlight, its own TikTok clone. Not to be outdone though, TikTok’s own Creator Fund has announced to grow to over $1 billion in the U.S. in the next three years and should be more than double that on a global basis.]