Farcaster, a blockchain-based social media project built on Ethereum, raised $150M in a round led by Paradigm and says it has 350K paid sign-ups (Bradley Keoun/CoinDesk)

Bradley Keoun / CoinDesk:
Farcaster, a blockchain-based social media project built on Ethereum, raised $150M in a round led by Paradigm and says it has 350K paid sign-ups  —  Dan Romero’s Farcaster made waves earlier this year with the introduction of “Frames,” a feature allowing apps to run within posts, so users don’t have to click off to another site.

Google plans to test search and shopping ads in its AI Overviews, drawing from advertisers’ existing campaigns; AI Overviews rolled out to US users last week (Paresh Dave/Wired)

Paresh Dave / Wired:
Google plans to test search and shopping ads in its AI Overviews, drawing from advertisers’ existing campaigns; AI Overviews rolled out to US users last week  —  Google is set to start mixing ads into its new AI-generated search answers.  It’s a test of how the company’s biggest revenue stream can adapt to the age of generative AI.

Microsoft unveils a Team Copilot for Microsoft Teams, Loop, and Planner that can help run meetings, manage projects, assign tasks, more, coming later this year (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Microsoft unveils a Team Copilot for Microsoft Teams, Loop, and Planner that can help run meetings, manage projects, assign tasks, more, coming later this year  —  Microsoft will test the limits of artificial intelligence in group collaboration with a new AI assistant that keeps meetings on track …

Tech Against Scams, a coalition to fight “pig butchering” ploys with better industry coordination, launches with Meta, Coinbase, Match, Kraken, others on board (Jeff John Roberts/Fortune)

Jeff John Roberts / Fortune:
Tech Against Scams, a coalition to fight “pig butchering” ploys with better industry coordination, launches with Meta, Coinbase, Match, Kraken, others on board  —  Bad people who prey on those looking for love, or hoping to make a quick buck, have been around since biblical times.

Microsoft ships Azure AI Studio in broad availability, adds support for OpenAI’s GPT-4o, and announces a new multimodal model in its lightweight Phi-3 family (Kevin Okemwa/Windows Central)

Kevin Okemwa / Windows Central:
Microsoft ships Azure AI Studio in broad availability, adds support for OpenAI’s GPT-4o, and announces a new multimodal model in its lightweight Phi-3 family  —  Azure AI will now ship with GPT-4o and Microsoft’s Phi-3 family of small AI models to help developers build custom Copilot apps responsibly and safely.

Microsoft launches Copilot Extension for GitHub, letting developers build third-party skills into Copilot, starting with DataStax, Stripe, MongoDB, and more (Frederic Lardinois/TechCrunch)

Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Microsoft launches Copilot Extension for GitHub, letting developers build third-party skills into Copilot, starting with DataStax, Stripe, MongoDB, and more  —  Build is Microsoft’s largest developer conference and of course, it’s all about AI this year.  So it’s no surprise that GitHub’s Copilot …