Google is bringing ads in its AI-powered Search experiences to international markets, betting that generative AI can open up new revenue opportunities even as growth in its core search advertising business slows. The announcement came Wednesday during Alphabet's third-quarter earnings call ,as the company reported $127.6 billion in revenue, up 25% year over year. But Search advertising growth continued to decelerate, and Alphabet shares fell 8% following the results. Google Search revenue grew 12% year over year in the third quarter, down from 17% growth in the second quarter and 19% in the first quarter. The slowdown puts added pressure on Google to turn its expanding AI features into a meaningful source of advertising revenue. 'We are now scaling high-quality ads within AI overviews in AI mode to more users and queries,' Philipp Schindler, Google's chief business officer, said during the call with investors. 'This includes taking our monetization footprint global for the first time. Today, we're announcing the expansion of ads in AI mode into international markets alongside multi-turn ads and AI mode in the U.S.'...

I got off the phone with a potential client whose company is doing great. The client, however, is not even thinking of selling the company as they see future growth over the next couple of years that they wish to materialize in order to get a larger exit. Founders and boards routinely track revenue and profitability over time. But another graph deserves equal attention: enterprise value. Its trajectory can turn downward while the operating numbers continue improving, with significant implications for M&A timing. Consider a hypothetical SaaS company generating $15 million in annual recurring revenue, valued at 6x ARR. Its implied enterprise value is $90 million. Two years later, ARR reaches $20 million, but the multiple falls to 3.5x revenue. Enterprise value drops to $70 million. Revenue increased 33%, while value declined 22%. These are only illustrative assumptions to demonstrate how multiple compression can overshadow operating growth. For a founder postponing a sale until the next revenue milestone, the practical implication is clear: Reaching that milestone may still produce a smaller exit....

A 60% growth in applications to one of the world's most prestigious research-grant programmes could result in an exceptionally low success rate, raising fears that quality scientific ideas will go unfunded. This rise is attributable, in part, to the ease of writing applications with artificial-intelligence tools. 'The number is a bit scary,' says Maria Leptin, president of the European Research Council (ERC) in Brussels, noting it's increasingly difficult for their staff and peer reviewers to tackle so many applications. The ERC's Starting Grant programme ' which offers base funds of up to '1.5 million (US$1.7 million) over five years to early-career scientists ' received 7,710 proposals for 2027 grants before the deadline on 14 October, up from 4,807 last year (see 'Rising torrent'). With up to 373 grants available, down from 421 last year because of funding constraints, that will mean a success rate of less than 5%, compared with 8.8% for the 2026 grant call. 'It's almost a lottery,' says Devang Mehta, a systems and synthetic biologist at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium who applied for a Starting Grant this year....

Some interface changes and nudges, like bright buttons urging you to subscribe in apps, are mildly annoying but easy to ignore. Others are so in your face that you want to throw your phone in a river. X's new push to get users to promote their posts is firmly in that category. Over the last 24 hours, a growing number of users have posted that a mysterious hand pointing to the 'promote' button suddenly showed up while they were writing a post. This has irked people across the board. With Halloween around the corner, it could be a prank meant to spook users, though X hasn't said so. And even users who wanted to promote a post and spend money might be scared off after seeing the hand. WTF @elonmusk, if I wanted jump scares I would've watched a horror movie instead. P.S. this hand popped out of nowhere and conveniently when the words "engagement farming" are in the tweet. pic.twitter.com/NWxt81AYie TBPN podcast's president Dylan Abruscato said that this engagement trick was the 'most Nikita-coded thing I've ever seen,' a nod to the growth tactics associated with Nikita Bier, X's former head of product....