Latest news with #Adobe
Hindustan Times
8 hours ago
- Health
- Hindustan Times
New weight-loss drug Wegovy is here, but is it a magical solution? Experts weigh in
The obsession with weight loss injections is still going strong. After the social media frenzy around Ozempic last year and celebrities such as Meghan Trainor, Lizzo, and Amy Schumer admitting to using it, and the buzz when Mounjaro (Elon Musk revealed he used it too!) arrived in India this March, there's a new contender on the block: Wegovy. Earlier this week (June 24), Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk launched this much-anticipated drug in India. But what makes it different from its predecessors, and why is everyone talking about it? Wegovy is designed for long-term weight management and to help reduce the risk of serious cardiovascular events in people living with obesity. It comes in a sleek, once-weekly pen device with five dosing options: 0.25 mg, 0.5 mg, 1 mg, 1.7 mg, and a maintenance dose of 2.4 mg. New weight-loss drug Wegovy is here, but is it a magical solution? Experts weigh in(Photo: Adobe Stock) Similar to Ozempic and Mounjaro, this new weight loss drug is also a prescription-only medication intended for adults who are obese or overweight and also have at least one weight-related health condition, like high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, or high cholesterol. 'The active ingredient in Wegovy is semaglutide, which is a synthetic version of a naturally occurring hormone called GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide-1). This hormone is released in the gut in response to food intake and helps regulate appetite and food intake,' informs Dr Kashish Gupta, Consultant Endocrinology at PSRI Hospital. In essence, semaglutide helps you feel full sooner, slows digestion and reduces hunger. These effects can lead to reduced calorie intake over time and, eventually, weight loss. It may also improve blood sugar levels and help lower the risk of heart issues in certain individuals, particularly those with type 2 diabetes. Who can use it? According to Dr Anjana Kalia, a dietitian at Diet Clinix, it's intended for adults with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30 or above, or 27 and above if there's a related health issue. 'But these are not miracle solutions. The decision to use it should always be taken with a qualified doctor after assessing medical history and risks,' she cautions. Who should avoid it? People who have a personal or family history of medullary thyroid carcinoma, multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome, have had pancreatitis or severe digestive disorders, are pregnant, breastfeeding or planning to conceive, have eating disorders, or are allergic to semaglutide or its components. These drugs should be taken in full consultation with your medical practitioner. Wegovy vs Mounjaro vs Ozempic 1. Wegovy Active ingredient: Semaglutide Approved for: Weight loss Dosage: Once weekly Benefits: Helps regulate blood sugar levels, lowers the risk of cardiovascular events Side effects: Nausea, diarrhoea, vomiting Price: ₹ 17,345 a month for 0.25mg, 0.5mg, and 1mg doses and ₹ 24,280 and ₹ 26,050 a month for 1.7mg and 2.4mg doses, respectively. 2. Mounjaro Active ingredient: Tirzepatide Approved for: Type 2 diabetes Dosage: Once weekly Benefits: Helps regulate blood sugar levels, improves insulin sensitivity Side effects: Nausea, diarrhoea, vomiting and pancreatitis or thyroid issues in rare cases Price: ₹ 4,375 ($50.67) for a 5 mg vial, ₹ 3,500 ($40.54) for a 2.5mg vial. 3. Ozempic Active ingredient: Semaglutide Approved for: Type 2 diabetes Dosage: Once weekly Benefits: Helps regulate blood sugar levels, decreases appetite Side effects: Nausea, diarrhoea, upset stomach Price: The injectable Ozempic can cost between ₹ 8,000 and ₹ 20,000 a shot.
The Verge
20 hours ago
- The Verge
Adobe's new camera app is making me rethink phone photography
Adobe's Project Indigo is a camera app built by camera nerds for camera nerds. It's the work of Florian Kainz and Marc Levoy, the latter of whom is also known as one of the pioneers of computational photography with his work on early Pixel phones. Indigo's basic promise is a sensible approach to image processing while taking full advantage of computational techniques. It also invites you into the normally opaque processes that happen when you push the shutter button on your phone camera — just the thing for a camera nerd like me. If you hate the overly aggressive HDR look, or you're tired of your iPhone sharpening the ever-living crap out of your photos, Project Indigo might be for you. It's available in beta on iOS, though it is not — and I stress this — for the faint of heart. It's slow, it's prone to heating up my iPhone, and it drains the battery. But it's the most thoughtfully designed camera experience I've ever used on a phone, and it gave me a renewed sense of curiosity about the camera I use every day. This isn't your garden-variety camera app You'll know this isn't your garden-variety camera app right from the onboarding screens. One section details the difference between two histograms available to use with the live preview image (one is based on Indigo's own processing and one is based on Apple's image pipeline). Another line describes the way the app handles processing of subjects and skies as 'special (but gentle).' This is a camera nerd's love language. The app isn't very complicated. There are two capture modes: photo and night. It starts you off in auto, and you can toggle pro controls on with a tap. This mode gives you access to shutter speed, ISO, and, if you're in night mode, the ability to specify how many frames the app will capture and merge to create your final image. That rules. Indigo's philosophy has as much to do with image processing as it does with the shooting experience. A blog post accompanying the app's launch explains a lot of the thinking behind the 'look' Indigo is trying to achieve. The idea is to harness the benefits of multi-frame computational processing without the final photo looking over-processed. Capturing multiple frames and merging them into a single image is basically how all phone cameras work, allowing them to create images with less noise, better detail, and higher dynamic range than they'd otherwise capture with their tiny sensors. Phone cameras have been taking photos like this for almost a decade, but over the past couple of years, there's been a growing sense that processing has become heavy-handed and untethered from reality. High-contrast scenes appear flat and 'HDR-ish,' skies look more blue than they ever do in real life, and sharpening designed to optimize photos for small screens makes fine details look crunchy. Indigo aims for a more natural look, as well as ample flexibility for post-processing RAW files yourself. Like Apple's ProRAW format, Indigo's DNG files contain data from multiple, merged frames — a traditional RAW file contains data from just one frame. Indigo's approach differs from Apple's in a few ways; it biases toward darker exposures, allowing it to apply less noise reduction and smoothing. Indigo also offers computational RAW capture on some iPhones that don't support Apple's ProRAW, which is reserved for recent Pro iPhones. After wandering around taking photos with both the native iPhone camera app and Indigo, the difference in sharpening was one of the first things I noticed. Instead of seeking out and crunching up every crumb of detail it can find, Indigo's processing lets details fade gracefully into the background. I especially like how Indigo handles high-contrast scenes indoors. White balance is slightly warmer than the standard iPhone look, and Indigo lets shadows be shadows, where the iPhone prefers to brighten them up. It's a whole mood, and I love it. High-contrast scenes outdoors tend toward a brighter, flat exposure, but the RAW files offer a ton of latitude for bringing back contrast and pumping up the shadows. I don't usually bother shooting RAW on a smartphone, but Indigo has me rethinking that. Whether you're shooting RAW or JPEG, Indigo (and the iPhone camera, for that matter) produces HDR photos — not to be confused with a flat, HDR-ish image. I mean the real HDR image formats that iOS and Android now support, using a gain map to pop the highlights with a little extra brightness. Since Indigo isn't applying as much brightening to your photo, those highlights pop in a pleasant way that doesn't feel eye-searingly bright as it sometimes can using the standard camera app. This is a camera built for an era of HDR displays and I'm here for it. According to the blog post, Indigo captures and merges more frames for each image than the standard camera app. That's all pretty processor-intensive, and it doesn't take much use to trigger a warning in the app that your phone is overheating. Processing takes more time and is a real battery killer, so bring a battery pack on your shoots. It all makes me appreciate the job the native iPhone camera app has to do even more. It's the most popular camera in the world, and it has to be all things to all people all at once. It has to be fast and battery-efficient. It has to work just as well on this year's model, last year's model, and a phone from seven years ago. If it crashes at the wrong time and misses a once-in-a-lifetime moment, or underexposes your great-uncle Theodore's face in the family photo, the consequences are significant. There are only so many liberties Apple and other phone camera makers can take in the name of aesthetics. To that end, the iPhone 16 series includes revamped Photographic Styles, allowing you to basically fine-tune the tone map it applies to your images to tweak contrast, warmth, or brightness. It doesn't offer the flexibility of RAW shooting — and you can't use it alongside Apple's RAW format — but it's a good starting point if you think your iPhone photos look too flat. There are only so many liberties Apple and any other phone camera maker can take in the name of aesthetics Between Photographic Styles and ProRAW, you can get results from the native camera app that look very similar to Project Indigo's output. But you have to work for it; those options are intentionally out of reach in the main camera app and abstracted away. ProRAW files still look a little crunchier than Indigo's DNGs, even when I take them into Lightroom and turn sharpening all the way down. Both Indigo's DNGs and ProRAW files include a color profile to act as a starting point for edits; I usually preferred Indigo's warmer, slightly darker image treatment. It takes a little more futzing with the sliders to get a ProRAW image where I like it. Project Indigo invites you into the usually mysterious process of taking a photo with a phone camera. It's not an app for everyone, but if that description sounds intriguing, then you're my kind of camera nerd. Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge
Yahoo
21 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
This Growth Stock Is Down 13% in 2025. Should You Buy the Dip?
The S&P 500 Index ($SPX) is hitting new all-time highs, putting tariff uncertainty, recession fears, and geopolitical turmoil on the back burner. Tech stocks have also participated in the rally with a few exceptions. Adobe Systems (ADBE), for instance, is down 13% for the year as of this writing. The stock's underperformance is not unique to 2025. It lost a quarter of its market capitalization last year, missing out on the tech rally. ADBE trades nearly 45% lower than its all-time high and has been out of favor with the market for quite some time now. Dear Nvidia Stock Fans, Watch This Event Today Closely 3 ETFs Offering Juicy Dividend Yields of 15% or Higher A $2 Billion Reason to Sell Super Micro Computer Stock Now Markets move fast. Keep up by reading our FREE midday Barchart Brief newsletter for exclusive charts, analysis, and headlines. To be sure, Adobe is no longer the kind of growth story it once was, and its revenues are expected to grow by less than 10% each in 2025 and 2026. The stock's valuations have also adjusted to the kind of growth Adobe is delivering. However, are the valuations now at a level where Adobe enters the 'buy' zone? Let's discuss. To begin with, let's analyze why Adobe stock has sagged. Firstly, the company is facing intense competition, particularly from Canva, whose paid users are now over half of Adobe Creative Cloud. Adobe tried acquiring Figma, which is its competitor in collaborative design tools and UX/UI design, but had to abandon that deal as it failed to get regulatory clearances. Markets are also apprehensive about the company's ability to monetize its artificial intelligence (AI) investments. Notably, AI is both an opportunity and a threat for Adobe as new competitors could put pressure on its pricing power, putting its juicy margins at risk. In hindsight, it seems Adobe management wasn't prudent with its capital allocation and spent aggressively on buybacks. While it still has a formidable balance sheet, the company repurchased shares at a much higher price than what they currently stand at. But it's not all over for Adobe. The company boasts significant recurring revenues through subscriptions. It reported digital media annualized recurring revenue (ARR) of $18.09 billion at the end of the quarter ending May, with the number rising 12.1% compared to the same time last year. The company expects its ARR book to rise 11% in the current fiscal year, which looks quite decent even as the growth has arguably come down. Among others, Firefly has helped expand the company's ecosystem. During its fiscal Q2 earnings call, Adobe said that the app is attracting new users to its franchise, and its subscribers rose 30% in the quarter. Adobe's gross margins are nearly 90% while adjusted operating margins are in the mid-40s, which is quite healthy. The company's subscription-based business helps it post fat margins, and historically, the stock has traded at a premium to broader markets given its business model. Overall, of the 34 analysts covering Adobe stock, 23 have a 'Strong Buy' rating while two rate it as a 'Moderate Buy.' The remaining nine analysts rate the stock as a 'Hold' or some equivalent. Adobe stock trades slightly above its Street-low target price of $380, while the mean target price of $499.40 implies upside potential of nearly 30%. Analyst action following Adobe's fiscal Q2 2025 earnings release was quite mixed. While some analysts raised their target price after a strong report where the company beat on all key metrics, others cut their target price. Adobe's outlook was perhaps best summed up by CFRA Research analyst Angelo Zino, who lowered his target price from $575 to $500. In his note, Zino said, 'Still, at near historical-low valuations and given its highly recurring business model and attractive margins, we think shares offer an enticing risk/reward opportunity, but investors may need to be patient due to limited catalysts.' Adobe's valuations have corrected amid the slowing growth and concerns over competitive pressure. It currently trades at almost 20x its expected EPS in the fiscal year 2026, which would end in November 2026. I believe the valuations are quite comfortable at these levels, even after pricing in the headwinds. Concerns over the company losing out to new startup rivals might be a bit overblown, and I find the stock's risk-return as reasonably attractive here, even as they are not mouthwatering, and the chances of an immediate re-rating look bleak. Overall, Adobe is one growth stock that I will keep on my radar, and would consider adding positions if the stock sees more downward pressure. On the date of publication, Mohit Oberoi did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. This article was originally published on Sign in to access your portfolio
Daily Mirror
a day ago
- Business
- Daily Mirror
'I misread my tenancy agreement and it cost me £15k - my business went bust'
Faye Finaro, 40, was looking to lease her first office building for her start-up but one oversight caused her business to go bust as she had to pay £15,000 to her landlord A businesswoman had to pay £15k to her landlord after misreading the T&C's in her tenancy agreement, leading her business to go bust. Faye Finaro, 40, was looking to lease her first office building for her start-up recruitment company in 2016 and found a good spot in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire. When deciding on whether to take the space Faye said she felt "pressured" to sign the 20-page contract and was offered a discount as incentive to sign it there and then. Alongside her then-business partner, Faye signed the tenancy agreement for the commercial premises without reading it in detail and got the keys the same day. They realised days later that it had no internet, nor could they get access to the server room to have it installed. They were using dongles for their staff, but said it was 'impossible' to work without Wi-Fi. Faye said: "We tried to tell them that we needed to go away and think about it before agreeing. But they started adding extras to help us make a flash decision and, in the end, we signed on the spot. 'The same week we realised there was no internet, or access to the server to install it; that wasn't mentioned in the agreement - they just omitted it.' They tried to hand in their notice after four months to move the business elsewhere. That was when they learned they'd unwittingly agreed to an 18-month break clause after not reading the terms and conditions in the tenancy agreement properly. After moving in in January 2016, they handed in their notice in April and were moved out by July, but started getting letters demanding their unpaid rent. That is when they were told there were 11 months left on their break clause – which amounted to £13,200 - plus £1,800 interest. When they refused, the landlord took them to small claims court and they lost their case. In January 2017, they were taken to Mansfield Magistrates' and County Court where they were told they had to pay the money they owed because they signed the contract. Faye said: "I had to pay £15,000 on an instalment plan as we were personal guarantors on the property. It was a huge setback and impacted how our business started; because of the default on my credit file, it led to the downfall of the business. We couldn't access funding because the bank lenders saw me as too high risk." In 2023, she launched her new business, SOSBeauty, "on a shoestring" - borrowing investments from friends. Now, CEO Faye has teamed up with Adobe to share her story to highlight how their Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant can help make it easier to find the small print in contracts. She said she's been able to build a "powerhouse" out of her new business and has since fully restored her high credit rating, but she still looks back on the "horrific" period of her life. Michi Alexander, at Adobe, said: 'Faye's story is more common than you'd think - 65 per cent of business leaders admit to signing contracts they don't fully grasp. 'We're using AI to make contracts clearer, easier to compare and understand, with verified answers and built-in data security.' Faye added: "I'd advise someone else - don't be scared to ask questions, and to ask for help. Don't put too much trust in landlords that have their own interests at heart - get other tenants' opinions too. She added: "The Adobe software would have been really useful when I was on the spot there. I often check legal things using Chat GPT but you still need to use the right prompts to get the right information, so if you don't know what to ask, it's hard. "If I'd had something like that in which was specifically tailored to contracts, we would have been able to check.'
Time of India
a day ago
- Business
- Time of India
The CMO Is Dead. Long Live the Chief Model Officer
By Vivek Pradeep Rana Let's call time on the performance. The traditional CMO is in critical condition. Not because marketing is dying—far from it—but because the job description can no longer contain what the role has become. The campaigns still roll out, the awards still come in, but beneath the surface, something fundamental has shifted: the marketer is no longer the messenger. In the age of AI, the marketer must become the machine's first editor, translator, strategist, and conscience. This isn't a sentimental obituary. It's a power handover. Because as large language models generate headlines, write scripts, draft product descriptions, segment audiences, personalise campaigns, and analyse sentiment before you've had your first coffee, the CMO has two choices. Either manage the fallout. Or design the future. The Chief Marketing Officer , as we know it, is obsolete. But a new role is emerging in its place: the Chief Model Officer . In a world of infinite creation and zero-cost distribution, the job of marketing is no longer about generating attention. It's about creating coherence. When every asset, ad, and email can be tailored, tuned, and tested in real time, the value of marketing shifts from volume to judgement. It's not about doing more. It's about doing what only your brand should do. The CMO's new job is to build the intelligence layer that allows this to happen. Across Indian enterprises, generative AI is moving from experiment to infrastructure. Adobe's 2024 Digital Trends Report found that 81% of Indian marketers are now using GenAI tools, but only 27% feel confident integrating them into long-term strategy. This is the cliff edge. As campaign development accelerates and machine-generated content becomes indistinguishable from human craft, the question isn't whether AI will replace marketers. It's whether marketers will still matter unless they become the ones designing the system. The irony is that marketing is better positioned than any function in the enterprise to lead AI transformation. It already runs experiments at scale, ingests real-time consumer feedback, and synthesizes cultural nuance into messaging. Every campaign is a miniature feedback loop. Every brand moment is a behavioural test. This is exactly what AI systems need to learn: structured data, fast iteration, and subjective evaluation. AI doesn't thrive in spreadsheets. It thrives in ambiguous environments with emotional stakes. That's marketing. Always has been. So why are most CMOs sitting on the sidelines, watching product and tech teams run the AI pilots? Why is marketing treating AI as a tool when it should be treating it as territory? Every day, Indian brands are feeding language models thousands of prompts. From WhatsApp campaigns in Bhojpuri to vernacular ad scripts tuned for sentiment, India is the perfect lab: multilingual, mobile-first, emotionally expressive. If your marketing team isn't building your brand's model layer, rest assured someone else's model is learning from your consumers. A Fortune India 500 bank recently automated over 80% of its customer lifecycle communication through a model trained on tone-modulated scripts. A D2C skincare startup in Surat launched 47 AI-personalized campaigns in a month—on a marketing budget smaller than one legacy brand's agency retainer. Speed and scale are no longer advantages. They're table stakes. The only competitive advantage that remains? Knowing what not to say. When Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message, he couldn't have predicted this. Today, the model is the message. Because the model decides what your brand says, who hears it, when, and in what emotional register. Every tone calibration, every prompt refinement, every data input is a strategic decision. That means marketers can no longer just approve outputs. They must shape the architecture of the systems producing them. That requires knowing how the model was trained. What data it sees. What biases it embeds. And how quickly it learns from feedback loops. CMOs who don't own the model will soon find themselves reacting to outputs they never signed off on. This is the real shift: AI doesn't replace marketing. It replaces mediocre marketing. What remains is a demand for discernment—taste, ethics, timing, restraint. In a system where everything can be generated, the only thing that matters is what you choose to publish. This is not creative direction. It's narrative governance. Brand integrity now lives inside model weights, in prompt instructions, in RLHF tuning, in ethical filters. The same way CMOs once fought for brand voice in a crowded media mix, they must now define what their brand looks like when expressed by a machine. Not just what it says. But what it's allowed to say. The most successful CMOs in the next five years won't be the ones with the best campaigns. They'll be the ones who understand that every part of their function is becoming programmable. The brief is a data set. The copy is a model output. The segmentation is dynamic. And the ROI is visible in real time. What that means is that CMOs will need to own the stack. Not just the martech tools—the actual APIs. The internal model governance. The fine-tuning datasets. The model guardrails. A few forward-thinking companies are already doing this. But the real shift will happen when marketers stop asking how AI can speed up what they do, and start asking how their brands can become AI-native systems of trust. So what makes a Chief Model Officer? It's someone who can move fluently between prompt libraries and poetry. Someone who knows when the model is lying. Who understands that the algorithm doesn't care about your tagline, unless you train it to. Who doesn't delegate judgement to dashboards but builds feedback mechanisms into the model itself? The Chief Model Officer is still a CMO but weaponised with context, technical curiosity, and a bias for orchestration over volume. They don't think in campaigns. They think in systems. And they're the only ones who can ensure that as the machines learn to speak, they speak with meaning. The CMO isn't disappearing. But the job, as written, is being overwritten. The opportunity is not to preserve the past. It's to define what marketing leadership looks like in a world where brand, content, experience, and trust are increasingly expressed through autonomous systems. The Chief Model Officer doesn't wait for disruption. They write the prompt. And they don't just guard the brand. They train the model that becomes it. (Vivek Pradeep Rana is the managing partner at Gnothi Seauton and a faculty member at MICA. Views are personal.)
