Electronic Arts‘ EA Sports and Adobe have teamed up to transform the Team Builder mode of EA Sports College Football 25.

EA’s new football game has been a hit relaunch for EA after many years of hiatus. Adobe Express, the easy-to-use make-anything app, will be used in the Team Builder mode of EA Sports College Football 25.

The collaboration brings Adobe Express to over one million users in Team Builder and will dynamically elevate the user experience by providing innovative tools for team customization, allowing players to express their creativity in new and exciting ways.

“We’re thrilled to partner with Adobe Express to bring its functionality to Team Builder, empowering our users to showcase their creativity. This integration brings additional customization options and takes the design experience to the next level of innovation. We can’t wait to see how players personalize their teams in exciting new ways,” said Jeff Skelton, head of technology partnerships at EA, in a statement.

Customizing gear for players

Adobe Express brings together the best of Adobe’s industry-leading creative tools, responsible AI and a massive library of professional-grade assets into an app that’s quick and easy for everyone to use.

Today, millions of solopreneurs, small businesses, marketers and business users turn to Adobe Express to promote and grow their ideas, passions and businesses. Adobe Express also brings easy content creation to where millions more people work with integrations into popular productivity platforms like Google Drive, ChatGPT and Slack.

The new partnership between EA Sports and Adobe Express will give College Football 25 players the ability to make their teams stand out on the field and on social media with custom logo, helmet, jersey and home-field designs that reflect their personal style and passions.

With Adobe Express in Team Builder, players can now access pro-grade assets and choose from more than 500,000 royalty-free Adobe Stock photos, 290,000 icons, 44,000 designs, including shapes, illustrations, brushes, textures, frames and more – all for no extra cost.

Players can bring their own photos or images into Adobe Express to create new designs. They can generate designs with responsible AI. Players simply type in what they want to see and Adobe Express instantly generates designs they can choose from. Adobe Express features powered by Firefly – Adobe’s generative AI model – are designed to be commercially safe so players can post their creations online and on social with confidence.

And they can share it on social. With Adobe Express, it’s simple for players to showcase their in-game designs with friends and fans on their favorite social media platforms.

“College Football 25 players bring a passion and pride to their teams and with Adobe Express in EA Sports’ Team Builder mode, it’s now easy for players to translate that passion into a team look and personality that’s uniquely theirs and they can showcase to the world,” said Aubrey Cattell, vice president of Creative Cloud Developer Platform and partner ecosystem at Adobe, in a statement. “We’re thrilled to put Adobe’s world-class creative tools ‘in the game’ for such a highly engaged audience.”

TCL has confirmed which smartphones will get the Android 15 OS update. After Google, Motorola, and Vivo, TCL has announced the Android 15 roadmap for quite a few of its devices.

Which TCL smartphones will receive the Android 15 OS update?

TCL isn’t a company that is particularly known to offer Android OS updates quickly. The company typically sells mid-range Android smartphones at attractive prices. However, the company does not offer major OS updates as swiftly as other Android smartphone makers.

Google recently rolled out the first stable version of Android 15 to its Pixel smartphones and tablets. Following Google’s footsteps, a few reputed and global smartphone manufacturers too have announced Android 15 OS update for some of their devices.

TCL too reportedly released a list, which includes 10 devices that will get Android 15. It includes TCL 50 5G, TCL 50 NXTPAPER 5G, TCL 50 Pro NXTPAPER 5G, TCL 50 SE, TCL 50 XL 5G, TCL 505, TCL Tab 8 Gen 2 and LTE, TCL Tab 10, NXTPAPER 5G, TCL Tab 11 Gen 2 and LTE, and TCL Tab 11 FE.

It is interesting to note that some of the TCL devices that will get the Android 15 OS update have been released in the last 12 to 14 months. Moreover, TCL hasn’t confirmed any timeline for the rollout.

TCL revising its update policy for smartphones

Traditionally, TCL has preferred to sell new phones with the latest Android OS update pre-installed. Moreover, it usually releases a single major Android OS update to its devices.

TCL’s track record for releasing software releases for its smartphones has been rather poor. The company has noticeably dragged its feet during the Android 13 and Android 14 updates.

TCL seems to be trying to change gears. In other words, TCL is revising its update policy. Some TCL smartphones, especially those belonging to the TCL 50 series, will receive two major OS upgrades.

Simply put, the TCL 50 series smartphones should get Android 16 update. The company has further indicated that these devices will also get five years of security updates.

For years, Finix has been slowly chipping away at Stripe – which handles payments for millions of businesses. But after previously helping companies set up internal payment systems of their own, the startup officially became a payment processor in 2023, just like Stripe. Now Finix is gearing up for its biggest push against the fintech giant yet.

In an interview with TechCrunch, CEO and founder Richie Serna says becoming a payment processor was “hugely transformational” for the business, and a main driver of its $75 million fundraise, which it announced on Thursday.

Serna says Finix has quadrupled its revenue in the last year, though he declined to share its true number of merchants. However, he told TechCrunch in 2022 that Finix was supporting more than 12,000 merchants and says Finix closed more deals in 2024 than in the company’s entire history — so Finix could have more than 24,000 merchants today.

That’s still a long way off from the customer base of Stripe, who Finix directly competes with — at least if you ask Sequoia Capital. The venture firm led Finix’s $35 million Series B round in 2020, only to walk away from the investment weeks later after determining a conflict of interest with Stripe, which it also backed. Finix got to keep the money but lost Sequoia as a backer.

Four years later, Serna says that moment helped put Finix on the map, and hasn’t had a lasting effect on the business. In fact, Serna says fintech companies like Stripe, Finix, and Adyen all have lots of room to grow in the payments space.

“One thing that we kind of try to correct, in terms of the narrative, is this idea that Stripe owns the entire market. We live in Silicon Valley. Everybody sort of believes that,” said Serna. “And so Stripe only actually owns 6% of the US market, and less than 2% worldwide. So payments is still relatively fragmented, and probably about 91% of payments today still goes through systems that were built back in the ’80s and the ’90s,” he noted.

So why would someone choose Finix over Stripe, and how are they different?

When Serna founded Finix, he didn’t see it as a payments business, but instead as a “payments infrastructure” company. Now that’s changing.

In some ways, these companies are more similar today than when Sequoia abandoned its investment in Finix for being too competitive with Stripe. Both process payments for businesses, require little to no coding to get set up, and operate in Canada and the United States.

However, Serna says Finix is specifically building products for businesses with both in-store and online footprints that don’t have the developers to build out those experiences. He says there are tens of millions of these companies in America. To this end, Finix offers more options for physical payments, integrating with several different payment devices.

Serna also says Finix offers more visibility into its pricing. Stripe takes a clean, but obscure, 2.9% cut of every transaction, plus a 30-cent fee. Finix, on the other hand, uses a cost-plus model, breaking down everything it’s charging a customer for and showing their markup.

With the new investment, Finix says it’s focused on growing its team beyond the 130 employees it has today and expanding into more countries around the world. Ideally the startup is hoping to take a bigger bite out of America’s payments system.

The $75 million round was led by Acrew Capital and co-led by Leap Global and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Other investors in the round include Citi Ventures, Tribeca Venture Partners, Homebrew, Insight Partners, Inspired Capital, and Cap Table Coalition. Finix has now raised $208 million in total funding to date with this Series C, which comes more than two years since the startup secured a $30 million tranche. Finix would not disclose its current valuation to TechCrunch but says this was an up round.

Google could preview its own take on Rabbit’s large action model concept as soon as December, reports The Information. “Project Jarvis,” as it’s reportedly codenamed, would carry tasks out for users, including “gathering research, purchasing a product, or booking a flight,” according to three people the outlet spoke with who have direct knowledge of the project.

Powered by a future version of Google’s Gemini, Jarvis reportedly only works with a web browser (it’s tuned specifically for Chrome). The tool is aimed at helping people “automate everyday, web-based tasks” by taking and interpreting screenshots and then clicking buttons or entering text, The Information writes. In its current state, it apparently takes “a few seconds” between actions.

The Information cautions that Google’s plan to show Jarvis off in December is subject to change. The company is reportedly considering releasing it to some small number of testers to find and help the company work out bugs.

Good morning! Let’s play Connections, the NYT’s clever word game that challenges you to group answers in various categories. It can be tough, so read on if you need clues.

What should you do once you’ve finished? Why, play some more word games of course. I’ve also got daily Wordle hints and answers, Strands hints and answers and Quordle hints and answers articles if you need help for those too.

It may only be halfway through its opening weekend, but Venom: The Last Dance is already falling short of its franchise’s standards at the box office.

The new comic book film brings Tom Hardy’s big-screen adventures as Eddie Brock to an end and was, therefore, marketed as a zany and climactic final outing for the superhero genre’s quirkiest duo. Unfortunately, while certain elements of the film’s early trailers — like the Venom-ized horse that Eddie and his symbiote pal use at one point to travel a bit more quickly — went viral online, it doesn’t seem like moviegoers feel as compelled to seek out Venom: The Last Dance like they did its two predecessors.

According to Variety, Venom: The Last Dance has so far earned only $22 million stateside from all of its Friday and preview screenings. That means the film is currently en route to falling shy of its initial box office projections, which placed its opening weekend total around $65 million. The movie’s first-day domestic gross is also lower than the $32 million that Venom accrued in the same amount of time in 2018 and the $37 million that 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage raked in across its preview and initial Friday screenings.

The fact that Sony’s third — and potentially final — Venom film is on track to perform worse financially than its two parent movies may not come as much of a surprise to those who have been keeping up with The Last Dance. The film received largely negative reviews prior to its theatrical debut, and multiple critics dinged the sequel for not focusing enough on the wacky, fun relationship between Hardy’s Eddie and his immature alien pal. The first two Venom movies didn’t receive overwhelmingly positive reviews, either, but The Last Dance‘s current audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is also lower than those of its predecessors.

Ultimately, it remains to be seen how close Venom: The Last Dance comes to matching its predecessors’ overall $856 million and $506 million respective worldwide box office totals. Both Venom and Let There Be Carnage notably earned more outside of the U.S. than they did domestically, and it’s possible The Last Dance will continue that franchise trend and end up doing better than its current earnings suggest. Only time will tell.

Venom: The Last Dance is now playing in theaters.