Roku grew streaming households to 81.6 million globally in Q1, a 14 percent gain year-over-year, according to the company. Revenue was up 19 percent to $881.5 million. Streaming hours were up 23 percent to 30.8 billion, but guidance that rival ad-supported streaming platforms could hinder further growth this year dinged the strong quarterly results, sending shares down 3 percent in after hour trading last week. Claiming a position as “the No. 1 selling TV OS in the U.S. and Mexico,” Roku said the Roku Channel was No. 3 on the platform “by both reach and engagement.” Read more

London-based AI-startup Synthesia, which creates avatars for enterprise-level generative video presentations, has added “Expressive Avatars” to its feature kit. Powered by Synthesia’s new Express-1 model, these fourth-generation avatars have achieved a new benchmark in realism by using contextual expressions that approximates human emotion, the company says. Express-1 has been trained “to understand the intricate relationship between what we say and how we say it,” allowing Expressive Avatars to perform a script with the correct vocal tone, body language and lip movement, “like a real actor,” according to Synthesia. Read more

Wacom is releasing the Wacom Movink, an OLED pen display developed around the needs of creative professionals, digital artists and design students. In addition to being the industry’s first OLED pen display, Wacom says the Movink is its “thinnest and lightest” pen display ever. The Movink combines the pen with a 13.3 inch full HD OLED Samsung drawing tablet display for $750, available from the Wacom online store. The company says the Wacom Movink has the fastest response time among Wacom pens, “with increased pen detection height and no visible parallax.” Read more

Microsoft revenue was $61.9 billion in the quarter ending March 31, up 17 percent compared to the same period a year ago. Profit was up 20 percent, to $21.9 billion, despite an increase in capital expenditure to purchase Nvidia GPUs for training and running AI models. The performance smashed analyst predictions, sending the stock up 5 percent in after-hours trading. Revenue for the Microsoft Cloud division overall was $35.1 billion, up 23 percent year-over-year, fueled largely by customers using it to host resource intensive AI services. Revenue in the Intelligent Cloud sector was $26.7 billion, a 21 percent uptick. Read more

Alphabet reported revenue of $80.5 billion for Q1, a 15 percent increase fueled largely by online advertising from Google Search and YouTube. The figure topped analyst estimates of $78.8 billion. Profit soared, rising 57 percent to more than $23.6 billion, wildly overperforming the forecast of $18.9 billion. The strong performance resulted in Alphabet announcing its first ever shareholder dividend, at 20 cents per share, which pays out on June 17. Alphabet’s board approved a $70 billion stock repurchase program, and the news-filled earnings event drove Alphabet shares up 13 percent in after-hours trading. Read more