Chatsworth, California-based toy company MGA Entertainment has launched MGA Studios to produce video games, online universes and other ancillary content. The privately held MGA is backing the new division with $500 million to drive production and acquisitions. MGA’s catalog of successful toys includes the L.O.L. Surprise!, Bratz, Little Tike and Rainbow High brands, some of which have spawned TV series and games. MGA Entertainment founder and CEO Isaac Larian’s son Jason Larian is president of the new unit, which has acquired Australia’s Pixel Zoo Animation and named Pixel Zoo founder and CEO Paul Gillett an MGA Studios partner. Read more

Google is stepping up in-app shopping, adding it to YouTube Shorts. “Doom scrolling is about to become doom shopping,” heralds the official blog of Nasdaq, where Google parent Alphabet trades. Now those parsing the YouTube feed of videos 60-seconds or less will have the option to purchase items instantly rather than through redirection to a third-party site. The move comes as Google and others saw digital ad revenue contract this year as a result of economic headwinds and increased competition — notably from TikTok, which is tracking to double its advertising income in 2022. Read more

Senior media executive Sharon Tal Yguado has launched Astrid Entertainment. The new venture will initially focus on games, with plans to expand into multiplatform content. Yguado, who earlier held top positions at Fox Networks Group and Amazon Studios, says Astrid is developing “rich worlds” where millions of people worldwide can build communities. The company, which is currently staffing, is already underway on its first interactive environment for multiplayer stories. Astrid has raised pre-seed investment funding of more than seven figures from participants including NetEase Games, Stardom and Tower 26. Read more

TikTok is closing in on its downward revised 2022 ad revenue target of $10 billion, according to research firm Insider Intelligence. The ByteDance company had initially projected $12 billion but adjusted the forecast due to a digital advertising downturn that’s affected everyone from Alphabet to Meta Platforms. Despite the hedge, TikTok’s ad haul this year will nearly double that of 2021, and is expected to surpass the performance of Twitter and Snap. However, it still trails advertising on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, which generated more than $84 billion in the first nine months of 2022 (essentially flat). Read more

Cerebras Systems has unveiled its Andromeda AI supercomputer. With 13.5 million cores, it can calculate at the rate of 1 exaflop — roughly one quintillion (1 followed by 18 zeroes) operations — per second using a 16-bit floating point format. Andromeda’s brain is built of 16 linked Cerebras CS-2 systems, AI computers that use giant Wafer-Scale Engine 2 chips. Each chip has hundreds of thousands of cores, but is more compact and powerful than servers that use standard CPUs, according to Cerebras, which is making Andromeda available for commercial and academic research. Read more