News
Twitter Plans To Charge $19.99 Per Month For Verification
After acquiring the social media platform for $44 billion, Elon Musk has issued a deadline to introduce a paid verification scheme.
In one of his first directives since the takeover, Elon Musk aims to change Twitter Blue, the optional $4.99 per month subscription service, into a more expensive add-on that verifies users with the familiar blue check mark.
If the current plan goes ahead, users will have 90 days to upgrade to the new monthly fee or lose their existing verification completely. Musk has made plenty of noise about revamping Twitter over the last few months and is rumored to have issued a November 7th deadline for this particular change, with employees facing being fired if the feature isn’t in place by that date.
Twitter’s new owner has been in charge for less than a week so far, but has already changed the site’s homepage. When logged-out users visit the root domain, they are redirected to the Explore page that shows trending tweets and the latest news stories. The outspoken Tesla founder is planning mass layoffs of Twitter middle managers and engineers who haven’t recently contributed to the site’s codebase, with cuts expected to begin happening this week.
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The original Twitter Blue subscription launched almost a year ago as a way to view articles without ads, as well as giving subscribers an undo function for Tweets. The service hasn’t been particularly popular, and ad revenue still constitutes the vast majority of the platform’s revenue.
Musk is keen to grow the subscription model to the point where it accounts for half of Twitter’s revenue — let’s see how the controversial Tesla CEO fares over the coming months.
News
LUVED Is A New Curated Preloved Marketplace For The UAE
Sellers keep 100 percent of every sale and AI can build a listing in five seconds — though the app’s smartest tools are still coming.
Secondhand shopping has become mainstream in the UAE, but the experience is still scattered across resale sites, social media and informal group chats. LUVED, a mobile-first marketplace that launched in Dubai this month, is betting it can pull that activity into one place — and that the thing buyers and sellers actually want is not more inventory, but trust.
The app trades in what it calls circular luxury: preloved fashion and lifestyle pieces across men’s, women’s and children’s categories, bought, sold or given away peer to peer. Its main pitch is economics, with sellers keeping 100 percent of every sale under a zero-commission, fast payout model, while buyers are promised vetted pieces at lower prices.
Where LUVED is staking its reputation is verification. Sellers pass a KYC check, and items run through a two-layer authentication system powered by Entrupy that pairs instant AI screening with human expert review for high-value pieces. Authenticity certificates travel with each item, payments sit in escrow, and a buyer-protection package the company calls The Safety Net adds a 48-hour return window and dispute resolution. Door-to-door logistics removes the in-person meetups that make most resale deals awkward.
An in-app assistant called Luvbot — offering selling insights and demand-based recommendations — is soon to be introduced to the platform. Other features include autofill and dynamic pricing that lets users build a listing in as little as five seconds from three photos, plus a swipe-based feed, story-style drops and in-app chat in English and Arabic. Finally, a gifting layer, Luved & Gifted, lets users pass items to others inside the app rather than sell them.
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“After moving to Dubai, I saw how difficult it was to sell or even give things away,” says founder and CEO Shaima Sibtain. The friction is real, and so is the competition. In resale, trust is won transaction by transaction — and that is the test LUVED has set itself.
The app is live on the App Store now, with Google Play to follow. The company also plans to expand across the region, which will be the real test for a marketplace staking everything on trust.
