[ad_1] ChargedUp, a U.K. startup that offers a mobile charging network that takes inspiration from bike-sharing, has closed £1.2 million in seed investment. Leading the round is Sir John Hegarty’s fund The Garage, and the ex-Innocent Smoothie founders fund JamJar. The funding will be used to grow the offering across the U.K. and for international…
[ad_1] TikTok is testing a new ad product: a sponsored video ad that directs users to the advertiser’s website. The test was spotted in the beta version of the U.S. TikTok app, where a video labeled “Sponsored” from the bike retailer Specialized is showing up in the main feed, along with a blue “Lean More”…
[ad_1] Twitter has been secretly developing an enhanced camera feature that’s accessible with a swipe from the home screen and allows you to overlay captions on photos, videos, and Live broadcasts before sharing them to the timeline. Twitter is already used by people to post pictures and videos, but as it builds up its profile…
[ad_1] Firefox for iOS is getting an update today that brings a new layout for its menu and settings, as well as new organization settings in the New Tabs features to iPhone and iPad users. But more importantly, it is also introducing persistent Private Browsing tabs that allow you to keep private browsing tabs alive…
[ad_1] While Amazon has been methodical (read: a little slow) in launching local versions of its site for various global markets, it has now embarked on a secondary track to snag more business outside the 14 countries where it has built out full operations. Amazon has partnered with WesternUnion to set up a service called…
[ad_1] Two older iPhone models are back on sale in Apple stores in Germany — but only with Qualcomm chips inside. The iPhone maker was forced to pull the iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 models from shelves in its online shop and physical stores in the country last month, after chipmaker Qualcomm posted security bonds to enforce…
[ad_1] Wattpad’s ambitions to grow beyond a storytelling community for young adults took another leap forward today with the announcement of a new partnership that will help expand its reach in Asia. The company has teamed up with Huayi Brothers in Korea, who will now be Wattpad’s exclusive entertainment partner in the region. The two…
[ad_1] The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Apple’s iOS update makes it easier to get to your subscriptions Moving the Manage Subscriptions menu so that it’s just…
[ad_1] As autonomous driving eventually transforms cars from transportation devices to mobile theaters or conference rooms we will need better audio inside them. And we’ve already seen that VCs like Andreessen Horowitz say ‘audio is the future.’ So it’s interesting that Swedish sound pioneer Dirac has completed a new $13.2 million round of financing led…
[ad_1] Apple has made a small but important change to iOS that will allow users an easier way to manage their app subscriptions. In the latest release of the mobile operating system (iOS 12.1.4 and 12.2 beta), the company has relocated the “Manage Subscriptions” setting so it’s only one click away when you tap on…
[ad_1] Insta-chat addicts, rejoice. You could soon be trading memes and emojis from your computer. Instagram is internally testing a web version of Instagram Direct messaging that lets people chat without the app. If, or more likely, when this rolls out publicly, users on a desktop or laptop PC or Mac, a non-Android or iPhone,…
[ad_1] Among mobile ad networks, Facebook and Google remain the best bet for advertisers, according to the latest ROI Index from marketing startup Singular. To pull this year’s index together, Singular says it sampled $1.5 billion in ad spending (from the $10 billion in spending that the company optimizes annually) and measured which networks are…
[ad_1] Facebook and Google were far from the only developers openly abusing Apple’s Enterprise Certificate program meant for companies offering employee-only apps. A TechCrunch investigation uncovered a dozen hardcore pornography apps and a dozen real-money gambling apps that escaped Apple’s oversight. The developers passed Apple’s weak Enterprise Certificate screening process or piggybacked on a legitimate…
[ad_1] A law change that comes into force in the UK today makes the highly intrusive practice of ‘upskirting’ illegal. The government said it wants the new law to send a clear message that such behaviour is criminal and will not be tolerated. Perpetrators in the UK face up to two years in prison under the…
[ad_1] One of China’s top smartphone brands Vivo appears to have joined its fellows Oppo, Huawei and Xiaomi in setting up a new sub-brand as a softening market and heightened competition at home drive players to venture upon their original reach. A new smartphone brand called iQoo made its debut on Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter,…
[ad_1] Apple’s push to get developers to build subscription-based apps is now having a notable impact on App Store revenues. According to a new report from Sensor Tower due out later this week, revenue generated per U.S. iPhone grew 36 percent, from $58 in 2017 to $79 last year. As is typical, much of that…
[ad_1] When Apple issued revised guidance for its quarterly earnings last month, the company singled out China as a primary driver for its disappointing result. Sure enough, iPhone revenue declined 15 percent year over year, and now IDC’s got some more insight into the role the Chinese market may have played in that decline. New…
[ad_1] Samsung’s not telling us anything we don’t already know with its latest teaser. But before I hop on yet another flight to San Francisco, it’s good to know I’m getting a little more bang for my (well, Verizon’s) buck. In addition to the Galaxy S10, Samsung will also be offering a much better glimpse…
[ad_1] Bumble, currently Tinder’s biggest rival in the dating app market, today launched its own version of Tinder’s “Boost” feature. On Bumble, it’s being called “Spotlight” and allows users to pay to bump their profile up to the front of the queue, in order to be seen by more people than they would otherwise. Very…
[ad_1] I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: 2019 just might be the year that smartphones get fun again. After years of similar form factors and slight upgrades, the mobile industry’s back is against the wall. For the first time ever, sales are down, owning to economic factors and slower upgrade cycles. Most…
[ad_1] Just in time for the Grammy Awards, Apple has unveiled three new ads for Apple Music, featuring new singles from Ariana Grande, Khalid and Florida Georgia Line. In each video, the musicians have been transformed in Memoji (the human-style Animoji variant that was announced last year), which lip synch to their latest songs. The…
[ad_1] While it’s true that it’s going to take some time before most of us will actually be able to enjoy the benefits of 5G, that doesn’t mean you can’t sit back and enjoy the fireworks right now. AT&T’s adoption of the “5G Evolution” label has already been controversial among industry followers and fellow carriers…
[ad_1] If you can’t beat or join them… force feed ’em? That appears to be Instagram’s latest strategy for IGTV, which is now being shoved right into Instagram’s main feed, the company announced today. Instagram says that it will now add one-minute IGTV previews to the feed, making it “even easier” to discover and watch…
[ad_1] Ticketing app Gametime is taking its last-minute approach about as far as it can go, with the launch of a new feature called LastCall. This allows users to purchase tickets through Gametime until 90 minutes after an event has started. Why would you want to do that? Well, prices usually drop precipitously after the…
[ad_1] Netflix today is launching a new feature on iOS devices that will help make it easier to watch its shows when you’re offline. The “smart downloads” feature, as it’s called, will automatically delete a downloaded episode after you’ve finished watching, then download the next one – but only when you’re connected to Wi-Fi. The…
[ad_1] T-Mobile doesn’t want to compete with other carriers or teleco’s by developing its own “skinny bundle” of streaming TV channels, the company said today on its earnings call with investors, noting the market was already oversaturated on that front. Instead, the mobile operator’s strategy will focus on helping customers pick and choose which paid…
[ad_1] LG’s never been much on waiting for a big show to announce its latest offering. Mobile World Congress is still weeks away, and the company just dropped what’s likely to be the biggest new feature of its upcoming flagship, the G8 ThinQ. Clunky naming conventions aside, the handset once again finds LG focusing its…
[ad_1] That nasty FaceTime bug is now a thing of the past. You can now download and update your iPhone and iPad to re-enable Group FaceTime again. iOS 12.1.4 is a bug fix release and doesn’t contain any new feature other than this one. Shortly after people found out that you could eavesdrop on somebody’s…
[ad_1] Tony Haile, who previously led analytics company Chartbeat, is trying to rethink the business model for news at his new startup Scroll. Now he’s adding aggregation and curation to the mix with the acquisition of Nuzzel. Scroll is still an invite-only product, but Haile explained the idea succinctly: “We deliver this amazing, clean, ad-free…
[ad_1] Weeks of leaks haven’t left much to the imagination. But for those waiting for the real thing, the latest iteration of Motorola’s budget G line just became officially official as of this morning — and with a few weeks to spare ahead of Mobile World Congress. Of course, the Moto G7 line isn’t really…
[ad_1] Many major companies, like Air Canada, Hollister and Expedia, are recording every tap and swipe you make on their iPhone apps. In most cases you won’t even realize it. And they don’t need to ask for permission. You can assume that most apps are collecting data on you. Some even monetize your data without your…
[ad_1] Facebook’s crack down on non-consensual ad targeting last year will finally produce results. In March, TechCrunch discovered Facebook planned to require advertisers pledge that they had permission to upload someone’s phone number or email address for ad targeting. That tool debuted in June, though there was no verification process and Facebook just took businesses…
[ad_1] French company Chauffeur-Privé is going to expand aggressively over the next couple of years. That’s why the company is changing its name to Kapten — a name that sounds less French. “We wanted to share with you a very important piece of news,” Kapten co-founder and CEO Yan Hascoet said in a press conference.…
[ad_1] A gaggle of new emoji have just been approved by the Unicode Consortium, meaning they’ll be standard across any platforms that choose to support them. This batch includes some much-needed representation for people with various disabilities, new animals from guide dogs to otters, food and many more objects. Folks with disabilities get a nice…
[ad_1] A gaggle of new emoji have just been approved by the Unicode Consortium, meaning they’ll be standard across any platforms that choose to support them. This batch includes some much-needed representation for people with various disabilities, new animals from guide dogs to otters, food and many more objects. Folks with disabilities get a nice…
[ad_1] Snap has finally begun publicly testing the engineering overhaul of its slow and buggy Android app that for years has cost Snapchat users. Promising early results and reduction in app startup time could help Snapchat fix its growth problem after daily active users sank in Q2 and Q3 before staying put at 186 million…
[ad_1] The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here: 1. Facebook now lets everyone unsend messages for 10 minutes For up to 10 minutes after sending a Facebook Message, the…
[ad_1] Facebook has finally made good on its promise to let users unsend chats after TechCrunch discovered Mark Zuckerberg had secretly retracted some of his Facebook Messages from recipients. Today Facebook Messenger globally rolls out “Remove for everyone” to help you pull back typos, poor choices, embarrassing thoughts, or any other message. For up to…
[ad_1] Teens’ aversion to Facebook jeopardizes not only the company’s feed ad revenue, but its dominance as an identity provider. The Facebook Login platform keeps people tied to the social network in order to easily access other apps without a separate username and password. But for younger users who ditch or neglect Facebook in favor…
[ad_1] The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here: 1. Google intros a pair of Android accessibility features for people with hearing loss Live Transcribe is, perhaps, the more compelling…
[ad_1] YouTube is expanding the test of its “Explore” feature, a new discovery tool it first introduced as an experiment within its iPhone app last year. Similar to Instagram’s Explore page, the new YouTube feature aims to introduce users to a diverse set of personalized recommendations so they can more easily find something new to…
[ad_1] Tethering your laptop and phone can be a bit of a hassle. Google’s Chrome OS has long offered a solution called Instant Tethering that makes the process automatic, but so far, this only worked for a small set of Google’s own Chromebooks and phones, starting with the Nexus 6. Now Google is officially bringing this…
[ad_1] Japanese messaging app company Line is pumping 20 billion JPY ($182 million) into its mobile payment business as it tries to turn things around following a challenging year in 2018. The company announced the infusion into Line Pay, a subsidiary that it fully owns, in a filing that stated the new capital is “necessary funds…
[ad_1] When Samsung announced a collaboration with Supreme at an event back in December, it didn’t go over great. It wasn’t that people weren’t excited about the potential of rocking a Supreme-branded Galaxy Note or whatever, so much as which Supreme the company had struck a deal with. You see, there’s Supreme, the U.S.-based streetwear…
[ad_1] Google this morning unveiled a pair of new Android features for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. As the company notes in a blog post this morning, the WHO estimates that 900 million people will be living with heading loss by 2055. The ubiquity of mobile devices — Android in particular —…
[ad_1] The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here: 1. We dismantle Facebook’s memo defending its ‘Research’ The fallout continues following TechCrunch reporting about a Facebook app that was paying…
[ad_1] SiriusXM this week offered a few more details on how it plans to leverage its newest asset, Pandora, following its $3.5 billion acquisition of the streaming music service last year, which officially closes on Friday. At the time of the deal, the company spoke about the potential for cross-promotion opportunities between the services and…
[ad_1] It’s been a long year for Nintendo fans waiting on Mario Kart Tour to come to mobile and, unfortunately, more patience is required after the game’s launch was moved back to this summer. Nintendo announced plans to bring the much-loved franchise to smartphones one year ago. It was originally slated to launch by the end…
[ad_1] A new mobile banking startup called Step wants to help bring teenagers and other young adults into the cashless era. Today, cash is used less often, as more consumers shop online and send money to one another through payment apps like Venmo. But teenagers in particular are still heavily burdened with cash — even…
[ad_1] We’ve written extensively about LG’s struggling mobile business, which has suffered at the hands of aggressive Chinese Android makers, and now that unit has dragged its parent company into posting its first quarterly loss for two years. The Korean electronics giant is generally in good health — it posted a $2.4 billion profit for…
[ad_1] Samsung Electronics reported its largest quarterly profit decline in two years during its earnings report today. As the Galaxy maker warned in its earnings guidance earlier this month, its results were hurt by slower-than-expected demand for semiconductors, which had bolstered its earnings in previous quarters even when smartphone sales were slow. Samsung’s forecast was…
[ad_1] Facebook managed to beat Wall Street’s estimates in its Q4 earnings amidst a constant beat down in the press. Facebook hit 2.32 billion monthly users, up 2.2 perecent from 2.27 billion last quarter, speeding up its growth rate. Facebook climbed to 1.52 billion daily active users from 1.49 billion last quarter for a 2…
[ad_1] In response to TechCrunch’s investigation of Facebook paying teens and adults to install a VPN that lets it analyze all their phone’s traffic, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) has sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg. It admonishes Facebook for not spelling out exactly what data the Facebook Research app was collecting or giving users adequate…
[ad_1] In the wake of TechCrunch’s investigation yesterday, Apple blocked Facebook’s Research VPN app before the social network could voluntarily shut it down. The Research app asked users for root network access to all data passing through their phone in exchange for $20 per month. Apple tells TechCrunch that yesterday evening it pulled the certificate…
[ad_1] India’s largest bank has secured an unprotected server that allowed anyone to access financial information on millions of its customers, like bank balances and recent transactions. The server, hosted in a regional Mumbai-based datacenter, stored two months of data from SBI Quick, a text message and call-based system used to request basic information about their…
[ad_1] It’s not surprising that Apple has a massive active install base of iPhones across the globe, but we now finally have an exact number to put behind it. During its Q1 earnings call, CFO Luca Maestri shared the install base for the first time. “Our global active install base of iPhone continues to grow…
[ad_1] If you haven’t been paying attention to TikTok, you haven’t been paying attention. The short-form video app hailing from Beijing’s ByteDance just had its biggest month ever with the addition of 75 million new users in December — a 275 percent increase from the 20 million it added in December 2017, according a recent…
[ad_1] Desperate for data on its competitors, Facebook has been secretly paying people to install a “Facebook Research” VPN that lets the company suck in all of a user’s phone and web activity, similar to Facebook’s Onavo Protect app that Apple banned in June and that was removed in August. Facebook sidesteps the App Store…
[ad_1] Apple’s Q1 earnings are in, and things don’t look too rosy the iPhone. Revenue for the handset has declined 15 percent year over year for the quarter. It’s a pretty hefty drop for device that’s been flying high for so long, but you can’t say Apple didn’t warn us. Earlier this month, Tim Cook…
[ad_1] Gmail on mobile will soon get a new look. Google today announced that its mobile email apps for iOS and Android are getting a redesign that is in line with the company’s recent Material Design updates to Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Docs and Site. Indeed, the new UI will look familiar to anybody who…
[ad_1] Update: Apple has disabled the group calling feature. You might want to turn off FaceTime for a few days. A newly discovered bug in iOS allows FaceTime callers to listen in before you accept the call. Word of the bug started spreading this morning after Chicago artist Benji Mobb demonstrated it in a tweet,…
[ad_1] The long-simmering battle between the U.S. government and Huawei heated up last night when the U.S. DOJ announced that it is pursuing criminal charges against the Chinese hardware maker. Huawei has, unsurprisingly, denied all wrongdoing, issuing a statement to the press that wonders aloud why it wasn’t given the opportunity to help clear itself…
[ad_1] Apple is kicking off the Entrepreneur Camp in Cupertino. 11 female-founded app development companies have been invited to Cupertino for multiple workshops and meetings with Apple employees. And Apple used that opportunity to share a new number when it comes to App Store revenue. Since the creation of the App Store, Apple has given…
[ad_1] Apple is sending out a message to app developers: stop tricking users into subscriptions. The company updated its guidelines for mobile developers to more clearly spell out what is and what is not allowed, according to 9to5Mac, which spotted the recent changes. The improved documentation comes at a time when subscriptions are becoming something of…
[ad_1] Apple is slowly building a lineup of content subscriptions. According to a report from Cheddar, Apple may also be working on a gaming subscription. Alex Heath managed to get five people to talk about the rumored service. If Apple goes ahead and launch such a service, users could pay a monthly subscription fee to…
[ad_1] Smartphone numbers are down all over — but things look especially stark in China these days. Tim Cook cited softened demand in the world’s largest smartphone market as a key factor in its lowered guidance, and Apple is far from alone in feeling the pinch. Today, Canalys reported another large drop in the country…
[ad_1] The Galaxy S10 will be revealed at an event in San Francisco on February 20. This much we know for sure. Samsung sent out invites for the event sporting a giant number a few weeks back. It’s clear the company’s looking to get out ahead of what should be a fairly action-packed Mobile World…
[ad_1] You’d be forgiven for being cynical. I’ve been seeing foldable display concepts for as long as I’ve been attending tech trade shows (which, quite frankly, is longer than I care to mention). Big names like Samsung and LG have been pumping countless R&D dollars into the technology in hopes of being first to next…
[ad_1] The North American market can be a tough one to crack for a number of reasons, not the least of which is consumers’ continued reliance on carriers. Without their distribution channels, most handset makers just can’t get a foothold here. In a meeting earlier this week, HMD told me that North America is going…
[ad_1] Mobile cryptocurrency wallet BRD is announcing that it’s raised $15 million in Series B funding. The funding comes from SBI Crypto Investment, a subsidiary of Japanese financial services company SBI Holdings (formerly a subsidiary of SoftBank). BRD said the funding will allow it to grow its product and engineering teams, and to expand in…
[ad_1] French startup Lydia now lets you share your Lydia sub-accounts with other people. The company wants to make it easier to manage money when you’re traveling with friends, sharing an apartment with someone and more. When Lydia introduced its premium offering back in March 2018, the company completely rethought the way Lydia accounts worked.…
[ad_1] As sales stagnate, will foldable phones and 5G be enough to save the day? Brian Heater @bheater / 9 hours Smartphone numbers are down. In 2018, global shipments dropped 3 percent, and while the long-promised arrival of 5G will help numbers get back into the black, IDC predicts that even then growth will be…
[ad_1] What if instead of just accepting Uber rides, gig workers could pick from higher paying skilled tasks around town like stocking shelves, checking inventory, or driving a forklift at a local grocer? When they work quickly and accurately or learn new trades, they get to choose between more complex jobs. That’s the idea that’s…
[ad_1] Last year, Huawei marked a notable bright spot in an otherwise flagging smartphone market. It was a remarkable rise for the handset maker, given the slowing pace of sales in China, not to mention the handset maker’s tenuous relationships with the U.S. and Canadian governments. Reuters notes a 50-percent jump in revenue in 2018,…
[ad_1] Astro, the company behind Luna Display and Astropad, is releasing a major software update that will drastically improve performance. According to the company’s own testing, you should expect as much as a 100 percent performance increase when it comes to latency and refresh rate. Luna Display lets you use your iPad as a second…
[ad_1] In the future everything will be a screen. Glasses, hats, shoes, windows. You’ll turn on the faucet and bath in screens. Sure, most of us have, at best, a love-hate relationship with the things, but we’ll probably never be able to quit them. The Apex 2019 is Chinese smartphone maker Vivo’s latest bid to…
[ad_1] Subscriptions are booming on the app stores, and particularly subscription video apps thanks to the growing number of cord cutters who are choosing to stream their TV shows and movies, instead of paying for cable or satellite. In the U.S., the top 10 subscription video apps by revenue pulled in $1.27 billion in 2018…
[ad_1] The Samsung Galaxy S10 is slowly being revealed through unofficial means. Several leaks have revealed key details and the latest report is the most detailed yet. According to All About Samsung, the upcoming Samsung flagship will have tiny bezels, front-facing cameras that poke through the display, a USB-C port and a headphone jack. This…
[ad_1] When Verizon stealthily launched a new startup called Visible last year, it operated under a bring-your-own-device model — to sign up, you needed to already have an unlocked iPhone, and Visible would send you a new SIM card. Today, however, Visible is announcing that it’s partnering with Affirm and Apple to sell iPhones with…
[ad_1] In 2019, we still don’t really know what to do about fake news. With nothing to disincentivize viral hyperpartisan headlines and other exercises in confirmation bias, online misinformation seems to run as rampant as ever. It’s a tricky problem, particularly because it’s one that requires the readers most drawn to too outrageous to be…
[ad_1] LG has put out a gesture-heavy hint ahead of the annual unveiling of new smartphone hardware at the world’s biggest mobile confab, Mobile World Congress, which kicks off in a month’s time. The brief video teaser for its forthcoming MWC press event in Barcelona, which was shared today via LG’s social media channels, shows…
[ad_1] Some call it madness. Others call it the next logical step in smartphone evolution. Meizu calls it, fitting, the “Zero.” It’s equal parts fascinating and maddening. And while being “totally seamless” with “a truly uninterrupted design” is probably not going to enough in and of itself to get people to purchase the thing, it’s…
[ad_1] I’m not allowed to tell you exactly how Anchorage keeps rich institutions from being robbed of their cryptocurrency, but the off-the-record demo was damn impressive. Judging by the $17 million Series A this security startup raised last year led by Andreessen Horowitz and joined by Khosla Ventures, Max Levchin, Elad Gil, Mark McCombe of Blackrock,…
[ad_1] Did you blow enough money on Uber to get Diamond status? A lot of users are finding out tonight as Uber rolls out its rider loyalty Rewards program to San Francisco and a slew of other cities. The feature calculates how much you’ve spent on Uber and Uber Eats in the last six months…
[ad_1] Honor officially launched the Honor View 20 today in Paris. Honor is Huawei’s sub-brand for mid-range phones. And the View 20 doesn’t look like your average smartphone — the company traded the notch for a hole-punch display. Honor thinks this design isn’t as intrusive as a centered notch. And rumor has it that Samsung…
[ad_1] Adjust, a Berlin-headquartered company focused on mobile ad measurement and fraud prevention, is acquiring bot detection startup Unbotify. Founded in 2012, Adjust has become increasingly focused on ad fraud, and in fact created an industry group called the Coalition Against Ad Fraud a little over a year ago. Co-founder and CTO Paul Müller argued…
[ad_1] A little more retail momentum for Apple Pay: Apple has announced another clutch of U.S. retailers will soon support its eponymous mobile payment tech — most notably discount retailer Target. Apple Pay is rolling out to Target stores now, according to Apple, which says it will be available in all 1,850 of its U.S.…
[ad_1] Most founders don’t walk away from their startup after raising $32 million and reaching 1000 clients. But Roger Dickey’s heart is in consumer tech, and his company Gigster had pivoted to doing outsourced app development for enterprises instead of scrappy entrepreneurs. So today Dickey announced that he’d left his role as Gigster CEO, with…
[ad_1] Google is removing apps from Google Play that request permission to access call logs and SMS text message data but haven’t been manually vetted by Google staff. The search and mobile giant said it is part of a move to cut down on apps that have access to sensitive calling and texting data. Google said…
[ad_1] Netflix thinks “Fortnite” is a bigger threat to its business than HBO. The company in its latest quarterly earnings report released on Thursday said that while its streaming service now accounts for around 10 percent of TV screen time in the U.S., it no longer views its competition only as those services also providing…
[ad_1] Dolby is secretly building a mobile music production app it hopes will seduce SoundCloud rappers and other musicians. Codenamed “234” and formerly tested under the name Dolby Live, the free app measures background noise before you record and then nullifies it. Users can also buy “packs” of audio effects to augment their sounds with EQs…
[ad_1] Spotify is making it easier to use its streaming app in the car, when the phone is connected to the vehicle over Bluetooth. The company today confirmed the launch of a new feature called “Car View,” which is a simplified version of the service’s Now Playing screen that includes larger fonts, bigger buttons, and…
[ad_1] Squad could be the next teen sensation because it makes it easy to do nothing… together. Spending time with friends in the modern age often means just being on your phones next to each other, occasionally showing off something funny you found. Squad lets you do this even while apart, and that way of…
[ad_1] Word about the next member of the Pixel family started leaking out just after Christmas. Now the rumored Pixel 3 Lite is getting some more time to shine, courtesy of a three minute YouTube video that highlights what appears to be a budget addition to Google’s flagship hardware line. Perhaps most interesting here (aside…
[ad_1] According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, U.S. federal prosecutors are preparing a criminal indictment against Huawei for stealing trade secrets. The report, which cites sources with knowledge of the indictment, specifically mentions Huawei’s actions surrounding a T-Mobile smartphone testing tool known as “Tappy.” The report notes that the current investigation is…
[ad_1] Sprint today announced it will support Apple’s Business Chat – the new platform that allows businesses and customers to interact over iMessage. According to the carrier, customers can now message a Sprint customer service agent, get info about plans and other services, as well as look up store information in Maps, Safari and with…
[ad_1] Tinder has already developed a fairly robust chat platform within its dating app, with support for sharing things like Bitmoji and GIFs, and the ability to “like” messages by tapping a heart icon. Now, the company is testing a new integration – sharing music via Spotify. Tinder confirmed with TechCrunch it’s trying out a…
[ad_1] Motorola has revived the Razr name a few times over the years, but the once mighty brand has failed to regain the heights of its early days as an ultra-slim flip phone. But what better time for for the phone maker’s parent Lenovo to bring back the brand in earnest as the mobile world…
[ad_1] Instagram has been earning money from businesses flooding its social network with spam notifications. Instagram hypocritically continues to sell ad space to services that charge clients for fake followers or that automatically follow/unfollow other people to get them to follow the client back. This is despite Instagram reiterating a ban on these businesses in…
[ad_1] The week following CES is probably as good a time as any to launch a Kickstarter campaign for your strange new smartphone. After all, a company like Doogee’s going to have difficulty rising above the din during a CES or MWC, even with an idea as interesting as the rugged, modular S90. The Chinese…
[ad_1] Pandora today announced the launch of its own, in-app voice assistant which you can call up at any time by saying “Hey Pandora,” followed by a request to play the music or podcasts you want to hear. The feature will allow you to not only control music playback with commands to play a specific…
[ad_1] Qualcomm has had a patent lawsuit against Apple dismissed by a court in Mannheim, Germany, as groundless (via Reuters). The chipmaker had argued Intel -powered iPhones infringed a transistor switch patent it holds. But in an initial verbal decision the court disagreed. Qualcomm has said it will appeal. In a statement, Don Rosenberg, Qualcomm’s…
[ad_1] Having established itself as a top streaming service with now over 200 million users, Spotify this year is preparing to focus more of its attention on podcasts. The company plans bring its personalization technology to podcasts in order to make better recommendations, update its app’s interface so people can access podcasts more easily, and…
[ad_1] Californians have a lot to enjoy — great weather, big waves, solid microbreweries, and of course extremely high taxes on prepaid mobile service. But this controversial last feature is being adjusted after a judge found at least part of the state’s Mobile Telephony Surcharge to be unconstitutional. As a result, bills could shrink by…
[ad_1] CES has never been much of a mobile show for Samsung — not with Mobile World Congress a little over a month away. But the company did use its big platform this week to announce the announcement of its next flagship smartphone. Turns out the Samsung’s not unveiling the Galaxy S10 in Barcelona, either.…
[ad_1] The Shield TV, Nvidia’s Android TV streaming box, is still getting regular updates, but the Shield Tablet, which launched in 2014, was last refreshed in 2015 and officially discontinued last year, wasn’t quite the same success. As Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during a small press gathering at CES in Las Vegas today, the…
[ad_1] Instagram is swaying the balance towards simplicity but away from originality. It’s adding the ability to publish feed posts to different accounts you control at the same time by toggling them on within the composer screen. An Instagram spokesperson confirms this option is becoming available to all iOS users, telling TechCrunch “We are rolling…
[ad_1] Square today announced the launch of its in-app payments SDK that allows developers to build Square-powered payments right into their mobile apps. While Square remains best known for its offline payments solutions that grace virtually ever independent coffee shop and quirky corner store, the company has long offered APIs for taking online payments on…
[ad_1] The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here: 1. Facebook is the new crapware Well Facebook, you did it again. Fresh off its latest privacy scandal, the troubled social…
[ad_1] Last year, four of the largest U.S. cell carriers were caught selling and sending real-time location data of their customers to shady companies that sold it on to big spenders, who would use the data to track anyone “within seconds” for whatever reason they wanted. At first, a little-known company LocationSmart was obtaining (and…
[ad_1] AT&T recently started a shady marketing tactic that labeled its 4G network as a 5G network. Now, rivals Verizon and T-Mobile are not having any of it. In an open letter, in which AT&T is not named directly, Verizon says in part “the potential to over-hype and under-deliver on the 5G promise is a…
[ad_1] Last week, in light of Apple’s revised revenue guidance, my TC colleague Ron Miller made a tongue-in-cheek apology for taking so long to upgrade his old iPhone. He wrote that he had finally bitten the bullet and shelled out to upgrade a more than three-years-old (but still working) iPhone 6 for a shiny new iPhone XR…
[ad_1] After a recent update some AT&T phones now have a 5G E icon. This icon replaces the one indicated the phone is running on a 4G network. But here’s the thing: The phone is still on a 4G network. AT&T has played these games before, too. This nonsense is a marketing ploy by AT&T.…
[ad_1] Spotify has begun testing a new type of ad in Discover Weekly, its personalized playlist of music that’s the streaming service’s flagship feature. The company says that, for the first time, it will allow a brand to “sponsor” this playlist as opposed to just running ads. It believes many advertisers will be interested in…
[ad_1] Far from Apple’s troubles in emerging markets and China, the company is attracting the ire of what should really be a core supporter demographic naturally aligned with the pro-privacy stance CEO Tim Cook has made into his public soapbox in recent years — but which is instead crying foul over perceived hypocrisy. The problem for this…
[ad_1] Huawei, currently the world’s second-largest smartphone company by sales, has won over users partly by loading its devices with a ton of new features, from wireless charging to top-class cameras and catchy cosmetic features like the colorful gradients on their shiny backsides. Now, a leaked image of its next flagship Android phone appears to reveal…
[ad_1] In more bad news for Apple, the company’s iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 models are not currently on sale in its own retail stores in Germany. This follows an injunction issued by a Munich court last month related to patent litigation brought by chipmaker Qualcomm that’s being enforced from today. The patent dispute concerns smartphone power…
[ad_1] Well, what have we here? If it isn’t the Samsung Galaxy S10, courtesy of perennial smartphone outer, EVLeaks. This marks one the first good looks we’ve got at the phone, which is likely due out in a couple of months at Mobile World Congress. It’s a pretty rough photo — the icons are all…
[ad_1] The only kids programming language worth using, Scratch, just celebrated the launch of Scratch 3.0, an update that adds some interesting new functionality to the powerful open source tool. Scratch, for those without school aged children, is a block-based programming language that lets you make little games and “cartoons” with sprites and animated figures.…
[ad_1] Apple stock was down over 9 percent overnight and continued the downward trend in trading this morning. In fact, the company’s stock price is down a total of 38 percent since October. This, after the company halted trading yesterday afternoon to provide lower guidance for upcoming earnings. As the iPhone upgrade market softened, it was…
[ad_1] Apple had some bad news tonight. It was so bad in fact that it had to halt trading for a time while posting a grim report that its numbers would be lower than it had forecast at the last quarterly earnings report in November. Apple blamed faltering sales in Asia, particularly in China, for the…
[ad_1] Shine, one of the many apps capitalizing on the growing self-care trend, has now brought its app used by 3 million people to Android devices. Originally launched as a simple messaging bot that doled out life advice and motivation, Shine has grown over the years to become a larger self-help platform aimed largely at…
[ad_1] The Roku Channel – Roku’s home to free, ad-supported content like movies, TV, sports and news – is expanding to include subscriptions. Essentially Roku’s own take on Amazon’s Prime Video Channels, users can now opt to add on some 25 premium video subscriptions within the Roku Channel, centralizing their access to streaming services in…
[ad_1] Citi Research has joined a growing list of analysts to lower first-quarter production estimates for Apple’s iPhones amid weakening demand for the smartphones. Citi Research analyst William Yang cut the overall iPhone shipment forecast by 5 million, to 45 million for the quarter, reported Reuters. That’s a sting that falls in line with others…
[ad_1] 911 emergency services in several states across the U.S. remain down after a massive outage at a CenturyLink data center. The outage began after 12pm ET on Thursday, according to CenturyLink’s status page, and continues to cause disruption across 911 call centers. Some states have seen their services restored. CenturyLink has not said what caused…
[ad_1] Instagram confirms that a bug this morning mistakenly rolled out a massive change to its feed that replaced the traditional scrolling with horizontal tap-to-advance like with Stories. In October, TechCrunch reported Instagram was testing tap-to-advance for browsing through Explore posts. But many users woke up to a shock this morning when their familiar vertical…
[ad_1] Google has scrambled to remove third-party apps that led users to child porn sharing groups on WhatsApp in the wake of TechCrunch’s report about the problem last week. We contacted Google with the name of one these apps and evidence that it and others offered links to WhatsApp groups for sharing child exploitation imagery.…
[ad_1] Two years ago, Apple killed the headphone port. I still haven’t forgiven them for it. When Apple announced that the iPhone 7 would have no headphone port, I was pretty immediately annoyed. I figured maybe I’d get over it in a few months. I didn’t. I figured if worse came to worse, I’d switch…
[ad_1] At the beginning of this year, I was using my iPhone to browse new titles on Amazon when I saw the cover of “How to Break Up With Your Phone” by Catherine Price. I downloaded it on Kindle because I genuinely wanted to reduce my smartphone use, but also because I thought it would…
[ad_1] ‘Twas the night before Xmas, and all through the house, not a feature was stirring from the designer’s mouse . . . Not Twitter! Not Uber, Not Apple or Pinterest! On Facebook! On Snapchat! On Lyft or on Insta! . . . From the sidelines I ask you to flex your code’s might. Happy…
[ad_1] The term “social network” has become a meaningless association of words. Pair those two words and it becomes a tech category, the equivalent of a single term to define a group of products. But are social networks even social anymore? If you have a feeling of tech fatigue when you open the Facebook app,…
[ad_1] HQ’s expansion beyond trivia emerges from beta tonight, but the question is whether it’s different and accessible enough to revive the startup’s growth. HQ Words opens to everyone with today’s 6:30pm pacific broadcast within the HQ Trivia app after several weeks of closed beta testing of the Wheel Of Fortune-style game. The launch will…
[ad_1] This was a bad year for the smartphone. For the first time, its seemingly unstoppable growth began to slow. Things started off on a bad note in February, when Gartner recorded its first year-over-year decline since it began tracking the category. Not even the mighty Apple was immune from the trend. Last week, stocks…
[ad_1] Meet Spot, a beautifully-designed mobile app to control your cryptocurrencies. Spot looks like a portfolio tracking app. But the company has built a strong foundation to add more features in the coming months. Spot wants to be your unique gateway to the world of cryptocurrencies. “Spot’s vision isn’t to build a portfolio tracker —…
[ad_1] WhatsApp chat groups are being used to spread illegal child pornography, cloaked by the app’s end-to-end encryption. Without the necessary number of human moderators, the disturbing content is slipping by WhatsApp’s automated systems. A report reviewed by TechCrunch from two Israeli NGOs details how third-party apps for discovering WhatsApp groups include “Adult” sections that…
[ad_1] Apple will allow iOS users to gift in-app purchases, not just paid apps, according to a change to the company’s App Store Review Guidelines spotted this week. This means developers may soon have the tools to allow users to purchase virtual goods or even subscriptions through their app, which can then be gifted to…
[ad_1] WhatsApp is making group calls easier with a change to the way its mobile app works. Before, users would have to start a 1:1 video call, then add participants – there wasn’t an option to begin a group call at once, the company says. Now, the design has been updated so you can start…
[ad_1] A coalition of twenty-two consumer and public health advocacy groups, led by Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) and Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), have today filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission asking them to investigate and sanction Google for how its Google Play Store markets apps to children. The complaint states…
[ad_1] Google announced today it’s now using mobile-first indexing for over half the web pages shown in its search results globally – a significant milestone in Google’s move to favor mobile sites over desktop sites in its search results. The plans for the project have been in the works for years. The company had first…
[ad_1] As Facebook colonized the rest of the web with its functionality in hopes of fueling user growth, it built aggressive integrations with partners that are coming under newfound scrutiny through a deeply reported New York Times investigation. Some of what Facebook did was sloppy or unsettling, including forgetting to shut down APIs when it cancelled…
[ad_1] If you’re reading this the year it was written, you’re almost certainly not getting it over 5G. If you’re reading this in the future, congrats, you made it. And hey, remember polar bears? 5G is the latest buzzword to send the mobile industry into a tizzy. This one’s got a particular weight to it,…
[ad_1] If you’re reading this the year it was written, you’re almost certainly not getting it over 5G. If you’re reading this in the future, congrats, you made it. And hey, remember polar bears? 5G is the latest buzzword to send the mobile industry into a tizzy. This one’s got a particular weight to it,…
[ad_1] Mobile licensing changes made by Google this fall, when it tweaked terms for OEMs wanting to license its Android smartphone platform on devices destined for the European market, don’t appear to be offering succour to search rivals — despite being triggered by an antitrust ruling intended to reset the competitive playing field. The European…
[ad_1] Bumble has come up with a new way for its dating app and related businesses to generate revenue. The company this week launched filters – a way to sift through potential matches by a set of specific criteria. For example, Bumble Date users can now filter matches by astrological sign or relationship type, among…
[ad_1] A little taste of 5G is coming early, courtesy of AT&T’s new mobile hotspot. The carrier announced this morning that it will be firing up limited 5G service in a dozen cities across the U.S. this Friday, currently only accessible via the Netgear Nighthawk 5G Mobile Hotspot. Those who pick the router up will…
[ad_1] Twitter accidentally exposed the ability to pull an account’s phone number country code and whether the accounts had been locked by Twitter. The concern here is that malicious actors could have used the security flaw to figure out which countries accounts were based in, which could have ramifications for whistleblowers or political dissidents. The…
[ad_1] K Health, the startup providing consumers with an AI-powered primary care platform, has raised $25 million in series B funding. The round was led by 14W, Comcast Ventures and Mangrove Capital Partners, with participation from Lerer Hippeau, BoxGroup and Max Ventures – all previous investors from the company’s seed or Series A rounds. Other previous investors include Primary…
[ad_1] The ride-hailing giant Careem is now in the delivery business as the company seeks new verticals in its ever-increasing fight against other services in the Middle East including Uber. Starting with food delivery in Dhabi and Jeddah, the company sees the delivery service expanding to pharmaceuticals according to a report by Reuters. Careem is…
[ad_1] There’s a lot you can make with a 3D printer: from prosthetics, corneas, and firearms — even an Olympic-standard luge. You can even 3D print a life-size replica of a human head — and not just for Hollywood. Forbes reporter Thomas Brewster commissioned a 3D printed model of his own head to test the…
[ad_1] Propel, maker of the Fresh EBT app for managing food stamps and other benefits, announced today that it has raised $12.8 million in Series A funding. Fresh EBT (the EBT stands for the Electronics Transfer Benefit card, which is how food stamp participants receive their benefits) allows users to check their food stamp/SNAP balance…
[ad_1] Earlier this year, Apple Music launched some of its top charts as playlist series. Today, YouTube is doing something similar. The company announced it’s making its YouTube Charts available as playlists in YouTube Music to users across the 29 markets where the music service is live. Each market will receive five of these “charts playlists”…
[ad_1] Since its public debut in fall 2017, Google’s parental control software dubbed Family Link, has been steadily expanding, both in terms of its capabilities and its reach. Today, it’s making the jump beyond smartphones for the first time, with newly added support for Chromebook computers. As on Android devices, parents will now be able…
[ad_1] Both Facebook Watch and Instagram’s IGTV have yet to become superstar video platforms, leaving Facebook at risk as more people seek streaming entertainment instead of status updates. So today Facebook is trying to build some buzz for Watch with new stats and rollouts. The free video hub that combines original content, sports, and cult…
[ad_1] Robinhood is undercutting the big banks by forgoing brick-and-mortar branches with its new zero-fee checking and savings account features. With no overdraft or monthly fees, a juicy 3 percent interest rate, and a claim of more US ATMs than the five biggest banks combined, Robinhood is using the scalability of software to pass impressive…
[ad_1] Ever wonder how much of your personal information is accessible to marketers? Well, there’s a new service called My Number Lookup that makes it easy (and free) for you to check the data that’s publicly available and tied to your mobile phone number. The service was created by Keepsafe, maker of privacy-centric products. While…
[ad_1] French startup Glose just raised a $3.4 million funding round (€3 million) for its reading app on iPhone, iPad and Android. The company wants to make reading books more social. If you’re an avid book reader, chances are you always carry a pencil with you to write some notes in the margins. Or maybe…
[ad_1] The Google Play Store is receiving an update today that will allow customers to make charitable donations to nonprofits from their Android device. While it may seem odd to to be rallying for support for charities within the same marketplace where users download apps and games, it’s not uncommon. Apple for years has collected…
[ad_1] Bloomberg today updated its earlier reporting on Apple’s plans for a news and magazine subscription service. Earlier this year, the outlet had said Apple would relaunch the digital newsstand business Texture, which it acquired this spring, as part of the Apple News app. Now, Bloomberg confirms the launch time frame could be “as soon…
[ad_1] If you’ve been browsing the App Store for long enough, chances are you’ve seen djay at some point. Algoriddim, the company behind djay, currently has eight different apps in the App Store. Today, the company is releasing a brand new version that is going to replace all previous apps at once. The reason why…
[ad_1] Americans are regularly checking a second screen while watching TV, according to a new report from Nielsen which examined the media consumption habits of U.S. adults in the second quarter of 2018. Today, 28 percent of adults say they “sometimes” use a digital device, like a phone or tablet, when watching TV. A much…
[ad_1] Internet users are already being tracked to death, with ads that follow us around, search histories that are collected and stored, emails that report back to senders when they’ve been read, websites that know where you scrolled and what you clicked, and much more. So naturally, the growing podcast industry wanted to find a…
[ad_1] It’s an ad duoply battle. Facebook is starting to test search ads in its search results and Marketplace, directly competing with Google’s AdWords. Facebook first tried Sponsored Results back in 2012 but eventually shut down the product in 2013. Now it’s going to let a small set of automotive, retail, and ecommerce industry advertisers…
[ad_1] French startup Lydia announced a partnership with Banque Casino today for small credit lines. Starting tomorrow, Lydia users in France will be able to borrow as much as €1,000 in just a few seconds. While Lydia started as a peer-to-peer money transferring app, fintech startups always end up offering credit at some point. It’s…
[ad_1] How do other dating apps compete with Tinder? By further distancing themselves from Tinder’s “hot-or-not” user interface design to focus on differentiating features — like conversation starters, commenting and richer profiles. Today, another anti-Tinder app is doing the same. On the heels of its $12 million Series B announced earlier this year, the oddly…
[ad_1] Apple’s mobile payment technology has finally launched in Germany, some four years after it debuted in the U.S. On its newly launched Apple Pay website for Germany, Apple lists partner banks and credit card companies at launch, with customers from the likes of Deutsche Bank, O2 Banking, N26, Comdirect, HypoVerensbank, Bunq and Boon able to…
[ad_1] First it was the notch, now the hole-punch has emerged as the latest tech for concealing selfie cameras whilst keeping our smartphones as free of bezel as possible to maximize the screen space. This week, Samsung and Huawei both unveiled new phones that dispense with the iconic ‘notch’ — pioneered by Apple but popularized by everyone…
[ad_1] Apple has filed an appeal to overturn a court decision that could ban iPhone sales in China, the company said on Monday, adding that all of its models remain available in its third-largest market. The American giant is locked in a legal battle in the world’s biggest smartphone market. On Monday, Qualcomm announced that…
[ad_1] Google Fit, Google’ s activity-tracking app for Android, is getting a small but meaningful update today that adds a few new features that’ll likely make its regular users quite happy. Some are pretty basic, like the launch of a Fit widget for your Android home screen, while others introduce new features like a breathing…
[ad_1] You’d think Facebook would be faster at copying itself. Five years after Facebook Messenger took a cue from WhatsApp and Voxer to launch voice messaging, and four months after TechCrunch reported Instagram was testing its own walkie talkie feature, voice messaging is rolling out globally on Instagram Direct today. Users can hold down the…
[ad_1] Where there is discovery in an app, there is paid discovery. Google helped you choose between links, then sold ads that promote a few. Facebook helped you choose between pieces of content, then sold ads that promote a few. And eventually, as Uber helps you choose between restaurants, it will sell ads that promote…
[ad_1] A more personalized version of Google Maps is now arriving on iOS. At Google’s I/O developer conference earlier this year, the company introduced a series of new features designed to help Google Maps users learn what’s happening around them, track area businesses to receive updates about their events and promotions, and receive personalized suggestions…
[ad_1] It appears that most mobile carriers, including O2 and SoftBank, have recovered from yesterday’s cell phone network outage that was triggered by a shutdown of Ericsson equipment running on their networks. That shut down appears to have been triggered by expired software certificates on the equipment itself. While Ericsson acknowledged in their press release yesterday…
[ad_1] Netflix just broke new records on consumer spending in its mobile apps, according to new data app intelligence firm Sensor Tower has shared with TechCrunch. In November, Netflix pulled in an estimated $86.6 million in worldwide consumer spending across its iOS and Android apps combined — a figure that’s 77 percent higher than the…
[ad_1] It’s been a rocky year for MoviePass, something that CEO Mitch Lowe acknowledged in an interview this week with Variety. “We have a lot to prove to all our constituents,” Lowe said. “We don’t just have to prove ourselves to our members, we also have to prove ourselves to the investment community, our employees,…
[ad_1] Want to run your own home shopping network? Facebook is now testing a Live video feature for merchants that lets them demo and describe their items for viewers. Customers can screenshot something they want to buy and use Messenger to send it to the seller, who can then request payment right through the chat…
[ad_1] A problem with the software in Ericsson equipment is causing outages across the world, including O2 users in Great Britain and SoftBank users in Japan, according to a report in the Financial Times earlier today. Ericsson took blame for the outage in a press release. It apparently involves faulty software on certain Ericsson equipment…
[ad_1] Last month, Pandora announced it would soon be bringing its “Genome” technology to a new space outside of music: it would leverage a similar classification system to make podcast recommendations, too. Initially, the feature was only available to select users on mobile devices, ahead of a broader public launch. Today, Pandora says its Podcast…
[ad_1] After going public in the U.K. last year, Boku has made an acquisition to expand its carrier billing services, which let users bill to their mobile bills mobile content purchases from companies like Apple, Microsoft, Spotify and 152 other app and other content purveyors. Today, Boku announced the acquisition of Danal, Inc., a specialist in mobile identity and…
[ad_1] A string of Chinese stocks fell hard on Thursday after the arrest of Huawei’s chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver deepened concerns over US-China trade tensions. The Hang Seng China Enterprises Index of Chinese companies listed in Hong Kong was off 2.76 percent as of 12:40 p.m. On the Mainland side, the CSI…
[ad_1] Duet Display is an app that lets you turn your iPad into a second Mac monitor. And the team behind it just released a major update that makes it much more efficient — it consumes less CPU resources and is now recognized as a true external display. If you’ve used Duet Display over the…
[ad_1] Apple’s new iPhone XR comes in a half dozen colors, including blue, yellow, red and coral. In fact, the colors are sufficiently fresh that it’d be kind of silly to buy a traditional phone case that would protect it but also hide if from plain view. It’s for this reason that Apple just began…
[ad_1] With the release of iOS 12, Apple hid the button that lets you jump from front camera to rear camera (or vice versa) during a FaceTime call. Previously a one-click thing, it was suddenly shoved away into a menu as if it wasn’t something you might use a half dozen times per call. Don’t…
[ad_1] “The Google of Russia” is a fairly apt description, as far as those things go. Yandex has its hand in just about everything internet in its native Russia. Recently additions include a Prime-style service, a smart speaker and, yes, self-driving cars. So it was really only a matter of time before the company unleashed…
[ad_1] Mobile intelligence and data firm App Annie is today releasing its 2019 predictions for the worldwide app economy, including its forecast around consumer spending, gaming, the subscription market, and other highlights. Most notably, it expects the worldwide gross consumer spend in apps – meaning before the app stores take their own cut – to…
[ad_1] Leave it to Samsung to talk up its second 5G smartphone before most companies have tipped their first. A few days after announcing its first 5G handset via Verizon, the company is already onto number two. This one comes via an AT&T press release with that qualifies the handset a bit more, calling it…
[ad_1] Facebook will now freely allow developers to build competitors to its features upon its own platform. Today Facebook announced it will drop Platform Policy section 4.1 which stipulates “Add something unique to the community. Don’t replicate core functionality that Facebook already provides.” Facebook had previously enforced that policy selectively to hurt competitors that had used…
[ad_1] Facebook will now freely allow developers to build competitors to its features upon its own platform. Today Facebook announced it will drop Platform Policy section 4.1 which stipulates “Add something unique to the community. Don’t replicate core functionality that Facebook already provides.” Facebook had previously enforced that policy selectively to hurt competitors that had used…
[ad_1] This week, Qualcomm is hosting press and analysts on Maui for its annual Snapdragon Summit. Sadly, we’re not there, but a couple of weeks ago, Qualcomm gave us a preview of the news. There’ll be three days of news and the company decided to start with a focus on 5G, as well as a…
[ad_1] The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission has approved new rules that set a minimum hourly wage of $17.22 (after expenses) for drivers who work with app-based services like Uber, Lyft, Via and Juno. Fast Company reports that the rules try to deliver that minimum wage by requiring drivers be paid according to…
[ad_1] Uber Eats has effectively invented its own native ad unit. Uber confirmed to TechCrunch that a test quietly running in markets around India allows restaurants to bundle several food items together and sell them at a discounted price in exchange for promoted placement by Uber Eats in a featured section of local “Specials”. In…
[ad_1] Samsung announced yesterday that it’s set to bring a 5G phone to market in the first half of next year, name-checking Verizon in the promise. This morning, however, AT&T was quick to note that it will also be getting its hand on the still-unnamed handset in the first half of 2019. The carrier issued…
[ad_1] YouTube on Monday announced a significant change to its mobile app – it will now autoplay videos by default when users are browsing the app’s home page, aka the “Home” tab. Fortunately, the videos will not autoplay with the sound enabled, the company says. Instead, the feature is meant to give users a preview…
[ad_1] Facebook hasn’t had a hit show yet for its long-form video hub Watch, so it’s got a new plan: digging up some deceased cult favorites from television. First up, Facebook is making all episodes of Joss Whedon’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly free on Facebook Watch. There’ll be simultaneous viewing Watch Parties…
[ad_1] Black Friday wasn’t just a boon for e-commerce retailers, it helped the mobile app stores break new records, too. According to a new report from Sensor Tower, the combined consumer spending across the U.S. Apple App Store and Google Play on Black Friday 2018 reached $75.9 million – a record for the most ever spent…
[ad_1] No one wants to post silly, racy, or vulnerable Stories if they’re worried their boss, parents, and distant acquaintances are watching. So to get people sharing more, and more authentically, Instagram will let you share to fewer people. Today after 17 months of testing, Instagram is globally launching Close Friends on iOS and Android…
[ad_1] A year ago, YouTube launched its own take on Stories, with the addition of a new short-form video format called Reels. The feature, which was rebranded as “YouTube Stories” at last year’s VidCon, was initially available only to select YouTube creators. But in June, YouTube said it would expand Stories to all creators with…
[ad_1] Media center app Plex today announced a partnership with streaming music service TIDAL, offering discounted access to TIDAL’s 60 million tracks and 244,000+ music videos for Plex Pass subscribers. The Plex Pass is the media center app’s own subscription program, which adds support for watching and recording from live TV as well as other…
[ad_1] Facebook pissed off journalists earlier this year when it announced that ads run by news publishers to promote their articles involving elected officials, candidates, and national issues would have to sport “paid for by…” labels and be included alongside political campaign ads in its ads transparency archive that launched in June, albeit in a separate…
[ad_1] Fintech startup Revolut has been teasing Asian market expansions for more than a year, but it sounds like it might finally happen. The company has secured licenses to operate in Singapore and Japan. It now expects to launch its service in Q1 2019. In Singapore, the company was granted a Remittance License by the…
[ad_1] Following a flopped IPO in 2012, Facebook desperately brainstormed new ways to earn money. An employee of unknown rank sent an internal email suggesting Facebook charge developers $250,000 per year for access to its platform APIs for making apps that can ask users for access to their data. Employees also discussed offering Tinder extended…
[ad_1] Google is making a major move to expand the availability of its Fi wireless service. It’s been a few years since Google launched Project Fi with the promise of doing things a bit differently than the large carriers. Because it could switch between the cell networks of multiple providers to give you the best…
[ad_1] Facebook has a new area of its app it will have to police for fake news and biased sensationalism. Facebook is launching “Today In”, its local news aggregator it began testing in January, in 400 small to medium-sized US cities. It’s also now testing it in its first overseas spot in Australia. iOS and…
[ad_1] Mission impossible: a new executive at LG is charged with fixing the company’s long-time loss-making smartphone division following a leadership change. Hwang Jeong-hwan took the job as president of LG Mobile Communications last October, and this week he LG announced that he will be replaced by Brian Kwon, who is head of LG’s hugely profitable…
[ad_1] A new app called Playlist aims to make music a more social experience than what’s offered today by the major music platforms like Apple Music, Pandora or Spotify, for example. In Playlist, you can find others who share your musical tastes and join group chats where you listen to playlists together in real time.…
[ad_1] The mainstream will never adopt blockchain-powered decentralized apps (dApps) if it’s a struggle to log in. They’re either forced to manage complex security keys themselves, or rely on a clunky wallet-equipped browser like MetaMask. What users need is for signing in to blockchain apps to be as easy as Login With Facebook. So that’s…
[ad_1] A group of European consumer watchdogs has filed a privacy complaint against Google — arguing the company uses manipulative tactics in order to keep tracking web users’ location, for ad-targeting purposes. The consumer organizations are making the complaint under the EU’s new data protection framework, GDPR, which regulators can use to levy major fines…
[ad_1] Facebook Watch has failed to capture viewers with its content, so it’s hoping to differentiate through the company’s core strength: social. Today Facebook fully launches Watch Party, its co-viewing feature where users can see and comment on the same video at the same time, to all profiles and Pages around the world. Watch Party…
[ad_1] Walking into the office of Viktor Prokopenya – which overlooks a central London park – you would perhaps be forgiven for missing the significance of this unassuming location, just south of Victoria Station in London. While giant firms battle globally to make Augmented Reality a ‘real industry’, this jovial businessman form Belrarus is poised…
[ad_1] More U.S. consumers were shopping on mobile devices on Black Friday this year, with $2.1 billion in sales coming from smartphones. This trend was also reflected across the U.S. App Store. According to new data from Sensor Tower out this morning, the top 10 shopping apps on the App Store added half a million…
[ad_1] A true apology consists of a sincere acknowledgement of wrong-doing, a show of empathic remorse for why you wronged and the harm it caused, and a promise of restitution by improving ones actions to make things right. Without the follow-through, saying sorry isn’t an apology, it’s a hollow ploy for forgiveness. That’s the kind…
[ad_1] Apple probably didn’t intend to let competitors take advantage of Siri Shortcuts this way, but you can now launch Google Assistant on your iPhone by saying “Hey Siri, OK Google” . But don’t expect a flawless experience — it takes multiple steps. After updating the Google Assistant app on iOS, you need to open…
[ad_1] The social media singularity continues with the arrival of Snapchat Stories-style slideshows on LinkedIn as the app grasps for relevance with a younger audience. LinkedIn confirms to TechCrunch that it plans to build Stories for more sets of users, but first it’s launching “Student Voices” just for university students in the US. The feature…
[ad_1] 15 weeks after Facebook announced its “Your Time On Facebook” tool that counts how many minutes you spend on the app, the feature is finally rolling out around the world. Designed to help you manage your social networking, the dashboard reveals how many minutes you’ve spent on Facebook’s app on that device each day…
[ad_1] Xiaomi is diversifying into a new range of phones as the Chinese smartphone maker announced impressive growth with its latest financials. The company announced it will take over selfie app maker Meitu’s smartphone business to go after new demographics, particularly women, while it lodged impressive 49 percent revenue growth in Q3. Xiaomi posted a net profit…
[ad_1] Instagram is fighting back against automated apps people use to leave spammy comments or follow then unfollow others in hopes of growing their audience. Today Instagram is removing inauthentic follows, Likes, and comments that violate its policies from people’s accounts who use these apps; sending them a warning to change their password to cut…
[ad_1] Genies is emerging as the top competitor to Snapchat’s wildly popular Bitmoji as Facebook, Apple, and Google have been slow to get serious about personalized avatars. Over one million people have customized dozens of traits to build a realistic digital lookalike of themselves from over a million possible permutations. When Genies launched a year…
[ad_1] “I wasn’t asking to pay in Bitcoin!” Plastiq CEO and co-founder Eliot Buchanan recalls with a laugh. “I went to pay part of my tuition at Harvard and I was told that they didn’t (and never would) accept credit card. It was inconvenient and seemed odd. Credit cards had been around for 50 years.”…
[ad_1] WhatsApp already ruined Snapchat’s growth once. WhatsApp Status, its clone of Snapchat Stories, now has 450 million daily active users compared to Snapchat’s 188 million. That’s despite its 24-hour disappearing slideshows missing tons of features including augmented reality selfie masks, animated GIFs, or personalized avatars like Bitmoji. A good enough version of Stories conveniently…
[ad_1] Stoop is looking to provide readers with what CEO Tim Raybould described as “a healthier information diet.” To do that, it’s launched an iOS and Android app where you can browse through different newsletters based on category, and when you find one you like, it will direct you to the standard subscription page. If…
[ad_1] Netflix and chill from afar? Facebook Messenger is now internally testing simultaneous co-viewing of videos. That means you and your favorite people could watch a synchronized video over group chat on your respective devices while discussing or joking about it. This “Watch Videos Together” feature could make you spend more time on Facebook Messenger…
[ad_1] The FCC’s space-focused meeting today had actions taken on SpaceX satellites and orbital debris reduction, but the decision most likely to affect users has to do with Galileo . No, not the astronomer — the global positioning satellite constellation put in place by the E.U. over the last few years. It’s now legal for…
[ad_1] Facebook secretly retracted messages sent by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, TechCrunch reported seven months ago. Now for the first time, Facebook Messenger users will get the power to unsend too so they can remove their sent messages from the recipient’s inbox. Messages can only be unsent for the first ten minutes after they’re delivered so that…
[ad_1] Uber’s new loyalty program incentivizes you not to check Lyft or the local competitor. Riders earn points for all the money they spend on Uber and Uber Eats that score them $5 credits, upgrades to nicer cars, access to premium support, and even flexible cancellations that waive the fee if they rebook within 15…
[ad_1] Mobile gaming company Jam City is announcing a multi-year deal to create mobile games based on Pixar and Walt Disney Animation characters and films. As part of the agreement, Jam City is taking over development of the match-three puzzle game Disney Emoji Blitz, which launched in 2016. Jam City says that everyone at Disney’s Glendale…
[ad_1] Truecaller may already be a familiar name, but many of you probably don’t know that it’s slowly becoming a significant messaging app. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Truecaller co-founder and CEO Alan Mamedi will join us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin. Truecaller first started as a call screening app. Some countries are more…
[ad_1] Facebook Lasso has a steep uphill climb ahead as it hopes to chase the musical video app it cloned, China’s TikTok (which merged with Musically). Lasso lets you overlay popular songs on 15-second clips of you lip syncing, dancing, or just being silly — kind of like Vine with a soundtrack. It’s off to…
[ad_1] Google’s Project Fi wireless service is getting a major update today that introduces an optional always-on VPN service and a smarter way to switch between Wi-Fi and cellular connections. By default, Fi already uses a VPN service to protect users when they connect to the roughly two million supported Wi-Fi hotspots. Now, Google is…
[ad_1] The big news today is that — finally — we have Amazon’s selection of cities for its dual second headquarters (Northern Virginia and NYC). Then some notes on China. But first, semiconductors and open sourcing analysis. We are experimenting with new content forms at TechCrunch. This is a rough draft of something new –…
[ad_1] Snapchat is doubling down on its biggest differentiator by turning its personalized avatar Bitmoji into a revenue stream and a new source of content. Snapchat is launching a Bitmoji merchandise store you can customize with you and your friends’ cartoonified faces, Bitmoji Stories comic strips featuring you and friends’ avatars in fun scenes, and…
[ad_1] The idea that social media can be harmful to our mental and emotional well-being is not a new one, but little has been done by researchers to directly measure the effect; surveys and correlative studies are at best suggestive. A new experimental study out of Penn State, however, directly links more social media use…
[ad_1] This week, I’ve tried to do something new at TechCrunch with this experimental column — getting obsessed about a topic broadly in tech and writing a continuous stream of thoughts and analysis about it. With my research consultant and contributor Arman Tabatabai, we’ve covered two topics: Form Ds, the filing that startups usually submit…
[ad_1] Black Friday giveaways have become a tradition for online sneaker marketplace GOAT. Today it’s announcing the details of this year’s campaign, which will be its first to incorporate augmented reality. Director of Communications Liz Goodno described this as “the largest digital sneaker event of the year.” The company says it will be offering more…
[ad_1] Google today announced that Chrome will soon get a new feature that aims to stop mobile subscription scams. Those are the kind of sites that ask you for your phone number and that then, unbeknownst to you, sign you up for a mobile subscription that’s billed through your carrier. Starting with the launch of…
[ad_1] Netflix’s internal hackathons have consistently produced fun and often silly hacks, from that “Netflixtendo” hack a few years ago that let you run Netflix on the original NES to the more recent “audiobook mode” that turned Netflix series into old school radio shows by way of Audio Descriptions. This year’s hackathon doesn’t disappoint either,…
[ad_1] Tinder has never really shaken its reputation among consumers as a “hook up” app, instead of one designed for more serious dating. Now, it seems Tinder is planning to embrace its status as the default app for younger users who aren’t ready to settle down. According to Match Group CEO Mandy Ginsberg, speaking to investors…
[ad_1] Photomath just raised a $6 million funding round from Goodwater Capital with Learn Capital also participating. Photomath has created a hugely successful mobile app for iOS and Android with 100 million downloads so far. Photomath first launched at TechCrunch Disrupt London back in 2014. The company was working on text recognition technology. Photomath was…
[ad_1] French startup Lydia is launching an insurance product for your mobile phone. For €4.29 per month ($4.89), you can insure your phone from the Lydia app. Lydia is one of the most popular peer-to-peer payment apps in Europe with 1.5 million users. Think about it as a sort of Venmo or Square Cash for…
[ad_1] Instagram is considering offering collaborative School Stories that only a certain school’s students can see or contribute to. And to make sure these Stories wouldn’t become bullying cesspools, Instagram’s code shows a warning that “School stories are manually reviewed to make sure the community is safe.” School Stories could create a fun space for…
[ad_1] Facebook is again looking to whip Oculus into shape for its 10-year journey towards making virtual reality mainstream. According to two sources, Facebook reorganized its AR and VR team this week from a divisional structure focused around products to a functional structure focused around technology areas of expertise. While no one was laid off,…
[ad_1] The first 5G phones are set to start arriving next year. Motorola plans to bring next-gen connectivity via a Mod for the Z3, and companies like LG and OnePlus have promised to deliver the tech baked into handsets at some point in 2019. iPhone users, on the other hand, may have to wait a…
[ad_1] You probably don’t know how much it should cost to get your home’s windows washed, yard landscaped, or countertops replaced. But Setter does. The startup pairs you with a home improvement concierge familiar with all the vendors, prices, and common screwups that plague these jobs. Setter finds the best contractors across handiwork, plumbing, electrical,…
[ad_1] Bumble and Match’s ongoing legal battles are continuing today. According to a statement released by Match Group this morning, Bumble is dropping its $400 million lawsuit against Match, which had claimed Match fraudulently obtained trade secrets during acquisition talks. However, Bumble is preparing to refile its suit at the state level, we’re hearing. If…
[ad_1] Apple is preparing to launch a new way for its customers to track election results. The company, on 8 PM ET on November 6, will swap out the existing Midterm Elections section in the Apple News app, and replace it with a new Election Night section instead. This section will also replace Apple News’…
[ad_1] Instagram hopes dollars from long-tail of small businesses and social media stars can help it pull its weight in the Facebook family. A new ad type called “Promote” for Stories allows Instagram business pages to show their ephemeral slideshows to more users without doing much work. Admins can choose to auto-target users similar to…
[ad_1] Walmart is giving augmented reality a shot. The retailer today announced the launch of a new AR scanning tool in its iPhone application which will help customers with product comparisons. However, unlike a typical barcode scanner meant only to compare prices on one item at a time, Walmart’s AR scanner can be panned about…
[ad_1] Twitter is digging one of its most important new features out of its settings and putting it within easy reach. Twitter is now testing with a small number of iOS users a homescreen button that lets you instantly switch from its algorithmic timeline that shows the best tweets first but out of order to…
[ad_1] Titan could put an end to stock market FOMO. The app chooses the best 20 stocks by scraping top hedge fund data, adds some shorts based on your personal risk profile and puts your money to work. No worrying about market fluctuations or constantly rebalancing your portfolio. You don’t have do anything, but can…
[ad_1] Last year, the top subscription video apps like Netflix and Hulu raked in a combined $781 million, and that trend is showing no sign of slowing down in 2018. In the third quarter of 2018, U.S. consumers spent an estimated $329 million in the top 10 subscription video-on-demand apps across the App Store and…
[ad_1] The News Feed won’t sustain Facebook forever, and that’s scaring investors. Today on Facebook’s earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg stressed that sharing is shifting to private chat, where people send 100 billion messages per day on Facebook’s family of apps, and Stories, where he says people share 1 billion of these slideshows per day (though…
[ad_1] Last summer, Google introduced its own take on Bitmoji with the launch of “Mini” stickers in its keyboard app, Gboard, which leverage machine learning to create illustrated stickers based on your selfie. Today, Google is expanding the Mini Stickers with the launch of what it calls “Emoji Minis” – meaning, emoji-sized stickers that look…
[ad_1] Over the past two years, the notch move from anomaly to fact of life, and no company has proven itself more pro-notch than Google. From its embrace of #notchlife in Android Pie to the downright gigantic one found up top on the Pixel 3 XL, Google’s really notchin’ it up. In fact, as noted…
[ad_1] iHeartMedia announced today that its streaming radio app iHeartRadio is coming to Mexico. In fact, a beta version of the app is already live, with plans for an official launch on November 3. As part of this launch, the company is partnering with Mexican broadcaster Grupo ACIR, which owns the Amor, Mix and La…
[ad_1] Observant has found a new way to use the fancy infrared depth sensors included on the iPhone X, XS and XR: analyzing people’s facial expression in order to understand how they’re responding to a product or a piece of content. Observant was part of the winter batch of startups at accelerator Y Combinator, but…
[ad_1] The new iPhones have some great new photography features, but the XR lacks a couple, for instance portrait mode for non-people subjects, owing to its sadly having only the one camera. So last year! Fortunately third party camera app Halide is here to help you get that professional-looking bokeh in your doggo shots. There’s…
[ad_1] This year marks an interesting turning point for OnePlus. In December, it will hit the five year mark. The Oppo-backed company has managed to grow significantly in that relatively short window. Back in June, it noted that it had sold one million units of its latest smartphone in the first 22 days. Continued growth…
[ad_1] Last month, Instagram co-founders CEO Kevin Systrom and CTO Mike Krieger announced that they would be leaving Instagram and Facebook. All eyes are now on Instagram to figure out what’s going to happen to the photo and video app. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Instagram Product Director Robby Stein is joining us…
[ad_1] Snapchat continued to shrink in Q3 2018 but its business is steadily improving. Snapchat’s daily active user count dropped again, this time by 1 percent to 186 million, down from 188M and a negative 1.5 percent growth rate in Q2. User count is still up 5 percent year-over-year, though. Snapchat earned $298 million in revenue…
[ad_1] The White House has issued a memorandum outlining the need for a new national wireless connectivity strategy; the document doesn’t really establish anything new, but does request lots of reports on how things are going. Strangely, what it proposes sounds a lot like what the FCC already does. The memorandum, heralded by a separate…
[ad_1] The dev team that’s now engineering the Fleksy keyboard app has raised more than $800,000 via an equity crowdfunding route. As we reported a year ago, the development of Fleksy’s keyboard has been taken over by the Barcelona-based startup behind an earlier keyboard app called ThingThing. The team says their new funding raise —…
[ad_1] Google Maps has been steadily rolling out new features to make its app more than just a way to find places and navigate to them. In recent months, it’s added things like group trip planning, music controls, commuter tools, ETA sharing, personalized recommendations, and more. Now, it’s introducing a new way for users to follow…
[ad_1] Xiaomi has announced the newest version of its bezel-less Mi Mix family, and it doesn’t sport a notch like its Mi 8 flagship. Indeed, unlike the Mi 8 — which I called one of Xiaomi’s most brazen Apple clones — there’s a lot more to get excited about. The Mi Mix 3 was unveiled at…
[ad_1] LG remains confident that it can turn the corner for its serially unprofitable mobile business despite the division racking up a loss of over $400 million this year so far. The Korean company as a whole is having a good year. Following a record six months of profit and revenue in the first half of 2018,…
[ad_1] Facebook wants to make YouTube-style monologue videos the new way for politicians to talk straight with their constituency. Today, Facebook launches Candidate Info, featuring thousands of direct-to-camera vertical videos where federal, state, and local candidates introduce themselves and explain their top policy priority, qualifications, and biggest goal if they win office. Congress members including…
[ad_1] Italy’s Autorità garante della concorrenza e del mercato, roughly equivalent to this America’s FTC, has fined Apple and Samsung a total of $15 million for the companies’ practice of forcing updates on consumers that may slow or break their devices. The amount may be a drop in the bucket, but it’s a signal that…
[ad_1] RevenueCat, a startup that helps developers manage their in-app subscriptions, has raised $1.5 million in new funding. The company was part of the most recent batch at Y Combinator, and CEO Jacob Eiting said growth has been “a rocket ship” for the past few months. As of this week, RevenueCat is working with 100…
[ad_1] If Facebook Messenger’s redesign succeeds, you won’t really notice it even happened. I hardly did over the past week of testing. There’s just a subtle sense that the claustrophobia has lifted. Perhaps that’s why Facebook decided to throw a big breakfast press event with 30 reporters today at its new downtown San Francisco office,…
[ad_1] There’s a war brewing to become the cloud pharmacy for men’s health. Roman, which launched last year offering erectile dysfunctional medication and recently added a ‘quit smoking’ kit, is taking on $97 million-funded Hims for the hair loss market. Today, Roman launched four new products it hopes to cross-sell to users through a unified…
[ad_1] Google Play has generated more than twice the downloads of the iOS App Store, reaching a 70% share of worldwide downloads in 2017, according to a new report from App Annie, released in conjunction with the 10th anniversary of the Android Market, now called Google Play. The report also examined the state of Google…
[ad_1] The team behind mileage-tracking app MileIQ, a company Microsoft acquired a few years ago, is out with a new application. This time, the focus isn’t on tracking miles, but rather expenses. The new app, simply called “Spend,” arrived on the App Store on Thursday, offering automatic expense tracking for work reimbursement purposes or for…
[ad_1] For the first time, Uber will make contextual, personalized suggestions about the best way to get from point A to point B. The startup offers more than just cars now, and it’s starting to understand the tradeoffs between price, speed, convenience, and comfort amidst its multi-modal fleet. Most noticeably, you’ll now see JUMP bikes…
[ad_1] Spotify has given its app a big makeover, with a focus on making the experience better for its paying subscribers. The company has simplified the app’s navigation by reducing the numbers of buttons and has revamped its Search page, which now incorporates elements previously found in “Browse,” like favorite genres or music to match…
[ad_1] HTML5 almost ruined Facebook when baking in the mobile web standard to speed up development slowed down the performance of the social network’s main iOS and Android apps. For a brief moment in 2011, Facebook even tried to build an HTML5 gaming platform codenamed Sparta to escape the taxes of Apple and Google’s mobile…
[ad_1] It’s been four months since Facebook launched IGTV, with the goal of creating a destination for longer-form Instagram videos. Is it shaping up to be a high-profile flop, or could this be the company’s next multi-billion dollar business? IGTV, which features videos up to 60 minutes versus Instagram’s normal 60-second limit, hasn’t made much…
[ad_1] Fintech startup N26 is growing quite rapidly. Building a startup is hard, but building a startup that manages your bank account is even harder given the increased scrutiny. German weekly magazine Wirtschaftswoche published an article that questioned N26’s identification processes. According to Wirtschaftswoche, it’s quite easy to create an account with a fake ID…
[ad_1] Memory, a startup out of Norway and maker of time tracking app Timely, has raised $5 million in further funding. Leading the round is Concentric, and Investinor, with participation from existing investor SNÖ Ventures. The company had previously raised $1 million in 2016 from 500 Startups, and SNÖ. Founded by Mathias Mikkelsen, a designer…
[ad_1] Google has announced changes to the licensing model for its Android mobile operating system in Europe, including introducing a fee for licensing some of its own brand apps, saying it’s doing so to comply with a major European antitrust ruling this summer. In July the region’s antitrust regulators hit Google with a recordbreaking $5BN fine…
[ad_1] Twitter today inserts activity-based tweets into your timeline, alerting you to things like the popular tweets liked by people you follow, or those Twitter accounts that a lot of people in your network have just started to follow. These alerts can be useful, but their timing is sporadic and they can be easily missed.…
[ad_1] If you’ve been laying off the Pokémon Go for a while due to a lack of new monsters, prepare to be glued to your phone again. Niantic is now adding pokémon from the rugged Sinnoh region that first appeared in 2007’s Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum games. Of course, it’s not so simple as a…
[ad_1] Dating app Hinge is today launching a new feature aimed at improving its recommendations, based on whether or not matches had successful real-world dates. The feature may also help to address one of the major problems with today’s dating apps: that no one knows how well they actually work. After all, it’s one thing…
[ad_1] The charmingly outdated media player Winamp is being reinvented as a platform-agnostic audio mobile app that brings together all your music, podcasts, and streaming services to a single location. It’s an ambitious relaunch, but the company behind it says it’s still all about the millions-strong global Winamp community — and as proof, the original…
[ad_1] There’s no shortage of interesting electronics kits out there to occupy an idle Sunday, but with this one you get a phone out of the bargain. The MakerPhone is a kit looking for funds on Kickstarter that lets you assemble a working mobile phone from a number of boards and pieces, and the end…
[ad_1] In a letter addressed to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Senators Mark Warner and Marco Rubio make a very public case that Canada should leave Chinese tech and telecom giant Huawei out of its plans to build a next-generation mobile network. “While Canada has strong telecommunication security safeguards in place, we have serious concerns…
[ad_1] AI-powered photo management app Zyl is going back to the drawing board with a streamlined, more efficient redesign. The app is now focused on one thing only — resurfacing your old memories. Taking photos on a smartphone is now a daily habit. But what about looking back at photos you took one year, three…
[ad_1] This summer, Facebook launched Fb.gg, its online gaming hub and Twitch competitor, designed to attract game streamers and their fans to watch videos on Facebook instead of on rival sites. The destination shows videos based on which games and streaming celebrities users follow, plus Liked Pages and Groups, and other featured suggestions of what…
[ad_1] Mobile ticketing app TodayTix is getting into the show production business with the launch of a new program called TodayTix Presents. While TodayTix is sometimes described as the mobile version of the TKTS booth where you can pick up last-minute tickets to Broadway shows, CEO Brian Fenty said that he sees the service’s real…
[ad_1] Half of all devices are now running the latest version of the iOS mobile operating system, iOS 12, according to figures shared by Apple. On devices introduced in the last four years, that number is as high as 53 percent. And iOS 12 adoption is taking place more quickly than the last release did,…
[ad_1] This time instead of exposing users’ data, a Facebook bug erased it. A previously undisclosed Facebook glitch caused it to delete some users’ Live videos if they tried to post them to their Story and the News Feed after finishing their broadcast. Facebook wouldn’t say how many users or livestreams were impacted, but told…
[ad_1] The effortless way you fast forward through Stories could be coming to more of Instagram . A screenshot from user Suprateek Bose shows Instagram “Introducing a new way to move through posts — Tap through posts, just like you tap through stories.” Now Instagram confirms to TechCrunch that it’s testing tap to advance within…
[ad_1] What if you could peek behind what’s in your photos, like you’re moving your head to see what’s inside a window? That’s the futuristic promise of Facebook 3D photos. After announcing the feature at F8 in May, Facebook is now rolling out 3D photos to add make-believe depth to your iPhone portrait mode shots. Shoot…
[ad_1] If you miss the old AOL chat rooms, you’ll love Facebook’s plan to combine Groups and with Messenger without spamming you to death. Starting today, Facebook will gradually roll out the ability for members of Facebook Groups to launch group chats about specific sub-topics that up to 250 members can join. They can also…
[ad_1] Fresh off a $150 million round of funding, kids’ gaming platform Roblox is making its first acquisition. The company says it’s acquiring the small startup PacketZoom, bringing its team and technology in-house to help it improve mobile application performance as its platform expands further into worldwide markets. Founded in 2013, and based in San Mateo,…
[ad_1] Last year, Mozilla made its first acquisition by snatching up Pocket, the Instapaper competitor that helps you save longer articles for later reading. Today, this popular reading app is getting a major update that gives its app a visual makeover, including a new dark mode, and most importantly, a better way to listen to…
[ad_1] Google just one-upped Apple in a significant way by addressing a problem that’s plaguing U.S. cellphone owners: spam calls. The company’s new Pixel 3 flagship Android smartphone is first to introduce a new call screening feature that leverages the built-in Google Assistant. The screening service transcribes the caller’s request in real-time, allowing you to…
[ad_1] As zero-commission stock trading app Robinhood starts preparing to IPO, an engineering investment two years in the making could accelerate its quest for profitability. Most stock broker services have to pay an external clearing house to reconcile trades between buyers and sellers. Now with 6 million accounts, that added up to a huge cost for…
[ad_1] Google has lodged its legal appeal against the European Commission’s €4.34 billion (~$5BN) antitrust ruling against its Android mobile OS, according to Reuters — the first step in a process that could keep its lawyers busy for years to come. “We have now filed our appeal of the EC’s Android decision at the General Court of…
[ad_1] Google unveiled a new lineup of devices today, including the Pixel Slate, a tablet that the company described as the next evolution of Chrome OS — but could also be seen as the company’s answer to both Apple’s iPad and Microsoft’s Surface. After the presentation, I had a chance to try the Pixel Slate…
[ad_1] Stardew Valley, the hit indie farming game made by one guy in his spare time, is coming to mobile. I’ve dropped dozens of hours into this charming little spiritual successor to Harvest Moon, and now I know how I’m going to spend my next few plane rides. In case you’re not aware, Stardew Valley…
[ad_1] If you’re considering making the jump to Google’s newly announced Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL, you’re in the right place. Whether you’re a Pixel 2 owner eyeing greener pastures or a bargain type hunting for a last-gen smartphone that’s still top of the line, comparing new and old is often useful. On specs…
[ad_1] With the Pixel 2, Google introduced one of the best smartphone cameras ever made. It’s fitting then that the Pixel 3 builds on an already pretty perfect camera, adding some bells and whistles sure to please mobile photographers rather than messing with a good thing. On paper, the Pixel 3’s camera doesn’t look much different…
[ad_1] As part of this morning’s official unveiling of the Pixel 3, Google also announced its larger sibling, the Pixel 3 XL. The news wasn’t a surprise, given the photos that leaked months ago (something that Google itself acknowledged by kicking off the event with a little montage of videos responding to early details). And…
[ad_1] Google Lens, the technology that combines the smartphone camera’s ability to see the world around you with A.I. technology, is coming to the Pixel 3 camera, Google announced this morning. That means you’ll be able to point your phone’s camera at something – like a movie poster to get local theater listings, or even…
[ad_1] Google today announced that its Pixel phones will soon get support for Smart Compose in Gmail. Smart Compose automatically finishes your sentences for you as you type, based on what Google knows about how you and others write similar sentences. Smart Compose can also auto-complete addresses for you. Google first launched this feature with…
[ad_1] SoundCloud moves painfully slow for a tech company, and no one feels that pain more than musicians who are popular on the site but don’t get paid. 10 years since SoundCloud first launched, and four years since it opened an invite-only program allowing just the very biggest artists to earn a cut of the…
[ad_1] Eager to change the conversation from their years-long exposure of user data via Google+ to the bright, shining future the company is providing, Google has announced some changes to the way permissions are approved for Android apps. The new process will be slower, more deliberate, and hopefully secure. The changes are part of “Project…
[ad_1] Facebook Messenger could soon let you user your voice to dictate and send messages, initiate voice calls, and create reminders. Messenger for Android’s code reveals a new M assistant button atop the message thread screen that activates listening for voice commands for those functionalities. Voice control could make Messenger simpler to use hands-free or…
[ad_1] Reelgood, a startup aimed at helping cord cutters find their next binge, is out today with its biggest update yet. The company has been developing its streaming guide over the past year to solve the issues around discovery that exist when consumers drop traditional pay TV in favor of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu,…
[ad_1] Analytics company Mixpanel is currently tracking the install base of iOS 12. And the latest version of iOS is quite popular as it’s already installed on roughly 47.6 percent of all iOS devices. 45.6 percent of devices still run iOS 11, and 6.9 percent of iOS users run an older version. Adoption rate is…
[ad_1] Amazon’s Alexa app has just been given a major visual overhaul, largely focused on helping users set up and control their smart home. From the app’s new devices tab, users can view all their different Alexa-enabled devices and groups on one screen, as opposed to switching between tabs like before. And the app is…
[ad_1] Adults, not teens. Messaging, not Stories. Developing markets, not the US. These are how Snapchat will make a comeback, according to CEO Evan Spiegel . In a 6,000-word internal memo from late September leaked to Cheddar’s Alex Heath, Spiegel attempts to revive employee morale with philosophy, tactics, and contrition as Snap’s share price sinks…
[ad_1] This is sure to exacerbate fears that Facebook will further exploit Instagram now that its founders have resigned. Instagram has been spotted prototyping a new privacy setting that would allow it to share your location history with Facebook. That means your exact GPS coordinates collected by Instagram, even when you’re not using the app,…
[ad_1] Between 2013 and last year, the number of boot camp schools tripled to more than 90 in the U.S. alone, according to Course Report, an outfit that tracks the industry. Some — including The Iron Yard and Dev Bootcamp — have since folded, unable to find enough eager recruits willing to pay top dollar…
[ad_1] When your feed and Stories tray go stale, or your follower count stops rising, you drift away from Instagram . That’s why the app is rolling out two big new features designed to connect you to new people and diversify your graph so there’s alwasy something surprising to look at and like. Today Instagram…
[ad_1] Move over Twitter, President Trump now has the power to send every phone in the land a simultaneous message — thanks to the new “presidential alert”, tested by FEMA yesterday. What’s it for? The idea is to enable the president of the United States to warn the nation of major threats — such as a…
[ad_1] Nearly a year after German fintech startup N26 announced that it would launch its service in the U.K., the company is launching in the U.K. N26 is already quite popular in the Eurozone with over 1.5 million customers. In this new market, it will face tough competition from existing players, such as Revolut, Monzo,…
[ad_1] An updated version of the Twitter mobile app will allow users to gain more control over their data usage – similar to how the Twitter Lite app designed for emerging markets works. Now, instead of having to download a separate app in order to limit data consumption or manually adjust various settings, users will…
[ad_1] Helping friends meet up offline has been a massive missed opportunity for Facebook . Whether because the brand is too creepy or the politely opt-in 2015 rollout of its location sharing feature wasn’t creepy enough, Facebook Nearby Friends never quite took off. Only 103 of my 1120 friends in San Francisco have it turned…
[ad_1] Google today is launching a major visual redesign of its Assistant experience on phones. While the original vision of the Assistant focused mostly on voice, half of all interactions with the Assistant actually include touch. So with this redesign, Google acknowledges that and brings more and larger visuals to the Assistant experience. If you’ve…
[ad_1] People procrastinate about buying insurance because it’s such a boring and complicated chore to compare policies. But Cover combines plans from 45 insurance companies into a single marketplace so it’s easy to find the best one for your car, home, rental, business, personal property, pets, jewelry and more. Now Cover is building powerful onboarding…
[ad_1] Apple is about to release the public beta version of iOS 12.1. And before everybody freaks out, the company announced that this update will feature new emojis — best feature update ever. In other words, Apple is releasing its own take on Unicode 11.0 emojis. Other devices and major services will soon all support…
[ad_1] Heed, a startup looking to create new ways for sports leagues and clubs to engage with fans, is announcing that it has raised $35 million led by SoftBank Group International. As laid out for me by CEO Danna Rabin, the company sits at the intersection of sports and IoT — which makes sense, since…
[ad_1] The education market has long been one of the cornerstones of growth for Apple’s hardware business, and today the company is leveraging its popularity in it, specifically among college-aged students, to build out a newer effort. Today, Apple started to integrate university student ID cards — used to access buildings, pay for food or…
[ad_1] Former Facebook VP of News Feed and recently appointed Instagram VP of Product Adam Mosseri has been named the new head of Instagram. “We are thrilled to hand over the reins to a product leader with a strong design background and a focus on craft and simplicity — as well as a deep understanding…
[ad_1] Google just announced new features for Google Maps on Android and iOS. The update is rolling out this week and features a bunch of new features focused on commuting, music and getting more personal data from you. While Google Maps is particularly useful for road trips and vacation, the app can also be useful…
[ad_1] Spotify has ended a test that required its family plan subscribers to verify their location, or risk losing accessing to its music streaming service. According to recent reports, the company sent out emails to its “Premium for Family” customers that asked them to confirm their locations using GPS. The idea here is that some…
[ad_1] The FCC is pushing for speedy deployment of 5G networks nationwide with an order adopted today that streamlines what it perceives as a patchwork of obstacles, needless costs, and contradictory regulations at the state level. But local governments say the federal agency is taking things too far. 5G networks will consist of thousands of…
[ad_1] There’s a secret Facebook app called Blink. Built for employees only, it’s how the company tests out new video formats its hoping will become the next Boomerang or SuperZoom. They range from artsy Blur effects to a way even old Android phones can use Slo-Mo. One exciting format involves audio beat detection that syncs…
[ad_1] Earlier this year, Google announced its revamped Google Maps, which puts a stronger emphasis on discovery. Some of the features the company announced back then have already launched, including many of the promised discovery and exploration tools, but the one feature that was still missing was group planning. But you won’t have to wait much…
[ad_1] The new iPhones have excellent cameras, to be sure. But it’s always good to verify Apple’s breathless on-stage claims with first-hand reports. We have our own review of the phones and their photography systems, but teardowns provide the invaluable service of letting you see the biggest changes with your own eyes — augmented, of…
[ad_1] More posts by this contributor Big data’s humble beginnings A future dominated by autonomous vehicles (AVs) is, for many experts, a foregone conclusion. Declarations that the automobile will become the next living room are almost as common — but, they are imprecise. In our inevitable driverless future, the more apt comparison is to the…
[ad_1] It’s been five years since T-Mobile picked up MetroPCS, and now the prepaid service is finally getting a fresh coat of paint. The “PCS” bit is getting the old heave-ho, while the brand’s owners are letting you know who’s boss with the new Metro by T-Mobile brand name. The new name involves some new…
[ad_1] Everyone’s favorite endless, serene snowboarding game just made the leap from mobile to the Mac App Store. Available now for $9.99, Alto’s Adventure for Mac is a desktop port of the side-scrolling snowscape game that’s won hearts and accolades since it first hit iOS in 2015. Earlier this year, the team behind Alto’s Adventure…
[ad_1] See, snap, sale. In a rare partnership for Amazon, the commerce giant will help Snapchat challenge Instagram and Pinterest for social shopping supremacy. Today Snapchat announced it’s slowly rolling out a new visual product search feature, confirming TechCrunch’s July scoop about this project codenamed “Eagle”. Users can use Snapchat’s camera to scan a physical…
[ad_1] It’s been 10 years since Google took the wraps off the G1, the first Android phone. Since that time the OS has grown from buggy, nerdy iPhone alternative to arguably the most popular (or at least populous) computing platform in the world. But it sure as heck didn’t get there without hitting a few…
[ad_1] Instagram tells me Regramming, or the ability to instantly repost someone else’s feed post to your followers like a retweet, is “not happening”, not being built, and not being tested. And that’s good news for all Instagrammers. The denial comes after it initially issued a “no comment” to The Verge’s Casey Newton, who published…
[ad_1] Geofenced sharing, Quiz stickers, Stories Highlight stickers, and a separate interface for adding hashtags to posts are amongst a slew of new features Instagram has prototyped or is now testing. The last one could finally #cure #the #hashtag #madness that’s infected many of Instagram’s 1 billion users, causing them desperately fill up their captions…
[ad_1] Does deeper data produce perfect matches? Facebook is finally ready to find out, starting today with a country-wide test in Colombia of its Dating feature. It’s centered around an algorithm-powered homescreen of Suggested romantic matches based on everything Facebook knows about you that other apps don’t. There’s no swiping and it’s not trying to…
[ad_1] Ghostery is launching new versions of its browsers for iOS and Android. In fact, Director of Product Jeremy Tillman said this is the first big update to Ghostery’s mobile browsers in several years. It’s not that mobile wasn’t a priority for the team before this, but Tillman said, “In our previous company, we didn’t…
[ad_1] There’s an empty space in my heart for a minimalist phone with only the most basic functions. Bad for my heart, but good for a handful of companies putting out devices aiming to fill it. Punkt’s latest, the MP02, goes a little ways to making the device I desire, but it isn’t quite there…
[ad_1] Popular travel app Kayak has put augmented reality to clever use with a new feature that lets you measure the size of your carry-on bag using just your smartphone. Its updated iOS app now takes advantage of Apple’s ARKit technology to introduce a new Bag Measurement tool that will help you calculate your bag’s…
[ad_1] Facebook is getting ready to purposefully influence the U.S. mid-term elections after spending two years trying to safeguard against foreign interference. Instagram plans to run ads in Stories and feed powered by TurboVote that will target all US users over 18 and point them towards information on how to get properly registered and abide…
[ad_1] Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, has been a controversial project since its debut. The need for the framework has been clear: the payloads of mobile pages can be just insane, what with layers and layers of images, Javascript, ad networks, and more slowing down page rendering time and costing users serious bandwidth on metered…
[ad_1] YouTube will no longer maintain a separate app targeting gaming and live game streaming, the company announced today. The YouTube Gaming app, which first arrived in 2015, will be sunset sometime next spring as its host of features make their way over to YouTube’s main site. Over the years, the YouTube Gaming app has…
[ad_1] Daily Burn, the online fitness brand owned by IAC, launched a new iPhone app today devoted to the popular workout style known as HIIT (high-intensity interval training). Daily Burn already offers a general training app, but the company says it’s planning a whole series of vertical workout apps, starting HIIT Workouts. The is “bringing personalized workout…
[ad_1] Instagram is embracing its true identity as a mail-order catalog. The question will be how much power merchants will give Instagram after seeing what its parent Facebook did to news outlets that relied on it. In a move that could pit it against Pinterest and Wish, Instagram is launching Shopping features across its app to…
[ad_1] Apple has just released the final version of iOS 12. This update is all about making your phone work better — and there are also a bunch of new features. The update is currently rolling out and is available both over-the-air in the Settings app, and by plugging your device into iTunes for a…
[ad_1] With today’s release of iOS 12, Apple is also rolling out a new feature called Siri Shortcuts, which allows users to create their own voice commands to take actions in apps. For example, you could create a shortcuts for ordering your morning coffee, playing your favorite music, getting your daily schedule, and much more.…
[ad_1] iOS 12, Apple’s latest mobile software for iPhone and iPad, is finally out. The new software packs in a bunch of new security and privacy features you’ve probably already heard about. Here’s what you need to do to take advantage of the new settings and lock down your device. 1. Turn on USB Restricted…
[ad_1] iOS 12 is finally here. And the update is packed with many improvements. In particular, Apple has tucked away many little features that you won’t see right away. If you want to impress all your friends with your mad iOS skills, here is a list of some of these features. I also wrote a…
[ad_1] iOS 12 could be summed up in one feature: speed. The rest is just a footnote, especially when you compare iOS 12 to iOS 11. You may remember that iOS 11 was filled with many new features, especially on the iPad. But it was also the buggiest release to date. Even the Calculator app…
[ad_1] A multi-month investigation by Sweden’s Medical Products Agency into a number of unwanted pregnancies among users of ‘digital contraception’ app Natural Cycles has been closed after the startup agreed to clarify the risk of the product failing. But, on the self-reported data front, the agency said it was satisfied the number of unwanted pregnancies is in…
[ad_1] If the whole map is red and it’s a short ride, maybe you’d prefer taking an Uber JUMP Bike instead of an UberX. Or at least if you do end up stuck bumper-to-bumper, the warning could make you less likely to get mad mid-ride and take it out on the driver’s rating. This week…
[ad_1] I only wanted one thing out of 2018’s iPhone event: a new iPhone SE. In failing to provide it Apple seems to have quietly put the model out to pasture — and for this I curse them eternally. Because it was the best phone the company ever made. If you were one of the…
[ad_1] Remember 3D Touch? Unless you’re a power iOS user you probably don’t. Or, well, you’d rather not. It’s been clear for some time now that the technology Apple lauded at its 2015 unveiling as the “next generation of multi-touch” most certainly wasn’t. For the mainstream iPhone user it’s just that annoying thing that gets…
[ad_1] YouTube Kids’ latest update is giving parents more control over what their kids watch. Following a change earlier this year that allowed parents to limit viewing options to human-reviewed channels, YouTube today is adding another feature that will give parents the ability to explicitly whitelist every channel or video they want to be available…
[ad_1] Sometimes fake news lives inside of Facebook as photos and videos designed to propel misinformation campaigns, instead of off-site on news articles that can generate their own ad revenue. To combat these politically rather than financially-motivated meddlers, Facebook has to be able to detect fake news inside of images and the audio that accompanies…
[ad_1] Themed collections of user generated content chosen by news publishers for viewing on and off Snapchat are the teen social network’s next great hope for relevance. Today Snap launches Curated Our Stories with the help of 20 partners like CNN, Cosmopolitan, Lad Bible, and NowThis. Instead of sifting through and selecting submissions to Our…
[ad_1] Mark Zuckerberg wants you to know he’s trying his damnedest to fix Facebook before it breaks democracy. Tonight he posted a 3,260-word battle plan for fighting election interference. Amidst drilling through Facebook’s strategy and progress, he slips in several notable passages revealing his own philosophy. Zuckerberg has cast off his premature skepticism and is…
[ad_1] HQ Trivia is aiming to attract more players following a slight decline in downloads with a new, large prize. The company announced today it has bagged Target to sponsor to sponsor a special Emmy-themed game featuring its biggest-ever single winner prize of $100,000. The game will air on Monday, September 17 at 9 PM ET,…
[ad_1] Snapchat’s sagging share price is making it tough to retain talent. Bobby Lo, founder and CEO of mobile search app Vurb that Snap Inc acquired for $114.5 million two years ago is leaving day-to-day operations at the company. That means Lo cut out early on his four-year retention package vesting schedule, which was likely…
[ad_1] With the launch of the new Gmail, the writing was on the wall, but today Google made it official: Inbox by Gmail, the company’s experimental email client for Gmail, will shut down at the end of March 2019. Google says it’s making this change to put its focus “solely on Gmail.” While that makes…
[ad_1] Even if you don’t plan on buying a new iPhone, you’ll be able to get a bunch of new features next week. Apple plans on releasing iOS 12, the next major version of iOS, on Tuesday, September 17th. As always, iOS 12 will be available as a free download. If your iPhone or iPad…
[ad_1] … it was nice pressing you. Well, at least some of the thousands and thousands of times. Apple has finally abandoned a feature that’s been a staple of its smartphones since the very start, over a decade ago: A physical home button. The trio of almost-all-screen iPhones unboxed today at its Cupertino HQ go…
[ad_1] Another year, another set of brand spankin’ new iPhones. But this year, little has been left to the imagination as leaks have continued to spring up over the course of the past few months. Today, however, the new iPhone becomes official. Apple has introduced a new models of the premium iPhone, the iPhone Xs,…
[ad_1] Apple just unveiled an updated Apple Watch. And this year’s new Watch is all about the display. Thanks to thinner bezels and a slightly bigger casing, you’ll see more on your screen. “Apple Watch isn’t just the number one smart watch, it’s the number one watch in the world period,” Apple CEO Tim Cook…
[ad_1] Google has secured a bit more buy in from Samsung for a next generation text messaging standard it’s long been promoting. The Android OS maker’s hope for Rich Communication Services (RCS), which upgrades what SMS can offer to support richer comms and content swapping, can provide its fragmented Android ecosystem with a way to offer comparably…
[ad_1] Apple is holding a keynote today on its new and shiny campus in Cupertino, and the company is expected to unveil new iPhones, an updated Apple Watch and maybe some other things. At 10 AM PT (1 PM in New York, 6 PM in London, 7 PM in Paris), you’ll be able to watch…
[ad_1] New 5G networks are coming and big companies are spending big bucks to roll them out. Ericsson is going to be providing T-Mobile with its latest 5G new radio hardware and 3GPP for a cool $3.5 billion. As it moves from LTE Advanced networks to 5G, T-Mobile said it will use the Ericsson portfolio…
[ad_1] Earlier this summer, Tinder began testing a new feature that surfaces a curated list of your best potential matches, called “Top Picks.” The feature, which is only available to paying subscribers on Tinder Gold, is now available worldwide, Tinder says. Top Picks had also quietly launched in the U.S. and U.K. last week following…
[ad_1] Wednesday is Apple’s big product release day, where analysts expect the company to release the next edition of the iPhone. While the usual upgrades to the screen, CPU, and storage are expected as always, one major lingering question is how the company is going to handle 5G, the next-generation telecommunications standard. The conventional wisdom…
[ad_1] False rumors forwarded on WhatsApp have led angry mobs to murder strangers in India, but the Facebook-owned chat app is still racing to add users in the country. Today it launched a feature phone version of WhatsApp for JioPhone 1 and 2’s KaiOS, which are designed to support 22 of India’s vast array of…
[ad_1] The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Tim Armstrong is in talks to leave Verizon as soon as next month. Armstrong heads up the carrier giant’s digital and advertising division, Oath (formerly AOL, prior to the Yahoo acquisition and the subsequent merger of the two units). Oath also happens to be TechCrunch’s parent, of…
[ad_1] Now valued at $5.6 billion, zero-fee stock trading app and cryptocurrency exchange Robinhood is starting preparations to go public. Just a year and a half ago, it was still largely under the radar. But then it raised a $110 million Series C at a $1.3 billion valuation in April 2017 and then just a…
[ad_1] In a move aimed at upping standards across biometric user verification systems, the industry consortium, Fido Alliance, has launched a certification program for biometrics systems. “The goal of the Biometric Certification Component Program is to provide a framework for the certification of biometric subsystems that can in turn be integrated into FIDO Certified authenticators,” it writes on…
[ad_1] Meet Stealthy a new messaging app that leverages Blockstack’s decentralized application platform to build a messaging app. The company is participating in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF and launching its app on iOS and Android today. On the surface, Stealthy works like many messaging apps out there. But it gets interesting once you…
[ad_1] AnchorFree, a maker of a popular virtual private networking app, has raised $275 million in a new round of funding, the company announced Wednesday. The Redwood City, Calif.-based app maker’s flagship app Hotspot Shield ranks as one of the most popular VPN apps on the market. The app, based on a freemium model, allows users…
[ad_1] Snapchat isn’t revealing sales numbers of version 2 of its Spectacles camera sunglasses, but at least they’re not getting left in a drawer as much as the V1s. The company tells me V2 owners are capturing 40 percent more Snaps than people with V1s. And today, Snapchat is launching two new black-rimmed hipster styles…
[ad_1] Just about a month after the merger of the short-form video apps Musical.ly and TikTok, the app is introducing a new social feature, allowing users to post their reactions to the videos that they watch. Instead of text comments, these reactions will take the form of videos that are essentially superimposed on top of…
[ad_1] Just over a year after Skype introduced a colorful, Snapchat-inspired makeover which included its own version of “stories,” the company says it’s now going to refocus on simplicity – and it’s ditching stories along the way. The redesign had been met with a lot of backlash. Skype had clearly wanted to appeal to a…
[ad_1] iOS 12 beta testers have been plagued with a frustrating bug that continually pops up messages alerting them that a new iOS update is available when, in fact, it’s not. Apple has now fixed this bug, which is patched in the latest iOS 12 betas rolling out now, we understand. The bug had first…
[ad_1] Apple is cracking down on apps that don’t communicate to users how their personal data is used, secured or shared. In an announcement posted to developers through the App Store Connect portal, Apple says that all apps, including those still in testing, will be required to have a privacy policy as of October 3,…
[ad_1] Research scientists at Queen’s University’s Human Media Lab have built a prototype touchscreen device that’s neither smartphone nor tablet but kind of both — and more besides. The device, which they’ve christened the MagicScroll, is inspired by ancient (papyrus/paper/parchment) scrolls so it takes a rolled-up, cylindrical form factor — enabled by a flexible 7.5inch…
[ad_1] Weebly is part of Square now, but it continues to update as a standalone product. This week, for example, the company announced a number of new e-commerce features for the Weebly mobile app. Those features include the ability to ship and print labels, to respond to customer questions (via Facebook Messenger, which can be…
[ad_1] Get ready for a leaked look at the new iPhone XS. 9to5Mac has gotten its hands on an image of Apple’s next generation of iPhone hardware, and the future looks pretty swanky. The leaked image showcases the new sizing of Apple’s soon-to-be-unveiled flagship bezel-less devices, which likely will have 5.8-inch and 6.5-inch screens, respectively.…
[ad_1] Sinemia continues its campaign to take advantage of MoviePass’ high-profile struggles and win over the better-known movie ticket subscription service’s customers. Today, it announced a new plan priced at $9.99 per month. MoviePass, after all, recently announced that it would be keeping its monthly subscription price at $9.95, but limiting subscribers to three movies…
[ad_1] Android One is one of a handful of Google projects aimed at helping the mobile operating system run better on entry level devices. As such, those handsets that qualify for the program are generally pretty middling, at best. But LG’s G7 One bucks the trend, with some specs that wouldn’t be out of place…
[ad_1] Another analyst has Huawei overtaking Apple in the global smartphone rankings for the second quarter this year. The latest figures from Gartner put Huawei ahead on sales to end users in Q2. Overall, Gartner says sales of smartphones to end users grew 2% in the quarter, to reach 374 million units. The analyst pegs the…
[ad_1] Instagram has never truly failed at anything, but judging by modest initial view counts, IGTV could get stuck with a reputation as an abandoned theater if the company isn’t careful. It’s no flop, but the long-form video hub certainly isn’t an instant hit like Instagram Stories. Two months after that launched in 2016, Instagram…
[ad_1] Google has clapped back in tremendous fashion at Epic Games, which earlier this month decided to make the phenomenally popular Fortnite available for Android via its own website instead of Google’s Play Store. Unfortunately, the installer had a phenomenally dangerous security flaw in it that would allow a malicious actor to essentially install any…
[ad_1] It’s not just parents who are worrying about their children’s device usage. According to a new study released by Pew Research Center this week, U.S. teens are now taking steps to limit themselves from overuse of their phone and its addictive apps, like social media. A majority, 54% of teens, said they spend too…
[ad_1] PayPal is revamping its mobile app. Again. In an effort to keep pace with newcomers like the bank-owned Zelle, PayPal says its new app will focus on making it easier to use its core features – that is, sending and requesting money. That means many of the app’s homescreen buttons – like Offers, Donate,…
[ad_1] A new app called HiHello is taking aim at business cards. While plenty of apps in the past have tried to kill the business card, they never achieved critical mass. Mainly, this is because most required that both parties — the business card holder and recipient — have their app installed. HiHello is different.…
[ad_1] Facebook has been a bit slow to adopt the voice computing revolution. It has no voice assistant, its smart speaker is still in development, and some apps like Instagram aren’t full equipped for audio communication. But much of that is set to change judging by experiments discovered in Facebook’s code, plus new patent filings.…
[ad_1] A new way to attack Facebook is to fraudulently report a news story as false in hopes of reducing its visibility, either because someone wants to censor it or just doesn’t agree with it. Sometimes known as “brigading”, a concerted effort by trolls to flag a piece of content can reduce its visibility. Facebook…
[ad_1] Google Fit is getting a major update today. The company’s activity tracking app has been around for a few years now but until today, it pretty much worked and looked that same as on the day it launched. Today’s redesign is quite a departure from that old look and feel, though, and it also…
[ad_1] Tinder is today rolling out what may be one of its smartest additions yet with the launch of Tinder U, a feature designed specifically for Tinder users in college. Once enabled, students with a .edu email address will be able to register with their school, then swipe on students who also attend their school…
[ad_1] Braavo, a startup that provides financing to mobile app developers, is announcing that it has raised $6 million in Series A funding. The might not seem like much compared to the $70 million that Braavo announced raising last year, but that was debt financing, used to loan money to developers. This new round is…
[ad_1] Netflix is one of the highest-grossing apps on the iOS App Store, but it looks like the video streaming giant is contemplating how it might make an even bigger margin on its iPhone and iPad users. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Netflix, in its own words, is “testing the iTunes payment method” in…
[ad_1] What Robinhood did to democratize buying individual stocks, Titan wants to do for investing in a managed portfolio. Instead of being restricted to rich accredited investors willing to pour $5,000 or even $500,000 into a traditional hedge fund that charges 2 percent fees and 20 percent of profits, Titan lets anyone invest as little…
[ad_1] A year ago I felt a panic that still reverberates in me today. Hackers swapped my T-Mobile SIM card without my approval and methodically shut down access to most of my accounts and began reaching out to my Facebook friends asking to borrow crypto. Their social engineering tactics, to be clear, were laughable but…
[ad_1] Twitter tried to downplay the impact deactivating its legacy APIs would have on its community and the third-party Twitter clients preferred by many power users by saying that “less than 1%” of Twitter developers were using these old APIs. Twitter is correct in its characterization of the size of this developer base, but it’s…
[ad_1] Food delivery startup DoorDash announced this afternoon that it has raised $250 million, just five months since the company announced a $535 million round. Why raise more money so soon? CEO Tony Xu told Axios that he wasn’t actively looking for additional investment, but was open to investor interest because it could help the company…
[ad_1] Inokyo wants to be the indie Amazon Go. It’s just launched its prototype cashierless autonomous retail store. Cameras track what you grab from shelves, and with a single QR scan of its app on your way in and out of the store, you’re charged for what you got. Inokyo‘s first store is now open…
[ad_1] Facebook’s role in the opioid crisis could become another scandal following yesterday’s release of harrowing new statistics from the Center for Disease Control. It estimated there were nearly 30,000 synthetic opioid overdose deaths in the U.S. in 2017, up from roughly 20,000 the year before. When recreational drugs like Xanax and OxyContin are adulterated…
[ad_1] It’s hard to be a fan of Twitter right now. The company is sticking up for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, when nearly all other platforms have given him the boot, it’s overrun with bots, and now it’s breaking users’ favorite third-party Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Twitterific by shutting off APIs these apps relied on.…
[ad_1] Coinbase wants to be Facebook Connect for crypto. The blockchain giant plans to develop ‘Login with Coinbase’ or a similar identity platform for decentralized app developers to make it much easier for users to sign up and connect their crypto wallets. To fuel that platform, today Coinbase announced it has acquired Distributed Systems, a…
[ad_1] If you’ve made any payments with a chip card, you’ve probably had awkward moments — those long seconds after you’ve inserted the card and everyone behind you is (literally or metaphorically) tapping their foot, waiting for the card to be processed. Well, Square has been working on this problem for a while now. Last…
[ad_1] MoviePass is about to roll out its new subscription plan, which will keep prices at $9.95 while imposing a new limit of three movies per month. But it seems that the transition hasn’t been going entirely smoothly. The Verge reports that several users have complained about previously canceling their plans, only to receive emails…
[ad_1] HQ Trivia’s app store ranking has continued to sink the past three months, but it’s hoping a new version on your television could revitalize growth. HQ today launched an Apple TV app that lets users play the twice-daily live quiz game alongside iOS Android players. But that might not be enough to get HQ’s…
[ad_1] A group of Tinder founders and executives has filed a lawsuit against parent company Match Group and its controlling shareholder IAC. The plaintiffs in the suit include Tinder co-founders Sean Rad, Justin Mateen and Jonathan Badeen — Badeen still works at Tinder, as do plaintiffs James Kim (the company’s vice president of finance) and…
[ad_1] Zombie-like passive comsumption of static video is both unhealthy for viewers and undifferentiated for the tech giants that power it. That’s set Facebook on a mission to make video interactive, full of conversation with broadcasters and fellow viewers. It’s racing against Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, and Snapchat to become where people watch together and don’t…
[ad_1] There are no secrets in consumer electronics anymore. Sometimes it’s the fault of flubs and flaws and leakers. Sometimes it’s by design. In the case of the Galaxy Note 9, it’s a little bit of both. The Galaxy S9 wasn’t the blockbuster Samsung’s shareholders were expecting, so the company understandably primed the pump through…
[ad_1] Zain Jaffer may be gearing up for a fight to take back control of Vungle, the mobile ad company he founded. Jaffer was removed from his role as CEO last fall following his arrest on charges of assault with a deadly weapon and performing a lewd act on a child. However, a San Mateo…
[ad_1] Facebook is invading the blockchain, but how? Back in May Facebook formed a cryptocurrency team to explore the possibilities, and today it removed a roadblock to revealing its secret plans. Former head of Messenger David Marcus who leads the Facebook Crypto team today announced he was stepping down from the board of Coinbase, the biggest…
[ad_1] One of the early backers of Musical.ly, the short video app that was acquired for $1 billion, is making a major bet that internet radio is one of the next big trends in media. Goodwater Capital, one of a number of backers that won big when ByteDance acquired Musical.ly last year, has joined forces…
[ad_1] Back when Dennis Woodside joined Dropbox as its chief operating officer more than four years ago, the company was trying to justify the $10 billion valuation it had hit in its rapid rise as a Web 2.0 darling. Now, Dropbox is a public company with a nearly $14 billion valuation, and it once again…
[ad_1] Samsung introduced a wide range of gadgets and upgrades today at its Unpacked event in Brooklyn. The overarching theme of the event centered on increased productivity throughout its connected ecosystem with performance improvements across the board. Here are seven takeaways from Samsung Unpacked: 1. Note 9 rumors are confirmed Samsung’s latest phablet was introduced…
[ad_1] Samsung didn’t just uneil new devices like the Galaxy Home, the Galaxy Watch and of course the new Galaxy Note 9 at its Unpacked event this morning — it also announced a partnership with Spotify. The goal is to create a seamless cross-device listening experience on Samsung devices, including the ones announced today. As…
[ad_1] Google has launched a new video-based Q&A app called Cameos on the App Store, which allows people to answer questions about themselves, then share those answers directly on Google. The app appears to be aimed at celebrities and other public figures, who are often the subject of people’s Google searches. With the Cameos app,…
[ad_1] The New York City Council has approved legislation that will halt the issuing of new licenses for ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft. The stated goal of the policy is to give the city time to study the industry’s impact. During that time, ride-hailing companies would only be able to add new vehicles if…
[ad_1] Facebook is diving deeper into in-house game development with the launch of its own version of Snapchat’s multiplayer augmented reality video chat games. Today, Facebook Messenger globally launches its first two AR video chat games that you can play with up to six people. “Don’t Smile” is like a staring contest that detects if…
[ad_1] The Stories War has officially killed Snapchat’s growth. In Q2 2018 earnings today, Snapchat’s daily user count shrank 1.5 pecent percent to 188 million this quarter, down from 191 million and positive 2.9 percent user growth last quarter. Snapchat did beat earnings expectations with $262.3 million in revenue and a loss of $0.14 while…
[ad_1] Palm’s smartphone return appears to still be on track for 2018. Last year, an executive at TCL confirmed that the dearly departed mobile brand would be making a comeback as part of the smartphone conglomerate’s portfolio, and with a little under five months left in the year, the ‘PVG100′ has hit the FCC and…
[ad_1] Maybe a year and a half after Russian interference was believed to have a key impact on the election of a U.S. president isn’t the best time to be floating new voting technologies. Not if you’re looking to avoid some major skepticism, at least. But West Virginia is going ahead with plans to allow…
[ad_1] As popular as Pokemon GO is, it has always been missing one major feature: pitting your Pokemon directly against another trainer’s. Strange, since that was the entire basis of the franchise to begin with! But the mobile game will at last get this much-requested feature by the end of the year, the company told…
[ad_1] The nickname for Android 9 is “Pie.” It’s not the most inspired of Android names, but it’ll do. What really matters at the end of the day are the new features in Pie — and there are plenty of those. If you are a Pixel owner, you’ll be happy to hear that Pie will…
[ad_1] If you have an old Kindle e-reader lying about then you’d best dig it up. This cool hack can turn your dead e-reader into a living clock that scours hundreds of books for exact times and displays the current time in a quote. It updates once a minute. The project, available on Instrucables, requires…
[ad_1] Backlash swelled this morning after Facebook’s aspirations in financial services were blown out of proportion by a Wall Street Journal report that neglected how the social network already works with banks. Facebook spokesperson Elisabeth Diana tells TechCrunch it’s not asking for credit card transaction data from banks and it’s not interested in building a…
[ad_1] Let’s say, hypothetically, that you make a mobile operating system, and somewhere along the line, you decided whimsically to name major updates after alphabetical dessert foods. What a fun idea! Sure, some letters will prove harder than others. “K” and “O” are admittedly tough, but that’s nothing that little bit of clever cross-branding can’t…
[ad_1] Most of the data around web browser market share puts Google Chrome or Safari at the top – with their percentage of the market varying by platform and region. But new research from analytics provider Mixpanel finds that many sources are overlooking a major contributor of mobile web browser events here in the U.S.:…
[ad_1] The New York Times announced on Friday how it’s adding its own take on Facebook-style News Feed to its mobile app. Yes, literally a news feed. The publication says it will now allow its iOS app users to customize their reading experience through a new feature called “Your Feed,” which consists only of those…
[ad_1] Some companies keep products a closely guarded secret, like they were nuclear codes or ingredients to a popular cola. Others seem less concerned about the whole thing, as long as it keeps people talking. Based on all we’ve seen from the Galaxy Note 9 to date, it seems that Samsung falls firmly into the…
[ad_1] For being the richest company ever with $243 billion in cash, Apple sure cuts corners in the stingiest ways. The hardware giant became the first trillion-dollar company week. Yet it’s tough to reconcile Apple earning $11 billion in profit per quarter with it still screwing us over on cords and keyboards. The “it just…
[ad_1] Portal founder Jonathan Swerdlin is just the latest media pundit to point to advertising as the root cause of the industry’s problems. But he’s not content to diagnose the illness — he thinks he’s created a cure. “Digital media has become toxic, in part, because of advertising,” Swerdlin said. “The unmet and unarticulated need…
[ad_1] How should you feel to know your employer is far, far richer than Croesus? As Apple CEO Tim Cook tells it — in a memo to staff, obtained by BuzzFeed News, re: yesterday’s news that the computer company Steve Jobs founded back in 1976 is now worth more than $1,000,000,000,000 — you should feel…
[ad_1] The official launch promo video for Samsung’s next flagship smartphone in the long-running Galaxy Note line — the Note 9 — appears to have leaked, with links to the video now cropping up on YouTube. And via Twitter… The forthcoming phablet has been pretty comprehensively leaked already. And clearly hasn’t had a radical (cosmetic nor…
[ad_1] Say what you will about the success or general usefulness of the Moto Mod line — Motorola keeps plugging away. The company currently offers 17 Mods with an 18th on the way, bringing one of the most interesting case uses yet. Along with the new Moto Z3 handset, Motorola unveiled a Mod that will…
[ad_1] A look back at the past decade of consumer technology use in the UK has shone a light on changing gadget habits, underlining how Brits have gone from being smartphone dabblers back in 2008 when a top-of-the-range smartphone cost ~£500 to true addicts in today’s £1k+ premium smartphone era. The report also highlights what…
[ad_1] “I think the mistake everyone made was to think that Stories was a photography product” says Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom. “If you look at all these interactivity features we’ve added, we’ve really made Stories something else. We’ve really innovated and made it our own.” His version of the ephemeral slideshow format turns two years…
[ad_1] It’s passive zombie feed scrolling, not active communication with friends that hurts our health, according to studies Facebook has been pointing to for the last seven months. Yet it’s treating all our social networking the same with today’s launch of its digital wellbeing screentime management dashboards for Facebook and Instagram in the US before…
[ad_1] Apple is inching closer and closer to becoming a $1 trillion company today after posting third quarter results that beat out what analysts were expecting and bumping the stock another few percentage points — which, by Apple standards, is tens of billions of dollars. The company’s stock is up around 2.5% this afternoon after…
[ad_1] A Dixons Carphone data breach that was disclosed earlier this summer was worse than initially reported. The company is now saying that personal data of 10 million customers could also have been accessed when its systems were hacked. The European electronics and telecoms retailer believes its systems were accessed by unknown and unauthorized person/s in 2017,…
[ad_1] A dark theme option for YouTube users on Android is in the early stages of rolling out to end users, Google confirmed to TechCrunch, following a number of reports and sightings of the dark mode showing up for users in the app’s settings. The feature has taken a bit longer to launch than expected…
[ad_1] Fabric, a personal journaling app that emerged from Y Combinator’s 2016 batch of startups, is relaunching itself as a Facebook alternative. The app is giving itself a makeover in the wake of Facebook’s closure of the Moves location tracker, by offering its own tool to record your activities, photos, memories and other moments shared…
[ad_1] Several dummy units of future iPhone models have leaked over the weekend. It gives a good idea of what you should expect to see in September when Apple introduces the next iPhone. Most likely, the iPhones on these photos aren’t actual iPhones. They are just dummy units. Every year, a few manufacturers create objects…
[ad_1] Prepare for the invasion of the unskippables. If the Stories social media slideshow format is the future of mobile TV, it’s going to end up with commercials. Users won’t love them. And done wrong they could pester people away from spending so much time watching what friends do day-to-day. But there’s no way Facebook…
[ad_1] More bad news for subscription movie ticket service MoviePass, which acknowledged yesterday that there was an unidentified issue preventing people from using their MoviePass credit cards to get tickets. A regulatory filing from parent company Helios & Matheson offers more insight about what happened. The filing (first spotted by Business Insider) announces a “demand…
[ad_1] Maisie Williams, who’s best-known for playing Arya Stark on Game of Thrones, announced earlier this year that she’s founding a startup called Daisie. With the app set to launch on August 1, Williams and her co-founder Dom Santry came by the TechCrunch New York office to discuss her plans for the company. Daisie will…
[ad_1] Opera is now a public company. The Norway-based company priced its initial public offering at $12 a share — the company initially expected to price its share in the $10 to $12 price range. Trading opened at $14.34 per share, up 19.5 percent. The company raised over $115 million with this IPO. Opera Ltd.…
[ad_1] Last May, Google launched a new events feature designed to help web searchers more easily find things to do nearby, while also challenging Facebook’s dominance in the local events space. Today, Google is updating event search with personalized event suggestions, and well as a new design that puts more event information directly in the…
[ad_1] IGTV didn’t get the benefit of being splayed out atop Instagram like Stories did. Instead, the long-form video hub is a bit more distant, located in a standalone app as well as behind a static orange button on the main app’s homescreen. That means users can go right on tapping and scrolling through Instagram without…
[ad_1] Snapchat hopes to boost ad spend by connecting businesses with its top independent creators, but it won’t take a cut of deals it helps arrange. Today Snap Inc launches its “Snapchat Storytellers” pilot program that will introduce brands to five of the app’s most popular content makers including Mplatco, Cyrene Q, and Shonduras. They’ll…
[ad_1] Based on the many, many Galaxy Note 9 leaks we’ve seen in the past few weeks and months, it seems like a pretty safe bet that the upcoming phablet won’t look all that different from its predecessors. The phablet does, however, appear to have a lot going under the hood. The most recent piece…
[ad_1] Korean electronics giant LG is soaring to new heights, but its mobile division continues to lag well behind the rest of the company and the signs aren’t promising. LG’s latest financials released today recorded another quarter of success with operating profit jumping 16 percent year-on-year to hit KRW 771 billion ($715.1 million) as overall sales…
[ad_1] In December, Apple introduced a new pay-per-install ad product called Search Ads Basic aimed at smaller developers, to complement the existing Search Ads product, which then became known as Search Ads Advanced. Today, the company is expanding Search Ads to more countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and Spain, bringing the total…
[ad_1] Facebook’s share price fell over 20 percent in after-hours trading today after the company announced its slowest-ever user growth rate and a scary warning that its revenue growth would rapidly decelerate. Before today’s brutal Q2 earnings, Facebook’s share price closed today at $217.50 – a record high — but fell to around $172 after…
[ad_1] Facebook today for the first time announced that in June, 2.5 billion people used at least one of its apps: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger. That’s a helpful number because it counts real people, rather than accounts, since people can have multiple accounts on a single app. 2.5 billion people compares to 2.23 billion monthly…
[ad_1] Facebook has hit a wall. The social network succumbed to the public backlash over its handling of fake news, privacy, and digital wellbeing to miss some of Wall Street’s estimates, showing mixed results in its Q2 2018 earnings. GDPR, Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before congress, and more scandals appear to have contributed to Facebook’s weak…
[ad_1] Good news for people who like near-final previews of mobile operating systems. Android just dropped Beta 4 for Android P, marking the last preview milestone before the full version launches. That means the still unnamed OS is just around the corner — promised to arrive at some point later this summer. As the all…
[ad_1] Outvote, a new Y Combinator-backed startup, wants to make grassroots-style campaigning easier and more personal, with the launch of an app that allows people to text their friends with reminders to vote. The idea is to take advantage of people’s willingness to use social sharing to communicate about political issues, while also leveraging the…
[ad_1] Google today said it will be rolling out an enterprise version of its Google Voice service for G Suite users, potentially tapping a new demand source for Google that could help attract a whole host of new users. Google voice has been a long-enjoyed service for everyday consumers, and offers a lot of benefits…
[ad_1] Google is running its playbook again of releasing big new products (or redesigns) to its average users and then moving what works over to its enterprise services, G Suite, today by making the Gmail redesign generally available to G Suite customers. Gmail’s redesign launched for consumers in April earlier this year, including new features…
[ad_1] Grubhub announced this morning that it’s agreed to acquire LevelUp for $390 million cash. Founder and CEO Matt Maloney told me that while previous Grubhub acquisitions like Eat24 were designed to give the company’s delivery business more scale, “This is kind of a different acquisition. It’s a product and strategic positioning acquisition.” LevelUp is…
[ad_1] A group of computer vision researchers from ETH Zurich want to do their bit to enhance AI development on smartphones. To wit: They’ve created a benchmark system for assessing the performance of several major neural network architectures used for common AI tasks. They’re hoping it will be useful to other AI researchers but also…
[ad_1] PicsArt, the company behind the photo-editing app of the same name, has hired Tammy Nam as its first chief operating officer. Nam was most recently the CEO of Viki, the Rakuten-acquired video streaming service, and before that served as a marketing executive at Viki, Scribd and Slide. PicsArt said Nam will report to founder…
[ad_1] Knock Knock, a startup building games for platforms like Facebook Messenger and WeChat, is announcing that it has raised $2 million in seed funding. The goal isn’t to build interactive chat fiction, but rather fully fledged mobile games that are accessed from messaging apps, while also taking advantages of the opportunities offered by incorporating…
[ad_1] Xiaomi gave Google’s well-intentioned but somewhat-stalled Android One project a major boost last year when it unveiled its first device under the program, Mi A1. That’s now joined by not one but two sequel devices, after the Chinese phone maker unveiled the Mi A2 and Mi A2 Lite at an event in Spain today.…
[ad_1] Musical.ly has begun redirecting users of its Live.ly app, which it decided to kill off last month, to a competing app called LiveMe. Existing Live.ly users are being pointed to LiveMe through an in-app message, it says. While it’s a fairly common industry practice for companies to direct users to similar apps or services…
[ad_1] Sonos today took the next step in its initial public offering price, setting a range for the shares it intends to sell that will help calibrate the final amount of money – and valuation — that it will have when it begins its trading debut. This isn’t the final, final step in the IPO process…
[ad_1] Let’s be real — the latest batch of Samsung ads are more about the company’s perception of Apple than its own devices. But hey, that tact has worked for the company in the past, so who can blame ‘em? They do, however, offer at least one key bit of insight into the company’s on-going…
[ad_1] Startup founders don’t usually pitch their ideas by admitting that they’re fixing something “boring,” but it seems to work for RevenueCat‘s Jacob Eiting. In fact, Eiting alternately described his startup (which is part of the current class at accelerator Y Combinator) as handling “boring work” and solving a “boring problem.” RevenueCat helps developers manage…
[ad_1] Apple Business Chat, Apple’s new platform for allowing companies and brands to communicate with customers over iMessage, is expanding. In addition to Dish becoming the first TV provider to support Business Chat, Apple says it has also added four other brands, Aramak, Four Seasons, Harry & David, and American Express, in addition to five…
[ad_1] The UK government has set out a package of measures it’s hoping will futureproof domestic networks and boost international competitiveness by supporting a nationwide rollout of full fiber broadband and 5G mobile technology. The Future Telecoms Infrastructure Review, published today, follows the announcement of a market review last year as part of the government’s Industrial…
[ad_1] Snapcash ended up as a way to pay adult performers for private content over Snapchat, not just a way to split bills with friends. But Snapchat will abandon the peer-to-peer payment space on August 30th. Code buried in Snapchat’s Android app includes a “Snapcash deprecation message” that displays “Snapcash will no longer be available…
[ad_1] Over the course of a weekend we got a glimpse at some of the coming seasons and movies for various sci-fi, superhero, and other types of highly-anticipated fan-favorite franchises from the San Diego Comic-Con this year. Here’s a quick selection of some of the ones shown over the weekend: [ad_2] Source link
[ad_1] Meet Wilson, a new iPhone app that plans to change the way you discover and listen to podcasts. The company describes the app as a podcast magazine. It has the same vibe as Longreads, the curated selection of longform articles. With its minimalistic design and opinionated typography, Wilson looks like no other podcasting app.…
[ad_1] The second quarter of 2018 was another record-breaker for mobile app downloads and revenue. According to a new report this week from App Annie, there were over 28.4 billion app downloads worldwide across both iOS and Google Play in the quarter, up 15 percent year-over-year. That number is even more remarkable because it doesn’t…
[ad_1] Dish today announced it’s becoming the first TV provider to offer customer support over Apple’s Business Chat. Launched earlier this year, Business Chat allows companies to communicate with their customers over iMessage in order to answer questions, provide customer service, or even enable purchases. In Dish’s case, the TV provider says its customers can…
[ad_1] The Data Transfer Project is a new team-up between tech giants to let you move your content, contacts, and more between apps. Founded by Facebook, Google, Twitter, an Microsoft, the DTP today revealed its plans for an open source data portability platform any online service can join. While many companies already let you download…
[ad_1] In a bid to cut down on the spread of false information and spam, WhatsApp recently added labels that indicate when a message has been forwarded. Now the company is sharpening that strategy by imposing limits on how many groups a message can be sent on to. Originally, users could forward messages on to…
[ad_1] India has quickly become ground zero for the smartphone wars. Last year, the country surpassed the U.S. to become the world’s No. 1 smartphone market, and manufacturers are falling over themselves to plant a flag. Samsung and Xiaomi have been the two biggest winners in recent quarters, battling it out for the top spot.…
[ad_1] In other news bears shit in the woods. In today’s second day Trump news: President ‘The Donald’ has seized, belatedly, on the European Commission’s announcement yesterday that it had found Google guilty of three types of illegal antitrust behavior with its Android OS since 2011 and was fining the company $5 billion; a record-breaking penalty…
[ad_1] On the heels of Google getting served a $5 billion fine by the EU over monopolistic practices related to its Android operating system, the European Commission today resurfaced another ongoing case in the world of large U.S. tech companies. The EC said that it has added to its investigation into Qualcomm and its predatory…
[ad_1] Anyone who follows George Takei on Twitter can tell you that Star Trek‘s original Sulu is not a fan of President Donald Trump. But he’s found a new way to express that criticism — not just in tweets, interviews and op-eds, but also in an augmented reality app called House of Cats. The app…
[ad_1] The Galaxy Note 9 won’t be announced until August. You wouldn’t know it by reading the internet, however. Every nook and cranny of the upcoming phablet has been bared for the world, in a series of leaks over the past several weeks. Sure, not all of them will pan out, but plenty have come…
[ad_1] Apple just released the third version of the iOS 12 beta as part of the public beta program. It means that everyone can now install a development build of iOS 12, the next major version of the operating system for iPhone and iPad. Don’t forget this is still a beta version. Things will crash,…
[ad_1] Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Samsung’s working on phone with a folding screen. And it’s arriving soonish. You’d be entirely forgiven if you rolled your eyes at that one, or at the very least took the whole thing with a sufficiently massive grain of salt. This particular rumor has been floating…
[ad_1] Google has been fined a record breaking €4.34 billion (~$5BN) by European antitrust regulators for abusing the dominance of its Android mobile operating system. Competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager has tweeted to confirm the penalty ahead of a press conference about to take place. Stay tuned for more details as we get them. Fine of…
[ad_1] A decision in a long running EU antitrust probe of Google’s Android OS is due to land shortly. European Commission officials are trailing a press conference with competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager — to announce an “antitrust decision” at 1pm CET, with a link to watch the event streamed live. Bloomberg is reporting the EU’s…
[ad_1] Hackers can steal your phone number by reassigning it to a different SIM card, use it to reset your passwords, steal your Instagram and other accounts, and sell them for Bitcoin. As detailed in a harrowing Motherboard article today, Instagram accounts are especially vulnerable because the app only offers two-factor authentication through SMS that…
[ad_1] With the upcoming release of iOS 12, Apple is introducing a new app called Shortcuts that will allow users to build custom voice commands for Siri that can be used to kick off a variety of actions in apps. While some apps will directly prompt users to add a Shortcut to Siri, the new…
[ad_1] Let’s be real: you are most certainly never going to be as good as Steve Nash, Chris Paul, James Harden — or really any professional NBA player. But it probably won’t stop you from trying to practice or model your game around your favorite players, and spend hours upon hours figuring out how to get…
[ad_1] Netflix didn’t add as many subscribers as expected by a bunch of people on Wall Street who, on a quarterly basis, govern whether or not it’ll be more valuable than Comcast — and that is probably a bad thing, as it’s one of the primary indicators of its future potential for said finance folk. While…
[ad_1] Apple’s App Store continues to outpace Google Play on revenue. In the first half of the year, the App Store generated nearly double the revenue of Google Play on half the downloads, according to a new report from Sensor Tower out today. In terms of dollars and cents, that’s $22.6 billion in worldwide gross…
[ad_1] In honor of World Emoji Day (yes, that’s a thing), Apple is previewing some of its upcoming emoji. Later this year, Apple’s emoji set will feature people with a variety of hairstyles and colors, including curly hair, red hair and white hair. What you’re about to see are simply Apple’s take on emoji that…
[ad_1] Need to resize a video for IGTV? Add subtitles for Twitter? Throw in sound effects for YouTube? Or collage it with other clips for the Instagram feed? Kapwing lets you do all that and more for free from a mobile browser or website. This scrappy new startup is building the vertical video era’s creative…
[ad_1] Uber is aiming to perfect the art of the pick-up with three features it says minimize cancellations. Guaranteed pickup windows boost confidence that you’ll make your flight, and give you a credit of up to $10 if your scheduled ride is late. Pre-written messages let drivers and riders let each other know they’ll “Be…
[ad_1] The company that brought you the best glass for your mobile device now gives you DSLR-like controls with their Pro Camera app. Features include full manual adjustment over ISO, shutter speed, white balance, image format and more. It should be noted that if you don’t have a shiny new device you won’t be able…
[ad_1] Adobe currently has three dozens apps in the App Store. But one app is still missing. According to a report from Bloomberg, the company could be working on a full-fledged version of Photoshop for the iPad. And it makes sense for a ton of reasons. First, it’s clear that the iPad has become powerful…
[ad_1] The Opera Android browser will soon be able to hold your cryptocurrencies. The system, now in beta, lets you store crypto and ERC20 tokens in your browser, send and receive crypto on the fly, and secures your wallet with your phone’s biometric security or passcode. You can sign up to try the beta here.…
[ad_1] Pinterest is trying to further tap its popularity as a place to plan events, this time adding ways for users to collaborate across boards that are baked directly into the app. Group boards will have their own designated feed, where users will be able to communicate with others collaborating on that board and also…
[ad_1] HTC isn’t gone just yet. Granted, it’s closer than it’s ever been before, with a headcount of fewer than 5,000 employees worldwide — that’s down from 19,000 in 2013. But in spite of those “market competition, product mix, pricing, and recognized inventory write-downs,” the company’s still trucking on. And while its claim to being “the leading…
[ad_1] iOS users have been reporting problems with excessive battery drain after updating to iOS 11.4. On Sunday, 9to5Mac reported on a raft of posts on Apple forums complaining about excessive battery drain since updating. ZDNet also flagged complaints around the issue early last month. The update to Apple’s mobile operating system was released at the…
[ad_1] Mobile games publisher and marketer Tilting Point is dramatically increasing its commitment to its user acquisition fund. The company announced a $12 million fund at the end of 2016, which it said would help developers grow their games while remaining independent. Today it revealed that it’s committing $132 million in annual spending to the fund.…
[ad_1] Slack’s search functions are getting another little quality-of-life update today with the introduction of filters, which aims to make search a little more granular to find the right answers. The company also says searches are going to be more personalized. All of this is an attempt to get to the right files or conversations…
[ad_1] Yesterday, we learned that 18-month-old, Bay Area-based electric scooter rental company Lime is joining forces with the ride-hailing giant Uber, which is both investing in the company as part of a $335 million round and planning to promote Lime in its mobile app. According to Bloomberg, Uber also plans to plaster its logo on…
[ad_1] While massive restaurant chains might have resources to build out their own management systems or integrate with larger point-of-sale providers, Toast — a provider of tools for restaurants to manage their business — is raising a big round of funding to go after everyone else. Now Toast is a business valued at $1.4 billion…
[ad_1] Google is making several updates to Google Pay, its recently-rebranded service for all its different payments tools. Most of these updates were announced earlier this year, but now, Google says they’re actually going live in the app. One of the additions is peer-to-peer payments. You could already pay or request money from a friend through Google…
[ad_1] Before Snapchat made social media about just today, Facebook made it about forever. The 2011 “Timeline” redesign of the profile and keyword search unlocked your past, encouraging you to curate colorful posts about your life’s top moments. That was actually an inspiration for Snapchat, as its CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in its IPO announcement…
[ad_1] Codenamed “Eagle”, Snapchat is building a visual product search feature that deliver users to Amazon’s listings. Buried inside the code of Snapchat’s Android app is an unreleased “Visual Search” feature where you “Press and hold to identify an object, song, barcode, and more! This works by sending data to Amazon, Shazam, and other partners.”…
[ad_1] Apple has released a handful of new ads promoting the iPad’s portability and convenience over both laptops and traditional paper solutions. The 15-second ads focus on how the iPad can make even the most tedious things — travel, notes, paperwork, and ‘stuff’ — just a bit easier. Three out of the four spots show…
[ad_1] This week Samsung is opening what it’s calling the world’s largest mobile phone factory in the the world’s second largest smartphone market. Expansion, which will be fully complete in 2020, is expected to nearly double Noida (New Okhla Industrial Development Authority), India’s current phone producing capabilities from 68- to 120 million phones per year.…
[ad_1] Samsung has put out earnings guidance for its Q2 which indicate quarterly growth at its slowest for more than a year — as a lack of new ideas to sell high end smartphones drags on the company’s bottom line. The electronics maker is reporting estimated profit of 14.8 trillion Korean won (USD$13.2BN) on revenue of 58 trillion Korean…
[ad_1] A number of top executives are out at ZTE as the phone maker works to fulfill the requirements of U.S.-imposed restrictions. Among the big changes up top is new CEO Xu Ziyang, who formerly headed up the company’s operations in Germany. A new CFO, CTO and head of HR have been named, as well,…
[ad_1] Facebook is becoming a marketplace for enterprise apps that help Group admins manage their communities. To protect itself and its users in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook locked down the Groups API for building apps for Groups. These apps had to go through a human-reviewed approval process, and lost access to…
[ad_1] HTC is gone. The company of today is not the company that helped start the smartphone revolution. That’s a shame, too. In the early years of the smartphone, HTC released some of the best devices available. Here’s a look back at ten of the company’s most iconic devices. [ad_2] Source link
[ad_1] Light, the company behind the wild L16 camera, is building a smartphone equipped with multiple cameras. According to The Washington Post, the company is prototyping a smartphone with five to nine cameras that’s capable of capturing a 64 megapixel shot. The entire package is not much thicker than an iPhone X, the Post reports. The…
[ad_1] All charges against former Vungle CEO Zain Jaffer, including a sexual abuse of a child, have been dropped. According to a statement from Jaffer’s representatives, San Mateo County Judge Stephanie Garratt dismissed the charges today. Jaffer was arrested last October and charged with several serious offenses, including a lewd act on one of his…
[ad_1] Norway-based company Opera Ltd has filed for an initial public offering in the U.S. According to its F-1 document, the company plans to raise up to $115 million. In 2017, Opera generated $128.9 million in operating revenue, which led to a net income of $6.1 million. While many people are already familiar with the…
[ad_1] After years of teasing, Original Stitch has officially launched their Bodygram service and will be rolling it out this summer. The system can scan your body based on front and side photos and will create custom shirts with your own precise measurements. “Bodygram gives you full body measurements as accurate as taken by professional…
[ad_1] Instagram is turning the Time Well Spent philosophy into features to help users avoid endless scrolling and distraction by notifications. Today, Instagram is rolling out its “You’re All Caught – You’ve seen all new posts from the past 2 days” warning in the feed which TechCrunch broke the news about in May. Past that…
[ad_1] Right now, the cable that comes with a new iPhone does not plug into a new MacBook Pro without a dongle. #donglelife is for real. If this leak is correct, though, that wrong might soon be righted. Photos have surfaced showing what is an engineering prototype of an Apple 18 W USB-C charger, which…
[ad_1] Gather around, campers, and hear a tale as old as time. Remember the HTC Dream? The Evo 4G? The Google Nexus One? What about the Touch Diamond? All amazing devices. The HTC of 2018 is not the HTC that made these industry-leading devices. That company is gone. It seems HTC is getting ready to…
[ad_1] Benchmark partner Mitch Lasky, who has served on Snap’s board of directors since December 2012, is not expected to stand for re-election to Snap’s board of directors and will thus be stepping down, according to a report by The Information. Early investors stepping down from the board of directors — or at least not seeking…
[ad_1] AT&T’s newly announced Watch TV, a low-cost live TV streaming service announced in the wake of the AT&T / Time Warner merger, is now up and running. The company already has one over-the-top streaming service with DirecTV Now, but this one is cheaper, has some restrictions, and doesn’t include local channels or sports to…
[ad_1] I’m not sure if you’re aware, but the launch of Apple Maps went poorly. After a rough first impression, an apology from the CEO, several years of patching holes with data partnerships and some glimmers of light with long-awaited transit directions and improvements in business, parking and place data, Apple Maps is still not where…
[ad_1] Cashify, a company that buys and sells used smartphones, is the latest India startup to raise capital from Chinese investors after it announced a $12 million Series C round. Chinese funds CDH Investments and Morningside led the round which included participation from Aihuishou, a China-based startup that sells used electronics in a similar way to Cashify…
[ad_1] The right music can make a boring photo or video epic, so Instagram is equipping users with a way to add popular songs to their Stories. TechCrunch had the scoop on the music feature’s prototype in early May, and now it’s launching to iOS and Android users in 51 countries including the U.S. Thanks…
[ad_1] And there we have it: Bird, one of the emerging massively hyped Scooter startups, has roped in its next pile of funding by picking up another $300 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital. The company announced the long-anticipated round this morning, with Sequoia’s Roelof Botha joining the company’s board of directors. This…
[ad_1] According to a report from The Information, Apple could choose to bundle all its media offerings into a single subscription. While Apple’s main media subscription product is currently Apple Music, it’s no secret that the company is investing in other areas. In particular, Apple has bought the distribution rights of many TV shows. But…
[ad_1] What does brand loyalty even mean anymore? App downloads, points, stars, and other complex reward systems have not just spawned their own media empires trying to decipher them, they have failed at their most basic objective: building a stronger bond between a brand and its consumers. Bumped wants to reinvent the loyalty space by…
[ad_1] Instagram’s future growth depends on the developing world, so it’s built a version of its app just for them. “Instagram Lite” for Android appeared today in the Google Play App Store without any announcement from the company. “The Instagram Lite app is small, allowing you to save space on your phone and download it quickly”…
[ad_1] Google is turning startup investor to further its goal of putting Google services like search, maps, and its voice assistant front and center for the next billion internet users in emerging markets. It has invested $22 million into KaiOS, the company that has built an eponymous operating system for feature phones that packs a…
[ad_1] Ready to scrounge for Likes on your Stories too? Facebook Stories can feel like a ghost town even though it has 150 million daily users. So Facebook is trying to get more people who view your ephemeral content on its Snapchat clone to speak up so you keep posting. Today Facebook is bringing its Like,…
[ad_1] Those Galaxy Note 9 rumors have been coming fast and furious in recent weeks, and now we know why. Samsung just sent out invites for its next big event in New York City, and its beloved phablet seems all but guaranteed to show up. The timeframe certainly lines up. The pen-enabled device was first…
[ad_1] Don’t want to know the ending to a World Cup game or Avengers movie until you’ve watched it, or just need to quiet an exhausting political topic like “Trump”? Facebook is now testing the option to “snooze” specific keywords so you won’t see them for 30 days in News Feed or Groups. The feature…
[ad_1] At its I/O developer conference last month, Google previewed a major update to Google Maps that promised to bring personalized restaurant recommendations and more to the company’s mapping tool. Today, many of these new features started rolling out to Google Maps users. The core Google Maps experience for getting directions hasn’t changed, of course,…
[ad_1] Instagram’s latest assault on Snapchat, FaceTime, and Houseparty launches today. TechCrunch scooped back in March that Instagram would launch video calling, and the feature was officially announced in at F8 in May. Now it’s actually rolling out to everyone on iOS and Android, allowing up to four friends to group video call together through…
[ad_1] On the busiest nights, a restaurant can’t afford to even lose a dishwasher to getting sick or not being around — or simply ghosting on the company — and end up frustrating the whole experience for the rest of the staff and restaurant goers. It’s a problem that Will Pacio was acutely familiar with during…
[ad_1] As companies get bigger and bigger, all the critical information about a company — even its mission and culture statements — can get lost in a massive pile of Google Docs or files strewn across dozens of collaboration tools, making it nearly impossible to find. That’s where the team behind EveryTeam hopes to step…
[ad_1] This is your opportunity to get a glimpse of the future of iOS. Apple just released the first public beta of iOS 12, the next major version of the operating system for iPhone and iPad. Unlike developer betas, everyone can download it without a $99 developer account. But don’t forget, it’s a beta. The…
[ad_1] CBS today announced an expanded agreement with the NFL which will allow it to stream NFL ON CBS games through its over-the-top service, CBS All Access, through 2022. The deal includes, for the first time, rights to stream the games on mobile devices. The changes will begin this season, and will additionally include the…
[ad_1] An app that has the needs of modern-day parents in mind, Winnie, has now raised $4 million in additional seed funding in a round led by Reach Capital. Other investors in the new round include Rethink Impact, Homebrew, Ludlow Ventures, Afore Capital, and BBG Ventures, among others. With the new funds, Winnie has raised $6.5 million…
[ad_1] The infrastructure that underpins our lives is not something we ever want to think about. Nothing good has come from suddenly needing to wonder “where does my water come from?” or “how does electricity connect into my home?” That pondering gets even more intense when we talk about cellular infrastructure, where a single dropped…
[ad_1] Set the “days without a Facebook privacy problem” counter to zero. This week, an alarmed developer contacted TechCrunch, informing us that their Facebook App Analytics weekly summary email had been delivered to someone outside their company. It contains sensitive business information, including weekly average users, page views and new users. Forty-three hours after we…
[ad_1] Urban transportation app Citymapper quietly rolled out an app update that lets you find many alternative mobility services in the app. You can now find the nearest dockless bike or electric scooter around you (not the Bird and Lime kind, the motorcycle kind). The integrations are already live in many cities. The company didn’t…
[ad_1] Are you ready for some scary numbers? After months of Mark Zuckerberg talking about how “Protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profits”, Facebook is preparing to turn that commitment into a Time Well Spent product. Buried in Facebook’s Android app is an unreleased “Your Time On Facebook” feature. It shows the…
[ad_1] Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week TechCrunch’s Silicon Valley Editor Connie Loizos and I jammed out on a couple topics as Alex Wilhelm was out managing his fake stock game spreadsheets or something. (The jury is out on whether this was…
[ad_1] Facebook’s been criticized for tearing America apart, but now it will try to help us forge bonds with our neighbors to the south. Facebook Messenger will now offer optional auto-translation of English to Spanish and vice-versa for all users in the United States and Mexico. It’s a timely launch given the family separation troubles…
[ad_1] AT&T this morning announced the launch of a second TV streaming service, called WatchTV, days after its merger with Time Warner. The lower-cost alternative to AT&T’s DirecTV Now will offer anyone the ability to join WatchTV for only $15 per month, but the service will also be bundled into AT&T wireless plans. This $15…
[ad_1] While French banks are just catching up to Apple Pay, French startup Lydia is adding support for Samsung Pay. If you have a recent Samsung phone, you can now add a virtual card to Samsung Pay and pay using your phone in your favorite stores. Lydia started as a peer-to-peer payment app. It works…
[ad_1] Instagram is ready to compete head-on with YouTube. Today at a flashy event in San Francisco, the company announced it will begin allowing users to upload videos up to one hour in length, up from the previous one-minute limit. And to house the new longer-form videos from content creators and the general public, Instagram…
[ad_1] Mobile app subscriptions are a big business, but consumers sometimes hesitate to sign up because pausing and cancelling existing subscriptions hasn’t been as easy as opting in. Google is now addressing those concerns with the official launch of its subscription center for Android users. The new feature centralizes all your Google Play subscriptions, and…
[ad_1] Instagram’s meteoric rise continues, dwarfing the stagnant growth rates of Snapchat and Facebook. Today Instagram announced that it has reached 1 billion monthly active users, after reaching 800 million in September 2017 with 500 million daily users. That massive audience could be a powerful draw for IGTV, the longer-form video hub its launching for…
[ad_1] Facebook is starting to let Group admins charge $4.99 to $29.99 per month for access to special sub-Groups full of exclusive posts. A hand-picked array of parenting, cooking and “organize my home” Groups will be the first to get the chance to spawn a subscription Group open to their members. During the test, Facebook won’t…
[ad_1] Recruiting is one of the latest industries to get a data science makeover through companies like Hired and Triplebyte, but the former hopes to turn it into a subscription business just like other enterprise software companies — and has raised a new pile of funding to do that. Hired looks to serve as a…
[ad_1] Just a few years ago, it might have been a bit of a challenge to convince investors that a mindfulness app would end up being a big business — but thanks to an increasing focus on mental health from both startups and larger companies, companies like Calm are now capturing the excitement of investors.…
[ad_1] TechCrunch has learned that the Instagram longer-form video hub that’s launching tomorrow is called IGTV and it will be part of the Explore tab, according to multiple sources. Instagram has spent the week meeting with online content creators to encourage them to prepare videos closer to 10-minute YouTube vlogs than the 1-minute maximum videos the…
[ad_1] Keepsafe, the company behind the private photo app of the same name, is expanding its product lineup today with the release of a mobile web browser. Co-founder and CEO Zouhair Belkoura argued that all of Keepsafe’s products (which also include a VPN app and a private phone number generator) are united not just by…
[ad_1] Rather than build its own HQ trivia competitor, Facebook is launching a gameshow platform. Today the company announced a new set of interactive live and on-demand video features that let creators add quizzes, polls, challenges and gamification so players can be eliminated from a game for a wrong answer. The features could help Facebook…
[ad_1] Facebook wants to help connect brands to creators so they can work out sponsored content and product placement deals, even if it won’t be taking a cut. Confirming our scoop from May, Facebook today launched its Brand Collabs Manager. It’s a search engine that brands can use to browse different web celebrities based on…
[ad_1] Verizon is cutting off access to its mobile customers’ real-time locations to two third-party data brokers “to prevent misuse of that information going forward.” The company announced the decision in a letter sent to Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who along with others helped reveal improper usage and poor security at these location brokers. It…
[ad_1] Lyft hasn’t acquired a bike-sharing startup or gotten a scooter permit yet, but it’s already preparing its app for them with a feature codenamed “last mile”. Code and screenshots dug out of Lyft’s Android app reveal a way to search a map for last mile vehicles, and scan a QR code or enter a…
[ad_1] Apple has been fined AUS$9M (~$6.6M) by a court in Australia following a legal challenge by a consumer rights group related to the company’s response after iOS updates bricked devices that had been repaired by third parties. The Australian Competitor and Consumer Commission (ACCC) invested a series of complaints relating to an error (‘error 53’)…
[ad_1] Pick a category, wager a few dollars, and double your money in 60 seconds if you’re smarter and faster than your opponent. Proveit offers a fresh take on trivia and game show apps by letting you win or lose cash on quick 10-question, multiple choice quizzes. Sick of waiting to battle a million people on…
[ad_1] There’s a great deal of activity in the fields of speech recognition and the “Internet of Things,” but one natural application of the two has gone relatively unpursued: helping the deaf and hard of hearing take part in everyday conversations. SpeakSee aims to do this (after crowdfunding, naturally) with a clever hardware design that…
[ad_1] Tel Aviv-based Photomyne, an A.I.-powered app that helps you bring your old photo prints online, has been benefitting from the subscription app boom to the tune of $5 million in Series A funding. Today, the app is used by a million people every month, and 250,000 people pay the $20 annual subscription for the expanded…
[ad_1] In November, Google introduced Datally, a data-saving app largely aimed at emerging markets where users often rely on prepaid SIM cards, and don’t have access to all-you-can-eat unlimited data plans. The app lets users granularly control which apps can use data, which resulted in a 30% savings on data usage during pilot testing and…
[ad_1] Are you Overgramming? Instagram is stepping up to help you manage overuse rather than leaving it to iOS and Android’s new screen time dashboards. Last month after TechCrunch first reported Instagram was prototyping a Usage Insights feature, the Facebook sub-company’s CEO Kevin System confirmed its forthcoming launch. Tweeting our article, Systrom wrote “It’s true…
[ad_1] PayPal-owned, peer-to-peer payments app Venmo is ending web support for its service, the company announced in an email to users. The changes, which are beginning to roll out now, will see the Venmo.com website phasing out support for making payments and charging users. In time, users will see even less functionality on the website,…
[ad_1] Gmail has recently introduced a brand new redesign. While you can disable or ignore most of the new features, Gmail has started resurfacing old unanswered emails with a suggestion that you should reply. And this is what it looks like: The orange text immediately grabs your attention. By bumping the email thread to the…
[ad_1] Despite some concerns over its adoption by scammers, new payment service Zelle is shaping up to overtake rival Venmo this year, according to a new forecast from eMarketer. The firm expects Zelle to grow more than 73 percent in 2018, to reach 27.4 million users in the U.S., ahead of Venmo’s 22.9 million. Square…
[ad_1] Today Snapchat finally gets a true developer platform, confirming TechCrunch’s scoop from last month about Snap Kit. This set of APIs lets other apps piggyback on Snap’s login for sign up, build Bitmoji avatars into their keyboards, display public Our Stories and Snap Map content, and generate branded stickers with referral links users can…
[ad_1] Fintech startup N26 is updating its N26 Metal product and launching it tomorrow. You might remember that the company first announced its premium card at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin in December 2017. Shortly after the conference, the card was available in early access for existing N26 Black customers. But the company had to go back…
[ad_1] Musical.ly is merging the functionality from its two-year old live streaming platform Live.ly into its main app, and has disabled Live.ly’s standalone app as part of the transition process. The Live.ly app will eventually be pulled from the App Store and Google Play, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. Instead of being able to go…
[ad_1] Facebook is hoping to avoid another privacy scandal by adding new accountability and transparency requirements for businesses that use its Custom Audiences too to target you with ads based on your email address or phone number. Starting July 2nd, advertisers will have to declare whether contact info uploaded for ad targeting was collected with…
[ad_1] BitWall, a Bitcoin-focused startup promising to help online publishers make money, has been acquired. Its new owner is Watch Out, the company behind an app that sends alerts about things like product and food recalls and weather-realted emergencies. It’s not the most obvious acquirer, but the companies say BitWall can help Watch Out improve…
[ad_1] Investors are placing another huge bet on a startup looking to reinvent a decades-old process into something that’s near instant, this time pouring $325 million into Opendoor — a company that wants to bring the complex operation of buying or selling a home down to something similarly as simple as hailing a Lyft. The…
[ad_1] Currently, when the Google Translate apps for iOS and Android has access to the internet, its translations are far superior to those it produces when it’s offline. That’s because the offline translations are phrase-based, meaning they use an older machine translation technique than the machine learning-powered systems in the cloud that the app has access…
[ad_1] More financing is coming in for Bird, this time potentially valuing the company at $2 billion, according to a new report by Axios. There’s not a ton to add here compared to the last round (which happened just weeks ago), as the same dynamics are probably in play here. While Uber was a bet…
[ad_1] Amino has raised a big Series C round of funding — $45 million from GV, Venrock, Union Square Ventures, Goodwater Capital and Time Warner Investments, with Hearst Ventures joining as a new investor. Co-founder and CEO Ben Anderson has described Amino as an way to help people who have “passionate niche interests” find others…
[ad_1] “The next hundreds of millions of riders for us are going to come from outside of the United States”, Uber’s head of rider experience Peter Deng tells me. The transportation giant already sees 75 million riders per month and 15 million rides per day. But to grow in the developing world, it had to…
[ad_1] Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook messages were retracted from the inboxes of some users, six sources told TechCrunch in April. Facebook quickly tried to normalize that breach of trust by claiming it would give everyone the ability to unsend messages in the coming months. We haven’t heard a word about it since, and Facebook told me…
[ad_1] Last week TechCrunch reported Instagram will launch a long-form video hub to compete with a tentative June 20th launch date. Now Instagram is asking reporters to RSVP for a June 20th “special event”, confirming our scoop’s date. The invitation simply reads “Instagram has some news to share, and we want you to be the…
[ad_1] A month after it filed for a much-anticipated Hong Kong IPO, Xiaomi has revealed a little more financial information after a monster 621-page document disclosed a $1.1 billion (seven billion RMB) loss for the first quarter of the year. The IPO, which could raise up to $10 billion value Xiaomi at high as $100…
[ad_1] “‘You Are Now Connected On Messenger’ Is The Worst Thing On Facebook’ Buzzfeed’s Katie Notopoulos correctly pointed out in a story yesterday. When you friend someone on Facebook or Messenger, or an old friend joins Messenger, you often get one of these annoying notifications. They fool you into thinking someone actually wants to chat…
[ad_1] Essential has been nearly radio silent since reports surfaced late last month that Andy Rubin was looking for a buyer for his hardware startup. The company didn’t really confirm or deny the rumors — or say much else for that matter. A few weeks later, the company does have some news — but it’s…
[ad_1] At Apple’s WWDC 2018 – an event some said would be boring this year with its software-only focus and lack of new MacBooks and iPads – the company announced what may be its most important operating system update to date, with the introduction of iOS 12. Through a series of Siri enhancements and features,…
[ad_1] Panda has built the next silly social feature Snapchat and Instagram will want to steal. Today the startup launches its video messaging app that fills the screen with augmented reality effects based on the words you speak. Say “Want to get pizza?” and a 3D pizza slice hovers by your mouth. Say “I wear…
[ad_1] You can now buy game and concert tickets from teams and musicians within Snapchat, thanks to an integration with SeatGeek . While Snapchat has started testing e-commerce features in the past few months, SeatGeek says this is the first ticket-buying experience built into the Snapchat app. The Los Angeles Football Club was the first…
[ad_1] TCL just dropped the sequel to the KeyOne, the company’s surprisingly good keyboard-sporting BlackBerry handset. We reviewed it roughly this time last year, and it was almost enough to restore our faith in the possibilities of BlackBerry as a brand. Almost. Of course, that had much more to do with TCL’s ability to create…
[ad_1] Fintech startup Revolut likes to announce new things all the time. Even though nothing is going live today, it’s interesting to see where the startup is heading. The company is working on a trading platform for traditional shares without any commission. You’ll find stock from public companies from the U.K. and the U.S., as…
[ad_1] Instagram is preparing to unveil a home for longer-form video — a YouTube competitor and its take on Snapchat Discover. Instagram will offer a dedicated space featuring scripted shows, music videos, and more in vertically oriented, full-screen, high-def 4K resolution according to multiple sources. Instagram has been meeting with popular social media stars and…
[ad_1] 20 months after launching its Craigslist competitor Marketplace and relentlessly promoting it with placement in the main navigation bar, Facebook will start earning money off its classifieds section. Facebook today begins testing Marketplace ads in the U.S. that let average users pay to “Boost” their listing to more people through the News Feed. While…
[ad_1] A month after releasing the first beta version of Android P at I/O (and right in the middle of Apple’s own developers conference), Google has just released Beta 2 of its upcoming mobile operating system. The update is available to users enrolled in Google’s developer program, who have access to a Pixel device. Those…
[ad_1] In earlier years, fitness gurus would market their programs for getting in shape on VHS tapes and, later, DVDs. These days, it’s an app business. At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference this week in San Jose, the company brought in one of the fitness app industry’s superstars, Kayla Itsines, co-creator of the BBG (Bikini Body Guides)…
[ad_1] At an event in Brazil this morning, Lenovo announced the latest addition to its line of modular handsets. The Moto Z3 doesn’t represent a big leap for the line, but it does introduce a slight change in approach for a company hoping to make a bigger splash on the modular side of the question.…
[ad_1] Facebook is expanding its support for header bidding, a technology that allows publishers to auction off ad impressions through real-time bidding between ad networks. The company announced its support for header bidding on the mobile web last year. Today, it’s adding something similar for in-app advertising. That means app publishers who use header bidding…
[ad_1] While DoorDash, Postmates and other apps are looking to reimagine what the food delivery experience looks like, Ray Reddy says he wants to figure out what the next generation of a food court looks like. Sort of. Reddy’s startup, Ritual, aims to remake the whole process of leaving your office and walking around five…
[ad_1] European Union institutions have reached a political agreement over an update to the bloc’s telecoms rules that’s rattled the cages of incumbent telcos. Agreement was secured late yesterday after months of negotiations between the EU parliament and Council, with the former pushing for and securing a price cap on international calls within the bloc…
[ad_1] Bird, the scooter startup whose scooters you might have seen fallen over on the sidewalk in a major metro area, has authorized a new $200 million round of funding that could value the startup at around $1 billion post-money, according to a certificate of incorporation filed in Delaware. The latest Bird round has been…
[ad_1] It’s scooters all the way down this morning, with Lime also reportedly raising $250 million in a funding this morning after a new Delaware filing this morning indicated that competitor Bird authorized the sale of up to $200 million in shares. GV (formerly Google Ventures) is leading this round, according to the report by…
[ad_1] From advancements in AR to Memojis to group FaceTime, there is plenty to be excited about with iOS 12. But one of the more practical updates to Apple’s mobile operating system, coming this fall, went unmentioned during the keynote at WWDC. According to 9to5Mac, iOS 12 will allow for two different faces to be…
[ad_1] For all of the news that Apple managed to cram into today’s 135 minute (!) WWDC keynote this morning, the event was actually pretty light on health care updates. It was a bit of a surprise, given how much of a focus the company has put on the space at past events. Apple did…
[ad_1] The weekend provided no rest to news-wary reporters, with major announcements coming from Xiaomi, SoftBank, and the Chinese government the past few days that will continue to change the global tech landscape. Xiaomi Chinese Depository Receipts One of the most important yet underreported stories of 2018 has been the development of Chinese Depository Receipts…
[ad_1] Apple’s Craig Federighi announced that Apple was doubling down on performance with the upcoming release of iOS 12 at the WWDC event in San Jose, Calif. today. What’s more, he said, the company would be making these changes to the full range of iOS devices going back to 2013. “And so for iOS 12, we…
[ad_1] Apple is invading Snapchat’s territory with new effects that let you embellish what you shoot through the Messages camera. Today at WWDC, Apple announced that iOS 12’s Messages camera will offer a variety of sticker packs, style transfers like a “comic book” filter, drawn shapes and both Animoji and the new personalized avatar Memoji.…
[ad_1] Kevin Lynch from the watchOS team introduced the next version of watchOS at Apple’s WWDC keynote. It’s been a slow and steady rise for the Apple Watch. It’s by far the most popular smart watch, and it’s becoming slightly more useful every year. This year is no different. There’s a new workout type for…
[ad_1] Apple is adding the ability to FaceTime more people onto a video call, allowing more than a dozen people to be on the call — and tapping an increasing interest in group video calling stemming from apps like Houseparty As far as features go, this was a pretty natural addition to the FaceTime App.…
[ad_1] Apple announced the next version of iOS at its WWDC developer conference. While iOS 12 won’t be available before the fall, it’s always interesting to get a sneak peek at the next version of iOS. Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering Craig Federighi first talked about some numbers. 81 percent of iOS users…
[ad_1] It’s that time again. This morning kicks off Apple’s annual World Wide Developers Conference. It’s a week of programming focused on developers, but this morning’s big event has a little something for everyone. Here’s a quick break down of what we can likely expect when Tim Cook takes the stage this morning. The keynote…
[ad_1] Apple is holding a keynote today at the San Jose Convention Center, and the company is expected to unveil new updates for iOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS and maybe also some new hardware. At 10 AM PT (1 PM in New York, 6 PM in London, 7 PM in Paris), you’ll be able to watch…
[ad_1] Hinge, the dating app that promised a better set of prospects by suggesting matches who share Facebook friends, is about to radically change its course: it’s ditching its requirement that users log in with Facebook. The change will go into effect on Monday, June 5th on Android, followed by a June 12th release on…
[ad_1] Instagram users were missing 70 percent of all posts and 50 percent of their friends’ posts before the app ditched the reverse chronological feed for an algorithm in July 2016. Despite backlash about confusing ordering, Instagram now says relevancy sorting has led to its 800 million-plus users seeing 90 percent of their friends’ posts…
[ad_1] Apple is fixing one of the worst parts of the concert experience: waiting in line for a beer while you miss your favorite song. Last week’s BottleRock music festival near San Francisco was the first to try a new “order ahead with Apple Pay” feature that Apple hopes to bring to more events. You…
[ad_1] At Google I/O in May, the company introduced a series of time management tools for Android users that help better manage screen time, track app usage, and limit the phone’s ability to distract, including a “shush” mode which turns on Do Not Disturb by flipping the phone over, and a “wind down,” color reduction…
[ad_1] Once a month or so, I’m reminded that my phone has a front-facing camera when I accidentally hit the toggle button, only to be greeted with a closeup image of my own, dumb face. Honestly, I can’t remember the the last time I used the thing — not intentionally, at least. I tried scrolling…
[ad_1] There’s a new app coming out of Google’s Area 120 incubator that could help New York City subway commuters navigate the ever-growing number of delays. While the Pigeon app is already live on the Apple App store, it currently requires an invite code to access, so I wasn’t able to try it out myself.…
[ad_1] This is a must-read for understanding the tech industry. We’ve distilled famous investor Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report down from its massive 294 slides of stats and charts to just the most important insights. Click or scroll through to learn what’s up with Internet growth, screen addiction, ecommerce, Amazon vs Alibaba, tech investment,…
[ad_1] Microsoft is launching an update to its Android launcher today that gives parents the ability to track their kids’ location. This is one out of a number of parent- and kid-focused announcements the company made today. Others include the ability to block sites in Microsoft Edge on Android and the launch of MSN Kids,…
[ad_1] The App Store has seen over 170 billion downloads over the past decade, totaling over $130 billion in consumer spend. This data was shared this morning by app intelligence firm App Annie, which is marking the App Store’s 10th Anniversary with a look back on the store’s growth and the larger trends it’s seen.…
[ad_1] At MWC, ZTE promised that its Tempo Go would be the first device to bring Android Oreo (Go Edition) to the States. But, well, stuff happened, and the company’s had a lot bigger things to deal with the intervening months. Alcatel, however, is on the case with the 1X. TCL announced this morning that…
[ad_1] Pinterest is continuing its push into video as a potential avenue for advertisers by today saying that it will offer advertisers a promoted video tool that takes up the width of the entire screen. While Pinterest normally offers users a grid that they can flip through — compressing a lot of content into a…
[ad_1] Project Fi, Google’s wireless service, is getting support for a number of new phones today. Until now, if you wanted to switch to Fi, the only officially supported phones were Google’s own Pixel and Pixel 2 phones, the Nexus 5X and 6P, as well as the Moto X4 and its Android One variant. Today,…
[ad_1] At CES in January, TechCrunch broke the news that media software maker Plex was planning to expand its service with the addition of new media content, starting with podcasts. Today, it’s making good on that promise by launching support for podcasts into beta, along with a whole new look and more customization options for its…
[ad_1] Leak says Snap will finally embrace developers Josh Constine @ / 7 hours Snapchat is secretly planning the launch of its first full-fledged developer platform, currently called Snapkit. The platform’s prototypes indicate it will let other apps offer a ‘login with Snapchat’ options, use the Bitmoji avatars it acquired, and host a version of…
[ad_1] By 2020, Brazilian mobile giant, Movile, wants to improve the lives of more than one billion people through its apps. The company began its mission in 1998 selling gaming, news and SMS messaging services to mobile operators in Brazil. After receiving its first investment from South African-based global investor Naspers 10 years ago, Movile…
[ad_1] They say you can’t predict the weather. Acquisitions are often the same way. If you had told me yesterday, for instance, that adorable weather app Poncho was about be acquired and effectively shuttered by a direct-to-consumer beverage company, I’d have told you that’s about as plausible as a cat who’s also a meteorologist. And…
[ad_1] Imgur is the internet’s best time sink, where 250 million monthly users silently consume an endless community-curated collection of absurd GIFs, inspiring tales, pop science explainers, and giant meme dumps. But what it’s never had is video. That was a differentiator that made it ideal for quiet browsing in class, on public transit, or in…
[ad_1] Apple this afternoon will officially release the latest version of its iOS software for your iPhone and iPad, iOS 11.4, which at last adds support for Messages in iCloud, along with other new features, including most notably, AirPlay 2 and an update that allows two HomePod speakers to work together as a stereo pair.…
[ad_1] Skyfire co-founder Nitin Bhandari is working on a new approach to cutting our addiction to social media and reducing screen time with a startup called ZenScreen. The startup has raised $700,000 in funding from Opera (now Otello) and assorted angel investors. It launched iOS and Android apps last month, as well as a Chrome…
[ad_1] Mobility is one of the most rapidly advancing technologies going, and we’re searching for the rising stars of early-stage mobility startups to apply as a TC Top Pick for Disrupt San Francisco 2018 on September 5-7 at Moscone Center West. It’s a competitive application process, but if TechCrunch editors designate your company as a…
[ad_1] Earlier this week, it came to light that Apple had removed a number of VoIP-based calling apps from the App Store, at the request of the Chinese government. The apps had been using CallKit, Apple’s new developer toolset that provides the calling interface for VoIP apps, freeing up developers to handle the backend communications.…
[ad_1] A patent case that began back in 2011 has reached a conclusion, with Samsung ordered to pay about $539 million to Apple over infringements of the latter’s patents in devices that are now long gone. The case has dragged on for years as both sides argued about the finer points of how much was…
[ad_1] Snapchat is taking another shot at location after its always-on coordinate-broadcasting Snap Map proved a bit invasive for some users. Snapchat now lets you send your on-going real-time location to a friend, or request theirs, which show up on the Snap Map and within your message thread. Essentially, this is location sharing built for…
[ad_1] Essential, the smartphone company helmed by Android co-creator Andy Rubin, is trying to sell itself and has cancelled development of its next phone, Bloomberg reports. The report states that Essential has hired Credit Suisse Group AG to advise them on potentially selling itself. The company raised $330 million from investors, including Rubin’s own Playground…
[ad_1] Avast has found that many low-cost, non-Google-certifed Android phones shipped with a strain of malware built in that could send users to download apps they didn’t intend to access. The malware, called called Cosiloon, overlays advertisements over the operating system in order to promote apps or even trick users into downloading apps. Devices effected…
[ad_1] Rover, a dog-walking and dog-boarding service that merged with DogVacay around this time last year, is now the second of such startups this year to raise a massive new round of funding with its announcement of a $155 million financing round. While competitor Wag has become a juggernaut, there seems room for both room…
[ad_1] Samsung’s AR Emojis were met with a…lukewarm reception when they launched alongside the Galaxy S9. The augmented reality avatars were regarded as a me-too response to Apple’s Animojis — and more to the point, were downright creepy. But at launch, the company brought one key element to the offering that Apple hasn’t: a content…
[ad_1] If you bought a battery replacement for an out-of-warranty iPhone last year, you may be eligible for a $50 credit from Apple. The company issued a new support page post this week, announcing the rebate policy, which applies to purchases made at authorized locations. The move is part of on-going restitution in the wake of an…
[ad_1] The all-screen smartphone is an inevitability. The question at this point, really, is who will get there first and how they’ll accomplish that feat. I spoke to a LG rep at the G7 launch, who suggested that the notch is going to be fact of life for the next couple of years, but a…
[ad_1] Edge Sense has always been a gimmick — but who can blame HTC for embracing a gimmick. The company’s mobile division has been struggling in recent years, so why not embrace the novelty of a squeezable side input? The tech got a bit more support when Google embraced it for the Pixel 2, renaming…
[ad_1] It’s not enough in this day and age that we have to deal with fake news, we also have to deal with fake prescription drugs, fake luxury goods, and fake Renaissance-era paintings. Sometimes all at once! IBM’s Verifier is a gadget and platform made (naturally) to instantly verify that something is what it claims…
[ad_1] The FBI seems to have been caught fibbing again on the topic of encrypted phones. FBI director Christopher Wray estimated in December that it had almost 7,800 phones from 2017 alone that investigators were unable to access. The real number is likely less than a quarter of that, The Washington Post reports. Internal records…
[ad_1] Right on the heels of launching its concierge service Hooch Black, Hooch announced today that it has raised $5 million in seed funding. The company’s basic subscription of $9.99 gets you one free drink per day from a variety of partner bars and restaurants. Hooch Black (which you have to apply for, and which…
[ad_1] Circle Invest is one of the easiest products when you want to get started with cryptocurrencies. When Circle first launched the app, I compared it to Coinbase. And Circle is making it even easier to get started as you can just “buy the market” now. Circle Invest started with just a handful of cryptocurrencies…
[ad_1] People really love getting their coffee more quickly. Starbucks, which has operated its own mobile payments service since 2011, is the market leader in terms of mobile payments users, beating out Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay, according to a new reporter from eMarketer out this morning. However, Starbucks’ lead over Apple Pay…
[ad_1] Readdle, the company behind popular email client Spark, is releasing a major new version of Spark on iOS and macOS. Spark is expanding beyond a personal email client. You can now work on emails with your team. While some of the features made me think about Front, the company says that it wasn’t the…
[ad_1] Without a chronological feed, it can be tough to tell if you’ve seen all the posts Instagram will show you. That can lead to more of the compulsive, passive, zombie browsing that research suggests is unhealthy as users endlessly scroll through stale content hoping for a hit of dopamine-inducing novelty. But with Instagram’s newest…
[ad_1] Facebook’s been talking Terragraph since way back during its 2016 F8 keynote. The social media giant’s ambitious plan to bring fast Wifi to cities is taking another key step toward real world trials with the addition of Qualcomm. The chipmaking giant announced today that it will add the 60Ghz tech to its future chipsets,…
[ad_1] HMD Global has been one of the mobile world’s biggest surprise hits in recent years. Founded by former Nokia execs, the Finnish company has made a name for itself reviving the dearly departed brand on Android smartphones to great effect. And it just managed to raise another $100 million, led by Ginko Ventures’ Alpha…
[ad_1] Google’s Duplex, which calls businesses on your behalf and imitates a real human, ums and ahs included, has sparked a bit of controversy among privacy advocates. Doesn’t Google recording a person’s voice and sending it to a data center for analysis violate two-party consent law, which requires everyone in a conversation to agree to…
[ad_1] The complexity and cost of packing an array of sensors and power inside a small amount of space has opened the door to a wider and wider variety of use cases for internet-connected devices beyond just smart thermostats or cameras — and also exposed a hole for getting those ideas into an actual piece…
[ad_1] Fornite is finally coming to Android…in a matter of months. After dominating the iOS gaming charts since March, the wildly popular sandbox survival game will be hitting the world’s top mobile operating system at some point this summer. Creator Epic Games buried the news in the middle of a larger blog post titled, “The…
[ad_1] What’s worse than companies selling the real-time locations of cell phones wholesale? Failing to take security precautions that prevent people from abusing the service. LocationSmart did both, as numerous sources indicated this week. The company is adjacent to a hack of Securus, a company in the lucrative business of prison inmate communication; LocationSmart was…
[ad_1] The bizarre recent tale of ZTE is getting another wrinkle. Earlier today, a bipartisan House Appropriations Committee unanimously voted to accept an amendment to uphold sanctions against the company. The amendment to the 2019 Commerce, Justice, and Science Appropriations bill is, of course, being viewed as a rebuke of the president, whose tweets over…
[ad_1] After 14 months of silence since launching, Facebook Stories has finally announced a 150 million daily active user count for its Snapchat Stories clone. And now it’s time to earn some money off it. Facebook Stories will start testing its first ads today in the U.S., Mexico and Brazil. They’re 5- to 15-second video…
[ad_1] The worst thing about Spectacles is how closely tied they are to Snapchat. The proprietary circular photo and video format looks great inside Snapchat where you can tip your phone around while always staying full screen, but it gets reduced to a small circle with a big white border when you export it to…
[ad_1] RED’s Hydrogen One handset is one of those devices we’ll believe when we actually see. The company’s been promising up the $1,200 smartphone for a while now, only to be hit with delays and outright admit, “We have no idea whatsoever what we are doing.” Consider this some small vote of confidence, however. AT&T…
[ad_1] Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank, has finally added Apple Pay to its mobile-only current account. The just over three year-old fintech says it has been one of the most requested features for its banking app, with over 2,000 mentions of Apple Pay on Monzo’s forum, whilst its customer support team have been asked about…
[ad_1] Here in the States, ZTE has been content with a kind of quiet success. The Chinese smartphone maker has landed in the top five quarter after quarter (sometimes breaking the top three, according to some analysts), behind household names like Apple, Samsung and LG. Suddenly, however, the company is on everyone’s lips, from cable…
[ad_1] GIFs offer a way to compress a ton of information into a small amount of space, and while Gfycat has positioned itself as more of a short-form video centric platform, it’s going to take a step further to see what a step beyond a standard GIF looks like. The company today said it would…
[ad_1] Facebook’s future rests on convincing the developing world to adopt Stories. But just because the slideshow format will soon surpass feed sharing doesn’t mean people use them the same way everywhere. So late last year, Facebook sent a team to India to learn what features they’d need to embrace Stories across a variety of…
[ad_1] Teatime Games, a new Icelandic “social games” startup from the same team behind the hugely popular QuizUp (acquired in by Glu Mobile), is disclosing $9 million in funding, made up of seed and Series A rounds. Index Ventures led both, but have been joined by Atomico, the European VC fund founded by Skype’s Niklas…
[ad_1] A few weeks ahead of its latest flagship announcement, HTC just revealed another piece of hardware. While the Taiwanese company has consolidated much of its mobile offerings in recent years, it announced today at the Consensus 2018 blockchain conference in New York that its upcoming Exodus handset is embracing everyone’s favorite tech buzzword. So,…
[ad_1] Facebook just installed its VP of Internet.org as the new head of WhatsApp after its CEO Jan Koum left the company. And now Facebook is expanding its mission to get people into “meaningful” groups to WhatsApp. Today, WhatsApp launched a slew of new features for Groups on iOS and Android that let admins set…
[ad_1] 23andMe, Color, and other genomic sequencing startups have exposed demand from consumers for cheap ways to test for potential problems they may have — and Amir Trabelsi hopes to bring that mentality to medical institutions around the world. That’s the hope for Genoox, a genomic analysis startup that’s geared toward doctors, clinicians and researchers that…
[ad_1] “Last year was pretty hard, I’m not gonna lie” says Peter Deng, Uber’s head of rider experience. But as part of new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s push to rebrand Uber around safety, “we’ve seen the company shift to more listening”. That focus on hearing users’ concerns prompted today’s change. Have a bad Uber ride when you’re…
[ad_1] When Apple introduced its completely redesigned App Store last fall, one of its goals was to improve app discovery by placing a larger emphasis on editorial content – including things like “app of the day” picks, lists, how-to’s and even interviews with app developers, among other things. Now, a new study from Sensor Tower…
[ad_1] Lenovo has teased a new arrival that might top Apple’s iPhone X in a bid to deliver a true all-screen smartphone. Apple’s iPhone X goes very close but for a tiny bezel and its distinctive notch, but Lenovo’s Z5 seems like it might go a step further, according to a teaser sketch (above) shared by Lenovo…
[ad_1] Google’s YouTube is the first streaming app that will actually tell users to stop watching. The company at its Google I/O conference this week introduced a series of new controls for YouTube that will allow users to set limits on their viewing, and then receive reminders telling them to “take a break.” The feature…
[ad_1] Snap screwed it all up jumbling messages and Stories, banishing creators to Discover, and wrecking auto-advance. Prideful of his gut instincts, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel refused to listen to the awful user reviews and declining usage. Now a YouGov study shows a 73% drop in user sentiment towards Snapchat, the app’s user count shrank…
[ad_1] Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone maker that’s looking to raise as much as $10 billion in a Hong Kong IPO, is continuing to grow its presence in the American market after it announced plans to bring its smart home products to the U.S.. The company is best known for its well-priced and quality smartphones, but…
[ad_1] Whoever thought we would leave telemarketing behind in this brave new smartphone world of ours lacked imagination. Robocalls are a menace growing in volume and even a massive $120 million fine leveled against a prominent source of them by the FCC likely won’t stem the flood. The fine was announced today during the FCC’s…
[ad_1] Google Pay got a big upgrade at Google I/O this week. At a breakout session, Google announced a series of changes to its payments platform, recently rebranded from Android Pay, including support for peer-to-peer payments in the main Google Pay app; online payments support in all browsers; the ability to see all payments in…
[ad_1] If you live in a city, you’re probably deciding between a handful of major broadband or wireless carriers — maybe something like Comcast or AT&T. But there’s a good chance that there are a bunch of local carriers that are looking to get off the ground, and Benjamin Huang wants to help make sure…
[ad_1] Robinhood started off as a dead-simple stock trading application that had no transaction fees — but since it’s continued to grow, and especially as it starts to dive into cryptocurrenty, investors are getting pretty excited about its prospects and are pouring a ton of new funding into it. And it’s that tantalizing prospect of creating…
[ad_1] “Whether for AR or robots, anytime you have software interacting with the world, it needs a 3D model of the globe. We think that map will look a lot more like the decentralized internet than a version of Apple Maps or Google Maps.” That’s the idea behind new startup Fantasmo, according to co-founder Jameson Detweiler. Coming out of…
[ad_1] Instagram is unveiling new features for businesses that want to use their profiles to message with customers and even facilitate transactions. Even if you’re not a business on Instagram, you might still notice the addition of action buttons, which will allow you to make a reservation, buy a ticket, start an order or make…
[ad_1] Social media stars have always been treated like nobodies instead of VIPs on Snapchat. Despite pioneering the Stories and creative tools they love, the lack of support saw many drift to YouTube’s ad dollars and Instagram’s bigger audience. Now Snap CEO Evan Spiegel is finally stepping up to win back their favor and their…
[ad_1] As the war for creating customized AI hardware heats up, Google announced at Google I/O 2018 that is rolling out out its third generation of silicon, the Tensor Processor Unit 3.0. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the new TPU is eight times more powerful than last year per pod, with up to 100 petaflops…
[ad_1] Facebook was a mess. The independence it dangled to close acquisition deals with Instagram and WhatsApp turned the company into a tangle of overlapping products. Every app had its own messaging and Stories options. Economies of scale were squandered. Top innovators led mature products already bursting at the seams with features while new opportunities…
[ad_1] Google wants to bundle its voice assistant into every device and app. And it’s true that it makes sense to integrate Google Assistant in Google Maps. It’ll be available on iOS and Android this summer. At Google I/O, director of Google Assistant Lilian Rincon showed a demo of Google Maps with Google Assistant. Let’s…
[ad_1] Google managed to elicit an audible gasp from the crowd at I/O today when it showed off a new augmented feature for Maps. It was a clear standout during a keynote that contained plenty of iterative updates to existing software, and proved a key glimpse into what it will take to move AR from…
[ad_1] No surprise here, Android P was the highlight of today’s Google I/O keynote. The new version of the company’s mobile operating system still doesn’t have a name (at least not as of this writing), but the company’s already highlighted a number of key new features, including, notable, Adaptive Battery. Aimed at taking on basically…
[ad_1] Google today said it is rolling out Lighthouse 3.0, an update to its tools that help developers optimize their websites and audit their performance. The new update is centered around more precise and actionable metrics, such as page load time and the components of the site that might be slowing it down. Google has…
[ad_1] Google today announced at its I/O developer conference a new suite tools for its new Android P operating system that will help users better manage their screen time, including a more robust do not disturb mode and ways to track your app usage. The biggest change is introducing a dashboard to Android P that…
[ad_1] Google I/O is nowhere near done. While the mainstream keynote just ended, the company is about to unveil the next big things when it comes to APIs, SDKs, frameworks and more. The developer keynote starts at 12:45 PM Pacific Time (3:45 PM on the East Cost, 8:45 PM in London, 9:45 PM in Paris) and…
[ad_1] Google unveiled some of the new features in the next version of Android at its developer conference. One feature looked particularly familiar. Android P will get new navigation gestures to switch between apps. And it works just like the iPhone X. “As part of Android P, we’re introducing a new system navigation that we’ve…
[ad_1] There was plenty of talk about Android P at today’s big I/O kickoff — but when can you actually download the thing? Right now, as a matter of fact, if you’ve got one of a handful of compatible handsets. You can find the upgrade here, if you dare. The list includes the Pixel, naturally,…
[ad_1] Google is adding morse code input to its mobile keyboard. It’ll be available as a beta on iOS and Android later today. The company announced that new feature at Google I/O after showing a video of Tania Finlayson. Finlayson has been having a hard time communicating with other people due to her condition. She…
[ad_1] How did you find Microsoft Build yesterday? We don’t really have time for your answer because Google I/O is already here! Google is kicking off its annual developer conference today. As usual, there will be a consumer keynote with major new products in the morning, and a developer-centric keynote in the afternoon. The conference…
[ad_1] Hidden inside the code of Facebook’s Android app is an unreleased feature called Facebook Avatars that lets people build personalized, illustrated versions of themselves for use as stickers in Messenger and comments. It will let users customize their avatar to depict their skin color, hair style and facial features. Facebook Avatars is essentially Facebook’s…
[ad_1] Buried inside Twitter’s Android app is a “Secret conversation” option that if launched would allow users to send encrypted direct messages. The feature could make Twitter a better a home for sensitive communications that often end up on encrypted messaging apps like Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp. The encyrpted DMs option was first spotted inside…
[ad_1] Instagram is preparing to let you add music to your Stories, judging by code found inside its Android app. “Music stickers” could let you search for and add a song to your posts, thanks to licensing deals with the major record labels recently struck by Facebook. Music stickers would make Instagram Stories much more…
[ad_1] China’s government has made technological independence from the United States one of its highest priorities. And now, it appears to be putting its money where its messaging has been. According to the Wall Street Journal, China is close to finalizing a $47 billion investment fund that would finance semiconductor research and chip startup development.…
[ad_1] Microsoft may have retreated from the smartphone operating system wars but that doesn’t mean it has given up on trying to get a foothold on other platforms. Today, at its Build developer conference, the company announced three new services that bring its overall cross-platform strategy into focus. On Android, the company’s Trojan Horse has…
[ad_1] Treating issues with mental health can be a daunting and very sensitive task for anyone that is suffering from any kind of mental illness — but the problem for many is that a lot of patients just don’t know where to start, according to David Ebersman. That’s where Lyra Health hopes to help. The service…
[ad_1] Google Assistant is gaining some new capabilities thanks to a deal with Fandango which should make ordering movie tickets a quick and easy process. Simply tell Google Assistant that you want to buy some movie tickets and you’ll see what’s playing nearby, you can dial in the specificity to find out just what’s playing…
[ad_1] The Chinese government is reportedly going to bat for ZTE over a seven-year ban that would have broad ranging consequences for the phone maker. According to a new report from Reuters, the subject was broached during a meeting with between senior Chinese and U.S. officials in Beijing this week. The ban imposed by the…
[ad_1] Another startup wants to make on-demand car washing work, where others have failed. Washé, a Boca Raton-based service for on-demand washes, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding to continue to grow its business, which involves a mobile app consumers use to connect with Washé’s network of around 1,000 licensed and insured car washing…
[ad_1] Perennial smartphone struggler HTC has revealed its newest smartphone — the U12/U12+ — will launch on May 23. The big spoiler from the company is that the phone will include… components. That isn’t exactly an informative teaser, but we do actually have a flavor for what HTC will bring to market. Serial leaker Evan…
[ad_1] It’s a time of optimism and transition at Nintendo, where brisk sales of the Switch have bolstered its bottom line and new leadership signals a fresh approach to the market. Shuntaro Furukawa, the new president, told the Nikkei that one of his plans is to pursue mobile gaming with more vigor, aiming to build…
[ad_1] In Spotify’s first ever earnings report, the streaming music came up short, pulling in $1.36 billion revenue in Q1 2018. That’s compared to Wall Street’s estimates of $1.4 billion in revenue and an adjusted EPS loss of $0.34. Spotify hit 170 million monthly active users, up 6.9 percent from 159 million in Q4 2017…
[ad_1] We’re at the cusp of the visual communication era. Stories creation and consumption is up 842 percent since early 2016, according to consulting firm Block Party. Nearly a billion accounts across Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Messenger now create and watch these vertical, ephemeral slideshows. And yesterday, Facebook chief product officer Chris Cox showed…
[ad_1] Facebook wants you to look and move like you in VR, even if you’ve got a headset strapped to your face in the real world. That’s why its building a new technology that uses a photo to map someone’s face into VR, and then sensors to detect facial expressions and movements to animate that…
[ad_1] Day 1 of Facebook’s F8 conference was packed with announcements and updates. Here are 10 big takeaways from Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote on Day 1. You can find full coverage and analysis of F8 here. 1. FaceDate Facebook is launching a dating feature where you can volunteer to make a profile that’s only visible to…
[ad_1] A couple years ago I was eagerly expectant of an app that would identify anything you pointed it at. Turns out the problem was much harder than anyone expected — but that didn’t stop high school senior Michael Royzen from trying. His app, SmartLens, attempts to solve the problem of seeing something and wanting…
[ad_1] Snapchat’s redesign was a disaster. It cratered ad views and revenue and led Snapchat’s user count to actually shrink in March. That’s why CEO Evan Spiegel just announced a big reversal of the redesign’s worst part. “We learned that combining watching Stories and communicating with friends into the same place made it harder to…
[ad_1] Snapchat neglected the international market in its early years, and now WhatsApp has snatched that growth opportunity. WhatsApp’s clone of Snapchat Stories, WhatsApp Status, now has 450 million daily active users. That’s compared to just 187 million daily users on all of Snapchat. This update from today’s F8 conference comes after Facebook said WhatsApp Status…
[ad_1] Facebook is recruiting help to make its Stories more interesting than Snapchat’s. Starting with Spotify, SoundCloud, and GoPro, third-party apps can now let their users share to Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories. Rather than screenshotting, users will be able to hit a button to share a photo or video of a playlist, song, or…
[ad_1] Hustle 20X’d its annual revenue run rate in 15 months by denying clients that contradict its political views. It’s a curious, controversial, yet successful strategy for the startup whose app lets activists and marketers text thousands of potential supporters or customers one at a time. Compared to generic email blasts and robocalls, Hustle gets…
[ad_1] Microsoft announced a series of new features for Outlook across desktop, mobile and web to take a bit of the focus off of Gmail’s massive redesign. Some of the features highlight Outlook’s usefulness in the workplace – like new meeting room suggestion capabilities and RSVP tracking. But others, particularly on mobile, are more innovative…
[ad_1] Facebook wants to prove it can earn businesses money, not just build their social media audience. This morning, just before its big F8 conference, a “Facebook Analytics” app for iOS and Android appeared in the app stores. It touts the ability to “stay on top of your growth, engagement, and conversion efforts on the…
[ad_1] ZeroCater may have made its name in bringing restaurant food to offices for lunch (or other meals), but it has now raised a new fresh round of funding for the next perk it hopes to bring to companies: snacks. While ZeroCater continues to expand from city to city with new restaurants as it tries…
[ad_1] OfferUp, the mobile marketplace for buying and selling locally, is expanding its sights beyond your neighborhood. Today, the company is announcing an expansion of its service that will now allow sellers to ship their items nationwide to interested buyers, potentially netting them a larger audience than if trying to sell only within their local…
[ad_1] When trying to figure out what to do after an extensive career at Google, Motorola, and Flipkart, Punit Soni decided to spend a lot of time sitting in doctors’ offices to figure out what to do next. It was there that Soni said he figured out one of the most annoying pain points for…
[ad_1] “It is time for me to move on . . . I’m taking some time off to do things I enjoy outside of technology, such as collecting rare air-cooled Porsches, working on my cars and playing ultimate frisbee” WhatsApp co-founder, CEO, and Facebook board member Jan Koum wrote today. The announcement followed shortly after The Washington…
[ad_1] Chinese authorities revealed over the weekend that they have the capability of retrieving deleted messages from the almost universally used WeChat app. The admission doesn’t come as a surprise to many, but it’s rare for this type of questionable data collection tactic to be acknowledged publicly. As noted by the South China Morning Post,…
[ad_1] Sprint and T-Mobile, after years of going back and forth as to whether they are going to tie up two of the largest telecom providers in the U.S., have announced that the two companies have entered a merger agreement this morning. The merger will be an all-stock transaction, and will now be subject to…
[ad_1] I want to live in the Gemini’s universe. It’s one where the promise of on-demand hardware has been fulfilled. Where crowfunding, rapid prototyping, scalable manufacturing all of those good things have improved our lives by giving us the devices we both want and need. It’s the utopian dream of 2011, fully realized. In the…
[ad_1] It’s hard launching a phone company — something Essential was pretty candid about from the start. Andy Rubin’s latest endeavor got off to something of a slow start, according to outside accounts, but today the well-funded hardware startup is getting ready to add a whole bunch of new markets to its online store. On…
[ad_1] It looks like a potential merger deal between T-Mobile and Sprint, two of the major telecom companies in the U.S., is getting closer and now has set valuation terms, according to a report by Bloomberg. The deal could be announced as soon as Sunday, according to a report by CNBC. The proposed tie-up of…
[ad_1] The maker of Shadowverse and Granblue Fantasy is teaming up with Nintendo for a new mobile RPG. Called Dragalia Lost, the Japanese-style action RPG will be a free-to-play game though likely loaded with Loot Box-style mechanics that will result in a financial windfall for Nintendo and developer Cygames. The trailer doesn’t reveal many details…
[ad_1] The excitement around 5G is palpable at the Brooklyn 5G Summit this week, and for good reason. Once the province of academic engineers, there is increasingly a consensus emerging among technology leaders that millimeter-wave technology is ready for prime time. Yet, there remain large barriers to a successful rollout, particularly at the local government…
[ad_1] As Dropbox looks to woo larger and larger businesses with its strategy of building simpler collaboration tools than what’s on the market, it’s making some moves in its online document tool Paper to further reduce that friction today. Dropbox said it was rolling out a new tool for Dropbox Paper that allows users to…
[ad_1] Samsung’s latest earnings report is a succinct lesson in hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. The actual news here is pretty positive, as the company reports a record operating profit, courtesy of high demand for its components and flagship handsets. But a statement tied to the news mentions “slow demand” no…
[ad_1] Photos, not just video. No yellow ring alerting people to the camera. Underwater-capable. Classier colors with lighter lenses. Prescription options. Faster syncing. And a much slimmer frame and charging case. Snapchat fixed the biggest pain points of its Spectacles camera sunglasses with V2, which launch today for $150. The company only sold 220,000 pairs…
[ad_1] Analysts have long-warned of a growth crunch in China’s smartphone space, and it’s looking like that’s very much the case right now. China’s smartphone growth has been the feel-good story for domestic OEMs who have clocked impressive figures as the billion-plus population has rushed online via mobile devices. However, the market reached saturation point…
[ad_1] Amongst massive criticism over data privacy, Facebook showed the resiliency of its advertising machine by beating Wall Street’s $11.41 billion revenue estimate in its Q1 2018 earnings report by raking in $11.97 billion in revenue with $1.69 EPS compared to the $1.35 estimate. Facebook added 48 million daily active users to hit 1.449 billion,…
[ad_1] Dolo is the kindness of strangers as an app. Where’s the prettiest place in the park? What’s the best thing on the menu? How do I skip the line? Dolo lets you leave helpful suggestions for anyone nearby. The new social app launches out of beta today to augment the world with serendipitous tips…
[ad_1] Gfycat is already a pretty popular host for lots of content like short clips from shows and movies, but there’s also a pretty substantial store of content centered around gaming — which is why the company is starting to put some extra focus on it. Gfycat, which is centered around creator tools to make…
[ad_1] Snapchat wants to let you play its augmented reality Lenses, not just play dress-up. Today it launched Snappables — AR games that use your touch, motion, and facial expressions to compete for high scores in literal head-to-head multiplayer matchups. Snappables live alongside Snapchat’s other lenses and are rolling out globally this week. New games…
[ad_1] Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone maker tipped for a public listing this year, has made a unique pledge: if it makes too much money, it’ll give a chunk of its profits back to its customers. Yes, that’s right. The company said today it will forever limit the net profit margins after tax for smartphones, smart…
[ad_1] Opera today announced a new mobile browser, Opera Touch, that shows that there’s still plenty of room for a competitor in the mobile browsing world. Opera Touch takes some ideas from the company’s experimental Opera Neon desktop browser and packages it into a highly usable package for Android, with an iOS version coming soon.…
[ad_1] As the vacation rental sector heats up — with Airbnb making even more moves to expand its portfolio of services to include multiple tiers of rentals — there’s going to be more and more of a need for people who manage a large number of properties. Guesty is one service that aims to do…
[ad_1] Facebook is making good on Mark Zuckerberg’s promise to prioritize user safety and data privacy over its developer platform. Today Facebook and Instagram announced a slew of API shut downs and changes designed to stop developers from being able to pull you or your friends data without express permission, drag in public content, or…
[ad_1] Two weeks ago TechCrunch called on Instagram to build an equivalent to Facebook’s “Download Your Information feature so if you wanted to leave for another photo sharing network, you could. The next day it announced this tool would be coming and now TechCrunch has spotted it rolling out to users. Instagram’s “Data Download” feature…
[ad_1] DoorDash is about to make a huge move into grocery delivery, but instead of going all out as a delivery service on its own, it’s instead going to be working behind the scenes to power delivery networks for larger companies — with Walmart as its first big partner. While Instacart looks to control the…
[ad_1] Hooch, the subscription startup that allows members to claim one free drink per day from hundreds of different bars and restaurants, is adding a new membership level called Hooch Black. Signing up for Hooch Black will cost you significantly more than the regular subscription — instead of $9.99 per month, it’s $295 per year.…
[ad_1] Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reported another pretty solid beat this afternoon for its first quarter as it more or less has continued to keep its business growing substantially — and is growing even faster than it was a year ago today. Google said its revenue grew 26% year-over-year to $31.16 billion in the first…
[ad_1] When it comes to the promises of persistent location hyper-awareness, the promises of mobile have largely fallen flat. While this has been a bummer for consumers looking for more contextual services from the apps they have installed, this also has been a pain for marketers keen to get their hands on more quality user…
[ad_1] When Instagrammers don’t get enough likes or think their posts look boring, they sometimes impetously delete them. But they can later regret this common emergent behavior which also deprives Instagram of monetizable content and your history in images that could keep you locked into the service. So Instagram is rolling out a new feature…
[ad_1] Germany’s Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit yesterday from Axel Springer against Eyeo, the company behind AdBlock Plus. The European publishing giant (which acquired Business Insider in 2015) argued that ad blocking, as well as the business model where advertisers pay to be added to circumvent the white list, violated Germany’s competition law. Axel Springer won…
[ad_1] It’s been a hell of a week for ZTE. News Monday that it was being hit with a seven-year export ban sent the company scrambling. The Chinese handset maker suspended its earnings report and reportedly sent its lawyers to meet with Google to see if anything could be worked out about a punishment that…
[ad_1] When Apple launched its new App Store in iOS 11 back in September, it aimed to offer app developers better exposure, as well as a better app discovery experience for consumers. A new study from Sensor Tower out today takes a look at how well that’s been working in the months since. According to…
[ad_1] AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson revealed on Thursday the carrier’s plans to launch another live TV service called “AT&T Watch,” which would offer a cheap, $15-per-month bundle of channels for customers, and be provided to AT&T Wireless subscribers for free. At this price point, the service would be one of the lowest on the market…
[ad_1] Everyone seems to be insisting on installing cameras all over their homes these days, which seems incongruous with the ongoing privacy crisis — but that’s a post for another time. Today, we’re talking about enabling those cameras to send high-definition video signals wirelessly without killing their little batteries. A new technique makes beaming video…
[ad_1] Ebay is rolling out an app update designed to make it easier to list items for sale on its online marketplace. Instead of filling out detailed forms on your mobile phone’s small screen, you can now scan the barcode on the item in question or type a description, choose the item’s condition, then click…
[ad_1] As the messaging app Telegram continues to try to evade Russian authorities by switching up its IP addresses, Russia’s regulator Roskomnadzor (RKN) has continued its game of whack-a-mole to try to lock it down by knocking out complete swathes of IP address. The resulting chase how now ballooned to nearly 19 million IP addresses…
[ad_1] Helios and Matheson Analytics is looking to push additional capital into its prime and wildly popular asset, MoviePass, by raising money in a new stock sale that appears to be giving Wall Street fits. Looking to raise additional capital, Helios and Matheson said it would sell up to $150 million in a stock sale…
[ad_1] Motorola’s phones aren’t always the flashiest, but there sure are a lot of them. And today, there are even more. The Lenovo-owned brand is launching not one, but four new handsets for your budget-phone-buying pleasure. The new handsets were launched at an event in São Paulo, Brazil. We, sadly, were not there. Instead, we…
[ad_1] mParticle, which helps companies like Airbnb and Spotify manage their customer data, has hired four new executives — including John Sedlak, most recently a vice president at Adobe, who’s joining the company as chief revenue officer. In addition, Kiran Hebbar (formerly CFO of Social Tables) is joining as chief financial officer, Will Rogers (previously an…
[ad_1] Facebook has posted a job opening looking for an expert in ASIC and FPGA, two custom silicon designs that companies can gear toward specific use cases — particularly in machine learning and artificial intelligence. There’s been a lot of speculation in the valley as to what Facebook’s interpretation of custom silicon might be, especially…
[ad_1] This week Snapchat is rolling out Shoppable AR, a new feature that makes it even easier for advertisers to sell goods through sponsored lenses. The new offering builds on top of the Sponsored Lenses the service rolled out in late-2015, which let advertisers create branded filters, bringing product placements to selfies. Now companies can…
[ad_1] Google’s internal incubator, Area 120, is today releasing its next creation: a learn-to-code mobile app for beginners called Grasshopper. At launch, the app teaches would-be coders how to write JavaScript, via short lessons on their iPhone or Android device. The goal is to get coders proficient in the basics and core concepts, so they…
[ad_1] 500 Startups may soon be coming up on the one-year mark for the end of a tumultuous saga involving its founder, but its accelerator classes still continue to plug along — and its next batch is now getting ready to roll. The firm’s 23rd batch of startups this year consists of the usual mix…
[ad_1] Facebook is about to start pushing European users to speed through giving consent for its new GDPR privacy law compliance changes. They ask users review how Facebook uses data around the web to target you with ads, sensitive profile info they share, and facial recognition But with a design the encourages rapidly hitting the…
[ad_1] Yesterday was a rough one for ZTE. A year after pleading guilty to violating sanctions with Iran and North Korea, the U.S. Department of Commerce brought the hammer down and announced a seven-year export restriction on goods sporting U.S. components. That applies to more than a quarter of the components used in the company’s…
[ad_1] Amazon has quietly launched an Android web browser app for emerging markets, where access to mobile data and high-speed connectivity is more limited. The browser has the rather generic name of: “Internet: fast, lite and private” on Google Play, and promises to be “lighter than the competition.” The app first appeared on the Play…
[ad_1] Huawei is readjusting its approach the the U.S. In an annual meeting in Shenzhen, the company asserted its commitment on existing customers and markets. It’s a shift in focus for a company that has been aggressively targeting new territories, looking to expand its position as the world’s third largest smartphone manufacturer. It’s understandable, of…
[ad_1] The cryptocurrency world is a strange one, but at least it has a sense of humor. A new game has you riding a little crypto-car along the wildly fluctuating prices of major and minor currencies. It’s quite ridiculous, and it isn’t even a bad game! It’s called Crypto Rider, predictably, and is very much…
[ad_1] Just last quarter Netflix passed a $100 billion market cap — and we might already be talking about it as a $150 billion company before too long with yet another big financial quarter that sent its stock soaring. Netflix, again, beat out some expectations Wall Street held for the first quarter and provided a…
[ad_1] T-Mobile will pay $40 million as part of a settlement with the FCC for playing ringing sounds to mislead customers into thinking their calls were going through when in fact they had never connected in the first place. The company admitted it had done so “hundreds of millions” of times over the years. The…
[ad_1] Sony promised an ‘ultra low-light camera’ during its Mobile World Congress press conference back in February. The off-hand announcement was intended to throw a bit of shade at Samsung’s recent flagship, but ultimately had the unintended consequence of undermining the company’s own newly announced XZ2. But, then, Sony’s never been great when it comes…
[ad_1] iHeartRadio is best known for its free service offering thousands of live, streaming AM and FM radio stations and its ability to create your own custom station, similar to Pandora. Today, the company is adding a new feature for all users – both free and paid – that blurs the lines between streaming radio…
[ad_1] This weekend, former Apple engineer and consumer gadget legend Tony Fadell penned an op-ed for Wired. In it, he argued that smartphone manufacturers need to do a better job of educating users about how often they use their mobile phones, and the resulting dangers that overuse might bring about. Take healthy eating as an…
[ad_1] Would being asked to pay Facebook to remove ads make you appreciate their value or resent them even more? As Facebook considers offering an ad-free subscription option, there are deeper questions than how much money it could earn. Facebook has the opportunity to let us decide how we compensate it for social networking. But…
[ad_1] Tesla is one of the more interesting companies for Wall Street that had an interesting couple of months this year — and it seems even tweets from Elon Musk, who said that the company will be profitable in the back half of the year, may be enough to swing its stock. The Tesla and…
[ad_1] Twitter, Vine, Voxer, MessageMe. Facebook has repeatedly cut off competitors from its feature for finding your Facebook friends on their apps…after jumpstarting its own social graph by convincing people to upload their Gmail contacts. Meanwhile, Facebook’s Download Your Information tool merely exports a text list of friends’ names you can’t use elsewhere. As congress…
[ad_1] Games, dating apps and streaming services contributed to a rise in consumer spending in iPhone apps last year, according to new data from app store intelligence firm, Sensor Tower. The firm found that U.S. iPhone users spent 23 percent more on in-app purchases in 2017 than they did the year prior – or, an…
[ad_1] Fresh off its relaunch as an app offering a suite of tools for podcasters, Anchor today is rolling a new feature that will make it easier for people to find someone to podcast with: Cohosts. As the name implies, the app will now connect you – sometimes immediately, if people are available – with…
[ad_1] You’ll soon be able to draw on the world around you and shoot back-and-forth Instagram Boomerang GIFs with the Facebook Camera. Bringing additional creative tools to the Facebook Camera could make it a more popular place to shoot content and help the company compete with Snapchat. “We wanted to give people an easy way…
[ad_1] For all the good of Android’s open-source approach, one of the clear and consistent downsides is that the onus to issue software updates falls on the manufacturer. That can mean frustration for those waiting for the latest and greatest feature updates — and in some cases, it can put your phone at risk with…
[ad_1] LG is making efforts to improve the user experience on its devices after it opened a “Software Upgrade Center” in its native Korea. The new lab will be focused on “providing customers worldwide with faster, timelier, smartphone operating system and software updates,” the company explained in a brief statement. The idea is to help…
[ad_1] Yesterday we reported that Instagram lacked data portability, knocking the app for the absence of an equivalent to Facebook’s Download Your Information too. Now an Instagram spokesperson tells me “We are building a new data portability tool. You’ll soon be able to download a copy of what you’ve shared on Instagram, including your photos,…
[ad_1] Tenor is now going to exclusively power GIF searches in LinkedIn messaging after Google a few weeks ago, adding yet another service to its already pretty large portfolio of messaging platforms. Tenor has long positioned itself as a GIF search tool working across a number of different platforms, ranging from its own keyboard to…
[ad_1] Mark Zuckerberg’s flimsy defense when congress asked about a lack of competition to Facebook has been to cite that the average American uses eight social apps. But that conveniently glosses over the fact that Facebook owns three of the top 10 U.S. iOS apps: #4 Instagram, #6 Messenger, and #8 Facebook according to App…
[ad_1] Mark Zuckerberg ran his apology scripts, trotted out his lists of policy fixes and generally dulled the Senate into submission. And that constitutes success for Facebook. Zuckerberg testified before the joint Senate judiciary and commerce committee today, capitalizing on the lack of knowledge of the politicians and their surface-level questions. Half the time, Zuckerberg…
[ad_1] Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg officially shot down the conspiracy theory that the social network has some way of keeping tabs on its users by tapping into the mics on people’s smartphones. During Zuckerberg’s testimony before the Senate this afternoon, Senator Gary Peters had asked the CEO if the social network is mining audio from…
[ad_1] Facebook didn’t ban Cambridge Analytica when it found out in 2015 that it had received user data from Dr. Aleksandr Kogan, and Zuckerberg called that a mistake during his testimony before the Senate. Cambridge Analytica has since been banned. Zuckerberg explained that “I want to correct one thing that I said earlier in response…
[ad_1] At the core of Facebook’s “well-being” problem is that its business is directly coupled with total time spent on its apps. The more hours you pass on the social network, the more ads you see and click, the more money it earns. That puts its plan to make using Facebook healthier at odds with…
[ad_1] It’s hard to #DeleteFacebook with no viable alternative, but at least you can export all your data. There’s no such option on Instagram . That lack of data portability puts users at the mercy of Instagram’s product and policy decisions. And it could even put users at risk as those who seek to backup…
[ad_1] Entrepreneurs have it rough in Africa, India, Pakistan — places where VC cash doesn’t fall from the sky and necessary infrastructure like reliable banking and broadband can be hard to come by. But companies grow and thrive nevertheless in these rugged environments, and DFS Lab is an incubator focused on connecting them with the…
[ad_1] Instagram is one-upping Apple with a portrait mode feature that runs on a wider variety of phones and works with video, not just photos. Last month TechCrunch reported about a Focus feature buried in Instagram’s code which began publicly testing a week later. Now Instagram is rolling out Focus, which blurs the background while…
[ad_1] Cambridge, U.K.-based startup Spectral Edge has closed a $5.3M Series A funding round from existing investors Parkwalk Advisors and IQ Capital. The team, which in 2014 spun the business out of academic research at the University of East Anglia, has developed a mathematical technique for improving photographic imagery in real-time, also using machine learning technology. As we’ve…
[ad_1] Sick of chatting but want to stay connected? Tribe‘s app lets you play clones of Space Invaders, Flappy Bird, Fruit Ninja, Name That Tune and more while video chatting with up to seven friends or strangers. Originally a video messaging app, Tribe failed to gain traction in the face of Snapchat and Facebook Messenger.…
[ad_1] Instagram is preparing to launch a feature called Nametags that lets you create a special image that people can scan with the Instagram Stories camera to follow you. TechCrunch broke the news of Nametags code in Instagram’s Android APK last month. But now thanks to reader Genady Okrain we have screenshots and more details…
[ad_1] The popular quiz startup HQ Trivia is beginning to roll out the first of many new social features to its app focused on leveraging competition with friends and family during game time. HQ Trivia has managed to bring people together in real life to play the game on their phones, but the startup has…
[ad_1] Global app downloads and consumer spending in apps had yet another record quarter, according to a new report from App Annie, out on Monday. In the first quarter of 2018, iOS and Google Play downloads grew more than 10 percent year-over-year to reach 27.5 billion – the highest figure to date. In addition, consumer…
[ad_1] Microsoft has released the source code for the original, 1990s-era File Manager that is so familiar to all of us who were dragging and dropping on Windows 3.0. The code, which is available on Github under the MIT OSS license, will compile under Windows 10. File Manager uses the multiple-document interface or MDI to…
[ad_1] Dictionary app Reverso is getting new features with its 8.0 update. There are new exercices and games to help you learn new words. Reverso also now has an integrated thesaurus. Reverso is one of the biggest dictionary players out there. It now has over 40 million unique visitors on its website and app every…
[ad_1] Facebook is looking to self-police by implementing parts of the proposed Honest Ads Act before the government tries to regulate it. To fight fake news and election interference, Facebook will require the admins of popular Facebook Pages and advertisers buying political or “issue” ads on “debated topics of national legislative importance” like education or…
[ad_1] Amazon is making it easier for parents to manage their child’s device usage from their own phone, tablet, or PC with an update to the Parent Dashboard in Amazon FreeTime. Since its launch in 2012, Amazon’s FreeTime Unlimited has been one of the better implementations of combining kid-friendly content with customizable profiles and parental…
[ad_1] Facebook says it was for security, but is it a breach of user trust? Josh Constine @ / 7 hours You can’t remove Facebook messages from the inboxes of people you sent them to, but Facebook did that for Mark Zuckerberg and other executives. Three sources confirm to TechCrunch that old Facebook messages they…
[ad_1] You only get one link on Instagram, but Tap Bio lets you point that to a customized landing page full of all the sites you want to share. Rather than constantly change your Instagram profile URL, you can easily add slides equipped with links to your Tap Bio corresponding to your latest Instagram posts.…
[ad_1] Facebook isn’t backing down from Stories despite criticism that it copied Snapchat and that Instagram Stories is enough. Instead, it’s committed to figuring out how to adapt the slideshow format into the successor to the status update. That’s why today the company is launching three significant tests that make Facebook Stories a default way…
[ad_1] Pinterest is known for having, and promoting, a lot of business content. It’s actually a majority of the content, and it’s usually from some of the most well-known brands that feed into the kinds of sometimes dream-level wants and needs of its users. And while Pinterest a majority of Pinterest’s potential is locked up…
[ad_1] Helios and Matheson Analytics, which already owns movie ticket subscription service MoviePass, has acquired Moviefone. Despite the old-school name, Moviefone is now a digital media business with trailers, movie information and ticketing via Fandango — it says it reaches 6 million unique visitors each month. Moviefone was previously owned by Oath, the Verizon subsidiary…
[ad_1] While IMAX has become synonymous with enormous theatrical screens, Chief Marketing Officer JL Pomeroy told me the company has “been an innovator at the forefront of technology breakthroughs for the last 50 years” — for example, it recently started creating virtual reality centers. And today, IMAX is releasing its first augmented reality project, developed in…
[ad_1] “This is going to be a never-ending battle” said Mark Zuckerberg. He just gave the most candid look yet into his thoughts about Cambridge Analytica, data privacy, and Facebook’s sweeping developer platform changes today during a conference call with reporters. Sounding alternately vulnerable about his past negligence and confident about Facebook’s strategy going forward,…
[ad_1] Michael Jaconi Contributor Michael Jaconi is the co-founder and chief executive of Button, and formerly served as the CEO of Rakuten Loyalty. Since the dawn of the internet, the titans of this industry have fought to win the “starting point” — the place that users start their online experiences. In other words, the place…
[ad_1] Cambridge Analytica is refuting a report by Facebook today that said Cambridge Analytica improperly attained data on up to 87 million users. Instead, it claims it only “licensed data for no more than 30 million people” from Dr. Aleksandr Kogan’s research company Global Science Research. It also claims none of this data was used in work…
[ad_1] The App Store shrank for the first time in 2017, according to a new report from Appfigures. The report found the App Store lost 5 percent of its total apps over the course of the year, dropping from 2.2 million iOS apps in the beginning of the year, to 2.1 million by year-end. Google…
[ad_1] Facebook is entering a tough transition period where it won’t take chances around data privacy in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica fiasco, CTO Mike Schroepfer tells TechCrunch. That’s why it’s moving up the shut down of part of the Instagram API. It’s significantly limiting data available from or requiring approval for access to Facebook’s…
[ad_1] One of the many accusations about the trouble with Facebook – amid its data privacy concerns and enabling of Russian trolls – is that it keeps people locked into echo chambers where access to other viewpoints are limited. This is a common problem across social media, people are beginning to realize. A new app…
[ad_1] Facebook is spelling out in plain english how it collects and uses your data in rewritten versions of its Terms Of Service and Data Use Policy, though it’s not asking for new rights to collect and use your data or changing any of your old privacy settings.The public has seven days to comment on…
[ad_1] Tinder is getting into video. On Wednesday, the popular dating app will begin testing its first video-based feature, Tinder Loops, with iOS users in Canada and Sweden. The company says it will evaluate how users respond to Loops before making a decision to roll it out to other markets. As you may have guessed…
[ad_1] After a racial slur GIF caused Snapchat to remove its GIPHY sticker feature, Snapchat confirms to TechCrunch it’s reinstated its integration. GIPHY has apologized, fixed the bug that let the objectionable GIF slip through, and reviewed its GIF sticker library four times in an effort to guarantee that offensive content won’t end up in…
[ad_1] Red flags and “disputed” tags just entrenched people’s views about suspicious news articles, so Facebook is hoping to give readers a wide array of info so they can make their own decisions about what’s misinformation. Facebook will try showing links to a journalist’s Wikipedia entry, other articles, and a follow button to help users…
[ad_1] Following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, users have flocked to their Facebook privacy settings to sever their connection to third-party apps that they no longer wanted to have access to their data. But deleting them all took forever because you had to remove them one by one. Now Facebook has released a new way to…
[ad_1] Google is rolling out a new feature today that will help you better plan your night at the movies. While the company has supported displaying movie showtimes within Google Search results following the closure of its standalone movie site in 2016, this update will help you narrow down your options more efficiently, thanks to the…
[ad_1] Perhaps aiming to snag some attention away from Snapchat’s big group video call update out this morning, Facebook also announced an update to its chat app Messenger, which will now allow users to share 360-degree videos and HD quality video (720p). In both cases, you’ll have to capture the photo or video outside the…
[ad_1] Shine, an early arrival in market now teeming with self-care apps and services, has closed on $5 million in Series A funding, the company announced today, alongside the milestone of hitting 2 million active users. The round was led by existing investor by Comcast Ventures with betaworks, Felix Capital and The New York Times…
[ad_1] Without warning, Instagram has broken many of the unofficial apps built on its platform. This weekend it surprised developers with a massive reduction in how much data they can pull from the Instagram API, shrinking the API limit from 5,000 to 200 calls per user per hour. Apps that help people figure out if…
[ad_1] Millennials may be a bit obsessed with self-care – and it’s beginning to pay off for the makers of self-care and digital wellness apps. According to data from multiple app store intelligence firms, the category is now seeing notable growth. In the first quarter of 2018, the top 10 grossing self-care apps in the…
[ad_1] Fitbit shaved off another roughly 10% of its value in trading today after a downgrade from a Wall Street firm, which will once again throw on more skepticism as to whether or not Fitbit can be a viable business in the smartwatch market. The note came from Morgan Stanley this morning, which said it…
[ad_1] Hot on the heels of last week’s security issues, dating app Grindr is under fire again for inappropriate sharing of HIV status with advertisers and inadequate security on other personal data transmission. It’s not a good look for a company that says privacy is paramount. Norwegian research outfit SINTEF analyzed the app’s traffic and…
[ad_1] Robinhood is rolling out its Coinbase-killer that’s already helped the fintech startup’s valuation grow 4X in a year. Zero-fee trading of Bitcoin and Ethereum is now available to all investors in California, Massachusetts, Missouri, and Montana. Everyone else is still on the waitlist. Robinhood users everywhere can already track 16 crypto coins including BTC, ETH,…
[ad_1] Facebook is scrambling to add safeguards against abuse of user data as it reels from backlash over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Now TechCrunch has learned Facebook will launch a certification tool that demands that marketers guarantee email addresses used for ad targeting were rightfully attained. This new Custom Audiences certification tool was described by Facebook…
[ad_1] At a time when the models of traditional social networks are being questioned, it’s more important than ever to experiment with alternatives. Arbtr is a proposed social network that limits users to sharing a single thing at any given time, encouraging “ruthless self-editing” and avoiding “nasty things” like endless feeds filled with trivial garbage.…
[ad_1] These kinds of leaks didn’t happen when I started reporting on Facebook eight years ago. It was a tight-knit cult convinced of its mission to connect everyone, but with the discipline of a military unit where everyone knew loose lips sink ships. Motivational posters with bold corporate slogans dotted its offices, rallying the troops.…
[ad_1] A company called Clipisode is today launching a new service that’s essentially a “talk show in a box,” as founder Brian Alvey describes it. Similar to how Anchor now allows anyone to build a professional podcast using simple mobile and web tools, Clipisode does this for video content. With Clipisode, you can record a…
[ad_1] When you’ve got leverage, don’t be afraid to use it. That’s been Google’s modus operandi in the news and publishing world over the last year or so as it has pushed its AMP platform, funding various news-related ventures that may put it ahead, and nourished its personalized Chrome tabs on mobile. The latter, as…
[ad_1] A funny thing happened the last couple of times I was briefed on a Huawei flagship product: news was breaking about some major roadblock for the company’s U.S. distribution plans. First it was AT&T backing out in the midst of CES and then it was Best Buy’s decision to drop the company just ahead…
[ad_1] A racial slur GIF slipped into GIPHY’s sticker library earlier this month, prompting Instagram and Snapchat to drop their GIPHY integrations. Now Instagram is reactivating after GIPHY confirmed its reviewed its GIF library four times and will preemptively review any new GIFs it adds. Snapchat said it had nothing to share right now about…
[ad_1] Google Play Audiobooks is getting a major update today that adds a number of new features to the service that were sorely missing when it launched earlier this year. None of these are groundbreaking, but they’ll help Google reach feature parity with some of its competitors while injecting a bit of its proprietary smarts…
[ad_1] Apple just released an iOS update for your iPhone and iPad. 11.3 introduces a ton of bug fixes but also a bunch of new features. If you forgot about Animjois, today is your lucky day as Apple is adding four new Animojis — a dragon, a bear, a lion and a skull. But that’s…
[ad_1] Users of Grindr, the popular dating app for gay men, may have been broadcasting their location despite having disabled that particular feature. Two security flaws allowed for discovery of location data against a user’s will, though they take a bit of doing. The first of the flaws, which were discovered by Trever Faden and…
[ad_1] Public places may soon be filled with secret pieces of art unlocked by looking through the lens of AR, if Artopia’s cheerily creative app catches on. It essentially lets you geocache your 3D scribbles so anyone else can find, appreciate, and share them. Artopia, currently in beta for Android and iOS, is a straightforward…
[ad_1] With the launch of Waze Local, Google-owned navigation app Waze is offering small businesses a way to market themselves to consumers on the road. Waze has allowed larger brands to buy ads for years, and it’s been beta testing Waze Local since 2016. “It’s been a gradual strategy,” said Matt Phillips, who leads the…
[ad_1] The Office of the Inspector General has issued its report on the circumstances surrounding the FBI’s 2016 lawsuit attempting to force Apple to unlock an iPhone as part of a criminal investigation. While it stops short of saying the FBI was untruthful in its justification of going to court, the report is unsparing of the…
[ad_1] Google will be acquiring Tenor, which powers a variety of GIF keyboards on phones and messengers like Facebook Messenger, the companies announced today. Tenor will continue to operate as a separate brand within Google, the company said in a blog post. Tenor has increasingly positioned itself as a search company, using that as a…
[ad_1] With the explosion of streaming services now available, it’s becoming more difficult to figure out not just what movie or TV show to watch next, but where you can actually watch it. Google today is rolling out its solution to this problem with a significant revamp of its Google Play Movies & TV app…
[ad_1] Meet the Huawei P20. It’s a pretty nice phone. I played around with it, and I can confirm that it is, indeed, a solid flagship with some suitably over-the-top features — what’s that you say? Three rear-facing cameras?! But all of this is kind of a moot point if you live here in the…
[ad_1] Huawei just unveiled its brand new flagship phone — the P20. It’s a solid, well-designed Android phone with a shiny design, an iPhone X-like notch and some extravagant features, such as not one, not two but three cameras on the back of the P20 Pro. I’ve played with the phone for a few minutes…
[ad_1] Huawei is about to unveil its brand new flagship smartphone — the P20. While many details have already leaked, this is going to be an interesting launch. The conference will begin at 3 PM in Paris, 9 AM in New York, 6 AM in San Francisco. The company chose to unveil its new device…
[ad_1] Snapchat has ephemeral messages, and now Facebook has ephemeral friend requests. The big blue social network feeds off your social graph, and every time you expand it, it has more content to show you. But if you leave a questionable friend request in limbo for too long, you’ll probably never confirm or delete it. So…
[ad_1] HQ Trivia, the TV-style game show in an app, is starting to make money. The company this week is rolling out its first sponsored games, including a $3 million deal which includes sponsored games from Warner Bros., as well as a sponsored game from Nike, arriving today. AdAge was the first to report on…
[ad_1] The U.S. maneuvers against China’s tech giants continue today with an official announcement from FCC Chairman Ajit Pai that the agency may soon ban purchasing anything from companies that “pose a national security threat.” Huawei, ZTE, and other major tech manufacturers aren’t named specifically, but it’s clear what is meant. Pai lists the risk…
[ad_1] Google announced this morning its “mobile -first” index of the web is now starting to roll out, after a year and a half of testing and experimentation. Back in 2016, Google first detailed its plan to change the way its search index operates, explaining how its algorithms would eventually be shifted to use the…
[ad_1] Smartphone and VR headset maker HTC has published its consolidated results for Q4 2017 — and it makes for grim reading. The topline figures are: Flat quarterly revenue of NT$15.7 billion (~$540M) with gross margin of -30.8% Quarterly operating loss of NT$9.6 billion (~$330M) with operating margin of -60.8% Quarterly net loss after tax:…
[ad_1] You know what tech startups hate? Complicated legal compliance. The problem is, Facebook isn’t a startup any more, but its competitors are. There have been plenty of calls from congress and critics to regulate Facebook following the election interference scandal and now the Cambridge Analytica debacle. The government could require extensive ads transparency reporting…
[ad_1] The swipe is where the similarity ends. Raya is less like Tinder and more like a secret society. You need a member’s recommendations or a lot of friends inside to join, and you have to apply with an essay question. It costs a flat $7.99 for everyone, women and celebrities included. You show yourself…
[ad_1] The vastness that makes the Amazon rainforest so diverse and fertile also makes it extremely difficult to protect. Rainforest Connection is a project started back in 2014 that used solar powered second-hand phones as listening stations that could alert authorities to sounds of illegal logging. And applying machine learning has supercharged the network’s capabilities.…
[ad_1] Cambridge Analytica may have used Facebook’s data to influence your political opinions. But why does least-liked tech company Facebook have all this data about its users in the first place? Let’s put aside Instagram, WhatsApp and other Facebook products for a minute. Facebook has built the world’s biggest social network. But that’s not what…
[ad_1] According to a new report from Bloomberg, Apple could be unveiling a new version of its entry-level iPad at its event next week. The company is holding a press event on March 27 in Chicago. And the only thing that we know is that the event is going to be focused on the education…
[ad_1] Tapas Media has its own platform for digital comics — but like a lot of publishers, CEO Chang Kim has ambitions beyond the comics world. Comixology is the big name in digital comics. The company, which was acquired by Amazon in 2014, is focused on selling print comics from major publishers in web- and…
[ad_1] Instagram isn’t quite bringing back the chronological feed but it will show more new posts and stop suddenly bumping you to the top of the feed while you’re scrolling. “With these changes, your feed will feel more fresh, and you won’t miss the moments you care about” Instagram writes. It should be more coherent…
[ad_1] Huawei can’t catch a break in the States. Just at the company was set to announce a big carrier deal at CES, AT&T reportedly switch gears last minute. Now, a week before the company is set reveal its next big flagship at an event in Paris, Best Buy is reportedly planning to stop sales…
[ad_1] When Cloudflare acquired Neumob, a mobile performance startup last fall, it was a sign that the company wanted to move beyond web performance into helping mobile app developers understand what’s happening at the network level. Today, the company introduced Cloudflare Mobile SDK, a free tool which could help developers understand network-level performance problems. Cloudflare’s…
[ad_1] For the visually impaired, there are lots of accessibility options if you want to browse the web — screen readers, podcast versions of articles and so on. But it can still be a pain to keep up with your favorite publications the way sighted app users do. BrailleVoice is a project that puts the…
[ad_1] Microbiome pills, gambling for one-on-one video games, and potential cancer cures were the highlights from legendary startup accelerator Y Combinator’s Winter 2018 Demo Day 2. You can read about all 64 startups that launched on Day 1 in verticals like biotech and robotics, our picks for the top 7 companies from Day 1, and our full coverage…
[ad_1] It’s moved beyond tradition and into the realm of meme that Apple manages to dominate the news cycle around major industry events, all while not actually participating in said events. CES rolls around and every story is about HomeKit or its competitors; another tech giant has a conference and the news is that Apple…
[ad_1] Uber appeared set to hire Assaf Ronen, the former vice president of Amazon’s voice and natural user interface shopping, to lead its products — but it looks like that isn’t going to happen due to a discrepancy in his working history, according to Recode. Uber discovered a discrepancy related to his tenure at Amazon,…
[ad_1] In this modern world, some days it can feel like everything is out of your grasp. So take stock on those thing that you can control. Like Messenger, Facebook’s increasingly feature-rich offshoot app, which now sports admin privileges for group chats. The new feature is rolling out this week, giving users the ability to…
[ad_1] Biotech, robotics, and fintech startups took the spotlight today at Y Combinator’s 26th Demo Day. This batch features 141 total companies from 23 countries, with presentations spread over two days. The house was packed at Mountain View’s Computer History Museum with wealthy investors forced to stand in the back or sit on the floor.…
[ad_1] Microbiome therapeutics, Photoshop for augmented reality, and cancer treatments were some of the ideas presented at Day 2 of startup accelerator Y Combinator’s Winter 2018 Demo Day. YC is increasingly using its massive class size (141 startups this time around) to fund especially risky frontier technology and biotech moonshots, while tempering the portfolio with…
[ad_1] Autonomous cargo shipping, voice games and a camera that fits in a catheter were amongst the most impressive startups that launched yesterday at the Y Combinator Winter 2018 Demo Day 1. You can read about all 64 startups that launched in verticals like biotech and robotics, and check back later for our full coverage…
[ad_1] AR-enabled shopping is expanding again today. This time, online furniture retailer Wayfair is introducing an augmented reality feature in its mobile app for Android that will allow customers to visualize furniture in their own home ahead of purchase, just by holding up their smartphone. The feature, called “View in Room 3D,” was previously available…
[ad_1] With little fuss or fanfare, Cleo, the London-based startup that offers an AI-powered chatbot as a replacement for your banking apps, has begun quietly offering its service to U.S. customers. Just 21 days in, I understand the U.K. fintech is already signing up 1,000 users across the pond per day. Described as an “alpha…
[ad_1] French startup Lydia announces two new things today. First, the company is launching a financial hub with multiple new products. Second, Lydia is announcing a new premium subscription to access those new features. “Today, we’re lucky enough to have you here to announce you the biggest thing we’ve done since Lydia’s launch,” co-founder and…
[ad_1] Instagram’s next big Stories feature could let you compliment or trash talk other people’s feed posts, or embed a “see post” button to promote your own. A TechCrunch reader sent us these screenshots of the new feature, which Instagram confirmed to us is appearing to a small subset of users. “We’re always testing ways…
[ad_1] There are plenty of choices out there if you want to learn a new language, but if you’re in Europe, chances are you’ve given Babbel a shot. The app, which started back in 2007 on the web, is celebrating its 10th birthday by expanding to the U.S. — a unique country that has proven…
[ad_1] Facebook is eager to displace YouTube and Patreon in order to become the home of online content creators, so it’s testing a bunch of new ways for them to earn money and connect with fans. Facebook’s dedicated Creator app that launched in November on iOS will come to Android soon, and it’s also starting a…
[ad_1] Pinterest is looking to continue to increase its portfolio of ads, though sometimes that can take a little while to see the light of day — and that includes a new-ish tool called Shopping Ads that’s slowly getting opened to more developers. Getting new ad formats is important for a smaller company looking to…
[ad_1] The epic battle between Qualcomm and Broadcom seems to have hit a final ceasefire, with President Trump using the power of CFIUS to block the transaction this past week, ending what would have been the largest tech M&A transaction of all time. It may be all quiet on the semiconductor front, but Qualcomm and…
[ad_1] Happy Saturday, everyone! While many things in the world are very bad today, if you were on the Internet last night, you probably caught wind of a pretty cool historic moment in college basketball: UMBC — University of Maryland, Baltimore County — knocked off the overall number one seed in the annual NCAA men’s…
[ad_1] The Tingles team has done much in the way of promotion, but the app has already built a fairly sizable following in its community. That’s one of the nice things about a targeted product — it spreads fast. In the year since Slovenian co-founders Gasper Kolenc and Miha Mlakar launched, the service has focused…
[ad_1] Hoping to capitalize on the popularity of trivia applications like HQ Trivia, dating app maker Zoosk has just released an experimental app that combines trivia with the potential for meeting someone new. The app is a relaunch and complete makeover of Zoosk’s Lively, which first debuted in July 2016 as a dating app that…
[ad_1] Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week Katie Roof and I were joined by Mayfield Fund’s Navin Chaddha, an investor with early connections with Lyft to talk about, well, Lyft — as well as two bombshell news events in the form of an SEC fine…
[ad_1] I wasn’t alone in suggesting that Samsung’s Animoji competitors were, well, creepy. AR Emojis sit firmly in the uncanny valley between face scans and cartoon characters — generally lacking the adorableness of Apple’s offering. They have, however, had one saving grace: Disney, the entertainment company that essentially owns all of your best childhood memories. …
[ad_1] Google Maps has a pretty solid set of data for taking transit from here to there, but anyone with a physical disability knows it isn’t quite that simple. Some stations may be wheelchair-unfriendly, have out-of-service elevators, that kind of thing. A new update to the service adds an option for you to specify a…
[ad_1] By adding a cryptocurrency exchange, a web version and stock option trading, Robinhood has managed to quadruple its valuation in a year, according to a source familiar with a new round the startup is raising. Robinhood is closing in on around $350 million in Series D funding led by Russian firm DST Global, the…
[ad_1] Facebook wants you to pay for internet. This week TechCrunch was tipped off that Facebook had quietly launched an Express Wi-Fi Android app in the Google Play store that lets users buy data packs and find nearby hotspots as part of Facebook’s distributed Wi-Fi network. The company’s Express Wi-Fi program is live in five developing…
[ad_1] Spotify explained why it’s ditching the traditional IPO for a direct listing on the NYSE on April 3rd today during its Investor Day presentation. With no lockup period and no intermediary bankers, Spotify thinks it can go public without all the typical shenanigans. Spotify described the rationale for using a direct listing with five points:…
[ad_1] Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, the ‘battle royale’ style game where everyone tries to be the last player standing while scrounging for supplies to keep them alive, has launched on Android in Canada MobileSyrup reports, which could presage a future release in the U.S. The arrival of the mobile version of the game more generally known…
[ad_1] BlackBerry today announced it reached an agreement to keep CEO John Chen in his current position through 2023. Chen joined the company in 2013 and is responsible for leading the company’s recovery as it left smartphones and embraced services. When Chen took over the company, the company was struggling on all fronts. Its time…
[ad_1] Now Spotify listens to you instead of the other way around. Spotify has a new voice search interface that lets you say “Play my Discover Weekly”, “Show Calvin Harris”, or “Play some upbeat pop” to pull up music. A Spotify spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that this is “Just a test for now”, as only…
[ad_1] Google Lens, the company’s visual search engine that can recognize what’s in your images and scan business cards, among other things, is now rolling out to all Google Photos users on Android. This marks Google’s first major expansion for Lens, which was previously only available to those who had access to the latest Pixel…
[ad_1] You probably don’t need a 4,000-word review to tell you that the Galaxy S9+ is a good phone. Now that everyone’s got all of the Note 7 jokes mostly out of their system, we can mostly agree that Samsung makes good phones. The S8 was great, and the S9 builds on that success in…
[ad_1] Want to know whether the Samsung Galaxy S9 is worth picking up when it arrives March 16? Good news: I’ve got 4,000 words on the matter that you can read over here. For those who don’t have the time to take all of that in, however, we’ve also put together this handy guide to…
[ad_1] LinkedIn used to have its own business card scanning app, CardMunch, which served a useful purpose in a world where paper cards simply refuse to die. But that app was shut down back in 2014, with LinkedIn suggesting users move to Evernote instead. Today, Microsoft is bringing back business card scanning – but this…
[ad_1] Snapchat and Instagram have temporarily removed their Giphy GIF sticker features after users saw an extremely racist GIF as an option to add to their images. Snapchat confirms to TechCrunch “As soon as we were made aware, we removed the GIF and have disabled Giphy until we can be sure that this won’t happen…
[ad_1] Philz Coffee CEO Jacob Jaber is wildly enthusiastic when he explains that the company’s new order-ahead app is a revelation for the young coffee store going up against giants like Starbucks — and maybe coffee stores as a whole. Here’s what it does: when you open it, you get a carousel of coffee choices…
[ad_1] YouTube’s mobile app is getting a dark mode. The company announced this morning its dark theme first introduced on its desktop site last year, is launching today on the YouTube iOS app and arriving soon after on Android. With the setting enabled, YouTube’s background turns from white to black throughout the YouTube experience as…
[ad_1] With TV programming now spread out across a variety of services beyond traditional network TV, it can be hard to know what to watch next and what’s popular, given how much great content there is to choose from. An app called TV Time is helping with that, by allowing TV fans to track shows they’re…
[ad_1] Apple has signed a partnership with Ito World to add bike-sharing data in Apple Maps in over 175 cities across 36 countries. The feature is now live and helps you find the nearest station by typing “bike sharing” in the search bar or the name of the service. Once again, Apple chose to integrate…
[ad_1] In a way, Essential is something of a pioneer. Before the iPhone X helped the world reluctantly embrace the screen notch, the company proudly displayed one atop its first flagship. Since then, of course, it’s become a feature, not a bug, with a long list of companies rushing to embrace it on their latest…
[ad_1] Snapchat has temporarily removed its Giphy GIF sticker feature after a user saw an extremely racist GIF as an option. Snapchat confirms to TechCrunch “As soon as w were made aware, we removed the GIF and have disabled Giphy until we can be sure that this won’t happen again. The spokesperson says that all…
[ad_1] Facebook’s augmented reality camera is evolving beyond selfie masks and randomly placed 3D objects to using location markers in the real world that trigger AR experiences in a precise location. Spotted today, Facebook confirms to TechCrunch that it’s testing the feature in closed beta with promotions for the upcoming Ready Player One and Wrinkle…
[ad_1] Urban Airship recently announced new capabilities designed to allow app developers to deliver the right message to their users at exactly the right time. Senior Vice President of Product and Engineering Mike Herrick explained that the company (which started out as a platform for push notifications) has supported in-app messaging for years. However, those messages…
[ad_1] We’re hearing from a number of sources that Giphy, the big platform for hosting GIFs that also runs a GIF keyboard, set out to raise huge new financing round — though it’s not clear if it ever crossed the finish line. Sources pegged the round at something as high as around $100 million, but…
[ad_1] There’s nothing we spend more money on for a worse experience than housing. Keyo wants to fix all of it. The audacious startup envisions a world where a building’s other tenants get $20 to show you an available apartment on your schedule. Where you auto-pay your rent online and it improves your credit score.…
[ad_1] Filed under moves that are potentially groundbreaking with big implications but with quite small numbers, Facebook has signed an exclusive deal with the MLB to stream 25 afternoon games, according to Bloomberg. The deal is a bit reminiscent of the one Twitter signed for Thursday Night Football back in 2016 to stream games that are…
[ad_1] Samsung’s new Galaxy S9 may not quite live up to the iPhone X when it comes to Samsung’s implementation of a Face ID-style system or its odd take on AR emoji. But that’s not going to matter much to Samsung device owners – not only because the S9 is a good smartphone overall, but…
[ad_1] Bixby is, by far, the most frustrating part of the S9. It’s true, of course, that no voice assistant is perfect, but a full year after Samsung’s smart assistant debuted on the Galaxy S8, it still feels unfinished. Of course, the company’s made some significant progress, and a slew of artificial intelligence startup acquisitions…
[ad_1] Snapchat now lets you @-tag someone in your Story, creating a swipe up “more” option that shows the tagged person’s name, handle, Bitmoji, and an Add button so you can follow them too. The feature could let friends call each other out in Stories, or promote their favorite influencers by making it easy for…
[ad_1] You probably don’t need a 4,000 word review to tell you that the Galaxy S9+ is a good phone. Now that everyone’s got all of the Note 7 jokes mostly out of their system, we can mostly agree that Samsung makes good phones. The S8 was great, and the S9 builds on that success…
[ad_1] Snap is laying off around 100 employees that are part of its engineering staff, according to multiple reports from CNBC and Cheddar. The company expects to lay off as much as 100 people in the engineering department, according to those reports. It’s another sign of potentially re-aligning efforts as it looks to remake itself…
[ad_1] The best bot on Messenger just got better. We’ve teamed up with Chatfuel and Bitext to add Bitext’s NLP Middleware to the TechCrunch Messenger bot. This enhanced version adds functionality for conversational interaction, improved natural language understanding and unique features like negation understanding. You can check out our new and improved Messenger bot here. To…
[ad_1] Just like in the last two years, Google is using the beginning of March to launch the first developer preview of the next version of Android. Android P, as it’s currently called, is still very much a work in progress and Google isn’t releasing it into its public Android beta channel for over-the-air updates…
[ad_1] Whether you’re a developer who’s working on mobile apps, or just someone enjoying the millions of apps available for your phone, today is a very special day. It’s the 10-year anniversary of the original iPhone SDK. I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that this release changed a lot of people’s lives. I know…
[ad_1] HQ is redefining mobile, creating through its twice-daily trivia games a sense of urgency that pierces the monotony of our social feeds. Now it’s raised a big round of funding to turn its scrappy operation into the Jeopardy from tomorrow. But just like its 12-round games, we’ve got 12 questions (and some answers) for…
[ad_1] ELSA, an app whose name stands for “English Language Speech Assistant” (and not the popular Disney character!), has raised $3.2 million for its A.I.-assisted language learning platform that teaches people how to speak English. Unlike other courses that focus mainly on teaching grammar and vocabulary, ELSA uses artificial intelligence and speech recognition technology to…
[ad_1] You might get to actually save money while you’re traveling if you just leave some free space in your bag — or not pay for that travel at all — if Daria Rebenok’s plan plays out. As avid travelers, and ones longing for products from home they can’t get abroad, she and Artem Fedyaev decided to…
[ad_1] Ahead of a big fundraising to fuel its mobile ambitions, “free” mobile service startup FreedomPop is taking an unexpected strategic side-road to expand into a completely different area: financial services. The company is licensing its customer conversion platform to Prudential, which plans to use it to up-sell existing customers to more of its products.…
[ad_1] Searching for a new job can be a daunting process — especially if you aren’t sure what you’re great at — and even finding the right companies and what jobs are out there is probably enough to make you freeze for a second. Leap.ai, an intelligent recruiting platform, is looking to make life a…
[ad_1] Eager to one-up Snapchat, Instagram appears to be preparing to expand its collection of shutter modes beyond options like Boomerang and Superzoom. Buried within Instagram’s Android Application Package (APK) is an icon for a Portrait shutter for the Stories camera. This could potentially let people shoot stylized portraits with bokeh effect-blurred backgrounds or other…
[ad_1] Everyone knew the MoviePass deal is too good to be true — and as is so often the case these days, it turns out you’re not the customer, you’re the product. And in this case they’re not even attempting to camouflage that. Mitch Lowe, the company’s CEO, told an audience at a Hollywood event…
[ad_1] Facebook’s algorithm is terrible at surfacing breaking news, often showing urgent posts hours or even days later when more facts have since emerged or the story has changed. This has made Twitter the default home for this content, but that position has weakened since Twitter implemented its own relevancy algorithm that brings up old…
[ad_1] Massive chipmaker Qualcomm, currently targeted by aggressive acquisition attempts by Broadcom, is now delaying a pivotal meeting with shareholders this week that would determine its fate going forward by at least a month to comply with regulators regarding the deal. The CFIUS — the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States — has…
[ad_1] Finbarr Taylor and Nick Raushenbush had started a little side project that was making just about enough money to keep the site’s lights on while they were working on their next plans. Then, a few months later, Shogun — a tool to help small businesses build shopfronts for sites like Shopify — started making…
[ad_1] Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi could make its debut in the U.S. as soon as this year, according to its CEO. Lei Jun, the serial entrepreneur who leads the phone maker, told the Wall Street Journal that the company — which is being linked with an IPO this year — plans to finally begin selling…
[ad_1] More intimate than text but easier to record than video, Facebook hopes voice could get people sharing more on its aging social network. And internationally where users may have to deal with non-native language keyboards, voice lets them speak their mind without a typing barrier. Facebook is now testing Voice Clips as a status…
[ad_1] Earlier this morning Samsung’s Galaxy S9’s camera was awarded the highest-yet score from DxOMark, and now its screen gets the best-of-all-time nod from DisplayMate and display wonk Ray Soneira. The margins between the victor and the vanquished, however, are growing thinner every generation. The S9 beats its competitors, chiefly the iPhone X if we’re…
[ad_1] You know the drill, right? A new flagship comes out and bumps the last big name out of the top spot. We’re still a couple of weeks out from the Samsung Galaxy S9/S9+ release date, but the premium handset just got the DxOMark treatment, and it seems the company’s got another feather to put…
[ad_1] Instagram wants to be your phone, not just your camera. And it wants to be better at it than Snapchat. Files buried in Instagram and the Instagram Direct standalone app’s Android Application Packages (APKs) are files and icons for “Call” and “Video Call”. APKs often show files for unreleased features that are lying dormant…
[ad_1] Users might hate it, but Facebook is now testing a self-serve sponsored messaging tool for small businesses that aren’t sophisticated enough to build bots. TechCrunch first reported Facebook internally building a prototype of the Messenger Broadcast tool back in November that let companies blast a message to anyone who’s already started a conversation with…
[ad_1] Given the fact that we already rely on them for pretty much everything else, why not just go all in and turn our smartphones in to literal toolboxes? Bullitt, the UK-based licensed phone manufacturer behind those Kodak handsets was on hand at Mobile World Congress this week, showing off a pair of super rugged…
[ad_1] Microsoft today launched Soundscape, a new iOS app that aims to give people who are blind or visually impaired a greater awareness of their surrounding by using 3D cues. It’s worth stressing that the app isn’t about replacing guide dogs or canes. Instead, it’s all about enriching people’s perception of their surroundings. A guide…
[ad_1] Sure, Apple didn’t have any sort of official presence at this year’s MWC, but this was the week the iPhone X really came into its own. The company’s premium flagship was everywhere in spirit, through the design choices from the competition. For some it was the mere legitimization of the notch — for others,…
[ad_1] The secret to Spotify’s public market debut is actually an acquisition it made in 2014. The Echo Nest was powering music recommendations for Beats Music, Rdio, Vevo, and iHeartRadio too before Spotify pulled it out from under them by buying it for a reported $100 million — 90 percent in Spotify equity. That deal paid…
[ad_1] Hall One at Mobile World Congress – a single space more massive than most conference centers in major cities – contained only a few displays. Although a quarter of the room housed small phone and mobile manufacturers, Huawei controlled the rest, creating a walled-off compound patrolled by women in folk costumes from many lands.…
[ad_1] Spotify’s “Family Plan,” a variation of which launched in 2014, as well as its “Student Plan” appear to be driving a significant portion of the company’s growth and improving retention, as the company points to it multiple times in its filing for a direct listing on public markets today. But that also comes at…
[ad_1] Spotify just filed for a direct listing in the U.S., sidestepping the traditional IPO process, and now we’re starting to see some of the true financial guts of the company — and some of the significant risks it faces from challenging services from Apple and Google. Apple, for example, charges apps a percentage of…
[ad_1] LinkedIn wasn’t built for low-skilled job seekers, so Facebook is barging in. Today Facebook is rolling out job posts to 40 more countries to make itself more meaningful to people’s lives while laying the foundation for a lucrative business. Businesses will be able to post job openings to a Jobs tab on their Page,…
[ad_1] Just last week, AT&T announced the first handful of cities where it’ll roll out its 5G network later this year. Today at Mobile World Congress, T-Mobile and Sprint did the same. Sprint’s first 5G networks will go live in Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, Washington, DC and Houston. T-Mobile will fire up 5G in…
[ad_1] Doogee’s Mobile World Congress press conference is mostly what you’d expect from a company you’ve never heard of: small, low key, in the second basement meeting room at a hotel across from the convention center. It’s a bit like the smartphone farm system, the company’s hoping it can gin up enough awareness to rise…
[ad_1] Facebook is trying to play extra nice with local news publishers by putting $3 million behind the launch of the Local News Subscriptions Accelerator. The three-month pilot program will help 10 to 15 U.S.-based metropolitan news organizations gain more digital subscribers both on and off Facebook. “We often talk to publishers about what the future…
[ad_1] “What’s all the fuss about?” Curiosity over why people are protesting the Snapchat redesign seems to have inspired a new wave of users to try the app. Snapchat downloads in the U.S. went up 41 percent to 76 percent in the week following the redesign’s February 6th rollout compared to the week before, according…
[ad_1] Pinterest today is adding another executive to its upper c-suite with the hire of Francoise Brougher, who was most recently business lead at Square and prior to that VP of SMB global sales and operations at Google, as its first chief operating officer. Both of those previous positions are probably going to be of…
[ad_1] When Equifax was broken into late last year — one of the biggest security breaches in recent history — Fletcher Heisler wanted to make sure security engineers got to know exactly what happened right away, and how to fix it. That’s part of the goal of Hunter2, a new online learning platform for security…
[ad_1] Greetings for snowy Barcelona. Sure we’ve still got several days of Mobile World Congress ahead of us, but we’ve entered the point in the week when all of the big names have already wrapped up their press conferences and revealed their hands. With that in mind, this seems like the perfect opportunity to take…
[ad_1] Back in 2016, Amazon’s Japanese rival Rakuten acquired Bitnet, a bitcoin wallet startup that it had previously invested in, to help it work on blockchain technology and applications. Today, one of the first fruits of that deal has come to light. The company is planning a new cryptocurrency called Rakuten Coin — built on blockchain…
[ad_1] Flutter is Google’s open source toolkit for helping developers build iOS and Android apps. It’s not necessarily a household name yet, but it’s also less than a year old and, to some degree, it’s going up against frameworks like Facebook’s popular React Native. Google’s framework, which is heavily focused around the company’s Dart programming…
[ad_1] The clicky-clacky, full keyboard devices that spring to mind when you hear “BlackBerry” might be a thing of the past… but the brand lives on. Famed gadget-unearther Evan Blass dug up a picture of an upcoming BlackBerry device said to be known as “Ghost.” For those finding themselves saying “Wait, they still make BlackBerries?,”…
[ad_1] Fitbit, which has increasingly had to fend off competition from devices like the Apple Watch and is increasingly making moves in the healthcare space, still hasn’t seemed to nail things down quite yet as it posted weaker-than-expected financial results for its fourth quarter. The quarter was more or less a complete whiff, falling short…
[ad_1] Huawei didn’t have a new phone to show at MWC this year, so it did what any good smartphone maker would: it put the Mate 10 Pro in an autonomous car and drove it directly at a dog. Of course, the promotional video was a lot more dramatic than what the company was actually…
[ad_1] Actions on Google, the Google Assistant’s version of what Amazon calls ‘skills,’ have been around for a while, but Google today announced that is expanding the platform to support a wider group of international developers, in addition to a number of other features for the platform. Maybe the most important update here is that…
[ad_1] Carriers have kicked off the world’s biggest mobile phone tradeshow with calls for an “investment friendly framework” to fund rollouts of next-gen 5G network technology and level the playing field with Internet giants. “We need a new mindset,” argued Telefonica CEO José María Álvarez-Pallete López, giving the first keynote of the morning here at…
[ad_1] Automaker Daimler has a new largest shareholder – Geely Automotive chairman Li Shufu. The Geely stake, worth an estimated $9 billion, should give the Chinese automotive giant more leverage when trying to work out cross-company tech arrangements with Daimler and its sub brands including Mercedes-Benz. Daimler is already partnered up with a major automotive concern…
[ad_1] According to KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and Apple Insider, Apple could be working on a brand new pair of wireless headphones for later this year. While the company already owns Beats, those over-the-ear headphones could be sold under the Apple brand. It seems like the AirPods are a success, and the company wants to…
[ad_1] Ford vehicles equipped with the automaker’s SYNC 3 infotainment system will soon have access to a new voice-powered driving assistant behind the wheel – Sygic’s new aptly named “Driving Assistant.” The feature, which works with Sygic’s GPS navigation app, is described as a “voice-controlled co-driver that helps the driver identify nearby rest-stops, restaurants, hotels”…
[ad_1] This morning’s Sony press conference was a real whirlwind. The company announced two new phones and the availability of its Xperia Ear Duo, still managed to wrap it all up in about an hour. All said, it was actually kind of refreshing to be in and out so quickly. There was a quick “one…
[ad_1] With the smartphone OS market almost entirely sewn up between Google and Apple, what’s an alternative operating system maker to do? Take an interest in feature phones, that’s what. Today Jolla, the Finnish maker of an Android alternative called Sailfish, has announced v3 of its platform. At a press conference at the Mobile World Congress…
[ad_1] Mozilla called it a day with Firefox OS for mobile handsets back in 2015 and said it would test the waters for an IoT effort using some of the same technology (and it has). But that hasn’t spelled the complete end for the tech on mobile devices. Quietly, a company called KaiOS, built on a…
[ad_1] Just like CES has seen an influx of car manufacturers in recent years, MWC, too, is now a showcase for new in-car technology. Like in previous years, BMW once again set up shop in Barcelona this week to show off some of its most recent innovations, all of which bring together some of the…
[ad_1] While some carmakers and others worry about Google’s domination in mapping and how that will play out in the auto industry, we are continuing to see announcements that point, if not to Google’s influence growing, its place in the market and how some may be testing the waters for more. Today, Ford announced that…
[ad_1] With rising concern over social media’s ‘toxic‘ content problem, and mainstream consumer trust apparently on the slide, there’s growing pressure on parents to keep children from being overexposed to the Internet’s dark sides. Yet pulling the plug on social media isn’t exactly an option. UK startup SafeToNet reckons it can help, with a forthcoming system of…
[ad_1] Sony always had an odd sort of relationship with the smartphone. Sure, it’s one of the world’s largest consumer electronics companies, but it’s never really cracked the code with its Xperia devices. Really, the company’s phones tend to feel more like a showcase for its latest camera technologies than truly competitive devices. The XZ2…
[ad_1] We’ve known for a while that Samsung’s been planning an Animoji competitor for its latest handset. Now that we’ve actually seen (the admittedly clunkily named) AR Emoji in action, we can testify to the fact that it’s some combination of compelling and creepy. That last part first. Like the iPhone X, the Galaxy S9…
[ad_1] Samsung didn’t leave too much up to the imagination at Mobile World Congress this year. The hardware giant took a little wind out of its own sails back at CES when it announced it would be launching its latest flagship sometime this month. And then, of course, the invites went out, bearing a giant…
[ad_1] If you were having any doubts about Samsung’s commitment to its DeX, consider them assuaged. The company introduced its smartphone docking hardware with the Galaxy S8 and has talked up a new version for every big phone release since then — and today’s big Galaxy S9 reveal is no different. We were pretty lukewarm…
[ad_1] ZTE’s one of those workhorse smartphone companies you don’t hear much about, aside from the occasional misguided flirtation with a bizarre form factor, a la the dual-screen Axon M. But the Chinese handset manufacturer still powers away and manages to produce some solid handsets at bargain bin prices. The company hasn’t officially announced pricing…
[ad_1] Things have been mostly quiet on the Android Go front since Google announced the low-power mobile operating system back in May — aside, of course, from an unexpected name chance to the decidedly less catchy. Android Oreo (Go Edition). One of the things that’s made the offering unique from the start, however, is that…
[ad_1] Nokia’s 8110 — the distinctive ‘candy bar’ feature phone with a slider opening — was once the phone that everyone wanted but no one could afford, made popular through the Matrix film franchise. Now HMD, the company that has the license to make Nokia phones, is hoping for a hit by bringing it back.…
[ad_1] Nokia — in its newest iteration as a licensed brand of HMD — is a long way off from its glory days, the years when it not only set the pace for innovation in the mobile phone market, but also led it as the world’s biggest handset maker. Today, the company took its latest…
[ad_1] Tablets may not be the most exciting product category these days, but they also aren’t quite as dead as some pundits would like you to believe — and for Huawei, they are actually a growing business. Indeed, the company argues that it’s now the third largest tablet maker in the world. It’s no surprise…
[ad_1] Samsung’s press conference at MWC in Barcelona is happening today. The conference starts at 6 PM CET (5 PM GMT, 12 PM EST, 9 AM PST). You can also check out our liveblog to get our commentary on Samsung’s news. And of course, everybody is waiting for the Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+. Details…
[ad_1] Welcome to LG’s new smartphone strategy. A new flagship every year, followed by an incremental upgrade six months later. It’s a strange approach that’s sure to annoy early adopters, but LG’s certainly not the first to adopt the strategy — it’s in-line with the sort of thing OnePlus, among others, have been doing for…
[ad_1] According to a number of reports today, the next version of Android would include a “dark mode” – something that’s been a long-time feature request from those who prefer the dark-themed and power saving option that’s already available in apps like YouTube and Twitter. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. News that Android was getting…
[ad_1] After Microsoft signed a deal to test Windows 10 on Xiaomi devices in 2015 and then Xiaomi bought a trove of patents to help run other Microsoft services on its devices in 2016, today the two companies announced another chapter in its collaboration. Xiaomi and Microsoft have signed a Strategic Framework Memorandum of Understanding (MoU)…
[ad_1] Rich Communication Services (RCS) is basically the standard for the next generation of text messaging, with apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, LINE and others now offering features that go far beyond the standard SMS-based messaging apps that tend to ship with your phone — unless, of course, you are an Apple and iMessage user.…
[ad_1] Airbnb today is rolling out a few new additions to their home-booking system, including new tiers that are aimed at higher-end customers called Airbnb Plus and Beyond by Airbnb. The new Airbnb Plus tier has homes that are verified for “quality and comfort,” rolling out with around 2,000 homes to start that have been…
[ad_1] Max Rhodes was walking around that weird little parklet in Hayes Valley in San Francisco after taking a break from a five-year stint at Square to figure out what he wanted to do next — and he kept seeing Square registers everywhere. It was spotting them over and over again in smaller retail shops…
[ad_1] Coinbase has some serious competition. Today Robinhood starts rolling out its no-commission cryptocurrency trading feature in California, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana and New Hampshire. Users can buy and sell Bitcoin and Ethereum with no extra fees, and track those and 14 other coins in its sleek app. That’s compared to paying 1.5 to 4 percent…
[ad_1] “We didn’t want to create another app thirsty for attention” writes Product Hunt CEO Ryan Hoover. So instead of a constant stream of fresh stories and alerts, Product Hunt today is releasing what’s essentially a tech industry newsletter in iOS and Android form. Sip distills the day’s big headlines into a set of Twitter…
[ad_1] Global smartphone sales have not been firing on all cylinders for several years now but Gartner’s latest figures record the first ever decline since the analyst began tracking the market all the way back in 2004. (Though it’s not the first analyst to call a decline.) Gartner’s figures peg sales of smartphones to end…
[ad_1] The pixel-peepers over at DxOMark have shared some of the interesting metrics and techniques they use to judge the quality of a smartphone’s artificial bokeh, or background blur in photos. Not only is it difficult to do in the first place, but they have to systematize it! Their guide should provide even seasoned shooters…
[ad_1] Perhaps the most surprising thing I learned about Signal when I spoke with Moxie Marlinspike, the encrypted chat service’s creator, last year at Disrupt, was that it was essentially running on a shoestring budget. An indispensable tool used by millions and feared by governments worldwide, barely getting by! But $50 million from WhatsApp co-founder…
[ad_1] If you own a car or home, one of the biggest challenges you’ll face is finding the right insurance plan that’ll cover everything you need and save you some money — but those plans are always changing, and consumers are getting stuck footing a bill they don’t necessarily need, according to Hanno Fichter. That’s…
[ad_1] With so many Android devices out there to choose from, it’s not always easy to find one that’s enterprise-friendly. To help alleviate that problem, Google announced the Android Enterprise Recommended program today. As the name implies, it’s designed to point enterprise IT departments at devices that Google has deemed to be enterprise-ready. This involves a…
[ad_1] What if you could digitally sculpt a 3D object and share it on Facebook, play with it in virtual reality, or insert it into your world with augmented reality? Facebook is polishing up stages one and two today after first debuting posts of interactive 3D models in News Feed in October that you can…
[ad_1] Messaging is the heart of Snapchat, so after cloning and augmenting Stories, Instagram is hoping to boost intimate usage of Direct with privacy controls not found elsewhere. Now when you send an ephemeral photo or video from the Instagram Direct camera, you can decide whether recipients can only view it once, replay it temporarily,…
[ad_1] David McIntosh’s startup Tenor builds a GIF keyboard — but he actually hopes you’ll spend as little time searching on it as possible. Instead, Tenor’s aim has been to collapse the amount of time it takes for you to find a GIF you like and send it to a friend. Instead of trying to…
[ad_1] Snapchat is bringing one of the best recent features of Instagram Stories to its own app, with the ability to add GIF stickers from Giphy to your posts. This is a notable reversal of the typical pattern we’ve seen of Instagram cloning Snapchat features, but it’s a good one for users since GIF stickers…
[ad_1] As we reported last month, Google is uniting all of its different payment tools under the Google Pay brand. On Android, however, the Android Pay app stuck with its existing brand. That’s changing today, though, with the launch of Google Pay for Android. With this, Google is rolling out an update to Android Pay and introducing…
[ad_1] A half-dozen years after launching Wikipedia Zero, The Wikimedia Foundation is sunsetting the program. Announced in 2012, it was the result of partnerships with mobile carriers, designed to waive the cost of accessing the free encyclopedia in developing countries, where data fees presented a barrier to accessing the site’s seemingly bottomless well of information.…
[ad_1] At the core of Facebook’s “well-being” problem is that its business is directly coupled with total time spent on its apps. The more hours you pass on the social network, the more ads you see and click, the more money it earns. That puts its plan to make using Facebook healthier at odds with…
[ad_1] Uber is preparing to sell its Southeast Asian business to Grab in exchange for a stake in the Singaporean ride-sharing company that has a big presence in that region, according to a new report from CNBC. This wouldn’t be an unfamiliar story for Uber, which was handily beaten by Didi in China before eventually…
[ad_1] The Essential Phone is currently in the midst of being rolled out in a range of new colors, including three that will be released excessively on Essential’s own website, with a staged release schedule that began Thursday. On Friday, however, Essential revealed a surprise fourth new color, “Halo Gray,” which will be exclusive to…