At its F8 developer conference, Facebook today announced that it is launching its Portal video chat hardware internationally by bringing it to Canada and a select number of European countries, too. This rollout will begin in June in Canada, with Europe following this fall. In the U.S., Portal sells for $199 and $349, depending on […]
Remember Prisma? The Moscow-based team behind the app that sparked a style transfer craze in 2016 has raised a $6 million Series A, led by early stage artificial intelligence focused VC firm, Haxus. While one of Prisma’s original co-founders left the company in the middle of last year, taking some team members with him, to […]
Mobile marketing company ManyChat has raised $18 million in Series A funding. The startup, co-founded by CEO Mikael Yang, is currently focused on Facebook Messenger. It offers tools for creating a bot on Messenger while also supporting live human chatting (ManyChat says its approach is a “smart blend of automation and personal outreach”), and additional […]
YouTube wants to have half of the featured videos in its trending tab come from streams originating on the company’s own site going forward, according to the latest quarterly letter from chief executive Susan Wojcicki. The letter, directed to YouTube’s users, is meant to help ease concerns the site’s biggest stars have over copyright challenges, […]
Rae Witte confessed to killing seven women, all of whom he met on dating apps. His criminal trial has been Conveniences by way of technological advances are normalizing a culture of being alone with strangers. Ramirez is a freelance journalist and runs her indie publication ILY Magazine mainly from her one-bedroom apartment. “My schedule isn’t […]
The monetization hose is on full blast at Instagram now, and today at F8, Facebook unveiled one of the latest developments on that front. The company said that creators will now be able to tag items to sell them directly to people viewing their posts and Stories. For now, this will work only on items […]
Extra Crunch offers members the opportunity to tune into conference calls led and moderated by the TechCrunch writers you read every day. Last week, TechCrunch’s Anthony Ha gave us his recap of the TED2019 conference and offered key takeaways from the most interesting talks and provocative ideas shared at the event. Under the theme, “Bigger Than […]
Facebook has been accused of blocking the ability of independent researchers to effectively study how political disinformation flows across its ad platform. Adverts that the social network’s business is designed to monetize have — at the very least — the potential to influence people and push voters’ buttons, as the Cambridge Analytica Facebook data misuse […]
Better late than never, Tumblr has rolled out HTTPS across its entire site. In a brief post on Tumblr’s engineering page, the company said all Tumblr sites will now have the web encryption setting enabled by default, though it admitted the move was “long-overdue.” Tumblr, which like TechCrunch is owned by Verizon, has 464 million […]
The antitrust argument that says big tech needs breaking up to stop platforms abusing competition and consumers in a two-faced role as seller and (manipulative) marketplace may only just be getting going on a mainstream political stage — but startups have been at the coal face of the fight against crushing platform power for years. […]
