Instagram is planning to launch video functionality in two days. But don’t go deleting Vine just yet. Before shoving Vine’s into the deadpool, let’s just calm it down a second.
Vine has been declared by many as the “Instagram for Video.” Instagram’s own video product is likely already too late to squash Vine like a bug. Heck, Facebook couldn’t even get Poke and Messenger off the ground after… → Read More
Stealing a page right out of a startup called Aggregift’s playbook, Amazon today launched a new feature called “Amazon Birthday Gift,” which allows a group of Facebook friends to go in on an Amazon.com Gift Card together. That gift isn’t posted to the recipients’ Facebook Timeline until their big day arrives. → Read More
Advertising giant WPP is taking another step into the world of startup investments, this time specifically in mobile and social media. WPP Ventures, a new investment arm of WPP Digital, today announced a stake in Muzy, a social media platform that presents its content arranged in a Pinterest-style grid layout. The site, in some regards, has flown under the radar, but it has some 20 million users… → Read More
Popular exercise- and nutrition-tracking service MyFitnessPal is making its first significant effort to reach an international audience.
Co-founder Mike Lee said that MyFitnessPal now has “well north of” 40 million registered users. That already includes users in other countries: “In absolute numbers it’s large, but … it’s just a small percentage of our total userbase.” So Lee argued that… → Read More
Here’s a fun comparison from Optimal, a social advertising and analytics startup: If you look at big brands on social networks, their following seems to be growing more quickly on Twitter than on Facebook.
Optimal says it looked at the data from 4,330 brands, representing a total of 3.49 billion Facebook Likes and 595 million Twitter followers. Last week, those brands added 18.5 million new… → Read More
The eyesore of a PowerPoint deck that contractor Edward Snowden had leaked had globally recognized names: Microsoft. Google. Yahoo. Facebook. Apple. AOL. Skype. YouTube. The NSA had allegedly collaborated with all of these Internet giants to request and access data on foreign users. But then there was also PalTalk. WTF? Even Stephen Colbert ribbed them last week. “You heard right. → Read More
What better way for an anti-social app to get noticed than by insulting its target audience? London-based app design studio ustwo has just put up a pair of billboards in the hipster heartland of Shoreditch, East London, a stone’s throw from where its own studio is based, which brazenly proclaim: You have no friends and No one likes you. → Read More
As we continue to see more details brought to light in how the government requests and uses information about what we do on the web and on our mobile devices, an ex-Googler and a consumer rights attorney, who have dedicated themselves to helping users remain private, have raised some funding to do this better and in more places. → Read More
We’ve been working on getting more details on a press event that Facebook is having this week. Earlier, we wrote it could launch a news-reading app, but we have since heard more details that point to something else entirely. On June 20, a source says Facebook will unveil that Instagram, its popular photo-sharing app, will begin to let people also take and share short videos. Call it the Vine… → Read More
People assume the worst. So when it comes to counting government “requests” for private data, a hard number, even a high number, is far better than the fear of infinity. That’s why tech giants are fighting to show they aren’t open books surrendered to the NSA. They want to prove only the suspicious are spied upon. → Read More
Ebay is generally credited with being the first company to bring auctions — a system that, for nearly 2,500 years, had exclusively taken place live in noisy, public (and offline) forums — into the Digital Era. But, today, in spite of the fact that eCommerce has become a thriving global industry, with online marketplaces collectively topping $1 trillion in sales last year, one market in… → Read More
The upcoming death of Google Reader, the addition of hashtags, and other signs say Facebook may launch a new way to discover and read news at the June 20th press event it’s just sent out mysterious invites to. [Update: However, a TechCrunch source says Facebook may launch a new way to share videos, either within Instagram, Facebook's apps, or in a new standalone app. More update details within.] → Read More
Back in March, I wrote about how Heyzap was introducing advertising to its mobile gaming platform. Now co-founder Jude Gomila says the company has become a significant player in mobile advertising.
Specifically, Gomila sent along the chart showing the growth in publishers running Heyzap ads and the corresponding growth in ad impressions over the past six months. You can’t tell exactly where… → Read More
As photo-sharing truly hits its stride, an entire ecosystem is born around it. But what is creation without consumption? That’s what Divvy is all about.
We met the folks behind Divvy at the TC Meetup + Pitch-Off. At it’s core, the app aggregates all your photos from Facebook and Instagram (Twitter, Flickr, Dropbox all coming soon) into one filter-capable stream. You can also save photos from… → Read More
Songbird, an early digital music service that aimed to compete against the iTunes, Pandoras and Spotifies of this world with an open source platform, is shutting down on June 28, after running out of money and failing to find a buyer. The startup, backed by Sequoia, Atlas Venture and Phillips, had raised at least $11 million and is planning to formally announce the news on its own site later… → Read More
Last week, Facebook announced that it will be streamlining the ad-buying process by eliminating more than half of its 27 ad units. Today it’s taking one step towards that goal by announcing that it will be eliminating the Sponsored Results unit starting in July.
The unit officially launched in August 2012, allowing businesses to run ads in the “typeahead” results that show up when users enter a… → Read More
Move over Reeder, Feedly, Digg, NewsBlur, Feedbin and the rest of the RSS players who hope to pick up some new users with the impending demise of Google Reader. Facebook may also be looking to wade into the game. → Read More
Foursquare this morning has launched a pretty new visualization feature called Foursquare Time Machine, which offers a new way to view a history of your check-ins on an interactive map. And oh, it’s also an advertisement for Samsung’s Galaxy S4 smartphone. Hey, look, Foursquare is trying to make some money by using your data! How clever! → Read More
Twitter now provides you with pretty extensive metrics and analytics for the performance of your tweets via its Ads dashboard (via TNW), in a move that looks designed to get more people (including individuals) aware of and using the Twitter Ads platform. The new free analytics dashboard access allows anyone to see the performance of their tweets, including how many Faves, Retweets and Replies each… → Read More
Even though it might seem intuitive that one messaging app will rule them all, WeChat, Line, WhatsApp and others are proving that messaging remains a stubbornly fragmented category with many geographic regions of the world seeing different leaders. KakaoTalk rules in South Korea, while WeChat dominates in China, while Line rules in Japan and the U.S. has no overwhelming leader. One thing… → Read More
Along with Skype, WhatsApp is the granddaddy of the mobile messaging app space. But despite its relative great age it appears to be continuing to build usage momentum. Earlier today WhatsApp announced a new daily messaging metric record, following on from its recent “bigger than Twitter” boast. Its new daily high is 10 billion+ inbound (sent) messages and 17 billion+ outbound (received) messages. → Read More
You might not have heard of Spanish social network Tuenti, but it was acquired by Telefonica back in 2010 for $99 million and has garnered over 14 million users. Since then it’s opened up to worldwide users in most languages, launched new apps (Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and Firefox OS) and moved heavily into messaging. → Read More
Last summer, word started to trickle out about a young, stealth startup called RelateIQ that was rumored to be one of the more ambitious players among the new (and expanding) class of Big Data startups. Adam Evans and Steve Loughlin had founded RelateIQ the summer before to tackle some enduring problems in the way we manage our professional relationships — the same ones that led to the birth of … → Read More
It looks like Twitter #Music has gotten a couple of improvements on the web — specifically to its individual artist profiles.
Previously, the artist page just pointed to the other artists that they were following. So the profile page for Fun., for example, pointed to the other musicians followed by Fun. on Twitter. (Clearly I’m writing this post to include as much #random punctuation. as… → Read More
Obviously MySpace has very few friends left to alienate — Tom has long since moved on — but that hasn’t stopped it annoying the hell out of its few remaining fans by forcing through an update to its shiny new music discovery platform that’s swallowed their old blog content, with no guarantee it’s ever going to be retrievable. → Read More
“[Twitter bird logo] #brand” just became an endangered species. Hashtags are becoming universal as Facebook will start supporting them. That neutralizes an important growth vector for Twitter. Before, each print or tv ad mentioning a hashtag nagged people to join Twitter. Now they can join the real-time conversation through the social network they already use. Businesses and events… → Read More
Facebook just announced that it is indeed launching ability to follow conversations via hashtags, as was reported in March.
In the blog post announcing the new feature, Facebook acknowledges that this isn’t exactly a new idea, noting that it will be “similar to other services like Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, or Pinterest” — when you click on a hashtag, you’ll get a feed of comments using the… → Read More
King, the decade-old gaming company that staged a surprising revival through the iPhone and its hit Candy Crush Saga, is abandoning advertising as a source of revenue. Going forward, they’ll be relying solely on virtual currency. (But really, it’s not like they need advertising at this point.) “We’ve grown very fast over the last year. The business model has changed because… → Read More
Now that China has surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest smartphone market, it’s no surprise that many developers are intrigued by the prospect of a country that may have 500 million devices in circulation by the end of next year. Because of that, plenty of companies like Yodo1, iDreamSky and CocoaChina have cropped up to help advise studios on how to navigate the unique… → Read More
The sheer amount of media produced by film makers, advertisers and ad agencies is exploding. And of course, literally everything from a TV ad to an app like Angry Birds needs a soundtrack. That means money. So-called ‘synch deals’ with this soundtrack music grew in 2011 by 5.7 per cent to US$342 million according to one estimate. Music licensing is a market worth at least $6bn globally. But at the… → Read More
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