Media & Entertainment
Account linking could make Instagram the heir to Facebook Login
3:12 pm PST • February 4, 2019
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…
Facebook published an internal memo today trying to minimize the morale damage of TechCrunch’s investigation that revealed it’d been paying people to suck in all their phone data. Attained by…
Privacy
Apple reactivates Facebook’s employee apps after punishment for Research spying
3:56 pm PST • January 31, 2019
After TechCrunch caught Facebook violating Apple’s employee-only app distribution policy to pay people for all their phone data, Apple invalidated the social network’s Enterprise Certificate as punishment. That deactivated not only…
Startups
Kleiner Perkins gets back to early-stage with its $600M 18th fund
1:58 pm PST • January 31, 2019
“KP used to be a small team doing hands-on company building. We’re moving away from being this institution with multiple products and really just focusing on early-stage venture capital,” Kleiner…
Media & Entertainment
Twitter cuts off API access to follow/unfollow spam dealers
1:09 pm PST • January 31, 2019
Notification spam ruins social networks, diluting the real human interaction. Desperate to gain an audience, users pay services to rapidly follow and unfollow tons of people in hopes that some…
Privacy
Facebook plans new products as Instagram Stories hits 500M users/day
2:18 pm PST • January 30, 2019
Roughly half of Instagram’s 1 billion users now use Instagram Stories every day. That 500 million daily user count is up from 400 million in June 2018. 2 million advertisers…
Media & Entertainment
Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach
1:14 pm PST • January 30, 2019
Facebook managed to beat Wall Street’s estimates in its Q4 earnings amidst a constant beatdown in the press. Facebook hit 2.32 billion monthly users, up 2.2 percent from 2.27 billion…
Privacy
Senator Warner calls on Zuckerberg to support market research consent rules
12:41 pm PST • January 30, 2019
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…
Privacy
Google will stop peddling a data collector through Apple’s back door
10:58 am PST • January 30, 2019
It looks like Facebook was not the only one abusing Apple’s system for distributing employee-only apps to sidestep the App Store and collect extensive data on users. Google has been…
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…
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…
Biotech & Health
Theranos documentary review: The Inventor’s horrifying optimism
8:35 pm PST • January 24, 2019
A blood-splattered Theranos machine nearly pricks an employee struggling to fix it. This gruesome graphical rendering is what you’ll walk away with from HBO’s “The Inventor.” It finally gives a…
Biotech & Health
How Jyve secretly raised $35M & built a $400M retail gig economy
9:01 am PST • January 24, 2019
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…
Featured Article
Anchorage emerges with $17M from a16z for ‘omnimetric’ crypto security
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, #Angels, Max Levchin, Elad Gil, Mark McCombe of…
6:00 am PST • January 23, 2019
Media & Entertainment
Uber Rewards is rolling out; here’s how the perks work
7:13 pm PST • January 22, 2019
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…
Startups
Roger Dickey ditches $32M-funded Gigster to start Untitled Labs
2:36 pm PST • January 21, 2019
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…
Media & Entertainment
Facebook launches petition feature, its next battlefield
10:21 am PST • January 20, 2019
Gather a mob and Facebook will now let you make political demands. Tomorrow Facebook will encounter a slew of fresh complexities with the launch of Community Actions, its News Feed…
Media & Entertainment
Facebook is secretly building LOL, a cringey teen meme hub
9:59 am PST • January 18, 2019
How do you do, fellow kids? After Facebook Watch, Lasso and IGTV failed to become hits with teens, the company has been quietly developing another youthful video product. Multiple sources…
Media & Entertainment
Dolby quietly preps augmented audio recorder app “234″
11:37 am PST • January 17, 2019
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…
Featured Article
Squad is the new screensharing chat app everyone will copy
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 punctuating…
8:15 am PST • January 17, 2019
Media & Entertainment
Instagram caught selling ads to follower-buying services it banned
10:28 am PST • January 15, 2019
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…
Featured Article
Microsoft Bing not only shows child sexual abuse, it suggests it
Illegal child exploitation imagery is easy to find on Microsoft’s Bing search engine. But even more alarming is that Bing will suggest related keywords and images that provide pedophiles with more child pornography. Following an anonymous tip, TechCrunch commissioned a report from online safety startup AntiToxin to investigate. The results were alarming. [WARNING: Do not search for…
10:07 am PST • January 10, 2019
Featured Article
Meet Caper, the AI self-checkout shopping cart
The Amazon boogie-man has every retailer scrambling for ways to fight back. But the cost and effort to install cameras all over the ceiling or into every shelf could block stores from entering the autonomous shopping era. Caper wants to make eliminating checkout lines as easy as replacing their shopping carts while offering a more familiar…
7:35 am PST • January 10, 2019
Media & Entertainment
Instagram now lets you regram your posts to multiple accounts
10:52 am PST • January 9, 2019
Instagram is swaying the balance toward 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…
Media & Entertainment
Zuckerberg’s 2019 challenge is to hold public talks on tech & society
12:03 pm PST • January 8, 2019
Rather than just focus on Facebook’s problems like his 2018 challenge, this year Mark Zuckerberg wants to give transparency to his deliberations and invite the views of others. Today he…
Startups
To automate bigger stores than Amazon, Standard Cognition buys Explorer.ai
7:12 am PST • January 7, 2019
Standard Cognition helps retail stores stand up to Jeff Bezos’ juggernaut. The $50 million-funded autonomous checkout startup is racing to equip bigger shops with scanless payment technology that lets customers…
Media & Entertainment
Instagram accidentally rolled out tap-to-advance feed, removes it
8:07 am PST • December 27, 2018
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…
Security
Google & Facebook fed ad dollars to child porn discovery apps
6:46 am PST • December 27, 2018
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…
Media & Entertainment
My product launch wishlist for Instagram, Twitter, Uber and more
4:00 pm PST • December 24, 2018
‘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!…
Startups
HQ Trivia launches HQ Words as reinstalled CEO seeks a game-changer
3:13 pm PST • December 23, 2018
HQ’s expansion beyond trivia is emerging from beta, but the question is whether it’s different and accessible enough to revive the startup’s growth. HQ Words opens to everyone today with…
