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Pinterest acquires Jelly, the crowdsourced Q&A startup from Biz Stone
Pinterest has made another acquisition that could point to another way that it plans to increase interaction on its visual-search-and-discovery platform: It has acquired Jelly, the startup co-founded by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and Ben Finkel in 2014 as a “human-powered search engine” — essentially an app that let people ask questions and get crowdsourced replies from… Read More
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How Pinterest’s visual search went from a moonlight project to a real-world search engine
Sometime around 2013 and 2014, deep learning was going through a revolution that required pretty much everyone to reset their expectations as to how things worked, and leveled the playing field for what people were doing with computer vision. At least that’s the philosophy that Pinterest engineer Andrew Zhai and his team have taken, because around that time he and a few others began… Read More
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Instapaper goes down for over a day, says a full restore will take a week
Read-it-later bookmarking service Instapaper, owned by Pinterest since last year’s acquisition, was hit by an extended outage this week. The service came back online yesterday, February 9, after being down since 12:30 PM PT the day prior. However, the company says the issue is not fully resolved – it will take a week for it to restore all its users’ saved articles. Though not… Read More
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Crunch Report | HBO NOW Passes 2 Million Subscribers
HBO NOW passes 2 million subscribers, Trident Capital Cybersecurity raises a $300 million fund, Pinterest adds new visual search features and Y Combinator now takes recommendations from anyone. All this on Crunch Report! Read More
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Pinterest users can now jump to other products within an image
Pinterest is looking to continually decrease the friction from finding something they’re interested in and drilling further into newer products and ideas, and it now has another product to try to close that gap. The company today said it’s launching a new feature that allows users to find and jump to additional products within a photo they’re currently viewing. So, for… Read More
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Pinterest adds visual search for elements in images and through your camera
Pinterest said today it’s launching three new products today that will point out specific elements in pictures — whether viewed live through a camera or through a typical image search — and use them as a jumping point for search. All of these are designed to keep Pinterest coming back over and over to discover ideas based on images. Pinterest has been increasingly trying… Read More
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97 companies file opposition to Trump’s immigration order
Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and other tech companies filed an amicus brief tonight voicing opposition to President Trump’s executive order on immigration on the grounds that it is discriminatory and has a negative impact on business. The companies filed their brief in a case brought by Minnesota and Washington state, which challenges Trump’s executive order. The Trump… Read More
Latest Crunch Report
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The rise of 4chan politics
We are entering an era when our digital lives spill out uncontrollably into our “real” lives. Whether or not you believe these two are separate, I would wager that the mass of humanity still sees a wall between Facebook and talking face-to-face at a PTA meeting. But a few people don’t. It’s these people – people emboldened by the seeming anonymity of the Internet… Read More
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Pinterest has lowered its hiring goals for women in engineering roles
Pinterest found that the 30% hiring rate it set for women in engineering roles was doing too much, so it’s lowering its 2017 goal to 25%, Pinterest disclosed on its blog today. “We still aspire to 30%—but realize it’s likely going to take more than 12 months to get there,” Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann wrote on the company’s blog. Over the past year… Read More
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Snapchat has reportedly filed confidentially for its massive IPO
Snapchat appears to be moving forward in its plans to go public early next year with the company filing confidentially for its IPO, according to a report from Reuters. In recent years, companies have begun filing confidentially for their initial public offerings well ahead of revealing their financial guts in the formal IPO process. That gives a time window between the SEC getting the… Read More
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Pinterest launches an ‘Explore’ section for trending topics and ideas
Pinterest today is launching a new section of the app that is geared around surfacing trending and top ideas that’ll get additional new content in front of users. Called “Explore,” it’s a new section of Pinterest that pits its recommendation algorithms against trending content across Pinterest from publishers and other sources that’ll get content in front of… Read More
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Pinterest finds another way to track purchases via its new “Tried It” button
Pinterest has historically been more an idea board – a place to dream about ideas you want to try or products you want to buy. Today, however, the company is rolling out a new feature aimed at encouraging people to track and share the things they’ve actually done, too. With a new “tried it” checkmark on Pins, Pinterest users can share the ideas they’ve tried… Read More
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Instapaper premium goes free for all users
Following its acquisition by Pinterest in August, Instapaper’s premium version will now be to all users, the company said today. As part of the acquisition, Instapaper’s team would begin working on Pinterest’s core experience. But the company also said that the app would live on as a separate entity and continue to get updates from the Instapaper team at Pinterest. Now, under… Read More
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Instagram tests shoppable photo tags
Instagram wants you to shop without always having to interrupt your scrolling with a browser window. That’s why today it will start showing shoppable tags on photos from 20 retail brands like Kate Spade and JackThreads to iOS users in the US. The retailers tag products in their photos, which are hidden behind a “Tap to view products” button. After selecting their product… Read More
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Weekly Roundup: Galaxy Note 7 recalled, Amazon’s music service and Verizon/Yahoo sale troubles
Things were pretty bleak for tech companies this week as the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 was officially recalled and Yahoo’s securities woes reportedly drove Verizon to request a $1 billion discount on its pending acquisition. Here are the top stories from around the tech universe to get you up to speed. Read More
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Pinterest hits 150M monthly users, missing earlier leaked projections in 2015
Today, Pinterest said it hit 150 million monthly active users, up from the 100 million it announced in September 2015. However, as TechCrunch previously reported, Pinterest in 2015 was targeting that it would hit 151 million monthly active users by the end of 2015. We reported the story in October last year, and the information was used by Andreessen Horowitz to solicit limited partners to… Read More
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Crunch Network
How artificial intelligence is changing online retail forever
AI is all around us, from searching on Google to what news you see on social media. With the momentum around AI growing, it’s not surprising that some of the most innovative retail sites have been experimenting with the use of AI, as well. Businesses that ignore this growing trend will find themselves playing catch-up for years. But how, exactly, is this technology going to change retail? Read More
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