Category Archive

 Clinkle imploded after employees quit en masse in May, protesting how its young CEO Lucas Duplan was mismanaging the $30 million-funded payments startup. But Duplan won’t quit. TechCrunch has attained emails showing Duplan is pivoting Clinkle away from its former ultrasound payments and loyalty debit card products. Now Clinkle is an SDK called Treats that other apps can integrate to… Read More

 GIF-sharing is so 2015. Or at least, a startup called Yarn hopes that will be the case. The team’s recently launched mobile app offers a different way to have fun while messaging your friends, by offering a way for you to search for and discover short clips from movies, TV and music videos that you can then pop into your conversation. Today, Yarn only supports Facebook Messenger, but… Read More

 Viadeo, the French rival to LinkedIn, is to exit China in order to focus on becoming a profitable business. In another cut-cutting move, it will also close its data center in California and migrate all data to the cloud. Read More

 The subject of contention is Free Basics, Facebook and Internet.org‘s app that offers free data access but only to a limited section of the Internet. Free Basics is available in roughly 35 countries through Facebook’s partnerships with mobile carriers who see it as a way to persuade people to buy data plans. But Facebook’s control over the technical guidelines for what… Read More

 Twitter did not have a lovely 2015. The world-famous social company saw its revenue rise, its usage flatten, and its share price fall. The company failed to change the arc of its own narrative during the year: Strong financial performance, but continued failure to grow its user base, the latter of which the market appears to weight more strongly. It brought in a new CEO to turn things… Read More

 2015 was a big year for video — especially when it came to user-generated video. Now there are services like Periscope and Meerkat, which are enabling users to broadcast the world around them live. We also saw YouTube launch a subscription model. And, according to Bessemer Venture Partners’ Ethan Kurzweil — who led the firm’s investment in Twitch — we’re… Read More

 Right before the holidays, Instagram snuck in an update for its most second-most popular spun-out app, Boomerang. The app currently sits in the top 250 on the App Store’s free apps.
The changes, although subtle, will probably make its users super happy. The premise of the app is to make little clipped-together videos, similar to an animated GIF or an Apple Live Photo. It feeds into… Read More

 In today’s episode of “boring patents…wait, WHAT ARE THOSE???”, it looks like Twitter filed a patent for messaging with or from, or both, an unmanned vehicle (drone!) in June of this year. It was just published a few days ago. It’s probably something that was put together at a hackathon and someone at Twitter said “hey that’s cool let’s patent… Read More

 In today’s episode of “boring patents…wait, WHAT ARE THOSE???”, it looks like Twitter filed a patent for messaging with or from, or both, an unmanned vehicle (drone!) in June of this year. It was just published a few days ago. It’s probably something that was put together at a hackathon and someone at Twitter said “hey that’s cool let’s patent… Read More

 OK, it doesn’t exist just yet, but one group called “Pinball Labs” has a new Kickstarter to bring back the feels you felt when you entered an arcade with tons of pinball games. There’s nothing like the sounds and visuals of old pinball machines (I love Addams Family) and it could become a…reality once again in VR. The Kickstarter recently went live and this video… Read More