Over the last few days, my WeChat has been inundated with people reminiscing about the first post they ever published on the app’s newsfeed, which marked its 10-year anniversary this week. The newsfeed feature, called Moments, is like a social network that lives within the WeChat super app. Unlike many other social networks, which either
There were a lot of lean years for IBM when the company posted 22 straight quarters of declining revenues, an agonizing period that stretched from 2012 to 2017. Even over the subsequent years, meaningful growth was hard to find. But for the second straight quarter, Big Blue has begun to change the narrative, posting revenue
The UK has announced a bundle of consumer protection and competition reforms which could see platforms that fail to tackle fake reviews fined up to 10% of their global annual turnover. Also incoming: Stronger powers for the national competition regulator to prevent tech giants from being able to buy up startups or smaller rivals with
The e-commerce market in Latin America has been gaining traction over the past two years and is poised to double in size and be valued at more than $100 billion by 2025. And like in the United States and elsewhere, customers in LatAm expect that when they submit an order online, it arrives at their
Sophie Alcorn Contributor Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Dear Sophie: I didn’t win the
Carta data shows breadth of slowdown, and early-stage startups are hardly immune Alex Wilhelm Anna Heim 7 hours The comedown from venture capital’s torrid 2021 is sparing few startups. New data from Carta, a provider of shareholder management services to private companies, indicates that the slowdown in venture capital activity is not constrained to a
Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced today that the company is going to tweak its ranking algorithm to highlight original content more on its platform. Following the announcement, a spokesperson for the social media giant told TechCrunch in an email that Instagram is making changes to its ranking algorithm to prioritize the distribution of original content,
Plastic foam like Styrofoam is a ubiquitous, harmful, and nearly immortal single-use material that is long overdue for a good, green replacement — and Cruz Foam is here to supply it. The startup creates a durable yet backyard-compostable packing foam out of shrimp shells produced (and discarded) by the seafood industry. It recently extended its
Amazon Web Services (AWS) today launched a new program, AWS Impact Accelerator, that will give up to $30 million to early-stage startups led by Black, Latino, LGBTQIA+ and women founders. The Amazon company claims that the three-year initiative will help recipients build successful businesses while “accelerating” growth in their respective markets. But critics contend that
The last couple of years have seen a boom in carbon calculation startups, and long may it reign. (We need all the help we can get to avoid the disaster of global warming and climate change). Included among those startups are those like https://plana.earth/ or https://www.planetly.org/ But many of these new companies, as welcome as
European Union lawmakers have taken a step closer to agreeing rules to standardize how a range of mobile gadgetry is charged. Today MEPs in the European Parliament’s internal market and consumer protection (IMCO) committee adopted their position on a Commission proposal announced last fall, ahead of a full vote by the parliament next month to
The future of Bolt, the Estonia-based ride-hailing company, in Tanzania is hanging in the balance following a new 15% service fee order that came into effect Friday last week. Bolt, Uber’s main rival in Europe and Africa, in response to queries by TechCrunch, said it had reached out to relevant stakeholders including the Land Transport
Everstage founders Vivek Suriyamoorthy and Siva Rajamani For sales reps, commission plans are often complicated and lack transparency, leading to accounting errors and frustration. Everstage, a sales commission platform, solves that, letting sales rep see exactly how much they earned. It also has features to estimate how much commissions they can potentially make from their
As consumers’ interest in the environment and nutrition rises, food-tech companies join the race to invent meat alternatives. In 2021, alternative seafood companies received $175 million in investment globally, increasing 92% from 2020. A South Korean startup called CellMEAT, which develops cell-based shrimp, has secured $8.1 million (10 billion KRW) Series A funding to compete
When it comes to presentation creation, PowerPoint and Keynote remain the de facto tools by incumbent advantage. PowerPoint has over one billion installs and 500 million users alone, thanks to Microsoft’s longtime bundling of Office with certain Windows editions. But this hasn’t stopped startups from trying to disrupt the status quo. Besides Prezi, there’s Pitch,
Platforms like Figma have changed the game when it comes to how creatives and other stakeholders in the production and product team conceive and iterate around two-dimensional designs. Now, a company called Gravity Sketch has taken that concept into 3D, leveraging tools like virtual reality headsets to let designers and others dive into and better
Netflix plans to offer a cheaper and ad-supported plan to consumers within a year or two, the world’s largest streaming service said, as it pushes to tap a wider set of potential customers. The firm, which reported a loss of 200,000 subscribers in Q1, will introduce the ad-supported plan to give customers more choice, company’s
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PT, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to this 109th day of 2022 – April 19 – which celebrates, among other things, National Garlic Day (nice try, Big Allium) and Bicycle Day, the anniversary of the
Local IPO pays off for merged entity of Indonesian trailblazers Gojek and Tokopedia Alex Wilhelm Anna Heim 17 hours GoTo, the combined entity resulting from the merger of Gojek (an Indonesian ride-hailing player) and Tokopedia (an Indonesian e-commerce company), raised around $1.1 billion (IDR15.8 trillion, per the company) in its public-market debut on the Indonesia
Instagram is adding the ability for users to create and donate to fundraisers directly from Instagram Reels, the app’s short-form video feature and TikTok rival. The feature was announced alongside a series of updates across Meta’s platform and services designed to celebrate Earth Day, including custom stickers for Instagram and Messenger, profile frames for Facebook, conservation-focused
Farmers don’t get embarrassed when the price of corn drops; similarly, there’s no reason for startup founders to lose their joy because publicly traded tech stocks are undercutting their valuations. If making as much money as you can is your primary goal, however, prepare to be disappointed. Accepting a down round or a smaller seed
U.K. food delivery gig platform Deliveroo has lost a court challenge in France over the “freelancer” status of riders. Reuters reports that the company has been fined the maximum penalty of €375,000 by a Paris court. Two former execs have also been fined €30,000 and given one-year suspended jail sentences for abusing the country’s labor
Are you looking to buy a folding smart phone? Do you want it to be Pokémon-themed? And do you live in South Korea? If all those stars are aligned just right, do we have some good news for you: Samsung is making a Pokémon Edition of the Galaxy Z Flip 3. They somehow decided to
Demostack, a San Francisco, California-based startup creating a “demo experience” platform for software-as-a-service (SaaS) sales teams, today announced that it raised $34 million in a Series B round led by Tiger Global Management with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Amiti Ventures, GTMfund, Operator Collective, and StepStone. CEO Jonathan Friedman says that the proceeds will be
Silicon Valley has gotten fantastically efficient at funding apps, SaaS and developer tools. It turns out, though, that climate change cares a lot less about bits, bytes, and stored procedures — it’s a lot more analog than that. Along come Evok Innovations and its cleantech fund, aiming to plow money into companies that are working
Instagram is removing the ‘Recent’ tab on hashtag pages for some users as part of a small test, the company announced on Tuesday. Currently, when you select a hashtag, you’re taken to a page where you can parse through the content that has been posted using that hashtag via three categories: Top, Recent and Reels.
Help us win a Webby by voting for us here. This week on Found we talk to Anthony DiMare, the co-founder and CEO of Bedrock, a company that has developed autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to survey and map the seafloor in a much more efficient and affordable way than the traditional “big ship with a
Watching Elon Musk and others attempt to buy Twitter got me thinking about the time Salesforce wanted to purchase the social media platform. Back in 2016, around the time of Salesforce’s Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco, rumors ran rampant that the company was ready to spend $20 billion to purchase Twitter. It would eventually back off when investors
Last year, SEON, which has an anti-fraud platform designed to fight accounts raised a $12 million Series A. It does this by looking at a customer’s ‘digital footprint’ – especially their social media – in order to weed out false accounts and thus prevent fraudulent transactions. Clients included Patreon, AirFrance, Rivalry and Ladbrokes. The London-based
Only 21% of the 12 million registered vehicles on Nigerian roads have genuine motor insurance, as the rest either have fake certificates (owners are mostly unaware) or are not covered at all. This report also states that a number of car owners holding genuine insurance policies also fail to renew them when they expire, a