Instagram adds new teen safety tools as competition with TikTok heats up

Instagram adds new teen safety tools as competition with TikTok heats up

Earlier this year, TikTok made an update to its privacy settings and defaults to further lock down the app for its teenage users. This morning, Instagram followed suit with teen-focused privacy updates of its own. But the Facebook-owned social app didn’t choose to add more privacy to teen accounts by default, as TikTok did — […]

Daily Crunch: Google Play halves commission on developers’ first $1M

Daily Crunch: Google Play halves commission on developers’ first $1M

Google is letting developers keep more of their Play revenue, Instagram adds teen safety features and we examine the global distribution of venture funding. This is your Daily Crunch for March 16, 2021. The big story: Google Play halves commission on first $1M Following a similar move by Apple last year, Google said that it […]

Investors Clara Brenner, Quin Garcia and Rachel Holt are coming to TC Sessions: Mobility 2021

Investors Clara Brenner, Quin Garcia and Rachel Holt are coming to TC Sessions: Mobility 2021

The transportation industry is abuzz with upstarts, legacy automakers, suppliers and tech companies working on automated vehicle technology, digital platforms, electrification and robotics. Then there are shared mobility companies from cars to scooters and mopeds to e-bikes. And who can forget the emerging air taxi companies? At the center of this evolving industry are the […]

Debunking the Outrageous Claims Made by the Starscope Monocular Lens

Debunking the Outrageous Claims Made by the Starscope Monocular Lens

The StarScope Monocular is advertised as both a hand-held scope and incredible zoom lens for smartphones accompanied by some rather unbelievable performance claims. Krazy Ken of YouTube Channel Computer Clan first looks at the ads and dissects the promises before putting the scope to the test himself. To say the claims put forth by the […]

Facebook to label all COVID-19 vaccine posts with pointer to official info

Facebook to label all COVID-19 vaccine posts with pointer to official info

Facebook will soon label all posts discussing the coronavirus vaccination with a pointer to official information about COVID-19, it said today. It also revealed it has implemented some new “temporary” measures aimed at limiting the spread of vaccine misinformation/combating vaccine hesitancy — saying it’s reducing the distribution of content from users that have violated its […]

Rising encrypted app Signal is down in China

Rising encrypted app Signal is down in China

Chinese users of the instant messenger Signal knew that the good times wouldn’t last long. The app, which is used for encrypted conversations, is unavailable in mainland China as of the morning of March 16, a test by TechCrunch shows. The website of the app has been banned in mainland China since March 15, according […]

Great Reads in Photography: March 14, 2021

Great Reads in Photography: March 14, 2021

Every Sunday, we bring together a collection of easy-reading articles from analytical to how-to to photo-features in no particular order that did not make our regular daily coverage. Enjoy! Naomi Rosenblum, Historian of Photography, Dies at 96 – Artcasso Naomi Rosenblum during FotoArtFestival 2007, Bieniecki Piotr, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons and Rosenblum’s classic […]

The Roblox final fantasy

The Roblox final fantasy

Hello friends, and welcome to Week in Review. Last week, I talked a bit about NFTs and their impact on artists. If you’re inundated with NFT talk just take one quick look at this story I wrote this week about the $69 million sale of Beeple’s photo collage. This hype cycle is probably all the […]

This Week in Apps: Parler denied App Store re-entry, Walmart doubles down on TikTok live shopping, Instagram Lite rolls out worldwide

This Week in Apps: Parler denied App Store re-entry, Walmart doubles down on TikTok live shopping, Instagram Lite rolls out worldwide

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices […]