Instant messaging app Telegram is “approaching” 500 million users and plans to generate revenue starting next year to keep the business afloat, its founder Pavel Durov said on Wednesday. Durov said he has personally bankrolled the seven-year-old business so far, but as the startup scales he is looking for ways to monetize the instant messaging […]
After spending more than a decade disrupting the neighborhood stores in the U.S. and several other markets, Amazon and Walmart are employing an unusual strategy in India to face off this competitor: Friending them. Walmart and Amazon, both of which face restrictions from New Delhi on what all they could do in India, have partnered […]
Facebook is working to bring back the Instagram Lite app, months after it shut down the light version offering worldwide. The social conglomerate said on Wednesday that it is testing the revamped Instagram Lite app in India, where it hopes to “gain valuable insights” about the new offering before “a global rollout” of the app […]
Facebook already made it clear that it isn’t happy about Apple’s upcoming restrictions on app tracking and ad targeting, but the publicity battle entered a new phase today. Over the summer, Apple announced that beginning in iOS 14, developers will have to ask users for permission in order to use their IDFA identifiers for ad […]
Collab, Facebook’s experimental app for making collaborative music videos, is today launching out of private beta testing with a public release on the App Store. The app is one of now many projects from Facebook’s internal R&D group, NPE Team, which tests new ideas that could ultimately influence Facebook’s next steps in social media. Collab […]
More than one billion people in India today have a mobile connection, thanks in part to the proliferation of low-cost Android smartphones and the world’s cheapest mobile data plans in recent years. This scale was unimaginable just three decades ago, when India had fewer than 2.5 million telephones in the country. One of the earliest […]
Consumers will have downloaded 130 billion apps in 2020 across iOS and Google Play, up 10% year-over-year, according to mobile data and analytics firm App Annie’s year-end forecast. Consumer spending across the two app stores will also grow by 25% year-over-year to reach $112 billion by year end, the firm also predicts. Typically, much of […]
WhatsApp said on Tuesday it is adding a new shopping feature to its app as the Facebook -owned instant messaging service looks to court more merchants and invite a larger portion of its 2 billion user base to shop. The instant messaging platform, where business accounts already process messages from more than 175 million people, […]
Snapchat introduces a TikTok -style feed, Amazon Echo Buds add fitness tracking and Vettery acquires Hired. This is your Daily Crunch for November 23, 2020. The big story: Snapchat adds Spotlight Snapchat has introduced a dedicated feed where users can watch short, entertaining videos — pretty similar to TikTok. This comes after the app also […]
Step, a mobile banking service aimed at teens, announced this morning it has raised $50 million in Series B funding after growing to over 500,000 users only two months after its official launch. The round was led by Coatue, with returning investors from Stripe, Crosslink Capital, Collaborative Fund and Will Smith’s Dreamers VC. The startup […]