I used to answer every message. Not any more. When Messenger buzzes, now I don’t know if it will be a friend or a bot. Every chime forces me to do a little Turing test in my head. Was I expecting to be pinged by a pal? Or is it 8:11pm again and TechCrunch’s bot […]
Lo and behold! A new wave of technology is preparing to crash down upon the unsuspecting consumer. Chatbots are surging towards our conversations at breakneck speed! No, not the kind of chatbots that have been around for donkeys’ years, adding robotic interjections to irreverent chatrooms when the Internet was a niche playground just for nerds. This […]
Oculus is bringing a new COO aboard as it perhaps looks to double down on tightening things up logistics-wise. Fitbit COO Hans Hartmann will be jumping ship and joining the virtual reality company owned by Facebook, according to a tweet from Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe. Hartmann, who was with Fitbit since 2011, will be replacing founding COO Laird Malamed, […]
Access to WhatsApp has been restored in Brazil, roughly 24 hours after telecom providers began blocking the messaging app in response to a court order. A judge in the Brazilian state of Sergipe ordered local phone carriers to block access to WhatsApp for 72 hours, but his ruling was overturned on appeal. Mark Zuckerberg celebrated the end of […]
WhatsApp, Facebook’s messaging service that recently rolled out end-to-end encryption to its users, will be blocked in Brazil for 72 hours, starting this afternoon. A judge from the small Brazilian state of Sergipe ordered telecom providers in the country to block WhatsApp today in a dispute over access to encrypted data. Judge Marcel Montalvao has ordered WhatsApp to turn […]
We’re excited to announce that we’re using Facebook Live to make Disrupt NY the first major media conference live streamed in its entirety — with TV-quality production — on Facebook. Delivering a real-time video feed of Disrupt to TechCrunch’s more than 2 million Facebook fans is a first for all of us and we can’t wait to see what happens. We’ll have […]
We’ve fallen in love with apps. It’s hard to see something so popular fading into the past, but what if that happened? What if apps were simply an iteration of the mobile web, before something better came along? With the flurry of announcements that occurred around Facebook’s F8 conference, perhaps that time has finally come. Are we witnessing […]
Reports in the Russian press that Google tried to acquire the Telegram messaging app last year for $1 billion have been firmly rebutted by Telegram founder Pavel Durov. The rumors had been widely reported in the tech press today. The suggestion was that the now Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, met with Durov a year ago, when Pichai headed up […]
Facebook released its biannual transparency report today, detailing the requests for user data it received from government agencies in the second half of 2015. The report includes requests received by Facebook as well as Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Facebook also disclosed how many posts it censors for violating local law in the countries where it operates. The social […]
Many of the world’s legendary tech companies got started just as the public markets were cooling off; Microsoft, Apple, HP, IBM, Oracle, FedEx, etc. The most recent case in point is the startup class of 2008-2009: Dropbox, Airbnb, Pinterest, Uber and Tiny Speck (Slack) all got their early funding in those dismal years. And, while not everyone […]