India has a new startup unicorn. On Wednesday, Bangalore-based online learning startup Unacademy announced it has raised $150 million in a new financing round that valued the Facebook-backed firm at $1.45 billion (post-money). SoftBank Group — through its Vision Fund 2 — led Unacademy’s Series F financing round, while existing investors Facebook, Blume Ventures, Nexus […]
Ravi Shankar Prasad, India’s IT and Law and Justice minister, has accused Facebook India’s leadership team of suppressing the reach of pages that support and promote right-leaning ideology, in what is the latest turn of events for the social giant in its biggest market by users where it has also been accused of showing favoritism […]
Scores of startups have launched short video apps in recent months For years, India has served as the largest open battleground for Silicon Valley and Chinese firms searching for their next billion users. With more than 400 million WhatsApp users, India is already the largest market for the Facebook-owned service. The social juggernaut’s big blue […]
Facebook News, the social network’s dedicated news section launched to U.S. audiences in June, is soon expanding to international markets. The company announced today it plans to accelerate its plans to bring the product to non-U.S. markets, including the U.K., Germany, France, India and Brazil, within the time frame of six months to a year. […]
Messenger Rooms, Facebook’s social Zoom competitor, is today rolling out new features aimed at making Rooms easier to both create and discover, as well as those for further personalizing your Rooms experience. The changes follow Messenger’s recent slight dip from the top of the U.S. App Store charts, where typically it ranks in the top […]
Facebook is announcing a number of new e-commerce features both within the main Facebook app and on Instagram. The pandemic has forced many businesses to shift online, and Facebook made a big announcement in May around the ability of merchants to create Facebook Shops that are viewable on both Facebook and Instagram. More recently, Instagram […]
A lot of studies and discussion of social media use time spent on the platforms as evidence for various theories and conclusions — but it turns out that people are actually super bad at telling how long they spend on them, according to research from Facebook. If you were conducting a study that was looking […]
What recession? The broader market melt up has helped buoy shares of Apple to new highs this morning. In early trading today, the market capitalization of the tech industry giant and FAAMG member crossed the $2 trillion mark before slipping just beneath the threshold. Shares of Apple have advanced just over 59% in 2020, despite […]
After Minneapolis police killed George Floyd and the subsequent racial justice uprising, many people in tech shouted from the rooftops that “Black Lives Matter,” despite having subpar representation of Black and Latinx folks at their companies. In some cases, these companies’ proclamations of “Black Lives Matter” felt especially performative in contrast to their respective stances […]
Facebook is facing heat in India, its biggest market by users, over a report that claimed the company compromised its hate speech policy to favor the ruling party. Politicians from the Bharatiya Janata Party, which rules the government in India, and opposition Indian National Congress lambasted Facebook for its supposed favoritism to the other, thereby […]