Byju’s, an education learning startup in India that has seen a surge in its popularity in recent weeks amid the coronavirus outbreak, is in talks to raise as much as $400 million in fresh capital at a $10 billion valuation, said three people familiar with the matter. The additional capital would be part of the […]
Facebook is today rolling out a tool that will allow users in the U.S. and Canada to export their Facebook photos and videos to Google Photos. This data portability tool was first introduced in Ireland in December, and has since been made available to other international markets. To use the feature, Facebook users will need […]
Researchers at NYU have identified hundreds of groups of Instagram users, some with thousands of members, that systematically exchange likes and comments in order to game the service’s algorithms and boost visibility. In the process, they also trained machine learning agents to identify whether a post has been juiced in this way. “Pods,” as they’ve […]
Graduation goes virtual, more details emerge about the U.K.’s contact tracing app and Shopify launches a mobile commerce app. Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 28, 2020. 1. Facebook will stream a virtual graduation ceremony featuring Oprah and Miley Cyrus Here’s some consolation for the Class of 2020: a virtual graduation ceremony, which kicks off […]
As dates for reopening the country are continually pushed back, virtually every aspect of life has been disrupted. Holidays, birthdays, weddings and funerals have begun to be virtualized in order for attendees to maintain social distances. It’s an inevitability the class of 2020 has no doubt been dreading for months. Here’s some consolation from Facebook: […]
WhatsApp’s bid on cutting virality of messages circulating on its platform by introducing an additional limit earlier this month has already started to pay off. The Facebook -owned service said on Monday that spread of “highly forwarded” messages sent on WhatsApp had dropped by 70% globally in weeks after introducing a new restriction earlier this […]
Facebook is co-opting some of the top video chat innovations like Zoom’s gallery view for large groups and Houseparty’s spontaneous hangouts for a new feature called Rooms. It could usher in a new era of unplanned togetherness via video. Launching today on mobile and desktop in English speaking countries, you can start a video chat […]
Facebook will soon allow users to go on “virtual dates,” the company announced today. The social network is planning to introduce a new video calling feature that will allow users of its Facebook Dating service to connect and video call over Messenger, as an alternative to going on a real-world date. This sort of feature […]
Even as Mark Zuckerberg touted the “hundreds of thousands of pieces of misinformation related to COVID-19” that the site had pulled in recent months, Facebook continued to offer targeted ads classified as “pseudoscience.” It was an odd choice from a social network so publicly declaring its own campaigns to remove junk science amid a global […]
The race to win neighborhood stores is on in India. A day after Facebook invested $5.7 billion in Reliance Jio Platforms to serve tens of millions of neighborhood stores in the country, the world’s largest e-commerce firm has launched “Local Shops on Amazon.” The program will help customers discover products from local shops in their […]