After having declared last year that the app would receive no future updates, Facebook is delivering a big update to its VR painting tool Quill. The update expands on Quill’s initial promise, expanding it from being a platform for designing static scenes to one that can handle dynamic animated ones. The new updates adds the ability […]
Want to let friends know you’re trying to party, hit the gym, focus on work or grab a drink? That’s the idea behind a powerful new feature Facebook Messenger is testing called Your Emoji. Akin to offline meetup app Down to Lunch, it lets you overlay a chosen emoji on your Messenger profile pic for […]
I’ve been struggling with whether or not to download Facebook’s new app aimed at children, Messenger Kids, onto my daughter’s iPad. This weekend, I took the plunge. I sat with her as she typed her first message and sent a selfie. I watched as she discovered GIFs. I wasn’t sure I had done the right […]
Seattle’s election commission says Facebook broke a city law that requires it to disclose who paid for campaign ads. Reuters reports that the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission’s executive director, Wayne Barnett, said Facebook must reveal advertising spending information for last year’s city elections or potentially face fines of up to $5,000 per ad purchase. […]
Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp sounds smarter and smarter. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on the Q4 2017 earnings call today that WhatsApp now has 1.5 billion users and sees 60 billion messages sent per day. That’s compared to 1.3 billion monthly users and 1 billion daily active users in July. The massive growth makes […]
Big news outlets stupidly sold their soul to Facebook. Desperate for the referral traffic Facebook dangled, they spent the past few years jumping through its hoops only to be cut out of the equation. Instead of developing an owned audience of homepage visitors and newsletter subscribers, they let Facebook brainwash readers into thinking it was […]
It’s been less than a year since Instagram brought advertising to Instagram Stories — a format that its owner Facebook said in November has more than 300 million daily users. Since then, it’s been working to expand those capabilities, like incorporating ad formats that were already established elsewhere. Today, Instagram is announcing plans to bring […]
Germany’s national competition regulator has announced it’s looking into market conditions in the online advertising sector, responding to concerns that a lack of transparency could be skewing market conditions. It could open up a full sector enquiry depending on results of its initial probe. The antitrust office says it will start by looking into the effects of […]
Jason Rowley is a venture capital and technology reporter for Crunchbase News. More posts by this contributor: In the world of mobile apps, numbers come in two sizes: big and bigger. More than one billion people use Facebook’s mobile app every day. Instagram — another Facebook property — has well over 100 million photos and […]
The slings and arrows of outrage keep flying at Facebook. Today a coalition of child health advocates has published an open letter addressing CEO Mark Zuckerberg and calling for the company to shutter Messenger Kids: Aka the Snapchat-ish comms app it launched in the US last December — targeted at the under 13s. At the time […]