Instagram Stories is benefitting from the large active user base Instagram itself enjoys, and now has 100 million daily active viewers. That’s two-thirds of the daily active user population for Snapchat, which reported 150 million global active users across its entire platform in late September. Even with a built-in audience to build from, and prime real estate positioning at the very top… Read More
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Today’s chatbots, for the most part, aren’t all that useful, but what if you could use them to learn a new language? When it comes to learning languages, using what you’ve learned in the context of a conversation is extremely useful. If you are learning online, though, you often don’t have anybody to talk to. That’s why Duolingo today introduced chatbots to its… Read More
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Google held its biggest ever hardware event on Tuesday, and we got a glimpse at devices that bear more of Google’s fingerprint than anything they’ve done before. Yet most of us here at TechCrunch, including myself and TCBC guest for this week Frederic Lardinois, came away with the feeling that the event was less about hardware than it was about Google’s work with… Read More
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At Google’s hardware event this week, the new version of the Android operating system, Android 7.1 (Nougat 7.1), was barely mentioned. As it turns out, there was a reason for that: some of the new Pixel smartphones‘ best features won’t be arriving in the new OS. This includes features like Google Assistant, the built-in customer support service, unlimited and free backup… Read More
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Just in time for New York Comic Con, Madefire is announcing that it has raised $6.5 million in Series B funding. Madefire co-founder and CEO Ben Wolstenholme said the funding — which was led by Santa Monica-based Plus Capital — will help his company build more connections with the media and entertainment world. It’s not that Madefire (which previously raised $6.3 million… Read More
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Zenefits announced this week, it was making a licensing compliance app it created in-house to ensure its sales people are properly licensed to sell insurance in a given state, available for free to anyone to download from the Salesforce App Exchange. Last winter Zenefits was sailing along providing HR services in the cloud for small and medium businesses when a bombshell hit. Buzzfeed… Read More
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There are a number of ways to save links from the web for later access, whether that’s marking articles to read later via apps like Instapaper or Pocket, pinning shopping inspiration to Pinterest, creating playlists on YouTube, or even just using a browser’s bookmarking feature. But a new app called Stash, available for both iOS and Android, wants to offer a better link-saving… Read More
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Happy Twitter-versary (for the nth time around), Jack Dorsey. Things haven’t been going well, it seems, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel — Twitter may be acquired by someone somewhere in the tech (or entertainment) industry, perhaps. To be perfectly fair, the company Dorsey inherited from his predecessor(s), including an array of former product leads as well as CEO… Read More
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It’s time to call it: The mobile wars are over. The mobile market was once vibrant and variegated, a virtual coral reef of odd devices aimed at specific users. There was a phone with a 3D camera! There was one with a weird version of Android that catered to the security-conscious! There was one with a bigger, removable battery and another made up of small parts that you could put together. Read More
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Pokémon GO fever may be receding in the U.S., but in Norway it’s still raging. The country’s prime minister, Erna Solberg, was caught red-handed playing the game in parliament.