Facebook sees 30 million updates to profiles each day, but it can’t build every tool to keep your photos and videos interesting. So today it’s globally rolling out its Profile Expression Kit to all developers. This makes it easy to add media like Vine videos, Boomerang GIFs, Beauty+ enhanced selfies, MSQRD face filters, Lollicam stickers, and Flixel cinemagraphs (seen above) as… Read More
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Facebook’s chat app wants to help you and your friends decide where to go for dinner or what movie to see, then use machine learning to remind you to pay them back. Today Messenger users on iOS and Android in the US get two new features which could roll out to other countries if they test well. Facebook tells me “We look at this chat assist function with polls and payments as… Read More
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The full version of Minecraft: Education Edition is finally arriving on November 1, following an extended testing and free trial period that began this summer. The version of Minecraft aimed at educators and schools came out of Microsoft’s acquisition of learning game MinecraftEdu earlier this year, which built upon Minecraft to give teachers tools to build lessons around STEM, art,… Read More
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Europe continues to test the waters of shared vehicle ownership models, and the Amber One is a car designed to help eliminate the huge amount of time our own vehicles currently spend idle. The all-electric concept has a 250-mile range on a single charge, a top speed of over 93 mph, and a 0 to 60 time of a respectable 7 seconds. But you can’t buy one – to gain access, you… Read More
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Signia Venture Partners has closed its second fund at $85 million to lead early-stage deals in emerging tech startups mostly in and around San Francisco. For the unfamiliar, Signia is typically the first money in and the lead investor in the companies it backs, writing $1-2 million in seed stage deals or $2-8 million in later stage rounds. The firm was started in 2012 by Rick Thompson, the… Read More
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Game streaming is something that everyone working in streamed video wants a part of, and now Facebook Live can stream Android games (and other apps) via the BlueStacks desktop emulator for PC and Mac. The integration is pretty smart, and while it was previously available for Twitch, the addition of Facebook Live support means mobile games streamers can potentially reach a different, more… Read More
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For those of you following Instagram’s ad business, my headline might seem a bit familiar — yes, the Facebook-owned photo-sharing service announced another advertiser milestone back in February, but at the time there were only 200,000 advertisers, less than half of the 500,000 advertisers that Instagram says it has today. To be clear, the company says that’s the number of… Read More
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With a little personal shopping assistance, Operator thinks Chinese citizens will pounce on American products sold through its conversational shopping app. The promise of becoming the guided commerce layer connecting China with the US has earned the two-year-old a $15 million series B round at a $100 million pre-money valuation. “We’re making commerce borderless”, Operator… Read More
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PicsArt today launched a brand new pair of apps for iOS, adding Prisma-like effects for photographs and videos to the visually stimulating toolbox that lives inside your phone. The company also launches a Remix Me feature, turning photo adjustments into a social experiment not entirely unlike what we saw with the now-defunct Dubble app. Read More
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When was the last time you printed a photo? Well, Fotr is a new iPhone app that wants to turn that trend on its head, by automatically printing every photo you take. The idea is to bring back an aspect of analog photography: shoot fewer, but higher-quality photos.