A year ago, Twitter ramped up its game in location services when it announced an integration with Foursquare to provide venue suggestions when you wanted to tag where you were tweeting. Interestingly, that deal appears to have applied only to the U.S., and now that Twitter’s expanding the service, it has partnered with one of Foursquare’s big competitors, Yelp, to power it. Read More
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Snapchat is done selling you stuff. As of today’s update, every snap can be replayed once, but you can no longer buy extra replays. That means people with more money can’t break the rules of Snapchat any more.
Snapchat launched $0.99 replays on top of the one free one you got per day, but along with the shut down of the Lens store that launched in November and closed in January… Read More
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Medium, the online publishing platform led by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, just announced that it has raised $50 million in Series C funding. It’s been less than a year since Medium raised a $57 million Series B, but Williams wrote that the company decided to raise additional funding “to bolster our resources now given the demand we’ve seen for the vision we are… Read More
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For a split second, Alphabet was the most valuable company in the world. Not so much any more, however, with the company’s market cap continuing to slide after it reported its first-quarter earnings. Relatively speaking, shares of Alphabet are only down around 5 percent in extended trading. But for a company worth more than $500 billion, that’s erasing tens of billions of dollars… Read More
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Home loans are the Holy Grail of online lending. They come with high loan balances, steady returns and hefty fees. There also is a healthy liquid market for the securitized loans, and the debt is asset backed, which reduces risk and opens up the investor pool. On top of that, “establishment” mortgage lenders are not leading the pack with innovation, which means there is a lot of… Read More
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A new iPhone application launching today called Plastiq lets you pay any bill with your credit or debit card just by snapping a photo. The goal with the app is to offer something designed for mobile, that’s also more convenient than using a bank’s online bill pay feature. And more importantly, it allows bills to be paid with plastic – hence the name – as opposed to… Read More
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Swarm, the gamified check-in app from Foursquare, has today launched a new feature that will let users check in to locations without sharing that location with their group of friends. The company is calling these private check-ins ‘off-the-grid check-ins’ and users will be able to activate them through a toggle in the check-in portion of the app. Foursquare originally launched Swarm… Read More
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Social networks make us lonely, and messaging feels transactional. There’s still no vibrant, real-time place to hang out with friends online. That’s why four years after Sean Parker’s chat roulette website Airtime fell flat, he’s reviving it as a mobile chat room where friends can share photos, music, and videos that they all experience simultaneously. Launching on iOS… Read More
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Let’s be honest, most concept videos suck. They show you an imaginary device that looks nothing like the final product and defy the laws of physics. But some software concept videos tick all the right boxes, like this one from MacStories.
Federico Viticci and Sam Beckett teamed up to create the following iOS 10 concept video. It’s a beautified wish list for the upcoming release of iOS. Read More
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Preempt Security, a startup still in stealth, came out of hiding today enough to announce an $8 million Series A round. Beyond that we know only a limited amount about what makes them worth such an investment. The round was led by General Catalyst with participation from Mickey Boodaei and Rakesh Loonkar, the founders of Trusteer, and Paul Sagan, the former CEO of Akamai Technologies.… Read More
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