Indian storytelling platform Pratilipi raises $48 million led by gaming giant Krafton

Pratilipi, an Indian startup that operates an online storytelling platform to enable writers to share their work in various formats, said on Wednesday it has raised $48 million in a new financing round led by Krafton. South Korean gaming giant Krafton led the Series D round for the seven-year-old B

Twitter now lets you limit who can reply to a tweet after the fact

If you’re tired of sending brilliant takes into the Twitterverse only to be met with wave after wave of reply guys, a new Twitter feature could give you some relief. Starting today, anyone on Twitter will be able to adjust who can reply to individual tweets after they’ve been sent. Prev

Discord buys Sentropy, which makes AI software that fights online harassment

The online chat platform Discord is buying Sentropy, a company that makes AI-powered software to detect and remove online harassment and hate. Discord currently uses a “multilevel” approach to moderation, relying on an in-house human moderation team as well as volunteer mods and admins

Instagram’s new test shows you stuff you’ve seen lately and lets you reshare it to Stories

Instagram is tinkering around with a new test feature that changes the way users reshare content they like to their Stories. The test, which will only appear for a subset of users, lets users see a collection of content they’ve viewed recently when they’re in the Stories section of the

Cadoo gets $1.5M to gamify fitness with betting challenges

Cadoo, a US-startup that’s gamifying fitness by turning it into a betting opportunity, using the prospect of winning (or losing) cold hard cash to motivate people to get off the couch, has collected $1.5 mlion in seed funds from Sam & Max Altman's Apollo VC and the student-focused Dor

Google fined $592M in France for breaching antitrust order to negotiate copyright fees for news snippets

France has hit Google with a fine of half a billion euros after finding major breaches in how it negotiated with publishers to remunerate them for reuse of their content — as is required under a pan-EU reform of digital copyright law which extended neighbouring rights to news snippets. The si

Nigeria leads mobile app market growth in Africa as use of gaming apps surge 44% from Q1 2020

The pandemic’s effect on the global app market has not been hard to miss. In the first quarter and first half of this year, consumer spending in mobile apps hit new records at $32 billion and $64.9 billion, respectively. In Africa, it can be tough to call out exact numbers on consumer spendin

This limited-edition Super Mario smartwatch will run you $2,150

Those who've followed Nintendo with any sort of frequency over the years know the gaming giant has a tendency to be extremely protective with its IP. Ultimately, it's probably for the best that the market wasn't flooded with cheap Mario knickknacks the way it easily could have been. In

Android 12 will let you play games before they finish downloading

At its Game Developer Summit, Google today announced a new feature for Android game developers that will speed up by almost 2x the time from starting a download in the Google Play store to the game launching — at least on Android 12 devices. The name of the new feature, “play as you dow

Controversial WhatsApp policy change hit with consumer law complaint in Europe

Facebook has been accused of multiple breaches of European Union consumer protection law as a result of its attempts to force WhatsApp users to accept controversial changes to the messaging platforms’ terms of use — such as threatening users that the app would stop working if they did n

How Retail Zipline’s Series A pitch deck ticked every box for Emergence Capital

Melissa Wong spent more than a decade working for major retail brands before founding Retail Zipline. That kind of outrageous advantage — a complete understanding of the industry — is something that investors struggle to resist in a vertical SaaS company. At least, according to Emergenc

Twitter appoints resident grievance officer in India to comply with new internet rules

Twitter has appointed a resident grievance officer in India days after the American social media firm said to have lost the liability protection on user-generated content in the South Asian nation over non-compliance with local IT rules. On Sunday, Twitter identified Vinay Prakash as its new reside

WhatsApp is adding a ‘best quality’ setting for sending photos and videos

WhatsApp is working on a setting that will let users more easily bypass its iffy image compression and send photos and videos in the highest available fidelity. The “best quality” option will likely join “auto” and “data saver” choices in a future version of the

Can advertising scale in VR?

One of VR’s prospective revenue streams is ad placement. The thought is that its levels of immersion can engender high engagement with various flavors of display ads. Think billboards in a virtual streetscape or sporting venue. Art imitates life, and all that. This topic reemerged recently in