Media

A group of Democratic lawmakers wrote to Mark Zuckerberg this week to press the CEO on his plans to curate a version of Instagram for children. In a hearing last month, Zuckerberg confirmed reporting by BuzzFeed that the company was exploring an age-gated version of its app designed for young users

TikTok this morning announced the launch of a new feature designed to make its app accessible to people who are hard of hearing or deaf. The company is today debuting auto captions — a feature that, when enabled, will automatically transcribe the speech from a video so viewers can read what&#

The European Union may investigate Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of customer service platform Kustomer after concerns were referred to it under EU merger rules. A spokeswoman for the Commission confirmed it received a request to refer the proposed acquisition from Austria under Article 22

Houseparty, the social video app acquired by Fortnite maker Epic Games in 2019, has just announced a major new step in terms of integrating these two properties: the company says it will now allow gamers to livestream their Fortnite gameplay directly into Houseparty. The feature works to allow user

The Supreme Court has vacated a previous ruling that found former President Trump violated the First Amendment by blocking his Twitter foes. The ruling was upheld by a Manhattan federal appeals court in 2019, which deemed Trump’s actions unconstitutional. The court found that because Trump us

Spotify is opening up its personalized playlist, “On Repeat,” to advertising sponsorship. This playlist, launched in 2019 and featuring users’ favorite songs, is only the second personalized playlist on the music streaming service that’s being made available for sponsorship.

Apple adds classic titles to Apple Arcade, Microsoft experiences an outage and Coinbase is going public. This is your Daily Crunch for April 2, 2021. The big story: Apple Arcade expands with classic games Until now, Apple’s game subscription service was limited to exclusive ne

Woody Sears has long been interested in storytelling. Following the debut in 2007 of the first iPhone, he founded a storytelling app called Zuuka that built up a library of narrated and illustrated kids' books for the iPhone and iPad. Sears later sold that company to a small New York-based outf

Apple has announced an expansion for its subscription gaming service Apple Arcade. In addition to exclusive game releases, the company is adding two new categories — Timeless Classics and App Store Greats. In the “App Store Greats” category, you can find some well-known iPhone games t

The first season of “The Mandalorian” last year wasn’t just a great show, it was the result of an entirely new paradigm in film and TV production. Stagecraft, the enormous LED-wall volume ILM used to shoot that season has since been expanded and updated to be better, faster and ea

U.S. consumers spent an average of $138 on iPhone apps last year, an increase of 38% year over year, largely driven by the pandemic impacts, according to new data from app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Throughout 2020, consumers turned to iPhone apps for work, school, entertainment, shoppin

Thrasio, an early mover and leading player in the wave of startups emerging to consolidate and scale companies that sell their goods mainly via Amazon’s Marketplace, has raised some more funding and is making a key executive appointment to do some scaling of its own. The company, which to dat

Meet Collabio Spaces: An office suite app with a cloudless co-authoring twist that looks helpful if you need to collaborate on documents without having to worry about losing control of your data or the thread of changes. The P2P software lets multiple people co-edit a document locally — from

Pair Eyewear has raised a $12 million Series A to help glasses-wearing kids and adults turn those glasses into what co-CEO Sophia Edelstein called “a form of self-expression.” After all, Edelstein (who founded the company with her co-CEO Nathan Kondamuri) noted that “you're sp