Media

“Snap, Inc. is a camera company,” Snap notes on its homepage, and whe a lot of its effort up to now have been about using that camera ethos to help people share images of their lives with their social circles on its flagship app Snapchat, today the company made an acquisition to further

Apple has fended off an attempt by advertisers in France to use a competition complaint route to derail incoming pro-privacy changes in iOS that will require third party apps to obtain users’ consent before they can track them. The French competition authority (FCA) said today it has rejecte

Google earlier this year announced an update to Google Maps to help people find COVID-19 vaccination sites nearby, and now Apple is doing the same. Apple device owners can either ask Siri or search within Apple Maps to find nearby COVID-19 vaccine providers within the U.S., the company says. These

"speakable-summary" dir="ltr">One of the biggest gripes about investing apps is that they are not acting responsibly by not educating users properly and allegedly letting them fend for themselves. This can result in people losing a lot of money, as evidenced by the number of lawsuits against Robinho

Facebook this morning announced it will increase the penalties against its rule-breaking Facebook Groups and their members, alongside other changes designed to reduce the visibility of groups’ potentially harmful content. The company says it will now remove civic and political groups from its

For the first time, Pinduoduo has surpassed Alibaba in annual active users, marking the Chinese e-commerce upstart’s meteoric rise over the course of five years. The milestone also indicates Pinduoduo has overcome the early stereotype that it was an app for users in China’s less-develop

Digitail, a cloud service for veterinary surgeries and customers, has raised $2.5 million in a seed round led by byFounders and Gradient Ventures (Google's AI fund), joined by Partech and a series of angels including Dr. Ivan Zakharenkov (SmartFlow). The startup was already backed (pre-seed rou

Existing remote desktop solutions like LogMeIn and TeamViewer can be complicated to set up and use, and can feel dated. A new startup called Cohere, now backed by $3.1 million in seed funding, aims to improve on the remote desktop and screen-sharing experience. With Cohere’s technology, busin

Video-streaming platforms have signed up more subscribers during COVID-19 lockdowns, and that growth is expected to continue after the pandemic, showcasing more international content. When subtitles are well done, they don't take audiences out of the immersive experience of a good show or movi

Google is letting developers keep more of their Play revenue, Instagram adds teen safety features and we examine the global distribution of venture funding. This is your Daily Crunch for March 16, 2021. The big story: Google Play halves commission on first $1M Following a similar mo

Google is making changes to its parental control system, Family Link, that aims to better reflect parents’ changing views on children’s screen time. In the pre-pandemic world, parents were more likely to see screen time as something in need of restriction — they’d rather the

Earlier this year, TikTok made an update to its privacy settings and defaults to further lock down the app for its teenage users. This morning, Instagram followed suit with teen-focused privacy updates of its own. But the Facebook-owned social app didn’t choose to add more privacy to teen acc

Chinese users of the instant messenger Signal knew that the good times wouldn’t last long. The app, which is used for encrypted conversations, is unavailable in mainland China as of the morning of March 16, a test by technewss shows. The website of the app has been banned in mainland China s

Over the years, Jack Ma has accumulated a media portfolio in China that rivals that of Jeff Bezos in the United States. But now the future of Ma’s media empire is in the crosshairs of the Chinese government, which is wary of the billionaire’s increasing media clout. The Chinese authorit