Superpowered lets you see your schedule and join meetings from the Mac menu bar

A newly launched Mac app called Superpowered aims to make it easier to stay on top of all your Zoom calls and Google Meets, without having to scramble to find the meeting link in your inbox or calendar app at the last minute. Instead of relying on calendar reminders, Superpowered offers a notifica

Facebook challenges FTC’s antitrust case with Big Tech’s tattered playbook

Facebook has challenged the FTC’s antitrust case against it using a standard playbook that questions the agency’s arguably expansive approach to defining monopolies. But the old reliable “we’re not a monopoly because we never raised prices” and “how can it be ant

Twitter is testing better image previews and fewer cropped photos

Twitter says it’s running a test with a small subset of iOS and Android users to “give people an accurate preview” of what an image will look like without the trial and error that process involves now. As it stands now, the platform automatically crops images to make them display

Rent the Runway’s first iOS team launches Runway, an easier way to coordinate app releases

A team of mobile app engineers and designers from companies like Rent the Runway, ClassPass, Kickstarter and others, are now launching their own startup, Runway, to address the common pain points they experienced around the mobile app release cycle. With Runway, teams can connect their existing too

Lawmakers want to empower publishers to collectively negotiate with Facebook

On the heels of a heated standoff between platforms and publishers in Australia, U.S. lawmakers reintroduced a piece of legislation that would allow the news industry to collectively negotiate content deals with tech companies. The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act is sponsored in the Sen

TikTok rolls out new commenting features aimed at preventing bullying

On the heels of last week’s launch of a new Q&A format for creators responding to viewer questions, TikTok today announced it’s rolling out new commenting features. Creators will now be able to control which comments can be posted on their content, before those comments go live. Ano

Russia is trying to throttle Twitter

In its latest strike against online content it doesn’t control Russia is throttling Twitter. State agency Roskomnadzor said today it was taking the action in response to the social media not removing banned content, claiming it had identified more than 3,000 unlawful posts that have not been

Facebook targets emerging markets with the launch of Instagram Lite, an Android app that takes up just 2MB, in 170 countries

Growth for Facebook is coming from the developing world, and so the social network today made another key move to cater better to consumers in those countries. After nearly three years in the planning, Facebook is taking the plunge today and officially launching Instagram Lite, a less data- and sto

Epic Games buys photogrammetry software maker Capturing Reality

Epic Games is quickly becoming a more dominant force in gaming infrastructure M&A after a string of recent purchases made to bulk up their Unreal Engine developer suite. Today, the company announced that they’ve brought on the team from photogrammetry studio Capturing Reality to help the

Walmart to host a new livestream shopping event on TikTok, following successful pilot

In December, Walmart partnered with TikTok on the first pilot test of a new livestreamed shopping experience in the U.S. on the video platform. That test seemingly performed well, as today Walmart announced it will return to TikTok to host another livestream shopping event, the “Spring Shop-A

Tech leaders discuss how social media is broken and what we can do about it

"">Toxic culture, deadly conspiracies and organized hate have exploded online in recent years. At technewss Sessions: Justice we talked with Color of Change’s Rashad Robinson, Accountable Tech’s Jesse Lehrich and Naj Austin, of Somewhere Good and Ethel’s Club about how much respo

White-label voice assistants will win the battle for podcast discovery

Americans are bored, housebound and screened out. This has created a golden opportunity for audio as consumers turn to podcasts, voice assistants and smart speakers — often at the same time. Roughly 128 million Americans use a voice assistant at least once a month. Smartphones account for most v

Apple teams with Common Sense Media to curate podcasts for kids

Apple announced this morning it’s teaming up with Common Sense Media to curate a selection of kid-friendly podcasts in the U.S. in light of what appears to be growing interest in spoken-word entertainment among families. That interest, in part, may have been prompted by the pandemic and paren

Makers of ‘kid’s first virtual world’ Animal Jam targets Gen Z teens with Fer.al debut

Before kids graduate to the expansive virtual worlds in games like Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite, they often get their start in online social gaming with a game like Animal Jam. Here, kids learn to personalize their avatar, explore a world, chat with other players and trade items in a safe environ