In hopes of App Store changes, Paddle develops an alternative to Apple’s payments system

Paddle, a solutions provider subscription-based businesses, is betting on a future where App Store developers are able to use third-party payment systems — and it wants to be among the first to market with an alternative once such a system is permitted. The company today announced a new in-app purchasing (IAP) system aimed at iOS […]

Co-streaming rolls out to all creators on Facebook Gaming

Co-streaming is rolling out to all users on Facebook’s game-streaming platform Facebook Gaming. The feature will allow users to team up and stream with one another, while enabling viewers to navigate between co-streams and choose which perspective they’d like to see the action from. The feature had previously only been available to streamers in the […]

Blue Fever, an anonymous social network, acquires Gen Z-founded Trill

With Senate hearings and leaked documents galore, teen mental health on social media is a hot topic right now. But Gen Z founders Georgia Messinger and Ari Sokolov have been trying to create healthier online spaces since they were in high school, when they started the anonymous virtual support app Trill. “People ask us sometimes, […]

Mark Cuban-backed live entertainment app Fireside launches to creators

Amid a deluge of new creator platforms, a startup called Fireside is launching today with what it believes will be a compelling proposition for professional creators in need of a more robust set of tools for content creation, distribution, measurement, and monetization. The service, which offers a platform for live and interactive shows, had been […]

Adaptive Shield lands $30M Series A to build out its SaaS security platform

Adaptive Shield, a Tel Aviv-based startup that automates the security of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, has secured $30 million in Series A funding led by Insight Partners. The funding round, which also saw participation from Okta Ventures and existing investor Vertex Ventures Israel, follows a $4 million seed round in 2019. The company tells TechCrunch it will […]

Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are slowly returning. Why did they disappear to begin with?

Facebook’s day-long outage is by far its longest and most extreme in years. At around 9 a.m. PDT on the U.S. West Coast — where the social giant is headquartered — Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger seemed to vanish from the internet. The outage continued through market close, with the company’s stock dropping around […]

Jared Spataro will talk about building Microsoft’s SaaS business at TC Sessions: SaaS

Jared Spataro has been with Microsoft for more than 15 years now, and he has been part of the transition from an on-prem software company to a SaaS business. Today his official title is corporate VP in charge of the company’s biggest SaaS product, Office 365. Spataro is going to join us on October 27th […]

DevOps market demand drives quick Series C turnaround for Esper

CEO Yadhu Gopalan said Insight proactively approached the company, and Esper “jumped at the opportunity to partner with them to accelerate our trajectory and predict market growth quicker.”