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, […]
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 […]
Twitter for Professionals will begin to roll out this week for businesses and creators
Twitter really can’t go a day without releasing new products. But if you’re running an account for a business or a public figure, its latest addition might capture your interest. Soon, businesses and creators will be able to opt into “professional accounts,” giving them additional tools to distinguish their profile, quickly promote content through ads […]
Utopia Labs is building an operating system for DAOs
Decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, are all the rage at the moment. We’re seeing explosive growth in this sector as people experiment with building companies on top of tokens and smart contracts. And where new organization types bloom, so does the need for infrastructure. Utopia Labs is a team of four founders who met on […]
PSPDFkit raises $116M, its first outside money; now nearly 1B people use apps powered by its collaboration, signing and markup tools
An under-the-radar, bootstrapped startup from Vienna, Austria — a hit with developers for technology that underpins user experience for some of the world’s most popular apps — is doubling down on momentum and announcing its first outside investment, in the form of a large growth round of funding. PSPDFkit — which provides APIs and an […]
Facebook grilled in Senate hearing over teen mental health
Last night, Facebook published two annotated slide decks in an attempt to contextualize the documents that the Wall Street Journal published this month, which reported evidence that the company is aware of its negative impact on teen mental health. These documents were released in anticipation of today’s Senate hearing on the mental health harms of […]
TikTok reached 1 billion monthly active users
TikTok announced in a blog post today that 1 billion people use TikTok every month. That means that on this big rock in space that we call home, about one in seven-and-a-half people are regularly watching short-form videos of dancing, dangerous “milk crate challenges” and even actual educational content. For context, Facebook said that in […]
Apps to reach record highs in Q3 of 36B downloads and $34B in consumer spending
A new forecast on the state of the app economy indicates the third quarter will see record-breaking revenues spent on apps and games. According to App Annie, consumers worldwide will spend $34 billion on apps and games in Q3, a 20% year-over-year increase on spending. The increase indicates that the Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on consumer […]
Bigeye, providing data quality automation, closes second round this year with $45M
The company is investing in how to find data-quality issues faster and get to the root cause so that data outages can be prevented in the future.
Twitter Super Follows has generated only around $6K+ in its first two weeks
Twitter’s creator platform Super Follows is off to an inauspicious start, having contributed to somewhere around $6,000 in U.S. iOS revenue in the first two weeks the feature has been live, according to app intelligence data provided by Sensor Tower. And it’s made only around $600 or so in Canada. A small portion of that […]