Ben Rubin explains why the Web3 era of social media will help everybody get paid

After a decade of a handful of social media companies trading what are essentially publishing tools in exchange for serving us all an endless deluge of ads, the winds of change are finally blowing.

VC Peter Relan helped launched Discord; now he’s “brewing” up two new incubators

Peter Relan is not exactly a household name, but he has seen a lot over the course of his career and enjoyed a fair amount of success. A Stanford grad who logged time at Hewlett Packard and Oracle before becoming the CTO of the ill-fated, bubble-era company Webvan, Relan has, in more recent years, become […]

Yahoo has built a new calendar app called Day, and it’s recruited the co-founder of Sunrise to design it

When it comes to online calendars and calendar apps, services like Google Calendar and Outlook from Microsoft rule the roost with hundreds of millions of users globally. Now another company is hoping to ruffle some feathers with its own move into the space. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Yahoo is working Day, a new […]

Ben Rubin, who founded Houseparty, Meerkat and Slashtalk, will peer into the future of social at Disrupt

Ben Rubin understands where social is going. In fact, he understands it so well, he’s always there early. Rubin is the current CEO and co-founder of Slashtalk and an angel investor who scouts for Sequoia Capital. He previously founded Houseparty and Meerkat — apps that pioneered group video chat and mobile livestreaming, respectively — shaping […]

Study finds half of Americans get news on social media, but percentage has dropped

A new report from Pew Research finds that around a third of U.S. adults continue to get their news regularly from Facebook, though the exact percentage has slipped from 36% in 2020 to 31% in 2021. This drop reflects an overall slight decline in the number of Americans who say they get their news from […]

Cameo launches Cameo Calls, a service for fans to video chat with celebs

If you really want to video chat tonight with William Hung of retro American Idol fame… got twenty bucks to spare? Yesterday, Cameo launched its Cameo Calls products, which lets fans video chat for up to 15 minutes one-on-one with their favorite influencers and celebrities. The talent sets the duration, time, and price of their […]

Facebook knows Instagram harms teens. Now, its plan to open the app to kids looks worse than ever

Facebook is in the hot seat again. The Wall Street Journal published a powerful multi-part series on the company this week, drawing from internal documents on everything from the company’s secretive practice of whitelisting celebrities to its knowledge that Instagram is taking a serious toll on the mental health of teen girls. The flurry of […]