It’s hard to imagine anyone but advertisers being happy with Apple for putting more ads on the page in App Store listings, but the way they rolled it out was especially troubling. Ads for shady gambling apps quickly pervaded the platform, appearing in the “you might also like” section of ordinary apps — including at…
Category Archives: Blog
Telegram announced today that will it hold an auction for usernames — for both individual accounts and channels — through a marketplace built on top of the TON blockchain. In August, Telegram founder Pavel Durov first mentioned the idea by noting the possibility of adding “a little bit of Web 3.0 to Telegram in the…
Meta’s other bet is making Alphabet’s long-running Other Bets segment appear cheap, both in cash and market cap terms. Shares of Facebook’s parent company plummeted after the company reported huge costs and losses associated with its future-facing metaverse project, accompanied by a revenue decline that, while forex-impacted, was still far from the heady days when…
Google has acquired Alter, an artificial intelligence (AI) avatar startup that helps creators and brands express their virtual identity, for about $100 million, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch, in a push to boost its content game and better compete with TikTok. The acquisition was completed about two months ago, the source said,…
The Tesla Cyberquad for Kids, a $1,900 mini ATV inspired by the yet-to-be produced Cybertruck, is being recalled due to safety concerns flagged by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Radio Flyer, which makes the Cyberquad for Tesla, is handling the recall. About 5,000 units have been sold, per the CPSC. Consumers will receive full refunds…
The social platforms that power the creator economy might seem like they’re starting to slip. YouTube’s quarterly ad revenue declined 1.9% year over year, per Google parent company Alphabet’s quarterly earnings report this week. Overall, Alphabet missed analyst estimates, earning $69.1 billion in revenue, about a billion dollars less than expected. For many YouTubers, ad…
For most venture-backed social companies, a period of hypergrowth seems like it would be the dream. It means the app broke through the noise of thousands of others, resonated with a mass market of people, and didn’t need to spend a penny on marketing. Clubhouse, however, offered a retort to that perspective. The app’s fall…
Uber is releasing a suite of new safety features geared towards the driver, including freezing fake rider account names and piloting a front-facing video recording tool to replace a driver’s dashcam. The safety features follow a feedback period from drivers that Uber began this summer. It looks like drivers have been having a hard time…
This is my dog, Stevie. A very good girl. (Pictured: The author’s dog, Stevie, a lab, boxer, pit bull mix.) Credit: Dylan Haas / Mashable She’s a lab, boxer, pit bull mix who likes cuddles, sleeping in, saying “hello” to strangers, and, probably more than anything else, chew toys. To some, picking out a toy…
A large typosquatting campaign has been detected abusing Amazon’s AWS cloud platform to lure people into tech support scams. After being tipped off by an actual computer technician working at a local shop, researchers at Malwarebytes discovered a “big typosquatting campaign” that started roughly a month ago. The campaign is quite dangerous, too, as victims…