Crunch Report | Facebook Helps You Find Wi-Fi

 Today’s Stories Facebook is rolling out its ‘Find Wi-Fi’ feature worldwide Delivery Hero’s valuation surpasses $5B following successful IPO Chat app Kakao raises $437M for its Korean ride-hailing service Cabin secures $3.3M for its ‘moving hotel’ Credits Written and Hosted by: Anthony Ha Filmed by: Matthew Mauro Edited by: Chris Gates Notes: Tito… Read More

Snapchat bought the AR location intellectual property of startup Drop

 Snap Map is Snapchat’s plan to tie together its online content with ways to augment your offline reality, and its got the patent to back it up. Augmented reality location startup Drop tells TechCrunch that Snap Inc acquired its intellectual property in 2015 including its “Location-based messaging” patent. In 2013, Drop developed an app that would let you post photos or text to… Read More

Facebook News Feed change demotes sketchy links overshared by spammers

 Technically, Facebook can’t suspend people’s accounts just for sharing 50-plus false, sensational, or clickbaity news articles per day. It doesn’t want to trample anyone’s right to share. But there’s nothing stopping it from burying those links low in the News Feed so few people ever see them. Today Facebook announced an algorithm change that does just that. It… Read More

Blue Apron tumbles again in its second day as its IPO settles for a down round

 Blue Apron is now down from its IPO price during trading today, falling around 4% and down to around $9.60 — a bit south of its original price. Early in the planning process, Blue Apron was shooting for a price range of between $15 and $17, which would have helped it raise even more money and value the company at around $3 billion. Instead, it had to settle for a valuation below $2… Read More

Andy Rubin’s Playground Ventures is raising another $15M

 Playground Ventures — the VC fund co-founded by Android inventor and former Google exec Andy Rubin that sits alongside an eponymous incubator/startup studio and is making some big bets in areas like artificial intelligence and new generations of hardware– is raising more money. A Form D filed with the SEC notes that Playground Ventures is in the process of adding another $15… Read More

Crunch Report | Blue Apron IPO Has A Rocky Start

 Today’s Stories  Blue Apron IPO off to a rough start Microsoft confirms Cloudyn acquisition, sources say price is between $50M and $70M Instagram implements an AI system to fight mean and harassing comments Uber crosses the 5 billion trip milestone amid ongoing issues A brief history of the iPhone Credits Written and Hosted by: Anthony Ha Filmed by: Matthew Mauro Edited by: Joe… Read More

A brief history of the iPhone

 The first iPhone was met with cautious excitement by many in the press — after all, where did the company get off thinking it could replace a physical keyboard with a touchscreen? But all these years later, the device still serves at the template for a majority of modern smartphones. In the intervening decade, the company has redefined the category time and again. Read More

What each model of the iPhone added to the game

 It was 10 years ago today that Steve Jobs announced the long-rumored iPhone to a crowd tech lovers excited to a fever pitch. We’ve already looked at the history of the iPhone going back to the Newton, but ten years of iPhone have brought us more than a dozen devices, each of which brought something new and important to the smartphone game. Let’s go through them, shall we? Read More

Google’s new experiment Triangle lets you block individual apps from using mobile data

 Google recently began testing a new tool for helping people better manage the mobile data used by their smartphones, through a new Android application called Triangle. The app, which is currently being tested in the Philippines, lets you do things like view your data balance, see which apps are accounting for the most data usage, and even block individual applications from using your mobile… Read More

Google Photos adds smarter sharing, suggestions and shared libraries

 Google today will begin rolling out new sharing functionality in Google Photos, first unveiled at the company’s I/O developer conference in May. Specifically, it’s launching the AI-powered Suggested Sharing feature along with Shared Libraries, both of which are designed to make the Google Photos app a more social experience, rather than just a personal collection of photo… Read More

Blue Apron significantly lowers its valuation with slashed IPO pricing

 Blue Apron — the next big consumer IPO for 2016 — isn’t looking as good as it was just a few weeks ago. The company said in an updated filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it would cut its IPO price range target to between $10 and $11 per share, down from between $15 and $17 per share. Normally these price ranges move around, but this is a pretty… Read More

Snapchat now lets you create custom geofilters right in the app

 Snapchat introduced a way to create custom geofilters back in February of last year, and now it’s making the feature easier to use. U.S. Snapchat users can now create and submit custom filters directly in the app, rather than having to go to the studio website to make their custom filter. The mobile creative studio is now located in settings, under a menu item called “On-Demand… Read More

Dating apps are embracing video

 Dating apps are, in their own way, a form of social networking – especially as they expand into new areas like friend-finding or professional networking. So it only makes sense that they would adopt video as well, given the growing popularity of the format on social apps like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, as well as the industry’s larger embrace of “Stories” as a… Read More