Microsoft’s Edge browser is now available for Android and iOS

 Last month, Microsoft announced its intentions to bring its Edge Browser to iOS and Android, as it works to broaden its reach on third-party mobile devices. After being made available in preview form for roughly a month, the app officially hits iOS and Android’s respective app stores starting today. The followup to the once ubiquitous Internet Explorer has been blossoming on Windows… Read More

LG shakes up its struggling mobile division with new top executives

 If you’ve stopped paying attention to LG in the last couple of years, you’ll learn everything you need to know from the first paragraph of its latest press release that highlights a “sweeping realignment to better address the challenges ahead.” The company’s in a tough spot. It makes good and innovative phones, but just seem to make a dent in a crowded mobile… Read More

There are now 25M active business profiles on Instagram

 Instagram announced this morning that it now has 25 million active business profiles, up from 15 million in July. The company throws out a lot of different statistics (back in September it said it had 800 million monthly active users, 500 million daily active users and 2 million advertisers), but this one’s significant as a measure of how many businesses see Instagram as an important way… Read More

Facebook drops fee on donations, will match $50M/year, adds Mentor feature

 Facebook has always been about friends, but now it’s seeking a broader purpose. So today, Facebook is lending a hand with what it does best: social connections, APIs, and money. At its first Facebook Social Good Forum conference in New York City, the social network just unveiled a slew of new philanthropy-minded features and initiatives. Mark Zuckerberg started the event with a… Read More

Stationhead allows anyone to become a streaming radio DJ, with live listener calls

 Streaming services like Spotify have turned playlists into one of the main ways to discover new music, but I’d argue that they’re missing some of the personality of traditional radio — the kind of radio where I knew not just the names of my favorite DJs, but also what kind of music they liked and random details about their life. That’s the experience that Stationhead,… Read More

Snapchat starts algorithm-personalized redesign splitting social and media

 By putting best friends first and dividing them from professional publishers, Snapchat hopes to conquer Instagram and revive its own growth with a big redesign that begins rolling out Friday. And it looks great. Snapchat is finally personalizing, highlighting the most relevant content so it’s easier to consume. “We are separating the social from the media, and taking an important… Read More

Samsung buys another AI company as it continues to build out Bixby

 It’s true that Bixby didn’t have the most auspicious of debuts when it rolled out on the Galaxy S8 earlier this year, but Samsung’s clearly got big plans for its smart assistant. Late last year, the company picked up Viv, the new assistant from the folks behind Siri — an acquisition that occurred too late to have a major impact on Bixby ahead of release. The consumer… Read More

Fox announces an ‘X-Files’ mobile game coming in 2018

 Not content to just revive The X-Files on television, Fox is also bringing the franchise to phones and tablets. The new title from FoxNext Games and Creative Mobile Games is planned for release early next year, after the TV show returns for its eleventh (!) season. According to Variety, the story will take place in 2010 — long after the original series, but before the events of last… Read More

Facebook prototypes Messenger Broadcast for businesses

 Facebook may soon be ready to squeeze more money out of its 1.3 billion user chat app. The company has internally developed “Messenger Broadcast”, a self-serve mass-messaging interface that lets businesses send marketing messages to users. Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s testing the feature internally, but hadn’t trialed it to the public or with businesses as… Read More

Apple launches a new YouTube channel offering device tutorials

 Apple is expanding its social media outreach. The company has just launched a new YouTube channel to teach people how to use their Apple devices, like the iPhone and iPad, via video tutorials. The first set of videos focus on common and fairly simple tasks, like taking screenshots, adding attachments to email, deleting photos, changing the wallpaper and more. The videos are short, with most… Read More

Nintendo’s Animal Crossing mobile title hits 15 million downloads less than a week after wide release

 Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp marked Nintendo’s most significant mobile title launch since Mario Run and it seems like the game has already delivered some significant downloads, with data from SensorTower suggesting that the title, which lets users chat with animals, catch fish and shake trees for fruit, has already been downloaded 15 million times in its first six days of availability. Read More

The Pixel 2’s dormant Visual Core chip gets activated in the latest Android developer preview

 Sadly, not all of the Pixel 2’s surprises have been the good sort since Google’s latest flagship launched. Visual Core is one of the more pleasant ones, though — a custom system-on-a-chip (SoC) that’s just been hanging out in the phone not really doing much of anything. It seemed that the component simply wasn’t ready for public consumption when the phone hit… Read More

Microsoft Office arrives on Chromebooks via Google Play Store

 Microsoft Office is now available for Google Chromebook users through the Google Play Store – a notable addition, given the two companies offer competing products in terms of office productivity software. Neither Google nor Microsoft are making a formal announcement about the Office applications’ arrival on Chromebooks. But we understand the Office Android apps will only be free… Read More