Hustle scores $8M to kill telemarketing with personalized texts

 No one picks up the phone and everyone gets too much email. If you want to contact people for fundraising, a political campaign, or marketing, texting is the way to go. But a generic mass text is more like spam than a convincing conversation. Hustle lets you personalize every message and turn it into persuasive one-on-one dialogue. Like CRM for SMS, organizers can assign lists of contacts to… Read More

Half of businesses on Instagram use Stories as it turns 1

 Instagram Stories has blossomed from a Snapchat clone into an integral part of the world’s largest dedicated visual communication app in the first year since its launch. Half of the businesses on Instagram produced a story in the last month, and its boosted the app’s average usage to 32 minutes per day for those under 25, and 24 minutes per day for those 25 and up. If… Read More

You can now use PayPal through Skype’s mobile app

 The PayPal partnerships keep coming. The still growing payments giant today announced a new deal with Skype that will allow users in 22 countries worldwide to send money to other Skype users through an updated version of the Skype mobile app. This extends PayPal’s potential reach by a sizable amount – the Skype app has been downloaded over a billion times to date, and has… Read More

Chinese smartphone makers closing the gap on iPhone, Samsung

 While Samsung and Apple continued to occupy long-time number one and two spots in the global smartphone market in the second quarter of the year, Chinese Android OEMs Huawei, Oppo and Xiaomi are continuing to close the gap. Read More

Apple hits an all-time high and is seemingly in striking distance of being a $1 trillion company

 Apple had a semi-blowout quarter — though, really, the story is about what’s happening in the next quarter — sending the stock to an all-time high. The big jump means Apple is now a company worth more than $800 billion. It seemed not too long ago that Google might have a fair shot at being a bigger company than Apple when it comes to its market cap, but now Apple is on a… Read More

Apple is signaling a huge fourth quarter and Wall Street is loving it

 Apple set its expectations for the fourth quarter above what Wall Street was looking for today in its earnings report — just in time for a huge iPhone launch coming up soon. Apple said it expected to generate between $49 billion and $52 billion in the fourth quarter. The midpoint of that falls above what Wall Street expected — around $49.2 billion — and it alludes to a… Read More

Nextbit ends support for Robin smartphone

 The shelf life of a Kickstarter-backed smartphone really isn’t something you’d expect to last forever, but warranty support on Nextbit’s Robin phone is over as of today, the company announced on Twitter this morning. Read More

Cute robot Kuri will also work as your family videographer

 We’ve written several times about Kuri, a self-driving robot that responds to voice commands. But there’s a big question that still hasn’t been answered. As Chris Matthews, vice president of marketing at Mayfield Robotics put it: “What does Kuri do?” In other words, we know that Kuri is cute and fun, but why would someone pay $799 for it? The answer — at least… Read More

VSCO launches its first video editing tool

 VSCO is a brand well-known among photographers who take advantage of its presets for desktop and its mobile app featuring film-inspired filters and pro image tools. Now the company is moving into video editing, with the launch of its first video editing tool on iOS. The tool will allow users to apply presets and tools to any size video from their smartphone camera, then share the… Read More

Ben Silbermann joins us at Disrupt SF to map out the future of searching through your phone’s eyes

 Pinterest is one of the industry’s most fascinating companies — going from a simple digital collage to one of the leaders in image recognition and visual search, of all things. That feeds into the company’s hope of helping its users — more than 150 million strong — discover things they didn’t realize they were interested in and finally decide to do… Read More

Boxed is trying to predict when you’ll run out of snacks and toilet paper

 Boxed allows online shoppers to to find the same kinds of deals you’d get at a wholesale retailer like Costco. Now it wants to help you avoid that awkward moment when you realize you’re all out of toilet paper. Co-founder and CTO William Fong said that last week, the company released a new feature called SmartStockup to about a quarter of its users, and it’s in the process… Read More

Here’s an early look at the Samsung Galaxy Note 8

 We’re just weeks away from Samsung’s next major launch event on August 23, and already we have a full visual of the device it is expected to unveil — the Galaxy Note 8. That’s courtesy of prolific smartphone leaker Evan Blass — who correctly detailed Samsung’s Galaxy S8 before it was announced earlier this year — and a couple of photos of the… Read More