Omnyway raises $12.75M to connect advertising and mobile commerce
Omnyway announced today that it has raised $12.75 million in Series A funding. Previously known as OmnyPay, Omnyway has built technology around what it calls “augmented digital commerce” — basically, helping retailers stay connected to consumers through their mobile phone during the in-store shopping process. Read More
Facebook Stories open to Pages, bringing brands to the ghost town
No one’s posting to Facebook Stories. Only eight of my 2,800 friends have Stories up right now, and three came from the new “cross-post from Instagram Stories” feature. It’s slow adoption for a feature cloned from Snapchat that’s proven wildly popular elsewhere, and lives prominently at the top of perhaps the world’s most-used app. Read More
Games account for over half of the 3M+ ARKit-powered app downloads, 62% of revenue
ARKit, Apple’s augmented reality framework that CEO Tim Cook recently likened to being as “dramatic” a development as the App Store itself, has now been installed more than 3 million times worldwide through a host of ARKit-powered apps and games, according to a new report out today from Sensor Tower. Read More
Toonstar lets you bring cartoon characters to life thanks to facial recognition
John Attanasio, CEO of Toonstar, said his goal is to create “a new Cartoon Network.” Attanasio said the key to Toonstar’s approach is to create animated content that’s “mobile, snackable, interactive.” The startup’s iOS app allows users to customize cartoon characters and then animate them using their own facial expressions. The resulting cartoons can… Read More
Spotify launches an app for artists with real-time streaming data, audience demographics
In the music streaming era, artists want to know how their music is being discovered, who’s listening, where, how many have streamed their release and what else their fans are into, among other things. Today, Spotify is releasing an app for artists that aims to answer these questions, while also giving artists a way to update their profile and connect with listeners while on the go. Read More
Facebook ‘3D posts’ let you play with VR objects in News Feed
Facebook wants to let you create virtual objects in its Oculus Medium sculpting platform or Facebook Spaces VR hangouts and then share them with friends who don’t have a VR headset. Today at Oculus Connect 4, Facebook previewed 3D posts, a new type of News Feed post where users can grab, spin and interact with a 3D object to look at it from all angles. Read More
U.S. consumers are spending 10 hours per year in shopping apps
Mobile shopping is on the rise, with U.S. consumers now spending nearly 50 minutes in shopping apps per month, or 10 hours per year, according to a new report out this morning from App Annie. Digital-first shopping apps, like those from Amazon, Etsy, Wish and others, are also growing more quickly in terms of total sessions and monthly usage, compared to shopping apps from traditional… Read More
When we last saw Zenefits, the company essentially handed off one of its initial core selling points — insurance brokerage — to partners. Since that rebrand rolled out, Zenefits seems to be following the sort of drip-drip-drip of updates that many startups trying to create a sort of “home” for a core employee experience utilize. That continues today with the launch… Read More
Your Facebook profile used to be the online version of “you”. But over the past year, Bitmoji has usurped Facebook to become the preferred way to share your identity over the web. The Facebook profile assembles a collection of text and real-world photos into a fixed set of poses, making it more of a snapshot of the offline you ported into the digital realm rather than a vision of… Read More
Twitter launches ‘Happening Now’ to showcase tweets about events, starting with sports
Twitter is today releasing a new feature called “Happening Now” aimed to make its service more accessible to newcomers by highlighting groups of tweets about a topic, beginning with sports, before expanding to other areas like entertainment and breaking news. If this sounds similar to Twitter’s existing Moments feature….well, it is. Moments, too, offers a way to learn… Read More
Twitterrific returns to Mac as a customizable Twitter client, but at twice the price of Tweetbot
After raising upwards of $100,000 via a Kickstarter campaign earlier this year, the team at Iconfactory has brought back one of the more popular third-party Twitter clients, Twitterrific for Mac. Effectively abandoned years ago when Iconfactory shifted its focus to mobile, the Kickstarter was meant to establish demand for a Mac app ahead of devoting developer resources to building it.
Today… Read More
Ex-TechCruncher Billy Gallagher announces book on Snapchat’s origin
“So much of it is stranger than fiction. It’s a great story, I knew that if I didn’t write the book, someone else would and I’d regret it,” says Billy Gallagher, author of “How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story.” The book follows CEO Evan Spiegel from the Stanford dorms where Snap was invented, to rejecting Facebook’s… Read More
Over 5,000 Wells Fargo ATMs now support card-free access via Apple Pay and other mobile wallets
Wells Fargo’s ATMs are getting an upgrade. The bank announced today that more than 40 percent – or over 5,000 of its ATMs – will now allow customers to perform transactions without having to pull out their bank card. Instead, users can take advantage of NFC – aka the “tap and pay” technology that powers mobile wallet systems like Apple Pay, Android Pay,… Read More
Snapchat’s new Context Cards use Snaps for spontaneous discovery
Snapchat is introducing a new feature that will transform the experience of using the apps at a fundamental level. They’re called ‘Context Cards,’ and they’re new ways to find out more info about any Snap shared by users, providing access to things like restaurant reviews, reservations, Uber and Lyft ride hailing, contact information and more. This is where Snapchat has… Read More
Microsoft’s virtual assistant Cortana has finally arrived in Skype. Announced at last year’s Microsoft Build 2016 event, the assistant’s integration was also previewed when the company released an overhauled, Snapchat-inspired version of its mobile messaging app this summer. But Cortana for Skype wasn’t ready at that time. Now, the feature is live, offering users… Read More
Standard Cognition gets $5M to build a machine vision-powered checkout
While image recognition in photos and video has become increasingly sophisticated at an incredible rate, Standard Cognition co-founder Jordan Fisher says everyone is chasing autonomous driving — or, the “shiny object,” as he calls it.
That’s not the aim of Fisher and his team, who set out to start a company that’s focused on streamlining the checkout experience. Read More
Flipboard opens up to more publishers by embracing the mobile web
Flipboard is changing the way it works with online publishers, thanks to two connected announcements. First, publishers no longer need to work directly with Flipboard in order to get their stories into the app. Instead, there’s a new self-serve signup option, allowing Flipboard to automatically pull in stories from publishers’ RSS feeds. To be clear, CEO Mike McCue said… Read More
Here’s a small way to start building your resistance to Y Combinator rejections
Who loves a good niche? We sure as hell do. And we also love niche products that address those niche problems — especially tech niches. So here we are, with Today in Good Niche Things. This time it’s a small little thing on the internet that sends you a rejection letter from Y Combinator before you even had a chance to apply to Y Combinator. It, instead, will send you a… Read More
Google acquires Relay Media to convert ordinary web pages to AMP pages
AMP — Google’s collaborative project to speed up the loading time for mobile web pages — is getting an interesting acceleration of its own today. Relay Media, a company founded by an ex-Googler that had developed technology to help covert web pages to the AMP format, has been acquired by Google. Read More
Benchmarks contradict ‘Apple slowed down my iPhone’ claims
It’s a refrain we all hear every year around September: “I swear, whenever they release a new iPhone, Apple makes all the old ones run worse to make you upgrade.” But thousands of performance tests conducted over the years by Futuremark users show that the conspiracy is mostly in your mind. Read More
