4 views on the future of retail and the shopping experience

The global spread of COVID-19 and resulting orders to shelter in place have hit retailers hard. As the pandemic drags on, temporary halts are becoming permanent closures, whether it’s the coffee shop next door, a historic bar or a well-known lifestyle brand. But while the present is largely bleak, preparing for the future has retailers adopting technologies faster than ever. Their resilience and innovation means retail will look and fee different...

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Daily Crunch: Trump takes aim at social media companies

President Trump follows through on his threat to challenge the legal protections enjoyed by social media and internet companies, Magic Leap’s CEO is stepping down and China sees its biggest autonomous driving round yet. Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 29, 2020. 1. Trump signs an executive order taking direct aim at social media companies Yesterday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting the legal shield that internet companies...

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Facebook takes on Twitter with Venue, a ‘second screen’ companion for live events

Facebook’s R&D group, NPE Team, is launching a new app for engaging fellow fans around live events, Venue. This is the third new app to launch just this week from Facebook’s internal team focused on experimenting with new concepts in social networking. With Venue, the company aims to offer a digital companion for live events, starting with this Sunday’s NASCAR race. The new app appears to be a challenge to Twitter, which today serves as the de...

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Twitter screens Trump’s Minneapolis threat-tweet for glorifying violence

After applying a fact-checking label Tuesday to a misleading vote-by-mail tweet made by US president Donald Trump, Twitter is on a roll and has labeled another of the president’s tweets — this time screening his words from casual view with what it calls a “public interest notice” that states the tweet violated its rules about glorifying violence.  Here’s how the tweet appears without further interaction (second tweet in the below screengrab): The...

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Trump signs an executive order taking direct aim at social media companies

On Thursday, President Trump signed an executive order targeting the legal shield that internet companies rely on to protect them from liability for user-created content. That law, known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is essential to large social platforms like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, the kind of companies the president has long accused, without evidence, of engaging in anti-conservative censorship. Trump was joined during...

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Going to war with Twitter, Trump threatens critical social media legal protections

Accusing Twitter of censorship for adding a contextual label to false claims he made about the 2020 election process, President Trump has again declared war on social media companies. After the White House told reporters that the president would soon announce an executive order “pertaining to social media,” the draft of that order is out in circulation. We’ve reviewed the draft, and while its contents are somewhat shocking by the standards of a normal...

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Daily Crunch: Twitter vs. Trump

Tensions escalate between President Trump and his favorite social media platform, Google and Microsoft considering investing in the Indian telecom market and the Raspberry Pi foundation announces a new Raspberry Pi. Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 28, 2020. 1. Jack Dorsey explains why Twitter fact-checked Trump’s false voting claims After Twitter flagged a pair of President Trump’s tweets with a fact-checking label on Tuesday, White House officials...

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Jack Dorsey explains why Twitter fact-checked Trump’s false voting claims

After Twitter flagged a pair of President Trump’s tweets with a fact-checking label on Tuesday, tensions between the president and his favored social media platform are running high. On Wednesday night, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey—rarely one to pick a political fight—took to his own platform to clarify the company’s decision. Fact check: there is someone ultimately accountable for our actions as a company, and that’s me. Please leave our employees...

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Investors say emerging multiverses are the future of entertainment

The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating the adoption of new technologies and cultural shifts that were already well underway. According to a clutch of heavy-hitting investors, this dynamic is particularly strong in gaming and extended reality. Unlike other segments of the startup and tech world, where valuations have been slashed, early-stage companies focused on building new games, gaming infrastructure and virtual or extended reality entertainment...

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Instagram to test new revenue streams, including badges and IGTV ads

Instagram today is launching new tools that enable video creators to make money, including badges that viewers can purchase during Instagram Live videos and the introduction of IGTV ads. Both launches are considered a test, as the company is limiting the features’ availability during its experimentation phase, it says. Badges will give viewers a way to support their favorite creators while also standing out in the comments, similar to efforts on...

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Facebook launches Collab, a mix-and-match app for making collaborative music videos

Facebook’s internal R&D group, NPE Team, is rolling out yet another new app today called Collab after having just launched a new group audio calling app, CatchUp, on Tuesday. With Collab, the focus has now returned to video, and specifically, the concept of watching, mixing, and matching original videos together, beginning with music. In Collab, creators can either record their own musical arrangement or swipe to discover arrangements to build...

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After Twitter fact-check, Trump threatens to regulate or close down social media platforms

Once again, Trump has doubled down. Following the addition of a fact-checking warning label added to his tweet about mail-in ballots, Trump took to the platform yet again to denounce it. In what may be his strongest words to date against a service that has largely given him free rein to this point, the President suggested that social media services would have to be regulated or shut down. Republicans have long held that social media sites harbor...

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Google removes millions of negative TikTok reviews amid backlash in India

ByteDance’s TikTok app, which has gained hundreds of millions of users in India with its short-form videos, is facing criticism in its biggest overseas market after disturbing videos surfaced on the platform. Phrases such as BanTikTok, DeleteTikTok, and BlockTikTok have trended on Twitter in India in the past three weeks after numerous users expressed disgust over some videos that were circulating on Chinese giant ByteDance’s jewel app. Users unearthed...

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Twitter adds a warning label fact-checking Trump’s false voting claims

On the heels of a furor over his tweets accusing MSNBC host Joe Scarborough of murder, Twitter has quietly begun to fact-check the president. A new warning label encouraging Twitter users to “Get the facts about mail-in ballots” appeared on a series of tweets in which the president baselessly claimed ballots received through mail-in voting methods are “fraudulent.” In a statement to TechCrunch, a Twitter spokesperson said the pair of tweets from...

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Twitter plans to expand its misinformation labels—but will they apply to Trump?

President Trump is again testing Twitter’s stomach for misinformation flowing from its most prominent users. In a flurry of recent tweets, Trump floated conspiracy theories about the death of Lori Klausutis, an intern for former congressman Joe Scarborough who was found dead in his Florida office in 2001—a freak accident a medical examiner reported resulted from a fall stemming from an undiagnosed heart condition. Scarborough, a political commentator...

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This Week in Apps: Facebook takes on Shopify, Tinder considers its future, contact-tracing tech goes live

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending three hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business....

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Facebook’s Workplace, now with 5M paying users, adds drop-in video Rooms and more

One of the biggest technology takeaways of the last couple of months has been that organizations need confident, wide-ranging digital strategies to stay afloat, and Facebook — in its wider bid to build products to serve businesses — is taking note. In the same week that the social network doubled down on business tools for small and medium enterprises with Shops, it is also sharpening its focus on larger enterprises and how they might use its platform. Today,...

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