After breach, Twitter hires a new cybersecurity chief

Following a high-profile breach in July, Twitter has hired Rinki Sethi as its new chief information security officer. Sethi most recently served as chief information security officer at cloud data management company Rubrik, and previously worked in cybersecurity roles at IBM, Palo Alto Networks and Intuit. In the new role at Twitter overseeing the company’s information security practices and policies, Sethi will report to platform lead Nick Tornow,...

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Brands building for scale should look to hypercultural Latinx consumers

Ilse Calderon Contributor Ilse Calderon is an investor at OVO Fund where she specializes in pre-seed investments across capital-efficient markets. Prior to OVO, Ilse spent a year at Silicon Valley Bank rotating across consumer and software teams. Kathleen Garcia-Manjarres Contributor Share on Twitter Kathleen Garcia-Manjarres (Kat Garcia) is a Growth Architect at BCG Digital Ventures (BCGDV) where she invests, invents, builds and scales...

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Facebook introduces cross-app communication between Messenger and Instagram, plus other features

Facebook announced today it will begin rolling out new functionality that will allow Instagram and Messenger users to communicate across apps, in addition to bringing a host of Messenger-inspired features to the Instagram inbox. On Instagram, users will be presented with an option to update to a new messaging experience that offers the ability to change your chat color, react with any emoji, watch videos together, set messages to disappear and more....

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Lee Fixel’s Addition leads $35 million investment in India’s Inshorts

Inshorts, which operates a popular news aggregator app in India, has raised $35 million in a new financing round led by Lee Fixel’s Addition as the Indian startup looks to scale its adjacent, social network platform. For Fixel, who wrote several high-profile checks to Indian firms while running Tiger Global, InShorts is the first Indian startup he is backing from his new VC firm. Fixel, who also invested in InShorts when he was at Tiger Global, has...

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Facebook names VP of product growth Alex Schultz as new CMO

To fill its empty CMO position, Facebook just promoted to the C-suite a longtime Facebook executive focused on product growth. Former VP of product growth and analytics Alex Schultz, who has been with the company since 2007, announced the move Tuesday in a Facebook post. Schultz will fill the position left open by Antonio Lucio, who joined the company from HP in 2018 and announced his departure last month. Lucio said he was leaving the company to...

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Ringing alarm bells, Biden campaign calls Facebook ‘foremost propagator’ of voting disinformation

In a new letter to its chief executive on the eve of the first presidential debate, the Biden campaign slammed Facebook for its failure to act on false claims about voting in the U.S. election. In the scathing letter, published by Axios, Biden Campaign Manager Jen O’Malley Dillon specifically singled out a troubling video post the Trump campaign shared to Facebook and Twitter last week. Over the course of that video, the president’s son claims that...

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Pivoting during a pandemic

Stan Chudnovsky Contributor Share on Twitter Stan Chudnovsky is the Vice President of Messenger from Facebook. Like everywhere else, the COVID-19 pandemic created a new “no normal” at Facebook. The seismic shifts and disruptions reverberated across the globe and we had to accept that and adjust, quickly. Suddenly, our products were more important than ever yet we had to rethink everything we had planned, including the very nature of the...

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Facebook introduces Accounts Center, a tool for managing a growing number of cross-app settings

Despite being under antitrust investigations in U.S. and E.U., Facebook today is rolling out a new feature that highlights the extent to which its suite of apps now interoperate. The company this morning introduced a consumer-facing tool called “Accounts Center,” which is found in the Settings section of Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. The feature aims to give users the ability to manage their connected experiences across Facebook-owned apps,...

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New program wants to be the Y Combinator for emerging fund managers

Rolling funds, the rise of solo capitalists, crowd syndicates, and team-based seed funds all scream one thing in unison: venture capital is growing and getting unbundled at the same time. While the asset class remains largely exclusive and skewed white and male, innovation does have the potential to usher in a new, far more inclusive generation of investors. The question is how to ensure that these newer investors survive and thrive and are able...

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Deep Science: Robot perception, acoustic monitoring, using ML to detect arthritis

Research papers come out far too rapidly for anyone to read them all, especially in the field of machine learning, which now affects (and produces papers in) practically every industry and company. This column aims to collect the most relevant recent discoveries and papers — particularly in but not limited to artificial intelligence — and explain why they matter. The topics in this week’s Deep Science column are a real grab bag that range from planetary...

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Apple is (temporarily) waiving its App Store fee for Facebook’s online events

Last month, Facebook introduced support for paid online events — and because many of the businesses offering those events have struggled during the coronavirus pandemic, the company also said it would not collect fees for the next year. At the same time, it complained that Apple had “dismissed” its requests to waive the App Store’s customary 30% fee on in-app purchases. Today, Facebook is announcing a reversal on Apple’s part: Online event fees will...

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LinkedIn launches Stories, plus Zoom, BlueJeans and Teams video integrations as part of wider redesign

With the employment market remaining sluggish as the world continues to struggle with Covid-19, a company that has built its popular businesses largely around recruitment is launching a redesign that pushes engagement in other ways as it waits for the job economy to pick up. LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned site now with 706 million registered users, where professionals network and look for work, is today taking the wraps off a new redesign of its desktop...

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Facebook gives more details about its efforts against hate speech before Myanmar’s general election

About three weeks ago, Facebook announced it will increase its efforts against hate speech and misinformation in Myanmar before the country’s general election on November 8, 2020. Today, it gave some more details about what the company is doing to prevent the spread of hate speech and misinformation. This includes adding Burmese language warning screens to flag information rated false by third-party fact-checkers. In November 2018, Facebook admitted...

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India’s ShareChat raises $40 million, says its short-video platform Moj now reaches 80 million users

ShareChat, an Indian social network that focuses entirely on serving users in non-English languages, said on Thursday it has raised $40 million from a clutch of investors after the Indian startup added tens of millions of new users in recent months. The five-year-old Bangalore-based startup said Dr. Pawan Munjal, chief executive and chairman of giant two-wheeler manufacturer Hero MotoCorp, Ajay Shridhar Shriram, chairman of chemical manufacturing...

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Instagram’s TikTok clone Reels updates to allow longer videos, easier edits

Instagram is today rolling out a few changes to its TikTok competitor, Reels, after early reviews of the feature criticized its design and reports indicated it was failing to gain traction. The company says it’s responding to user feedback on a few fronts, by giving Reels users the ability to create longer videos, extend the timer, and by adding tools to trim and delete clips for easier editing. TikTok helped popularize the short, 15-second video...

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Pinterest officially launches new Story Pins format in beta

Pinterest is announcing its spin on the increasingly popular stories format today — Story Pins, which combine multiple pages of images, videos, voiceover and overlaid text. We wrote about Story Pins back in June, and apparently various versions of the format have been in the works since last year. But the company is only officially launching Story Pins in beta today, along with a number of other tools designed to help creators on the platform. Asked...

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Facebook denies it will pull service in Europe over data transfer ban

Facebook’s head of global policy has denied the tech giant could close its service to Europeans if local regulators order it to suspend data transfers to the US following a landmark Court of Justice ruling in July that has cemented the schism between US surveillance laws and EU privacy rights. Press reports emerged this week of a Dublin court filing by Facebook, which is seeking a stay to a preliminary suspension order on its EU-US data transfers,...

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