Today, Twitter announced that it is acquiring Squad and that the team from the screen-sharing social app will be joining Twitter’s ranks. Squad’s co-founders, CEO Esther Crawford and CTO Ethan Sutin, and the rest of the team will be coming aboard inside Twitter’s design, engineering and product departments, Twitter tells us. Crawford specifically notes that

Twitter has been doubling down on video services within its app, building out Twitter Live and recently launching Fleets so that users can share more moving media alongside their pithy 180-word observations, links and still photos. But in the process, it appears that it may also be streamlining its bigger stable of services. Code in

Stu Wall is a technology executive and entrepreneur who founded Signpost, a cloud-based customer communication platform that helps small businesses scale. The coronavirus pandemic accelerated America’s addiction to technology, and it’s making us sad, anxious and unproductive. Companies like Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat earn more advertising revenue the more frequently we use their products. These

Twitter is partnering with Snap to bring tweets into Snapchat with a native integration that both companies hope will push users away from screenshots and toward more interactive embeds. Twitter users who are also logged into the Snapchat app on their phone will be able to access the functionality by tapping share on a particular

Pinterest today is adding a few new features — notes, favorites and a board toolbar — aimed at helping those who use their boards for making lists of gift ideas, or who have a hard time navigating and sorting through boards with a larger number of items. The additions follow a blowout third quarter for

Will Johnson is CEO of The Harris Poll, one of the world’s leading public opinion research firms. In government, there’s rare bipartisan consensus on taking down Big Tech. Capping a 16-month investigation, a Democratic-controlled House committee recently identified Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google as monopolies that snuff out competition and innovation, equating the Big Four

Facebook faces big antitrust lawsuits, DoorDash and C3.ai go public and YouTube announces new election misinformation policies. This is your Daily Crunch for December 9, 2020. The big story: FTC and 48 state AGs sue Facebook The Federal Trade Commission filed an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook today, as did 48 attorneys general representing 46 states.

Richard Socher, former chief scientist at Salesforce, who helped build the Einstein artificial intelligence platform, is taking on a new challenge — and it’s a doozy. Socher wants to fix consumer search and today he announced you.com, a new search engine to take on the mighty Google. “We are building you.com. You can already go

Snap today announced a new 2021 fund of $3.5 million that will be directed toward supporting Snapchat Lens creators and developers who are using the company’s Lens Studio tool to explore the use of AR technologies. The news kicked off Snap’s multi-day virtual event, Lens Fest, where it also announced an upgraded version of its

Buzzy face-swap video app Reface, which lends users celebrity ‘superpowers’ by turning their selfies into “eerily realistic” famous video clips at the tap of a button, has caught the attention of Andreessen Horowitz. The Silicon Valley venture firm leads a $5.5 million seed round in the deep tech entertainment startup, announced today. Reface tells us

Round of applause for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism — which fought for two years to obtain details of a closed door meeting between Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and the UK secretary of state in charge of digital issues at the time, Matt Hancock (now health secretary). Freedom of information requests for minutes of the 2018

Twitter’s timeline is currently overrun with ads for some users, in what at first appeared to be a glitch involving the distribution of Promoted Tweets. Typically, a Promoted Tweet — which is just a regular tweet an advertiser has paid to promote more broadly — will appear just once at the top of a user’s

Twitter is shutting down its experimental app twttr, which the company had used publicly to prototype new features back in 2019. The app was first introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2019, then launched to testers that March. Its primary focus had been on trying out new designs for threaded conversations, including things

YouTube today announced it’s launching a new feature that will push commenters to reconsider their hateful and offensive remarks before posting. It will also begin testing a filter that allows creators to avoid having to read some of the hurtful comments on their channel that had been automatically held for review. The new features are

Salesforce, the CRM powerhouse that recently surpassed $20 billion in annual revenue, announced today it is wading deeper into enterprise social by acquiring Slack in a $27.7 billion megadeal. Rumors of a pending deal surfaced last week, causing Slack’s stock price to spike. Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff didn’t mince words on his latest

A Facebook -funded body that the tech giant set up to distance itself from tricky and potentially reputation-damaging content moderation decisions has announced the first bundle of cases it will consider. In a press release on its website the Facebook Oversight Board (FOB) says it sifted through more than 20,000 submissions before settling on six

The Libra Association, a consortium created by Facebook to support its Libra cryptocurrency efforts, announced this morning that it has a new name — the Diem Association — and made some key hires ahead of its launch. This is just the latest course correction since the Libra project was announced last year. In an attempt

Facebook makes a billion-dollar acquisition, we learn more about Twitter’s Clubhouse-style feature and Moderna applies for emergency authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine. This is your Daily Crunch for November 30, 2020. The big story: Facebook acquires Kustomer for $1B Kustomer says it can give customer service teams better data and a more unified view of

Earlier this month, Twitter announced it would soon begin testing its own Clubhouse rival, called Audio Spaces. The new product will allow Twitter users to gather in dedicated spaces for live conversations with another person or with groups of people. While the company showed off a handful of screenshots of the product at the time

Today Facebook made one of its biggest plays yet to build out the services it provides to businesses on its platform: It is acquiring Kustomer, a startup founded with the aim of disrupting the customer services industry with a new approach to providing agents with better data and a more unified picture of users by

Pinterest is getting into online events. The company has been spotted testing a new feature that allows users to sign up for Zoom classes through Pinterest, while creators use Pinterest’s class boards to organize class materials, notes and other resources, or even connect with attendees through a group chat option. The company confirmed the test

Twitter prepares to hand out more blue checkmarks, YouTube suspends OANN and Discord is raising a big funding round. This is your Daily Crunch for November 24, 2020. The big story: Twitter will bring back verification Twitter paused its blue checkmark verification system in 2017 as it faced controversy over who gets verified — specifically

Instagram is developing a new product, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), that will allow people to start conversations with businesses or creators’ accounts by tapping on a commonly asked question within a chat. Those who already have the feature available report they’re able to create up to four questions that can optionally be displayed at the

Bernard Moon is co-founder and partner at SparkLabs Group, a graduate of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and is an alumni of the Coro Fellowship. More posts by this contributor Cultivated data is the next Gold Rush Dilution: The good, the bad and the ugly After Election Day, NPR, The Washington Post and various blogs described America

Twitter announced today it’s planning to relaunch its verification system in 2021, and will now begin the process of soliciting public feedback on the new policy ahead of its implementation. Under the policy, Twitter will initially verify six types of accounts, including those belonging to government officials; companies, brands and nonprofit organizations; news; entertainment; sports;

F3, an anonymous Q&A app targeting Gen Z teens which blends a Tinder-style swipe-to-friend gamification mechanic, Stories-esque rich media responses and eye-wateringly expensive subscriptions to unlock a ‘Plus’ version that actually lets you see who wants to friend you — has raised a $3.9M seed round, including for a planned push on the US market.

Snapchat introduces a TikTok-style feed, Amazon Echo Buds add fitness tracking and Vettery acquires Hired. This is your Daily Crunch for November 23, 2020. The big story: Snapchat adds Spotlight Snapchat has introduced a dedicated feed where users can watch short, entertaining videos — pretty similar to TikTok. This comes after the app also added

Richard Jones Contributor Richard is CMO of Cheetah Digital, a cross-channel customer engagement solution provider. As an expert in zero-party data, he is committed to helping brands provide a value exchange with consumers through the lifecycle in return for consumer attention, engagement and loyalty. 2020 has brought about much-needed social movements. In June, activists launched

Facebook today is introducing a new feature that will allow users in the U.S. to collect food, clothing and other necessities for people in need. The feature, called “Drives,” is being made available through Facebook’s existing Community Help hub, which is the place where Facebook centralizes requests and offers for help within a local community.

After taking on TikTok with music-powered features last month, Snapchat this morning is officially launching a dedicated place within its app where users can watch short, entertaining videos in a vertically scrollable, TikTok-like feed. This new feature, called Spotlight, will showcase the community’s creative efforts, including the videos now backed by music, as well as