GajiGesa, a fintech company that offers Earned Wage Access (EWA) and other services for workers in Indonesia, has raised $2.5 million in seed funding. The round was co-led by Defy.vc and Quest Ventures. Other participants included GK Plug and Play, Next Billion Ventures, Alto Partners Multi-Family Office, Kanmo Group and strategic angel investors. The company […]
Grab, the Southeast Asian ride-hailing and on-demand delivery giant, announced a program to increase access to COVID-19 vaccinations today. Its goal is to have all of its employees, as well as driver and delivery partners, vaccinated by 2022 (excluding people who are medically unable to receive shots). Grab also said it will work with governments […]
Remote video podcasting is surprisingly still something of a Wild West these days. Given the massive sums of money currently being pumped into the category — not to mention the fact that pretty much all podcasting became remote podcasting in 2020 — you’d expect there to be a more unified solution. Many still continue to […]
TikTok announces additional steps to fight misinformation, Myanmar’s military cracks down on Facebook and Google’s subsea cable goes online. This is your Daily Crunch for February 3, 2021. The big story: TikTok will downrank ‘unsubstantiated’ claims TikTok had already said it would try to reduce misinformation by removing videos flagged by fact checkers for including […]
Spotify again signaled its interest in developing new ways to monetize its investments in podcasts. In the company’s fourth-quarter earnings, chief executive Daniel Ek suggested the streaming media company foresees a future where there will be multiple business models for podcasts, including, potentially, both ad-supported subscriptions and à la carte options. The company, which also […]
The California Supreme Court today shot down the lawsuit filed by a group of rideshare drivers in California and the Service Employees International Union that alleged Proposition 22 violates the state’s constitution. “We are disappointed in the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear our case, but make no mistake: we are not deterred in our […]
Myanmar’s new military government has ordered local telecom firms to temporarily block Facebook until February 7 midnight, days after the military seized power in the Southeast Asian nation in a military coup. Several users on Myanmar subreddit reported moments ago that Facebook was already inaccessible on their phones, suggesting that internet service providers had already […]
Today, Andreessen Horowitz founder Marc Andreessen announced that social media product veteran Sriram Krishnan will be joining the firm as their latest general partner. Krishnan, whose previous roles include stints at Snap, Facebook and Twitter, has gained a higher profile in recent weeks from his recurring audio show “The Good Time Show” on Clubhouse. His […]
The idea of a virtual concert tour might seem tailor-made for the pandemic, but musician Todd Rundgren said he’s actually been thinking about something like this for years. Rundgren told me that he’d become frustrated with our “collapsing” air travel system — exacerbated by hurricanes and climate change — that increasingly left him “sitting somewhere, […]
Founders — by now you must have heard about TechCrunch Early Stage events on April 1 and 2 and July 8 and 9. The two-day founder and entrepreneur bootcamp brings together top experts to teach you how to get ahead and build a successful company. This year on the second day of each event we’re […]
Chat platforms like Slack have been game-changers when it comes to what business users want and expect out of their work communications. Today, a company that’s aiming to move the goalpost again with an integrated, open-source alternative is announcing some funding to fuel its growth. Rocket.Chat, a startup and open-source-based platform of the same name […]
There is so much data sitting inside companies these days, but getting data to the people who need it most remains a daunting challenge. Polytomic, a graduate of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 cohort set out to solve that problem, and today the startup announced a $2.4 million seed. Caffeinated Capital led the round with […]
No sooner did we start developing a newsletter, the newsletter industry exploded. Twitter jumped in with a purchase of Revue, Facebook was rumored to be investigating the platform, and each new day brought further experiments. You could blame it on the post-Trump lifting of the fog of despair. The pandemic continued apace, with new variants […]
We highlight some of Spotify Group Sessions user experience failings and offer ways to fix them, as well as a number of UX features that are done right.
TikTok has agreed to re-verify the age of every user in Italy and block access to users who state they are younger than 13, the country’s data protection agency said today. The video-sharing social network confirmed that from February 9 every user in Italy will be required to go through its age gate process again […]
Controversial facial recognition startup Clearview AI violated Canadian privacy laws when it collected photos of Canadians without their knowledge or permission, the country’s top privacy watchdog has ruled. The New York-based company made its splashy newspaper debut a year ago by claiming it had collected over 3 billion photos of people’s faces and touting its […]
Instagram is developing a new feature that could give its app more of a TikTok-like feel: Vertical Instagram Stories. Today, users browse through Stories through taps and horizontal swipes — a feature Instagram adopted from Snapchat. But now, Stories are passé. Even Snapchat is borrowing ideas from TikTok. Its recent launch of Spotlight, for example, […]
Google, together with its partner SubCom, today announced that the company’s privately owned Dunant subsea cable between Virginia Beach, Virginia and Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez on the French Atlantic coast is now operational. Google first announced this project, which was named after the first Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of the Red Cross, Henry Dunant, back in the […]
Several high-level Apple services are experiencing issues and outages on Wednesday morning, Apple has confirmed. These issues are impacting a number of consumer-facing services, including Apple Music and Radio, Apple Books, and the App Store platforms across both iOS devices and Mac. For some users, the services are down. For example, there were reports circulating […]
