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In that way, Emburse can become a much more prolific service within traditional corporate environments and not just typical Silicon Valley early adopter companies.
“A lot of the valley are using common tools, whether it’s Slack or they’re using Greenhouse or Expensify,” co-founder Peter Lai said. “What we’re trying to do is make an addition. | Enterprise |
Once you build one integration you don’t have to do it multiple times, because we share a lot of mutual clients.”
Emburse works with banks and card-issuers to create custom pre-paid debit cards that can either be used one time or are refillable. | Enterprise |
But they are designed to be managed more rigorously through Emburse, so a finance team can keep close track of behavior.
One example use case of the new service, Lai said, would be to allow Greenhouse on behalf of recruiters to issue cards for travel and food while they are interviewing for a job. | Enterprise |
Another would be operating with a virtual assistant that might be booking flights, which users may not initially trust, Lai said.
Emburse went through Y Combinator’s winter class last year and has raised $1.5 million in seed financing, and launched at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco last year.. | Enterprise |
OpenStack, the massive open source project that helps enterprises run the equivalent of AWS in their own data centers, is launching the 14th major version of its software today. Newton, as this new version is called, shows how OpenStack has matured over the last few years. The focus this time is on making some of the core OpenStack services more scalable and resilient. | Cloud |
In addition, though, the update also includes a couple of major new features. The project now better supports containers and bare metal servers, for example.
In total, more than 2,500 developers and users contributed to Newton. | Cloud |
That gives you a pretty good sense of the scale of this project, which includes support for core data center services like compute, storage and networking, but also a wide range of smaller projects.
As OpenStack Foundation COO Mark Collier told me, the focus with Newton wasn’t so much on new features but on adding tools for supporting new kinds of workloads.
Both Collier and OpenStack Foundation executive director Jonathan Bryce stressed that OpenStack is mostly about providing the infrastructure that people need to run their workloads. | Cloud |
The project itself is somewhat agnostic as to what workloads they want to run and which tools they want to use, though. “People aren’t looking at the cloud as synonymous with [virtual machines] anymore,” Collier said. Instead, they are mixing in bare metal and containers as well. | Cloud |
OpenStack wants to give these users a single control plane to manage all of this.
Enterprises do tend to move slowly, though, and even the early adopters that use OpenStack are only now starting to adopt containers. “We see people who are early adopters who are running container in production,” Bryce told me. | Cloud |
“But I think OpenStack or not OpenStack, it’s still early for containers in production usage.” He did note, however, that he is regularly talks to enterprise users who are looking at how they can use the different components in OpenStack to get to containers faster.
Core features of OpenStack, including the Nova compute service, as well as the Horizon dashboard and Swift object/blob store, have now become more scalable. | Cloud |
The Magnum project for managing containers on OpenStack, which already supported Docker Swarm, Kubernetes and Mesos, now also allows operators to run Kubernetes clusters on bare metal servers, while the Ironic framework for provisioning those bare metal servers is now more tightly integrated with Magnuma and also now supports multi-tenant networking.
The release also includes plenty of other updates and tweaks, of course. | Cloud |
You can find a full (and fully overwhelming) rundown of what’s new in all of the different projects here.
With this release out of the door, the OpenStack community is now looking ahead to the next release six months form now. | Cloud |
This next release will go through its planning stages at the upcoming OpenStack Summit in Barcelona later this month and will then become generally available next February.. | Cloud |
Salesforce wants to make things super clear for everyone — no, the company won’t buy Twitter. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff gave an interview to the FT and said that the company ruled out the acquisition.
“In this case we’ve walked away. It wasn’t the right fit for us,” Benioff told the FT. | Finance |
If you were looking for an official confirmation, it can’t get more official than that.
Two weeks ago, nearly all suitors announced at the same time that they weren’t interested by Twitter after all. Google, Apple and Disney don’t want to buy Twitter anymore. | Finance |
Salesforce was the last remaining suitor.
While the company could have used this opportunity to lower the acquisition price, it wasn’t the case. During an investor meeting, Benioff already said that Twitter wasn’t the right fit for Salesforce. He even ended up saying “I wish Jack very well.”
But many thought Benioff was quite excited about the idea of buying Twitter. | Finance |
So what happened exactly? Salesforce’s largest shareholder Fidelity Investments was against the deal. And given that Fidelity owns 14 percent of Salesforce, it would have been hard to buy Twitter with the board’s approval. This is probably the wisest decision for Benioff.
Following the FT’s interview, Twitter shares are crashing once again. Shares are down 6.86 percent to $16.57. | Finance |
Twitter’s market cap is now $11.6 billion.
. | Finance |
PayPal, the giant digital payments company that was spun off from eBay last year, has had an up-and-down relationship with the business of crowdfunding over the years, but there are some indications that this could change. | Fundings & Exits |
We’ve been hearing that PayPal was interested in buying GoFundMe — the crowdfunding site that lets people raise money for both serious causes and lighter life events — potentially for a price above $1 billion.
It’s not clear how far conversations proceeded between the two, or if they are still active.
Both GoFundMe and PayPal said their companies do not comment on rumor or speculation; several investors and others we contacted also declined to comment. | Fundings & Exits |
We believe conversations took place among a limited group of senior people.
Co-founded by Andrew Ballester and Brad Damphousse in 2008 in San Diego, GoFundMe has been on a growth tear. | Fundings & Exits |
In 2015, the startup — which sits alongside others like Kickstarter, Indiegogo and Tilt, all covering different kinds of crowdfunding — raised what appears to be its only significant external funding: an undisclosed amount of money from a group of investors led by Accel and Technology Crossover Ventures (also including Iconiq Capital, Greylock and Meritech). | Fundings & Exits |
A month later, it was revealed that Stripes invested in it, too.
As part of that transaction, the investors took a majority stake in the business, buying out the two founders in the process; installing an Accel venture partner, Rob Solomon, as CEO; and valuing the business at around $600 million. | Fundings & Exits |
At the time, GoFundMe was estimated to be processing $100 million per month in funding for the different campaigns using its platform, growing 300 percent year-over-year.
For PayPal, a closer relationship or acquisition of a crowdfunding site would be an interesting — if surprising — turn of events.
Earlier this year, PayPal stopped offering Purchase Protection for payments made on crowdfunding platforms. | Fundings & Exits |
The company has had a rocky relationship with the crowdfunding community, with some notable cases of freezing accounts. | Fundings & Exits |
One of the problems for PayPal is risk management, and specifically whether it would be liable for chargebacks — that is, if a person contributing money decided that he/she wanted a refund.
At GoFundMe, PayPal was removed as a payment option altogether some time ago, replaced by a combination of Stripe and WePay. | Fundings & Exits |
The reason given by GoFundMe was that these two allowed people to pay directly with debit or credit cards on a campaign page, and gave GoFundMe more control over the payment experience.
Earlier this month, GoFundMe took the issue of purchase protection into its own hands: it launched its own form of limited guarantee for donors and fundraisers, who respectively can claim up to $1,000 and $25,000 in the event of a campaign gone wrong. | Fundings & Exits |
The guarantee for now is only applicable in the U.S. | Fundings & Exits |
and Canada.
However, there are reasons why PayPal might be interested in giving crowdfunding another chance, and perhaps getting involved in it in a deeper and more serious way.
GoFundMe, which focuses on funding causes and events, may have had its share of controversy, but it’s also been a strong platform for bringing out generosity and goodwill. | Fundings & Exits |
It’s also been very popular: one source described it as “printing money”.
A potential buyer could continue to operate GoFundMe as a separate entity. | Fundings & Exits |
Or more strategically, the company would be a strong complement to PayPal’s existing business, which includes its ongoing relationship providing payments services to eBay, physical world point of sale, payments in third party apps through Braintree and P2P payments.
You probably have already seen plenty of campaigns for GoFundMe in your Facebook News Feed, some inspiring, maybe a few bizarre and in bad taste. Altogether, the company said in May that it has seen 25 million donors and has raised around $2 billion total.
GoFundMe, like other commerce platforms, takes a 5% share of the total transaction volume, in addition to a small additional fee through the commerce platforms it uses. | Fundings & Exits |
Because the site basically operates on the principles of an online social network and (today) relies on outside payment providers, it has little overhead — meaning the gross margin for an operation like this is likely very high.
And integrated with PayPal, GoFundMe could become even more valuable.
Additional reporting Katie Roof. | Fundings & Exits |
Google yesterday announced it will introduce a fact check tag on Google News in order to display articles that contain factual information next to trending news items. | Opinion |
Now it’s time for Facebook to take fact-checking more seriously, too.
Facebook has stepped into the role of being today’s newspaper: that is, it’s a single destination where a large selection of news articles are displayed to those who visit its site. | Opinion |
Yes, they appear amidst personal photos, videos, status updates, and ads, but Facebook is still the place where nearly half of American adults get their news.
Facebook has a responsibility to do better, then, when it comes to informing this audience what is actually news: what is fact-checked, reported, vetted, legitimate news, as opposed to a rumor, hoax or conspiracy theory.
It’s not okay that Facebook fired its news editors in an effort to appear impartial, deferring only to its algorithms to inform readers what’s trending on the site. | Opinion |
Since then, the site has repeatedly trended fake news stories, according to a Washington Post report released earlier this week.
The news organization tracked every news story that trended across four accounts during the workday from August 31 to September 22, and found that Facebook trended five stories that were either “indisputably fake” or “profoundly inaccurate.” It also regularly featured press releases, blog posts, and links to online stores, like iTunes – in other words, trends that didn’t point to news sites.
Facebook claimed in September that it would roll out technology that would combat fake stories in its Trending topics, but clearly that has not yet come to pass – or the technology isn’t up to the task at hand.
In any event, Facebook needs to do better.
It’s not enough for the company to merely reduce the visibility of obvious hoaxes from its News Feed – not when so much of the content that circulates on the site is posted by people – your friends and family – right on their profiles, which you visit directly.
Plus, the more the items are shared, the more they have the potential to go viral. | Opinion |
And viral news becomes Trending news, which is then presented all Facebook’s users in that region.
This matters. Facebook has trended a story from a tabloid news source that claimed 9/11 was an inside job involving planted bombs. It ran a fake story about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly which falsely claimed she was fired. | Opinion |
These aren’t mistakes: they are disinformation.
Facebook has apologized for the above, but declined to comment to The Washington Post regarding its new findings that fake news continues to be featured on the platform.
In addition, not only does Facebook fail at vetting its Trending news links, it also has no way of flagging the links that fill its site.
Outside of Trending, Facebook continues to be filled with inaccurate, poorly-sourced, or outright fake news stories, rumors and hoaxes. | Opinion |
Maybe you’re seeing less of them in the News Feed, but there’s nothing to prevent a crazy friend from commenting on your post with a link to a well-known hoax site, as if it’s news. There’s no tag or label. | Opinion |
They get to pretend they’re sharing facts.
Meanwhile, there’s no way for your to turn off commenting on your own posts, even when the discussion devolves into something akin to “sexual assault victims are liars” (to reference a recent story.)
Because perish the thought that Facebook would turn of the one mechanism that triggers repeat visits to its site, even if that means it would rather trigger traumatic recollections on the parts of its users instead.
There is a difference between a post that’s based on fact-checked articles, and a post from a website funded by an advocacy group. There’s a difference between Politifact and some guy’s personal blog. | Opinion |
Facebook displays them both equally, though: here’s a headline, a photo, some summary text.
Of course, it would be a difficult job for a company that only wants to focus on social networking and selling ads to get into the media business – that’s why Facebook loudly proclaims it’s “not a media company.”
Except that it is one. | Opinion |
It’s serving that role, whether it wants to or not.
Google at least has stepped up to the plate and is trying to find a solution. Now it’s Facebook’s turn.
Facebook may have only unintentionally become a media organization, but it is one. And it’s doing a terrible job.. | Opinion |
Today Google added a new “fact-check” tag to its popular Google News service. | Media |
The site aggregates popular timely news from multiple sources and has traditionally grouped them with tags like “opinion,” “local source” and “highly cited.” Now readers can see highlighted fact-checks right next to trending stories.
The company cites the growing prominence of fact-checking sites as one of the reasons for creating the tag. Content creators will be able to add the new fact-check tag to posts themselves using a finite set of pre-defined source labels. | Media |
ClaimReview from Schema.org will be used to compile and organize stories offering factual background. The Schema community builds markups for structured data on the internet. The group is sponsored by Google but also has support from Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex.
Casual readers in the U.S. and U.K. | Media |
can find nuggets of fact within the expanded view of news stories on web and mobile versions of the service. | Media |
Fingers crossed the new tool doesn’t result in stories claiming that the earth is really flat rising to the top of our feeds.
On a support page, Google explains that it holds the power to intervene if posts are improperly tagged as fact-checks.
“Please note, that if we find sites not following those criteria for the ClaimReview markup, we may, at our discretion, either ignore that site’s markup or remove the site from Google News.”
This may not prevent false stories from rising up in Google News, but it will make it a lot harder. It doesn’t appear that very many fact-check stories have propagated yet on Google News. | Media |
We couldn’t find any in a quick visit to the site, but given the timeliness of the presidential election in the U.S., we can only expect the system to be put through its paces in the coming weeks.. | Media |
null | Mobile |
Today, Pinterest said it hit 150 million monthly active users, up from the 100 million it announced in September 2015.
However, as TechCrunch previously reported, Pinterest in 2015 was targeting that it would hit 151 million monthly active users by the end of 2015. We reported the story in October last year, and the information was used by Andreessen Horowitz to solicit limited partners to invest in a special investment fund for Pinterest earlier in the year.
With Pinterest growing by half this year, it looks like it may miss on its 2016 projections that it set earlier last year as well. | Mobile |
Leaked documents reviewed by TechCrunch at the time also projected that Pinterest would end 2016 at 218 million monthly active users. The Wall Street Journal today also reported the company is expected to triple last year’s revenue to $300 million in 2016. | Mobile |
That, too, falls below projected estimates of $663 million for 2016 from those leaked documents.
Again, these projections came in early 2015, and companies are constantly revising them as the years progress. | Mobile |
Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann, in response to those projections, told The Wall Street Journal that “there were some early projections when we were just a couple months into building the business, but we’ve learned more about it.”
“Start up life is dynamic, and years old projections aren’t particularly relevant to where companies are today,” Andreessen-Horowitz partner Jeff Jordan, who is on Pinterest’s board, told TechCrunch. | Mobile |
“We’re thrilled with Pinterest’s performance — strong continued user growth, best-in-class user engagement, and an increasingly robust platform for advertisers that’s leading to rapidly expanding revenue. We’re very excited about what’s to come.”
Revenue of $100 million for 2015, and potentially $300 million for 2016, are enviable numbers for a consumer ad-driven startup that’s only 7 years old. | Mobile |
This isn’t really a reflection of poor performance for Pinterest, it would seem — just that the expectations may have been set a little high. Many startups are sometimes valued, to some extent, at a multiple of next year’s revenue. | Mobile |
While Pinterest’s valuation is likely also relative to the latent pent-up marketing and user demand, as well as its growth and overhead, it would still seem the company needed to reset its expectations.
Last week, the company announced that it had brought on its first chief financial officer, former Twitter executive Todd Morgenfeld. | Mobile |
But at that time, The Wall Street Journal reported that the company had generated $100 million in 2015, which fell below its projections of $169 million. | Mobile |
To be sure, 50% growth year-over-year would be an enviable clip for any service with more than 100 million users (as in, Twitter), but there has always been a question as to what the upper bound of Pinterest would be beyond really powerful use cases like wedding planning or recipes.
There are a lot of potential reasons for this. | Mobile |
With Facebook still immensely growing, scooping up new communications platforms and offering a wider array of advertising products, advertisers may be more inclined to simply stick to what they know. And the experimental budgets that these firms have, which previously may have gone to Pinterest, may be shifting to other emerging platforms like Snapchat, which has 150 million daily active users. | Mobile |
Snapchat, a 5-year-old company, is already projecting revenue as high as between $500 million and $1 billion for 2017.
The souring on alternative platforms to Facebook and traditional advertising has been made increasingly apparent as Twitter’s valuation has dropped off a cliff. In recent weeks, reports came out that suitors have emerged (and slinked back, and emerged, and so on) to buy Twitter. | Mobile |
That sent Twitter’s shares rocketing up, but it’s since cratered back to a market cap of around $12.5 billion. That’s not too far off from Pinterest’s valuation of $11 billion in its previous financing round.
Pinterest has increasingly offered an advertising tool that serves a larger funnel than other services. | Mobile |
While Facebook — and likely Snapchat — are very effective at awareness and brand advertising, Pinterest has billed itself as a way for marketers to push users further and further toward conversion. It can get their attention at the awareness phase, their intention to purchase with search, and finally a conversion when they are pinning products or even purchasing them. | Mobile |
For many kinds of products, particularly fashion, Pinterest is one of a very small set of marketing tools that touches users at every point in a purchasing life cycle.
That’s also why it’s been aggressively investing in tools surrounding visual search, including a tool that would allow users to search for products with photos from their smartphone cameras. | Mobile |
Those sort of things are designed to capture the moment of an impulse purchase, increasingly offering alternative marketing products to its partners — and potentially to draw advertising dollars away from Facebook (or Snapchat).
In addition, Pinterest is also an online advertising service. | Mobile |
Something like that might generally require little overhead, and to be sure, the company is generating a lot of revenue. | Mobile |
It raised $553 million in its last financing round that valued it at $11 billion, so at face value it would appear that the company shouldn’t have any fear of running out of cash despite a lot of R&D investment and talent acquisitions — to go along with a healthy revenue stream.
What remains to be seen is whether this represents a more general trend for Pinterest. | Mobile |
Will it being to see slowing user growth similar to Twitter, or more sustained gains like Facebook? The company’s international expansion appears to be going effectively, with 80 million of its users coming from outside the United States. There are of course different cultural quirks in different countries, but there’s clear demand for a service like Pinterest.. | Mobile |
null | Apps |
Vine has a new feature for iOS app users called Soundboard, which lets users incorporate viral sounds within their own Vines, including Vine-sourced classics like ‘why you always lyin’ – it’s basically an express remix feature for trying to give your own content some reflected glow from memes that already made it big.
The Soundboard comes in at the portion of the Vine creation workflow where you add captions and edit the post, via new sound wave icon you’ll see towards the bottom of the app interface. | Apps |
Once you open that up, it’ll present you with a catalog of existing sounds, including stuff like “free-shavocadoooo” and other popular things of the internet. | Apps |
You can also record your own, and Vine plans to update the library, likely adding more of the fire sounds of online culture as they gain XP rumbling around our shared digital brain.
I’m all for Internet Fun so this sounds great – that’s a pun btw. BA-BOING. | Apps |
Facebook wants you to lean back and watch its News Feed videos on your television with a new feature that lets you stream clips via Apple TV, AirPlay devices, Google Chromecast, and Google Cast devices. | Apps |
The move could help Facebook generate more video ad revenue, and increase usage time by giving people the richest possible viewing experience while at home.
The feature is now available on iOS and will come to Android soon. | Apps |
To use it, just find a video in the feed on your phone or desktop, tap the TV button in the top right, and then select the device you want to stream through.
You can keep scrolling through the feed and using Facebook while the video continues to stream. | Apps |
That allows Facebook to become both the first and second screen, a strategy Periscope is pursuing differently by allowing professional content broadcasts to be piped into Periscope and Twitter via its new Producer feature.
Facebook started testing streaming to televisions from Android back in May and iOS in August. | Apps |
The company actually added a way to cast via AirPlay from its iPad app back in 2011, so it’s strange that it’s taken this long to come to web and mobile.
Competitors like YouTube and Periscope already have ways to stream onto televisions, and today’s launch could make sure Facebook doesn’t fall behind. | Apps |
YouTube lets you create a queue of videos on the fly to watch sequentially, which seems like a sensible next feature for Facebook to add.
The goal for Facebook is always ubiquity, so it’s embracing as many viewing platforms as possible. While its most popular surface and core money maker might remain mobile for a long time, VR and TVs could give Facebook an even bigger presence in our lives.
. | Apps |
Periscope is embracing professional streaming and expanding beyond amateur content shot on phones with its new Periscope Producer feature. | Apps |
It allows creators to generate a special URL that they can then stream to from a wide array of devices, including professional cameras, studio editing rigs, satellite trucks, desktop streaming software like OBS, games, VR headsets, drones and later, potentially 360 cameras.
Periscope Producer is Twitter’s answer to Facebook’s Live API, which similarly allows news rooms, brands, web celebrities, app developers, and others to livestream to mobile and web users. | Apps |
The feature could help fill Periscope and Twitter with more polished content, filling the gap between off-the-cuff Periscope phone broadcasts, and the big licensing deals Twitter has struck with the NFL and other premium content makers.
Today Twitter will start offering Periscope Producer access to more creators who apply here, with availability on iOS now and Android coming soon. | Apps |
Eventually Periscope wants to roll it out to all streamers as well as provide an API for programmatically initiated broadcasts.
Check out our interview with Periscope CEO and co-founder Keyvon Beykpour about the potential for Periscope Producer and its impact on Twitter’s strategy above.
“We’re taking a big step towards allowing any live broadcast, captured on mobile or otherwise, to be piped into Periscope and vicariously Twitter” Periscope co-founder and CEO Kayvon Beykpour told reporters yesterday at Twitter HQ. | Apps |
When asked if Periscope might eventually serve ads on Producer-based streams or help creators monetize, Beykpour said “Periscope Producer is definitely laying the groundwork to do those explorations.”
Periscope Producer has been in testing for six weeks with launch partners like ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, CBS 12, Estadao, Fusion, Louis Vuitton, The News & Documentary Emmy Awards, Walt Disney Studios, XBox UK, and TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference. | Apps |
You can click these links to check out what they’ve created with the feature.
If you have Producer access, you’ll be able to go into your Periscope app’s profile settings, and in Additional Sources you can generate the streaming link you’ll enter into your professional equipment. Once your stream starts recording, you’ll see a preview in Periscope from which you can publish the stream publicly. | Apps |
Once a stream has started, you’ll have all the typical Periscope features, like visible replies from the audience, view counts, feedback hearts, and more. Tweets hosting Periscope videos can also be embedded on the web.
Periscope Producer won’t actually help make your video itself look more professional. It’s just a new pipe. | Apps |
But creative content makers using their own software or equipment can create overlaid graphics, swap in images or videos, take call-ins from Skype, stream from the first-person perspective of a VR headset, or use iOS ReplayKit to broadcast live gaming footage. Creators can even make their streams or games react to viewer comments or feedback. | Apps |
The Periscope team built a version of Flappy Bird that goes faster and gets harder as more viewers send hearts.
“We think this is the lowest common denominator to giving the most people access to this tool” Beykpour says about building Producer as a feature available in Periscope’s app rather than an API only more experienced developers can use. | Apps |
The streaming link method means anyone with a desktop streaming studio app like OBS can instantly broadcast through Producer with no coding skills necessary.
For example, bedroom web TV host Alex Pettit used Producer to show sponsorship reels, bring on Skype call-ins, and display overlaid graphics like you’d see on CNN.
Tyler Hansen used Producer to stream from a Mount Everest VR game.
TechCrunch has been testing Periscope Producer since September, and found it to be powerful and simple to use. | Apps |
There were a few issues, though. Periscope Producer streams get cropped into squares within embedded tweets, which can cut off the sides of the video as seen below. | Apps |
Longer streams can suffer since Producer doesn’t offer a way to republish tweets with the link, so you’d have to manually promote your stream during the broadcast after it drops down Twitter’s river.
Periscope will to prove the reach of Producer streams in order to attract broadcasters. | Apps |
The easier the set-up and the bigger the audience, the more creators who’ll be willing to syndicate video to Periscope or make content for its specifically. | Apps |
It will be competing with Facebook Live video, which can now be watched on televisions, and YouTube Live, which has close ties to creators.
Getting more broadcasts piped in is critical for Twitter at a time when live video is emerging as its best bet for success. | Apps |
It needs to demonstrate any long-term business potential it can right now as it’s accepting acquisition bids from Salesforce and possibly others. Rather than just being the second screen for television, Producer could bring that the best video content to Twitter so it can be the first screen too.. | Apps |
Tucked away inside Pandora’s rebranded app, launched yesterday, the company was hiding its first iMessage app, too. | Apps |
In fact, it’s the first third-party party streaming music service to launch its own iMessage extension, the company says.
That’s not to say it’s the only music-focused iMessage app, of course.
Apple Music already lets you share your favorite songs within iMessage, and Shazam recently launched a similar tool to both detect and send songs directly in iMessage.
However, Pandora’s app works a little differently.
Shazam and Apple Music’s iMessage extensions both point users to Apple Music and iTunes after a track preview is shared with the friend.
Meanwhile, Pandora’s app also lets you send a 30-second sample within a chat thread, but if the recipient likes the track, they can tap it to start a Pandora artist station based on that shared track instead.
The experience works better if both parties have the Pandora app installed, though the recipient doesn’t need to be logged in to hear the track (just start the station.) And if the person you’re sharing with doesn’t have Pandora installed, they’ll be prompted to download it, the company notes.
Obviously, kicking of artist radio stations via a shared music clip isn’t as useful as being able to go directly to that artist and listen to their entire song, album, or catalog, as with an on-demand service. | Apps |
However, given that Pandora’s install base tops 78 million users, it’s more likely that your friends have Pandora on their phone rather than any other third-party music service, including Spotify, which has 40 million subscribers as of September, or even Apple Music, which announced at its iPhone 7 event that it had grown to 17 million subscribers.
In order to share songs, you simply launch the iMessage app while playing a Pandora station on your phone.
The current track will immediately pop up under “Now Playing” in the iMessage extension. | Apps |
Pandora’s curators will also handpick tracks that are good for sharing, including the current top hits and those that are trending.
As a bonus, the app includes a dozen stickers you can use to annotate your message. | Apps |
These are fairly basic – a thumbs up and thumbs down, a heart, lips, sad and happy emojis, and a few that say things like “Fire” or “Jam Alert,” among others.
There are also a couple of versions of the new Pandora logo included in the sticker pack. | Apps |
Why? Uh…because branding?
The iMessage extension arrived in yesterday’s app update, but like all iMessage apps, it only works if you’re running iOS 10.. | Apps |
Ever wonder which of your selfies is best? Tinder wants to help you figure it out, with the launch of a new feature called Smart Photos. And Smart Photos, in turn, show us just how much Tinder is a big data company, meticulously collecting information about what (and who) you like and don’t like.
Smart Photos is a single toggle in the Profile section of the app. | Advertising Tech |
When toggled on, Tinder continuously tests your various profile photos to determine which one is most popular, and automatically serves up that photo first in your ‘deck.’
Not only does the Smart Photos algorithm take into account overall popularity of your photos, but it also accounts for the swiping patterns of people looking at your profile.
So let’s say that you have one regular selfie, one picture of you sky-diving, and one picture of you with your Schnauzer named Donald.
The pic of you and the pup gets more overall right swipes than any other picture, and is served up as the first picture (or, calling card) of your profile most of the time. | Advertising Tech |