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Letgo takes on Craigslist with addition of housing listings
Everyone wants to be the Craigslist killer. In November, Facebook expanded its Marketplace section to include partners’ housing rentals alongside secondhand merchandise, and today the No. 3 three shopping app letgo is doing the same. The company says that, starting today, its tens of millions of users can now quickly snap a few photos and…
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Korea’s Kakao eyes overseas acquisitions following $1 billion raise
Korea’s Kakao, the internet giant behind the country’s top messaging app, is actively seeking overseas investment opportunities after it raised $1 billion via a placement. Kakao is valued at over $7 billion and its services are used by more than 40 million people. The company, which counts Tencent as an early investor, now appears to…
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Grab is adding bike-sharing to its ride-hailing service in Southeast Asia
Grab, Uber’s chief rival across Southeast Asia, appears to be getting into bike-sharing after plans for a joint service with oBike surfaced in Singapore. Last week, an eagle-eyed resident in Singapore shared photos of Grab Cycle bikes — which show an oBike logo, too — being loaded into a van. Grab declined to comment when we…
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Why inclusion in the Google Arts & Culture selfie feature matters
When Google Arts & Culture’s new selfie-matching feature went viral earlier this week, many people of color found that their results were limited or skewed toward subservient and exoticized figures. In other words, it pretty much captured the experience of exploring most American or European art museums as a minority. The app was launched in…
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Women’s March embraces collaborative social app Crunchet
Today’s nationwide Women’s March attendees will advocate for voter registration through every conceivable social network, so one of its planning organizations has allied with a new app that lets you combine posts from across apps. Crunchet will help the Women’s March Alliance and Chicago march create collages of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, Spotify, and…
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Apple’s enterprise evolution
Back in 2010, Apple’s iconic co-founder Steve Jobs was not entirely enthralled with the enterprise. In fact, Jobs is famously quoted as saying, “What I love about the consumer market, that I always hated about the enterprise market, is that we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it, and every…
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Inside Oculus and Black Eyed Peas’ VR comic book
“When people view VR, it’s an over-sensory experience like ‘What the fuck?!’ ” will.i.am says, wildly spinning his head around as you can see in the GIF below. That was the Black Eyed Peas’ frontman’s inspiration for creating a 90-minute VR comic book that moves at your pace and lets emotion sink in instead of…
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The light and dark of AI-powered smartphones
Analyst Gartner put out a 10-strong listicle this week identifying what it dubbed “high-impact” uses for AI-powered features on smartphones that it suggests will enable device vendors to provide “more value” to customers via the medium of “more advanced” user experiences. It’s also predicting that, by 2022, a full 80 per cent of smartphones shipped…
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The difference between good and bad Facebooking
“Social media” is a clumsy term that entangles enriching social interaction with mindless media consumption. It’s a double-edged sword whose sides aren’t properly distinguished. Taken as a whole, we can’t decide if it “brings the world closer together” like Facebook’s new mission statement says, or leaves us depressed and isolated. It does both, but our…
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Facebook adds support for live streaming and video chats to Messenger games
Last November, Facebook launched Instant Games, a new platform for gaming with friends inside the Messenger chat app. Today, the company is announcing a couple of notable new features for this gaming platform, including support for live streaming via Facebook Live and video chatting with fellow gamers. The idea with Instant Games is to boost…