Social Media
Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian on how to survive these crazy days (and what to learn from them)
Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian founded Initialized Capital roughly nine years ago and they’ve closed four funds since, including most recently in late 2018. That $225 million vehicle is roughly twice the size of their previous fund, but because of the coronavirus, the firm, and its portfolio companies — some of which include Opendoor, Instacart…
Greece’s Convert Group raises €1.2M to bring e-commerce visibility to FMCG
Convert Group, a startup based in Athens that offers a SaaS to help FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) brands understand how they are performing across e-commerce, has raised €1.2 million in seed funding. The investment comes from Uni.fund, which is backed by the EquiFund investment platform (an initiative created by cooperation between the Hellenic Republic and…
Resso, Bytedance’s music streaming app, officially launches in India, sans Tencent-backed Universal Music
TikTok, the hugely popular social media app, found a lot of early traction by giving users a way to create funny lip-synced versions of clips from well-known songs and then share them with friends (its predecessor in the West was even called Musically). Now at long last, TikTok’s owner, China’s ByteDance, is doubling down on…
Assembled raises $3.1M led by Stripe to build ‘the operating system for support teams’
CRM software accounts for one-quarter of all enterprise IT spend. But ironically, while a lot of money is spent on platforms like Salesforce or SAP to manage incoming calls and outgoing marketing and sales activity, not a lot of attention is given to the issue of how to help the teams using all that software work…
Making money from games: the future of virtual economies – TechCrunch
In Part 6 of our multiverse series, we discuss the business opportunities and compliance challenges of virtual economies Fictional portrayals of virtual worlds such as “Ready Player One” and “The Matrix” typically portray the physical and virtual worlds as distinct realms siloed from each other. Characters escape a dystopian, impoverished physical realm and enter a…
Startups Weekly: Why some fintech companies aren’t blinking at customer acquisition costs
[Editor’s note: Welcome to our weekly review of news that startups can use from across TechCrunch and Extra Crunch. If you want this post by email, just subscribe here.] Why some fintech startups aren’t blinking at customer acquisition costs Distribution channels are getting saturated across the internet and beyond, and in many tech sectors the…
Facebook’s latest ‘transparency’ tool doesn’t offer much — so we went digging
Just under a month ago Facebook switched on global availability of a tool which affords users a glimpse into the murky world of tracking that its business relies upon to profile users of the wider web for ad targeting purposes. Facebook is not going boldly into transparent daylight — but rather offering what privacy rights…
Your VPN or ad-blocker app could be collecting your data
The underpinnings of how app store analytics platforms operate were exposed this week by BuzzFeed, which uncovered the network of mobile apps used by popular analytics firm Sensor Tower to amass app data. The company had operated at least 20 apps, including VPNs and ad blockers, whose main purpose was to collect app usage data…
Vimeo’s new app helps small businesses create professional social videos
Vimeo signaled last year its plans to move further into the social video creation and editing space with its acquisition of short-form video editor Magisto. Today, the company is unveiling the results of its work in the months following the deal’s close with the debut of Vimeo Create. The new app includes a set of…