Twitter will suspend repeat offenders posting abusive comments on Periscope live streams

As part of Twitter’s attempted crackdown on abusive behavior across its network, the company announced on Friday afternoon a new policy facing those who repeatedly harass, threaten or otherwise make abusive comments during a Periscope broadcaster’s live stream. According to Twitter, the company will begin to more aggressively enforce its Periscope Community Guidelines by reviewing and suspending accounts of habitual offenders. The plans were announced via a Periscope blog post and tweet that said everyone should be able to feel safe watching live...

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Why unskippable Stories ads could revive Facebook

Prepare for the invasion of the unskippables. If the Stories social media slideshow format is the future of mobile TV, it’s going to end up with commercials. Users won’t love them. And done wrong they could pester people away from spending so much time watching what friends do day-to-day. But there’s no way Facebook and its family of apps will keep letting us fast-forward past Stories ads just a split-second after they appear on our screens. We’re on the cusp of the shift to Stories. Facebook estimates that across social media apps, sharing to...

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Why unskippable Stories ads could revive Facebook

{rss:content:encoded} Why unskippable Stories ads could revive Facebook https://ift.tt/2K22fhv https://ift.tt/2NRsHwy July 27, 2018 at 08:18PM Prepare for the invasion of the unskippables. If the Stories social media slideshow format is the future of mobile TV, it’s going to end up with commercials. Users won’t love them. And done wrong they could pester people away from spending so much time watching what friends do day-to-day. But there’s no way Facebook and its family of apps will keep letting us fast-forward past Stories ads just a split-second...

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MoviePass borrowed $5M to end yesterday’s outage

{rss:content:encoded} MoviePass borrowed $5M to end yesterday’s outage https://ift.tt/2K0F9HG https://ift.tt/2uVAPoG July 27, 2018 at 06:48PM More bad news for subscription movie ticket service MoviePass, which acknowledged yesterday that there was an unidentified issue preventing people from using their MoviePass credit cards to get tickets. A regulatory filing from parent company Helios & Matheson offers more insight about what happened. The filing (first spotted by Business Insider) announces a “demand note” of $6.2 million, including $5...

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MoviePass borrowed $5M to end yesterday’s outage

More bad news for subscription movie ticket service MoviePass, which acknowledged yesterday that there was an unidentified issue preventing people from using their MoviePass credit cards to get tickets. A regulatory filing from parent company Helios & Matheson offers more insight about what happened. The filing (first spotted by Business Insider) announces a “demand note” of $6.2 million, including $5 million in cash that the company borrowed. It goes on to explain: The $5.0 million cash proceeds received from the Demand Note will be used...

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Maisie Williams shows off Daisie, an app for artistic collaboration

Maisie Williams, who’s best-known for playing Arya Stark on Game of Thrones, announced earlier this year that she’s founding a startup called Daisie. With the app set to launch on August 1, Williams and her co-founder Dom Santry came by the TechCrunch New York office to discuss her plans for the company. Daisie will offer a way for filmmakers, musicians, visual artists, writers and other creators to showcase their work and find collaborators. The startup has already picked an initial 100 creators to kick things off. Williams and Santry also gave...

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Maisie Williams shows off Daisie, an app for artistic collaboration

{rss:content:encoded} Maisie Williams shows off Daisie, an app for artistic collaboration https://ift.tt/2LWyNuO https://ift.tt/2K5Q570 July 27, 2018 at 06:07PM Maisie Williams, who’s best-known for playing Arya Stark on Game of Thrones, announced earlier this year that she’s founding a startup called Daisie. With the app set to launch on August 1, Williams and her co-founder Dom Santry came by the TechCrunch New York office to discuss her plans for the company. Daisie will offer a way for filmmakers, musicians, visual artists, writers and other...

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Maisie Williams shows off Daisie, an app for artistic collaboration

Maisie Williams, who’s best-known for playing Arya Stark on Game of Thrones, announced earlier this year that she’s founding a startup called Daisie. With the app set to launch on August 1, Williams and her co-founder Dom Santry came by the TechCrunch New York office to discuss her plans for the company. Daisie will offer a way for filmmakers, musicians, visual artists, writers and other creators to showcase their work and find collaborators. The startup has already picked an initial 100 creators to kick things off. Williams and Santry also gave...

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Browser maker Opera successfully begins trading on NASDAQ

{rss:content:encoded} Browser maker Opera successfully begins trading on NASDAQ https://ift.tt/2uU37zW https://ift.tt/2Gna3ZN July 27, 2018 at 05:00PM Opera is now a public company. The Norway-based company priced its initial public offering at $12 a share — the company initially expected to price its share in the $10 to $12 price range. Trading opened at $14.34 per share, up 19.5 percent. The company raised over $115 million with this IPO. Opera Ltd. filed for an initial public offering in the U.S. earlier this month. The company is now trading...

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Twitter vows to continue spam fight despite negative impact on user numbers

Twitter has no intention of easing up on its fight against spam users and other factors that jeopardize the “health” of its service, despite the approach costing it three million in ‘lost’ monthly active users. Investor panic sent Twitter’s stock price down by nearly 20 percent in early trading today following its latest financial report. Twitter posted a record profit of $100 million for Q2, but its monthly user count dropped by one million, with its U.S. number in particular down to 68 million from 69 million in the previous quarter. The...

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Facebook’s debacle, $100M rounds and Slack links up with Atlassian

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This was one hell of a week. Happily, we had our own Connie Loizos, Matthew Lynley, and Alex Wilhelm on hand, along with Initialized Capital’s Alexis Ohanian to pick over the mix. First up we had zero choice but to talk about Facebook. The social company’s epic repricing in the middle of the week blotted out the news sun. It may keep us in the shade for another week, too. Facebook’s dive has implications for...

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Facebook trips on its own moderation failures

After weeks of speculation around how it plans to handle conspiracy website Infowars, its creator Alex Jones and others that spread false information, Facebook finally gave us an answer: inconsistently. The company hit Jones with a 30-day ban after it removed four videos that he shared on the Infowars Facebook Page. The move is Facebook’s first that curtails the reach of Jones, who has been a major talking point in the media because he is continually allowed a voice on the social network, despite spreading “alternative theories” on events like...

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Facebook also removes 4 Infowars videos, including one it previously cleared

Days after defending its decision to give a voice to conspiracy theory peddler Alex Jones and his Infowars site, Facebook has removed four of his videos for violating its community standards. But one of the four had already been allowed to slip through the firm’s review system. A source within Facebook told TechCrunch that one of the videos had previously been flagged for review in June but, after being looked over by a checker, it was allowed remain on the social network. That decision was described as “erroneous” and it has now been...

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Atlassian’s HipChat and Stride to be discontinued, with Slack buying up the IP

HipChat, the workplace chat app that held the throne before Slack was Slack, is being discontinued. Also being discontinued is Atlassian’s own would-be HipChat replacement, Stride. News of the discontinuation comes first not from Atlassian, but instead from a somewhat surprising source: Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield. In a series of tweets, Butterfield says that Slack is purchasing the IP for both products to “better support those users who choose to migrate” to its platform. Butterfield also notes that Atlassian will be making a “small but symbolically...

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Google revamps local events search to include personalized suggestions

{rss:content:encoded} Google revamps local events search to include personalized suggestions https://ift.tt/2NNYSN8 https://ift.tt/2LFe55O July 26, 2018 at 09:23PM Last May, Google launched a new events feature designed to help web searchers more easily find things to do nearby, while also challenging Facebook’s dominance in the local events space. Today, Google is updating event search with personalized event suggestions, and well as a new design that puts more event information directly in the search results. When the feature first launched last...

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Jeffrey Katzenberg’s NewTV closes a billion dollar round, says report

Jeffrey Katzenberg’s new mobile video startup NewTV, which snagged Meg Whitman as CEO in January, has now closed on $1 billion in funding, according to a report out today in CNN. Investors in the round include Disney, 21st Century Fox, Warner Bros, Entertainment One and other media companies, with a combined $200 million investment, while institutional investors from the U.S. and China made up the rest. The news follows a May report from Bloomberg, which said NewTV had then raised around $800 million. It had also said 21st Century Fox and...

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Facebook finally hands over leave campaign Brexit ads

The UK parliament has provided another telling glimpse behind the curtain of Facebook’s unregulated ad platform by publishing data on scores of pro-Brexit adverts which it distributed to UK voters during the 2016 referendum on European Union membership. The ads were run on behalf of several vote leave campaigns who paid a third company to use Facebook’s ad targeting tools. The ads were run prior to Facebook having any disclosure rules for political ads. So there was no way for anyone other than each target recipient to know a particular ad existed...

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IGTV carousel funnels Instagram feed traffic to buried videos

{rss:content:encoded} IGTV carousel funnels Instagram feed traffic to buried videos https://ift.tt/2mM3pV8 https://ift.tt/2LGJGUS July 26, 2018 at 06:21PM IGTV didn’t get the benefit of being splayed out atop Instagram like Stories did. Instead, the long-form video hub is a bit more distant, located in a standalone app as well as behind a static orange button on the main app’s homescreen. That means users can go right on tapping and scrolling through Instagram without coming across IGTV’s longer videos that range up to an hour. IGTV has only...

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