This Week in Apps: Honey’s $4B exit, a new plan for iOS 14, Apple’s new developer resource

{rss:content:encoded} This Week in Apps: Honey’s $4B exit, a new plan for iOS 14, Apple’s new developer resource https://ift.tt/2reXpcR https://ift.tt/37vBq23 November 23, 2019 at 03:35PM Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support, and the money that flows through it all. What are developers talking about? What do app publishers and marketers need to know? How are politics impacting the App Store and app businesses? And which apps are everyone using? This week, we’re...

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Code and compete in the TC Hackathon at Disrupt Berlin

We’re in the home stretch to the TC Hackathon going down at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. If you have what it takes to compete against some of the best hackers, developers, engineers and code poets, apply to the TechCrunch Hackathon now. We have fewer than 50 seats left, and they’ll be gone before you can say deep hack mode. The Hackathon is free — no fee to apply or to compete. It’s a thrilling, fun and exhausting ride. Designing, creating and pitching a working product in roughly 24 hours will test your physical, mental and...

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More than 1 million T-Mobile customers exposed by breach

{rss:content:encoded} More than 1 million T-Mobile customers exposed by breach https://ift.tt/2QHjdbO https://ift.tt/37ESzXc November 23, 2019 at 01:25AM T-Mobile has confirmed a data breach affecting more than a million of its customers, whose personal data (but no financial or password data) was exposed to a malicious actor. The company alerted the affected customers but did not provide many details in its official account of the hack. The company said in its disclosure to affected users that its security team had shut down “malicious, unauthorized...

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Facebook prototypes Favorites for close friends microsharing

Facebook is building its own version of Instagram Close Friends, the company confirms to TechCrunch. There’s a lot people that don’t share on Facebook because it can feel risky or awkward since its definition of “friends” has swelled to include family, work colleagues, and distant acquaintances. No one wants their boss or grandma seeing their weekend partying or edgy memes. There are whole types of sharing, like Snapchat’s Snap Map-style live location tracking, that feel creepy to expose to such a wide audience. The social network needs to get...

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Facebook prototypes Favorites for close friends microsharing

{rss:content:encoded} Facebook prototypes Favorites for close friends microsharing https://ift.tt/2OFyYNG https://ift.tt/2DaHI9q November 22, 2019 at 10:30PM Facebook is building its own version of Instagram Close Friends, the company confirms to TechCrunch. There’s a lot people that don’t share on Facebook because it can feel risky or awkward since its definition of “friends” has swelled to include family, work colleagues, and distant acquaintances. No one wants their boss or grandma seeing their weekend partying or edgy memes. There are whole...

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FCC bans spending on Huawei, ZTE and other ‘national security threats’

{rss:content:encoded} FCC bans spending on Huawei, ZTE and other ‘national security threats’ https://ift.tt/37soWYU https://ift.tt/2XEAnYV November 22, 2019 at 08:39PM The FCC has finally put the seal of approval on its plan to cut funding going to equipment from companies it deems a “national security threat,” currently an exclusive club of two: Huawei and ZTE. No money from the FCC’s $8.5 billion Universal Service Fund, used to subsidize purchases to support the rollout of communications infrastructure, will be spent on equipment from these companies. “We...

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Pitch OUT of Palace — Duke of York steps down from Pitch@Palace as event goes independent

Prince Andrew, The Duke of York, is to completely step down from his role as head of the Pitch@Palace initiative he set up at Buckingham Palace to showcase entrepreneurs, and the operation will be relaunched as ‘Pitch’ without any royal involvement, according to a well-placed source. Despite indications on Thursday that the Duke had decided to stay on in the private sector after stepping aside from all public duties, TechCrunch understands there is to be “no further royal involvement”. This week, Pitch@Palace’s major sponsors – including Barclays...

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VTEX, an e-commerce platform used by Walmart, raises $140M led by SoftBank’s LatAm fund

E-commerce now accounts for 14% of all retail sales, and its growth has led to a rise in the fortunes of startups that build tools to enable businesses to sell online. In the latest development, a company called VTEX — which originally got its start in Latin America helping companies like Walmart expand their business to new markets with an end-to-end e-commerce service covering things like order and inventory management; front-end customer experience and customer service — has raised $140 million in funding, money that it will be using to continue...

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Don’t miss out: Exhibit in Startup Alley at Disrupt Berlin 2019

Heiliger Strohsack — holy smokes! In just a few weeks, thousands of attendees will arrive in Germany for Disrupt Berlin 2019, the premiere international tech conference focused on early-stage startups. Talk about an opportunity to expose your fledgling startup to savvy investors, hungry media and a host of successful tech entrepreneurs and potential customers — from more than 50 countries. Here’s the best part: you still have time to plant your flag in Startup Alley and place your innovative products and ideas in front of the movers and shakers...

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Equity Dive: Poshmark’s origin story with co-founder & CEO Manish Chandra

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. We have something a bit different for you this week. Equity co-host Kate Clark recently sat down with Manish Chandra, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Poshmark, and one of his earliest investors, NFX managing partner James Currier. If you haven’t heard of Poshmark, it’s an online platform for buying and selling clothes. Basically, it’s the thrift shop of the 21st century. We asked Chandra how he and...

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Watch Sacha Baron Cohen skewer Zuckerberg’s “twisted logic” on hate speech and fakes

Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen has waded into the debate about social media regulation. In an award-acceptance speech to the Anti Defamation League yesterday the creator of Ali G and Borat delivered a precision takedown of what he called Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s “bullshit” arguments against regulating his platform. The speech is well worth watching in full as Cohen articulates, with a comic’s truth-telling clarity, the problem with “the greatest propaganda machine in history” (aka social media platform giants) and how to fix it: Broadcast-style...

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Bellman wants to simplify property management for residential buildings

Meet Bellman, a new French startup that wants to improve residential building management using technology and a fair amount of human interactions. The startup has been co-founded by Antonio Pinto, who previously co-founded TV Time. “I know this space quite well because I’m the son of a caretaker so I grew up in the caretaker’s apartment until I was 17,” Pinto told me. In France, the vast majority of property management of residential buildings is handled by private companies. As co-owners of the hallways, elevator and common space of your building,...

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Twitter will finally let you turn on two-factor authentication without giving it a phone number

Two-factor authentication is good! SMS-based two-factor authentication? Not the best option. After countless tales of people having their phone numbers and inbound SMS hijacked by way of SIM swapping, it’s clear that SMS just isn’t the right solution for sending people secondary login codes. And yet, for many years, it’s been the mandatory go-to on Twitter. You could switch to another option later (like Google Authenticator, or a physical Yubikey) — but to turn it on in the first place, you were locked into giving Twitter a phone number and using...

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OutVoice officially launches its freelancer payment tools

OutVoice, a startup that allows editors to pay freelancers with the click of a button, has officially left beta testing and is open to any publication. The company is also announcing that it has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from content monetization startup Coil. OutVoice was founded by Matt Saincome and Issa Diao (pictured above). When the product was still in beta last year, Saincome told me it was created to solve “a horrible problem for everyone” involved in publishing freelance work: When he was a freelance writer, he’d have...

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Camp Grounded Digital Detox returns after founder’s death

Summer camp for adults and beloved tech-free weekend getaway Camp Grounded ground to a halt in 2017. Its big-hearted founder Levi Felix who’d espoused the joys of trading screens for nature walks was tragically killed by brain cancer at just age 32. Left in his wake was mourning community who’d lost their digital detox rally just as everyone was realizing the importance of looking up from their phones. As an attendee, I’d been impressed by how the founder (known as Professor Fidget Wigglesworth at camp) used playfulness and presence to transport...

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