News

 Now that you are giving up on check-ins and sharing your location with your friends, a French startup is coming up with better technology and new use cases to make location cool again. Zenly has been quietly working on location for years, and teenagers are now getting addicted to this app. SoLoMo is back. Zenly couldn’t be more straightforward. When you open the app, you see a giant map… Read More

 Some have criticised Google for falling behind when it comes to social networking and new communications services, but the company is now working hard to catch up. Today, the company announced a new video calling app called Duo — a high-definition app for Android and iOS devices. Duo was unveiled on the heels of Allo, Google’s new smart messaging app. Why the decision to launch… Read More

 Today at I/O, Google took the wraps off its latest foray into the world of communications: the company announced Allo, a smart messaging app supercharged with machine learning and Google’s new Google Assistant service (its answer to Amazon’s Alexa), giving users the ability not just to chat to each other with animated graphics and enlarging/shrinking text, but to call in… Read More

 And we’re back for yet another developer conference extravaganza. Google is kicking off its annual I/O developer conference today. The conference starts at 10 a.m. Pacific Time (1 p.m. on the East Cost, 6 p.m. in London, 7 p.m. Central European Time) and you can watch the live stream right here on this page. We have a team on the ground ready to cover the event. We’ll have a live… Read More

 We’re hearing from multiple sources that Down to Lunch has met with investors about a potential financing round. Down to Lunch became a bit of a darling during its rise thanks to its dead-simple approach: signal to your friends that you’re interested in getting lunch, drinks, or whatever else and figure out who’s up for it. This is a simple concept, but in reality fills… Read More

 SocialRank is a startup that helps brands, agencies and celebrities understand their social media followers — not just in aggregate, like most social analytics services, but on an individual level. Today it introduced more features as part of a new SocialRank Premium plan. As a refresher: SocialRank helps customers find things like their “most valuable” followers on Twitter… Read More

 Facebook appears to have been blocked in Vietnam as a part of a government-imposed crackdown on social media, amid public protests over an environmental disaster attributed to toxic discharges from a steel complex built by Taiwan’s Formosa Plastics. Dissidents are blaming wastewater from the steel plant for a mass fish death at aquatic farms and in waters off the country’s… Read More

 Twitter has been releasing a variety tools for publishing its content beyond Twitter itself. Now it’s giving publishers an additional incentive — monetization through the company’s MoPub ad exchange. Previously, if a web publisher or app developer embedded a timeline from Twitter, they could run ads on the same page, but not on the timeline itself. That’s changing… Read More

 If you’re a basketball fan, you’re more than aware it’s playoff time — and we’re down to the final four teams. You probably also know that the NBA has been running a promo called ‘Every Second Counts‘, which includes a new song written specifically for the campaign by the artist Timbaland. Now The NBA wants to get fans involved too, and… Read More

 Google is not giving up on its social ambitions, it seems, despite its failures with Google+. The company announced this morning a new social app called Spaces, which focuses on group sharing. The app allows small groups of users to tap into other Google services, including Google Search, YouTube and Chrome, in order to post links and share content without having to move in between apps. They… Read More