With the rise and rise of messaging (I have at least six messaging apps on my phone and counting), tech companies are piling into the space. Many are trying to shoe-horn ‘chat bots’ into behaving like they are capable of customer service. Facebook Messenger, Kik, Twitter, Skype, Telegram, and WhatsApp have all announced such services. But as others have pointed out, we are nowhere… Read MoreLiveNinja secures a further $2M to combine live web chat and messaging
With the rise and rise of messaging (I have at least six messaging apps on my phone and counting), tech companies are piling into the space. Many are trying to shoe-horn ‘chat bots’ into behaving like they are capable of customer service. Facebook Messenger, Kik, Twitter, Skype, Telegram, and WhatsApp have all announced such services. But as others have pointed out, we are nowhere… Read More
What’s more lucrative than a video ad? Multiple videos in a single ad. To help businesses show different sides of their products in vivid motion, today Instagram is launching video ad carousels. It’s a savvy way for the company to give advertisers more flexibility through horizontal space so as not to further clutter the vertical scrolling feed. Now the carousels Instagram introduced… 
A Brazilian judge has denied an injunction against a countrywide ban filed by messaging app WhatsApp, according to local media reports. 
With all of Giphy’s integrations with chat platforms, it was only a matter of time before the betaworks-backed GIF platform launched its own keyboard. World, welcome Giphy Keys into the mix. The Giphy Keys third-party keyboard launches on iOS today, and lets users send GIFs from any app they want. Even Snapchat. Here’s how it works: Once you’ve downloaded the Giphy Keys app… 
By the time the Form 1 began shipping to Kickstarter backers, the market was already flooded with countless 3D printers built around the same basic plastic extruding technology.
Twitter’s stock is cratering this week following its earnings report on Tuesday, down around 15% and shaving more than a billion dollars off its market cap — again. This isn’t even an all-time low for Twitter. But the company is a long, long ways from its successful run after its initial public offering. At the time, Twitter was showing — while slow — user growth… 
As Twitter tries out bigger things to spur growth activity — like changing the order and length of tweets — it is turning away from others. Twitter has quietly retired Magic Recs, a strikingly effective bot account that used to send you DMs recommending viral accounts or Tweets to follow, run by an algorithm that measured how many others you knew were following an account… 
Reports in the Russian press that Google tried to acquire the Telegram messaging app last year for $1 billion have been firmly rebutted by Telegram founder Pavel Durov. The rumors had been widely reported in the tech press today. 
Snapchat may have started out as the ephemeral messaging and photo-sharing app, but a majority of users now consume video there too, according to a report from Bloomberg today. Daily video views on Snapchat have spiked to 10 billion, the report said. That’s up from 8 billion video views on Snapchat in February this year, 6 billion daily video views in November 2015, and 4 billion in… 
The League, the dating startup that’s maybe-maybe-not elitist, is launching version 2.0 in a new city — Los Angeles. Founder and CEO Amanda Bradford said The League has already rolled out the updated app to users in its existing markets, New York and San Francisco, without much fanfare. Today, however, marks the official launch, as well as the addition of its first city in nearly…