News

 Social media startup RebelMouse has created a new tool for publishers — Rebel Discovery, which helps those publishers identify the social media accounts that they should be sharing stories with for maximum impact. Founder and CEO Paul Berry said that when you publish a story, there are probably many Facebook Pages or Twitter accounts that would be happy to post a link — not… Read More

 Twitter has appointed its first managing director for China. A former general manager at Microsoft and Cisco, Kathy Chen will reach out to companies who can use Twitter to reach international audiences, even though the service is blocked by the Great Firewall. Read More

 Seasoned entrepreneur and digital strategist Gary Vaynerchuk sat down with TechCrunch to talk about his new book, #AskGaryVee. An investor in Facebook, Twitter, Uber and Tumblr, Vaynerchuk also advises Fortune 500 companies on their social media ad spend with his company, Vaynermedia. Read More

 After laying off staff in December as it shifted business models to find a sustainable operation, Dinner Lab has officially shut down, according to a blog post on the company’s site. Dinner Lab, like many startups, is facing a challenging environment for startups that lately have to find their way to profitability instead of simply fund operations with venture capital. Gumroad, for… Read More

 Facebook debuted chatbots for Messenger this week to much fanfare, promising consumers a new way to interact with their favorite businesses over the company’s popular messaging service. The idea is that Messenger users could simply “chat” with these automated software programs to do things like read the latest news from CNN, get a weather report or even go shopping. In… Read More

 Vine, Twitter’s social network turned entertainment platform, is today announcing a new way to consume content on the app.
The company is introducing a “Watch” button, which will let users watch a particular channel or account without needing to scroll. When a user presses the watch button on a certain account or channel, videos in that feed will play back-to-back… Read More

 In an interview with Walt Mossberg, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said threaded messaging — perhaps one of the service’s most important missing components — is finally coming. Butterfield told Mossberg that Slack had been using threading internally for months while testing what the best version of the tool would be for the service, which will hopefully come out in the… Read More

 Talent wars may never cease in Silicon Valley. Facebook today announced it has hired former Google vice president of advanced technology and projects, Regina Dugan, to head up a new group dubbed Building 8.
According to a company statement, Dr. Dugan’s department will combine R&D with product development, and focus on technologies that “fluidly blend physical and digital… Read More

 Facebook is making big strides in using its artificial intelligence systems for image recognition, but it’s also working on bringing this technology to video. As the company demoed at its F8 developer conference in San Francisco today, it has a team working on automatically tagging people in videos. As Facebook’s director of machine learning Joaquin Quiñonero Candela said during… Read More

 Oculus wants to let you go anywhere in the world instantly, look like yourself, and even take a photo while you’re there, and today it demoed how at F8. Watch the demo of Facebook and Oculus’ 360 photo spheres, virtual reality selfie stick, and personalized avatars below: To show how social VR could work, Facebook’s CTO Mike Schroepfer strapped into Oculus in San… Read More