Ask most writers and editors and I’ll bet they agree: Writing headlines is hard. It’s not easy to come up with something exciting and attention-grabbing that also conveys the important information about a story in just a few words. Meanwhile, brands and marketers are creating more of their own content, so they have to worry about this, too. Native advertising company Sharethrough… Read MoreSharethrough grades your headlines with its new Hemingway tool
Ask most writers and editors and I’ll bet they agree: Writing headlines is hard. It’s not easy to come up with something exciting and attention-grabbing that also conveys the important information about a story in just a few words. Meanwhile, brands and marketers are creating more of their own content, so they have to worry about this, too. Native advertising company Sharethrough… Read More
Upvotes! What are they good for? Soon, they might get your very, very early stage company into Y Combinator. The incubator is experimenting with using the Hacker News community to pick startups for its Fellowship program. 
Reddit is looking to shape itself a bit more around the needs of the individual user in order to make the community more accepting as a whole. Reddit users will soon be able to block and mute other users on the site so they can customize their experience, The New York Times reports. Reddit co-founder Christopher Slowe detailed the changes in an announcement on the site this morning.… 
Meet TechCrunch writers and fellow Facebook developers the night before the madness of Facebook’s F8 conference begins. Join us at the Southern Pacific Brewing Company at 620 Treat Avenue in SF’s Mission District from 6-9pm on Monday April 11th.
Today Facebook launches its full assault on YouTube with a dedicated hub for watching Live and recorded videos in its mobile app. A Video tab is taking over Messenger’s prime, center spot in the navigation bar at the bottom of the screen, turning Facebook into a destination for discovering videos categorized by topic beyond stumbling across them in the feed. The Video hub heavily… 
It may have started as a Bitcoin wallet but veteran entrepreneur Jeremy Allaire’s fintech startup Circle has since shifted focus to social payments, launching an app in Q4 last year that lets users send U.S. dollars to settle IOUs between each other, with its pitch being it makes payments as easy as firing off an SMS. 
Land grab! Net neutrality! Imperialism! There was a lot of justified outrage (and perhaps delight) when Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of bringing the Internet to rural Indians came crashing down recently, fueled by the 11 million people who contacted the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India in protest and 457 companies and more than 800 startups that signed letters vehemently opposing… 
Slack has a lot of functions, but end-to-end encryption isn’t one of them, which makes the platform a no-go for some users. Along comes ClearChat to serve the needs of the slightly more security-conscious teams, with chat, file transfer and more. ClearChat describes its service as “a combination of Slack and Dropbox,” except with some military-grade encryption thrown in. 
In a flurry of news this morning, it would appear that Twitter has won a deal with the NFL that gives the social network the right to stream Thursday Night Football live on the platform. Beyond the live stream of the game, the partnership will also include pre-game Periscope broadcasts from players and teams, as well as in-game highlights from TNF. Bloomberg first reported the news this… 
Facebook has launched a tool, Automatic Alternative Text, for blind and visually impaired people to “see” images on the site. For people using screen readers to identify what’s displayed on a screen, AAT uses object recognition technology to generate descriptions of photos on Facebook. This tool, led by Facebook’s accessibility team, has been several months in the making.