This Week in Apps: Twitter Notes, Instagram age verification, Spotify’s Live Events
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined …
Snap will pay 25 Black creators $120k in a new accelerator program
On stage at VidCon, Snap announced its first accelerator program for emerging Black creators. Over the course of a year, Snap will pay 25 selected applicants $10,000 a month ($120,000 total) to help launch their careers, marking a $3 million total investment. This program is part of Snap’s 52…
Andreessen Horowitz’s Sriram Krishnan on crypto social networking
Web3 has plenty of money going for it — well, yes quite a bit less than a few months ago — but it’s still hard to argue that mainstream consumers have lined up to embrace web3 internet services. There have been some flash-in-the-pan hits so far, but investors are still searching f…
Game studio HiDef partners with Snap to develop a Bitmoji dance social mobile game
A game studio, HiDef, announced today that it is teaming up with camera company Snap Inc. to develop an off-platform Bitmoji-based dance and music social game. The game will leverage Snap’s augmented reality tech as well as Bitmoji, the personalized cartoon avatar maker. Bitmoji joined the Snap fam…
Snapchat will now display restaurant recommendations in the Snap Map in select cities
Snapchat is partnering with restaurant review website The Infatuation to enable users to find local eats on the Snap Map, the company announced today. The social media app is adding a new Map Layer from The Infatuation to give users access to restaurant recommendations for places near them. Users i…
It’s been a rough month in the tech sector. We’ve rounded up week after week of layoffs, and according to aggregator layoffs.fyi, over 15,000 tech workers have lost their jobs this month. Hopefully the sun will come out in June. A number of tech companies that enjoyed pandemic-related surges are fa…
Snapchat rolls out new ‘Shared Stories’ feature to make it easier to share memories
Feature is a new iteration of Snapchat's "Custom Stories" feature, which allows users to create a story and add friends to view and contribute to it.
TikTok says ‘Project Texas’ will bolster security for U.S. users in wake of China data access concerns
Over the weekend, TikTok wrote to Republican Senators to assure them that it’s working on a program called “Project Texas” to bolster data security for U.S.-based users. This was in response to the Senators’ letter to the company dated June 27 that questioned its data access…