YouTube Create, Google’s standalone mobile app aimed at creators, which helps them produce both Shorts and longer videos, is expanding to a broader set of markets after last fall’s launch into beta testing.
The idea behind Create is to offer video creators an easy-to-use suite of free tools for making videos on the go.
With Create, users can upload clips, split and trim videos, use effects, and access royalty-free music to complement their videos.
By offering a suite of tools just for YouTube creators, the company hopes to capture more of the market that prefers to use standalone tools for editing videos.
Starting today, the Create app is available in new markets including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, and Turky.
Dating app maker Bumble is rethinking its vision for the company’s future after announcing weak earnings and massive job cuts that will see the company cutting a third of its staff, or around 350 employees.
“Candidly, we have been slow to realize this broader vision with Bumble BFF thus far,” she told investors on Tuesday’s Q4 2023 earnings call.
The CEO noted that the current BFF product has a small, but strong following.
This is due to BFF using the same one-to-one match paradigm for friendships as Bumble uses for dating.
That could limit BFF’s ability to monetize as Bumble’s dating product does.
Newsmast also credits the Mastodon app and Mozilla-backed startup Mammoth for the inspiration around Communities.
In addition, Newsmast offers a system where anyone can build their own Mastodon server with a selection of communities they’ve curated.
Users could then connect to that server in place of the Newsmast server within the Newsmast app.
Later this week, Newsmast will also open up its API to developers, which means your preferred Mastodon app could integrate with Newsmast’s Communities, too, for a more seamless experience.
(In fact, some Mastodon users were confused why Newsmast’s accounts were following them and boosting their content, without understanding the larger purpose.)
Ethiopian startup eQub is the winner of the fintech pitch-off at 4YFN 2024, Mobile World Congress’ startup event.
The startup’s name is an Amharic word referring to a local form of peer-to-peer credit, Michael said.
An Equb is a group of people who join forces to save money, which is then distributed on a rotating basis.
Starting with an app, it targets users among the growing number of Ethiopians who have bank accounts and mobile phones, but limited access to credit.
Making an Equb digital is an improvement in itself: For eQub members with bank accounts, they can add money without having to go to an ATM.
Out of the box, Apple’s Vision Pro doubles as a 4K Mac virtual display, allowing you to extend an existing Mac desktop to the device’s spatial computing environment.
A new app called Splitscreen takes things a step further, by allowing you to add a second macOS display to your Vision Pro — even if it uses a different Apple ID.
Such an app could prove valuable for multitaskers who want to use more than one Mac computer with their Mac Virtual Display in the Vision Pro — for instance, one for work and one for personal use.
With Splitscreen, you can effectively create the feeling of having a multiple monitor setup, but inside the VR/AR environment.
However, the approach the app takes will allow the team behind Splitscreen to add more displays, settings, and other features soon after launching.
For example, on February 25, 2024, Threads saw 486,803 installs on Google Play and 342,228 on iOS.
X, by comparison, saw 225,408 Google Play downloads and 112,625 on iOS, Appfigures data shows.
That’s nearly triple the downloads on iOS for Threads and more than double the downloads on Google Play.
Then, Threads had 382,999 daily installs on iOS versus just 113,649 installs of X on the same platform — or more than triple.
Threads’ Google Play downloads were 660,882 at this time, versus just 210,475 for X on the Play Store — also more than triple.
It’s hard to keep track of crypto’s technical development, but one thing hasn’t changed much: blockchain applications are notoriously hard to build.
This stems in part from their decentralized nature, resulting in a lack of uniform standards across different infrastructure pieces.
Initia, founded by a group of developers in their late 20s, is trying to bring more interoperability to multi-chain networks and simplify the process of creating app-specific blockchains, or app chains.
In layman’s speak, Initia is abstracting away app chains’ technical complexity, aiming to make them more friendly to both end users and app developers.
They paused the project after the FTX implosion and eventually changed tack to work on blockchain infrastructure.
Lapse has been been gaining some traction in the market — claiming millions of users, 100 million photos captured each month and a coveted, consistent top-10 ranking in the U.S. app store for photographic apps.
Now it’s announcing a new round of funding of $30 million to take its ambitions to the next level.
The company’s ethos may have an old school feel to it, but some of the mechanics of how the app operates are anything but.
Lapse has come under some scrutiny — see our story here — for how it has used growth-hacking and forced invites to expand the number of installs of its app.
(“Buh-bye, Lapse!” one of my more cranky and frustrated friends told me when I asked her to download the app to connect with me.)
The new update has a scan feature, which lets users scan a physical document and import the text to listen to it later.
The company is introducing a feature to let users read their emails by integrating their Gmail accounts.
The app can also help users import their PDF attachments into the Speechify app.
For instance, read later app Pocket, which is owned by Mozilla, has an in-app text-to-speech feature.
Speechify wants to stand out in this market and wants to become a one-stop shop for anyone thinking about reading experiences by offering all kinds of integrations.
While the bookmarking icon is within easy reach on X at the bottom of the post, the new feature on Threads is a bit more hidden.
That’s because Instagram is rolling out new Threads features in phases over time, not to all of the Threads user base at once.
Bookmarks aren’t the only new feature being spotted by Threads users.
Another Threads user noticed they’ve now begun to receive notifications from Threads and Facebook in their Instagram notifications.
In another effort to grow its app, Threads also began testing a cross-posting feature from Facebook to Threads, the company confirmed last week.
