This week, we’re looking at a new finance-based dating app, Robinhood’s earnings results and the startup in which PayPal Ventures made its first investment.
Launched by financial platform Neon Money Club, Score is a dating app for people with good to excellent credit, and it seeks to help raise awareness about the importance of finances in relationships.
Dollars and centsFinom, a European challenger bank aimed at SMEs and freelancers, has raised €50 million ($54 million) in a Series B equity round of funding.
Rasa, an enterprise-focused conversational generative AI platform with financial services companies as clients, raised $30 million in a Series C round co-led by StepStone Capital and PayPal Ventures.
Cash App announced it will now offer “up to” a 4.5% APY (annual percentage yield) for its Cash App Savings customers, with a few caveats.
OpenAI releases Sora, a credit score–based dating app launches and an anti-Tesla ad comes under fireWelcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter covering noteworthy happenings in the tech industry.
This week, OpenAI stunned the blogosphere with the release of Sora, a new AI model that can generate videos in impressively high fidelity.
Elsewhere, startup Score released a dating app exclusive to people with good to excellent credit scores.
Google upgrades Gemini: Google expanded the range of its Gemini AI models available to developers across its platforms.
And it’s previewed a new Gemini model capable of analyzing whole books, hours-long audio and hour-long videos.
Apple last week announced new rules for EU app developers to comply with new regulation, the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Developer responses to the changes have been mixed, as several larger companies, including Epic Games, Spotify and more recently Microsoft, have come out against Apple’s changes, which seemed designed to ensure that Apple’s ability to profit from iPhone apps continues, regardless of how they’re discovered and installed.
This fee applies to apps both distributed on the App Store and through alternative marketplaces and is €0.50 for each first annual install per year over a 1 million threshold.
After digging through the documents Apple provided and speaking to the company, there are a few caveats and details to these rules that developers should know.
We’re compiling them below as a starting point and will add to this list over time as we learn more.
The move is part of the company’s plans to turn TikTok Shop into a multi-billion dollar e-commerce business in the United States.
During the Black Friday and Cyber Monday season in November, more than 5 million new U.S. customers purchased something via TikTok Shop.
The new feature would bring TikTok Shop links to regular content on the app, which may not be a welcome change for some.
New data reveals that TikTok’s growth has started to slow, raising the question of whether the app’s TikTok Shop e-commerce efforts could be to blame.
The slowdown comes on the heels of the launch of TikTok Shop in the U.S.People have been debating online whether TikTok Shop has “ruined” the app, with some lamenting that TikTok Shop was turning the app into an “ad-filled wasteland.”In addition to bringing TikTok Shop links to more videos on the platform, TikTok is also exploring other ways to boost its e-commerce business.
Apple last week announced new rules for EU app developers to comply with new regulation, the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Meanwhile, the company is implementing a Core Technology Fee that Apple says pays for their access to Apple’s proprietary technologies and tools, developer services and support, and platform integrity.
This fee applies to apps both distributed on the App Store and through alternative marketplaces and is €0.50 for each first annual install per year over a 1 million threshold.
After digging through the documents Apple provided and speaking to the company, there are a few caveats and details to these rules that developers should know.
We’re compiling them below as a starting point and will add to this list over time as we learn more.
Tiger Global and a16z-backed productivity company ClickUp has acquired the calendar app Hypercal to boost its platform offering, TechCrunch has learned.
As part of the acquisition, the app’s founder Ricardo Clerigo is also joining ClickUp as Head of Calendar.
Hypercal also had a paid tier costing $10 per month for unlimited calendar and task integrations.
We’ve already eliminated the need for many apps by building docs, whiteboards, dashboards, tasks, and AI natively into our platform.
The calendar apps space has been busy in the last few months.
Long COVID is the strongest ‘why now’ slide — and it has shone a light on all these other conditions,” says Leeming in an interview with TechCrunch.
Trying it outAs someone who suffers from long COVID myself, I tried its solution out as I was at CES in Las Vegas earlier this year.
“We aim to take fitness, wellness and illness into account with our tracker.
No longer a mere risk assessment tool, Visible’s “illness tracker” has evolved into a personal assistant for health maintenance and a symbol of empowerment for patients.
Even at this initial stage, it certainly seems that Visible is starting to illuminate a new way forward for chronic illness sufferers.
On Friday, the streaming music company issued its response to Apple’s new DMA rules, calling the new fees imposed on developers “extortion” and Apple’s compliance plan “a complete and total farce,” that demonstrated the tech giant believes that the rules don’t apply to them.
It will also charge a 3% payment processing fee when developers use Apple’s in-app payments instead of their own.
Apple’s App Store will maintain its power, Ek believes.
Plus, because of the increased fees, Spotify doesn’t even have a choice, Ek explains — it’s forced to stick with the current system.
“With our EU Apple install base in the 100 million range, this new tax on downloads and updates could skyrocket our customer acquisition costs, potentially increasing them tenfold.
With deck.blue, Bluesky users can view posts on the social network in the column-based format popularized by TweetDeck, including things like their home timeline, notifications, likes, lists, or even custom feeds.
But when he examined the options available to Bluesky users, he was dissatisfied with the experiences that had been built so far.
The deck.blue project began last August and within a month of writing the first line of code, it launched.
Initially, the app was called Bluesky Deck, but Bluesky suggested that using Bluesky in the app’s name wasn’t the right move.
So Filho renamed the app deck.blue and hired a designer to work on the branding.
In an effort to retain developers, Apple has begun its pilot tests of “contingent pricing,” a new way for them to market App Store subscriptions, TechCrunch has learned.
That’s the case with the debut pilot test of contingent pricing that pairs up two apps: Structured and one sec.
(An interesting choice for the pilot, given Apple and Meta’s ongoing beef over App Tracking Transparency, which Meta said harmed its business!)
With contingent pricing, customers who subscribe to one of the apps can receive a discount if subscribing to the other.
Apple says it helps the developers with the implementation of contingent pricing to make the redemption process “seamless” for customers purchasing through its App Store.
