After years of copying and pasting shopping links into spreadsheets and taking screenshots of products to share with her friends and family, Kristine Locker finally decided to launch a social shopping platform (which she named after herself) that could take her endless tabs and organize them into a shareable, virtual wish list all in one place.
Locker recently closed on a $2.5 million round from Wonder Ventures at a $9 million valuation, the company announced today.
For instance, you get exclusive Locker merch if you refer 25 users to Locker.
At 500 users, you get $750 to purchase an outfit from your Locker collection, the startup’s founder explains.
Its average commission rate is around 12%, however, depending on how much exposure the brand wants, Locker raises the rate to as high as 25%.
Adults on TikTok lean camera-shy, a new study from Pew Research Center suggests.
From the TikTok research, the top 25% most active posters were responsible for 98% of all public videos.
The study also found that age wasn’t necessarily a factor in assessing adults’ TikTok posting habits.
Another finding showed that 85% of TikTok users say they find the content on their For You page to be at least somewhat interesting.
This research arrives as a third of U.S. adults say that they use TikTok; among the 18- to 34-year-old demographic, that percentage jumps to 56%.
TikTok launches its ‘Add to Music app’ feature available in over 160 countriesTikTok announced today that it is launching its “Add to Music app” feature, which lets users add a song playing on a clip to services like Apple Music and Spotify, in 163 new countries.
The function lets users add the song to Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Spotify depending on the availability in the region.
They can tap on the button and select the music service of their choice the first time.
Last year, ByteDance launched its music service TikTok Music in Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Singapore, and Indonesia.
The company added it is is working on making the Add to Music App feature available to TikTok Music users soon.
Samsung is bringing its Galaxy AI features to more devices through a new One UL 6.1 update coming in late March, the company announced today.
The features are coming to the Galaxy S23 series, S23 FE, Z Fold5 and Z Flip5, as well as Tab S9 Ultra, Tab S9+ and Tab S9.
The AI features were first introduced for the Galaxy S24 series, but will soon be available to even more Samsung users.
As nearly every tech company is introducing and expanding their AI-powered features, it makes sense for Samsung to make its features more widely accessible.
In addition, a new “Note Assist” feature will let users generate summaries and translate notes, while a “Browsing Assist” feature will provide them with quick summaries of news articles.
Over the weekend, hackers targeted federated social networks like Mastodon to carry out ongoing spam attacks that were organized on Discord, and conducted using Discord applications.
But Discord has yet to remove the server where the attacks are facilitated, and Mastodon community leaders have been unable to reach anyone at the company.
She told TechCrunch that while Discord has mechanisms for reporting individual users or messages, it lacks a clear way to report whole servers.
And as Smith notes, these mass spam attacks can drive up server costs, leaving admins with unexpected bills.
According to reports on Mastodon, this fully-automated attack was sparked by a conflict between teenagers on two different Japanese language Discord servers.
The CEO of meditation app Insight Timer, Christopher Plowman, is frustrated.
That’s what happened with Insight Timer, a popular meditation app with around 25 million installs and 3 million monthly active users.
Because Insight Timer doesn’t take a cut of users’ donations to favorite teachers, those donations shouldn’t be subject to Apple’s commission — or so Plowman believed.
Insight Timer implemented the feature using Stripe as the payment provider on the backend, as the rule permits.
During the time the commission-free donations feature was live, Insight Timer’s users donated roughly $100,000 per month to the app’s teachers, Plowman says.
The company has been spotted testing a cross-posting feature that would allow Facebook users to post to both platforms at the same time, using the same feature that was originally available for cross-posting from Facebook to Instagram.
The feature will allow users to share both text and link posts from Facebook to Threads, a rep for Meta said.
Even if only a sliver of those on Facebook used the cross-posting feature for Threads, it could still dramatically increase the number of posts available on the app.
With last summer’s launch of its Twitter/X competitor, Threads, the company leveraged its other, larger social networks to rapidly grow the new service’s user base.
The test of the Facebook cross-posting feature was recently spotted in the wild on Facebook’s iOS app, as in this example here shared by Threads user @whimchic (Ljiljana Grujicic).
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This is our Wednesday show, in which we talk through the week’s leading startup and venture capital news.
This is a short week, but there’s still a lot to talk about:We’ll be back Friday morning!
Apple today is continuing its investment in sports and subscriptions business with the launch of a new app for iPhone users, Apple Sports.
While the app itself is free to use, it can help Apple direct customers to its other subscription offerings in live sports, via its Apple TV app where users can watch live games from Apple and their other apps.
Last year it also began offering the MLS Season Pass through the Apple TV app, for $14.99 per month or $99 per season.
Sports can help Apple to grow its services revenue, which hit a record of $22.3 billion in the fourth quarter, encompassing areas of Apple’s business including Apple TV+, Apple Music, iCloud, the App Store, advertising and more.
Apple TV+ subscribers can add MLS Season Pass at a discounted rate of $12.99 per month or $79 per season.
Of the professions in danger of being replaced by AI, language teacher is certainly up there.
One of those is Loora, which leans on conversational AI to teach English to students.
“The idea for Loora [came from] our frustration with language learning,” Mor told TechCrunch in an email interview.
Quite a few English learning platforms offer features along those lines, including OpenAI-backed Speak, Preply (which recently doubled down on AI tech) and ELSA.
Loora also intends to launch an enterprise service, broadening beyond its current customer base of 15,000 app users.
