Basecamp founders’ email service Hey is fighting with Apple again — this time over the rejection of its new calendar app from the App Store.
Last week, Basecamp launched an integrated calendar service with Hey, along with a new standalone app for it.
On Saturday, Hey’s co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson posted on X that Apple has rejected Hey’s standalone calendar app.
In 2020, Apple first rejected Hey’s email app because users couldn’t sign up for the service on the app.
So Hey’s calendar app should be allowed on the App Store.
Clicks Technology is today unveiling the Clicks creator keyboard for the iPhone.
The thing is, we haven’t abandoned physical buttons.
By moving the keyboard off the display when typing, Clicks almost doubles the available screen.
And for those who really miss the good old days of typing on a physical keyboard, the Clicks creator keyboard offers real keys.
iPhone users can now use shortcuts like CMD + H to navigate to the home screen, or CMD + Space to launch Search.
TikTok is looking to grow the size of its TikTok Shop U.S. business tenfold to as much as $17.5 billion this year, according to a new report from Bloomberg.
As Bloomberg previously reported, TikTok was on track to amass around $20 billion in global gross merchandise value last year.
In addition, the report says the company is planning to launch TikTok Shop in Latin America in the coming months.
The report indicates that during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday season in November, more than 5 million new U.S. customers purchased something via TikTok Shop.
TikTok Shop has also started to reduce some subsidies for merchants.
As search engine incumbents — namely Google — amp up their platforms with gen AI tech, startups are looking to reinvent AI-powered search from the ground up.
Srinivas, Perplexity’s CEO, previously worked at OpenAI, where he researched language and gen AI models along the lines of Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 3.
This reporter is skeptical about the longevity of gen AI search tools for a number of reasons, not least of which AI models are costly to run.
Concerns around misuse and misinformation inevitably crop up around gen AI search tools like Perplexity, as well — as they well should.
Some plaintiffs, like The New York Times, have argued gen AI search experiences siphon off publishers’ content, readers and ad revenue through anticompetitive means.
Canva has crafted a wildly successful business model on the idea that graphic design should be accessible to everyone.
Canva is in 190 countries and over 100 languages, and has signed on more than 170 million active users.
“We’ve concentrated a huge amount on having really international, localized, authentic content,” Adams said.
All of that authentic local experience has been crucial to our international growth.
And international growth has been the story of Canva.”Canva’s top market is the U.S., and Adams said that’s closely followed by Brazil and India.
Beeper is giving up on its mission to bring iMessage to Android after implementing a series of fixes that Apple has knocked down one by one over the past month.
The latest workaround requires users to own or rent a jailbroken iPhone to get iMessage working via Beeper.
You then need to install a Beeper tool to generate an iMessage registration code, then update to the latest Beeper Mini app and enter your code.
The process is quite complicated and significantly takes away from the original appeal of Beeper, which was supposed to provide an easy way to bring iMessage to Android.
Although Beeper is done trying to bring iMessage to Android, the company says it’s “shifting focus back to our long-term goal of building the best chat app on earth” in the new year.
Kosmik was founded in 2018 by Paul Rony and Christophe Van Deputte.
And that’s when he started to build Kosmic, Rony told TechCrunch, drawing on a prior background in computing history and philosophy.
It also features a built-in browser, saving users from having to switch windows when they need to find a relevant website link.
Additionally, the platform also sports a PDF reader, which lets the user extract elements such as images and text.
“I think that everything revolves around the idea that we do not have the best web browser, text editor or PDF reader,” Rony said.
Elon Musk’s social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, suffered an outage globally earlier Thursday that lasted for more than an hour.
X Pro, formerly known as TweetDeck, also faced the outage.
This was not Twitter’s first outage – the abrupt workforce cuts earlier exposed the site to more vulnerabilities and reliability issues.
The last major outage on the platform, which was still called Twitter at that time, occurred in early July.
Users encountered “rate limit exceeded” and “cannot retrieve tweets” errors.
The company also announced today it’s expanding its AR collectible tickets to cinema partners in the Asia-Pacific region, including Japan, Korea, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.
Each Fandime gets a unique Blockchain-based ID and is minted on Avalanche’s blockchain network and stored in a user’s Really account.
Users can redeem Fandime for digital rewards, movie-related AR content, exclusive opportunities, “AR trophies and wearable face filters,” the company explained.
If we combine those two things today, which Really is doing, we believe we are ahead of the game,” Really AR founder and CEO James Andrew Felts told TechCrunch.
In the long term, Really plans to create original AR content and branch out to other areas besides the entertainment industry, Felts revealed to us.
Spill, a platform founded by ex-Twitter employees, is closing out its first year on the market by opening up its beta to all users, whether they’re on iOS or Android.
Spill is like the polar opposite of X, a platform that continues to alienate users with platform policies that make the app actively less inclusive.
Around his one-year anniversary of being laid off from Twitter, Spill CEO Alphonzo Terrell told TechCrunch that the app has amassed around 200,000 users.
Spill may not be growing as quickly as other Twitter competitors like Bluesky, Mastodon or Threads, but Terrell isn’t worried.
“People are looking for something new,” Terrell told TechCrunch last month.
