Claim, a platform that is both a rewards app and a social network, has raised $4 million in a seed funding round led by Sequoia Capital.
With Claim, users and their friends can earn cash back, exchange rewards and even redeem them together.
The platform is a social network that aims to focus on real-world value and communal experiences rather than manufactured content and reposts.
“We started Claim because we were really interested in what it meant to own something online,” Stephenson told TechCrunch in an interview.
They then decided that users should be able to use the rewards with their friends or exchange them.
Beeper, the app that brings iMessage to Android users, is implementing a fix that it says will allow users to once again access the service after Apple blocked it.
However, the fix requires you to have access to a Mac computer, or have a friend on Beeper with a Mac.
“This 1:1 mapping of registration data to individual user—in our testing—makes the connection very reliable,” the post reads.
“If you use Beeper Mini, you can use your Mac registration data with it as well, and Beeper Mini will start to work again.
Beeper says that in its testing, it found that 10-20 iMessage users can safely use the same registration data.
Telegram and Line, two of the world’s most popular messengers with hundreds of millions of monthly users, have both been integrating crypto features in recent months.
Backed by all three divisions of Sequoia — Sequoia Capital, Sequoia Capital India and Sequoia Capital China (now called HongShan), Singapore-based EthSign aims to provide a web3 equivalent of DocuSign with the promise of an additional layer of transparency and trustworthiness.
EthSign is deployed on the respective blockchain network that runs on Telegram and Line, TON and Finschia.
EthSign has already rolled out on Telegram as a mini app, which can notify users of a list of pending documents to approve.
Already live on Line as a web app, EthSign has signed a memorandum of understanding with Finschia for further integration in the coming months.
Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft’s AI-powered chatbot, can now compose songs thanks to an integration with gen AI music app Suno.
From a single sentence, Suno can generate complete songs — including lyrics, instrumentals and singing voices.
Meta has published several of its experiments with AI music generation.
Stability AI’s own gen AI audio lead quit after saying that gen AI “exploits creators,” and the Grammys have banned fully AI-generated song from consideration for awards.
Clarity on the legal status of gen AI music may arrive soon — if not from court decisions.
“India is a massive, massive country with so many diverse needs,” said Miriam Karthika, VP for Google Maps Experience, at the event.
This India-first capability, introduced for developers on Google Maps Platform earlier this year, will be available across over 75 Indian cities.
Apart from launching the global features in India, Google partnered with India’s Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) and mobility app Namma Yatri to provide metro schedules and bookings to users directly through Google Maps.
In July last year, Google introduced Street View in India six years after the feature was banned in the country over security concerns.
Today, over 50 million users are viewing Street View in the country, Google said.
Google said today it will pay $700 million — $630 million to U.S. consumers and $70 to a fund used by U.S. states — in a settlement over Play Store reached in September.
In September, the company reached a tentative settlement in a class action lawsuit filed by U.S. states and consumers originally filed in 2021.
The complaint highlighted Google’s monopoly over app distribution on Android through the Play Store.
Today, the company said it will expand the program in the country as part of the settlement.
The company also said that it would make the sideloading process streamlined without giving any further details about the new process.
TikTok has rolled out an update to enhance the app experience for viewers on tablets and foldable devices, the company announced on Monday.
The company says the app is now better optimized for larger screens, as viewers can now experience a clear video feed, streamlined navigation bars and orientation support.
By rolling out a landscape mode on larger devices, TikTok is inching further into YouTube’s territory, which it has already been doing by supporting longer videos.
It’s worth noting that TikTok’s optimization for foldables and tablets comes as Instagram, one of its main competitors, still lacks an iPad app.
By rolling out updates for the app experiences on larger devices, TikTok is able to move beyond its mobile-first approach at a time when the competition is still behind.
Apple’s move to cut off Beeper, the app that brought iMessage to Android users, already caught the attention of U.S.
Of Commerce had earlier this year described Apple as a “gatekeeper” with a “monopoly position” in its mobile app ecosystem.
Earlier this month, Beeper debuted an app called Beeper Mini, which leveraged new technology to bring support for blue bubble iMessage chats to Android users.
Though the company was able to get a fix rolled out, Apple once again targeted Beeper’s users, deliberately blocking messages for about 5% of users, the company said.
Lots more to come this week,” said Migicovsky, in a post on X about the letter, reported first by CBS Mornings in a segment about the Beeper app.
Today, the social magazine app Flipboard is announcing it has also now integrated with ActityPub.
That changed this year, when Flipboard shifted its Twitter integration over to Mastodon and another alternative social app, Bluesky.
All this was in the lead-up to making Flipboard itself a federated social app, a process that’s kicking off today.
As this rolls out, all Flipboard users will have one Flipboard.com account connected to the fediverse, even if they host numerous Flipboard magazines.
Today, Flipboard has over 10,000 publishers of social magazines on its app and over a quarter million individuals who are curating content using Flipboard’s app.
In this edition of WiR, we cover Cruise slashing 24% of its driverless workforce (and, relatedly, Tesla’s autopilot recall), Twitch’s new nudity policy conundrum, Adobe’s updated app design language and Instagram launching a generative AI–powered background editor.
Most readGemini comes to more apps: Google’s Gemini GenAI models — specifically Gemini Pro, a lightweight version of a more capable model, Gemini Ultra, set to arrive in the coming months — is making its way into more Google products.
Duet AI, the company’s suite of dev assistance tools for code completion and generation, will soon start using Gemini.
So will AI Studio (formerly MakerSuite), Google’s AI app design experience on the web, and Vertex AI, the tech giant’s managed AI dev platform for enterprises.
Called Spectrum 2 (no surprise there), the new design system backs off a bit from the austerity of the current Spectrum design and adds quite a few more splashes of color.
