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The team behind Verst is joining Dropbox, in an acquisition that marks the end of the Verst publishing platform. The startup actually started life as DWNLD, a platform that transformed websites into mobile apps. It raised a $12 million Series A led by Grelock Partners before shifting focus to Verst, which launched earlier this year as a blogging platform that has traffic and revenue… Read More
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Instagram announced this morning that it now has 25 million active business profiles, up from 15 million in July. The company throws out a lot of different statistics (back in September it said it had 800 million monthly active users, 500 million daily active users and 2 million advertisers), but this one’s significant as a measure of how many businesses see Instagram as an important way… 
Video advertising company Innovid has acquired another advertising startup, Taykey. We’ve written about Taykey as a tool that companies can use to target their ads based on the topics that their desired audience is interested in. Innovid says that by combining Taykey’s analysis with its own data about video engagement, it can show advertisers how targeting relevant content affects… 
I’ve been thinking a lot about this important if long Medium post by James Bridle regarding the nonsensical and potentially damaging kids content on YouTube. In it he moves from video to video, finding stranger and stranger examples. Further, an exodus of advertising is hitting the service as some disgusting comments were found below videos aimed at kids and of kids. Strangers with… 
Streaming services like Spotify have turned playlists into one of the main ways to discover new music, but I’d argue that they’re missing some of the personality of traditional radio — the kind of radio where I knew not just the names of my favorite DJs, but also what kind of music they liked and random details about their life. That’s the experience that Stationhead,… 
Researchers at Duke University, OSU and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have solved one of the biggest problems with new forms of quantum encryption: quantum key distribution. QKD is the process of distributing keys during a transmission and in a way that will tell both sides of the conversation that someone is eavesdropping. The new system, which uses lasers to transmit multiple bits at once,… 
A few years ago jailbreaking your iPhone was all the rage. The cat-and-mouse game of hackers versus Apple was great fun and some of the open source products available to jailbreakers – namely the Cydia alternative app store – added amazing features and customizability to the iPhone. Some devs even launched only on jailbroken phones, thumbing their noses at Apple’s walled… 
I’ve been thinking about token sale marketing lately mostly because it’s been so bad. I’ve gotten hundreds of emails asking me to be an ICO advisor or evangelist or influencer primarily because the ICO marketing techniques come to us straight out of the spammiest corners of affiliate marketing. I’ve gotten emails from founders who have been promised “posts on… 
Board games are a blast. They’re cheap to buy, fun to give, and amazing to play. We’ve chosen twelve of our favorites that you can add to your stack of games this Holiday Season. Some pit you against each other; others have you working together to save the world. Order in, crack a few beers (or seltzers) and have a blast! 
Marvel and Netflix’s latest show The Punisher stars Jon Bernthal as the bloodthirsty superhero. Bernthal first took on the role in the second season of Daredevil, but now he’s the headliner in a story exploring the aftermath of war and a broader government conspiracy. In the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Original Content podcast, hosts Darrell Etherington and Anthony Ha… 
The story of AppLovin‘s acquisition has taken another turn. We first reported that the mobile ad startup was in acquisition talks in August of last year, and the announcement came a month later: AppLovin would sell a majority stake Chinese private equity firm Orient Hontai Capital. Today, however, CEO Adam Foroughi revealed that the deal is (sort of) off. Instead of an outright… 
John Lasseter, the chief creative officer of both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, is the latest media executive to face allegations of inappropriate behavior. In a memo to employees, Lasseter acknowledged “missteps” and said he will be taking a six-month sabbatical. 
Physicists at MIT have developed and released a $100 muon detector that you can build at home, allowing you to sense deep space bombardment on something that looks like a TV remote. The CosmicWatch is basically a little box that can detect high-energy cosmic rays as they hit the Earth’s atmosphere and decay into muons. Muons hit the Earth in a “light drizzle” say the… 
A company called Confido raised a small ICO by selling special CFD designed to allow “safe and trustless cryptocurrency payments. According to ICODrops they raised their goal of about $400,000 and quickly disappeared, taking the cash with it. The site is currently a parked web server that points to nothing. The apparent founder and former eBay employee, Joost van Doorn, posted a message to… 
Dabbl is giving users a straightforward reason to interact with ads — the ads earn them money in the form of gift cards. For example, when I signed up for Dabbl this morning, I was presented with a menu of several different campaigns. The first one that I chose was from Oreo, where I answered a bunch of questions about how I feel and what I know about Oreo products. The whole thing… 
You’re sitting down to a nice meal and your aunt, always one step ahead, mentions she wants to start investing in Bitcoin. You freeze, a drip of gravy plopping off the ladle. It’s your time to shine. You got this. First, you know that the state of crypto is very, very good. This has been a banner year for cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin rose from $738 a year ago to $8220 as of this year.… 
Swiss watchmakers have long resisted the siren call of ecommerce. While many of their products sold online – you can find everything from Swatch to Breguet on the “grey market” – there were no official online channels for many brands. Until now. Omega, a Swiss watchmaker whose wares now grace the wrist of James Bond, just started selling online, joining Panerai and… 
Ten years ago this week, Amazon released the first Kindle. It was big and clunky and kind of ugly, with an awkward physical keyboard and 250 MB of on-board storage. It sold out in less than six hours and would remain that way until the following April. Amazon, it seemed, was really onto something. 
We are now walking through a media desert. While access to content is astronomically high, the content that we read is dead, lifeless, and derivative. Yes, I see the irony in posting my criticism of the state of online media on, well, online media, but I want to explore how we got here and what we can do about it. We begin in about 1983. The education necessary to interact with media of that… 
Justice League, the DC cinematic universe’s answer to The Avengers, is finally here. It comes at the end of a terrific year for superhero movies. Logan was genuinely great, while Wonder Woman‘s success should have demolished any lingering Hollywood skepticism about action movies directed by and starring women. Plus, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Thor: Ragnarok were pretty… 
Watchmaker Romain-Jerome has announced a new Batman-themed watch that looks like something Bruce Wayne would wear to the club. The watch, which is based on R-J’s Skylab design, features a meticulous reproduction of a map of Gotham City cut into the rear sapphire glass and a glowing Bat Signal that lights up in the dark and/or in times of danger. R-J is famous for making high-end watches… 