A trio of popular media apps received updates Friday, with live broadcasting app Meerkat gaining upgrades to compete with Twitter's Periscope, while Vine moves to 720p video and Instapaper adds Instant Sync and Twitter "textshots."
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Tumblr’s iOS App Will Now Add ‘Buy,’ ‘Pledge,’ And ‘Get Involved’ Buttons To Select Posts 1
March 27th at 10:03pm / TechCrunch / 0 opinionsTumblr today introduced a change to its service that will encourage users to purchase or fund products and campaigns on other websites, including Etsy’s online marketplace and Kickstarter, for example. With an update to its mobile application for iOS, posts that link to those sites as well as DoSomething.org will now automatically be given buttons that let others “Buy,…
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Meerkat Strikes Back At Periscope With New Ways To Follow 2
March 27th at 9:43pm / TechCrunch / 0 opinionsWith Twitter’s much more polished live-streaming app Periscope now on the market, Meerkat needs to strengthen its own social graph to keep users from straying to its new competitor. So today Meerkat for iOS was updated with recommendations of people to follow, a way to follow people from inside streams, and ways to discover streams your friends like. It’s also trying to neutralize…
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Anonymous Social App Cloaq Lets You Secretly Comment On Anything 1
March 27th at 5:43pm / TechCrunch / 0 opinionsThe trend toward anonymous social applications may be on the downswing for some, but others believe there’s still a place for online discussions where users don’t have to reveal their real identity. Case in point: Cloaq, the anonymous app where users never had to provide an identifying piece of information, like a phone number or email, is today launching out of beta with a new twist.
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First Apple Watch-ready apps start appearing in the App Store 0
March 27th at 5:05pm / Mashable / 0 opinionsThe first Apple Watch-ready apps have already started arriving in Apple's App Store.
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The first Apple Watch apps have arrived, sort of 0
March 27th at 7:49am / Macworld / 0 opinionsThe Apple Watch won't launch until late April, but a couple dozen apps have already arrived.
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‘Scope Meets World 1
March 26th at 11:03am / TechCrunch / 0 opinionsMovies, financial markets and fashion trends all fall into frenzies, dips and lulls. Consumer apps are much the same. Whether it’s photo-sharing, anonymity or live streaming, it seems that a confluence of apps all doing similar things at the same time is a natural occurrence.
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Twitter launches Periscope, a Meerkat-like live video streaming app 1
March 26th at 6:49am / Macworld / 0 opinionsiPhone users got another app on Thursday to help them share live video streams after Meerkat launched several weeks ago. This time Twitter is getting into the game with Periscope.
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Periscope, Twitter's answer to Meerkat-style live-streaming, is now available 0
March 26th at 3:53am / The Verge / 0 opinionsLive-streaming apps are the thirstiest of all media. A Facebook post wants a like, a tweet begs for favs, and a snap means little without a response. But for sheer drop-everything, look-at-me arrogance, nothing beats the push notification that says "LIVE NOW." Iâm doing literally anything, the notification says. Watch now, or youâll miss out forever....
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Zendo Is My New Favorite Secure Messaging App 2
March 24th at 11:43pm / TechCrunch / 0 opinionsHow does a new secure messaging app stand out in such a crowded space? By making something that’s super easy to use. And also by using a type of encryption that technically cannot be cracked. Yet which has been overlooked by cryptographers for decades…
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Why Meerkat, the breakout app of SXSW, is more than a flash in the pan 0
March 19th at 3:27am / Macworld / 0 opinionsIf Meerkat can continue to evolve quickly, it might survive Twitter's own live-streaming launch. (Despite its terrible videos.)
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Make Games On Your iPhone With Playr 2
March 19th at 1:43am / TechCrunch / 0 opinionsFor nearly two years, eighteen-year-old Chris Galzerano has been working on Playr, an app that lets anyone make their own games. Unlike engines and kits like Unity or GameSalad, Playr doesn’t require a powerful PC or professional-tier tools to get started — all development takes place in the phone.
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Facebook Introduces Free Friend-To-Friend Payments Through Messages 3
March 17th at 10:43pm / TechCrunch / 0 opinionsWhen you chat with friends about settling debts or splitting the bill, Facebook doesn’t want you to have to open another app like PayPal or Venmo to send them money. So today it unveiled a new payments feature for Facebook Messenger that lets you connect your Visa or Mastercard debit card and tap a “$” button to send friends money on iOS, Android, and desktop with zero fees.
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Twitter cofounder Biz Stone on Jellyâs spectacular failure and the yet-to-be-determined success of Super 0
March 15th at 1:03pm / Macworld / 0 opinionsAt a SXSW session, Biz Stone explains why Jelly failed and how its demise made room for his next app, Super.
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Live video sharing apps are having a moment -- just in time for SXSW 0
March 13th at 10:45pm / Mashable / 0 opinionsThe sightings started late Thursday night. A man wearing a vibrant yellow T-shirt with a strange mongoose-like creature printed on it was spotted in the wild at Austin's international airport. Some observers shouted "Meerkat!" at the man as he made h...
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Personality Test App Knozen Asks You Seemingly Random Questions About Your Friends 2
March 13th at 7:23pm / TechCrunch / 0 opinionsKnozen has been described as an app for rating your coworkers, but the startup has been moving beyond that, into becoming a broader social game and personality test.In fact, if you visit the Knozen website now, you’d be hard-pressed to figure out that there’s anything job-related. Instead, it describes the app as “a new kind of game where your opinions matter.”
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Twitter buys Periscope as its livestreaming response to Meerkat 1
March 13th at 3:30pm / Macworld / 0 opinionsTwitter and Periscope confirm that the livestreaming video app is now part of the Twitter flock. Periscope is reportedly similar to Meerkat, a competing video streaming startup that's making waves.
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Spayce Takes On Yik Yak With A Location-Based, Social App For Sharing “Moments,” Not Gossip 0
March 12th at 8:23pm / TechCrunch / 0 opinionsWhile popular location-based social app Yik Yak struggles amid controversy and on-campus bannings, a newcomer called Spayce is gearing up to compete with its own take on local social networking. Its few weeks-old app forgoes anonymity by default, and instead encourages community members to share their photo and video “memories” happening around a given location, whether that’s…
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Swarm updates app with simpler messaging and group chat 0
March 12th at 6:42pm / The Verge / 0 opinionsFoursquare's bringing some much needed simplicity to its standalone Swarm app today, removing the old "plans" feature that let users publicly awkwardly ask all of their friends to hang out in favor of a private messaging system. We think it will bring up the value of neighborhood sharing, which lets you see your friendsâ general proximity, and we hope that this will help people start reaching out to their nearby friends a little more often," product manager Nick Burton told TechCrunch. That gives off...
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Swarm updates app with simpler messaging and group chat 0
March 12th at 6:42pm / The Verge / 0 opinionsFoursquare's bringing some much needed simplicity to its standalone Swarm app today, removing the old "plans" feature that let users publicly (and awkwardly) ask all of their friends to hang out. That's been ditched in favor of a private messaging system. "We think it will bring up the value of neighborhood sharing, which lets you see your friendsâ general proximity, and we hope that this will help people start reaching out to their nearby friends a little more often," product manager Nick Burton...
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VaporChat Scores $1.5M For Its Private Messaging App That Puts Users In Control Of Their Texts 0
March 11th at 7:23pm / TechCrunch / 0 opinionsA startup called VaporChat has raised $1.5 million for its newly launched mobile application which pushes the concept of “ephemeral” messaging further, by not only allowing users to un-send text and photos, but also control whether or not message recipients can copy or save the content being shared over its service, and much more.Today, there are a number of…
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Apple Pay adds support for 14 new merchants including Jamba Juice and Office Max 0
March 11th at 5:31am / AppleInsider / 0 opinionsFollowing big MacBook and Apple Watch announcements at Monday's "Spring Forward" event, Apple updated its running list of merchants that support Apple Pay to include 14 new stores, and expanded the number of featured apps that use the service to 29.
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What Your Favorite Apps Look Like On Apple Watch (Plus New Ones!) 0
March 10th at 12:03am / TechCrunch / 0 opinionsIn preparation for Apple’s first wearable device, mobile developers have been busy creating all kinds of applications designed especially for the Apple Watch’s small screen. The watch, which is said by early testers to be so usable that they found they were no longer pulling out their iPhone as often, allows you to interact with a variety of apps and notifications, ranging…
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Meerkat is a little app that's turning live video into a big deal again 1
March 9th at 8:30am / The Verge / 0 opinionsAfter a year and a half working on his video startup, Yevvo, Ben Rubin had started to think about pulling the plug. The app had been conceived as a way of letting you share live video with your friends, but soon accrued a set of arguably useless features: location tagging, text comments, a variety of login options. Yevvo had acquired 400,000 users since launching in August 2013, but most weren't very active. "There was no heartbeat," Rubin says....
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FireChat's hashtags help festival-goers find the hottest spots at SXSW 0
March 5th at 9:00am / Macworld / 0 opinionsThe off-the-grid messaging app takes on Twitter to be South by Southwest's communication platform of choice.