Author: pekandesigns

 Did WhatsApp go down for you earlier today? You weren’t alone. The Facebook-owned messaging service experienced a roughly hour-long global outage on Friday, which led to difficulties in accessing the app and sending messages to friends. While no online service is immune to the occasional hiccup, this outage was notable for its global scale which […]

 Going from food delivery to data integration might seem like an unlikely progression for a startup team, but it was a natural fit for Hevo Data’s founders. Manish Jethani and Sourabh Agarwal previously launched SpoonJoy, an on-demand restaurant delivery app in India. The challenges they encountered while analyzing data in order to improve SpoonJoy’s service […]

 Want to exercise more, but lack motivation? An app called Lazy Jar, aimed at Fitbit owners, may be able to help. The app actually penalizes you a monetary amount if you fail to meet the fitness goals you’ve set for yourself, in terms of metrics like steps per week, miles walked, or calories burned, for […]

 As Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, gears up to report its quarterly earnings next week, it looks like the company is making some moves to beef up its primary business line, advertising. TechCrunch has learned that the company has acquired Metamarkets, an ad tech startup that provides programmatic ad data-related services to marketers, such as […]

 I’ll be rolling through Oman next week for a conference and I thought it would be fun to see what the region has to offer. I’m holding one of my patented MicroMeetups in Muscat, Oman on Thursday November 9th from 3pm to 6:30pm. We will meet at the Sheraton Oman. There is no RSVP list […]

 Snapchat’s mobile app fell out of the top 10 for the first time this year during Q3 2017, according to a recent report from Sensor Tower. The app, which had been ranked at #8 during Q2 2017 dropped to #18 on iOS during the quarter, but remained ranked at #2 on Google Play. Combined, that […]

 Facebook Questions first launched in 2010 as a Quora wannabe before shifting into lighter-weight polls, but Facebook shut down the feature in 2012. Apparently it was just ahead of its time, as Facebook went poll-crazy this year. Now the social network is launching Facebook Polls, with the options of using photos or GIFs as answers. Polls […]

 Kat Kinkead and Peter Weijmarshausen met at their old company, Shapeways. Weijmarshausen recently stepped down as CEO and was looking for something cool to do when he and Kinkead realized that the most popular application of 3D scanning and printing was in 3D figurines. These tiny action-figure-like representations were wildly popular print subjects back at […]

 Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was a treat due to the huge news cycle we followed. So, Katie Roof and I — Alex Wilhelm — brought David Golden into the studio to help us carve through it all. Golden is a […]

 Apple’s blockbuster Q4 pushed the company’s valuation to $900 billion, but it also saw the firm return to growth in key market China following a challenging past couple of years. Analysts already reported that Apple saw shipment growth in China during the last quarter with a 41 percent increase, but now the company’s latest financial […]