Geofenced sharing, Quiz stickers, Stories Highlight stickers, and a separate interface for adding hashtags to posts are amongst a slew of new features Instagram has prototyped or is now testing. The last one could finally #cure #the #hashtag #madness that’s infected many of Instagram’s 1 billion users, causing them desperately fill up their captions with…
SK Planet, one of Korea’s largest telecommunications firms, is looking to step up its blockchain game with a nationwide collaboration. The telecom giant has signed a memorandum of understanding with the ICON Foundation. The cooperation will see SK planet integrate blockchain into a number of existing products, such as OK Cashbag. The collaboration aims to…
Atlanta-based consumer credit reporting agency Equifax has been issued a £500,000 fine by the UK’s privacy watchdog for its last year’s massive data breach that exposed personal and financial data of hundreds of millions of its customers. Yes, £500,000—that’s the maximum fine allowed by the UK’s Data Protection Act 1998, though the penalty is apparently…
NEWSBYTE Chinese ecommerce and technology giant Alibaba has announced that it is to set up a dedicated chip subsidiary. It aims to launch its first self-developed AI inference chip, which could be used for autonomous driving, smart city applications, and logistics, in the second half of 2019, the company said yesterday. The new subsidiary will…
Disrupt Berlin 2018 takes place on 29-30 November, and we simply can’t wait to see you all there. We always get super stoked about Startup Alley, the Disrupt exhibition hall, where hundreds of innovative early-stage startups display the very latest tech products, platforms and services. Now, the only thing better than exhibiting in Startup Alley…
Credit rating giant Equifax has been issued with the maximum possible penalty by the UK’s data protection agency for last year’s massive data breach. Albeit, the fine is only £500,000 because the loss of customer data occurred when the UK’s prior privacy regime was in force — rather than the tough new data protection law,…
Does deeper data produce perfect matches? Facebook is finally ready to find out, starting today with a country-wide test in Colombia of its Dating feature. It’s centered around an algorithm-powered homescreen of Suggested romantic matches based on everything Facebook knows about you that other apps don’t. There’s no swiping and it’s not trying to look…
The earliest adopters of Bitcoin — the libertarian anarchist “cypherpunk” crowd — were mostly men. Today, roughly a decade after Satoshi Nakamoto’s famed white paper was released, the majority of cryptocurrency holders are still men. This poses a problem for the companies betting on the mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency. At this point, they’ve already tapped into…
Omobola Johnson (Image: Flickr/World Economic Forum under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 TechCrunch Startup Battlefield is returning to Africa in December, this time in Lagos, Nigeria. We will have a day-long program full of our flagship Battlefield competition highlighting the best startups that Africa has to offer. Not only that, we’ll have panel discussions designed to…
The entire Bitcoin infrastructure has been issued with a stern warning: update Bitcoin BTC Core software or risk having the whole thing collapse. Until now, anyone could have brought down the entire Bitcoin blockchain by flooding full node operators with traffic, via a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. “A denial-of-service vulnerability (CVE-2018-17144) exploitable by miners has…
