Facebook says birthday fundraisers have raised more than $300 million over the past year – TechCrunch

Facebook marked the first anniversary of its birthday fundraisers by revealing that more than $300 million in donations have been raised through the feature, which lets users mark their birthdays by creating a donation drive for an organization of their choice. About 750,000 non-profits currently have access to Facebook’s fundraising tools (but not every user,…

Shelf Engine uses machine learning to stop food waste from eating into store margins – TechCrunch

Shelf Engine’s team While running Molly’s, the Seattle-based ready meal wholesaler he founded, Stefan Kalb was upset about its 28 percent food wastage rate. Feeling that the amount was “astronomical,” he began researching how to lower it — and was shocked to discovered Molly’s was actually outperforming the industry average. Confronted by the sheer amount…

Twitter puts Infowars’ Alex Jones in the ‘read-only’ sin bin for 7 days – TechCrunch

Twitter has finally taken action against Infowars creator Alex Jones, but it isn’t what you might think. While Apple, Facebook, Google/YouTube, Spotify and many others have removed Jones and his conspiracy-peddling organization Infowars from their platforms, Twitter has remained unmoved with its claim that Jones hasn’t violated rules on its platform. That was helped in…

Revcontent is trying to get rid of misinformation with help from the Poynter Institute – TechCrunch

CEO John Lemp recently said that thanks to a new policy, publishers in Revcontent‘s content recommendation network “won’t ever make a cent” on false and misleading stories — at least, not from the network. To achieve this, the company is relying on fact-checking provided by the Poynter Institute’s International Fact Checking Network. If any two independent…

AR startup Ubiquity6 lands $27M Series B to build a more user-friendly augmented reality – TechCrunch

While nearly every tech giant has publicly proclaimed augmented reality the next frontier to conquer, product movement has been relatively slow as the companies’ aim to nail very base issues in consumer-friendly ways has proven difficult. Ubiquity6 is one of a handful of startups aiming to tackle the backlog of backend features currently missing from…