Josh Constine
TechCrunch
San Francisco, CA, United States
Contact Josh
Discover and connect with journalists and influencers around the world, save time on email research, monitor the news, and more.
| Recent: |
|
Recent articles by Josh:
Apple acquires talking Barbie voicetech startup PullString
Apple has just bought up the talent it needs to make talking toys a part of Siri, HomePod, and its voice strategy. Apple has acquired PullString, also known as ToyTalk, according to Axios’ Dan Primack and Ina Fried. → Read More
First look at Twitter’s Snapchatty new Camera feature
Twitter has been secretly developing an enhanced camera feature that’s accessible with a swipe from the home screen and allows you to overlay captions on photos, videos, and Live broadcasts before sharing them to the timeline. → Read More
Instagram is now testing a web version of Direct messages
Insta-chat addicts, rejoice. You could soon be trading memes and emojis from your computer. Instagram is internally testing a web version of Instagram Direct messaging that let’s people chat without the app. → Read More
Medium buys Bay Area mag The Bold Italic to add to its paywall
Medium is seeking to juice up its premium subscription content in its home market with the acquisition of The Bold Italic. The 10-year-old culture magazine will go behind the $5 per month Medium Membership paywall. → Read More
Apple fails to block porn & gambling “Enterprise” apps
Facebook and Google were far from the only developers openly abusing Apple’s Enterprise Certificate program meant for companies offering employee-only apps. → Read More
Reddit confirms $300M Series D led by China’s Tencent at $3B value
Last week TechCrunch reported that Reddit was raising $150 million from Chinese tech giant Tencent and up to $150 million more in a Series D that would value the company at $2.7 billion pre-money or $3 billion post-money. → Read More
Sean Parker’s govtech Brigade breaks up, Pinterest acqhires engineers
Facebook co-founder Sean Parker bankrolled Brigade to get out the vote and stimulate civic debate, but after five years and little progress the startup is splitting up, multiple sources confirm to TechCrunch. → Read More
The plot to revive Mt. Gox and repay victims’ Bitcoin
It was the Lehman Brothers of blockchain. 850,000 Bitcoin disappeared when cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox imploded in 2014 after a series of hacks. The incident cemented the industry’s reputation as frighteningly insecure. → Read More
Facebook will reveal who uploaded your contact info for ad targeting
Facebook’s crack down on non-consensual ad targeting last year will finally produce results. → Read More
Snapchat stops losing users but shrinks losses in Q4
Snapchat isn’t growing again, but at least it didn’t hemorrhage any more users in its Q4 earnings report. → Read More
Snapchat’s Android usage keeps falling but rebuild tests promising
Snap has finally begun publicly testing the engineering overhaul of its slow and buggy Android app that for years has cost Snapchat users. → Read More
Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3 billion valuation
Reddit is raising $150 million to $300 million to keep the front page of the Internet running, multiple sources tell TechCrunch. The forthcoming Series D round is said to be led by Chinese tech giant Tencent at a $2.7 billion pre-money valuation. → Read More
Facebook now lets everyone unsend messages for up to 10 minutes
Facebook has finally made good on its promise to let users unsend chats after TechCrunch discovered Mark Zuckerberg had secretly retracted some of his Facebook Messages from recipients. → Read More
Account linking could make Instagram the heir to Facebook Login
Teens’ aversion to Facebook jeopardizes not only the company’s feed ad revenue, but its dominance as an identity provider. → Read More
We dismantle Facebook’s memo defending its Research data-grab
Facebook published an internal memo today trying to minimize the morale damage of TechCrunch’investigation that revealed it’d been paying people to suck in all their phone data. → Read More
Apple reactivates Facebook’s employee apps after punishment for Research spying
After TechCrunch caught Facebook violating Apple’s employee-only app distribution policy to pay people for all their phone data, Apple invalidated the social network’s Enterprise Certificate as punishment. → Read More
Kleiner Perkins gets back to early stage with its $600M 18th fund
“KP used be a small team doing hands-on company building. We’re moving away from being this institution with multiple products and really just focusing on early stage venture capital” Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman tells me. → Read More
Twitter cuts off API access to follow/unfollow spam dealers
Notification spam ruins social networks, diluting the real human interaction. Desperate to gain an audience, users pay services to rapidly follow and unfollow tons of people in hopes that some will follow them back. → Read More
Instagram Stories hits 500M daily users as Facebook plans new products
Roughly half of Instagram’s users 1 billion users now use Instagram Stories every day. That 500 million daily user count is up from 400 million in June 2018. → Read More
Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite scandals
Facebook managed to beat Wall Street’s estimates in its Q4 earnings amidst a constant beat down in the press. Facebook hit 2.32 billion monthly users, up 2.2 perecent from 2.27 billion last quarter, speeding up its growth rate. → Read More