Facebook And Eutelsat Partner To Deliver Internet To Africa From Space

space globe shutterstock As part of Internet.org, its initiative to bring billions of people around the world online, Facebook will partner with Eutelsat to launch a new satellite that will provide Internet access to parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. Internet.org’s network infrastructure already includes drones and a laser communication system that are now undergoing lab tests, but this is its first project to… Read More

Yes, Facebook Is Down

fb Yes, friends, the (not really) unimaginable has happened: the titan that is Facebook is down. We don’t usually raise our eyebrows too high when Facebook goes down for a minute, but it’s been in and out for a good 20 (update: 30!)minutes now. For a company that makes millions in revenue per day, every minute is tens of thousands of dollars in ad revenue lost. We’ve hit up… Read More

President Bill Clinton Steps Into VR

Screen Shot 2015-09-28 at 11.58.47 AM As I mentioned during my VR panel at TC Disrupt last week, Bill Clinton has been messing around with virtual reality. Today, Felix & Paul Studios’ production “Inside Impact: East Africa” has hit both Oculus (Oculus Store for Gear VP Innovator Edition) and Facebook 360 degree video. For the video embedded below, hit play and drag the screen around to get the full… Read More

Instagram Hits 400M Users Just Nine Months After Announcing 300M

instagram-app Today, Facebook-owned photograph-centric social network Instagram announced that it has hit 400M users. This comes just 9 months after announcing that it hit the 300M mark.
Looks like they’ll have to update this chart:

Here’s what the team had to say about hitting the 400M user mark:
Our community has evolved to be even more global, with more than 75 percent living outside of the US. Read More

Is Virtual Reality Gaming Bound To Crash?

 Techies of all varieties constantly look forward to the next great revolution. For video gamers, that revolution promises to be virtual reality. Countless new companies have emerged to research and develop virtual reality hardware, while existing…

CrunchWeek: iOS 9 Is A Hit, Facebook Has Empathy, & Snapchat’s Rainbow Barfers

crunchweek-4-3 Hello fellow disrupters, and welcome to another episode of CrunchWeek, TechCrunch’s weekly roundup show where we talk the biggest things in tech. This week we’re chatting about iOS 9 landing, WatchOS2 not, Facebook’s working on a not-dislike emoji button and people are rainbow barfing all over Snapchat. Also, we invite Ahmed to join us in the TechCrunch studio the next time… Read More

Facebook’s Not-Quite-A-Dislike Button Could Just Be Emoji

Facebook Emoji How do you convey empathy concisely and unambiguously across languages?  The Dislike button has been the most requested feature from Facebook’s users for years. Finally, this week CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed the company is building a way for people “to express that they understand and that they relate to you” when you share something sad, such as news of a natural disaster… Read More

Boz Led Facebook To Conquer Mobile Ads. He’ll Tell Disrupt SF How To Adapt

boz Facebook has become the supermassive black hole of mobile. It’s sucking every other business towards it, from publishers to small businesses to app developers. At this point, you ever figure out how to play nice with Facebook, or fade into the void. That’s why TechCrunch is bringing Facebook’s ad czar Andrew “Boz” Bosworth to Disrupt SF. He’s going to break… Read More