World Of News

Want to rock out together even when you’re apart? Spotify has prototyped an unreleased feature called “Social Listening” that lets multiple people add songs to a queue they can all listen to. You just all scan one friend’s QR-style Spotify Social Listening code, and then anyone can add songs to the real-time playlist. Spotify could potentially expand the feature to synchronize playback so you’d actually hear the same notes at the same time, but for now it’s a just a shared queue. Social Listening could give Spotify a new viral growth channel, as users could urge friends to download the app to sync up. The intimate experience of co-listening might lead to longer sessions with Spotify, boosting ad plays or subscription retention. Plus it could differentiate Spotify from Apple Music, YouTube Music, Tidal, and other competing streaming services. A Spotify spokesperson tells TechCrunch that “We’re always testing new products and experiences, but have no further news to share at this time...

Tinder this morning announced a second, more premium version of its most popular a la carte purchase, Boost , with the launch of Super Boost — an upgrade only offered to Tinder Plus and Tinder Gold premium subscribers. The idea with the new product is to extract additional revenues out of those users who have already demonstrated a willingness to pay for the dating app, while also offering others another incentive to upgrade to a paid Tinder subscription. Similar to Boost, which puts you on top of the stack of profiles shown to potential matches for 30 minutes, Super Boost also lets you cut the line. Tinder says the option will be shown to select Tinder Plus and Tinder Gold subscribers during peak activity times, and only at night. Once purchased and activated, Super Boost promises the chance to be seen by up to 100 times more potential matches. By comparison, Boost only increases profile views by up to 10 times. Also like Boost, Super Boost may not have a set price point. Tinder p...

Microsoft has issued its second advisory this month urging users to update their systems to prevent a re-run of attacks similar to WannaCry. The software giant said Thursday that the recently discovered “wormable” vulnerability in Remote Desktop Services for Windows can allow attackers to remotely run code on a vulnerable computer — such as malware or ransomware. Worse, the vulnerability allows it to spread to other computers on the same network “in a similar way as the WannaCry malware,” which spread across the globe in 2017 causing billions of dollars in damage. A patch was released earlier this month on Microsoft’s usual patch release day — its so-called Patch Tuesday. And though there’s no signs of an active attack yet, “this does not mean that we’re out of the woods,” the company said. Microsoft said it’s “confident” that an exploit exists for the vulnerability, putting close to one million computers directly connected to the internet are at risk. But that figure could be fa...

Just over a month ago, Emtek announced the end of BlackBerry Messenger for consumers. The once mighty messaging service had a good run, outstripping the popularity of its hardware namesake. Launched in 2005, licensing rights for the service were acquired by Indonesia-based tech conglomerate Emtek 11 years later. For many years, BBM was considered BlackBerry’s (nee Research in Motion) strongest product, with some loyalists eschewing Android and iOS devices before it was finally ported over to those operating systems in 2013. But competition ultimately proved too much. Technology and the world moved away from BBM and BlackBerry at large. The rewards, it seems, weren’t worth the resources. “We poured our hearts into making this a reality, and we are proud of what we have built to date,” Emtek wrote in a blog post last month. “The technology industry however, is very fluid, and in spite of our substantial efforts, users have moved on to other platforms, while new users proved difficul...

Hello and welcome back to  Equity , TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. It’s our first week in the new TechCrunch podcast studio, or it was for Kate Clark and Chris Gates . Alex Wilhelm will be back around SF next week. For now, we fired up the mics and dug into what was a veritable barrage of news. First, Paul Graham’s contentious comments. The co-founder of Y Combinator tweeted some criticism of the tech press on Thursday; naturally, Kate and Alex had a few thoughts. In summary, Graham doesn’t seem to understand what it is we tech journalists do and that’s a problem. When a startup is small, it seems cute and the press writes encouragingly about it. When it reaches the size where they can get attention by attacking it, they do that instead. — Paul Graham (@paulg) May 30, 2019 Next up was Uber’s first quarter numbers . Given how strongly the company had signaled this set of results, the earnings report wa...

Odds of the U.S. and China cooling off their trade war further diminished on Friday after the world’s most populous nation said it would create a list of “unreliable” foreign firms of its own. Gao Feng, a spokesman of China’s commerce ministry, said today that the nation will create an “entity list” that will include, in part, foreign companies that have stopped or curtailed their businesses with Chinese firms. “Foreign enterprises, organisations or individuals that do not comply with market rules, deviate from a contract’s spirit or impose blockades or stop supplies to Chinese enterprises for non-commercial purposes, and seriously damage the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese enterprises, will be included on a list of ‘unreliable entities’,” he was quoted  (in Chinese) as saying by local media. The retaliation comes weeks after the U.S. Commerce Department enlisted Huawei and 68 affiliates in an entity list over national security concerns, thereby requiring American co...

Reeling from the ongoing U.S.-China trade war , Chinese technology giant Huawei has found itself in yet another dilemma: How to pursue internal communications with its own U.S. employees? For now, the company has ordered its Chinese employees to bar technical meetings with their U.S. contacts and sent home the American workers deployed in research and development functions in Shenzhen headquarters. Dang Wenshuan, Huawei’s chief strategy architect, told the Financial Times that the company has also limited general communications between its Chinese and U.S. workers. The move comes as the Chinese technology giant scrambles to comply with the murky laws after its weeks-long tension with the U.S. government sees no signs of resolution in the immediate future. The Chinese giant is also controlling the subjects of interactions workers in its campus have with overseas visitors. The conversations cannot touch topics related to technology, the FT report said. Dang said the company was just t...