Category: apps
Seoul-based payment tech startup CHAI gets $60 million from Hanhwa, SoftBank Ventures Asia
Demand for contactless payments and e-commerce has grown in South Korea during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is good news for payment service operators, but the market is very fragmented, so adding payment options is a time-consuming process for many merchants. CHAI wants to fix this with an API that enables…
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Facebook adds carts to WhatsApp to make shopping easier
WhatsApp said on Tuesday it is adding a new shopping feature to its app as the Facebook -owned instant messaging service looks to court more merchants and invite a larger portion of its 2 billion userbase to shop. The instant messaging platform, where business accounts already process messages from more…
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Spam calls grew 18% this year despite the global pandemic
Despite several efforts from carriers, telecom regulators, mobile operating system developers, smartphone makers, and a global pandemic, spam calls continued to pester and scam people around the globe this year — and they only got worse. Users worldwide received 31.3 billion spam calls between January and October this year, up…
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Second federal judge rules against Trump administration’s TikTok ban
Another federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction against U.S. government restrictions that would have effectively banned TikTok from operating in the United States. The ruling (embedded below) was made by U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols in a lawsuit filed by TikTok and ByteDance against President Donald Trump, Secretary…
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This Week in Apps: The year’s best apps, 2020’s biggest downloads, the App Store’s newest hire
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People now spend three hours and 40 minutes per day…
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Grab-Singtel and Ant Group win digital bank licenses in Singapore
Singapore on Friday granted four firms including Ant Group and Grab the licenses to run digital banks in the Southeast Asian country, in a move that would allow tech giants to expand their financial services offerings. The nation’s central bank, Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), said it applied a “rigorous,…
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