Unicorn chat app Tango shuts down its e-commerce feature, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have a rocket
pissing content on Twitter, Square readers are now supporting Apple Pay. and more...
It's Tuesday November 24th, and this is Crunch Report.
Tango, the mobile messaging app that hit a billion dollar valuation when Alibaba invested
$280 million in it early last year, is pulling back on an e-commerce effort and laying off
around 9% of its staff, or 30 employees. The commerce feature was linked to Alibaba and
Walmart inventory and launched back in May in the U.S., but the company now tells TechCrunch
that ‘Tango Shop’ was closed down last month after the initiative didn't pan out.
Tango now has 270 staff across its U.S. office and a smaller presence in Beijing, China.
Back in May when Tango Shop launched, the company claimed 300 million registered users,
but isn't updating that number on this most recent news. Which probably means user growth
isn't very exciting. Tango is somewhat of a chat veteran, first coming onto the scene
as a mobile video calling service back in 2009.
You know how Jeff Bezos has that space company, Blue Origin? Things appear to be going well.
Blue Origin's “New Shepard” vehicle flew to space... well specifically, reached its
suborbit test altitude of 329,839 feet and then successfully landed vertically at the
launch site in West Texas. Bezos tweeted of the feat: "The rarest of beasts - a used rocket.
Controlled landing not easy, but done right, can look easy." Elon Musk, whose competitor
company SpaceX has been very publicly attempting similar milestones, first congratulated Bezos
on Twitter, which is very nice of him.... but then, he took the opportunity to explain
that "space" and "orbit" aren't the same thing, and then got into Mach 3 vs. Mach 30, and
mentioned SpaceX's Falcon 1 Grasshopper... and in general just let all of us know that
SpaceX did everything Blue Origin did, first. Billionaire space CEOs, splitting hairs about
vertical takeoff and landings. It's a wonderful life.
Newly public payments company Square has announced its new wireless card reader is now available
to pre-order on its website for $49, for shipment in early 2016. The big new feature is support
for Apple Pay, plus an NFC chip and a tokenization system for a variety of secure contactless
payments. If you can't pay with your phone for some reason, the new reader's design now
has a slot for chip cards too, which should make Square adoption in Europe a lot more
attractive. Being that it's wireless, a small built-in battery inside is rechargeable with
a standard microUSB port. Square says 100 retailers are already using the new reader,
which is a pretty small rollout... but I say any Apple Pay expansion is a good one. Speaking
of, sources cited by a new Dow Jones report claim that Apple plans to have Apple Pay live
in China by February 2016. China is Apple's big cash cow now, where revenue jumped 99%
year-over-year to reach $12.51 billion in the company's most recent quarter. Alipay
and Tencent’s WePay, which is the payments service inside the crazy popular WeChat app,
are currently the front runners in China’s mobile payments race.
It took me a while to warm up to Twitter's 6-second looping video app Vine. But over
the years, I've come around. Vines are excellent, and educational. And Today, Vine is letting
us all discover new Vines that have things in common with Vines we already like. So say
you're browsing a channel or through your own feed, you can now swipe left on a Vine
and see some more good stuff. For me, it's cat butts. For you, maybe, Justin Beiber.
It doesn't always work, but it's clearly helping me discover stuff I wouldn't see otherwise.
Vine actually launched a Similar Vines feature back in October for Android and then iOS,
but the swipe left feature is new, instead of having to click the “Similar Vines”
tab under the post. Good for discovery for sure. Oh, and Vine's app is now Apple Watch
compatible, and if you're seriously into it, you can add Vine as a watch face that will
show your account’s total loops. ]
Tis the season to buy junky gifts for people who probably don't really want them. Do you
feel like doing that? Yeah me neither. Luckily, companies like Magic, Operator, Fetch, GoButler,
even Facebook, are all testing out messaging-based virtual assistants that help you buy pretty
much anything from gifts to restaurant reservations, airline tickets, all sorts of things you might
not feel like doing yourself. And now Google's trialing ITS own SMS-based alerting service,
with a special focus on helping holiday shoppers in the U.S. find the best deals. The company
announced in a Google+ post that it would be adding this service earlier this month,
and today the blog Google Operating System noticed a new option to “subscribe” to
Black Friday phone deals on a mobile phone after a related search. Now Google explains
these “deal alerts” are actually an AdWords option that’s being trialed with a limited
number of advertisers, but didn't elaborate on ad pricing or which companies are participating.
That’s the report for today. I’m Sarah Lane.
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