Archive
Category: Dev
Square’s Online Store Opens up to Large Sellers With New Developer Tools
Square’s efforts to attract large sellers to its platform are gaining traction based on its latest quarterly earnings report. The company says that its mid-market sellers grew by 43 percent annually, twice its total Gross Payment Volume (GPV) growth. To further that momentum, Square is launching a developer API giving these merchants access to not […]
Facebook’s VR (Dys)topia
As I watched Facebook unveil the latest developments in virtual reality at last month’s Oculus Connect developer conference, there were two things going through my mind. First, there’s excitement in hearing about the latest game titles that’ll be available with Oculus VR, but it’s the second that has me the most concerned: the VR incarnation […]
Zendesk’s New Developer Platform Lets Brands Incorporate Customer Chat Support Into Apps
“If you don’t reach them on channels where they communicate, you’ll lose them,” Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane told me in an interview three years ago. It was at that time when the company head detailed how the customer service and support landscape was changing. “You have to embrace all the platforms, but you have to […]
Square Banks on Developer Platform to Woo Larger Sellers in March Upmarket
“The journey is one of peaks and valleys,” Carl Perry remarked, describing in a cautiously optimistic tone the progress made with the developer program he manages at Square. For more than six years, the commerce company has gradually opened more of itself up to third-party developers in a bid to bring its experience to more […]
Facebook Touts Privacy Future, But Critics Question Sincerity
“Today we are going to talk about building a privacy-focused social platform,” said Mark Zuckerberg as he began his keynote address at this year’s F8 developer conference. Facebook’s soon-to-be 35-year old chief executive took the stage to introduce the world to what he hoped his creation could become, one that pressured its users to be […]
Mark Zuckerberg To Make Case To Developers That Privacy Is A Good Thing
On a May morning, Mark Zuckerberg, weeks after an intense grilling by members of Congress, made what would be his first public address, telling a room full of developers: We have real challenges to address, but we have to keep [our optimism for the future] as well. And what I’ve learned this year is that […]
Google Summons the Power of YouTube and the Cloud in Bid to Shake up Gaming
At this year’s Game Developers Conference, Google introduced its game-streaming service called Stadia touted as an industry wake-up call and aiming not only at incumbents Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft but going after Amazon and its subsidiary Twitch. Perplexing name-aside, Stadia’s appeal may be its lack of hardware — Google is drawing from not only its […]
Samsung Woos Developers With AI Fund, Mirroring Amazon’s Playbook
Editor’s Note: This post about Samsung launching its Q Fund was originally published on the now-defunct All Turtles blog in June 2018. You can read other articles I’ve written for that site here. We’re in a gold rush-like moment where the biggest tech companies are staking their claims to capitalize on the soaring demand for voice assistants […]
Begin Shuttering Slack-Based Task Management Tool To Pursue The Serverless Stack
Nearly two months ago, Ryan Block launched a Slack bot called Begin with a goal of improving our workplace productivity. But on Thursday, his company announced a major change: The bot is being shuttered in favor of pivoting to become a “continuous delivery platform.” For some, the termination of Begin’s current incarnation might be stunning, […]
Facebook’s Likely Message to Developers at F8: Hear Us Out
Facebook’s F8 developer conference is right around the corner (May 1-2) and while the past few years have been more celebratory and designed to further modernize the company’s ecosystem, the 2018 edition will likely be a bit subdued. Weighing on people’s minds is the latest controversy plaguing Facebook namely, how it uses our data. Whether […]