TECHCRUNCH.COM — Visionaries Club, a new European VC focussing on B2B, is disclosing that it has raised two micro funds of €40 million each, aimed at pre-seed/seed and Series respectively. The Berlin-based VC firm is founded by Sebastian Pollok and Robert Lacher. Pollok was a VC at e.ventures in San Francisco and also founded Amorelie, which exited to to Pro7Sat.1 Media Group at a valuation over $100m in 2018.

TECHCRUNCH.COM — Fintech startup N26 is raising $170 million a few months after raising $300 million. While it’s technically structured as a new round, the company considers today’s new funding as an extension of the Series D round. has only reached out to existing investors. All the investors in the Series D round are investing again, as well as a few investors that have been around for a while.

BLOG.HOOTSUITE.COM — Blog / Social Your Instagram aesthetic is the first thing potential customers will notice when they check out your brand’s profile. The colors, layout, tone, and overall feeling of your Instagram page contribute to an aesthetic that can either gain you a new follower—or send them…

FORBES.COM — Each year for the past five, Forbes has searched the country for the 25 venture-backed startups most likely to reach $1 billion in value. Graduates include: food delivery service DoorDash, home seller Opendoor, luggage brand Away and synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks. This year, with the…

FORBES.COM — Red faces in Moscow this weekend, with the news that hackers have successfully targeted FSB—Russia’s Federal Security Service, making off with 7.5 terabytes of data which exposed secret projects to de-anonymize Tor browsing, scrape social media, and help the state split its internet off from the…

BLOG.HOOTSUITE.COM — Blog / Social Facebook targeting tools and resources are so effective that they’ve earned the platform billions in advertising revenue. More than two billion people use Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, or WhatsApp every day. That allows Facebook to collect a trove of information…

BLOG.HOOTSUITE.COM — Blog / Social Facebook targeting tools and resources are so effective that they’ve earned the platform billions in advertising revenue. More than two billion people use Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, or WhatsApp every day. That allows Facebook to collect a trove of information…

BLOG.HOOTSUITE.COM — Blog / Social What does YouTube advertising look like in 2019? For one, it’s one of the world’s biggest platforms for advertisers. The numbers don’t lie. YouTube is also the second-biggest search engine after Google, with 1.9 billion monthly active users. 50 million of those users…

MASHABLE.COM — Thatgamecompany co-founder Jenonva Chen, the mind behind wildly acclaimed titles like Journey and Flower, designs games with one simple but seemingly impossible goal: to create virtual worlds where people are nice to each other. In 2012, the monolithic Journey achieved that seemingly impossible task.

MASHABLE.COM — It’s easy to assume that queer consumers are driving this prostate explosion, but that would be a mistake. As the sexologist Carol Queen points out, “our culture tends to conflate anal play and prostate pleasure with gay and bi men,” even though not all men who have sex with men engage in anal…

TECHCRUNCH.COM — Instagram this morning announced several changes to its moderation policy, the most significant of which is that it will now warn users if their account could become disabled before that actually takes place. This change goes to address a longstanding issue where users would launch Instagram only to find that their account had been shut down without any warning.

BLOG.HOOTSUITE.COM — Blog / Social Every business—small, medium, or large—should have a social strategy, and every strategy should be backed by a social media budget. Budgeting helps you ensure you’ll have the funds to achieve your goals, whether that’s promoting a new business or driving sales on a new…

FORBES.COM — Everyone’s seen them: friends posting pictures of themselves now, and years in the future. Viral app FaceApp has been giving people the power to change their facial expressions, looks, and now age for several years. But at the same time, people have been giving FaceApp the power to use their…

WIRED.COM — The messages started arriving on a Sunday afternoon in mid-May. “Just wanted to draw your attention to this,” one began. “Rumors are starting to surface,” another informed me. “I’d be very interested in getting your thoughts,” a third suggested. My correspondents, mostly strangers, were polite…

SOCIALMEDIATODAY.COM — Twitter can be a powerful tool in any company’s or professional’s arsenal. The platform can help you rocket to success and stand out from the crowd – but, you’ll only be able to achieve out of this world results if you know how to release the true potential of tweets. Chances are, you aren’t getting everything out of Twitter that you could be – and you might even be wasting valuable time (or even losing followers) by performing the wrong actions, or focusing on the wrong elements.

SOCIALMEDIATODAY.COM — Yet at the same time, as is always the case with buzzwords, there’s also a lot of mistrust and misconceptions around the process. What is social listening? How is it different from social media monitoring? And can it actually benefit your business in any meaningful way? There’s a heap of educational resources which look at the value of social listening, and the many different ways it can benefit your marketing strategy – but it’s not often that I see an article which explains how social listening data ties into a bigger picture – how it represents where your company currently stands and can impact your business strategy in the long run.

BLOG.HOOTSUITE.COM — Blog / Social What is a social media style guide? It’s where you go to know how your brand should look and behave on social. It’s a document you create and share, showing the right voice, tone, colors, words, and visuals that makes your brand you. It’s not your content marketing…

TECHCRUNCH.COM — Retailers and brands have both seen a tremendous shift in traditional retail dynamics, with merchants and marketplaces increasingly ceding control of the online and in-store shopping experience to the brands themselves. Democratizing access to data through new verticalized tools, however, represents a unique opportunity for retailers to leverage this trend by further transforming the retail dynamic and changing their role in the process.

MASHABLE.COM — Over the past few days, brands have been trying to find their way into the parody Facebook event that involves over 1 million people planning to storm the military base Area 51, which is synonymous with alien conspiracies. “If we Naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Lets see them aliens,” the event description read.

MASHABLE.COM — The next time you’re on a plane you might want to pause before browsing the in-flight entertainment options and reach for some sanitizer. For all you know, the screen you’re about to touch could be glazed with… someone’s foot sweat. Though the screens on plane walls and seat backs are mounted around eye level so passengers can easily reach out their arms and use their fingers to swipe through the selections, one traveler was recently spotted using his FOOT to operate the touch screen.