📸 Mini moneymakers: Mavely, a social commerce app for influencers, reports that it is seeing strong year-over-year growth. The secret to Mavely's success may lie in the fact that the company doesn't have a follower count requirement for people to join, unlike some of its competitors. Read more
🔊 Space jam: Space is loud, apparently. Whisper Aero is building quieter tech and just landed a new NASA contract to make the International Space Station a little quieter. Read more
🖥️ X is calling: X is building a videoconference tool. There is no official rollout or release date yet, but the company has started testing internal calls in the program. I think we should all be spending less time, not more, on X during work. Read more
📳 Tablet time: Snapchat now has an iPad-native app. Users have always been able to download Snapchat on their iPad and just use a slightly larger version of the traditional mobile app, but now there is an app made for the tablet. What took them so long? Read more
🪖 Operation advertisement: The U.S. military released psychological operations ads — ads meant to influence a targeted group — warning Lebanon not to attack the U.S. or its allies. Some of these ads ended up on Tinder. The dating app removed them. Read more
🎧 Career lessons: LinkedIn co-founder Eric Ly has been in Silicon Valley since childhood and a startup founder since the 1990s. Ly came on TechCrunch's Found podcast to talk about his lessons learned and what's changed in the startup and venture markets over the last few decades. Listen here
🚗 Verification: Lyft announced today that it is rolling out a rider verification pilot program. This is meant to help drivers identify who they are picking up for increased security. The pilot program will start in nine cities; there is no word on when or where it might expand. Read more
🤑 What's for sale? A lot of consumers in LatAm like to shop through WhatsApp, but brands aren't well-equipped to do so. Mercately is building the back-end software to make it easier for companies to land sales in the messaging platform. It just raised $2.6 million. Read more
