On the heels of Tumblr’s decision to integrate with ActivityPub — the social protocol powering the open source Twitter alternative Mastodon and others — it appears that photo-sharing site Flickr is now considering doing the same. Flickr CEO Don MacAskill today began to actively poll users about whether or not they’d like to see Flickr support the protocol, too. If it moved forward with this plan, Flickr would be the latest larger company to commit to joining the “fediverse” — the interconnected group of independent servers across the globe running free, open source software that allows their u ..read more

Flickr isn’t very good at making money, but as the old adage goes, sex sells. So, in an attempt to draw in more paying subscribers, Flickr changed its content guidelines to only allow Flickr Pro users to post “restricted” or “moderate” content, which includes photos of “full-frontal nudity and sexual acts.”  Honestly, it’s not a bad move — it might be more effective than asking subscribers to recruit their friends to pay for Flickr. When SmugMug acquired the photo-hosting service in 2018, CEO Don MacAskill hoped to make the service profitable, calling it “core to the entire fabric of the ..read more

When in April of last year, the photo-hosting service SmugMug acquired the photo-hosting service Flickr from Verizon’s digital media subsidiary, SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill said he was committed to breathing new life into the service, calling it “core to the entire fabric of the Internet.” MacAskill didn’t reveal at the time how much SmugMug — which is itself an independent, family-owned operation — paid for Flickr. But it seems now that SmugMug may have underestimated its carrying costs. In an email tonight to users of Flickr who pay roughly $50 annually for the service, MacAskill has basical ..read more

Slack’s public debut is happening Thursday on the NYSE and the company has set a reference price of $26 per share for its direct listing, according to WSJ, which would value the company at around $15.7 billion. The company’s stock is expected to pop at open, according to the WSJ’s sources. Slack is pursuing a direct listing, eschewing the typical IPO process in favor of putting its current stock on to the NYSE without doing an additional raise or bringing on underwriter banking partners. This isn’t a first for the technology industry, as Spotify did the same thing about this time last year, b ..read more

Let’s rewind a decade. It’s 2009. Vancouver, Canada. Stewart Butterfield, known already for his part in building Flickr, a photo-sharing service acquired by Yahoo in 2005, decided to try his hand — again — at building a game. Flickr had been a failed attempt at a game called Game Neverending followed by a big pivot. This time, Butterfield would make it work. To make his dreams a reality, he joined forces with Flickr’s original chief software architect Cal Henderson, as well as former Flickr employees Eric Costello and Serguei Mourachov, who like himself, had served some time at Yahoo after ..read more

The African no-fee, cross-border payment startup Chipper Cash has raised a $2.4 million seed round led by Deciens Capital. The payments company also persuaded 500 Startups and Liquid 2 Ventures — co-founded by Joe Montana — to join the round. Chipper Cash’s Ugandan chief executive, Ham Serunjogi, pitched the U.S. football legend directly. “He was quite excited about what we’re doing and his belief that the next wave of [tech] growth will come from…Africa,” Serunjogi told TechCrunch. Chipper Cash went live in October 2018, joining a growing field of fintech startups aiming to scale digital fina ..read more

While the world marvels at the first black hole image ever taken, a Chinese photo-sharing community is setting off a huge public outcry over its use of the landmark photo and a wider debate over copyrights practices in China. As soon as the European Southern Observatory released the black hole photo on April 10, Visual China Group (VCG), China’s leading stock image provider that’s compared to Getty Images and owns Flikr’s one-time rival 500px, made the image available for sale in its library without attribution to the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration (EHT), an array of radio telescopes th ..read more

Flickr announced today that all Creative Commons images will remain protected on its site – including those uploaded in the past and those that will be added in the future. The news follows Flickr’s November 2018 announcement where it had stated it wouldn’t delete Creative Commons photos already on its service, after switching over to a new business model which put an end to the free terabyte of storage in favor of a new subscription-based service. There had been concern prior to Flickr’s statement in November that the photography site’s revamped business model would see works deleted from Cr ..read more

Oh joy, oh rapture, unsubdued, Flickr’s login is no longer tied to Yahoo. The photo-sharing platform announced today that it will roll out a new system to members over the next few weeks that doesn’t require a Yahoo ID. This is welcome news to longtime Flickr users who are still bitter over the requirement, introduced in 2007, two years after Yahoo acquired Flickr, that forced everyone to use Yahoo credentials to sign in. Flickr was acquired by SmugMug in April 2018 and since then, a new login has been “the single most requested feature by our community,” according to a post on the company’s ..read more

If you’ve got a Flickr account, hopefully you’re already aware: the free 1 terabyte plan is going away. If you’re on a free Flickr account, the company is only going to let you keep 1,000 photos at a time. Anything past that will be auto deleted, starting with the oldest stuff. The deadline for saving all your old photos was supposed to be yesterday. But due to a bunch of issues experienced by folks at the last minute, they’re pushing it back a bit. In a statement, a rep from Flickr tells us: Based on feedback from our members and complications some members experienced when downloading photos ..read more