Stripe has led a $12 million Series A round in Manila-based online payment platform PayMongo, the startup announced today.

PayMongo, which offers an online payments API for businesses in the Philippines, was the first Filipino-owned financial tech startup to take part in Y Combinator's accelerator program. Y Combinator and Global Founders Capital, another previous investor, both returned for the Series A, which also included participation from new backer BedRock Capital.

PayMongo partners with financial institutions, and its products include a payments API that can be integrated into websites and apps, allowing them to accept payments from [...]

A U.S. federal court has said a ban on TikTok will not go into effect on Monday as scheduled.

The move to delay the anticipated ban will allow Americans to continue using the app while the court considers the ban's legality and whether the app poses a risk to national security as the Trump administration claims.

For weeks since President Donald Trump signed two executive orders in early August, the government has threatened to shut down the viral video sharing app over fears that its parent company ByteDance, headquartered in Beijing, could [...]

Anyone can access portions of a web portal, used by law enforcement to request customer data from Amazon, even though the portal is supposed to require a verified email address and password.

Amazon's law enforcement request portal allows police and federal agents to submit formal requests for customer data along with a legal order, like a subpoena, a search warrant, or a court order. The portal is publicly accessible from the internet, but law enforcement must register an account with the site in order to allow Amazon to “authenticate” the requesting officer's credentials before they can make requests.

Only time sensitive emergency [...]

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And I don't mean building an app that gets the world addicted to short-form videos. I mean, where you build a huge company that spans the world and then get turned into a political football.

The Bytedance-owned app developer still appears headed for a shutdown in the US, after the already convoluted talks stalled out this past week. Each national government appears to require local ownership of a new [...]

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the TechCrunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.

The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending three hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren't just a way to pass idle hours — they're a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a [...]

Yikes!

"This is a classic example of an evolutionary mismatch."

We only had evidence that primates could do this.

"One million is a terrible number."

An amoeba that can kill.