Instagram will soon let you purchase products without leaving the app. Starting Tuesday, users won’t have to go to a third-party website to buy things like clothes or beauty products they see in their feed. Of course, as Kurt Wagner writes, “Instagram isn’t just doing this out of concern for your online shopping woes.” There’s serious money to be made. The company is taking a small fee — it won’t say exactly how much — for each transaction. Even if that fee doesn’t add up to a huge amount, the company could make even more money from promoting shopping posts, and the data they can collect from customers through purchases could prove valuable. [Kurt Wagner / Recode]
Recode Daily: Instagram makes a push into commerce
Plus: Canada welcomes foreign tech workers, Facebook’s issue of scale, and Kickstarter’s CEO resigns.
Shirin Ghaffary was a senior Vox correspondent covering the social media industry. Previously, Ghaffary worked at BuzzFeed News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and TechCrunch.
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Canada is welcoming the tech talent the US is turning away. US companies are increasingly turning to other countries like Canada for tech talent. Sixty-three percent of employers surveyed in a new study said they are increasing their workforce presence in Canada. That’s helping Toronto become a growing tech hub. The city topped San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC, as a top location for tech workers, according to a report from real estate firm CBRE last year. [Rani Molla / Recode]
Facebook’s massive scale is its biggest asset and its biggest problem. In the wake of the New Zealand mosque shootings, it’s become more apparent than ever that Facebook’s 2 billion monthly users are a massive liability that can cause grave societal harm, writes Kurt Wagner. While Facebook said its technology was able to take down 80 percent of the videos people uploaded of the shooting in the first 24 hours after the incident, that still means that 300,000 videos slipped through the cracks. The same goes for other platforms like Twitter and YouTube, which both cited uploads of the New Zealand shooter video at an “unprecedented” level. [Kurt Wagner / Recode]
Kickstarter’s CEO and co-founder resigned as the company announced it plans to unionize. Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen announced he’s stepping down from the online fundraising platform on Tuesday. Chen will remain as a chairman of the board to focus “on high-level and long-term company needs.” The move comes as Kickstarter employees are organizing with the Office and Professional Employees International Union. If the effort is successful, this could be the first staff of a major US tech company to organize. [Brian Heater / TechCrunch]
Top Stories from Recode
70 percent of tech workers in the Bay Area say they can’t afford to buy a home. In tech’s capital, even programmers with six-figure salaries are struggling to afford studio apartments. [Shirin Ghaffary]
Airbnb recently sold some common stock at a $35 billion valuation, which is only slightly more than what it was valued at two years ago by private investors. The home-rental startup hasn’t raised money in two years, so every piece of information pre-IPO is revealing about the company. [Theodore Schleifer]
If you want to fix San Francisco, don’t blame the NIMBYs — tax the rich, says Berkeley’s Richard Walker. Walker discussed his latest book, all about “the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area,” on the latest episode of Recode Decode. [Kara Swisher]
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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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