Facebook has revealed additional details about the development of Portal, its first in-house video calling device, including the tidbit that early prototypes included a motor that let Portal swivel to face video subjects. If the plan was to sell lots of video calling devices, it’s probably best that a swiveling Portal was never released. Following Facebook’s […]
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Walmart’s cavernous stores apparently aren’t large enough to hold the Hidden World in DreamWorks’ latest How to Train Your Dragon film. Instead, the retailer announced today that it will use its parking lots to host free five-minute VR dragon riding experiences — and the expected significant lines of people — in an effort to spur […]
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Amazon is launching Amazon Moments, a service that lets you reward customers in more than 100 countries on iOS, Android, FireOS, and other platforms. With Moments, you don’t need to rely on stale discount offers to drive retention and activity in apps. This new solution makes it easy to offer unique rewards to customers who […]
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Mozilla today released Firefox 15 for iOS, which brings improvements to the Private Browsing mode, the main menu, settings, and tabs. iPhone and iPad users can download the latest version now from Apple’s App Store. According to Mozilla, Firefox has about 300 million active users. Firefox for iOS was released in November 2015 and has […]
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European Union lawmakers reached a broad agreement on new digital platform rules aimed at sharply reducing the power of tech giants. A review of these platforms’ dominance began in Europe last year amid concern that companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon wield too much control over the buying and selling of goods and […]
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WASHINGTON — In pursuit of a wall, President Trump ran into one. A single-minded drive to force Congress to finance his signature campaign promise has left Mr. Trump right back where he started, this time seeking a way to climb over the political barrier in his way after trying to charge through it did not […]
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Subscriptions are becoming increasingly major sources of Apple’s “Services” revenue, and the company’s been openly working on two followups to Apple Music: a paid subscription service for Apple News, and a video subscription service for iOS devices and Apple TVs. Each is said to be Apple’s take on the popular all-you-can-watch streaming service Netflix, here […]
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Yesterday, Recode cofounder Kara Swisher conducted a 90-minute interview with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey — on Twitter. Dorsey was the one who suggested the format, saying that a live conversation tool “might be a feature we want to build” and that he wanted to see how it worked with Twitter’s current format. If he learned […]
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Fiverr has acquired ClearVoice, a five-year-old Phoenix-based company that helps content writers find new jobs and show off their portfolios. For Fiverr, which touts content services as one of the most popular categories on its platform, ClearVoice emerged as a good fit, Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman said. “We are uniquely positioned to consolidate best-in-class vertical […]
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With messaging being a key area of focus for Facebook in 2019, that means every property that’s gone without chat features so far may soon get them — including Instagram for the web. Instagram is testing the ability for web users to send direct messages, on both desktop and mobile. That’s according to a Tweet […]
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It’s no surprise that Apple’s News app proved successful after arriving preinstalled on iOS devices and Macs, reaching over 85 million readers in the three territories where it’s available. Equally unsurprising: Apple is once again reportedly upsetting news organizations with a plan to take too big a cut of their subscription revenues, and to offer […]
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SuperAwesome, which makes internet content safe for viewing by kids, has raised a $13 million round of financing led by Harbert European Growth Capital. SuperAwesome’s ‘kidtech’ infrastructure is used by hundreds of kids companies, such as Mattel, Disney, Hasbro, and Lego to enable kid-safe content, advertising, and other digital services. The company has defined the digital standards […]
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The world’s richest man had a week unlike any in his life. Last Thursday, in a long post on the website Medium, Jeff Bezos accused the National Enquirer of extorting him with compromising photos. The tabloid had published lurid texts that proved that the Amazon founder and CEO, whose divorce from his wife of 25 […]
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Singular reported that Facebook and Google are still the top performers when it comes to return on investment for marketing campaigns that place ads in mobile apps and games. San Francisco-based Singular is a marketing intelligence company that optimizes more than $10 billion in annual ad spending. The annual Singular ROI Index sifted through $1.5 […]
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PlayStation shows no sign of relinquishing its crown when it comes to TV budgets — Sony’s console brand accounted for over 43 percent of all industry spend in January. We also had some notable newcomers to the top five last month: Scopely, Square Enix, and Seriously Digital Entertainment made appearances. GamesBeat has partnered with iSpot.tv, […]
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WASHINGTON — Jeff Bezos understands survival instincts. As a hedge fund refugee, he conjured Amazon, the world’s biggest store, by tapping into our hunter-gatherer instincts, the compulsion to collect more stuff with less effort. Amazon became “the Prince of Darkness for retail,” Scott Galloway writes in “The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook […]
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The Iowa caucuses are still more than a year away. The first Democratic primary debate won’t occur until this June. But some journalists are already declaring that one of the party’s 2020 frontrunners, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, is in serious trouble. After it was revealed recently that Warren had listed her race as “American Indian” […]
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Facebook this week admitted one of its users logged into someone else’s account with just a phone number. A Facebook spokesperson told VentureBeat that both users had the same phone number associated with their accounts, so the person who presently had that phone number could access both. What boggles my mind here is that there […]
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Jeff Bezos in 2018. Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty On Thursday, Jeff Bezos—the incredibly powerful founder of Amazon, the owner of the Washington Post, and the world’s richest man—took to Medium to announce that the National Enquirer had tried to blackmail him. Last month, following the announcement that Bezos was getting a divorce, the Enquirer published […]
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Facebook took another step today towards unifying its family of apps by announcing that businesses will now be able to receive and respond to Instagram messages from customers on their Facebook page inbox, eliminating the need to toggle between the two services for the purpose of responding to messages. The change, announced today at Facebook’s […]
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