Uber likes to promote its service as an easy way to get from point A to point B with a smartphone. Now the company wants to reward you for making one of those points a hotel.The ride-hailing service is teaming up with Starwood Hotels & Resorts to boost the use of its app among the well-traveled crowd. Through the partnership, members of Starwood’s guest loyalty program can link their accounts with Uber accounts and earn Starwood credits whenever they take an Uber ride. They’ll earn more credits if they take the ride while staying in one of the hotel company’s 1,200 properties in 100 countries.The arrangement goes into effect Wednesday, marking Uber’s first partnership of this sort with a hotel operator.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Reddit, the online message board known for its users’ unrestrained posts, is going against its laissez-faire philosophy and moving to restrict an abusive form of sexual content.Under a revised privacy policy going into effect on March 10, it will be officially prohibited for Reddit users to post naked photos and sex videos if they lack permission from the people depicted.Affected people should email the company at [email protected] to expedite the removal of the offending photos or videos “as quickly as possible,” Reddit said in the policy.Reddit, which bills itself as “the front page of the Internet,” has built its following of nearly 160 million users by letting them express themselves with various degrees of anonymity to communicate about any topic. The site’s “Ask Me Anything” discussions are popular threads.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google says its new YouTube app for kids is its first product “built from the ground up with little ones in mind,” and it appears to have taken careful steps not to ignite a furor by sacrificing children’s’ privacy for its business interests.YouTube Kids was released Monday in the U.S. in the Google Play store and Apple’s App Store. It has privacy-preserving features but also displays ads, which Google says will be “family friendly.”Ads in nearly a dozen categories are prohibited including beauty and fitness, food and beverages, and politics, Google says. And it says the ads won’t collect data about those who view or engage with them, or track them elsewhere on the web.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Mobile users have become a vital part of Yahoo’s recovery effort, and on Thursday it tried to woo developers with new tools to help them build better apps using its services.The company held its first-ever mobile developer conference in San Francisco on Thursday, where it unveiled tools that help developers collect data about their apps and make money from them using Yahoo advertising services.Many of the tools come courtesy of Flurry, a mobile analytics and advertising company Yahoo acquired last year. Flurry now has more than 200,000 developers using it’s tools, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said Thursday. Yahoo hopes to get even more developers on board by giving them new ways to see how their apps are performing and by baking Yahoo advertising options directly into Flurry.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Yahoo, one of Silicon Valley’s aging giants, wants to show it’s got the goods for today’s mobile app developers.On Thursday, the company will hold its first-ever mobile developer conference. The daylong event in San Francisco shows the company wants to develop lucrative relationships with developers and put mobile at the center of its turnaround effort.The event will feature talks by top Yahoo executives, including CEO Marissa Mayer, and deep dives into Yahoo’s technology services for mobile apps. A critical part of those services is Flurry, a mobile analytics and advertising company Yahoo acquired last year. Flurry tracks more than 600,000 apps worldwide, providing information on app performance and users that can aid in ad targeting.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Twitter is giving users what it thinks is a safer way to handle shared access to an account without compromising the login.Users of TweetDeck, the popular dashboard system for the site, will be able to share access to Twitter accounts without sharing passwords. That adds a useful layer of security for businesses that use Twitter, by eliminating the need to disseminate passwords among employees.Some high-profile Twitter accounts like those belonging to Newsweek magazine and the U.S. military’s Central Command have been hacked in recent months. Shared passwords are an obvious weak point for corporate social media accounts, as they increase the likelihood of unauthorized access.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Yelp has filed a lawsuit against Revleap, a company that says it can help businesses improve their ratings, though Yelp says it actually spams them and cons them out of money.Revleap, based in Los Angeles, operates a paid service that it says can “create a large constant flow of positive reviews that stay on top of your profile, and remove fake reviews,” according to its website.These sorts of messages are knowingly false, Yelp contends in a lawsuit filed Friday, because Revleap has no way of removing bad reviews or getting good ones to appear more prominently.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Yelp has filed a lawsuit against Revleap, a company that says it can help businesses improve their ratings, though Yelp says it actually spams them and cons them out of money.Revleap, based in Los Angeles, operates a paid service that it says can “create a large constant flow of positive reviews that stay on top of your profile, and remove fake reviews,” according to its website.These sorts of messages are knowingly false, Yelp contends in a lawsuit filed Friday, because Revleap has no way of removing bad reviews or getting good ones to appear more prominently.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Zach Miners