Zach Miners
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Mobile ads now generate almost 75 percent of Facebook’s revenue
Facebook continued growing its business with ads placed on small screens last quarter, when it generated 73 percent of its sales from mobile ads.Facebook’s total first-quarter revenue was US$3.54 billion, up more than 40 percent from a year earlier, the company reported Wednesday. That was a bit less than the consensus analyst estimate of $3.56 billion, as polled by Thomson Reuters.With a trove of personal data on its billion-plus members—many of whom now log in from their smartphones—Facebook’s mobile ad business has become a powerhouse.During the quarter, which ended March 31, Facebook grew its mobile ad sales by 59 percent to $2.59 billion. After going public in mid-2012, Facebook faced questions from investors over its ability to grow its business on mobile, but the company eventually dispelled those doubts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Facebook releases a caller ID app for Android
Facebook wants to mesh its massive social network with phone communications so that it can provide its members with useful information about people at the other end of the line.On Wednesday, the company launched Hello, an app for Android smartphones that, by pulling data from Facebook profiles, acts like caller ID with a social networking twist.When they receive a call from a fellow Facebook member, Hello users will see a card appear with profile information about the caller that the recipient already has access to, either because the information has been shared with the recipient, or because it’s public on the site. For example, the card may include the caller’s name, job title and the number of friends the caller and recipient have in common.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Yahoo, still reliant on PCs, posts earnings that disappoint
Mobile is a crucial element in CEO Marissa Mayer’s turnaround plan for Yahoo, but the company is still heavily dependant on PCs for its money.That was evident Tuesday when Yahoo reported its financial results for the last quarter. Revenue from ads displayed on PCs brought in $873 million—more than three-quarters of the total. Mobile revenue climbed 61 percent from last year, but still reached only $234 million.This could be one reason Yahoo continues to struggle. Overall sales at the company rose by 8 percent to $1.23 billion. But excluding payments made to partners, sales were down 4 percent to $1.04 billion, missing the analyst estimate of $1.06 billion, according to a poll by Thomson Reuters.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Live streaming apps pose legal risks for users
Live video is messy. It’s raw, unedited, and with new mobile apps, it’s now capable of capturing many more people who aren’t aware they’re being recorded. And in some cases, that can add up to legal problems. Meerkat and Periscope aren’t the first tools to offer live-streaming capabilties, but they have captured attention due in large part to the ease with which they allow video to be recorded on the fly, from a smartphone, and shared publicly on Twitter. Twitter owns Periscope, while Meerkat is the indie player, a breakout hit at this year’s South by Southwest technology festival in Austin, Texas. And both are positioned to spawn a crop of disputes, and even lawsuits, around alleged privacy violations or copyright infringement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Want to be open to all direct messages? Twitter will let you
As part of Twitter’s larger push to give more people a reason to use its service, it is changing its direct messaging function to let users receive missives from people they don’t follow.Previously, users could only send the private, direct messages to those who followed them. By letting more users message each other privately, Twitter hopes to more strongly compete against messaging apps WhatsApp, with roughly 800 million monthly users, and Facebook Messenger with 600 million users who log in monthly. Twitter had 288 million users as of the end of last year.Importantly for those who worry about spam and abuse, Twitter is letting would-be recipients of the DMs decide if they want to change their account settings to accept direct messages from people they do not follow. A new direct message button will appear on the profiles of people who turn this on.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Facebook tries to keep it real by killing more ‘fake’ likes
Facebook has tripled its detection and elimination of “fake” likes, which can artificially inflate a brand’s prominence on the site and deceive users, the company said on Friday.Facebook began improving its processes for eliminating fake likes this past October. They’re a real problem for the site, because they can trick a page owner or business into thinking they’re more popular on Facebook than they really are, fooling regular users along the way.Fraudulent likes originate from click farms, fake accounts and malware, and are sold to page owners who want to boost their exposure on Facebook. But in reality they don’t do much to win them actual customers, fans or increased sales.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Instagram clarifies rules to ban revenge porn
Instagram is clarifying its rules around sexual, illegal and other inappropriate content, including posts involving revenge porn.The site now expressly forbids users from threatening to post intimate images of others, as well as sexual content involving minors, the service said in its updated policies on Thursday. More broadly, photos showing sexual intercourse, genitals, and close-ups of fully-nude buttocks aren’t allowed, Instagram says.For safety reasons, Instagram may also remove images that show nude or partially nude children, the company said.Instagram previously had a ban on nude images and other content like photos depicting extreme violence or gore. But as the Facebook-owned company has grown, it’s now clarifying its rules, aiming to keep its app friendly for a general audience. Instagram, which Facebook bought for US$1 billion in 2012, now has more than 300 million users who log in monthly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Apple’s ResearchKit is here, now open your iPhone and say ‘ah’
An Apple a day keeps the doctor away, unless that doctor is now gathering your health data through your Apple iPhone.Apple is embarking on its boldest push yet into health, with a new open source framework for letting medical researchers and software developers gather health data from iPhone owners and build health-related apps. Apple officially opened the framework, called ResearchKit, to all researchers and software developers on Tuesday, after announcing it at an event in March.The idea behind ResearchKit is that, given the iPhone’s prominence, it will allow for much more health data to be collected than through typical studies, helping researchers and clinicians to increase their understanding of diseases and health conditions. Researchers can tap into the framework to gather the data it has collected, while third-party app developers can build health-related apps on top of it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Jawbone’s UP3 will ship April 20 — just don’t take it swimming
Jawbone’s latest activity tracker, the UP3, will finally ship April 20 after being delayed for months, though without a core feature the company had hoped for.Water resistance issues led to delays in the product’s launch, Jawbone said Thursday. The company was hoping for a product that could be submerged up to 10 meters underwater, but Jawbone couldn’t achieve that. The shipping product will withstand everyday splashing and showers, like other trackers, but will be unsuitable for swimming or submerged use, Jawbone said in a blog post.Customers who want to cancel their pre-order can do so with no charge, the company said. Jawbone had originally planned on launching the UP3 late last year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Jawbone’s UP3 will ship April 20 — just don’t take it swimming
Jawbone’s latest activity tracker, the UP3, will finally ship April 20 after being delayed for months, though without a core feature the company had hoped for.Water resistance issues led to delays in the product’s launch, Jawbone said Thursday. The company was hoping for a product that could be submerged up to 10 meters underwater, but Jawbone couldn’t achieve that. The shipping product will withstand everyday splashing and showers, like other trackers, but will be unsuitable for swimming or submerged use, Jawbone said in a blog post.Customers who want to cancel their pre-order can do so with no charge, the company said. Jawbone had originally planned on launching the UP3 late last year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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The first woman CEO to appear in a Google Images search is … CEO Barbie
The Ellen Pao-Kleiner Perkins trial shone a light on discrimination in the tech industry, but for a more immediate look at the challenges women face in corporate America, look no further than a Google Images search.Doing a search at the site for “CEO” reveals just one female face in the top results: CEO Barbie. The doll (which may not even be a real Barbie product) appears way down in the results, under a sea of male, mostly white faces.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Pairing iPhones with Android Wear smartwatches may become possible
Google is said to be developing a version of Android Wear to let iPhone owners sync their phones with smartwatches running Google’s OS.Google is close to finishing the final technical details, according to a report in The Verge which cited one unnamed source close to the development team.A Google spokesman declined to comment.If Google is in fact working on this, it could boost its efforts to compete against Apple’s upcoming Apple Watch. Smartwatches running Android Wear currently derive much of their functionality via an integration with Android-based smartphones. Android Wear smartwatch sales haven’t been great.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Facebook still king of social media among teens
The findings of a new survey debunks theories that Facebook is losing its “cool factor” among teenagers.Facebook is the most popular social network among teens, according to the results of the survey published Wednesday night by the Pew Research Center. The researchers found that 71 percent of all teens use it. And 41 percent of teens said they use Facebook the most often compared to other sites.The findings are a victory for Facebook, which has had to address claims in recent years that its site is losing popularity among teens. In 2013, Facebook’s chief financial officer admitted to a decline in the number of daily users among U.S. teens.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Russian hackers accessed White House email, report says
Hackers working for the Russian government were able to access President Obama’s email system inside the White House, CNN reported Tuesday, indicating that an earlier breach may have been more serious than previously thought.The State Department and the White House said late last year they had seen suspicious activity in their networks, though the White House said at the time only unclassified systems were affected. That may have been true, but it understated the sensitivity of the information accessed, CNN reported Tuesday, citing unnamed U.S. officials briefed on the investigation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Edward Snowden: Don’t censor your d**k pics
People shouldn’t hold back on sending racy photos of themselves online for fear the images might be scooped up by government spies, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has said.Snowden appeared for a sit-down interview Sunday night on HBO’s “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.” The host traveled to Russia to do the interview in person.To make the issue hit home for his TV audience, Oliver asked Snowden which government programs might allow spies to access people’s “d**k pics.”Many of the programs would, Snowden said, but that shouldn’t cause people to hold back.“You shouldn’t change your behavior because a government agency somewhere is doing the wrong thing,” he said. “If we sacrifice our values because we’re afraid, we don’t care about those values very much.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Turkey blocks Twitter, YouTube over hostage photo
A Turkish court blocked access to numerous sites including Twitter and YouTube on Monday, over their hosting of images of an Istanbul prosecutor held at gunpoint by militants last week.An Istanbul court issued the ruling blocking Twitter and YouTube, as well as 166 other sites that had distributed the photograph, a report in The New York Times said. It also blocked the pages of several newspapers in Turkey that had printed the photo.Turkey’s Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, called outlets that had circulated the image “tools of terrorist propaganda,” the Times reported.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Uber’s hiring plans show outlines of self-driving car project
The most interesting people that Uber is now hiring aren’t drivers: they’re engineers whose innovations may ultimately put those drivers out of work.The mobile ride-hailing app has listed a slew of jobs at its new Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh. The research center, created just two months ago in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University, is focused on developing self-driving car technology and other advanced vehicle safety and mapping systems. To staff up, Uber is looking for engineers in the areas of robotics, machine learning, communications, traffic simulation, vehicle testing, and software and hardware development.One Uber posting seeks mechanical engineers with knowledge of modern automotive electronics and diagnostics, who can handle “multiple design challenges.” It also wants software engineers to work in the areas of computer vision, vehicle controls and sensors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Snapchat tallies government data requests for the first time
Snapchat’s service featuring disappearing messages is known for its popularity among teens. Now it’s becoming popular with law enforcement.Snapchat, for the first time, has disclosed the number of requests for user information it has received from governments in the U.S. and in other countries. These requests may come in the form of subpoenas, court orders, search warrants or other legal processes, seeking a variety of user information like usernames, email addresses and phone numbers.Authorities may also seek the content of messages. They have a tight window, though—Snapchat says it deletes people’s messages from its servers after all recipients have viewed them, or 30 days after an unopened message is sent. Governments can also seek logs containing the metadata of messages, which Snapchat retains.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Snapchat tallies government data requests for the first time
Snapchat’s service featuring disappearing messages is known for its popularity among teens. Now it’s becoming popular with law enforcement.Snapchat, for the first time, has disclosed the number of requests for user information it has received from governments in the U.S. and in other countries. These requests may come in the form of subpoenas, court orders, search warrants or other legal processes, seeking a variety of user information like usernames, email addresses and phone numbers.Authorities may also seek the content of messages. They have a tight window, though—Snapchat says it deletes people’s messages from its servers after all recipients have viewed them, or 30 days after an unopened message is sent. Governments can also seek logs containing the metadata of messages, which Snapchat retains.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Facebook ‘riffs’ on Snapchat with new group video app
Facebook has released a new app for making videos that it thinks can win over the competition by allowing collaboration among friends.The company on Wednesday released Riff, a mobile app that lets people create short videos and then share them with friends. A video creation and sharing app alone is not unique—other services like YouTube, Snapchat and Twitter provide some other apps for this—but Facebook is hoping to distinguish its app by adding a strong collaborative element to it.After someone creates a video in Riff, that person’s Facebook friends can add to the video with a video of their own. From there, friends of the friend can add to it, and so on. This has the potential to give the video a communal effect, reminiscent of the Our Stories function in Snapchat that lets people watch videos taken by others during an event or over a period of time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here