Snapchat Inc. could begin paying users to post photos and videos, according to patent filings that reveal another way for the company to push the bounds of social media advertising. Through its popular Live Stories feature, the Venice firm produces highlight reels of events across the world made...
Ticketmaster isn't the only site giving out freebies this week. Thanks to a class-action lawsuit, Apple is paying for Amazon account credit for people who bought certain e-books between April 2010 and May 2012. You can check here to see if you've got any settlement money in your account. Amazon...
As the driverless car gets closer to reality, so too does the dilemma of how to insure the car and its owner. The auto insurance industry faces upheaval in the next 25 years as the migration to autonomous safety features — and ultimately a self-driving car — shifts more of a car’s accident risk...
Last summer, flower delivery start-up BloomThat was in an enviable position. The 2-year-old San Francisco company had raised more than $5 million in venture capital funding. It had earned a tech world pedigree after graduating from the prestigious incubator Y Combinator. And it had its roots firmly...
Access is one of the fundamental reasons so many young people today idolize YouTube stars over traditional Hollywood celebrities. You can track the daily lives of digital luminaries like Tyler Oakley, Justine Ezarik and Connor Franta simply by checking out their latest videos, tweets or snaps. They’ll...
Access is one of the fundamental reasons so many young people today idolize YouTube stars over traditional Hollywood celebrities. You can track the daily lives of digital luminaries like Tyler Oakley, Justine Ezarik and Connor Franta simply by checking out their latest videos, tweets or snaps. They’ll...
Thanks to pressure from Apple, a new set of emojis will not contain a rifle. The Unicode Consortium -- the shadowy overlords who approve and code new emojis -- said Friday that a depiction of a scoped shooting rifle has been pulled from the Unicode 9.0 release on June 21, BuzzFeed News reported....
China is providing Apple with one of its most lucrative markets. It’s also giving the tech giant no shortage of headaches. In another hiccup with regulators, Beijing's patent office has ordered Apple to stop selling its iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus in the city because its design too closely resembles...
China’s dominant ride-hailing and taxi company, Didi Chuxing, has one-upped Uber with its latest funding round, reportedly raising $7 billion just weeks after Uber raised $3.5 billion from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign investment fund. Included in the round is a $1-billion investment from Apple, $600...
Companies breached by computer hackers must inform customers that their personal information has been compromised. But when? As 30 journalists learned at a cybersecurity demonstration last month, there’s value to holding off. Being immediately upfront with customers gives victims time to clamp...
Uber needs cash to power its global expansion, but selling more equity could prove costly for the world’s most valuable start-up. That’s why the ride-hailing giant is turning to the risky leveraged loan market, according to a person familiar with the matter. Uber has hired Morgan Stanley and Barclays...
Federal regulators can strictly oversee the Internet to ensure that content flows freely to consumers, a court ruled Tuesday in a major victory for President Obama and other supporters of the long-pursued concept of net neutrality. In a 2-1 decision, a panel of judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals...
Though fans may not always notice, professional athletes put thought into their outfits off and on the field. They’ll choose custom sneakers on the court, fancy jackets at the press conference and color-coordinated headphones in the locker room. But in e-sports, not so much. Professional video...
Despite the increasing amount of time people spend on their smartphones, the app market is in a lull. Facebook, Snapchat, Uber and other big-name apps get heaps of downloads. But most everyone else is seeing demand level off. That’s why app-makers raved about Apple’s announcement at its Worldwide...
Skyy John owes much of his early Internet fame to YouTube, where he’s amassed nearly 3 million subscribers to his cocktail tutorial channel, Tipsy Bartender. But more recently, John has switched-up the recipe, posting clips for his strawberry margarita Jello shots or his mini vodka watermelon bowl...
Video game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. plans to award $1 million over the next year to top players of its latest “Madden NFL” title. The prize money is a selling point for a new, four-tournament series beginning this fall, marking the first e-sports initiative from the nation’s second-most-profitable...
Months after Susan Tully and friends bought a pair of professional video game teams for an estimated $1 million, her four-man “Call of Duty” squad finished its season in 11th out of 12 places. A loss in a post-season gunfight would relegate Tully’s H2K squad to the second-tier league. There, exposure...
Thomas J. Perkins, whose investments fueled the growth of tech firms including America Online Inc., Amazon.com and Google Inc., died Tuesday. He was 84. He died of natural causes, according to a statement from venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. Through his venture capital...
The hacker recently linked to attacks on social media sites such as MySpace, LinkedIn and Tumblr is at it again, offering millions of what are alleged to be Twitter usernames and passwords to anyone willing to pay. The hacker, known as Tessa88, is asking 10 bitcoin, or just under $6,000, for what...
A French court has convicted and fined Uber and two of its executives for deceptive commercial practices and illegal business activity over its lowest-cost ride service. It's the latest legal tangle for the app-based business, which has faced protests from taxi unions and regulators around the...
A Lenovo smartphone unveiled Thursday will be clever enough to grasp your physical surroundings — such as the room's size and the presence of other people — and potentially transform how we interact with e-commerce, education and gaming. Today's smartphones track location through GPS and cell towers,...
Airbnb’s annual tech conference, OpenAir, has traditionally focused on engineering challenges: how to grow a platform, how to use big data, how to better match people looking for short-term lodging with those who have rooms for rent. This year, the conference focused on a different challenge for...
Yahoo Inc. is hoping to sell most of its technology patents as part of a purge that also could culminate in the sale of its Internet operations. More than 3,000 patents that already have been issued or are under approval review are on the auction block. The Sunnyvale, Calif., company said it hasn't...
Snapchat Inc. downplayed a popular feature Tuesday as it attempts to better promote less-watched content from the likes of ESPN, BuzzFeed and Cosmo. Snapchat’s Live Stories -- highlight videos developed mostly from user-submitted clips at special events -- are now bundled among links to stories...
Yahoo Inc. shares are down slightly after a report that Verizon Communications Inc. is expected to bid $3 billion for the embattled tech company’s core Internet business. Yahoo’s stock was down 19 cents, or 0.5%, to $36.88 around 11:30 a.m. Eastern time. According to the Wall Street Journal, Verizon...
Loot Crate has built a business supplying comic book and sci-fi fans with monthly shipments of goodies typically only found at specialty shops or conventions. Soon, Loot Crate could apply the same formula to sports, music and more corners of entertainment -- getting fans to purchase merchandise...
Peter Csathy, a digital media executive who has tracked the rise of online video for more than a decade, has launched an advisory and investment company named Creatv. The Los Angeles firm pulls together executives with backgrounds in online video, venture capital and social media to form an advisory...
Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg briefly found his Twitter account hijacked, as were at least two of his other social media accounts. Zuckerberg's Facebook account and password were not compromised, the company said in a statement; his account on Facebook-owned Instagram was also unaffected....
The Supreme Court won't hear an appeal from Google over a class-action lawsuit filed by advertisers who claim the Internet company displayed their ads on “low-quality” websites. The justices on Monday let stand a lower court ruling that said the lawsuit representing hundreds of thousands of advertisers...
The celebrity entourage has a new member. Now joining the ranks of hairdressers, nannies, brand managers and personal chefs are computer security experts, entrusted by the rich and the famous to stave off threats to social media accounts, smartphones and home networks. Cybersecurity consultants...
Tony Fadell is stepping down as chief executive of Nest, the home-automation firm he founded and sold to Google. The departure, which was announced Friday in a blog post, comes as Fadell faced increasing criticism at Google, now called Alphabet Inc., because of his abrasive management style. Nest,...
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has enlisted ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft to help it battle rising grocery competitor Amazon.com Inc. The two San Francisco firms will partner with Wal-Mart to get last-mile grocery deliveries to customers as part of a test program starting in two weeks. Uber will deliver...
When Yahoo announced last year that it had lost $42 million reviving NBC’s TV series “Community” and launching two other original shows, the company framed it as a failed experiment. It didn’t work, so Yahoo was cutting its losses. But those in the entertainment industry were scratching their heads:...
Great news for bacon lovers: Soon you'll be able to express yourself via emoji. The symbol for your favorite cured pork product, along with 71 other characters, is coming out in the next version of Unicode. Other symbols that will be in the version 9.0 release include a soaring eagle, a salad,...
Start-ups have long been the domain of venture capitalists. But with this week’s staggering $3.5-billion investment in Uber from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the tech world has been put on notice -- sovereign wealth funds are loaded with cash and ready to do business directly. Paltry...
Uber said Wednesday that it is getting a massive cash infusion from Saudi Arabia. The oil-rich nation's sovereign investment fund is putting $3.5 billion into the global transportation company and will get a seat on Uber's board of directors. Funding for new tech companies has been slowing in recent...
Periscope hopes to stop abuse and spam on its video streams by turning its users into judges, juries and commentators. The video-streaming app, owned by Twitter Inc., launched Wednesday a quasi-judicial system to determine if comments that users have identified as offensive should be removed from...
Salesforce.com Inc. has acquired e-commerce platform maker Demandware Inc. in a transaction worth about $2.8 billion, as the cloud-computing software firm looks to become more of a one-stop shop for companies that want to sell things online. San Francisco-based Salesforce said it would pay $75...
Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg pledged two weeks ago to keep his company neutral when it comes to political discussions at home. On Tuesday, he promised the European Union he’d promote propaganda at the behest of Western governments. So how does neutrality allow for activism?...
The European Union reached an agreement Tuesday with some of the world's biggest social media firms, including Facebook and Twitter, on ways to fight the spread of hate speech online. Under the terms of a code of conduct, the firms, which also include YouTube and Microsoft, have committed to “quickly...
To think like a hacker, start-up founder Andrew Peterson hired some people who know hackers well. His co-founders at Venice cybersecurity start-up Signal Sciences Corp. include a guy whom companies used to pay to try to hack them and a guy who led engineers often responsible for leaving unintended...
It doesn't advertise, has no celebrity spokespeople and hasn't achieved the brand recognition of competitors Forever 21 and H&M. In fact, most shoppers probably don’t even know that Cotton On already has a few dozen stores in Southern California. The Australian fast-fashion behemoth has been quietly...
In an interview last month about Facebook's recent push into live-streaming video, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg repeats the word "raw" as if it's some kind of sacred totem. Facebook Live is "raw and visceral," he says. It's this "new, raw" way to communicate. Zuckerberg doesn't seem to realize...
If virtual reality lives up to its hype, someone is destined to get rich from building the medium’s first mass-market camera. Han Jin asks, why not him? The co-founder and chief executive of Lucid VR thinks he’s made a device small and cheap enough to appeal to anyone. His LucidCam fits in your...
When lawyer Veena Dubal heard last month that Uber drivers seeking to be recognized as employees rather than independent contractors might settle their class-action lawsuit before it went to trial, she cried. Dubal, an associate professor at the UC Hastings College of Law where she researches...
To advertisers, Facebook Inc.'s biggest treasure trove is what it knows about you. Anything from your age to where you went to school to your favorite band can be treated as a data point that the social network can use to display highly specific advertisements. With this wealth of personal information...
Co-presidents. Co-directors. Co-animation leads. Co-art directors. At Santa Monica video game maker Naughty Dog, it doesn’t take long to notice that co-responsibilities are commonplace. Pitting bosses against each other to decide on characters, gameplay and script is a key strategy the firm credits...
Snapchat Inc. has broadly expanded its shareholder base over the last year, going far beyond the few venture capitalists who bankrolled the Venice firm when it was merely an app for sharing self-destructing photos. Now operating a complex social media app that teenagers can't seem to look away...