Exclusive: Instagram Business Lead Emily White to Be Named COO of Snapchat
Emily White, the Facebook executive in charge of bringing advertising to its Instagram photo-sharing unit, is leaving to become COO of Snapchat. — The move is a major talent grab by the ephemeral ph...
UPS researching its own delivery drones to compete with Amazon's Prime Air
Flying parcel-carriers are the next logical frontier for delivery companies — Amazon made headlines Sunday night when it announced it was working on small drones that could someday deliver customers...
Spotify opens up analytics in effort to prove its worth to doubting musicians
Streaming music firm opens Spotify Artists website and claims when it reaches 40m subscribers, even ‘niche indie albums’ will earn $17k a month — Streaming music service Spotify is hoping to win …
Officials estimate a third of people enrolled through HealthCare.gov affected by system errors
Health-care enrollment on Web plagued by bugs — The enrollment records for a significant portion of the Americans who have chosen health plans through the online federal insurance marketplace …
Nokia Gets Ruling Blocking Sales of HTC's One Mini Phone in U.K.
A London judge said HTC Corp. (2498) couldn't sell its One Mini phone in the U.K. from Dec. 6 after it was found to have infringed patents owned by Nokia Oyj. (NOK1V) — While Judge Richard Arnold a...
Google is building Chrome apps support for Android and iOS, beta release coming as soon as January 2014
Google is working on bringing Chrome packaged apps from the desktop to the mobile world. The company is currently building a toolkit to help developers create Chrome apps for Android and iOS …
Motorola apologizes for Moto X Cyber Monday snafus, extends deal
Claiming it wasn't ready for the high volume of orders on discounted Moto X handsets on Monday morning, Motorola apologized later that same evening for the hours of customer frustration. A blog post ...
Google's Compute Engine Hits General Availability, Drops Instance Prices 10%, Adds 16-Core Instances & Docker Support
Google today announced the general availability of the Google Compute Engine, the cloud computing platform it launched in the summer of 2012.
Dreamworks-incubated video-creation app Ptch acquired by Yahoo, shutting down January 2
Ptch Joins Yahoo! — We launched Ptch just over a year ago. Our passion and our mission was to give you the best way to make and share beautiful movies made from the photos and videos on your phone.
Future iPhones may unlock, hide messages based on a user's face
Apple on Tuesday was granted a patent that uses facial recognition technology to control a computing device, like an iPhone, iPad or Mac, allowing for a more secure and productive operating environmen...
YouTube's Music Subscription Service Won't Show Up This Year
Waiting for YouTube's subscription music service? You're going to have to be patient. — The video service, which is already the biggest free music service in the world, had planned on launching a p...
Honda integrates iPhone w/ 2014 Civic touchscreen in first steps towards iOS in the Car
Honda is introducing two new technologies in its new 2014 Civic that will make it easier for iPhone users to interact with content in the car in its first steps towards Apple's iOS in the Car.
Square acquires Viewfinder so sellers can create ‘personal, human experiences’ for their customers
Square has acquired Viewfinder, a company specializing in helping you “organize, share, and relive memories” with friends and loved ones. The move will see Viewfinder eventually shut …
Twitter Considered Buying Topsy, Too — Here's Why It Didn't Happen
Here's Why It Didn't Happen — Apple just spent a bunch of money on social analytics company Topsy. And while everyone has good guesses on what Apple wants from Topsy, no one seems to know for sure. ...
VSCO Cam brings its simple interface and powerful photo-editing tools to Android
Free app gives users yet another way to tweak and share their photos — After an extended beta test period, VSCO Cam for Android is now available to download from the Google Play Store.
HP Slate tablets running Android Jellybean hit the market
Hewlett-Packard's latest Android tablets with multiple screen sizes are available through the company's website. — HP Slate 7 Extreme — The tablets run Android 4.2, code-named Jellybean, and are l...
NORAD and Microsoft team on a touch-friendly Santa Claus web tracker
NORAD's Santa Claus tracking has officially entered the tablet era. The defense agency has teamed up with Microsoft on an updated web-based tracker that's designed for touch-friendly browsers, includ...
Hotfile settles MPAA copyright case, agrees to $80 million in damages
Six days before movie studios were set to begin a jury trial over alleged copyright violations by the “cyberlocker” site Hotfile, the case has settled. Hotfile has agreed to pay $80 million and to st...
How does the NSA break SSL?
A few weeks ago I wrote a long post about the NSA's ‘BULLRUN’ project to subvert modern encryption standards. I had intended to come back to this at some point, since I didn't have time to discuss th...
Netflix is balancing its streaming traffic across Amazon's cloud
Netflix is fighting back outages in the Amazon Web Services cloud computing platform with a new architecture that has its streaming-video service running live across multiple regions of the AWS cloud ...
Microsoft's ‘Project Spark’ beta arrives on Windows 8.1, lets you create an Xbox One game
Microsoft is launching a beta version of Project Spark today, its game maker project for Windows 8.1, Xbox 360, and the new Xbox One console. Project Spark is essentially a tool to allow developers …
Intel Makes Another Acquisition: Hacker League, A Platform For Hackathons, Is Now A Part Of Mashery
Intel's acquisition spree continues apace, with the latest being made to augment one of its other recent acquisitions. It is buying Hacker League, a popular platform for managing hackathons …
E La Carte Scores Deal With Applebee's, Bringing 100,000 Tableside Tablets To All U.S. Locations By Year-End 2014
Applebee's, the largest casual dining chain in the U.S., has signed a deal with restaurant tablet hardware and software provider E la Carte, which will see it introducing 100 …
Stockholm-based KnCMiner sells $8 million worth of bitcoin mining hardware in 24 hours
Bitcoin Developer Sells $8 Million Worth Of Hardware In 24 Hours, As Mining Technology Arms Race Goes Insane — Stockholm-based KnCMiner sold $8 million worth of their new $10,000-a-pop bitcoin miner...
PayPal launches a digital gift store, featuring Apple as its sole launch partner
A week after adding support for prepaid gift cards, payments giant PayPal has launched its own digital gift store to allow US -based customers to buy gift cards for friends and family using its servic...
Nintendo Seen Missing Target as Sony-Microsoft Dwarf Wii U
Nintendo Co. (7974)'s prospects for meeting its profit and sales forecasts for this year are diminishing after Sony Corp. (6758) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) each sold more game consoles in 24 hours tha...
Judge: MPAA can't call Hotfile founders “pirates” or “thieves” at trial
Action figures that absolutely can't be used in the upcoming MPAA v. Hotfile trial. — lamont_cranston / flickr — In years past, the Motion Picture Association of America has had success in shuttin...
Yahoo's Year In Review Includes Top Searches For 2013 & First Ever Posting Of Top Tumblr Trends
Yahoo has assembled an impressive list of search trends for 2013, covering 38 different “Top Searched” lists on everything from top searches overall to top searched cookies (yes, the ones you eat).
Netflix Changes Binge Release Strategy for DreamWorks Turbo Show
When Netflix started its big push into original TV shows this year, it played up its binge-friendly strategy: Each time the streaming service debuted a new show, like “House of Cards”, it released a s...
Rdio Names Former Amazon Exec Anthony Bay Its New CEO
After enduring a round of layoffs last month, Rdio, the streaming music startup from Skype co-founder Janus Friis, has found a new chief executive officer, Anthony Bay. Bay, whose experience includes...
Firehose Provider DataSift Raises $42M Led By Insight Venture Partners For Global and Non-Social Ambitions
DataSift, a social data platform that provides brands and enterprises with access to content from the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and dozens of other social networks …
India seeks US help to intercept chats from online platforms
NEW DELHI: India will ask the US to share its technology on how to decrypt conversations over various services like Viber, Whatsapp, Skype, Wechat and Blackberry messenger while complaining about serv...
Chrome Beta Gets New Tools For Mobile Development With Better Viewport Emulation, Screencast-Enabled Remote Debugging
With the launch of the latest Chrome beta this morning, Google introduced a number of new tools for mobile developers that should make it a bit easier for them to test their mobile web apps right from...
Landmark Princeton Study Sends Bots Across The Web To Track Discrimination
Privacy advocates have long argued that the commercialization of our online data is a worrying trend, but it's been hard to argue why since the advertising and marketing firms who track much of what w...