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Apple suspends online TV service development efforts: Bloomberg

December 10, 2015February 11, 2016 Staff Writer

Apple Inc has suspended plans to offer a live Internet-based television service and is instead focusing on being a platform for media companies to sell directly to customers through its App Store, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. Apple’s plan to sell a package of about 14 channels for $30 to $40 a month has run into resistance from media companies that want more money for their programing, Bloomberg reported, citing a person with knowledge of the matter. Apple was in discussions with broadcasters such as CBS Corp and Twenty-First Century Fox…

Study: Retailers Ignore Over 80% of Customers’ Requests via Social Media

November 6, 2015February 11, 2016 Staff Writer

Sprout Social has found most that merchants fail to respond to consumer questions on Facebook and Twitter, a problem compounded during the holiday shopping season when the volume of requests increases. The stats from the Spout Social’s Q4 2015 Index are damning. Retailers failed to respond to more than 80 percent of consumer questions and requests on social media in the last year. And the cold shoulder from merchants was coldest when you’d think they could least afford it, during the holiday shopping season. During the fourth quarter of 2014,…

Flurry Report Reveals U.S. Consumers Now Spend More Time In Mobile Apps Than Watching TV

September 11, 2015February 15, 2016 Staff Writer

At yesterday’s Apple event in San Francisco, CEO Tim Cook spoke about the need to bring apps to the TV’s big screen, while introducing the new Apple TV. Today, a new report from Flurry also highlights how apps have edged their way further into our lives, noting that, for the first time ever, the time spent inside mobile applications by the average U.S. consumer has now exceeded that of TV. Traditional cable TV has already been suffering in recent months, as more consumers are cutting the cord or opting never…

How 5 most valuable internet companies have changed over the past 2 decades

June 5, 2015February 16, 2016 Staff Writer

It’s mind-boggling how the 5 most valuable internet companies have changed over the past 20 years In 1995, the internet was just about to get started. It was only a year after big internet companies like Yahoo and Netscape were founded. Fast forward 20 years later, and the web business landscape looks a lot different from back then. In fact, only 1 out of the 5 most valuable public internet companies from 1995 are still in the top 5 list, according to Mary Meeker’s “Internet Trends” report. Check out the…

Xiaomi: China’s big Apple rival isn’t worth getting excited about (yet)

February 13, 2015February 16, 2016 Staff Writer

Xiaomi, the third-largest smartphone maker in the world, is coming stateside, but not in the way pundits expected. The company announced at a conference Thursday that its e-commerce website, Mi.com, could start selling products to U.S. customers in five months. Surprisingly, smartphones will not be among them — at least, at first. Instead, Hugo Barra, Xiaomi’s Global VP, suggested the company might start with items such as a recently-launched pair of headphones and its popular external battery pack, the latter of which sold 15 million units in 2014. The company has…

Apple posts $18 billion profit, the largest in its history

January 29, 2015February 17, 2016

Apple just posted its first quarter results, and as expected, it was a big one. Led once again by record sales of new iPhones and holiday sales of iPads and Macs, Apple posted earnings of $18 billion on $74.6 billion in revenue, far above what it forecasted back in October, and marking the highest quarterly profit in its history. By product, Apple sold 74.5 million iPhones, 21.4 million iPads, and 5.52 million Macs. Those numbers were up big from the number of iPhones and Macs Apple sold during the same time…

Facebook, Apple, And Microsoft Are Ganging Up On Google — And It Couldn’t Happen At A Worse Time

January 2, 2015February 17, 2016

Back in the old days, the big bad company in tech that all the other companies teamed-up against was Microsoft. Microsoft was the evil empire. So, Apple and Google worked together to squash Microsoft. Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs used to mentor Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google CEO Eric Schmidt used to sit on the Apple board. This is no longer the case. These days, the common enemy is Google. In recent years, there have been a number of explicit and implicit partnerships between the three biggest…

WSJ: U.S. technology companies are in a pitched battle with Europe’s sovereign states

December 10, 2014February 17, 2016 Staff Writer

Discontent on Continent Highlights Battle Over Economics, Culture, Internet Control BRUSSELS—From Berlin to Madrid, from London to Paris, U.S. technology companies are in a pitched battle with Europe’s sovereign states. It is a clash that pits governments against the new tech titans, established industries against upstart challengers, and freewheeling American business culture against a more regulated European framework. And it poses one of the greatest threats to U.S. technology giants since their emergence from garages and college campuses over the past four decades. First and foremost, the battle is about…

WashingtonPost: Why Obama’s plan to save the Internet could actually ruin it

November 24, 2014February 17, 2016

On Monday, President Obama joined the chorus of those urging FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to inject federal and state regulators directly into the heart of the Internet, “reclassifying” wired and mobile broadband ISPs as public utilities under a 1934 law written to control the former Bell telephone monopoly. While Obama has long supported the notoriously slippery idea of “net neutrality,” this is the first time the White House has explicitly asked the FCC to take specific action, let alone to embrace the most radical and legally uncertain approach being considered…

Apple downplays Masque bug risk for users of iOS devices

November 14, 2014February 17, 2016

Apple has downplayed exploit fears stemming from the discovery of a security loophole which could trick users into downloading malicious apps on to their iOS devices. On Monday, security researchers at FireEye detailed the discovery of the Masque bug in a new report. The researchers said the bug, in which apps running on iOS 7.1.1 and later — including the latest iOS 8 — can be replaced with malicious, legitimate-looking applications. Once granted access to a user’s device, these apps could theoretically install malware or steal user data. The “Masque…