Category: Tech news

 Mike Vernal, a Facebook VP who has spent the last eight-plus years at the company, most recently leading its search, profile, local and developer platform product groups, is leaving the company to become a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital. Before joining Facebook, Vernal spent nearly six years at Microsoft, first as a product manager and later as a development lead. The Harvard grad… Read More

 Chalk this up as the latest major bet on the importance of mobile video for the future of digital media. Verizon Wireless and Hearst Corp. are set to jointly acquire Complex Media. The “video-first” lifestyle site, focused on pop-culture trends and general entertainment, will continue to operate independently, albeit with Verizon and Hearst now each owning 50 percent stakes in… Read More

 A Supreme Court order issued today closes the book on (or perhaps merely ends this chapter of) more than a decade of legal warfare between Google and the Authors Guild over the legality of the former’s scanning without permission of millions of copyrighted books. And the final word is: it’s fair use. Read More

 Netflix just posted its first-quarter earnings, and it looks like for investors it was a whiff. The company’s shares are diving more than 10% in extended trading, which more or less fits in with the usual behavior of Netflix — big spikes, up and down, all over the place and all the time. Even the last time the company reported earnings, shares spiked 8%, and we’re seeing that… Read More

 In terms of venture capital dollars, it’s still hard to beat Silicon Valley. The latest figures have Bay Area companies gobbling up about 15 percent of the world’s venture capital. Factor in San Jose and Los Angeles and that share climbs to nearly one-third of the all the money raised by private companies in 2015. By contrast, New York City companies raised just 5 percent,… Read More

 Despite adding a record number of new users in the first quarter, Netflix is having a no good, very bad day. The company reported earnings of 6 cents per share — a beat — but missed on revenue targets with $1.96 billion in revenue. Analysts were expecting earnings of 3 cents per share on $1.97 billion in revenue. But that miss on revenue might not be the only thing weighing on… Read More

 Kanye West’s decision to flip-flop on whether or not his new album, “The Life of Pablo,” would be an exclusive to music streaming service Tidal, has now been met with a class action lawsuit led by consumer tech privacy law firm Edelson PC. The artist originally promised the album would only be on Tidal, but later decided to release “Pablo” to competitors,… Read More

 There’s an old saying in football: It isn’t the hours you put in but what you put in the hours.
Apparently, Bill Campbell — a widely revered former Columbia University football coach who went on to run Intuit for four years in the 1990s and only retired as its chairman in January — put something magical into his hours with entrepreneurs.
A great many of them are… Read More

 Technology market analysts at ABI Research predict that advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are going to be big business in the next decade — to the tune of $132 billion. But they also predict the decline and fall of night vision in our cars. Night vision systems have been available for vehicles since the early 2000s. They use either infrared or thermographic cameras to scan the… Read More

 We get to see the Earth in high definition every day, it’s true, but we’re limited to a certain ground-level point of view. Not so much the astronauts aboard the International Space Station. And they’ve just sent down a batch of stunning 4K footage of the Earth taken with their fancy RED Epic Dragon camera. Read More

 Apple has yet to update its website, but we now know the dates of the next Worldwide Developers Conference. When you ask Siri “when is WWDC,” Siri already has an answer for you. Apple will hold its annual developer conference from June 13 to June 17. This is in line with Apple’s previous conferences. The company will very likely present a bunch of new stuff during its… Read More

 It looks like incremental news, but the fact that Amazon now lets you subscribe to Amazon Prime Video separately from the rest of Amazon Prime signals a bigger shift. Amazon wants to turn the company into a subscription business, one subscription at a time. Read More

 OpenText, the Canadian content management company, announced today that it was buying much of the customer experience content management business from HP Inc, the consumer printer business that emerged after the HP split last year. The deal was for approximately $170 million, according to a statement released by OpenText. What’s more OpenText expects the assets to generate… Read More

 YouTube will today begin supporting 360-degree live streaming on its service, confirming reports from earlier this year stating that such a feature was in development. One of the first videos to take advantage of this more immersive format will be this year’s live stream from music event Coachella, where select performances from the festival will now be live streamed in 360 degrees.… Read More

 Google today announced that it is (finally) bringing podcasts to its Google Play Music service in the U.S. and Canada. With this, it follows in the footsteps of services like Spotify, which recently launched podcast support out of beta, and — of course — iTunes, which was one of the first music players to support podcasts back in 2005.
Last October, Google launched a portal for… Read More