REUTERS - Jan 27 - Access to Facebook and its Instagram was blocked around the world for up to an hour on Tuesday, which the company said later was due to an internal fault and not an outside attack. Tinder was also down around the same period, but recovered. A hacker group associated with other recent high-profile attacks on other online services sought to claim responsibility for the outages, but Facebook said the fault was its own.
Facebook Takes Blame For Service Outages
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Facebook Releases Facebook Lite
LIFEHACKER - Jan 26 - A super lightweight version of its app directed at developing markets, currently only available officially in Bangladesh, Nepal, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. The APK is about 252KB, as opposed to the 27MB.
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LobbyFriend: Pop-up Social Networks At Hotels
USA TODAY - Jan 25 - The app will enable users to get information on events near and at the property, as well as send messages to other guests for the length of a hotel stay. LobbyFriend launched in February 2012, and will be in four more U.S. properties by March. Hotels pay on average $100 a month for LobbyFriend, which guests can use when they access the hotel's Wi-Fi. Users can remain anonymous, fill out a profile, sign in with Facebook or even create an avatar.
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Facebook Accused Of Playing Monopoly With Virtual Currencies
FORBES - Jan 23 - In an antitrust lawsuit, Social Ranger LLC claims that Facebook parlayed its dominance of social gaming into an unlawful monopoly. They claim game developers were invited to its social network platform to attract subscribers, telling the developers that they could keep any money earned. When Facebook purportedly saw how much money developers were making, it launched its own virtual currency and service provider and made game developers use it instead of the variety of virtual currencies and service providers available. The social gaming market in the US was valued at over $5B for 2015 - Facebook reported around $200M in revenue from the sector for the Q1 of 2013.
by Peter Geier
See full article at Forbes
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Twitter Partners With Bing For Language Translation
IDG NEWS SERVICE - Jan 23 - A globe icon may now appear in the top right corner of tweets that are not in the user's selected language. For those tweets, when the user clicks to expand them, the translated text will appear underneath the original. The feature works on iOS, Android, the desktop and TweetDeck.
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Xing Buys Intelligence Competence Center
RTTNEWS - Jan 22 - Xing AG has acquired all shares in Aschaffenburg-based Intelligence Competence Center (Deutschland) AG, the operator of the largest jobs search engine in German-speaking countries. Xing AG has to make an aggregate payment of approximately 6.3M euros to all shareholders and depending on the achievement of operating targets for 2015 and 2016, the main shareholder and founder of Intelligence Competence Center (Deutschland) AG may receive additional purchase price payments of up to 2.4M euros by February 2017.
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Ello's Video And Music Launch
TECH CRUNCH - Jan 22 - The anti-Facebook social network today launched the ability to share music and video clips in its feed. Ello hoped to dethrone Facebook by not having ads. But while hipsters had fun hating on Zuck’s creation for a few days, they all went back to it and promptly ditched Ello. Now it’s left with $5.5 million squeezed out of investors and no reason to exist.
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Lend Eyes To The Blind With Be My Eyes App
CNET NEWS - Jan 22 - The brainchild of Hans Jørgen Wiberg, Be My Eyes is an iPhone app (coming soon for Android) that lets users lend eyesight to someone who needs a little assistance. Once users register within the app (via Facebook or an e-mail address) and agree to notifications and microphone/camera use, they're placed into a queue. At some point their phone will ring and giving them the option of being connected to a blind user.
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Pinterest Acquires Recommendation Engine Kosei
TECH CRUNCH - Jan 21 - For an undisclosed figure, Pinterest gets Kosei’s tech that understands 400 million relationships between 30 million products, and the majority of its 10 person team including its co-founders. The Kosei team will spend their first 90 days figuring out where to apply themselves across black ops spam deterrence, product discovery and recommendations, visual object recognition, ad click prediction for monetization, growth analytics, and building a machine learning system on spark for Pinterest’s data team.
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Togethera: The 'Unsocial Network'
DAILY MAIL - Jan 22 - Accessible on the web and through apps for iPhone, iPad and Android, there are no publicly discoverable profiles on Togethera, meaning only people who know each other can connect and see each other's content. It allows families to easily share photos and videos. It claims its key is 'Simplicity and substance' and has also banned advertising.
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WhatsApp Comes To The Desktop
TECH CRUNCH - Jan 21 - It’s a web app rather than a native client: to log in on the desktop, users have to take a picture of a QR code through WhatsApp on their phone. This is necessary, presumably, because WhatsApp uses your phone number and SMS verifications rather than usernames/passwords. This currently works on Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry.
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Tencent Introduces Advertising On WeChat
GLOBAL TIMES - Jan 21 - A large number of WeChat users on Wednesday received the first ads in their app's Moments section,. The advertisements came from an account named "WeChat team," which is automatically added to users' friend list and operated by Tencent Holdings as displayed on the account label. WeChat had accumulated over 468M monthly active users by Q3 of 2014. The total income from WeChat's advertising project could reach $1.6B annually.
by Hu Weijia
See full article at Global Times
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Twitter Officially Launches Recap Feature
TECH CRUNCH - Jan 21 - The “While You Were Away” feature that helps users catch up on missed tweets is officially launching on iOS today (with Android and web coming soon).
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YouTube To Launch Original Content Effort By Year-End
BOSTON HERALD - Jan 20 - The effort will be focused on taking top native YouTube talent and giving them the financial lift to execute programming concepts they couldn't otherwise achieve. In addition to financial support, the talent involved will be able to partake of marketing help, "matchmaking with off-YouTube talent," and the company's own production facilities. The originals initiative will likely sync up with Google Preferred, an initiative YouTube announced at its "newfronts" presentation last year that allows advertisers to buy into the top 5% of its ad inventory.
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ChatGrape Scores $1.3M Led By Betaworks
TECH CRUNCH - Jan 20 - The investment, which comes in the form of Convertible Notes, is being led by U.S.-based Betaworks after venture partner (and head of new product development at Facebook) Josh Miller met with the startup in Vienna in December. The new funding will be used to grow the company’s engineering team based in Vienna, with a key focus on mobile applications and experts in the fields of artificial intelligence and language processing, along with “intensifying” ChatGrape’s collaboration with the ÖFAI, The Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
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BAND Surpasses 40M Accumulated Downloads
BUSINESS KOREA - Jan 21 - Camp Mobile announced that its social networking mobile application for groups, BAND, has surpassed 40M accumulated downloads as of January this year, only 28 months after it was first launched. Monthly active users amounted to 16M, meaning nearly 40% of those who downloaded the service actually use it.
by Jack H. Park
See full article at Business Korea
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1.35B Facebook Users Have $227B Global Economic Impact
VENTURE BEAT - Jan 20 - According to a new report commissioned by Facebook and conducted by Deloitte, the social networking site had a global economic impact of $227 billion and indirectly created 4.5 million jobs in 2014. Deloitte says Facebook generates economic activity through its marketing tools, its app platform, and the incentive it creates among its users to consume more mobile broadband and data services.
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Professional Matchmaking App Shapr
FAST COMPANY - Jan 20 - The professional networking platform was designed to increase the chances that you can bump into the person who could lead you to your dream job, invest in your startup, or simply give you some much needed advice. It has 2.5K users since launching a year ago, and has just finished raising $3M in seed funding from private investors including Frédéric Mazzella, founder and CEO of BlaBlaCar.
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Twitter Confirms Acquisition ZipDial
TECH CRUNCH - Jan 19 - Twitter said about the deal “For many, their first online experience will be on a mobile device – but the cost of data may prevent them from experiencing the true power of the Internet. Twitter, in partnership with ZipDial, can make great content more accessible to everyone.” Twitter will use ZipDial’s platform to deliver itself to feature phones and others with irregular Internet connections. Facebook and Google are both exploring ways to get those without Internet connected to their services. ZipDial gets Twitter in the business of accessibility too.
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