- Twitter Aims to Show Advertising to Much Wider Audience: Twitter has long argued that its reach and influence extends far beyond the 320 million people who log into its social media service at least once a month. Tweets are embedded on thousands of other websites and apps, emailed, displayed on television and published in newspapers. Now the company plans to start making money from the vast number of people who are not signed in to the service but may click on a tweet they find through a web search or that is sent to them via email or text — an audience Twitter estimates at more than 500 million people worldwide. In a blog post on Thursday, the company said it has begun showing advertising to some of those casual viewers when they click on the link to a tweet or visit a Twitter user’s profile page. About 60 advertisers are participating initially, with the ads, known as promoted tweets, aimed at people in the United States, Britain, Japan and Australia. But the program, which has been in development for more than a year, is expected to ramp up quickly. These ads, which will be on the desktop web version of Twitter at first, won’t be quite as finely targeted as typical Twitter ads, relying on context, like other pages people have recently browsed, for targeting. Twitter estimates that each of these “logged out” users could be worth $2.50 a year to advertisers, compared with about $4 a year for active users. Wall Street, which has been focused mostly on Twitter’s lack of growth in active users, sees lots of potential in the program, and Twitter’s stock rose almost 7 percent on Thursday.
- GoPro's First Drone, Due Out in 2016, Will Be Called 'Karma': GoPro recently said it will debut its first drone in early 2016, and now the company has announced the brand name—Karma. On Wednesday, the company made the revelation by pushing a one-minute YouTube teaser. The video is a cut-up of the unbranded two-minute clip that GoPro uploaded to the video site on Oct. 28, when it originally disclosed its latest hardware. The longer spot has garnered nearly 4 million views since then. There's not much information about the drone—in terms of what it looks like or how much it will cost—in the video or on its dedicated website. But developing and marketing the product makes a lot of sense since so many GoPro enthusiasts have been attaching the high-def camcorders to drones made by other hardware companies. There are literally thousands of videos from such productions on YouTube.
- Facebook to Publish Designs for `Big Sur' AI Computer Hardware: Facebook’s use of artificial intelligence, which ranges from tools for image recognition to the filtering of the news feeds for its social network, demands special computing infrastructure. The company recently began building custom servers for its artificial intelligence workload and Thursday announced it would release the designs for that powerful hardware to the world -- for free. The company said the plan to open-source the blueprints of the servers -- called “Big Sur” -- would help other companies and researchers benefit from the incessant tweaking of Facebook’s developers. This follows Google’s release last month of a software tool for building AI systems named TensorFlow. The servers are built around graphical processing units from Nvidia Corp. GPUs are widely used in artificial intelligence because the chips have far more individual processing cores on them than traditional processors produced by Intel Corp., making them adept at the dumb-but-numerous calculations required by AI software.
- Wal-Mart adds to mobile wallet frenzy with 'Walmart Pay': Wal-Mart launched its own mobile payment service Walmart Pay on Thursday, potentially dealing a sharp blow to the ambitions of a mobile wallet the company had been co-developing with a consortium of retailers. The mobile payments space in the U.S. has seen a flurry of new launches and partnerships in the past year but has failed to gain traction as customer and merchant adoption have been sluggish. CurrentC - whose developers included Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy among others - was likely to prove strong competition to Apple's Apple Pay because it was developed as a single payment solution that could be used at many retailers and integrate their loyalty programs. But years of delay, a data breach and management changes hurt its prospects. An increasingly bigger worry for CurrentC is the end of its exclusive partnership with most of its members, which means they can now accept other mobile payment options at their stores. A survey released by data firm InfoScout found Apple Pay use to be at its lowest rate since the firm started tracking it. Shoppers used it this past Black Friday for only 2.7 percent of eligible transactions.
- Rovio’s CEO Steps Down After Just Over a Year: Last August Pekka Rantala took over the role of Rovio CEO from co-founder Mikael Hed, but just over a year later he’s already stepping down. He’s to be replaced by Kati Levoranta, former chief legal officer for the Angry Birds maker. Rantala says that “I feel now the time is right for me to step aside and move on to new challenges.” Despite being in the role for a relatively short period, Rantala presided over a tumultuous time for the game developer. Last October the company laid off 130 employees, and followed that up with 260 more job cuts in August, more than 30 percent of its workforce. The initial, unexpected success of Angry Birds caused the company to expand in many directions, yet it never managed to follow up Angry Birds with another big hit.
Uber China closes $1 billion fundraising round at $7 billion valuation: sources: Uber’s China arm has closed its $1 billion fundraising round early, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, with investors still hopeful for the U.S.-based ride service despite strong domestic competition in the car-hailing market. The deal was oversubscribed, said the second source directly familiar with the fundraising. According to a fundraising document seen by Reuters last week, this round values Uber China at $7 billion, with the unit planning to list on the mainland by 2020.
One Billion People Log In to Facebook for First Time: For the first time, a billion people used Facebook in a single day on Monday. Facebook’s chief, Mark Zuckerberg, observed the occasion with a post on his Facebook page, saying that one out of seven people on Earth logged in to the social network to connect with their friends and family. The one billion figure is different from the daily user numbers Facebook discloses each quarter when it reports its financial results. Those are the average number of daily users, counted over a 30-day period. Facebook had 968 million daily active users in June. Most people on Facebook live outside the United States and Canada.
YouTube gets super serious about gaming videos: Enter player two: YouTube stepped into the world of game-streaming Wednesday with the official launch of YouTube Gaming -- its answer to Amazon's popular gaming site, Twitch. The new section of YouTube allows gaming companies and everyday gamers to share live or recorded videos about the games of the moment. It also gives YouTube an official home for video game content as the business of watching other people play video games continues to gain popularity. Google first announced it would launch YouTube Gaming early this summer, ahead of the industry's big Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show, known more widely as E3. The debut comes a year after Google lost a bidding war with Amazon to buy Twitch, the Web's current leader in video game streaming. Amazon bought Twitch last August for nearly $1 billion dollars. Twitch is Google's main competition here. But YouTube isn't starting from scratch: it already has a huge amount of gaming content across its site. The company boasts "billions" of views across its site and says that time its users spend with gaming videos is up 75 percent in the past year. ZEFR, a technology firm that crunches YouTube data, estimates that videos of the walkthrough genre of what is known as "Let's Play" has garnered 40 billion views in the lifetime of YouTube.
Shazura: A More Efficient Way to Search Images: While most image-search software finds photos using keywords or phrases, Shazura’s binary system behaves more like the human brain, visually matching images that look the same with greater speed and efficiency. Pérez de la Coba, an electrical engineer by training, began coding Shazura in 2011 out of frustration. She’d snapped a photo of a pair of shoes she wanted but had trouble finding them online with existing image-comparison services such as Google’s. Upload a file, outline what you want to search for, and Shazura’s algorithm converts the image to a lengthy “numeric signature” containing extensive descriptive information. The number for a willow, say, is distinct from that for a cypress, or a green bag from a blue one. By cutting out the intermediary translation steps, Shazura sifts through a customer’s image database more quickly and accurately and uses less computing power than traditional search engines. Without having to rely on keyword tags or extensive if-then instructions, Shazura can make large-scale image searches much easier for government agencies, advertisers, or social networks, says Pérez de la Coba. Shazura has raised $1.2 million from investors and so far the 10-employee company has licensed its technology to clothiers El Corte Inglés and RichRelevance.
Facebook's Instagram adds new photo sizes to keep users, attract ads: Instagram has added new layout options in addition to its signature square for pictures and videos in a bid to attract more advertisers and to stop users defecting to more flexible services such as Snapchat. The move is the first major alteration to the photo-sharing, social media service since Facebook Inc bought it for $1 billion in 2012, and addresses the wishes of many of its 300 million users, who have been constrained by the square format. One in five photos and videos posted on the service do not fit the square format, Instagram said in a blog post. "Friends get cut out of group shots, the subject of your video feels cramped and you can’t capture the Golden Gate Bridge from end to end," it said. From Thursday, Instagram's web-based service and its mobile apps running on Google Inc's Android system and Apple Inc's iOS will allow portrait and landscape formats, giving both users and paying advertisers more options. The move should help Instagram in its battle with newer rivals such as Snapchat for users in the fast-moving messaging and media-sharing market. At the same time, it should attract more advertising revenue for Instagram, which said in June it would open its platform to all advertisers by the end of the year, rather than just to select brands. Instagram is expected to generate nearly $600 million in advertising revenue by the end of this year and $2.8 billion in 2017, according to projections from research firm eMarketer.
Apple is closing in on Fitbit: Apple, which launched the Apple Watch in June, is within striking distance of leader Fitbit Inc in the wearable devices market, market research firm IDC said. Apple shipped 3.6 million Apple Watches in the second quarter of 2015, just behind Fitbit's 4.4 million wearable fitness and health trackers, IDC said. The Apple Watch, which sports many health-related features and apps, is seen as the biggest rival to Fitbit's trackers. Shipments of wearable devices more than tripled to 18.1 million units in the second quarter, IDC said. "It's worth noting that Fitbit only sells basic wearables - a category that is expected to lose share over the next few years, leaving Apple poised to become the next market leader for all wearables," the IDC report said. Fitbit Inc's stock market listing in June got a rousing response from investors, with shares jumping as much as 60 percent. They closed at $38.40 on Wednesday, nearly double their IPO price.
