Articles by David Jones

Tinder on Thursday announced the launch of Tinder Social, a new platform that helps users plan group nights out. The new platform will help users plan double dates or larger group events, creating new opportunities for people to make connections, the company said.

Facebook on Wednesday announced that the number of people using its Messenger app every month has surpassed 1 billion -- a major milestone for what is arguably the most important tool in the company's growth strategy going forward A growing number of people are using Messenger to communicate with friends, send money, plan events, play games and tel...

Shares of Netflix fell sharply Tuesday after it reported lower-than-expected second quarter earnings, which the company blamed on subscriber growth that fell short of forecasts Netflix added 1.7 million subscribers in the quarter, pushing its total membership to more than 83 million, the company said in a letter to shareholders. However, that growt...

Uber just celebrated its two-billionth trip in a 147-way tie, according to CEO Travis Kalanick, who shared the information in a Monday post on Facebook Each of the drivers and riders who began their trip at 4:16 a.m. GMT on Saturday, June 18, got a US$450 gift from Uber -- the number is significant because Uber now operates in 450 cities across the...

Yahoo on Monday reported second quarter earnings that fell just short of Wall Street estimates but left investors and analysts waiting to hear about progress in finding a strategic investment partner. Negotiations over the potential sale of the company's core assets are under way. The company reported earnings from operations of US$39 million, or ...

Softbank Group has agreed to buy British semiconductor maker ARM Holdings for Pounds 24.3 billion (about US$31.4 billion) in cash, the companies announced Monday. Softbank agreed to pay a hefty premium for ARM, with a price of 1,700 pence (about US$67.28) per ARM share, which is a 42.9 percent premium over the $47.08 closing price as of Friday, th...

Valve last week announced it would take action against third-party sites that run illegal gambling operations A number of gambling sites have been leveraging the Steam gaming platform -- in particular, the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive game -- to create massive operations that convert virtual skins into cash, Valve said.

Google and its parent company Alphabet are facing new charges in the European Commission's ongoing investigation of allegations that Google's comparison shopping and online advertising platforms violated antitrust laws. The EC on Thursday alleged that Google had abused its dominant position by systematically favoring its own comparison shopping se...

Consumer Reports on Thursday urged Tesla to disable the automatic steering function and change the name of its Autopilot driving assist feature. Questions recently have arisen over whether Tesla's Model S vehicles can operate safely without regular human intervention.

Just days after Pokemon Go sent Nintendo shares soaring in Tokyo, the game's developers were scrambling to close a massive privacy hole The iOS version of the mobile game -- which superimposes figures onto real-world environments through augmented reality technology -- apparently had a default setting that required users to grant broad permissions ...

Facebook last week said it would begin testing long anticipated end-to-end encryption capabilities in its Messenger app, enabling users to have secret conversations. The new level of security means that a message will be visible only to the sender and the recipient -- Facebook won't even be able to read it.

Amazon on Tuesday launched its second annual Prime Day promotion, offering tens of thousands of deeply discounted lightning deals for top customers and ratcheting up the e-commerce competition Walmart and others struck back in an aggressive effort to hold onto their key customers.

Nintendo shares soared on Monday after its new augmented reality mobile app, Pokemon Go, burst out of the gate over the weekend in the U.S and in key markets around the globe. The company's shares rose 36 percent in two days, after downloads of the Pokemon Go app raced to the top of iOS and Android charts in the U.S.

Pokemon Go, the highly anticipated augmented reality game from Niantic Labs, is finally available for download for iOS and Android mobile devices in the U.S., as well as in New Zealand and Australia. Niantic, the former Google unit behind the popular augmented reality game Ingress, has teamed up with The Pokemon Company and Nintendo to bring the i...

Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs, a sister company of Google, recently began negotiating a plan to help restructure the public transportation system in Columbus, Ohio, after the city won the Obama administration's national competition to ease traffic gridlock issues. Sidewalk Labs will leverage its cloud-based transportation data to help Columbus implemen...

Apple and Donate Life America on Tuesday announced a partnership to offer an organ donation app when the new iOS 10 update becomes available this fall. iPhone users will be able to register for the program with a couple taps of a button. They'll be able to sign up to make organ, eye or tissue donations, automatically entering their information in ...

Symantec last week confirmed that it had developed fixes for a series of eight vulnerabilities found in its portfolio of security products for enterprise and consumer customers, after an outside researcher identified the problem. A researcher from Google's Project Zero alerted the company, but there was no evidence of the vulnerability being explo...

Amazon on Tuesday announced a wide expansion of its Dash Button on-touch retail sales program, despite indications of relatively low acceptance among its key base of Prime customers The company added more than 50 retail products to its lineup of Dash thumb-drive size buttons, which let consumers reorder things like detergent and toilet tissue when ...

Microsoft on Tuesday announced a new Windows 10 upgrade policy -- weeks after losing a US$10,000 case in a small claims court. The owner of TG Travel Group in Sausalito, California, last month won a final judgment after she alleged that her computer was upgraded to the new operating system without prior authorization, according to court documents....

The United States Senate last week rejected a Republican-backed amendment that would have given the FBI expanded authority to access the browser histories and other electronic records of targets of terrorism and other national security investigations without first obtaining a warrant. The Senate voted 58-38 for the amendment, cosponsored by Sen.