Articles by David Jones

The digital media world was abuzz last week when news surfaced that billionaire Peter Thiel, one of PayPal's cofounders, had provided financial backing for a defamation lawsuit against Gawker Media. The suit stemmed from Gawker's publication of a sex tape involving ex-WWE superstar Terry Bollea, better known as "Hulk Hogan." A Florida jury awarded...

A coalition of technology companies and advocacy groups earlier this week wrote to the Federal Communications Commission, urging it to open a public investigation into zero-rating practices, in which mobile providers allow some video or music providers to be excluded from data caps The group, which includes Common Cause, Etsy, Foursquare, Mozilla a...

Facebook this week said it would make several procedural changes to its Trending Topics feature to quell concerns that the results could be steered in a particular political direction, even though it has found no evidence of bias. The company will retrain workers in the Trending Topics department and institute additional oversight and control to m...

Microsoft on Wednesday announced plans to streamline its smartphone business by cutting 1,850 jobs. It will record an impairment charge of US$950 million, with severance payments accounting for $200 million of the charge The restructuring will entail up to 1,350 job losses at Microsoft Mobile Oy in Finland, and 500 more cuts around the world.

It took a hacker just a day to come up with a workaround for the platform update Oculus released last week, which blocked users from running the company's games on rival virtual reality systems Version 1.4 of the Oculus App blocked a hack from LibreVR called "Revive," which allowed users to play Oculus games on rival systems, including the HTC Vive...

Bids for Yahoo's core assets were expected to come in at between US$2 billion and $3 billion, far below prior estimates that it could fetch $4 billion to $8 billion at auction, The Wall Street Journal reported last week Verizon, which remains the leading candidate for Yahoo's assets, and other contenders met with CEO Marissa Mayer at the company's...

Microsoft last week announced plans to crack down on terrorist content, perhaps in response to the Obama administration's intense effort to get Silicon Valley's help in preventing organizations like ISIS from using social media as a recruiting and fundraising tool Microsoft has amended its terms of use to prohibit the posting of terrorist content o...

The Hyperloop -- the high-speed transportation concept Elon Musk has promoted heavily -- is edging closer to becoming a reality Russia plans to develop a Hyperloop network for freight transportation, the country's transport minister announced Friday....

Google on Thursday filed an appeal with France's supreme administrative court over an order from a privacy regulator requiring it to scrub certain search results around the world under a law called "the right to be forgotten." The March order from the CNIL requires Google and other search engines to delist the information of Europeans that shows up...

Nokia on Wednesday announced its return to the mobile phone and tablet business in connection with a larger agreement by Microsoft to sell its entry-level phone business toHMD Global andFIH Mobile for US$350 million Under the deal, Microsoft will sell its Hanoi, Vietnam, manufacturing facility to FIH Mobile, a unit of Hon Hai/Foxconn Technology Gro...

Google CEO Sundar Pichai kicked off the company's annual I/O developers conference on Wednesday with a keynote address that included previews of a batch of new products. Among those showcased were Google Assistant, a tool that can understand and respond to complex questions in real time; and Home, Google's highly anticipated response to Amazon's Echo speaker.

In an effort to better monetize its platform and boost user traffic, Twitter may relax the 140-character limit on individual tweets by no longer counting photos and Web links, Bloomberg reported earlier this week The tweak could take place within two weeks, according to the story, which cited an unnamed source who asked for anonymity because the de...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg invited a group of 15 media executives and right-leaning pundits, including talk show host Glenn Beck, to meet with him Wednesday to discuss accusations that the social media network biased it's trending news topics to omit conservative viewpoints. In addition to Beck, founder of the multiplatform conservative network ...

Microsoft and SAP on Tuesday announced plans to integrate their respective cloud-based systems, allowing the SAP HANA database to work with Microsoft Azure, which will enable Office 365 to communicate directly with SAP enterprise apps. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and SAP CEO Bill McDermott sat down before a packed audience at SAP's annual Sapphire...

AT&T on Monday announced that it has agreed to buyQuickplay Media, which will serve as the backbone for DirecTV's upcoming multiplatform streaming video services Quickplay, which supports AT&T's U-Verse TV Everywhere service, will support DirecTV Now, DirecTV Mobile and DirecTV Preview, which are scheduled to launch in the fourth quarter. The servi...

AT&T on Monday announced that it has agreed to buyQuickplay Media, which will serve as the backbone for DirecTV's upcoming multiplatform streaming video services Quickplay, which supports AT&T's U-Verse TV Everywhere service, will support DirecTV Now, DirecTV Mobile and DirecTV Preview, which are scheduled to launch in the fourth quarter. The servi...

AT&T on Monday announced that it has agreed to buyQuickplay Media, which will serve as the backbone for DirecTV's upcoming multiplatform streaming video services Quickplay, which supports AT&T's U-Verse TV Everywhere service, will support DirecTV Now, DirecTV Mobile and DirecTV Preview, which are scheduled to launch in the fourth quarter. The servi...

Apple CEO Tim Cook on Monday met with executives fromDidi Chuxing, just days after the company announced that it had received a US$1 billion investment from Apple After arriving in Beijing, Cook tweeted out photos of himself taking a taxi with Jean Liu, the president of Didi Chuxing, and of her showing him the mobile app....

Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable last week announced that California regulators approved their planned merger following a series of hearings in which the companies agreed to open access to underserved communities The California Public Utilities Commission voted unanimously to approve the merger, which requires the combined company to pr...

Google is rumored to be developing a direct competitor to Amazon's Echo, code-named "Chirp." The device, which might resemble the OnHub router (pictured above), would incorporate its Google Now voice assistant technology Google likely will launch the product later this year, according to a Wednesday Recode article that debunked earlier reports sugg...