Secretive mixed-reality startup Magic Leap is itching to go mobile. Its ability to create the illusion of 3D objects in the world around you has garnered endless buzz, and the company is flush with more than $2 billion in funding from high-profile investors such as Google, Qualcomm and Warner Bros. It’s now set to strike …

Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz said the mixed-reality startup’s headset will cost about as much as a high-end desktop computer when it’s released later this year, the first in what will be multiple products from the company. “It’s a premium computer so we’re pricing it that way,” Abovitz said Tuesday at the Code Media conference in Huntington Beach, California.  Magic Leap is …

SoundCloud expects to have hundreds of thousands of artists in payment program SoundCloud Premier in the next couple years, CEO Kerry Trainor said in an interview Tuesday.   The invite-only program launched in 2014 to begin paying back artists a share of revenue for ads that run alongside their audio. At launch, the company said its goal ultimately was to …

Tim Armstrong, the CEO of Verizon’s digital-media unit Oath, suggested that Go90, Verizon’s free mobile video app, may be dismantled.  The shows and programs in Go90 will be redistributed inside Oath’s different distribution outlets, like HuffPost and Yahoo Finance, Armstrong said, adding that Go90’s identity is morphing into that of a content engine and library more so than an standalone …

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki won’t divulge her biggest fear about competing with Facebook, but she will give them some free advice.  “They should get back to baby pictures,” Wojcicki said Monday at the Code Media conference in Huntington Beach, California. (By the way, Facebook’s already aiming in that direction.) Video has been an obsession for Facebook, as it tries to swipe …

Facebook is renovating itself to increase users’ “time well spent” there, but the company’s head of News Feed said the social network itself is still figuring out what that means.  “We’re trying to figure out how to best measure and understand that,” Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s head of News Feed, said at the Code Media conference in Huntington Beach, California. The …

Patreon, which gives fans a way to pay their favorite creators on a recurring basis, on Tuesday introduced Lens, a feature similar to Instagram or Snapchat Stories that gives patrons special access to their favorite creators’ behind-the-scenes peeks.  The feature, which is part of Patreon’s mobile app, lets creators take photos and videos with their phones that display in a …

YouTube’s data-light app YouTube Go, now in 15 countries, will expand to more than 130 nations, the company said in a blog post Thursday.  Launched first in India last year, the YouTube Go app is designed to work with little to no connectivity, use less data and make recommendations more tailored to where you live. YouTube Go is also a …

Huawei’s ambitions to sell its phones in the US appear to remain just out of reach. Verizon is abandoning a plan to sell phones made by the popular Chinese device maker because of US government worries about security risk, according to a Bloomberg report Tuesday that cited unnamed people familiar with the matter.  Huawei has been pushing to sell its Mate …

Are kids ready for social media? Until December, the answer was no. Even Facebook had rules against children under the age of 13 joining more than 2 billion other people around the world who logged on to the service each month. But since then, the company has created an app called “Messenger Kids,” designed to let children communicate with people …