If Facebook gets its way, maybe the next time you want your friend to hold the door for a second, you’ll say, “Hang on for 705,600,000 flicks.” Well, OK, you probably won’t. But you could, because Facebook introduced a new unit of time on Monday called the flick. The company thinks it’ll be useful for …

Last year Apple managed to shrink photo file sizes dramatically so you could cram twice as many photos onto your iPhone. But hold on, because that might not be the only game in town. Google, Mozilla and others in a group called the Alliance for Open Media are working on a rival photo technology. In testing so far, the images …

Mozilla, the nonprofit behind the Firefox web browser, has cut dozens of staff in its Taiwan office as it shifts its priorities in Asia. Formerly, the Taiwan office supported Mozilla’s broader, global open-source software efforts. Now, it’s making changes so it can “better meet the unique needs of consumers in emerging markets across Asia,” Mozilla said in a statement Thursday. …

Want people with phones to find your website? Better make sure it loads fast, because otherwise Google will punish you in its search results. Google long has given fast-loading web pages preferential placement in search results, but for now that only happens when people search on personal computers. Starting in July, particularly slow websites will be penalized in search results, …

What do you get when you cross an online chat room with streaming video? A Facebook watch party. The social-network colossus has begun testing the watch party feature, which works with both Facebook Live videos that are broadcast as they’re recorded and with ordinary Facebook videos that already are published. “In a Watch Party, members of a group can watch …

Browser maker Brave is handing out about $1 million worth of cryptocurrency-backed tokens it hopes will help build a better online advertising system. Brave developed a technology called the Basic Attention Token (BAT) designed to pay publishers, YouTube contributors and others who today rely on advertising revenue or subscription payments. For now, you can set up Brave to send BATs …

USB’s performance is doubling right now, but you speed freaks should be pleased to hear another doubling is possible for the ubiquitous connection technology. USB, short for Universal Serial Bus, is the wildly successful port that you probably use to plug your phone in to a charger and plug your external drive in to your laptop. When it arrived two …

The demise of the film camera industry didn’t work out well at Kodak, but so far things are working out better with an effort to capitalize on another digital revolution: cryptocurrency. On Tuesday, Kodak announced the KodakOne service, a technology based on the KodakCoin cryptocurrency and designed to let photographers get paid when their photos are used without a license. …

Political pressure may have interfered with a second deal by Chinese tech giant Huawei to sell its phones in the United States, this time with Verizon Wireless. On Monday, news emerged that AT&T pulled out of a deal to sell the Huawei Mate 10 Pro, and The Information reported the deal had been a victim of congressional pressure. Now, on …

USB is getting more power — the kind that’s measured in watts and that’s useful for charging phones and laptops — and the companies behind it are trying to make that power easier to use. At the CES tech show, the consortium in charge of USB announced work to ensure USB gets better at fast charging — and won’t zap …