At least it lasted longer than six seconds. The popular microvideo platform that Twitter scooped up in 2012 is headed for an abrupt ending, as Vine announced in a blog post Thursday morning that it would be shutting down its app. Vine was a widely used app where videos looped and were limited to 6-second …
Read More »
Amazon is in a pickle. It would probably like to raise the fee on its popular Prime membership to offset its skyrocketing shipping costs. That fee, though, already stands at $99 a year, meaning an increase of just a buck would push membership to the psychologically important $100 barrier. Here’s the rub: the inherent contradiction of Prime is that the …
Read More »
The big splash at Microsoft’s product showcase on Wednesday was a bit of a throwback. It wasn’t a new tablet or fitness band or even a laptop. It was an all-in-one desktop computer. While desktops lost the computing crown to smartphones years ago, Microsoft sought to remake its own all-in-one, called the Surface Studio, as a touchscreen-enabled hub for artistry …
Read More »
Samsung‘s third quarter went down in flames. The Korean electronics giant had pinned its hopes on the Galaxy Note 7, a phone it expected to help its rebound in the mobile market. Indeed, Samsung expected to post a modest increase in its operating profit compared with the same period last year. Samsung’s hopes were dashed, however, when the company was …
Read More »
The heyday of Apple’s lights-out iPhone growth has passed. Since introducing the hugely popular iPhone 6 two years ago, the tech giant has labored to spark the intense consumer passion it has counted on to make the iPhone an even-better seller year after year. Apple is still struggling to reignite interest. The iPhone 7, which went on sale last month, …
Read More »
Twitter is planning to cut hundreds of jobs, with an announcement possibly coming as soon as this week ahead of its third-quarter financial results, Bloomberg reported Monday. The financially troubled company is planning to eliminate about 300 jobs, or 8 percent of its workforce, unidentified people described as familiar with the matter told the media outlet. It’s roughly the same …
Read More »
AT&T may have overshadowed T-Mobile’s earnings announcement, but the Un-carrier had the last laugh. T-Mobile was forced to reschedule its third-quarter earnings conference call on Monday after AT&T abruptly scheduled its own call to discuss its earnings results, which it released Saturday right after announcing an $85.4 billion deal to acquire Time Warner. But while AT&T promised a revolution in …
Read More »
Maybe AT&T can offer a free HBO Now subscription to every wireless customer. That might help reverse the company’s flagging growth in its core wireless phone business, as illustrated in its third-quarter results (PDF). They were released shortly after AT&T confirmed it would purchase media company Time Warner for $85.4 billion. Perhaps Time Warner will put a spring in AT&T’s …
Read More »
Things are looking up for Microsoft‘s Surface. The Redmond, Washington-based tech giant reported that sales of its tablets surged 38 percent in the first quarter compared with the same period a year ago. The company credited strong sales of its Surface Book and the Surface Pro 4 with generating $926 million in revenue during the quarter, up from $672 million …
Read More »
PayPal’s goal to become a bigger part of our payment lives took another step forward Thursday, with the company adding more money-transfer features to its platform. Nearly a year after it purchased money-transfer company Xoom, PayPal on Thursday integrated a handful of Xoom’s functions to its websites, making it easier for PayPal’s 87 million US users to send money or …
Read More »
