Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Going public pits Spotify’s suggestions versus everyone

 The secret to Spotify’s public market debut is actually an acquisition it made in 2014. The Echo Nest was powering music recommendations for Beats Music, Rdio, Vevo and iHeartRadio before Spotify pulled it out from under them by buying it for a reported $100 million — 90 percent in Spotify equity. That deal paid off big time. Read More



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There’s always a bigger fish

 Hall One at Mobile World Congress — a single space more massive than most conference centers in major cities — contained only a few displays. Although a quarter of the room housed small phone and mobile manufacturers, Huawei controlled the rest, creating a walled-off compound patrolled by women in folk costumes from many lands. The Small World After All jollity stopped at the gates. Read More



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Spotify plays the long game with Family and Student Plans even as revenue per user drops

 Spotify’s “Family Plan,” a variation of which launched in 2014, as well as its “Student Plan” appear to be driving a significant portion of the company’s growth and improving retention, as the company points to it multiple times in its filing for a direct listing on public markets today. But that also comes at a cost of decreasing the amount of revenue it… Read More



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Even with double the subscribers, Spotify says Apple will always have an edge owning the app store

 Spotify just filed for a direct listing in the U.S., sidestepping the traditional IPO process, and now we’re starting to see some of the true financial guts of the company — and some of the significant risks it faces from challenging services from Apple and Google. Apple, for example, charges apps a percentage of revenue for subscriptions processed through the App Store. Apple… Read More



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Facebook rolls out job posts to become the blue-collar LinkedIn

 LinkedIn wasn’t built for low-skilled job seekers, so Facebook is barging in. Today Facebook is rolling out job posts to 40 more countries to make itself more meaningful to people’s lives while laying the foundation for a lucrative business. Businesses will be able to post job openings to a Jobs tab on their Page, Jobs dashboard, Facebook Marketplace, and the News Feed that they… Read More



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Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Square’s bets beyond a register brought in $253M last year as it posts a largely positive fourth quarter

 Square posted a largely successful fourth quarter that showed continuing growth with its Cash App — with users spending around $90 million on its Cash card in December, putting it on a potentially $1 billion run rate. That would offer another significant avenue for Square to snap up additional customers as it looks to chip away at the alternatives available for directly sending cash… Read More



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These will be the first cities getting 5G from Sprint and T-Mobile

 Just last week, AT&T announced the first handful of cities where it’ll roll out its 5G network later this year. Today at Mobile World Congress, T-Mobile and Sprint did the same. Sprint’s first 5G networks will go live in Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, Washington, DC and Houston. T-Mobile will fire up 5G in New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Dallas first. Read More



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Facebook launches a local news accelerator for publishers

 Facebook is trying to play extra nice with local news publishers by putting $3 million behind the launch of the Local News Subscriptions Accelerator. The three-month pilot program will help 10 to 15 U.S.-based metropolitan news organizations gain more digital subscribers both on and off Facebook. Read More



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Chinese smartphone maker Doogee shows off its vision for the smartphone camera


 Doogee’s Mobile World Congress press conference is mostly what you’d expect from a company you’ve never heard of: small, low key, in the second basement meeting room at a hotel across from the convention center. It’s a bit like the smartphone farm system, the company’s hoping it can gin up enough awareness to rise above the din of news from the world’s… Read More



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Pinterest hires former Square and Google exec Francoise Brougher as its first COO

 Pinterest today is adding another executive to its upper c-suite with the hire of Francoise Brougher, who was most recently business lead at Square and prior to that VP of SMB global sales and operations at Google, as its first chief operating officer. Both of those previous positions are probably going to be of particular interest to Pinterest, as someone with Brougher’s experience… Read More



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Despite backlash to the redesign, Snapchat downloads are up

 “What’s all the fuss about?” Curiosity over why people are protesting the Snapchat redesign seems to have inspired a new wave of users to try the app. Snapchat downloads in the U.S. went up 41 percent to 76 percent in the week following the redesign’s February 6th rollout compared to the week before, according to data provided exclusively to TechCrunch by Sensor Tower.… Read More



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Hunter2 wants to teach engineers to handle web app security with a hands-on approach

 When Equifax was broken into late last year — one of the biggest security breaches in recent history — Fletcher Heisler wanted to make sure engineers got to know exactly what happened right away, and how to fix it. That’s part of the goal of Hunter2, a new online learning platform for engineers that’s designed to teach them how to handle these kinds of breaches in a… Read More



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EnvKey wants to create a smarter place to store a company’s API keys and credentials

 If an engineer ends up leaving a company, on their own, or for any other reason, the company work is going to have to quickly work to change all of their keys for their credentials and keys application components. That’s a huge hassle, because often times it’s hard to know where they are stored, who can access what, and how to change everything at a massive scale — especially… Read More



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Rating the big smartphone makers at MWC 2018

 With that in mind, this seems like the perfect opportunity to take a good look at how the industry’s big names fared at the show. Barring any sort of unforeseen circumstances, here’s a list of this week’s biggest winners and losers. HMD (Nokia): HMD scored a coup for a second year in a row, led by another nod to Nokia’s former successes. This time out, it was a return… Read More



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Google’s Flutter app SDK for iOS and Android is now in beta

 Flutter is Google’s open source toolkit for helping developers build iOS and Android apps. It’s not necessarily a household name yet, but it’s also less than a year old and, to some degree, it’s going up against frameworks like Facebook’s popular React Native. Google’s framework, which is heavily focused around the company’s Dart programming language,… Read More



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Rakuten will roll its $9B loyalty program into a new blockchain-based cryptocurrency, Rakuten Coin

 Back in 2016, Amazon’s Japanese rival Rakuten acquired Bitnet, a bitcoin wallet startup that it had previously invested in, to help it work on blockchain technology and applications. Today, one of the first fruits of that deal has come to light. The company is planning a new cryptocurrency called Rakuten Coin — built on blockchain technology and the company’s existing… Read More



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