By Eric Auchard MUNICH (Reuters) – The world's most popular messaging service, WhatsApp, is dropping its token $1 fee still levied on some users as it experiments with making businesses pay to reach their customers, Chief Executive Jan Koum said on Monday.
(Reuters) – Apple Inc said it will soon start charging for iTunes Radio, its music-streaming service that competes with Pandora Media Inc. ITunes Radio, which was announced in 2013, will no longer be free from the end of January, Apple said in statement. The ad-supported service, available only in the United States and Australia, will be folded into Apple Music, which costs $9.99 a month. Beats 1, the global 24/7 radio station, will now be the free music option for listeners.
The program, which some Republican presidential hopefuls have criticized because they say it puts Americans at greater risk of attack by Islamic State and other violent groups, has satisfactorily complied with eight privacy safeguards that include transparency, oversight, data minimization and use limitation since its implementation in November, according to a report released by the NSA’s Civil Liberties and Privacy Office. The NSA ended its daily vacuuming of millions of Americans’ phone metadata, meaning the numbers and time stamps of calls but not their content, late last year after Congress passed a law reforming some of the government’s surveillance practices. A presidential review committee found that the bulk data collection, exposed in 2013 by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, was an ineffective tool in fighting terrorism.
GoPro Inc estimated fourth-quarter revenue below market expectations due to disappointing sales of its action cameras, and said it would cut 7 percent of its workforce, sending its shares into freefall. GoPro shares plunged 28 percent to $10.50 in extended trading, or less than half its 2014 IPO price of $24. The San Mateo, California-based company said it expects revenue of about $435 million for the fourth quarter, well below analysts' average estimate of $511.9 million, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. The company, which had about 1,500 employees at the end of 2015, said quarterly revenue was also hit by a price cut meant to boost demand for its Hero4 Session cameras.
Google will need to add to the number of partners to develop the next phase of its self-driving project, but the president of that project did not name any of those partners-to-be. John Krafcik, president of the Google self-driving project, in a speech on Tuesday at an auto industry conference in Detroit, did not mention the name of any automaker or say whether it would partner with any automakers to build a fully autonomous car. Krafick said Google wants to form some partnerships in 2016.
The revolutionary aviation industry has brought the world some “power” –ful things. Airplanes are one of society’s greatest marvels. Their capabilities and transcendent nature have gifted the world with an […]
By Heru Asprihanto and Nicholas Owen JAKARTA (Reuters) – So stiff is competition between Indonesia's motorcycle taxis app companies that new entrants are going to extreme lengths to stand out. Aris Wahyudi, the founder of the newest motorcycle-sharing company, reckons he has found a unique way to win business: not-so-smelly drivers. “We took the decision to do an odor test for our customers' satisfaction,” Wahyudi said, speaking in a sweltering basement car park, where prospective drivers are lining up to have their armpits sniffed as part of a selection test.
By Joseph Menn SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Juniper Networks Inc said late on Friday it would stop using a piece of security code that analysts believe was developed by the National Security Agency in order to eavesdrop through technology products. The Silicon Valley maker of networking gear said it would ship new versions of security software in the first half of this year to replace those that rely on numbers generated by Dual Elliptic Curve technology. The statement on a blog post came a day after the presentation at a Stanford University conference of research by a team of cryptographers who found that Juniper's code had been changed in multiple ways during 2008 to enable eavesdropping on virtual private network sessions by customers.
By Alexandria Sage LAS VEGAS (Reuters) – Germans love the latest wave of touch-free car controls, which respond to the flick of a wrist or the swipe of a hand, as it means no messy fingerprints on their spotless dashboards. Germany's BMW demonstrated a 7 Series car that recognizes five simple gestures, from a finger twirl to the right to raise the music volume and a hand swipe to decline an incoming call. Japan's Pioneer had a minty scent shoot out of a dashboard to revive a driver after a car seat sensor detected a falling heart rate, a possible prelude to nodding off.
The stock briefly traded as low as $99.87, its lowest level since Aug. 24, a day when the entire stock market suffered a brief 'flash crash.' Apple shares traded as low as $92 that day. Apple stock closed down nearly 2 percent at $100.70 on Nasdaq on Wednesday, amid a broadly lower stock market. The stock's decline comes as a growing number of analysts are trimming their estimates for iPhone sales – the bedrock of Apple's business – with some predicting sales this year will decline on an annual basis for the first time since the phone was introduced.