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Facebook is continuing to grow at an impressive rate and is set to reach 2 billion users this year. The companyannounced its fourth quarter 2016 and full-year earnings on Wednesday and, as usual, it smashed expectations. In its most recent quarter, Facebook’s total revenue spiked by 51 percent year-over-year to hit $8.81 billion — the great majority of which ($8.6 billion) came from advertising. Facebook’s quarterly profit hit $3.57 billion, up 128 percent from the $1.56 billion it posted a year earlier. Further breaking down its ad revenue, Facebook continues to capitalize on what COO Sheryl Sandberg described as a shift to mobile. Overall, mobile advertising revenue represented 84 percent of ad revenue in the fourth quarter, up from 80 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015. Just as impressive are Facebook’s increasing user numbers. With each passing month, the social network is inching ever closer to its next milestone of 2 billion users. As of December 31 2016, the platform’s mon

Plex, the streaming media application, just announced the acquisition of the streaming news service Watchup. The deal includes Watchup's team of engineers, but terms of the cash and stock transaction were not disclosed. Watchup plays host to over 150 news sources including  CBS ,  CNN ,  Vox (disclaimer: Vox is a sister site of  The Verge ), and Hearst Television. Investors include Turner Broadcasting, Tribune Media, and former executives from  The Wall Street Journal . As a service, Watchup lets you choose TV channels and content types to build a custom news feed that can then be fine-tuned by liking and disliking stories. Plex stresses that these are "credible news sources" with a nod to the many fake news sources available in this post-truth era. Watchup Watchup on Amazon Fire TV “Our mission at Plex has always been to provide our users with one simple and personalized window into all of their media, accessible from any device," said Plex CEO Keith Valory. &quo

Following Bloomberg’s report, the Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society (what a name) officially announced that Apple is joining other tech companies as a founding member of the AI initiative. Companies will work on research projects, AI best practices and more. The Partnership on AI was officially unveiled back in September 2016.

Amazon is opening up its mobile app to rival retailers, but it's definitely not out of the goodness of its heart. According to  The Information , the e-commerce website will launch a "place cards" service that its competitors can use for newsletters and the like. It's part of an even bigger undertaking called Amazon Commerce Services. When you click on a link in the place card, you'll get taken to a page that looks like the store's app or website but is actually part of Amazon's app. Apparently, the e-retail giant is hoping that the companies it manages to entice will end up using its other services, as well, particularly Amazon Payments. Since the company takes a cut out of every transaction made through the payment solution, it could become a lucrative venture if it ever takes off. While Amazon's app has more users than other big retailers' applications, the company will likely have a hard time convincing them to sign up. A Macy's executive

In 2013’s  Her , retro teddy bear Theodore Twombly (played by Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with an artificial intelligence that lives in his ear. At CES in 2017, tech company Kolibree is asking, “what if you fell in love with your toothbrush instead?” Well, sort of. The company has unveiled its latest product, the Ara, which it claims is the “first toothbrush with embedded AI.” This doesn’t mean, of course, that some sultry-voiced operating system will whisper sweet nothings to you while you’re brushing your teeth (they’d be pretty muffled anyway), but a bunch of sensors in the brush will monitor how long you use it each day and which areas of your mouth you you hit. This data will be analyzed in the toothbrush itself   by Kolibree’s “patented deep learning algorithms,” and recommendations on how to up your brushing game will be sent to your phone or emailed to you once a week. Functionally, it’s nearly identical to Kolibree’s first smart toothbrushintroduced in 2014. So, yeah, thi

Three years running, I've visited Energous at CES to be pitched on its wireless vision for the future of charging. This time, things are a little different. It's not announcing a manufacturing milestone or touting independent verification of its WattUp charging tech. Instead, it's actually launching some products. If you've never heard of Energous, it's a startup that uses RF to charge devices at a distance. There are a few different types of transmitters, but the basic tech involves a WattUp charging station sending out RF waves in a focused beam toward a compatible device. A chip in the gadget then converts the waves into direct current electricity. This "rectification" process isn't new, but Energous' claim is it's able to do it efficiently enough to make sense for charging small devices like wearables and phones. In the long run, Energous will offer wireless charging at 15 feet. For the first batch of products, though, it's the less-i

Many luxury smartphone makers see their work mainly as a matter of wrapping an ordinary device in upscale materials, maybe adding a concierge service and calling it a day.Gionee, however, is taking a different approach: it's giving you one huge feature that gives you a clear reason to pay a premium. It just launched the M2017, a metal-and-leather 5.7-inch phone whose centerpiece is its enormous 7,000mAh battery. Yes, there's a real chance that it has a larger power pack than your tablet. The company estimates that it'll last for nearly 32 hours of talk time and 26 hours of non-stop video, or enough to get you through a few days of moderate use. If you're a jetsetting business type (Gionee's target market), you might never need to plug in during that all-important day trip. Thankfully, the M2017 is (mostly) above-average beyond its epic longevity. It packs a curved quad HD AMOLED screen that's bound to be noticed, a hefty 6GB of RAM, at least 128GB of storage, a

Numerous web browsers have alreadystopped supporting Windows XP and Vista, but not Firefox. To this day, Mozilla's latest software can work with your decade-old PC. However, even that team has its limits -- it's phasing out support for XP and Vista starting next year. Mozilla will start by moving users on these operating systems to the Extended Support Release in March 2017, limiting them to feature updates that can be "several cycles" behind the curve. And while the company plans to unveil a final support end date in the middle of that year, it'll effectively cut the cord in September, when it stops delivering security updates. This doesn't mean that Firefox will stop working on XP or Vista in September, of course. But when security flaws are hard to avoid, it'll be impractical to keep using Firefox on those platforms when you could remain permanently vulnerable to exploits. There aren't likely to be many people who both run a 10-year-old operating s

Last month, Uber unveiled a totally redesigned and streamlined version of its app that featured a cleaner interface and way less confusion around which service to request. The company also promised to add a couple of new things: a Snapchat filter and the ability to use a friend’s location as your destination. Today, those features go live, and  The Verge  got an early look to see how it works. The Snapchat filter only works when you’re in the vehicle en route to your destination. Swipe up to show Uber’s new “feed,” and you’ll see a prompt to unlock several new Snapchat filters. That redirects you to Snapchat, where the app will ask whether you want to unlock the filter for a short duration. The idea here is that you’ll only be able to use Uber’s Snapchat filters when you’re in an Uber vehicle. There’s a standard Uber filter, one that displays the estimated time of arrival at your destination, and a “mystery” filter — which for me just displayed a gold cup that said Uber. Full discl

Apple and Nokia settled a patent lawsuit back in 2011, but now, they’re back at it again. This time, Apple is filing an antitrust lawsuit, not against Nokia but instead against third-party companies known as patent assertion entities, or PAEs, that are acting on its behalf. In retaliation for this lawsuit, Nokia is suing Apple directly. In its lawsuit, Apple argues that Nokia already has agreements to license its patents for fair and reasonable terms, aka FRAND. But Nokia is transferring these patents to PAEs in order to aggressively pursue money. This, Apple says, shouldn’t be allowed because it’s “anticompetitive and abusive” to Apple and other technology companies. Nokia is separately suing because it believes Apple owes it money for patents used in Apple products. The two companies last had a licensing spat in 2009, when Nokia sued Appleover claims that Apple infringed on some of its essential patents. These standard essential patents are used across the industry and as such, are

It might not quite rival last week'srevelation that up to one billion Yahoo accounts had been hacked in 2013, but it'll be news to anybody who contacted local government officials in Los Angeles. A Nigerian national has beencharged with hacking LA county employee accounts that might have exposed personal data of up to 756,000 people. 37-year-old Kelvin Onaghinor has not been arrested and authorities are unsure whether he's still in the US. They're also searching for possible accomplices. The hack resulted from the successful phishing of 108 county employees back in May, who provided names and passwords to their email accounts. The potential victims' data was contained in messages sent to those workers. Due to their occupational responsibilities, those communications may have included personally-identifiable information from names and dates of birth to Social Security numbers and medical records. As of last Friday when news broke, there was no evidence that confide

Are you tired of that boring black and white text on Facebook? Do you long for the days of MySpace where you could throw caution to the wind and just paint your profile page neon green? Well, you can't quite do that, but Facebook has introduced a new feature that could let you do the next best thing: adding background color to your posts. To do so, tap the "What's on your mind" question (also known as the the empty text field) and start writing. You'll immediately see a color palette option below. Tap your favorite hue and, voila, your Facebook post will be bathed in color as in the image above. Right now, the feature is only available to Android users, but anyone on Facebook should be able to see those stylized posts. It's rolling out to the world starting this week, so get ready for your timeline to be  way  more colorful, whether you like it or not.

Google told us in May that it would eventually block Adobe Flash Player content on Chrome. And today, the company is making good on its promise. Google is slowly rolling HTML5 out to users over the next couple of months, starting with one percent of users on the current version of Chrome. Everyone should have an updated Chrome by February, when the most recent beta version goes stable. This means that unless a website has an HTML5 content player, the Flash content won’t display. Users will have to enable it manually on a site-by-site basis. At first, the Flash permissions will only apply to sites that users are visiting for the first time, but by October, every site will require user permission to run Flash. Google isn’t the first company to block Flash content. Last year, Facebookmade every video on its website play in HTML5 by default across all browsers. Even Adobe told people to stop using Flash last year, so really, Google’s update is for the best.

Music users since September, bringing its total subscriber count to 20 million. Furthermore, VP Eddy Cue tells Billboard  that 60 percent of those are new customers who haven't purchased an iTunes song in the last year. By contrast, Spotify announced it had 40 million users in September, afteradding 10 million premium subscribers in a six month period. As before, Apple is using exclusive artist deals to drive users to Music. "Chance the Rapper, who we put on Apple Music exclusively, hit the top 10 on the Billboard charts [from streaming alone] and I can't recall that being done before," said Cue. Such deals are controversial with fans and the press, however, and artists like Kanye West (who has done his own exclusive deals on Tidal) have railedabout it. Unlike Apple, Spotify has a free, ad-supported subscription tier that it uses to drive premium subscriber growth. As of June, the company said it had100 million total users, including non-paid subscribers. Apple has

Angela Merkel this week warned that fake news and bots may influence Germany’s national elections next year, days after she announced plans to seek a fourth term as the country’s chancellor. In a speech to parliament on Wednesday, Merkel said that fake news and bots have “manipulated” public opinion online, adding that lawmakers must “confront this phenomenon and if necessary, regulate it," the AFP reports. "Something has changed — as globalization has marched on, [political] debate is taking place in a completely new media environment. Opinions aren't formed the way they were 25 years ago," Merkel said. "Today we have fake sites, bots, trolls — things that regenerate themselves, reinforcing opinions with certain algorithms and we have to learn to deal with them." “Opinions aren't formed the way they were 25 years ago.” Donald Trump’s victory in this month’s presidential elections has sparked a debate over the role that fake news played in the US cam

President-elect Donald Trump says he told Tim Cook in a phone call recently that he intends to get Apple to build its products in the US. “I said, ‘Tim, you know one of the things that will be a real achievement for me is when I get Apple to build a big plant in the United States, or many big plants in the United States, where instead of going to China, and going to Vietnam, and going to the places that you go to, you’re making your product right here,’” Trump recounted  during a wide-ranging interview with   The New York Times  yesterday. Apple did not respond to multiple requests for comment or confirmation that the call took place. “THOSE JOBS AREN’T COMING BACK.” Convincing Apple to move its manufacturing stateside won’t be easy. Manufacturing jobs have been  disappearing by the millions  for a decade and a half, and the potential to get Apple to build products in the US appears to have gone out with them. Back in 2011, Steve Jobs  is reported  to have told President Obam

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Facebook may have been beaming with pride when it completed the first full test of its Aquila internet drone on June 28th, but that "structural failure" near the end? US officials aren't so happy about that. The National Transportation Safety Board hasrevealed that it's investigating the incident, which it considers "substantial" enough to be treated as an accident. The exact circumstances aren't available, but there wasn't any damage on the ground. In a statement to  Bloomberg , Facebook reiterates that it was "happy" with the test flight, which checked everything from basic aerodynamics to controls. There were "no major unexpected results," the social network says. It likely wasn't catastrophic, then, but the NTSB's involvement still raises eyebrows. Is it investigating just to be cautious, or is this more than a small snag? Whatever the situation, it's only going to add to Facebook's headaches as it tries to o

The most popular web browsers are calling time on SHA-1, the hashing algorithm for securing data, and will soon begin blocking sites that use it. In a blog post, Microsoft stated that the algorithm was no longer secure and allowed attackers to carry out spoofs, phishing attacks, or man-in-the-middle attacks. From February 14, Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer 11 will no longer automatically load up a site that uses SHA-1; instead they will display a warning message to the user about this invalid certificate before they go any further. “Microsoft, in collaboration with other members of the industry, is working to phase out SHA-1,” Microsoft said. Website owners have been urged to update their certificates ASAP. The news comes just a couple of days after Google made a similar announcement, explaining that Chrome 56 will not support the outdated hashing algorithm. Chrome 56 is tipped for release in late January but Google had previously outlined these plans almost a year ago. Simil

Uber has made it much easier to buy gift cards for friends, family and anyone else who paid for your fare in the past. You can now get digital gift cards straight from Uber's website and send them straight to someone else's email address. The company started selling physical gift cards through retailers back in September, but now you only have to click a few buttons to get one. If you've ever bought e-gift cards from websites that use CashStar's program, such as Sephora, the process will look very familiar. You can choose the digital card's design, write a note to go with it and choose the amount you want to give. The ride-sharing company says your recipients can use what they get to pay for either a ride or an UberEATS purchase if the latter's available where they live. Source:  Uber