What does WhatsApp's co-founder Brian Acton, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Playboy's CEO Cooper Hefner, and now Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak all have in common? They've all left Facebook in some capacity. Wozniak, speaking to USA Today, seemingly no longer wants to be the "product" that Facebook sells. "Users provide every detail of their life to Facebook and ... Facebook makes a lot of advertising money off this," he told the publication in an email this weekend. "The profits are all based on the user’s info, but the users get none of the profits back." "Apple makes its money off of...
Three people were wounded on Tuesday after a shooting broke out at YouTube's California headquarters. The shooter later committed suicide. According to a statement, the San Bruno Police Department received 911 calls "reporting gun fire at the YouTube campus located at 901 Cherry Avenue in San Bruno". Officers then arrived at the headquarters minutes later. "Arriving officers encountered numerous employees fleeing the building. Officers encountered one victim with an apparent gunshot wound to a lower extremity at the front of the building," the statement continued. A "deceased female inside with a possible self-inflicted gunshot wound" was then found. She was...
BlackBerry's back at it again. Not content with simply suing Facebook-owned WhatsApp for alleged patent infringement this year, BlackBerry is now suing Snap Inc's Snapchat for doing the same. According to BlackBerry, Snap "has used BlackBerry's intellectual property to compete with it in the mobile messaging space". These infringements are "damaging" BlackBerry's business, it notes in its complaint. Said intellectual property includes six patents -- 8,825,084; 8,326,327; 8,301,713; 8,209,634; 8,296,351; and 8,676,929 -- that it used and pioneered through BlackBerry Messenger. These cover a broad spectrum, including Snap Map and Snap Ads. Additionally, Bloomberg notes that four of those six patents were...
If you're still using Facebook Messenger, you can now send 360 degree photos and videos -- in addition to 720p video -- from the Android and iOS app. "For 360 degree photos in Messenger, simply set your phone camera to panorama and snap a photo or capture a 360 degree photo using a 360 photo app or camera. Then share it in Messenger as you would a normal photo," the company explains in an update. As the 360 media you capture isn't reliant on Messenger but your phone's default camera app, this feature might not be supported by all phones. This...
In what seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to its parent company's recent leaky-data woes, Instagram has restricted third-party developers from accessing its data pool. For users, this may sound like a welcome change, but it's a mixed bag. A report by TechCrunch suggests that the image-sharing social network reduced its API call limit -- essentially the total number of instances a third-party app or service can request information from Instagram in an hour -- from 5000 calls to just 200 calls. This means that services fundamentally requiring high update rates -- or simply services built with the original update rate in...
A few days ago, we wrote a piece about Tinder's parent company Match suing its dating app rival Bumble for patent infringement. While that particular case isn't over just yet, a new counter-case has just emerged. That's right. The plucky bee-themed dating company is now suing Match for US$400-million for "fraudulently" requesting trade secrets. According to a TechCrunch report, Match required the information -- in the midst of the company's drive to purchase Tinder's rival -- to validate a higher offer. But an offer never came, and Bumble believes the information Match requested was used to benefit it financially in the dating...
The sleeping social media giant has finally woken up. After offering users lip-service through its nightmarish past two weeks, Facebook is now physically addressing its data issues, beginning with a redesign its apps' privacy settings and the addition of a user info management section. "Last week showed how much more work we need to do to enforce our policies and help people understand how Facebook works and the choices they have over their data," writes Erin Egan, the company's VP and CPO, and Ashlie Beringer, VP and deputy general counsel in a joint statement. Here's the extent of the company's latest...
Facebook wants you to forget about its woes just for a moment, and remind everyone that people do in fact still use it. Notably, not just people, local news outlets. After it announced in January 2018 that users across the US will see more local news in their timelines, the company has now extended this tweak globally. "With this update, we’re helping local publishers who cover multiple, nearby cities reach audiences in those cities," Alex Hardiman and Campbell Brown, Facebook's heads of news product and partnerships, respectively, clarified in a statement. "We’ll consider a publisher as local to multiple cities if the...
It's the F-word you've been hearing an awful lot of this week, and its one everyone should be using. Yes, Facebook. Please forgive me for swearing. The social network's still managing the fallout of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and recent suggestions that it has been gaining call and messaging data through its Android apps. But the question on everyone's lips is: what does the company know about me? There's a really, really easy way to find out. Here's how to download your Facebook data, step by step. How to download your Facebook data Log into Facebook. From the home page, click the downward-pointing...
After the Cambridge Analytica scandal piqued public panic last week, Facebook is again coming under fire for another user data issue. After the above news broke, Twitter user Dylan McKay published a screenshot detailing a particularly interesting set of data: a log of the outgoing, incoming and even missed calls he had received for two years. He made the discovery after downloading his Facebook data (You can download your own Facebook data right here). "Downloaded my facebook data as a ZIP file," McKay writes. "Somehow it has my entire call history with my partner's mum." Downloaded my facebook data as a ZIP file Somehow...
Social media was last week awash by the #GautengFloods, according to analytics firm ROI Africa's latest report. According to stats siphoned from the web from the previous seven days, the rainfall in the country's smallest province became social media's most talked about event of the past week. Ironically, #DayZero also trended as Cape Town received minimal rainfall. Politics constituted the other share of the chatter, with Julius Malema and his EFF thrust firmly into the spotlight due to Floyd Shivambu's handling of a journalist outside Parliament. "#Malema told the media he is in charge of South Africa and he made several comments about...
So it seems that you can indeed teach old advertising-laden dogs new tricks. Instagram, after years of users complaining about its algorithmic feed, is finally tweaking it. But it's not doing away with it entirely, because old dogs are still the same old dogs at their core. "Today we’re introducing changes to give you more control over your feed and ensure the posts you see are timely," it writes in an update. In another "how have they not done this yet moment", Instagram has now slapped a "New Posts" button on its app interface, doing away with automatically updating timelines, and...
WhatsApp rival Telegram now has 200-million monthly active users, the company revealed in a Thursday update. "Within the last 30 days, Telegram was used by 200 000 000 people," writes Pavel Duvov, the firm's Russia-born founder and CEO. "This is an insane number by any standards. If Telegram were a country, it would have been the sixth largest country in the world." In light of the recent Cambridge Analytica/Facebook saga, Duvov also took a moment to poke the big blue Menlo Park bear. "Unlike other popular apps, Telegram doesn’t have shareholders or advertisers to report to. We don’t do deals with marketers, data...
Meanwhile on the less acerbic side of the Facebook spectrum, Instagram this week introduces a new feature to users' bios. "Today, we’re introducing hashtag and profile links in bio, a new way to express yourself and the things you care about," the company writes in an update. Said new way to express yourself comes courtesy of "live links" in your biography, whenever you use an @ or # ahead of a word that leads to a another profile or a hashtag. And if you can't quite think of a popular hashtag, the company will recommend a few to you once you've...
So people are talking about Facebook a lot this week. You know, that social network that only Baby Boomers seem to use now? It somehow has more than two-billion users at present, and that number for data collection firms is a goldmine just waiting to be ravaged. Speaking of which, one particular company through a series of ducks, dips, dives and dodges, has garnered a hefty slice of this information. Here's what you need to know about the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook data siphoning fiasco. What is Cambridge Analytica? Cambridge Analytica is a privately-owned firm based in London, England, but has satellite offices...
Trailer: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’s fun to fright ratio is just right
Truecaller hits the 100m daily active users mark, 20% reside in Africa
Netflix launches Instagram Stories-like previews on its iOS app
Vodacom’s 4G network exceeds 80% population coverage in South Africa
This ‘Kitten Kollege’ YouTube series is the cutest thing you’ll watch today
Drake and Jeremy Loops rule Spotify’s first month in South Africa
FNB launches eWallet eXtra mobile bank accounts in South Africa
Memeburn focuses on everything digital in the emerging markets sphere. More about us here
