Steve Thomas - IT Consultant

Late last year, Spotify began offering 15 hours of monthly audiobook listening to its Premium subscribers in select markets, including the U.S. Now the company says the new service is the second-largest audiobook provider behind Amazon-owned Audible — something Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said was notable “given how entrenched the legacy players are.” During its […]

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Mozilla today is introducing a new subscription service that will help people locate and remove their personal and sensitive information from data broker websites around the web. This includes the ability to remove your phone number, email, home address, and other information that is exposed on data broker websites and sold for profit, the company […]

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The recent surprise announcement that Meta will soon be shutting down a Facebook Groups API is throwing some businesses and social media marketers into disarray. On January 23rd, Meta announced the release of its Facebook Graph API v19.0, which included the news that the company would be deprecating its existing Facebook Groups API. The latter, […]

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Snapchat maker Snap is the latest tech company to conduct layoffs with its newly announced plans for a 10% workforce reduction, the company said on Monday. The layoffs would impact roughly 500-plus employees, based on headcount figures Snap released in November 2023, when it saw small-scale layoffs of its then north of 5,000 employees. The […]

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Controversies and PR headaches weren’t enough to dissuade Spotify from re-upping its agreement with podcaster Joe Rogan, whose show over the past couple of years drove divisions among music fans and artists alike and even prompted some big names, like Neil Young, to pull their catalogs from the streaming service. Regardless, the show remained popular […]

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has added his voice to those criticizing Apple’s compliance with the EU’s new Digital Markets Act (DMA) regulation, which forces Apple to open up its App Store and allow developers to use their own payment systems, among other things. During Meta’s Q4 earnings call this afternoon, Zuckerberg responded to an investor […]

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Instagram Threads now has more than 130 million monthly active users, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings today. The text-based social networking app is one of the many new projects that have sprung up in the wake of Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter, now called X, where it competes with […]

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Amazon announced today the launch of an AI-powered shopping assistant it’s calling Rufus that’s been trained on the e-commerce giant’s product catalog as well as information from around the web. The company says the new tool will launch to a subset of U.S. customers in beta, starting today, before expanding to more users in the […]

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Fortnite maker Epic Games is preparing to fight Apple in court over how Apple has chosen to comply with a court order that required the tech giant to change its App Store rules. In the antitrust case filed by Epic Games, a district court judge in Northern California ruled that app developers should be able […]

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The pace is picking up for the Apple Vison Pro apps ahead of the spatial computing device’s Friday launch as developers ready their apps for the new platform. While just last week, only 150-plus apps had been specifically designed for the Vision Pro so far, according to a third-party analysis of the App Store, Apple […]

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During today’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing focused on kids’ online safety, X CEO Linda Yaccarino downplayed the social network’s reach among younger users, when she noted that less than 1% of the app’s U.S. users were teens ages 13 through 17. The executive put that number in context by also sharing that there were 90 […]

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Instagram Threads will adopt another Twitter/X feature: trends, the company has confirmed. In a reply to a user on the app, Instagram head Adam Mosseri noted that work on such a feature was in the works, responding that “we are working on surfacing trends” — a feature that would make the X rival even more […]

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