Internet & Websites - Page 14

In somewhat of a conflict of interest, Gaming Media giants IGN have acquired Humble Bundle, the discounted gaming, book and software retailer that has raised over $106 million for charity since its inception 7 years ago.

Humble Bundle posted a blog post, Jeffrey Rosen- Humble Bundle cofounder and CEO said "Announcing our biggest bundle ever: Humble Bundle is proudly joining the IGN family! We will continue to bring you all of our humble products, but with more resources and help from IGN."

"We chose IGN because they really understand our vision, share our passion for games, and believe in our mission to promote awesome digital content while helping charity. I can't think of a better partner than IGN to help Humble Bundle continue our quest."

Prime Day is July 11th and Amazon is planning to celebrate its annual Prime Day for its customers with secret in-store deals at their physical book store locations.

While Amazon doesn't have many book store locations, we found out that they will be having some secret unadvertised sales in store that won't be available on Amazon.com's own online Prime Day celebration.

These in-person deals include:

Mark Zuckerberg has just announced that Facebook reached a new milestone. There are now 2 billion people on Facebook every month.

"We're making progress connecting the world, and now let's bring the world closer together. "It's an honor to be on this journey with you," wrote Zuckerberg.

To celebrate this milestone, Facebook is launching a personalized video to "celebrate bringing the world closer together." You may see your video in your News Feed or by visiting Facebook.com/goodaddsup.

Facebook is looking at building out its own original TV shows, reportedly offering Hollywood studios up to $3 million per episode for original shows. The social network is looking at the 17 to 30 age range, with shows similar to ABC's own Pretty Little Liars, Scandal, or The Bachelor.

The social networking giant is going to be launching over 24 shows when it launches its TV shows later this year, and is now offering Hollywood bundles of cash for original TV shows at up to $3 million per episode, according to The Wall Street Journal. The future of business in this space is content heavy, something Facebook is fully aware of. We know that content rules, which is why Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Hulu, and many others make their own original TV shows... it's massive business, and Facebook is seeing this growing wave and is jumping onto its surfboard in a big way.

Snapchat is a big competitor for Facebook, as they've signed deals with the likes of DIsney, MTV, MGM, Time Warner, and A&E for original content. Snapchat isn't the same as Facebook and Netflix with full original TV series, but they will have episodes between 3 and 5 minutes long.

Facebook Live continues to evolve, with the social networking giant making some big changes to Live video that will make it much, much more social.

Facebook has announced Live Chat with Friends, and Live With features for Facebook Live videos. As TechCrunch points out, comment streams on popular Live videos are a gigantic mess, especially when there are hundreds and sometimes thousands of people typing comments at once, with Facebook saying there are ten times as many comments for Live videos than there are on normal videos.

There is a better way of dealing with this, so Facebook is getting you chat with friends while you're both watching Facebook Live videos. You can create a private chatroom where you can invite whoever you want, which is a great way of Facebook making Live video a much more personal experience. There's also a new feature that lets you go live with another person side-by-side, which is going to be great for interviews and collaborations.

Facebook is stepping into the world of gaming and eSports streaming, announcing it has teamed with ESL to stream eSports content on Facebook.

The social networking giant will be streaming exclusive eSports events and content in six languages, all within the elite Rank S CS:GO competition. ESL will be bringing 5500 hours of eSports content to Facebook, as well as offering 1500 hours of exclusive eSports content for Facebook.

Facebook won't just have the Rank S CS:GO matches, but we will also receive ESL One and Intel Extreme Masters events as well - all livestreamed in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and German. The social networking giant will also be making an original 30-minute Facebook Live series that will look back at previous CS:GO match highlights, showcasing top players as well as up and coming players.

Facebook has plenty to smile about for the first 3 months of 2017, with the company releasing their first quarterly earnings for the year.

The social networking giant now has 1.94 billion monthly active users, which is around 300 million more people on Facebook since this time last year. There are now an average of 1.28 billion people who use Facebook each and every day.

On the money side of things, Facebook raked in a sizeable $8 billion in revenue, a 49% increase from the same period of 2016. Facebook made just over $3 billion in net profit, representing a massive 76% increase in profits. Most of this comes from mobile advertising, which represents close to 85% of Facebook's advertising revenue.

Back in March, Facebook introduced Reactions for Messenger, and now the company has added ability to respond to Facebook comments with like, love, haha, wow, sad and angry.

"We've heard from people they'd like more ways to show their reaction in conversations on Facebook, so we're rolling out the ability to react to comments," a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement.

It appears that this feature isn't available to everyone yet, but is slowly rolling out globally.

Instagram announced that as of April 26th this social platform has more than 700 million users. The Facebook-owned company added that the last 100 million Instagrammers joined faster than ever before.

In December of last year, the company reached 600 million users, meaning that 100 million people joined Instagram in less than five months.

This milestone is a huge success for Instagram who has managed to double the number of its users in just two years.

Netflix is ramping up for a big month, with 25 new original TV shows next month alone - including the first two installments of the huge return of Dave Chappelle, a deal that will see Chappelle earning $60 million.

As for the new shows, this is what to expect, and their debut dates - the asterix means they're feature-length films:

Facebook is already creepy, where even just yesterday one of my personal messages sent through Messenger had been flagged as 'malicious content', even though I said 'all of your videos are great' to a YouTuber - but hey, their latest idea on reading your mind should be secure.

During a Q&A session, Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg said: "One day, I believe we'll be able to send full rich thoughts to each other directly using technology. You'll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too if you'd like".

But Business Insider has discovered a few job listings for Facebook's super-secretive 'Building 8' group, which is teased as a project that uses "neuroimaging" and "electrophysiological data" in order to create the "communications platform of the future".

Facebook loves to get to know its users, so it purchases offline financial information on you from 6 of its data partners in the US: Acxiom, Epsilon, Experian, Oracle Data Cloud, TransUnion and WPP.

With this information, Facebook knows about users' household income, and much more. The social network buys the offline data, mixing it with the data it collects on your online activity. Facebook uses the blend of information to customize advertising for you on Facebook, with ProPublica "reports 29,000 categories are offered to advertisers, with 600 filled with third-party data", reports NextPowerUp.

Is there anything Facebook doesn't know about you? Considering its founder Mark Zuckerberg tapes up the webcam on his laptop, I wouldn't put it past them.

In a series of Tweets where Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey had been soliciting user feedback, the CEO indicated that Twitter is seriously considering the ability to edit tweets.

As anyone who tweets knows, you currently must delete a tweet to fix any typographical errors, which is both a blessing and a curse. For celebrities and politicians, they can easily be caught making mistakes while regular users constantly delete tweets to fix minor mistakes.

Twitter is circling the drain right now, with Global Equities Research's Managing Director Trip Chowdhry saying that Twitter is "toast" and "not even a $10 stock". Harsh words, but with the departure of another top level executive this week, he could be right.

Josh McFarland, VP of Product at Twitter said he was leaving the company on the same day that Twitter's Chief Technology Officer Adam Messinger tweeting that he is leaving the social networking company to "take some time off". They added onto the pile with Adam Bain, Chief Operating Officer of Twitter, who was replaced by Chief Financial Officer Anthony Noto, for now.

Chowdhry continued: "Many investors were foolishly building (an) investment thesis based on complete stupidity". Twitter shares closed at $17.92 on Tuesday, so if Chowdhry is right and Twitter stock drops to $10, it would be a 44% drop from where it sits today. Chowdhry added that Twitter data quality is "horrible", and that many pollsters used Twitter data to predict Hillary Clinton's win - but with Donald Trump winning, it shows that Twitter's data isn't very valuable at all.

There are a lot of online platforms and apps that let you listen to the radio stations around the world, but Radio Garden, a Dutch project, shows the radio stations around the globe on one interactive map. Basically, it's the Google Maps for radio stations.

When you open the page, you will see our planet and green dots. Each green dot represents a radio station. The page will automatically start playing a radio station that is closest to your location. But then, you can spin the globe, click the green dot and listen to radio stations in any part of the world.

As of today, December 14th, Amazon Prime Video is available to customers in more than 200 countries and territories around the globe.

Netflix' biggest competitor is now available in the almost the entire world, except for China. Customers can sign up for a Prime Video membership and watch on Android and iOS phones and tablets, Fire Tablets and LG and Samsung smart TVs.

Amazon is offering a free 7-day trial and the monthly price for this service is $2.99 or 2.99 euro for the first six months. After that, the monthly fee will double to $5.99, which is still less than Netflix subscription which is $8.99.

Netflix currently offers 30 original shows; in 2017, it will more than double its content to at least 1,000 hours according to chief content officer Ted Sarandos.

Next year marks the start of a different direction for the majority of the company's original content, too: over 20 of the upcoming shows will be unscripted, including global competition series Ultimate Beastmaster (produced by Sylvester Stallone). Scripted shows on the horizon include A Series Of Unfortunate Events (starring Neil Patrick Harris), Santa Clarita Diet (starring Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant), and Mind Hunter (a David Fincher series about the early days of FBI serial killer profiling).

Netflix will spend approximately $6 billion on content in 2017, an increase of $1 billion over this year. An estimated 50 percent of that will go toward original content.

We all know social media is enjoyed and used on a daily (and minute-by-minute) basis by billions of people across the world, but by 2019 - social media advertising budgets will balloon out to a massive $50 billion according to French advertising Publicis Group Publicity Zenith (Zenith Optimedia).

On Monday, the group predicted that by 2020, global social media advertising spending will reach $50 billion, exceeding newspaper advertising. Power Communications is estimating by 2019 that global social media spending will account for 20% of total internet advertising - or $50 billion, just 1% lower than newspaper advertiser spending.

By 2020, social media spending will easily exceed newspaper ads - and most likely, even before then at the rate we're seeing. Online vide advertising is also growing, where by 2019 it's expected to reach $35.4 billion, higher than radio ads, but lower than TV advertising.

The website and digital preservation service known as the Internet Archive is moving house to Canada in response to the election of Donald Trump. A known opponent of open internet, Trump has claimed he will close "certain areas" of the web in order to help curb terrorist communication.

"On November 9th in America, we woke up to a new administration promising radical change," the site writes in a blog post. "It was a firm reminder that institutions like ours, built for the long-term, need to design for change."

"For us, it means keeping our cultural materials safe, private and perpetually accessible; it means preparing for a Web that may face greater restrictions; it means serving patrons in a world in which government surveillance is not going away; indeed it looks like it will increase."

Netflix now allows subscribers to download specific content on mobile devices to watch offline.

Streaming giant Netflix today announced that subscribers can now download movies and TV shows to their mobile devices to watch offline, saving precious MBs in their data plans. Every subscriber of every plan will be able to download content for free, but you'll have to update the Netflix app to version 4.12.0 on both iOS and Android phones and tablets to use it. The feature is not available on desktops.

"While many members enjoy watching Netflix at home, we've often heard they also want to continue their Stranger Things binge while on airplanes and other places where Internet is expensive or limited. Just click the download button on the details page for a film or TV series and you can watch it later without an internet connection," Netflix Director of Product Innovation Eddy Wu said.