facebook

Facebook slammed in Europe over U.S. spying 

September 23

LONDON

Facebook is starting to feel the heat in Europe. 

The social network, and other big U.S. tech companies, might soon be forced to rethink the way they deal with user data in Europe. 

The European Union's top court issued a strong opinion Wednesday suggesting that Facebook(FB, Tech30) and others can't simply hand over data to U.S. authorities. 

Under an agreement reached in 2000 between the U.S. and Europe, tech firms were allowed to transfer users' data in huge quantities to their servers in the U.S.

But the advocate general at the European Court of Justice believes that the deal is no longer valid in the light of allegations of mass spying by the U.S. intelligence services. It said individual countries should have the right to ban U.S. companies from transferring data in the future. 

The court said the easy access to the data by the U.S. authorities "constitutes an interference with the right to respect for private life and the right to protection of personal data." It also said that U.S. intelligence services were carrying out "mass, indiscriminate surveillance."

The case against Facebook was brought forward by Austrian law student Max Schrems. He said he was uncomfortable with the way Facebook transfers his personal data to the U.S., where it can be accessed by authorities with little respect for his privacy. He used documents exposed by the Wikileaks whistleblower Edward Snowden to illustrate the problem.

"This finding, if confirmed by the court, would be a major step in limiting the legal options for U.S. authorities to conduct mass surveillance on data held by EU companies, including EU subsidiaries of U.S. companies," Schrems said in a statement.

Related: Google under siege in Europe

Facebook said it operates "in compliance with EU Data Protection law." 

"Like the thousands of other companies who operate data transfers across the Atlantic we await the full judgment," a Facebook spokesperson said. 

Austrian activist Max Schrems brought the case against Facebook. 

A final ruling is expected later this year. In the majority of cases at the European court, the verdict is consistent with the opinion of the advocate general. 

"The opinion on U.S. surveillance is very strong," Paul Bernal, data protection expert and a law lecturer at University of East Anglia, said. 

"To say strongly and clearly that US surveillance is 'mass, indiscriminate surveillance' is very direct," he added.

The case could cause headaches for other big U.S. companies operating in Europe. Around 4,000 companies use the current rules to transfer data. 

Other big tech companies, such as Google(GOOG), Amazon (AMZN, Tech30), and Twitter(TWTR, Tech30), are already under the scrutiny of the European Union over antitrust and privacy concerns. 

facebook

How Facebook plans to make money on Messenger

September 22

SAN FRANCISCO

You bought a bag of chips for lunch, but it turns out they're all broken. It's a sad bag of chip dust. How do you let the company know? 

The hot new way to communicate with businesses is through Facebook (FB, Tech30)private messages, according to Facebook. In the six months since launching new Messenger features just for businesses, it's become an even more popular way for brands to talk to their customers. 

"It's not a big leap to go from that to a monetization strategy," said Andrew Bosworth, Facebook's head of ads and Pages, at TechCrunch Disrupt on Tuesday. 

Though it's still to soon to know exactly how Messenger will make money, Facebook has a few ideas its working on. 

For starters, Bosworth thinks a business could drive commerce, bring in repeat customers, or offer discounts over Messenger.

Since that's a lot of communicating, many companies will turn to Facebook for help automating the process. That's where M comes in. Facebook debuted the artificial intelligence Messenger assistant last month.

M already helps people do things like make restaurant reservations and order flowers. Down the line, it could automate communications -- and purchases -- between companies and Facebook users.

Another possibility is click-to-message ad features, which the company is testing out internally. If a Facebook user clicked on one of those ads, it would launch a private Messenger conversation with the business. 

Piling more features like payments and customer service chats into Messenger makes sense. More than 700 million people use the Messenger service every month. 

Looking even further into the future, Bosworth talked about virtual reality. Facebook owns Oculus Rift, maker of the most hotly anticipated VR headsets coming out next year. Will companies sell us things in virtual reality? 

"That experience should include ads, because life includes ads. So to not have ads would make it less lifelike," said Bosworth. 

"But then again, I'm an ads guy."

peopole

Why people are gushing about Amy 

September 22

NEW YORK

Amy Ingram is a dream personal assistant: professional, prompt and receptive to critiques.

She's scheduled tens of thousands of meetings for her clients -- and she makes those who use her services look good. 

"Some people are like how the hell did they afford an assistant," said Dennis Mortensen, cofounder of X.ai, the startup behind Amy.

"They" can afford to pay Amy because she's not a human. She is an artificially intelligent personal assistant -- just look at her initials (A.I.) -- and right now, she's free.

All X.ai clients need to do is "cc" Amy on an email requesting a meeting. This tells her to take over the task of coordinating schedules and setting the date. Like a real-life assistant, clients grant her access to their digital calendar.

In fact, Amy helped coordinate my interview with Mortensen. An hour after she was cc'ed on the email to schedule our meeting, she suggested three times. I confirmed what worked best and, soon after, had a calendar invite.

Mortensen -- whose previous business sold to Outbrain in 2013 -- says his intention is to turn Amy into the anti-Siri.

"You can ask [Siri] anything, but she can't go very deep," he said. "We want to do the opposite."

For X.ai, this means that Amy will do one thing extremely well: Scheduling. And the company has raised $12 million from investors to do just that. 

Amy has to understand the nuances of human language and personalities. That's one of the reasons why the startup is taking on a variety of clients -- from tech CEOs to dentists to students -- in its free beta mode. (Mortensen did not disclose the number of beta users but said the wait is "extremely long.)

If Amy can't find an immediate solution to a scheduling conflict, the hope is that she will continue to work on it until she solves it. The more meetings Amy takes on, the more she learns and improves.

Related: Personal assistant startup Zirtual shuts down

"We've allowed ourselves two years to solve this," said Mortensen, of X.ai, which launched in April 2014. "Good enough isn't good enough. Only near perfect is good enough ... If i don't trust Amy to set up meetings accurately every time, I can't use it." 

The team has grown to 53 people, all working to perfect Amy. "It's always the last 2%," said Mortensen.

If all goes as planned, Mortensen hopes that Amy will launch to the public by early 2016. It will eventually charge a small monthly fee, around $9 to $15 per month (similar to what services like Slack charge), while still offering a free option. With a paid account, clients will be able to change Amy's name.

In perfecting Amy, one of the things X.ai has had to account for is gratitude. Even when people find out she's a machine, they continue to send her thank you notes. Though Amy has been taught to respond, she's had to learn that not every correspondence requires it. 

"Amy needs to understand that you're not trying to cancel or reschedule [a meeting]," Mortensen said.

So far, clients seem happy. One -- a partner at a VC firm -- told me that Amy legitimately has changed the way he functions at work. He's been using her for over a year. Others have taken to Twitter to express their love for her. 

"I've been trying out @xdotai to schedule meetings," tweeted bloglovin' CEO Giordano Contestabil. "It's pretty funny seeing people wishing a good weekend to a robot."

Related: This app makes sure you never walk home alone

microsoft

The new Microsoft Office is here

September 22

NEW YORK

Poor Microsoft Office.

It is Microsoft's most successful product, but has been stuck in a 90s-era time warp. There are now shinier, more modern ways to get work done, such as Slack, Google Apps and Trello. 

What those sexier apps have in common is that they let people get work done in a more 21st century way, with collaboration in mind. People can simultaneously edit documents, share work without an endless sea of attachments and quickly send group messages. 

Microsoft is trying to turn that conversation on its head with Office 2016, which launched Tuesday.

It makes some subtle but important tweaks that make it much easier to share, collaborate -- and, yes -- simultaneously edit documents (finally!) in Word.

At first glance, you won't notice much of a change between Office 2013 and Office 2016. What stands out immediately are some bolder colors and a search bar placed at the top of the various apps. 

In Microsoft Office 2016 you can simultaneously edit documents in Word -- finally!

The changes are there, though. There's a persistent "share" button at the top right of the app. You can Skype with coworkers from within Word, Excel and PowerPoint. You can set up group conversations in Outlook and work together as a team on documents saved in Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage.

"This is a huge release for us, even though the user interface has largely stayed the same," Jared Spataro, Microsoft's general manager for Office, told CNNMoney. "We've made the transition from 'me work' to 'we work.'"

Office has actually had a lot of these capabilities for some time. They just have been buried in the background, because Microsoft has been tepid about scaring off workers who have been using Office for decades.

Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30) found an elegant way of adding collaboration features in Office 2016 without radically changing the way people are accustomed to accomplishing tasks.

For example, when you share a document in Office 2016, you will open an Outlook email that appears to have a Word file attached. When the recipient gets the email, it will also show a Word file icon. But it's not a Word file -- it's a hyperlink to a file located on OneDrive, enabling both people to make changes to the document without saving it, renaming it, and reattaching it to another email.

Workers have long treated Office as a necessary evil. It's the best tool for email, word processing spreadsheets and presentations -- but it's just horribly unsexy. By making Office more collaborative, Microsoft is hoping to make its bestselling product cool.

groups

Groupon is laying off 1,100 employees

September 22

NEW YORK

Groupon will lay off about 1,100 people over the next year, or about 10% of its staff.

The job cuts are part of the company's bigger plan to consolidate its technology systems and operations, and eliminate non-lucrative international markets from its business, Groupon said in statement on Tuesday. 

The layoffs will primarily affect Groupon's customer service and "Deal Factory" teams. The Deal Factory employees research sales leads, maintain relationships with merchants and write the blurbs for the site's deals, according to a recent job posting.

The company is also shutting down operations in several countries: Morocco, Panama, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Taiwan, Thailand, and Uruguay. Recently, Groupon also closed operations in Greece and Turkey.

"Two years ago, we started the ambitious process of unifying our global technology platforms, tools and processes," the company said in a statement. "Alongside this process, we've also taken a close, honest look at where we do business [and] saw that the investment required to bring our technology, tools and marketplace to every one of our 40+ countries isn't commensurate with the return at this point."

In a filing with the SEC, Groupon (GRPN) says the restructuring will require a one-time charge of up to $35 million. 

Groupon has been trying to turn around its business over the past few years. But the task has been hard given the countless ways people can now shop online and find deals. 

The company has competition from all sides -- including big e-commerce platforms like Amazon(AMZN, Tech30) and eBay (EBAY), as well as social networks like Facebook (FB, Tech30) and Twitter(TWTR, Tech30), which have been launching their own "Buy now" buttons. 

instagram

A screen displays the Instagram logo during a presentation by co-founder Kevin Systrom as he announces the launch of a new direct image messaging service named Instagram Direct in New York December 12, 2013. 

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Instagram now has more than 400 million users, the company announced Tuesday, making it far larger than rival Twitter Inc with 100 million more users. 

The photo-sharing app has grown rapidly over the past three years, faster than many of its social app competitors, including Twitter and Snapchat. The Facebook unit has rolled out a number of products and features this year aimed at getting users to spend more time in the app. 

More than 75 percent of Instagram's users are outside the United States, the company wrote in a blog post. More than half of the 100 million newest users living in Europe and Asia with Brazil, Japan and Indonesia adding the most users.

blackberry

T

BlackBerry unveils a quirky new smartphone

August 04

NEW YORK

BlackBerry has updated the "Passport," its oddball, square smartphone.

Announced Tuesday, the BlackBerry (BBRY, Tech30) Passport Silver Edition is an upgraded version of the BlackBerry Passport, released in late 2014.

The Silver Edition has a 4.5" square screen, 13 MP camera and the latest BlackBerry operating system -- the same as the original Passport. But a closer look tells you why this BlackBerry isn't going to make you yawn and move on.

The Waterloo, Ontario-based firm has been listening to its customers and implementing subtle but necessary changes.

"We strive to deliver products that combine cutting-edge technology with purposeful, globally recognized design, and the BlackBerry Passport Silver Edition is the latest manifestation of this vision," Scott Wenger, Global Head of Design at BlackBerry, said in the press release. 

BlackBerry claims that the design improvements make communication easier.

"It brings together BlackBerry's latest OS platform, enhanced productivity features, and a refined industrial design based on customer and user feedback to deliver an unmatched experience for professionals who value precision and focus," Wenger said. 

A new stainless steel body adds strength and durability. A textured back and rounded bottom edges that don't jab you when you type will go a long way with BlackBerry fans. 

And if you feel as strongly about a physical keyboard as Kim Kardashian does, you're still in luck. The physical tap-tap-tap is here to stay. The trackpad capability across the improved keyboard is ideal for those who resent touchscreens. 

Makers of this business-phone have made smart changes. With every enhancement, BlackBerry hit two birds with one stone: aesthetics and functionality.

The BlackBerry Passport Silver Edition is priced at only $50 more than its predecessor. It started retail in North America through ShopBlackBerry.com for $549. It will become available internationally in the coming weeks. 

Customers who order the phone before 19th August may be eligible for $130 worth free bonus accessories too.