By
Debra KaufmanNovember 5, 2018
Apple reported record revenue and profit for the fourth consecutive quarter, due to higher iPhone prices and App Store sales, but shares fell 6.5 percent to $207.76 in after-hours trading. Investors were unhappy about the company’s announcement that it plans to stop reporting unit sales for products. Apple’s numbers reflect a trend of tech share price drops, due to investor concern about the combination of high valuations, slowing revenue growth and rising costs. Apple forecasts that December quarter revenue will be between $89 billion and $93 billion. Read more
By
Debra KaufmanNovember 2, 2018
In light of how bad actors use online platforms to sow dissension and disinformation, many beleaguered tech behemoths have added another tool in its arsenal to fight this problem: so-called counterspeech initiatives. The term is based on Supreme Court Louis Brandeis’ statement that the best remedy for bad speech isn’t silence but more speech. YouTube — in addition to Redirect Method, which sends users searching for terrorism-related keywords to videos offering an alternative view — has its Creators for Change program. Read more
By
Rob ScottNovember 2, 2018
CBS launched its latest streaming network this week, as part of its strategy to reach younger viewers who are losing interest in traditional pay TV. The free ET Live channel, developed by CBS Interactive and “Entertainment Tonight,” will offer a wide array of entertainment news and related original programming via CBS All Access and ETLive.com, in addition to its own standalone app for Android, iOS, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV (integration with more platforms is expected in the future). CBS recently rolled out a number of streaming services as part of its CBS Local brand. Read more
By
Debra KaufmanNovember 2, 2018
Facebook’s video clips get over 8 billion views a day on average, but people with bad Internet connections or disabilities often don’t have access to them. That led Facebook to create VideoStory, which the company described in a research paper as “A Dataset for Telling the Stories of Social Media Videos.” The paper, to be delivered at the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, noted that, “automatically telling the stories using multi-sentence descriptions of videos would allow bridging this gap.” Read more
By
Debra KaufmanNovember 2, 2018
Samsung Electronics reported an approximately 20 percent increase in operating profit for the latest quarter from a year earlier, resulting in a record high profit of about $15 billion. But that sudden lift may not last. According to industry experts, the higher numbers are due to increased demand for memory chips for use in data centers and smartphones. Samsung and other chipmakers invested to expand production, but now demand for smartphones (and other consumer electronics) is reaching a plateau. Read more