Items tagged with (NASDAQ:FB)
The law of gravity (or slightly more accurate, Newton's third law of motion) suggests that what goes up must come down. This was never meant to describe the stock market, but it often applies, and sometimes to a larger degree than investors would like. Case in point, Facebook's stock recently experienced the biggest single day plunge in its stock market history, and now the social network is facing a lawsuit over what caused this massive dip. That single day slide equated to a gut wrenching $120 billion loss in Facebook's market capitalization. On Wednesday, shares of Facebook were trading at $217.50,...
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You can easily tell if someone is ore has recently been active in Messenger, just look for the little dot underneath your contacts. Now Facebook is adding a similar feature to Instagram. The standalone photo-sharing app announced in a blog post that it is adding status indicators to contacts, which appear next a user's profile picture. "DMing friends and connecting over the content you love is more fun when you know your friends are there to see it. This update gives you the ability to have more of those realtime conversations while giving you the control to hide your status altogether," Instagram...
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Like any industry, technology follows trends that pave a path into the future. As it stands right, the two biggest trends are artificial intelligence (AI) and, related to that, robotics. It's no surprise that Facebook is increasing its investments into those sectors, both by hiring a handful of top-level computer scientists and by building new facilities. This is all an extension of Facebook's AI Research (FAIR) division, which it created over four years ago to focus on advancing the science and technology of AI. It's a pretty flexible setup for participants—researchers have the freedom to...
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There is a new open standard in the realm of virtual reality and it has the backing of some industry heavyweights. including AMD, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oculus (owned by Facebook), and Valve. All of those companies are part of a consortium that has introduced VirtualLink, and open industry standard that enables next generation VR headsets to connect to PCs via USB Type-C. Connecting headsets via USB Type-C would replace the current method of attaching VR gear to PCs using a combination of multiple USB 3.0/2.0 and HDMI cables, plus a power cable. The consortium is pushing for a single cable to rule...
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It almost feels inevitable that once a technology company grows to a massive size, the pursuit of designing its own chips is likewise inevitable. Case in point: Facebook, which follows many other technology companies - such as Google - in building its own chips to accelerate its business. Starting m earlier this year, Facebook began hiring chip engineers, but the specifics of what the company is working on isn't entirely clear. Its latest hire, Shahriar Rabii, comes from Google, where he worked on the Pixel's Visual Core chip. He's now going to work under Andrew Bosworth, who's in charge of Facebook's...
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Facebook has been fighting a legal battle with its Oculus arm against ZeniMax for a while now. In February 2017, Facebook's Oculus was ordered to pay ZeniMax $500 million for patent infringement. With that sort of money on the line, Facebook and Oculus appealed the decision. A new ruling in the case has been handed down and Facebook came out on top this time. The ruling sees the $500 million award given to ZeniMax halved to $250 million. U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade in Dallas, TX also rejected a request by ZeniMax that sales of Oculus VR headsets be banned in the U.S. The ZeniMax and Oculus...
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Knowledge is power, but it can also be frightening, in a sobering kind of way. Have you ever wondered how much time you spend online, and specifically on Facebook? That's something you might not want to know, especially if you fire up the social network's app on your phone several times throughout the day. If you are curious, however, it looks like Facebook will soon oblige by introducing a new 'Your Time on Facebook' tool. This has not been released yet, or even announced by Facebook. Nevertheless, it will eventually com to fruition, as the unreleased tool was discovered in Facebook's app for...
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Do you remember when Facebook didn't have any advertisements? That was a long time ago, and it was always inevitable that ads would infiltrate our timelines. Fair enough—it is a free service, after all, and Facebook has to generate income to keep it going. Over time, however, they've become more pervasive and, in some cases, annoying. Like autoplaying videos. And soon, you could see video ads in Messenger while chatting privately with your friends and family members. Ads are not new to Messenger—they have been around for about a year in a half. But what is new to Messenger is the presence...
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Photography is a tricky thing, and we're not even talking about principles like the rule-of-thirds or using Bokeh effects to spice up a snapshot. No, the real trick is dealing with that subject that has a tendency to close his or her eyes. In my neck of the woods, we call that subject "Tammy," and if it's a group photo, there's a 99.9 percent chance (rough estimate) she'll close her eyes right as the photo is taken. This leads to laughs and groans, followed by a retake, but what if there was another way? Facebook is working on that very thing. Over at Facebook Research, the dudes and dudettes in...
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Instagram is no longer testing a feature that alerted users when someone else would take a screenshot of their story. The feature had been in place for several months and would plop a starry icon next to the username of anyone who snapped a screenshot, thereby letting the user know that someone saved a potentially embarrassing post. With the test concluded, users are free to grab screenies all they want without Instagram ratting them out. This is either a good thing or potentially bad thing, depending on your perspective. For users who like to save photos that others take, Instagram's alert system...
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Facebook today launched a live game streaming hub called Fb.gg, which directs users to a special Facebook page that aggregates live and pre-recorded gaming video on the social network in one place. The cleverly named portal pays homage to the phrase "good game." It also puts Facebook in direct competition with Twitch, as both aim to be the go-to destination for live game streamers, their audiences, and creators in general. This is a big move by Facebook. As the esports category grows, so does the potential to cash in on hosting streams, which is one of several gaming sectors that Facebook is hoping...
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When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently testified before Congress, one of the common criticisms by multiple elected officials is that the social network has a history of screwing up in various ways, and then later apologizing and promising to do better. That's also what happened with the Cambridge Analytica scandal that prompted the testimony. Now just weeks later, Facebook is apologizing once again, this time for a bug that changed the default settings for millions of users, causing them to publicly share posts that they may have thought were private. "We recently found a bug that automatically...
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The intricacies of Facebook's full data collection and sharing policies are not really known outside of the social network, but it is safe to assume that your information changes hands. Facebook does not hide this tidbit, even if the full scope is not known. What is known, however, is that Facebook has data sharing deals with four Chinese companies, perhaps more, including Huawei, Lenovo, Oppo, and TCL. These are not small firms by any means. Huawei is the world's third biggest smartphone player, while Lenovo often jostles with Hewlett-Packard for the top spot in computer shipments and market share....
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Facebook users who are concerned about their privacy may need to worry about more than the apps that they or their friends download. The social media giant purportedly gave over sixty smartphone developers access to Facebook users’ information. Corporations such as Apple, Samsung, Amazon, BlackBerry, and Microsoft have reportedly not only been able to comb through their own customers’ data over the last decade, but the personal information of their customers’ Facebook friends. According to a report by The New York Times, Facebook made agreements with over sixty device makers to...
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