We’re just weeks away from Samsung’s next major launch event on August 23, and already we have a full visual of the device it is expected to unveil — the Galaxy Note 8. That’s courtesy of prolific smartphone leaker Evan Blass — who correctly detailed Samsung’s Galaxy S8 before it was announced earlier this year

Google’s brand of VR is, at last, beginning to arrive on Samsung devices. Reports emerged last week that certain Verizon Galaxy S8 and S8+ devices were getting the Daydream update, but today Google confirmed the rollout. Don’t panic if you don’t see the Daydream app on your device quite yet as the company said that

Charter Communications says it has “no interest” in merging with Sprint, after the Wall Street Journal reported that Sprint had proposed a deal. The proposed merger would have combined Sprint and Charter into a new publicly traded entity controlled by SoftBank, which currently controls a majority stake in Sprint. If it had come to fruition,

Facebook could jumpstart its Snapchat clone by letting social media stars and public figures post Stories publicly. When Facebook Stories launched globally in March, you could only share to all their friends or a subset of them. Now if you allow public followers, you can post your Story publicly so anyone can watch. Social media

T-Mobile and Sprint have been in merger talks for a long while now, but the latter may be attempting to jockey for position by allying itself with Charter and Comcast, the Wall Street Journal reports. Details are scarce, but the deal isn’t likely to be a full-on merger, according to a Reuters source. Instead, Sprint

Alistair Goodman, CEO of mobile marketing company Placecast, said location data is the “next frontier” when it comes to ad measurement and verification. For example, Goodman pointed to a study by Factual and the Mobile Marketing Association that found that 40 percent of marketers are concerned about the quality of location data. He said there

Peter Yared is a co-founder and the CTO at Sapho. More posts by this contributor: Despite an early lead with Windows Mobile and Windows CE — and spending billions on Nokia’s mobile business — Microsoft has been on its heels in the mobile device market since the one-two punch of iPhone and Android launching in

Chat fiction apps are among some of the most popular in the App Store, thanks to their highly engaged, largely teenage to young adult fan base who enjoy reading thrilling stories told in the form of text messages. Today, one competitor in this space, Wattpad, is rolling out an upgrade to its chat stories to

Dropbox may be taking another step in its very slow shuffle toward an IPO, and is now working with Goldman Sachs to prepare documents that could be filed as soon as this year, according to a report by Bloomberg. The company is expected to hire Goldman Sachs as the lead advisor of the IPO process, according

Approximately 2 million people have installed the YouTube TV app, Google’s live TV service aimed at a younger generation of cord cutters, as well as those who never signed up for traditional pay TV in the first place. That download figure comes from app store analytics firms Sensor Tower and App Annie, which both also

Twitter reported its second-quarter earnings today, and it did not go over well. As a result, the stock is down more than 12% in trading today — which is a very Twitter thing to happen, so to speak. Here’s the chart, which could pretty much be summed up with a 😐: Today also wiped out most

I’m reviewing the transcript in my notes of Twitter’s second-quarter earnings call — which definitely did not go well, with the stock crashing more than 10% — and it seems like Twitter is beating the drum very hard on its daily active user growth. The company is regularly referring to double-digit growth in its DAU

The small nice-ish story Twitter had going for itself for the past few quarters was that, at the very least, its monthly active users were growing quarter-over-quarter. While MAUs might not be the right number to look at these days, for better or worse it’s one of the core metrics that Twitter is judged on

LG’s mobile business is in a sticky patch after the company admitted its flagship LG G6 smartphone hasn’t sold as well as expected. LG Electronics itself posted a business-wide operating income of KRW 664.1 billion (USD 588.2 million) on overall revenue KRW 14.55 trillion (USD 12.89 billion). While LG’s operating income rose by 14 percent year-on-year

Facebook is winning the race to bring Snapchat’s Stories format to the rest of the world before its originator. WhatsApp Status, its version of Snapchat Stories, now has 250 million daily active users. That’s despite it being relegated to a secondary dedicated tab in the app, opposed to being front and center on the home

China’s Xiaomi, once the world’s highest valued tech startup, is getting over a disappointing two years with a notable spike in sales in its homeland during the second quarter of 2017. That’s according a new report from analyst firm Canalys, which estimates that Xiaomi, which was valued at $45 billion at the end of 2014, shipped

Blue Apron announced several changes at the executive level today, including co-founder Matthew Wadiak stepping down from the COO role to become a senior advisor. Wadiak’s changing role comes after a painful IPO for the meal kit delivery service, which first had to reduce its original IPO price and has since seen a significant drop

Mobile chip maker Qualcomm wants to enable deep learning-based software development on all kinds of devices, which is why it created the Neural Processing Engine (NPE) for its Snapdragon-series mobile processors. The NPE software development kit is now available to all via the Qualcomm Developer Network, which marks the first public release of the SDK, and

Third party keyboards might seem like an app fad blast from the recent past. But the smartphone keyboard space could be set for a shake up as long time player Fleksy gets a new team working full time on the app. Barcelona-based keyboard startup, ThingThing, announced today that it’s reached a deal with Fleksy’s founders

Google today launched the fourth and final developer preview of Android O, the latest version of its mobile operating system. As expected, there are no major changes in this release and, according to Google, the launch of Android O remains on track for later this summer. There’s still some time left before the official end

Today’s kids aren’t just reading books. They’re also tapping and playing with interactive stories on tablets as preschoolers, then delving into instant messaging-like chat fiction apps as teens. Amazon’s entry in this space, Amazon Rapids, was announced late last year as a way to bring this style of interactive fiction to readers in the 5

Netflix’s booming subscriber growth, announced in the company’s earnings last week, is also being felt on the App Store, where its app has again become the top earner in terms of revenue. According a recent report from app store analytics firm Sensor Tower, the app in Q2 saw 233 percent revenue growth year-over-year to $153

Aditya Agarwal, who came in to Dropbox from its acquisition of Cove way back in 2012 and was given the CTO role last year, will be leaving the company. He announced his departure in a post on Facebook. Agarwal held the CTO role for about 9 months and was previously the VP of engineering. That

Acorns is quickly turning into an oak tree in the financial services space. The company now boasts more than 2 million investment accounts (with 600,000 opened in 2017 alone) and is on track to do 1 billion trades in 2017 through the proprietary broker-dealer that it created. Those are hefty numbers to post for any

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group representing online publishers and advertisers, has released new standards around mobile and web advertisers. Not every publisher and advertiser will follow these standards, but the standards are important because they help establish best practices around what is and isn’t acceptable for the industry. If done right, they help

Pokémon Go’s getting Legendary Pokémon, those ultra rare, ultra powerful pocket monsters that typically figure prominently in the narrative arc for the main series console games. The Legendary Pokémon will appear as Eggs at gyms, and they’ll act as bosses for the new Raids that the game recently introduced – once defeated, you’ll get a

Messaging app Viber earlier this year made its first foray into shopping services with Instant Shopping, a feature that lets you search for items for sale via a keyboard when you have the messaging app open. Today, the company is announcing some more e-commerce related news: it’s buying the startup that helped build that feature. Viber

With Facebook’s newest feature, a musician could run an on-site fan club, a brand could organize its ambassadors and a newspaper could discuss articles with just its top readers. Today Facebook globally launched Groups for Pages, allowing the 70 million Pages on Facebook to create their own distinct communities and feeds. Facebook first quietly tested

One-third of all link clicks on Facebook already go to its self-hosted Instant Articles. Facebook claims they drive more referral traffic click-for-click because people don’t abandon them mid-click as they do with slow-loading mobile websites. Now Facebook is teaming up with Nielsen to prove that individual publishers benefit when they post with the Instant Articles

After much delay, Samsung has begun rolling out it Bixby smart assistant to users in the U.S.. The company said today that an update will allow owners of the Galaxy S8 and S8+ to gain voice capabilities for the service. Bixby is the Korean phone-maker’s take on Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, but it