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“Wait,” I asked, “so it’s supposed to delete my personal files from my internal hard drive without asking my permission?” “Yes,” she replied.

through the Apple Music subscription, which I had, Apple now deletes files from its users’ computers. When I signed up for Apple Music, iTunes evaluated my massive collection of Mp3s and WAV files, scanned Apple’s database for what it considered matches, then removed the original files from my internal hard drive. REMOVED them. Deleted. If Apple Music saw a file it didn’t recognize—which came up often, since I’m a freelance composer and have many music files that I created myself—it would then download it to Apple’s database, delete it from my hard drive, and serve it back to me when I wanted to listen, just like it would with my other music files it had deleted.

What Apple considers a “match” often isn’t. That rare, early version of Fountains of Wayne’s “I’ll Do The Driving,” labeled as such? Still had its same label, but was instead replaced by the later-released, more widely available version of the song. The piano demo of “Sister Jack” that I downloaded directly from Spoon’s website ten years ago? Replaced with the alternate, more common demo version of the song. What this means, then, is that Apple is engineering a future in which rare, or varying, mixes and versions of songs won’t exist unless Apple decides they do.

High-profile mobile money launches by Apple and Samsung may have caught the headlines

But it is the developments in payments systems in supposedly less developed nations in Africa and Asia that point the way to the probable future for wider mobile banking.

the reality remains that the mobile phone as a means of payment remains relatively niche even in developed markets.

Hundreds of people at Apple are said to be secretly working on a design for an electric people-carrier which has been given the code name “Titan”. So far, the technology firm has declined to comment on the project

The Titan project was reportedly signed off almost a year ago by Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook, who has assigned vice president of product design, Steve Zadesky, to lead the group

Apple announced Wednesday it will build 200 megawatts of solar energy projects in China and work with local suppliers to source more renewable energy

the tech giant said it will launch an initiative to "drive its manufacturing partners to become more energy efficient and to use clean energy for their manufacturing operations."

Apple said the 200 megawatts projects will produce the equivalent of the energy used by more by than 265,000 Chinese homes in a year.

"There's a certain class of content which is only going to come onto Facebook if there's a good way to compensate content owners for that,"

"We've recently rolled out the business model for this. We'll give a revenue share on a portion of the views to content owners

To grasp the scope of change unraveling in content creation, which is increasingly fragmented, consider all the mobile apps on your smartphone.

Consumers in China spent $116.8 billion on luxury goods abroad in 2015

This translates to 46% of the global volume of high-end goods, which includes branded leather goods, cosmetics and electronics, according to consultants at Beijing-based Fortune Character Group, which derived these figures from the revenues of some 20,000 brands.

The government says that 120 million Chinese tourists — just about 1% of the population — went overseas in 2015, and contributed to 12% of global spending on their holidays.

Apple announced the opening of a new materials recovery lab in Texas and upgrades to its Daisy robot, another effort in its goal toward eliminating the need to mine new materials from the earth.

Discarding used gadgets like smartphones, laptops, TVs, and other appliances could pose environmental and health risks and wastes valuable resources needed to produce electronics

The new 9,000-square-foot research and development lab opening in Austin will use robots like Daisy as well as machine learning and artificial intelligence to break new ground when it comes to recycling electronics

In 2007, Netflix changed the landscape by introducing streaming on PC, allowing customers to instantly watch shows. By 2010, Netflix video streaming became available on additional platforms, including iOS devices. Today, video streaming services Netflix and Hulu have a strong hold among combined iOS and Android Top US Apps.

These convenient apps have set the stage for a preferred entertainment delivery. A whole generation of consumers have grown up with video streaming, rather than (or in addition to) paying for cable television: cord cutters and cord nevers. Major premium cable networks, HBO and Showtime, are now after a piece of the pie Netflix and Hulu have carved out

Both HBO NOW and Showtime are taking different approaches to standalone streaming partnerships. HBO NOW has gotten more traction in part to a heavy promotion from Apple, resulting in positive metrics. Showtime’s success is less clear, being married into Hulu’s already strong performance

Today, Facebook Messenger has 800 million monthly active users – more than 100 times the number of iPhone owners when Apple launched the App Store. Messenger’s current active user base exceeds even the total number of iPhones ever sold. Messaging apps now have more active users than social networks.

If and when Facebook announces a Bot Store, it will mark the “end of the beginning” of a new era: messaging as a platform. Conversational user interfaces are about to change the way billions of users interact with the world around them.

Pavel Durov announced the expansion of the Telegram Bot Store and Ted Livingston staked out Kik’s claim to be the WeChat of the West. By the end of the year, Slack had announced the Slack App Directory, supported by an $80 million fund to fuel the growth of the ecosystem, and Google was rumored to be developing its own chatbots.

В 2015 г. продажи музыки выросли на 3,2% до $15 млрд, сообщила Международная федерация звукозаписывающей индустрии (IFPI)

Рост рынка обеспечен прежде всего тем, что продажа музыки в цифровом формате приносит теперь больше выручки, чем продажа треков на физических носителях – CD- и DVD-дисках.

На цифровые форматы теперь приходится 45% всех продаж, или $6,7 млрд. А в 19 странах мира они занимают уже больше половины рынка. За последние 10 лет онлайн-продажи музыки выросли в 6 раз, а в 2015 г. – на 10,2%.

Its latest purchase is Nest Labs, a maker of sophisticated thermostats and smoke detectors: on January 13th Google said it would pay $3.2 billion in cash for the firm. Google’s biggest move into hardware so far is its $12.5 billion bid for Motorola Mobility

With Google’s collection of hardware businesses, the common factor is data: gathering and crunching them, to make physical devices more intelligent.

Packed with sensors and software that can, say, detect that the house is empty and turn down the heating, Nest’s connected thermostats generate plenty of data, which the firm captures.

Though characters like Woody and Buzz Lightyear are wonderfully realistic and lovable, the relationship that kids have with them is largely one-sided. Kids can hear these characters talk—not only through movies, but games, toys, and other movie merchandise—but they can’t engage them.

It was this idea that inspired Jacob to team up with his former Pixar colleague, Martin Reddy, and launch a new company, ToyTalk. The San Francisco-based outfit develops mobile games that let kids have conversations with animated characters—dialogues that can last for hours

Known as PullString, it’s equal parts speech recognition engine and script writing tool, and it’s quite a departure from other speech rec tools developed by the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Apple. It’s tailored specifically to kids, whose sentence structure, pitch, and vocal tone have posed challenges for traditional tools.

Mattel unveiled its new, $300 3D Printer, the “ThingMaker,” which will allow children to print their own toys at home

While there are affordably priced 3D printers available today, the software that works with them can sometimes have a learning curve that can hinder adoption. With the new application, live now on iOS and Android, the goal was to make it easy enough for anyone to design their own toys – even younger children

The idea isn’t just to print an object and be done, however – instead, kids will print parts that can be assembled to form larger creations, like dolls, robots, dinosaurs, scorpions, skeletons, bracelets or necklaces, for example

Using partners that have existing payment systems would be one option, but many of the most obvious partners have become direct or quasi-competitors to Facebook over recent years, including both Amazon and Apple. Once a user’s first transaction is completed, the rest is straightforward, but it’s that first transaction that’s going to be the hard part. Crack that, and Facebook should quickly become a major player in e-commerce, adding yet another arrow to its quiver and opening up a whole new set of revenue streams.

The average American driver spends 51 minutes a day in the car

On future screens, local restaurants, doctors’ offices and other services could target ads based on typical driving routes

“We see this as the battle for the fourth screen,”