Tech Biz

Amazon may increase its US Amazon Prime membership fee by $40 dollars more, the company’s chief financial officer announced Thursday during an earnings call. CFO Tom Szkutak said growing transportation costs may cause the online retail giant to add between $20 to $40 to the subscription fee. Prime — which offers free, two-shipping on certain Continue Reading →

Facebook has made a big point over the years of having real identities for its users, but it looks like that requirement is soon going to disappear, and users will able to use made-up names for more anonymity. Call it the Snapchat effect. According to a profile of Mark Zuckerberg published on Thursday in BusinessWeek Continue Reading →

Google has just let us in on another tidbit about the deal it has built with Lenovo over the sale of its Motorola Mobility assets: It keeps the high-tech Q division-type stuff being developed at Motorola’s Advanced Technology Group. That means the Ara modular smartphone concept, as well as sensors you swallow and passwords you Continue Reading →

Google on Wednesday sold Motorola to Lenovo for $2.91 billion. While many speculated that Google would release phones after it bought Motorola in 2011, it didn’t happen — Motorola remained a partner like other Android OEMs. Recently, Google acquired Nest, and TechCrunch has learned that Google has big plans for the team behind the connected Continue Reading →

LinkedIn on Wednesday launched a new “How You’re Connected” tool on profile pages that aims to help members introduce each other. This feature will begin rolling out to English members around the world beginning Wednesday, and the social media company says the types of insights it provides will be expanded “in the months to come.” Continue Reading →

Twitter’s new head of news, Vivian Schiller, announced her first project on Wednesday: a partnership with CNN and the New York startup Dataminr. The initiative will help journalists cover breaking news by making sense of the flood of public information on Twitter. Dataminr uses machine learning algorithms to analyze the Twitter firehose of data and Continue Reading →

Payment company Ribbon, which to date has offered a merchant-facing tool that allows its users to set up a quick-and-easy checkout page on their own sites or share checkout links via social media, is getting into the business of peer-to-peer payments, too. We first spotted this service while in development last November, when the company Continue Reading →

Having a job that requires you to be “on” all the time is something of a badge of honor in today’s tenuous economy. It’s also incredibly unhealthy. There’s one behavior in particular that a new pair of studies found ruined the next morning for workers on the job. Using a smartphone to answer work emails Continue Reading →

Airbnb, the travel service that aims at getting people to rent their homes or apartments to others, is helping the UK economy in a big way, the company claims. In a blog post on Tuesday, Airbnb announced that its service generates $824 million in economic activity in the UK each year. Exactly what “economic activity” Continue Reading →

More than one billion smartphones were shipped worldwide in 2013, the most ever shipped in a one year period to date. According to data from the International Data Corporation, vendors shipped 1,004.2 million smartphones in the 12 month period, an increase of 38.4 percent from the 725.3 million units shipped in 2012. Among vendors, Samsung Continue Reading →