Top music labels like Shazam Entertainment have reportedly attracted investments in the popular music-identification app. Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group owner Access Industries are each taking $3 million stakes in the start-up, The Wall Street Journal reports. All of the shares were purchased from a single third-party investor, sources tells WSJ.  

Yahoo this week rolled out a fancy new native ad unit, which is tailored for the mobile experience. “They are seamlessly integrated with surrounding content, targeted to the right consumer for even better results,” The Next Web reports. “The new ads are available through Yahoo Gemini, the company’s unified marketplace for advertisers dealing with mobile search and native advertising.”

Why is Apple so taken with Beats Electronics? Along with its popular hardware, Apple is attracted to Beats Music, the company’s music streaming service. Unveiled earlier this year, the unit has been “rapidly converting users into paying subscribers,” Bloomberg reports, citing sources. That and other reasons make it likely that the $3.2 billion is going to get done, according to Bloomberg.

Bent on world domination, Samsung is settling for nothing short of perfection. So, when its latest phone, the Galaxy S5, failed to wow reviewers, the Korean company was quick to react. As Reuters reports, head designer Chang Dong-hoon recently agreed to step aside, and let Lee Min-hyouk, currently VP for mobile design, take his place. Not leaving the company, however, “The realignment will enable Chang to focus more on his role as head of the Design Strategy Team,” Samsung said in a statement.

Apple’s best days are behind, according to star venture capitalist Fred Wilson. What about the company’s amazing hardware? “I think hardware is increasingly becoming a commodity,” Wilson told attendees of a TC Disrupt conference, this week. Google and Facebook, on the other hand, will likely remain on the top of their game well through 2020, Wilson predicted. 

Unfortunately for Facebook, mobile developers are less reliant than ever on the social network. “Developing for mobile devices, where the new action is taking place, has empowered developers with one key tool -- your smartphone’s phone book,” Re/Code writes. “As such ... new apps are bypassing gatekeepers like Facebook and building new networks right from your own smartphone by going directly to your contacts list.” 

Continuing to gain traction among investors, film fan social network MovieLaLa is getting a leg up from Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce. As he tells TechCrunch, Benioff was drawn to the site’s secondary role as a data-driven marketing platform for Hollywood. “Movie studios are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to market movies without the analytics and data to know where to target that marketing and to know it’s working,” Benioff said. 

To better differentiate itself from, er, itself, Foursquare is dividing into two distinct apps: a new app named Swarm that will continue to do what everyone associates with the current Foursquare brand, i.e., let users check in to locations and become the “mayor” of their bar. Another, a more Yelp-like service, will take the Foursquare name. Confused yet? No matter, “The point of the company … was never to build an awesome check-in button,” Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley tells The Verge.