Venture Beat
Amazon is now offering Dash Buttons beyond U.S. borders, beginning with the U.K., Germany, and Austria. "The internet giant first introduced the Wi-Fi-connected buttons in the U.S. in March last year, letting consumers reorder items such as coffee, paper towels, or detergent by hitting a physical button that has been pre-programmed with their Amazon account credentials," Venture Beat notes.
Business Insider
Snapchat is planning to introduce behavioral targeting for advertisers, Business Insider writes, citing comments by the company's director of revenue operations Clement Xue in a new eMarketer report. "Xue said the company was working towards rolling out behavioral targeting capabilities in the third quarter of 2016," according to BI. "Snapchat will, at this stage, only be using behavioral data from users' activity in the app."
BuzzFeed
Facebook is conducting private tests of an “Add Contact” feature in Messenger. “The feature allows people to connect on the popular messaging app … without becoming friends on Facebook itself,” Buzzfeed reports. “Facebook already allows non-Facebook friends to message each other on Messenger, via message requests.”
Politico
Web giants are apparently not happy with the Obama administration’s proposal to identify security threats by asking foreign visitors about their social media accounts. “The Department of Homeland Security for months has weighed whether to prompt foreign travelers arriving on visa waivers to disclose the social media websites they use -- and their usernames for those accounts,” Politico reports.
Venture Beat
Microsoft just bought artificial-intelligence-powered scheduling service Genee. “The company is planning to integrate the intelligence technology into Office 365 and shut down the Genee service,” Venture Beat reports. “Genee was founded in 2014 to simplify the scheduling and rescheduling of meetings.”
Wall Street Journal
Despite offering increasingly attractive incentives to in-house recruiters, Facebook has had little success in diversifying its ranks. “Last month, the company said 4% of its U.S. employees were Hispanic and 2% were black, the same as the two prior years,” The Wall Street Journal reports. “Women made up 33% of its global workforce, up from 31% in 2014.”
The Verge
Erasing it anonymous roots, Yik Yak will now require users to create handles that will be directly connected to their activity on the network. Taking another page from Snapchat, “It’s also adding 18-character status messages that expire after 24 hours, as well as a feed of nearby users with whom you can exchange messages,” The Verge reports.
Business Insider
Snapchat is planning to significant expansion in New York City, Business Insider reports. “The Los Angeles-based startup has agreed to create 396 new jobs in the state of New York in exchange for tax breaks totaling up to $5 million from Empire State Development,” it writes. “The incentive proposal from ESD (a state-owned organization) stipulates that Snapchat create the new jobs over the next five years and keep them through January 2027.”
CNBC
Since February, Twitter says it has suspended 235,000 accounts for violating policies related to violent threats and promotion of terrorism. “That brings the total to 360,000 suspensions since the middle of 2015, with daily suspensions up 80 percent since last year,” CNBC reports, citing Twitter’s internal figures. “The news comes after Twitter made headlines for its free-speech policies.”
TechCrunch
Say, “So long, Tsu!” Yes, “Tsu, a social network that worked around the App Store’s rules on pay-per-installs, incentivized its users to create content, rewarded people for signing up friends, and got banned from Facebook for spamming, has now shut down,” TechCrunch reports. “No big surprise.”