By Julia Love and Yasmeen Abutaleb SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – When users ask Siri, Apple’s digital assistant, what she likes to drink, she is quick with an answer. What's your favorite drink?” As the tech giants race to build ever better artificial intelligence platforms, they are obsessing over the nuances of their digital assistants' personalities.
Read moreTwo years after his messy departure from Maker Studios, the YouTube network he co-founded, Internet entrepreneur Danny Zappin has big plans for his newest venture, Zealot Networks. Zappin says he expects the digital media company, which announced the purchase of viral content website ViralNova on Thursday, to be worth at least $5 billion in about two years. Zealot, founded in August 2014, helps digital media startups connect with media companies, brands and advertisers.
Read moreNEW YORK (Reuters) – The accused mastermind behind the underground website Silk Road was sentenced on Friday to life in prison for orchestrating a scheme that enabled more than $200 million of anonymous online drug sales using the digital currency bitcoin.
Read moreBy David DeKok HARRISBURG, Pa. (Reuters) – None of the women in nude photographs posted on a Facebook page for a now-suspended Penn State fraternity is cooperating with investigators, police said on Friday, frustrating efforts to bring charges against the fraternity’s members. Earlier this week, Pennsylvania State University suspended the school’s Kappa Delta Rho chapter for three years after discovering a private Facebook page that included photos of female students who were undressed, and in some cases, apparently unconscious or sleeping.
Read moreBy Nita Bhalla NEW DELHI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A virtual reality film aims to help raise funds for survivors of last month’s earthquake in Nepal by giving viewers a first-hand experience of the disaster’s aftermath, the director said on Friday. Los Angeles-based company RYOT – which produces news stories for audiences to act on – shot the footage in the days following the 7.8 magnitude quake which struck the impoverished nation on April 25, killing more than 8,000 people.
Read moreBy Nate Raymond NEW YORK (Reuters) – The accused mastermind behind the underground website Silk Road will be sentenced on Friday for orchestrating a scheme that enabled more than $200 million of anonymous online drug sales using the digital currency bitcoin.
Read moreNielsen NV announced on Wednesday that it is partnering with Tencent Holdings Ltd to measure its digital audience in a move that could direct more ad dollars from companies in the United States to China's biggest social network.
Read moreSports betting and gaming company GVC Holdings Plc said it had submitted a bid for bigger rival Bwin.Party Digital Entertainment Plc, which put itself up for sale last year. Bwin’s shares were up 9.6 percent at 98.00 pence at 1422 GMT (10.22 a.m. ET) on Friday.
Read moreBy Alastair Macdonald BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Can a bunch of graying politicians in Brussels really get with it and give Europe a revolutionary open market in digital technology? Jean-Claude Juncker and other EU executives poked fun at their own generation in an online video posted on Twitter on Wednesday to try and convince younger Europeans that they can.
Read moreThe EU executive will propose cutting the bloc’s sales tax on online newspapers, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said on Wednesday, in a move that would bring them into line with print media. Addressing Germany’s newspaper publishers federation BDZV in Brussels, Juncker said the Commission would put forward draft legislation in the first half of next year to extend national governments’ right to set reduced rates of value-added tax (VAT) on newspapers to their digital versions
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