Mobile

Roku’s smart home play: It’s leaning on its installed base of connected TVs as hubs for affordable smart home cameras, doorbells, and lights.

The ad industry lost 8,700 jobs last month: Legal, tech, and economic issues have created a perfect storm that the industry will struggle to crawl out of.

TikTok enters the streaming music arena: TikTok is timing its streaming super app and services takeover at a time when key player Spotify’s value is declining and ByteDance is on the rise.

It turns out podcast exclusivity may not be the move: Layoffs at Spotify revealed that exclusivity drastically reduced Gimlet Media’s listeners.

Microsoft’s shrinking Surfaces: Microsoft’s hardware offerings were meager this year as the company focused on popular products while remaining mum on its more daring moonshots.

With Apple TV+, ad-supported streaming becomes the norm: Apple’s service is one of the last to hop on the AVOD trend, but its ad ambitions go much further.

Teens represent untapped demand but they could be left exposed to losses and vulnerable to manipulation.

More than 90% of US digital coupon users will access the vouchers via smartphone this year. That figure is increasing slowly as tablet coupon adoption remains fairly stagnant.

Twitter’s edit feature paves its super app path: Paid subscribers can now edit tweets, and the feature could open up a new revenue stream and payments backbone necessary to fuel super app aspirations.

It looks like gambling is coming to ESPN: Disney is reported to be close to striking a deal with sportsbook DraftKings.

Google goes ambient: New Pixel phones, the first ever Pixel smartwatch, and a future tablet that transforms into a smart display are all touchpoints to Google’s wider IoT and ambient computing aspirations.

Google Cloud’s $100B opportunity: Data residency and sovereignty in regions like Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Greece could be Google Cloud’s competitive advantage in its pivot to a network provider.

Meta’s formula for growth, shockingly, involves more ads: Instagram’s new placements might open up inventory for advertisers but irk some users.

He wants to create the US version of WeChat. Twitter can help him do this, but there could be regulatory hurdles ahead.

Designed in California, made in India: AirPods join iPads and iPhones as the next products to be made in India. The acceleration away from China opens up opportunities for alternative manufacturing hubs.

The larger the mobile ad, the more time spent looking at it. Static interscroller ads, which fill the screen once users scroll past a certain point, receive the most attention from smartphone users worldwide—an average of 3.3 seconds. For the video interscroller format, that figure is 3.0 seconds.

Positive movement in the chip sector: Samsung aims for 2 nanometer chips, Intel tries its luck with GPUs, and Micron plans to invest $100 billion in a New York factory.

For real this time: Elon Musk is buying Twitter for $44 billion after backing out of the deal and engaging in a public dispute that put personnel and shareholders through the wringer.

Google exits cloud gaming: Expect Big Tech to continue retreating from moonshots by abandoning underperforming services and products to focus on profitable assets.