Going public pits Spotify’s suggestions versus everyone

 The secret to Spotify’s public market debut is actually an acquisition it made in 2014. The Echo Nest was powering music recommendations for Beats Music, Rdio, Vevo, and iHeartRadio too before...

There’s always a bigger fish

 Hall One at Mobile World Congress – a single space more massive than most conference centers in major cities – contained only a few displays. Although a quarter of the room housed small phone and...

Spotify plays the long game with Family and Student Plans even as revenue per user drops

 Spotify’s “Family Plan,” a variation of which launched in 2014, as well as its “Student Plan” appear to be driving a significant portion of the company’s growth and improving retention, as the...

Even with double the subscribers, Spotify says Apple will always have an edge owning the app store

 Spotify just filed for a direct listing in the U.S., sidestepping the traditional IPO process, and now we’re starting to see some of the true financial guts of the company — and some of the significant...

Facebook rolls out job posts to become the blue-collar LinkedIn

 LinkedIn wasn’t built for low-skilled job seekers, so Facebook is barging in. Today Facebook is rolling out job posts to 40 more countries to make itself more meaningful to people’s lives while...

Square’s bets beyond a register brought in $253M last year as it posts a largely positive fourth quarter

 Square posted a largely successful fourth quarter that showed continuing growth with its Cash app — with users spending around $90 million on its Cash card in December, putting it on at a potentially...

These will be the first cities getting 5G from Sprint and T-Mobile

 Just last week, AT&T announced the first handful of cities where it’ll roll out its 5G network later this year. Today at Mobile World Congress, T-Mobile and Sprint did the same. Sprint’s first...

Chinese smartphone maker Doogee shows off its vision for the smartphone camera

 Doogee’s Mobile World Congress press conference is mostly what you’d expect from a company you’ve never heard of: small, low key, in the second basement meeting room at a hotel across from the...

Facebook launches a local news accelerator for publishers

 Facebook is trying to play extra nice with local news publishers by putting $3 million behind the launch of the Local News Subscriptions Accelerator. The three-month pilot program will help...

Pinterest hires former Square and Google exec Francoise Brougher as its first COO

 Pinterest today is adding another executive to its upper c-suite with the hire of Francoise Brougher, who was most recently business lead at Square and prior to that VP of SMB global sales and...

Despite backlash to the redesign, Snapchat downloads are up

 “What’s all the fuss about?” Curiosity over why people are protesting the Snapchat redesign seems to have inspired a new wave of users to try the app. Snapchat downloads in the U.S. went up 41...

EnvKey wants to create a smarter place to store a company’s API keys and credentials

 If an engineer ends up leaving a company, on their own, or for any other reason, the company work is going to have to quickly work to change all of their keys for their credentials and keys application...

Hunter2 wants to teach engineers to handle web app security with a hands-on approach

 When Equifax was broken into late last year — one of the biggest security breaches in recent history — Fletcher Heisler wanted to make sure security engineers got to know exactly what happened...