Facebook Inc is adding more than 60 partners to a service that lets users tell friends what they are currently doing online, from listening to music to reading news.
The company is working with Pinterest, Ticketmaster, Rotten Tomatoes and other applications to let users publish their activities on their Facebook pages, Carl Sjogreen, director of platform products, said at an event in San Francisco on Wednesday.
For instance, if someone is researching a travel spot on TripAdvisor, they could post the details to Facebook.
Facebook, the most popular -social-networking service, wants to open up new opportunities for advertising and get people to spend more time using its features. The new partnerships also help make Facebook more of a media hub, ramping up competition with Google Inc and Apple Inc.
“We believe this is the beginning of a new wave of apps,” Sjogreen said. “We’re really excited about the potential.”
With the so-called open-graph system, which was updated last year, users have already been able to use Spotify Ltd’s service to show the songs they’re playing and Washington Post Co’s sites to share news items.
The platform is now being opened up to all developers, Sjogreen said. The activities can be seen on three parts of Facebook’s site: the Ticker, News Feed and Timeline. Other partners include Foodspotting, the Kobo electronic-book service and the Gogobot travel site.
The service lets Facebook developers create applications that are better customized to their users, said Andrew Dreskin, chief executive officer of San Francisco startup Ticketfly Inc, another partner.
“They are looking to make the platform more flexible and have it all make more sense in terms of the actions consumers are taking and how they describe those actions,” Dreskin said. “It’s the evolution of Facebook.”
Ticketfly, which sells tickets to music concerts and other events, has added new buttons to its Web site to let users “Like” specific artists on Facebook after they purchase tickets.
Visitors to the site also can click on new buttons to indicate “I’m Seeing” a band to their friends on Facebook, Dreskin said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained