June 2015

Most of the world will be using a smartphone to watch videos and access news in five years’ time and almost two in three dollars set to be spent globally on internet services will be for mobile access not fixed line, says new research.

More than two-thirds of the world’s population will be using smartphones by 2020, according to a report by Ericsson, the Swedish group. It estimates that smartphone subscriptions will double in the next five years to 6.1 billion fuelled by the rapid adoption of mobile internet in emerging markets. “This immense growth will make today’s big data revolution feel like the arrival of a floppy disk,” says Rima Qureshi, chief strategy officer at Ericsson. It points to “mass-scale transformation” of the mobile market owing to an increase in applications and falling costs of devices as the key factors driving connected devices. Overall worldwide mobile subscriptions are set to overtake the global population with a rise from 7.1 billion in 2014 to 9.2 billion by 2020. The growth will lead to new revenues for device makers and telecoms groups that adjust their businesses to provide services for the expansion of mobile, Ericsson said.

Instagram is cranking up its money machine, and that means a lot more ads in your photo feed. Facebook, which bought Instagram in 2012, has kept the mobile photo-sharing service mostly free of advertising, allowing only a handful of big brands to put a few carefully drafted commercial messages on the service. But the company announced plans to open the Instagram feed to all advertisers, from the local tattoo parlor to global food makers. Marketers will be able to target ads to the service’s 300 million users by interest, age, gender and other factors, just as they can on Facebook. Instagram will also begin testing a type of ad that allows viewers to click on a link to buy a product or install an app that is advertised. The commercialization of Instagram, while sure to disappoint some users, was probably inevitable.

Over the last couple of years, an array of media companies, venture capitalists and wealthy individuals have quietly explored buying a stake in The Huffington Post. The most recent valuation, according to half a dozen people briefed on the matter: about $1 billion. Those interested have included the European media companies Le Monde and Axel Springer; the Napster founder Sean Parker; and the private equity firm General Atlantic, those people said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Some of the talks were navigated by AOL, The Huffington Post’s parent company, as it sought ways to raise money, others by the site’s well-connected founder, Arianna Huffington.

But when the music stopped last month and Verizon’s $4.4 billion takeover of AOL was announced, The Huffington Post was still owned by AOL — creating an unlikely corporate home for one of the nation’s leading liberal news outlets. Verizon executives have said that the primary reason for the purchase was AOL’s advertising technology, so it is not completely clear what it might want with The Huffington Post, and how a relationship between them might work. It also is unclear whether the famously independent Ms. Huffington will be comfortable operating within Verizon. Her contract expired this year, and she has yet to sign a new one, which raises the prospect of a Huffington Post without a Huffington.

After weeks of tense standoffs marked by the lapse of parts of the Patriot Act, the Senate easily passed comprehensive surveillance reform, ending a chapter of high-stakes brinkmanship on Capitol Hill that eventually concluded with lawmakers taking their first significant step away from the post-9/11 national security policy that has come to define two presidencies. By an overwhelming margin, lawmakers approved 67-32 the House-passed USA Freedom Act, which would restore the three provisions of the Patriot Act that expired on June 1, but usher in a bevy of changes designed to better protect privacy and increase transparency of the government's surveillance operations. It will also transition toward an effective end to the National Security Agency's bulk collection of US call data. The measure will now be sent to President Barack Obama, who is expected to swiftly sign it into law.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) failed in the end to convince his caucus to support him on a last-ditch effort to eke out even a small victory in a contentions, months-long battle over government spying that has left a bruise on his young tenure at the helm of the upper chamber. The Senate earlier rejected a host of amendments offered by Majority Leader McConnell that were intended to weaken the legislation. Most notably, the bill would end the NSA's once-secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act to justify its bulk collection of US call metadata, the first and most controversial of the programs exposed by NSA-whistleblower Edward Snowden. In lieu of that mass-surveillance regime, the Freedom Act calls for a transition within 6 months to a system where phone companies provide records to government spies on an as-needed, more-targeted basis after judicial approval is obtained from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.