A New York man who rented his apartment through Airbnb was found to have violated the city’s residency laws, marking the first legal setback for the peer-to-peer home rental start-up as it faces a growing number of regulatory questions.
An administrative law judge ruled that Nigel Warren had broken a 2010 New York City law when he accepted about $600 from a Russian tourist to stay in his apartment for a few days while he was out of town. The law prohibits apartment owners from renting property for less than 30 days, and was intended to crack down on landlords who bought affordable housing units and then converted them to hotels to make more money. Mr Warren was fined $2,400. Read more
African-American teenagers are more likely to use Twitter than their white counterparts, according to a study out today from the Pew Research Center.
Researchers noted a significant jump in Twitter use among teens in general, but found that 39 per cent of African-American teens used the microblogging site compared to 23 per cent of white teens. Read more
Apple chief executive officer Tim Cook took the hot seat on Tuesday morning in Washington to answer questions about a tax planning strategy that has enabled it to avoid billions of dollars of taxes.
Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate investigations committee, set the tone with his opening remarks, noting that just in 2012, Apple had exploited tax loopholes allowing it to avoid $9bn in US taxes. Such practices, he said, did “real harm” to the US economy, disadvantaging domestic companies that don’t make use of “tax gimmicks”.
You can watch the hearing here, read Mr Cook’s written testimony here and read the Senate committee’s report on Apple’s tax structure here.
Yahoo bought Tumblr for its rambunctious community. Despite the coat of paint rapidly applied to its email, homepage and various apps since Marissa Mayer arrived as chief executive less than a year ago, Yahoo was still in need of an injection of youth and energy.
But in solving that problem, Tumblr may have created another for Yahoo. Ad execs and Wall Street analysts alike are voicing concerns about – along with gifs and memes – one of Tumblr’s most popular types of content: pornography. Read more
A new mobile service operator called ItsOn aims to shake up the US smartphone business by offering users the ability to tailor their voice, text and data plans precisely, and – perhaps most interestingly – buy data by the app.
The company’s Zact service – a play on the word ‘exact’ – operates as a cloud-based mobile virtual network operator, buying capacity on Sprint Nextel’s 4G/LTE network and reselling it to its own customers via a smartphone app or web page.
Read more
Splashpath founder Dan Morgan (left) with Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps
London startup Active in Time has taken the path less traveled to financing by licensing its Splashpath swim tracking app to Speedo. Read more
By Richard Waters and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
By showing that it is prepared to play by the music industry’s rules with its new All Access subscription service, Google has won itself new friends among the music labels.
The main questions now: Can it overcome a patchy past track record in the music business, take advantage of its early lead in subscriptions over Apple and show that it can carve an audience of paying punters out of its massive user base? Read more
Google shares rose past the $900 mark on Wednesday as it announced 900m Android activations at its annual developer conference, Google I/O, in San Francisco. Google also launched a new subscription music streaming service, Google Play All Access, and a bunch of new services for developers, including improved gaming capabilities, mapping services and voice-controlled search tools.
Here’s a transcript of the liveblog by Chris Nuttall and Tim Bradshaw, who were reporting from the Moscone Center.
Yes, says image analyst Neal Krawetz, who believes the photo of grieving in the Gaza Strip may be three images melded together. No, say independent analysts contracted by World Press Photo, including a nifty tech outfit called Fourandsix.
But another start-up argues that there can be no definite answer once the process of image manipulation has started. Instead Scoopshot’s app transfers photos taken by users immediately to its platform, allowing it to guarantee that the photos that editors received are actually what the camera took.
Read more
The US may be moving only slowly towards opening up its airspace to commercial drones, but a market for unmanned aerial vehicles is already emerging rapidly elsewhere. Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures are the latest to jump in, with a $10.7m investment in drone technology company Airware. Read more
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Richard Waters
Chris Nuttall
Maija Palmer
Robin Kwong
Tim Bradshaw