Twitter tries to spur growth with shopping and political donations

Twitter Inc's plans to let users buy goods and make political donations through tweets offer a path to reach new customers and build profit at a time the company has struggled to increase its audience. On Tuesday, Twitter announced it has partnered with mobile payment company Square Inc to accept online donations for U.S. political campaigns

Read more

Guyana-Venezuela border spat takes to Google Maps

By Girish Gupta CARACAS (Reuters) – A centuries-old territorial dispute in South America has taken a technological turn as anglophone Guyana decries Google Maps’ Spanish-language labeling of street names in a region claimed by neighboring Venezuela.

Read more

With ‘$Cashtags,’ Twitter plays greater campaign finance role

By Alana Wise and Ginger Gibson NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – When Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential election campaign took over earlier this year the Twitter and Facebook accounts he had used in his Senate election races, there was almost no-one following him. Now, Sanders' campaign has 1.4 million Facebook likes – more than his rival for the Democratic nomination Hillary Clinton, who is much better known

Read more

Twitter.com currently unavailable for some users

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Twitter.com was unavailable on Monday for some users across the United States but the mobile app and Tweetdeck, another Twitter website that allows users to view multiple browsers at once, appeared to be working normally. Twitter users and others said they received a message that read “something is technically wrong” when trying to open the Twitter website on their personal computers

Read more

Florida private investigator charged for trying to hack charity

By Nate Raymond NEW YORK (Reuters) – A Florida private investigator is facing criminal charges over his alleged effort to infiltrate a charity's computer network while researching whether nonprofits are financing Islamic militants, U.S. prosecutors said on Monday.

Read more

Turkish magazine raided, copies seized for mock Erdogan selfie

By Ece Toksabay ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkish police raided a magazine on Monday over a mocked-up “selfie” of a smiling President Tayyip Erdogan with the coffin of a soldier – an allusion to comments that families of soldiers killed by Kurdish rebels could be happy about their martyrdom. An Istanbul prosecutor’s office banned distribution of the latest edition of Nokta magazine and ordered raids on its offices over charges of “insulting the Turkish president” and “making terrorist propaganda”, after the cover was published online, the magazine said in a statement. The cover depicted a grinning Erdogan in shirt-sleeves taking a selfie, in the background a coffin draped in the red Turkish flag being borne along in state by soldiers.

Read more

Alibaba hasn’t hit bottom yet: Barron’s

The reasons the weekly financial newspaper gave for the dour outlook: China's struggling economy, increasing competition in e-commerce and more scrutiny of the company's culture and governance. Alibaba spokesman Bob Christie said the article “contains factual inaccuracies and selective use of information, and the conclusions the reporter draws are misleading.” The company has posted on the internet a letter to Barron's editor complaining about the story.

Read more

Google hires Truecar’s Krafcik to head its driverless car unit

(Reuters) – Google Inc said it named auto industry veteran John Krafcik as chief executive of its self-driving car project from late September. With the hiring of Krafcik, currently the president of automotive pricing terminal Truecar Inc and a former CEO of Hyundai Motors America, Google is starting to look at the project as a potential and relevant business in the near future. Chris Urmson, who has been head of the self-driving car program since 2009, will continue overseeing the project as its technical lead, the company said in an emailed statement

Read more