Amazon reported a profit of $214 million for Q4 2014 off the back of a big increase in Prime membership sales. Net sales increased 15 percent to $29.33 billion in quarter, up from $25.59 billion Q4 2013. The figures would have been higher but an unfavorable exchange rate took $895 million from the total amount. Operating ...

Google Inc.’s Q4 earnings missed market expectations Thursday with the tech giant posting Q4 revenue of $18.1 billion ($14.48 billion minus traffic acquisitions costs), or $6.88 per share, against a prediction of $7.08 per share. Despite missing Wall Street predictions, the figures were a record high for Google, with revenue up 15 percent for the same quarter in ...

Online media companies Mashable Inc. and Business Insider Inc. were both in the money Wednesday with announced new funding rounds of $17 million and $25 million respectively. Mashable’s Series B round was led by Time Warner Investments and included previous investors Elio Leoni-Sceti, Kass Lazerow, Michael Lazerow, Social Starts, New Markets Venture Partners and Updata Partners. From its humble beginnings ...

Sony Corp. is dumping its Music Unlimited music streaming service in a new partnership that will see music provided from Spotify Ltd. The new Spotify-powered service named “Playstation Music” will launch in 41 markets including the U.S., Canada, Mexico and Brazil; of note its previous offering was only available in 19 countries. The Music Unlimited service ...

Facebook Inc. has risen to new highs in the fourth quarter with the social networking giant posting $3.85 billion in revenue off the back of a surge in mobile advertising. Revenue from advertising came in at $3.59 billion, up 53 percent on the same quarter in 2013. Mobile advertising delivered 69 percent of advertising revenue for the fourth ...

Bitcoin security platform provider Gem has announced the deployment of custom Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) from Thales e-Security that will now be offered as part of Gem’s Bitcoin wallet product. The HSM devices are used in 80 percent of global payment transactions and also provide security to military applications, according to Gem. The modules offer FIPS-140-2 Level 3 hardware-certified security, ...

Bitcoin mining company Cointerra Inc. has filed for bankruptcy protection in Texas after a fall in the price of Bitcoin made its Bitcoin mining business uneconomical. Problems at Cointerra first emerged January 14th when it was sued by Utah-based C7 Data Centers Inc., who alleged that CoinTerra acted in bad faith by intentionally underpaying for services, ...

Snapchat Inc. launched its new curated news service Discover Tuesday in an attempt to broaden its offering outside of its core chat service. The service, which we previously covered pre-launch on January 22nd, is billed as “a new way to explore stories from different editorial teams.” Discover offers a storytelling format that the company says “puts the narrative ...

Yahoo Inc. announced its Q4 and yearly results Tuesday while at the same time announcing that it would spin off its remaining stake in Chinese E-Commerce giant Alibaba Inc. The financials weren’t great for Yahoo with the once internet-leading company seeing a small decline in revenue. Fourth quarter revenue came in at $1.253 billion, down ...

Notorious hacking group Lizard Squad appears to have ticked off another entry on its achievements list today having successfully hacked the Twitter and Instagram accounts of Taylor Swift. The hack occurred Tuesday morning with multiple tweets appearing on Swift’s Twitter account; the first encouraged her fans to follow user @Veriuser, with a second tweet urging users to ...