Remember MySpace? It still exists and is now owned by Time

Myspace still exists? It does, and the company that owns the once-ubiquitous social network is being bought by Time Inc to help the magazine publisher target ads.
Time Inc did not say on Thursday what it paid. The publisher of People, Sports Illustrated and Time magazines was spun off from entertainment company Time Warner in 2014. It is facing a decline in print ad dollars and posted an $881 million loss last year.

Myspace's parent company is Viant, which says it provides marketers with access to over 1.2 billion registered users. That's the number of people who have signed in to Myspace since it was created in 2003.

Myspace peaked in 2008 with some 76 million US visitors before losing ground to Facebook. News Corp sold it in 2011 to Justin Timberlake and digital ad company Specific Media, which was founded by brothers Tim, Chris and Russell Vanderhook, for $35 million, a fraction of News Corp's $580 million purchase.

Today, Myspace is an entertainment-focused site that plays music videos and songs. Chris Vanderhook, now Viant's COO, says the site gets about 20 million to 50 million unique views a month. Travis DeLingua, a spokesman for Viant, declined to give a more precise estimate, saying in an email, "That's accurate but we don't have a more precise number than that."
As a comparison, Facebook has more than a billion monthly active users.

Chris Vanderhook says Viant has used Myspace's data files to attract marketers who want demographic information like age, gender and geographic location on online users, and that targeting ability is what attracted Time Inc.
And Timberlake? Tim Vanderhook, Viant's CEO, said the pop star has "been an equity owner the whole time," but declined to say if he still is after the deal with Time Inc.

Virtual reality set to transform filmmaking

Chris Milk stepped onto a TED Conference stage and took the audience on an awe-inducing trip into the future of movies. While much of the early attention on virtual reality has focused on use of the immersive technology in video games, Milk and his US startup Vrse are using it to transform storytelling and filmgoing. "We have just started to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality," Milk said. "It's not a video game peripheral. It connects humans to other humans in a profound way... I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world." He had everyone in the Vancouver audience at TED , which ended Friday, hold Google Cardboard viewers to their eyes for what was billed as the world's collective virtual reality experience. Google Cardboard gear is literally that -- cardboard

Explained: Camera Improvements in the New HTC 10

With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...

Freedom 251: 30,000 Units Sold, Components for Up to 2.5 Million Will Be Imported

Ringing Bells, the makers of the Rs. 251 smartphone - the Freedom 251 - confirmed to Gadgets 360 on Tuesday that it has still only accepted payments for 30,000 units of the phone. It also added that the components for these phones will be imported, and only assembled in India, not made here. Ringing Bells stopped accepting orders on February 19, and claims to have received over 70 million registrations. The company President and Director both repeatedly stated that the price of the phone would be made possible through economies of scale, and making the phone in India to cut out import costs. Economies of scale? However, in a discussion with Gadgets 360 the company revealed that it had only sold 30,000 units of the phone on day one. The company has now confirmed that it has not sent out the payment emails to anyone else who registered - "we were working out details of cash on delivery, which we are announcing now, so we will be sending emails to the first 2.5...

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