Mobile News - Week of November 1, 2021

Facebook rebranded to ‘Meta’, which will be a holding company that contains both the Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram apps and also its investment in VR and ‘the metaverse’ ($10bn this year), which Mark Zuckerberg believes is the next platform after smart phones and the next social canvas after smartphone apps. 

If you think Facebook is evil it’s easy to see this as a transparent piece of PR - ‘change your name and hope people forget what the old name stood for.’

Join the Techstars LA team and a collection of consumer-focused founders that have been through the program to get a behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like to build a company with Techstars.

The conversation will be moderated by Managing Director Matt Kozlov and Entrepreneur-in-Residence Ana Rosenstein with founders from top consumer companies on hand to answer all your burning questions, including Sumant Yerramilly of Lightbox, Rob Gregg of Gales, and more to come. 

Apple has cut back sharply on iPad production to allocate more components to the iPhone 13, multiple sources told Nikkei Asia, a sign the global chip supply crunch is hitting the company even harder than it previously indicated.

Production of the iPad was down 50% from Apple’s original plans for the past two months, sources briefed on the matter said, adding that parts intended for older iPhones were also being moved to the iPhone 13.

The iPad and iPhone models have a number of components in common, including both core and peripheral chips. This allows Apple to shift supplies between different devices in certain cases.

Although ads won’t be shown during meetings themselves, it’s still a potentially big shift for the videoconferencing service. Zoom has typically imposed only minor restrictions on its free tier, which helped the service explode in popularity last year as people around the world adapted to working and socializing from home. Even its end-to-end encryption, which Zoom initially said would be limited to paid users, ended up coming to free users after all.

After early tests in select markets, Netflix announced today its debut lineup of exclusive mobile games will begin rolling out to all members globally on Android devices, starting this week. In July, the streaming service first confirmed its plans to enter the mobile gaming market, calling games “another new content category” for the company to […]