Communications Major

Report suggests growing labor costs, customer acceptance will spur usage of tablets and smartphones at restaurants, replacing some wait staff.

From presidential selfies to never-ending Instagram feeds, the world is now drowning in images. Celebrated photographers debate the impact of this mass democratisation on their craft.

New shopping services will allow consumers to instantly buy items they see on television, in magazines and even in their refrigerators.

A short history of BlackBerry smartphones, which now may be destined to become relics.

Instagram has blocked a large number of hashtags — the keywords people use with "#" as a prefix to make their images more searchable — and unsurprisingly most of them are obscenities. The Data Pack has a large list of hashtags that Instagram has rendered unsearchable. You can tag your photos with them, but doing so is meaningless because no one will be able to search for them.

Smartphones are keepiing people under 30 connected in a way that owning a car used to. And as such, smartphones compete against cars for young people’s big-ticket dollars, since the cost of a good phone and data plan can exceed $1,000 a year.

WhatsApp, the largest messaging service in the world, will now be under the command of Facebook.

WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app for smartphones, according to OnDevice Research.

Buying WhatsApp will only bolster Facebook's already strong position in the crowded messaging world. Messenger, Facebook's a standalone messaging app for mobile devices, is second only to WhatsApp in its share of the smartphone market.

In politics, image is king, and every politician knows it. So, it's surprising to see the president caught in a three-way selfie at Nelson Mandela's memorial service in South Africa, even if the other two people in the picture are the British and Danish Prime Ministers. The now iconic picture, snapped by an AFP photographer, speaks more than its thousand-word allotment — largely because Michelle Obama appears to be the only one showing any decorum.

\Customers of the social networking giant continue to shift toward mobile phones and tablets to gain access to the site instead of a PC.

Remember MySpace? Sure you do. You probably even have an old account kicking around somewhere from before you got hooked on Facebook and Twitter. Like from 2008, maybe? Well, it's been some time, but MySpace is re-entering the social media world (and a lot has changed!). The site is targeting the 13-30-year-old demographic. So, if you are 31+ no need to read further....