Instagram rolls out 'pinned comment' feature for everyone: Details here

The new feature will help users to pin on the top important or favourite comments on their posts.

Facebook-owned photo-sharing app Instagram has rolled out the pinned comment feature to help users maximise engagement. The new feature will help users to pin on the top important or favourite comments on their posts, said the company.
"We're rolling out pinned comments everywhere. That means you can a pin a few comments to the top of your feed post and better manage the conversation," the company said in a tweet on Tuesday.

Instagram started testing pinned comments in May alongside its comment filtering tools. One can pin up to three comments to the top of the post at a time, all of which will appear right underneath your photo with a "Pinned" label underneath it.

In addition to this, Instagram had also rolled out a feature for users to bulk delete comments.

To enable the feature on iOS, tap on a comment and then the dotted icon in the top right corner. Select Manage Comments and choose up to 25 comments to delete at once and then tap "More Options" to block or restrict accounts in bulk.

Aside to this, the platform is testing a new ‘Shops’ feature with select users globally to help small businesses and entrepreneurs set up a single online store for customers.

The Shops tab would replace the current 'Activity' tab for those in the test. Users would be able to access 'Activity' via an additional icon in top right.

Facebook in May announced to roll out 'Shops' on its social media platform.

Instagram to show ads in IGTV videos, share revenue with content creators

In addition to ads, Instagram would also roll out 'badges' next month that can be purchased by subscribers from their favourite creators.

Facebook-owned photos and videos sharing platform Instagram is rolling out new tools for content creators to place ads on IGTV videos.

Instagram will share at least 55 per cent of the revenue from these ads with creators, which would motivate more influencers to create material for IGTV. To begin with, the ads will only appear when people click to watch IGTV videos from previews in their feed, and the initial round of ads will be vertical videos up to 15 seconds long.

"Starting next week, we are introducing ads in IGTV, our long-form video destination. We want to support creators' investment in IGTV by sharing advertising revenue with them," Instagram said in a statement.

In addition to ads, Instagram would also roll out 'badges' next month that can be purchased by subscribers from their favourite creators. Badges will appear next to a person's name throughout the live video.

"Fans who have purchased badges in Live will stand out in the comments and unlock additional features, including placement on a creator's list of badge holders and access to a special heart," said the company.

Badges will roll out to a few countries in the coming months, including the US, the UK, Brazil, Germany, France, Italy, Turkey, Spain and Mexico.

Samsung partners Facebook to help retailers use social media for business

The training helps offline retailers establish their business pages and accounts on Facebook and Instagram.

Samsung India has partnered with Facebook to train offline retailers to go digital. In the first phase, Samsung and Facebook have already trained more than 800 offline retailers, and more training sessions are lined up in the coming weeks, said Samsung in a statement.

Facebook has several platforms under its kitty, including Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. The focus of training programme is on enabling offline retailers build a digital presence through the Facebook family of apps.

“By leveraging the Facebook training, our retail partners will be able to discover and target local consumers digitally. Consumer too will benefit as they can now access product information and shop for Galaxy smartphones through Social Media pages of their local retailers,” said Mohandeep Singh, Senior Vice President, Mobile Business, Samsung India.

How it works:

The training helps offline retailers establish their business pages and accounts on Facebook and Instagram. Once set-up, retailers can target local consumers on Facebook and Instagram, and engage with potential consumers through WhatsApp. Connecting with local retailers online on social media platforms eliminates the need for consumers to visit the physical store of their local retailers.

Retailers can then engage with potential consumers to share information such as e-detailers and e-catalogues on available Samsung phones. Consumers can order a Samsung smartphone via WhatsApp by contacting the local retailers on retailer’s WhatsApp Business app , who can home deliver phones, ensuring consumers do not have to step out from the comfort of their homes.

Facebook takes on Amazon with online shopping, commerce venture Shops

The Facebook chief executive officer announced a handful of updates Tuesday signaling the company's commitment to online shopping and commerce.

Facebook is making another run at building a shopping empire — and this time it has the direct involvement of the company’s most important executive, Mark Zuckerberg.

The Facebook chief executive officer announced a handful of updates Tuesday signaling the company’s commitment to online shopping and commerce, one of the areas he highlighted as a priority for this year.

The main product, called Shops, is a new version of an existing Facebook feature with a similar name, and will let retailers upload product catalogs to their Facebook page or Instagram profile.

Users can find these Shops directly from the retailer’s page, or by clicking on an ad that will redirect them to a Shop inside Facebook instead of the retailer’s own website.

ALSO READ: Covid-19 crisis: Donald Trump threatens permanent freeze on WHO funding

Eventually, Zuckerberg says, these Shops will be accessible across the Facebook family, including Messenger and WhatsApp, giving retailers a way to reach Facebook’s nearly 3 billion users with one product catalog.

“This is really the first very major push that we’re going to be making into that next step around commerce,” Zuckerberg said in an interview Monday.

He also highlighted the importance of Shops for small businesses, almost all of which are operating exclusively online during the Covid-19 pandemic. The “vast majority” of Facebook advertisers are small businesses, Zuckerberg said, so ensuring they can operate is important to Facebook’s business as well.

Facebook to invest $5.7 bn in RIL's Jio Platforms to pick up 9.99% stake

Jio Platforms, Reliance Retail and WhatsApp also enter into a commercial partnership agreement.

Facebook on Wednesday announced investment of Rs 43,574 crore to pick a 9.9 per cent stake in Reliance Industries Limited's wholly-owned subsidiary, Jio Platforms, in what is being touted as the largest foreign direct investment for minority stake in India.

The company said, "Today we are announcing a $5.7 billion, or INR 43,574 crore, investment in Jio Platforms Limited, part of Reliance Industries Limited, making Facebook its largest minority shareholder."

“Reliance Industries Limited, Jio Platforms Limited and and Facebook today announced the signing of binding agreements for an investment of Rs 43,574 crore by Facebook into Jio Platforms,” Reliance Industries said in its statement.

Concurrent with the investment, Jio Platforms, Reliance Retail Limited and WhatsApp have also entered into a commercial partnership agreement to further accelerate Reliance Retail’s New Commerce business on the JioMart platform using WhatsApp and to support small businesses on WhatsApp.

The companies will work closely to ensure that consumers are able to access the nearest kiranas who can provide products and services to their homes by transacting seamlessly with JioMart using WhatsApp.

Commenting on the partnership with Facebook, Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director, Reliance Industries Ltd, said, “The synergy between Jio and Facebook will help realise Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi’s ‘Digital India’ Mission with its two ambitious goals — ‘Ease of Living’ and ‘Ease of Doing Business’ – for every single category of Indian people without exception.”

This investment by Facebook values Jio Platforms at Rs 4.62 trillion pre-money enterprise value ($65.95 billion, assuming a conversion rate of Rs 70 to a US$). Facebook’s investment will translate into a 9.99 per cent equity stake in Jio Platforms on a fully diluted basis, the statement said.

Coronavirus: Spanish football coach Francisco Garcia passes away aged 21

Atletico Portada Alta released an official statement on Instagram about the passing away of Garcia.

Spanish football trainer Francisco Garcia has died matured 21 in the wake of contracting coronavirus.

Garcia was filling in as the supervisor of Atletico Portada Alta's childhood group since 2016. He has become the most youthful casualty of the sickness in the district, goal.com revealed.

Atletico Portada Alta discharged an official explanation on Instagram about the dying of Garcia.

"We need to communicate our most profound sympathies to the family, companions and dear companions of our mentor Francisco Garcia who has left us, tragically, today," the announcement said.

"Presently what do we manage without you, Francis? You were consistently there with us at Portada or any place you were required, assisting. How might we continue covering each one of those kilometers in the group? We don't have the foggiest idea how, yet we will unquestionably do it for you. We won't overlook you, find happiness in the hereafter, marvel. Until always," it included.

He spent away on Sunday subsequent to testing positive for COVID-19 a week ago, having been sent to the Regional Hospital of Malaga for treatment. At the point when the administrator showed up at the office, it was likewise discovered that he was additionally experiencing leukemia.

Spanish football's significant classes have been closed down inconclusively to contain the spread of coronavirus. Something very similar has been followed in UK, France, and Italy.

All significant football rivalries like La Liga, Premier League, Champions League, and Serie A have been suspended due to the coronavirus flare-up.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday announced that the focal point of the coronavirus pandemic has moved from China, where new cases revealed have radically diminished, to Europe, where most nations are seeing a move in diseases and fatalities.

How online dating is changing the way single people spend their money

This evolution is having an economic impact 'because it's driving consumer spending, it's driving household formation'.

Online dating is not only transforming the way people hook up, it is changing the way single people spend their money and shaping the nature of household spending, according to one investor taking an interest in the emerging sector.

"It's driving pretty much everything, if you think about all the things people spend money on around finding a romantic partner, courting them, getting married, having kids," said Daniel McMurtrie, the young co-founder and CEO of Tyro Capital Management, a New York hedge fund.

McMurtrie, 28, has tracked the rising tide in people going online to find a partner "from a kind of niche category, which was a little bit of a joke to some people, to being the dominant form of dating."

According to a Pew Research Center study published Thursday, 30 per cent of American adults have used a dating app or website. For people under 30, that increases to 50 per cent.

The proliferation of smartphones and the ease of using apps have been game changers. All a user has to do is enter a small amount of personal information to start seeing photos of potential matches. A simple swipe of the finger can show interest, and if it is reciprocated, start a conversation.

The financial cost of arranging a date has been drastically reduced, as has the cost in time from wasted encounters or rejections.

"Historically people have dated within their social circles, their friends, their family, their church, their social groups," said McMurtrie. "That's really maybe 100, 200 people max."

The social penalties have also been reduced. "If you date someone who's a friend of a friend and it doesn't work out, that can be very awkward." "Because everyone can get a number of dates instantly through an app, it doesn't really make sense to take that risk anymore," noted McMurtrie, who published a research paper on the phenomenon in November.

Instagram launches 13+ age verification for users to curb underage use

The move aims to help Instagram comply with a US law and its own policies.

Instagram has said that it would require new users to verify they are at least 13 when they join the visually focused, Facebook-owned social network.

The move aims to help Instagram comply with a US law and its own policies that require any user to be at least 13.

"Asking for this information will help prevent underage people from joining Instagram, help us keep young people safer and enable more age-appropriate experiences overall," an Instagram blog said.

The company said the age information would not be visible to others but would help in creating "age-appropriate and safer experiences" on the social network with more than a billion users.

It was not immediately clear how Instagram would protect against young people providing false information, which has been a persistent issue for social media.

The announcement came a day after a TechCrunch article which noted that Instagram did not follow the example of most of its social media peers in checking the ages of users, which could put the network in violation of the Child Online Privacy Protection Act.

The article noted that Facebook and Instagram both employed moderators who may lock the accounts of any users they suspect are under 13.

Business Standard

Why boys and girls use tech differently? Here's the likely reason

Emerging research indicates that brain differences between males and females help account for the split.

Business Standard : Many parents of both boys and girls have witnessed striking differences in the way their kids use technology, with their sons generally gravitating to videogames and their daughters often spending more of their screen time scrolling through social media.

Emerging research indicates that brain differences between males and females help account for the split.

“It is entirely plausible from a neurological perspective that there’s an underlying biological component to this difference people are seeing,” said Larry Cahill, a professor of neurobiology and behavior at the University of California, Irvine, who has spent two decades researching gender differences in the brain.

In this column I’ve chronicled the aggression some boys exhibit when they have to shut off videogames and transition to other activities, as well as the problems some young men face when they go to college and have to juggle game time and school work without mom and dad’s help.

That led some readers to question why girls don’t appear to be having these problems. Of course, girls have issues of their own, such as smuggling “burner” phones to keep up with forbidden social media accounts. It’s just that when it comes to videogames, most girls seem to have a better handle on when to stop.

According to a 2017 survey conducted by Pew Research Center, 41 per cent of teenage boys said they spend too much time playing videogames while only 11 per cent of girls said they do.

Marc Potenza, a psychiatry professor at Yale University, teamed up with researchers at universities in China to find out why. Using functional MRIs, which measure brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow, the team studied neural responses in young male and female gamers, particularly in the parts of the brain associated with reward processing and craving—a motivating factor in addiction. When the men and women were shown photos of people playing videogames, those parts of the men’s brains showed higher levels of activation than those parts of the women’s brains.

Brain regions that have been implicated in drug-addiction studies also were shown to be more highly activated in the men after gaming. The researchers said the results suggest men could be more biologically prone than women to developing internet gaming disorder.

Instagram's trial to hide number of 'likes' may save users' self-esteem

Without a public tally of likes, it is likely that comments will become an even stronger indicator of how people are interacting with a particular Instagram post.

Instagram is running a social media experiment in Australia and elsewhere to see what happens when it hides the number of likes on photos and other posts.

If you have an Instagram account, you’ll get to see the numbers but your followers won’t – at least, not automatically. They will be able to click and see who liked your post, but will have to count the list of names themselves.

The trial is taking place right now in six countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Italy, Japan and New Zealand. Canada has just finished its trial.

It’s a bold move by Instagram, but arguably a necessary one. There is growing concern about the effect of social media on young people’s mental health and self–esteem.

Instagram explained:

We want your friends to focus on the photos and videos you share, not how many likes they get.

Likes, and their public tallying, have become the heart of Instagram and many other social media platforms. By hiding them, does Instagram risk devaluing a crucial currency?

Receiving loads of likes can feel like getting a gold star. It’s a public affirmation that you’re doing good work – a useful bit of quantitative feedback on your photographic skills or creativity. Under the new trial you’ll still get the gold star, but in private, and without broader recognition.

Nevertheless, the mental health repercussions of counting likes cannot be ignored. The design of social media promotes social comparison. You don’t have to spend long on Instagram to find a plethora of people who are evidently better-looking, more successful, and more glamorous than you.

As a result, young people can be left feeling inadequate and unworthy. Teens report that social media makes them feel closer to friends (78%), more informed (49%), and connected to family (42%). Yet many teens also report feeling pressure to always show the best versions of themselves (15%), overloaded with information (10%), overwhelmed (9%), or the dreaded “fear of missing out” (9%). These positive and negative reactions can see-saw, depending on a person’s particular mindset at the time.

Business Standard

Instagram wants to curb online bullying with a pop-up warning

Another new tool is aimed at limiting the spread of abusive comments on a user's feed.

Instagram on Monday announced new features aimed at curbing online bullying on its platform, including a warning to people as they are preparing to post abusive remarks.

"It's our responsibility to create a safe environment on Instagram," said a statement from Adam Mosseri, head of the visually focused social platform owned by Facebook.

"This has been an important priority for us for some time, and we are continuing to invest in better understanding and tackling this problem.

One new tool being rolled out is a warning generated by artificial intelligence to notify users their comment may be considered offensive before it is posted.

"This intervention gives people a chance to reflect and undo their comment and prevents the recipient from receiving the harmful comment notification," Mosseri said.

"From early tests of this feature, we have found that it encourages some people to undo their comment and share something less hurtful once they have had a chance to reflect."

Another new tool is aimed at limiting the spread of abusive comments on a user's feed.

"We've heard from young people in our community that they're reluctant to block, unfollow, or report their bully because it could escalate the situation, especially if they interact with their bully in real life," Mosseri commented.

A new feature called "restrict" that is being tested will make posts from an offending person visible only to that person.

"You can choose to make a restricted person's comments visible to others by approving their comments," Mosseri added.

"Restricted people won't be able to see when you're active on Instagram or when you've read their direct messages."

The move by Instagram is the latest in a series of actions on cyberbullying by social networks to deal with hate speech and abusive conduct which can be especially harmful to young users.

Business Standard

49 mn Instagram users had their data leaked by Mumbai-based agency, Chtrbox

The company termed the reports of private data being leaked as 'inaccurate' and acknowledged that 'a particular database for limited influencers was inadvertently exposed for approximately 72 hours'.

Mumbai-based Chtrbox, which was allegedly responsible for leaking data of millions of Instagram users, has said database for a limited number of influencers was inadvertently exposed but that did not include any sensitive personal data.

The company termed the reports of private data being leaked as "inaccurate" and acknowledged that "a particular database for limited influencers was inadvertently exposed for approximately 72 hours".

"This database did not include any sensitive personal data and only contained information available from the public domain, or self reported by influencers," it said in a statement late Tuesday night.

On Tuesday, Facebook-owned Instagram said it is investigating whether a third-party - Chtrbox - improperly stored its user data in violation of its policies after reports that information of millions of users being available online allegedly in an unsecured database emerged.

These reports said the database found online - with over 49 million records - contained information of millions of Instagram influencers, celebrities and brand accounts. The database was allegedly traced back to Chtrbox.

The reports had said apart from public data (like bio, profile picture and number of followers), the database also allegedly contained users' private contact information such as email address and phone number.

An Instagram spokesperson had said the company is "investigating whether a third party improperly stored Instagram data, in violation of our policies. It's also not clear whether the phone numbers and e-mails in Chtrbox's database came from Instagram".

Chtrbox, in its statement, asserted that no personal data has been sourced through unethical means by the company.

"Our database is for internal research use only, we have never sold individual data or our database, and we have never purchased hacked-data resulting from social media platform breaches. Our use of our database is limited to help our team connect with the right influencers to support influencers to monetize their online presence, and help brands create great content," it added.

Business Standard

Facebook unveils redesign plan as it tries to move past privacy scandals

Move is the most visible signal of how the social media giant is starting to emphasise private communications.

Mark Zuckerberg declared in March that he planned to shift Facebook away from being a public town square and to private communications. Now, the chief executive is rolling out the first in a series of changes to achieve that.

On Tuesday at its annual developer conference, Facebook unveiled a redesign of its mobile app and desktop site. The revisions add new features to promote group-based communications instead of News Feed, where people publicly post a cascade of messages and status updates.

Keep Reading : Business Standard

With the changes, users can more easily message one another and share news and other items with members of private groups on the site, the company said. Zuckerberg is working to integrate and encrypt Facebook’s different messaging services, which include WhatsApp and Messenger. The company also plans to continue emphasising its Stories product, which allows people to post updates that disappear after 24 hours. And it unveiled a spare, stark white look for Facebook, a departure from the site’s largely blue-tinted design.

The features, when combined, “will end up creating a more trustworthy platform,” Zuckerberg said in an interview. “Everywhere you can see and connect with friends, you’ll be able to see and connect with groups; it’s going to be woven into the fabric of Facebook.”

The redesign is the most tangible sign of how the privacy scandals and user-data issues that have roiled Facebook are forcing change at the company. The social network has spent the past three years grappling with criticism that it did not properly protect its users’ information, that it spread false news and other toxic content and that it was used as a tool for election interference. Last week, it said it expected to be fined up to $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission for privacy violations, in what would be a record penalty against a technology company by the United States.

Facebook is also playing catch-up with people’s shifting social media behaviour. Questions about the benefits of social media and more recognition of its ills have prompted many to turn toward methods of private communications, such as messaging apps.

“By far, the three fastest-growing areas of online communication are private messaging, groups and Stories,” Zuckerberg said. “In 2019, we expect the amount of Stories that are shared to outnumber the amount of Feed posts that are shared.”

Eventually, he said, Facebook plans to roll out dozens of small product updates across its four main apps of WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Facebook itself.

Facebook rules out cyber attack after its family of apps suffers outage

According to the website downdetector.com, outages were heaviest in North America and Europe, but some users appeared to be affected in other regions.

Facebook and Instagram users lost access to the social network's applications in parts of the world Wednesday as a result of an outage of undetermined origin.

The California giant which has more than two billion users acknowledged the outage after users noted on Twitter they could not access Facebook or had limited functionality.

"We're aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We're working to resolve the issue as soon as possible," a Facebook statement said on Twitter.

A short time later, Facebook indicated the outage was not related to an attack aimed at overwhelming the network.

"We're focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can confirm that the issue is not related to a DDoS attack," Facebook said, referring to what is known as a distributed denial of service cyber strike.

According to the website downdetector.com, outages were heaviest in North America and Europe, but some users appeared to be affected in other regions.

Last November, a Facebook outage was attributed to a server problem and a September 2018 outage was said to be the result of "networking issues.

Business Standard

How Indians are turning to WhatsApp to talk about food, culinary traditions

The application, blamed for all kinds of mayhem on the subcontinent, has proved a boon for farmers, home cooks and chefs who once lacked a way to share.

Anil Bandawane, a farmer living outside Pune, India, was fed up with the poor advice he was getting from the government’s national hotline for agricultural queries. Life as a farmer in India can be isolating, and he felt cut off from his peers.

So he started a WhatsApp group called Baliraja (which roughly means “farmer king” in the Marathi language). The group, which allows his fellow farmers across the country to exchange expertise and support on the popular messaging platform, gained so much traction that Mr. Bandawane has created more than a dozen different subgroups for various districts.

To the south, in the state of Kerala, Bharathy Gopalakrishnan, a stay-at-home mother, wanted to make a little money from some leftover red-velvet cupcakes. That idea turned into PB Kitchen, a WhatsApp group she founded to allow the women in her apartment complex to buy and sell one another’s homemade dishes, from sambars and vadas to burgers and cakes.

Around the same time, Krishna Prasad, the director of an organic-agriculture advocacy group, and Abhishek Naik, a scientist, were looking for a way to share healthy recipes and information about organic food. So they created a group a WhatsApp group, Anna Arogya (“food for good health” in Kannada).

It has been three years since India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, started Digital India, an initiative to increase internet connectivity across the country, especially in rural areas. WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, has become the medium of choice: It is free, requires only an internet connection, and often comes installed on new phones. As a result, India now has more users of the application — over 200 million, or one in six Indians — than any other country, a WhatsApp spokeswoman said.

That saturation has often led to misuse: Various groups have deployed WhatsApp to spread false news, incite mob violence and manipulate votes during elections in India and other nations.

But among Indians who produce, cook or care about food, the service has been a godsend. In a country where culinary traditions are often spoken but not written, WhatsApp has provided an open, democratic forum where Indians can share and codify their knowledge and skills, in new ways, and even profit from them.

“One of the problems with documenting Indian food is that the people who prepare it” — mainly homemakers, farmers and young cooks — “tend to be less empowered and less formally educated,” said Vikram Doctor, 51, a journalist in Mumbai. “They just don’t document. They are not comfortable using a computer or blogging, or people just don’t ask them.”

WhatsApp’s interface is simple and unfussy, with easy-to-navigate tabs for messages and calls. Aysha Tanya, 29, a founder of the food and culture publication The Goya Journal, said she uses WhatsApp to get recipes from her mother, because it’s the only digital platform that people her mother’s age feel confident using.

Business Standard

How China built its own internet to challenge the US' in ambition and reach

If people in the West didn't see this coming, it was because they mistook China's authoritarianism for hostility toward technology.

Today, China has the world’s only internet companies that can match America’s in ambition and reach.

It is years ahead of the United States in replacing paper money with smartphone payments, turning tech giants into vital gatekeepers of the consumer economy.

And it is host to a supernova of creative expression — in short videos, podcasts, blogs and streaming TV — that ought to dispel any notions of Chinese culture as drearily conformist.

All this, on a patch of cyberspace that is walled off from Facebook and Google, policed by tens of thousands of censors and subject to strict controls on how data is collected, stored and shared.(Business Standard)

China’s leaders like the internet they have created. And now, they want to direct the nation’s talent and tech acumen toward an even loftier end: building an innovation-driven economy, one that produces world-leading companies.

Not long ago, Chinese tech firms were best known for copying Silicon Valley.

But the flow of inspiration now runs both ways. American social media executives look to Tencent and ByteDance for the latest tricks for keeping users glued to their phones.

Tencent’s WeChat app, an all-in-one hub for socializing, playing games, paying bills, booking train tickets and more, paved the way for the increasingly feature-stuffed chat apps made by Facebook and Apple. Facebook recently took a page from TikTok, a Chinese service that is a sensation among Western tweens, by releasing its own highly similar app for creating goofy short videos.

If people in the West didn’t see this coming, it was because they mistook China’s authoritarianism for hostility toward technology.

But in some ways Chinese tech firms are less fettered than American ones. Witness the backlash against Big Data in the United States, the calls to break up giants like Facebook and the anxiety about digital addiction. None of those are big problems for Chinese companies.

In China, there is pretty much only one rule, and it is simple: Don’t undermine the state.

So titans like Weibo and Baidu heed censorship orders. Unwanted beliefs and ideologies are kept out.

Beyond that, everything is fair game. Start-ups can achieve mammoth scale with astonishing speed; they can also crash brutally. Thanks to weak intellectual property protections, they can rip one another off with abandon — not great for rewarding innovation, but O.K. for consumers, who get lots of choices.

And the money just keeps flowing in... Read More