Apps

#TBT: RIP, Yahoo. You had a good run

Published

July 28, 2016

Monch Lopez

News broke out on Monday that Verizon, one of the giants of the U.S. telecom industry, is acquiring Yahoo for a small fraction of what it was worth during the dot-com boom glory days. Reports said the agreement was worth five billion dollars in cash — which is a lot but still nowhere near Yahoo’s $125-billion valuation in 2000, when it had enough in the coffers to buy Google.

And although the deal has yet to be fully ironed out — it will be completed sometime in 2017 — the death knell has sounded, the fate of an internet pioneer has been decided, and it looks like its next chapter will involve mobile video.

Yahoo, as you and I know it, is no more, even if it retains its name.

(Time for a disclosure: I wrote tech stories for Yahoo Philippines. My partner worked as an editor for the company.)

This isn’t a eulogy for Yahoo; it has historically done well on the stock market. People far smarter than I am said its stock outperformed its contemporaries from a bygone era. Unfortunately, its accomplishments on Wall Street didn’t mean as much to the people in Silicon Valley and to the rest of the world.

We should’t shed a tear for the company, or its investors. We could instead take a nice, casual walk on memory lane.

My early exposure to the web started with Yahoo services: the Yahoo landing page was my Facebook News Feed; the email and chat clients were my Gmail and Messenger and Slack apps; Yahoo Music on the desktop messenger app was my Spotify; Yahoo Groups was my Reddit; and all my searches were done on the Yahoo homepage.

If I wanted to get things done online in the late ’90s, Yahoo was my first click. For the vast majority of the population, including myself, Yahoo wasn’t on the internet, it was the internet.

And I wasn’t alone; my brother, all my friends — we were on the same page. These were innocent times, before hackers and malware coders and trolls and cyberbullies and mean-spirited armchair critics.

I’d be lying to you if I said at that time I thought the status quo would never change, but it did irrevocably. My social circle stopped using Yahoo for anything except to tell the people around them to use Google or Friendster or Napster instead. Being the impressionable youth I was, I gave in and signed out.

Your story is probably different than mine. But the ending is nevertheless familiar: We signed out.

Over the next few months, pundits will argue why Yahoo’s empire crumbled; why Marissa Mayer, the ex-Google executive tasked to lead the company’s comeback efforts, couldn’t keep the roofs and pillars from collapsing; and what could have been done to stop the cracks from showing.

I share the sentiment that it didn’t pivot fast enough to take full advantage of the digital ad market, and that Yahoo couldn’t decide what it wanted to be, even as Google was attempting to usurp its dominance in search. Most damning of all is its failure to act on shifting consumer preferences, the shift from desktop to mobile computing and from websites to apps.

I still have two active Yahoo Mail accounts: There’s one I check less frequently than my Google inbox; the other, I couldn’t care less about — it’s probably full of spam, anyway. That’s about the extent of Yahoo’s influence on my life today, its role reduced to housing possibly malicious emails.

How times have changed.

[irp posts=”8688″ name=”16 biggest hits and misses of 2016″]

Apps

WhatsApp will introduce usernames to hide your phone number

Hide your number from others.

Published

June 30, 2026

Luigi Leonardo

WhatsApp is about to get an extra later of protection. After thriving on number-based chatting, the platform will soon add usernames, eliminating the need to share your number with strangers.

Usernames are the standard way of maintaining your anonymity online. Though most platforms today require users to log their email addresses or phone numbers, establishing a username can prevent other users from seeing this information way too easily.

Today, Meta has started rolling out reservations for WhatsApp usernames. The feature itself isn’t available yet, but early adopters can grab theirs as soon as the setting becomes available on their app.

To access the reservation, users can go to Settings > Account > Username. Of note, this isn’t available for everyone yet. But if you want to take dibs on a specific name, be on the lookout for the setting.

As for the username itself, users can reserve anything as long as it’s unique. Business owners and creators can also use their Facebook or Instagram handles as their WhatsApp usernames.

The feature, once it launches, will stop users from accessing your phone number when messaging. Similarly, other users will now need your exact username to start a conversation. Users can also set a separate code to protect conversations further.

Apps

HONOR, Xiaomi are working on their own Privacy Displays

Samsung’s Privacy Display is apparently very popular

Published

June 24, 2026

Luigi Leonardo

Normally, a smartphone brand’s blatant copying of another brand’s feature is not a good practice. Today, however, there is a new feature that we wish other brands would copy: Samsung’s Privacy Display. Thankfully, some brands, like HONOR, have finally gotten the message and are working on version of the feature.

As reported by Digital Chat Station on Weibo, HONOR is reportedly working on a privacy screen for its smartphones. Likewise, Xiaomi is working on the same thing, potentially launching the feature for the Xiaomi 18 Pro.

For the uninitiated, the Samsung Privacy Display is a built-in feature that blocks visibility of the screen at certain angles. If you’re not looking at the screen from the front, all you’ll see is a black void. It’s a built-in version of those protective screens that you can buy separately. Besides adding a nice layer of protection against scratches, it’s also meant to prevent snooping from your shoulder.

Samsung’s take was widely acclaimed for being insanely useful. When it arrives, this feature will be a godsend to more brands. Even better, users will no longer need to rely on third-party screen just to enjoy the privacy.

That said, there’s still no indication as to when these features will arrive on either HONOR or Xiaomi.

Apps

Meta is reportedly experimenting on a gambling app

Users can spend virtual points on Arena.

Published

June 24, 2026

Luigi Leonardo

Meta does not have the most stellar of reputations. Despite offering the world’s most popular social media platforms, the company, through its various experiments throughout the years, continuously proves that it has other priorities than just providing the best for its users. Today, another reported experiment wants to take Meta to a new market that its users might fall into: the prediction market.

If you haven’t heard of the prediction market, consider yourself lucky. These apps, such as Kalshi, are basically just gambling platforms without the glitz of playing cards or the rigor of the stock market. Users gamble on mundane circumstances like the weather and more serious ones like war.

Today, as reported by The New York Times, Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly asking Meta to develop a prediction app of its own. Interestingly, the experimental app, supposedly called Arena, will use virtual points, rather than real money. However, Meta has not ruled out real money — and hence, real gambling — in the future.

Meta is entering the industry at an extremely volatile time. The world is starting to crack down on prediction markets. Some users, for example, have been accused of using insider information to get easy wins on these platforms. Some markets have also accused these platforms of subverting anti-gambling laws.