Snapchat users primarily in North America have some bad news coming their way right on the first day of the new year. The usernames and phone numbers of over 4.6 million users have been obtained and leaked online by a site called SnapchatDB.

SnapChatDB managed to acquire this information through a security exploit in Snapchat that the latter was warned about but took too long to fix. This private information is now available on this website and available for download to anyone as an SQL dump or a CSV text file. Read more »

Jan Koum, the CEO of WhatsApp has announced that the popular messaging service now has about 400 million active users across the globe.

In a blog post, Jan also claimed that WhatsApp has added 100 million users in the last four months. Read more »

Facebook has introduced a new set of stickers for the Facebook Messenger service. These are all variations of the famous Facebook Like icon showing a thumbs up gesture, with the hand showing other gestures, including a much requested thumbs down or Dislike gesture that Facebook would probably never implement on their site. So you can’t yet Dislike a post but now you can at least send them a sticker on Messenger.

For those not aware of Facebook stickers (or are possibly embarrassed to admit), these are small static or animated images that you can insert in your chat. Read more »

LG has announced that the popular music streaming service Spotify will soon be coming to its Smart TVs. The app will be compatible will all the 2013 models and the service is expected to go live in the next couple of days.

However, you would require a premium Spotify subscription to stream the music. The paid membership gives you access to use the service across smartphones, tablets and other platforms such as TV’s and connected devices. Read more »

Google has expanded the reach of Maps Navigation to 25 new countries across Africa, Europe, Central America and Asia.

Google Maps Navigation, which is still carrying the beta tag, is now available in 99 countries. The coverage in newly added countries is said to include all the major roads covered with turn-by-turn navigation. Read more »

Not content with having flying droids deliver your packages, Amazon has another service that will seemingly inch them closer to world domination: Pantry.

Think of Pantry as an online Costco. Amazon plans to carry about 2,000 of the most commonly purchased groceries and offer them online, at warehouse store discounted prices. Also, like Costco, there is a yearly fee: Amazon Prime. However, if you’re a regular shopper on Amazon, then you probably have a Prime account anyway. Read more »

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s update to the Android version, Google announced that it will soon automatically display Gmail images in the body of the emails by default. The feature will be available on the web version of the email client, as well as its iOS and Android counterparts.

The new Gmail functionality is possible thanks to an improvement in the way Google handles images. Read more »

Spotify has just announced that you can now access millions of songs across your smartphones and tablets for free.

Spotify allows you to shuffle play on your smartphones and tablets. Furthermore, you can now listen to your favorite music, or to your favorite artist without having to pay anything. Read more »

In its latest update to Play Books, Google added some enhancements to speed and smoothness but by far the most important gain is the option to upload from your Android device.

Now instead of using the Play website to add books to your account you can do it straight from your smartphone. Play Books supports ePub and PDF files and you can upload to Google Play books from any Android file manager. Read more »

Pandora for iOS got treated to an update which brought alarm clock functionality. The new feature complements the previously added sleep timer function of the popular music streaming app.

The Pandora for iOS alarm clock feature allows users to wake up to the tune of their favorite music station. Read more »

Google’s on-demand music streaming service that was introduced at this year’s Google I/O event, is now available in Germany.

With Google Play Play Music All Access, you can stream millions of songs on any device and you can also store up to 20,000 songs for free. Read more »

Yesterday we brought you comScore’s breakdown of the smartphone OS distribution in the US and today we’re bringing you the mobile app and mobile browsing usage.

According to the firm’s research users in the US are mostly accessing on Google and Facebook through their smartphones. Google takes the top spot with a huge 88.0%, while Facebook is close in second with 84.4%. Read more »

“Beats Music is real. We’re in an internal, private beta with people who know and love music…” What those words by Ian Rogers, chief executive, mean is that Beats Music is coming to the US (for starters, we hope) in January next year to drop a music-streaming service to the masses.

A product of Beats Electronics (by Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine), Beats Music now allows you to claim your name so that when the service becomes a reality your desired username will be there and waiting for activation. Read more »

Google has updated its Calendar service with a couple of new features that can really help you get more organized. First off Google Maps lends a helping hand and you will now receive auto-complete location results when filling the location of events.

Once the event has been created the users you’ve invited will have a click on the map option, which will show them exactly where the event will be held instead of wondering where to go. Read more »

Google in association with HBO has brought a couple of popular TV shows to the Play Store. The new deal has allowed the search engine giant to include Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, True Blood, Girls and Veep on the Google Play service for the first time.

The Play Store will also stream a couple of older shows such as The Wire, The Sopranos and Band of Brothers in the coming week. Read more »