service

Avis Budget Group, best known for its car rental services has moved to acquire car-sharing company Zipcar for $500 million.

The companies announced the deal today, saying that Avis paid $12.25 per share for Zipcar, representing a 49 percent premium on its $8.24 closing price on December 31. Zipcar's board of directors unanimously approved the deal, and shareholders owning about 32 percent of Zipcar have already signed off.

Zipcar offers a unique service in the car business. Rather than rent out cars in the traditional way, like Avis, Zipcar offers a "sharing" service that places … Read more

Amazon has posted an apology for a disruption in its cloud services that hobbled Netflix's streaming services on Christmas Eve and said it is taking steps to prevent future disruptions.

Although Amazon's explanation of the outage didn't identify Netflix by name, the streaming service blamed Amazon Web Services last week for an outage that affected "many but not all devices" across the Americas.

"We want to apologize," Seattle-based Amazon said in its statement. "We know how critical our services are to our customers' businesses, and we know this disruption came at an … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which I answer Mac-related questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week, readers wrote in with questions about managing custom services in OS X, RAM prices for MacBook systems falling dramatically over the past year, and resetting a forgotten administrator password without admin access and without an OS X installer or recovery disc. I welcome views from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: Managing custom services in OS X MacFixIt reader Francis asks:

Instagram's attempt to change its terms of service has inspired not only a user backlash but also-- now -- a class-action lawsuit.

The proposed terms of service were introduced last week, though Instagram has since backpedaled. The lawsuit -- filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on Friday and first reported by Reuters -- argues that the proposed changes would "transfer valuable property rights to Instagram while simultaneously relieving Instagram from any liability for commercially exploiting customers' photographs and artistic content, while shielding Instagram from legal liability."

Instagram is making a "grab for customer … Read more

An avid player of Electronic Arts' "The Simpsons: Tapped Out" mobile game, David Lamb was disheartened when he logged into his account in October and found that all of the data from his game was gone.

The iOS game, which is essentially "Farmville" with Springfield buildings and Simpsons characters, rewards players who spend huge amounts of time completing tasks and collecting money in an effort to re-create their favorite animated city. Lamb, a 45-year-old video editor from La Canada, Calif., had accumulated $80,000 in game cash and 70 donuts (the game's premium currency) after … Read more

Instagram has backpedaled on changes to its terms of service that appeared to let the maker of the photo-sharing app sell users' images, with founder and CEO Kevin Systrom announcing today that the terms will revert to the version in place since the service launched in 2010.

Facebook-owned Instagram ignited a storm of protest with the announcement earlier this week that it was claiming perpetual rights to sell users' photographs without notifying or compensating the photographer. Under that new policy, Facebook claimed the right to license all public Instagram photos to companies or any other organization, including for advertising purposes, … Read more

If the events surrounding Instagram over the last few days have made you want to close your account and start using a different service such as Flickr, we understand. But before you go and delete your Instagram account, wouldn't it be nice to have all of your photos imported to Flickr for you?

Check out @freethephotos to automagically migrate @instagram pics to @flickr bit.ly/VQ5wQs

As you can see from the tweet above, it's possible and the process is simple.

Freethephotos is a new Web site created during the … Read more

Yahoo has announced that it is terminating its music service in China as of next month, according to The Next Web.

Apparently the closure comes as the Web giant looks to rework its product strategies.

"Thank you all for your continued support of Yahoo's products," a statement posted on the Yahoo China's music search portal read, according to The Next Web. "As part of an adjustment to our product strategy, we have decided to stop providing the Yahoo [China] Music service starting January 20, 2013."

With new CEO Marissa Mayer on board, Yahoo has … Read more

Instagram apologized to its users today, saying it will "remove" language from its legal terms that would have let it sell users' photos or use them in advertisements.

In a blog post this afternoon, Chief Executive Kevin Systrom said it's "our mistake that this language is confusing" and that the company is "working on updated language."

"Since making these changes, we've heard loud and clear that many users are confused and upset about what the changes mean," he wrote.

Instagram's terms of use agreement announced yesterday sparked a user revolt … Read more