Update: Motorola has provided us with an official comment on the new branding.
In an interview with CNET, Motorola COO Rick Osterloh said that the storied Motorola brand will be phased out for Lenovo. Purchased by Google in 2011 and then sold to Lenovo in 2014, Motorola has had varying level of successes. While praised for stock Android, Moto devices on the high-end have not been successful in dethroning Samsung or LG.
Instagram announced today that it’s now at 300 million monthly active users, up from 200 million users that it announced approximately nine months ago. The company is announcing the new milestone on its website alongside other update user stats.
In addition, Instagram is today rolling out verified badges for brands and public figures while announcing it’s making a “significant effort to remove spammy and fake accounts”:
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Ad Age is reporting that Google+ will open up brand pages within the next two weeks. The brand pages will resemble Facebook’s, who has seen great success gaining ad revenue from them. Ford, MTV, and Mashable are expected to be the first pages. As they wait for their official page, Ford has already set up a profile — acting as a mock page. For companies that would like to get a page, they can simply fill out a form. The form must be popping, because Google told Ad Age they can barely keep up with requests. Check out Google’s thoughts of Ford’s move below.
Ad Age: So it turns out plenty of companies are interested in setting up a business page on Google+, so much so that you’re having to turn off some of these pages. What’s the plan?
Christian Oestlien: We’re basically nine days in to what you could describe as a multi-year project. We’ve gotten several thousands of applications to be in the test group since we opened it up last night.
Ad Age: Ford is one of them, and it appears to be very active already. Are you asking it to take down its page?
Mr. Oestlien: We’re positively overwhelmed by how quickly Ford has become involved with the project. They’re doing to some incredibly cool stuff like the “hangout” they’re doing this afternoon with their customers. It’s the kind of stuff we’re looking to test.