Techmeme
February 15, 2012, 5:10 AM

Top News

Nick Wingfield / Bits:
Apple Chief Unveils a New Product: Himself  —  When he was alive, Steven P. Jobs, Apple's former chief executive, treated investors as if they were biohazards, rarely deigning to meet with them.  The disdain was not mutual, as an Apple stock chart for the last ten years shows.
Horace Dediu / asymco:
Tim Cook on the “Law of Large Numbers”  —  Q: 37 million units of iPhones shipped.  When do we run into the Law of Large Numbers?  What are the growth opportunities coming up?  —  A: 37 million is a big number.  It was a decent quarter.  It was 37 million — more than we'd ever done before.
Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
iOS apps and the address book: who has your data, and how they're getting it  —  Over the course of the past week, a firestorm has erupted in the world of iOS apps, thanks to the discovery that Path was uploading data from your iPhone's address book without asking for explicit permission.
Bloomberg:
Amazon Has Fewer Prime Subscribers Than Estimated  —  Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN)'s Prime service, a linchpin of its effort to keep customers loyal and fuel long- term profit, has attracted fewer than half as many members as analysts estimate, three people familiar with the matter said.
Wall Street Journal:
Apple's Size Clouds Market  —  To Get a Picture of Corporate Health, Analysts Cut Tech Giant Out of the Frame  —  In analyzing U.S. corporate earnings and stock-market trends, apples-to-apples comparisons may now require tossing out the Apple.  —  Apple Inc.'s success selling consumer gadgets …
More: Gizmodo
Kim-Mai Cutler / Inside Mobile Apps:
Download bots were the “well-known secret” of the app ecosystem  —  It's remarkable how widely-known the phenomenon of fraudulent download bots was throughout the iOS developer community.  Essentially, bots or automated programs have been used for well over a year to download apps until …
John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
Walter Isaacson's ‘Steve Jobs’  —  What is Apple at heart: a software company, or hardware company?  —  This is a perennial question.  The truth, of course, is that Apple is neither.  Apple is an experience company.  That they create both hardware and software is part of creating the entire product experience.
Kunur Patel / AdAge:
Apple Slashes iAd Pricing Again as Mobile Ad Share Declines  —  Moves Are Reaction to Competition From Google and Realities of Mobile-Ad Market  —  Apple is once again slashing the minimum amount it charges advertisers to run a campaign on its iAd mobile ad system and boosting the amount …
Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:
Why Would You Pay $12 a Month for Free TV?  Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia Explains.  —  If you want to watch TV that comes from one of the broadcast channels, you've got options: You can get it for free, using an old-fashioned over-the-air antenna.  Or you can pay for it as part of your cable TV package.
Barb Darrow / GigaOM:
Zynga lessens its Amazon dependency  —  Zynga, the newly public company behind Farmville, Mafia Wars and other games played by gazillions of people, is relying far less on Amazon's public cloud than it has in the past.  —  On the company's fourth quarter earnings call Tuesday …
Mat Honan / Gizmodo:
Happy Valentine's Day, Tech Bloggers  —  There's been so much hate and self-righteous indignation in tech blog circles lately.  Name calling.  Ugly accusations.  Petty bickering.  It's even divided good friends, brother against brother.  Can't we all just get along?
Kara Swisher / AllThingsD:
Exclusive: Yahoo Asia Deal Talks Off for Now  —  According to sources close to the situation, the discussions between Yahoo and its Asian partners have hit a potentially deal-breaking impasse over the efficacy of the centerpiece of the complex negotiations — a cash-rich split-off — and several other issues.
Eric Eldon / TechCrunch:
Jonathan Schwartz Launches CareZone, A Simple Caregiving Site With Big Plans  —  The problem that former Sun Microsystems chief executive Jonathan Schwartz is trying to fix with his new startup is clear enough.  —  More and more people are having to care for older relatives as the US population ages …
Seth Weintraub / 9to5Mac:
Siri leaks her own upcoming ability to speak Japanese  —  Siri is many things, but it seems she is not a good secret keeper.  A few tipsters reached out and told us that Siri now speaks Japanese.  Rumors earlier this month said Apple's AI speech recognition interface would gain Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and possibly Russian.
Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Kindle Touch breakthrough: Startup debuts handwriting recognition in puzzle book  —  Puzzle technology startup Puzzazz is giving Amazon's Kindle Touch a capability that even Amazon didn't envision — letting users input numbers and letters by writing them naturally with a finger on the screen …
Janko Roettgers / GigaOM:
Take that, Netflix: Hulu premieres Battleground series  —  Hulu launched its first original scripted series Battleground Monday night, just one week after Netflix started its foray into original programming with Lilyhammer.  —  New episodes of Battleground, a comedy about a Senate campaign in Wisconsin …
John Markoff / New York Times:
Flaw Found in an Online Encryption Method  —  SAN FRANCISCO — A team of European and American mathematicians and cryptographers have discovered an unexpected weakness in the encryption system widely used worldwide for online shopping, banking, e-mail and other Internet services intended to remain private and secure.
Liz Gannes / AllThingsD:
Reid Hoffman's New Business Book Tells Everyone to Act Like Entrepreneurs  —  Reid Hoffman is a nice-guy billionaire who founded LinkedIn, was an early backer of many of the most important Internet companies of the last decade and now also invests professionally as a Sand Hill Road venture capitalist.
More: TechCrunch

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