Techmeme: Zynga lessens its Amazon dependency (Barb Darrow/GigaOM)

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February 15, 2012, 1:45 AM

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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.

More: MacRumors, Forbes, New York Times, Wired.co.uk, The Tech Trade, PC World, BBC, Guardian, rc3.org and CNNMoney.com

Tweets: @chrisnuttall, @johnpaczkowski, @fromedome, @nickwingfield, @entrecapitalist, @coopeydoop, @applespotlight and @johnpaczkowski

Erica Ogg / GigaOM:

Tim Cook's vision for Apple, and its cash — At Goldman Sachs' investor conference Tuesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook gave some rare color on how he views not only his own job as Steve Jobs' successor, but also his views on the company's $98 billion cash pile. While he did not make investors …

More: CNET, VentureBeat, Reuters, MacNN, Between the Lines Blog, CNN, Between the Lines Blog, The Register, mocoNews and Macworld. Tweets: @macworld

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.

More: iDownloadBlog.com, MacStories and TUAW

Matthew Panzarino / The Next Web:

Apple's Tim Cook says there are now over 100M iCloud users, marking 15M user growth in 21 days

More: MacDailyNews, TUAW, FierceWireless, Wired, TechCrunch, 9to5Mac, Business Insider, TechCrunch, Newsome.Org, The Verge and AllThingsD. Tweets: @poornimagupta

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.

More: The Next Web. Tweets: @parislemon, @zpower, @jbruin, @shanedingman, @backlon and @carlospache_co

Jennifer Van Grove / VentureBeat:

Your address book is mine: Many iPhone apps take your data — Path got caught red-handed uploading users' address books to its servers and had to apologize. But the relatively obscure journaling app is not alone. In fact, Path was crucified for a practice that has become an unspoken industry standard.

More: CNET, TechCrunch and Los Angeles Times

Tweets: @dannysullivan, @hunterwalk and @cdixon

Thanks:@dylan20

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.

More: Examiner, CNET, ReadWriteWeb, Business Insider, VentureBeat, The Next Web, WebProNews, GeekWire, paidContent and Tech Trader Daily

Tweets: @firstadopter, @davidsoloff, @obrien and @taylorbuley

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.

More: DealBook, CNET, DealBook, VentureBeat, PE Hub Blog, Reuters, Business Insider, ITworld.com, Betabeat, Washington Post, Electronista, The Tech Trade and Tech Trader Daily

Tweets: @dougkass and @scottnations

Matt Rosoff / Business Insider:

Activist Shareholder Declares War On Yahoo: Here's Who He Wants On The Board

More: AllThingsD. See also Mediagazer

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.

More: paidContent, CNET, TechCrunch, GigaOM and Mixed Media. See also Mediagazer

Brian Stelter / Media Decoder:

New Service Will Stream Local TV Stations in New York

More: The Verge, VentureBeat, pocketnow.com, Business Insider, Engadget, Betabeat and TechCrunch. See also Mediagazer

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 …

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:

Clear: Why This Simple To Do List App Has Everyone Talking — Clear, the heavily-anticipated touch-based to-do list app, is launching in the iTunes App Store tonight. And by heavily anticipated, I mean this app was getting tech blog coverage based on demos, previews and teaser videos.

More: 9to5Mac, MacRumors, MacStories and The Next Web. Tweets: @fredericl

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 …

More: The Tech Trade, AllThingsD, CNET, Digits, VentureBeat, Bloomberg, Mercury News, MarketWatch, Fast Company, San Francisco Chronicle, Robert Scoble, CareZone Blog, CareZone Blog and Xconomy

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 …

More: CNNMoney.com

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:

Zynga beats earnings estimates for its first-ever quarterly report as a public company

More: The Verge, Business Wire, Inside Mobile Apps, Business Insider, TechCrunch, Between the Lines Blog, Social Media, Inside Social Games, Digits, Guardian, TechCrunch, WebProNews and Social Markets

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 …

More: AdExchanger.com, iPhone Alley, paidContent, MacRumors and iClarified

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 …

More: CNET, Gizmodo and Hulu Blog

Bloomberg:

Netflix Said to Plan Another Original Series, Increasing Challenge to HBO

More: TechCrunch, VentureBeat and TPM Idea Lab

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.

More: MacRumors, Computerworld, iDownloadBlog.com, The Next Web, TUAW and Electronista

Jeremy K. Chen / The Official Google Blog:

Google Public DNS: 70 billion requests a day and counting — We launched Google Public DNS in December 2009 to help make the web faster for everyone. Today, we're no longer an experimental service. We're the largest public DNS service in the world, handling an average of more than 70 billion requests a day.

More: CNET, CircleID, The Next Web, Neowin.net, WebProNews, 9to5Google, SiliconFilter and Techdows

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.

More: Dan Kaminsky's Blog and Slashdot

Kevin Fitchard / GigaOM:

AT&T's data traffic is actually doubling annually — AT&T is now claiming on its Innovation Space blog that its mobile data traffic is doubling every year, rather than increasing by the more modest 40 percent annual rate it detailed in recent investor and analyst calls.

More: BGR, ATT Blogs, TMF Associates MSS blog, Digits, TechCrunch, PhoneArena, MediaFile, Cisco Blog and blog.chron.com

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 …

More: The Seattle Times

Tatsuo Nomura / Google LatLong:

An easy way to access directions and locations you care about — If you're anything like me, you might use Google Maps to look up the same places and directions more than once, like the location of your hotel while you're on vacation, or directions to a friend's house that you've visited before.

More: VentureBeat, SlashGear, Marketing Pilgrim, The Next Web, Softpedia News and WebProNews

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

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?

More: Techvibes.com, SiliconFilter, broadstuff and The Awl

Tweets: @kevinmarks, @alexia, @parislemon, @jesusdiaz, @rsingel, @joshuatopolsky and @jennydeluxe

Thanks:@jesusdiaz. See also Mediagazer

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 …

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