Techmeme
May 1, 2012, 7:10 PM

Top News

Marguerite Reardon / CNET:
Russell Goldman / ABCNEWS:
Zuckerberg's Dinners with Girlfriend Help Spur Life-Saving Facebook Tool  —  Conversations over the dinner table with his med-student girlfriend helped Mark Zuckerberg formulate his latest big idea — harnessing the power of Facebook to help eliminate the critical shortage of organs …
Satya Patel / Twitter Blog:
Discover better stories  —  The Discover tab makes it easy to discover information that matters to you without having to follow additional accounts.  Starting today, the Discover tab will begin to surface content that is even more personalized and meaningful to you.
JP Mangalindan / Fortune:
Barnes & Noble CEO: NFC coming to the Nook  —  The battle for e-book dollars became a lot more interesting earlier this week when Barnes & Noble (BKS) announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft (MSFT).  Over the next five years, the Redmond, Washington-based software giant will invest …
AppleInsider:
Samsung overtakes Apple to claim smartphone market share lead  —  Despite strong growth year-over-year, Apple ceded its spot as the world's top smartphone vendor in the first quarter of 2012 as Samsung boosted both smartphone and feature phone shipments to record levels.
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Foursquare Blog:
A faster way for businesses to start connecting with customers on foursquare  —  Over 20,000,000 people use foursquare to discover and share new experiences.  It's also an incredibly powerful tool for businesses who want to connect with their customers, and over 750,000 of them have already signed …
New York Times:
Data Engineer in Google Case Is Identified  —  At the center of the uproar over a Google project that scooped up personal data from potentially millions of unsuspecting people is the company software engineer who wrote the code.  —  Google has declined to identify the engineer, as has the Federal Communications Commission.
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Skype replaces P2P supernodes with Linux boxes hosted by Microsoft  —  Microsoft has drastically overhauled the network running its Skype voice-over-IP service, replacing peer-to-peer client machines with thousands of Linux boxes that have been hardened against the most common types of hack attacks, a security researcher said.
More: ZDNet and Liliputing
Adrianne Jeffries / Betabeat:
This Is What a Kickstarter Scam Looks Like  —  When Kickstarter projects go wrong, backers often think they've been scammed; usually, the creators simply overpromised.  But a campaign for an action video game, MYTHIC: The Story Of Gods and Men, has just been busted by forum users at Reddit, SomethingAwful and Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
Florian Mueller / FOSS Patents:
Apple wants U.S. district court to obscure Samsung logo on video display for jurors  —  After just blogging about the technical and timeline-related part of a joint Apple-Samsung filing made a few hours ago, I now have some tidbits from the filing that are, in a way, more entertaining.
Quentin Hardy / Bits:
Google Offers Big-Data Analytics  —  Google is selling some of its analytic guts as an online service, in an effort to compete with the likes of Amazon Web Services in the market for enterprise cloud computing.  —  In November, Google offered a limited number of developers access …
Amir Efrati / Wall Street Journal:
Google Wins U.S. Contract  —  The U.S. Department of Interior has chosen to use Google Inc.'s online email and collaboration offerings over software from rival Microsoft Corp., marking Google's second major victory in a quest to sell such services to government agencies.
Ryan Kim / GigaOM:
Signpost, the AdSense for local business, raises $3.75M  —  As local businesses move their marketing spending from Yellow Page listings and mailers to online ads, there's a growing opportunity to help them make the transition.  Signpost, a New York start-up, has been growing quickly by filling this gap for local merchants.
Jbat / John Battelle's Search Blog:
Does the Pebble Cause a Ripple In Apple's Waters?  —  Ever since the Pebble watch became an cause célèbre in tech circles for its kickass Kickstarter moves (it's raised almost $7mm dollars and counting), something's been nagging me about the company and its product.

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