Techmeme: Is the OMGPOP Acquisition Haunting Zynga? (Tero Kuittinen/Forbes)

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May 2, 2012, 10:40 PM

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Tom Warren / The Verge:

Exclusive: $99 Xbox 360 + Kinect bundle launching next week with two-year subscription — Microsoft is planning to launch a $99 Xbox console package with a monthly subscription as early as next week, according to our sources. The software giant will offer the 4GB console with a Kinect sensor …

Steve Kovach / Business Insider:

Liquidmetal Inventor: Apple Will Use It In A ‘Breakthrough Product’ — We've been hearing a lot about Liquidmetal lately, mostly because of rumors that Apple could be using the alloy in its next iPhone. — But what exactly is Liquidmetal? What makes it so special that Apple decided to license the rights to use it in its products?

More: msnbc.com, CNET, AppleInsider, Mobile, Redmond Pie, MacRumors, iDownloadBlog.com, 9to5Mac, PadGadget and iPhone in Canada Blog

Ross Miller / The Verge:

It's official: Target will phase out all Kindle-branded products this spring — Last night we reported on Target's plans to discontinue sale of the Kindle due to “conflict of interest,” and now the company has confirmed to us that it will, indeed, discontinue sale.

Paul McNamara / Network World:

EXCLUSIVE: Watch Steve Jobs play FDR in Apple's long-lost takeoff on famous ‘1984’ Macintosh TV commercial — Nine-minute film called ‘1944’ was produced to inspire Apple sales team to take on IBM — h(f)){c=a.createElement('script'); c.type='text/javascript';c.src= 'http …

More: Computerworld, CNET, iDownloadBlog.com, Macgasm, Techland, Redmond Pie, The Verge, MacStories and Engadget

Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Fortune:

An Apple CEO-in-waiting sells 95% of his company shares — The head of iPhone and iPad software sold 64,151 shares Friday worth $38.7 million FORTUNE — Scott Forstall took home a chunk of change Friday. Taking advantage of Apple's (AAPL) relatively high (but not record) share price …

More: PC Magazine, iDownloadBlog.com, App Advice, TUAW, NBC Bay Area, CNET, Pulse2 Technology …, AppleInsider and VentureBeat

Wil Wheaton / WWdN: In Exile:

Google is making a huge and annoying mistake. — I like Google Plus. Some of the smartest people I've ever read are on Google Plus, and the Hangout is amazing. — But Google is doing everything it can to force Google Plus on everyone, and it's pissing me off. — Yesterday, I tried to like a video on YouTube.

More: Business Insider, parislemon, CNET and Marketing Land. Tweets: @zephoria

David Cohen / AllFacebook:

Facebook Introduces Open Graph Action Links — Allfacebook Marketing Conference AllFacebook.de SocialTimes Send an anonymous tip — Move over, action verbs, and make way for action links, which Facebook introduced today as a way for users to interact directly with timeline applications.

More: VentureBeat, Los Angeles Times, AllThingsD, ZDNet, The Next Web, Facebook Developer Blog, Mashable!, WebProNews and internetretailer.com

Jim Edwards / Business Insider:

Tumblr Wants $25,000 Per Ad—Here's What They Look Like — Tumblr, the blogging platform with a massive audience but negligible revenues, has set its entry-level ad price at $25,000, the company said in an email. — The ad spots are on Tumblr Radar and Tumblr Spotlight …

More: CNET, VentureBeat, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Digital Trends, Betabeat, Mashable!, The Next Web, WebProNews, The Next Web and Adotas. Tweets: @tumblr. See also Mediagazer

John Cook / GeekWire:

Zillow to buy RentJuice for $40M in cash, posts record revenue and profits — Zillow is using some of its new-found cash to gobble up San Francisco's RentJuice, adding a new set of technologies that help landlords and property managers more easily keep track of properties, upload photos, manage revenue and deals.

More: Zillow MediaRoom, The Seattle Times, Business Insider and TechCrunch. Thanks:@toddbishop

Kim-Mai Cutler / TechCrunch:

Yelp's Post-IPO Earnings: $27.4M in Revenue, Up 66% From A Year Earlier, But Net Loss Triples — In its first ever earnings report as a publicly-traded company, Yelp said it earned $27.4 million in revenue in the first quarter, up 66 percent from the $16.5 million it made in the same time a year ago.

More: Business Insider, VatorNews, VentureBeat and WebProNews

Tero Kuittinen / Forbes:

Is the OMGPOP Acquisition Haunting Zynga? — Zynga's much-anticipated quarterly report was very close to being a non-event - ten minutes after the press release, the share price was within 0.3% of the close. Yet ZNGA declined from nearly $16 to $8 between early March and late April.

More: CNET, New York Times, The Atlantic Wire, Gotta Be Mobile, BGR, Pocket-lint and Know Your Mobile

Steven Bertoni / Forbes:

The 26-Year-Old VC Who Cashed In On Instagram — Joshua Kushner was in Mexico in April for a family Passover trip, up late in his hotel room reading The Power Broker, Robert Caro's biography of New York City's master builder, Robert Moses, when the text message arrived from an insider.

Thanks:@joshraffel

Jessica Dolcourt / CNET:

Verizon's LTE-powered in-home broadband goes national — While Sprint and T-Mobile are struggling to launch their 4G LTE networks, Verizon apparently has enough LTE to power your devices at home. — Starting Thursday, Verizon's HomeFusion Broadband service will bring LTE-powered Internet access nationwide.

More: ZDNet, PC World, dailywireless.org, The Verge and Engadget

Enigmax / TorrentFreak:

Pirate Bay Enjoys 12 Million Traffic Boost, Shares Unblocking Tips — Last Friday the UK High Court ruled that several of country's leading ISPs must censor The Pirate Bay website having ruled in February that the site and its users breach copyright on a grand scale.

More: NEWS.com.au, Guardian, WebProNews, gHacks Technology News and Washington Post

Stuart Dredge / Guardian:

The dark side of in-app purchases — Decision to make music game unplayable is controversial, but it's not the only example — The glory days of guitar-based music games may be firmly in the past, yet there are plenty of people still firing up Rock Band or Guitar Hero on their consoles for a nostalgic glow.

More: CNET, The Register, msnbc.com, RockBandAide and VG247

Jennifer Baker / PC World:

Programming Languages Not Copyrightable Rules Top EU Court — Europe's top court ruled on Wednesday that the functionality of a computer program and the programming language it is written in cannot be protected by copyright. — The European Court of Justice made the decision in relation …

More: Jan Wildeboer, The Register, Techdirt, Inquirer, Ars Technica and ZDNet

Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:

Google Updates Google Docs With 450 New Fonts, 60 New Templates And More — Google today announced that it is bringing web fonts to Google Docs. Thanks to this update, you can now use 450 new fonts in your Google documents. These are the same 450 fonts Google already features on its Web Fonts site for web designers.

More: Ars Technica, VentureBeat, Engadget, Docs Blog, 9to5Google, Techland, The Next Web and The Verge

Daniel Frankel / paidContent:

Demand and Google leave farm fight behind with “premium” YouTube channels — It was only about 14 months ago that Google made headlines for targeting Demand Media with algorithmic pesticides, classifying the Santa Monica, Calif.-based company's freelancer-produced content …

More: WebProNews

Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:

Amazon Gets Into the Sitcom Business — Amazon has been stocking up its Web-video offering with lots of old TV shows. Now it's going to start making some of its own. — The company is pulling back the covers (a bit) on its plans to produce kids' shows and sitcoms via its “Amazon Studios” …

Todd Bishop / GeekWire:

German court says Motorola can block Xbox, Windows — but U.S. court stands in way — Setting up an unusual conflict between courts on different continents, a judge in Germany ruled overnight that Microsoft violates two of Motorola Mobility's digital video patents — ostensibly preventing …

More: Dow Jones Newswires, BBC, Pulse2 Technology …, VentureBeat, DailyTech and VG247

Brendan Sasso / Hillicon Valley:

Senate to examine Obama plan for online privacy ‘bill of rights’ — The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee will examine the Obama administration's plan to protect users' online privacy at a hearing on May 9, committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) announced Wednesday.

More: Digital Trends

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:

DEV, NYC's New Seed Fund For Digital Media Startups, Announces First Investments — Here comes money for media startups: former MediaNet CEO Alan McGlade and VC Michael Yang are announcing the launch of a new NYC-based firm called DEV (Digital Entertainment Ventures) whose early stage capital fund …

More: DEV Blog, Business Wire and Betabeat

Ryan Kim / GigaOM:

Pebble smartwatch gets its first app partner: RunKeeper — When I talked to the man behind the Pebble smartwatch, which has become the biggest Kickstarter project ever, he said what excited him about all the success was the ability to turn Pebble into an app platform.

More: RunKeeper, Mashable!, PC Magazine, Android and Me, Gotta Be Mobile, everythingiCafe, iPhone in Canada Blog, Betabeat, Business Insider and The Next Web

Kara Swisher / AllThingsD:

Silver Lake Grabs Large Minority Stake of WME to Push Digital Initiatives — Large private equity firm Silver Lake is buying a large stake in powerful Hollywood talent agency William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, which is being described as a way to turbocharge its digital efforts.

More: Variety, Wall Street Journal, The Tech Trade and DealBook

David Pierce / The Verge:

LTE-enabled PlayBook coming soon, says RIM CEO Thorstein Heins — Rumors have been swirling that RIM is preparing an LTE version of its PlayBook tablet, but rumor no longer: CEO Thorstein Heins let us know this morning at a press briefing at BlackBerry World that there will indeed be an LTE-capable PlayBook in the near future.

More: BGR, Gotta Be Mobile, Shiny Objects, TechCrunch and Digits

Rip Empson / TechCrunch:

Castlight Lands A Whopping $100M D Round To Bring Transparency To Healthcare Costs — One of the biggest causes of the high cost of healthcare in the U.S. has been an utter lack of transparency in pricing, even for the most routine procedures. A recent study at UC San Francisco revealed …

More: bizjournals, Ezra Klein and mobihealthnews. Thanks:@ripemp

Jennifer Van Grove / VentureBeat:

Prezi zooms past 10M users, releases PowerPoint import tool — In building an intuitive and fluid alternative to PowerPoint, startup Prezi is helping presenters reimagine their productions. Tuesday, the company announced that it surpassed 10 million users, and released a PowerPoint import tool …

More: The Next Web

Mary Jo Foley / CNET:

Microsoft to drop Windows Live branding with Windows 8 — Microsoft's perpetually confusing Windows Live branding is about to get a long-overdue clean up. — Microsoft is doing away with the Windows Live brand, according to a May 2 post on the Building Windows 8 blog.

More: Computerworld, PC World, MSDN Blogs, GeekWire, Business Insider, WMPoweruser, LiveSide.net and SuperSite for Windows

Tweets: @theromit and @theromit

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Twilio Rising: Microsoft Inks Deal To Offer Voice, Messaging APIs To ‘Tens Of Thousands’ Of Azure Developers — A potentially big move forward for cloud-based telephony API startup Twilio — and an intriguing development for Microsoft, given its would-be ownership of Skype …

More: MarketWatch, ZDNet, MSDN Blogs, WebProNews, WMPoweruser and VentureBeat. Thanks:@twilio

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