Techmeme
May 17, 2012, 10:55 AM

Top News

AllThingsD:
Exclusive: Japan's Rakuten Wins the Heart of Pinterest in $100M Funding Race With $1.5B Valuation  —  Rakuten, the largest e-commerce site in Japan, is expected to be the lead investor in the much-contested next round of funding for Silicon Valley's hottest start-up, Pinterest.
Tim Bradshaw / FT Tech Blog:
Rakuten CEO on why Pinterest is worth $1.5bn  —  Rakuten has led a $100m funding round into Pinterest, which values the online “curation” community at around $1.5bn.  —  The Japanese ecommerce giant won out over major US venture capital firms who were vying for a piece of Silicon Valley's new sweetheart …
Sunlen Miller / ABCNEWS:
Senators to Unveil the ‘Ex-Patriot Act’ to Respond to Facebook's Saverin's Tax ‘Scheme’  —  Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has a status update for Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin: Stop attempting to dodge your taxes by renouncing your U.S. citizenship or never come to back to the U.S. again.
Quentin Hardy / New York Times:
A Facebook Co-Founder Reflects on the Path Forward  —  Eduardo Saverin can escape the United States, but he can't slip Facebook.  —  “Everything I do in my personal life, in my professional life, it's completely there,” said Mr. Saverin, a Facebook co-founder, in his first major interview.
Business Week:
How Mark Zuckerberg Hacked the Valley  —  In 2006, when he was 22, Mark Zuckerberg gave up writing computer code to focus on managing his rapidly growing startup.  Like Jim Brown retiring from football at 29 or E.M. Forster abandoning the novel in his forties, the prodigy who programmed …
DealBook:
Ahead of Facebook I.P.O., a Skeptical Madison Ave.  —  With Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has created a seemingly perfect home on the Web, one where people feel comfortable chatting with friends, playing games, sharing photos and videos, listening to music and revealing the most intimate details of their lives.
Janko Roettgers / GigaOM:
Netflix launches sexy new web-based video player  —  Netflix just rolled out a completely revamped video player for browser-based viewing, and I gotta say, it's pretty slick: Not only does it come with lightbox-like text overlays while a video is paused, users can also preview entire seasons …
Amit Singhal / The Official Google Blog:
Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings  —  Search is a lot about discovery—the basic human need to learn and broaden your horizons.  But searching still requires a lot of hard work by you, the user.  So today I'm really excited to launch the Knowledge Graph …
Emil Protalinski / ZDNet:
The Pirate Bay returns, Anonymous hater takes credit for DDoS  —  Summary: The Pirate Bay is back online.  An Anonymous traitor who goes by the name AnonNyre has claimed responsibility for the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that kept the site offline for days.
Matthew Braga / Ars Technica:
Say hello to the real real-time Web  —  It's not just a buzzword, but a technological shift—the instantly accessible Web.  —  Real-time technologies are making Web apps faster—and in some cases, indistinguishable from desktop apps.  —  Garret Voight  —  It started with a simple idea …
Nilay Patel / The Verge:
HTC shipping custom Android builds on US devices to avoid Apple patents  —  The HTC One X for AT&T and Evo 4G LTE for Sprint already bear the distinction of being the first Android devices to face an import block at US Customs for potentially infringing an Apple patent, but the ignominy may be fleeting …
Josh Lowensohn / CNET:
Flashback makers missed out on their payday, Symantec says  —  The high-profile Flashback Trojan that is estimated to have infected more than 600,000 Macs at its peak earlier this year would have earned its creators $14,000 in the course of three weeks.  —  The only hitch is that the money isn't going anywhere.
Sinead Carew / Reuters:
FCC chooses spectrum for wireless medical devices  —  (Reuters) - The U.S. telecommunications regulator is expected to announce plans on Thursday to set aside spectrum to connect wireless medical devices for more convenient health monitoring.  —  The Federal Communications Commission …
Antony Savvas / Computerworld UK Public Sector:
Met Police uses ‘quick’ mobile data extraction system against suspects  —  Police will have immediate access to data on handset  —  The Metropolitan Police has rolled out a mobile device data extraction system to allow officers to extract data “within minutes” from suspects' phones while they are in custody.
Kim-Mai Cutler / TechCrunch:
Sleepover Time!  All-Night Hackathon Precedes Facebook IPO At Headquarters  —  Carrying on in the esteemed tradition of Facebook hackathons, there will be an all-nighter on Thursday at the company's Menlo Park headquarters that culminates with CEO Mark Zuckerberg ringing in the NASDAQ bell ahead …
Mike Beasley / 9to5Mac:
Facebook rolling out new “Pages Manager” app for iPhone  —  Facebook has just broken out another feature of their main app and released Pages Manager for the iPhone.  The app appears to function just like the main Facebook app, but with all of the features dedicated to fan pages.
Kara Swisher / AllThingsD:
Even as Settlement Hopes Appear, Facebook Blames Shoddy Checking in Answer to Yahoo Patent Fraud Claim  —  When last we tuned in to the ongoing drama that is the patent infringement lawsuit Yahoo aimed at Facebook, Yahoo had a CEO — Scott Thompson — who was full steam ahead in pressing the controversial legal action.
Sean Gallagher / Ars Technica:
Google's bots learn to read interactive webpages more like humans  —  Google can now index parts of the Web that weren't indexable before  —  Google feeds its search engine's index with site data from a virtual army of “bots”—Web-crawling applications that scour sites for content.
Emil Protalinski / ZDNet:
Wikileaks has been under DDoS attack for the last three days  —  Summary: The Pirate Bay is down.  Wikileaks is down.  Visa was down.  Are all these Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks a coincidence?  Right now it's not clear, but something is definitely happening.
Rebecca Mackinnon / Foreign Policy:
The Rise of Europe's Private Internet Police  —  Activists are fighting to rein them in.  —  In 2005, Peter Mahnke, a resident of the English town of St. Margaret's, Middlesex, set up a community website.  For the past seven years, he and a handful of local volunteers have been publishing regular updates …
Paul Sawers / The Next Web:
The Weather Channel launches redesigned iOS app, with new social, local and personal features  —  The Weather Channel has rolled out a new version of its iOS app which sees a massive interface overhaul and a number of key new features introduced.  —  Launched in the UK in July 2001 …

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Sue Marek / FierceWireless: