Techmeme
November 8, 2012, 4:35 AM

Top News

Michael Scherer / TIME:
Inside the Secret World of Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win  —  “The cave” at President Obama's Election headquarters in Chicago  —  In late spring, the backroom number crunchers who had powered Barack Obama's campaign to victory noticed that George Clooney had an almost gravitational tug on West Coast females ages 40 to 49.
Daniel Terdiman / CNET:
Obama's win a big vindication for Nate Silver, king of the quants  —  Despite some incredulous political pundits, the FiveThirtyEight statistician appears to have correctly predicted the winner in all 50 states in the presidential election.  —  In the end, big data won.
Jacqueline Seng / CNET:
MasterCard rolls out credit card with display and keypad  —  The next-generation 2-in-1 card features an embedded LCD display and touch-sensitive buttons for generating one-time passwords.  —  Next time you get a new card from your bank, don't be surprised if it has a keypad and an LCD on it.
Tricia Duryee / AllThingsD:
7,000 Starbucks Locations Added to the Square Wallet  —  Starbucks is now accepting Square's mobile payment application at roughly 7,000 of its stores as part of a wide-ranging agreement between the two companies.  —  The roll out is right on schedule, coming just three months after the partnership was announced in August.
Josh Ong / The Next Web:
Google decline in China continues as its search share falls to 4th place, maps to 6th  —  It's been more than two and a half years since Google left the Chinese search market, and the market share for its search and maps segments has continued to wane.  —  Marbridge Daily recently called attention …
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Exclusive: Microsoft Office for iPhone, iPad, and Android revealed  —  Office Mobile will arrive in early 2013  —  Microsoft's Office for iPad, iPhone, and Android is a reality.  Although Office Mobile has been rumored and reportedly spotted in the wild, Microsoft has remained persistently quiet about its plans for the product.
Ryan Lawler / TechCrunch:
Airbnb Partners With NYC.gov To Provide Free Housing For Hurricane Sandy Victims  —  Last week, Airbnb waived fees for users affected by Hurricane Sandy.  It also encouraged hosts with listings in affected areas to lower their prices and take in those without food, power, or housing.
Alexia Tsotsis / TechCrunch:
The Narcissism Of Minor Silicon Valley Differences  —  There's a prevalent myth in Silicon Valley, the myth that people aren't snobs here.  This isn't true.  A sort of reverse/meta-snobbery exists here, mostly intellectual in its nature, and the line between the alphas and the betas is extremely clear cut for those who can see it.
Andy Greenberg / Forbes:
Bradley Manning Offers To Admit To Leaking Secrets To WikiLeaks In Court Plea  —  Updated with a clarification from Bradley Manning's lawyer.  —  In the more than 900 days since Bradley Manning was first jailed as the suspected source of the WikiLeaks' bombshell releases of 2010 and early 2011 …
Rip Empson / TechCrunch:
LearnStreet Launches With $1M From Vinod Khosla To Help You Learn How To Build, Test And Push Code  —  For more than a few years now, engineering talent has been in high demand but it also seems that, of late, coding has become cool.  Okay, maybe not cool, but thanks to a fleet of startups …
More: GigaOM and AllThingsD
AppleInsider:
Apple's Eddy Cue joins Ferrari board of directors  —  Eddy Cue, Apple's head of Internet software and services, has joined the Ferrari board of directors, in a move that could hint that Apple is interested in moving into users' vehicles.  —  Ferrari announced in a statement on Wednesday that Cue has joined its board.
Brad Molen / Engadget:
Sprint updates Samsung Galaxy Note II with Multi-Window feature  —  Multi-Window is a key feature for the Samsung Galaxy Note II because it adds split-screen functionality to the device's 5.5-inch display — allowing you to run two apps at the same time — but unfortunately it has been noticeably absent on the phone's US versions.
Timothy B. Lee / Ars Technica:
Voters boot three SOPA-sponsoring Hollywood allies from Congress  —  Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), a key supporter of the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act dedicated to her late husband, lost her seat in Tuesday's election.  —  US Congress  —  When the new Congress takes office in January …
More: CNET
Nilay Patel / The Verge:
Microsoft's chief patent counsel Bart Eppenauer: ‘We believe our patent laws have served the country very well.’  —  But will he accept our challenge to write his next legal document with a stylus?  —  Bart Eppenauer is Microsof't Chief Patent Counsel — the man who oversees the company's enormous portfolio of 20,000 patents.
Reuters:
Foxconn's Gou says tough to cope with iPhone demand  —  (Reuters) - Taiwan's Foxconn Technology Group said on Wednesday the company's flagship Hon Hai unit is finding it difficult to cope with the massive demand for Apple Inc's iPhones.  —  “It's not easy to make the iPhones.
Christina Bonnington / Wired:
Apple Granted Patent for Original iPad Design  —  Apple was granted a design patent for the original iPad Tuesday.  Image: USPTO  —  Can you patent a rectangle with rounded corners?  Absolutely.  And Apple has done it again.  On Tuesday, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted …
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Patent suits target Google, Intel, hundreds more for encrypting web traffic  —  Enlarge / A figure from the patent that has been asserted against Intel, Google, and hundreds of other companies providing SSL and TLS on their websites.  —  Google  —  An unknown company's four-year campaign …
Gregg Keizer / Computerworld:
Adobe, now ‘married’ to Microsoft, moves Flash updates to Patch Tuesday  —  Will sync Flash security updates with partner's monthly schedule  —  Adobe on Tuesday announced that it will pair future security updates for its popular Flash Player with Microsoft's Patch Tuesday schedule.
Michael Kan / Computerworld:
Apple out of China's top five smartphone list in Q3  —  Coolpad smartphones took third place in market share for China, according to Canalys  —  Apple dropped out of the top five list in China's smartphone market for the third quarter, as local handset vendors saw their shipments surge …
More: ZDNet and ITworld.com
Brian Steinberg / AdAge:
NBC Universal and American Express Try to Bring Dawn of ‘Television Commerce’  —  Using ‘Second-Screen’ Devices to Make Impulse Buys Is Still in Infancy  —  The idea of buying something you see in a TV show by pressing a button on your remote or smartphone has long been the stuff of futurist gabbing or science fiction.
Arik Hesseldahl / AllThingsD:
Hurricane Sandy Proved How Hard It Is to Break the Internet  —  All the damage to the communications infrastructure brought on by Hurricane Sandy is sure giving the people who keep track of the technical underpinnings of the Internet a lot of fodder to see how well things do and don't work in real-world situations.

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