Techmeme
December 4, 2012, 12:10 PM

Top News

Eric Slivka / MacRumors:
iTunes Music Store Launches in 56 New Countries, Movies Arrive in Four  —  Earlier today, we noted that the iTunes Music Store had gone live in Russia and Turkey, but now that changes have propagated throughout iTunes and we've had time to collect reports, it now appears that Apple …
Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
Facebook Messenger for Android drops account requirement, taking on SMS and WhatsApp  —  The race to replace SMS is on  —  Facebook has entered the race to replace SMS in earnest today, announcing that its messenger app for Android will no longer require a Facebook account to sign up.
Jay Yarow / Business Insider:
Mary Meeker's Latest Must-Read Presentation On The State Of The Web  —  Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker is doing a year-end presentation on the state of the web at Stanford tonight.  —  We have the slides of her presentation here.  —  As usual, it's a must read for anyone in the industry, or anyone with interest in technology.
Jemima Kiss / Guardian:
Soundcloud revamps site as users hit 180 million  —  The ‘YouTube of audio’ claims to now reach 8% of the world's internet population as mobile audio takes off  —  If the future of the internet is mobile, things are looking very good for Soundcloud, the Berlin-based sound-sharing site.
Jack Purcher / Patently Apple:
US Patent & Trademark Office Grants Apple Registered Trademarks for “Retina” & “Game Center” Icon  —  On December 4, 2012, the US Patent & Trademark Office granted Apple two Registered Trademarks.  The first trademark covers the word “Retina” representing Apple's brilliant Retina display …
Vlad Savov / The Verge:
Nokia selling Espoo headquarters to raise cash, but won't be moving out  —  Nokia is about to add roughly $220 million to its balance sheet through the sale of its central HQ building in Espoo, Finland.  The company will continue to operate within the premises as previously …
Jamie Yap / ZDNet:
Sharp gets $120M investment from Qualcomm  —  Summary: Both companies agree to jointly develop and commercialize display panel technology, after Qualcomm agrees to inject US$120 million equity investment into Sharp and become a minority stakeholder.  —  Jamie Yap
Michael Carney / PandoDaily:
Younity skips storage limits, making all your files available on all your devices  —  Despite all the cloud storage and syncing solutions out there, most consumers still struggle with accessing all of their files across multiple devices.  A big part of the problem is that the average user …
Jonathan Rudenberg:
SMS Vulnerability in Twitter, Facebook and Venmo  —  Twitter users with SMS enabled are vulnerable to an attack that allows anyone to post to their account.  The attacker only needs knowledge of the mobile number associated with a target's Twitter account.  Messages can then be sent to Twitter with the source number spoofed.
Mark Hosenball / Reuters:
Swiss spy agency warns U.S., Britain about huge data leak  —  (Reuters) - Secret information on counter-terrorism shared by foreign governments may have been compromised by a massive data theft by a senior IT technician for the NDB, Switzerland's intelligence service, European national security sources said.
More: CNET, ZDNet and SecurityWeek
Barb Darrow / GigaOM:
And whomp, here it is: The Pivotal Initiative brought to you by VMware and EMC  —  At long last here it is: The long-simmering VMware-EMC spin-off that is.  The Pivotal Initiative will focus on bringing resources from the two parent companies to bear on big data and cloud application platforms …
Dan Seifert / The Verge:
Ashton Kutcher's portrayal of Steve Jobs to debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January  —  This coming January is likely to be the first time that anyone outside of a production facility will get a look at jOBS, the new biopic of Steve Jobs starring Ashton Kutcher.
Steve Lohr / NYT Bits:
Google Cranks Up Its Patent Engine  —  Google has been accelerating its patent production impressively in the last few years, even before it bought Motorola Mobility last year for $12.5 billion.  —  That is one nugget in a new report from Thomson Reuters.  The report, “2012 Top 100 Global Innovators …
More: Washington PostTweets: @blachab
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Nest's Tony Fadell Talks Thermostats, Apple, Kickstarter And Hardware Startups At LeWeb  —  At LeWeb Paris this morning, Nest Labs' Founder and CEO Tony Fadell took the stage with the Iliad Group's founder Xavier Niel to talk about his advanced thermostat and the Internet of Things.
Ken Yeung / The Next Web:
OneSpot raises $1.5 million to redefine Web banner advertising using rich-media and social  —  The world of advertising is constantly searching for new ways to reach consumers.  One of the well-used mediums has been banner advertising — you know, those things that pop up every once in a while that people often ignore?
Joe Mullin / Ars Technica:
CA to app devs: get privacy policies or risk $2500-per-download fines  —  They had a month—and now it's over.  Any California mobile-app developers who don't have a privacy policy obviously available to consumers need to get one and fast.  If they don't, they could be facing potentially massive fines: up to $2,500 per app download.
More: The Verge
Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch:
Europe v Facebook Privacy Campaign Group Is Preparing To “Fight” Facebook In Ireland, Sets Up Crowdfunding Platform To Fund Legal Fight Against Irish DPA (Updated)  —  As Facebook polls its users on site governance and privacy policy - a poll that looks very likely to result …

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