Techmeme: Cellular versions of Apple's iPad 4 and iPad mini close to China launch after gaining network license (Josh Ong/The Next Web)

December 18, 2012, 2:40 PM

Top News

Aaron Souppouris / The Verge:

Samsung drops Apple injunctions in Europe — Samsung has today announced it will drop its inunction requests against Apple for standards-essential patent infringement in Germany, the UK, France, Italy and the Netherlands. In a statement given to The Verge, the manufacturer said:

More: Bloomberg, FOSS Patents, Examiner, The Next Web, Marketing Land, InfoWorld, SiliconBeat, MacRumors, Ars Technica, VentureBeat, Computerworld, iPhone Hacks, Electronista, FierceWireless, GigaOM, CNET, iDownloadBlog.com, BGR, Engadget and MacDailyNews. Tweets: @fosspatents

Florian Mueller / FOSS Patents:

Judge denies Apple permanent injunction, throws out Samsung's jury misconduct claims — Judge Lucy Koh, the federal judge presiding over the Apple v. Samsung litigation in the Northern District of California, just entered two important post-trial orders. Within minutes of each other …

Bloomberg:

Apple Loses Bid for U.S. Ban on Infringing Samsung Phones — Apple Inc. (AAPL)'s request for a U.S. sales ban on 26 Samsung Electronics Co. devices was rejected by a federal judge following a jury verdict in August finding infringement of six of the iPhone maker's patents.

More: Telegraph, Business Insider, Tech Trader Daily and Pocketnow

Roger Cheng / CNET:

Nokia CEO: We have to move with more urgency (Q&A) — Stephen Elop speaks to CNET and weighs in on the cultural shift at Nokia, why he went with AT&T as an exclusive partner, and what keeps him up at night. — Nokia has undergone a significant cultural and identity shift under the leadership of CEO Stephen Elop.

More: SlashGear, Business Insider, The Verge, Bloomberg, CNET, My Nokia Blog, Nokiapoweruser, PhoneArena and Ubergizmo

Wayne Lam / iSuppli:

Samsung Displaces Nokia as Top Cellphone Brand in 2012 and Takes Decisive Smartphone Lead Over Apple — For the first time in 14 years, wireless communications giant Nokia will not sit atop the global cellphone business on an annual basis at the end of 2012—with Samsung set to seize the mobile handset market's top rank.

More: PC Magazine, The Next Web, LAPTOP Magazine, GeekWire, TechCrunch, 9to5Google, ZDNet, Mercury News, Tech Trader Daily, 9to5Mac, dailywireless.org, Redmond Pie, iPhone Hacks and PhoneArena

Tom Warren / The Verge:

Instagram backlash is Flickr's gain — Users look elsewhere after Instagram changes its policies — Popular photo sharing service Instagram is facing a user backlash after the company revealed new terms of service this week. The fine print, that takes effect on January 16th …

More: ReadWrite, Business Insider, Digits, IntoMobile, PhoneArena, ZDNet and BuzzFeed

Tweets: @nickbilton, @dhh, @mike_ftw, @willsmith and @safesolvent

See also Mediagazer

NYT Bits:

What Instagram's New Terms of Service Mean for You

Alexis C. Madrigal / The Atlantic Online:

Why You Should Want to Pay for Software, Instagram Edition

More: Forbes and Know Your Cell

Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:

Mark Zuckerberg's Wedding Photographer Is Not Pleased With Mark Zuckerberg

Jason Del Rey / AdAge:

Facebook Prepares to Bring Video Ads to News Feed, Aims for TV Dollars — But Will TV Ads Disrupt Social Experience? — Facebook is set to unveil a new video-ad product in the first half of next year in its largest attempt to date to attract big swaths of ad dollars from TV advertisers …

More: Betabeat, VentureBeat, Business Insider, The Next Web, Gizmodo, AllFacebook, The Verge and Mashable!. Thanks:@cottondelo

Matthew Panzarino / The Next Web:

Apple releases iOS 6.0.2 for iPhone 5, iPad mini to fix annoying WiFi connectivity bug — Apple has today released iOS 6.0.2 for the iPhone 5 and iPad mini only, fixing a bug that could affect the connections and speeds of their WiFi radios. The update is currently available in iTunes only …

More: Engadget, MacRumors, MacStories, Business Insider, GigaOM, CNET, Macworld, The Verge, BGR and 9to5Mac

Wall Street Journal:

Apple in Preliminary Talks with Foursquare About Data-Sharing Deal — Apple Inc. is in early discussions to integrate local data from Foursquare Labs Inc. into its mapping application, according to people familiar with the talks, as the company continues to build an arsenal of local data to try to take on Google Inc.

More: digitaltrends.com, SiliconANGLE, BGR, PandoDaily, GigaOM, CNET, Ars Technica, TUAW, Marketing Land, VentureBeat, Good Morning Silicon Valley, PadGadget, FierceMobileContent News and Redmond Pie

Myriam Joire / Engadget:

Google Music gains scan and match feature in the US — It wasn't very long ago that Google Music landed in Europe — to the delight of local music lovers, we're sure. On its trip across the pond, the service gained a unique new feature called scan and match, wherein Google scans …

More: The Verge, Google+, CNET, GigaOM, TechCrunch, The Next Web, AllThingsD and 9to5Google

Jon Russell / The Next Web:

Google starts putting Meebo to use: New Google+ social sharing bar spotted on the Web (Updated) — Update at foot of post. — It looks like Google has begun putting its acquisition of Meebo to use after a chat bar looking very much like that of the advertising startup was spotted in the wild — screenshot below.

More: Engadget

Jessica Guynn / Los Angeles Times:

Federal Trade Commission to data brokers: Show us your data — The Federal Trade Commission has ordered nine data brokerage companies to tell the agency how they harvest and use data on consumers, toughening its stance toward the multibillion-dollar industry.

More: Federal Trade Commission, Washington Post, GeekWire, The Hill, The Verge and TPM IdeaLab. Tweets: @kashhill

Matt Brian / The Next Web:

Samsung unveils new 5-inch dual-SIM Galaxy Grand, with dual-core 1.2GHz processor and 8MP camera — Adding yet another Galaxy S III (or maybe Note) clone to its collection of Android smartphones, Samsung today launched its new Galaxy Grand handset, offering a dual 1.2 GHz processor …

More: SAMSUNG TOMORROW Global, BetaNews, Ars Technica, CNET, GigaOM, PC World, 9to5Google, Life On My Mobile, CNET, GadgeTell, Engadget, Softpedia News, The Verge, Computerworld, digitaltrends.com, WebProNews, Phones Review, ZDNet and Pocket-lint

Julianne Pepitone / CNNMoney.com:

Why 84% of Kickstarter's top projects shipped late — If you pledged cash for a crowdfunded product, be prepared to be very, very patient: A CNNMoney examination of the top 50 most-funded projects on Kickstarter found that 84% missed their target delivery dates.

More: Betabeat, The Verge and Business Insider

Paul Mozur / Wall Street Journal:

Foxconn Workers Say, ‘Keep Our Overtime’ — SHENZHEN, China—Nets to catch would-be jumpers still sag ominously from Hon Hai Precision Industry Co.'s buildings. — But two years after a spate of suicides at the Apple Inc. supplier's campus here, workers are more concerned …

Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch:

Twitter Passes 200M Monthly Active Users, A 42% Increase Over 9 Months — Twitter has announced via its own official Twitter account that the service now has more than 200 million monthly active users, an increase of 60 million from the 140 million milestone it shared back in March.

More: digitaltrends.com, Marketing Land, VatorNews, Mashable!, The Next Web, CNET, Business Insider, GeekWire, VentureBeat and AllTwitter. Tweets: @twitter

Craig Lloyd / SlashGear:

Tim Cook, Marissa Mayer among TIME Person of the Year finalists — TIME Magazine has unveiled its shortlist of finalists for the magazine's 2012 Person of the Year award, which goes to the person or group that TIME editors deem had the single greatest impact during the past year.

More: Mercury News, TODAY Celebrates, 9to5Mac, VentureBeat, App Advice and Macgasm

Mat Smith / Engadget:

NVIDIA Tegra 4 processor details leaked: 4-plus-1 cores, 28nm, six times the power of Tegra 3 — NVIDIA's next superhero-themed mobile chipset has possibly made an early appearance in a leaked side in China, and it looks like it wants to go toe-to-toe with the latest processors from Samsung and Qualcomm.

More: The Verge, SlashGear, CNET, SiliconANGLE, ZDNet, VentureBeat, TechSpot, The Tech Report, Inquirer, FierceCIO:TechWatch News, DailyTech, ExtremeTech, Pocketnow, Android Authority, Techie Buzz, Electronista, Gizchina and Mobile Magazine

Liz Gannes / AllThingsD:

European Antitrust Case Against Google Moves Towards Settlement As Well — Google seems to have stared down antitrust concerns both at home and abroad, with the help of its Chairman Eric Schmidt. — The company has been given a new deadline of January 2013, said Joaquin Almunia …

Bill Rigby / Reuters:

Microsoft, Motorola millions apart on royalty payment case — (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp and Google Inc's Motorola phone unit remain millions of dollars apart in their respective valuations of video and wi-fi patents at issue in a pivotal case before a federal judge in Seattle.

More: Neowin, CNET and CNET

Matthew Panzarino / The Next Web:

Instagram's latest app update fixed my biggest pet peeve, and people hate it — As a long time user of Instagram, I have come to loathe a certain thing that people do on the service. No, it's not duckface or Throwback Thursdays. It's not even the fact that most people will never …

More: Technosailor.com

Geoffrey A. Fowler / Wall Street Journal:

Tor: An Anonymous, And Controversial, Way to Web-Surf — For more than four years, William Weber has helped run a free service called Tor that makes Web surfing anonymous for anyone. — Then on Nov. 28, the police showed up at the 20-year-old's home in Graz, Austria, and accused him of distributing child pornography.

Sean Ludwig / VentureBeat:

Bitcasa brings ‘infinite’ cloud storage to Android & Win 8 with new apps, iOS & Mac coming soon — Cloud storage startup Bitcasa has released new mobile apps for Android and Windows 8 platforms, with iOS and Mac apps coming in January, the company announced Tuesday morning.

More: Engadget, TechCrunch, The Next Web, Softpedia News and Know Your Cell

Sponsor Posts

Channel 9:

Windows Store Weekly — This week we take a look at: Star Trek App, Box, Fling Theory, StumbleUpon, and wordBrush.

Cloud Foundry:

Static.com Adds Hadoop Support for Cloud Foundry — In this guest post, Jake Farrell, CTO for Static.com, explains how the major shift in the hosting industry towards platforms for high developer productivity …

Rackspace Blog:

An Army Is Forming To Battle Patent Trolls — For the past several months, we've exposed the flaws in the patent system and how they're being exploited by opportunistic patent trolls looking to extort a quick buck …

Hortonworks » Blog:

Mobile Telco Dials In and Harnesses Big Data with Hadoop — Smartphones have transformed our daily lives. A key indicator of this trend is our increased spend on data plans versus voice.

Unison's blog:

“Yammer sucks” — Not to be mean to Yammer, or anything — it's a very good tool for some use cases — but that's what a customer told me recently (and others feel the same way).

Sponsor Techmeme

Who's Hiring In Tech?

Google: Do cool things that matter.

Automattic: 18% down, 82% to go. WordPress.

CBSi: Have your people call our people.

@WalmartLabs: A thin line between work and play.

Disqus: Build something worth talking about.

FancyCorp: We are real fancy.

imo: Awesome People. Awesome Products.

Zoosk: Fall in love. With your job.

Facebook: Best place to build & make an impact.

Amazon: Work hard. Have fun. Make history.

Square: Come simplify the complex.

Twitter: Less characters; more fulfilling.

Add your company here

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 2:40 PM ET, December 18, 2012.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.