Techmeme: Big layoffs at T-Mobile headquarters, ahead of merger (Brier Dudley/The Seattle Times)

March 7, 2013, 4:55 AM

Top News

David Faber / CNBC:

Carl Icahn Takes Up to a 6 Percent Stake in Dell: Sources — Carl Icahn appears set to enter the fray over the leveraged buyout of Dell. — Trading sources said they were confident that Icahn had amassed a position in Dell that may approach 100 million shares, and would bring him to a roughly 6 percent ownership.

More: DealBook, Fortune, Reuters, AllThingsD, Business Insider, CNET, The Register, VentureBeat, BGR, Forbes, Deal Journal, The Next Web, Neowin and The Next Web

Alex Wilhelm / The Next Web:

Inside Microsoft's decision to loan the Dell buyout consortium $2 billion — Dell's current expedition to go private is encountering turbulence in the form of investor discontent, leaving the details of the accepted deal somewhat obscured behind the smoke of shareholder battle.

More: Deal Journal. Thanks:@panzer

Serena Saitto / Bloomberg:

Dell Said to Draw Interest From Blackstone to Lenovo

More: Wall Street Journal, BestTechie, Business Insider, Tech Trader Daily and bizjournals

Tweets: @levie and @danprimack

Michael J. de la Merced / DealBook:

Dell Board Committee Insists Sale Was Best Outcome

More: Deal Journal, SiliconANGLE, Bloomberg and Reuters

Brier Dudley / The Seattle Times:

Big layoffs at T-Mobile headquarters, ahead of merger — A significant round of layoffs is happening at the Bellevue headquarters of T-Mobile USA just ahead of its merger with MetroPCS, according to people inside the company. — Employees are expecting the cuts, which may affect …

More: PR Newswire, ZDNet, TmoNews, AllThingsD, PC Magazine, CNET, SlashGear, PhoneArena, The Register and Electronista

Kevin Fitchard / GigaOM:

Justice Department: T-Mobile-MetroPCS merger is fine by us

More: eWeek, TechSpot, Engadget, BGR, The Full Signal, PhoneArena, SlashGear, CNET, The Verge and Ars Technica

Path:

A Brand New Language - Introducing Path 3 with Private Messaging, Stickers, and the Shop — When we speak with friends, share a joke, a quiet word, or a conversation over drinks, there is so much more than words that pass between us. A smile or nod or encouraging gesture - these allow for true connection and understanding.

More: The Next Web, AllThingsD, MacRumors, SlashGear and Forbes. Thanks:@forrestkoba

Matthew Panzarino / The Next Web:

Path 3.0 adds private messaging and The Shop, with ‘handcrafted’ stickers and premium photo filters

More: Engadget, CNET, iMore, The Verge, The Next Web, GigaOM and Gizmodo

Tweets: @davemorin, @hunterwalk, @qthrul, @davemorin, @thinkmariya, @msquinn, @beijingdou and @panzer

Somini Sengupta / New York Times:

Facebook's Redesign Hopes to Keep Users Engaged — SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook plans to announce on Thursday a substantial redesign of its News Feed — a makeover aimed at both keeping users glued to the social network and luring more advertising dollars. — Company executives have broadly …

More: NYT Bits, Mobile Marketing Watch and Business Insider

Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet:

Microsoft to update its core Windows 8 apps well before ‘Blue’ — Summary: Microsoft may have refreshes of its Mail, Calendar, Music and Games apps for Windows 8 and Windows RT in its app store as soon as this month. — There's been some worry that Microsoft's Windows team may be waiting until the …

More: The Box Blog, The Register, WinBeta, Neowin, The Next Web and Softpedia News

Sarah Maslin Nir / New York Times:

Internet Marriages on Rise in Some Immigrant Communities — With a red embroidered veil draped over her dark hair, Punam Chowdhury held her breath last month as her fiancé said the phrase that would make them husband and wife. After she echoed them, they were married.

More: digitaltrends.com, Ubergizmo, Gizmodo, The Verge and Betabeat

Tweets: @amyvirshup and @sarahmaslinnir

David Kravets / Wired:

Aaron Swartz Case Was ‘a Good Use of Prosecutorial Discretion,’ Attorney General Says — Holder, the nation's top prosecutor, is the highest-ranking member of the President Barack Obama administration to defend the indictment and prosecution of the former director of Demand Progress …

More: Politico, Ars Technica, CNET, Boston Globe and Hillicon Valley. Tweets: @tprophet

John Paczkowski / AllThingsD:

EU's Microsoft Fine a Warning to Google — The European Commission's announcement Wednesday of $732 million in sanctions against Microsoft is an inevitable and expected comeuppance for the software giant's failure to comply with the terms of an antitrust settlement requiring it to offer consumers a choice of Web browsers.

More: Computerworld, The Atlantic Wire and Quartz

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Microsoft Will Not Appeal $731M Fine Over Browser Antitrust Violations: ‘We Take Full Responsibility’

More: Microsoft, Engadget, Datamation.com, Forbes, VatorNews, Marketing Land, VentureBeat, DailyTech, Reuters and Macgasm

Marco Arment / Marco.org:

A Mac Pro Mini — For years, geeks have wanted Apple to make an “xMac”: an expandable desktop tower like the Mac Pro, but much cheaper, generally achieved in theory by using consumer-class CPUs and motherboards instead of Intel's expensive, server-grade Xeon line.

John Markoff / New York Times:

Unreported Side Effects of Drugs Found Using Internet Data, Study Finds — Using data drawn from queries entered into Google, Microsoft and Yahoo search engines, scientists at Microsoft, Stanford and Columbia University have for the first time been able to detect evidence …

More: CNET and kottke.org

MIT Technology Review:

Computer Scientists Measure the Speed of Censorship On China's Twitter — Censorship on Weibo, China's version of Twitter, is near real-time and relies on a workforce of over 4000 censors who stop work during the evening news, according the first detailed analysis of censorship patterns

More: The Register, Web 2.0 Asia Blog, Quartz and The Verge

Brian Crecente / Polygon:

EA won't have microtransactions in all future games, exec clarifies — Electronic Arts chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen clarified today that while all of EA's future games will support the ability to include microtransactions, that doesn't mean that all of them will actually have them.

More: The Verge, Massively, VG247, Joystiq, gameinformer.com, Blue's News and MCV: Home Stream

Naomi Tajitsu / Reuters:

Megaupload founder can sue New Zealand spy agency: court — WELLINGTON (Reuters) - A court ruled on Thursday that Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom can sue New Zealand's spy agency for illegal surveillance, opening the government up to more scrutiny over its role in an unlawful 2011 police raid on the internet entrepreneur's home.

More: TorrentFreak, New Zealand Herald, CNET, ZDNet, BBC and Bloomberg

Ken Yeung / The Next Web:

Yammer's David Sacks offers to create $250k Launch fund to support five startups from the festival — At the 2013 Launch Festival, Yammer co-founder David Sacks took part in the conference's third fireside chat. During the conversation, Sacks offered to help fund five of the startups presenting …

More: TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Business Insider, CITEworld, Tech Cocktail and Jawfish Games

Terje Langeland / Bloomberg:

Samsung's Patent Spat With Apple Spurs U.S. Lobbying Push — Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) has doubled mobile-phone sales in the U.S. since 2008. As the company faces anti-dumping measures and a protracted court battle with Apple Inc. (AAPL), its U.S. lobbying bill is growing even faster.

More: CNET and The Verge

Emil Protalinski / The Next Web:

comScore: Apple debuts 2013 as top US smartphone maker, Samsung gains but Android falls for the first time — In the US, Apple ended 2012 as the top OEM and it has only further increased its lead with the start of the New Year. Samsung is gaining as well, but not quite as quickly.

Drew Olanoff / TechCrunch:

The Check In Is Dead; Long Live The Check In As Foursquare Adds Quick Glide Feature On iOS — Depending who you ask, Foursquare could be in a great place as far as growth. Or in a bad place. We've heard about potential acquisitions, difficulty fundraising and everything in between.

More: Foursquare Blog, TUAW, SlashGear, WebProNews and The Next Web

Michael Lee / ZDNet:

Bug allows complete lock screen bypass on Samsung Galaxy S III — Summary: Following a brief lock screen bypass that had ‘limited scope’, another Samsung owner has found that the lock screen on Galaxy S III handsets can be bypassed completely. — Michael Lee

More: Engadget, The Verge, PhoneArena, Phones Review, Examiner, Pocket-lint, Mashable!, Ars Technica, Redmond Pie, BGR, UnleashThePhones, Gotta Be Mobile, Help Net Security and SlashGear

Zack Whittaker / ZDNet:

EU caves in to pressure on new data, privacy law changes; U.S. tech firms breathe sigh of relief — After major U.S.-based technology companies lobbied European member states and politicians, many will wake up today able to breathe a sigh of relief, as the European Commission is forced …

Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:

Trulia Launches Trulia Suggests, A Recommendation Engine For Real Estate — Trulia, the popular real estate search engine, just launched the beta of Trulia Suggests, a personalized real estate recommendation engine. The typical search experience on virtually every online real estate site involves telling …

More: CNET and AllThingsD

Thomas Grillo / bizjournals:

Facebook shops Kendall Square office space for a return to Cambridge — Facebook is poking around in Cambridge for office space it may “like.” — The $66 billion social networking company, founded in a Harvard University dorm by Mark Zuckerburg and friends, is seeking 7,000 square feet …

More: TechCrunch and AllFacebook

Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica:

How two volunteers built the Raspberry Pi's operating system — When you buy a Raspberry Pi, the $35 computer doesn't come with an operating system. Loading your operating system of choice onto an SD card and then booting the Pi turns out to be pretty easy. But where do Pi-compatible operating systems come from?

More: Inquirer

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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 …

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Get Started with Hadoop on Hortonworks Data Platform 1.1 for Windows — We are excited to release the Hortonworks Data Platform 1.1 for Windows as a Generally Available product.

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