Techmeme: The Cost of Uber's Free Rides (Matt Buchanan/The New Yorker)

March 17, 2013, 11:35 AM

Top News

Mark Gurman / 9to5Mac:

Following Samsung Galaxy S4 launch, Apple debuts ‘Why iPhone’ webpage to tout why people love iPhone, slam Android — On the eve of Samsung's Galaxy S4 launch, Apple and its marketing chief Phil Schiller spoke with mainstream news publications to slam Android and iPhone competitors.

More: Business Insider, TechCrunch, Forbes, MacRumors, sefsar, Redmond Pie, The Verge, App Advice, AllThingsD, Mashable!, PhoneArena, Electronista, Neowin, iPhone in Canada Blog, AppleInsider, CNET, Daring Fireball, iClarified, iPhone Hacks, Communications …, TUAW, Fortune, Softpedia News and CITEworld

Tweets: @ow, @reneritchie, @johnpaczkowski, @stevekovach, @tomwarren, @nerdtalker and @reneritchie

Thanks:@llsethj

Kim Zetter / Wired:

Crooks Spy on Casino Card Games With Hacked Security Cameras, Win $33M — A high-roller and hacker accomplices made off with about $33 million after they gamed a casino in Australia by hacking its surveillance cameras and gaining an advantage in several rounds of high-stakes card games.

More: HeraldSun, The Register, Geek.com, The Verge, Agence France Presse and TechSpot

Matt Buchanan / The New Yorker:

The Cost of Uber's Free Rides — “It sucks getting around here,” Max Crowley said, in a rare moment of real emphasis. Crowley is an executive at the car-service start-up company Uber, and “here” is Austin, Texas. More importantly, here is downtown Austin in the middle of South by Southwest Interactive …

More: TechCrunch and Betabeat. Tweets: @mattbuchanan

T.C. Sottek / The Verge:

More than 500,000 Google Reader users flock to Feedly in two days — Google's controversial decision to shut down Google Reader on July 1st has left its users searching for a new news-collecting homeland, and we now have an idea of the scale of the RSS diaspora.

More: Building Feedly, The Next Web and T3 News

John Gruber / Daring Fireball:

Ceding the Crown — So Phil Schiller gave a second eve-of-Galaxy-S4-launch interview, this one to Reuters reporter Poornima Gupta. The headline ("Apple's Schiller Blasts Android, Samsung on Galaxy's Eve") is spot-on, but here's the second paragraph:

More: asymco, Slashdot and Business Insider

Mikey Campbell / AppleInsider:

Apple sued by THX for allegedly misusing patented speaker tech in iPhone, iPad and iMac — THX, the sound innovation company founded by George Lucas, filed suit against Apple in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Thursday, claiming that various models of the iPhone …

More: The Verge, CNET, Bloomberg, Engadget, PC Magazine, Macgasm, Electronista, VentureBeat, 9to5Mac, T3 News, Patently Apple, Neowin, SlashGear, TECH.BLORGE.com, App Advice and iDownloadBlog.com

Molly Wood / CNET:

Samsung GS4 launch: Tone-deaf and shockingly sexist — I don't get offended very often. But Samsung's long parade of '50s-era female stereotypes, in the midst of an entirely other long parade of bad stereotypes, just put me over the edge. Oh, they announced a phone? You'd barely know it.

Kim-Mai Cutler / TechCrunch:

Facebook Brings Down The Hammer Again: Cuts Off MessageMe's Access To Its Social Graph — MessageMe, an app that launched last week and raced up the charts to the #2 spot in social networking in the U.S., is confronting Facebook's touchiness around access to its social graph.

More: The Verge, AllThingsD, TechHive, T3 News and Mashable!

Tweets: @semil and @joshelman

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Foursquare Aims At A Moving Target As It Tries To Close Another Round Of Funding — This year's SXSWi did not herald the next Big Thing in tech, as some guessed it wouldn't, but it wasn't always this way. In 2010, a year when people were a bit more optimistic about the new new thing, Foursquare was the boss.

More: About Foursquare and Skift. Tweets: @dens, @qthrul, @rabois, @hunterwalk and @alexia

Nathan Hurst / Wired:

How the America Invents Act Will Change Patenting Forever — Photo: United States Patent and Trademark Office — On Saturday, around 18 months after President Obama signed it into law, the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act will take effect. Ostensibly, the act is designed to bring U.S. patent law in line with the rest of the world.

More: The Next Web, PhoneArena, Forbes, AllThingsD and adafruit industries blog. Tweets: @cdixon

Dieter Bohn / The Verge:

Kinect for Windows SDK to get hand-recognition, 3D-modeling on March 18th — We've been expecting Microsoft to release an update to the Kinect SDK for Windows that would enable both hand recognition and real-time 3D modeling, and today we finally have a date: verision 1.7 will be released on Monday, March 18th.

More: ReadWrite, MSDN Blogs, Engadget, T3, WinBeta and Joystiq

Chris Velazco / TechCrunch:

Smartwatch Developers Rejoice! Pebble Will Release Proof-Of-Concept Watchface SDK In Early April — After much fanfare the Pebble smartwatch made the leap from fanciful concept to full-fledged product earlier this year, but now that units have started to ship and people have started to wear them, what's Pebble's next step?

More: Kickstarter, Mashable!, VentureBeat, iPhone in Canada Blog, CNET and Business Insider

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