Techmeme: Blackstone Said to Mull Outbidding Silver Lake for Dell LBO (Bloomberg)

March 18, 2013, 10:45 PM

Top News

Brooks Barnes / ArtsBeat:

Funny or Die Makes a Steve Jobs Movie — LOS ANGELES — Techies have been keeping a hot eye on dueling Steve Jobs biopics, one an indie starring Ashton Kutcher and the other, written by Aaron Sorkin, in the works at Sony, which made “The Social Network.” — But it turns out there was also a joker …

More: Los Angeles Times, CNET, Cult of Mac, PhoneArena, TUAW, SiliconBeat, MacNN, PC Magazine, iDownloadBlog.com, Macgasm, PopWatch, Rolling Stone, iLounge, TechRadar.com, Mashable!, PadGadget, I4U News, MacRumors and AllThingsD. Tweets: @funnyordie

Paul Smith / Financial Review:

BlackBerry chief lays out survival plan and says iPhone is old news — BlackBerry chief exectutive officer Thorsten Heins has said the rapidly advancing global smartphone market has left Apple's iPhone in its wake, and predicted his company would have 100,000 native apps available …

Ina Fried / AllThingsD:

T-Mobile Plans March 26 Event to Tout Big Changes Coming — T-Mobile USA is planning a March 26 event in New York where it is expected to detail further changes to both its technology and business. — The No. 4 U.S. carrier is in the midst of readying an LTE network for commercial launch.

More: Mobile Marketing Watch, TmoNews, Engadget, PhoneArena, dailywireless.org and Gotta Be Mobile

Joseph Volpe / Engadget:

T-Mobile's LTE ambitions get real: network expansion, the BlackBerry Z10 and an OTA update for the Galaxy Note II — AT&T's failed acquisition was the best thing to ever happen to T-Mobile. As a consequence of the failed merger, the fourth place wireless carrier received AWS spectrum in over 100 markets …

Matt Brian / The Verge:

Andrew ‘weev’ Auernheimer sentenced to 41 months for exploiting AT&T iPad security flaw — Following prison term, Auernheimer will be subject to three years of supervised release; ordered to split $73,000 restitution to AT&T — Security researcher Andrew ‘weev’ Auernheimer was today sentenced …

More: Wired, The Huffington Post, Bloomberg, SlashGear, TUAW, MacRumors, TechCrunch, Guardian, Macgasm, Business Insider, Slate, Betabeat, PhoneArena, DSLreports, 9to5Mac, Gizmodo, The Next Web, PC Magazine, VentureBeat, Mashable!, Electronista, Inquirer and iClarified

Tweets: @anildash, @adrianchen, @mat, @rsingel and @tcarmody

Kyle Wiens / Wired:

Forget the Cellphone Fight — We Should Be Allowed to Unlock Everything We Own — While Congress is working on legislation to re-legalize cellphone unlocking, let's acknowledge the real issue: The copyright laws that made unlocking illegal in the first place. Who owns our stuff?

Michael Grothaus / Co.Labs:

An In-Depth Comparison Between iOS Map Frameworks: Apple MapKit vs. Google Maps SDK — “When we first got sight of Apple's maps in the iOS 6 SDK beta at WWDC 2012, we were excited,” says Lee Armstrong, developer of the popular Plane Finder app, which tracks planes in flight all over the world.

More: AppleInsider, 9to5Mac and MacRumors

Roberto Baldwin / Wired:

Behold: Google's Stunning Street Views From the Top of the World — While on the Everest Base Camp Trek in Nepal you can stand face to face with Mount Everest, the “Goddess Mother of the Earth”, from the easily reached high-point of 18,192-foot Kala Pattar.

More: The Official Google Blog, Google LatLong, Engadget, Search Engine Land, 9to5Google, GeekWire, VentureBeat, BetaNews, BuzzFeed, PC Magazine, The Next Web, Softpedia News, Gizmodo and The Atlantic Online. Thanks:@strngwys

Kim-Mai Cutler / TechCrunch:

Zynga Looks To Revive Draw Something With A Sequel That's Much More Of A Social Network — Zynga's biggest acquisition to date — the $180 million deal to buy Draw Something-maker OMGPOP last year — was the one it ended up being the most pilloried for. At its peak, Draw Something …

More: Betabeat, Inside Social Games, PadGadget and AllThingsD. Tweets: @tfadp

Martin Bryant / The Next Web:

Flattr now lets you make money from your Twitter Favorites, Instagram Likes and more — Swedish startup Flattr has been running its ‘online tipjar’ service for a few years now, and yet it's failed to gain much traction. However, it's now taking a new direction that may finally make it click with a mainstream audience.

More: Flattr Blog, GigaOM, digitaltrends.com, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Softpedia News, hypebot, ArcticStartup and Evolver.fm

David Pierce / The Verge:

Meet the tiny, Florida-based phone maker that thinks it can beat Samsung — One cheap, high-end, unlocked smartphone at a time — Sammy Ohev-Zion starts our chat with an economics lesson. It costs every company about the same amount to manufacture a phone, he says …

More: TechSpot

Laurie Burkitt / China Real Time Report:

Apple Attack Backfires for State Broadcaster … A report by China Central Television questioning the integrity of Apple Inc. has instead ended up shining an unkind spotlight on the state broadcaster's own reputation thanks to what appears to be a poorly edited post on the country's most popular Twitter-like microblogging service.

More: Macgasm and Business Insider

Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet:

Microsoft delivers first public preview of its Hadoop on Windows Azure service — Summary: Microsoft is making available its first public preview of HDInsight, the Hadoop big-data framework on Windows Azure technology it is developing with Hortonworks. — Microsoft made available …

More: ScottGu's Blog, MSDN Blogs, TechCrunch, The Next Web and MSDN Blogs

Fred Wilson / A VC:

Short Term Thinking vs Long Term Thinking — One of the mistakes I often see in business is short term thinking vs long term thinking. It struck me over the weekend when I saw this tweet: … Sure Samsung is making a killing on handset sales right now. So is Apple.

Tweets: @graubart, @mdudas and @jyarow

Michael McWhertor / Polygon:

EA CEO John Riccitiello steps down — Electronic Arts announced today that John Riccitiello will step down as chief executive officer and as a member of the Board of Directors effective March 30. — Riccitiello will be replaced by Larry Probst “to ensure a smooth transition” …

More: EA.com, Kotaku, GeekWire, Digits, VG247, Engadget, GamesIndustry International, CNET and Giant Bomb

Greg Sterling / Marketing Land:

State Of The News Media: Everything In Decline But Digital — The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism's has served up its annual and comprehensive “State of the News Media” report. It offers a mostly pessimistic assessment of the condition and trajectory of various news media in the US today.

More: Associated Press, Poynter, O'Reilly Radar, Poynter, The Verge, Screenwerk and Nieman Journalism Lab. See also Mediagazer

Chris Welch / The Verge:

AT&T rolls out monstrous 30GB, 40GB, and 50GB shared data tiers starting at $300 monthly — It's unlikely you'll ever see unlimited data from AT&T again, but the carrier today rolled out three new Mobile Share packages for its most data-hungry customers. The company's previous shared tiers topped …

More: AT&T, Engadget, FierceWireless, TechnoBuffalo, Gotta Be Mobile, iDownloadBlog.com and Gizmodo

Josh Constine / TechCrunch:

Facebook Hires Co-Founders Of Trustworthiness Verification Startup Legit — Legit, a startup working on a universal reputation system that could help sharing economy services verify whether users are trustworthy, has announced its team will join Facebook. Specifically, co-founders Jeremy Barton …

More: The Next Web

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Messaging Service WhatsApp To Extend Subscription Model To iOS This Year, But Don't Hold Your Breath For A Desktop App — WhatsApp, the popular mobile messaging app that eschews advertising in favor of a paid model, is getting ready to bring its iOS app in line with the apps it makes …

More: Electronista, Examiner, TUAW and iPhone Hacks

Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:

Mozilla Plans To Improve Firefox Developer Tools With In-Browser Editing, Better Firebug Integration, Network Panel & More — Last week, Mozilla technology evangelist Paul Rouget asked web developers what improvements they wanted to see in Firefox's developer tools.

More: paulrouget.com and Softpedia News

Bloomberg:

Blackstone Said to Mull Outbidding Silver Lake for Dell LBO — The Dell Inc. headquarters in Austin, Texas. Blackstone and larger personal computer makers Hewlett-Packard Co. and Lenovo Group Ltd. have inspected Dell's books after signing non-disclosure agreements.

More: CNET, AllThingsD and Electronista

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Marc Andreessen, Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf Among Inaugural Winners Of The £1M Queen Elizabeth Prize For Engineering — Queen Elizabeth II is not exactly known for being a digital-first champion of technology, but it looks like the British monarchy may be trying to change that association …

More: pmarca, The Verge, BBC, PC Magazine, SiliconBeat, The Register, Telegraph, VatorNews, Inquirer, TechSpot, PalmAddict, VentureBeat, V3.co.uk, The Huffington Post, Guardian and AllThingsD. Tweets: @timberners_lee

Erik Hayden / Hollywood Reporter:

Reddit Debuts Original Web Mini-Series (Exclusive) — The site is debuting three episodes of a series based on the subreddit “Explain Like I'm Five.” — Online community Reddit is experimenting with original web programming and is debuting three episodes of a new web series on Monday.

More: VentureBeat, AllThingsD and PopWatch. See also Mediagazer

David Kravets / Wired:

Supreme Court OKs $222K Verdict for Sharing 24 Songs — The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a jury's conclusion that infamous file-sharer Jammie Thomas-Rasset pay the recording industry $222,000 for downloading and sharing two dozen copyrighted songs on the now-defunct file-sharing service Kazaa.

More: The Verge, Associated Press, TorrentFreak, NPR, Bloomberg, Hollywood Reporter and Ars Technica. See also Mediagazer

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