Techmeme: Amazon Is Experimenting With Autonomous Flying Delivery Drones (Chris Velazco/TechCrunch)

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December 1, 2013, 8:20 PM

Top News

New York Times:

Inside the Race to Rescue a Health Site, and Obama — WASHINGTON — As a small coterie of grim-faced advisers shuffled into the Oval Office on the evening of Oct. 15, President Obama's chief domestic accomplishment was falling apart 24 miles away, at a bustling high-tech data center in suburban Virginia.

More: ThinkProgress, CNBC, Business Insider and Wonkblog

Tweets: @jamestaranto, @gerrydales, @ron_fournier, @davepell, @rich_gallup, @noahsussman, @loh, @shearm, @sbroadie, @kausmickey, @craigmod, @mollywood, @taniel, @jpodhoretz, @qthrul, @amychozick and @benioff

Sarah Kliff / Wonkblog:

Obama administration says HealthCare.gov uptime above 90% excluding scheduled maintenance, response time under 1 second — The White House says it met its Obamacare goal. There's still more work ahead. — Today is the day: Vast Majority Sunday! For weeks now, the Obama administration …

More: Gizmodo, NPR, Washington Post, Gigaom, ZDNet and Washington Wire. Tweets: @ezraklein

Bloomberg:

Obamacare Website Getting Fixes as Repair Deadline Passes

More: Wall Street Journal, Wall Street Journal, cms.gov, New York Times, VentureBeat, Forbes, The Verge and Los Angeles Times

Sam Altman:

Bitcoin will only succeed if legitimate transaction volume ramps up — Thoughts on Bitcoin — Maybe bitcoin will be the world reserve currency, maybe it will totally fail, or maybe it will survive in some niche capacity. I don't know how to weight the probabilities …

Tweets: @abrams and @hunterwalk

Economist:

Bitcoin's success is putting it under growing strain

More: Business Insider and TNL.net. Tweets: @glennf, @binarybits, @jocke and @digiphile

Andy Greenberg / Forbes:

Silk Road Competitor Shuts Down And Another Plans To Go Offline After Claimed $6 Million Theft — When a black market calls itself “Sheep,” it's no surprise when someone gets fleeced. But the effects of a purported theft of thousands of bitcoins from the drug-selling site Sheep Marketplace …

More: Tapscape and Techie News

Thomas Schulz / Spiegel Online:

Tech Giants Like Apple and Amazon Building Monuments to Digital Domination — Technology giants in the United States are building bombastic new headquarters to immortalize their grandiose ambitions, while inside they plan to turn traditional office culture on its head.

Chris Velazco / TechCrunch:

Amazon Is Experimenting With Autonomous Flying Delivery Drones — Between launching a charity-friendly buying program, announcing Sunday deliveries, and gearing up for the first wave of frenzied holiday shoppers, Amazon has been busy these past few weeks. But that didn't stop CEO Jeff Bezos …

More: CBS News and The Verge. Tweets: @hblodget, @lanceulanoff, @matthewkeyslive and @60minutes

John Koetsier / VentureBeat:

Sentient code: An inside look at Stephen Wolfram's utterly new, insanely ambitious computational paradigm — In 2002 Stephen Wolfram released A New Kind of Science and immediately unleashed a firestorm of wonder, controversy, and criticism as the British-born scientist, programmer …

Tweets: @carlzimmer

Nitasha Tiku / Valleywag:

Kanye West Courts Silicon Valley Investors, But VCs Don't Want DONDA — Nucleic rapper Kanye West, embodiment of the New Uncanny, appears to have found himself in the same position as many an entrepreneur before him: long on ideas and short on financing. And what better place to look …

More: StartupBook. Tweets: @runchal, @om and @mdudas

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Sold To Telefonica For $207M In 2009, Now-Neglected VoIP Provider Jajah Is Shutting Down — Chalk up another casualty in the consolidation of Internet voice services. Nearly four years to the day after getting acquired by Telefonica for $207 million, VoIP provider Jajah has announced …

More: VentureBeat, Jajah and The Next Web

Ernesto / TorrentFreak:

What Piracy? Removing DRM Boosts Music Sales by 10 Percent — For more than a decade the music industry has been struggling with online piracy. — To prevent music from spreading like wildfire all the major labels have experimented extensively by adding DRM to digital music files.

More: Gizmodo and Boing Boing. Tweets: @schestowitz and @glynmoody

Jaclyn Trop / New York Times:

Secret Weapon in Mall Battle: Parking Apps — Phoebe Scott of Orange County, Calif., has a new routine before heading to the mall. — She checks the parking lots on her ParkMe smartphone app “so that I can see what I'm up against, or if I need to change my plans.” If a lot is below 90 percent full, the trip is on.

Tweets: @jn_seattle and @l_lysakowski

Claire Gordon / Al Jazeera America:

How Google is transforming disaster relief … Since Haiti, the Google Crisis Response team has responded to 25 more disasters. When Japan was ripped up in 2011 by the biggest earthquake in its history, Person Finder was live within 90 minutes. The tool compiled more than 600,000 names …

Tweets: @americatonight

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