Techmeme: Amazon unveils futuristic plan: Delivery by drone (CBS News)

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December 1, 2013, 10:20 PM

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CBS News:

Amazon unveils futuristic plan: Delivery by drone — Amazon's secret R&D project aimed at delivering packages to your doorstep by “octocopter” mini-drones with a mere 30-minute delivery time — Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos had a big surprise for correspondent Charlie Rose this week.

Charlie Rose / CBS News:

Amazon's Jeff Bezos looks to the future — Amazon is the world's largest online retailer, serving 225M customers. What's next for the company that prides itself on disrupting tradition? There has never been a company quite like Amazon. Conceived as an online book seller …

More: Forbes, The Hill and The Next Web. Tweets: @valleyhack

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: @gerrydales, @ron_fournier, @davepell, @rich_gallup, @noahsussman, @shearm, @sbroadie, @jamestaranto, @kausmickey, @craigmod, @loh, @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

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

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.

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

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

Ted Greenwald / MIT Technology Review:

Profile of Aaron Levie, Who Is Trying to Make the Startup Box Vital for Work — The CEO of Box is building an online file storage system designed to reshape industries. — Aaron Levie bounds onstage with the swagger of a standup comic. But he's not performing at the Comedy Store.

Tweets: @jason_pontin and @stevesi. Thanks:@srikardr

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

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

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

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, VoIP Watch, Jajah and The Next Web

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