Techmeme
February 19, 2014, 6:15 PM

Top News

Facebook:
Facebook to acquire WhatsApp for $4B cash, $12B in Facebook shares, and $3B in restricted stock units  —  Facebook to Acquire WhatsApp  —  Facebook today announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire WhatsApp, a rapidly growing cross-platform mobile messaging company …
Jan Koum / WhatsApp Blog:
WhatsApp says it will remain autonomous and nothing will change for users  —  Facebook  —  Almost five years ago we started WhatsApp with a simple mission: building a cool product used globally by everybody.  Nothing else mattered to us.  —  Today we are announcing a partnership …
Jim Goetz / Sequoia Capital:
WhatsApp in numbers: 450M active users, 32 engineers, $0 in marketing, and only $1/year to use  —  Four Numbers That Explain Why Facebook Acquired WhatsApp  —  WhatsApp Co-Founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton  —  Earlier today, Facebook announced its acquisition of WhatsApp for $16 billion.
Mark Zuckerberg / Facebook:
WhatsApp and Messenger serve different uses, Facebook will continue investing in both  —  I'm excited to announce that we've agreed to acquire WhatsApp and that their entire team will be joining us at Facebook.  —  Our mission is to make the world more open and connected.
Jeff John Roberts / Gigaom:
Wheeler unveils new proposed rules for network neutrality, will try to stop “improper blocking”  —  The FCC announced its response to an explosive court decision that ended “net neutrality” last month: it will not appeal the decision, but scramble to impose new rules.
Bloomberg:
Google Capital Lands $300 Million and Leaps Into Web Education  —  Google Inc. (GOOG)'s new investment arm has $300 million in fresh capital to put to work this year and is starting the dealmaking with its first foray into Web education.  —  Google Capital, established by the search company …
Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica:
Google Fiber chooses nine metro areas for possible expansion  —  Google Fiber is ready to expand, as Google has identified nine metro areas scattered around the country as possible sites of deployment, the company said.  —  “We've invited 34 cities in nine metro areas across the US to work …
Josh Lowensohn / The Verge:
Google I/O is back June 25-26 and you'll need to win a lottery to attend  —  Google just announced dates for its annual I/O developers conference, an event that has typically brought new products and updates to other services.  This year's conference will be held from June 25-26 …
Ellis Hamburger / The Verge:
Loop Wallet review: mobile payments are finally everywhere you want to be  —  Loop tricks any cash register into thinking your phone is your credit card  —  NFC was supposed to be the future.  —  My next phone was going to include the technology, which would let me pay at any cash register …
Nick Summers / Businessweek:
New Tinder Security Flaw Exposed Users' Exact Locations for Months  —  Internet security researchers in New York say that a flaw in Tinder, the super-popular hookup app, made it possible to find users' precise location for between 40 and 165 days, without any public notice from the company.
Nathan Ingraham / The Verge:
BlackBerry's CEO is ‘outraged’ by T-Mobile's attempts to convert its customers to the iPhone  —  BlackBerry's new CEO John Chen is taking issue with what appears to be a fairly innocent T-Mobile promotion.  Last week, T-Mobile sent out an email to some customers currently using …
Leena Rao / TechCrunch:
eBay Acquires PhiSix To Integrate 3-D Virtual Try On Technology Across The Marketplace And More  —  It looks like 3-D virtual try-on technology will soon make an appearance on eBay.  The marketplace giant is announcing the acquisition of PhiSix, a company that develops 3-D visualization and simulation technologies for clothing.
Benjamin Mayo / 9to5Mac:
Apple bringing iTunes Festival to the US for the first time at SXSW, for five nights in March  —  Apple has announced that it is bringing the iTunes Festival to the United States for the first time, after being a UK-only event since it began in 2007.  The festival will be held at SXSW …

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Equals:
Stop vibe coding analytics  —  Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards.  Build once, iterate for years.
Zoho:
Agentic AI in data & analytics: The next evolution of business intelligence  —  In a recent conversation, Clarence Rozario, Business Head - Zoho BI Suite, joined Ravit Jain on The Ravit Show to discuss how Agentic AI …
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:
Kimi K3 & AI's Price War, What Happened To Google?, OpenAI's Partner Trouble
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Great Chat:
Never follow your heroes (on X)
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
Hard Fork:
The A.I. Trade Secrets War + Economists Say 'We Must Act Now' + HatGPT
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
Subscribe to Hard Fork.
The Upstarts Podcast:
Pigment's Eléonore Crespo: Building France's Next Unicorn With AI Agents And Tom Cruise
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
Access:
This AI will push back if you're rude to it
A show about the tech industry's inside conversation, hosted by tech reporter Alex Heath and founder whisperer Ellis Hamburger.
Subscribe to Access.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 6:15 PM ET, February 19, 2014.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Earlier Picks

Emil Protalinski / The Next Web: