Techmeme: Japanese E-Commerce Giant Rakuten Launches $100M Global Investment Fund (Catherine Shu/TechCrunch)

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June 30, 2014, 10:05 AM

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Kashmir Hill / Forbes:

Facebook Doesn't Understand The Fuss About Its Emotion Manipulation Study — * Updated with an additional statement from Adam Kramer, the Facebook data scientist who conducted the study. — This weekend, the Internet discovered a study published earlier this month in an academic journal …

More: Cornell Chronicle, The Laboratorium, Engadget, New York Times, citation needed, The Verge, Fortune, Guardian, iMore, Forbes, BGR, Mashable, Guardian, Scott Monty, Telegraph, InfoWorld, Gizmodo, Inquirer, Technabob, Dice News, Entrepreneur, TechPresident, Tech City News, Wired.co.uk, TechCrunch, TIME, TODAY, CNNMoney.com, Holtz Communications …, The Register, TechHive, Trakin' the india …, I4U News, BBC, memeburn, BetaNews, SlashGear, Ubergizmo, VentureBeat, Business Insider, The Register, VacuousMinx, Sydney Morning Herald, Electronista, The Atlantic Online, Techzim, PC Magazine, ABC News, Network World, CNET, GeekTime, The Raw Story, Jay Rosen, Neowin, Geek News Central, Tech Times, NEWS.com.au, and The Atlantic Online

Tweets: @kashhill, @tomkrazit, @steve_lockstep, @kashhill, @qthrul, @kashhill, @mattdpearce, @johnmcquaid, @joshconstine, @jayrosen_nyu, @marshallk and @niftyc

Sebastian Deterding / Tumbling Conduct:

Frame Clashes, or: Why the Facebook Emotion Experiment Stirs Such Emotion

More: Techdirt, Boing Boing, SocialTimes, Gizmodo, Forbes, Ubergizmo, TechCrunch, Digital Trends, I4U News and Gizmodo UK. Tweets: @joshconstine

Adam Sherwin / The Independent:

UK cinemas ban Google glasses over piracy risk — If you've just acquired a Google Glass headset for £1,000, don't show it off at the movies. UK cinemas are to ban the headsets over fears that the gadgets can be used to make pirate copies of Hollywood blockbusters.

More: TorrentFreak, 9to5Google, Engadget, Inquirer, VentureBeat, Digital Trends, Softpedia News, Ubergizmo, WebProNews, Android Central and Geeky Gadgets

See also Mediagazer

Carlos Bueno / Quartz:

How insular Silicon Valley companies exclude good job candidates by enforcing a “culture fit” — The next thing Silicon Valley needs to disrupt big time: its own culture — There's a problem with Silicon Valley and the subcultures that imitate it.

More: Business Insider. Tweets: @jtozz, @martinvars and @jpstacey. Thanks:@themadhacker

Catherine Shu / TechCrunch:

Japanese E-Commerce Giant Rakuten Launches $100M Global Investment Fund — June is barely over, but Rakuten has already had a busy year. In addition to purchasing messaging app Viber for $900 million, the Japanese consumer Internet conglomerate also made investments in several companies based …

More: PE Hub Blog, The Next Web and Wall Street Journal

Dan Frommer / Quartz:

Android Wear lacks mass market appeal given current software, hardware, design, and ecosystem — These are not the wearables we've been waiting for — Google presented its vision for smartwatches—one of the first waves of wearable computers—this week at its I/O conference in San Francisco.

More: AppleInsider, Quartz, Subtraction.com and Daring Fireball. Tweets: @fromedome

Amy Gesenhues / Search Engine Land:

Bing Ups Its Twitter Game: Rolls Out Hashtag & Twitter Handle Search Features — Starting this week, Bing users are going to see even more Twitter content in search results. — As a result of an exclusive partnership between the two companies that started in 2009, tweets have been showing up in Bing search results for some time.

More: Search Blog, Search Blog, BetaNews, VentureBeat, Windows Phone Central, Windows Phone Central and PC World

Kaylene Hong / The Next Web:

Akamai: Global average web speed up 24% annually to 3.9 Mbps, 20% of connections now above 10 Mbps — 1.2K — The global average internet speed is continuing its steady increase, growing 1.8 percent quarter-over-quarter and 24 percent year-on-year to reach 3.9 Mbps, according to Akamai …

More: Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and PC Magazine. Tweets: @joshm

Mike Butcher / TechCrunch:

Mobile-Only Bank Osper Raises $10M To Aim At UK Youth Market — Osper, a new UK startup, has come up with an innovative way to create a banking service than can be used by children, combining prepaid debit cards and smartphone apps controlled by both them and their parents.

More: The Next Web

Bill Wasik / Wired:

Inside Highway1, PCH's incubator to help hardware startups prototype and manufacture products — The Man Making Silicon Valley Go Crazy for Hardware — Liam Casey, the founder and CEO of PCH, which is trying to create a platform to take hardware startups from “zero to Apple.” Ian Allen

Tim Rogers / D Magazine:

Woot founder Matt Rutledge is self-funding a new company called A Mediocre Corporation to conduct e-commerce experiments — This Internet Millionaire Has a New Deal For You — The breakfast with Jeff Bezos started awkwardly and ended with an indignity that Matt Rutledge didn't even catch at first.

More: Gawker and Business Insider

Sean Buckley / Engadget:

Second Life's second act will be a social network for virtual reality — Eight years ago, I was slouching through my college's required mass-media course and silently groaning while my professor excitedly mapped out the promises of Second Life. That online virtual world, where players create items …

More: Gamasutra and Guardian. Tweets: @jayrosen_nyu

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