Techmeme: Microsoft plans holiday assault on Chromebooks with $199 HP laptop, $249 laptops from Acer and Toshiba (Tom Warren/The Verge)

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July 15, 2014, 8:05 AM

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Dina Bass / Bloomberg:

Microsoft likely to announce job cuts this week; may be biggest restructuring in its history — Microsoft Said to Announce Job Cuts as Soon as This Week — Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) is planning its biggest round of job cuts in five years, as the software maker looks to slim …

Tom Warren / The Verge:

Microsoft plans holiday assault on Chromebooks with $199 HP laptop, $249 laptops from Acer and Toshiba — Microsoft launches a price assault on Chromebooks — Microsoft is aiming straight for Google's Chromebooks this holiday season. At the company's partner conference today …

Alex Wilhelm / TechCrunch:

Microsoft pushes cloud strategy, saying 14% share of total devices calls for a new mindset

More: BetaNews, GeekWire, InfoWorld, Microsoft Azure Blog, theWHIR.com, Softpedia News, WinBeta, eWeek, WinBeta, CITEworld and ZDNet

Stacey Higginbotham / Gigaom:

Nest and Samsung launch Thread, a wireless mesh standard for the smart home — Samsung, ARM, Nest and four other companies have gotten together to build a new radio standard for the smart home. Dubbed Thread, it is a low-power, mesh network protocol that also supports IPv6.

More: VentureBeat, Inquirer, The Verge, 9to5Google, Engadget, The Next Web, Re/code, Computerworld, CNET, USA Today, Thread Group, AnandTech and Geeky Gadgets

Dan Frommer / Quartz:

The Eric Schmidt email confirming Google's one-hour window to counter Facebook job offers — More fascinating emails continue to trickle out of the Google/Apple/Intel/Adobe wage-conspiracy case in California. In one exchange revealed last week, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt confirmed …

More: Guardian, Re/code and Valleywag. Tweets: @fromedome

Jeff Elder / Wall Street Journal:

Google Directors Wanted Page, Brin to Court Facebook Employees

More: Softpedia News, CNET, Ars Technica and Business Insider. Tweets: @marksumnernz

Jack Purcher / Patently Apple:

USPTO Refuses to Register Apple's “Touch ID” Trademark — Today, the US Patent & Trademark Office published an official letter that was sent to Apple regarding their trademark application for “Touch ID” having been refused by their trademark examiner. Noteworthy is the fact that the letter …

More: 9to5Mac, Gizmodo, iPhone in Canada Blog, The Mac Observer, Softpedia News, MacDailyNews, TheDomains.com and iClarified

Daniela Hernandez / Wired:

Microsoft says its deep learning project “Adam” is faster than Google Brain in benchmark test — Microsoft Challenges Google's Artificial Brain With ‘Project Adam’ — Microsoft's new artificial intelligence system, Project Adam, can identify images, including photos of a particular breed of dog.

More: Next at Microsoft, Microsoft Research, The Register, Windows Phone Central, Gizmodo, WinBeta and GeekWire. Tweets: @albert_swart

Liam Spradlin / Android Police:

Exclusive: Google Prepping Play Store Update That's One Step Closer To Material With Beautiful New Listing UI — When we first wrote about Quantum Paper (the internal name for the material in Material Design), we noted that Google was anticipating a series of updates to its own apps between …

More: Neowin, Ausdroid, ITProPortal, Geeky Gadgets, TechnoBuffalo, Ars Technica, Gizmodo, WCCFtech, 9to5Google, Geek.com, Gotta Be Mobile, Droid Life, DailyTech and Phandroid

Rob Knies / Inside Microsoft Research:

Microsoft to integrate academic data into Bing, hopes to improve Cortana for use in research — Making Cortana the Researcher's Dream Assistant — Cortana, the personal assistant for Windows Phone 8.1, certainly has received plenty of attention since being announced in April.

More: VentureBeat, Windows Phone Central, WinBeta, WMPoweruser, Next at Microsoft and MSDN Blogs

Secret / Medium:

Secret raises $25M series B, launches ‘Collections’ feature and anonymous Facebook login — Onward — The next six months — Six months into growing and evolving Secret, our community has shown us how much demand there is for a social network centered around honest conversations.

More: Index Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, GeekTime, Secret Notes, NextBigWhat, Daily Dot, SiliconANGLE, VatorNews, CIO.com, SecurityWeek, YourStory.com, VentureBeat, The Next Web, TechHive and Gigaom

Tweets: @mims, @fromedome, @davidbyttow and @scottmaustin

Jenna Wortham / New York Times:

Six-month-old Secret valued at more than $100M after latest funding round

More: Wall Street Journal, TheDomains.com, Engadget and PandoDaily. Tweets: @qthrul

Glenn Greenwald / The Intercept:

GCHQ developed tools to manipulate online polls, inflate pageviews, censor videos, more — Hacking Online Polls and Other Ways British Spies Seek to Control the Internet — The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information …

More: Gigaom, ZDNet, Errata Security, Schneier on Security, Softpedia News, TechCrunch, Electronista, Boing Boing, Engadget, Guardian, The Verge and The Register

Tweets: @onekade and @usdronewardept

Todd Hoff / High Scalability:

Bitly: Lessons Learned Building a Distributed System that Handles 6 Billion Clicks a Month — Have you ever wondered how bitly makes money? A URL shortener can't be that hard to write, right? Sean O'Connor, Lead Application Developer at bitly, answers the how can bitly possibly …

Tweets: @jewelia

Taylor Soper / GeekWire:

Seattle legalizes Uber, Lyft to operate without caps — Transportation startups like UberX, Lyft, and Sidecar will finally be able to legally operate in Seattle. The City Council today voted 8-1 to approve legislation that provides a new regulatory framework for the San Francisco-based startups …

More: PandoDaily and CNET

Ellen Emmerentze Jervell / Wall Street Journal:

Swedish author and his bot created 2.7M Wikipedia articles; some editors object to methods — For This Author, 10,000 Wikipedia Articles Is a Good Day's Work — In Sweden, Sverker Johansson and His ‘Bot’ Have Created 2.7 Million Articles; Some Purists Complain

More: Gizmodo

See also Mediagazer

Gavia Baker-Whitelaw / Daily Dot:

Tumblr culture enthusiasts convention DashCon 2014 becomes a disaster over the weekend — Over the course of a weekend, DashCon 2014 descended into chaos — It only took a few hours for DashCon 2014 to degenerate into the most catastrophic fan convention in recent memory.

More: Boing Boing, The Beat, Jezebel, CraveOnline and Boise Weekly

Tweets: @dashconchicago, @karaswisher and @heyveronica

Mike Beasley / 9to5Mac:

Apple launches in-store iPhone trade-in program in Australia, offers A$250 toward upgrade — Late last month 9to5Mac reported that Apple would soon be launching its iPhone trade-in program in Australia. Today the Apple Store app started notifying Australian users that the offer is now available in that country.

More: AppleInsider, ninemsn, iMore, Gizmodo Australia, MacNN, AppleInsider, MacRumors and App Advice

Jim Edwards / Business Insider:

Twitter Is Cracking Down On Companies That Provide Stats About Its Users — Twitter has taken the unusual step of shutting off its datapipe to certain companies that have published their own stats on how big Twitter's user base really is, according to two sources.

Tweets: @mathewi and @qthrul

Kara Swisher / Re/code:

Sources: AOL CEO Tim Armstrong would love to merge with Yahoo, but Marissa Mayer finds the idea backward-looking — Two Years and Still Stuck in a Revenue Rut, Will Yahoo's Mayer Bite the AOL Bullet? — Maybe AOL and Yahoo will merge. Maybe not. Maybe they should. Maybe they shouldn't.

More: CNET and Business Insider. Tweets: @cheeky_geeky and @mathewi

See also Mediagazer

Matt Burns / TechCrunch:

ScribbleLive Acquires CoveritLive, Will Still Operate Both Brands — Once bitter rivals ScribbleLive and CoveritLive are now family. Scribble Technologies is today announcing the acquisition of CoveritLive from Demand Media, effectively bringing two of the largest live content creation companies under one roof.

More: Globe and Mail, Business Wire and Techvibes Global News

See also Mediagazer

Jack Schofield / ZDNet:

Microsoft testing a wearable headband in the UK to help blind people navigate surroundings — Microsoft's wearable Alice band is not a rival to Google Glass — Summary: Microsoft is working on a wearable “Alice band” that helps blind people to navigate the urban environment …

More: The Sunday Times, BBC, Forbes, Absolute Gadget, Ubergizmo, Highlight Press, Daily Mail, Neowin, Connectedly, HEXUS.net Mobile Latest …, WinBeta and http://thefootballexaminer.com. Tweets: @pmarca

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