Techmeme: Google acquires polling service Polar for Google+, will shut down service at end of the year (Alistair Barr/Wall Street Journal)

Open Links In New Tab

Mobile Archives Advertise Site News Contact Editors

September 11, 2014, 6:55 PM

Top News

Craig Timberg / Washington Post:

Court documents show US threatened Yahoo with $250K/day fine in 2008 if it refused to participate in NSA's PRISM program — U.S. threatened massive fine to force Yahoo to release data — The U.S. government threatened to fine Yahoo $250,000 a day in 2008 if it failed to comply …

More: Yahoo Global Public Policy, New York Times, ZDNet, Associated Press, The Verge, Gizmodo, Re/code, The Hill, VentureBeat, TIME, Guardian, Hit & Run, Gigaom, The Daily Caller, Heavy.com, National News, NBC News, Mediaite and The Daily Beast

Ben Woods / The Next Web:

Chromebooks can now run some Android apps for the first time, including Evernote and Vine — We knew that Google planned to add support for running Android apps on Chromebooks since the company announced it back at Google I/O in June, but today we've had confirmation that the first Android apps …

Tom Warren / The Verge:

Leaked Windows 9 screens reveal virtual desktops, windowed “modern” apps, search button on taskbar, and more — Leaked Windows 9 screenshots reveal the future of the desktop — Leaked Windows 9 screenshots have surfaced previously, but this time we're getting a closer look …

Arik Hesseldahl / Re/code:

HP acquires cloud startup Eucalyptus, for under $100M according to sources; CEO Marten Mickos will lead HP's cloud unit — HP Tests the M&A Waters With Acquisition of Cloud Startup Eucalyptus — Hewlett-Packard took another step back into the mergers and acquisitions market …

More: New York Times, Gigaom, The Register, PC World, Mercury News, Data Center Knowledge, ZDNet, VentureBeat, MarketWatch and hp.com

Roger Cheng / CNET:

HTC's smartwatch is alive and kicking, and due in early 2015 — CNET has learned that HTC still plans to enter the burgeoning wearables business despite speculation its watch was scratched. — LAS VEGAS — HTC still wants in on the wearables game, even after Apple made its big move.

More: Android Police, PC World, Phandroid, TechnoBuffalo, SlashGear, 9to5Google, GSMArena Blog, GadgeTell, Wearable World News, Ubergizmo, Pocketnow, Android Authority, Droid Life, Android and Me and Android Central. Thanks:@jeskillings

Max Eulenstein / Facebook:

Facebook will now show better News Feed ads using data users report on why they hid ads — News Feed FYI: Listening to People's Feedback to Show Better Ads — Every day, there are millions of ads that are eligible to be shown in News Feed from more than 1.5 million active advertisers on Facebook …

More: ZDNet, Marketing Land, The Verge, AllFacebook, TechCrunch, The Next Web, Inside Facebook, Marketing Pilgrim, Wall Street Journal and WebProNews

David Lieberman / Deadline:

Verizon CEO Says Its Internet TV Service Will Be Up By Mid-2015 And Will Include “Custom Channels” — CEO Lowell McAdam offered a few more details this morning about Verizon's plan to offer a TV-like service over the Internet, a market that Sony and Dish Network also hope to lead.

More: The Verge, Gizmodo, Tech Times, Hollywood Reporter, DSLreports, Reuters, Gigaom, Engadget, Electronista, SlashGear and Ubergizmo. See also Mediagazer

Juli Clover / MacRumors:

iPhone 6 Pre-Orders to Kick off Tonight at 12:01 AM Pacific — Following Tuesday's announcement of both the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus, Apple announced plans to begin taking pre-orders for the devices on Friday, September 12. — Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T will all begin accepting pre-orders …

More: The Techolic, BGR, Geek.com, SlashGear and TUAW

Killian Bell / Cult of Mac:

iPhone 6 vs. iPhone 6 Plus: notable differences include the display, camera, battery life

More: Apple, CNET, TrustedReviews, PC Advisor, Gotta Be Mobile, CITEworld and Forbes. Tweets: @kylerichter

Benedict Evans:

Apple's new iPhones eliminate most of the reasons for buying high-end Android phones

More: VentureBeat and DisplayBlog. Tweets: @benedictevans and @olebegemann

Cade Metz / Wired:

Uber's Revenue Is 12 Times The Size of Lyft's, New Study Says — The bitter battle between Uber and Lyft isn't exactly a close fight. — According to new research that draws on credit and debit card transactions by 3.8 million Americans, Uber's revenue was about 12 times that of its rival between May 2013 and May 2014.

More: Fortune and Forbes

Alistair Barr / Wall Street Journal:

Google acquires polling service Polar for Google+, will shut down service at end of the year — Google's Deal for Polar Shows it Has Not Given Up On Google+ — Google's social network Google+ has failed to catch Facebook, but the Web giant has not given up on the business entirely.

More: Re/code, LukeW, VatorNews, VentureBeat, TechCrunch, Electronista and 9to5Google

Neil Hughes / AppleInsider:

Analyst who predicted sapphire displays for new iPhones reports displays missed the phones “by weeks” due to manufacturing issues — Analyst who cried sapphire takes another swing, despite whiffing on iPhone 6 predictions — A financial analyst focused almost exclusively …

More: BGR, Pocketnow and Cult of Mac

Harrison Weber / VentureBeat:

Dropbox received hundreds of data requests from law enforcement, only told 91 users about them — Above: Dropbox cofounder and CEO Drew Houston. — Dropbox announced its first six-month transparency report today, revealing 268 law enforcement requests “for user information” …

More: The Dropbox Blog, ZDNet and TechCrunch

Greg Bensinger / Wall Street Journal:

eBay is preparing to launch an advertising network for its mobile apps — EBay Prepping New Mobile Ad Network — EBay is set to launch an advertising network for its mobile app, opening up a new avenue for marketers to reach the app's roughly 4.6 million daily visitors.

More: Marketing Land, Re/code and WebProNews. Thanks:@gregbensinger

Clayton Jones / Official Google for Work Blog:

Google announces iOS Sync for Google Apps users for increased security on iPhones and iPads — Increasing security and productivity for iOS devices — Marvel and DC Comics, Star Wars and Star Trek, Emacs and VI—we all have our favorites. And then there's iOS and Android, each with dedicated fans.

More: ZDNet, Engadget, VentureBeat, App Advice, The Verge, The Next Web, 9to5Mac, FierceMobileIT News and Business Insider

Josh Kosman / New York Post:

EMC explores selling stake in VMware — EMC Corp., a $60 billion tech giant specializing in cloud-based applications, has decided to explore selling its stake in VMware, a 16-year-old software services company, The Post has learned. — The decision to consider putting the Palo Alto …

More: Tech Trader Daily, Re/code, Reuters, Tech Trader Daily, Business Insider, bizjournals, Wall Street Journal, ZDNet, Fortune and Seeking Alpha

Arik Hesseldahl / Re/code:

Brad Garlinghouse Out as CEO of Hightail — Brad Garlinghouse, the former Yahoo executive tapped two years ago to transform the company formerly known as YouSendit into the file-sharing company Hightail, has left the company. — Garlinghouse confirmed the move to Re/code.

More: Business Insider. Tweets: @dannysullivan and @ahess247

Kia Kokalitcheva / VentureBeat:

Not to be outdone by rival Stripe, Braintree announces Apple Pay support — Yesterday was a huge — huge! — day for Apple, as it unveiled new and bigger phones, its first smartwatch, and a new wireless, NFC-based payments system: Apple Pay. — Apple announced a long list of financial …

More: Blogtree, Re/code, Bank Innovation and ReadWrite

Toby Wolpe / ZDNet:

Jenkins is now sole focus for CloudBees as it drops PaaS and teams up with Pivotal — Summary: There'll be a 100 percent bump in the engineering resources CloudBees puts into the Jenkins tool now the firm has turned away from platform as a service. There will also be more partnerships like the one it's just signed with Pivotal.

More: VentureBeat, Gigaom, CloudBees, Network World, Talkin' Cloud, cloudcomputing-news.net, Forbes, CITEworld and theWHIR.com

Emerging Technology From the arXiv:

How the SuperVision algorithm, developed in 2012, marked the turning point in image recognition when machines surpassed humans — The Revolutionary Technique That Quietly Changed Machine Vision Forever — Machines are now almost as good as humans at object recognition …

More: ReadWrite and Beyond Search. Tweets: @mattcutts

Loek Essers / PC World:

Libraries may digitize books without permission, EU top court rules — European libraries may digitize books and make them available at electronic reading points without first gaining consent of the copyright holder, the highest European Union court ruled Thursday.

More: Engadget, Publishers Weekly and Intellectual Property Watch

Casey Newton / The Verge:

Yahoo News Digest arrives on iPad with weekly segments from Katie Couric — Yahoo's global new anchor will deliver short explainers every Sunday — Yahoo News Digest, which offers a twice-daily summary of current events delivered to your mobile device via push notification …

More: VentureBeat, BuzzFeed, CNET, Nieman Lab, Mashable, MobileSyrup.com and BBC. See also Mediagazer

Laura Hazard Owen / Gigaom:

Longform publishing service Byliner acquired by Vook; existing authors' royalty pay increased to 85% — Failed e-singles startup Byliner acquired by digital publisher Vook — Byliner, which aimed to find a new model for selling longform journalism online, crashed and burned this summer.

More: PandoDaily, The Digital Reader, Publishers Weekly, Vook, Talking New Media and Digital Book World. See also Mediagazer

Sebastian Anthony / ExtremeTech:

Western Digital unveils world's first 10TB hard drive: Helium-filled, shingled recording — In what can only be described as the hard drive equivalent of Game of Thrones, Western Digital's HGST has announced the world's first 10-terabyte hard drive: the helium-filled Ultrastar He10.

More: Computerworld, FierceCIO News, Gizmodo, Gearburn, Ars Technica and HGST Storage

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.

Cloudflare:

Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference — Stop preparing for agents. Start running them. 100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.

Zoho:

Zoho Sign takes a bite of Apple's latest: iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS Golden Gate — It's September, and you know the drill. Apple just handed us a fresh batch of releases, and there's plenty to look forward …

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.

Sponsor Techmeme

Featured Podcasts

Channels with Peter Kafka:

AI Wants to Shop for You. What Could Go Wrong?

Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.

Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.

Invest Like the Best:

Michael Moritz - Lessons From 40 Years of Investing and Writing

The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.

Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.

Sources:

Baseten's CEO on why every company will want to own its AI

Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.

Subscribe to Sources.

Training Data:

Box's Aaron Levie: On Reinventing Yourself in the AI Age and Enterprise Diffusion

Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.

Subscribe to Training Data.

Uncapped with Jack Altman:

Andrew Feldman from Cerebras

Conversations with people I admire about things I'm genuinely interested in.

Subscribe to Uncapped with Jack Altman.

Acquired:

The Home Depot

Learn the playbooks that built the world's greatest companies - and how you can apply them as a founder, operator, or investor.

Subscribe to Acquired.

Add your podcast here

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 6:55 PM ET, September 11, 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.