Techmeme
February 8, 2015, 8:05 AM

Top News

Nathan Donato-Weinstein / bizjournals:
Facebook acquires 56 acres immediately south of current Menlo Park HQ at an estimated $400M  —  Exclusive: Facebook buys 56 acres in Menlo Park, considers future of the campus  —  Facebook Inc. has already changed how people connect online.  Now it's thinking about transforming the Silicon Valley tech campus.
John Herrman / The Awl:
Media companies turn to communication apps and services instead of websites for distribution  —  The Next Internet Is TV  —  I was talking to someone who works on one of those half-dozen or so apps that we tend to associate with teenagers: the ones that were built around some novel concept …
Dan Frommer / Quartz:
Microsoft now has over 100 active apps on iOS and Android, excluding Skype and Yammer apps, as it expands its presence on multiple platforms  —  Don't look now, but Microsoft has more than 100 iOS and Android apps  —  As Microsoft works on revamping its underperforming Windows Phone platform …
Arielle Duhaime-Ross / The Verge:
MIT researchers study successful startups to map entrepreneurial quality in the Bay Area  —  An analysis of San Francisco's startups shows where the ‘real’ Silicon Valley is  —  Mapping entrepreneurial quality in California  —  There's a new map of entrepreneurial hotspots in California …
More: Science and Dice News
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Google Acquires Odysee, An App For Private Photo/Video Backup And Sharing, Team Joins Google+  —  Google may be adding more offline and private sharing features to its Google+ Photos service soon.  It has acquired Odysee, an iOS and Android app that let users automatically back up photos …
More: OdyseeTweets: @korzing
Megan Geuss / Ars Technica:
Patent reform hits Congress again with reintroduced Innovation Act  —  New act, same as old act, but this time will it make it through the Senate?  —  Today, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) introduced a new version of the patent-reforming Innovation Act to the House of Representatives.
Chris Gayomali / Fast Company:
Inside Zulily, the flash sale e-commerce company for young mothers that's about to hit $1B in annual revenue  —  The Billion-Dollar E-commerce Company You Know Nothing About  —  Zulily has defied the conventional wisdom—marketing to moms, sticking with flash sales, evading Amazon.
Nellie Bowles / Re/code:
Startups and Self-Loathing at the 8th Annual Crunchies Awards  —  There was a moment last night — when comedian T.J. Miller (who had called an Uber co-founder's girlfriend “bitch” multiple times) was smashing a TechCrunch piñata as a hundred people walked out of his performance …
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Google Uses Hangouts As A Virtual Genius Bar To Sell Google Devices  —  In 2013, Google expanded its Hangouts video conferencing service into a commerce platform called Helpouts, where people buy and sell services like cooking or technical advice via live video.

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Ben Fox Rubin / CNET:

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