Techmeme: China's Alibaba to invest $590 million in smartphone maker Meizu (Paul Carsten/Reuters)

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February 9, 2015, 11:10 AM

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Janko Roettgers / Gigaom:

Sling TV opens the floodgates, accepts sign-ups without invites — Credit: Janko Roettgers / Gigaom — Credit: Janko Roettgers / Gigaom — Sling TV, the online TV streaming service from Dish Networks, is now available to everyone: The service ended its invitation-only soft launch late Sunday night …

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: Odysee, 9to5Google, USA Today, Android Authority, ZDNet, VentureBeat, Techcircle.in, Engadget, TechSpot, Digital Trends, Android Central, BetaNews, Geeky Gadgets, Android Police, Ubergizmo, Ausdroid, SiliconANGLE, The Next Web and ResearchBuzz. Tweets: @korzing

Ernesto / TorrentFreak:

KickassTorrents loses .so home to domain name seizure, reverts to .to domain — KickassTorrents Taken Down By Domain Name Seizure — With millions of unique visitors per day KickassTorrents (KAT) is one the most used torrent sites on the Internet. — The site's popularity …

More: Wired.co.uk, Gizmodo, VentureBeat, BetaNews and TheDomains.com. See also Mediagazer

Erik Franco / Motherboard:

Inside Chinese factories that mine 4050 bitcoins/month, equivalent to about $1.5M, with computing power that amounts to roughly 3% of the bitcoin network — Inside the Chinese Bitcoin Mine That's Making $1.5M a Month — In October of last year Motherboard gained access to a massive …

More: jackgavigan.com. Tweets: @kelvindchen and @digiphile

Paul Carsten / Reuters:

China's Alibaba to invest $590 million in smartphone maker Meizu — Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd said in a statement on Monday it will buy a minority stake in domestic smartphone maker Meizu Technology Co for $590 million. Alibaba didn't disclose how much of the privately owned handset maker it will acquire.

More: Business Wire, Re/code, CNET, GSMArena.com, Ubergizmo, TechCrunch, The Verge, Geeky Gadgets, Android Authority, Wall Street Journal, Engadget and SiliconANGLE. Tweets: @inafried

Daniel Eran Dilger / AppleInsider:

LinkedIn, American Airlines, and other major developers begin to adopt Apple's Swift, report improved productivity and fewer errors — Apple's new Swift programming language takes flight with Getty Images, American Airlines, LinkedIn, and Duolingo — Apple's new Swift programming language …

More: Apple Spotlight and MacDailyNews

Everett Rosenfeld / CNBC:

Ecuador is the first country to roll out a state-run electronic payment system; digital currency will be tied to the US dollar — Ecuador becomes the first country to roll out its own digital cash — In 2000, Ecuador moved to ditch its stumbling currency for the U.S. dollar.

More: SlashGear

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Palantir Buys Fancy That To Add Retail, Shopping Data To Its Analytics Platform — Palantir is known for its data analytics platform that is used extensively in areas like law enforcement, financial and insurance research and healthcare. Now you can add retail and shopping data to the mix.

Reuters:

Exclusive: Qualcomm nears $1 billion deal resolving China antitrust dispute - source — (Reuters) - Qualcomm Inc (QCOM.O) is likely to pay China a record fine of around $1 billion, ending a 14-month government investigation into anti-competitive practices, after the U.S. chipmaker and the regulator …

More: Tech Trader Daily, ZDNet, CNET, Bloomberg Business, TheStreet.com, Channel EYE, PhoneArena and Seeking Alpha

Shane Harris / The Daily Beast:

Samsung's SmartTV privacy policy warns that spoken personal or sensitive information captured by voice recognition may be transmitted to a third party — Your Samsung SmartTV Is Spying on You, Basically — You may be loving your new Internet-connected television and its convenient voice-command feature …

Andrew Cunningham / Ars Technica:

Dell Venue 8 7000 review: a $400 Intel-based Android tablet with solid build, thin bezels, nearly 10 hours of battery life — Dell's Venue 8 7000: A striking tablet that falls short of greatness — Review: A premium tablet with a cool design that doesn't always work in real life.

More: The Verge and Gotta Be Mobile

Jeremy Kessel / The Twitter Blog:

Twitter transparency report: worldwide requests up 40% for government info, 84% for content removal — Three years of increased #transparency ... and counting — Since we launched our first transparency report back in 2012, many other companies have followed suit (more than 30, according to this recently published list by Access).

More: The Next Web and New York Times. See also Mediagazer

Quentin Hardy / New York Times:

VPNs increasingly used to circumvent geo restrictions, access content on sites like Netflix — VPNs Dissolve National Boundaries Online, for Work and Movie-Watching — Rod Drury, an entrepreneur in Auckland, New Zealand, regularly visits the United States. Sometimes there are multiple visits a day.

Tweets: @digiphile and @jonrussell

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