Techmeme: Profile of John B. Goodenough, who invented the lithium-ion battery and is now trying to build a powerful new super-battery (Steve LeVine/Quartz)

Open Links In New Tab

Mobile Archives Advertise Site News Contact Editors

February 9, 2015, 3:55 AM

Top 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: Odysee, The Next Web, Engadget, Ausdroid, BetaNews, VentureBeat, SiliconANGLE and ResearchBuzz. Tweets: @korzing

Shane Harris / The Daily Beast:

Samsung's SmartTV privacy policy warns that voice recognition can collect and transmit sensitive personal information to improve the product — Your Samsung SmartTV Is Spying on You, Basically — You may be loving your new Internet-connected television and its convenient voice-command feature …

More: TechCrunch, SamMobile, The Verge, CNET, Gizmodo, SlashGear, International Business Times, Electronista, UPROXX, Ubergizmo, Tom's Guide, BGR and The Daily Dot

Steve LeVine / Quartz:

Profile of John B. Goodenough, who invented the lithium-ion battery and is now trying to build a powerful new super-battery — The man who brought us the lithium-ion battery at the age of 57 has an idea for a new one at 92 — AUSTIN, TEXAS—The chances are you have never heard of—nor …

More: Wired.co.uk. Tweets: @fmanjoo and @dtunkelang

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

Kevin Roose / Fusion:

How Waterloo recovered after BlackBerry's decline and avoided a talent exodus — The life, death, and rebirth of BlackBerry's hometown — It's a little after 5:30 p.m. on a Wednesday night, and I'm sitting in a freezing rental car outside the BlackBerry headquarters in Waterloo, Ontario, looking for signs of life.

Tweets: @kevinroose, @cdixon and @pmarca

Julie Bort / Business Insider:

Interview with Amit Singh about Google for Work's progress and plans for the future — We talked to the head of Google's next multibillion-dollar business. Here's what he told us — Five years ago next month, Google got serious about creating a new revenue stream for itself beyond search ads …

More: Business Insider. Tweets: @benedictevans and @charlesarthur

Jason Tanz / Wired:

Some techies with DIY mentalities choose to homeschool their children — The Techies Who Are Hacking Education by Homeschooling Their Kids — Chris and Samantha Matalone Cook are homeschooling their sons Simon and Parker. (Their daughter Lucy asked to attend private school for the time being.)

More: Wired. Tweets: @mims, @toughloveforx and @mat

Kashmir Hill / Fusion:

How Slack makes sure the work conversations of 365K people stay private — How a start-up got 365,000 people to trust it with their office secrets — It was Anne Toth's first week at Slack, and she already had a crisis on her hands. “TeamNameGate,” she now calls the episode.

Tweets: @msquinn, @juliaangwin and @kashhill

Christopher Solomon / Popular Mechanics:

Profile of Alex Holden, who tracked down the Russian hackers who stole over 1.2B credentials — Meet The Man Who Finds Your Stolen Passwords — Last summer a gang of Russian hackers was caught amassing the largest cache of stolen user names and passwords ever discovered—1.2 billion in all.

Tweets: @cwarzel

Daniela Velázquez / Fast Company:

In Kansas City, Google Fiber penetrates wealthier neighborhoods, but digital divide remains — Lessons From Google's First Rollout Of Google Fiber — Three summers ago, it was everywhere: An old-fashioned ice cream truck with peppy, electronic music blaring from its speakers.

John Herrman / The Awl:

For distribution, media companies turn to apps and services, whose ad-driven, mediated businesses mirror broadcast TV — 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 …

More: Gigaom and everwas. Tweets: @grahamfarmelo, @tim, @stevebryant, @mattyglesias, @frankpasquale, @dkthomp, @mathewi, @mattbuchanan, @digiphile and @dangillmor

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: GSMArena.com, Re/code, Business Wire, TechCrunch, Wall Street Journal, Engadget and SiliconANGLE. Tweets: @inafried

Sponsor Posts

Command Line:

Introducing Microsoft-Decision-1, our model for fast decision-making — Our new model delivers top performance in latency and quality on structured decision tasks to outperform other models.

Will Reed:

The best sales leaders aren't job hunting. Here's how to reach them without months of cold outreach. — Our team came from Box, Square, and Brex, so we already know the GTM leaders worth meeting.

Zoho:

Zoho Books now supports CT600 & Final Accounts Filing as an add-on in the FREE plan — Managing end-of-year filing for limited companies in the UK is often expensive and multi-layered.

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

Big Technology Podcast:

Meta & Microsoft's Claude Slowdown, His Agent Leaked His Banking Info, Don't Bully Your AI

The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.

Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.

Sources:

Qualcomm's CEO on the coming AI phone supercycle

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.

The Upstarts Podcast:

Bringing Back Mammoths And Building Noah's Ark 2.0 | Colossal's Ben Lamm

Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.

Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.

Great Chat:

The launch industrial complex

A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.

Subscribe to Great Chat.

Channels with Peter Kafka:

Larry Ellison's Media Ambitions & Kevin Roose on AI's Biggest Gamble

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.

Training Data:

Google's AI Infrastructure Chief, Amin Vahdat, on the Physics & Economics of Frontier AI

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.

Add your podcast here

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 3:55 AM ET, February 9, 2015.

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.