Techmeme
June 18, 2015, 10:50 AM

Top News

CNBC:
Fitbit opens 52% higher in market debut  —  Fitbit CEO: We're more than just wearables  —  Fitbit co-founder and CEO James Park, shares how one customer got really into counting steps, and the company's mission.  —  On Wednesday, fitness wearables maker Fitbit priced its initial public offering …
Julia Love / Reuters:
Slice Intelligence research says 2.79M Apple Watches sold to date; IHS estimates $49 band costs Apple $2  —  Exclusive: Apple mines big profits from Watch band  —  Nearly 20 percent of Apple Watch buyers are not only shelling out hundreds of dollars for the timepiece but are springing for a spare band too …
Edgar Alvarez / Engadget:
Xbox 360 game-streaming is coming to Windows 10  —  As if backwards compatibility on the Xbox One wasn't enough, Microsoft's also going to let you stream and play those older games on Windows 10 PCs.  In a private demo of the recently announced Xbox One updates, the company confirmed to Engadget …
Cory Bennett / The Hill:
Reddit to fully encrypt traffic  —  Reddit, the self-described “front page of the Internet,” will start encrypting all of its traffic by the end of the month, joining other major Internet players that have made similar moves in recent months.  —  “We're ready to enforce that everyone use …
TechCrunch:
Sean Parker's Brigade App Enters Private Beta As A Dead-Simple Way Of Taking Political Positions  —  Sean Parker, who changed the music industry as a teenager and then went onto have an early and formative role in Facebook, has long had one frontier that he's wanted to change: American democracy.
Mark Gurman / 9to5Mac:
Apple Watch 2: Apple plans FaceTime camera, iPhone-free Wi-Fi, $1000+ models, similar battery  —  Two months after the initial launch of the Apple Watch, and only a day following the device's debut at Apple Stores, sources have revealed Apple's intentions for the 2016 release of a second-generation model.
Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge:
Vimeo overhauls Cameo into a simple video editor for iOS  —  Vimeo is today releasing a huge update to Cameo, stripping the app down to its core elements and making the entire experience about editing video.  The new app doesn't resemble the old Cameo at all, and the changes are for the better.
Ben Thompson / Stratechery:
Many unicorns may fail, but as a group they are likely undervalued  —  Unicorns  —  The entire point of the name “Unicorn”, first coined by Aileen Lee in November 2013, is to describe something very rare: “U.S.-based software companies started since 2003 and valued at over $1 billion …
Nathan Ingraham / The Verge:
Thomas Gryta / Wall Street Journal:
An Early Net-Neutrality Win: Rules Prompt Sprint to Stop Throttling  —  FCC's new net-neutrality rules went into effect Friday  —  The Federal Communications Commission's new net-neutrality rules are already having an effect.  —  Sprint, the third-largest U.S. wireless carrier …
Nimrod Tamir / The Official Google Blog:
Google Trends now delivers real-time popular searches and trending stories; News Lab team will publish curated datasets to Github  —  A new window into our world with real-time trends  —  Every journey we take on the web is unique.  Yet looked at together, the questions and topics we search …
Katy Steinmetz / TIME:
Why the California Ruling on Uber Should Frighten the Sharing Economy  —  This week a ruling from the California Labor Commission was made public because popular ride-sourcing company Uber appealed it.  A San Francisco-based driver named Barbara Ann Berwick brought a case alleging that she is an employee …
New York Times:
Julia Greenberg / Wired:
LinkedIn's new Pulse app uses human editors and algorithms to deliver personalized news; Pulse to list reason for showing specific content above stories  —  LinkedIn Brings Back Human Editors to Tailor News to You  —  At some point soon after you wake up, you probably check the news.

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Earlier Picks

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Rob Lewis / Techvibes:
Darren Pauli / The Register:
Amy Schatz / Re/code: