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12:00 PM ET, October 13, 2011

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
Fred / A VC:
What We Are Seeing  —  The Wall Street Journal has a story out today that says “Web Startups Hit Cash Crunch.”  There has been a fair bit of reaction in the tech blogs and I thought I'd toss into the discussion some things we are seeing:  —  1) There are so many startups out there raising money.
RELATED:
Pui-Wing Tam / Wall Street Journal:
Web Start-Ups Hit Cash Crunch  —  As New Companies Proliferate, Financing Is Drying Up; Some Founders Seek Bridge Loans,  —  SAN FRANCISCO—Amid a glut of Web start-ups, some strains are starting to show.  —  For most of this year, a start-up fever, fueled by Facebook Inc. and others, has gripped Silicon Valley.
Alexia Tsotsis / TechCrunch:
Web “Start-Ups” Hit Cash Crunch. Or Don't, Depending On Whom You Ask
Bryce Roberts / BRYCE DOT VC:   The Pig Passing Through The Python
Joshua Topolsky / This is my next:
Siri says some weird things  —  Look, I'm not going to go into great detail about what I've been doing with Siri during my testing period, but I will tell you this — Siri says some crazy stuff.  —  Hit the gallery below for a look at a number of bizarre items the AI / voice recognition …
RELATED:
Danny Sullivan / Daggle:
Outlook 2010 PC?  It's iCloud Or Google Calendar Sync, Not Both - And Outlook 2011 Mac Gets No Love  —  I live a complicated Calendar life.  I keep my schedule in Outlook 2010 on my PC, which syncs to the cloud through Google Calendar but can't talk to Outlook 2011 on my Mac, which I use for travel.
Discussion: @stshank and TechHog.com
iFixit:
iPhone 4S Teardown  —  iFixit: “Siri, may we disassemble you for all to see?” iPhone 4S (Siri): “42” iFixit: “I didn't ask for the meaning of life, Siri...” iPhone 4S (Siri): “42 is the number of seconds you have left until I initiate the self-destruct sequence...” iFixit: “Message received.”
RELATED:
Scott Moritz / Bloomberg:
Apple's New IPhone Sells Out at U.S. Carriers
Discussion: BGR, Business Insider and App Advice
Brad Burnham / Union Square Ventures:
Duck Duck Go  —  When I first got into the venture capital business in the early 90s, it seemed to me that half of the deals I brought to the partnership were dismissed with the line “sure it's cool but what the heck do they do if Microsoft decides to enter this business.”
RELATED:
Gabriel Weinberg / Gabriel Weinberg's Blog:
DuckDuckGo is growing - welcome USV et al.!  —  DuckDuckGo has been growing in a number of ways this year: traffic, team and now investors (was previously just me).  I'm really excited to announce that Union Square Ventures has led our first round of financing (Brad Burnham will join our board and just blogged about us).
Ben Fritz / Los Angeles Times:
Apple prepping movie cloud service  —  Apple Inc. is preparing to put movies in the cloud, entering a market in which it may be both competitor and ally to a similar offering backed by most Hollywood studios.  —  Representatives of the iPhone and iPad maker have been meeting with studios …
Business Week:
Scott Forstall, the Sorcerer's Apprentice at Apple  —  The iOS chief is a lot like his mentor Steve Jobs: brilliant, presents well, a tenacious infighter—arguably just the taskmaster Apple needs to stay on top  —  The deteriorating health of Steve Jobs loomed over Apple's Oct. 4 press event …
Amar Toor / Engadget:
Mike Lazaridis apologizes for BlackBerry outage: 'We've let many of you down' (video) (Update: full services restored)  —  Now that BlackBerry services are returning to full functionality, RIM founder Mike Lazaridis has decided to issue a public apology for this week's mysterious global outage.
RELATED:
Ina Fried / AllThingsD:
RIM Says Service Back Globally, Vows to Win Back Lost Trust  —  Research In Motion said on Thursday that its service is returning to normal levels following a days-long outage in Europe that spread globally.  —  “BlackBerry services are operating well globally,” the company said in a statement.
Florian Mueller / FOSS Patents:
Steve Jobs patent enables Apple to shut down any new Android product in Australia  —  In a posthumous triumph for the late Steve Jobs, one of his more than 300 patents — a patent on touchscreen heuristics — just helped Apple score a major legal win in Australia that lends momentum …
RELATED:
Reuters:
Australia court stops sale of Samsung tablets in Apple dispute
Liz Gannes / AllThingsD:
“We Are Absolutely in a Feature Race,” Says Bradley Horowitz of Google+  —  As Facebook changes to become more about personal expression and oversharing, and Twitter maintains it will stay simple rather than get caught up in a feature race, how will Google+ respond?
RELATED:
Xeni Jardin / Boing Boing:
Dennis Ritchie, 1941-2011: Computer scientist, Unix co-creator, C programming language designer  —  Computer scientist Dennis Ritchie is reported to have died at his home this past weekend, after a long battle against an unspecified illness.  No further details are available at the time of this blog post.
Horace Dediu / asymco:
Windows Phone, a year on  —  Windows Phone is in limbo.  The company acknowledged that it has performed below expectations.  During the last quarter for which we have data (ending June) I have an estimate that Windows Phone sold only 1.4 million units (Gartner's sell-through analysis suggests 1.7 million).
Roger Cheng / CNET News:
LightSquared: GPS fix to cost industry $400M  —  SAN DIEGO—Start-up wireless provider LightSquared said today it will cost the commercial GPS industry as much as $400 million for gear that will eliminate the interference potentially caused by its planned next-generation network.
Discussion: DSLreports and Electronista
Jesse Drucker / Bloomberg:
IRS Auditing How Google Shifted Profits Offshore to Avoid Taxes  —  Oct. 13 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. Internal Revenue Service is auditing how Google Inc. avoided federal income taxes by shifting profit into offshore subsidiaries, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
Ramzi Amri / Quora:
Why did Steve Jobs choose not to effectively treat his cancer?  —  Answer: I hesitated a long time before addressing this topic, but now that someone asked me to, I'll just do it.  To avoid any risks of bias, let me start by stating that all the details on Jobs specific case are based on secondary sources …
JR Raphael / Computerworld:
Privacy alert: Verizon is now monitoring your mobile Web habits  —  Verizon Wireless users, listen up:  —  Verizon is making a significant change to its privacy policy for mobile users this week.  By default, the company will now use a bunch of your info for “certain business and marketing reports” …
Bloomberg:
‘Angry Birds’ Maker May Hold IPO in 2012, Mighty Eagle Says  —  By Jon Erlichman and Diana ben-Aaron - October 13, 2011  —  Rovio Entertainment Oy, the Finnish creator of “Angry Birds” mobile-phone games, may sell shares to the public as early as next year and is probably worth more than $1 billion, its chief marketing officer said.
Discussion: CNET News and ArcticStartup Posts
Erica Naone / Technology Review:
Startup Lets You Save and Share Parts of Web Pages  —  No need to copy and paste—Clipboard employs advanced Web technology to let users save the part of a page they want.  —  The Web may make it easy to communicate with people thousands of miles away and put libraries full of knowledge at our fingertips …
 
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 More Items: 
Khidr Suleman / V3.co.uk:
Dell World: Dell gearing up to launch Windows 8 devices as Android disappoints
Rachel Metz / Associated Press:
EBay to add image recognition to mobile offerings
Discussion: FierceMobileContent and TechCrunch
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines Blog:
Google Q3 earnings preview: Eyes on economy, Motorola Mobility hit
Discussion: Reuters
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Founders Fund Leads $33 Million D Round In Learning Startup Knewton
Julian Benson / Wired.co.uk:
Q&A: Nick Halstead on mining Twitter's firehose with Datasift
Ellen Messmer / Network World:
The SSL certificate industry can and should be replaced
Discussion: CircleID
Alexia Tsotsis / TechCrunch:
Crowdsourced Learning Platform Udemy Raises $3 Million From Lightbank And Others
 Earlier Items: 
Dan Lyons / Real Dan Lyons Web Site:
A conversation with Woz
Discussion: Business Insider
Nick Wingfield / Bits:
Snubbed by Apple, T-Mobile Looks Beyond the iPhone
Steve Yegge / Google+:
Hi external-world folks,  —  I posted a long opinionated rant tonight …
Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Exclusive: Hands-on with Amazon Locker, now working
Discussion: Gizmodo, Gadget Lab, SlashGear and Asiajin, Thanks:johnhcook
Ryan Kim / GigaOM:
With X.commerce, eBay eyes a bigger prize as sales enabler