Techmeme
March 9, 2012, 10:50 AM

Top News

Farhad Manjoo / Slate:
The iPad Is Unbeatable  —  Why Apple's tablet competitors don't stand a chance—and maybe never will.  —  Apple CEO Tim Cook announcing the newest iPad  —  Imagine you run a large technology company not named Apple.  Let's say you're Steve Ballmer, Michael Dell, Meg Whitman, Larry Page, or Intel's Paul Otellini.
K. T. Bradford / Gotta Be Mobile:
Trevor Berg / The Dropbox Blog:
A fresh new Dropbox on the web  —  Over the past few weeks, we've been quietly rolling out a major redesign of the Dropbox website.  Today we turned it up to 11, and anyone who signs into dropbox.com will see a simpler, more powerful, and more beautiful web experience.  Here's what we came up with:
Ernesto / TorrentFreak:
Leaked: Police Plan to Raid The Pirate Bay  —  In the spring of 2006 a team of 65 Swedish police personnel entered a datacenter in Stockholm.  The officers were tasked with shutting down the largest threat to the entertainment industry at the time - The Pirate Bay's servers.
Geoff Duncan / Digital Trends:
Why are companies defecting from Google Maps?  —  First Foursquare and now Apple are scaling back their use of Google Maps.  Why are major players starting to back way from Google's nearly ubiquitous mapping service?  —  In recent years, Google Maps has transformed itself …
Robin Wauters / The Next Web:
Green Dot acquires location-based services company Loopt for $43.4 million in cash  —  In a move straight out of left field, Green Dot, a U.S. provider of prepaid debit cards, has acquired Loopt for total consideration of $43.4 million in cash.  —  The press release is below, we're updating this post.
Chad Bray / Wall Street Journal:
FBI's ‘Sabu’ Hacker Was a Model Informant  —  As soon as he was caught, an influential computer hacker agreed to become a government informant and “literally worked around the clock” to help federal agents nab an elusive collective of alleged cyber criminals who have launched online attacks against companies …
Iljitsch van Beijnum / Ars Technica:
iTunes 1080p video looks better, saves space using better H.264 compression  —  In the comments on yesterday's AppleTV story, many people doubted whether 1080p support in the third-generation AppleTV will be very useful.  That question becomes even more relevant when observing the file sizes …
Mark Memmott / NPR:
Facebook Co-Founder Chris Hughes Is Buying ‘The New Republic’  —  Social media meets old media:  —  Saying that he's convinced “the demand for long-form, quality journalism is strong in our country,” Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes tells NPR's Steve Inskeep that he's buying The New Republic.
Robert Andrews / paidContent:
Germany Wants To Charge Search Engines To Use News Excerpts  —  Germany's government wants search engines and news aggregators to pay news publishers for using pieces of their material.  —  Its coalition committee has resolved that a collecting society should charge royalties to re-publishers of news material.
Chris Ziegler / The Verge:
Google forcing Android developers to use Google Wallet for in-app payments, Reuters says (Google: same policy as before)  —  Reuters is reporting this afternoon that at least some developers of applications in Google Play (née Android Market) are being forced to use Google Wallet …
Hubert Nguyen / Ubergizmo:
Apple A5X and the great quad-core confusion, explained  —  When Apple announced the New iPad, the part about the Apple A5X chip has created a lot of confusion, hype, joy and sometime sheer anger: first, many now believe that the new iPad is a Quad-Core tablet and secondly …
Nielsen Wire:
Buzz in the Blogosphere: Millions More Bloggers and Blog Readers  —  Blogs are sometimes overlooked as a significant source of online buzz in comparison to social networking sites, yet consumer interest in blogs keeps growing.  By the end of 2011, NM Incite, a Nielsen/McKinsey company …
Yishan Wong / reddit:
New reddit CEO reporting for duty  —  Hi everyone.  My name is Yishan Wong, and this week I'm starting a new job.  It turns out that this job is the CEO position at reddit.  I've been a redditor since 2005 (yishan) and over the years, I've read blog posts about the ups and downs of the reddit team …
Larry Dignan / ZDNet:
Cloud's price race to zero: Microsoft cuts Azure pricing, eyes Amazon  —  Summary: Cloud computing costs are falling fast for IT buyers and are already on par with electricity rates.  —  Microsoft on Friday cut pricing on its Azure storage as you go service and its extra small compute effort.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
HomeSnap Is Not A Boring Real Estate App  —  Sawbuck Realty, an online real estate broker, has just launched a new app called HomeSnap which lets you discover information about any home nationwide just by taking a photo of it.  Using a combination of mobile phone sensors to determine location …
More: Tech CocktailThanks:@loumintzer
Kevin Fitchard / GigaOM:
Clearwire outs first post-PC WiMAX dongle  —  The most unsexy gadget in mobile just got a lot more attractive.  Clearwire has started to sell a new WiMAX dongle that users can plug into laptops, tablets or netbooks and get instant mobile broadband access - without installing any device management software or messing about with logins.
Spencer E. Ante / Wall Street Journal:
Financing to Value Instagram at $500 Million  —  Instagram is poised to raise a new round of financing that will value the popular photo-sharing application at as much as $500 million, people familiar with the matter said, despite skepticism that the fast-growing company will find a way to make money.
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
After the pwnage: Critical Google Chrome hole plugged in 24 hours  —  Less than 24 hours after a Russian hacker pocketed $60,000 by exploiting a previously unknown critical vulnerability in Google Chrome, company developers released an update removing the security threat.

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Stephen Totilo / Kotaku:
Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft Blog: