Techmeme
June 5, 2012, 6:35 PM

Top News

Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Face To Face: How Airtime Will Re-Humanize The Internet  —  One minute into using Airtime I was laughing with someone I'd never met.  That's something special when despite all the asynchronous connection, the Internet threatens to make us feel lonely.  On Airtime, you experience together thanks …
Kashmir Hill / The Not-So Private Parts:
Are You Okay With Airtime Secretly Taking Photos Of You While You're Video Chatting?  —  Airtime: You watch it.  It watches you.  —  Facebook is boring, according to a third of its users.  Yikes!  Luckily, tech entrepreneur Sean Parker plans to save the day, launching a new video chat service called Airtime.
Michael Hogan / The Huffington Post:
Sean Parker's Airtime Launch: Olivia Munn, Joel McHale, Jim Carrey & More Improvise As Event Unravels  —  Whatever Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning paid the celebrities who attended this morning's unveiling of their new video-chat application, it wasn't enough.
Alan Warren / The Official Google Blog:
Google + Quickoffice = get more done anytime, anywhere  —  We're happy to announce that we have acquired Quickoffice, a leader in office productivity solutions.  —  Today, consumers, businesses and schools use Google Apps to get stuff done from anywhere, with anyone and on any device.
Wall Street Journal:
Sprint's Virgin Mobile to Offer iPhone  —  Sprint Nextel Corp. is set to become the second U.S. mobile-phone carrier to offer Apple Inc.'s iPhone on a pay-as-you-go basis.  —  Sprint will announce this week it will offer the popular smartphone on its Virgin Mobile pay-as-you-go brand as soon as July 1 …
Greg Bensinger / Wall Street Journal:
Carriers' Next Move: One Choice for Voice  —  The largest U.S. wireless carriers are working on ways to keep their customers paying up for something they do less and less—making phone calls.  —  In a sea change for consumer behavior, the amount of time spent making old-fashioned voice calls …
More: WebProNews and Macgasm
Jim Edwards / Business Insider:
Facebook Just Opened Up Its Mobile-Only Ad Market  —  Facebook has added its mobile-only “Sponsored Stories” ads to the list of ad products buyers can purchase via the ads API and Power Editor, without going through its sales force, the company announced.  —  The move makes buying ads …
Wall Street Journal:
Nasdaq Takes Steps to Compensate Facebook Investors  —  Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. officials are telling brokers they plan to submit Wednesday the first step in the exchange group's bid to compensate investors for the technical glitches that undermined Facebook Inc.'s initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter.
Richard Lawler / Engadget:
Google Fiber GFHD100 ‘IP set-top box’ breezes through the FCC, doesn't say where it's headed  —  The future of Google as a hardware manufacturer (beyond its purchase of Motorola) continues to be shrouded in rumor and mystery, but the GFHD100 box that just popped up in the FCC's database is very much a fact.
Andy Greenberg / The Firewall:
Google Starts Showing Users Alerts For Accounts Hacked By “State-Sponsored Attackers”  —  Here's a message from Google some Gmail users can expect to see in the near future, and that the rest of us hope we never will: “Warning: We believe state-sponsored attackers may be attempting to compromise your account or computer.”
Chris Ziegler / The Verge:
Pre to postmortem: the inside story of the death of Palm and webOS  —  It wasn't looking good.  Just months into Elevation Partners' investment, morale in Palm's engineering corps was already flagging.  Executives had sold them on a change-the-world mentality and Duarte had delivered …
More: BuzzFeed.  Thanks:@max8378
Nick Wingfield / Bits:
R.I.P. Zune  —  Microsoft is sending Zune to the pasture where Microsoft brands go to die.  It's the end of the road for a name that once symbolized Microsoft's grand plans to curb Apple's entertainment ambitions.  —  In a flurry of announcements that Microsoft made Monday at the E3 games conference …
Laura Hazard Owen / paidContent:
Kobo launches e-book self-publishing platform, “Writing Life”  —  Digital reading company Kobo is launching a competitor to Amazon's KDP and Barnes & Noble's PubIt: Kobo Writing Life, a free self-publishing platform for independent authors and publishers.  —  Writing Life is in beta tests …
Douglas MacMillan / Bloomberg Tech Blog:
Ning Co-Founder Bianchini Has New Design on Online Groups  —  Gina Bianchini, who cofounded Ning, is changing the direction and design of her latest startup, Mightybell.  —  Serial entrepreneur Gina Bianchini is betting that people want to congregate and collaborate around common interests on a site other than Facebook.
Adrian Holovaty:
The connection between Google Street View and driverless cars  —  I'm in the middle of taking the Coursera Machine Learning class — which has been amazingly good — and it recently covered how one could implement a machine-learning algorithm to power driverless cars.  —  Here's how you might do it.
Drew Olanoff / The Next Web:
Facebook to help those infected with DNSChanger clean up their computer before July 9th  —  If you've been infected by a dirty little virus called DNSChanger, you won't be able to access the Internet after July 9th.  Even though the people behind the virus have been arrested, there might be millions of computers still infected.

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Featured Podcasts

Channels with Peter Kafka:
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Sources:
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Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
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Big Technology Podcast:
Meta's Muse Revival, Frontier AI Under Threat, The Rise Of Dopamine Sites
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Great Chat:
Doomers at Dreamforce
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
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