Techmeme
June 13, 2012, 2:00 PM

Top News

ICANN New gTLDs:
Reveal Day 13 June 2012 - New gTLD Applied-For Strings  —  ICANN developed the New generic Top-Level Domain Program to increase competition and choice by introducing new gTLDs into the Internet's addressing system.  What is a gTLD?  It is an Internet domain name extension such as the familiar .com, .net, or .org.
Devindra Hardawar / VentureBeat:
Retina MacBook Pro is the least repairable laptop ever, says iFixit  —  Apple's new MacBook Pro with Retina Display is ridiculously fast and thin — but you can forget about ever taking it apart.  —  The repair gurus at iFixit unveiled their teardown of the Retina MacBook Pro this morning …
John Paczkowski / AllThingsD:
Apple's Ping to End With a Thud in Next Release of iTunes  —  Apple has finally acknowledged what the market has been telling it since it first debuted Ping, its social network for music, in September of 2010.  The service is a failure.  —  And rather than continue to maintain Ping …
Dan Levine / Reuters:
Analysis: Apple's big enemy in smartphone wars: delay  —  (Reuters) - Apple Inc has spent nearly three years fighting its rivals in a global smartphone patent war.  Now, setbacks in two key U.S. court cases are laying bare why a drawn-out battle could be bad news for the iPhone maker.
Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Fortune:
The high-school blogger who's been cracking Apple's secrets  —  In the walk-up to this week's big keynote, nobody had more scoops than Mark Gurman FORTUNE — Trying to scope out Apple's (AAPL) product plans in advance is serious business for a small army of tech journalists …
Dennis K. Berman / Wall Street Journal:
Tin Pan Valley: The Coming Shakeout for App Makers  —  Like the Early Music Industry, Today's Apps Are ‘Made’ By Marketing, Sales  —  They were 20-somethings emboldened by new technology.  If they were shrewd, they just might get rich.  —  These inventors and wheedlers, dreamers and hucksters …
More: Guardian and Wall Street Journal.  Tweets: @pkafka
Richard MacManus / ReadWriteWeb:
Why Zynga is Shedding Users  —  Social gaming company Zynga had an outstanding 2011, leading to a well-hyped IPO in December.  But Zynga's biggest risk was always an over-reliance on Facebook, with most of its revenue and users coming from the social network.
Mike Masnick / Techdirt:
Apple Steps Into Patent Fight To Unnecessarily Silence A Little Girl  —  We've covered plenty of stories concerning Apple's ridiculously arbitrary nature as the gatekeeper for iOS apps, approving or pulling them with little reason.  And, of course, we've discussed a variety of ridiculous patent lawsuits …
Aaron Ricadela / Bloomberg:
Dell Seeks $2 Billion In Cost Cuts Over Next Three Years  —  Dell Inc. (DELL), the world's third-largest maker of personal computers, will focus on data-center gear as well as computing software and services while seeking to cut costs by more than $2 billion over the next three years.
Daniel Rubino / wpcentral:
Supposed leaked screenshots of Windows Phone 8 Apollo appear, show off Skype and Lenses  —  With less than week before Microsoft is expected to show off Windows Phone 8 in San Francisco, some leaked (and terrible looking) screenshots have appeared on the site Nokia Innovation.
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Skype For Windows Now Features “Conversation Ads”  —  Skype just announced that it will now begin to show some of its users ads during 1:1 audio calls.  These so-called “conversation ads” will only appear for users who don't have Skype credit or a subscription and, for the time being …
Greg Sandoval / CNET:
Amazon getting cloud-music rights, may match iCloud (scoop)  —  Amazon executives are close to striking license deals with music studios to cover the company's cloud music service, numerous music industry sources told CNET.  —  Amazon already has reached agreements with Universal Music Group …
Wall Street Journal:
U.S. Probes Cable for Limits on Net Video  —  WASHINGTON—The Justice Department is conducting a wide-ranging antitrust investigation into whether cable companies are acting improperly to quash nascent competition from online video, according to people familiar with the matter.
Wall Street Journal:
HTC Resists Push Toward Low-End Phones  —  TAIPEI—Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC Corp. will stick to its strategy of selling medium- to high-priced phones, even though it has been struggling to compete in that price range where Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. are increasingly dominant.
Ernesto / TorrentFreak:
DepositFiles Settles Multi Million Dollar Piracy Lawsuit  —  As one of the largest files-sharing sites on the Internet, DepositFiles is visited by millions of users per day.  —  After the Megaupload shutdown the cyberlocker appeared to be one of the top alternatives.
Ben Popper / The Verge:
Mark Cuban puts $500,000 investment into immersive video startup, Condition One  —  Danfung Dennis spent the last decade working as a photo-journalist and filmaker in some of the world's most dangerous places, shooting war footage that appeared in Newsweek and The New York Times and directing …
Evan Rodgers / The Verge:
US lawmakers create website to crowd-source a ‘digital bill of rights’  —  Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) have started drafting a crowd-sourced digital bill of rights in hopes of preventing piecemeal laws like SOPA and CISPA from over-regulating the internet.
Dan Primack / Fortune:
Exclusive: China's Hudong.com raising $50 million  —  Chinese encyclopedia wiki returns to VC market.  —  FORTUNE — Hudong.com, a Chinese-language encyclopedia wiki, is raising up to $50 million in Series C funding, Fortune has learned.  —  The money is being raised, at least in part …
Edward Wyatt / New York Times:
Denials Over Google Street View  —  Google has long prided itself on not being a conventional company.  But there is one characteristic it apparently shares with the most sclerotic bureaucracy: the willingness of its employees to say, “Not my job.”  —  The company on Tuesday released a trove …
Trevor Sheridan / AppleNApps:
iOS 6 Hands-On: iTunes Match Now Streams Music  —  One of the new additions to iCloud and iTunes was iTunes Match, which is a service that lets you store your iTunes library in iCloud.  It costs $24.99/year, and the system works by matching any of your music with the iTunes Store, and any unmatched songs are uploaded.

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Jordan Crook / TechCrunch: