Techmeme: Google Acquires Wildfire, Will Now Sell Facebook And Twitter Marketing Services [Update: $350M Price] (Josh Constine/TechCrunch)

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August 2, 2012, 9:15 AM

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Mike Isaac / AllThingsD:

Schadenfreude, Anyone? In Wake of Facebook Bullying Claims, Google+ Chief Vic Gundotra Woos Developers — When our enemies stumble publicly, some take the high road and steer clear of mentioning our adversary's folly. But for others, some things are just too good to pass up.

More: ZDNet, Pulse2 Technology …, Google+ and Business Insider

Dalton Caldwell:

Dear Mark Zuckerberg … On June 13, 2012, at 4:30 p.m., I attended a meeting at Facebook HQ in Menlo Park, California. In addition to myself, the meeting was attended by executives at Facebook with the following titles: “VP, Engineering & Products”, “VP, Partnerships”,"VP …

More: PE Hub Blog, Marketing Pilgrim, Guardian, 9.blog, AllThingsD, The Next Web, SlashGear, Mashable!, VentureBeat, TechCrunch, PC Pro and Forbes

Tweets: @hunterwalk, @cdixon, @bling0, @jason, @stephlauren, @tolles, @erickschonfeld, @mims and @hunterwalk

Thanks:@andybritcliffe

Ryan Lawler / TechCrunch:

App.net's Dalton Caldwell Turned Down A Facebook Acqui-Hire Offer Before Rebooting His Company

More: Business Insider

Timothy B. Lee / Ars Technica:

Bill would force patent trolls to pay defendants' legal bills — A new bill introduced in the House of Representatives attempts to deter frivolous patent litigation by forcing unsuccessful patent plaintiffs to cover defendants' legal costs. Introduced by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) …

More: Softpedia News, Gizmodo, SlashGear, GeekWire, Ubergizmo, ZDNet, Electronista, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Slashdot

Tweets: @rickasaurus, @binarybits, @richardbuckle and @michaelramsgate

Brandon LeBlanc / The Windows Blog:

Windows 8 has reached the RTM milestone — Today, I am excited to announce that Windows 8 has been released to manufacturing (RTM)! This means we've completed the product development and testing of the product and have started handing off the final code to our OEM partners.

Steven Sinofsky / MSDN Blogs:

Releasing Windows 8 - August 1, 2012

Mike Isaac / AllThingsD:

With Three Key Exits, Facebook's Top Talent Departures Continue — The question on everyone's minds after Facebook's May IPO — How long till the brain drain starts? — Apparently, not that long. Ethan Beard, director of platform partnerships at Facebook, announced on Wednesday via Facebook that he will soon leave the company.

More: VentureBeat, The Register, CNET, Ethan Beard, Fortune, Digits, TechCrunch and memeburn

MG Siegler:

Twitter's Landscaping Problem — Twitter. On the surface, it's another year, another bitch session. Developers are up in arms! Everyone is threatening to leave! Or, at least, hundreds of people! There's talk of open source competitors! It's over! Maybe!

Tweets: @avibryant and @mathewi

Mike Isaac / AllThingsD:

The Future of Twitter's Platform Is All in the Cards

More: PandoDaily, TechCrunch, Mashable!, Betabeat and VentureBeat. Tweets: @pkafka

Owen Thomas / Business Insider:

As Twitter Goes To War With Its Developers, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue Quits The Board

Emil Protalinski / CNET:

Facebook: 8.7 percent are fake users — Facebook estimates that 4.8 percent are duplicate accounts, 2.4 percent are user-misclassified accounts, and 1.5 percent are undesirable accounts. — Follow @emilprotalinski — Does she have a Facebook account? — Last week, during …

More: Betabeat, BBC and Pocket-lint

Robin Wauters / The Next Web:

Cisco expands its board of directors with Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and Kristina Johnson — Networking equipment giant Cisco this morning announced that Marc Benioff, co-founder and chief executive officer of enterprise cloud computing company Salesforce.com, has joined its board of directors.

More: AllThingsD

Josh Constine / TechCrunch:

Google Acquires Wildfire, Will Now Sell Facebook And Twitter Marketing Services [Update: $350M Price] — Google has just bought social marketing software developer Wildfire, which lets brands serve marketing and ad campaigns on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and LinkedIn.

More: ZDNet, Social Commerce Today, WebProNews, Small Business News …, Los Angeles Times and Inquirer. Tweets: @sebprovencher

Wall Street Journal:

Businesses Leap on Fiber Bandwidth Wagon — Google's Plan for a High-Speed Data Network in Kansas City Area Starts Gears Turning Among Region's Entrepreneurs — As Google Inc. starts to roll out its elaborate Fiber project in Kansas City, the area's entrepreneurs are plotting how to capitalize …

Billy Gallagher / TechCrunch:

Kevin Rose Responds To Reddit AMA: Biggest Digg Regrets, Thoughts On New Digg, More [Video] — Last night, I wrote about Kevin Rose not responding to questions on his AMA on Reddit. Rose was at a birthday party last night but has returned to Reddit today and has posted YouTube responses to five Redditers' questions.

More: Betabeat

Jesse Hicks / The Verge:

High and low: what RIM's failure is doing to the people of Waterloo — That entrepreneurial spirit doesn't always come naturally to Canadians, says Iain Klugman, maybe half-jokingly. “The American dream is to make it big, to build a big company, to become a rock star,” he says.

More: Coyote Tracks

Ryan Mac / Forbes:

Professor Billionaire: The Stanford Academic Who Wrote Google Its First Check — David Cheriton wrote a $100,000 check to Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. Today that check is now worth more than $1 billion in Google shares. (Martin Klimek / Getty Images)

Thanks:@gerryshih

Ryan Paul / Ars Technica:

Nokia reportedly planning to sell Qt as more developers are laid off — Nokia is shutting down its Qt offices in Australia, laying off the team that was responsible for developing key parts of the open source development toolkit, including the QML user interface layout system.

More: The Register, The H Open Source, lists.qt-project.org …, SlashGear, Phoronix, Delimiter, ZDNet, My Nokia Blog, PhoneNews.com and Slashdot

Matt Warman / Telegraph:

BlackBerry: other manufacturers could license our new BB10 platform — Thorsten Heins, chief executive of Research in Motion, has told the Telegraph that manufacturers such as Sony or Samsung could licence the new BlackBerry operating system. — New RIM CEO Thorsten Heins introduced BlackBerry 10 in Florida

More: Gizmodo, Telegraph, Tim Anderson's ITWriting and Pocket-lint

Digits:

Past Apple-Twitter Investment Talks Were Tied to Product Integration — Apple Inc. floated the idea of investing in Twitter Inc. as the companies discussed integrating the social service into Apple's mobile operating system last year, according to people familiar with the discussions.

More: Business Insider, iPhone, AppleInsider, iDownloadBlog.com, MacRumors, VentureBeat, MacDailyNews, Ars Technica and iLounge

Alex Wilhelm / The Next Web:

Nokia Maps update brings route planning, Groupon Now! integration — Today Nokia released a new version of its Maps application for Windows Phone. In it is support for route planning, at last, and also integration with the Groupon Now! product. — Route planning, the ability to determine …

More: Nokia Conversations, Inquirer, Gotta Be Mobile, My Nokia Blog, Engadget, Light Reading, Reuters, AllThingsD, SlashGear, PhoneArena, Ubergizmo, CNET and The Verge

Henry Blodget / Business Insider:

Facebook Stock Crash Hoses California's Tax Revenue — Well, the hits from the Facebook stock implosion keep coming. — Now, it's the State of California, which apparently overestimated how much tax revenue it was going to collect from Facebook employees after the IPO.

More: PolitiCal and Capitol Alert. Tweets: @jonerlichman

Euan Rocha / Reuters:

RIM says has not compromised BlackBerry security in India — (Reuters) - Research in Motion refuted on Wednesday a new round of Indian media reports, which claim that the BlackBerry maker has granted the Indian government the encryption keys to its secure corporate email and messaging services.

More: The Register, TechEye, India Real Time and ZDNet

Sam Byford / The Verge:

Sony loses $312 million in Q1 2012 amid high restructuring costs — Sony has announced its financial results for the first quarter of its fiscal year, and as expected for a company in transition they don't make for pleasant reading — it managed to lose $312 million off sales of $19.2 billion.

More: BGR, CNET, Inquirer, Guardian, Reuters, BBC, Bloomberg, Softpedia News, Engadget and ZDNet

Mikey Campbell / AppleInsider:

Apple to file sanctions over Samsung's evidence ‘leak’ — In a letter to Judge Lucy Koh on Wednesday, Apple said it plans to file an emergency motion for sanctions and “other relief that may be appropriate” as a result of Samsung's issuance of excluded evidence to media outlets earlier this week.

More: Fortune, PhoneArena, ZDNet, PC Magazine and MacNN

Jeff Blagdon / The Verge:

Ballooning losses at Sharp lead to 5,000 job cuts — The planned turnaround at Sharp following last year's record $4.7 billion loss is taking a nosedive. The company is announcing a first quarter operating loss of ¥138.4 billion (about $1.76 billion) — nearly triple 2011's first quarter loss …

More: Fast Company, ZDNet, Agence France Presse, Wall Street Journal, Reuters and Engadget

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