Techmeme: Killer fail: how Romney's broken Orca app cost him thousands of votes (Adi Robertson/The Verge)

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November 10, 2012, 12:00 PM

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Sean Gallagher / Ars Technica:

Inside Team Romney's whale of an IT meltdown — Orca, the Romney campaign's “killer” app, skips beta and pays the price. — Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock — It was supposed to be a “killer app,” but a system deployed to volunteers by Mitt Romney's presidential campaign may have done …

More: GigaOM, NYT Bits, Washington Post, Computerworld, CNET, Techdirt, Wired, InfoWorld, msnbc.com, BREITBART.COM, Politico, New York Magazine and Ace of Spades HQ

Tweets: @kvox, @lazerow, @joshbloch, @timoreilly, @mikeindustries, @jayrosen_nyu and @zedshaw

Adi Robertson / The Verge:

Killer fail: how Romney's broken Orca app cost him thousands of votes — An attempt to harness big data turns into a nightmare of crashes and confusion — A few days before the presidential election, Mitt Romney's campaign announced what it hoped would be its secret weapon at the polls.

More: Twitchy

Natalie Jennings / Washington Post:

Romney digital director: Orca wasn't a loss — The digital director for the Romney campaign responded to criticism in the blogosphere of the campaign's Election-Day “Orca” vote monitoring platform, saying the program had issues but for the most part performed its mission.

Alex Wilhelm / The Next Web:

Shellacked: Groupon fell 30% today in regular trading as investors unloaded the firm following its weak Q3 — Yesterday after the bell, Groupon reported its quarterly earnings. The company, losing a mere $3 million during the quarter, had earnings per share of $0.00, and revenue of $568.6 million.

More: Statspotting!, New York Post and CNNMoney.com

Samantha Murphy / Mashable!:

Facebook Experiments With ‘Reply’ Button on Comments — Facebook isn't just testing a sound-alert function on the site — it's also experimenting with a reply option for comments posted to Timeline, a Facebook spokesperson has confirmed. — “We are testing a new way to add comments to a post on Facebook …

More: digitaltrends.com, Tech Shout!, Softpedia News and Gizmodo

Sean Ludwig / VentureBeat:

Facebook testing new notification sounds — we hate it already

More: BGR, Los Angeles Times, Mashable!, The Blog Herald, WebProNews, Business Insider, Techie Buzz, Softpedia News and Gizmodo

Matthew Panzarino / The Next Web:

ToyTalk, the AI toy company founded by Ex-Pixar talent, gets $11.5M from Charles Rivers Ventures — ToyTalk, the artificial intelligence toy company founded by ex-Pixar and SRI talent has recieved $11.5M in Series-A funding from Charles Rivers Ventures. The funding round was discovered …

More: TechCrunch, VentureBeat and GigaOM. Thanks:@panzer

Robin Wauters / The Next Web:

After $368.2m award in patent lawsuit, VirnetX files another complaint against Apple — VirnetX, the Internet security software company that was awarded $368.2 million after a jury decided that Apple had infringed several of its patents, has filed another complaint against the Cupertino, CA-based consumer electronics giant.

More: AppleInsider, PhoneArena, The Verge, PR Newswire, Guardian, MacRumors and SlashGear

Michael Kan / Computerworld:

Google access returns to China after brief blocking — Access was cut off for about 12 hours — Access to Google services in China appeared to return Saturday morning after they were blocked briefly as the country prepares to appoint new leadership. — The blocking appeared …

More: NYT Bits, Mercury News and Softpedia News

Kara Swisher / AllThingsD:

Touch-A, Touch-A, Touch Me: Yahoo's Latest New Homepage Redesign Tries Dramatic Interactive Tile Look — Another week and yet another new design for the Yahoo homepage is being tested out on users — this time, it appears to be one (which you can see below) that looks a lot …

More: BGR, TechSpot, CNET, Neowin, Business Insider, WebProNews and Softpedia News

Liz Gannes / AllThingsD:

Study Shows Airbnb Is Good for San Francisco, Says Airbnb — Peer-to-peer accommodation site Airbnb commissioned an independent economic development study to show that it's having a positive effect on the San Francisco economy. — Airbnb helps freelancers and lower-income residents pay …

More: TechCrunch and Forbes

Rob Williams / HotHardware.com News:

Microsoft's Big Hidden Windows 8 Feature: Built-In Advertising — Despite the fact that I've been using Windows 8 for the past three weeks, I somehow managed to overlook a rather stark feature in the OS: ads. No, we're not talking about ads cluttering up the desktop or login screen …

More: TechnoBuffalo, MacDailyNews, Ed Bott and DisplayBlog

Chris Taylor / Mashable!:

NASA Builds Interplanetary Internet, Controls LEGO Robot From Space … In the annals of geeky space experiments, it's going to be hard to top this one. — NASA and the European Space Agency announced Thursday that it had successfully tested a new kind of communications protocol — the backbone of a future interplanetary Internet.

More: VentureBeat, ExtremeTech, PC Magazine, BBC, Engadget, The Register, The Verge, ZDNet, NASA, SiliconBeat and Network World

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