Techmeme: Disruptions: Silencing the Voices of Militants on Twitter (Nick Bilton/NYT Bits)

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December 3, 2012, 5:25 AM

Top News

TechCrunch:

What's Up With Whatsapp? Facebook Might Want To Buy It, That's What — Whatsapp, the multiplatform mobile messaging app that has been one of the runaway success stories for ad-free, paid services, has been in talks to be acquired by Facebook, according to sources close to the matter.

More: CNET, Ubergizmo, memeburn, PandoDaily, The Next Web and iClarified

Tweets: @markgurman, @cjamesmusic and @jonrussell

Paul Graham / Y Combinator:

YC W13 Will Be Smaller — We just finished interviews for the winter 2013 YC cycle. We funded a lot fewer startups this time than last. We funded 84 in summer 2012. We don't know yet exactly how many we'll have in winter 2013 because we usually add a handful after interviews and sometimes …

More: Forbes, TechCrunch, The Next Web, GigaOM and TechCrunch

Tweets: @semil, @hncomments, @blake, @santiagojara, @hunterwalk and @shaig

Chris Dixon:

The product lens — There has been a lot of discussion lately about the markets for startup financing. Many of the discussions use words like “valuations” “bubble” “crunch” etc. Words like that generally mean the writer is discussing the world through the lens of finance.

Tweets: @bill_gross, @pkafka, @infoarbitrage and @bznotes

Vint Cerf / The Official Google Blog:

Keep the Internet free and open — Starting in 1973, when my colleagues and I proposed the technology behind the Internet, we advocated for an open standard to connect computer networks together. This wasn't merely philosophical; it was also practical. — Our protocols were designed …

More: BetaNews, Guardian, BBC, Delimiter, The Mozilla Blog, ZDNet and TechnoLlama. Tweets: @mattcutts

Adi Robertson / The Verge:

New World Order: is the UN about to take control of the internet?

More: David Talbot, The Huffington Post, PC World and Ars Technica

Cade Metz / Wired:

How Amazon Followed Google Into the World of Secret Servers — Chris Pinkham was walking through a data center that would one day house Amazon's seminal cloud computing service — the Elastic Compute Cloud — when he came face to face with a cage of Google machines.

Tweets: @nrfrancescon, @iblamm and @sequoia_capital

Virginia Postrel / Bloomberg:

A Free-Market Fix for the Copyright Racket — While most of the punditocracy was chattering earlier this month about Mitt Romney's “gifts” gaffe, another Republican took an unexpectedly bold stand about a huge and controversial special-interest handout that largely benefits Democratic constituencies.

More: Dynamist

Mikey Campbell / AppleInsider:

Some new iMacs marked as being ‘Assembled in USA’ — Apple may be taking some of the burden of assembling the new iMac off Chinese supply partners by performing parts of assembly in the U.S., as a number of newly-purchased standard units are showing an “Assembled in America” notation usually reserved for made-to-order machines.

More: 9to5Mac, Gizmodo, CNET, Fortune, Mashable!, MacRumors, TUAW and Examiner. Tweets: @jyarow

Brian X. Chen / New York Times:

App Maker Uber Hits Regulatory Snarl — WASHINGTON — Summoning a taxi or car service with your smartphone feels like the future. City governments around the world can agree on that. But many of them are proposing new rules that would run Uber, one of the most prominent ride-requesting apps, off the road.

More: NYT Bits. Tweets: @agpublic, @brettgurewitz and @kzaleski

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Tim Berners-Lee's Open Data Institute Gets Its First Outside Investment, $750K From The Omidyar Network To Top Up UK's $16M — The Open Data Institute, a UK-based incubator and promoter of open-data businesses that was first conceived by Tim Berners-Lee and artificial intelligence pioneer Nigel Shadbolt …

More: The Next Web

Dan Seifert / The Verge:

Motorola Droid RAZR HD, Maxx HD to get Android 4.1 update as soon as next week — Verizon Wireless has announced that the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean update for its Motorola Droid RAZR HD and Maxx HD smartphones will begin rolling out to users starting next week.

More: Softpedia News

Nick Bilton / NYT Bits:

Disruptions: Silencing the Voices of Militants on Twitter — Twitter, perhaps more than any other social media outlet, has become one of the most powerful tools to promote democracy in the Middle East. The service, which helped Arab Spring protesters in their drive for a new order in the region …

More: memeburn. Tweets: @karaswisher and @moriza

Kimber Streams / The Verge:

Mitsubishi seals the fate of rear-projection TVs, discontinues its last line — Mitsubishi has announced that it will be discontinuing its line of rear-projection televisions, marking the end of the affordable but clunky television technology. The company bet it all on RPTVs last year …

More: ZDNet, SlashGear, CE Pro News Stories, Engadget and TechSpot

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