Techmeme: A Free-Market Fix for the Copyright Racket (Virginia Postrel/Bloomberg)

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December 3, 2012, 4:10 AM

Top News

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: TechCrunch, GigaOM, The Next Web and TechCrunch

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

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, The Next Web and PandoDaily

Tweets: @markgurman, @cjamesmusic and @jonrussell

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: Guardian, The Mozilla Blog, Delimiter, ZDNet, TechnoLlama and Renesys Blog. Tweets: @mattcutts

Adi Robertson / The Verge:

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

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

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, CNET, Fortune, 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

Alexandra Chang / Wired:

Don't Blame Us for Windows 8′s Slow Sales, PC Makers Say — Microsoft is publicly touting its Windows 8 sales figures — 40 million licenses sold! Windows 8 outpacing Windows 7 upgrades! Windows Store apps double since launch! — but it isn't all sunshine and smiles in Redmond.

More: PC Magazine, The Next Web and Neowin. Tweets: @carnage4life

Sam Byford / The Verge:

King of Samsung: a chairman's reign of cunning and corruption — Lee Kun-hee made Samsung a global power over 25 years, but at what cost? — If Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee takes a moment this weekend to reflect on the past 25 years, he could be forgiven for having mixed emotions.

Tweets: @lluk and @zpower. Thanks:@max8378

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: Engadget, CE Pro News Stories and TechSpot

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.

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