Techmeme: Facebook testing service to let strangers pay to message you (Ellis Hamburger/The Verge)

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December 20, 2012, 6:15 PM

Top News

Alex Wilhelm / The Next Web:

RIM beats street by losing less than expected in Q3 with EPS of -$0.22, revenue of $2.7B — Today Research In Motion reported third quarter revenue of $2.7 billion and earnings per share of -$0.22. While the company lost money per share, its loss was lower than expected.

More: Market Wire, BGR, Engadget, Ars Technica, Computerworld, LAPTOP Magazine, Business Insider, VentureBeat, Tech Trader Daily, CNET, ZDNet, TechCrunch, Digits, Mashable! and MarketBeat

Tweets: @m4tt, @sammywalrusiv, @asymco and @reckless

Steve Kovach / Business Insider:

RIM's CIO Will Retire At The End Of The Year — RIM's Chief Information Officer, Robin Bienfait, will retire at the end of this year, the company announced today. — Bienfait has been with the company for six years. She'll continue to advise the company during the transition …

More: Wall Street Journal, Reuters and Reuters

Andrew Nusca / ZDNet:

Red Hat's Q3 earnings: beats estimates, acquires ManageIQ

More: Business Wire, Tech Trader Daily, BetaNews, VentureBeat, Business Insider, Forbes, AllThingsD, Business Wire and Wall Street Journal

Aoife White / Bloomberg:

Samsung Faces EU Antitrust Complaint Over Apple Patent Clash — Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) faces a European Union antitrust complaint over its use of standard- essential patents in legal disputes with Apple Inc. (AAPL), the European Union competition commissioner said.

More: Reuters, PC World, Wall Street Journal, SlashGear, iDownloadBlog.com, FOSS Patents, Patently Apple, 9to5Mac, ZDNet, BGR, CNET and Hillicon Valley

Aaron Souppouris / The Verge:

EU will charge Samsung ‘very soon’ in Apple antitrust case

John Koetsier / VentureBeat:

Apple kills a Kickstarter project: Portable power project POP refunding $139,170 to backers — Edison Junior, the technology and design lab behind the POP portable power station, is returning the full $139,170 in funding it received from Kickstarter backers to develop the device.

More: GigaOM, Wired, The Verge and Pocketnow

Unwired View:

BlackBerry Z10: first BlackBerry 10 handset pictured in black, white — As the January 30th launch draws closer, more details are coming to light regarding the upcoming BlackBerry 10-powered handsets Research in Motion plans to announce. Both a Torch-like full-touch device …

More: Business Insider, CNET, The Verge, Engadget, MobileSyrup.com and PhoneArena

Ellis Hamburger / The Verge:

Facebook testing service to let strangers pay to message you — Facebook today announced refinements to its Messaging filters, as well as a test for a very small portion of American users to determine if people will pay to get in touch with those they aren't Facebook friends with.

Jessica E. Lessin / Wall Street Journal:

Home-Automation Startup R2 Studios in Acquisition Talks — A secretive startup founded by the man who popularized the Slingbox has been in talks with companies considering buying it, people close to the company say, with Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and Apple Inc. cited as participants.

More: The Verge, GigaOM, MacRumors, 9to5Mac, AllThingsD, 9to5Google, iDownloadBlog.com and PhoneArena. Tweets: @jessicalessin

Amir Efrati / Wall Street Journal:

Kleiner Partners' View Of the Future of Tech — Venture capitalists John Doerr and Ted Schlein of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers have had a front-row seat at Silicon Valley's recent Web froth and its fallout. — Their venture firm in the past decade made a big bet on clean technology.

More: Venture Capital Dispatch

Mike Isaac / AllThingsD:

As IPO Gets Closer, Twitter Tries Growing Up Fast — Preparing for an eventual IPO isn't easy, taking years of planning, of careful strategy decisions, of picking your people perfectly. Even then, things can still go wrong. Just ask Facebook. — While an initial public offering …

Mike Isaac / AllThingsD:

Twitter Shuffles Top Brass With New COO and CFO Appointments

More: SiliconANGLE, TPM IdeaLab, VatorNews, FierceMobileContent News, CNET and Fortune. Tweets: @dickc

Matthew Panzarino / The Next Web:

IFTTT gets $7M from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Lerer to connect all of our Internet silos — Today, IFTTT is announcing a Series A round of $7M that is led by Andreessen Horowitz, with NEA and Lerer Ventures participating. The round will help IFTTT to expand its staff, and work towards building out its service into a platform.

More: TechCrunch, GigaOM, PandoDaily, AllThingsD and NYT Bits

Andrii Degeler / The Next Web:

Google Play is growing faster, but Apple's App Store brings in way more money: Distimo — App analytics firm Distimo has published a new report looking at how Google Play and Apple's App Store have fared in 2012. It finds that while the former is growing rapidly, the latter still beats it more than four-fold in terms of revenues.

More: PC Magazine, Inside Mobile Apps, iPhone Hacks, Silicon Republic, Ubergizmo, iDownloadBlog.com, CNET, InvestorPlace and VentureBeat

Ken Yeung / The Next Web:

The Hacker Way: Facebook reveals its top hacks of 2012 — The culture at Facebook has always been known to be about The Hacker Way. Through this philosophy, the company has periodically held and participated in numerous hackathons on its campus. Today, it has shared what it says are the top hacks from the past year.

More: Facebook, WebProNews and VentureBeat

Ken Yeung / The Next Web:

Path boosts social discovery for its 5 million users with the addition of Search and Nearby features — Path is releasing an update to its iOS and Android applications. Starting today, users are going to notice Path Search, a new feature that the company says will help make it easier …

More: Digits, blog.path.com, PC Magazine, CNET, TechCrunch, The Verge, GigaOM, Engadget, Mashable!, Wired, TIME and Xconomy

Neil Hughes / AppleInsider:

Siri's reliance on Google cut in half with iOS 6 — Tests with Apple's voice-driven personal assistant, Siri, have found that the service turns to Google for an answer in iOS 6 half as much as it did in iOS 5. — When investment firm Piper Jaffray initially tested Siri in June …

More: Fortune, Search Engine Land, Business Insider, Tech Trader Daily, Business Insider, iPhone Hacks and iDownloadBlog.com

Don Reisinger / CNET:

Verizon responds to AT&T, adds 29 LTE markets — Verizon customers in Selma, Al. and Port Angeles, Wa. are among the cities getting access to the company's 4G LTE network. — Verizon has added 29 new LTE markets to its service. — The company announced today that Selma, Al. and Port Angeles …

More: Verizon Wireless, The Seattle Times, TechSpot, iPhone Hacks, PC Magazine, App Advice, PandoDaily, PadGadget, SlashGear and iDownloadBlog.com

Jessica Dolcourt / CNET:

Samsung preps 5.5-inch flexible phone screen for CES demo — In January, Samsung's mobile display spin-off will bring us a step closer to bendable smartphones. Now that's twisted. — You won't have to bend over backward to see Samsung's latest effort in flexible smartphone screens.

More: Network World, Engadget, Los Angeles Times, DailyTech, Gotta Be Mobile, newlaunches.com and Neowin

Don Melton:

When I first heard the name “Safari” — Ten years ago this month, my secret Web browser team at Apple became the “Safari” team — less than 30 days before we debuted the product on January 7, 2003. — To this day, I don't know who suggested the name “Safari.”

More: MacRumors, Ars Technica, BGR, Redmond Pie, iDownloadBlog.com, PhoneArena, WebProNews, Macgasm and iPhone Hacks

Tweets: @carterrabasa, @h1brd, @beverloo and @wooster

Alexia Tsotsis / TechCrunch:

Snapguide Comes To The iPad Because The Future Of The How-To Is On The Tablet — I wouldn't have an iPad if I didn't have to do two things: Do interviews and cook. The first I have to do for work but the second I do for fun. Which is why I think that Snapguide's bold and stylish move …

More: iPhone Hacks, GigaOM, Snapguide, Macgasm and Mashable!

Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch:

Chitika: iOS 6 Spike Likely Due To iPhone In China, Not Google Maps, As U.S. Growth Remains Flat — While a study this week from MoPub suggested that iOS 6 adoption indeed did see a spike coinciding with the introduction of Google Maps, Chitika has a new, longer-term look at adoption in the U.S …

More: MacRumors and PadGadget

Jamillah Knowles / The Next Web:

T-Mobile opens up pre-paid 4G access to its members in 14 markets via Solavei, on a band perfect for the iPhone — The low-cost contract-free service provider Solavei has announced that its users can now access up to 4G coverage on unlocked GSM iPhones in 37 new markets with the 1900MHz band.

More: Issues & Insights Blog, Business Wire, VentureBeat, The Verge, MacRumors, GeekWire, GigaOM, Ubergizmo, Gotta Be Mobile and Electronista

David Meyer / GigaOM:

Deutsche Telekom CEO Obermann to step down, CFO to take over — The head of Deutsche Telekom, Rene Obermann, is to step down in a year's time. He apparently requested that the board set a termination date for his contract of 31 December 2013, and his successor has been chosen.

More: Deutsche Telekom, Engadget, PhoneArena, BGR, Bloomberg, The Verge, Associated Press, iDownloadBlog.com and FierceWireless

Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:

4 Out of 10 Americans Have Connected Internet to TV — Still waiting for the Internet and TV to converge? It may have already happened. — Four out of 10 Americans have connected their TV to the Internet, according to a new Forrester study. If you're just talking about the whippersnappers …

Jon Russell / The Next Web:

Facebook starts rolling out new privacy settings, making it easier to control what data is public — Facebook announced plans to make its privacy control settings easier to find this month, and now a series of new menus and notifications has begun to roll out to users of the social network, initially in New Zealand.

More: CNET, AllFacebook, SiliconANGLE, Mashable! and WebProNews

Myriam Joire / Engadget:

Flipboard lands on Android tablets, now supports Nexus 10 — It's no secret that we're big fans of Flipboard here at Engadget, but there's one thing we've been longing for: a tablet-optimized Android version. Until now, running the app on the Nexus 10 (by sideloading the APK) or even the Nexus 7 …

More: Flipboard, Inside Flipboard, LAPTOP Magazine, The Verge, Gotta Be Mobile, GigaOM, The Next Web, ZDNet, AllThingsD, 9to5Google, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, CNET, SlashGear, PC Magazine, Know Your Cell and Mobile Magazine

Tricia Duryee / AllThingsD:

Google's Head of Shopping Says Company Has No Plans to Become a Retailer — If you've visited Google Shopping recently, you might confuse the search giant for a retailer. — Google Google's VP of Shopping Sameer Samat — At the top of the Shopping page, a photo shows a snowboarder floating …

More: The Verge, Search Engine Land, BGR and SlashGear

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