Techmeme: Facebook's mobile hype, eyeballs and dollars grow. Is that enough? (Om Malik/GigaOM)

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April 4, 2013, 1:45 AM

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Adam Barth / Chromium Blog:

Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project — WebKit is a lightweight yet powerful rendering engine that emerged out of KHTML in 2001. Its flexibility, performance and thoughtful design made it the obvious choice for Chromium's rendering engine back when we started.

Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:

Google Forks WebKit And Launches Blink, A New Rendering Engine That Will Soon Power Chrome And Chrome OS — Google just announced that it is forking WebKit and launching this fork as Blink. As Google describes it, Blink is “an inclusive open source community” and “a new rendering engine based on WebKit” …

More: Ars Technica, Macgasm, ReadWrite, The Next Web and Electronista

Stephen Shankland / CNET:

Google parts ways with Apple over WebKit, launches Blink — Both Chrome and Safari will move faster when uncoupled from each other, Google argues. But it's not just about technology: social issues also factored into the schism. — A years-long marriage of convenience that linked Google …

More: Eric Bidelman and Jake Archibald. Tweets: @carnage4life

Emil Protalinski / The Next Web:

Opera confirms it will follow Google and ditch WebKit for Blink, as part of its commitment to Chromium

More: Macgasm

Brendan Eich / The Mozilla Blog:

Mozilla and Samsung Collaborate on Next Generation Web Browser Engine — Mozilla's mission is about advancing the Web as a platform for all. At Mozilla Research, we're supporting this mission by experimenting with what's next when it comes to the core technology powering the Web browser.

John Paczkowski / AllThingsD:

Samsung Buddies Up With Mozilla on New Android Browser Tech

More: Android Police

Evleaks / 9to5Google:

Facebook Home offers a fresh take on Android UI (Photos) — It should come as little surprise to industry observers that Facebook plans to unveil both a rich, skinned version of its Android app at a press event tomorrow, along with the first hardware to run that experience out of the box.

Twitter Blog:

New mobile updates for Android, iPhone and mobile web — We just released a new version of Twitter for Android. Its new design reflects a native Android experience: wider and taller timelines that fill the screen, a flat navigation bar, tap and hold for quick actions, and more.

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:

Twitter Is Building A Gateway To The “Web” Of Mobile Apps

More: GigaOM, PandoDaily and Inside Mobile Apps

Sean Ludwig / VentureBeat:

Bitcoin wallet service Instawallet hacked, shuts down ‘indefinitely’ — Updated at 12:57 p.m. with more detail about current Bitcoin prices. — Bitcoins are a hot commodity now, but are your Bitcoins actually safe? Bitcoin wallet company Instawallet has suspended its service “indefinitely” after being hacked.

More: Computerworld, Business Insider, TechCrunch, The Verge and The Next Web

Alex Fitzpatrick / Mashable:

Bitcoin Plunges By Nearly $30 As Largest Market Suffers Outage

More: The Verge, New York Magazine, CNNMoney.com, Guardian, Financial Times, CNET, VentureBeat and Forbes

Felix Salmon / Medium:

The Bitcoin Bubble and the Future of Currency

More: Business Insider, Statspotting!, Guardian, Unqualified Reservations, Betabeat, Salon, The Atlantic Wire, Wonkblog, Domain names … and eToro

Tweets: @dcurtis, @glennf, @ferenstein and @binarybits

Om Malik / GigaOM:

Facebook's mobile hype, eyeballs and dollars grow. Is that enough? — Facebook is likely to announce its own interpretation of Android tomorrow, perhaps in partnership with HTC. This will be company's first full-scale assault on the mobile business, a move that is being watched …

More: VentureBeat and Forbes

eMarketer:

Facebook to See Three in 10 Mobile Display Dollars This Year

More: AllThingsD, AdExchanger, Forbes and CNET

Simon Khalaf / The Flurry Blog:

Flurry Five-Year Report: It's an App World. The Web Just Lives in It — Five years ago, the iPhone ushered in the era of mobile computing. Today, more than a billion consumers are “glued” to these devices and their applications, impacting nearly every aspect of their lives.

More: CNET, BGR, The Next Web, Android Community, Fortune, Android Authority, TechCrunch and Mobile Marketing Watch. Tweets: @dannysullivan

Ina Fried / AllThingsD:

Samsung Decides to Build Its Own Stores — Inside Best Buy — Samsung is battling Apple on many fronts, and retail stores are no exception. — However, this time the company has opted not to follow the same path as its rival. Whereas Apple opened its own chain of stores …

More: Wall Street Journal, CNET, CNET, NYT Bits, Engadget, AllThingsD, The Verge and Bloomberg

Beth J. Harpaz / Associated Press:

Arthur Frommer gets Frommer brand back from Google — NEW YORK (AP) — Travel guru Arthur Frommer said Wednesday that he has reacquired rights to his travel guidebook brand from Google, and that he intends to resume publishing Frommer guidebooks. — Google acquired the Frommer brand …

More: CNET and Skift. Tweets: @skiftnews and @edbott

Greg Kumparak / TechCrunch:

Disney Shuts Down LucasArts Just 154 Days After Acquiring It — Pour one out for the Gold Guy tonight, my fellow gamers. A sage pillar of the industry has fallen. — Just 154 days after acquiring LucasArts as part of their larger, $4B acquisition of Lucasfilm, Disney has dissolved the classic video game development company.

More: Kotaku, Motherboard, Forbes, gameinformer.com and Computerworld

Agam Shah / PC World:

Prices of Windows RT tablets drop, point to failure of OS — Prices of Windows RT devices have started falling, signaling an attempt by PC makers to quickly clear out stock after poor adoption of tablets and convertibles with the operating system. — Microsoft released Windows RT …

More: Windows 8 Beta, WinBeta, ITworld.com, InfoWorld and Pocketnow

Matt McGee / Search Engine Land:

Google Upgrades Its Google Places Dashboard With Google+ Local Integration — Google has begun a staged upgrade of its Google Places Dashboard — the backend tool that allows local businesses to manage their business information that appears in Google's search results.

More: Google and Your Business, Understanding Google …, WebProNews, Search Engine Roundtable, Google Plus Daily, 9to5Google and Marketing Pilgrim

Matthew Panzarino / The Next Web:

Rdio launches Vdio social movie and TV service with an iPad app coming later today and $25 credit for Rdio subscribers — After being rumored for over a year, the movie and TV rental and purchase service Vdio soft-launched last night for premium Rdio subscribers in the US and UK.

Daniel Terdiman / CNET:

The untold story behind Apple's $13,000 operating system — CNET looks at newly surfaced contracts, design specs, and page after page of schematics and code, revealing how Apple created its first disk OS, a chapter of Silicon Valley history critical to its later success.

More: The Verge and TUAW

Casey Chan / Gizmodo:

Holy Crap, Is This Mark Zuckerberg's Embarrassing Childhood Angelfire Website? — The word on the interwebs today is that this 1999 Angelfire page belongs to one Mark Zuckerberg. Yes, that Mark Zuckerberg, which means this could be the very first website that the hoody that made Facebook ever created.

More: The Verge, NEWS.com.au, CNET and Yahoo! News. Tweets: @dannysullivan

Anthony Ha / TechCrunch:

Owen Thomas Joins ReadWrite As Editor-in-Chief, Says He Will Take The Site ‘Back To Our Roots’ — Say Media just announced that Owen Thomas, previously the West Coast Editor at Business Insider, has joined ReadWrite (a tech blog that Say acquired in 2011) as editor-in-chief.

More: Say Media. Tweets: @qthrul, @owenthomas, @marshallk and @ricmac

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