Techmeme: Intel's homage to Raspberry Pi: The much pricier Minnowboard (Iain Thomson/The Register)

Open Links In New Tab

Mobile Archives Advertise Site News Contact Editors

July 31, 2013, 11:35 AM

Top News

Glenn Greenwald / Guardian:

XKeyscore: NSA tool collects ‘nearly everything a user does on the internet’ — A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals …

More: TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, GigaOM, Hillicon Valley, Business Insider, The Next Web, Softpedia News, WebProNews and Salon

Tweets: @0xabad1dea, @jayrosen_nyu, @nikcub, @kashhill, @samsteinhp, @viticci, @mdudas, @jeffjarvis and @ggreenwald

See also Mediagazer

Guardian:

XKeyscore presentation from 2008 - read in full

More: Inquirer. Tweets: @janinegibson

Phil Mattingly / Bloomberg:

U.S. Declassifies Court Order Allowing Record Collection

More: Office of the Director …, Engadget and New York Times

Quip Blog:

Introducing Quip — Today, we are extremely excited to launch Quip. Quip is a modern word processor that enables you to create beautiful documents on any device — phones, tablets and the desktop. If you haven't already, download Quip to try it out. — Why Quip?

More: AllFacebook, ZDNet, ReadWrite, memeburn and 9to5Mac

Tweets: @dannysullivan, @joshconstine, @stevesi, @levie, @eghosao, @rabois and @btaylor

Thanks:@hunterwalk

Josh Constine / TechCrunch:

Quip Is A Beautiful New Mobile-First Word Processor From Ex-Facebook CTO Bret Taylor

More: AllThingsD, MacRumors, SiliconANGLE, New York Times, GigaOM, Business Insider, App Advice, Engadget and The Next Web

Tweets: @fbajak, @jlanzone, @tedr, @hunterwalk and @joshconstine

AnandTech:

Update on GPU Optimizations in Galaxy S 4 — Yesterday we posted our analysis of the Exynos 5 Octa's behavior in international versions of the Galaxy S 4 in certain benchmarks first discovered by Beyond3D user @AndreiF. Samsung addressed issue on their blog earlier today:

More: LAPTOP Magazine, The Next Web, PC Magazine and Digits

Aaron Souppouris / The Verge:

Samsung claims innocence in face of benchmark-rigging allegations

More: SAMSUNG TOMORROW Global, Guardian, Gizmodo, The Next Web, Crave, 9to5Google, PhoneArena, Sammy Hub and Android Police

Jordan Kahn / 9to5Google:

Google gives AT&T the boot, will supply 7000 US Starbucks locations with WiFi starting next month — After a brief announcement back in June that it had partnered with Starbucks to offer free, unlimited music through its new Google Play All Access streaming service, Google today announced …

More: The Official Google Blog, CNET, TechCrunch, GigaOM, The Next Web, Engadget, The Verge, iClarified, iDownloadBlog.com, Macgasm and Softpedia News. Tweets: @hunterwalk

Tom Warren / The Verge:

Microsoft Office for Android now available, but not for tablets — Microsoft is extending its Office mobile software to Android this week, bringing basic editing to smartphones running Android 4.0 or higher. Following the release of Office for iPhone, the Android variant is almost identical in what it provides and its requirements.

Tom Warren / The Verge:

Microsoft forced to rename SkyDrive following trademark case with broadcaster — A UK court recently ruled that Microsoft's SkyDrive name infringed on a trademark owned by British Sky Broadcasting Group (BSkyB), and the software maker has agreed to change the name of its cloud-based service worldwide as a result.

More: Engadget. Tweets: @tomwarren

Edmund Lee / Bloomberg:

Facebook Said to Plan to Sell TV-Style Ads for $2.5M Each — Facebook Inc. (FB), seeking to break the long-held dominance of television over advertising budgets, plans to sell TV-style commercials on its site for as much as $2.5 million a day, two people familiar with the matter said.

Liz Gannes / AllThingsD:

Dropcam Snaps Up $30M for Connected Video Cameras — A recent generation of Web-connected hardware startups — Withings, Fitbit (unofficial), and now Dropcam — have in the past few months raised $30 million each to scale their businesses. Funnily enough, it seems to be a magic number for the cohort …

More: GigaOM, The Verge, TechCrunch, Business Insider, The Next Web, VentureBeat and bizjournals

Brian X. Chen / NYT Bits:

OpenTable Begins Testing Mobile Payments — OpenTable, the world's largest online reservation service, lets users book a restaurant reservation with its smartphone app or Web site. Now the company is getting ready to take the next step and let diners pay for the meal with its app, too.

More: AllThingsD, The Next Web, Digital Trends, Engadget and MobilePaymentsToday.com News

Todd Bishop / GeekWire:

Microsoft Surface revenue so far: $853 million — Microsoft just filed its annual Form 10-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and deep in the filing is the first public disclosure of the company's revenue from its Surface tablet lineup: $853 million.

More: PC World, SiliconANGLE, iDownloadBlog.com, BGR, InfoWorld, ZDNet, MacRumors, AllThingsD, Inquirer, Daring Fireball, Reuters, I4U News, LAPTOP Magazine, The Tech Report, Softpedia News, The Next Web and PhoneArena. Tweets: @ckindel. Thanks:@taylor_soper

Walter S. Mossberg / AllThingsD:

Review of Google's New Chromecast — Google is trying to change television watching again, after the tepid response to its Google TV product a few years back. This time, instead of building a complex system to bring apps and Internet video to the TV, the search giant is taking a simpler approach.

More: 9to5Mac, iDownloadBlog.com and Apple Bitch

Barb Darrow / GigaOM:

Here are the 7 companies Microsoft doesn't want its ex-Windows chief to join — Since Steven Sinofsky and Microsoft shocked the PC world by divorcing last year, some details of Sinofsky's severance have already surfaced. But now we know, thanks to Microsoft's 10-K filing …

More: GeekWire, AllThingsD and Gizmodo. Tweets: @rebeccabuckman

Ryan Singel / Wired:

Now That It's in the Broadband Game, Google Flip-Flops on Network Neutrality — In a dramatic about-face on a key internet issue yesterday, Google told the FCC that the network neutrality rules Google once championed don't give citizens the right to run servers on their home broadband connections …

More: DSLreports, GigaOM, The Verge and Mashable

Tweets: @rsingel and @gaberivera

Jeff Blagdon / The Verge:

FileMaker dropping Bento database app for Mac and iOS — FileMaker is dropping Bento, the consumer-friendly database app for OS X and iOS, in order to focus on its core products. The Mac app was first released in 2008 to generally positive reviews, followed by an iPhone version the following year and an iPad version in 2010.

More: MacRumors, 9to5Mac, Macworld, Softpedia News, App Advice and TUAW

Sean Hollister / The Verge:

Nvidia Shield review — Is Android ready for a portable game console? — Last summer, I bought an iPad 3. I convinced myself I'd use it for everything: showing off wedding photos, reading all those neglected articles I save to Pocket, and as a second monitor for my laptop.

More: VentureBeat, Engadget, IGN, Joystiq, Gearburn, Android Central, IntoMobile, AnandTech, CNET and SlashGear

Tweets: @whatthebit and @a_webster

Mark Collins / GSM Insider:

Moto X To Use Nano-SIM Card, SIM Tray Leaks In Hong Kong — Moto X leaks again and again. This time is about the Nano-SIM tray of the Moto X. It was leaked earlier in an Asian country, Hong Kong. It looks like Moto X is available in different parts of the world.

More: 9to5Google, GigaOM, Gizmodo, Phones Review, Engadget, SlashGear, Ubergizmo, The Verge and IntoMobile

Amir Efrati / Wall Street Journal:

Google's Privacy Balancing Act — Internal Debates Arise Over Using Collected Information and Protecting Privacy — In 2011, Google Inc. Chief Executive and co-founder Larry Page asked executives to develop a new, simplified privacy tool that would act as a kind of sliding scale …

More: The Verge. Tweets: @amir

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:

Nintendo swings back to net profit, but it sold only 160K Wii U consoles in past quarter — Swinging back into a net profit, Nintendo today reported financial results for the first quarter ended June 30. But the company reported a sizable operating loss, and it sold only 160,000 Wii U game consoles from April 1 to June 30.

More: Guardian, TechHive, The Register, Geek.com, Tech in Asia, Reuters, The Next Web and GeekWire

App Annie Blog:

App Annie Index - Market Q2 2013: Google Play Exceeds iOS App Store in App Downloads by 10% in Q2 2013 — Welcome to the App Annie Market Index, where at the end of each quarter, we review the latest download and revenue insights by stores, countries and categories.

More: VentureBeat, BGR, Forbes, AllThingsD and PhoneArena

Iain Thomson / The Register:

Intel's homage to Raspberry Pi: The much pricier Minnowboard — Open source, or open your wallet? — The huge popularity of the British-designed Raspberry Pi has caught Chipzilla's attention, and so you can now buy a similar bare-bones x86 PC named Minnowboard with a similar caseless design running an Angstrom Linux build.

More: Geek.com

Jeff Blagdon / The Verge:

Zynga sues ‘Bang With Friends’ maker for trademark infringement — Zynga is going after hookup app Bang With Friends, suing its maker with trademark infringement over its use of the phrase “with friends” — common to a series of Zynga games including Words With Friends and Chess With Friends.

More: Guardian, BBC, Business Insider, Betabeat, GigaOM, Inquirer, GamesIndustry International, Macgasm, Polygon and memeburn

Tweets: @inafried, @mikeisaac, @panzer and @ryanlawler

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:

Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning — SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds. Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.

Cloudflare:

Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference — Stop preparing for agents. Start running them. 100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.

Zoho:

The 90-day recognition cliff: Why praise programs fade, and what keeps them alive — Recognition programs often start with enthusiasm. Employees participate, managers share shoutouts, and teams have a new way to celebrate achievements.

IDrive:

Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Sponsor Techmeme

Featured Podcasts

Channels with Peter Kafka:

David Ellison's Paramount-Warner Empire & The Fight That Comes Next

Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.

Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.

Sources:

Factory CEO on why AGI is already here

Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.

Subscribe to Sources.

Invest Like the Best:

Noah Shinn - Building Instinct: The Personal Agent

The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.

Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.

Lenny's Podcast:

The grief, loneliness, and burnout sweeping through the tech industry right now | Molly Graham

Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.

Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.

Big Technology Podcast:

Meta's Muse Revival, Frontier AI Under Threat, The Rise Of Dopamine Sites

The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.

Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.

Great Chat:

Doomers at Dreamforce

A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.

Subscribe to Great Chat.

Add your podcast here

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 11:35 AM ET, July 31, 2013.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.