Techmeme
August 7, 2013, 3:55 PM

Top News

IDC:
Apple Cedes Market Share in Smartphone Operating System Market as Android Surges and Windows Phone Gains, According to IDC  —  Despite beating Wall Street expectations in terms of shipment volumes, Apple's share in the worldwide smartphone operating system market posted a year-over-year decline during the second quarter of 2013 (2Q13).
Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:
AOL Makes the Biggest Buy of the Tim Armstrong Era: $405 Million for Adap.TV  —  Tim Armstrong hasn't bought anything for a couple years.  Now he has made his biggest purchase since taking over AOL in 2009: AOL is buying Web video company Adap.TV for $405 million in cash and stock.
David Pierce / The Verge:
LG's new G2: high-end smartphone in the front, button party in the back  —  It left very little up to the imagination, but LG has finally, officially, shown off the G2 smartphone it's been talking so much about.  The G2 is the company's new flagship, the first without the Optimus branding.
CBC News:
3 senior BlackBerry executives leaving company  —  Departures come almost 2 weeks after 250 layoffs in Waterloo  —  Almost two weeks after 250 employees were let go from BlackBerry's testing facility in Waterloo, Ont., CBC News has confirmed three senior members of the company will also be leaving.
Ina Fried / AllThingsD:
Apple Faces Hurdles Attracting First-Time Smartphone Buyers  —  While Apple does extremely well in the global and domestic smartphone markets, they aren't doing as well among first-time smartphone buyers as one might think.  —  A new study paints an interesting picture of the first-time phone buyer and the devices they are choosing.
New York Times:
Tech Magnates Bet on Booker in Web Venture  —  The conference room in the Mountain View, Calif., headquarters of LinkedIn was packed with the stars of Silicon Valley.  Top executives of Facebook, Google and Twitter gathered around a table; the billionaire Sean Parker looked on from a back row.
Dave Tach / Polygon:
John Carmack becomes Oculus CTO, will remain at id as well  —  John Carmack, the co-founder of id Software and creator of the Doom, Quake and Rage series of games, joined Oculus VR as its Chief Technical Officer, according to a post on the virtual reality headset's Kickstarter blog.
CNET:
Samsung co-CEO: We want Tizen to be on everything  —  In an interview with CNET Korea, Samsung's J.K. Shin talks about the opportunity for the upstart operating system to run on everything from smartphones to cars.  —  Samsung Electronics has broad ambitions for Tizen …
Anil Dash:
On Location with Foursquare  —  There's a great, deep story by Austin Carr in Fast Company today giving a broad overview of where Foursquare is headed, as a product and as a company.  I was quoted a few times in the piece, and spent a good bit of time talking to Austin …
More: Business Insider.  Tweets: @naveen
Harrison Weber / The Next Web:
Instagram brings video to Ice Cream Sandwich users, lets you import videos from your library  —  Instagram has just been updated to version 4.1 — the first major release since video landed in the Facebook-owned photo-sharing app.  —  With this update, users can now import video from their library …
Billy Gallagher / TechCrunch:
Failed Professional Network BranchOut Pivots To Workplace Chat  —  BranchOut, a startup that launched in July 2010 as a Facebook application for professional networking, has pivoted to be a messaging platform for teams of coworkers.  —  Users are authenticated by their work email addresses …
Liz Gannes / AllThingsD:
The Quiet Mobile Giant: With 300M Active Users, WhatsApp Adds Voice Messaging  —  WhatsApp, a tiny startup with a very basic idea, boring design and lots of competition, has somehow managed to connect up most of the world.  And that's actually pretty exciting.

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