Techmeme
August 15, 2013, 10:20 AM

Top News

AllThingsD:
Facebook to Test Its Own PayPal Competitor in Bid to Simplify Mobile Purchases  —  Facebook plans to test a new payments product that would allow online shoppers to make purchases on mobile apps using their Facebook login information, according to sources familiar with the company's plans.
Jon Fingas / Engadget:
Lenovo posts Q1 earnings, reveals that its mobile sales have overtaken PCs  —  Don't look now, but Lenovo just became an industry bellwether.  While reporting strong first quarter results that include a record $8.8 billion in revenue and $170 million in profit, the tech giant revealed …
Juro Osawa / Digits:
Q&A: Lenovo CEO on Smartphones and BlackBerry  —  China's Lenovo Group Ltd. is outperforming its peers in the struggling personal-computer industry.  The world's largest PC vendor said Thursday that it posted a 23% rise in net profit and a 9.7% rise in revenue in its fiscal first quarter through June, beating analysts' expectations.
Juli Clover / MacRumors:
Apple Releases New App Store Review Guidelines with Updated Rules for Kids Apps, Gambling Apps  —  Apple has updated its App Store Review Guidelines, revising several sections and introducing a number of new rules based on various policies that have been enacted over the last six months.
Chris Morris / GamesIndustry International:
Former Steam boss Jason Holtman lands at Microsoft  —  Valve veteran will be focused on “making Windows a great platform for gaming”  —  Jason Holtman, who spearheaded Valve's Steam business for eight years before leaving the company in February, has a new job.
Ryan Lawler / TechCrunch:
Tastemade Raises Another $10 Million And Launches An iPhone App For Video Reviews Of Local Restaurants  —  In just 12 months since being founded, Los Angeles-based Tastemade has carved out a place for itself as the go-to place for high-quality videos about food on Facebook.
Klint Finley / Wired:
Meet the Hackers Who Want to Jailbreak the Internet  —  PORTLAND, OREGON — One guy is wearing his Google Glass.  Another showed up in an HTML5 t-shirt.  And then there's the dude who looks like the Mad Hatter, decked out in a top hat with an enormous white flower tucked into the brim.
More: Hillicon Valley.  Tweets: @jhong
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Google confirms critical Android crypto flaw used in $5,700 Bitcoin heist  —  Google developers have confirmed a cryptographic vulnerability in the Android operating system that researchers say could generate serious security glitches on hundreds of thousands of end user apps, many of them used to make Bitcoin transactions.
Chloe Albanesius / PC Magazine:
Roku Trumps Apple TV as Most-Used Streaming Media Player  —  The Roku is the most popular streaming video device in the U.S., trumping the Apple TV, according to new data from Parks Associates.  —  Of the 10,000 people polled by Parks, 37 percent of those with a streaming video media device used …
Blair Hanley Frank / GeekWire:
Worried about wildfires or floods?  Trulia heat maps help find safest places to live  —  If you're looking to buy a home, you don't want that investment taken away from you by a natural disaster.  While people who have lived in an area for a while often have a decent idea of the risks inherent …
Alex Colon / GigaOM:
Samsung announces the Hennessy, a dual-screen, quad-core Android flip phone  —  When you think of smartphones, the image of a sleek, minimalist slab is probably what comes to mind.  But how about a flip phone?  Now there's a form factor you don't see everyday - at least, not on any phone that's powered by Google.
Scott Buscemi / 9to5Mac:
iCloud.com beta updated with iOS 7 design  —  The beta.icloud.com website has been redesigned to match the design of iOS 7.  Removing the linen and other Forstall-era design elements, this is the first display of Apple bringing iOS 7 design elements to the web.
Dina Bass / Bloomberg:
Microsoft's First Chip Brings Tank-Finding Design to Xbox  —  Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), seeking to fend off competition for its Xbox game console by souping up the Kinect motion sensor, is tapping a new semiconductor developer: itself.  —  For the first time, the company will build its own processors based on an in-house design.
Ken Yeung / The Next Web:
eBay launches “My Gadgets”, an easy way to catalog, value and one day sell your gadgets  —  Today, online auction marketplace eBay launched a new product called “My Gadgets” that it says will let users catalog the tech devices they have and appraise them should they wish to sell any later.
Tom Simonite / MIT Technology Review:
Devices Connect with Borrowed TV Signals, and Need No Power Source  —  Devices that can make wireless connections even without an onboard battery could spread computing power into everything you own.  —  WHY IT MATTERS  —  Being able to create sensors and other electronics …
More: TechEye and Wired.co.uk.  Tweets: @davidbrin
Alex Konrad / Forbes:
The Creepy Ad Firm That's Charging Top Brands For YouTube Ads That Aren't Supposed To Exist  —  YouTube viewers with a penchant for downloading what they watch have been unwittingly participating in a sketchy advertising cycle that shows them ads in places YouTube and Google never meant for an ad to exist.
Derrick Harris / GigaOM:
Facebook's trillion-edge, Hadoop-based and open source graph-processing engine  —  People following the open source Giraph project likely know that Facebook was experimenting with it, and on Wednesday the company detailed just how heavily it's leaning on Giraph.
Anthony Ha / TechCrunch:
Ad-Free Social Platform App.net Raises Another $2.5M From Andreessen Horowitz  —  App.net, the social platform created in response to the ad-driven consumer social networks (specifically Twitter), just announced that it has raised $2.5 million in new funding.
More: App.net, InfoQ, bizjournals and The Next Web.  Tweets: @itod
John Paczkowski / AllThingsD:
BlackBerry Patent Portfolio Worth $2 Billion to $3 Billion  —  BlackBerry's continuing decline has left it with comparatively little to offer a potential acquirer.  There's a crumbling smartphone business, a too-late-to-market operating system that has failed to capture the imagination …
More: ZDNet and BGR.  Tweets: @johnpaczkowski
Nilay Patel / The Verge:
Yes, Gmail users have an expectation of privacy  —  Sending email to Gmail users means you expect Google's servers will process it  —  Consumer groups are up in arms today over a motion Google made in June to dismiss a class-action lawsuit alleging that Gmail violates federal …

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