Techmeme: Expecting the Unexpected From Jeff Bezos (New York Times)

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August 19, 2013, 1:55 AM

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MG Siegler / TechCrunch:

Goldfinger: The Next iPhone — “Gold? All over?” M asks James Bond upon hearing how Jill Masterson died in 1964′s Goldfinger. While Bond goes on to explain that the gold coating on Ms. Masterson caused her to die of “skin suffocation”, the same fate will not befall the next iPhone.

New York Times:

Expecting the Unexpected From Jeff Bezos — EARLY employees of Amazon still remember the day the company took away their aspirin. — It was late 1999. After years of heady excess, the Internet boom was beginning to falter. Amazon, among the most celebrated of the dot-coms, was burdened with debt and spiraling losses.

More: AllThingsD and Business Insider. Tweets: @sfiegerman, @mathewi, @jfdulac, @bussgang, @nxthompson, @stevekovach, @herbgreenberg, @karaswisher and @erik_hayden. See also Mediagazer

Wall Street Journal:

Beats By Dre Looks to Drop HTC — The maker of the popular Beats by Dr. Dre headphones is looking to buy out its Asian partner and bring in a new investor that can provide it with fresh funds for growth, people familiar with the matter said. The moves come as the founders of Beats Electronics LLC …

More: Digits and VentureBeat. Tweets: @hunterwalk and @monkbent

Peter Bright / Ars Technica:

Celebrity endorsements: Turning tech companies around since 2010

Jacob Weisberg / Vogue:

Yahoo's Marissa Mayer: Hail to the Chief — As she works to reverse the fortunes of a failing Silicon Valley giant, Yahoo's Marissa Mayer has fueled a national debate about the office life, motherhood, and what it takes to be the CEO of the moment. — “I really like even numbers, and I like heavily divisible numbers.

More: USA Today, New York Magazine, The Atlantic Wire, CNBC, Bloomberg, DealBook, Mashable, Salon, The Huffington Post, The Tell and New York Times

Tweets: @ajs, @jonsteinberg31, @karaswisher and @nytimesbits

Jack Hitt / New York Times:

An Inventor Wants One Less Wire to Worry About — SOMETIMES, there is an actual eureka moment. For Meredith Perry, it was in late 2010, during her senior year studying astrobiology at the University of Pennsylvania. She was searching for an idea to enter into the college's innovation competition.

Tweets: @eirepreneur, @meredithperry, @ladybits and @cdixon

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:

Dalton Caldwell: App.net may not have won yet, but we are still fighting the good fight — When entrepreneur Dalton Caldwell launched the open platform known as App.net a year ago this week, it looked like a fool's errand. It didn't help that everyone seemed to see the new service as an attempt …

Tweets: @mathewi. Thanks:@mathewi

Laura Hazard Owen / GigaOM:

Barnes & Noble drops Nook with GlowLight price to $99. New model on the way? — Barnes & Noble dropped the price of its front-lit e-reader, the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight, to $99 on Sunday, from $119. This makes the Nook with GlowLight the only front-lit reader on the market under $99.

More: VentureBeat, TechCrunch, TechnoBuffalo, Forbes, PC Magazine, SlashGear and Engadget

Louis Kowolowski / Silent Circle Blog:

Why can't email be secure? — Coming on the heels of our announcement that we had shut down our Silent Mail service, we received a comment about securing email communications. “In a recent press release, your company stated it was impossible to secure email communication ‘as we know it’.

More: The Verge and Forbes. Tweets: @marypcbuk, @jonrussell and @carnage4life

Gregg Keizer / Computerworld:

Mozilla to ship ‘Metro-ized’ Firefox Dec. 10 — If all goes well, touch-enabled Windows 8 browser will ship as part of Firefox 26 — Mozilla will launch Firefox for Microsoft's Windows 8 “Modern” user interface in mid-December, more than a year after the operating system's launch …

More: PC Advisor, ZDNet, Business Insider, The Next Web, TechnoBuffalo and WinBeta

Dante D'Orazio / The Verge:

Researchers pose as scammers to cut back on bogus Twitter accounts — Results help Twitter shut down ‘several million’ spammy accounts — Spam is a problem, and any Twitter user knows well that the social network has its fair share of it. A team of researchers is working to fight back, however.

Ted Mann / Metropolis:

Paying Some Cabbies Won't Involve Cash or a Card Swipe … As New York City taxi riders experiment with smartphone apps to hail yellow cabs, one feature taking root in other cities isn't yet available here: bypassing the meter, the card swipe or the wad of cash and simply paying with a tap of the phone.

More: The Verge, VeriFone Global, Engadget, InformationWeek, Fast Company and GigaOM

Patrick Thibodeau / Computerworld:

Obama and Romney big data experts continue the battle as businesses — Big data is used to help Democrat Senate candidate Cory Booker in New Jersey — WASHINGTON — The self-described nerds of President Obama's presidential campaign last year were back using big data analytics …

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