Techmeme
September 16, 2013, 7:35 AM

Top News

Roger Cheng / CNET:
Sprint preps ‘One Up,’ its own early upgrade program  —  Sprint One Up allows customers to pay for their devices in monthly installments and upgrade after one year, CNET has learned.  —  Better late than never, Sprint is finally getting into the early upgrade game.
Spiegel Online:
NSA Spies on International Payments  —  The United States' NSA intelligence agency is interested in international payments processed by companies including Visa, SPIEGEL has learned.  It has even set up its own financial database to track money flows through a “tailored access operations” division.
Ernesto / TorrentFreak:
Netflix Uses Pirate Sites to Determine What Shows to Buy  —  Video streaming giant Netflix sees itself as one of the most prominent competitors to the many pirate sites that offer video content without owners' permission.  —  However, these pirate sites also offer Netflix valuable information …
Ben Sisario / New York Times:
Rdio to announce ad-supported free tier in partnership with radio operator Cumulus  —  Online Music Service Rdio in Deal With Cumulus  —  As radio broadcasters go digital and online music services try to stand out in a crowded market, both are finding ways to scratch each other's backs.
Thomas Schulz / Spiegel Online:
Google Translate Has Ambitious Goals for Machine Translation  —  Can the language barrier be breached?  Google certainly thinks so: Under the leadership of a computer scientist from Germany, the company is making progress toward a universal translation tool.  But competition is looming from Microsoft and Facebook.
Billy Gallagher / TechCrunch:
Silicon Valley Luminaries Got Grilled On The NSA At Disrupt, Here's How They Responded  —  On Monday, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington wrote that he would press the CEOs, VCs, and other Silicon Valley leaders who he was interviewing at TechCrunch Disrupt about the NSA scandal.
More: Forbes
George Hahn / Generic Maker:
Why the PhoneBloks phone will never happen  —  It's a physics issue.  Signals in modern devices are extremely high speed; the easiest and cheapest way to combat this is to bring components closer together.  For example, the wireless radios, RAM, and processor in all modern phones exist as one chip.
Mark Gurman / 9to5Mac:
Apple Stores to show off iPhone 5s Touch ID feature using demo app  —  One of the cornerstone features of Apple's upcoming iPhone 5s is the Touch ID fingerprint scanning system.  The feature allows an iPhone 5s user to unlock their iPhone or authenticate iTunes/App Store/iBooks downloads …
Mike Butcher / TechCrunch:
Conduit, Worth $1.4BN, Merges With Email Giant Perion (Worth $153M)  —  Conduit, the Israeli-based browser-toolbar and mobile startup estimated to be worth some $1.4 billion, has confirmed it is merging with Perion Network.  Conduit's Client Connect business and Perion will combine in an all-stock transaction.
More: GeekTime.  Thanks:@mikebutcher
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Tumblr Inks Firehose Deal With DataSift To Tumble Further Into The World Of Big Media Advertising  —  When Yahoo acquired Tumblr for $1.1 billion earlier this year, Yahoo's CEO Marissa Mayer and CFO Ken Goldman both pointed out that advertising on the site (and revenues from those ads) …

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.
Zoho:
Introducing Campus: The digital home for educational institutions  —  Every educational institution needs a place where students, teachers, and administrators can find one another, communicate …
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.
Soxton:
Fast, affordable law for startups  —  Soxton automates startup legal so founders can move faster and sleep better.  We handle incorporation, advisor, employment and commercial contracts.  Join the waitlist for early access!

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:
Anthropic's IPO Leak, OpenAI's Dots vs. Meta's Muse, Visual Turing Test
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.
Sources:
OpenAI's Dots lead on the future of ChatGPT
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.
Great Chat:
What does the tech industry owe San Francisco?
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.
Uncapped with Jack Altman:
David George from a16z
Conversations with people I admire about things I'm genuinely interested in.
Subscribe to Uncapped with Jack Altman.
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.
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.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 7:35 AM ET, September 16, 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.

More News

Earlier Picks

Josh Lowensohn / CNET: