Techmeme
September 26, 2013, 3:55 PM

Top News

TechCrunch:
EBay's PayPal Acquires Payments Gateway Braintree For $800M In Cash  —  Ebay's PayPal has acquired Chicago-based payments gateway Braintree, in an all-cash deal worth $800 million.  We had originally reported that Braintree was on the block, with Square and PayPal both in acquisition talks for the company.
David Meyer / GigaOM:
Seriously, Samsung?  Sorry, roamers, but the new Galaxy Note 3 is region-locked  —  People buying the unlocked Galaxy Note 3 in regions such as Europe or North America will not be able to a SIM card from another region in it, meaning they will have to pay exorbitant roaming fees if they travel outside the region.
Taylor Soper / GeekWire:
Finally: Bill Gates admits Control-Alt-Delete was a mistake  —  Bill Gates made many exceptional decisions while he was leading Microsoft to immense success.  He did, however, make a few errors.  —  Bill Gates chats with David Rubenstein, Harvard Campaign co-chair.
Eric Chemi / Businessweek:
Listen Up Apple Haters: iPhone Sales Eclipse Microsoft and Amazon  —  Apple CEO Tim Cook has taken plenty of flack for running a company that is supposedly well past its glory days—and the iPhone smartphone franchise is sometimes dismissed as a spent force, losing ground to other more innovative brands like Android and Samsung.
Mark Gurman / 9to5Mac:
Apple releases iOS 7.0.2 with fix for Lock screen passcode bypass flaw  —  Apple has released iOS 7.0.2 over-the-air for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.  This is a bug fix release that focuses on rectifying an issue that could allow users to bypass the passcode unlock on the Lock screen.
TechCrunch:
Evernote Announces A Market For Physical Products, Including Post-Its ... And Socks?  —  Evernote, the popular note-taking app with 75 million users, today unveiled the latest chapter in its bid to become the go-to place for people to store all their memories — a decisive move into physical merchandise.
More: Engadget and ZDNet
Howard Blume / Los Angeles Times:
LA officials may delay school iPad rollout after students hack them for personal use  —  LAUSD halts home use of iPads for students after devices hacked  —  LAUSD students have figured out how to bypass security restrictions on iPads issued to them by the school district, giving them access to non-scholastic Internet sites.
Dana Wollman / Engadget:
Stir's Kinetic Desk is a standing desk that learns your sitting habits, moves when you need a break (video)  —  If Apple were to build a desk, it would look like this.  Much like Nest, maker of the world's sexiest thermostat, Stir is a company founded by someone who worked on the first iPods …
John Paczkowski / AllThingsD:
BlackBerry Manufacturing Partner Looking to Bail  —  BlackBerry's ongoing collapse is becoming a serious drag on the company's manufacturing partner Jabil Circuit.  So much so that Jabil is considering ending its business relationship with the struggling smartphone pioneer.
More: The Verge, BGR and Engadget
Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:
Hopster Promises Netflix for Kids, and No One Else  —  If you're a certain kind of parent, then you know that Netflix is a pretty excellent babysitter.  But Netflix, and rival services like Amazon's Instant Prime, have lots of movies and TV shows that aren't aimed at kids.
Benjamin Mayo / 9to5Mac:
Major update to VLC for Mac adds 4K support, improved MKV support, interface improvements and more  —  VideoLAN has released version 2.1 of its popular open source video player, VLC.  The update — codenamed “Ricewind” — brings new audio processing to the app, to improve both processing performance and audio fidelity.
More: iMore, The Verge and TUAW
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Mobile Deal-Finding App Shopular Raises $6.4 Million Series A From Sequoia  —  While most mobile applications today are heavily concerned with getting users to remember to open them regularly, mobile deal-finding application Shopular has been content to run in the background …
John Markoff / New York Times:
Researchers Build a Working Carbon Nanotube Computer  —  PALO ALTO, Calif. — A group of Stanford researchers has moved a step closer to answering the question of what happens when silicon, the standard material in today's microelectronic circuits, reaches its fundamental limits for use in increasingly small transistors.
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
JustFab Raises Another $40M Led By Hong Kong's Shining Capital To Take Its Fashion Subscription Commerce Model To Asia And Beyond  —  Hot on the heels of its merger with rival ShoeDazzle (yes, pun intended), subscription-based fashion commerce site JustFab, now with 35 million users …
Michael Lee / ZDNet:
Google Hangouts/GTalk glitch sends chats to wrong recipients  —  Summary: [UPDATE] Be careful what you say over Google's instant messenger, as they may be sent to the wrong person.  Google has acknowledged an issue and is looking into it.  —  Michael Lee  —  [UPDATE] Google's Hangouts …

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
SubQ Snap 1.1: the first long-context decision model for real enterprise work  —  Tied for #1 on the AA Decision Index, Snap is a multimodal model with a 384k-token context window for fast reasoning and agentic decisions.
Command Line:
GitHub Universe 2026: Highlights from the developer's developer conference  —  Copilot Fusion was the belle of the ball, but the hero at the heart of the two-day event was the developer community.
Zoho:
3 smarter updates for your staffing pipeline  —  Staffing recruiters manage multiple client requirements, large candidate databases, and tight submission deadlines.  Finding suitable candidates is only the first step.
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.

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:
Big Tech's Ugly Week, Getting Rich At Anthropic, AI Costs Plunge
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.
Machine Gods:
OpenAI's Latest Discoveries Spark a Backlash + Help! My Kid Hates AI
The official podcast of the singularity, from Casey Newton and Kevin Roose. Twice-weekly news, analysis, and interviews with the people who are building the future.
Subscribe to Machine Gods.
The Upstarts Podcast:
The Accidental YC Founder Solving AI's GPU Crisis | SF Compute's Evan Conrad
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
Cheeky Pint:
Why Sam Altman is against a single superintelligence
Stripe cofounder John Collison interviews founders, builders, and leaders over a pint.
Subscribe to Cheeky Pint.
Great Chat:
The case for AI optimism
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.
Sources:
Tobi Lütke on the AI agent revolution and future of Shopify
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.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 3:55 PM ET, September 26, 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

Greg Sterling / Marketing Land:
Reuters: