Techmeme: School Districts Grapple With Glitches in Computer Tablets (Stephanie Banchero/Wall Street Journal)

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October 15, 2013, 11:15 AM

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Apple:

Angela Ahrendts to Join Apple as Senior Vice President of Retail and Online Stores — Apple® today announced that Angela Ahrendts, CEO of Burberry, will be joining Apple in a newly created position, as a senior vice president and member of our executive team, reporting to CEO Tim Cook.

Mark Gurman / 9to5Mac:

Tim Cook talks hiring of Angela Ahrendts as Retail chief, says she is ‘best person in the world for this role’ — Last night, Apple announced that it had finally found a new Head of Retail: Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts. Ahrendts has been CEO of the fashion retailer for several years …

More: MacRumors

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Apple Ups Its Fashion Cred, Names Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts As SVP Of Retail And Online Stores

More: Digits, Pocket-lint, Gizmodo, ZDNet, PhoneArena, memeburn and BBC

Washington Post:

NSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally — The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials …

Washington Post:

The NSA's problem? Too much data. — The National Security Agency's Special Source Operations branch manages “partnerships” in which U.S. and foreign telecommunications companies allow the NSA to use their facilities to intercept phone calls, e-mails and other data.

More: WebProNews, The Switch, TechCrunch, SiliconANGLE, ZDNet and Techdirt

Tweets: @evanchill and @astepanovich

Seth Weintraub / 9to5Google:

Google Watch is happening soon, heavy into Kit Kat/Google Now functionality — I recently heard word that Google was putting the finishing touches on a Watch product. Details are slim but the person seemed to think that Google Now functionality would be at the center of the product.

Sean Hollister / The Verge:

Flickr redesigns individual picture pages with 25 percent larger photos — Flickr has been all about putting big, bold, beautiful photos front and center since the website's massive redesign in May, but Yahoo just found one more place to make those photos bigger and more beautiful: individual photo pages.

More: Flickr Blog, VentureBeat, Gizmodo, The Next Web and Ubergizmo. Tweets: @iannolan1

Bonnie Cha / AllThingsD:

Sony's Latest Xperia Phones, SmartWatch 2 Launch in U.S.; No Carrier Announcements Yet — After making the rounds in Europe and Asia, Sony announced today the U.S. availability of its Xperia Z Ultra and Xperia Z1 smartphones, and the SmartWatch 2. But a word of caution: If you're eyeing one of these phones, it's going to cost you.

More: The Verge, 9to5Google, CNET, LAPTOP Magazine, TechHive, BGR, Engadget, Electronista, SlashGear and SlashGear

Serena Ng / Wall Street Journal:

Amazon cuts costs by shipping directly from warehouses of P&G and other key suppliers — Soap Opera: Amazon Moves in With P&G — E-Commerce Giant Sets Up Shop Inside Warehouses of Suppliers TUNKHANNOCK, Pa.—Atop a hill at the end of a road called P&G Warehouse Way sits a warehouse stocked …

More: I4U News, TechCrunch, ecommercebytes.com and Softpedia News

Tweets: @bfeld and @besvinick

Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:

Vox Media Raises $34 Million to Build SB Nation, the Verge, Polygon — Tech investors are supposed to avoid content businesses. But they do make exceptions: The people who brought you Huffington Post, for example, have been able to raise a ton of money for BuzzFeed.

More: GigaOM. Tweets: @justinnxt, @pkafka, @mattbuchanan and @danprimack. See also Mediagazer

The Switch:

Yahoo Mail switching to HTTPS connections by default in January, four years after GMail — Yahoo to make SSL encryption the default for Webmail users. Finally. — Beginning Jan. 8, Yahoo will enable encryption by default for users logging into its Web-based mail service, the company has told The Washington Post.

More: Digital Trends, Graham Cluley, SiliconANGLE, The Register, The Verge, WebProNews, Gizmodo, TechGeek and Softpedia News

Tweets: @_cypherpunks_, @csoghoian, @mattcutts and @accessnow

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Supercell Dominates The Realm: Game Maker Sells A 51%, $1.53B Stake To SoftBank and GungHo Online — Another big move for Softbank into the gaming world, and a massive investment for Finnish gaming juggernaut Supercell: the company is selling a 51% stake for $1.53 billion to Japan's SoftBank …

More: Supercell Blog, PC World, BGR, PandoDaily, Forbes, AllThingsD, ArcticStartup, The Next Web, Business Insider, Tech in Asia, GigaOM, Bloomberg, www.pocketgamer.biz and The Next Web

Stephanie Banchero / Wall Street Journal:

School Districts Grapple With Glitches in Computer Tablets — Districts Grapple With Glitches as Some Say Devices Can Supplement Lessons — Two elementary-school pupils in the Los Angeles district tool around with their tablets in August. Problems have stalled the district's tablet rollout.

Tweets: @lisafleisher and @drkeithsawyer

Jeff John Roberts / GigaOM:

A web page that lasts forever: the plan to stop “link rot” in law and science — Imagine a research library where most of the books are missing footnotes — where the bottom of the pages are stained or ripped out, making it impossible for scholars to tell the sources of information.

More: Times Higher Education, Business Insider and Ars Technica. Tweets: @jeffjohnroberts. See also Mediagazer

Mary Ellen Gordon / The Flurry Blog:

The South Korea Report: Device and App Trends in The First Saturated Device Market — In August of this year Flurry Analytics measured 33,527,534 active smartphones and tablets in South Korea. While that was only 2.8% of the entire worldwide connected device installed base Flurry measures …

More: The Next Web, Softpedia News, App Advice, textually.org, TechNode, TUAW, MacRumors and AppleInsider

Tweets: @benedictevans and @dujkan

Jon Russell / The Next Web:

UK retailer Argos announces the £100 MyTablet, an Android Jelly Bean tablet for kids — The UK's high streets are alive with the sound of own-brand tablets, or at least they will be soon after retailer Argos announced its first Android-powered device, following in the footsteps …

More: Guardian, BBC, Inquirer, BetaNews, Reuters, Softpedia News, T3 News, TechRadar.com, Lastest ITProPortal news and Pocket-lint

Bloomberg:

Netflix Gets TiVo Assist in Push to Join Cable-TV Lineup — Netflix Inc. (NFLX), pressing cable operators to grant equal footing to its Web-based films and television shows on pay-TV systems, is getting an assist from set-top box maker TiVo Inc. (TIVO) — Netflix, the world's largest …

More: GigaOM, Bloomberg and SlashGear. See also Mediagazer

Mikael Ricknäs / PC World:

VMware acquires Desktone, makes network virtualization generally available — VMware continues to push its plan to virtualize the whole data center, with the general availability of its network virtualization platform, and desktops too with the acquisition of desktop-as-a service company Desktone.

More: GigaOM, ZDNet and VMware Blogs

Amy Gesenhues / Search Engine Land:

Bing Gives IE11 Users A Quick Look At The Top Search Result With New “Pre-Rendering” Feature — Bing released a new search feature today that “almost instantly” renders the associated page of the top search result when clicked. With the goal of providing a “faster end-to-end search experience …

More: ZDNet, Search Blog, I4U News and Engadget

Richard Lawler / Engadget:

Lavabit reinstates service briefly so users can download emails, change passwords — Email provider Lavabit shut down in August due to government pressure in the wake the Edward Snowden leaks, but it is apparently re-opening — for a little while. A press release issued by Lavabit indicates …

More: PC World, InfoWorld, PR Newswire, Guardian, Inquirer, SlashGear, ZDNet, The Register, Electronista, The Verge and CNET

Mayumi Negishi / Wall Street Journal:

Sony, Microsoft Court Developers of Free-to-Play Titles for Its Consoles — Sony, Microsoft Court Developers of Free-to-Play Titles for Its Consoles Once seen as warring factions within the $66 billion videogame industry, advocates of the traditional console and free-to-play games are striking …

James Temple / The Technology Chronicles:

Google-backed startup seeks clearer economic signals through better, faster, stronger data — David Soloff, CEO of Premise Data Corp., at the company's San Francisco offices. — In the spring of 2009, entrepreneur David Soloff noticed his daily reality diverging from the headlines.

More: AllThingsD, Wall Street Journal, I4U News, GigaOM and Forbes. Tweets: @jtemple. Thanks:@techchronicle

Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security:

Thousands of Sites Hacked Via vBulletin Hole — Attackers appear to have compromised tens of thousands of Web sites using a security weakness in sites powered by the forum software vBulletin, security experts warn. — Attack tool for exploiting vulnerable vBulletin forums.

More: Securosis Highlights

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