Techmeme: Square acquires Viewfinder so sellers can create ‘personal, human experiences’ for their customers (Ken Yeung/The Next Web)

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December 3, 2013, 3:10 PM

Top News

Ben Popper / The Verge:

UPS researching its own delivery drones to compete with Amazon's Prime Air — Flying parcel-carriers are the next logical frontier for delivery companies — Amazon made headlines Sunday night when it announced it was working on small drones that could someday deliver customers packages in half an hour or less.

More: GeekWire, Los Angeles Times, Digital Trends, Engadget, TechCrunch, stratechery, Gotta Be Mobile and Business Insider

Tweets: @kevinroose and @samfbiddle

Marcus Wohlsen / Wired:

Even if the Feds Let Them Fly, Amazon's Delivery Drones Are Still Nonsense — Amazon took over the 24-hour news cycle last night with the unveiling of Prime Air, an aerial drone that can fly Amazon packages straight to your front porch. The world's largest online retailer duped 60 Minutes …

More: BGR, CITEworld, Forbes, Bloomberg, Network World, AnandTech, Wired.co.uk, All Points Blog, CBS San Francisco, PhoneArena, Facebook and USA Today. Tweets: @benedictevans

Stuart Dredge / Guardian:

Spotify opens up analytics in effort to prove its worth to doubting musicians — Streaming music firm opens Spotify Artists website and claims when it reaches 40m subscribers, even ‘niche indie albums’ will earn $17k a month — Streaming music service Spotify is hoping to win …

More: Spotify for Artists, Ars Technica, Inquirer, Digits, Gigaom, SiliconBeat, The Independent, TechRadar.com, Digital Music News, Engadget, The Next Web, Music Week, SlashGear, Music Week, Telegraph, Music Ally, The Verge, I4U News, Evolver.fm, hypebot and TechCrunch

Tweets: @bwerde and @tobias_nielsen

Thanks:@stuartdredge. See also Mediagazer

Gautham Nagesh / Wall Street Journal:

The Agency Running HealthCare.gov Mostly Kept to Itself as Warning Signs Grew About the Website — When warning signs emerged earlier this year, the agency running the HealthCare.gov website mostly kept the problems to itself—a decision that now looms large in explaining how the project went so badly astray.

Tweets: @stefaniei

Washington Post:

Officials estimate a third of people enrolled through HealthCare.gov affected by system errors

More: ABC News, PandoDaily, The Week, ThinkProgress and The Wire

Tweets: @sarahkliff, @washingtonpost, @shawnanbcnews and @sarahkliff

Ken Yeung / The Next Web:

Square acquires Viewfinder so sellers can create ‘personal, human experiences’ for their customers — Square has acquired Viewfinder, a company specializing in helping you “organize, share, and relive memories” with friends and loved ones. The move will see Viewfinder eventually shut …

More: Square Engineering Blog, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Gigaom, Engadget, ZDNet and AllThingsD

Kevin C. Tofel / Gigaom:

Motorola apologizes for Moto X Cyber Monday snafus, extends deal — Claiming it wasn't ready for the high volume of orders on discounted Moto X handsets on Monday morning, Motorola apologized later that same evening for the hours of customer frustration. A blog post from Motorola CEO Dennis …

More: The Official Motorola Blog, PC Magazine, AllThingsD, Los Angeles Times, The Verge, TechHive, CNET, Droid Life, Unwired View, Pocketables, Yahoo! News, TechnoBuffalo, iPhone, MobileBurn.com, 9to5Google, The Next Web, PhoneNews.com, Android Beat and 9to5Toys

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Intel Makes Another Acquisition: Hacker League, A Platform For Hackathons, Is Now A Part Of Mashery — Intel's acquisition spree continues apace, with the latest being made to augment one of its other recent acquisitions. It is buying Hacker League, a popular platform for managing hackathons …

More: Digits, PandoDaily, ZDNet, ProgrammableWeb and The Next Web. Tweets: @swiftalphaone

Kit Chellel / Bloomberg:

Nokia Gets Ruling Blocking Sales of HTC's One Mini Phone in U.K. — A London judge said HTC Corp. (2498) couldn't sell its One Mini phone in the U.K. from Dec. 6 after it was found to have infringed patents owned by Nokia Oyj. (NOK1V) — While Judge Richard Arnold also ruled that HTC's …

More: FOSS Patents, Engadget, The Next Web, Pocket-lint, Phandroid, Android Central, Pocketables, Geeky Gadgets, Electronista, CNET, Gigaom, BGR, PhoneArena, Inquirer, Android Beat, Phones Review, pocketnow.com and Softpedia News. Tweets: @marypcbuk

Matthew Green / A Few Thoughts …:

How does the NSA break SSL? — A few weeks ago I wrote a long post about the NSA's ‘BULLRUN’ project to subvert modern encryption standards. I had intended to come back to this at some point, since I didn't have time to discuss the issues in detail. But then things got in the way.

Tweets: @dennisf, @csoghoian and @glynmoody

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:

E La Carte Scores Deal With Applebee's, Bringing 100,000 Tableside Tablets To All U.S. Locations By Year-End 2014 — Applebee's, the largest casual dining chain in the U.S., has signed a deal with restaurant tablet hardware and software provider E la Carte, which will see it introducing 100 …

More: Examiner, USA Today, Y Combinator Posthaven, TIME, Engadget and Business Insider. Tweets: @scottkirsner

Agam Shah / PC World:

HP Slate tablets running Android Jellybean hit the market — Hewlett-Packard's latest Android tablets with multiple screen sizes are available through the company's website. — HP Slate 7 Extreme — The tablets run Android 4.2, code-named Jellybean, and are listed at the company's tablet page.

More: Ars Technica, GadgeTell, IntoMobile, Gotta Be Mobile, Android Authority, Engadget, Digital Trends, Android Community, Android Police, Unwired View and Phandroid

Jon Russell / The Next Web:

PayPal launches a digital gift store, featuring Apple as its sole launch partner — A week after adding support for prepaid gift cards, payments giant PayPal has launched its own digital gift store to allow US -based customers to buy gift cards for friends and family using its service.

More: The Official PayPal, Engadget, App Advice, Electronista, Geeky Gadgets, iPhone, iDownloadBlog.com, Gotta Be Mobile, 9to5Mac, Inquirer, MacStories and Softpedia News

Rob Wile / Business Insider:

Stockholm-based KnCMiner sells $8 million worth of bitcoin mining hardware in 24 hours — Bitcoin Developer Sells $8 Million Worth Of Hardware In 24 Hours, As Mining Technology Arms Race Goes Insane — Stockholm-based KnCMiner sold $8 million worth of their new $10,000-a-pop bitcoin miners …

More: ReadWrite, TechSpot and Geeky Gadgets

Mikey Campbell / AppleInsider:

Future iPhones may unlock, hide messages based on a user's face — Apple on Tuesday was granted a patent that uses facial recognition technology to control a computing device, like an iPhone, iPad or Mac, allowing for a more secure and productive operating environment. — Source: USPTO

More: BGR, 9to5Mac, TechCrunch, CNET, Telegraph, MacRumors, Gigaom, SlashGear, VentureBeat, PhoneArena, Redmond Pie, iPhone in Canada Blog, MacNN, bizjournals, Phones Review and TUAW

Jon Christian / Wired:

From ‘Preggers’ to ‘Pizzle’: Android's Bizarre List of Banned Words — There's no “sex” at the Googleplex. — Type or swipe the word on the latest version of Android's Google Keyboard — or for that matter “intercourse,” “coitus,” “screwing” or even “lovemaking” — and the web giant's predictive algorithm will offer no help.

More: LAPTOP Magazine, Softpedia News, bizjournals and Inquirer

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:

Scientist-developed malware covertly jumps air gaps using inaudible sound — Topology of a covert mesh network that connects air-gapped computers to the Internet. — Hanspach and Goetz — Computer scientists have developed a malware prototype that uses inaudible audio signals to communicate …

More: Help Net Security, BGR, InfoWorld, PC World, VentureBeat, Engadget, ExtremeTech, Softpedia News and Gizmodo. Tweets: @chrisnahr

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Firehose Provider DataSift Raises $42M Led By Insight Venture Partners For Global and Non-Social Ambitions — DataSift, a social data platform that provides brands and enterprises with access to content from the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and dozens of other social networks …

More: Tech Europe, Gigaom, Mashable, PE Hub Blog, Bloomberg, Telegraph and CloudAve. Thanks:@ingridlunden

Derrick Harris / Gigaom:

Netflix is balancing its streaming traffic across Amazon's cloud — Netflix is fighting back outages in the Amazon Web Services cloud computing platform with a new architecture that has its streaming-video service running live across multiple regions of the AWS cloud and balancing user traffic between them.

More: SlashGear and GeekWire

Tom Warren / The Verge:

Microsoft's ‘Project Spark’ beta arrives on Windows 8.1, lets you create an Xbox One game — Microsoft is launching a beta version of Project Spark today, its game maker project for Windows 8.1, Xbox 360, and the new Xbox One console. Project Spark is essentially a tool to allow developers …

More: TechCrunch, CITEworld, Engadget, TechNewsWorld, WebProNews, WinBeta and Softpedia News

Catherine Shu / TechCrunch:

Rdio Names Former Amazon Exec Anthony Bay Its New CEO — After enduring a round of layoffs last month, Rdio, the streaming music startup from Skype co-founder Janus Friis, has found a new chief executive officer, Anthony Bay. Bay, whose experience includes executive positions at Amazon …

More: PR Newswire, The Verge, CNET, GeekWire, Gigaom, Billboard, I4U News, The Next Web and AllThingsD. Tweets: @dougw. See also Mediagazer

Nicole Lee / Engadget:

E Ink's new Fina display technology promises lighter, thinner e-readers — That Kindle Paperwhite is pretty thin and light already, but future e-readers could be even skinnier thanks to a new screen technology from E Ink known as Fina. The tech uses a super thin glass substrate that'll supposedly result …

More: E Ink, Softpedia News, Softpedia News, Electronista, Liliputing, Ubergizmo, Gigaom, SlashGear and Good E-Reader

Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch:

Apple Buys Topsy For Price Reportedly North Of $200M, Could Use Social Signals To Bolster Siri, App Store Relevance — Apple has purchased social analytics firm Topsy, which focuses on parsing data from Twitter, reports The Wall Street Journal. The deal was apparently worth ‘more than $200M’ according to the publication.

More: Digits, Mobile Marketing Watch, PC Magazine, Tech Trader Daily, Gigaom, Lastest ITProPortal news, BetaNews, AppleInsider, Digital Trends, AppleTell, The VAR Guy, Beyond Search, App Advice, Softpedia News, Internet Evolution, eWeek and Forbes

Wall Street Journal:

Apple acquires Topsy, a company specializing in Twitter search and analytics, for more than $200M

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