Techmeme: Google's Niantic Labs opens up location-based augmented reality game Ingress, plans ads, APIs (Casey Newton/The Verge)

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December 15, 2013, 12:00 AM

Top News

John Markoff / New York Times:

Google acquires Boston Dynamics, maker of BigDog, Petman, and other research robots — Google Adds to Its Menagerie of Robots — SAN FRANCISCO — BigDog, Cheetah, WildCat and Atlas have joined Google's growing robot menagerie. — Google confirmed on Friday that it had completed …

New York Times:

Officials Say U.S. May Never Know Extent of Snowden's Leaks — WASHINGTON — American intelligence and law enforcement investigators have concluded that they may never know the entirety of what the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden extracted from classified government computers …

More: CBS News, TechCrunch, SlashGear, Business Insider and Newsy

Tweets: @davidfrum, @trdeghett, @nxthompson, @trevortimm, @mlcalderone, @jameeljaffer and @ggreenwald

Jonathan Stempel / Reuters:

Lawsuit accuses IBM of hiding China risks amid NSA spy scandal — (Reuters) - IBM Corp has been sued by a shareholder who accused it of concealing how its ties to what became a major U.S. spying scandal reduced business in China and ultimately caused its market value to plunge more than $12 billion.

More: The Atlantic Online, Businessweek, AllThingsD, Business Wire, New Orleans Times-Picayune, SlashGear, Gigaom, Washington Post, TechEye and Guardian

Yoree Koh / Digits:

Twitter Test Shows ‘Nearby’ Tweets — Twitter has an eye on your location — and is testing ways to share it with other nearby users. — The short-messaging service appears to be testing a new timeline for its mobile app, called “Nearby.” It shows recent nearby tweets, whether you follow the tweeter or not.

More: The Verge, CNET, TechCrunch, SlashGear, The Next Web and Electronista

Leena Rao / TechCrunch:

As Software Eats The World, Non-Tech Corporations Are Eating Startups — Netscape founder and VC titan Marc Andreessen famously wrote back in 2011 that software is steadily eating the world, disrupting industries like music, retail and more. Now large corporations in these industries are starting to eat startups.

Tweets: @alexisohanian, @mdudas and @jess

Cyrus Farivar / Ars Technica:

Boston Police indefinitely suspends license plate reader program — The Boston Police Department currently has 14 license plate scanners, which are often mounted on police cars. — cle0patra — The Boston Police Department (BPD) has indefinitely halted its use of license plate readers …

More: The Boston Globe, The Verge and SlashGear. Tweets: @freedomofpress

Brendan O'Connor / The Awl:

The Golden Era Of Spam Comments Has Ended — The search engine optimization community has spent the last two years in a panic. SEO people flood our Internet with spam links and fake Twitter bots and paid traffic, to help bad websites look more popular than they are, to deliver fake viewers to web ads.

More: Boing Boing. Tweets: @dannysullivan, @awl, @plamere, @thijs, @waxylinks, @peterrojas, @markjaquith and @jonhrach. See also Mediagazer

Damon Lavrinc / Wired:

Ford Unveils Its First Autonomous Vehicle Prototype — Ford has thrown its hat into autonomous car ring with the debut of its Automated Fusion Hybrid Research Vehicle, the latest in a series of steps the automaker is taking to realize its grand vision of transportation in 2025.

More: Ford Media, The Verge, Autoblog, Autoweek, PC Magazine, SlashGear, VentureBeat, Engadget, Gigaom and TechHive

Casey Johnston / Ars Technica:

Instagram senders can delete their messages from recipients' phones — The Instagram Direct interface, which allows you to share photos directly to a subset of those you follow, rather than to all your followers. — The surface read of Instagram's announcement of a messaging-like feature today was a bit underwhelming.

Tweets: @rakeshlobster, @caseyjohnston and @stottle

Casey Newton / The Verge:

Google's Niantic Labs opens up location-based augmented reality game Ingress, plans ads, APIs — The everywhere arcade: How Google is turning location into a game platform — Niantic Labs' Ingress project will expand to support new games — and ads — Every week, players …

More: SlashGear, Ubergizmo, Engadget, TechRadar.com and AndroidGuys. Tweets: @caseynewton

Jennifer Golbeck / Slate:

Facebook collects metadata on “self-censorship”, updates you begin typing but don't publish — Facebook wants to know why you didn't publish that status update you started writing — Facebook wants to know why you didn't publish that status update you started writing.

More: BGR. Tweets: @jengolbeck, @jengolbeck, @mathewi, @jennyjinx, @slate, @courosa, @rcalo, @monstro and @joshelman

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