Techmeme
January 9, 2014, 1:25 PM

Top News

Jungah Lee / Bloomberg:
Samsung Plans Galaxy S5 by April With Possible Eye-Scan Security  —  Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) will release its Galaxy S5 smartphone by April and is considering using iris scanning technology for the first time as it readies the new high-end handset to compete with Apple Inc. (AAPL)'s latest iPhones.
Edwin Chan / Reuters:
Apple, Samsung CEOs agree to mediation in U.S. patent fight: court filing  —  (Reuters) - Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics have agreed to attend a mediation session to be held on or before February 19, as they prepare to clash in court in March over smartphone patents.
Alex Hern / Guardian:
Yahoo malware turned European computers into bitcoin slaves  —  Search firm remains silent on how its ad servers infected Windows PCs of visitors to homepage  —  As many as two million European users of Yahoo may have received PC malware from virus-laden ads served by its homepage over a four-day period last week.
Ellis Hamburger / The Verge:
Snapchat apologizes for leaked user data, updates app to let you opt out of ‘Find Friends’  —  Snapchat today rolled out the security fix it promised last week, which lets users opt out of the app's “Find Friends” feature.  The feature, which let users plug in their phone number to find friends …
Stephanie Armour / Wall Street Journal:
Lenders Use Social Media to Screen Borrowers  —  Regulators Have Concerns About Lenders' Use of Facebook, Other Sites  —  WASHINGTON—More lending companies are mining Facebook, Twitter and other social-media data to help determine a borrower's creditworthiness or identity …
More: SiliconBeat, Gigaom and Marketing Pilgrim
Tweets: @lheron and @wsj
Sean Hollister / The Verge:
Lauren Orsini / ReadWrite:
The Most In-Demand Tech Skills: Why Java And The Classics Ruled 2013  —  If you're a Java developer, chances are you did pretty well for yourself in 2013.  —  At least, that's according to statistics from Stack Overflow.  Thousands of companies use the website's Careers 2. search in order …
Lester Victor Marks / AppleInsider:
First look: iOS-connected smart watches, health trackers, home automation from Archos  —  Archos is hitting the wearable devices market hard in 2014, with a new range of products showcased at the Consumer Electronics Show capable of connecting to Apple's iOS mobile platform via Bluetooth Low Energy.
More: Gigaom and Engadget
Facebook:
The evolution of memes on Facebook  —  A meme is an idea that is readily transmitted from person to person.  But we humans are not perfect transmitters.  While sometimes we repeat the idea exactly, often we change the meme, either unintentionally, or to embellish or improve it.  —  Take for example, the meme:
Andrew Grush / Android Authority:
ZTE shows off its own Project Ara alternative, the Eco-Mobius modular concept  —  When we first heard about Phonebloks, we though it was a cool idea but mostly just a pipedream that had little chance of becoming a reality.  Shortly after that, Motorola announced their own modular phone concept called Project Ara.
Matt Asay / TechRepublic:
Google's master plan for Android: More Internet users paying $6.30 a pop  —  The mobile industry is headed to Google, who is in an ideal position to clean up at roughly $6.30 per Internet user per year.  —  Forget today's smartphone profits: Apple and Samsung increasingly split those relatively evenly …
More: TheStreet.com and BGRThanks:@jasonhiner
Alexis C. Madrigal / The Atlantic Online:
From Stephen Colbert to Obama: the origin and evolution of Reddit's AMA  —  AMA: How a Weird Internet Thing Became a Mainstream Delight  —  Reddit's question-and-answer format imports the aspirational norms of honesty and authenticity from pseudonymous Internet forums into mainstream interviews.

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John Herrman / BuzzFeed:
Spencer E. Ante / Wall Street Journal: