Techmeme: Lenders Use Social Media to Screen Borrowers (Stephanie Armour/Wall Street Journal)

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January 9, 2014, 11:35 AM

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.

More: BBC, Daily Mail, SiliconANGLE, ZDNet, Techdirt, Yahoo! Finance, Daily Dot, SlashGear, Darknet, CoinDesk, WebProNews and Softpedia News. Tweets: @nytimesbits

Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica:

T-Mobile CEO: “This industry blows,” biggest carriers offer “horsesh**” — T-Mobile US CEO John Legere has had an eventful week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. He was thrown out of AT&T's CES party Monday night after the company detected his presence.

More: Mashable. Tweets: @cheeky_geeky and @igrigorik

Wall Street Journal:

T-Mobile Added 800,000 Prized Customers in 4th Quarter

More: Business Insider

Sean Hollister / The Verge:

T-Mobile will now pay $350 for you to leave AT&T, Sprint, or Verizon

Stephanie Bodoni / Bloomberg:

Google Data Chief Says ‘Flawed’ EU Privacy Law Is Dead — Google Inc. (GOOG)'s top privacy official said the European Union's “flawed” attempt to overhaul data-protection rules is “dead” and urged politicians to go back to the drawing board. — “Europe's much-ballyhooed, and much-flawed …

More: Peter Fleischer and Business Cloud News

Sam Schechner / Wall Street Journal:

Online Privacy Could Spark U.S.-EU Trade Rift — French, Spanish Fines Against Google Are Latest Flare-Ups in Trans-Atlantic Disagreement … PARIS—Knowing what Europeans like Rémi Boulle bought for Christmas could spark the next trans-Atlantic trade battle.

More: Marketing Land and bizjournals. Tweets: @willmauldin

David Meyer / Gigaom:

France fines Google over privacy violations and makes it put a notice on its site

More: CNIL, Inquirer, Reuters, ZDNet, Wall Street Journal, Engadget, TechCrunch, PC Magazine, Computerworld, CNET, Rude Baguette, WebProNews, SlashGear, The Register and Associated Press. Tweets: @cri

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: @wsj and @lheron

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

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 …

More: Snapchat, Business Insider, TechCrunch, CNET, Gigaom, Engadget, Softpedia News and Mashable

Julie Bosman / New York Times:

Barnes & Noble Reports Steep Drop in Holiday Sales — Barnes & Noble, the nation's last remaining major bookstore chain, experienced steep sales declines in its digital division during the nine-week holiday period, the company announced on Thursday. — Revenue in the Nook division …

More: CNET, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and Reuters. See also Mediagazer

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 …

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:

More: Co.Labs, BuzzFeed, Daily Dot, Business Insider, TechCrunch, Digital Trends and Gizmodo

Tweets: @sunny_hundal, @jonerp and @nathanjurgenson

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.

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.

More: The Verge, SlashGear, PC Magazine, Softpedia News and PhoneDog

Wall Street Journal:

Dish Pulling Its Bid for LightSquared — Letter of Termination of Bid Expected to Be Disclosed as Soon as Thursday Morning — Dish Network Corp. is officially pulling its bid for LightSquared Inc., the telecommunications firm in bankruptcy that has wireless spectrum Dish has been coveting …

More: CNET

Jonathan Shieber / TechCrunch:

Tech Angels Cross The $1 Billion Mark In 2013 — Buoyed by a stronger economy, angel investors companies worldwide poured a record amount of cash into early-stage technology and life-sciences companies, according to data from CrunchBase. — Angel investments have been climbing steadily since 2008 …

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