Techmeme: Blackboard Buys Austin Edtech Startup MyEdu for Student Profiles (Angela Shah/Xconomy)

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January 19, 2014, 1:30 PM

Top News

Richard Verrier / Los Angeles Times:

Paramount first major studio to release movies in digital format only, abandons film — Paramount stops releasing major movies on film — It becomes the first big Hollywood studio to embrace digital-only U.S. releases. Others are expected to quickly follow suit. — Roll credits.

More: VentureBeat, Gizmodo, Ars Technica, Engadget, Digital Trends and The Verge. Tweets: @zseward

Mark Gurman / 9to5Mac:

Apple continues hiring raid on medical sensor field as it develops eye scanning technology — Apple is moving to expand its personnel working on wearable computers and medical-sensor-laden devices by hiring more scientists and specialists in the medical sensor field.

More: Re/code, iClarified, iPhone in Canada Blog, PhoneArena, SlashGear, iMore, MacRumors, iPhone Hacks and iDownloadBlog.com

Tweets: @jyarow and @markgurman

Thanks:@mikebeas

Jeff Jordan / Andreessen Horowitz:

The Tipping Point (E-Commerce Version) — The news around shopping during the holiday season was dominated by two separate stories. One talked about how traffic to brick-and-mortar stores was well below expectations, and that these retailers were forced to discount tremendously to drive sales.

Tweets: @erickschonfeld, @howardlindzon, @pmarca and @davemcclure

Wall Street Journal:

Stores Confront New World of Reduced Shopper Traffic

More: Gawker. Tweets: @netbanker, @timjhanrahan and @jeff_jordan

Steven Levy / Wired:

Why Obama's NSA Reforms Won't Solve Silicon Valley's Trust Problem — When Barack Obama announced his reforms of National Security Agency surveillance programs today, few people were as interested as Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Marissa Mayer, and Steve Ballmer. — And the president knew it.

More: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsy, Electronic Frontier Foundation and The Switch

Tweets: @stevenlevy and @jayrosen_nyu

Barton Gellman / Washington Post:

Obama's restrictions on NSA surveillance rely on narrow definition of ‘spying’

More: emptywheel. Tweets: @trevortimm and @bartongellman

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry / Forbes:

Marc Andreessen Is Using Twitter Like A Real Human, And It's Amazing — Nowadays, if you're a prominent or powerful person, a Twitter presence has become de rigueur. But for the vast majority of those who tweet, their Twitter account is just a feed for press releases.

Tweets: @karaswisher and @birsic

Kara Swisher / Re/code:

After Mulling Sale, Business Insider Raising a New Round of Funding — Business Insider — which rejected an informal acquisition offer of around $100 million floated by AOL last year and has discussed other sale efforts — is likely to be raising a new round from its existing investors, including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

More: Bloomberg. Tweets: @carney, @zseward, @peterlauria3 and @pkafka. See also Mediagazer

David George-Cosh / Canada Real Time:

Canada Says Bitcoin Isn't Legal Tender … Canada doesn't consider bitcoin to be legal tender, a government official said, putting a question mark over the use of the increasingly popular virtual currency here. — The Canadian government, along with regulators including the central bank …

More: CoinDesk and CNBC

Leena Rao / TechCrunch:

The Rise Of The Hedge Fund Startup Investor (Again) — The first question I thought of when I read that San Francisco hedge fund Coatue Management was the backer behind Snapchat's $50 million round of funding was which VC firm lost the deal. My second question was why take money from a hedge fund?

More: Forbes. Tweets: @semil

Vindu Goel / NYT Bits:

Former Yahoo COO De Castro was paid more than CEO, made at least $88M for 15 months of work — Yahoo's No. 2 Executive Made More Than His Boss (and Virtually Everyone Else) — It's hard to shed too many tears for Henrique de Castro, who was fired this week as Yahoo's No. 2 executive.

More: CNET, PC Magazine and Forbes

Tweets: @pmarca, @pmarca, @pmarca, @karaswisher and @qhardy

Ron Amadeo / Ars Technica:

Adware vendors buy Chrome Extensions to send ad- and malware-filled updates — One of the coolest things about Chrome is the silent, automatic updates that always ensure that users are always running the latest version. While Chrome itself is updated automatically by Google …

More: Business Insider and Digital Inspiration …. Tweets: @dangillmor, @andreasbovens, @jamiew and @asadotzler

Matt Mullenweg:

43% of websites on Techmeme's leaderboard are powered by WordPress, 42% use a custom CMS — WordPress & Techmeme 100 — Whenever I visit a site I can usually tell whether it's WordPress or not within an instant — there's just something about a WordPress site that is distinctive.

Tweets: @pmaiorana, @splatf and @mathewi. Thanks:@photomatt

Angela Shah / Xconomy:

Blackboard Buys Austin Edtech Startup MyEdu for Student Profiles — MyEdu, an Austin, TX-based edtech firm, was purchased by education software giant Blackboard Wednesday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. — Founded in 2009, MyEdu makes a free online platform where students …

More: PandoDaily, TechCrunch, Inside Higher Ed, Blackboard Blog, VentureBeat, EdSurge and PR Newswire

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