Techmeme
February 3, 2014, 9:10 AM

Top News

New York Times:
As device makers strive to improve battery and charging tech, Apple tests inductive charging for its watch  —  Building a Better Battery  —  SAN FRANCISCO — The next breakthrough smartphone, or maybe the one after that, might not have a traditional battery as its sole source of power.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Developer Behind “Flappy Bird,” The Impossible Game Blowing Up The App Store, Says He Just Got Lucky  —  Flappy Bird, a game you can barely play for more than a few seconds without throwing your phone across the room in frustration, is dominating the App Store and Google Play.
Danny Sullivan / Marketing Land:
Hashtags in 57% of Super Bowl ads; Facebook led social networks with 5 mentions to Twitter's 4  —  New Record For 2014: Hashtags Mentioned In 58% Of Super Bowl Ads … Hashtags were in 58 percent of Super Bowl ads, up from 50% in 2013 and setting a new record.
Liam Tung / ZDNet:
Hackers access 800,000 Orange customers' data  —  Summary: Orange reveals an attack on its website exposed details for three percent of its French customer base.  —  Liam Tung  —  Orange customers in France could see a spike in phishing attempts after hackers nabbed hundreds of thousands …
Ryan Lawler / TechCrunch:
Required Reading: The Economist's Special Report On Tech Startups  —  It's not every day we here at TechCrunch just point to someone else's work and say, “Here, you should go read this.”  But today's an exception, because The Economist has put together a 16-page Special Report on the rise of technology startups around the world.
More: Economist
Drew Crawford / Sealed Abstract:
How in-app purchase is not really destroying the games industry  —  So there's an article on HN today about how in-app purchase is destroying the game industry.  There are a couple of problems with this theory.  —  The original in-app purchase  —  See, in the in-app purchase model actually predates phones.
Rebecca J. Rosen / The Atlantic Online:
Forgotify: The Tool for Discovering Spotify's 4 Million Unheard Tracks  —  The idea first came to Lane Jordan when he heard an odd little fact: Around 20 percent of tracks on Spotify—some four million songs—had been played exactly zero times.  —  Four million songs!  That got Jordan thinking.
Mike Isaac / Re/code:
New iPhone app “Secret” lets you share confessions anonymously with your network of friends  —  With New Anonymous Social App Secret, the Merit Is in the Message  —  What if you could share anything you wanted to, with little worry of repercussion?

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Earlier Picks

Valentina Palladino / The Verge:
Brian X. Chen / NYT Bits: