Techmeme: Postmates raises $16M series B funding, passes 10,000 deliveries a week (Nick Bilton/NYT Bits)

Open Links In New Tab

Mobile Archives Advertise Site News Contact Editors

February 18, 2014, 3:15 PM

Top News

FaryaabS / SamMobile:

Samsung Galaxy S5 to have swipe-style fingerprint sensor in home button for unlocking device, app shortcuts, website logins — Explained: Samsung's implementation of the fingerprint sensor on the upcoming Galaxy S5 — Yes, you heard it right folks! Today, we are finally confirming …

Bloomberg:

Galaxy S5 to have 5.2 inch screen, sharper display, improved battery and camera, may arrive alongside upgraded Galaxy Gear — Samsung's New Galaxy Said to Feature Bigger, Sharper Display — Samsung Electronics Co. (005930)'s new high-end smartphone will have a larger 5.2-inch screen …

More: USA Today, BGR, Gigaom, BGR, VentureBeat, Gotta Be Mobile, Ubergizmo, Droid Life and Business Insider. Tweets: @evleaks

The Intercept:

GCHQ spied on WikiLeaks visitors; NSA discussed targeting WikiLeaks, Pirate Bay, and Anonymous — Snowden Documents Reveal Covert Surveillance and Pressure Tactics Aimed at WikiLeaks and Its Supporters — Top-secret documents from the National Security Agency and its British counterpart reveal …

Kate Kaye / AdAge:

Amazon and Apple struggle with ad growth because they're “slow, cocky and downright stingy” according to media buyers — Why Can't Amazon And Apple Catch a Break on Madison Ave? — Advertising Sales Are a Tough Slog for Both — And for A lot of the Same Reasons — Goodby, Silverstein and Partners

More: MacRumors, BGR, AppleInsider, Computerworld, Business Insider, Apple Bitch, 9to5Mac, MacNN, iPhone in Canada Blog, iDownloadBlog.com and App Advice

Peter Kafka / Re/code:

Here Comes the Candy Crush IPO! After a $1.9 Billion Year, King Gets Ready to Go Public — Candy Crush isn't just a crazily addictive time-waster: It's also a really, really big business. Now the company behind it wants to go public. King Digital Entertainment, the Irish publisher behind Candy Crush …

More: Adweek, Wall Street Journal, DealBook, The Register, The Next Web, PR Newswire, Guardian, TechCrunch, TechCrunch, The Technology Chronicles, VatorNews, Forbes, VentureBeat, Business Insider, ZDNet, Bloomberg, Gigaom, memeburn, Pulse 2.0, Geeky Gadgets, Digits, The Verge, Reuters, PE Hub Blog and WebProNews

Tweets: @pkafka, @giawire, @jyarow, @pkafka, @sfiegerman, @rafat and @willoremus

Nick Bilton / NYT Bits:

Postmates raises $16M series B funding, passes 10,000 deliveries a week — Postmates Closes New Financing Round and Passes 10,000 Deliveries a Week — Kosmo tried it and failed — dismally. Urban Fetch did, too. But it seems Postmates, a mobile-delivery service that can fetch …

More: TechCrunch, VentureBeat and Re/code

Eli Lake / The Daily Beast:

Spy Chief: We Should've Told You We Track Your Calls — The U.S. government long considered its collection of Americans' call records to be a state secret. Now the Director of National Intelligence admits it would have been better if Washington had acknowledged the surveillance in the first place.

More: TheBlot, Guardian, Salon and Firedoglake

Tweets: @xor, @declanm and @robpegoraro

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:

Asus router vulnerability allows everyone on the Internet access to data on connected drives — Dear Asus router user: You've been pwned, thanks to easily exploited flaw — An Ars reader by the name of Jerry got a nasty surprise as he was browsing the contents of his external hard drive over the weekend …

More: Krebs on Security, Softpedia News, BetaNews, The Wirecutter and TechSpot. Tweets: @robpegoraro

Phil Wahba / Reuters:

First U.S. bitcoin ATMs to open soon in Seattle, Austin — (Reuters) - Robocoin said on Tuesday that later this month it will install the first automated teller machines in the United States that let users buy and sell bitcoin, the latest step into the mainstream for the digital currency.

More: ReadWrite, CNET, The Technology Chronicles, PC World, The Verge, HotHardware.com News, Business Insider, Gigaom, CoinDesk, SlashGear, Softpedia News, Inquirer and Gizmodo

Tom Krazit / Gigaom:

Some day Silicon Valley will move north. Here's why it should settle in Oakland — Silicon Valley is both a metaphor for the entire tech industry and a real place that is (on a rare good day) an hour south of San Francisco. It's the longtime home to some of the world's most important …

More: The Technology Chronicles and SiliconBeat. Tweets: @tomkrazit

Jeff John Roberts / Gigaom:

AT&T's first transparency report shows 300K government demands for data including 37K for location, 35K from NSA — AT&T reveals number of NSA and location demands in first-ever transparency report — Phone giant AT&T published its first “transparency report” on Tuesday morning …

More: AT&T, The Switch, CNET, The Verge, TheHill, Mashable and Nextgov. Tweets: @kashhill

Vlad Savov / The Verge:

HTC sets March 25th date for its next flagship phone launch — Here comes the next One — HTC is distributing press invitations for its next big event, scheduled for March 25th, where the company's next flagship smartphone will be revealed. As with the HTC One launch in February of last year …

More: Engadget, VentureBeat, Examiner, LAPTOP Magazine, Android Beat, IntoMobile, Softpedia News, 9to5Google, TechCrunch, iPhone Hacks and BGR

Arik Hesseldahl / Re/code:

IPO-Bound Box Hires Cloud Chief Graham Younger Away From SAP — Cloud storage and collaboration company Box has poached a senior executive from the ranks of software giant SAP. — Graham Younger, who runs SAP's SuccessFactors unit, will join Box as executive VP for worldwide field operations.

More: The Box Blog, Business Insider, ZDNet, Gigaom and Forbes

Tom Warren / The Verge:

Nokia teases ‘X’ as it prepares to launch its Android phone — Nokia is preparing to launch its Android phone, codenamed Normandy, and the company is teasing it heavily today. The low-cost handset is expected to be named Nokia X when the Finnish smartphone maker unveils it next week …

More: Nokia Conversations, 9to5Google, CNET, AndroidGuys, The Droid Guy, GadgeTell, Softpedia News, UnleashThePhones, Electronista, Wpxbox, Android Central and Pocketnow. Tweets: @evleaks

Michael McWhertor / Polygon:

BioShock developer Irrational Games ‘winding down,’ new studio being formed by Ken Levine — BioShock developer Irrational Games is “winding down” in its current form and all but approximately 15 members of the studio will be laid off, according to an update from co-founder Ken Levine.

More: Irrational Games, The Verge, CNET, Forbes, Digital Trends, Re/code, Engadget, TechCrunch, GamesIndustry International, Gamasutra, Giant Bomb, destructoid, Wired.co.uk, TechnoBuffalo, Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Joystiq, Kotaku and VG247

Tweets: @jasonxbergman, @dphrygian, @mitchyd, @agentbizzle and @jimsterling

Yash Maheshwari / UnleashThePhones:

Windows Phone 8.1's rumored swipe keyboard demoed on video — Exclusive: Swipe Keyboard in Windows Phone 8.1 “Blue” [VIDEO] — Although it has only been rumoured to be coming with Windows Phone 8.1 “Blue” release, we now have an exclusive video showcasing the Swipe keyboard in action on Windows Phone 8.1.

More: Re/code, The Verge, GeekWire, Gigaom, CNET, WinBeta, Wpxbox, AmongTech and Softpedia News

Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:

Duolingo Raises $20M Series C Led By Kleiner Perkins To Dominate Online Language Learning — The popular language learning platform Duolingo today announced that it has closed a $20 million Series C round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. As Duolingo's founder Luis von Ahn told me …

More: Re/code, Fortune, PandoDaily, PE Hub Blog, Android Community and Skift. Thanks:@fredericl

Michael Brown / PC World:

Nvidia unveils Maxwell: A supremely power-efficient GPU architecture — The GPU arms race is usually about frames per second: Which video card can churn out triple-A games such as Battlefield 4 at the fastest clip? So when AMD and Nvidia announce a new GPU architecture …

More: Gizmodo, CNET, AnandTech, Computerworld, Softpedia News, ExtremeTech, PC Magazine, VentureBeat and TIME

Bloomberg:

Talks for including Netflix on Time Warner set-top boxes are on hold after Comcast deal announcement — Netflix Talks for Time Warner Cable Carriage Said to Slow — Netflix Inc. (NFLX)'s effort to secure a place for its video-subscription service on Time Warner Cable Inc. set-top boxes …

More: VatorNews, VentureBeat, Business Insider, Gigaom Research, I4U News, iPad, Gizmodo, DSLreports, SlashGear and Ars Technica. See also Mediagazer

Juli Clover / MacRumors:

‘AirPlay Recorder’ App Lets Mac Users Save Songs From iTunes Radio — doubleTwist, the company behind the popular multi-platform iTunes-compatible doubleTwist Media Player, today brought its new AirPlay Recorder app to the Mac, allowing iTunes users to capture and save streaming audio for offline use.

More: doubleTwist blog, Guardian, iLounge, App Advice, iMore, Breaking Apple News …, MacNN, Engadget, iDownloadBlog.com and iPhone Hacks

Rachel King / ZDNet:

Intel unveils Xeon E7 v2 chips for crunching big data in double time — Summary: Last year, the term du jour in enterprise tech was big data. Now, it's advanced analytics. — SAN FRANCISCO—Intel is upping the ante for crunching big data, promising to double the performance …

More: Inquirer, Data Center Knowledge, The Register, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, HotHardware.com News, V3.co.uk and Intel Newsroom

Mikey Campbell / AppleInsider:

Apple patents sensor-packed health monitoring headphones with ‘head gesture’ control — In one of the earliest pieces of evidence pointing to Apple's push into the fitness and health monitoring field, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Tuesday granted the company a patent …

More: The Verge, Gizmodo, MacNN, Gigaom, iPhone in Canada Blog, CNET, TechnoBuffalo and TechCrunch

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:

Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning — SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds. Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.

Cloudflare:

Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference — Stop preparing for agents. Start running them. 100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.

Zoho:

Beyond productivity: Why live captions belong in every meeting — You join a meeting, someone starts talking, and within a minute, there are names, numbers, ideas, and unfamiliar terms flying around. You could ask them to repeat it.

IDrive:

Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Sponsor Techmeme

Featured Podcasts

Sources:

Factory CEO on why AGI is already here

Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.

Subscribe to Sources.

Invest Like the Best:

Noah Shinn - Building Instinct: The Personal Agent

The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.

Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.

Lenny's Podcast:

The grief, loneliness, and burnout sweeping through the tech industry right now | Molly Graham

Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.

Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.

Big Technology Podcast:

Meta's Muse Revival, Frontier AI Under Threat, The Rise Of Dopamine Sites

The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.

Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.

Channels with Peter Kafka:

Meta's New $1300 Glasses and the Fight to Control AI

Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.

Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.

Great Chat:

Doomers at Dreamforce

A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.

Subscribe to Great Chat.

Add your podcast here

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 3:15 PM ET, February 18, 2014.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.