Techmeme: LinkedIn Finally Lets You Block Other Members (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Open Links In New Tab

Mobile Archives Advertise Site News Contact Editors

February 21, 2014, 6:50 PM

Top News

TechCrunch:

TestFlight Owner Burstly Acquired By Apple — Burstly, the makers of an in-app ad management platform called SkyRocket and the parent company of popular mobile app testing platform TestFlight, has been acquired, we're hearing. Though we're working to get more information on this now …

Peter Kafka / Re/code:

Sources say Amazon readying an Android-based Web TV box competing with Apple TV and Roku, for March rollout — Amazon Gets Its TV Box Ready, Again — Amazon is gearing up to take on Apple and Roku, again. — Industry sources say Amazon is getting ready to launch a Web TV box …

Paul Graham / Y Combinator Posthaven:

Sam Altman for President — I'm delighted to announce that Sam Altman has agreed to become president of Y Combinator starting next batch. I'll continue to do office hours with startups, but Sam is going to lead YC. — Why the change? Because YC needs to grow, and I'm not the best person to grow it.

More: Gigaom, CNET, Business Insider, VentureBeat, Entrepreneur and PE Hub Blog

Tweets: @albertwenger, @papadimitriou, @brezina, @pmarca, @bonatsos, @alexisohanian, @sama, @alexia, @naval, @sequoia_capital, @sanjaydastoor and @bhorowitz

Colleen Taylor / TechCrunch:

Sam Altman Taking Over As President Of Y Combinator, Replacing Paul Graham At The Helm — After nine years at the helm of Y Combinator, Paul Graham is stepping away from his leadership role at the famed Silicon Valley startup incubator. Taking over as Y Combinator's president is Sam Altman …

Tweets: @loyalelectron

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:

Crypto weaknesses in WhatsApp “the kind of stuff the NSA would love” — Poor implementation of SSL encryption could be a boon to eavesdroppers. — WhatsApp, the mobile messaging app developer that Facebook is acquiring for $19 billion, may be an attractive addition to the social network …

More: PandoDaily, Threatpost, Forbes and praetorian.com

Mike Isaac / Re/code:

Facebook's WhatsApp Deal Could Jumpstart Internet.org Plans

More: NYT Bits, ParisLemon, Poynter, Business Insider and WebProNews. Tweets: @jonrussell. See also Mediagazer

Wall Street Journal:

Koum and Zuckerberg differ sharply in their approaches to advertising and privacy

Tweets: @dmac1

Evelyn M. Rusli / Wall Street Journal:

WhatsApp: the Bomb That Shook Silicon Valley

More: The Next Web, Venture Capital Dispatch and Business Insider

Tweets: @wsjd and @monkbent

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:

LinkedIn Finally Lets You Block Other Members — LinkedIn has at last added a long-requested feature with the introduction of member blocking. This adds a new privacy control to the service, which lets you restrict access to your profile, direct interactions, and network activity …

More: Computerworld, Engadget and WebProNews

Bloomberg:

Verizon completes $130B buyout of Vodafone's stake in Verizon Wireless — Verizon Sale Cuts Vodafone Value by Half to $100 Billion — Vodafone Group Plc (VOD) completes the biggest sale of the past decade today, leaving the wireless carrier about half the size it was …

More: CNET, Gigaom, The Verge, Engadget, VentureBeat, Businessweek, ValueWalk, The Droid Guy, Wall Street Journal, ZDNet and App Advice

Lee Hutchinson / Ars Technica:

Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to produce dumb cryptocurrency — Love of money can cause people to do unwise things—like stealing time on your university's resident supercomputer to mine crypto-coins. The Harvard Crimson is carrying the story of someone who did exactly that …

More: The Verge and Harvard News

Bloomberg:

Roku Said to Be Weighing Initial Public Offering in U.S. in 2014 — Roku Inc., the maker of set-top boxes that connect TVs to the Internet, is weighing an initial public offering in the U.S. this year, according to people with knowledge of the matter. — A decision to move ahead hasn't been made …

More: Gigaom. Tweets: @pkafka

Laura Northrup / Consumerist:

Fitbit Voluntarily Recalls Rash-Inducing Force Wristbands — Since the first reports of contact dermatitis caused by Fitbit Force movement trackers surfaced on the company's forums (and gained publicity when Consumerist broke the story last month) customers have asked that the company recall the trackers.

Kevin Fitchard / Gigaom:

Sprint launches Wi-Fi calling, turning the Galaxy Mega, S4 Mini into IP phones — In the next few weeks, Sprint customers with a Samsung Galaxy Mega or a Galaxy S4 Mini will get an over-the-air software update that will turn their devices into IP phones - at least when they're connected to Wi-Fi networks.

More: The Verge, Engadget and IntoMobile

Laura Hazard Owen / Gigaom:

Amazon increases price of Prime in U.K. and Germany as it rolls in Lovefilm streaming video — Amazon is rolling together its Prime and Lovefilm Instant services in the U.K. and Germany. Starting February 26, U.K. and German Prime members will be able to stream movies and TV shows as part …

More: ReadWrite, Consumerist, iMore, PC Magazine and Business Insider. See also Mediagazer

Greg Bensinger / Wall Street Journal:

Amazon in talks with brand retailers like Neiman Marcus and Abercrombie to feature their listings as it contemplates Prime rate hike

More: BGR, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, Pocket-lint and Digits

Tweets: @wsj, @stevesi, @stevesi and @wsjd

Thanks:@gregbensinger

Chris Williams / The Register:

Apple releases iOS 7.0.6 and 6.1.6 updates with SSL/TLS security fix — Update your iThings: Apple splats scary SSL snooping bug in iOS 6, 7 — Encrypted connections vulnerable to tampering — Apple has released updates for its mobile operating system iOS to patch a bug that blew apart …

More: Apple, The Next Web, ZDNet, AppleInsider, CNET, Gotta Be Mobile, TechnoBuffalo and MobileSyrup.com. Tweets: @matthew_d_green

Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch:

Secret Adds Subscribe/Unsubscribe Options, Post Flagging, Unlinking And More — Hot anonymous social network Secret has just pushed an update for its app that addresses a number of issues and improves performance. The new version allows users to subscribe or unsubscribe to any Secret post by swiping left …

More: Medium, tech.co and The Verge. Tweets: @ryanlawler

Neil Hughes / AppleInsider:

Apple's iPhone led 2013 US consumer smartphone sales with 45% share - NPD — With more than 120 million smartphones sold in the U.S. in 2013, Apple's iPhone accounted for nearly half of those, taking a 45 percent share in its home market last year, new data released by the NPD Group on Thursday reveals.

More: Examiner, Fortune, Investor's Business Daily, App Advice, MacNN, Patently Apple, PC Magazine and Morning News USA

Chris Welch / The Verge:

Airbnb hosts must install smoke and carbon monoxide detectors by end of 2014 — Hosts can request free detectors, first-aid kits, and safety information cards — As Airbnb's housing rental service continues to grow in popularity, the company wants to ensure that all guests have a safe stay.

More: The Airbnb Blog, TechCrunch, Gigaom, The Technology Chronicles and CNET

Brad Stone / Businessweek:

Invasion of the Taxi Snatchers: Uber Leads an Industry's Disruption — Ray Markovich started driving a taxi in Chicago three years ago after shuttering his struggling wireless phone store. Driving a cab wasn't particularly gratifying or lucrative—he had to pay $400 a week just to lease his 2011 white Ford Escape.

More: StrictlyVC, The Switch and SiliconBeat

Tweets: @erickecage, @jamesappell, @valleyhack, @bw and @nytimesbits

Stacey Higginbotham / Gigaom:

Direct connection between Comcast and Netflix networks suggests peering agreement reached — Breaking: Netflix and Comcast have reached a peering agreement — Consumers' troubles with online video may be subsiding — at least for Comcast customers. Comcast and Netflix appear to have resolved …

More: gist.github.com, BGR, DSLreports, Ars Technica, The Verge and SlashGear

Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge:

Not using BBM? BlackBerry hopes that stickers will make you start — Meet CosCat and Bubble Bot — The best feature that an instant messaging app can have is all of your friends using its service. The second best, arguably, is stickers. Taking advantage of the surprising popularity …

More: Inside BlackBerry, Engadget, TechnoBuffalo, CrackBerry.com, TechCrunch and iPhone in Canada Blog

Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch:

Google Acquires Spider.io To Help Spot And Stop Online Ad Fraud — London-based Spider.io has been acquired by Google, the company's DoubleClick advertising blog announced today (via Re/Code). Spider.io is a startup that specialized in weeding out fraudulent clicks around online ads.

Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch:

BufferBox Ending Standalone Service, Closing Down Pick-Up Locations And Rolling Into Google — Waterloo-based BufferBox, which was acquired by Google in November 2012, is shutting down its standalone service. The company sent an email to members today alerting them to the news …

More: BufferBox blog, The Verge and 9to5Google

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:

Pro Tips: 4 tips to overcome data problems in your CRM — Most CRM data problems don't look like problems. At a glance, your CRM looks fine: records exist, fields are filled, and reports run.

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

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.

Sources:

Satya Nadella on Microsoft's agent bet and AI's trust problem

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.

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 6:50 PM ET, February 21, 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.