Techmeme: eBay chairman Omidyar defends board members, CEO against Icahn attack, says PayPal should remain part of the company (eBay, Inc.)

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February 27, 2014, 2:55 PM

Top News

Guardian:

GCHQ, aided by NSA, intercepted and stored webcam images of millions of global Yahoo users — UK spy agency intercepted webcam images of millions of Yahoo users — • Optic Nerve program collected Yahoo webcam images in bulk — • 1.8m users targeted by GCHQ in six-month period alone

eBay, Inc.:

eBay chairman Omidyar defends board members, CEO against Icahn attack, says PayPal should remain part of the company — Statement by Pierre Omidyar, eBay Inc. Chairman of the Board — I am eBay Inc.'s founder, board chairman and largest shareholder. — A new eBay shareholder, Carl Icahn …

More: ZDNet, CNNMoney.com, USA Today, CNET, Shareholders Square Table, TechCrunch and GeekWire

Tweets: @pierre and @pmarca

Steven Perlberg / Business Insider:

Carl Icahn Goes After The eBay Board In A New Open Letter With 6 Facts — Carl Icahn is out with a new open letter to the shareholders of eBay. — There has been quite a back and forth between the activist investor and eBay's board, and the scrap continues today with Icahn laying out six “facts.”

More: Shareholders Square Table and Guardian. Tweets: @cnbc

Fred Wilson / AVC:

Fred Wilson to Senator Manchin: “Benefits of Bitcoin will be as important, impactful, and beneficial as that of the Internet” — A Letter To Senator Manchin — Senator Joe Manchin wrote a public letter to financial regulators asking them to “take appropriate action to limit …

More: The Switch, Union Square Ventures, Wall Street Journal, Feld Thoughts, Bloomberg View and Bitcoin Foundation

Tweets: @polemitis, @fredwilson and @bradusv

Steven Russolillo / Wall Street Journal:

Yellen on Bitcoin: Fed Doesn't Have Authority to Regulate It in Any Way … Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen said the central bank doesn't have the authority to regulate bitcoin. — “The Federal Reserve simply does not have authority to supervise or regulate bitcoin in any way,” …

More: Business Insider and Guardian. Tweets: @onemanatatime

Andy Greenberg / Forbes:

Senator Calls For Bitcoin Ban In Letter To Financial Regulators

More: CNET, Business Insider, The Verge, TechCrunch, Mashable, Network World, SiliconANGLE, Inquirer, CoinDesk, ITworld.com, Mashable, Engadget, Ars Technica, Digital Trends, Techdirt, The Switch, newsBTC, MarketWatch and Business Insider

Tweets: @sen_joemanchin and @kashhill

Emil Protalinski / The Next Web:

Facebook Messenger for Windows will shut down on March 3 — Facebook today began prompting Facebook Messenger for Windows users with a message saying the app is shutting down next week. Without much of an explanation, the company plans to kill off Windows support for Facebook Messenger on March 3.

More: Engadget, PC World, TechnoBuffalo, Softpedia News, gHacks Technology News, SlashGear and AllFacebook. Thanks:@epro

Harry McCracken / TIME:

Project Ara: Inside Google's Bold Gambit to Make Smartphones Modular — The two-year quest to create the ultimate customizable phone, inside and out. — On January 29, Google announced that it had agreed to sell Motorola, its phone-manufacturing business, to Chinese electronics giant Lenovo.

Luke Baker / Reuters:

Europe invites Apple, Google to discuss ‘in-app’ purchases — (Reuters) - The European Commission announced plans on Thursday to tackle one of the scourges of the modern age - games on tablets and mobile phones that allow adults and children to rack up vast credit card bills by making “in-app” purchases.

More: EU Press Room, MacRumors, Wall Street Journal, iPhone in Canada Blog, Gigaom, CNET, Dow Jones Newswires, iDownloadBlog.com …, bizjournals and MobileBurn.com

Eric Johnson / Re/code:

A Long Tail of Whales: Half of Mobile Games Money Comes From 0.15 Percent of Players — Oh, you've spent a couple dollars on Candy Crush? How cute. — In a mobile monetization report released today, app testing firm Swrve found that in January, half of free-to-play games' in-app purchases came from 0.15 percent of players.

More: VentureBeat, Inc.com, Joystiq, Guardian, Ubergizmo, destructoid and www.pocketgamer.biz. Tweets: @codinghorror

Farhad Manjoo / New York Times:

T-Mobile has turned every accepted practice in the mobile phone business on its head — T-Mobile Turns an Industry on Its Ear — A rash of consumer-friendliness has broken out across the mobile data industry. Over the last year, the four major carriers — AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile …

More: Quartz. Tweets: @alexisohanian and @johnlegere

Nancy Gohring / CITEworld:

With $50 million, ClearSlide will beef up analytics for salespeople — ClearSlide [1], the provider of services designed to help sales people better communicate with customers, just raised a whopping $50 million. It plans to use the funding to scale up and continue developing more analytics capabilities.

More: VentureBeat, Gigaom, TechCrunch, VatorNews, PE Hub Blog and silicontap.com. Thanks:@mattrosoff

David Pierce / The Verge:

Meet Moov, the fitness tracker that turns Siri into your new personal trainer — Nikola Hu is running wrong. He's loping along, leaning back as he goes. Suddenly a voice emerges from his phone: “Your cadence is low. Try swinging your arms legs and arms faster.”

More: TechCrunch, Engadget, Gizmodo, iMore, MacRumors, USA Today, Fortune, CNET, Gigaom, Co.Design, Ubergizmo, Pocket-lint, Mashable, Liliputing and SlashGear

Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch:

Apple Launches Big Improvements For iOS Management Tools For Enterprise And Education — Apple has been busy in the IT department. Today, it released a slew of improvements and alterations to its large-scale deployment tools for education and enterprise customers.

More: Fraser Speirs, Ars Technica, iMore, 9to5Mac, Macworld, App Advice, The Loop, iDownloadBlog.com …, iPhone Hacks, AppleInsider, MacRumors and PalmAddict

Steven Brill / TIME:

How an ad-hoc team of outside coders and troubleshooters revived HealthCare.gov — Obama's Trauma Team — How an unlikely group of high-tech wizards revived Obama's troubled HealthCare.gov website — more than two weeks after the launch of HealthCare.gov—White House chief …

Tweets: @benlabolt

David Kravets / Wired:

Feds Refuse to Release Public Comments on NSA Reform — Citing Privacy — The Obama administration has received 28 proposals from corporations with ideas for managing the NSA's massive database of U.S. phone call metadata. But don't expect to see the proposals anytime soon.

More: VentureBeat, The Switch and Wall Street Journal

Tweets: @jesselynradack and @thomas_drake1

Alex Wilhelm / TechCrunch:

Bitcoin Startup Coinbase Surges Past 1M Consumer Wallets In The Post-Mt.Gox Era — Rumor: Brainwave-Sensing Startup InteraXon Was Approached By Google About An Acquisition — Today Coinbase announced that it has created more than 1 million consumer Bitcoin wallets on its platform …

More: The Coinbase Blog and The Next Web. Tweets: @mikegracen and @paulg

Douglas MacMillan / Wall Street Journal:

Marketing Chief Kathy Savitt's Star Rises at Yahoo — A management shake-up at Yahoo Inc. has conferred more power on Kathy Savitt, a marketing executive who has quickly risen to become one of Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's most prominent and trusted lieutenants.

More: bizjournals and GeekWire. Tweets: @wsjd. See also Mediagazer

Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:

Google Launches Maps Gallery To Make Public Data Maps More Discoverable — Google today launched the Google Maps Gallery, an extension of the Google Maps Public Data Program it announced last October. The new gallery is meant to showcase maps from the organizations Google is working with …

More: Google Enterprise Blog, The Next Web, GeekWire, The Verge, ReadWrite, ZDNet, WebProNews, SlashGear and All Points Blog

Greg Sterling / Marketing Land:

Pew's “The Web at 25”: 87% of Americans use the Internet, social media ranked easy to quit — Survey: Of Major Technologies, Social Media Is The Easiest To Give Up — Based on a new survey of just over 1,000 US adults, the Pew Research Center has released findings commemorating the 25th anniversary of the web.

More: Pew Internet, VatorNews, CNET, TechCrunch and PC World

Bloomberg:

Baidu's Q4 revenue grows 50% YoY, profits not set to increase as company invests in mobile — Baidu Forecast Beats Estimates as Mobile Users Lure Ads — Baidu Inc. (BIDU), the owner of China's largest Internet search engine, forecast first-quarter sales that beat analysts' estimates …

More: Bloomberg, ABC News, Wall Street Journal, ITworld.com, Reuters and Reuters

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