Techmeme: Bill Gates, Satya Nadella, Tony Bates and Microsoft's board all initially opposed Ballmer's plan for Nokia acquisition (Bloomberg)

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March 6, 2014, 8:30 AM

Top News

Gemma Padley / British Journal of Photography:

Getty Images makes 35 million images free in fight against copyright infringement — Getty Images has single-handedly redefined the entire stock photography market with the launch of a new embedding feature that will make more than 35 million images freely available to anyone for non-commercial usage.

More: Wall Street Journal, Nieman Journalism Lab, TechEye, CNET, SlashGear, everwas, Digital Photography Review, GeekWire and Business Insider

Tweets: @taratw, @jeffjarvis, @erinsiegal, @agarciaphoto, @yunghi, @jbenton, @thomashawk and @beng

See also Mediagazer

Neil Chenoweth / Financial Review:

Apple moved $8.9B in untaxed profits from Australia to Irish subsidiary in last decade — How Ireland got Apple's $9bn profit — US tech giant Apple has shifted an estimated $8.9 billion in untaxed profits from its Australian operations to a tax haven structure in Ireland in the last decade …

More: AppleInsider, MacNN, Financial Review, The Register, Guardian, Breaking Apple News …, 9to5Mac, ABC, Delimiter and ZDNet

JP Mangalindan / Fortune:

CNN sells Zite to Flipboard in all-stock transaction worth more than the $20M CNN paid in 2011 — Flipboard buys Zite news app from CNN — The standalone iPad news app will eventually be shut down and integrated into Flipboard. Also: Zite's CEO tells Fortune why he left.

More: Bloomberg, Flipboard, Inside Flipboard, Reuters, Inside Flipboard, TechCrunch, Gotta Be Mobile, I4U News, ZDNet, iMore, Forbes, Marketing Land, Cult of Mac, Engadget, App Advice and The Digital Letter. Tweets: @mathewi. See also Mediagazer

Mark Johnson / LinkedIn Pulse:

Zite CEO Mark Johnson is not joining Flipboard, will eventually start a new company

More: Digital Trends, Gigaom, AndroidOS.in, PC Magazine, TechSpot, VatorNews, The Next Web, iPhone in Canada Blog and inessential.com. See also Mediagazer

Reid Hoffman / LinkedIn Pulse:

Short-term Profit Taking vs. Long-term Value Creation: The Future of PayPal — In January, activist investor Carl Icahn acquired around 2 percent of eBay's stock. A month or so later, eager for a return on his investment, he published an open letter to eBay's shareholders.

More: New York Times, Marc Andreessen, CNET and Mercury News

Tweets: @noplay, @mdudas, @peteskomoroch, @fmanjoo, @jeffjarvis and @cdixon

Reuters:

EBay CEO says top shareholders agree PayPal should stay put — (Reuters) - EBay Inc CEO John Donahoe said on Wednesday that several of the online retailer's most active shareholders have assured him they support his efforts to resist demands by activist investor Carl Icahn for a spin-off of the PayPal unit.

More: CNBC, TechEye, Trends, MarketWatch, Wall Street Journal, Re/code, bizjournals and Fox Business

Florian Mueller / FOSS Patents:

Setback for Apple: U.S. judge denies renewed bid for permanent injunction against Samsung — After it just became publicly-known that Apple itself had disclosed confidential licensing terms with respect to which it wanted Samsung sanctioned, Apple has to deal with another setback in its litigation with its most important competitor.

More: AppleInsider, 9to5Mac, The Switch, MacRumors, InfoWorld and Wall Street Journal. Thanks:@fosspatents

Lisa Fernandez / NBC Bay Area:

Facebook Will Be First Private Company in U.S. to Pay for Full-Time Beat Cop — Facebook will become what experts say is the first private company in the country to bankroll a full-time beat cop, establishing what could become a blueprint for many more similar partnerships.

More: Salon, Mercury News, Business Insider, Valleywag and Re/code

Tweets: @mikeisaac, @susie_c and @nbcbayarea

Tim Peterson / AdAge:

Apple Bringing Full-Screen Video iAds to Mobile — iPhone Maker May Sell the Ads Thru Company's New Ad Exchange — How Advertising Performs in a Social Media World — Coming to an iPad near you: iAds that look a lot like TV ads. — Apple will roll out new video iAds this year …

More: Inquirer, 9to5Mac, SlashGear, ReelSEO Video Marketing, TechnoBuffalo, Internet2Go, Cult of Mac, iMore, iPhone in Canada Blog, MacRumors, iDownloadBlog.com …, Pocket-lint, AppleInsider, MacNN, Phones Review and BGR. Tweets: @om

Ron / WinBeta:

Microsoft to unveil DirectX 12 on March 20th at the Games Developers Conference — The Games Developers Conference (GDC) is set to take place in San Francisco on March 20th and Microsoft has something big up their sleeve for that event - the unveiling of DirectX 12, Microsoft's next generation graphics API.

More: Engadget, ExtremeTech, Ars Technica, Polygon, AnandTech, CNET, Gearburn, DailyFinance, computerandvideogames.com, Windows Phone Central, SlashGear and Gamasutra

Reuters:

Exclusive: DirecTV in talks with Disney on deal for Internet rights — (Reuters) - DirecTV is in talks with Walt Disney Co to license the rights to offer Disney's broadcast and cable channels as part of an Internet-based product, DirecTV said on Wednesday. — The deal would mirror …

More: CNET, The Verge and SlashGear

Cyrus Farivar / Ars Technica:

Ars Technica experiments with digital currency, creates Arscoin for “educational use only” — Behold Arscoin, our own custom cryptocurrency! — Recently, I became the first person in the history of Ars Technica to have a gold—rather than black—user name. — How did I get this blinged-out honor?

Tweets: @scifri, @matthew_d_green and @caseynewton

Evelyn M. Rusli / Wall Street Journal:

Founders Fund Raises $1 Billion for New Venture-Capital Fund — Founders Fund, a backer of Facebook and Space Exploration Technologies, has closed $1 billion in new financing for a fifth fund, the firm announced on Wednesday. — The new vehicle is quite a step up from the $50 million …

More: Bloomberg, Re/code, VentureBeat, Business Wire, TechCrunch, PE Hub Blog and FinSMEs

Kim Zetter / Wired:

Feds dismiss charges against Barrett Brown for linking to Anonymous' stolen data — Feds Drop Most Charges Against Man Who Linked to Anonymous' Stolen Data — Federal prosecutors in Texas have moved to drop all but one of the 12 fraud charges against Barrett Brown, a writer charged …

More: Mashable, Guardian, The Switch, The Verge, Techdirt, Firedoglake, thenation.com/blogs/177862, dissenter.firedoglake.com, RT, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Ars Technica. See also Mediagazer

Adrianne Jeffries / The Verge:

Native American tribes adopt Bitcoin-like currency, prepare to battle US government — MazaCoin could be what the Lakota people need to boost them out of longstanding poverty, but is it legal? — The programmer and Native American activist Payu Harris raised a gavel Monday night …

More: Forbes, RT, ThinkProgress, The Independent and The Wire. Tweets: @marshallk

Emil Protalinski / The Next Web:

Stripe updates Checkout with better address support, new device-specific design, option to save payment info — Stripe today announced its first major update to Stripe Checkout, its attempt at the most straightforward payment experience possible. The new release includes expanded address support …

More: Stripe Blog, Business Insider and TechCrunch

Dana Wollman / Engadget:

Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 12.2 will ship March 9th for $650 — Samsung already gave us a heads-up that the largest of its new tablets, the Galaxy Pro 12.2, wouldn't arrive until March. Well, here it is, right on schedule. The company just announced that the 12-inch Android slate will go on sale March 9th …

More: Electronista, SamMobile, Droid Life, PhoneDog.com, Ubergizmo, 9to5Google, Softpedia News, Unwired View and SlashGear

Rohin Dhar / Priceonomics Blog:

San Francisco house prices are going up, but not the 60-80% over asking price cited by NYT — Fact Checking The New York Times and Redfin — Over the weekend, The New York Times about San Francisco real estate titled “The Housing Market with Nowhere to Go (But Up).” As we've previously shown, and are going way up.

Tweets: @joshconstine and @ikai. Thanks:@rohindhar

Biz Carson / Gigaom:

CrossCoin Ventures launches first Ripple startup accelerator — With Bitcoin's woes, could it be time for Ripple to shine? CrossCoin Ventures plans to announce Wednesday that it is launching the first Ripple digital currency accelerator, which will be based in San Francisco.

More: VentureBeat, Techvibes Global News, bizjournals, Fast Company and Finextra Research news. Thanks:@ianchaffee

Emil Protalinski / The Next Web:

Mozilla launches JPEG encoder mozjpeg to reduce webpage loads, results show up to 10% decrease in file size — Mozilla today announced a new project called mozjpeg, the goal of which is to provide a production-quality JPEG encoder that improves compression rates.

More: Mozilla Research, TechCrunch, CNET, Engadget, The Register, 1001 Noisy Cameras and BrowserNative

Bloomberg:

Bill Gates, Satya Nadella, Tony Bates and Microsoft's board all initially opposed Ballmer's plan for Nokia acquisition — Microsoft's Nadella Manages Legacy of Ballmer-Board Split — As Satya Nadella puts his stamp on Microsoft Corp., he's coming to grips with the tug of war over strategy …

More: Guardian, SiliconANGLE, PandoDaily, BGR, Wired, DailyTech, Computerworld, Ubergizmo, TheStreet.com, Microsoft News, MacDailyNews, GeekWire, WMPoweruser and CNET. Tweets: @manan

Shawn Musgrave / BetaBoston:

Car repossession companies profit from scanned license plates showing when and where vehicles were located — A vast hidden surveillance network runs across America, powered by the repo industry — Few notice the “spotter car” from Manny Sousa's repo company as it scours Massachusetts parking lots …

Tweets: @llorenzin, @cindycreem and @dangillmor. Thanks:@morisy

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