Techmeme: How Aaron Levie and his childhood friends built Box into a $2 billion business, without stabbing each other in the back (Rachel King/TechRepublic)

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March 10, 2014, 1:45 AM

Top News

Andy Greenberg / Forbes:

Hackers Hit Mt. Gox Exchange's CEO, Claim To Publish Evidence Of Fraud — The Bitcoin community has been angrily pressing for details on what the Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox has described as a massive hacker attack that stole hundreds of millions of dollars worth of its users' bitcoins and left the company bankrupt.

More: MagicalTux in Japan, The Verge, Pastebin, CoinDesk, TechCrunch, SlashGear, Engadget, TheDomains.com and Ars Technica

Rachel King / TechRepublic:

How Aaron Levie and his childhood friends built Box into a $2 billion business, without stabbing each other in the back — “Water,” says Aaron Levie. It's 11:00 AM on a bright October morning in Silicon Valley. Levie, the bright-eyed young chief executive with patches of grey hair …

More: Bloomberg. Tweets: @stevesi, @mattrosoff and @mamoonha. Thanks:@rachelking

Josh Ong / The Next Web:

Google to launch Android developer SDK for wearable tech in 2 weeks — At SXSW today, Sundar Pichai, Google's SVP of Android, Apps and Chrome, announced that the company will soon release an Android developer SDK specifically designed for use with wearable devices.

Ernesto / TorrentFreak:

Popcorn Time: an open source, cross platform app for simply streaming movie torrents — Popcorn Time: Open Source Torrent Streaming Netflix For Pirates — Over the years BitTorrent has become fairly mainstream, with hundreds of millions of people using torrent clients to download the latest entertainment.

More: Technology Personalized, Cult of Mac, Gizmodo, Digit - Tech News, ITworld.com, Haverzine and Boing Boing

Tweets: @glynmoody and @iankennedy

Kaylene Hong / The Next Web:

Tencent takes a 15% stake in Chinese online retailer JD.com to take on Alibaba — Chinese Internet giant Tencent, which is best known for its wildly popular messaging service WeChat (known as Weixin in China), has officially combined its e-commerce operations with online retailer JD.com, after rumors last month hinted at such a move.

More: TechCrunch, PC World, CNET, Bloomberg, Tech in Asia, Pulse 2.0, Wall Street Journal and Reuters. Tweets: @jonrussell

Sean Hollister / The Verge:

Neil Young's high-fidelity iPod competitor will cost $399 — The age of the iPod might be over, but music artist Neil Young doesn't believe portable media players are dead. On March 15th, he'll offer pre-orders on Kickstarter for the PonoPlayer, a $399 triangular digital music player designed to sound worlds better.

More: Computer Audiophile, The Register, Pitchfork, Evolver.fm, Electronista, Fuse, Exclaim!, Vanyaland, Guardian and Engadget. Tweets: @davezatz

Alyson Shontell / Business Insider:

Young stars of Vine turn comedy into a business with sponsored videos and trips — Meet The Stars Of Vine: These Kids Have Millions Of Followers And Make Eye-Popping Amounts Of Money — For 16 year-old Lauren Giraldo, $2,000 isn't hard to come by. — All she has to do is press …

Christopher Mims / Quartz:

Apple's new product process is a giant checklist covering all steps in product's life cycle — Any company can copy the keystone of Apple's design process — It turns out that the key to Apple's creativity, speed, and adaptability is, on its surface, the exact opposite of the kind of free-wheeling creativity one might expect.

Tweets: @dalmaer

Steven Bertoni / Forbes:

Shutterstock CEO unperturbed by Getty's free images, says 99.9% of business is commercial use — Free Getty Images No Threat To Photo Market Says Shutterstock CEO — Getty Images is giving away 35 million photos for free. Some are saying the move, aimed to combat pic piracy, will upend the entire stock photo market.

More: Wired

Jenna Wortham / New York Times:

Vendors using Instagram as an unofficial e-commerce platform worry it will become official — On Instagram, a Bazaar Where You Least Expect It — Instagram, the photo-sharing app owned by Facebook, is my favorite place to skim through pictures of friends.

Tweets: @cschweitz

Casey Newton / The Verge:

In the wake of Zite's sale, it's time to take a more skeptical look at news personalization by algorithms — The smarter news apps are, the dumber they get — A curiously hot category with little to show for it — In August 2011, CNN bought the newsreading app Zite for $20 million.

More: Rex Hammock's RexBlog.com. Tweets: @timobrien and @mathewi

Emil Protalinski / The Next Web:

Pinterest's first transparency report: 12 government requests for data on 13 accounts in second half of 2013 — Pinterest today published its first transparency report, with the promise to release a new edition every six months. The company revealed it only received seven warrants …

More: Re/code, Oh, How Pinteresting!, Mashable, VentureBeat, Softpedia News and Pulse 2.0

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