Techmeme: Tencent Agrees to Buy 15% Stake in JD.Com for $214.7 Million (Lulu Yilun Chen/Bloomberg)

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March 9, 2014, 10:10 PM

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, Pastebin, CoinDesk, TechCrunch, Ars Technica, SlashGear, Engadget and TheDomains.com

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.

More: The Verge, ZDNet, Engadget, Wall Street Journal, CNET, TechnoBuffalo, VentureBeat, Pocket-lint, ReadWrite, 9to5Google, Pocket-lint, Re/code, iDownloadBlog.com …, Droid Life and TechHive

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: ZDNet, Bloomberg and CNET

Tweets: @stevesi, @mattrosoff and @mamoonha

Thanks:@rachelking

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

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

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

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, Pitchfork, Engadget, Evolver.fm, Fuse, Exclaim!, Vanyaland and Guardian. Tweets: @davezatz

Lulu Yilun Chen / Bloomberg:

Tencent Agrees to Buy 15% Stake in JD.Com for $214.7 Million — Tencent Holdings Ltd. (700), Asia's largest Internet company, agreed to buy a 15 percent stake in Chinese e-commerce company JD.com for $214.7 million as it steps up its challenge to Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

More: The Next Web, Wall Street Journal and Reuters

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!, VentureBeat, Mashable, Softpedia News and Pulse 2.0

Liz Gannes / Re/code:

Lyft Funding Official: Documents Filed for New $150 Million Round — Lyft, the ride-sharing app that is locked in an expensive competition with rival Uber, is at least part of the way to its next round of funding. — The company filed a document associated with a Series D round worth $150 million …

More: Wall Street Journal, The Technology Chronicles, The Verge, TechCrunch, Mashable and VentureBeat

Sean Hollister / The Verge:

Future of gaming microconsoles in question as Ouya pivots to become a software platform — The indie game console may already be dead — Last year, I predicted that the rising tide of Android gaming would raise all boats — that indie game consoles like the Ouya, the Shield …

More: Slashdot, Business Wire, PC Magazine, Forbes, Polygon, Eurogamer.net, VentureBeat, Joystiq, Engadget, Ars Technica, Re/code, Kotaku and The Next Web

Wall Street Journal:

SoftBank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son Pushes Sprint to Shed ‘Loser’ Mindset in Mobile-Phone Industry — At a meeting with Sprint Corp. executives in October, the chief executive of parent company SoftBank Corp. lost his temper about the mobile carrier's advertising, complaining that it wasn't luring enough new customers.

More: DSLreports, Computerworld and BGR

Tweets: @danamattioli and @jessicalessin

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