Techmeme: Tencent takes a 15% stake in Chinese online retailer JD.com to take on Alibaba (Kaylene Hong/The Next Web)

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March 10, 2014, 4:35 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, Pastebin, CoinDesk, The Verge, 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 …

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

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, Digit - Tech News, ITworld.com, Gizmodo, Haverzine and Boing Boing

Tweets: @glynmoody and @iankennedy

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.

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: Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, CNET, Tech in Asia, Pulse 2.0, Reuters and Wall Street Journal. 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, Pitchfork, Evolver.fm, The Register, 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 …

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

Alissa Walker / Gizmodo:

A look at UCLA's 3420 Boelter Hall, where the first ARPANET node was installed — This Is The Room Where The Internet Was Born — For something as ubiquitous as the internet today, it certainly isn't easy to find where it all started. I don't mean historically, I mean logistically …

More: Daily Mail

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

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

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