Techmeme: Icahn's latest tip: eBay should sell 20 percent of PayPal via IPO (Rachel King/ZDNet)

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March 19, 2014, 2:30 PM

Top News

Richard Lai / Engadget:

Oppo Find 7 is the world's first phone that can take 50MP photos (video) — We've seen the teasers and we've seen the leaks, so it's about time to see the real thing. Oppo has finally unveiled the Find 7 in Beijing just now, and as promised, this Android 4.3 device really can take 50-megapixel photos!

Jay Hathaway / Gawker:

Dong Nguyen says Flappy Bird will return to the App Store, but not soon — Enjoy Your Life While You Can, Because Flappy Bird is Coming Back — The most addictive, dangerous new drug of 2014 is about to come back on the market. Game developer Dong Nguyen has announced that his hit game Flappy Bird …

More: TechCrunch, MacRumors, LAPTOP Magazine, Wall Street Journal, BGR, Business Insider, iMore, USA Today, SlashGear, VentureBreak, AndroidGuys and Phandroid. Tweets: @dongatory

Adrianne Jeffries / The Verge:

Twitter gives up on encrypting direct messages, at least for now — Twitter has shelved a project that would have made it more difficult for the government to intercept users' private messages without a court order, sources tell The Verge, a sudden reversal for a company that has been ahead …

More: TechHive, Business Insider, Gigaom, Ubergizmo and Softpedia News

Diane Bartz / Reuters:

Exclusive: States to probe Comcast plan to buy Time Warner Cable — (Reuters) - Florida and other U.S. states will join the Justice Department in seeking to determine if Comcast's plan to merge with Time Warner Cable is legal under U.S. antitrust law, Florida said in a statement to Reuters.

More: The Verge, CNET, DailyTech, Engadget, Softpedia News, SlashGear and Electronista

Ben Gilbert / Engadget:

Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4 now available by subscription for $19, headed to OS X and more — Unreal Engine 3 set the standard for games last generation, powering breakout franchises like Gears of War and Mass Effect. We don't know if Unreal Engine 4 will have the same impact …

More: Unreal Engine, VentureBeat, TechCrunch, CNET, The Verge, Gamasutra, iDownloadBlog.com, Rock, Paper, Shotgun, VG247 and Joystiq

Sean Hollister / The Verge:

The second Oculus Rift developer kit includes higher resolution panels, peripheral camera for position tracking, ships in July for $350 — World-builders, rejoice: the final Oculus Rift VR dev kit is here — One year ago today, Oculus introduced the first version of its prototype virtual reality headset …

More: Oculus VR, Polygon, New York Times, Engadget, Wall Street Journal, Re/code, TechCrunch, Tested and Kotaku

Tweets: @starfire2258, @starfire2258 and @tomwarren

Sam Byford / The Verge:

Sony reveals Project Morpheus, its VR headset for PlayStation 4 — Sony has revealed that it is working on virtual reality technology for PS4. Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Worldwide Studios, made the announcement at an ongoing Game Developers Conference 2014 event entitled Driving the Future of Innovation.

Phil Goldstein / FierceWireless:

Huawei backtracks, won't release a dual-OS Android, Windows Phone smartphone — Huawei said it has no plans to release a dual-OS smartphone running Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows Phone and Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android, contradicting earlier statements from a Huawei executive.

More: TechCrunch, Ubergizmo, Windows Phone Central, Android Community, SlashGear and WMPoweruser

David Pakman / Re/code:

Dilemma for music streaming services: labels demand twice what listeners are willing to pay — The Price of Music — Will the recorded music industry ever grow again? Since 1999, the industry has been in rapid decline as CDs became unbundled into downloaded singles.

More: The Verge, Evolver.fm and Guardian. Tweets: @pkafka

Emil Protalinski / The Next Web:

Pandora raises One price to $4.99 per month for new subscribers and scraps annual option, blames royalty rates

Peter Kafka / Re/code:

Streaming Subscriptions Are Now a Billion-Dollar Business, but Music Sales Stall

More: Wall Street Journal, hypebot, Newsome.Org, Reuters, Associated Press, Bloomberg, Billboard, Guardian and Telegraph. See also Mediagazer

Caitlin Dewey / Washington Post:

Meet Cloak, the ‘antisocial’ network that helps you avoid people — We have myriad tech-enabled ways to encounter friends (and strangers!) in real life. We can check in on Foursquare. Tag a location on Instagram. Swipe on Tinder. Tweet, from just about anywhere.

More: CNET, SiliconANGLE, Mashable, BBC, BuzzFeed, Wired.co.uk, PSFK, Daily Dot, memeburn and NEWS.com.au. Tweets: @fmanjoo

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Autodesk Buys Creative Market To Square Up To Adobe With A Marketplace For Designers And Makers — It looks like Autodesk has taken one more step forward in its bid to compete more with the likes of Adobe in the business of providing tools to the design community, but also a bigger step into the maker movement.

More: Creative Market, ZDNet and VentureBeat

Cyrus Farivar / Ars Technica:

Judge rebukes Feds for overbroad search warrant applications for e-mail — In a rare public rebuke of American prosecutors' request on accessing a person's e-mail, a federal magistrate judge in the District of Columbia has denied a government warrant request to search an unnamed user's @mac …

More: Politico and Electronista

Rachel King / ZDNet:

Icahn's latest tip: eBay should sell 20 percent of PayPal via IPO — Summary: The American business magnate published yet another open letter to eBay shareholders on Wednesday. — Carl Icahn won't give up on nagging eBay over selling PayPal (among many other things) …

More: Shareholders Square Table, Re/code, Reuters and Wall Street Journal

Larry Hryb / Xbox Live's Major Nelson:

Project Spark Goes to Open Beta on Xbox One — Our friends at Team Dakota have just announced that Project Spark is now in open beta on Xbox One. That means Xbox One owners can join the existing community of Project Spark players and creators without needing a beta code.

More: PC Magazine, BGR, WinBeta, Geeky Gadgets, Engadget, Wired.co.uk, WebProNews, VG247 and Blue's News

Ryan Lawler / TechCrunch:

Y Combinator Alums Aaron Harris And Justin Kan Join As Partners — Startup accelerator Y Combinator just announced that it's added a couple of new partners, both of whom have been through the program. Alums Justin Kan and Aaron Harris have joined to help mentor the startups that participate in the 12-week accelerator.

More: Y Combinator Posthaven

Joel Rosenblatt / Bloomberg:

Google Won't Face Group E-Mail Privacy Lawsuit: Judge — Google Inc. (GOOG) won a major victory in its fight against claims it illegally scanned private e-mail messages to and from Gmail accounts, defeating a bid to unify lawsuits in a single group case on behalf of hundreds of millions of Internet users.

More: Education Week, The Register, Naked Security, bizjournals, Reuters and Mercury News

Deborah Gage / Wall Street Journal:

Platfora Raises $38M to Make Big Data Accessible to Businesses — One of the biggest drivers of the recent Big Data movement is Hadoop, the open source software named after a toy elephant and the target of hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. — Data analytics and tools companies …

More: VentureBeat, TechCrunch, Gigaom, Fortune and PE Hub Blog

Ron Amadeo / Ars Technica:

In-depth with Android Wear, Google's quantum leap of a smartwatch OS — We take a look at how Android Wear works, and even manage to break some stuff. — Yesterday, Google announced Android Wear, its wearable device platform for smartwatches. Android Wear is a shrunken-down …

More: The Verge and PandoDaily

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:

10,000 Linux servers hit by malware serving tsunami of spam and exploits — Two-year-old Windigo may also have infected kernel.org Linux developers. — Researchers have documented an ongoing criminal operation infecting more than 10,000 Unix and Linux servers with malware that sends spam …

More: We Live Security, The Switch, ZDNet, Softpedia News, TechEye, Help Net Security and V3.co.uk. Tweets: @securityninja

Bloomberg:

Japan Display Plunges 15% in Debut on Business Model Concerns — Japan Display Inc. plunged in its debut after the supplier of screens for Apple Inc. devices priced shares through an initial public offering at the bottom of a planned range. — The IPO raised 318.5 billion yen ($3.1 billion) with an offer price of 900 yen.

More: Wall Street Journal, Reuters, BBC and CNBC

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