Techmeme: Facebook courts advertisers to target likely World Cup viewers, a first for a TV event (Cotton Delo/AdAge)

Open Links In New Tab

Mobile Archives Advertise Site News Contact Editors

April 18, 2014, 11:55 PM

Top News

Nick Statt / CNET:

Exclusive: Nike fires majority of FuelBand team, will stop making wearable hardware — The sportswear company has decided that only software has a future in the company's technology vision. That means cutting the FuelBand, and those who helped make it.

More: Secret, GeekWire, MacRumors, TechCrunch, AppleInsider, Gigaom, ParisLemon, Gizmodo, iMore, The Verge, 9to5Mac, The Next Web, Engadget, VentureBeat, Electronista, Patently Apple, Neowin, Gotta Be Mobile, Daring Fireball, Network World, Redmond Pie, Mashable, Business Insider, SlashGear and iDownloadBlog.com

Tweets: @bgurley, @nickstatt, @mistersterling, @lessien, @dannysullivan, @jyarow, @ryan, @ryanlawler, @felixsalmon and @danprimack

Thanks:@coopeydoop

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Airbnb closes TPG-led $450M-500M funding round valuing company at $10B — Airbnb Has Closed Its $500M Round Of Funding At A $10B Valuation, Led By TPG — TechCrunch has learned that Airbnb, the fast-growing site that lets people become hoteliers by renting out sofas, rooms or entire private homes …

More: Wall Street Journal, VentureBeat, Re/code, Mashable, VatorNews, Skift, PandoDaily, Business Insider and Forbes. Thanks:@alex

Kim Zetter / Wired:

Certificate Revocation Lists increase sharply in size in the wake of Heartbleed, hogging bandwidth — Heartbleed Bug Sends Bandwidth Costs Skyrocketing — The exposure of the Heartbleed vulnerability last week had a number of repercussions, one of which was to set off a mad scramble …

More: CloudFlare Blog. Tweets: @xor

Daniel Cid / Sucuri Blog:

Heartbleed status scan: 0.52% of top 10K sites, 2% of top 1M sites still vulnerable — HeartBleed in the Wild — As most of you probably already know, ten days ago security Researchers disclosed a very serious vulnerability in the OpenSSL library, which is used to power HTTPS on most websites nowadays.

More: PC Magazine, PandoDaily, Neowin, Business Insider, Re/code and Guardian

Tweets: @sucuri_security and @virusbtn

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:

Heartbleed exploits expand to VPN devices: attackers hijack user sessions, bypassing multifactor authentication

More: M-unition, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, SecurityWeek, IEEE Spectrum Recent …, ReadWrite and Computerworld

Tweets: @dangillmor and @pierre

Peter Kafka / Re/code:

Beats Bites the Bullet, and Starts Selling Subscriptions From Apple's App — Apple has a crazily powerful digital store, used by hundreds of millions of customers. But if you want to sell something there it will cost you: In almost every case, Apple keeps 30 percent of the purchase price on whatever its users buy.

More: Engadget, MacRumors, AppleInsider and 9to5Mac

Tweets: @pkafka and @pkafka

Mike Beasley / 9to5Mac:

Apple reaching out to developers who didn't win WWDC lottery, offering chance to buy unclaimed tickets — If you didn't get a chance to buy a WWDC ticket in the lottery last week, you might just get another chance soon. Developers who won were given until April 14 to buy a slot at the conference …

More: MacRumors, iMore, CNET, SlashGear and iPhone Hacks

Deep Nishar / Official LinkedIn Blog:

LinkedIn hits 300M members, 100M in US, says mobile traffic will overtake desktop later this year — The Next Three Billion [INFOGRAPHIC] — We are excited to announce that we reached a big milestone today: there are now more than 300 million LinkedIn members in the world!

More: TechCrunch, Marketing Pilgrim, Techie Buzz, PC Magazine, Simply Measured, TechSpot, ZDNet, VatorNews, VentureBeat, The Next Web, Marketing Land, Gigaom, The Tell, Re/code, Softpedia News and WebProNews

Vodafone Social:

HTC hints at DSLR-like optical zoom in the next 18-24 months, “wants to own the selfie market” — HTC talks camera tech: DSLR-destroying optical zooming ‘18 months’ away — The HTC One (M8) is here, and even though we're only in April, it's already a strong contender for phone of the year.

Sam Altman:

YC's new president suggests several solutions to key issues in employee stock compensation — Employee Equity — Startup employees often do not get treated very well when it comes to stock compensation. New ideas float around occasionally, but lawyers are usually averse to trying new things …

Tweets: @tensafefrogs, @karlnieb, @cw, @davetisch, @vlgreen, @sparty_legal, @jbrewer and @cdixon

Carla Marinucci / SFGate:

Sam Altman and Marissa Mayer co-hosting Obama fundraiser for DNC at Y Combinator HQ on May 8 — New! Obama to hit Y Combinator headquarters in Mt. View on May 8 — President Obama will hit the Mt. View headquarters of Y Combinator, the hot Silicon Valley start-up funder and incubator …

Josh Constine / TechCrunch:

Facebook not currently using location data from Nearby Friends for ads, will in the future — Facebook ‘Nearby Friends’ Will Track Your Location History To Target You With Ads — Facebook says it's not using its new Nearby Friends feature to target ads yet, but after I asked why it's tracking …

More: AdAge, CNET, I4U News, Marketing Land, eWeek, Technabob and WebProNews. Tweets: @qthrul

Kevin Fitchard / Gigaom:

Welcome to the spectrum-dome: FCC lays groundwork for its controversial incentive auction — This spring is shaping up to be a very contentious season for almost everyone that has a stake in the country's wireless airwaves. The Federal Communications Commission on Friday released …

More: FCC.gov, Ars Technica, Adweek, Engadget, PC Magazine, Computerworld, Variety, TheHill and DSLreports. See also Mediagazer

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:

Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning — SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds. Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.

Cloudflare:

Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference — Stop preparing for agents. Start running them. 100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.

Zoho:

Beyond productivity: Why live captions belong in every meeting — You join a meeting, someone starts talking, and within a minute, there are names, numbers, ideas, and unfamiliar terms flying around. You could ask them to repeat it.

IDrive:

Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Sponsor Techmeme

Featured Podcasts

Channels with Peter Kafka:

David Ellison's Paramount-Warner Empire & The Fight That Comes Next

Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.

Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.

Sources:

Factory CEO on why AGI is already here

Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.

Subscribe to Sources.

Invest Like the Best:

Noah Shinn - Building Instinct: The Personal Agent

The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.

Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.

Lenny's Podcast:

The grief, loneliness, and burnout sweeping through the tech industry right now | Molly Graham

Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.

Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.

Big Technology Podcast:

Meta's Muse Revival, Frontier AI Under Threat, The Rise Of Dopamine Sites

The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.

Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.

Great Chat:

Doomers at Dreamforce

A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.

Subscribe to Great Chat.

Add your podcast here

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 11:55 PM ET, April 18, 2014.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.