Techmeme: How the ‘PayPal Mafia’ redefined success in Silicon Valley (Conner Forrest/TechRepublic)

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July 1, 2014, 9:05 AM

Top News

Washington Post:

New Snowden documents show FISA court authorized NSA to spy on all but four foreign countries — Court gave NSA broad leeway in surveillance, documents show — Virtually no foreign government is off-limits for the National Security Agency, which has been authorized to intercept information …

More: Techdirt, The Times of Israel, Softpedia News, TechCrunch, Gizmodo and The Hill

Tweets: @csoghoian and @trevortimm

ProPublica:

Bulk or targeted? Foreign or domestic? This handy diagram plots the answer for the NSA programs revealed this past year — The NSA Revelations All in One Chart — This is a plot of the NSA programs revealed in the past year according to whether they are bulk or targeted …

More: Gizmodo, VentureBeat and FlowingData

Tweets: @loisbeckett and @propublica

Robert McMillan / Wired:

Recent hires suggest Apple is forming its own speech recognition team for a neural-net-boosted Siri — Siri Will Soon Understand You a Whole Lot Better — It all started at a small academic get-together in Whistler, British Columbia. — The topic was speech recognition …

More: LAPTOP Magazine, AppleInsider, iMore, MacNN, App Advice, MacRumors, 9to5Mac, Ubergizmo and Cult of Mac. Tweets: @cdixon

Jason Del Rey / Re/code:

“Buy Now” Buttons Start Appearing in Tweets. Is Twitter Shopping Finally Here? — Two things stand out about the sneakers pictured above in a screenshot from Twitter. First, their list price is a cool $170 million (though we imagine that's a glitch). — Second, there's a “Buy now” button included in the tweet.

More: The Register, SocialTimes, Ubergizmo, State of Digital, memeburn, CNET, Marketing Land and Mashable

Tweets: @jbruin and @caseynewton

Conner Forrest / TechRepublic:

How the ‘PayPal Mafia’ redefined success in Silicon Valley — The “PayPal Mafia” is no mafia at all. It's a diaspora. “Basically, we were kicked out of our homeland and they burned down our temple. So, we were scattered to the four corners of the globe, and we had to make new homes.”

Tweets: @davidsacks, @stilenius, @mdudas and @hkanji

Kashmir Hill / Forbes:

Facebook Added ‘Research’ To User Agreement 4 Months After Emotion Manipulation Study — Unless you've spent the last couple of days in a Faraday pouch under a rock, you've heard about Facebook's controversial ‘emotion manipulation’ study. Facebook data scientist Adam Kramer ran an experiment …

More: ReadWrite, BGR, New York Times, Guardian, Gigaom, Mashable, Tech Times, New Statesman, Daily Dot, Business Insider, ExtremeTech, ZDNet, Gizmodo, TechnoBuffalo, PandoDaily, Salon, TODAY, USA Today, Washington Post, WebProNews, Computerworld, Valleywag, POPSUGAR, AllFacebook, Mission Loc@l, PSFK, Wall Street Journal, VacuousMinx, WindowsITPro and Technabob

Tweets: @jayrosen_nyu and @kashhill

Thanks:@aatilley

Ina Fried / Re/code:

Twitter Scoops Up AdTech Firm Tap Commerce for Around $100 Million — Twitter is in the process of acquiring Tap Commerce, a New York-based mobile advertising technology firm, according to sources familiar with the situation. The deal is expected to be announced later on Monday.

Kaylene Hong / The Next Web:

Samsung reveals the mini version of its Galaxy S5 smartphone, will go on sale in Russia first — Samsung has taken the wraps off the mini version of its flagship Galaxy S5 smartphone. The 4.5-inch Galaxy S5 mini has pretty much the same features as its parent device, featuring IP67 certification …

More: Samsung Mobile Press, PC World, CNET, BetaNews, Gizmodo, Digital Trends, 9to5Google, Engadget, The Verge, Neowin, SlashGear, Phones Review, Softpedia News and Pocketnow

David Meyer / Gigaom:

The dark side of .io: How the U.K. is making web domain profits from a shady Cold War land deal — The .io country code top-level domain is pretty popular right now, particularly among tech startups that want to take advantage of the snappy input/output reference and the relative availability of names …

More: Guardian and The Independent. Tweets: @superglaze, @farman and @robmoff

Pete Rizzo / CoinDesk:

Silk Road auction: 45 bidders, 63 total bids; SecondMarket was outbid on all blocks — Bitcoin Price Surges as Silk Road Auction Spurs Investor Interest — The US Marshals Service (USMS) has begun to inform participating investors as to the official results of its 27th June auction …

More: NEWSBTC

Biz Carson / Gigaom:

Bitcoin price jumps six percent as US Marshals' auction comes to a close

More: PandoDaily, Wall Street Journal, CoinDesk, Softpedia News, Reuters and Business Insider

Tom Huddleston Jr / Fortune:

Tinder's former marketing VP Whitney Wolfe sues company for sexual discrimination, claims co-founder title removed — Tinder has a date with sexual discrimination suit — Dating app Tinder has been hit with a sexual discrimination lawsuit filed by its former vice president of marketing.

More: USA Today, TechCrunch, Reuters, Wall Street Journal, TMZ.com, TIME, Valleywag, LAist, Daily Dot, NEWS.com.au and Reuters. Tweets: @davidu

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:

Millions of dynamic DNS users suffer after Microsoft seizes No-IP domains — Legitimate users caught in legal fire designed to take down botnets. — Millions of legitimate servers that rely on dynamic domain name services from No-IP.com suffered outages on Monday after Microsoft seized 22 domain names …

Mikey Campbell / AppleInsider:

Apple rolls out two-step verification for iCloud.com Web apps — Apple appears to be testing out a new implementation of its two-factor Apple ID authentication system with iCloud.com, requiring users who have the additional layer of security enabled to enter a special code before accessing the Web apps.

More: The Verge, MacRumors, App Advice, The Next Web, Ubergizmo, iPhone in Canada Blog, iMore and MacStories. Thanks:@mikeycampbell81

Charles Hudson / Charles Hudson's Weblog:

Competing with LinkedIn and the Case Against Unbundling — I've been thinking about LinkedIn quite a bit lately. I think LinkedIn is really interesting because in many ways I think it is one of the most durable and hard to disrupt companies that sit at the intersection of SaaS and social networking.

Tweets: @howardlindzon, @stevesi and @danprimack

Brianna Valleskey / Benzinga:

The AP will use robots to turn data into stories for earnings reports beginning July — AP Using Robots For Journalism Starting In July — The Associated Press announced Monday that it will begin using automated technology to write company earnings reports next month.

More: THE DEFINITIVE SOURCE, New York Times, Gigaom, Mashable and Business Insider

Samit Sarkar / Polygon:

Ouya now selling 12-month pass to 800 games for $59.99 — Ouya launched a limited deal today, the All-Access Pass, which gives customers 12 months' worth of access to almost all games on the platform for $59.99. — According to its listing on the Ouya Shop, the All-Access Pass covers …

More: Gamasutra, Engadget, TechSpot, Ubergizmo, Ars Technica, Electronista, Connectedly, CNET, Develop Feed, SlashGear, Liliputing, VentureBeat, Hardcore Gamer, Android Police and Gizmodo

Tweets: @mikebithell and @necrosofty

Julian Chokkattu / TechCrunch:

US National Archives To Upload All Holdings To Wikimedia Commons — Ever since the National Archives and Record Administration launched the Open Government Plan in 2010, it has increasingly been uploading content to Wikipedia to digitize and gain a wider reach for its holdings.

More: Washington Post. Tweets: @20tauri

Derrick Harris / Gigaom:

Databricks announces a Spark cloud and $33M in venture capital — Databricks, the company trying to commercialize the Apache Spark data-processing framework, announced on Monday at the second-annual Spark Summit that it has raised $33 million in series B venture capital …

More: TechCrunch, insideBIGDATA, InformationWeek, The Register, bizjournals, VentureBeat, PE Hub Blog and Wall Street Journal

Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet:

More details on Microsoft's desktop-focused Windows ‘Threshold’ release; public preview expected in fall 2014, release in spring 2015 — Windows ‘Threshold’: More on Microsoft's plan to win over Windows 7 users — Summary: One of Microsoft's main goals with 'Threshold …

Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:

CoreOS Raises $8M Series A Round, Launches Managed Linux As A Service — CoreOS, a Linux distribution optimized for very large server deployments, today announced that it has raised a $8 million Series A funding round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers with follow-on investments by Sequoia Capital and Fuel Capital.

More: SiliconANGLE, Gigaom, PR Newswire, InformationWeek, eWeek, The Register, InfoWorld, Network World and CoreOS Blog

Reuters:

Automakers incrementally approach self-driving cars, see dangers to Google's eagerness — Google, Detroit diverge on road map for self-driving cars — (Reuters) - In 2012, a small team of Google Inc engineers and business staffers met with several of the world's largest car makers …

More: Tech Times, SlashGear and DailyTech

Steve Johnson / Mercury News:

Hewlett-Packard and shareholders reach settlement in suit over Autonomy deal — PALO ALTO — In a victory for Hewlett-Packard, the tech giant said Monday it has tentatively reached a settlement in a federal shareholder lawsuit over its ill-fated purchase of British software company Autonomy …

More: Marketwired, The Register, ZDNet, Reuters, Re/code, Gigaom, CNET and NASDAQ.com

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