Techmeme: Expedia Acquires Australia's Wotif Group for $703 Million (Dennis Schaal/Skift)

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July 7, 2014, 1:35 PM

Top News

Jason Del Rey / Re/code:

Google sets aside as much as $500M to expand Shopping Express nationwide, fend off Amazon — Inside Google's Big Plan to Race Amazon to Your Door — Google is the undisputed king of search in all but one lucrative and vital category: Product searches. — Over the past decade …

More: Fortune, ScreenwerkScreenwerk, Marketing Land, USA Today, Forbes, 9to5Google, Beyond Search, Droid Life, Ubergizmo, Business Insider, Android Police, NBC Bay Area and WebProNews

Tweets: @delrey, @stilenius and @stevesilberman

Thanks:@delrey

Benedict Evans:

Android L and iOS 8 mark the first true mobile platform philosophy divergence since the iPhone — The next phase of smartphones — It's now 7 years since the iPhone reset the phone business, and indeed the entire computing and internet businesses. But it was pretty clear …

More: Ars Technica and Monday Note. Tweets: @stevesi

Kwame Opam / The Verge:

TSA blocking uncharged mobile devices from flights at some international airports — International travelers will have to make sure they charge all their devices before boarding their flights. In an announcement made Sunday, the TSA now plans on blocking flyers with uncharged phones …

Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch:

Oculus Debuts Oculus Connect Developer Conference, Acquires RakNet And Open Sources Its Tech — Oculus made a couple of announcements today, including the acquisition of middleware game-network technology provider RakNet, which powers cross-platform voice chat, SQL logging …

More: Oculus VR, VentureBeat, ZDNet, PC Magazine, Digital Trends, CNET, USA Today, Fortune, Engadget, Re/code and SlashGear

Dennis Schaal / Skift:

Expedia Acquires Australia's Wotif Group for $703 Million — The merger and acquisition binge in online travel just kicked up a notch as Expedia Inc. agreed to acquire Australia's Wotif Group for $703 million, or $3.30 per share. — With brands in the Asia-Pacific region that include Wotif.com …

More: GeekWire, VentureBeat, The Age, The Next Web, Wall Street Journal and Sydney Morning Herald. Tweets: @skift

Jerry Neumann / Reaction Wheel:

To succeed at investing when you're not a YC or Sequoia, focus on a single sector — Betting on the Ponies: non-Unicorn Investing — I bet on a horse called the Bottle of Smoke — I have decided to angel invest. Any advice? — I spent some time decades ago in the horse-racing world …

Tweets: @bgadoci, @howardlindzon, @daniellemorrill, @patio11, @mdudas and @davemcclure

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Gartner: Device Shipments Break 2.4B Units In 2014, Tablets To Overtake PC Sales In 2015 — The gradual decline of the PC industry, spurred on by the rapid rise of mobile computing, continues apace. Today the analysts at Gartner have published their latest forecasts for global PC, tablet …

More: Gartner, PC World, eWeek, GeekWire, Gigaom, Telegraph, GSMArena Blog, The Drum, ZDNet, Softpedia News, AndroidHeadlines.com and The Next Web. Thanks:@ingridlunden

Mathew Ingram / Gigaom:

ReservationHop is just the latest startup idea to exploit financial opportunity without thinking about ethics — It's getting harder to tell what's a real Silicon Valley startup and what's a parody — Maybe it's the foolish amounts of venture capital swirling around Silicon Valley …

More: InfoWorld. Tweets: @mathewi, @jayrosen_nyu, @evanselinger and @mikalfm

Hal Hodson / New Scientist:

Hong Kong subway AI manages 10K workers doing 2600 weekly engineering tasks across the system — The AI boss that deploys Hong Kong's subway engineers — An algorithm schedules and manages the nightly engineering work on one of the world's best subway systems - and does it more efficiently than any human could

More: Gizmodo. Tweets: @barticz

Janko Roettgers / Gigaom:

Apps on rarely-upgraded devices like cars, TVs increasingly rendered remotely, streamed as video — From Android Auto to OnLive: how video is becoming the secret glue of connected devices — Here's something you may not know about Android Auto, Google's attempt to enter the automotive space …

Tweets: @lukew, @gigaom and @stevesi

Eric Johnson / Re/code:

How Twitch's Founders Turned an Aimless Reality Show Into a Video Juggernaut — Broadcasting yourself playing videogames online may not sound like a billion dollar business. But that's just a matter of who you ask. — Twitch, the three-year-old video site is raising eyebrows across …

Kevin Poulsen / Wired:

How malicious community edits on Google Maps can destroy a business — How Google Map Hackers Can Destroy a Business at Will — Rene Bertagna blames Google for the death of his restaurant, Serbian Crown. Courtesy Rene Bertagna — Washington DC-area residents with a hankering …

More: Business Insider

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