Techmeme: The story of WebP: How Google wants to speed up the web, one image at a time (Janko Roettgers/Gigaom)

Open Links In New Tab

Mobile Archives Advertise Site News Contact Editors

July 21, 2014, 8:05 AM

Top News

Janko Roettgers / Gigaom:

The story of WebP: How Google wants to speed up the web, one image at a time — Tired of slow web pages? So is Google, and the company thinks it has the key to speed up the web: smaller image files. Google's WebP image format aims to replace existing image file formats like JPEG with a smaller file size …

Nitasha Tiku / Valleywag:

Product Hunt Founder Explains Why The Hell He Joined Y Combinator — Industry obsessives talk about Product Hunt—a leaderboard that lets members vote on new apps, devices, and other assorted technologies—with a sense of gratefulness. Venture capitalists use its hand-picked daily list to find a diamond in the deluge.

Tweets: @nitashatiku and @hunterwalk

Jeyup S. Kwaak / Wall Street Journal:

Seoul Moves to Ban Uber, Plans Own App — UPDATE: Uber Monday evening called Seoul city government's earlier statement a sign that it lags behind in adopting what it called an innovation in transportation. “Comments like these show Seoul is in danger of remaining trapped in the past …

More: The Korea Times, Financial Times, Forbes, BusinessTech and NDTV News

Author Earnings:

Study: 31% of ebooks sold on Amazon are self-published; DRM harms sales at all price levels — July 2014 Author Earnings Report — It has been nearly half a year since we first pulled data for nearly every ranked ebook on Amazon.com's thousands of category bestseller lists.

More: Good E-Reader and Boing Boing

Arik Hesseldahl / Re/code:

Edward Snowden Plans to Work on Privacy Tech — NSA leaker Edward Snowden says he plans to work on technology to preserve personal data privacy and called on programmers to join his efforts. — Speaking via a Google Hangout at the Hackers on Planet Earth Conference in New York …

More: SiliconANGLE, The Register, Motherboard, TechCrunch, ZDNet, BetaNews and Reuters

Kim Zetter / Wired:

How Ladar Levison and a convicted hacker aim to encrypt emails, including to and from fields, with Dark Mail — A Convicted Hacker and an Internet Icon Join Forces to Thwart NSA Spying — The internet is littered with burgeoning email encryption schemes aimed at thwarting NSA spying.

Tweets: @gmillard and @kgosztola

Shalini Ramachandran / Wall Street Journal:

Verizon FiOS, facing slowing growth, plans symmetrical upload speeds at no additional charge — Verizon FiOS Enhances Bandwidth for Uploads — Company Is Seeking to Race Ahead of Cable Industry in Its Internet Speeds — Verizon Communications Inc. 's FiOS TV and broadband service …

Jerin Mathew / International Business Times:

Huawei's First-Half Revenue up 19% While It Emerges as Major Smartphone Brand — China-based telecommunications equipment maker, Huawei Technologies, has reported a 19% increase in revenues for the first half of 2014 as consumers across the world become aware of its smartphone and tablet offerings, leading to higher sales.

More: BBC, ZDNet, Huawei Press Center, The Economic Times, MarketWatch and Reuters

Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security:

New search engine Indexus indexes records from data breaches, mostly from sites young hackers frequent — Even Script Kids Have a Right to Be Forgotten — Indexeus, a new search engine that indexes user account information acquired from more than 100 recent data breaches, has caught many in the hacker underground off-guard.

More: The Verge and Engadget. Tweets: @_n1k_nak, @cert_polska_en and @teamcymru

Rohin Dhar / Priceonomics Blog:

Sequoia Capital will likely earn more from investing in YC companies than YC — The Big Winner from Y Combinator's Success? Sequoia Capital — Yesterday, Y Combinator's president, Sam Altman, that the seed investment firm had funded 716 companies that were currently valued collectively at around $30 billion.

More: CB Insights. Tweets: @jason and @bryce

Ina Fried / Re/code:

Mobile carriers have kept profits high, even after moving away from charging for voice minutes — Mobile Carriers Charging Differently, but Still Finding Plenty of Ways to Make Money — A few years ago, cellular companies charged for each call their customers made and gave most of them unlimited data.

Tweets: @inafried

Kate Cox / Consumerist:

From AT&T To Verizon: What The Web's Biggest Players Told The FCC About Net Neutrality — The FCC originally planned to stop taking comments about their net neutrality proposal on Tuesday. But after demand overwhelmed and crashed their antique IT system, they extended the deadline to 11:59 p.m. (EDT) tonight.

More: Business Insider. Tweets: @nytimesbits

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.

Cape:

Most carriers track everything. Cape doesn't. — Unlimited talk, text & data, 24-hr metadata deletion, network ID rotation, SIM-attack defense, and more. Switch today and get 29% off for life.

Zoho:

Do you need a Zoho Partner? Here's why working with one can benefit you. — Zoho offers over 60 applications, each one built for a unique use case. From sales and marketing to finance, HR, and customer support …

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

The Talk Show With John Gruber:

'What's in Louie's Wallet', With Louie Mantia

The director's commentary track for Daring Fireball. Long digressions on Apple, technology, design, movies, and more.

Subscribe to The Talk Show With John Gruber.

Big Technology Podcast:

Leopold Blows Up, OpenAI Drastically Cuts Prices, Microsoft's Best Day

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.

Hard Fork:

Open Model Wars + Claire Stapleton's Dishy Google Memoir + Substack's Slop Fight

The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.

Subscribe to Hard Fork.

Great Chat:

Tech's short-term era

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.

Access:

Meet the most AI-pilled CEO on Earth

A show about the tech industry's inside conversation, hosted by tech reporter Alex Heath and founder whisperer Ellis Hamburger.

Subscribe to Access.

Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:

Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin

Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.

Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.

Add your podcast here

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 8:05 AM ET, July 21, 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.