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July 24, 2014, 8:15 PM

Top News

Amazon:

Amazon.com Announces Second Quarter Sales up 23% to $19.34 Billion — Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced financial results for its second quarter ended June 30, 2014. — Operating cash flow increased 18% to $5.33 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $4.53 billion …

More: VentureBeat, The Verge, The Register, Business Insider, CNET, ZDNet, New York Times, TechCrunch, Re/code, Ars Technica, Network World, Tech Trader Daily, TechSpot, Android Central, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and WebProNews. Tweets: @jbrodkin

Dan Frommer / Quartz:

Amazon's cloud price war with Google is starting to hurt — The numbers: Mixed, as always. Amazon sales grew in the double-digits for the 52nd quarter in a row. Revenue increased 23% year-over-year to $19.3 billion. Operating loss reached $15 million, down from a $79 million operating profit a year ago.

More: Businessweek and Gigaom. Tweets: @shiraovide, @firstadopter and @carmencrincoli

Alex Wilhelm / TechCrunch:

Amazon Drops 5% After Missing In Q2 With In-Line Sales Of $19.34B, Larger Than Expected Loss Of $0.27 — Following the bell today, Amazon reported its second quarter financial performance including a $0.27 per share loss on revenue of $19.34 billion. Analysts had expected Amazon to lose $0.15 on revenue of $19.34 billion.

More: USA Today, Forbes, Fortune, GeekWire, Guardian, CNET, ABC News, TIME and Electronista. See also Mediagazer

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:

Google's $1B purchase of Twitch confirmed — joins YouTube for new video empire — Google has reached a deal to buy game livestreaming firm Twitch for $1 billion, according to sources familiar with the matter. — Citing unnamed sources, Variety said back in May that Google had made an all-cash offer …

Jason Del Rey / Re/code:

Facebook and Uber Discuss Integration of Car Service Into Messenger — Mark Zuckerberg must be looking to Asia for inspiration for the kind of platform Facebook Messenger could become. — Here's one idea: An integration with popular car-hailing service Uber that would be beneficial to both companies and, presumably, their users.

More: VentureBeat, VatorNews, Gizmodo, SlashGear, The Verge, Pocket-lint, The Next Web and WebProNews

Tweets: @dmac1 and @marshallk

Bloomberg:

Zillow seeking to acquire Trulia for up to $2 billion, combining the two most-visited US real estate sites — Zillow Said to Be Seeking to Buy Rival Real-Estate Site Trulia — Zillow Inc. is seeking to acquire rival Trulia Inc., people with knowledge of the matter said …

More: Fortune, Wall Street Journal, Business Insider and MarketWatch

Tweets: @emilychangtv, @stalingrad_poor and @bloombergdeals

Andy Greenberg / Wired:

How Hackers Hid a Money-Mining Botnet in the Clouds of Amazon and Others — Hackers have long used malware to enslave armies of unwitting PCs, but security researchers Rob Ragan and Oscar Salazar had a different thought: Why steal computing resources from innocent victims when there's …

Tweets: @pirateorg

Jillian D'Onfro / Business Insider:

Google Is Offering Three Months Of Free Unlimited Music To Celebrate One Year Of Chromecast — Happy first birthday, Chromecast! — Google released its $35 TV streaming dongle about one year ago, and to celebrate, the company is giving users a free, 90-day subscription to All Access Music …

More: CNET, Gizmodo, TechHive, WebProNews, Android Beat, BetaNews, Phandroid and IntoMobile

Janko Roettgers / Gigaom:

Chromecast has been used 400M times to ‘cast’ sessions to TVs since it launched a year ago

More: Google Chrome Blog, VentureBeat, SlashGear, 9to5Google, PC Magazine, Forbes, Digital Trends, TechCrunch, The Verge, The Droid Guy, The Next Web and Engadget. See also Mediagazer

Faryaab S. / SamMobile:

Exclusive: Samsung Gear VR setup walkthrough, First look at Gear VR Manager — A few weeks ago, we exclusively confirmed the existence of Samsung's upcoming virtual reality headset, the Gear VR, and revealed some new information about it and posted a render of the actual device.

More: CNET, TechCrunch, Gotta Be Mobile, TechnoBuffalo, The Droid Guy, Droid Life, Android Central, Pocketnow and 9to5Google

Ravi Somaiya / New York Times:

Joshua Topolsky, editor in chief of The Verge, joins Bloomberg as editor of a series of new online ventures, will be replaced by Nilay Patel — Josh Topolsky of The Verge Is Joining Bloomberg — Josh Topolsky, the co-founder of the technology website The Verge, will join Bloomberg …

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:

Instagram's “Bolt” Leak Could Be A New Facebook App Or An App Install Ad Test — Some Instagram users are reporting having briefly seen a banner advertisement within the Instagram application which pointed to a new app called “Bolt,” described as a “one tap photo messaging” app.

More: The Verge, VentureBeat, PC Magazine, Business Insider, Gizmodo, iPhone Hacks, 9to5Google, Pocket-lint, Engadget, Mashable, SlashGear, Cult of Mac, SocialTimes, App Advice and WebProNews

Politico:

President Barack Obama to issue executive order on drone privacy — President Barack Obama plans to issue an executive order to develop privacy guidelines for commercial drones operating in U.S. airspace, POLITICO has learned. — The order would put the National Telecommunications …

More: TechCrunch, SlashGear, Gigaom, VentureBeat and Ubergizmo. Thanks:@ericengleman

Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet:

Microsoft moves Yammer under Office 365; Co-founder David Sacks is out — Summary: Microsoft is fine-tuning further its Office businesses and is moving Yammer under Office 365. Yammer Co-founder David Sacks is leaving Microsoft. — Ever since Microsoft bought enterprise social-networking vendor Yammer …

More: TechCrunch, Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, GeekWire and The Register

Anthony Ha / TechCrunch:

Pandora Q2 Tops Estimates Slightly With $218.9M In Revenue, But Its Stock Is Falling — Pandora came in barely ahead of analyst estimates in its just-released second quarter earnings report. — The streaming music company reported revenue of $218.9 million (up 38 percent on a non-GAAP basis) …

More: Re/code, AdExchanger, CNET, Business Wire, Tech Trader Daily and TheStreet.com. See also Mediagazer

Tracey Lien / Polygon:

Sony agrees to $15M settlement in 2011 data breach class action — Sony today agreed to a $15 million preliminary settlement in a class action lawsuit over its 2011 data breach, which led to the theft of names, addresses and possibly credit card data belonging to 77 million user accounts.

Deborah Gage / Wall Street Journal:

Digital Whiteboard Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M — For the second time, Fog Creek Software Inc. has spun out a company—Trello Inc., an internal project management tool that became so popular, according to the founders, it needed to exist on its own.

More: TechCrunch, Bijan Sabet, Joel on Software and VentureBeat. Tweets: @marshallk

Steve Dent / Engadget:

IFTTT's recipe-powered automation now works with Square mobile payments — Consumers have been automating apps with IFTTT (If This Then That) for awhile by, say, backing up Instagram photos to Dropbox whenever they snap a photo. Now, businesses will be able to take advantage of IFTTT directly from the Square mobile payment app.

More: VentureBeat, Gigaom, AppleInsider, The Next Web, Electronista, 9to5Mac and SlashGear

Abby Phillip / Washington Post:

Wikipedia blocks anonymous edits (and trolling) from a congressional IP address — A Wikipedia administrator has blocked anonymous edits from a congressional IP address for 10 days because of “disruptive” edits being made by someone located in the House of Representatives, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation confirmed.

More: Mediaite, Gizmodo, Ars Technica, The Hill and Nextgov. Tweets: @insidejobscast. See also Mediagazer

Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica:

FCC gets its chance to overturn state limits on broadband competition — FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has been saying he'll use the agency's authority to overturn state laws that limit municipal broadband networks, and now he has a chance to make good on that promise.

More: TechCrunch, Gigaom and GamePolitics blogs. See also Mediagazer

Ernesto / TorrentFreak:

Pirate Bay Launches Mobile Site, Teases More Expansions — One of The Pirate Bay's strengths has been its resilience. No matter how hard the movie and music industries try, the site remains operational. — Over the years the Pirate Bay site has undergone many changes to make it harder to shut down.

More: VentureBeat and Plagiarism Today. See also Mediagazer

Rob Wile / Business Insider:

Barry Silbert Steps Down As SecondMarket CEO — SecondMarket founder Barry Silbert is stepping down as SecondMarket CEO to focus exclusively on Bitcoin. — He'll remain Chairman and CEO of SecondMarket Holdings, Inc., but now plans to spin off the firm's digital currency activities.

More: CoinDesk, The Crypto Crimson and NEWSBTC. Tweets: @crains40under40

Sven Grundberg / Wall Street Journal:

Nokia Gets Boost From Sale of Handset Business — Finnish Company Swings to Second-Quarter Profit After Selling Unit to Microsoft — STOCKHOLM—Shares of Nokia Corp. surged on Thursday after the Finnish mobile network company said its expectations for 2014 have improved …

More: The Drum, Bloomberg, Financial Times, New York Times, Reuters and Associated Press. Tweets: @parislemon

Timothy J. Seppala / Engadget:

Google Voice offers web-based calls through Hangouts, no G+ profile needed — The rumor is that eventually we're going to see Google Voice merged completely into Hangouts, and that's getting even closer to becoming reality. You can now make phone calls via Hangouts directly from the Google Voice website, no Google+ necessary.

More: Alex Wiesen, PC Magazine, Android Central, Pocketables, Droid Life, PC Advisor, 9to5Google, Gizmodo, Android Central and Softpedia News. Tweets: @monkbent

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