Techmeme: Xiaomi now world's fifth largest smartphone maker; Android captures record 85% market share in Q2 (Parmy Olson/Forbes)

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July 31, 2014, 1:50 PM

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Andy Greenberg / Wired:

Security researchers say USB security is fundamentally broken; hard-to-detect malware in the firmware can take over Macs/PCs, no easy fix — Why the Security of USB Is Fundamentally Broken — Computer users pass around USB sticks like silicon business cards.

More: Security Research Labs, ExtremeTech, Ars Technica, The Verge, Help Net Security, 9to5Mac, VentureBeat, MacRumors, 9to5Google, MacDailyNews, Reuters, Electronista and Gizmodo. Thanks:@wiredmike

Wall Street Journal:

French telecom Iliad has made a $15 billion offer for T-Mobile US — France's Iliad Makes Bid for T-Mobile US — Bid Counters Earlier Offer From Sprint Corp. — French upstart telecommunications company Iliad SA has made an offer for T-Mobile US Inc., in a bold bid to counter an offer …

More: Business Insider, The Verge, ZDNet, BGR, Fortune, Wall Street Journal, The Hill, USA Today and TechnoBuffalo

Tweets: @harrymccracken and @miriamgottfried

Min-Jeong Lee / Wall Street Journal:

Samsung VP: two new smartphones coming within six months, one with a “large screen”, the other with “new materials” — Samsung to Launch New Smartphones as Profit Falls — One Model Will Have a Large Screen While the Other Will Be Built Using New Materials

More: VentureBeat, SamMobile, BGR, TechnoBuffalo, Business Insider, The Verge, Forbes and SlashGear

Chris Duckett / ZDNet:

Samsung mobile profit down by a third in 2Q 2014

More: Samsung Tomorrow, 9to5Google, The Verge, Ars Technica, Re/code, Bloomberg, Inquirer, PC World, Engadget, Digital Trends, ITProPortal, ABC News, Telegraph, BBC and Electronista. Tweets: @asymco

Mark Mazzetti / New York Times:

C.I.A. Admits Penetrating Senate Intelligence Computers — WASHINGTON — An internal investigation by the Central Intelligence Agency has found that its officers improperly penetrated a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee in preparing its report on the C.I.A.'s detention and interrogation program.

More: McClatchy Washington Bureau, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, USA Today and Newsweek

Ben Fox Rubin / CNET:

iFixit's Oculus Rift teardown finds Samsung display, 40 LEDs — The repair-guide website uncovers a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 display inside the second-generation virtual-reality headset prototype. — Inside the Oculus Rift DK2 prototype. — iFixit — If you're one of the lucky few …

More: iFixit, Business Insider, TechCrunch, 9to5Google, Fortune, Ars Technica, Gizmodo, CNET, Engadget, Polygon, Phandroid, Connectedly and SlashGear

Eric Slivka / MacRumors:

Shazam Brings Always-On Music and TV Recognition to Mac With Free Menu Bar App — Music recognition service Shazam, which was one of the early App Store hits and has continued to see good success on mobile platforms, is now bringing its services to the desktop in the form of the first music, TV show, and ad recognition app for Mac.

Parmy Olson / Forbes:

Xiaomi now world's fifth largest smartphone maker; Android captures record 85% market share in Q2 — China's Xiaomi Becomes World's 5th Largest Smartphone Maker — Global smartphone sales are still growing, but the market's star performer in the last three months wasn't Apple or even Samsung.

More: TechCrunch, PR Newswire, Wall Street Journal, BetaNews, Wireless Smartphone Strategies, Computerworld, The Next Web, CNET, BGR, PR Newswire and Android Police. Thanks:@parmy

Ina Fried / Re/code:

T-Mobile Adds 1.5 Million More Customers, Swings to Profit on Spectrum Sale — T-Mobile said Thursday that it added a further 1.5 million customers to its network in the second quarter, making this the fifth straight quarter of million-plus customer gains. — The company posted a net profit …

More: BGR, The Verge, GeekWire, AppleInsider, VentureBeat, Electronista, BGR, CNET, ZDNet and Engadget

Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch:

Runtastic's $120 Orbit Fitness Tracker Prizes Function And Features Over Fashion — Runtastic is doing the reverse of what many startups are doing these days: it's going from being a software platform provider to becoming a hardware maker with the Runtastic Orbit fitness tracker.

More: Engadget, TUAW, iMore, ReadWrite, SlashGear, The Next Web, Ubergizmo, Gizmodo and TechHive

Dan Rayburn / StreamingMediaBlog.com:

Apple's CDN Now Live: Has Paid Deals With ISPs, Massive Capacity In Place — Since last year, Apple's been hard at work building out their own CDN and now those efforts are paying off. Recently, Apple's CDN has gone live in the U.S. and Europe and the company is now delivering some of their own content, directly to consumers.

More: Ars Technica and MacRumors. Thanks:@danrayburn

Josh Constine / TechCrunch:

Internet.Org's App With Free Access To Facebook, Google, Wikipedia, Local Info Launches In Zambia — 85% of the 5 billion people without Internet simply can't afford data plans. So Facebook's accessibility initiative Internet.org today launches its Android and web app for the developing world …

Jordan Crook / TechCrunch:

Indiegogo Goes Mobile With International Launch Of iOS App — Ever since Indiegogo raised that massive $40 million Series B this year, the crowdfunding platform has been laser-focused on building out its mobile presence. In fact, CEO Slava Rubin said in an interview with TechCrunch recently …

More: Engadget, 9to5Mac, GeekTime, iMore, Indiegogo Playbook, Crowdfund Insider, The Next Web and WebProNews

Nick Summers / The Next Web:

PlayStation Now game streaming service hits open beta today on PS4 in the US and Canada — Sony is launching a public beta for its PlayStation Now video game streaming initiative in the US and Canada today (July 31). — For now, the service will be available exclusively on the PlayStation 4 …

More: PlayStation.Blog, PC Magazine, Ars Technica, Polygon, Kotaku, Softpedia News, Gamasutra, destructoid, gameinformer.com, TechnoBuffalo, Engadget, SlashGear, All Games Beta, Softpedia News, TechRadar.com and VG247

Rolfe Winkler / Wall Street Journal:

Google Will Add Ratings to Search-Results Ads So They Look More Like Amazon — Google is prodding merchants to provide more information to make its search results more effective-and more like Amazon. The question is whether merchants will play ball. — In a blog post Tuesday …

More: VentureBeat, Search Engine Land, Softpedia News and Mashable

Reuters:

European regulators training sights on Google's mobile software — (Reuters) - European regulators are preparing what could be a stern challenge to Google Inc's (GOOGL.O) (GOOG.O) mobile software business in the coming months after a nearly four-year investigation into the company's Web …

More: Marketing Land, The Verge, WindowsITPro, Guardian, ITProPortal, Computerworld, ZDNet, 9to5Google and CNET

David Pierce / The Verge:

Lytro Illum review: an expensive, flawed, buggy glimpse of the future of photography — Lytro Illum review: this is the camera of the future — It's almost time to forget everything you ever knew about photography — Ten minutes into using the Lytro Illum, I'm throwing out everything I've ever learned about photography.

More: The Verge, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and The Next Web

Colleen Taylor / TechCrunch:

Timeful, The Khosla And Kleiner Backed Time Management App, Launches On iOS — For months now, there's been a stealthy buzz around a startup called Timeful. Attracting a nearly $7 million pre-launch Series A round from the likes of Khosla Ventures, Data Collective, and Kleiner Perkins certainly seemed …

More: Re/code, BGR, VentureBeat, PC Magazine and The Next Web

Alex Chitu / Google Operating System:

64-Bit Chrome for Windows, Now in Beta — 2 months after the Dev/Canary channels, the 64-bit version of Chrome for Windows is now available in the beta channel. It's still limited to Windows 7 and Windows 8+ and you obviously need a 64-bit operating system.

More: Google Chrome Releases, 9to5Google, TechSpot, blog.chron.com, BetaNews, Ubergizmo, Web Browser and PC World

Erin Griffith / Fortune:

Palantir snaps up Propeller — its second deal this week — Until this week, Palantir Technologies, a Palo Alto-based data analytics company, wasnt much of an acquirer. Despite having raised $896 million in venture capital, at a $9 billion valuation, and generating more than $500 million in revenue …

More: TechCrunch, SiliconBeat, Wall Street Journal and silicontap.com

Liam Tung / ZDNet:

IBM snaps up Italian cloud security vendor CrossIdeas — Summary: IBM is adding more troops for its assault on the enterprise security market - this time with an Italian vendor giving it tools to handle segregation of duties. — Liam Tung — IBM has acquired CrossIdeas …

More: eWeek, VentureBeat, Gigaom and CloudWedge

Ben Woods / The Next Web:

Twitter transparency report: Account info requests up 46%, still no national security breakdown — Twitter has published its fifth transparency report, revealing that the number of requests it receives from different countries around the world is continuing to climb, up 46 percent since its last report in February.

More: The Twitter Blog, ZDNet, TechCrunch, New York Times, Re/code, Softpedia News, TIME, Mashable and WebProNews. See also Mediagazer

Carolyn Said / San Francisco Chronicle:

Medical marijuana delivery service Eaze launches in SF, hoping to be the “Uber of pot” — Medical marijuana users link to delivery services with Eaze — Deliveries will be free for patients, with driver fees and Eaze paid by dispensaries in exchange for gaining new business.

More: SFWeekly, bizjournals, NDTV Gadgets, Chinatopix, Betabeat, Business Wire and San Francisco magazine. Tweets: @csaid

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