Amazon acquiring Twitch for $970M in cash  —  Amazon.com to Acquire Twitch  —  Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Twitch Interactive, Inc., the leading live video platform for gamers.  In July, more than 55 million unique visitors viewed …

Facebook will reduce “click-baiting” headlines and links shared in photo captions in News Feed  —  News Feed FYI: Click-baiting  —  Today we're announcing some improvements to News Feed to help people find the posts and links from publishers that are most interesting and relevant …

Microsoft cuts Surface 2 price by $100, hinting at successor or discontinuation  —  Surface 2 prices slashed, hinting at discontinuation or replacement  —  Microsoft has cut $100 off the price of its Surface 2 Windows RT tablets.  This puts the cheapest 32GB unit at $349, the 64GB unit at $449 …

The Rise and Fall and Rise of Virtual Reality  —  In the wake of Facebook's purchase of Oculus VR, can this revolutionary technology triumph anew?  Seeing is Believing: The State of Virtual Reality By Matthew Schnipper The promise of virtual reality has always been enormous.

NSA providing records of 850B calls, locations, emails, and internet chats to 23 US agencies with a Google-like ICREACH search engine  —  The Surveillance Engine: How the NSA Built Its Own Secret Google  —  The National Security Agency is secretly providing data to nearly …

Robo Brain, a repository of information mined from the internet, for robots to draw on  —  ‘Robo Brain’ mines the Internet to teach robots  —  To serve as helpers in our homes, offices and factories, robots will need to understand how the world works and how the humans around them behave.

Calif. governor signs smartphone ‘kill switch’ bill into law  —  Law requires security software to come enabled by default, but other than that, not much will change for most smartphone users.  —  State Sen. Mark Leno and San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon introduced the California “kill switch” bill in February.

Google releases new Slides app for iOS, updates Sheets and Docs with offline and direct Office file editing  —  Your iPhone & iPad are ready to get to work with new apps for Docs, Sheets, & Slides  —  You suddenly remember you need to add “buy milk” to your grocery list, but don't have a pen or paper in sight.

EXCLUSIVE: Samsung working on circular Gear smartwatch, SIM-enabled Gear coming with Galaxy Note 4  —  We've known for some time that Samsung is working on various new wearables, including a Gear smartwatch with cellular connectivity and the Gear VR, a virtual reality headset.

HubSpot files for $100 million IPO  —  Today, HubSpot, the Cambridge-based inbound marketing company, filed the much-awaited plans for its initial public offering.  —  The company aims to raise $100 million through the offering to expand its business, according to the filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.