Techmeme: Digital Studio JibJab Acquires Startup Behind ‘Hello Santa’ Video Service (Todd Spangler/Variety)

Open Links In New Tab

Mobile Archives Advertise Site News Contact Editors

September 16, 2014, 9:45 AM

Top News

Buster Hein / Cult of Mac:

Apple confirms iPhone 6 NFC chip is restricted to Apple Pay — Apple finally added NFC to the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, but if you were hoping the company's new NFC chip will allow you to pair speakers or integrated NFC tags into your favorite apps, however you won't be able to do any of the when …

More: Gizmodo, Engadget, BGR, Inquirer, 9to5Mac, The Verge, InfoWorld, Digital Trends, Business Insider, iMore, CNET, PC Advisor, Neowin, Geek.com, iPhone, WebProNews, MacRumors, AppleInsider, ITProPortal, Ubergizmo, SlashGear and App Advice

Michael Carney / PandoDaily:

Paypal attacks Apple Pay security with full-page ad in NYT referencing recent iCloud celebrity photo hack — “We the people want our money safer than our selfies.” PayPal goes after Apple in a full page NYT ad — As the rumors of an Apple payments platform swirled leading up to last week's keynote …

More: Inquirer, BGR, CNET, DailyTech, Cult of Mac, ReadWrite, TechRadar.com, Patently Apple, MacRumors, AppleInsider, App Advice, 9to5Mac and TUAW

Tweets: @rabois, @halthomas, @rabois, @ow, @arj, @cjc, @delrey, @lessien and @carnage4life

Austin Carr / Fast Company:

Tony Fadell on the evolution of Nest, working with Jobs and Page, and integrating Google's culture — The $3.2 Billion Man: Can Google's Newest Star Outsmart Apple? — Google is betting big on Nest CEO Tony Fadell, who helped invent the iPod and iPhone. Here, a look inside his design revolution.

More: Business Insider. Tweets: @austincarr

Jonathan Vanian / Gigaom:

Cloud darling Docker gets $40M in funding to push its container technology — The closing of the funding round ends a momentous summer for the container management startup in which companies like Google, Microsoft and VMware have all pledged support and a bunch of startups have sprung up to take advantage of the Docker platform.

More: TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Docker Blog, The Register, Wall Street Journal, Data Center Knowledge, InfoWorld and PE Hub Blog

Tom Warren / The Verge:

Microsoft announces Windows 9 event in San Francisco on September 30th — Microsoft is preparing to detail its next major version of Windows. We had been expecting the company to hold a press event later this month, and now it's official. Microsoft will hold a “Windows event” in San Francisco on September 30th.

Tim Peterson / AdAge:

Amazon tops list of Google's biggest search advertisers, spent $158M on search ads in 2013 — Amazon Tops List of Google's 25 Biggest Search Advertisers — Online Retail Giant Spent $158M on Search Ads in 2013 — One of Google's emerging rivals for online ad dollars is also its biggest search-ad buyer.

More: Digiday, Softpedia News, Business Insider, ECPM BLOG, ScreenwerkScreenwerk and Marketing Land. Tweets: @jyarow

Derrick Harris / Gigaom:

Facebook launches an open source organization and releases new routing tech — Facebook is upping the ante in the open source world, announcing on Monday a new open source technology for routing data across server caches, and also a new open organization (along with other big-name companies) to help foster open source efforts.

More: Facebook Code, Facebook Code, New York Times, Help Net Security, AllFacebook, PC World, Softpedia News, VentureBeat, Computerworld, Re/code, Bloomberg, Inside Facebook, Data Center Knowledge, ZDNet and insideHPC

Stephen Wolfram / Wolfram Blog:

Wolfram launches cloud-based Mathematica Online that works in the browser — Launching Today: Mathematica Online! — It's been many years in the making, and today I'm excited to announce the launch of Mathematica Online: a version of Mathematica that operates completely in the cloud …

More: The Next Web

Adam Lashinsky / Fortune:

Silicon Valley's view of Alibaba: a competitor only for investments, and a potential acquirer — How Silicon Valley sees Alibaba — Wall Street is seeing green this week regarding the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba. It hopes to raise more than $20 billion.

Tweets: @jonrussell

Wall Street Journal:

Alibaba increases IPO price range to $66-68 a share, from $60-66, could raise as much as $25B

More: Associated Press, Bloomberg, New York Times, SiliconBeat, Gigaom, Tech Trader Daily, Forbes, Bloomberg, Reuters and CNET. Tweets: @wsjbreakingnews

Ben Popper / The Verge:

Why parents are raising their kids on Minecraft — Microsoft's latest purchase has remarkable intergenerational appeal — Back in June of 2011, David Pakman's daughter and son, at the time age 10 and eight, asked him for a copy of Minecraft. “At the time I didn't know what that was …

More: Re/code, GeekWire and kottke.org

Tweets: @a91g and @cwarzel

Bloomberg:

Apple Watch Privacy Questioned by Connecticut AG Jepsen — Apple Inc. (AAPL) faces questions by Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen over privacy protections for users of the company's watch, which includes features such as health tracking, unveiled last week as part of its lineup of new products.

More: State of Connecticut, Fox News, CNET, Hartford Courant, New Haven Register, iDownloadBlog.com, BGR and MacRumors

Tweets: @evilbachus and @parislemon

Chris Welch / The Verge:

Roku has sold over 10 million of its streaming players — Roku just hit a milestone: over 10 million of its streaming players have been sold to this point, stretching from the company's original set-top box — which debuted in 2008 — through today. It's a big number, and it establishes Roku …

More: The Official Roku Blog, Tech Times, Engadget, CNET, Ubergizmo, Re/code, Multichannel News, Fast Company, Gigaom and The Next Web. Tweets: @piercedavid. See also Mediagazer

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Mail.ru Takes Over 'Russia's Facebook' Vkontake In $1.47B Deal, Settles Durov Suit — Some big shareholder shifts at Vkontake, the social network with 92 million monthly active users that's often described as Russia's Facebook and has been embroiled in political controversies that resulted in the ousting of its founder, Pavel Durov.

More: Mail.ru Group, PC World, PandoDaily, Gigaom, The Next Web, New York Times, ABC News, Webrazzi, Reuters and Bloomberg

Tweets: @ingridlunden and @jonrussell

Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch:

500px Co-Founder And Former CEO Ousted From The Startup — Toronto's 500px photo portfolio site and marketplace is undergoing some major changes, as co-founder Oleg Gutsol is out from the company he started. The executive shared the information on Facebook on Monday, saying that he was …

More: BetaKit. Tweets: @rcnaturephotos

Natalie Gagliordi / ZDNet:

Macy's rolls out retail's largest beacon installation — Summary: Macy's expects to complete the installation by early fall, just in time for the upcoming holiday shopping season. — Following a test run during last year's holiday shopping season at its flagship stores in New York City and San Francisco …

More: Search Engine Watch, MacRumors and SlashGear

Todd Spangler / Variety:

Digital Studio JibJab Acquires Startup Behind ‘Hello Santa’ Video Service — JibJab Bros. Studios, the company whose backers include Sony Pictures Entertainment best known for its political satires, announced that it has acquired Make Believe Studios, creators of the “Hello Santa” …

More: PandoDaily, L.A. Biz and TechCrunch

Josh Lowensohn / The Verge:

Tim Cook doesn't want Apple to be a ‘treasure trove’ of user data for the NSA — Apple's privacy and security measures have been under a microscope for the past month, first with a targeted attack on celebrities that led to leaked nude photos, and now on Apple's own systems as the company gears …

More: Re/code, PandoDaily, VentureBeat, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Wall Street Journal, Cult of Mac, Ubergizmo, App Advice, MacRumors and The Mac Observer

Nate Hoffelder / The Digital Reader:

Your Amazon Account Can be Hacked via a Kindle eBook — Amazon might not have a security issue at Audible but they do have one on their main website. — A security researcher has reported, and I can confirm, that Amazon has a security hole on the “manage Your Kindle” page - one which is relatively easy to fix.

More: B.FL7.DE, The Verge, ZDNet, Gizmodo, Business Insider, Digital Book World, Engadget, Good E-Reader and ITProPortal

Charlie Osborne / ZDNet:

Gartner: 75% of mobile apps will fail basic security tests in 2015 — Majority of mobile apps will fail basic security tests in the future: Gartner — Summary: The research firm claims that 75 percent of all mobile applications will fail basic security tests next year — leaving the enterprise vulnerable.

More: Gartner, SecurityWeek and BetaNews

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.

Equals:

Stop vibe coding analytics — Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards. Build once, iterate for years.

Zoho:

Agentic AI in data & analytics: The next evolution of business intelligence — In a recent conversation, Clarence Rozario, Business Head - Zoho BI Suite, joined Ravit Jain on The Ravit Show to discuss how Agentic AI …

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

Big Technology Podcast:

Kimi K3 & AI's Price War, What Happened To Google?, OpenAI's Partner Trouble

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.

Great Chat:

Never follow your heroes (on X)

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.

Hard Fork:

The A.I. Trade Secrets War + Economists Say 'We Must Act Now' + HatGPT

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.

The Upstarts Podcast:

Pigment's Eléonore Crespo: Building France's Next Unicorn With AI Agents And Tom Cruise

Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.

Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.

Access:

This AI will push back if you're rude to it

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 9:45 AM ET, September 16, 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.