Techmeme: Neil Young's PonoPlayer promises high-res audio, but with no discernible sound improvement and massive file sizes, it's not worth the $400 price tag (Mario Aguilar/Gizmodo)

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January 13, 2015, 3:05 PM

Top News

Emily Vacher / Facebook:

Facebook to show AMBER alerts in News Feed to users in targeted search areas to help find missing children — Introducing AMBER Alerts on Facebook — Today, we are announcing a partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to send AMBER Alerts to the Facebook community to help find missing children.

Douglas MacMillan / Wall Street Journal:

Uber gives the city of Boston anonymized trip data to enable smarter city planning, ease traffic congestion; more cities to follow — Uber Offers Trip Data to Cities, Starting With Boston — For the first time, Uber is giving government officials a look inside its rich trove of transportation data.

More: Uber Blog, Gigaom, PandoDaily, ReadWrite, The Next Web, SiliconBeat, Entrepreneur, CNET, Business Insider, SlashGear, ABC News, Network World, BetaBoston, Mashable, Gizmodo, VentureBeat, Engadget and The Verge

Tweets: @dmac1, @nancyscola and @digiphile

Cory Doctorow / Boing Boing:

Why David Cameron's proposal to ban encrypted messaging services won't work, and would make Britons less secure — What David Cameron just proposed would endanger every Briton and destroy the IT industry … What David Cameron thinks he's saying is, “We will command all the software creators …

More: Guardian, Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, TechPresident, BBC, Digital Trends, bit-tech.net, theWHIR.com and The Independent. Tweets: @pmarca

Mark Scott / New York Times:

British Prime Minister wants to ban encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp and iMessage if security agencies can't access them

Jon Russell / TechCrunch:

Media Streaming App Allcast Is Finally Available For iOS Devices — Impressive mobile streaming service Allcast has been an Android-only affair for some time, much to the delight of those that use the Google mobile platform, but at last it has finally made its way to iOS — as Engadget first spotted.

More: Engadget, Gizmodo, App Advice, PC World, Gigaom, MacRumors, Redmond Pie, SlashGear, The Next Web and 9to5Mac

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:

App Annie Raises $55 Million Series D, Launches New Product For Tracking App Usage — App Annie, a company whose data on app downloads, rankings, app store trends and more has made it a go-to resource for anyone invested in today's app economy, today announced a new $55 million round of Series D funding.

More: GeekWire, StrictlyVC, PandoDaily, VentureBeat, GeekTime, Digital Media Wire, FierceMobileIT News, PE Hub Blog, CNET, The Next Web, AdExchanger, bizjournals, Re/code and TechNode. Tweets: @getcloak

Juli Clover / MacRumors:

Apple Maintains Mac Sales Momentum in Holiday Quarter — Apple saw an increase in its U.S. PC shipments during the recent holiday quarter, according to PC shipping estimates from Gartner. Apple shipped over 2.1 million Macs in 4Q14, up from 1.9 million Macs in 4Q13, marking an 11.5 percent increase.

More: IDC, Gartner, TechCrunch, GeekWire, Digital Trends, 9to5Mac, Re/code, eWeek, AppleInsider, TechCrunch, Quartz, Inquirer, SiteProNews, Windows Central, The Overspill, VatorNews, MacNN and iMore. Tweets: @kwiens

Mario Aguilar / Gizmodo:

Neil Young's PonoPlayer promises high-res audio, but with no discernible sound improvement and massive file sizes, it's not worth the $400 price tag — Don't Buy What Neil Young Is Selling — Neil Young's “high resolution” PonoPlayer goes on sale for $400 today. You shouldn't buy it.

More: Gigaom, New York Post, Business Insider, RAIN News, bizjournals and hypebot. Tweets: @mathewi. See also Mediagazer

Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat:

Google Domains opens to all in the U.S., gets Blogger and Dynamic DNS integration — Google today announced Google Domains, the company's domain registration service, is now available to all in the U.S. While the invitation restriction has been lifted in the company's home country …

More: The Register, TechCrunch, The Next Web, Google and Your Business, The Verge, 9to5Google, Pocket-lint, Android Central and TheDomains.com

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Teradata Buys App Marketing Platform Appoxee For $20-25M, Sets Up Israeli R&D Center — Teradata, the publicly-traded analytics company, has made another acquisition to beef up its operations in mobile: the company has acquired Appoxee, an Israeli push-messaging startup aimed at publishers …

More: PC World, Wall Street Journal and ZDNet

Sam Machkovech / Ars Technica:

8chan domain “seized” over allegations of “child abuse” content — Happened shortly after users doxxed those who'd filed complaints to 8chan's host. — Last week, the imageboard site 8chan.co was brought offline for a sustained period of over five days due to a prolonged DDoS attack.

More: Gizmodo. Tweets: @infinitechan and @glennf

Deborah Gage / Wall Street Journal:

Ionic Security Raises $40 Million to Secure Data Against Cyberthieves … The cost of cybercrime in the U.S. is rising for companies in all industries, according to a study last year by the Ponemon Institute, and more companies are starting to assume they have been hacked, even if they don't know for sure.

More: eWeek, Gigaom, Forbes and VentureBeat

Eric Johnson / Re/code:

Kabam Acquires TapZen and Magic Pixel, Will Open Los Angeles Studio — Free-to-play gaming company Kabam has acquired two Los Angeles-based gaming outfits, TapZen and Magic Pixel, and is putting its name on a new L.A.-area studio to house them. — The new Culver City office will be Kabam's …

More: CNET and VentureBeat

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