Techmeme
July 31, 2015, 11:20 PM

Top News

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Uber closed round of nearly $1B with Microsoft participating, valuing the company at over $50B and bringing total funding to more than $5B  —  Uber Valued at More Than $50 Billion  —  Ride-sharing app, which just closed a funding round, reaches mark faster than Facebook
Dina Bass / Bloomberg Business:
Microsoft Said to Invest About $100 Million in Startup Uber  —  Microsoft Corp. has agreed to invest about $100 million in Uber Technologies Inc. at a valuation of approximately $50 billion, a person with knowledge of the matter said.  —  The deal was finalized earlier on Friday …
Dan Seifert / The Verge:
YotaPhone cancels US launch of YotaPhone 2 despite successful Indiegogo campaign, citing complications with its manufacturing partners  —  YotaPhone 2 won't be coming to the US  —  Yota Devices revealed today that it is canceling its plans to launch the YotaPhone 2 in the US, citing complications with its manufacturing partners.
Anthony Ha / TechCrunch:
Yahoo Will Acquire Fashion Startup Polyvore  —  Yahoo just announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire style-focused community Polyvore.  —  In a blog post about the deal, Yahoo's senior vice president of publisher products Simon Khalaf highlighted “Polyvore's expertise …
Mike Masnick / Techdirt:
4th Amendment Lives: Court Tells US Government Get A Warrant If It Wants Mobile Phone Location Info  —  A potentially big ruling came out of the courtroom of Judge Lucy Koh yesterday, in which she affirmed a magistrate judge's decision to tell the government to get a warrant if it wants …
More: ZDNet
Biz Carson / Business Insider:
Frontback announces they will not shut down, after signing an agreement with a new partner  —  Frontback, the once-hot startup that rejected a $40 million Twitter acquisition, is back from the dead  —  The selfie app Frontback has found a new partner and narrowly avoided shutting down.
Thanks:@bizcarson
Peter Kafka / Re/code:
LinkedIn asks its top 500 “Influencers” for blanket permission to syndicate posts, with no money changing hands  —  LinkedIn Starts Building a Syndicated Content Network  —  LinkedIn has gotten a lot of mileage out of the free content that famous people like Richard Branson write for the social network.
Matthew Lynley / TechCrunch:
Early Apple Designer Susan Kare Joins Pinterest's Creative Team  —  Susan Kare, an early Apple designer behind some of the company's early typefaces and icons, has joined Pinterest.  —  She'll be part of Pinterest's creative team as a product design lead, according to the company.
Ian Paul / Greenbot:
88,000 Nvidia Shield tablets recalled due to heat risk  —  Put that slate down, Nvidia Shield Tablet users.  No, seriously—put it down.  It's being recalled.  —  Nvidia announced on Friday that Nvidia Shield tablets sold between July 2014 and July 2015 need to be sent back to the manufacturer.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Dropbox Arrives On Roku With An App For Viewing Your Personal Photos And Movies  —  Dropbox has launched on the Roku, with an app that allows you to view the photos and videos you have stored in your account directly on your TV by way of Roku's streaming media player.
Kana Inagaki / Financial Times:
Japan's Sharp to stop making TVs for the North American market after worse-than-expected quarterly loss of $274m  —  Japan's Sharp to quit North America TV market  —  Sharp is to pull out of the North American television market and will consider spinning off its display business as a slowdown …

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.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
Beyond productivity: Why live captions belong in every meeting  —  You join a meeting, someone starts talking, and within a minute, there are names, numbers, ideas, and unfamiliar terms flying around.  You could ask them to repeat it.
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.

Featured Podcasts

Channels with Peter Kafka:
David Ellison's Paramount-Warner Empire & The Fight That Comes Next
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Sources:
Factory CEO on why AGI is already here
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
Invest Like the Best:
Noah Shinn - Building Instinct: The Personal Agent
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Lenny's Podcast:
The grief, loneliness, and burnout sweeping through the tech industry right now | Molly Graham
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Big Technology Podcast:
Meta's Muse Revival, Frontier AI Under Threat, The Rise Of Dopamine Sites
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:
Doomers at Dreamforce
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.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 11:20 PM ET, July 31, 2015.

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.

More News

Earlier Picks