Techmeme
January 6, 2016, 11:15 AM

Top News

Apple:
Apple announces record $1.1B App Store sales during holiday season, $20B during 2015, and has paid developers $40B since 2008  —  Record-Breaking Holiday Season for the App Store  —  App Store Has Now Paid Developers Nearly $40B and Continues to Drive Incredible Job Growth
Eva Dou / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Apple has cut order forecasts to iPhone suppliers in past several months  —  Apple Scales Back Orders for Its iPhones  —  Component suppliers that rode the iPhone's boom are now bracing for lower sales  —  BEIJING— Apple Inc. is scaling back orders for its iPhones …
@jack:
Jack Dorsey likens additional text in tweets to text screenshots, affirms the value of the 140-character constraint, predicts most tweets will still be short  —  At its core Twitter is public messaging. A simple way to say something, to anyone, that everyone in the world can instantly see. We didn't start Twitter with a 140 character restriction. We added that early on to fit into a single SMS message (160 characters).
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Sources: Facebook giving some developers access to chat SDK to build bots in Messenger for shopping, booking travel, more  —  Facebook's Secret Chat SDK Lets Developers Build Messenger Bots  —  M won't be the only artificial intelligence on Facebook Messenger.
Vlad Savov / The Verge:
Samsung's new Notebook 9 laptops take “thin-and-light” to a beautiful extreme, with the 13.3-inch model weighing just 1.85lbs, the 15-inch 2.84lbs  —  Samsung's Notebook 9 laptops take ‘thin-and-light’ to a beautiful extreme  —  Before Intel coined the term “ultrabook” …
Ryan Whitwam / Android Police:
Casio's Android Wear watch is drop and shock resistant, will have up to a month of battery life, coming April for about $500  —  Casio's First Android Wear Watch Will Be Ruggedized And Have Up To A Month Of Battery Life  —  Most of the Android Wear devices out there are similar takes on the same use case …
Flurry Insights Blog:
Flurry Report: Mobile app usage grew 58% in 2015, led by emoji keyboards, news, and productivity apps  —  Media, Productivity & Emojis Give Mobile Another Stunning Growth Year  —  In the seven years that Flurry has been reporting on mobile app usage, we have seen nothing but growth, and this year continued the trend.
Reuters:
Sources: Verizon to auction off 48 data centers to focus on core business, hopes to raise $2.5B+  —  Exclusive: Verizon launches auction to sell data centers - sources  —  Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N) has started a process to sell its data center assets, hoping to fetch more than $2.5 billion …
Jon Fingas / Engadget:
PlayStation 4 sales now total 35.9M units after 5.7M game consoles are sold in the fall  —  PlayStation 4 sales top 35 million after a huge holiday  —  If you had a hunch that the PlayStation 4 would keep up its gangbuster sales rate through the holiday season... well, you guessed correctly.
Mike Brunker / NBC News:
Lumosity to Pay $2M to Settle FTC Charges Over ‘Brain Training’ Ads  —  The company that created the Lumosity “brain training” program has agreed to pay $2 million to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it deceived consumers into believing that its mind games could help users excel …
Jordan Novet / VentureBeat:
Cloudability buys data visualization startup DataHero  —  Cloudability, a startup with a tool that helps companies track their spending on public cloud infrastructure, is announcing today that it has acquired DataHero, a startup with an easy-to-use data-visualization service.
Jon Healey / Los Angeles Times:
Dish releases Hopper 3 set-top box, can record 16 HD shows simultaneously, introduces HopperGo, a portable, $99 battery-powered storage device  —  CES 2016: Dish offers a DVR for the stream-and-binge generation  —  Dish Network's Hopper 3 set-top box can record programs on 16 channels simultaneously …
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Oracle Buys Audience Tracking Firm AddThis For Around $200M  —  Oracle continues to ramp up its business in the area of marketing tech.  Today the enterprise software giant announced that it has acquired AddThis, which makes sharing features (i.e., those buttons on web pages that let you share stories …
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Toshiba's 12-inch Windows 10 DynaPad available for pre-order today, will be available in stores late January, prices start at $570  —  Toshiba starts selling its thinnest 12-inch Windows 10 Dynapad tablet  —  Toshiba said today it is shipping its newest 12-inch Dynapad tablet powered by Windows 10.

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Adi Robertson / The Verge: