Techmeme
January 6, 2016, 1:15 PM

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 …
Kyle Orland / Ars Technica:
Pre-orders open for Oculus Rift consumer edition, on sale for $599, shipping in March  —  Virtually a reality: Oculus Rift goes on sale for $599  —  Pre-orders are open ahead of March ship date for consumer version  —  After dozens of trade-show demos, two publicly available development kits …
Ashley Carman / The Verge:
Snapchat is shutting down its lens store on Friday, only two months after its launch  —  Snapchat is killing its lens store  —  We barely knew Snapchat's lens store, and it's already time to say goodbye.  The social media platform is shutting down the store on Friday, only two months after its launch.
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.
@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).
Natt Garun / The Next Web:
Netflix expands to 130 new countries including India, Vietnam, Turkey, South Korea, Poland, and Russia, but not China; stock up over 6%  —  Netflix officially arrives in India, Russia, Vietnam and more - totaling 130 new countries  —  At the opening keynote at CES, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings …
Simon Khalaf / 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.
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 …
Andy Greenberg / Wired:
David Chaum, known for inventing cryptographic protocols, introduces PrivaTegrity, an encryption scheme for messaging with a “carefully controlled backdoor”  —  The Father of Online Anonymity Has a Plan to End the Crypto War  —  It's been more than 30 years since David Chaum launched …
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” …
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.
Yevgeniy Sverdlik / Data Center Knowledge:
Apple to build another data center adjacent to its existing campus in Reno  —  Apple Doubling Down on Data Center Construction in Reno  —  Apple has filed for approval to build another massive data center campus adjacent to the existing Apple data center site in Reno, Nevada, local officials told the Reno Gazette Journal.
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.

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Earlier Picks

Mike Brunker / NBC News: