Techmeme
January 6, 2016, 2:40 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 …
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 7%  —  Netflix officially arrives in India, Russia, Vietnam and more - totaling 130 new countries  —  At the opening keynote at CES, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings …
Kyle Orland / Ars Technica:
Pre-orders open for Oculus Rift consumer edition, on sale for $599, shipping in March; orders already backlogged until May  —  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 …
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.
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 …
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.
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.
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 …
@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).
Steve O'Hear / TechCrunch:
GoButler, The Messaging-Based Personal Assistant, “Pauses” Operations In Germany To Focus On U.S.  —  GoButler, the messaging­-based digital personal assistant that combines AI with human assistants to let you request anything on-demand, has exited the German market …
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” …

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