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12:15 PM ET, November 4, 2011

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
Alexia Tsotsis / TechCrunch:
Groupon IPO Shares Pop 40% On First Trade, Debuts At $28 With A $17.8B Market Cap  —  After some timing drama, daily deal site Groupon finally has begun trading on the NASDAQ this morning, in the most hotly anticipated and largest Internet company IPO since Google.
RELATED:
Kara Swisher / AllThingsD:
Exclusive: Groupon Prices at $20 a Share; More Than 10x Oversubscribed, So It Adds 5M More Shares
Darren Murph / Engadget:
B&N launching Nook Tablet for $249 on November 16th, and we've got the dirty details  —  Sitting down?  Good.  Come November 16th, Amazon's Kindle Fire will have company.  We've wrapped our paws around a stash of documents confirming the impending launch of the first bona fide tablet in the Nook line …
RELATED:
Phil Nickinson / Android Central:
Nook Color dropping to $199; new software update brings Hulu Plus, music  —  Will cost just $50 less than the new Nook Tablet  —  The venerable Barnes & Noble Nook Color hasn't been left out in the cold just because the new Nook Tablet specs and pricing are here.
Business Week:
Apple's Supply-Chain Secret?  Hoard Lasers  —  The iPhone maker spends lavishly on all stages of the manufacturing process, giving it a huge operations advantage  —  About five years ago, Apple design guru Jony Ive decided he wanted a new feature for the next MacBook …
Florian Mueller / FOSS Patents:
European Commission investigating Samsung over possible abuse of FRAND patents against Apple  —  Samsung's various attempts to shut down Apple products — most recently the iPhone 4S — with patents declared essential to the 3G industry standard have now given rise to an antitrust investigation by Europe's top competition “watchdog”.
Ryan Lawler / GigaOM:
CBS turned down an ad-based Apple TV deal  —  CBS CEO Les Moonves is known to occasionally drop pieces of information that he's not supposed to on his company's earnings calls, and this quarter was no exception.  When asked about CBS's appetite for striking deals with new streaming providers …
DigiTimes:
Amazon next-generation Kindle Fire likely to have 8.9-inch display  —  Amazon is likely to change its product roadmap by shifting the display size of its next-generation Kindle Fire to 8.9-inch instead of 10.1-inch as originally planned, according to sources in Amazon's supply chain.
Wall Street Journal:
Google Ponders Pay-TV Business  —  Pilot Project in Kansas City Would Rival Cable, Satellite  —  Internet giant Google Inc. is considering a plan to offer paid cable-TV services to consumers, a move that could unleash a new wave of competition within the traditional TV business.
IDC:
Samsung Takes Top Spot as Smartphone Market Grows 42.6% in the Third Quarter, According to IDC  —  FRAMINGHAM, Mass. November 3 2011 - The worldwide smartphone market grew 42.6% year over year in the third quarter of 2011 (3Q11), despite a slowdown within key mature markets.
Nick Bradbury:
The Long-Term Failure of Web APIs  —  Years ago, when developers such as myself started the transition away from OS-specific APIs to web APIs, we believed that doing so would empower our software and save it from the confines of the desktop.  —  And we were right.
Thanks:dsilverman
Ingrid Lunden / paidContent:
BPI Asks BT To Block BitTorrent Site Pirate Bay, Or It's Court Time  —  A new twist today in the battle of media companies trying to stop their content from being distributed by illegal means online: the UK's main music trade body, the BPI, has today teamed up others in the creative industries to request BT …
Ina Fried / AllThingsD:
Sprint CEO Hesse: “We Stand for Simplicity and Value”  —  Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said his company has eliminated 85 percent of the possible rate plan options in recent months in an effort to make things easier for customers.  —  “We stand for simplicity and value,” Hesse said …
Kimberly Dozier / Associated Press:
AP Exclusive: CIA following Twitter, Facebook  —  McLEAN, Virginia (AP) — In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building, the CIA is following tweets — up to 5 million a day.  —  At the agency's Open Source Center, a team known affectionately as the …
Nick O'Neill:
The Increasingly Prevalent Auto-Follow “Trick”  —  If you're one of the millions of consumers of mobile applications, there's a good chance you've downloaded an app recently that has you log in with Facebook or Twitter.  While not all of these products are “social” by nature …
RELATED:
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Kevin Rose's Oink Hits The App Store
Mark Gurman / 9to5Mac:
Exclusive: Apple Vice President of Global Security John Theriault departs company following lost iPhone 4S investigation  —  A sizable amount of Apple senior executives have left the company this year, with the latest being Apple's Vice President of Global Security.
Dana Vachon / Vanity Fair:
The Code of the Winklevii  —  Remember the Winklevoss twins?  The golden-boy Harvard rowers who claimed that Mark Zuckerberg had stolen the idea for Facebook from them?  They spent years suing him, won a settlement that is currently worth about $200 million, and now feel it should have been four times that.
Jordan Crook / TechCrunch:
Hands-On With The Samsung Focus S For AT&T  —  If the Samsung Focus Flash had you even remotely excited, then the Focus S is sure to leave you thrilled.  With almost all the same specs as baby brother, the Focus S brings a slightly larger screen and more powerful camera to an already snappy little phone.
Discussion: The Verge, CNET News, Gizmodo, BGR, BGR and Engadget
Peter Burrows / Bloomberg:
Apple's First Freebie IPhone Pits Once-Premium Brand Against Bargain Fare  —  Apple Inc. (AAPL)'s iPhone 3GS model is more than two years old and shunned by gadget snobs, and yet it's turning into one of the company's bigger weapons against devices running Google Inc. (GOOG)'s Android software this holiday season.
Tricia Duryee / AllThingsD:
Ex-Googlers Raise $5.8 Million to Help Retailers Track Foot Traffic  —  Euclid Elements is hoping to be the Google Analytics of the physical retail world.  —  The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company helps brick-and-mortar retailers track shopping behavior by putting sensors in their stores …
John Cook / GeekWire:
My five favorite pitches from the TechStars Seattle Demo Day  —  TechStars Seattle today concluded their three-month long startup bootcamp as 10 companies presented their business ideas to a packed crowd at the Showbox Sodo in Seattle.  —  It's been a long, hard voyage for each of the companies …
Discussion: Tech Cocktail and TechFlash
Nick Bilton / Bits:
Thailand Floods Could Affect Cloud Computing  —  Thailand is under water, and as a result, some Internet companies could be facing problems.  —  Flooding in the country has now shuttered more than 1,000 factories — some of which make computer hard drives.
Janko Roettgers / GigaOM:
Exclusive: majority of YouTube views from non-English audience  —  Talk about a truly global audience: Sixty percent of all video views on YouTube come from users who select a language other than English as the site's display language, a Google spokesperson told us on Thursday afternoon.
Discussion: 9to5Google and YouTube Blog
Wil Shipley / Call Me Fishmeal:
Real Security in Mac OS X Requires Apple-Signed Certificates  —  The Mac needs to be as secure as the iPhone.  The good news is Apple already has the tools.  The bad news is they are forcing developers to use the wrong ones.  —  There are three primary ways Apple increases security …
Discussion: Softpedia News and inessential.com
 
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 More Items: 
Farhad Manjoo / Slate:
It's Not Just for Baby Photos Anymore
Bloomberg:
Syria Crackdown Aided by U.S.-Europe Spy Gear
Katy Bachman / Adweek:
Robert Levine on Why Copyright is Good for the Internet
Ryan Paul / Ars Technica:
The sods must be crazy: OLPC to drop tablets from helicopters to isolated villages
Discussion: PC World, ExtremeTech and Techland
Chester Wisniewski / Naked Security:
Microsoft announces workaround for the Duqu exploit
 Earlier Items: 
Alyson Shontell / Business Insider:
Another Startup, Another Big Round: Solve Media Raising At A $25-40 Million Valuation
Leena Rao / TechCrunch:
Zynga's Newest Title CastleVille Combines Rich Storylines, Fantasy, And Social Gaming In A Medieval World
Robert Scoble / Scobleizer:
Verb wall: The $40 billion Mark Zuckerberg is leaving on the table
Felix Gillette / Business Week:
Michael Arrington's Revenge
Matt LeMay / bitly blog:
bitly and Verisign
Discussion: ReadWriteWeb and Betabeat
Fortune:
Facebook vs. Google: The battle for the future of the Web
Discussion: The Atlantic Wire, Gawker, ChasNote and Daily Dot, Thanks:mhelft