Techmeme
July 11, 2012, 4:00 PM

Top News

Amazon Appstore Developer Blog:
Announcing Amazon GameCircle - A New Gaming Experience for Kindle Fire  —  Announcing Amazon GameCircle, a new set of services designed to make it easier for you to create more engaging gaming experiences and grow your business on Kindle Fire.  —  GameCircle will make achievements …
Chris Velazco / TechCrunch:
Mark Jardine / Tapbots:
Tweetbot for Mac  —  It's finally here! (sort of)  —  Tweetbot for Mac is finally available!  However it may not be quite as you had hoped.  Developing for the Mac is no easy task, especially a full-featured Twitter client.  However, we've gotten to a point where while not complete, it is useable.
Federico Viticci / MacStories:
Tweetbot for Mac: Public Alpha Review  —  Today, Tapbots released the first public alpha of Tweetbot for Mac.  This is not a final review of the app: being in the development stage — albeit ready to be tested by the public — Tweetbot for Mac is still lacking several features that will be available …
Chris Foresman / Ars Technica:
Confirmed: Mountain Lion sends some 64-bit Macs gently into that good night  —  Mountain Lion won't support all 64-bit Macs when it ships in late July.  —  Apple, Inc.  —  Apple has now confirmed via its Mountain Lion upgrade page that previously published limitations on some 64-bit Macs will extend to the final release.
Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:
Twitter's Pitch Deck for Big Advertisers (Slides)  —  Twitter's ad business is looking less like an experiment and more like a real business, one that could generate $1 billion a year in the not-too-distant future.  —  If Twitter ads really take off, it will be because CEO Dick Costolo …
Salvador Rodriguez / Los Angeles Times:
Twitter CEO says company has ‘a truckload of money’  —  Twitter Chief Executive Dick Costolo told the Los Angeles Times his company has a “truckload” of money and will hold off going public for as long as it wants.  He's pictured here at event in Cannes, France, three weeks ago.
Arik Hesseldahl / AllThingsD:
Google's Nexus 7 Costs $152 To Make, IHS iSuppli Teardown Finds  —  Google's Nexus 7 tablet may be all about an attempt to compete with Apple's incredibly popular iPad, but when you crack it open it sure looks an awful lot like Amazon's Kindle Fire inside.  —  That's the impression that analysts …
Ryan Kim / GigaOM:
New York starts turning payphones into free Wi-fi hotspots  —  Payphones, those relics of the pre-cellphone era, may just get a new lease on life in New York.  The city is testing a pilot program in which it installs free Wi-Fi on select payphone kiosks.  —  The hotspots are initially coming …
Greg Sandoval / CNET:
Netflix's lost year: The inside story of the price-hike train wreck  —  Before he angered customers by raising prices, before he became the butt of Saturday Night Live satire for his Qwikster schemes, Netflix CEO Red Hastings alienated some of his key executives.
More: ZDNet and Webomatica
Zack Whittaker / ZDNet:
Viacom, DirecTV talks fail; 26 channels go dark  —  Summary: Negotiations between Viacom and DirecTV have failed, forcing 26 channels off DirecTV's airwaves and leaving its customers to pay a 30 percent price hike if they want reconnected service.  —  Zack Whittaker  —  Follow @zackwhittaker
Lorraine Luk / Wall Street Journal:
Amazon, With Suppliers, Is Testing a Smartphone  —  TAIPEI—Amazon.com Inc. is working with component suppliers in Asia to test a smartphone, people familiar with the situation said, suggesting that the Internet retail giant, which sells the Kindle Fire tablet computers, is considering broadening its mobile-device offerings.
Lauren Barack / Fortune:
Facebook wants to be your online bank  —  The social media giant is quietly supporting new services for banks that want to engage socially with their customers: The decidedly unsocial business of online banking.  —  FORTUNE — Someday soon, Facebook users may pay their utility bills …
John Paczkowski / AllThingsD:
Ballmer: “Surface Is Just a Design Point”  —  By designing and building the Surface tablet itself, Microsoft is not blowing off its longtime PC manufacturing partners.  And PC makers shouldn't take it that way.  Surface is a reference design meant to show them what's possible.
Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet:
Microsoft to reach 44 retail store total by mid-2013  —  Summary: Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner told Worldwide Partner Conference attendees more retail stores are coming, including two outside the U.S., in fiscal 2013.  —  Follow @maryjofoley
Edmund Lee / Bloomberg:
Square CEO Jack Dorsey Says Company To Go Outside U.S.  —  Jack Dorsey, chief executive of mobile-payments startup Square Inc., said the company will expand and make its device available outside the U.S.  —  Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter Inc., was invited to speak on a panel …
More: CNET
Alexis Madrigal / The Atlantic Online:
Confessions of an Internet Addict  —  Newsweek's cover story this week posits that “new research says the Internet can make us lonely and depressed—and may even create more extreme forms of mental illness.”  We found an Internet addict to tell us all about his affliction.
Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:
After A Month, Silence From The FTC On Search Engine Disclosure  —  A month ago, I sent a letter to the US Federal Trade Commission asking it to review how search engines are complying with its guidelines on disclosing listings where payment is involved.  The silence since then, as the saying goes, has been deafening.
More: Digits
Mike Masnick / Techdirt:
Judge Rejects Key Universal Music Argument In Legal Fight With Grooveshark  —  Two and a half years ago, Universal Music (UMG) sued Grooveshark (or, really, its parent company Escape Media).  The case has had a few twists and turns since then, but the judge has issued a ruling (embedded below) …
Sean Ludwig / VentureBeat:
AdRoll nabs $15M from Foundation, Accel, & Merus to get you clicking more ads  —  Online ad retargeting startup AdRoll has raised $15 million in its second-round of funding.  It plans to expand the company and improving its technology, which allows companies to serve more relevant display ads.
Anthony Ha / TechCrunch:
Google Ventures Leads $5M Investment In Virtual Currency Startup Pocket Change  —  Pocket Change, a startup offering a virtual currency platform for Android games, has raised $5 million in a Series A round of funding.  —  Creating a currency platform that works across Android games …
Jon Gold / Computerworld:
Would you like to play a game?  New AI teaches itself the rules  —  An AI that can watch two-minute videos of some simple board games being played, learn the rules, and then play against human opponents has been developed by Lukasz Kaiser, a researcher at Paris Diderot University.
More: Engadget
Jordan Kahn / 9to5Mac:
Facebook releases SDK 3.0 Beta with iOS 6 integration & new iOS Dev Center  —  Facebook announced today that it is releasing its biggest iOS SDK update yet with the release of SDK 3.0 Beta for iOS, which also includes iOS 6 integration for native Facebook login.

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