Techmeme
July 12, 2012, 8:55 PM

Top News

Wall Street Journal:
Betaworks to Pay $500,000 for Fallen Social Media Star Digg  —  New York technology development firm Betaworks has agreed to buy news-sharing website Digg, in an attempt to revive a company that was early to social media but outmaneuvered by rivals like Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc.
Matt Williams / Digg Blog:
Digg and Betaworks  —  Today marks the next stage in Digg's future.  —  Believe it or not, it's been seven years since Digg launched.  To date, we've had over 350M Diggs, 28M Story Submissions and 40M Comments.  We're extremely proud to have helped pioneer social voting on the web.
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Updated: Betaworks Acquires Digg (For Significantly More Than $500K)  —  Betaworks, the company behind bit.ly, news.me, Chartbeat and a number of other successful products, has acquired the social news site Digg.com for an undisclosed amount.  Betaworks' founder John Borthwick will become the new CEO of Digg.
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Nielsen Blog:
Two Thirds of New Mobile Buyers Now Opting For Smartphones  —  During Q2 2012 smartphone penetration continued to grow, with 54.9 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers owning smartphones as of June 2012.  This growth is driven by increasing smartphone purchases: 2 out of 3 Americans who acquired …
Ben Kuchera / Penny Arcade Report:
The reality of the OUYA console doesn't match the hype: why you should be skeptical  —  There is a reason that the press around the newly-announced OUYA game console is based almost exclusively around the amount of money being raised by the product's Kickstarter, and that reason is simple: There is very little else to report on.
Jenna Wortham / Bits:
Brewster, a Mobile App, Wants to Transform Your Address Book  —  On average, how many contacts do you have in your phone?  How about on Facebook?  On Twitter?  —  Steve Greenwood, an entrepreneur in New York, is willing to bet that the average person is juggling at least a thousand contacts and could use a little help.
Dylan Tweney / VentureBeat:
Microsoft's Bing Fund will give online startups cash, advice, and discounts  —  After playing coy and dropping hints for weeks, Microsoft has finally announced its newest incubator, the Bing Fund.  —  The Bing Fund will invest $50,000-$100,000 in early-stage startups, through standard convertible notes …
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Nexus 7 arrives: here's where you can buy it right now (update: Google asks retailers to halt sales)  —  Google says it's “still on track” for a mid-July release of the Nexus 7 — the company told us it still isn't officially on sale — but the Asus-manufactured device is already starting to crop up at resellers.
Greg Bensinger / Digits:
Netflix Users' Taste for Movie Streaming Continues to Fall  —  Netflix Inc., which built its business on mailed movie DVDs, is increasingly the destination of choice for television viewing.  —  Netflix users were less interested in streaming movies titles than a year earlier …
Drew Olanoff / The Next Web:
Wedding and engagement news now get the birthday treatment on Facebook  —  If you're like me, you don't have the time to watch every single item flow through your News Feed on a daily basis.  Because of that, I miss out on some pretty awesome events like a wedding or engagement.
Donna Tam / CNET:
NBC Olympics to stream games live on mobile devices  —  NBC Sports and Adobe Systems have teamed up to give fans two apps that stream the Olympics live on mobile devices, record footage for playback, and share the experience through social media.  —  The apps — a live-streaming app …
Neil Hughes / AppleInsider:
20 million iPad sales projected for Apple's June quarter  —  Apple is poised to report record breaking sales of 20 million iPads in the just-concluded June quarter, one analyst believes.  —  Charlie Wolf with Needham & Company issued a note to investors on Thursday in which he increased …
Christina Chaey / Fast Company:
LevelUp Will End Your Business' Credit Card Processing Fees.  Really.  —  Merchants shell out $50 billion a year to the companies that process your credit card payments.  One company, LevelUp, is dropping its fees altogether.  Here's how they're getting away with it.
John Cook / GeekWire:
E-signature company DocuSign raises $47.5 million, names Mary Meeker to board  —  DocuSign, the maker of electronic signature technology, has raised $47.5 million in equity financing, according to a SEC filing released today.  Terms of the deal and investment firms were not listed in the filing …
Darrell Etherington / BetaKit:
FuzeBox Grabs $20M for Online Meetings Tool That Counted Steve Jobs As a User  —  FuzeBox, the online meetings company that found favor with Steve Jobs, among many other influential figures in tech and business, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series A round from venture sources …
Tim Farrar / TMF Associates MSS blog:
Spectrum crisis or capex crisis?  —  As others have pointed out recently, the supposed spectrum crunch is really more of an infrastructure crunch, because if wireless data traffic is going to grow by 10 or 20 times, how can 20% more spectrum possibly solve that problem?
More: BuzzFeed
John Cook / GeekWire:
After the writedown: How Microsoft squandered its $6.3B buy of ad giant aQuantive  —  Big expectations for aQuantive: In this 2007 file photo, then-Microsoft executive Kevin Johnson, left, talks with aQuantive co-founder Nick Hanauer, center, and former aQuantive CEO Brian McAndrews.
More: The Next WebThanks:@toddbishop
Reuters:
Google CEO Page recovering, was in office this week  —  (Reuters) - Google Inc CEO Larry Page, absent from the Internet company's biggest public events for weeks, is recovering from an unspecified ailment that caused him to lose his voice and was in the office on Monday, Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said.
More: CNET
Mark Gurman / 9to5Mac:
New Food and Drink category goes live in the App Store  —  Earlier this month, Apple promised that a new Food and Drink section would be going live in the App Store in the coming weeks.  Like clockwork, Apple's new App Store section has gone live.  The new section currently holds nearly 3000 apps …
Shalini Ramachandran / Digits:
Amid Dish Dispute, AMC to Live Stream ‘Breaking Bad’  —  For TV companies, it's not clear whether the Web is friend or foe.  —  When Dish Network dropped AMC network from its channel lineup at the end of June, one reason it cited, in addition to high costs relative to low viewership, was the availability of AMC programming online.
More: Engadget
Matt Brian / The Next Web:
Moving beyond Angry Birds, Rovio launches Amazing Alex for iOS and Android  —  Rovio has proved there is life beyond Angry Birds by today launching its new puzzle-based games series Amazing Alex on iOS and Android devices, challenging gamers to complete 100 levels using 35 fully interactive objects.

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