Techmeme
June 19, 2014, 8:15 AM

Top News

Amazon.com:
Introducing Fire, the First Smartphone Designed by Amazon  —  New breakthrough innovations—Dynamic Perspective, Firefly button, and more  —  Seamless integration with Amazon's vast ecosystem—over 33 million songs, apps, games, movies,  —  Only smartphone with Mayday, ASAP, X-Ray, and Second Screen
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Fire Phone compared with iPhone 5S, Galaxy 5S, One, Moto X, and Lumia Icon: unique software running on average hardware  —  Fire Phone against the world: can Amazon take on iOS and Android?  —  Amazon's unique software is running on pretty average hardware
Robert Sorokanich / Gizmodo:
Nick Summers / The Next Web:
Chris Ziegler / The Verge:
T-Mobile is setting a dangerous precedent for wireless net neutrality with its Music Freedom initiative  —  T-Mobile's ‘Music Freedom’ is a great feature — and a huge problem  —  It sounds great, but it's really, really, really bad  —  Net neutrality has seen headier days, and to be honest …
Ina Fried / Re/code:
T-Mobile Offering Weeklong iPhone “Test Drive” To Lure Customers  —  Pulling a page from the car dealer's manual, T-Mobile is offering would-be customers a free seven-day trial of its network using an iPhone 5s.  —  “You (can) have a 7-night stand,” CEO John Legere said in an interview …
Brad Molen / Engadget:
On T-Mobile, you can now stream music without hurting your data plan  —  Streaming music on your phone would be fantastic — if it weren't for all those pesky data caps.  T-Mobile's latest UnCarrier move addresses this particular pain point: Starting today, you'll be able to listen …
Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch:
Facebook Goes Down In Global Outage.  Update: It's Back!  —  Facebook appears to be a suffering a major outage this morning, with the site unavailable in multiple regions around the world, and Facebook social plug-ins on other websites also acting up.  —  The Facebook.com site is unavailable …
Other World Computing:
Teardown of Apple's new $1,099 iMac shows 8GB memory soldered to motherboard; will not be upgradable  —  Teardown of Lower-Cost 2014 iMac Reveals Soldered Memory  —  As we reported earlier today, Apple has released a new $1,099 iMac model with new specs including a 1.4GHz Dual-Core i5 processor …
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Code Spaces closes shop after attackers destroy Amazon-hosted customer data  —  Code Spaces closes shop after attackers destroy Amazon-hosted customer data.  —  A code-hosting service that boasted having a full recovery plan has abruptly closed after someone gained unauthorized access …
Chad Bray / New York Times:
British Property Website Zoopla Valued at $1.5 Billion in I.P.O.  —  LONDON - The Zoopla Property Group, a British real estate listings website, was valued at more than $1.5 billion in its initial public offering in London on Wednesday.  —  The company priced its offering at 2.20 pounds a share …
Judd Legum / ThinkProgress:
People Invested $1 Million In An App That Just Says ‘Yo’  —  It only took 8 hours to build the app, and the only thing it does is allow you to send the word ‘Yo’ to your friends.  To many, it seems like a joke.  But its inventor, Or Arbel, is totally serious.
Evelyn M. Rusli / Wall Street Journal:
Nest investor Shasta Ventures raises $300M for its fourth, and largest, fund  —  Shasta Ventures Sticks to Basics With New $300 Million Fund  —  Tod Francis, a managing director of Shasta Ventures, recalls a time when few in venture capital were interested in “consumer” start-ups.
More: PE Hub Blog and VentureBeatTweets: @jacob
Seth Rosenblatt / CNET:
Google cheers growing support for ECPA reform  —  Years after Google first began raising concerns about the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the tech titan's efforts to get Congress to care might be bearing fruit.  —  Google is cheering for a small uptick of support for ECPA reform in Congress …
Stacey Higginbotham / Gigaom:
Facebook has built its own switch.  And it looks a lot like a server  —  Not content to remake the server, Facebook's engineers have taken on the humble switch, building their own version of the networking box and the software to go with it.  The resulting switch, dubbed Wedge …

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