Amazon is planning a big biodome at the foot of its new HQ, because Jeff Bezos. [Gizmodo]
More people are using their tablets on planes. Someone actually paid to conduct this study. [USA Today]
Square has expanded to Japan. [The Next Web]
Kim Dotcom says he invented two-factor authentication and Google, Twitter and others are engaging in “massive IP infringement.” [The Verge]
Foursquare now offers more specific search and filter capabilities. [TechCrunch]
Leaning Out of Tumblr Jessica Bennett, the Tumblr employee who was laid off with the shuttering of Storyboard, announced today on Twitter that she’s taken a job with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. “Turns out being fired ain’t that bad,” she tweeted, along with a link to a Facebook post by Ms. Sandberg herself announcing Ms. Bennett’s hiring:
“So excited to welcome Jessica Bennett to the Lean In team! Jessica is joining us to run Editorial – helping us connect women all over the world with their passion for leaning in! Special thanks to Nell Scovell and Rachel Sklar for introducing us to Jessica!”
How much leaning in was required to land that job? Read More
News broke late Friday night that daily deals site LivingSocial was hacked, exposing the personal data of 50,000,000 users. [New York Times]
Robert Scoble showered in his pair of Google Glass and everyone on the Internet cried themselves to sleep. [Google Plus]
Jack Dorsey has a new plan for world domination: revamping how McDonald’s charges you for that Big Mac. [USA Today]
Facebook is losing users quickly as many decamp for new social network experiences on platforms like Path. According to one study, just last month the site lost 6 million U.S. users, a 4 percent drop. [The Guardian]
What you Google can predict how the stock market behaves. Time to buy all the stocks in “Sergey Brin arms” then? [BBC]
Zuck apparently wears a t-shirt while swimming in the ocean. Who’s surprised? [Valleywag]
Twitter cofounder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey took the stage in a non-Silicon Valley venue this afternoon: an auditorium in the Hearst HQ, for a chat with Harper’s Bazaar executive editor Laura Brown.
Fittingly for an audience of stylishly attired editorial belles, Ms. Brown led by asking Mr. Dorsey about his leadership philosophy. The man, it seems, likes to think of himself as an editor.
“I’ve studied a lot of editors, I’ve studied a lot of newspapers and magazines,” Mr. Dorsey explained. He thinks of his own job as editing the team (brings new meaning to “kill your darlings”), as well as crafting both mission and product for the company. ”It’s a constant chance to make it better and better and better and better. Sometimes the best edit is a complete rewrite,” he concluded. Read More
The Chat-rooming Classes Today, seemingly every tech reporter in the business tuned into Jason Calacanis‘s “This Week in Startups,” presumably in the hopes that Mr. Calacanis would tell all re: the allegations of abuse against Michael Arrington. But as familiar names chattered away in the chat room, Mr. Calacanis had little to say beyond comparing himself to Obi Wan. That would make Mr. Arrington Anakin Skywalker, of course; Mr. Calacanis said he taught him how to be powerful in media, and “I regret that.”
As for the allegations themselves, Mr. Calacanis was quick to say he wouldn’t be commenting on whether they were true, citing his lack of direct knowledge. (He did, however, openly discuss the time that Mr. Arrington called a PR honcho “the c-word,” thereby outing someone who’d never mentioned the incident publicly!) [Correction: Mr. Calacanis first mentioned the incident and the PR exec (Brooke Hammerling) by name in the comments of his Facebook post, prompting Ms. Hammerling to confirm the story, also in a Facebook comment.] All in all, it sounds like he (kinda sorta) regrets getting involved. He apparently thought writing a Facebook note wouldn’t go very far. “I thought that that would be a place where it just lived there,” he said. (Paging Randi Zuckerberg!) “I got a little P.T. Barnum in me and I feel like me commenting on all this stuff actually detracts from it,” he added.
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Accel has closed a $475 million fund that they plan to use for Series A startups mainly in Israel and Europe. [TechCrunch]
Yesterday was Twitter’s 7th birthday and it celebrated by hitting the 200 million users milestone. That’s great and all but… [The Verge]
…YouTube announced they have one billion monthly users. You know what’s cool? [San Jose Mercury News]
The influx of new money from this round of billion dollar startups has undeniably changed the Valley. But is it for the better? [East Bay Express]
Turns out Starbucks baristas actually have no idea how to use that Square thing. [Fast Company]
As far as technophiles seeking political office go, Jack Dorsey is taking the opposite approach from Sheryl Sandberg.
Ms. Sandberg’s new book may read like the source material for a campaign platform, but on a recent 60 Minutes appearance, she evaded questions about leaning in to the White House. Mr. Dorsey, on Read More
Several big tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Intel have publicly declared their support for gay marriage. They’re part of a corporate group that’s reportedly planning to file an amicus brief in support of overturning California’s Prop 8. [Bloomberg]
Yahoo would like you to know that its new, anti-work-from-home police has absolutely nothing to do with you (unless you work at Yahoo). [Mercury News]
“While hanging with my 12 year old cousin the other day, I unknowingly entered into the world of Tweenstagram, a vastly different space than the Instagram I have grown to know and love (and refresh too often).” Do go on. [Wisdom of Pearls]
Max Levchin, one of the cofounders of PayPal, is launching a new mobile payments startup with the chipper name of Affirm. “You will essentially be putting a purchase on a digital tab, and we are going to make it work for us by looking at all available data to determine if you are someone who will pay it back.” [AllThingsD]
Former Square COO Keith Rabois, who left in the wake of sexual harassment accusations, has landed at Khlosa Ventures as a VC. [AllThingsD]
Earlier today, news broke that Square’s COO, Keith Rabois, had left the company. It was a strangely-timed departure, considering Square recently raised $200 million in a Series D. Now, the Wall Street Journal has broken the news that Mr. Rabois is embroiled in a sexual harassment claim from a fellow Square employee, and resigned so that the allegations would “not cause a distraction for the company.” Read More
Aleksey Vayner, the Yale grad who gained Internet infamy in 2006 for his video resume, “Impossible is Nothing,” is dead at 29. [Motherboard]
Square COO Keith Rabois is leaving the San Francisco-based payments company; Kara Swisher says disagreements with CEO and founder Jack Dorsey are at least partially behind the departure. [AllThingsD]
The latest petty sleight in the high-school style feud between two social media giants: Facebook has cut off access to Twitter’s new video-sharing service, Vine, preventing the app from using Facebook to find new friends. [AllThingsD]
What asshole decided to name a smartphone made for the African market YOLO? [Mashable]
A French court wants to force Twitter to reveal the identities of users who author racist tweets in violation of the country’s hate-speech laws. Twitter is deciding whether to fight the ruling. [NYT]
