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Friday, February 14, 2014
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After releasing its BlackBerry Messenger chat app for Android and iOS devices to considerable fanfare last fall, BlackBerry on Thursday announced that it had expanded the app's functionality on those platforms with two key features. Previously available only to users of BlackBerry's own mobile platform, BBM Voice and BBM Channels are now part of the company's offerings for Android and iPhone users as well, giving those customers the ability to make free voice calls to BBM contacts over a WiFi or data connection.


5:09 AM

After releasing its BlackBerry Messenger chat app for Android and iOS devices to considerable fanfare last fall, BlackBerry on Thursday an...

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doodle

Google has a Valentine’s Day doodle for their search homepage, the way they do every year. This one is fairly elaborate, however, and features stories supplied by Ira Glass and NPR’s This American Life (if you’re in the U.S.). Each story is animated using simple illustrations drawn on candy hearts, and each tells a story of love from a different perspective.


The video above shows the making of Google’s Valentine’s Day doodle, as described by the Doodler team within the company to TIME’s NewsFeed. You can see that a lot of work goes into the creation of any Google Doodle, but this one is especially elaborate. It’s also interesting to see how the animator has to balance considerations like what’s possible from an engineering perspective with mundane worries like file size.


Google is serving up a different doodle for international visitors, which features a mix-your-own box of chocolates that you can then actually send to your sweetie, and the company is also adding animated floating hearts to your Google+ photo uploads depicting hugging and kissing. They manage this using their Auto Awesome photo enhancing feature, and it’s yet another example of just how advanced Google is getting with regards to photo analysis and editing automation.


This may not be everyone’s favorite holiday, but Google’s approach to celebrating it is pretty adorable, even if you’re essentially a curmudgeon when it comes to chocolates, flowers and paper hearts.





5:09 AM

Google has a Valentine’s Day doodle for their search homepage, the way they do every year. This one is fairly elaborate, however, and featur...

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jeffholden-linkedin

Well that was fast. Just a few days after it was revealed that Groupon product chief Jeff Holden was leaving the daily deals giant to join a “Bay Area tech company,” we now know where he has landed. Uber announced this morning that it has hired Holden as its new Chief Product Officer.


Holden joined Groupon in 2011 after his startup Pelago was acquired. Pelago made a Foursquare-like, location-based check-in product called Whrrl, but it was shut down and Holden & co. were integrated into the Groupon product team.


Prior to Pelago, Holden had spent years at Amazon where he was an early hire. Starting there in 1997, he held various roles in the supply-chain optimization and consumer applications divisions of the online retailer. He oversaw many aspects of the Amazon site experience, including search and personalization, and led the development of Amazon Prime.


At Uber, Holden will report to CEO Travis Kalanick and lead the product team in San Francisco. While his experience at Amazon and Groupon point to his ability to scale large product organizations, Kalanick also called out Holden’s “passion, discipline and imagination” from his time as an entrepreneur that will be invaluable in his role at the on-demand ride startup.


This is just the most recent in a series of big hires that Uber has made recently. Last September the company hired Google exec Brent Callinicos as its CFO, Klout COO Emil Michael as its VP of Business, and Facebook Head of International Growth Ed Baker as its Head of Growth.


Here’s the text of Kalanick’s blog post:



I’m super-pumped to announce that Jeff Holden is joining Uber as our Chief Product Officer. I can’t imagine a better fit for Uber’s entrepreneurial culture and world-changing mission. He will be a strong strategic thought partner for the executive team and someone with whom I can spar to solve Uber’s hardest problems and invent our future. Having experienced Amazon’s hyper-growth from the very early days, Jeff knows how to think big while building for the long-term and scaling a world-class product organization. But the icing on the cake is the force multiplier of Jeff having been an entrepreneur in his own right. The passion, discipline and imagination that comes from being an entrepreneur is invaluable, and when those characteristics can spread through your organization at scale, the potential is limitless. I have high hopes for our new partner in the business, and I know Jeff is up for meeting and exceeding them. Welcome to the team!






3:09 AM

Well that was fast. Just a few days after it was revealed that Groupon product chief Jeff Holden was leaving the daily deals giant to join...

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Thursday, February 13, 2014
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Xiaomi Singapore screenshot

Xiaomi just announced that it will launch in Singapore on Feb. 21. This is a significant move because it marks the company’s first expansion beyond China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan six months after naming Google’s former Android vice president Hugo Barra as the head of Xiaomi Global in a surprise announcement.


The company unveiled its Singapore site earlier this week. The only product currently featured is the Redmi, Xiaomi’s cheapest Android phone, which will cost just S$169 (or about $133 USD).


Despite its very low price, the Redmi still has some impressive features, like a quad-core processor, a 4.2-inch HD screen, and 8MP camera, that may help it standout from competitors. Xiaomi’s other handsets have also earned kudos for strong specs, attractive design, and Xiaomi’s Android skin, which it customizes by crowdsourcing user feedback.


Singapore makes sense as Xiaomi’s first stop in its international expansion because the country has one of the highest mobile penetration rates in the world. According to Nielsen, 87% of people in Singapore have a smartphone, the same number as in Hong Kong. To put that figure into context, it beats the 71% mobile penetration rate in China, 72% in the UK, and 60% in the U.S.


Xiaomi has grown extremely quickly since launching just three years ago. In 2013, for example, it more than doubled its sales to 18.7 million phones.


Though Xiaomi continues to face strong competition from domestic Android handset makers like Lenovo, ZTE, and Huawei, it has held its own thanks to the high profile of its founder, Chinese tech pioneer Lei Jun, as well as unique marketing strategies, like selling phones directly from Sina Weibo, China’s top microblogging platform.


Xiaomi’s growth plan has worked very well so far: in August 2013, Xiaomi’s market share in China surpassed the iPhone by a small margin, according to Canalys.





10:39 PM

Xiaomi just announced that it will launch in Singapore on Feb. 21. This is a significant move because it marks the company’s first expansio...

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secret about you

Secret, which has fast become everyone’s favorite way to share “anonymish” thoughts with friends and strangers alike, has launched a new program that is designed to find — and squash — bugs in its mobile app before being exposed to the general public.


The launch of the program comes less than a day-and-a-half after a photo began making the rounds on Secret and on Twitter, which appeared to link a user’s email address to posts that they had shared through the app. The Secret team not only squashed the bug almost immediately, but also announced plans to launch the bug bounty for hackers playing around with the app.


And, well, here it is.


Saying that it is “committed to working with this community to verify, reproduce, and respond to legitimate reported vulnerabilities,” the team is asking for researchers to participate in the process of identifying those vulnerabilities and working with it to close them.


In doing so, Secret is asking for hackers to “make a good faith effort” to violate user privacy, destroy data, or degrade its service. That includes not accessing or violating any data that does not belong to the user, or sharing it with the public before it’s resolved.


The launch comes after hacks and attacks on other apps which promise anonymity or ephemerality that expose user information. In late December, a hack of Snapchat exposed information connected to 4.6 million of its users. It took more than a week for Snapchat to apologize for that incident and release further security features in an effort to ensure a similar incident doesn’t occur again.


For Secret, the whole idea behind the program is to take a proactive approach to finding and eliminating any potential issues in the app that could expose users’ identity or link secrets to them. That protection is necessary in an app in which users can share what could be sensitive information anonymously with each other.


For now, Secret says it’s hoping to “work with great people and learn from others” while closing any bugs, and promises gifts to those who participate.





5:54 PM

Secret , which has fast become everyone’s favorite way to share “anonymish” thoughts with friends and strangers alike , has launched a new ...

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The Linux desktop offers distributions for many diverse interests and specialties. Distro Astro is for astronomy enthusiasts. The latest version, Distro Astro 2.0, is dubbed "Pallas." It was released Nov. 20, 2013, at the South East Asian Young Astronomers Collaboration conference in Bandung, Indonesia. It is a major upgrade focusing on refinements for professional astronomers. The next release, version Juno 3.0, is due next November. It will focus on the needs of amateur stargazers.


5:24 PM

The Linux desktop offers distributions for many diverse interests and specialties. Distro Astro is for astronomy enthusiasts. The latest v...

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dick costolo



2013 was a very good year for Twitter, so it’s only fitting that Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo took home the award for CEO of the year at the 7th annual Crunchies Awards held this week in San Francisco.

Backstage at the show, TechCrunch co-editor Matthew Panzarino pulled Costolo aside for a quick interview to talk about Twitter’s success over the past year and what it means to be a good CEO. When Panzarino asked Costolo to share his “playbook” for leading Twitter, he had a really thoughtful response. He said:



“I’ll say two things. We had the good fortune to have Adam Silver, the new commissioner of the NBA, in the office the other day, and someone asked him about the culture of the NBA. Adam said, ‘One of the great players in the NBA told me that championships aren’t won on the court, they’re won on the bus.’ And what he was referring to is that sense of team building, and making sure that it feels like a team, and that you’re all pulling for each other and working together. That is what makes something work. And I think that’s something I just really pay very careful attention to.


Someone asked me once in an interview, ‘If you had to describe yourself as a CEO how would you describe yourself?’ And I thought about it for a second, and I said, ‘Well, I think I’m present.’


I try to be really present and there for the team, and to understand what everybody else understands. Because when you have that understanding of what everybody else understands, you can provide the proper context for the decisions that are being made, and help communicate those decisions. And then, it’s easier for everybody else in the company to feel like they have a sense of why decisions are being made…


…If I could sum up my advice in one sentence, it would be to make sure that everybody understands what you understand.”



You can watch that and the rest of the conversation in the video embedded above.





5:24 PM

2013 was a very good year for Twitter, so it’s only fitting that Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo took home the award for CEO of the year at the...

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