FTC says T-Mobile made hundreds of millions on crammed text message charges; T-Mobile says accusations are “unfounded and without merit”
FTC Alleges T-Mobile Made Millions From Allegedly Bogus Text Message Charges — T-Mobile made hundreds of millions of dollars …
New Snowden documents show FISA court authorized NSA to spy on all but four foreign countries
Court gave NSA broad leeway in surveillance, documents show — Virtually no foreign government is off-limits for the National Security Agency, which has been authorized to intercept information …
Recent hires suggest Apple is forming its own speech recognition team for a neural-net-boosted Siri
Siri Will Soon Understand You a Whole Lot Better — It all started at a small academic get-together in Whistler, British Columbia. — The topic was speech recognition …
Federal privacy watchdog finds NSA programs targeting foreigners are effective, legal and show “no trace” of “illegitimate activity”
Privacy board backs NSA's foreign spying — A federal privacy watchdog is largely putting its support behind a major pillar …
Vine introduces ‘loop count’ popularity indicator, updates home and activity feeds
Introducing Loop Counts — Starting today, you'll see loop counts on Vines in our iOS and Android mobile apps and on the web. Loop counts indicate how many times people have looped a video …
Google acquires music streaming service Songza for undisclosed amount, will keep product intact for now
Google Buys Songza — Google has acquired music streaming service Songza after weeks of speculation around a potential buyout. — Songza uses information about the user and context …
Microsoft strengthens encryption for Outlook.com and OneDrive, opens Redmond Transparency Center to let governments review source code
Advancing our encryption and transparency efforts — Vice President, Trustworthy Computing Security, Microsoft — In December, we announced …
Twitter names ex-Goldman banker Anthony Noto CFO, Mike Gupta now Head of Strategic Investments
Twitter CFO Steps Down and Is Replaced By Banker Who Took Company Public — Twitter said in a filing today that it's CFO Mike Gupta was shifting his job to become an SVP of strategic investments.
Amazon sues former employee for taking Google cloud job, in new test of non-compete deals
Amazon is suing a former Amazon Web Services strategic partnerships manager, Zoltan Szabadi, alleging that his new job at Google Cloud Platform violates the terms of a non-compete agreement that he si...
Lumia 635 with LTE comes to US through T-Mobile, Metro PCS for as little as $99
Microsoft's newest Lumia smartphone with LTE arrives in the U.S. later this month. The Lumia 635 can be had from T-Mobile for zero down and $7 a month while MetroPCS customers get special promotional...
VAIO computers return after Sony sells the brand
The new VAIO Corporation is here — The iconic VAIO PC brand has been resurrected today, following Sony's sale of the struggling business to investment fund Japan Industrial Partners. At the time, S...
Apple Launches $49 Mac Pro Security Lock Adapter in Online Store
Apple today launched a new $49 Mac Pro Security Lock Adapter in its online store, offering users of the new Mac Pro a way to easily secure their machines using existing Kensington locks. Previously, ...
Tinder CEO's Internal Memo Claims Harrassment Complaint Is Inaccurate
TechCrunch has obtained an internal memo sent from Tinder CEO Sean Rad to employees in the wake of a new lawsuit waged against the company. The lawsuit focuses on the relationship between Whitney Wol...
US Marshals: One Auction Bidder Claimed All 30,000 Silk Road Bitcoins
The US Marshals Service (USMS) has announced that a single, undisclosed bidder claimed all of the roughly 30,000 bitcoins seized from online black market Silk Road and sold in its recent auction.
Apple Launches 2014 ‘Back to School’ Promotion with Apple Store Gift Cards Up to $100
As indicated yesterday, Apple today launched its annual Back to School promotion offering qualified educational purchasers an Apple Store gift card of $100 with the purchase of a new Mac or a $50 gift...
Amazon Launches Its Most Affordable EC2 Instances Yet, But There's A Caveat
Amazon today launched its most affordable instances for its EC2 cloud computing service yet. Starting at just $0.013 per hour ($9.50 per month) for on-demand access (reserved instances are even cheap...
iPhone & iPad AppleCare+ purchase window extended to 60 days as standard plan discontinued
Apple today will be rolling out a couple of significant changes to its AppleCare support offerings. As we detailed in a report last month regarding Apple's future plans for AppleCare …
Dropbox Buys E-Commerce A/B Testing Service Predictive Edge, Shuts It Down
Dropbox has made another acquisition: Predictive Edge, a company that had built a way to personalise e-commerce offerings, along with dynamic pricing, for marketers to send out to users and run A/B te...
Android Wear review: Fast notifications, accurate voice commands, but still feels like a beta
Android Wear software review: Smartwatch software that doesn't suck — Google wearables: take two. — Believe it or not, Google has been a leader in the wearables space for some time with Google Gla...
Source: Google paid more than $39M for Songza
Google Buys Songza, a Playlist Service for Any Occasion — In a sign of growing consolidation in the digital music business, Google announced on Tuesday that it had bought Songza, a three-year-old ap...
Hinge, a Transparent Dating App, Raises $4.5 Million
Hinge, a transparent, totally not anonymous dating app (you use your full name, and it pulls photos from Facebook), just received $4.5 million in venture funding from Founders Fund, Lowercase Capital ...
US National Archives To Upload All Holdings To Wikimedia Commons
Ever since the National Archives and Record Administration launched the Open Government Plan in 2010, it has increasingly been uploading content to Wikipedia to digitize and gain a wider reach for its...
Tumblr “shadow CEO” Derek Gottfrid is out according to internal email from David Karp
One The Most Important People At Tumblr — Derek Gottfrid — Is Out Of The Company — A key Tumblr employee is out of the company. — Derek Gottfrid, who joined from the New York Times in 2010 …
eBay Confirms Shutdown of Small-Business E-Commerce Software Products
eBay announced on Tuesday that it would be shutting down its Magento Go and ProStores small-business e-commerce products in early 2015. The closure of these offerings, which Re/code first reported la...
Competing with LinkedIn and the Case Against Unbundling
I've been thinking about LinkedIn quite a bit lately. I think LinkedIn is really interesting because in many ways I think it is one of the most durable and hard to disrupt companies that sit at the i...
Samsung reveals the mini version of its Galaxy S5 smartphone, will go on sale in Russia first
Samsung has taken the wraps off the mini version of its flagship Galaxy S5 smartphone. The 4.5-inch Galaxy S5 mini has pretty much the same features as its parent device, featuring IP67 certification...
The dark side of .io: How the U.K. is making web domain profits from a shady Cold War land deal
The .io country code top-level domain is pretty popular right now, particularly among tech startups that want to take advantage of the snappy input/output reference and the relative availability of na...
How the ‘PayPal Mafia’ redefined success in Silicon Valley
The “PayPal Mafia” is no mafia at all. It's a diaspora. “Basically, we were kicked out of our homeland and they burned down our temple. So, we were scattered to the four corners of the globe, and w...
US book publishers now make more money from online sales than physical stores
Brick-and-mortar book stores have clearly been on the decline for a while — just look at Barnes & Noble's rocky finances. However, there's now some tangible evidence that the pendulum has swung in fa...
Databricks announces a Spark cloud and $33M in venture capital
Databricks, the company trying to commercialize the Apache Spark data-processing framework, announced on Monday at the second-annual Spark Summit that it has raised $33 million in series B venture cap...
The AP will use robots to turn data into stories for earnings reports beginning July
AP Using Robots For Journalism Starting In July — The Associated Press announced Monday that it will begin using automated technology to write company earnings reports next month.
PayPal freezes account of secure email startup ProtonMail, asking “Is it legal?”
The Switzerland-based startup, established by MIT, Harvard and CERN researchers, says it can't access money that crowdfunding backers have given it, because PayPal has frozen its account.