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RT @WSJ: Cupcakes were dessert craze of 2012. Now it's all about donuts, according to Google Trends.

RT @Techmeme: Exclusive: YouTube weighs funding efforts to boost premium content - sources (Reuters)

Tortured statements from CEOs, politicians, coworkers, spouses, or suppliers, in no hierarchical order, mean one thing: I have something to hide, but I want to be able to say I told you the facts.

The analyst did hold out some hope that the 5.5-inch "iPhone 6" could launch in 2014. But even if that happens, he said it's likely to occur after mid-fourth-quarter, which would mean after mid-November — a much later timeframe than Apple has launched new iPhone models in recent years.

Glinda-esque as her job might be, Tabriz appears to wear black almost exclusively. “It’s slimming,” she says, shrugging, not that she needs to worry about that. She has a simpatico face, always worn bare, that could easily elide from one ethnicity to another and a classic Gap-in-its-heyday sleek tomboy aesthetic: dark-wash jeans, clean-line crewnecks, and Chuck Taylors, with the occasional bomber jacket thrown on top.

In addition to helping create Google Glass, Parviz, a Univ. of Washington Assistant Professor, was a Google X team member who helped the organization develop the first bionic contact lenses. He holds a PhD in electrical engineering from the Univ. of Michigan, and he was a postdoctoral fellow in chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard.

Ahead of tomorrow's deadline, a total of 647,000 comments have been sent to the commission expressing views on the future of the internet.

In essence, President Barack Obama's administration claims that any company with operations in the United States must comply with valid warrants for data, even if the content is stored overseas. It's a position Microsoft and companies like Apple say is wrong, arguing that the enforcement of US law stops at the border.

But here’s the rub. When a platform like Amazon emerges as the dominant monopoly in publishing, who will keep them honest? When every author has left the publishing house system and has gone direct with Amazon, what does that world look like?

Volunteering his time over the past seven years publishing to Wikipedia, the 53-year-old Swede can take credit for 2.7 million articles, or 8.5% of the entire collection, according to Wikimedia analytics, which measures the site's traffic. His stats far outpace any other user, the group says.

Much to my surprise a lady from Cupertino called me up the next day, saying she’d received a concerning email from Tim about ugly distortion hold music while on the phone, that Tim had tested this himself and agreed that something had to be done. She assured me that the hold music would be tested to make sure it sounded pleasant on all types of phones and connections.

With the Gmail API in hand, it’s finally possible to create apps that live on top of email without spending weeks or months on them. "Google’s intent is really to power apps and services that make use of email data, but aren’t trying to be email clients. That is its own emergent category of email apps," says Javier Soltero, founder of mail app Acompli. "Through IMAP this is cumbersome and requires you to know more about email than you really want to unless you’re building an email client," he says. "The API navigation of that structure is a lot easier to follow." In plain English, instead of having to deal with building an IMAP-syncing engine to access an inbox, you might only need to query Google’s server for a specific search term or email address.

Just a few months ago Alan Mulally was being mentioned as the possible next CEO of Microsoft, but after leaving his position as CEO of Ford he's now aligned with a different tech company: Google. Google announced today that he's joined its Board of Directors, effective July 9th. While his connections to the auto industry could obviously be valuable for projects like Android Auto and the development of self-driving cars, Google's announcement also mentions his aviation experience as a former executive at Boeing. Mulally was president of Boeing's space and defense business, and between Project Loon, drones and satellite launches we figure there's plenty of input to provide there as well.

Apple has announced a strategic partnership with IBM that will see the enterprise giant transfer over 150 of their enterprise and IT apps and tools to Apple platforms natively, and will also have IBM selling Apple iPhones and iPads to its business clients all over the world. In an interview with CNBC, Apple CEO Tim Cook and IBM CEO Virginia Rometty both told the network that Apple and IBM are like “puzzle pieces” that fit perfectly together.

After three-plus years of restricting users to their real names on the network, Google+ announced today that it is abandoning the policy and allowing people to use any username they choose.

Over the years, as Google+ grew and its community became established, we steadily opened up this policy, from allowing +Page owners to use any name of their choosing to letting YouTube users bring their usernames into Google+. Today, we are taking the last step: there are no more restrictions on what name you can use.

The media giant 21st Century Fox, the empire run by Rupert Murdoch, made an $80 billion takeover bid in recent weeks for Time Warner Inc. but was rebuffed.

Amazon is testing an ebook and audiobook subscription service called “Kindle Unlimited” that offers “unlimited access to over 600,000 titles and thousands of audiobooks on any device for just $9.99 a month.” Most of the test pages were pulled down Wednesday after some users on the Kindle Boards noticed them, but they are still available through Google Cache and some are still live on Amazon’s site.

The technology journalists who don’t want the geeky path need to step up to the plate and start tackling the important stories involving how technology is changing our lives.

One of the reasons for Swisher’s unusual status in the Valley is her longevity. Now 51, she began covering tech in the early ’90s and was already a senior industry statesperson when the Web 2.0 generation was coming of age. People who are powerful today sought her advice when they were just starting out. She met Jeff Bezos when Amazon was in short pants, Marc Andreessen as Netscape was going public. She was at the pitch meeting for TiVo. “It felt like you were meeting Tesla, all these people,” she says.

Nokia X Android Devices Will Run Windows Phone

Well, as I explained in my last blog post, the bit that is congested is the place where the Level 3 and Verizon networks interconnect. Level 3’s network interconnects with Verizon’s in ten cities; three in Europe and seven in the United States. The aggregate utilization of those interconnections in Europe on July 8, 2014 was 18% (a region where Verizon does NOT sell broadband to its customers). The utilization of those interconnections in the United States (where Verizon sells broadband to its customers and sees Level 3 and online video providers such as Netflix as competitors to its own CDN and pay TV businesses) was about 100%. And to be more specific, as Mr. Young pointed out, that was 100% utilization in the direction of flow from the Level 3 network to the Verizon network.

Microsoft is starting with 13,000 cuts today, and more will be made over the next year to bring the total to 18,000. About 1,351 positions will be cut in the Seattle region as part of that first wave, representing about 3 percent of the company’s workforce in the region.

“At Netflix we continuously test new things. In this case, we are testing a feature in which a user watching a movie or TV show can choose to view in “Privacy Mode.” Choosing that option means the program will not appear in your viewing activity log, nor will it be used to determine recommendations about what you should watch in the future.”

The big headline, however, is what we’ve been anticipating: Yahoo’s share has now fallen below 10 percent. This is an “all-time low.” The combined Yahoo-Bing “search alliance” share remains flat at 29 percent. Bing has grown almost entirely at Yahoo’s expense.

Dell today announced it has started accepting Bitcoin for all items available on Dell.com (including Alienware products). The company says it is “piloting” the digital currency for consumer and small business shoppers in the US; presumably if the test goes well, the option will be expanded internationally.

This is why I argue in the start of a white paper I’m finishing now that we must shift to a business based on known relationships with people as individuals and communities rather than as a mass.

The Cupertino, Calif., company is asking suppliers to manufacture between 70 million and 80 million units combined of two large-screen iPhones with 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch displays by Dec. 30, according to people familiar with the matter.