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Lawmakers and Congressional staffers may be trickling out of their Hill offices and to the airports, the encryption debate is not taking a holiday this week. Following media reports that the terrorists responsible for the Paris attacks communicated via encrypted messaging platforms, both opponents and proponents of backdoors for law enforcement are speaking up. Yesterday Senator Ron… Read More... →

Earlier today, The Information published a piece that told its readers that the “smart money is betting less on early-stage tech startups.” Per data provided to the news outlet by SignalFire, a venture firm and real-time information platform (you may have read about it here last month), blue-chip VCs accounted for 5.3 percent of Series A funding in the first nine months of… Read More... →

Posted by jenstarFor many SEOs, a glimpse at the Google’s Search Quality Rater’s Guidelines is akin to looking into Google’s ranking algorithm. While they don’t give the secret sauce to rank number one on Google, they do offer some incredible insight into what Google views as quality – and not-so-quality – and the types of pages they want to serve at the top of their search results. Last week, Google made the unprecedented move of releasing the entire Search Quality Rater’s Guidelines, following an analysis... →

Jet.com, an e-commerce company with its sights on Amazon, has raised a fresh $350 million, and according to a report on Re/code has “verbal agreements” for another $150 million. TechCrunch confirmed the details of the story with the firm. Jet has managed several feats in its short life, including generating a tectonic quantity of buzz by raising capital aggressively before its launch. Read More... →

Buying gifts for geek guys (with “geek” herein used in the most loving way possible, meaning someone who’s really into the thing they like) can be tough. Ask us what we want, and we usually say “Eh, I don’t know”. Fortunately, we have a bunch of geek guys on staff. Geeks of all shapes, sizes, and interests. And we know what we like. After much deliberation… Read More... →

When Slack’s IPO window opens, it wants to be able to quickly spring into the public markets. Otherwise it could see sour conditions or botched IPOs by other tech companies shut the window before it rings the opening bell. That’s why Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield says its already getting its ducks in a row so its poised to IPO when the time comes. Today, Butterfield The Australian… Read More... →

Engineering student James Patrick has built a working 3D-printable revolver that uses a rubber band and a nail to fire .22 bullets. The revolver can hold six or eight bullets and moves the cylinder from position to position after each shot. Patrick has built in a protective system that keeps the gun from firing when dropped. His last project, called the Songbird, a single shot model, is… Read More... →

Gillmor Gang – Matt Mullenweg, John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, and Steve Gillmor. LIVE recording session today at 3pmPT/6pmET. LIVE ChatCenter chatroom during LIVE recording Gillmor Gang on Facebook HERE Our sister show G3 on Facebook HERE G3 show archives on Ustream Read More... →

Clique Media Group, the company behind shoppable fashion site Who What Wear, has acquired Canadian startup Wantering. Clique’s properties (which also include lifestyle site MyDomaine and beauty site Byrdie) already combine editorial content with shoppable links, but the company is planning a bigger move into commerce, starting with a partnership that will see Target selling Who What… Read More... →

3D Slash, a free 3D design application, is now fully Raspberry Pi-compatible and works on the Pi-Top, an educational minicomputer based on the Raspberry Pi. The program allows students to design 3D objects on the single board computer, a feat unthinkable only a few years ago. By enabling users of the Pi-Top to move objects with the trackpad and interact with the keyboard you basically create… Read More... →

The interrelated trends around miniaturization and portability, wireless communications, power-efficient computing and advanced display technologies have come together to create the smart devices of today. The patriarch of these devices, the smartphone, is 15 years in, and smart-wearables are now poised to drive the next great wave of innovation. This wave is shaped by the technologies that… Read More... →

Square’s IPO came in hot, bouncing more than 40 percent in its first day of trading. Priced conservatively, the offering did what all IPOs must do to set a positive narrative: rise. In the ensuing days of trading, Square has slipped. Today, as TechCrunch reported, shares in Square fell for the third consecutive session. A good first day, it seems, does not a good first week make. The… Read More... →

Tango, the mobile messaging unicorn that reached a billion dollar valuation when Alibaba invested $280 million in it early last year, has laid off around nine percent of its workforce after it shuttered a brief effort at e-commerce. Read More... →

Buffer, a company known for its radical transparency, has reformed its salary algorithm that it uses to calculate the pay of its staff. It’s been several years since Buffer first published its salary list. The company also has an equity chart that anyone can read, and a revenue dashboard that you can use to track its performance. Read More... →

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web...... →

Posted by Ian Cook, head of IT, charity: water Editor's note: Today's post comes from Ian Cook, head of IT at charity: water , a non-profit organization that provides clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. Learn about how the organization is using Chromebox for meetings to keep the team connected, from its New York City HQ to onsite in Cambodia.... →

We pulled together all 153 unicorns currently listed on the Crunchbase Unicorn Leaderboard and then matched them up with data provided by Glassdoor to give you the top 20 highest paying startup unicorns for software engineering jobs. In our previous report, we revealed cloud-based big data company Cloudera paid the best overall. Dropbox now takes the top spot when narrowing it down to… Read More... →

We’re hearing from sources that GitHub CFO Vlado Herman, who joined in December 2012, is no longer at the company. To be sure, as a company matures, executive departures are normal. Herman was a high-profile hire at the time — and prior to GitHub, he was the CFO of Yelp. That being said, he had been at the company for around three years. GitHub has essentially become one of… Read More... →

Consumer watchdog groups announced today they’ve filed additional complaints with the FTC over the advertising content in the YouTube Kids application, this time focused on how the app allows food and drink advertisers to violate their self-regulatory pledges they made as members of the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI), a program whose aim is to shift… Read More... →

ANALYSIS: Almost everyone I know in the mobile industry is pulling for BlackBerry. No one likes to see a company fail — even if they personally don’t use its products — because failed companies lead to layoffs. And if it’s a brand that people hold nostalgia for, this is even more true. (For mobile industry examples, look no […]... →