Kyocera thinks the old audio speaker in your mobile phone is passé. There are just too many steps: a diaphragm vibrates to produce sound waves that travel through the air down your ear canal, where they resonate off your eardrum

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Kyocera ceramic transducer makes you hear voices in your head

Foursquare plans to offer personalized coupons through a redesigned app in July, part of a larger effort to start making money through the location-based social network. The Wall Street Journal reported  Tuesday that Foursquare will allow merchants to pay for special placement of personalized local offers. Foursquare already offers specials for users, but it hasn’t charged merchants for special billing of those coupons.

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Foursquare looks to personalized coupons to generate revenue

PayPal is forming a joint venture with Softbank Corp . to help launch its small business mobile payment product PayPal Here in Japan. The joint venture, called PayPal Japan, will include investments of $12.5 million each from both PayPal and Softbank, a leading telecom and Internet company

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PayPal forms alliance with Softbank to launch PayPal Here in Japan

Patti Hart, the Yahoo director who headed the search committee that selected Scott Thompson as CEO, was supposed to be one of the board members staying on during a makeover. Instead, Hart, whose own credentials were questioned when activist shareholder Daniel Loeb unveiled Thompson’s claims of a degree he didn’t have, is leaving. The official reason : her own board asked her not to serve again.

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Yahoo search committee head leaves board as CEO inquiry starts

Alex Payne, formerly of Twitter and and more recently of Simple, a banking service! asks the all-important question: What is and is not a technology company : It’s now accepted-going-on-cliché to say things like ‘software is eating the world’, which is an aggressive way of assuming that every company now has to be at least a bit of a technology company, and those that want to grow rapidly even more so. Many new companies targeting industries as diverse as eyeglasses and baby food are, at the outset, leveraging technology for everything they do: supply chain management, marketing, recruiting, internal communication, product development, and so on

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So what exactly is a tech company?

“The field of [big data] draws on findings from statistics, databases, and artificial intelligence to construct tools that let users gain insight from massive data sets.” – Michael Pazzani, Intelligent Systems Pazzani’s quote was originally published in February 1999 and did not reference big data; it referenced knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD).

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Is big data just a fad, or something much more profound?

Comcast Tower We’re at a flashpoint in the evolution of television, and the battle lines are getting clearer. We have the pay TV providers who want to keep their high-dollar cable packages going even as broadband has the potential to break their bundle of channels. We also have content companies, some of whom are owned by the cable providers and others who are independent.

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7 ways Comcast is killing the cable killers

Sahil Lavingia has a gift for building what people want. A look at his resume reveals he was a designer for Pinterest , built the iPhone app for Turntable.fm , and now he’s the founder of Gumroad , a startup with the modest ambition of enabling people to sell anything (a song, a snippet of code, an icon design) to anyone

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Gumroad’s CEO on great design and advice for young entrepreneurs

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels Let it never be said that the cloud computing wars are boring. Within hours of being blasted for locking developers into its ever-rising cloud stack , Amazon announced new managed database services  and Elastic Beanstalk support targeting thousands upon thousands of Microsoft-centric developers. Late on Tuesday, Amazon posted on its AWS blog that Microsoft SQL Server is now part of AWS’ relational database service (RDS) program

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Amazon woos Microsoft devs with .NET, SQL Server support

As various levels of government both in the U.S. and around the world have stepped up their attempts to track down dissidents through social networks , the pressure has intensified on companies like Twitter and Facebook to comply with these demands — even at the expense of their users’ privacy. Despite that pressure, Twitter at least seems determined to fight these incursions wherever possible

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Twitter: We’re still the free-speech wing of the free-speech party