Google’s head of news: Newspapers are the new Yahoo

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Google has a somewhat tense relationship with the traditional newspaper industry, since publishers like News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch still believe it is depriving them of revenue by “stealing” their content and aggregating it at Google News. So you might think that Google’s head of news products, Richard Gingras, would try to smooth over any ruffled feathers when talking about the future of news.

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No, Snapchat Isn’t About Sexting, Says Co-Founder Evan Spiegel

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“The minute you tell someone that images on your server disappear, everyone jumps to sexting.” Evan Spiegel laughed and leaned back into his chair during his first sitdown interview since his iPhone app Snapchat blew up over the last month. Snapchat  is #12 on the free iOS photo app charts in the U.S. and  just scored some mainstream media attention in The New York Times . Plus, we hear that Snapchat has also impressed Facebook’s internal product leadership and even Zuck himself

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From Disrupt NY To A $43 Million Skype Acquisition, GroupMe Tells All

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They have raised $11.45 million in both Angel and Series B funding since launch, acquired a company called Sensobi, and have been themselves acquired by none other than Skype (which was acquired by Microsoft). There may not be a wilder tale of a Disrupt success (though plenty of startups would beg to differ), which is why we’ve chosen GroupMe to kick off a series I’m doing on “Disrupt Startups: Where They Are Now.” We sat down earlier today to chat with co-founders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci to find out their perspective on Disrupt as a launchpad. Try as I might to snip down the interview, the whole thing is basically gold.

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California Passes Law Preventing Employers From Demanding Social Media Access [Privacy]

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With the passage of AB 1844, the California State Assembly has effectively banned employers from requiring access to their workers' social media accounts. Several states already outlawing the practice and a national ban is in the works, employers will soon have a much harder time snooping through your online life.

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The Engadget Show returns Friday, May 18th — get tickets to the taping!

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Why, it seems like only last month that we recorded our last Engadget Show.

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Consolidation Hits UK Local Sites: Zoopla Buys UpMyStreet, Folds It Into Its Own Property Pages

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The UK housing market has been on shaky legs for a while now — with tight lending conditions, unemployment and general consumer confidence all playing their part in slowing things down — and that is having the inevitable knock-on to sites built up to serve that sector: today brings news that Zoopla , one of the UK’s bigger property sites, is buying up a smaller competitor / data supplier, UpMyStreet , and folding the latter company’s business into its own. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it looks like the acquisition means curtains for the UpMyStreet brand, one of the oldest local-listings sites in the UK: if you visit that URL now you will see that the site now automatically redirects to Zoopla’s pages, with no sign of UpMyStreet branding to be seen. There is a quick splash, however, that appears on some pages that announces the sale: UpMyStreet had already been a strategic partner of Zoopla’s before the acquisition, providing supplementary information about property locations alongside Zoopla’s core real-estate listings service.  “ Zoopla has had a commercial relationship with UpMyStreet.com for some time and this acquisition is a natural fit for us and allows us to further extend our audience and reach for the benefit of our members,” said Alex Chesterman, founder and CEO of Zoopla, in a statement

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Nick Denton is betting the future of advertising is conversational

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When we spoke with Nick Denton recently, the Gawker Media CEO talked about how the new commenting system he launched last month would shape the future of the company — and he hinted that this would involve the business side as well as the editorial side of the New York-based operation. Now we know what he was referring to : in an internal memo on Thursday, Denton announced the formation of a new sales unit that will focus on helping advertisers and brands take part in the new commenting system . Gawker is also launching a content-driven commerce arm that will focus on affiliate links and in-page transactions.

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Disrupting Media: Where Do We Go Now That We’ve Won? With Henry Blodget, Jonah Peretti And Gabe Rivera

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In a world where Instagram is worth more than the New York Times, old media is no longer dying, it’s dead. Instead, in its wake, we’ve got the Wild West: A chaotic morass of never-ending slideshows, puny WordPress blogs breaking big time news (and selling for tens of millions) and the merger of lolcats and politics on a site which focuses just as much on content sharing as content

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Want to reinvent TV? Don’t forget the TV

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Smart TVs, dumb TVs, Google TVs, Ikea TVs and even everything we know about the rumored Apple TV set all have something in common: In the end, they’re just TVs. That’s whether they’re 42, 50 or 60 inches in size, with a bezel that frames your viewing experience

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The Carr-Benkler wager and the peer-powered economy

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When you look around at the web and the state of the online economy, does it look like it has been colonized by large corporations for their own purposes, or do you see a world that is powered primarily by peer-to-peer networks? That’s the question behind one of the longest-running wagers of the modern web era — a bet that author and web sceptic Nick Carr made with Harvard professor and networking theorist Yochai Benkler in 2006. Carr claims that he has won , since commercial interests rule the web, but Benkler maintains the web as we know it is clearly based on what he calls “commons-based peer production.” So who is right

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