Exclusive: Google’s Andy Rubin and Asus’ Jonney Shih on how they cooked up the Nexus 7 [ALL THINGS D]

“Our engineers told me it is like torture,” Shih said in an interview on Wednesday, shortly after the Google-Asus joint project was announced. “They [Google] ask a lot.”

It’s a sphere! The inside story of Nexus Q, Google’s music hardware gamble [WIRED]

Nearly devoid of outward-facing controls, Nexus Q is a puzzle — a satin-coated curio that begs to be touched and examined. But when you gaze into this mysterious black ball that crackles with light, you don’t see the future but rather blasts from the past: a return to speaker-driven audio, along with all the real-time social sharing that vinyl once inspired.

The next platform war: Google play vs. Apple iTunes [FORTUNE]

But there was one announcement that should give Apple pause: The rebranding of the Android Marketplace into Google play. It’s no secret that the Android platform — despite its dominance in terms of smartphones sold — has been struggling to hold its own against Apple’s iTunes. Although Android has nearly caught up to Apple in the sheer number of available apps (650,000 vs. 600,000), in almost every other respect it trails far behind. iTunes users listen to more music, buy more apps, keep them longer, look at more ads, purchase more products and generate far more revenue ($1.9 billion in fiscal Q2 alone).

Project Glass is the future of Google [TECHCRUNCH]

Dorky as they might look, Glass signals the first glimpse of how to integrate such invasive and important technology into our lives in a more seamless way. Isabelle Olsson, the industrial design guru on the team, says the design of Glass ensures “you can look into people’s eyes.”

59% of young people say the Internet is shaping who they are [THE ATLANTIC]

Younger Americans express a greater expectation that the personal information they use on sites such as Facebook and Twitter will remain private. Slightly more than half of 18-to-29-year-olds said they held this expectation, whereas only 38 percent of Americans over 65 said the same.

Bad hackers turned good get top spot in Facebook manhunt [BLOOMBERG]

“There’s no diploma to become a hacker,” said Guillaume Vassault-Houliere, 29, also known as Free_Man, who helped host 1,200 participants outside Paris last weekend in an event started 10 years ago by a local hacker. “Recruiters drop by looking for talent that just can’t be learned at school.”