Why a cloud looms over one of tech’s most exclusive gatherings this year; how to survive after RIM.
Hackers expose 453,000 credentials allegedly taken from Yahoo service [ARSTECHNICA]
Hackers posted what appear to be login credentials for more than 453,000 user accounts that they said they retrieved in plaintext from an unidentified service on Yahoo. … To support their claim, the hackers posted what they said were the plaintext credentials for 453,492 Yahoo accounts, more than 2,700 database table or column names, and 298 MySQL variables, all of which they claim to have obtained in the exploit.
The survival guide for life after RIM [BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK]
If RIM were to disappear tomorrow, a lot of the BlackBerry’s most important corporate functions might go down with it. Because of that risk, some 50 percent of information technology managers plan to replace their BlackBerry servers with rival services in the next year, according to a recent survey by ThinkEquity.
I want it today — How Amazon’s ambitious new push for same-day delivery will destroy local retail [SLATE]
But now Amazon has a new game. Now that it has agreed to collect sales taxes, the company can legally set up warehouses right inside some of the largest metropolitan areas in the nation. Why would it want to do that? Because Amazon’s new goal is to get stuff to you immediately—as soon as a few hours after you hit Buy. (Disclosure: Slate participates in Amazon Associates, an “affiliate” advertising plan that rewards websites for sending customers to the online store. This means that if you click on an Amazon link from Slate—including a link in this story—and you end up buying something, Amazon will send Slate a percentage of your final purchase price.)
Uncertainty looms over annual Sun Valley gathering [THE NEW YORK TIMES]
Last year, the industry was busy toasting the new Web kings, a group led by Mark Pincus, the chief executive of Zynga; Andrew Mason, the chief executive of Groupon; and Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Facebook, who had brought his playful Puli, Beast. At the time, their companies were on the precipice of going public at sky-high valuations. In the months since, the start-ups have received a swift lesson on the capricious nature of the public markets. Zynga, the game maker, is roughly 50 percent below its offering price. Groupon is trading below $8, an all-time low. And Facebook, after a tumultuous first month, has clawed its way back, but is still 18 percent below its offering price. The pain in the public markets has seeped into the private, bogging down enthusiasm for other high-profile start-ups like Twitter, the micro-blogging service.
The story behind how Apple’s iCloud data center got built [GIGAOM]
“We almost lost it,” says the President of the Catawba County Economic Development group, Scott Millar, who has a background in advertising and a penchant for crossword puzzles. That would have been a major missed opportunity — at the peak of construction of Apple’s data center there were 1,400 construction workers on-site on a single day, says Millar. But beyond just the construction jobs, Apple’s influence — as one of the world’s largest and most-watched tech companies — is enormous. “It gave us the ability to be able to convince others to locate here, too,” says Millar, adding, “They are a powerful company.”
