Snapchat is close to finalizing a $20 million fundraising round led by VC firm Kleiner Perkins at a $10 billion valuation, CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, and TechCrunch are reporting.
The messaging app now has 100 million users, according to the WSJ report.
Rumors of a new funding round for Snapchat started last month when several reports said Chinese ecommerce company Alibaba wanted to invest. But Business Insider discovered that was a bogus rumor.
Snapchat's valuation has shot up tremendously in a very short period. Last year the company was valued at $3 billion, a figure now dwarfed by their current value.
Kleiner Perkins' investment is not the end of Snapchat's near-term fundraising efforts. The current investment round remains open. The Wall Street Journal noted that "at least one strategic investor" yet unnamed has committed to the round as well.
You can expect Snapchat and its investors to formally announce the new round of funding very soon.
SEE ALSO: LA Schools Suspend A Billion-Dollar Contract With Apple
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Amazon's cloud service dominates the Internet so thoroughly that it's scarcely worth noting new customers. Unless, that is, the customer in question is ... Apple.
Tucked away in a Monday New York Times piece on the online-storage price wars lies this brief but interesting nugget (AWS is Amazon Web Services—i.e., Amazon's cloud):
Apple's iCloud storage service and other parts of Apple, along with operations at several large banks, run inside A.W.S., say people familiar with the service who spoke on the condition they not be named so they could sustain relations with the powerful cloud company.
You have to love the Timesian sourcing on that one, by the way, which at 24 words comes in five words longer than the actual information attributed to said people. Not to mention the possibly intentional ambiguity of which "powerful cloud company" these unnamed folks so desperately want to sustain relations with. (Both Amazon and Apple would qualify, depending on how literally you want to read this sentence.)
See also: Amazon's Cloud Is The Fastest Growing Software Business In History
In any event, this revelation is intriguing in a couple of respects. It's certainly not the first time Apple has used an outside company to provide Web services—see, for instance, Akamai, which delivers software, music and video downloaded from Apple's website and the iTunes store.
But Apple is usually obsessed with micromanaging every aspect of its technology and services. So some of its users might be surprised to learn that they're storing their backups and other personal data not on Apple servers, but on ones rented from Amazon. It's not totally clear that anyone should care about that, but you never know.
Of course, iCloud is also in the midst of a big transition, as it preps new consumer-storage services as part of Mac OS X Yosemite and its CloudKit service designed to provide cloud storage for iOS apps. And Apple has been building out data centers at a furious pace, with the latest one slated to start up sometime this year in Prineville, Ore. (My former colleague Taylor Hatmaker snapped some photos of the construction for ReadWrite last year.)
See also: Apple Is Taking On Amazon And Google With A Big Server Giveaway
So possibly Apple is just short on server capacity until Prineville spins up. Though it's understandable why the company might not want to advertise its apparent dependence on -- For more information read the original article here.
-- For more information read the original article here.
A former acting director of cyber security at the Department of Health and Human Services was convicted on federal child pornography charges on Tuesday, according to the Department of Justice.
The details of the evidence presented against Timothy DeFoggi, the former acting director, are gruesome and include an apparent plot to enact some of his violent "fantasies" in the real world.
Federal prosecutors said DeFoggi was arrested as part of an investigation into three child pornography websites the FBI shut down in 2012. DeFoggi registered as a member of at least one of these websites and "solicited child pornography from other members, and exchanged private messages with other members where he expressed an interest in the violent rape and murder of children."
He "even suggested meeting one member in person to fulfill their mutual fantasies to violently rape and murder children."
It was not immediately clear to what extent DeFoggi's participation in the websites overlapped with his work at the Health Department. However, a government document detailing funding estimates for the 2014 fiscal year listed a "Tim Defoggi" as the head of "OS IT Security Operations" and indicated he reported directly to the department's chief information security officer.
DeFoggi's sentencing is scheduled for November.
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Because everything is bigger in Texas, an Austin brewery has made a 99 pack of beers for 99 bucks. Ninety-nine beers, in one case. God bless America.
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Apple TV is adding the Showtime Anytime app to its offerings today. Slowly, but surely, you're getting more options on the Apple streaming platform.
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-- For more information read the original article here.