Selena Larson says, “Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has spent close to two and a half years at the helm without articulating any particularly clear strategy for revitalizing the hodgepodge of a Web company. Now, pressured by activist shareholders who want her to cut costs and send its Alibaba-IPO windfall back to investors, Mayer has basically announced that she plans to … do more of what she’s been doing. During the company’s quarterly earnings call on Tuesday, Mayer defended her strategy of acquiring startups—the majority of whose apps and servicesalmost immediately vanished without... [...]

Owen Thomas says, “I know, I know. We’re all supposed to be celebrating the miracle of Apple Pay right now. That’s too bad. After conducting several transactions with Apple’s new payments service, my conclusion is that Apple Pay makes the same mistake that several past attempts at reinventing payments made: It doesn’t solve any real problems for consumers. Problem No. 1: Getting Set Up To use Apple Pay to pay in stores, you need an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus that’s been upgraded to iOS 8.1. There are many reasons you might not want to upgrade to 8.1—but you have no choice... [...]

Matt Asay says, “With the release of Java 8 back in March 2014, the developer community was primarily excited about two things. One was support for lambda expressions, also known as anonymous functions, which (in Cay Horstmann’s admirably simple definition) are blocks of code you can pass around in a program for later execution—or, if you prefer more formal terms, “a way to represent one method interface using an expression.” Second was Java 8’s embrace of the multicore world“. Developers Are Adopting Java 8 In Droves ReadWrite  [...]

Selena Larson says, “Google’s Gmail 5.0 app will finally provide Android users with one email management application that streamlines all their different accounts. According to a video obtained by Android Police, the Gmail app expected with Google’s Android Lollipop mobile operating system will let users read and answer email from non-Gmail accounts such as Yahoo and Outlook. It doesn’t say whether it will manage other accounts as well. If the Gmail app will manage a variety of outside email accounts, the new app could finally give Android users an obvious alternative to bouncing... [...]

Matt Asay says, “In a world increasingly shaped by software, developers are market makers. Nowhere is this more true than in the burgeoning Internet of Things market. Currently riddled by a mess of competing proprietary standards, the winner in the Internet of Things will be the one that goes furthest to make developers’ lives easier. Sourcing Developers Though VisionMobile estimates put the total Internet of Things developer population at 3.2 million today, only a fraction of those are dedicated to IoT. Even so, this dedicated core of developers will more than double by 2015″. Why... [...]

Liz Gannes says, “Google missed expectations for the September quarter despite a slowdown in the decline of online ad rates. The search giant reported adjusted profit of $6.35 per share. The Street was looking for $6.54. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company had $16.52 billion in sales for $13.17 billion in net income. It basically looks like Google spent a lot of money this quarter — categories like operating expenses, data center and hardware costs and stock-based compensation were all up. The company now has 55,030 employees, up nearly 3,000 since three months ago”. Google Misses... [...]

Matt Asay says, “Most open source developers focus on writing great code and don’t bother marketing their project. Which is why most open-source projects fail. Utterly. While it’s a convenient fiction to believe that open source is a meritocracy where the best code wins, it’s just that: fiction. As Apache Storm founder Nathan Marz writes in a recent blog post, solving an important project with useful code is only half the battle. It’s equally important—and sometimes more so—”to convince a significant number of people that your project is the best solution to... [...]

Selena Larson says, “Say you’re a software developer and you want to give back to an open-source project you’ve relied on yourself. Or perhaps you just want to build up experience in open source because, well, open-source projects are the future. But you’re hesitant because open source communities can be unfriendly—sometimes even intimidating—to newcomers and outsiders. That might be especially true for women and people of color, who appear to be woefully underrepresented in open source. How are you supposed to get started? Fear not. Shauna Gordon-McKeon has your back”. How... [...]

Selena Larson says, “Facebook may be sticking to its guns on its controversial “real names” policythat says people need to use their real identities when using the service, but it’s apparently not ruling out anonymity altogether. The company is creating a new app that will let people communicate anonymously with one another, according to a report from the New York Times. The social network prides itself on being central to identity on the Internet—outside applications even rely on it to confirm that users are who they say they are. Of course, not everyone abides by those... [...]

Selena Larson says, “When Facebook announced changes as to how it will conduct online research, there was one glaring omission in its new guidelines: There’s no mention of how the social network will treat its users moving forward. Facebook faced quite the backlash from its emotional manipulation study published earlier this summer, in which it deliberately showed some users more positive or negative posts to see how they affected mood. In an effort to placate its critics with more transparency, the company issued new guidelines on Thursday to help it conduct online experiments more responsibly. The... [...]