Flickr/Brian Caldwell
Emmett Shear, right, is CEO of Twitch.
- Amazon is paying $970 million in cash to acquire Twitch, a live video-game-streaming site with more than 55 million users. It's a big win for Twitch's investors, who last valued the company at $100 million.
- If you don't know much about Twitch, here's a good explainer that says why Amazon may want to own it. As of July, Twitch had over 15 billion minutes of content, and users were spending more than 100 minutes a day on the site, on average.
- Amazon wasn't the only company interested in owning Twitch. Yahoo and Google both made offers to acquire the game-streaming company but those fell through. Twitch's CEO says he picked Amazon because "they believe in our community, they share our values and long-term vision, and they want to help us get there faster."
- Facebook is cracking down on click-baiting. It will now be examining how long a user stays on a publisher's site after clicking a Facebook link to determine quality (the longer they stay, the better).
- Tesla's cars could soon double their miles per charge from 265 to 500 miles by using a "super material" graphene. Graphene is carbon-based, and it's roughly 200 times stronger than steel. By using graphene-based anodes, Tesla could potentially quadruple the density and output of its lithium-ion batteries.
- Facebook may be readying a new ad strategy that will compete with Google's DoubleClick. Facebook is reportedly pouring more resources into Atlas, the ad server technology it purchased from Microsoft last year.
- Burning Man, a popular desert festival attended by many people in Silicon Valley, was closed on opening day due to heavy rain and hail.
- Mozilla is has a new low-cost phone that's targeting first-time smartphone buyers in India. It costs $33 and it could hinder Android phone makers, particularly Samsung, which currently has about 29% market share there.
- For the first time in 20 years, Nintendo could be bringing back the infamous dog from "Duck Hunt." An updated version of the dog was spotted in a leaked screenshot of what could be the next Super Smash Bros., which is due out in October.
- Here are the ridiculous ways rich kids on Instagram spent their summers.