Yahoo is offering to purchase social email startup Xobni for $30 million to $40 million, according to AllThingsD's sources. If the deal goes through, Xobni would be the latest acquisition by Yahoo as CEO Marissa Meyer seeks to boost the company's talent roster and product offerings.

I get as excited as anyone thinking about the upcoming 49ers season. Quite a bit has happened since we were 5 years from winning the Super Bowl. The stadium was branded with the Levi’s logo, we got Anquan Boldin from the Ravens for pretty much nothing, and Michael Crabtree suffered a hefty injury. Yahoo!, while on a purchasing spree of startups, decided to align themselves with SF’s most beloved football team (sorry Raider fans) by inking a 10 year deal that makes them the 49ers exclusive partner for online digital content.

Jack Conte, musician and founder of Patreon, has been on a tear lately with a set of unique music remixes performed by him and a group of pneumatic robots that fire off audio sequences to create some amazing music.

If there’s one striking thing about those PRISM slides, other than their hideous aesthetics, it’s that Apple’s allocated yellow oval, instead of a date, has the words “(added Oct 2012)” underneath it. That difference is most striking when you consider the fact that Apple competitor Microsoft cooperated with the government a full five years earlier. The company, which denies ever having heard of PRISM, released its FISA request numbers today, starting on December 1st, 2012, through this May 2013. Though it’s plausible that the government would not have disclosed the name of the program, the NYT confirmed Apple’s participation in a government surveillance network designed to make data collection more efficient for the NSA — whatever that entails, like “a broad sweep for intelligence, like logs of certain search terms.” From Claire Cain Miller’s article: While

Here's a fun comparison from Optimal, a social advertising and analytics startup: If you look at big brands on social networks, their following seems to be growing more quickly on Twitter than on Facebook. Optimal says it looked at the data from 4,330 brands, representing a total of 3.49 billion Facebook Likes and 595 million Twitter followers. Last week, those brands added 18.5 million new Likes and 4.5 million new followers — so on a percentage basis, their following grew 55 percent more quickly on Twitter than it did on Facebook.

Following up on their massively successful $2.4M Kickstarter campagin, Oculus VR has just locked down a gigantic $16M Series A to help them build their truly amazing virtual reality goggles, the Oculus Rift.

The eyesore of a Powerpoint deck that contractor Edward Snowden had leaked had globally recognized names: Microsoft. Google. Yahoo. Facebook. Apple. AOL. Skype. YouTube. The NSA had allegedly collaborated with all of these Internet giants to request and access data on foreign users. But then there was also Paltalk. WTF? Even Stephen Colbert ribbed them last week. “You heard right. They’re monitoring Paltalk. Folks. You know what that means. We are that close to learning what Paltalk is….” Paltalk, a profitable group video chat site that’s been around for more than a decade and has about 5.5 million monthly uniques, officially says it had no idea what Prism was until the slidedeck was published — just like every other tech company. And then added — like every other tech company —

When most men go out to buy a casual shirt, they think of sizing in terms of small, medium, or large. But a new startup called Trumaker wants men to start expecting more from the fit of their day to day shirts, by bringing personalized made-to-measure fitting to the world of casual men's shirts -- all at a price point that's in line with the current offerings from mainstream men's clothing companies. To help in achieving its mission, Trumaker has raised $1.9 million from a group of seed backers that include Venrock, RRE, and angels including Alex Bard, David Tisch, Bonobos CEO Andy Dunn, Velos Partners, Eniac Ventures, and others.

President Obama finally took a sit-down interview on the National Security Agency scandal and we’ve pasted a partial transcript below. Disappointingly, most of it is (very) generic and defensive. But, there is one important takeaway: President Obama couldn’t answer whether oversight courts (FISA) have ever rejected a single NSA spying request. PBS’s Charlie Rose asked, pointedly, “has FISA court turned down any request?” The president appears to bumble through the answer, “The — because — the — first of all, Charlie, the number of requests are surprisingly small… number one. Number two, folks don’t go with a query unless they’ve got a pretty good suspicion.” This is problematic, since leaker Edward Snowden has claimed that the FISA courts are essentially a “rubber stamp” for any NSA investigations. As a result, they routinely exploit legal and technical

Online coupon giant RetailMeNot has just filed for $230 million IPO, according to an S-1 released today.