Month: December 2016

(credit: Valentina Palladino)

A report from The Information states that the fitness tech giant Fitbit is finalizing a deal to buy Pebble. The report suggests the price would be for "a small amount," and an independent source confirmed to Engadget that Fitbit will buy Pebble for $34 to $40 million.

The news isn't entirely a surprise. Pebble, which first came on the scene through its popular Kickstarter campaigns for its smartwatches, recently announced it would lay off 25 percent of its workforce. At the time, Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky didn't give an exact reason for the layoffs, only stating that money was "pretty tight."

Pebble has been looking to sell for a while, likely due to these financial woes, but it has turned down offers in the past. Citizen offered Pebble $740 million for the company back in 2015. Intel also wanted to buy Pebble for $70 million earlier this year, but it would have required a delay in the launch of the Pebble 2 and the Pebble Time 2.

Enlarge / SpaceX launches its Falcon 9 rocket in June, 2016. (credit: SpaceX)

The satellite communications provider Iridium says it has a tentative launch date of December 16 for the first batch of its Iridium NEXT satellites, which would mark the return to flight for SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. The company made the announcement Thursday morning on its website.

Any launch remains contingent on Federal Aviation Approval of SpaceX's investigation into the cause of its September 1 accident, which caused a total loss of the rocket and payload on a Florida launch pad. However that investigation is near a resolution, and the setting of a launch date indicates some confidence in its successful conclusion.

According to Iridium, the mid-December launch would occur from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, at 3:36pm ET (8:36pm UK). It will send 10 satellites into space as part of Iridium's plan, over the course of seven launches, to replace its existing constellation of communications satellites in low Earth orbit with 70 next-generation satellites.

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The United Launch Alliance has launched (!) a website that lets you specify, build, and eventually launch (!!) an Atlas V rocket carrying your precious cargo. The website, aptly called Rocket Builder, says right at the top that launches start at just $109 million (£87 million)—a bargain.

Rocket Builder, while ostensibly a semi-funny marketing tool, is surprisingly full-featured. When you've fully configured your launch vehicle you can even submit it directly to the ULA sales office, whereupon they'll phone you up and ask for your credit card details.

To send your payload into space the Rocket Builder website requires the following info: a launch date; a desired orbit (GTO, GEO, LEO, polar, solar, Earth escape); the weight of the payload; and a variety of "service options." Selecting a geosynchronous orbit with a large payload seems to be the most expensive option, starting at around $155 million (those five additional solid rocket boosters don't come cheap).

Enlarge (credit: Ken Teegardin)

On Wednesday, a federal judge in San Francisco approved a request made earlier this month by the Internal Revenue Service to force Coinbase, a popular online Bitcoin wallet service, to hand over years of data that would reveal the identities of all of its active United States-based users.

The IRS is concerned that some of Coinbase’s customers may have used its service to circumvent or mitigate tax liability. Federal investigators say they need Coinbase's records to be able to identify some Bitcoin wallets and to check against tax records to make sure Coinbase's users are paying any and all proper taxes on their Bitcoin-related income.

In a two-page court order, US Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley agreed that the IRS can serve the San Francisco-based company with a form that would require disclosure of essentially all personal data of all Coinbase users who conducted a transaction between 2013 and 2015. (Full disclosure: such records would include this reporter, who briefly possessed a small amount of bitcoins in 2014 and sold them as part of our Arscoin story.)