Catching Up: Today's Must-Read Tech Stories

Every day, we compile a list with the most interesting and thought-provoking tech stories published over the last 24 hours.

New Kindles, 120,000 The Daily Subscribers, Microsoft’s Android Tax, and Music Pirates Who Just Give Up and Use Spotify

The tech news today was dominated just one story: the launch of Amazon’s Android-based $199 Kindle Fire tablet. While most pundits expected the tablet, though, Amazon went a step further and also launched a basic $99 touch-based Kindle ($149 with 3G) and a keyboard-less, non-touch version for only $79 (with Amazon’s “Special Offers” program). Besides all of the new hardware, the Seattle-based company also introduced a new browser for the Kindle Fire. The “Silk” browser offloads a lot of its processing to Amazon’s own EC2 cloud-computing platform to speed things up.

Even though Amazon dominated the news, we found quite a few other interesting stories today as well, ranging from Microsoft’s Android patent deal with Samsung to the revelation that News Corps.’ much-hyped The Daily only has about 120,000 weekly users. Today’s list also features a story about Spotify’s effect on piracy, how military drones are learning to recognize people and an inside look at how things are going with Google+.

To read these stories (which we curate with the help of Pearltress), just click on any headline in the embed below that sounds interesting. An overlay will then pop up and allow you to read the story and navigate to all the other ones as well.

Catching Up (9/28) in Best / Frederic Lardinois (fredericl)