The days are numbered for the Daily News -- at least as a printed paper. “Within tabloid circles, chatter is rampant that the News is already considering a plan to go digital-only sometime in the next few years,” Capital New York reports. Says a source at the News: “The discussions are not about if, they're about when.” Earlier this year, Rupert Murdoch said New York Post could go all-digital within the next five-to-ten years. 

Confidence among tech investors appears to be waning for the first time in two years, according small survey conducted by University of San Francisco Professor Mark Cannice. “Cannice attributed the decline in sentiment to high valuations and an ‘overheated’ market,” The Wall Street Journal reports. “In recent weeks, big-spending venture capitalists have spoken ill of the startup scene, namely that companies are raising and burning through too much money.” 

After failing to achieve traction with its mobile phone business, Amazon is taking a $170 million charge “primarily related to Fire phone inventory valuation and supplier commitment costs.” In other words, “The Fire phone has been a disappointment,” Re/Code reports. “The company’s first phone came on the market at $199, but the price was quickly cut to 99 cents.” 

Groupon this week launched a new format and online presence called Pages. “This is an online directory that will give businesses their own home page on Groupon’s site, where offers, news, user reviews and other information will live,” TechCrunch reports. If successful it should also help the daily-deal company “compete against Yelp, Foursquare, Google, Facebook and the dozens of others that aggregate local listings and provide individual pages for each business in the process.” 

Marc Andreessen thinks it’s a good thing -- maybe essential -- for tech entrepreneurs to have very short memories. “There’s sort of two Silicon Valleys right now,” the top venture capitalist tells New York Magazine. “There’s the Silicon Valley of the people who were here during the 2000 crash, and there’s the Silicon Valley of the people who weren’t, and the psychology is actually totally different.”  

Beating Apple to the punch, Microsoft is reportedly planning to release its first “wearable” in a matter of weeks. “The gadget is a smartwatch that will passively track a wearer’s heart rate and work across different mobile platforms,” Forbes reports. “It will also boast a battery life of more than two days of regular use, sources close to the project say.” Apple isn’t expected to start selling its first Smartwatch until sometime next year.  

Despite its crippling trademark dispute with Twitter, photo-sharing service Twitpic was reportedly working on a reinvention. Alas, “The reports of Twitpic’s survival were greatly exaggerated,” TechCrunch reports. “Despite claiming it had found an acquirer to save it from death … the photo-sharing service today announced that didn’t happen and it’s game over on October 25.” Users are now being encouraged to export their photo files through that date -- “at which point they’ll vanish into the void.” 

Ramping up its local news efforts, Vice Media plans to launch “local-language” editions of Vice News and newsrooms in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Australia, Brazil and Mexico. Vice Media founder Shane Smith “will also boost the London office of U.S.-based Vice Media, which already employs over 150 … its headquarters for Europe, the Middle East and Africa,” The London Evening Standard reports. 

The Guardian is defending its report that mobile messaging site Whisper is tracking the location of users, including those that specifically asked not to be followed. In response to the original story, “Whisper executives … have denounced those reports as ‘lousy,’ ‘a pack of vicious lies’ and ‘beyond silly,’” Guardian writes. Sticking to its guns, Guardian insists: “Whisper establishes the broad whereabouts of some users who have disabled their geolocation services, by extracting approximate location information from IP data.” 

After raising $50 million in funding, Reddit has acquired third-party iOS Reddit app Alien Blue. “Alien Blue is probably the most preferred Reddit iOS app for the majority of regular Reddit users -- including some of the original Reddit employees, who decided to forgo development on their own in-house official Reddit app in favor of using it,” VentureBeat reports. “In other words, it was unofficially the official Reddit iOS app anyway.”