Personal shopping and delivery service Stitch Fix has raised $12 million to scale its business. “The idea behind Stitch Fix is that it can deliver a comparable [personal shopping] experience at a more accessible level, and on a wider scale, thanks to -- you guessed it – technology,” TechCrunch writes. 

GigaOm takes a look at F# -- a startup trying to sell brands on the idea of turning their banner ads into Web radio stations and on-demand music players. “Imagine pre-listening an album when you browse a music or lifestyle site, or tuning into a game day mix while reading up on the next Super Bowl,” GigaOm writes.  

In the third quarter, iPhones were responsible for just over half of all Verizon’s smartphone activations, 9To5Mac reports. That share is up significantly from the second quarter of the year, when the Apple devices accounted for about 43% of Verizon’s smartphone activations. Notes 9To5Mac: “It is important to remember the distinction between activations and sales, with activations including passed-down devices to spouses or children, as well as the strong iPhone reseller market.” 

Seeing growth potential is private messaging, Twitter reportedly plans to develop its direct-messaging product. “It has kicked around the idea of launching a standalone direct-messaging application separate from the Twitter app,” AllThingsD reports, citing sources. “Twitter’s move comes as a defensive riposte to personal-messaging apps, such as WhatsApp, Line and KakaoTalk, all of which have drastically increased in popularity over the past two years.” 

Boding well for all online media and commerce, new research shows that “universal broadband” is finally becoming a reality. Worldwide, about half of all connections made to Akamai’s network are now running at 4Mbps or higher, the traffic optimization specialist reports. “Perhaps more to the point, the number of countries and regions with average speeds of 1Mbps or less are continuing to fall,” TechCrunch notes. 

Calling it a realignment, social networking app Path just cut about 20% of its workforce -- or 13 employees. "We're working to realign the company to support continued innovation and Path 4.0,” a company spokesperson tells ValleyWag, adding: “The business is strong … we have 20 million users." Sources tell Valleywag that Path is still seeking a lead investor for a new round of capital at a $400 million valuation. 

The Verge takes a good look at Aviate -- a Google Now-like service started by some former Google engineers. “To the founders of Aviate, you shouldn’t even need to open Google Now,” The Verge writes. According to co-founder Paul Montoy-Wilson, the service, “needs to live and breathe within the context of your phone -- within the context of the experience where you access all of your content." 

We learned more about Twitter’s imminent IPO, this week, courtesy of an amendment filed by the company to its S-1 filing. Twitter will be listed under the vowel-free ticker symbol “TWTR,” ZDNet reports. The social Goliath also confirmed that it is going to file its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange -- “quite the contrast to Facebook's tumultuous public launch on the Nasdaq last year,” ZDNet notes. 

Will Google be ready to debut its smartwatch by the end of the month? That’s what 9To5Google is hearing from sources, but details are otherwise scarce. “Details are slim but the [source] seemed to think that Google Now functionality would be at the center of the product,” it reports. “Google could put a lot of the functionality of Google Glass in the watch product … Push a button, ask a question, get a response as the watch talks to the Now-enabled smartphone.”   

Flickr this week is previewing a new design dubbed the "new photo experience," which makes images look about 25% bigger and places comments, tags, recommendations and camera information to the right of each photo. “Flickr has been all about putting big, bold, beautiful photos front and center since the Web site's massive redesign in May, but [parent company] Yahoo just found one more place to make those photos bigger and more beautiful: individual photo pages,” The Verge reports.