DailyDose, your everyday technology brief from around the world is here. In today’s edition: Groupon fires its founder & CEO Andrew Mason. Pentagon plans to welcome Android and iOS devices starting in 2014 and other top 11 stories.

Inc.

Groupon CEO Fired as Daily-Deals Biz Bottoms Out: Groupon CEO Andrew Mason has been fired after another quarterly earnings whiff from the onetime darling of the daily-deals business.Read more here. Groupon said:  Executive Chairman Eric Lefkofsky and Vice Chairman Ted Leonsis have been appointed to the newly created Office of the Chief Executive, effective immediately, replacing Andrew Mason. Lefkofsky and Leonsis will serve in this role on an interim basis. The Board has commenced a search for a new Chief Executive. Read Andrew Masons candid memo here.

Nielsen Launches $25M Chief Scientist Backed Early Stage Investment Fund In Israel : After being awarded the mandate to launch a government-backed technology incubator in July 2012, Nielsen is today announcing the launch of ‘Nielsen Innovate‘, a $25M Israeli fund dedicated to early stage investments in web, media, research, measurement, and advertising startups. The fund is co-owned with Partam High Tech, the private investment fund of Yigal Ahuvi. Read more here.

Foursquare CEO Looks Beyond Mobile Handsets: Anywhere There’s A Screen, We Want To Be On It: Google has yet to release the Mirror API that will open Google Glass as a platform, but developers of some of the more popular mobile apps today are gearing up for when wearable computing products, like Glass, will. Today, speaking at a keynote at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Dennis Crowley, CEO of social location app Foursquare, highlighted Google’s new headgear as an example of how mobile screens are evolving, and later he told TechCrunch that Foursquare is looking at how it can evolve along with that. More here.

Stuff

Outages result in gray skies for iCloud users: If you’re a regular Photo Stream or Documents in the Cloud user, this morning’s iCloud outage is probably already giving you hives. The entire service isn’t down, but key parts of it are—users can still make use of Find My Friends, iTunes Match, and Contact, Calendar, Reminders, and Notes syncing, but iOS device backups, document syncing, and Photo Stream have been down for (as of this writing) almost seven hours and counting. More here.

Asana finally takes its task-management app to Android: Asana is one startup we’ve had our eye on for a while, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz’s slick collaborative task and project management app. It actually started off as a side-project while Moskovitz was still at Facebook. And today Asana has finally landed on Android, 15 months after its first foray into native mobile apps with iOS, an app that was redesigned and rebuilt from the ground up six months ago. Read More here.

#youdidntgetglass Google Has Closed Registrations For Their #ifihadglass Pre-Order Ploy: Google has officially shut down registrations for its #ifihadglass round of Google Glass pre-orders/applications.The competition was first announced on February 20, alongside a video asking prospective Google Glass buyers to take to Twitter or Google+ using the #ifihadglass hashtag to explain why they deserve one of the first-ever Google Glass Explorer Editions. More here.

Pentagon plans to welcome Android and iOS devices starting in 2014: In a sign of the times, the U.S. Department of Defense has announced plans to move beyond BlackBerry as its primary mobile device platform to a more “platform agnostic” policy that is more open to Android and iOS devices. Read more here.

Facebook trials tweaked single-column Timeline design and new ‘Like Page’ button in New Zealand: Facebook is experimenting with a new single-column Timeline design for users in New Zealand, shifting status updates and shared content to the right-hand side while adding a refreshed ‘About’ section on the left.The trial could be affecting only a select number of users in the country and follows a slightly different profile redesign that was rolled out to some users there earlier this year. More here.

Hardcode

Certified ‘Powered by Firefox OS’ devices require Firefox Marketplace, minimum hardware specs: Mozilla says that in order for Firefox OS phones to bear the Firefox logo, they’ll need to meet a variety of software and hardware requirements, including mandatory installations of the Firefox mobile browser and the official Firefox Marketplace app store. More here.

Amazon Web Services Drops Its Pricing On Messaging And Notification Services: Amazon Web Services has once again dropped its pricing. This time the decrease is for two of its services:  Simple Queue Service (SQS) and the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). More here.

.Gov

China claims its defense sites face constant US hacking attacks: China is routinely accused of launching concerted hacking campaigns against the US, many of them reportedly tied directly to the army’s Unit 61398 in Shanghai. If you believe the Ministry of Defense’s spokesman Geng Yansheng, however, just the opposite is true. Along with claiming that China would never hurt (or rather, hack) a fly, he asserts that the Ministry and China Military Online sites faced an average of 144,000 hacking attempts per month from foreign sources in 2012, 62.9 percent of which allegedly came from the US. More here.

An Instagram look behind the secret walls of North Korea: Days after North Korea opened up its mobile data service to foreigners, Instagram is promoting some of the photos captured by the Associated Press’s Chief Photographer for Asia inside the country. While having a photographer share their work on the photo-sharing service isn’t necessarily a big thing, it’s rare that we get to see unscripted and first-hand images from inside the secretive country. More here.
EU may fine Microsoft over browsers by end-March: EU competition regulators plan to fine Microsoft Corp before the end of March in a case tied to the U.S. software giant’s antitrust battle in Europe more than a decade ago, three people familiar with the matter said on Thursday. More here.

Bradley Manning Takes ‘Full Responsibility’ for Giving WikiLeaks Huge Government Data Trove: Wearing his Army dress uniform, a composed, intense and articulate Pfc. Bradley Manning took “full responsibility” Thursday for providing the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks with a trove of classified and sensitive military, diplomatic and intelligence cables, videos and documents. More here.