10 Things You Need To Know This Morning In Tech

Good morning. Here's the news.

• Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post.

• Everyone is passing around Venture capitalist Mike Moritz's blog post about Bezos's famous shareholder letters: "Jeff Bezos’ reports on Amazon should be required reading – not just for the journalists who are about to become his employees – but also for anyone aspiring to build and lead a company."

• Henry Blodget wrote a post about what it's like working with Jeff Bezos as an investor. Blodget also speculates on why Bezos bought the Post: "I'd guess that Jeff Bezos thinks that owning the Washington Post will be interesting, fun, and cool."

• Bezos's acquisition completely surprised Brad Stone, who spent hours interviewing Bezos for a book coming out in October. So why did Bezos do it? Stone guesses: "he’s buying a lot of political influence."

• Washington Post journalists are sad the old owners are going, and they're scared about change. They say the internal meeting where the sale was announced was "like a funeral."

• In Washington D.C., 50 people showed up to volunteer for a one way trip to Mars via the Mars One project.

• A woman using an iPhone was electrocuted to death. Apple says the cause was a power cable sold by a third-party. So Apple is offering a $10 for non-Apple power cords.

• The western press likes to say the CEO of Xiaomi is the wannabe Steve Jobs of China. Problem is, Xiaomi now sells more smartphones than Apple in China.

• Nielsen has a new study out showing that people talking about a TV show on Twitter actually does increase that TV show's ratings. That's good news for Twitter, which is selling ads to TV show advertisers on that premise.

• OMGPOP employees tried to buy OMGPOP.com back from Zynga. Zynga said no, and is shutting it down.

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.