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Links from all over, collected

Start up: Grexit to bitcoin?, Google’s antitrust deadline, Merkel’s suspect PC, Samsung security hole and more

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Stockpiled – a bit like HTC’s unsold phones. Photo by .dh on Flickr.

A selection of 7 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Bitcoin surges as Grexit worries mount, posts best run in 18 months » Reuters

Jemima Kelly:

Joshua Scigala, co-founder of Vaultoro.com, a firm that holds bitcoin for its customers and allows them to exchange it for gold and vice versa, said that Greeks were buying the currency as their trust in the authorities waned. It is also unclear what currency would be used if a Grexit does occur — another potential factor driving Greek demand for bitcoin.

“Some people aren’t waiting for the government to figure out an exit plan and are doing it for themselves,” said Scigala.

“You have people worrying about their families’ wealth or their life savings, and worrying that their money might be locked up in banks … They’d rather hold money in a private asset like gold or bitcoin.”

Scigala said over the past two months, with Greece locked in talks with its creditors, the company had seen a 124% pick-up in inflows from Greek IP addresses – numerical labels that identify computers and other internet-enabled devices.

124% = doubling. Which doesn’t amount to much, really, unless Greece was already a lot of business. Here’s the problem with this story. To buy bitcoin, you have to sell the euros to someone. If Greeks are withdrawing their euros from banks, why not hold on to those euros instead of buying bitcoin with them? Do they really think a post-Grexit euro will be worth less, rather than more? I’d bet on the latter.

There may be some Greek euros moving into bitcoin, which is moving bitcoin – but that only indicates that bitcoin has low liquidity, and so small amounts of money can move the value easily. Or else it’s something else altogether causing it.

Critics due to get EU’s Google antitrust charge sheet this week: sources » Reuters

Foo Yun Chee:

Microsoft, German publisher Axel Springer and 17 other critics of Google are expected to get a copy of the EU’s antitrust charge sheet against the search engine giant this week in order to allow them to provide feedback, four people familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.

The 19 companies, which include U.S. online travel site Expedia, U.S. consumer reviews website Yelp, online mapping service Hot-map and British price comparison site Foundem, helped triggered the European Commission’s case against Google nearly five years ago…

…Google has until July 7 to respond to the accusations. This can be extended on request. It can also seek a closed-door hearing to argue its case before a broad audience of antitrust officials and the critics.

The complainants were told on Monday to sign confidentiality waivers not to disclose the so-called statement of objections to journalists or public affairs consultants before they could get a copy of the redacted document, according to a Commission letter seen by Reuters.

The critics were told to restrict the charge sheet to their lawyers and economists.

Leaks in 3,2,1… And there’s Andrew Orlowski’s writeup of the Foundem examination into Google’s “search for harm” blogpost.

One tiny number can reveal big problems at a global smartphone maker » Bloomberg Business

Tim Culpan:

Tucked away in a corporate earnings report—past the data on profit margins and revenue growth, hidden deep inside a balance sheet—is a number that can tell you a lot about a mobile phone maker’s health. In the global smartphone war, brands are routinely measured by market share, revenue, profit, and the coolness of their ads. But one line item called finished goods inventory, which refers to the percentage of materials that were manufactured into phones but went unsold, can give insight into whether a company’s fortunes are changing.

The latest company to let phones pile up in warehouses and on store shelves is HTC. The Taiwanese company’s stock just fell to its lowest point in a decade after lowering its sales forecast on June 5 and announcing a NT$2.9 billion ($93 million) writedown, though it’s recovered some of that loss amid speculation the decline could make it a buyout target. HTC’s finished goods inventory had climbed to a record high 2.35% of total assets at the end of last quarter. During the company’s heyday, that figure rarely nudged above 1%.

Culpan has done a neat job, building on what I pointed out last week about HTC’s broader inventory numbers. Relating inventory to total assets is an effective way to look at it; here’s the graph.

HTC inventory as percent of assets
So now it’s higher than ever before. Finished goods inventory is going to be one of the first numbers people look at when the Q2 figures are published (in late July, probably).

Merkel’s PC was the first one infected in the Bundestag hack »Security Affairs

I have written many posts regarding a recent attack against the German Bundestag with caused a major data breach.

We discussed the possibility that the cyber attack against the German Parliament was coordinated by Russian state-sponsored hackers that spread a highly sophisticated malware inside the network of the Bundestag.

The consequence of the data breach could be serious for the German Government, German media states that Bundestag may need to replace 20,000 computers after the intrusion, an operation that could cost millions of euros.

New revelations in the investigation confirms that the cyber attack on the German Bundestag began with the compromise of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s personal computer.

Her phone by the NSA, her computer by Russia…

Flaw lingers in Samsung phones, illustrating hacking risk » WSJ

Danny Yadron:

Last fall, researchers at cybersecurity firm NowSecure found a bug in most Samsung smartphones that could allow hackers to spy on users.

In March, Samsung told NowSecure it had sent a fix to wireless carriers that they could distribute to users. It asked NowSecure to wait three months before going public.

Last week, the researchers bought two new Samsung Galaxy S6’s from Verizon Wireless and Sprint. They found both were still vulnerable to the security hole, which involves how the phone accepts data when updating keyboard software.

NowSecure CEO Andrew Hoog shared his version of events with The Wall Street Journal as his company prepared to release its research Tuesday. The story helps illuminate why hacking is so hard to stamp out.

That’s particularly true in smartphones, with its diffuse system of device makers, software programmers and network operators. Things likely are only to get worse as Americans connect their thermostats, door locks and cars to the Internet and face the need to update their software…

…Welton found he could hijack the process of updating one of the virtual keyboards Samsung installs on many Android smartphones. From there, he could eavesdrop on phone conversations, rummage through text messages and contacts, or turn on the microphone to capture audio.

That was possible, Hoog said, because Samsung didn’t encrypt the update process.

It’s the IOT vulnerability that’s the real worry here, much more than which make of phone is involved. Except that Samsung asked NowSecure for a year to fix the bug – a month after it was told about it. And what does this mean for Google’s “we find a bug and we publicise it in 90 days” stance?

Nokia faces lengthy arbitration over LG patent royalty payments » Reuters

Jussi Rosendahl:

Nokia said the arbitration with LG is expected to conclude within two years. Shares in Nokia rose 1.4 percent by 1204 GMT (8.04 a.m ET).

“This is becoming a more and more common model. The companies won’t go to the court but instead let an independent party decide,” said Nordea analyst Sami Sarkamies.

He estimated that the Samsung deal, expected to conclude later this year, could eventually mean Nokia receives 100-200 million euros of additional royalty payments annually, on top of retroactive payments.

Seems to be related to 4G patents; Nokia signed a similar deal with Samsung a while back. For LG, means that profitability in the smartphone side becomes that little bit more elusive – especially after the back payment.

Apple News curation will have human editors and that will raise important questions » 9to5Mac

Jordan Kahn:

Techmeme‘s founder Gabe Rivera gave us the hard truth on why being an algorithm-based service like Google News doesn’t make sense for the Apple News app saying, “All news aggregators intended for the mass market need editors, so this makes sense for Apple.” But the flip side of Apple’s human-based curation is that without a separation of editorial and the business, there will undoubtedly be conflicts of interest. Rivera points out that “…as the world’s most valuable corporation, they can’t and shouldn’t be trusted to present well-rounded coverage on many important topics.” Rivera continues, “But most readers won’t care about that.”

Apple doesn’t want this to be an algorithm thing, because (a) algorithms might not pull outré-yet-fascinating stuff to the surface (b) if some story that were grisly/violent/sexual – pick the topic you think Americans in particular would react in horror to – popped up, Apple would of course get the blame. Apple hates that.

So it wants humans on hand to stop the Bad Stuff that will Offend People finding its way into the app. But that immediately raises the question: what will it define as Bad Stuff? Are Mark Gurman’s well-sourced leaks of Apple plans Bad Stuff? Is vicious criticism of Apple?

I suspect people are overplaying this; Apple is really wary of consumer backlashes over pr0n. Look at how Facebook struggles with the same topic, and the issue of content posted by millions of people which some find offensive and others really don’t.

No simple answer, but Apple may not have realised it was putting itself in the position of a publisher.

Start up: LastPass’s warning, Google tracks down racists, HTC snubs Asus, valuing maps, and more

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Health risk? An LED bulb sign board. Photo by Patrick Hoesly on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Competition and Partisanship » ignore the code

Lukas Mathis:

I wish we’d see even more competition! I wish Samsung would get serious with its own OS. I wish HP would revive Web OS. I wish Blackberry would stop making bad decisions, and start kicking ass again. I wish smaller companies like Jolla, Ubuntu, and the Firefox OS team would be better able to compete with the big guys. I wish Microsoft would get more credit for the progress it has made in UI design, instead of just getting crap for changing things from how they were in Windows 95. And I wish people would look outside of the confines of their chosen platform, and acknowledge the positive contributions that other companies are making. Get out of your bubbles! Other systems are great and interesting and useful, too!

The problem with this view, happy as it is, is that there’s a cognitive load associated with learning a new OS, and the cognitive load grows geometrically the more OSs you have to work on.

LastPass Security Notice » The LastPass Blog

Joe Siegrist:

We want to notify our community that on Friday, our team discovered and blocked suspicious activity on our network. In our investigation, we have found no evidence that encrypted user vault data was taken, nor that LastPass user accounts were accessed. The investigation has shown, however, that LastPass account email addresses, password reminders, server per user salts, and authentication hashes were compromised.

We are confident that our encryption measures are sufficient to protect the vast majority of users. LastPass strengthens the authentication hash with a random salt and 100,000 rounds of server-side PBKDF2-SHA256, in addition to the rounds performed client-side.

That’s grea– hang on, “vast majority” of users?

Do lightbulbs need a health warning label? » Consumer Reports

Consumer Reports’ medical experts say that studies have shown that exposure to light at night is clearly associated with an increased risk of sleep problems as well as mood disorders. Additional research has linked light at night with an increased risk of breast cancer, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, however, much more research remains to be done to determine just how significant that risk may be.

So, why single out LEDs? LEDs do emit more blue light than CFLs, and incandescents emit very little. And while any light can suppress melatonin, the hormone that facilitates sleep, research has shown that human eyes are especially sensitive to blue (which is also emitted in higher levels by most of today’s indispensable electronic devices).

Fred Maxik, founder and chief technology officer of Lighting Science, says that in contrast to the older incandescent bulbs, LEDs and CFLs have significantly changed the impact light has on human health, affecting our circadian rhythms. He believes the effects can be beneficial, such as promoting alertness or enabling natural sleep hormones to be released. But “there’s a growing amount of evidence that light can also have negative biological effects,” he says. And that’s why the company created the label. Maxik is also encouraging other lighting manufacturers to make consumers aware of the effects of light on health.

Lighting Science has hired former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Louis W. Sullivan, M.D., as a consultant. “The fact is that the wrong kind of light can be disruptive on sleep patterns,” he says. “I think this label gives interesting information to the public so they can decide, particularly for people with sleep problems.”

Short answer: no, unless you’re an American.

Use Google searches to figure out how racist your neighbourhood is » Gizmodo

Annalee Newitz:

What [data scientist Seth] Stephens-Davidowitz ultimately discovered was that racism “appears to have cost Obama roughly four percentage points of the national popular vote in both 2008 and 2012.” He determined this by showing that the higher the number of searches there were on “nigger” in a given area, the more likely it was that Obama lost votes there — even controlling for things like income, already-existing political affiliations, and more. In other words, even in an area where people typically voted for Democrats, you’d see a less-than-typical number of votes for Obama if the rate of Google searches on “nigger” was higher than average. As Stephens-Davidowitz put it, “An area’s racially charged search rate is a robust negative predictor of Obama’s vote share.”

Campbell’s law, Goodhart’s law, and the trouble with observation » mmitII

Matt Ballantine pointed me back to this observation of his from 2012, following the article I linked the other day about how most mobile benchmarks aren’t much use:

Charles Goodhart is an economist from the London School of Economics, and a former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee.

The law named after him was first noted in a paper he published in 1975, and states:

“that once a social or economic indicator or other surrogate measure is made a target for the purpose of conducting social or economic policy, then it will lose the information content that would qualify it to play that role.”

And if you use benchmarks to try to value a phone (or PC) they’ll be gamed and become worthless.

BlackBerry: an Android phone won’t move the needle » Seeking Alpha

Zenith Investments:

So what can BlackBerry bring to the table so that they can make a profit from an Android smartphone if it can’t bring security? The sources spilling the beans on BlackBerry’s potential Android phone also indicated that they plan to differentiate their phone with a physical keyboard. Again I see the argument – this should appeal to the hardcore BlackBerry fans who had to switch to Android because of the added apps. The problem is that this was tried before – with the Motorola Droid Pro. It was an Android phone that was equipped with a physical keyboard, but it suffered from very low sales. The problem seems to be that the people, who desperately want a physical keyboard, also want the BlackBerry operating system.

That’s pretty much it. Seeking Alpha is a site where you can find any opinion that suits you, but this one on the “Android BlackBerry” is at least realistic about why people buy the phones. I’m forecasting an operating loss of about $20m in the just-gone quarter.

To clarify the news on Asustek will not rule out the possibility of acquiring HTC Corp » HTC

HTC’s formal announcement to the Taiwanese stock exchange on Monday:

We didn’t contact Asusteck and will not consider the acquisition. As an international brand, HTC will continue to design world-class innovative smart devices through its pursuit of brilliance brand promise.

Let’s put a marker down on that one.

Where are Maps going? » Asymco

Horace Dediu, using Apple’s data points about map requests per week:

In December 2012 I posted an analysis on the the cost of maps. It showed that maintaining maps requires an investment of between $1 billion and $2 billion/yr. With the addition of new features such as 3-D mapping, transit maps and thousands of new cities, the cost is likely to have increased. $2 billion/yr is probably the norm today.

Apple then could be seen as spending about $6.5/user/yr on maps and Google could be spending about $2/user/yr. To be profitable Google would need to find ad revenues of $2/user/yr and Apple would need to find $6 of profit on each phone/yr. Clearly, each of these targets is achievable.

In contrast we can see why Nokia’s HERE Maps business is now worth a lot less than it was in 2007. The asset has been for sale for some time and the latest bid  has been for $3 billion, making the $5 billion lost in market value and $7 billion of investment since seem like a catastrophe. Without a business model the data is worthless – with only 30 million users the cost per user reaches $66/yr. A buyer needs to find an appropriate model for sustaining a $2 billion/yr burn rate.

So the question of where maps are going depends on the business model for maps.

The point about the loss in value of HERE is well made.

Apple Music vs. Spotify: don’t repeat Bob Lefsetz’s mistake » Medium

Lefsetz, you’ll recall, was hugely dismissive of Apple Music. Michael Vakulenko thinks it is a different play altogether – a platform play in a different world of music:

Apple Music is more than a differently-packaged version of Spotify. Google AdWords is more than a less-expensive advertising agency, iOS is more than a nicer-looking version of Symbian, Uber is more than a digital version of a Taxicab stand, AirBnB is more than renting mattresses to strangers and Munchery is more than a bigger restaurant kitchen. These are platforms having very different economics from traditional products. As Marshall Van Alstyne said: “Platforms beat products every time.”

Platforms disrupt industry after industry: telecom, computing, watches, automotive, consumer electronics, banking, education, food, transportation, hospitality, healthcare, and more. When you see a new idea in the market or a new competitor, ask yourself: “Is it a market-creating platform?” and “What will it mean for my business if the platform reaches critical mass?”

Start up: Apple’s Sonos rival?, Nokia’s smartwatch, three-ton Twitter, Netscape in the NHS, and more

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Sunday Times sourcing? Photo by DrJohn2005 on Flickr

A selection of 8 links for you. Why not? I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Apple Music’s missing link: how Beats Electronics fumbled its Sonos killer (EXCLUSIVE) » Variety

Janko Roettgers:

Beats was looking to build a premium product that would mimic and compete with wireless speakers produced by Sonos. Like Sonos, Beats wanted to give consumers the option to place speakers in multiple rooms of their house, and then have them all play the same music synchronously. And like Sonos, Beats was looking to introduce a bigger, more powerful speaker for the living room first, and then follow up with a smaller, more affordable product for the kitchen and bedroom.

However, Beats wasn’t just looking to copy Sonos. The company was also working on combining Bluetooth with Wifi and NFC to allow for seamless handovers, effectively making it possible to launch music playback as soon as you’d enter the room, said a source familiar with technical details of the project. And thanks to its premium brand, Beats wasn’t looking to undercut Sonos — quite the contrary: Word has it the company was looking to sell its bigger Wifi speaker for as much as $750.

1) wouldn’t have been a Sonos killer
2) this is utterly random, but my next-door neighbour works in the (legal) pharma industry, and four months ago told me the story of going to a party in San Diego where “people from Apple” were talking about exactly this device. So I’m inclined to believe it, weirdly. Also, my neighbour’s reaction: “I said, so you’ve reinvented the boombox?” Probably why it was canned.

Apple’s WWDC keynote: issues with structure, approach, direction » Mobile Forward

Hristo Daniel Ushev on the messy Apple WWDC keynote:

Ultimately, the issues above are symptoms of weak (or hand-cuffed) direction. Not just in the form of what to do (e.g., don’t have Eddy Cue focus on the app) but also in terms of what not to do – i.e., editing. Editing in this context: shortening the list of presenters, directing them to use fewer slides (at one point, they flashed by like pages in a flip book), and saying no to distracting uses of humor and movement. When viewed through this lens, I think this keynote lacked a director. Or at least one that could effectively influence the senior executives and the choices they made. (Believe me, I’m not saying any of this is easy.)

Will all this impact the products’ success? Not directly. Indirectly, however, key influencers of consumers (developers, fans, and journalists) may get a fuzzier picture of Apple’s intent or advantage.

The music segment was terrible. The rest, fine.

Sunday Times Snowden story is journalism at its worst » The Intercept

Glenn Greenwald on the Sunday Times’s story – its front-page lead (aka “splash”) claiming that UK intelligence agencies “had to move” agents and that Russia and China “had cracked” the files (here’s text of the print version; try reading it first):

how could these hidden British officials possibly know that China and Russia learned things from the Snowden files as opposed to all the other hacking and spying those countries do? Moreover, as pointed out last night by my colleague Ryan Gallagher – who has worked for well over a year with the full Snowden archive – “I’ve reviewed the Snowden documents and I’ve never seen anything in there naming active MI6 agents.” He also said: “I’ve seen nothing in the region of 1m documents in the Snowden archive, so I don’t know where that number has come from.”

Greenwald is furious, and rightly so. The Sunday Times story is clearly hung on a single quote from a UK intelligence agency source, but one which doesn’t support the story’s claims. The Snowden archive is vast, but putting a number on it is surprisingly difficult, because it has interrelated files – there’s an almost wiki-like quality to some parts.

Given that the UK (and US) intelligence agencies don’t claim to know what’s in the Snowden files, they can’t know what the Russians or Chinese know from it – if for the sake of credulity we believe that the Russians and Chinese have cracked the encryption, which I seriously doubt.

When I used to work Sunday shifts as a news reporter at The Independent, I often had to “follow up” stories that appeared in the Sunday Times. The problem was, as soon as you began trying to establish the facts they claimed, the stories fell apart – the claims didn’t match reality. This is another example, although that hasn’t stopped the BBC repeating it (though an analysis by Gordon Corera in the middle of this straight-up followup rather backs away from the Sunday Times claims).

Microsoft Moonraker was Nokia’s smartwatch before it was killed » The Verge

Tom Warren:

Nokia’s Moonraker smartwatch never made it to market primarily because Microsoft was anticipating its wearable Band. While the Moonraker had a number of sensors to allow you to lift your arm to read texts or drop it to turn off the display, Microsoft opted for the Band as it had more functionality. Nokia took the familiar “Metro” interface from Windows Phone and paired it with simple email, phone, and messaging apps on its smartwatch. There was even a camera remote feature to take pictures on a smartphone from the watch. Facebook and MixRadio integration was also built-in, alongside customizable watch faces and different colored straps.

It’s unlikely that the “Moonraker” will ever make it to the market, but given time Microsoft may want to bring some of the more fashion-related aspects of it over to the Band in the future. Microsoft is now working on the second generation of its Band. While the software platform on the upcoming Microsoft Band 2 will remain largely the same, the look and feel of the device will improve. Microsoft is expected to launch its next-generation Band later this year after Windows 10 is available broadly.

The UI looks unfinished in the photos. And would it have worked only with Windows Phone? If so, it was dead already.

The Twitter of the three-ton nail » Medium

Zeynep Tufekci on Twitter’s “metric-driven” approach to please Wall Street:

if you set up an absurd game, as Wall Street often does, ruled by the incentives of those who set the rules (their quarterly bonus calculations depend on chasing growth for the sake of growth), people will, naturally, game the system and produce the results you want, just as absurdly.

At the moment, sadly, Wall Street is not solely a representative of market dynamics, but also a collective madness imposed upon us by the distorted over-accumulation of capital in the hands of too-few people. This “elite failure” has repercussions beyond my beloved platform: from global warming to revving up global growth (you can’t grow demand if people don’t make money) but in a sustainable manner (because the annual bonus is not the right time-frame). We are paying the price for having surrendered our economy to a game that is not about some independent logic of the market, but the absurdity of accumulating more zeroes in a bank account (which you cannot spend in any reasonable lifetime).

If you’re not following @zeynep, you should. She’s so incisive.

Misunderstood or inappropriate mobile benchmarks are hurting the industry and consumers » Forbes

Patrick Moorhead:

Because of the creation, use and promotion of these inaccurate, misunderstood, and/or gameable  benchmarks, we are seeing smartphone manufacturers and SoC vendors dedicating time and engineering resources to ensuring that their performance in these benchmarks is up to expectations. After all, if so many people are using or mischaracterizing AnTuTu and Geekbench, it lends them credibility even when it shouldn’t.

Or vendors are adding features that make the misrepresentative benchmarks look better, like by adding more CPU cores beyond what any piece of software can use to improve the experience outside of battery life.

Additionally, because so many reputable tech blogs don’t run ANY benchmarks at all, they are essentially giving the ones that do more credibility when they show AnTuTu and other benchmarks.

I trust Anandtech (as does Moorhead), but most other benchmarks strike me as crap because they tell you nothing about experience. Google’s Project Butter (smoother scrolling) and Project Volta (longer battery life) and focus, in Android M, on standby life tells us that benchmarks tell you barely anything about real-life use.

Exclusive: BlackBerry may put Android system on new device: sources » Reuters

Euan Rocha:

BlackBerry is considering equipping an upcoming smartphone with Google’s Android software for the first time, an acknowledgement that its revamped line of devices has failed to win mass appeal, according to four sources familiar with the matter.

The move would be an about-face for the Waterloo, Ontario-based company, which had shunned Android in a bet that its BlackBerry 10 line of phones would be able to claw back market share lost to Apple’s iPhone and a slew of devices powered by Android.

The sources, who asked not to be named as they have not been authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said the move to use Android is part of BlackBerry’s strategy to pivot to focus on software and device management. BlackBerry, which once dominated smartphone sales, now has a market share of less than 1%.

Rocha is based in Toronto. I’d trust his sources. Can’t see why BlackBerry thinks this is a good idea though. It’s losing money on handsets; this would be a way to get commoditised out of the solar system, and lose its faithful buyers too.

NHS browser statistics » LinkedIn

Mark Reynolds:

Have you wondered what technology the NHS uses? We gather anonymous statistics on those using NHSmail and so have a good picture of technology across healthcare in England and Scotland.

88% of users access the service via Windows, with 8% on Macs and 3% on Linux. Amazingly we have a user browsing NHSmail using their Wii, which suggests dedication to the cause or spoofing the browser data. 65% of users are on Windows 7, followed by XP (20%) and Vista (3%). Windows 8 usage is too low to register. 

Microsoft Internet Explorer dominates browser statistics at 73%, followed by Chrome (13%), Safari (7%), Mozilla (5%) and Firefox (2%). 0.9% of traffic comes from Netscape! Internet Explorer 7 and 8 account for 61% of the traffic, with IE 11 too low to register.

Two things: Netscape > Windows 8. Also: XP > Vista + Windows 8. That’s inertia.

Worth comparing with data.gov.uk stats for web browsing.

Start up: Oculus here!, when cashless fails, what Twitter needs now, EC’s ebook probe, and more

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Musical toast? Photo by revedavion.com on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

April 2015: Twitter needs new leadership » Stratechery

Ben Thompson nailed it months ago:

I believe it’s time for Twitter’s leadership, in particular CEO Dick Costolo, to make way for new leadership that has improved credibility with Wall Street, with developers, and within Twitter itself…

…Twitter would be better off retooling their API and developer agreements to ensure they are learning from every application they interact with, and in return sharing their graph along with advertising in the form of their MoPub or Namo Media-derived offerings. The advantage of this approach is that the imagination and ingenuity of a massive developer ecosystem will always be far faster and more innovative than anything any one company can do on its own — just ask Apple.

Worth reading (or re-reading). The accompanying podcast nails it too.

Apple Music » Lefsetz Letter

Bob Lefsetz has a typically nuanced take on Apple’s new offering:

It’s toast.

Its success was based upon eliminating free. But that positively non-techie entity known as the government put the kibosh on that. Now the labels and Apple are too scared to enact their plan of eliminating freemium. So while the techies leap ahead, creating solutions to problems we didn’t even know we had, those in the music business stay mired in the past, believing backroom dealings and brawn will get them what they want.

But it won’t in the new world.

What I find puzzling is that nobody at the record labels has heard of the Laffer curve.

Oculus teams up with Microsoft on Rift VR headset » FT.com

Tim Bradshaw:

Oculus faces mounting competition from Sony PlayStation’s Project Morpheus and games software maker Valve’s Vive headset, made by HTC. Google is also investing heavily in VR, after unveiling updates to its low-cost Cardboard headset last month, including its Jump 360-degree video system.

Oculus emphasised its headset’s ease of use and a familiar video-gaming content for its launch.

“It rests comfortably right on your brow,” Mr Iribe said of the Rift. “You’re going to put it on like a baseball cap. It’s going to be simple and easy . . . The goal is you put it on and it goes away, it disappears.”

Download Festival-goers left hungry as cashless system goes to Borksville » The Inquirer

Chris Merriman:

Festivalgoers are ready to throw a Five Finger Death Punch at organisers after a cashless society model involving digital currency failed.

The Download Festival at Castle Donington is completely cashless this year, and visitors are being issued with a dog-tag At the Gates.

However, the system for topping up the dog-tags with currency has failed, and there’s no back up, leaving many people complaining of being unable to eat or drink.

This is a huge embarrassment for cashless as the future of money in the week that Apple Pay was announced for the UK market.

Download proudly hailed itself as the first major festival to use RFID technology to replace cash, but the Utopian dream seems to have turned into a nightmare as festival goers are not only unable to eat, but face the prospect of seeing Slipknot sober.

Test, and then test. Then test it again. Then pull out something essential. Test.

Who’s afraid of DNS? Nominet’s ‘turing’ tool visualises hidden security threats » Techworld

John Dunn:

UK domain registry Nominet has shown off a striking new visualisation tool called ‘turing’ that large organisations can use to peer into their DNS traffic to trace latency issues and spot previously invisible botnets and malware.

In development for four years, and used internally by Nominet for the last two, at core turing is about representing DNS traffic in visual form, allowing administrators to ‘see’ patterns in real time that would normally be impossible to detect let alone understand.

EU opens investigation into Amazon’s e-book selling » Reuters

Julia Fioretti:

The investigation adds to the pressure on the online retailer in Europe, where it is already being investigated for the low tax rates it pays in Luxembourg.

The Commission said it would look in particular into certain clauses included in Amazon’s contracts with publishers.

These clauses, it said, required publishers to inform Amazon about more favorable or alternative terms offered to Amazon’s competitors, a means to ensure Amazon is offered terms at least as good as those of its competitors…

…”Amazon has developed a successful business that offers consumers a comprehensive service, including for e-books,” Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in a statement.

“Our investigation does not call that into question. However, it is my duty to make sure that Amazon’s arrangements with publishers are not harmful to consumers, by preventing other e-book distributors from innovating and competing effectively with Amazon.”

Similar in that sense to Apple’s bad action in the “most favoured nation” clause for ebooks it sought from publishers.

Google’s Android One may go down as an interesting idea that bombed » ETtech

Gulveen Aulakh:

Google’s first set of phone-making partners Micromax, Karbonn and Spice have no development roadmap for the platform’s next batch of devices. Some are clearing available stock at discounts, executives told ET. Intex, Lava and Xolo, which were to join the above three, no longer seem to be keen, leading some to question whether the search giant is planning to drop the Android One project altogether.

Google insisted it’s still committed to the product. “We’re not backing away from the programme,” Caesar Sengupta, vice president of product management at Google, told ET. “We’ve learnt a lot from the initial round with our partners and they have learnt in terms of device availability, in channel and others. Over time, as we work with our partners, we will keep working on making sure that we do things much better.” But with the products not doing too well, executives at the three partners said they weren’t working on the next lot of Android One devices.

The problem with Android One being that it tried to force a uniform experience – which left the OEMs no way to differentiate. Who benefits? Only Google.

jansoucek/iOS-Mail.app-inject-kit » GitHub

Jan Soucek:

Back in January 2015 I stumbled upon a bug in iOS’s mail client, resulting in HTML tag in e-mail messages not being ignored. This bug allows remote HTML content to be loaded, replacing the content of the original e-mail message. JavaScript is disabled in this UIWebView, but it is still possible to build a functional password “collector” using simple HTML and CSS.

It was filed under Radar #19479280 back in January 2015, but the fix was not delivered in any of the iOS updates following 8.1.2. Therefore I decided to publish the proof of concept code here.

Here’s the Youtube video:

It uses a targeted email to capture the person’s iCloud password (if their iCloud email is the same email). The prime weakness is the way iOS 8 keeps popping up dialogs asking you to sign into the App Store. Secondary weakness may be loading images in Mail; I don’t know whether turning off “load images” guards against this.

Bad that it has taken Apple six months not to do anything for a potential targeted phishing attack.

The mobile to machine learning era: privacy in the new age. » Praxtime

Nathan Taylor on Apple, privacy and machine learning:

there’s a risk that inside the company Apple could cripple their machine learning efforts by overcommitting to their own marketing and privacy ideology. I noticed Apple’s Phil Schiller was on message last night about privacy on John Gruber’s The Talk Show. It’s hard to be certain of Apple’s motivation here. It’s likely some mix of being out of touch with recent trends so being overly creeped out by machine learning, spinning their backwardness in cloud and machine learning in the best light, having some real and serious moral concerns about privacy, plus some very cynical distancing from Google. The latter since they know Google will be the one to bear the brunt of the lawsuits and tech regulations around privacy as machine learning explodes. And then Apple can follow serenely behind in their wake…

…What I noticed and liked about the Apple keynote at WWDC this week is Craig Federighi clearly loved all the new cool features based on machine learning and searching with natural language. He has an infectious enthusiasm. It’s great to see. Apple clearly takes machine learning very seriously. They just want to do it their own quirky and backhanded way.

The point about lawsuits and regulation is one I hadn’t seen raised before. But once it’s said, it feels inevitable.

Start up: iOS 9, Google and adblocking; Kaspersky under attack; the Search for Harm Data, and more

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A blow for mobile advertising: the next version of Safari will let users block ads on iPhones and iPads » Nieman Journalism Lab

Joshua Benton:

Why would Apple do this?

An Apple partisan might argue it just wants to give users control of their iPhone experience, and having debuted extensions in the last version of iOS, allowing them to alter web content is a natural next step.

An Apple realist might argue that its great rival Google makes more than 90% of its revenue from online advertising — a growing share of that on mobile, and a large share of that on iPhone. Indeed, Google alone makes about half of all global mobile advertising revenue. So anything that cuts back on mobile advertising revenue is primarily hurting its rival.

An Apple cynic might note that the company on Monday unveiled its new News app, which promises a beautiful reading experience — and a monetization model based on Apple’s iAds.

Oh, it’s that cynic again. Alternatively, someone who’s used iOS might have found their browsing hijacked by bad ads that take you to the App Store, and wanted to block those too – they’re a terrible user experience, and Apple hates things that cause bad UX (remember Flash and Java?)

Google gets its slice principally from iOS search – will those get blocked? Meanwhile, and unintuitively, AdBlock Plus doesn’t seem keen on it.

Google losing billions in adblocking devil’s deal » Inside PageFair

Pagefair is an “anti-adblock technology company”:

even more controversial than the debate over the ethics of adblocking is the sheer scale of the payments being made – and what that money is funding.

It is safe to assume that Google – rumored to be paying $25m – is the largest customer on the Acceptable Ads program. This is a relatively small sum for a global corporation with revenues of nearly $60bn, while being a huge cash injection for a fast-growing adblocking startup in Cologne. It is not credible that these funds are simply being spent on the administration of the acceptable ads program. Instead, they are presumably being reinvested in the future development of adblocking.

“Acceptable Ads” means that if you pay up, your ads don’t get automatically blocked. Taboola has done the same; AdBlock Plus must be minting it. And there’s no sign that this is going to go away. For both ABP users and ABP itself, it works perfectly.

Kaspersky Lab investigates attack on its own network » Kaspersky Lab Official Blog

Eugene Kaspersky:

We’ve found that the group behind Duqu 2.0 also spied on several prominent targets, including participants in the international negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program and in the 70th anniversary event of the liberation of Auschwitz. Though the internal investigation is still underway we’re confident that the prevalence of this attack is much wider and has included more top ranking targets from various countries. I also think it’s highly likely that after we detected Duqu 2.0 the people behind the attack wiped their presence on the infected networks to prevent exposure.

Kaspersky hints, but doesn’t outright say, that a nation state was behind the attack.

Washington scrutinizes the sharing economy » NYTimes.com

Rebecca Ruiz:

Matthew W. Daus, former commissioner and chairman of the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, took issue with calling Uber a member of the sharing economy.

“We’re coming up with these incredible definitions and clarifications, and I’m just trying to throw some water on everybody’s faces,” Mr. Daus said. “There’s no sharing going on. This is about for-hire transportation, and there needs to be a level playing field,” he said, suggesting that capping the number of vehicles on the road was necessary.

Across town at the exact same time, at another conference focused on the intersection of technology, business and government, the sharing economy was also under the microscope. The conference, called Techonomy Policy, included participation from the F.T.C. and the Federal Communications Commission.

“How sustainable is this?” asked Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University’s business school.

Perhaps more sustainable than some would like. Why would AirBnB or Uber go away?

Analysing Google’s public response to the EC’s Statement of Objections

Remember Google’s blogpost “The Search for Harm“, which suffered from misquoted statistics about incoming search to news websites?

This analysis by Foundem (one of the EC complainants over search) suggests – very strongly, with data to back it up – that the graphs Google included there to show how little effect it was having on online price comparison shopping, which is what the EC complaint is about initially, looked at quite different topics.

And that when you look more closely at what Google’s been doing, you discover far more effect than you might expect.


It’s a fascinating analysis; Google has questions to answer.

Huawei delays launch of its SmartWatch to September-October in China » TalkAndroid.com

Peter Holden:

Huawei’s Watch was first unveiled at MWC back in March, and it is still one of the better-looking Android Wear devices around. There is no set shipping date for the Huawei Watch just yet, although it is available to pre-order in most countries. Not in China though, availability of the Huawei Watch has been delayed until at least September, although October hasn’t been ruled out if things don’t go to plan.

It all stems down to Google having left the Chinese market due to disagreements with the Chinese government. This means that Google’s Services won’t work in China, which has left Huawei with the task of adapting Android Wear to use its own services. Obviously this isn’t going to be a quick fix.

Given that many westerners can’t pronounce Huawei (it’s Hoo-wah-way), and won’t know it has a smartwatch, no great loss of face. Also, Peter Holden: things stems *from*, not “down to”.

Open data on council spending is largely unread by voters » The Guardian

Ben Worthy at the Public Leaders Network:

there has been less interest in the data than many hoped. Council finance data is viewed around 200 times each month. The person on the street has not been desperate for data. No army of armchair auditors has sprung up. There are some enthusiasts here and there; a concerted campaign in Barnet used open data to build its case against the (now deceased) Conservative council. But few people have the time and, most importantly, the motivation to scroll through complicated pdf documents of raw council spending data. Data needs a narrative, and pdf documents and spreadsheets don’t yet tell a good enough story.

This links to a further problem. If you do find a smoking gun among the spreadsheets, who do you send it to? The council itself, the opposition or the local press? It’s notclear what the next step would be and how it would fit in with the processes by which councils are accountable to citizens.

The better news is that something is being done with the data. Users include businesses, pressure groups and journalists as well as a handful of members of the public. While they haven’t unleashed a wave of accountability, there have been sudden bursts of data-driven questioning of local authorities.

Sounds like there’s been pretty much exactly the right amount of interest in the data. And the key point is, if the councils and politicians know that the data is auditable, they will realise they can’t hide stuff. Compare and contrast: FIFA payments.

Why I’m breaking up with the Apple Watch » NYTimes.com

Jessica Friedman:

the busywork the watch’s apps can replace — handing over airline boarding passes, opening hotel room doors — seems less like an advance than a loss of control. Call me a Luddite, but honestly, I don’t mind unlocking things with my actual hands. The new watches announced this week may change the situation, but I am not sure I have the patience to wait.

Likewise (and I know this will be heresy to anyone really excited about the coming Fitbit initial public offering), the fitness-app aspect — the tracking of my steps, the measuring of my heart rate, the telling me to stand up when I am in the middle of an article — seems more like a burden than freedom.

I have worked hard to wean myself from a reliance on exercise machines telling me how hard I had worked — how many calories I had burned, how many stairs I had climbed — in part because I knew I was cheating pretty much all the time anyway and thus could not trust the results, and in part because it became an excuse to modify, or not, my ensuing behavior.

But the truth is, I know when I am in shape; I can see the difference in my body and feel it when I ride my bike in the park. The watch threatened to drag me back into a numbers-driven neurosis, and that’s a temptation I would rather not have.

The secrets of seven amazingly surreal photos revealed » Lumia blog

When it comes to Lumia photography, we think Pritesh Patel knows a thing or two about inspiring others. His amazingly surreal work is inspiring on many levels, with a magical combination of skill, creativity, and originality all working together to create some seriously fantastic photos.

Pritesh is a 22-year-old Mechanical Engineering graduate from Anand in Gujarat, India who has been a big lover all things Lumia for quite some time. And luckily for us, he’s here to tell us all about the magic behind his super photos — what he loves about his Lumia, what inspired him to create his photos, how he does it, and how you can do it too.

They are clever photos (though lots of post-editing is needed; it would be nice if some were clever trompes l’oeil). Also, “amazingly surreal” photos? Either amazing or surreal. Not both.

Start up: more PC slowdowns, Apple Pay goes big, Facebook gets AI, Uber’s early days, and more

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2012 Keynote
Big touchscreens: what are they good for? Photo by Microsoft Ignite NZ on Flickr.

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A compilation of robots falling down at the DARPA Robotics Challenge » YouTube

I for one welcome our new robotic ove.. AH, NOT SO SMART NOW, ARE YOU?

Siri’s search power grows, as Apple accelerates machine learning » Mobile Forward

Hristo Daniel Ushev:

I’m changing my mind about Google’s data-volume-based advantage. I believe Apple sees a volume of (anonymized) user data that’s on the same order of magnitude as Google (on mobile). Google Now may provide Google with more question/intent data, but Apple sees the bigger picture of what consumers (in aggregate) do/need throughout the day. I base my belief on iOS’s huge installed base, high app downloads and usage, and Apple’s full-stack access to iOS devices.

With so many dots to connect – Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, Siri, Maps, News, HealthKit, HomeKit, and CarPlay – Apple will have great opportunities to add value to consumers’ daily life.

Machine learning is to 21st century devices as the graphical user interface was to 20th century computers. I don’t mean that as a user interface metaphor, but as a way to express how critical it will be to a high-performance product.

At a machine learning conference the other day, someone said to me: “a really smart AI wouldn’t need a ton of data. It would figure out what lions look like from just one picture of a lion, not hundreds. Maybe Google’s aren’t that good if they need so much data.” Well, perhaps..

Samsung’s new smartwatch to offer mobile payments: Electronic Times » Reuters

Tech giant Samsung Electronics Co Ltd plans to offer a mobile payments function in a smartwatch to be launched in the second half of the year, South Korea’s Electronic Times newspaper reported on Monday citing unnamed sources.

Samsung would use near-field communication (NFC) technology to support mobile payments on the smartwatch, the report said. This is the same technology Apple Inc uses for the Apple Pay function supported by its smartwatches.

How about that.

The future of computers is the mind of a toddler » Bloomberg Business

Jack Clark:

On June 9, Facebook plans to publish a research paper detailing a system that can chew through several million pieces of data, remember the key points, and answer complicated questions about them. A system like this might let a person one day ask Facebook to find photos of themselves wearing pink at a friend’s birthday party, or ask broader, fuzzier questions, like whether they seemed happier than usual last year, or appeared to spend more time with friends.

While AI has long been an area of interest for Hollywood and novelists, companies hadn’t paid much attention to it until about five years ago. That’s when research institutions and academics, aided by new techniques for crunching reams of data, started breaking records in speech recognition and image analysis at an unexpected rate. Venture capitalists took notice and invested $309.2 million in AI startups last year, a twentyfold increase from 2010, according to research firm CB Insights. Some of these startups are helping to break new ground. One in Silicon Valley, called MetaMind, has developed improvements to computers’ understanding of everyday speech. Clarifai, an AI startup in New York, is doing complex video analysis and selling the service to businesses.

Facebook’s office for this is in France. British companies are big in this too. Cannot emphasis enough how important this field is. (Can’t find the research paper, though.)

Apple Pay UK: some retailers to ditch £20 contactless limit » Pocket-lint

Stuart Miles:

As is the case with Apple Pay in the US, Apple has convinced retailers and banks to remove the limit because they can prove the customer is present thanks to the use of the Touch ID fingerprint scanner on the iPhone.

MasterCard have confirmed similar options for Apple Pay retailers in the UK too:

“Currently the vast majority of payment terminals here in the UK are set to accept contactless transactions up to the £20 spending limit, but that will rise to £30 in September (for cards as well),” a spokesman for MasterCard told Pocket-lint when we asked about clarification on the limit thresholds.

“As more digital services like Apple Pay come to market, we’re [MasterCard] supporting retailers and banks as they update the terminals so that they can accept authenticated transactions above that limit from digital devices.”

Uber: An oral history » Fortune

Some fascinating interviews by Adam Lashinsky (with Uber’s cooperation, of course), which are all worth reading; including this by Conrad Whelan, who was its first engineer:

When I joined the company, you couldn’t actually sign up for the product. It was just a way to order the car. So I built the sign-up flows that would take a credit card and make user accounts. So as soon as we did that, we could officially launch, which was June 1st, 2010, two months after I started.

I think the next thing I did, which I really enjoyed, was optimize the dispatch algorithms to take into account drivers that might miss a dispatch. That lasted like three years, or something like that, which is pretty cool.

Sounds throwaway, but gives a hint of the huge complexity involved.

Large touchscreens: what’s different? » Nielsen-Norman Group

Amy Schade tried out a 24in tablet with her children (because children don’t know what they’re not supposed to not do):

While the large screen was completely enthralling to my 2 year olds, the size of the touchscreen was a drawback for my daughter. She leaned on the screen with one hand in order to reach another part of the screen. As a result, the puzzle pieces that she was trying to move jumped from one hand to the other, if they moved at all.

Using the large screen was particularly hard for her, based on her size relative to the device —most of us aren’t using devices that are nearly as big as we are. However, her attempts to use it also illustrate a problem far more likely to be encountered with large touchscreens: that of unintended two-handed touches and other accidental touches.

We see this play out in our testing of mobile devices. We witness more accidental touches or brushes of the screen as people maneuver standard sized tablets than we do when watching people use their phones.

Designs need to anticipate and accommodate accidental touches and consider ways to incorporate larger gestures, hand presses versus finger touches, and multi-hand interactions.

PC inventory issues growing serious in Europe; retailers boycotting vendors dumping inventory » Digitimes

Monica Chen and Joseph Tsai:

First-tier PC vendors reportedly are seeing serious inventory issues in Europe and may try to digest stocks by offering price cuts. At the same time, some channel retailers are reacting to the news by boycotting the vendors to avoid having inventory dumped on them, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.

The PC supply chain was originally optimistic about demand for PCs in the second quarter, but component suppliers have seen their orders from brand vendors weakening during the quarter as most vendors have high inventory levels on hand, which they are struggling to clear as most consumers have halted their notebook purchasing to wait for the release of Windows 10, which is scheduled for the end of July…

…In addition, Windows 10’s free upgrade strategy is also expected to weaken consumers’ demand for buying new PCs.

“First-tier PC vendors” is probably code, here, for Asus and Acer.

Facing the music » All this

Dr Drang on the longest half-hour ever, at the end of the Apple keynote in which Eddy Cue introduced Apple Music:

nothing justifies the dancing. I’m sure Eddy thought it was funny and self-deprecating, but it was just annoying and a waste of our time. I often think Craig Federighi overdoes the jokes, but he knows when to pull it back and doesn’t let his presentation get derailed. Eddy doesn’t have that sense.

As to whether Apple Music is really good, we’ll have to wait and see, but the signs aren’t pointing in that direction. The elevator pitch is that “Apple Music is three things” – an attempt to tie it to the 2007 introduction to the iPhone. (And someone should have explained that to Iovine before sending him onstage. He clearly didn’t understand the audience’s reaction to the “three things” line.) But while the advantages of a multifunction device are obvious, the advantages of a multifunction app aren’t. The App Store’s success is largely based on tightly focused apps, not sprawling suites.

Start up: Apple Music?!, preserving the web, watch wars, Sony’s parsimonious storage, and more

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Layered Movements
Where’s the Bluetooth module? Photo by Kellar Wilson on Flickr.

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What changes at Medium and Yahoo Pipes teach us about the persistence of the web » Scripting.com

Dave Winer:

What we need, and still don’t have, is a systematic way of publishing to the future. Such a system would allow you to pay a fixed sum to keep your content at a specific address for the foreseeable future. No one can make a guarantee, we don’t know what the future holds, but every effort has to be made, upfront, to be sure that the content has the best chance to survive as long as possible. # It would be nice if a visionary entrepreneur would get involved, and an educational institution, perhaps, and/or an insurance company, the kinds of organizations our society creates to be long-lived. It would be great to get input from Stewart Brand and his colleagues at the LongNow Foundation.

Not a bad idea. But isn’t that what the Internet Archive is doing? Winer responds to that: “long-lived context is not the same thing as having a snapshot” [as the IA does].

iPad update won’t work on old devices » Business Insider

Tim Stenovec:

the bad news is that the new features may not work on your iPad, unless it’s one of the newest models. And Split View, which allows you to use two apps at the same time, and is one of the best new features, only works on the iPad Air 2, Apple’s latest iPad, which starts at $499 and was released last fall.

The cynic would say the fact that the new features, which are part of a software update coming later this year, only working on the latest and greatest iPads is a ploy to get you to upgrade your iPad. Apple has struggled with relatively sluggish iPad sales — the company still sells millions each quarter, more tablets than any other single company — but sales continue to fall…

…Of course, using two apps at the same time, or watching a video in the background while doing something else on your iPad, certainly requires more processing power than just using one app, so it may be that the features only work well enough for Apple to include it on its latest and most powerful iPad.

Yeah, but the cynic will disregard that sort of logical argument. All software can run on all hardware, regardless of age, according to the cynic.

Apple Music: a platform play with hidden nuance » Music Industry Blog

Mark Mulligan:

Apple continues to be ridiculed for its failed Ping! music social network. While it was no killer app it nonetheless represented an attempt to turn iTunes into a music platform. Now that same strategy has been rekindled with the launch of Artist Connect. This is Apple’s attempt to turn itself into an artist-fan engagement platform. Artist-fan engagement is the gold dust of the digital era music business. It’s the scarce, invaluable commodity that music fans crave in a post-scarcity music world…

…while DIY sites of various guises are niche, Apple presents the opportunity to reach more than a hundred million of the world’s most valuable (i.e. highest spending) music fans. Sure some of them now pay for Spotify but they’re still iTunes users also. If Apple’s featureset for artist is strong enough, expect strong uptake, especially from the bigger labels and artists.

Chart: Apple Music vs. Spotify, Pandora, Rhapsody and the rest of the streaming competition » GeekWire

Todd Bishop and James Risley:

Apple unveiled its new $9.99/month streaming music service this morning, staking its claim in a market with a large number of existing competitors. Established players include radio services like Pandora, freemium services like Spotify, and industry veterans like Seattle-based Rhapsody. This chart, created by GeekWire, shows how Apple compares to many of these existing services.

The missing element: how many devices is each one effectively preinstalled on? Yeah, Apple Music gets an advantage there. (I admit that I was surprised by the introduction on Android. But it makes perfect sense.)

Apple previews new Apple Watch software » Apple

Coming in autumn (when the new phones come out, one assumes):

Additional watchOS 2 features include: • Nightstand Mode that transforms Apple Watch into a bedside alarm clock, with the Digital Crown and side button serving as snooze and off buttons for the alarm;
• the ability to use merchant rewards and store-issued credit and debit cards with Apple Pay™, which can be added to Wallet;
• support for Transit in Maps*, so you can view detailed transportation maps and schedules, including walking directions to the nearest stations with entrances and exits precisely mapped;
• workouts from third-party fitness apps contributing to your all-day Move and Exercise goals;
• using Siri® to start specific workouts, launch Glances and reply to email; and
• Activation Lock, which lets users secure their Apple Watch with their Apple ID, preventing another user from wiping or activating the device if it is lost or stolen.

That last touch is neat – you remember the discovery of how easily the Watch could be stolen and wiped. Now it has something that sets it apart from any Rolex or other expensive watch (well, apart maybe from an engraved one): stealing it becomes pointless. Lots of stuff that feels as though it just didn’t make the cut for version 1.

Can the Swiss watchmaker survive the digital age? » NYTimes.com

Clive Thompson:

[Frederique Constant watch designer Pim] Koeslag faced a significant problem, though: He had never worked with chips and sensors before. He didn’t even own a soldering iron. Swiss watchmakers don’t need them; their devices are put together with screws and screwdrivers. He led me to a large microscope and placed one of the chip sets under it. When the image appeared on a large computer screen, he zoomed in on the Bluetooth antenna, which looked like a dark, square block. Getting that into the right spot caused him a great deal of trouble, he said. “Under the microscope, we actually welded it on, by hand,” he said.

Well, I guess that answers the question in the headline. Turns out the Swiss watch industry is terrified of the smartwatch’s effect on the $1,200 price segment on their watches which have an accuracy of around 2 seconds per day. Per day?!

Freemium is hard » Marco.org

Marco Arment on how Shuveb Hussain saw app purchases plummet when he went ot freemium:

Freemium is hard. Its effectiveness depends on where you can put that purchase barrier in your app. Many app types simply don’t have a good place for it. In this case, Shuveb faces the fatal combination of two major problems: • His app is a lightly used utility, but he only stands to make money from heavy use. His free tier is good enough for most users.
• His purchase barrier — more than one article per day — discourages more frequent use, which hinders habit-building. When faced with a paywall, most people will try to avoid it unless there’s a compelling reason to pay. The few customers who hit Comfy Read’s paywall probably just think, “I guess I won’t send this article to my Kindle,” or “I guess I’ll use another app for this.” Users aren’t given the chance to let the app become a crucial part of their workflow or build any loyalty toward it, which would make them more willing to pay, before hitting a paywall.

Sony cripples the ‘8GB’ Xperia M4 Aqua » Xperia Blog

We have the European E2303 retail model of the Xperia M4 Aqua, which is SIM free so should have less bloatware than carrier versions. It is running firmware build 26.1.A.1.100 and the screenshots you see below are straight out of the box without installing any new apps. You can see that out of 8GB of storage, 4GB is taken up by Android 5.0 and just over 2GB of pre-installed apps. For our model, this leaves a paltry 1.26GB for our own apps, media, photos and videos. No problem, you might say – just delete some unwanted apps. However, most of the apps are baked in and cannot be uninstalled.

Largest one: Facebook (why?), followed by Google Play Services (124MB) and Android System WebView (120MB) and Google+ (110MB). There’s also Chrome in the list. You can use an SD card, but that’s not ideal. Sony also claims – apparently wrongly – that there’s 3GB of free space. (For comparison, the 8GB iPhone 5C has 4.9GB free for users.)

Start up: find a doppelgänger!, privacy woes, voice input’s promise, Brazil’s smartphone boom, and more

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How my doppelgänger used the Internet to find and befriend me » Fusion

Kashmir Hill:

For some reason, we’re obsessed with the idea of finding people in the world who look like us and the wondrousness of looking into a flesh-and-blood mirror. It’s fascinating enough that Canadian photographer Francois Brunelle has spent the last 14 years finding doppelgängers and taking their portraits. He told CBS News he loves capturing the shock that happens when they meet, and that he endlessly gets emails from people who want him to help them find their look-alike. I asked him why he finds face-twins so compelling. “I don’t really know,” he responded by email. “The fascination of seeing two same-looking people side by side.” With the rise of facial recognition, having a doppelgänger can sometimes be problematic. In 2011, a Massachusetts man had his license revoked because an anti-fraud system that scanned people’s photos decided he looked too much like another driver.

My ears, my eyes, my Apple Watch » Living with Usher Syndrome

Molly Watt:

On leaving the ReSound Offices [where she was fitted with hearing aids that connect directly her iPhone] and within 15 minutes I had my Apple Watch set up and it was a real “WOW” moment when I made my first call to my Dad, via my Apple Watch, his voice came straight into my ears, he sounded different, so much clearer than before, it dawned on me, I’d never heard my Dad’s real voice before, my Mum, ever faithful support and chauffeur sat beside me sounded totally different, even I sounded different to myself, it was strange, very strange, hard to process but it made me feel so emotional that day, day one, I was experiencing so much, new things for the first time ever!

I’ve linked to Watt before; her posts are such wonderful examples of how technology can enable people who would otherwise be excluded from so much.

Meet Apple PR’s worst nightmare » Fortune

Philip Elmer-DeWitt:

it’s at WWDC that Gurman’s shoe-leather reporting shines brightest, and he’s worked this year’s event harder than ever. If you want to know what’s coming Monday — or at least what’s expected — you might as well start with the round-up Gurman published Friday. It’s the post everybody else is linking to, including Wall Street analysts. I caught up to Gurman on Saturday at his parents’ home in Los Angeles where, lacking an invitation from Apple, he will watch Monday’s keynote remotely. He’s got one more year in Michigan, where he’s taking a lot of technical courses — software design, server structure, data analysis — at the School of Information. To carve out more time for coursework he cut back this year on day-to-day rumors to focus on the big scoops. After graduation he’s thinking about business school — he likes Stanford — and relocation to San Francisco or New York.

Gurman has got more and more things exactly right as time has gone on.

Talking computers pose a threat to current Apple versus Google market segmentation. Beyond Peak Google. » Praxtime

Nathan Taylor:

Google Now is already shipping and riding a technological tidal wave of machine learning. Let’s tie this back to the discussion on native ads. If Google owns the voice interaction channel to the internet, and can do branded “native ads” whenever someone talks into their phone or watch, then Peak Google is solved. Google will be launched into the next wave without being eclipsed. Billions are (potentially) at stake. Where’s the closest restaurant I’ll enjoy? What’s the best toothpaste to buy? How much are tickets to the game? What apartment can I afford to rent? What kind of car should I buy? Who should I marry? Except for that last question, I’m sure Google will eventually be capable and quite happy to answer. With proper brand product placement of course. And a small finder’s fee owed by the end vendor for any purchase. As Google becomes the front end to a potentially huge new voice interaction distribution channel, they’ll take their cut.

A complete taxonomy of internet chum » The Awl

John Mahoney on those annoying boxes that try to tempt you to click somewhere else, which he calls “chumboxes”:

Like everything else on the internet, traffic flowing through chumboxes must be tracked in order for everyone to be paid. Each box in the grid’s performance can be tracked both individually and in context of its neighbors. This allows them to be highly optimized; some chum is clearly better than others. As a byproduct of this optimization, an aesthetic has arisen. An effective chumbox clearly plays on reflex and the subconscious. The chumbox aesthetic broadcasts our most basic, libidinal, electrical desires back at us. And gets us to click.

Come and meet “Skin Thing”, “Old Person’s Face”, “Miracle Cure Thing” and the rest.

Global markets foreshadow low-cost smartphone opportunity in Brazil » Jana Blog

137 million people in Brazil own a mobile phone, and one-third [41m] of them own a smartphone. Brazil is the second largest country for downloads within the Google Play Store, and its citizens are some of the most eager app consumers. Brazil’s active Android smartphone market presents a huge opportunity for device manufacturers to capture the other 91 million mobile subscribers as they make their first ever smartphone purchase. In recent years, other countries have seen a massive adoption of smartphones thanks to a rush of competing brands entering the market and driving down handset costs. The smartphone market in Brazil is big, but could it be bigger?

Main installed base players: Samsung (50%), Motorola (21.1%) and LG (17%).

Exclusive: In ‘year of Apple Pay’, many top retailers remain skeptical » Reuters

Nandita Bose worked through the top 100 retailers in the US asking whether they would support Apple Pay:

Many companies that accept Apple Pay report that they and their customers are happy with it. Whole Foods spokesman Michael Silverman said that Apple Pay transactions accounted for 2% of its sales dollars as of March and that it expects use to rise. “Our shoppers are really enjoying the speed, convenience and security of Apple Pay,” he said. But for other retailers and consumers, Apple has yet to answer the question “what is in it for us if we use Apple Pay?” said Alberto Jimenez, program director for mobile payments at IBM, which provides technology to mobile wallet makers and retailers. Jimenez would not say whether Apple is among their customers. The program doesn’t offer loyalty rewards to customers, as companies such as Starbucks do with their mobile applications, nor does it provide customer information to retailers about Apple Pay users. For 28 of the retailers surveyed by Reuters, lack of access to data about customers and their buying habits is a key reason they don’t accept Apple Pay. “One of the biggest concerns is data control,” said Mario De Armas, senior director, international payments at the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Apple is expected to provide some sort of way for retailers to collect loyalty data about customers – although this seems contrary to its point about not tracking your purchases. Clearly though there’s a tension between retailers and Apple over this. Now read on…

The online privacy lie is unraveling » TechCrunch

Natasha Lomas:

The [US] report, entitled The Tradeoff Fallacy: How marketers are misrepresenting American consumers and opening them up to exploitation, is authored by three academics from the University of Pennsylvania, and is based on a representative national cell phone and wireline phone survey of more than 1,500 Americans age 18 and older who use the internet or email “at least occasionally”. Key findings on American consumers include that — • 91% disagree (77% of them strongly) that “If companies give me a discount, it is a fair exchange for them to collect information about me without my knowing”
• 71% disagree (53% of them strongly) that “It’s fair for an online or physical store to monitor what I’m doing online when I’m there, in exchange for letting me use the store’s wireless internet, or Wi-Fi, without charge.”
• 55% disagree (38% of them strongly) that “It’s okay if a store where I shop uses information it has about me to create a picture of me that improves the services they provide for me.”

HMRC ditches Microsoft for Google, sends data offshore » The Channel

Kat Hall:

Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) is the first major department to move to Google Apps, part of an apparent loosening of Microsoft’s stranglehold on the government’s software services. The department will join the Cabinet Office and Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) in deploying the fluffy white stuff. HMRC has 70,000 staff, and as such will be Whitehall’s first mass deployment of Google’s cloud services. The Cabinet Office currently has 2,500 users on Gmail. The government said in March the Google Apps suit best met the user needs for the Cabinet Office and DCMS. “Other solutions (e.g Microsoft 365) also scored highly, but the advanced collaboration and flexible working features of Google Apps were the best fit for our needs,” it said at the time.

Wow. That’s a huge blow to Microsoft, huge win for Google.

Start up: drone questions, Baidu barred in AI comp, why Apple shunned HERE, and more

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This is what it looks like when you’re upset, Google. Photo by donnierayjones on Flickr.

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The UX of Commercial Drones » UX Magazine

Dan Saffer:

Let’s examine the customer experience as demonstrated by Amazon: The drone flies in and lands on the back patio. The customer leaves the house. The drone releases the package and flies away. The customer grabs the package and heads back inside. This is all well and good, but a lot of important detail still needs to be addressed. For starters, how does the customer know when the drone is arriving? People aren’t going to want their packages sitting outside unattended, especially in inclement weather (assuming drones will even be able to fly when it’s raining or snowing). And people won’t want to sit around looking out their window for half an hour. But what might work is something like what the car service Uber does: showing you via an app where your drone is and how long until it arrives, as well as alerting you via SMS when it does arrive. This would provide a level of assurance, especially at the onset when the idea of a drone carrying an emergency last-minute birthday gift will seem the height of novelty. When the drone does appear, it’s going to be really tempting to race out and grab the package, especially for kids—and perhaps for dogs and excitable adults as well. One problem: between the person and the package are several spinning, knife-like blades that form the rotors of the drone. Being accidentally hit in the face by one would be a great way to lose an eye or obtain a nasty cut.

“We included plasters in case you get hurt!”

Computer scientists are astir after Baidu team is barred from AI competition » NYTimes.com

John Markoff:

The competition, which is known as the “Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge,” is organized annually by computer scientists at Stanford University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Michigan. It requires that computer systems created by the teams classify the objects in a set of digital images into 1,000 different categories. The rules of the contest permit each team to run test versions of their programs twice weekly ahead of a final submission as they train their programs to “learn” what they are seeing. However, on Tuesday, the contest organizers posted a public statement noting that between November and May 30, different accounts had been used by the Baidu team to submit more than 200 times to the contest server, “far exceeding the specified limit of two submissions per week.”

Previously reported here, before the multiple entries were spotted. Baidu’s team calls their multiple entries “a mistake”.

The new Google Photos app is disturbingly good at data-mining your photos » Fusion

Daniela Hernandez:

What’s particularly incredible is the facial recognition. The app sees individuals in photos even if they are barely in the picture, far in the background, or featured in a photo within a photo. When I did a search for my adult sister’s face, it recognized her in a photo I took of a 20-year-old elementary school picture of her. When I searched for my father’s face, it included a photo I took of a decorative tile-wall in Mexico. I thought it had messed up, because I didn’t see any people in the photo, but when I looked closely, there was a tiny version of my dad at the bottom. Facial recognition has gotten very powerful. Google also seems to know how to flatter its users. When I typed in “skinny,” the search unearthed pictures of me, friends, my sister and my mother, as if it was trying to compliment us. But when I searched for other adjectives, particularly negative ones — fat, sad, upset, angry — Google Photos came up empty. (Some of my colleagues got similar results.) The technology to help computers decipher emotions is out there already, so there’s no technical reason why Google isn’t turning up results for those searches. It gave us results for “love,” but not for “hate.” Whether it’s that we don’t take photos of ugly things, or that Google is shielding us, is something we’d really like to ask the search giant.

You could pick up the phone and ask them…

Eric Schmidt on why Google won’t fail » Business Insider

Jillian D’Onfro:

Shareholders understand Google’s search and ad business, [Schmidt said at the AGM], but they don’t necessarily understand the other projects that the company invests in, like self-driving cars or smart contact lenses. On past earnings calls, analysts and investors have sounded impatient when questioning how those businesses are going to ultimately pay off. But Schmidt assured shareholders Wednesday that ambitious goals like cutting down on car crashes or measuring a diabetic’s blood sugar through their tears are the kinds of things that will ultimately make Google a long-lasting, successful company. “Most companies ultimately fail because they do one thing very well but they don’t think of the next thing, they don’t broaden their mission, they don’t challenge themselves, they don’t continually build on that platform in one way or another,” he says. “They become incrementalists. And Google is very committed to not doing that. We understand the technological change is essentially revolutionary, not evolutionary.”

Are there any lessons from technology companies that have lasted more than a century, such as Nintendo, IBM and Nokia?

Here’s why Apple didn’t want to buy Nokia’s mapping unit HERE » Forbes

Parmy Olson:

Apple appears intent on fixing the problems that cropped up from relying on third-party map providers. One of the reasons Apple Maps was so buggy from when it was launched in June 2012 is the fact that its data percolated in from multiple sources like TomTom, Acxiom, Waze and Yelp By building its own geography dataset, Apple can pare down its reliance on sources like TomTom’s TeleAtlas. Apple’s likely vision is that years from now, we’ll have forgotten about how bad Apple Maps was, because Apple will have taken complete control of its mapping infrastructure and made it watertight.

There’s still plenty of money in dumb phones » Quartz

Leo Mirani:

there’s little doubt that dumb phones and feature phones are a shrinking market. Between the first quarter of 2013 and the first quarter of 2014, the market for non-smartphones shrunk by a 14%, according to CCS Insight (pdf), a research firm. This year, some 590 million non-smartphones will be sold. By 2019, that number will shrink to 350m. But 350m phones in one calendar year is still a lot of phones. And it is, as Microsoft’s Pekka Haverinen of Microsoft’s feature phone division tells Quartz, a predictable market with high volumes and a high market share for Microsoft. It’s not just device-makers who stand to profit from cheap, basic phones. Ericsson reckons (pdf) that by 2020, there will 9.2bn mobile subscriptions, of which 1.4bn will be non-3G subscriptions. This huge market is hungry for services.

Well, sorta. Microsoft’s featurephone segment is shrinking really rapidly; this is a market which is being eaten up by cheap Chinese players for whom, as they say, “your [profit] margin is my opportunity”.

Twitter just killed Politwoops » Gawker

JK Trotter:

A Twitter spokesperson just provided the following statement to Gawker regarding the apparent suspension of Politwoops’ access to Twitter’s developer API, which enabled the Sunlight Foundation-funded site to track tweets deleted by hundreds of politicians. Summarized: Politwoops is no more.

Earlier today we spoke to the Sunlight Foundation, to tell them we will not restore Twitter API access for their Politwoops site. We strongly support Sunlight’s mission of increasing transparency in politics and using civic tech and open data to hold government accountable to constituents, but preserving deleted Tweets violates our developer agreement. Honoring the expectation of user privacy for all accounts is a priority for us, whether the user is anonymous or a member of Congress.

The post also says that Twitter was considering a “quiet reversal” but found itself snookered on the question of “why them and not others”. But if someone tweets something publicly, haven’t they yielded their expectation of “privacy”? In the print days, the UK Ministry of Defence could demand back documents about cruise missile sitings from The Guardian on the basis of copyright. That seems to be what Twitter is imposing here.

Start up: watch the commuters!, SamsungPay’s big obstacle, Apple gets mappy, and more

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Mars: likely to remain inhabited only by robots for quite a long time yet. Photo by ridingwithrobots on Flickr.

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The Samsung Galaxy S6 might be the best Android phone of 2015, but it is unusable » Android Beat

Rajesh Pandey:

The Moto X 2014, which has 2GB of RAM, has around 700MB of free RAM with a similar setup. Despite the 1GB difference in RAM, the Moto X — running Android 5.1 — feels significantly smoother to use. The RAM management issue on the Galaxy S6 is so bad that jumping between a Chrome tab and another app running will force the Chrome tab to reload. This makes the phone completely useless for any kind of serious browsing or for doing any transactions through a bank’s website. I have to restart my Galaxy S6 once every 24 hours to make sure the handset does not feel sluggish and slow. On the days that I do forget to reboot the handset, the phone gets so slow that it feels like I am using some low-end Android device and not the best Android handset in the market currently. It’s nothing short of a miracle that I have not yet thrown the phone in sheer frustration. In all probability, the poor RAM management of the Galaxy S6 stems from different memory leaks present in Android 5.0 Lollipop. The Moto X and Nexus devices had similar issues on Android 5.0, so it makes sense that the Galaxy S6 has them as well. However, the Galaxy S6 was released more than 5 months after Google had released Lollipop, which means that Samsung had more than ample time to track down and fix the memory leaks.

I’ve previously linked to the complaints about Lollipop having memory leaks. I haven’t seen this complaint before, though.

The Apple vs. Google battle has changed » Above Avalon

Neil Cybart:

Google I/O made it clear that Google needs Apple and iOS. To ignore such a vibrant base of highly-engaged users, especially when other companies like Facebook enjoy a prominent place in the platform, would be highly destructive to Google’s ambitions. On the other hand, Apple also needs Google as its services remain very popular among iOS users. However, judging from Apple’s prior actions and mission statement to personalize technology, I would expect Apple will continue to try to minimize its dependence on Google as such a situation represents a long-term threat to Apple’s mission. Similar to how the Nexus experience provides the closest thing to pure Android, I suspect Apple wants to continue down the path of being in a position to ship an iPhone and suite of apps and services that make it possible to live within the Apple ecosystem without much interference from Google. While most consumers will end up settling somewhere in the middle, using both Apple and Google products and services, it is this quest to control the entire user experience that ultimately validates the competition between Apple and Google as genuine. The probability of a world where Android excels as a direct result of iOS faltering is becoming more remote as time goes on. Instead, Google is becoming more reliant on a healthy iOS platform…

Watch the City of London pulling in commuters from across the south east like an imploding star » CityMetric

Last week we ran some fascinating maps [Alasdair Rae] created showing the population density (and, consequently, urban area) of major British cities. Now, he’s created a visualisation that shows the limits of this type of static density modelling: an animation that shows the massive population shift that takes place every day as workers commute into the City of London. The visualisation is based on 2011 census data showing daily commuter journeys into the square mile, London’s main financial distract. It shows commuters speeding into the city’s centre from as far away as Bournemouth and Margate. It’s also completely hypnotic to watch:

Now I want the commute home too…

Toyota unintended acceleration and the big bowl of “spaghetti” code » Safety Research & Strategies, Inc

[Embedded software expert Michael] Barr testified: “There are a large number of functions that are overly complex. By the standard industry metrics some of them are untestable, meaning that it is so complicated a recipe that there is no way to develop a reliable test suite or test methodology to test all the possible things that can happen in it. Some of them are even so complex that they are what is called unmaintainable, which means that if you go in to fix a bug or to make a change, you’re likely to create a new bug in the process. Just because your car has the latest version of the firmware — that is what we call embedded software — doesn’t mean it is safer necessarily than the older one….And that conclusion is that the failsafes are inadequate. The failsafes that they have contain defects or gaps. But on the whole, the safety architecture is a house of cards. It is possible for a large percentage of the failsafes to be disabled at the same time that the throttle control is lost.” Even a Toyota programmer described the engine control application as “spaghetti-like” in an October 2007 document Barr read into his testimony. Koopman was highly critical of Toyota’s computer engineering process.

Remember how shonky the interfaces for VCRs and DVDs were? What if the people who did those were writing your car code? What if they already are?

Jobs at Apple » Apple

Job Summary The Maps team is looking for a web technology expert to help make maps work seamlessly on the web. The ideal candidate will be a JavaScript expert, have in- depth knowledge of various core web technologies, and be proficient with web developer tools for debugging and performance analysis.

If you have an iOS device and use iCloud.com, you can use Apple Maps online to do Find My iPhone. Either Apple is looking to expand its desktop Maps so that it’s not just an OSX experience, or this is just strengthening the FMI team.

Mars One reveals true number of applicants » Matter on Medium

Elmo Keep:

On a new page on its site, The Science of Screening Astronauts, Mars One writes, “The total number of completed and submitted applications was 4,227.” Citing a report by NBC, Matter reported the figure of publicly available video applications at 2,782. We don’t know that 4,227 is any more real than 200,000. It’s just what they’re self-reporting. (Mars One did not provide us any clarification despite repeat queries.) Regardless, that falls far short of the 200,000 widely reported initially by countless media outlets, and shorter yet of the one million applicants CEO Bas Lansdorp anticipated at the launch of the project.

This is starting to feel like Capricorn One.

Why SamsungPay is toast » Starpoint Blog

Tom Noyes (who – reminder – called it correctly that the iPhone 6 would have NFC and payments back in May of 2014):

Let’s assume that Samsung solves ALL of the technical issues above and now SamsungPay works on all Android devices. Everyone knows that MNOs decide what gets pre-installed on the phones they subsidize (even Apple). Six weeks before Mobile World Congress [in March], Google made a strategic deal with the US MNOs to buy ISIS in exchange for Android Pay (the new Google wallet) becoming part of Google Mandatory Services (GMS.. just like search and gmail). Part of this is also a new android registration flow that addresses THE KEY weakness of Android profitability.. it gets consumers to add a card and play account (Apple brilliantly required an iTunes account… with accompanying credit card.. in launch of iPhone). Samsung’s wallet could still work.. however IT IS NOT PRE LOADED.. so this is what the consumer would have to do (AFTER REGISTERING FOR ANDROID PAY): 1) Find out about Samsung pay
2) Install Samsung Pay
3) Register for Samsung Pay
4) Understand where they can use Samsung Pay
5) Wave it near the Mag Head reader
6) Then use Android pay for in-app and play purchases..
Forget about the technical issues.

But it can attempt it in other countries.

Sizing up the opportunity for Apple Pay » Kantar

Carolina Milanesi:

Among iPhone 6 and 6 Plus owners in the US, 13% have used Apple Pay, and 11% are planning to do so. Lack of trust and knowledge do not play a major role as reasons not to use it. Only 2.6% said they did not use Apple Pay because they do not trust it, and only 4.1% said they did not use it because they do not understand how it works. Eleven percent said they did not use it because their credit cards work just fine, and 58% just answered “no” without adding any more detail. Among Apple Pay users, men were more numerous than women, with 59% versus 41% of users, and 55% versus 45% of intenders. This is not surprising since early adopters tend to skew male, but what is interesting is that adoption of the new iPhone models has been slightly stronger among women at 52% versus 48% for men… …In March 2015, as a measure of comparison, only 7% of Android users we surveyed in the US said they used NFC/mobile payment. Google Wallet has been around since 2010, and any Android device with NFC capability can access it for payments.

I’d say that’s actually a pretty good showing for Google Wallet.

Three Google directors survive challenge over pay » Reuters

Devika Krishna Kumar and Ross Kerber:

Three Google compensation committee members were re-elected on Wednesday, the technology company said at its annual meeting, despite a challenge from a high-profile proxy adviser that raised concerns over executive pay. Google did not immediately detail by how much of a margin the directors won re-election at the meeting, which was webcast. Proxy adviser Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) had recommended that Google shareholders withhold votes for the three directors, saying “mega grants” provided to executive chairman Eric Schmidt and chief business officer Omid Kordestani were “problematic.” ISS recommended that votes be withheld for Google compensation committee members John Doerr, Paul Otellini and Ram Shriram. ISS also recommended investors withhold votes from Google director John Hennessy, president of Stanford University, citing what it said is his role as a non-independent member of the board’s nominating committee.