Category Archives: links

Links from all over, collected

Start up: Google v EC, decrypting ransomware, Apple’s troubled app reviews, and more

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Hard to find off the US’s west coast. Photo by aftab on Flickr.

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

Files encrypted by CoinVault ransomware? New free tool may decrypt them » PCWorld

Loek Essers:

Victims of the CoinVault ransomware might be able to decrypt their files with a free tool released by Kaspersky Lab together with the Dutch police.

The tool can be found at https://noransom.kaspersky.com. The application uses decryption keys found by the Dutch police as part of an investigation.

Ransomware like CoinVault encrypts data on a disk or blocks access to a computer system. It is usually installed by exploiting a vulnerability on victims’ computers via phishing emails or links to malicious websites.

Unlike other ransomware, CoinVault lets victims see a list of the files it encrypted and decrypt one for free to try to get people to pay up.

The National High Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) of the Dutch police recently obtained a database from a CoinVault command-and-control server containing decryption keys, the Dutch police said in a news release. The information obtained from that database allowed Kaspersky to build a decryption tool.

Not all of the keys, but a useful start.

Final Words – The HTC One M9 Review: Part 2 » Anandtech

Joshua Ho:

Battery life is probably the most important aspect of any smartphone, and a poor showing here can be enough to write off a phone. HTC has traditionally done quite well here despite using a smaller battery in their phones than average. Unfortunately, this isn’t true of the One M9. Despite using a newer SoC and a bigger battery, HTC regresses significantly in battery life when compared to the One M8…

The camera of the One M9 is also a weak point, despite significant changes on HTC’s part in this area. Unfortunately, the post-processing here is just not acceptable, and the results of the camera are equally unacceptable.

Poor battery life, poor camera. HTC’s got problems – if people listen to reviews.

Sardine population collapses, prompting ban on commercial fishing » SFGate

Peter Fimrite:

The sardine population along the West Coast has collapsed due to changing ocean conditions and other factors, including allegations of overfishing, prompting regulators Monday to cancel fishing next season and schedule a vote this week on an immediate emergency ban.

The Pacific Fishery Management Council agreed to close the fishery from Mexico to the Canadian border starting July 1, when the 2015 season begins, after federal scientists documented a 91% decline in sardine numbers along the West Coast since 2007.

Water shortages, sardine population collapse. What’s next for California? When will people notice what’s happening?

Apple’s App Store review process is hurting users, but we’re not allowed to talk about it. » Medium

Kushal Dave:

There should be outrage.

Think about how much ink has been spilled over Amazon vs. Hachette, TimeWarner vs CBS, Verizon vs. net neutrality, Google vs. Yelp. Here we have a gatekeeper, which also has lock-in, and it has found the only reasons to close the gates that could be worse than profit: paternalism and complacency.

Many of us are afraid of retribution for speaking out too loudly. Apple has, unbelievably, made a threat explicitly in writing: “If your App is rejected, we have a Review Board that you can appeal to. If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps.” If Apple made good on its promise to penalize developers who complain in public, who would we appeal to?

Apple’s process makes sense for Apple, but less for developers. Users do get hurt by slower updates, certainly. But Apple is paranoid about apps being updated to malicious or other “embarrassing” forms, and apparently doesn’t have Google’s virus checking-in-the-cloud capability (though it does have a kill switch). The paranoia has now become routine.

But Apple does listen to complaints that reach the press. It should probably update that part of its guidelines.

Europe to accuse Google of illegally abusing its dominance – FT.com

Alex Barker, Christian Oliver and Anne-Sylvaine Chassany:

Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition commissioner, is to say that the US group will soon be served with a formal charge sheet alleging that it breached antitrust rules by diverting traffic from rivals to favour its own services, according to two people familiar with the case.

Serving Google with a so-called statement of objections will be the opening salvo in one of the defining antitrust cases of the internet era. It could prove as epic as the decade-long battle with Microsoft that ultimately cost the company €2bn in fines.

The commission’s move comes after a torrid five-year investigation that Google came close to settling without charges last year. The draft deal collapsed after fierce objections were raised by ministers in France and Germany, and by some of the continent’s most powerful telecoms and media groups.

Told you. Recap: Why Google’s struggles with the EC – and FTC – matter.

Google, Microsoft, Stall Points, and Growth » Paul Kedrosky

When might Google have its Microsoft moment? That is, when will it begin its inexorable decline – as most aging tech companies do when their growth stalls, and as Microsoft did – largely unbeknownst to (and even denied by) most observers? How might we know?

I have a few things I look for when thinking about inflection points in aging technology companies. Not all of these conditions need to be satisfied, but at least some of them do.

There are five major parts of the argument:
1. Stock compensation loses its luster
2. Declining growth
3. No longer hiring for innovation
4. Price & margin pressure in core business
5. Government action

Kedrosky asks smart questions, which yields surprising answers.

Apple acquires Israeli camera tech company LinX Imaging for ~$20m » Mac Rumors

Juli Clover:

Apple has purchased Israeli camera technology company LinX Imaging for approximately $20m, reports The Wall Street Journal. LinX specializes in creating multi-aperture camera equipment for mobile devices and it’s possible that Apple will use the company’s technology in upcoming iOS devices.

Last year, LinX announced the launch of miniature multi-aperture cameras half the height of standard mobile cameras with the ability to create “stunning color images and high accuracy depth maps” for SLR image quality without the bulk of an SLR camera.

The image quality of mobile cameras has reached a dead end. Device makers are striving to differentiate using imaging capabilities but the pixel size race has ended and next generation cameras do not reveal any dramatic improvements. LinX cameras revolutionize mobile photography and broaden the usability span and user experience, allowing us to leave our SLRs at home.

The engineers at LinX have solved all problems associated with combining multiple images captured from different points in space such as registration errors and occlusion related artifacts which are seen on competing technologies.

LinX’s technology uses software to extract depth information for each pixel to create a depth map for that can also be used for 3D image reconstruction. LinX’s website is now defunct, but the company offered products with two, three, and four camera arrays in multiple configurations and sizes. Its most recent technology was downscaled enough to be ready for use in mobile devices.

I linked to this writeup rather than the WSJ’s because of the background MacRumors found. Face recognition? 3D reconstruction? Lots of possibilities in this one. The Authentec fingerprint reader was incorporated within 18 months of purchasing that company – but quite possibly Apple is already working on incorporating these cameras into its products. I’d expect them in products in 2016.

Start up: spotting comment trolls, stopping piracy Of Thrones, where’s Android One?, and more

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Try putting those on Bittorrent, suckahs. Photo by Jemimus on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Scientists develop algorithm that can auto-ban internet trolls » The Stack

Martin Anderson:

The study found that on CNN the studied trolls were more likely to initiate new posts or sub-threads, whilst at Breitbart and IGN they were more likely to weigh into existing threads.

The report does not exonerate host communities of all blame for troll behaviour, finding that immediately intolerant communities are more likely to foster trolls:

“[communities] may play a part in incubating antisocial behavior. In fact, users who are excessively censored early in their lives are more likely to exhibit antisocial behavior later on. Furthermore, while communities appear initially forgiving (and are relatively slow to ban these antisocial users), they become less tolerant of such users the longer they remain in a community. This results in an increased rate at which their posts are deleted, even after controlling for post quality.”

Seems mostly accurate, apart from calling breitbart.com a “political hub”. I’d go for “troll-employing troll magnet”, personally.

Game Of Thrones leak and watermark: a stupid tracking system » bru’s blog

The first four episodes of game of thrones leaked nearly 36 hours ago. They have been extensively downloaded, and the only tracking set up HBO seemed to be a watermark in the bottom left corner of the screen. Once blurred, it is useless. This impresses me. It’s 2015 and all you’re using is a “confirm you’re deleted” + “your copy is watermarked” for protection? There are simple schemes that would have allowed HBO to track the leak.

The idea is very simple: make each copy unique in a non-visible way.

Seems like the editing to create unique copies would be a hassle. Not sending them out (by getting people to come in to previews?) might be simpler. But there would be geographic reasons against that. No matter what, though, it only delays the piracy by 36 hours or so. That’s the bigger problem.

BOMBSHELL: MUSL employee might have rigged Hot Lotto computerized drawing » Lottery Post

Prosecutors countered this motion by claiming they have a “prima facie,” or at first glance, case that Tipton tampered with lottery equipment.

In their reply to the defense’s motion, prosecutors argued that Tipton’s co-workers said he “was ‘obsessed’ with root kits, a type of computer program that can be installed quickly, set to do just about anything, and then self-destruct without a trace.” The prosecution claimed a witness will testify that Tipton told him before December 2010 that he had a self-destructing root kit.

Prosecutors also argued in their reply that Tipton was in the draw room on Nov. 20, 2010, “ostensibly to change the time on the computers.” The prosecution alleged the cameras in the room on that date recorded about one second per minute instead of how they normally operate, recording every second a person is in the room.

“Four of the five individuals who have access to control the camera’s settings will testify they did not change the cameras’ recording instructions; the fifth person is Defendant,” the prosecution wrote.

Someone’s writing the screenplay already, yes? The accused bought a ticket that won $14.3m.

What’s Become of Android One? » CCS Insight

Peter Bryer is an analyst:

our checks indicate that Android One has had a limited direct effect on the market, despite initial enthusiasm for the programme. Sales of Android One-based smartphones began more than half a year ago in India, but volumes don’t stand out.

The first Android One products came from Karbonn, Micromax and Spice, with more familiar brands expected to begin adopting the platform. Acer, Asus, HTC, Lenovo and Panasonic were among the smartphone manufacturers listed by Google as partners in the project, but this interest appears to have stalled.

The fading momentum of Android One is an indication of the expanding selection of equally well-specified, low-cost smartphones and tablets in emerging markets. Hundreds of models are available at $100 or below — a once impossible price band has become very ordinary.

The standard having been set, others have matched it. All works for Google. But see later…

Flipkart’s move to dump mobile site could hit Google » WSJ

Rolfe Winkler:

Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart has decided it doesn’t need to rely on the Web to lure shoppers, dumping its mobile site and pushing visitors to its app. That move may spell trouble for the future of Google ‘s cash-cow search engine, which relies heavily on links to shopping sites.

Smartphone users that go to the mobile websites of either Flipkart or its sister site Myntra no longer see the same virtual store shelves as when they visit those sites from a personal computer. Instead they see a message to download the sites’ mobile apps.

The problem for Google is that a large percentage of its ad business is driven by paid links that direct users to e-commerce sites. But mobile apps are walled gardens unto themselves, unconnected by links to the broader Web.

A general problem, but if it starts happening early in countries like India, that is a problem for Google.

Brazil’s iPhone investment falls short on promises of jobs, lower prices » Reuters

Brad Haynes:

The Brazilian iPhone was meant to mark a new era.

When Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group agreed in April 2011 to make Apple products here, President Dilma Rousseff and her advisers promised that up to $12 billion in investments over six years would transform the Brazilian technology sector, putting it on the cutting edge of touch screen development. A new supply chain would be created, generating high-quality jobs and bringing down prices of the coveted gadgets.

Four years later, none of that has come true.

Foxconn has created only a small fraction of the 100,000 jobs that the government projected, and most of the work is in low-skill assembly. There is little sign that it has catalyzed Brazil’s technology sector or created much of a local supply chain.

Not quite clear where the blame lies – high expectation by Foxconn, local taxes or local culture.

Formal charges may be next in Europe’s Google antitrust inquiry » NYTimes.com

James Kanter and Conor Dougherty:

Some experts say that Mr. Almunia’s unsuccessful strategy makes further attempts to settle the case without formal charges unlikely.

“Given the history of failed attempts to reach a commitment decision, I just don’t see what she would gain from going down this route again, unless Google has promised more concessions that we don’t know about,” said Liza Lovdahl-Gormsen, the director of the Competition Law Forum at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law.

Without formal charges, Ms. Lovdahl-Gormsen said, “Google might try to buy themselves time by offering commitments that are unlikely to be accepted by the commission, and that it knows won’t be accepted by the market, simply because it does not want to be faced with the instrument of torture — the statement of objections.”

Expect news on Wednesday.

My voice is my passport: Android gets a “Trusted Voice” smart lock » Ars Technica

How secure is this system? We’re wondering the same thing. The popup when you enable “Trusted Voice” warns that the feature is not as secure as a traditional lock screen and that “Someone with a similar voice or a recording of your voice could unlock your device.” We’d love to test it out, but it hasn’t rolled out to any of our devices yet—we only know about it thanks to a report from Android Police.

Android Police hasn’t given it any scrutiny (none of its devices – even Nexuses – seem to have got it.) The commenters on AP don’t seem enamoured, though, pointing out how easy it would be to spoof (as Google itself admits). So there’s now pattern, PIN, face and voice unlock, and also “trusted device” (Android Wear). Flexibility is good, but they aren’t all equally robust, which feels like a problem.

Start up: S6 battery life, Datasift squeezed, notifying Apple Watch, and more

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Endangered species (one of many)? Photo by DaveCrosby on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Spread straight from the fridge. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

A Japanese court has ordered Google to take down negative business » Quartz

Google was ordered by a Japanese court today to take down anonymous negative business reviews of a medical clinic, written by people who said they were former patients. The decision is the latest sign of the spread of the “right to be forgotten” concept from Europe to Asia.

The case pitted a Japanese medical clinic against the search engine, Japan’s largest. The plaintiff, an unnamed doctor, said in a signed affidavit that the reviews complaining of poor service were false, one person briefed on the case said.

In the ruling, which was not made public but was reviewed by Quartz, Chiba District Court court ruled that Google must remove the reviews from its local and global search results, or face a ¥300,000 ($2,494) fine.

Google will appeal, but reversal is unlikely.

A ‘darker narrative’ of print’s future from Clay Shirky » NYTimes.com

Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times’s ombuds..person, relaying emails from Shirky, who thinks we’re currently in a lull of print decline (which he says will go fast – which the US saw in 2007-9 – and then slow, as now, and then fast at some time in the near future:

The problem with print is that the advantageous returns to scale from physical distribution of newspapers become disadvantageous when scale shrinks. The ad revenue from a print run of 500,000 would be 16 percent less than for 600,000 at best, but the costs wouldn’t fall by anything like 16%, eroding print margins. There is some threshold, well above 100,000 copies and probably closer to 250,000, where nightly print runs stop making economic sense. This risk is increased by The New York Times’s cross-subsidy of print, with its print+digital bundle. This bundle creates the risk of rapid future readjustment, when advertisers reconsider print CPM in light of reduced consumption and pass-around of print by all-access subscribers. (Public editor note: C.P.M. is the cost to the advertiser per thousand readers or viewers, a common measurement in advertising.)

Both your Sunday and weekday readerships are already near important psychological thresholds for advertisers — one million and 500,000. When no advertiser can reach a million readers in any print ad in the Times (2017, on present evidence) and weekday advertising reaches less than half a million (2018, using the 6 percent decline figure you quoted), there will be downward pressure on C.P.M.s. [cost to the advertiser to reach a thousand readers; high CPMs are good for a publisher].

And then things unravel, Shirky suggests.

Galaxy S6 Edge battery life – first 24 hours » Android Authority

Nirave Gondhia is starting a series where he tests the battery life on his new phone:

Testing battery life can be subjective as each person’s usage will vary widely but to try and provide some context to these battery tests, I copied all my data and apps from my Galaxy Note 4 (running Lollipop). Whereas the Galaxy S6 Edge lasted just over 14 hours, my Galaxy Note 4 would usually last 18 to 22 hours with largely the same apps and services running.

The first thing you will notice about the Galaxy S6 Edge battery is that the first 10% seems to drain very quickly. After this initial short burst, the battery begins to level off and settle down. It’s a strange occurrence that many people have reported but it’s possible this is due to the handset being new – after a few days usage, will it still drain the first 10%?

Reviewers have pointed to the S6 having less battery life than the S5; worth watching how this pans out in real life.

Lost In Mobile to close on 18th April » Lost In Mobile

Shaun McGill:

It’s been a good run, but the time has come to finally close LIM. As you will be aware, the content has dropped significantly in recent weeks and this has been due to workloads elsewhere and a continual problem finding mobile news that I consider worthy of sharing.

The mobile industry has changed to the point that I believe that one-man blogs are unable to offer the kind of benefits readers used to receive and with so many resources and larger services out there, I am struggling to find the motivation to keep posting content.

Been going 13 years. A sign of the times?

It’s time to stop tiptoeing around Joni Mitchell’s health condition » The Globe and Mail

Russell Smith:

No news items have revealed what exactly caused her sudden hospitalization, but all have mentioned that she “suffers from Morgellons disease.” This is because Mitchell herself described the affliction and used its name in an interview in 2010. News stories may then carefully allude to the fact that this “disease” is “mysterious” or even “controversial.” But the damage is done: The phrase “suffers from Morgellons” is quite simply inaccurate, and even harmful, in that it perpetuates a delusion.

Those who claim to be suffering from it are more likely suffering a psychiatric illness, experts say. If that’s the case with Mitchell, we should really be saying she “revealed in 2010 that she suffers from delusional parasitosis.” The name Morgellons was invented by a person who is not a doctor and is not employed by any hospital, university or research institution. It was intensely studied by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, and the CDC’s conclusions, released in 2012, were straightforward: Researchers found no common cause of the disease, and say those who believe they have it have often self-diagnosed after encountering websites that describe it. In other words, it is a delusion that is spread by the Internet.

The fact that newspapers are being so tactful about the possibility of psychiatric disturbance in Mitchell’s case is incongruent with the supposedly new attitudes about mental illness that are being trumpeted in those same newspapers. Aren’t we constantly reading about how we should “end the stigma” when it comes to mental illness? Aren’t we being told that there is no shame in psychiatric disorders, that their sufferers should not be morally judged, that they should be open about their ailments?

Smith’s article makes the point strongly: artists are separate from their creations. If Mitchell (whose music I love) has a mental problem, that doesn’t subtract from her music or any of her achievements. It just means she has a mental problem.

To our users: a community update » PressureNet.io

Pressurenet is an Android app that measures barometric pressure and then tries to crowdsource it for, well, weather and related forecasting. But as happens, it has to try to make some money somewhere – including the sale of past data that it collected:

We are aware of the sensitive nature of selling user-contributed data and we want to be open about exactly what information we collect and what control you have over it.

The data is anonymous and is comprised of: an alphanumerical user id that is not directly linked to any personal user information, atmospheric pressure, location (latitude, longitude, and altitude) and time of the pressure reading, phone model type, whether the phone was charging at the time the reading was sent, as well as some other metadata. PressureNet does not and has never collected any personally identifiable information.

Umm. A location doesn’t identify a person, but if you could track the phone by any other means, you’d have a ton of data.

Twitter ends its partnership with DataSift – firehose access expires on August 13, 2015 » Datasift Blog

Nick Halstead:

With the end of our partnership with Twitter the disruption is not only measured by the impact on our 1,000 direct customers, but on the tens of thousands of companies that use applications that are “DataSift-powered”. Many of these companies create insights that drive direct advertising revenue back into Twitter. A direct switch to Twitter/GNIP will not mitigate that disruption. Today, 80% of our customers use our advanced processing capabilities that are not available from Twitter/GNIP.

Really bad news for Datasift (a British company that was one of the first into the “big data” social space), which is now going to turn to Facebook. What happens if that decides to go in-house, though? Maybe DataSift needs to look at processing for private clients such as finance.

What the Apple Watch means for the Age of Notifications » Medium

Steven Levy:

the Age of Notifications is about to face its biggest mess yet, as alerts move from phone screens to watch faces. Notifications are just about the entire point of a smart watch — you’re not going to be reading books, watching movies or doing spreadsheets on them. And a tilt of the wrist is the perfect delivery system for those little blips.

But having that delivery system on your body makes notifications much harder to ignore. It’s jarring enough to get a phone-buzz notifying you of an alert. When it’s something zapping your skin, it’s even more compelling. What’s more, because it’s so easy to simply twist your wrist to see what the fuss is about, the temptation is all the harder to resist.

I don’t get this. It makes it sound as though people are helpless children who can’t figure out what classes of notification (as in, from which app) interest them. The example he gives – a pointless notification from MLB – would have me deciding that MLB was never again going to get the chance to bother me. You don’t need to know about every incoming email (VIPs is fine, for me). Perhaps some people need to retreat a bit from their phones. But that’s no bad thing, whether it comes from buying a smartwatch or just realising they’re failing to live in the moment.

Start up: PC shipments slump (again), are reviews broken?, Tidal’s challenge, monetising Android and more

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Now containing fewer PCs. Photo by runner310 on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Mercury News editorial: Google’s YouTube Kids should meet TV ad standards » San Jose Mercury News

It’s disappointing that Google didn’t voluntary follow the Federal Communications Commission’s longtime TV standards with its online YouTube Kids app, which ignores basic protections for children whose developing brains cannot grasp the difference between ads and entertainment.

The Federal Trade Commission, not the FCC, has jurisdiction over online commerce, and it needs to catch up. Google apparently decided to push the envelope, given its mission as a public company is to maximize profits.

But as one of the Valley’s biggest success stories — it could reach a market capitalization of $1 trillion in this decade — Google should be a leader in taking responsibility for the welfare of children viewing products designed for them. So should Netflix, Apple and any other Valley company producing or contemplating kids programming.

Now the FTC is investigating. You won’t however have been surprised by Google’s behaviour if you read my piece on Google, EC, antitrust and the FTC, which looked at the tenets the search company works by.

Product reviews are broken » Above Avalon

Neil Cybart:

I still think the world needs independent product reviews. There is enough prior misbehaviour on behalf of companies to suggest such third-party reviews can serve a purpose by giving consumers value. The problem is that many reviewers don’t know what kind of value that is. The move into personalized wearables has largely turned the traditional tech gadget review into an artifact from a begone era. The nature of the tech review should have changed, but many tech reviewers haven’t adapted their review process to this new wave of technology. While adding video may represent a new dimension to the review, the underlying premise of the review needs to be rethought.

I agree with Cybart. Reviews have turned into a mess; the desire on social networks to attract attention by being outrageous dilutes the thoughtful ones. And commenters’ desire to attach a single value to a device’s “worth” – is it one star, five stars? Why is that four stars but this five – wipes subtlety away in pursuit of a blunt distinction.

How TIDAL can deliver on its promises » Music Industry Blog

Mark Mulligan:

With streaming, music fans don’t need to waste time listening to music they don’t like upon first listen. They can bypass the duff. They also tend to listen less to any single piece of music in general because they have so much other music to choose from at no additional cost. Artists earning a 150th per stream of what they earn from a download is thus only part of the problem. Most of the time their mainstream fans (and by that I mean not their top 10% of super fans) aren’t listening to them enough.

Scale will come, but it will take time.

The theory is that this will be fixed by scale, that a massive installed base of users will result in bigger listening volumes.  But it’s not that easy.

Apple Maps now includes hotel reviews from TripAdvisor and Booking.com » Mac Rumors

Eric Slivka:

Since the release of Apple’s in-house Maps app as part of iOS 6 back in 2012, Yelp has been the company’s sole partner for integrating customer reviews of businesses and other points of interest. In recent days, however, Apple’s Maps app has begun including reviews from TripAdvisor and Booking.com on select hotel listings.

Very slow but steady improvement. Apple Maps is getting better and better at finding whatever you want.

PC shipments beat expectations despite weak currencies and product transitions » IDC

Worldwide PC shipments totalled 68.5m units in the first quarter of 2015 (1Q15), a year-on-year decline of -6.7%, and slightly ahead of previous projections, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker.

Following a strong second half of 2014, which benefitted from the tailwind of the Windows XP refresh and pockets of price-driven consumer activity, the Q1 market faced multiple headwinds – including inventory build-up of Windows Bing based notebooks, commercial slow down following the XP refresh and constrained demand in many regions due to currency fluctuations and unfavorable economic indicators. As a result, growth and volume declined with Q1 shipments below 69m units, the lowest recorded volume since Q1 2009.

Those have to have been some low expectations. And here’s the threat:

“Although shipments did exceed an already cautious forecast, the market unfortunately remains heavily dependent on pricing being a major driver, with entry SKU volume masking a still tenuous demand for higher priced systems that is needed to sustain a more diverse PC ecosystem. Pricing pressure is bringing many premium SKUs into formerly mid-level pricing tiers” said Jay Chou, Senior Research Analyst, Worldwide PC Trackers. “As more vendors find it increasingly difficult to compete, we can expect additional consolidation in the PC market.”

Who’ll withdraw next? Samsung? Toshiba? Actually, Acer is seeing terrible profits – about $3 per unit sold at an ASP of $363, based on operating profit and revenue numbers.

Understanding tech penetration in Latin America » TechCrunch

Fascinating article by Omar Téllez, a director of Moovit:

With more than 85 million Facebook users and around 15 million Twitter accounts growing at 25 percent per year, it’s no wonder the Wall Street Journal called Brazil “The Social Media Capital of the Universe.”

Brazilians spend on social media networks more time per month than anyone else in the world.

Latin American startups have a canny ability to take a proven business model, and execute like crazy to improve on it.

After winning “Best International Startup” in the 2012 Crunchies, Peixe Urbano the online to offline (O2O) daily deal company, went on to grow to more than 25 million users and 30K merchant partners, and recently sold control to China’s Baidu, the No. 2 Internet search engine in the world, for and undisclosed amount.

While it’s easy to be amazed by the growth that taxi app companies such as Easy Taxi and 99Taxis have driven in Brazil, after raising hoards of money, it’s difficult not to be impressed by Tappsi. With a focus in Colombia, Perú and Ecuador, Tappsi has easily surpassed 1.3 million bookings per month with only $600K in seed funding.

Universities Inc. in the UK

After yesterday’s link about Procter & Gamble’s disruptive capacity, David Colquhoun from University College London pointed out that it’s not all sweetness and light – far from it:

Dr Aubrey Blumsohn MBBCh, PhD, MSc, BSc(hons), FRCPath was, until 2006, a senior lecturer and honorary consultant in metabolic bone diseases at Sheffield University. He, and his boss, Richard Eastell, were doing a clinical study of a Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals (P&G) drug, Actonel (risedronate), The work was funded by Procter & Gamble.

Richard Eastell is Professor of Bone Metabolism, and was Research Dean.

Procter & Gamble refused, from 2002 onwards, to release the randomisation codes for the trial to the authors whose names appear on the paper. After trying to see the data for years, and getting little support from his employer, Blumsohn subsequently got hold of it in 2005, and then discovered flaws in the analysis provided by P&G’s statistician. P&G wrote papers on which the names of university academics as authors. Blumsohn did the only thing that any honest scientist could do: he went public with his complaint.

Bad things ensued.

Goldman Sachs says Android is making Google very little money » Business Insider

Nicholas Carlson:

according to a new report from a group of Goldman Sachs analysts, Android users aren’t clicking on very many Google ads.

Earlier this week, Goldman’s analysts estimated that Google did $11.8bn in mobile search revenue in 2014.

Goldman estimated that 75% of that revenue, $8.9bn, came from web searches made using iPhones and iPads.

That means that, at most, Google generated $3bn from searches made on Android devices in 2014.

$3bn is a paltry amount compared to Google’s overall business, which generated $66bn in the last twelve months. For further context, consider that Facebook generated more than $2.65bn in mobile ad revenues during the fourth quarter of 2014 alone.

It makes you wonder: Will Android ever become a big business?

On the basis of a billion Android users, that $3 per user per year. That’s likely to go down as the user base grows because most developed countries are pretty saturated; those coming onstream are in emerging countries with lower per-capita income. All additive for Google, though. Not a great business, but a profitable one. (Also, how about the actual BI headline: “Android is supposed to save Google, but it’s actually a terrible business”?)

Start up: P&G’s disruptive nature, duck searching, Watch reviews, Google’s new ad chief, and more

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Disrupt this before Proctor & Gamble does. Photo by Premshree Pillai on Flickr.

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

Why Procter & Gamble is more disruptive than you » Medium

Kavin Stewart:

So how does a company of this size [>$80bn in annual revenue] stay so disruptive? P&G is dealing with constantly changing consumer needs across many product lines (many of which are customized for local markets). Instead of relying on the personal experiences of their employees, P&G borrows a page from the playbook of anthropologists — they find relevant cultural groups to study and embed their employees where they live for a period of time, participating in their day to day lives to gather holistic data:

Soon after they’re hired, new employees of P&G undergo special cultural training. “They spend a week in a low-income neighbourhood, working in a bodega, a little shop,” [Jim] Stengel [global marketing officer of P&G] says. “He [the executive] puts an apron on. He works there. He talks to the shop owner. He talks to the people who come in. He becomes part of life.”

Product managers pay a lot of lip service to knowing the customer. But how many of them would spend a week living in Mexico and working at a bodega?

You can read a longer piece about Stengel at the FT. But the lesson that big companies can self-disrupt shouldn’t be ignored.

Apple sides with Microsoft in closely watched patent dispute with Google » GeekWire

Todd Bishop:

The case has already created some unusual alliances. Apple and T-Mobile are among the companies siding with Microsoft in the case, while Nokia and Qualcomm are seeking to overturn a lower court’s ruling that found in Microsoft’s favor.

After a 2013 trial in Seattle, Microsoft won a $14.5m jury verdict against Motorola based on a finding that Motorola breached its obligation to offer its standard-essential patents for video and wireless technologies on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, known in legal circles as “RAND” or “FRAND.”

The case is notable in part because U.S. District Judge James Robart in Seattle took the unusual step of setting a process for establishing royalties for standard essential patents.

Based on his process, Robart ruled in April 2013 that the Microsoft owed less than $1.8m a year for its use of Motorola’s patented video and wireless technologies in Windows, Xbox and other products. Motorola had originally sought a rate amounting to more than $4bn a year, plus $20bn in back payments.

Slightly more complex than it seems, because it could debase the idea of SEPs if they’re too low-priced. But Motorola was really trying too hard. (It tried the same against Apple and was rebuffed.)

Apple releases iOS 8.3 with emoji updates, wireless CarPlay, space bar UI fix » Mac Rumors

Ton of bugs squashed, apparently. Space bar very slightly elongated. Apple Watch icon/app can now be hidden/removed, apparently. And those all-important emoji fixes.

The ascension of Google’s Sridhar Ramaswamy » The Information

Amir Efrati has a real in-depth piece about Ramaswamy (who doesn’t seem to have cooperated with it) pointing to tensions with Susan Wojicki, head of YouTube ads):

Mr. Ramaswamy viewed himself as a protector of the search-history data. In the past, he and Mr. Page and others had stated their fear that it might feel creepy if people saw banner ads on non-Google sites based on things they had searched for on Google.com. Ms. Wojcicki had long pushed Google to stay current with ad-tech industry trends, pushing the boundaries of what people like Mr. Ramaswamy were comfortable with.

In the 2013 meetings, Mr. Ramaswamy also expressed hesitation about Google search data being used to target ads to people visiting YouTube, where the DoubleClick cookie was used, because it might be visible or “leak” to advertisers that used the cookie, which might lower its value. And he feared that Ms. Wojcicki and her team would use the search data to try to improve the ad quality of non-Google sites that are part of the display-advertising “network,” which also includes YouTube.

“Tell me what you really want to do,” Mr. Ramaswamy asked Ms. Wojcicki at one meeting, looking visibly annoyed, according to one participant. “You want to use search data on the network,” including non-Google sites. “Just say it.”

Battery life: Apple’s solving for x » Six Colors

Jason Snell:

Over the years I’ve said numerous times that when it comes to battery life on iOS devices, Apple appears to have a target battery life in mind and builds its hardware—a balance of power-saving software, hardware efficiency, and battery capacity—to hit that number.

It’s an observation born out of reading spec sheet after spec sheet over the years while writing reviews of new iPhones and iPads. Every year, people who are frustrated with their iPhones running out of juice before the end of the day hold out hope that the next iPhone will ameliorate the issue. In general, those people have not been satisfied.

And here’s the graph that proves his point – though note the pop at the end:

Samsung execs briefed over user experience » Korea Times

Kim Yoo-chul:

Yonsei University Professor Cho Kwang-soo was the speaker for this week’s session. The professor said the mantra of “one person, one device” has passed.

“Today, ‘one person, multi device’ has become the main trend, meaning that one person is now being connected to multiple devices. Without understanding about human nature, you can’t develop products that can meet consumer expectations,” Cho was quoted as saying.

Samsung needs to invest more for the development of wireless charging and new mobile operating systems that allow multiple devices to activate, the professor said.

In a briefing to local reporters, chief Samsung communications officer Lee Joon said the Apple iPhone was presented as the right device that has shown remarkable advancements in user-experience design.

Not the S6?

Surface tablet shipments expected to exceed 4 million units in 2015 » Digitimes

Aaron Lee and Joseph Tsai:

Microsoft is expected to have a chance to ship over four million Surface tablets in 2015, up from two million units in 2014, because of its new Surface 3 and Surface Pro series products, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.

Microsoft is reportedly planning to unveil its next-generation Surface Pro 4 tablet during the upcoming Build developer conference in April. The new Surface Pro tablet is estimated to enter mass production in June and will be released along with Windows 10 in the second half of 2015, the sources said.

Apple Watch reviews are in: an ‘elegant’, overpriced gadget ‘you don’t need’ » The Guardian

Sam Thielman:

The upshot seems to be that the battery life is good, unless you’re using it as a glorified FitBit (which it kind of is), that the application loading times are very long (which Apple has promised to fix in subsequent versions) and that it’s a lovely little device, unless of course you disagree, but it’s slow, not particularly intuitive and it’s probably worth waiting for the inevitable upgrade.

There’s also a fundamentalist split between the haute horologie posse and the tech world: in the former, consumers expect a flawless device for an unspeakable amount of money. In the latter, where inconveniences and flaws are ironed out by simply iterating the product again, a new chunk of tech is often praised for the novelty of what it aspires to do. “Unlike the Cartier I got for college graduation, the original Apple Watch’s beauty will soon fade,” [Joanna] Stern [at the WSJ] observes.

The ducks are always greener » Marco.org

Marco Arment:

My principles are only diverging further from Google’s over time, and I feel a bit defeated whenever I turn to them for anything anymore, so I attacked my primary dependence head-on: web search.

In my experience so far, DuckDuckGo’s search is good enough the vast majority of the time. Sometimes, its results are even better than Google’s, and they’re rarely much worse.

The number of people moving to DuckDuckGo is growing, very slowly; they’re finding that search is a commodity.

Start up: iMessage v Android, Waze in Costa Rica, Google knows your face!, and more

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A bit like Costa Rica’s maps. But here comes Waze! Photo by Ted’s photos on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Back to Android » AVC

Rather like those rich people who split their time between whichever hemisphere is sunny, venture capitalist Fred Wilson spends six months a year on an iPhone, and six on an Android phone:

After a few days on iOS I wrote a post about what I liked and did not like about iOS. Reading it now after six months on iOS, it is still pretty accurate. But now that I am back on Android, the two things I really miss about he iPhone are TouchID and iMessage. If Android had both of those two things, I wouldn’t miss anything. I don’t totally understand why Apple doesn’t make an iMessage client for Android. They have the most popular messenger in the US (maybe the world) and they aren’t taking advantage of it. They are doing the same thing with iMessage that Blackberry did with BBM.

Is this man really trusted with other peoples’ money? BlackBerry didn’t fail because it didn’t open BBM; the opposite is true – people stayed on the platform despite its worsening lack of apps because of BBM. (But eventually the lack was too much.) Similarly, iMessage is a USP (unique selling point) for iOS and OSX; making an Android version would add no value to Apple at all. (And in all the fulminating comments, nobody points this out.)

Why Google’s struggles with the EC – and FTC – matter » The Overspill

ICYMI, I read the (half) FTC report so you don’t have to. And:

“Google doesn’t have any friends,” I was told by someone who has watched the search engine’s tussle with the US Federal Trade Commission and latterly with the European Commission. “It makes enemies all over the place. Look how nobody is standing up for it in this fight. It’s on its own.”

Karen, an app that knows you all too well » NYTimes.com

Frank Rose on London-based Blast Theory’s forthcoming (April 16) app:

Unlike most real life-coaching apps, this one displays video rather than text — a tactic that makes it easy to forget the distinction between what’s digital and what’s human. When you open the app, Karen (played by Claire Cage, an actress who has appeared on the British TV series “Coronation Street” and “Being Human”) starts speaking to you directly, asking a series of questions.

She seems winsome and friendly — a little too friendly, perhaps. “She’s only recently out of a long-term relationship,” explained Matt Adams, one of the three members of Blast Theory, “and she has a hunger for a new social alternative.”

The dynamic that unfolds is somewhat reminiscent of “Her,” the 2013 Spike Jonze film in which Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls in love with an operating system. With Karen, however, it’s not the user but the app that starts exhibiting inappropriate behavior. “She develops a kind of friend crush,” Mr. Adams said. “And over the next 10 days or so, she feeds back to you things she’s learning about you — including some things you’re not quite sure how she knows or why.”

Why Waze is so incredibly popular in Costa Rica » The Washington Post

Matt McFarland:

“It’s a nightmare.” That’s how Eduardo Carvajal describes the Costa Rican way to give an address.

“If I want to give the address of my office I say ‘Okay, go to the ice cream cone shop in Curridabat then drive 100 meters south and 50 meters east,” Carvajal said.

He’s part of the team of volunteers who mapped Costa Rica in Waze, a crowdsourced traffic and navigation app. Carvajal, whose day job is running a software company, has made hundreds of thousands of edits to Waze’s map of Costa Rica.

Fellow volunteer Felipe Hidalgo spent 50 hours a week for almost two years helping to map the country. Hidalgo has made 378,000 edits to maps in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Cameroon, St. Helena Island, Panama and Trinidad and Tobago. He described the work as addicting. Since the mapping of Costa Rica was completed, he scaled back to 10-15 hours a week.

Pity that it wasn’t OpenStreetMap; then everyone could have benefited, including Waze. But as the article shows, Waze “addresses” have become part of the culture there – so much so that the government partnered with it on road closures.

Google: our new system for recognizing faces is the best one ever » Fortune

Derrick Harris:

Last week, a trio of Google researchers published a paper on a new artificial intelligence system dubbed FaceNet that it claims represents the most-accurate approach yet to recognizing human faces. FaceNet achieved nearly 100% accuracy on a popular facial-recognition dataset called Labeled Faces in the Wild, which includes more than 13,000 pictures of faces from across the web. Trained on a massive 260-million-image dataset, FaceNet performed with better than 86% accuracy.

Researchers benchmarking their facial-recognition systems against Labeled Faces in the Wild are testing for what they call “verification.” Essentially, they’re measuring how good the algorithms are at determining whether two images are of the same person…

…However, the approach Google’s researchers took goes beyond simply verifying whether two faces are the same. Its system can also put a name to a face—classic facial recognition—and even present collections of faces that look the most similar or the most distinct.

Samsung Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge review » Android Central

Andrew Martonik:

Bottom Line: The Galaxy S6 finally offers the hardware that we’ve long desired, and it’s included a wonderful camera. But not everything is perfect — the software experience and battery life just aren’t up to speed.

Harsh? But Jessica Dolcourt at Cnet seems to be unhappy too, saying battery life is less than the S5. (Hers is a review worth reading too.)

Samsung earnings point to smartphones pick-up » FT.com

Simon Mundy:

Samsung executives had stoked anticipation for the first-quarter results with bullish public statements. “We’re done with recovery,” Kim Hyun-seok, head of Samsung’s television business, told local reporters last week.

Nevertheless, revenue was lower than expected, in part a reflection of weaker household electronics revenue in Europe and some emerging markets, whose currencies have fallen significantly in recent months.

And while the earnings figure was up from Won5.3tn in the prior quarter, it reflected significant margin shrinkage following strong profits in the first half of last year — a level of profitability Samsung will not regain in the near future, said CW Chung, an analyst at Nomura, pointing to the ever-fiercer competition in the smartphone market.

“Last year’s smartphone profit in the first half was about Won11tn, but this year it will be maximum Won6tn,” he said…

…Samsung’s first-quarter results were boosted by early shipments of 3m Galaxy S6 phones, said Daniel Kim at Macquarie, citing guidance from the company.

Telling final detail there: Samsung likes to shove handsets into the channel for early revenues. Here’s the graph of Samsung’s revenue and operating profit growth. Really interested to see how the S6/Edge fare.

Samsung revenue and operating profit change

Year-on-year change in operating profit (green) and revenues (blue) at Samsung Electronics

Interview with Matt MacInnis, CEO of Inkling » Pi.co

A long interview by Om Malik with MacInnis, who seems to want – yet also not to want – to “reinvent” the book. This point struck me as particularly relevant:

I look at content through another axis, which is its longevity. If you look at the scale of how long something lasts, a Tweet can have a shelf life of minutes. There are exceptions, but in general a blog post might have a shelf life of a few weeks, sometimes months. If you look at news articles, they tend to have a shelf life of a day. Nobody wants to pick up the New York Times from a week ago and read it for the news. Monthly magazines with long-form feature pieces are interesting on the span of months. And then you get into things like nonfiction and textbooks, which have shelf lives of years. Travel guides have the shelf life of about a year.

You’re talking about taking content that has a long shelf life, things like facts that don’t change, data about the history of something that informs the present, and using it to inform the news article that has a shelf life of a few days. You watch the Tour De France and you want to know who won yesterday. That information that was reported about who got where in the interim period is useless to you once somebody wins the Tour De France.

Angela Ahrendts says a ‘significant change in mindset’ to launching Apple Watch online » Business Insider

Jim Edwards:

For observers, shortages of Apple products have appeared to be a PR advantage. When Apple ran out of the gold iPhone 5S shortly after launch, it generated yet more publicity for the product. Some people have even thought these shortages are part of Apple’s marketing strategy — to make them seem more desired and scarce than they actually are.

The Ahrendts memo, however, is an indicator that Apple does not like being unable to meet demand or leave customers frustrated. Channelling customers online partly solves that problem. Customers will still have to wait if there isn’t enough product, but at least they know the product is on its way — and they’re not wasting their time showing up at Apple’s stores.

For the Apple Watch launch in the UK, the only way to get an Apple Watch will be to order online and then have it shipped to your home, even if you’re in the store.

So much for “observers”.

Google denies YouTube Kids app unfairly targets children » The Guardian

Sam Thielman:

[US] TV rules, for example, mandate “bumpers” between programs and commercials – the five-second segments that announce that the show will be right back – while YouTube Kids goes on in an uninterrupted stream.

More seriously, the complaint alleges YouTube violates its own advertising guidelines: “Products related to consumable food and drinks are prohibited, regardless of nutritional content,” says the company’s Advertising on YouTube Kids page, and yet the stream of watchable videos (not the ads, the actual programs) includes a McDonald’s channel, complete with a video starring Mythbusters’ Grant Imahara called “Our Food. Your Questions: What Are McDonald’s Chicken Nuggets Made Of?”

A small tag in the corner reads “promotional consideration provided by McDonald’s.” The complaint alleges that this counts as deceptive marketing by YouTube of the Kids app, not to kids, but to parents.

The complaint also questions “unboxing” videos – user0generated videos of new products, ranging from iPhones and new toys and sneakers, being opened for the first time. Last year Google said it had received 20m searches for “unboxing.”

Google, the complaint notes, “urges advertisers to ‘[c]onsider how unboxing videos might help your brand connect with consumers.’”

Google, YouTube and advertising. I’m reminded of the fable of the fox, the river and the scorpion.

Start up: hacking nannycams, S6 SD/battery poll, Watch wait, and more

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Could Samsung need these more than it thinks? Photo by seeweb on Flickr.

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

Rochester family finds their “Nanny Cam” hacked for the world to see » KTTC Rochester, Austin

Mike Sullivan:

Many people across the country use “nanny cams” to monitor their children.  Some are closed circuit, but others allow parents to access their cameras through the Internet.  One Rochester family began to notice odd things happening with their “nanny cam”, but what they found out may shock you.

“We were sleeping in bed, and basically heard some music coming from the nursery, but then when we went into the room the music turned off,” said the Rochester mother who chose to remain anonymous.

Where were these tunes coming from? Would you have guessed another country?

“We were able to track down the IP address through the Foscam software, and found out that it was coming from Amsterdam,” said the concerned mother of one. “That IP had a web link attached to it.”

Creepy.

The $1,000 CPM » Medium

Hank Green:

Imagine that you would like to consume a piece of content, but in between you and that content is a paywall. They’re asking $15 for one person to view the content one time. While a YouTube video might net you $2 per thousand viewers, this fantasy world I’ve just described will net you $15,000 per thousand impressions…A $15,000 CPM!

With a $15,000 CPM, every two thousand views is a full-time, living-wage human per year!

Of course, this model would never work…except that it works every day at every movie theater in America.

Oh yeah. Then again, making a movie is incredibly expensive: the paywall around that process is unbelievable, running to millions of dollars. The barrier to entry for YouTube is effectively zero.

Samsung may have just lost half of its fans with the Galaxy S6 » AndroidPIT

Following a suggestion I made, Android Pit asked its readers whether they wanted a removable battery and/or SD card slot on the Galaxy S6. No data on how many people responded (and of course it’s a self-selecting survey – see later), so take with a pinch of salt what Kris Carlon finds:

The survey results also showed that only about two-fifths of Samsung owners currently carry a spare battery, and that the other three-fifths either don’t have one or rarely use the spare battery they do own.

Only 18% of respondents stated a removable battery was critical and would turn them off buying Samsung in future. Another 28% claimed it was important and that they would consider other manufacturers with removable battery options.

That’s 46% of current Samsung customers not happy with the decision to remove the removable battery. However, 54% said it either didn’t matter so much or that they preferred fast charging to a removable battery.

Pretty much in line with what I expected. Different story with SD cards:

An incredible 82% of respondents currently use a microSD card with a further 6% happy to at least have the option available to them. Only just over one-tenth of current Samsung owners don’t use a microSD card at all.

Almost two-thirds of participants either stated that they would no longer buy Samsung without a SD card slot or would consider buying other manufacturers that do include this feature on their smartphones. That’s 65% of current customers unhappy with Samsung’s decision to remove microSD expansion.

Let’s see if they don’t buy an S6, though. (Note: Samsung’s preliminary quarterly results for the first three months – not including the S6 launch – should now be available via its investor site.)

What to look for in the Apple Watch reviews » Beyond Devices

Jan Dawson:

The hardest thing for reviewers to gauge will likely be one of the most important factors in its ultimate success or failure – whether the Watch is compelling enough as an addition to the iPhone that its appeal lasts beyond the initial period when the novelty wears off. I don’t know how long reviewers will have had the Watch by the time they do their reviews, but it may well not be long enough to draw a conclusion on this. The Watch, like the iPad, lacks a single compelling selling point. Rather, I think each user will have to discover their own reasons why wearing one makes sense.

It’s time for the Watch » Above Avalon

Neil Cybart, in a thorough recap of how the Apple Watch got to where it is, makes a salient point about how we try to rationalise, or find a story thread, in stuff that’s more accidental:

Looking back at the iPad and iPhone, many have developed elaborate stories around those products in order to address the mystery. In reality, they were simply great products that relied on a revolutionary multi-touch user interface. After launching at a too-high price (and different business model based on mobile revenue sharing) and without an app store, it took Apple and the iPhone three years and additional features and changes before hitting mass-market awareness. However, the legend was that Apple foresaw the coming mobile app revolution. Stories are told to provide answers to the unknown. The problem occurs when those answers are fabricated. Apple is launching the watch as a fun, personalized iPhone accessory with different use cases dependent on the user. If one doesn’t leave the complicated stories and theories at the door, it will be difficult to see the Apple Watch for what is and, more importantly, isn’t. 

A new wave of Chinese smartphones set to emerge in 2015 » TechNode

Tracey Xiang:

China’s smartphone market is already crowded. But we’re expecting to see another half a dozen Chinese Android phone brands emerge in 2015. Many of them are already big tech companies in their home sectors.

LeTV, Qihoo, Gree, Smartisan – expect to hear more about them.

Bad data PR: how the NSPCC sunk to a new low in data churnalism » Online Journalism Blog

Paul Bradshaw:

Only Vice magazine decided to ask questions of the stats. And this is what they found:

“It turns out the study was conducted by a “creative market research” group calledOnePoll. “Generate content and news angles with a OnePoll PR survey, and secure exposure for your brand,” reads the company’s blurb. “Our PR survey team can help draft questions, find news angles, design infographics, write and distribute your story.

“… The OnePoll survey included just 11 multiple-choice questions, which could be filled in online. Children were recruited via their parents, who were already signed up to OnePoll.”

There are so many methodological issues here I can’t list them all, but let’s try. Firstly, there’s the issue of how representative OnePoll users are as a whole and how accurately they complete the survey (the site pays 20p per survey completed, and you have to reach £40 before you can withdraw). There’s the issue of self-selection (PDF) and of whether children are in an environment to give honest answers. And there’s the issue of leading questions: “I am addicted to pornography”?

As Vice’s article points out, research into this area is normally carried out very carefully to avoid these problems.

I’m always extremely wary of “surveys” like this; good to know Vice is too. Google News shows 129 hits for “NSPCC pornography”. Will any of them retract their pieces as a result of this untrustworthy data?

November 2014: Is the Rolling Stone story true? » Shots in the Dark

Richard Bradley is a former editor at George magazine, where he dealt with stories written by Stephen Glass which were shot through with untruths – which gave him an eye for it:

Written by a woman named Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the article is called “A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA.”

The article alleges a truly horrifying gang rape at a UVA fraternity, and it has understandably shocked the campus and everyone who’s read it. The consequences have been pretty much instantaneous: The fraternity involved has voluntarily suspended its operations (without admitting that the incident happened); UVA’s president is promising an investigation and has since suspended all fraternity charters on campus; the alumni are in an uproar; the governor of Virginia has spoken out; students, particularly female students, are furious, and the concept of “rape culture” is further established. Federal intervention is sure to follow.

The only thing is…I’m not sure that I believe it. I’m not convinced that this gang rape actually happened. Something about this story doesn’t feel right.

Note that he wrote this when everyone was insisting that the story was true, must be true. Erdely isn’t the first journalist to be spoofed (it’s happened to me, though for much, much lower stakes). The failure was at Rolling Stone, where there wasn’t enough scepticism. And that failing continues throughout a lot of journalism; I notice it a lot (at a lesser scale) in tech journalism.

ActiveX actively going: South Korean gov’t to repeal ActiveX security requirement » BusinessKorea

Mary PArk:

The South Korean government plans to remove ActiveX from the county’s websites to boost foreign online shopping. The Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning said on Wednesday that it will let the private sector drop the troublesome technical requirement, which has been cited as a major obstacle in Internet transactions.  

ActiveX is an Internet Explorer exclusive plug-in that allows Internet Explorer to run executable files on a user’s computer. Most of Korea’s financial websites and online shopping malls have relied on ActiveX to run their proprietary payment systems and online identity protection programs. But the outdated ActiveX dependency has prevented users of other web browsers or mobile devices from using those local websites…

…According to the Ministry, at least 90 percent of the country’s top 100 websites will replace ActiveX with alternative systems and technologies by 2017. This ActiveX-free plan provides subsidies of up to 50% of the financial costs to stop using ActiveX-based systems and to create HTML5-related alternative technologies to replace it, up to 100m won (US$91,734) per web site or 20m won (US$18,345) per solution.

So, so very overdue. South Korea has seen so many hacks due to its reliance on ActiveX, which has also held back mobile commerce.

Start up: Samsung’s #bendgate?, algorithms v April Fool, graphene is coming!, the US’s backward financial improvement

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This might be what to do with trading algorithms on April Fools Day. Photo by kippster on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. Not thixotropic. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Chinese fingerprint on smartphone trends in Malaysia, Singapore » Digital News Asia

Karamajit Singh:

Chinese smartphone vendors entered the Malaysian market in earnest in 2013, and this accelerated in 2014 with the various brands winning over a sceptical market with their price-to-performance models.
 
As a consequence, what used to be known as the mid-level phone market in Malaysia – the RM700 to RM1,200 (US$190 to US$325) level – is collapsing rapidly, IDC argues.
 
“The story is that the low-end market is getting more competitive and many phones that carry good specs are already priced below RM700,” says [Jensen] Ooi [IDC market analyst for client devices at IDC Asia Pacific].
 
Feeling the pain here from the rapid commoditisation of the mid-tier market are the traditional large players like Samsung, Sony and LG, which are unable to differentiate their phones at price points above RM700.
 
IDC’s data shows that sub-RM700 phones made up nearly 60% of the Malaysia market in 2014, up from nearly 40% the year before. The majority of the growth has been captured by the Chinese vendors at the expense of Samsung, Sony and LG.
 
More bad news for these Android vendors: “Their share in the mid-range and high-end market has weakened and will continue to weaken this year, with only Apple continuing to grow there in 2014,” says Ooi.

Teardown of new Samsung Galaxy smartphone suggests deeper loss for Qualcomm » Reuters

Se Young Lee and Noel Randewich:

Samsung is not only using its own Exynos mobile processor, as had been widely reported, but also decided to rely on its in-house semiconductor business to source other parts, including the modem and power management integrated circuit chips, Ottawa-based consultancy Chipworks said in a web posting dated April 2.

Samsung is counting on its new flagship Galaxy S6 and S6 edge phones to help revive earnings momentum after a disappointing 2014. Strong sales of system chips such as its Exynos processor could also help boost earnings, analysts and investors say.

The Galaxy S6 also comes with Samsung’s Shannon modem chip, US phone carrier AT&T said on its website.

“It’s pretty clear if they’re using Shannon for the modem for AT&T that they’re trying to use all-Samsung silicon,” said Jim McGregor, an analyst at Tirias Research. “With their market share going down they’re under pressure to increase profit margins.”

Makes sense (and poses a problem for Qualcomm): the more Samsung-built chips are in each phone, the greater its profit. Samsung Electronics’s preliminary results – its range of expected revenues and operating profit – are released on Tuesday 7 April; full results by division later in the month.

Apple invents watertight iDevice buttons » Patently Apple

Jack Purcher:

Apple began working on various waterproofing methods for iDevices back in 2010 and in 2013 devised a waterproofing nano coating. In March we posted a report covering Apple’s most advanced invention on waterproofing to date titled “Apple Invents a Waterproofing Method for Future iDevices using Hydrophobic Conformal Coatings and Silicon Seals.” Today, the US Patent & Trademark Office published yet another waterproofing patent application from Apple that specifically covers a water tight button solution for iDevices.

It feels like an obvious solution, and covers the power switch and volume switches. Is the headphone jack and Lightning port close-ended? In that case water resistance would be sorted – and could become another extra feature to differentiate from past models.

Wal-Mart exec calls credit card upgrade a ‘joke’ » CNN

Wal-Mart’s executive in charge of payments thinks the United States’ switch to chip-based credit cards is going to be a disappointment.

The new “chip & signature” program is barely an improvement on security and fraud, said Mike Cook, Wal-Mart’s assistant treasurer and a senior vice president, at this week’s Electronic Transaction Association’s Transact conference in San Francisco. Cook said Wal-Mart would have preferred a “chip and PIN” system that Europe and Africa have, since PINs would protect cards from being stolen.

“The fact that we didn’t go to PIN is such a joke,” Cook told CNNMoney.

Cook said signatures on checks were sufficient 100 years ago, but they’re outdated today. PINs on debit cards were a major improvement to stop thieves decades ago. They’d do the same for credit cards – which is why banks should use them for all cards.

“Signature is worthless as a form of authentication,” Cook said during a presentation at the conference. “If you look at the Target and Home Depot breaches … not a single PIN debit card needed to be reissued in those breaches. The card number was worthless to the individual thief and fraudsters, because they didn’t know the PIN.”

Americans truly have no idea how backwards their financial systems are.

Schaumburg man acquitted after child porn got mixed up in WWII downloads » DailyHerald.com

Barbara Vitello:

Testifying in his own defense, [Wocjciech] Florczykowski, a 40-year-old electrical engineer, described himself as a history buff with an interest in World War II, specifically battlefield memorabilia. In pursuit of that hobby, Florczykowski said he occasionally travels to battlefields in Poland where he and other military history buffs use metal detectors to unearth everything from medals and canteens to shells, grenades and unexploded land mines.

He testified he was using a program called uTorrent (which enables users to share large files) to research explosives on a laptop supplied to him by his former employer DLS Electronic Systems in Wheeling and inadvertently downloaded pornography.

“What I discovered was completely disgusting. I was not looking for this stuff,” he said, adding that he moved the offensive images and other unwanted material to a folder he intended to delete but was fired from his job before he could do so.

Discovering information on explosives on the laptop, his supervisors alerted federal authorities.

And then things got really bad. (Note: on the site itself, you need to answer a survey question to view the content. Can’t decide if that’s great, terrible, or “never going to scale”.) Also: it’s child abuse, not child “porn”.

Grooveshark publishes proactive anti-piracy policy » TorrentFreak

In the Capitol case the Court noted that while Grooveshark keeps records of all processed DMCA takedown complaints and associated users, it does not keep an “independent record” of repeat infringers.

“Escape does not try to identify repeat infringers and fails to keep
records that would allow it to do so,” the judge said.

Grooveshark says it is now dealing with that criticism.

“In an era of simple database queries this new requirement may be redundant, but we will now create an additional independent record of repeat infringers from our existing databases, until our appeal clarifies this issue for Grooveshark and other hosting services committed to complying with the DMCA,” the company writes.

Grooveshark’s entire business model is basically built around passive piracy – letting people upload and then share stuff whose copyright they don’t own. The music labels have been trying to tear it down for years; it’s basically a wart on the face of the web.

Tesla stockholders can’t take a joke » Bloomberg View

On April 1, five minutes before the market closed, Tesla put out a spoof press release on its official feed. The stock leapt, then drooped:

So people lost maybe as much as a few hundred thousand dollars because, for a brief stupid minute, they thought that Tesla was introducing … a watch? No, of course they didn’t. They thought Tesla was introducing a thing called the Model W, and they didn’t read any further than the headline, and they bought Tesla stock hoping that the Model W, whatever it was, would be a huge success (or would be perceived as a huge success by someone else a minute later), and then they realized that they’d been fooled, and they sold the stock at a small loss and moved on with their day. And when I say “people” I mean mostly “algorithms,” which are faster and more literal than humans, though in the space of a minute it is conceivable that an actual human saw that headline and fired off a buy order before reading any further.

Maybe stock algorithms will kill off April Fool’s Day online. Here’s hoping.

How graphene may revolutionize the mobile industry » Android Authority

Roni Peleg (who edits a graphene news aggregation site):

Graphene can allow for super-efficient batteries that charge within minutes and last much longer than conventional Li-ion batteries, composite materials that make devices lightweight and extremely durable, touch screens that are flexible and transparent, and even chips that are extremely small but much faster than silicon chips.

Love graphene as a concept (and reality), but it’s weird how its implementation is always five years away.

SquareTrade tests shows Samsung S6 Edge as bendable as iPhone 6 Plus and more likely to crack under pressure » YouTube

Pretty brutal treatment, though. (Also includes abuse of HTC M9.) Here, by the way, is a Samsung executive at the S6 launch assuring the audience it won’t bend:

A little part of me wonders about the original “bendgate” stories and their origin.

The Economist’s Tom Standage on digital strategy and the limits of a model based on advertising » Nieman Journalism Lab

Joseph Lichterman interviews Standage, who remarks:

we’re not big on linking out. And it’s not because we’re luddites, or not because we don’t want to send traffic to other people. It’s that we don’t want to undermine the reassuring impression that if you want to understand Subject X, here’s an Economist article on it — read it and that’s what you need to know. And it’s not covered in links that invite you to go elsewhere. We’ll link to background, and we’ll link to things like white papers or scientific papers and stuff like that. The idea of a 600-word science story that explains a paper is that you only need to read the 600-word science story — you don’t actually have to fight your way through the paper. There is a distillation going on there.

I do like that thinking, having lived with it the majority of my life. (Do the links here actually help you? Do you click through? Most people don’t.)

Also worth reading: his observations about ads (“they’re going to go away”) and millenials – who, he says, are “all fans of Snapchat, AdBlock and incognito [mode]”.

Start up: Apple’s China watch pricing, Google v EC (and FTC), inside the Watch, and more

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Not from Elon Musk, but who knows in future? Photo by Eva the Weaver on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The Apple Watch, China Edition » MarkDMill

Mark Miller:

This is the political and social environment in which the gold Apple Watch Edition enters China. Luxury watches are worn in China as a display of one’s wealth, but right now displaying wealth on one’s wrist is dangerous and, legitimately or not, is taken as a sign of corruption. The gold Apple Watch will sell,  but I would wager an Apple Watch Edition that it won’t be seen on the wrists of government officials or successful business people with political connections (which is most successful business people)–or, if it is seen, that person will quickly be sanctioned or even sacked.

This, then, is why Apple’s positioning of Apple Watch is so brilliant: by releasing Apple Watch Edition at the luxury price of RMB 74,800 ($12,062),1 the “normal” Apple Watch seems downright frugal at RMB 4,188 ($675). Even the most expensive Apple Watch (RMB 8,288; $1336) looks cheap in comparison to the most expensive Apple Watch Edition (RMB 112,800; $18,190). By pricing one collection so high, Apple has managed to make Apple Watch seem downright moderate – even though it costs 15-30% of the average Chinese annual salary!

Twitter meets deep search, and much, much more. — Medium

Mark Yoshitake:

Today Kifi is proud to announce the launch of a Twitter integration that will allow you and millions of others to automatically save links you have shared through Twitter, and use them in an entirely new way. Think of this as a search engine built just for the content you’ve Tweeted. Kifi will also recommend other great content for you to share, based on these links. Join the beta now, its free.

We know one of the huge problems people have is recalling all the wealth of information they’ve found and shared, on Twitter. So we built this incredibly powerful tool to allow you to get back to any link you have shared on Twitter, instantly.

Twitter will either kill this or buy it, won’t it?

iPhone killer: the secret history of the Apple Watch » WIRED

David Pierce:

one thing was clear [to Kevin Lynch, who was surprised to find himself in charge of the project – already underway – on his first day in the job, and two days from a top-level review] from the start: The Watch would succeed or fail on the strength of what’s prosaically called the user interface. The interface would determine whether the Watch ended up displayed in a dozen museums or remembered as Apple’s biggest flop since the Newton.

That’s where Alan Dye comes in. As chief of Apple’s human interface group, he’s in charge of creating the ways you tell your device what to do and how that device responds. Those cool little experiences you have with your laptop and phone and tablet, like when the app icons quiver because they’re ready to move around your screen? That’s the human interface team.

Pierce has written a fantastic piece. The amount of access seems comparable to that afforded the New Yorker. Clearly, Apple wants both the fashion crew and the tech crew to like it; but note how it’s approaching them, in different ways.

Beyond the FTC memorandum: comparing Google’s internal discussions with its public claims » Ben Edelman

Edelman is a specialist in competition law; he has consulted for rivals to Google, including Microsoft, but also for Google. This is a deep dive of what’s in the FTC memorandum and others. Here’s just a taste:

Specialized search and favoring Google’s own services: targeting bad sites or solid competitors?

In public statements, Google often claimed that sites were rightly deprioritized in search results, indicating that demotions targeted “low quality,” “shallow” sites with “duplicate, overlapping, or redundant” content that is “mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators … so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care.” Google Senior Vice President Jonathan Rosenberg chose the colorful phrase “faceless scribes of drivel” to describe sites Google would demote “to the back of the arena.”

But when it came to the competing shopping services Google staff sought to relegate, Google’s internal assessments were quite different. “The bizrate/nextag/epinions pages are decently good results. They are usually well-format[t]ed, rarely broken, load quickly and usually on-topic. Raters tend to like them. …. [R]aters like the variety of choices the meta-shopping site[s] seem… to give” (footnote 154, citing GOOGSING-000014375).

Here too, Google’s senior leaders approved the decision to favor Google’s services. Google co-founder Larry Page personally reviewed the prominence of Google’s services and, indeed, sought to make Google services more prominent. For example: “Larry thought product [Google’s shopping service] should get more exposure” (footnote 120, citing GOOG-Texas-1004148). Product managers agreed, calling it “strategic” to “dial up” Google Shopping (footnote 120, citing GOOG-Texas-0197424). Others noted the competitive importance: Preferred placement of Google’s specialized search services was deemed important to avoid “ced[ing] recent share gains to competitors” (footnote 121, citing GOOG-Texas-0191859) or indeed essential: “most of us on geo [Google Local] think we won’t win unless we can inject a lot more of local directly into google results” (footnote 121, citing GOOGEC-0069974).

The European Commission’s antitrust group has seen the full FTC report. Speaking of the Commission…

EU lays groundwork for antitrust charges against Google » WSJ

Tom Fairless and Alistair Barr:

The European Commission, the European Union’s top antitrust authority, has been asking companies that filed complaints against Google for permission to publish some information they previously submitted confidentially, according to several people familiar with the requests. Shopping, local and travel companies are among those that have been contacted, one of those people said.

A decision to file charges against Google would kick off the EU’s highest-profile antitrust suit since its lengthy campaign that started a decade ago against Microsoft Corp., which paid the bloc €1.7 billion ($1.8 billion) in fines through 2012.

A settlement in Google’s case is always possible. Even if the EU presses ahead with charges, Google could still strike a deal to resolve the bloc’s concerns that the company abuses its dominance in the European search market.

“Publish” doesn’t mean quite what you’d hope. Here’s what happens:
• If – as now seems certain – the EC raises a “Statement of Objections” against Google, it will include in the SOO that gets sent (privately) to Google some of the info that objectors provided to it confidentially.
• So it has to ask them to send that.
• Google looks at the SOO, redacts any info about itself it thinks is commercially confidential, sends that back to the EC.
• The EC sends the now-Google-redacted SOO to objectors, who can comment to the EC about it
• EC has a finished SOO and can use it against Google.

The process then is still lengthy. Expect all this to carry on through 2015 – possibly even to 2016 – before any resolution. But the possibility of a fine exists, and isn’t minimal.

Margrethe Vestager has clearly decided though to take a different tack from her predecessor, Joaquin Almunia; she’s not looking to settle. He tried three times and failed, in the face of objections from those who had complained, and latterly of politicians in Germany and France.

Google Lab puts a time limit on innovations » WSJ

Alistair Barr:

the new emphasis on Advanced Technology and Projects, which upends some Google traditions. Most projects are limited to two years, after which they are killed, moved into Google, spun off into independent firms or licensed to others. The group jettisons project leaders after two years and hires mostly outside experts.

There have been 11 projects in the group, including Ara, a smartphone with switchable components; Tango, a 3-D mapping technology; and Spotlight Stories, interactive animations and short films for smaller phone screens.

The approach is the brainchild of Regina Dugan, the former head of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. She joined Motorola, then a division of Google, in 2012 and is close to [Eric] Schmidt, who’s been spending more time at the research lab recently.

“We like this model because it puts pressure on people to perform and do relevant things or stop,” Mr. Schmidt said. “I’ve spent an awful lot of time on projects that never end and products that would never ship.”

Is there just a little note of.. anxiety here? (In passing, Alistair Barr has been doing some great, solid reporting of late.)

Slack hack and broken model of centralized data » Medium

Muneeb Ali:

The interesting thing about security is no one cares about it until shit hits the fan. That shiny new product feature you’re working on seems so much more important than securing your chat logs. Our solution was to simply stop talking about anything sensitive over Slack. You can afford to do that when you’re a small startup and literally sit next to each other. But you can’t scale this as you grow.

To me the Slack hack is yet another reminder that centralized models are broken by design. Slack is an awesome company and I’m sure they’ll comply with the best security practices. It doesn’t look like the hacker got access to chat logs in this hack. But that still means that Slack is a single point of failure. They’re a prime target for hackers. A single place from where confidential information of a lot of other companies can be accessed.

Ali’s company Onename uses a blockchain-based approach for decentralised identity. Interesting approach.

Musk’s tweeted promise not such a surprise after all » FT Tech blog

Richard Waters:

there are no real surprises here, it seems. Speaking on a Tesla earnings call on February 11th, he said the company was working on a “consumer battery that will be for use in people’s houses or businesses”, with a product unveiling “probably in the next month or two”.

SolarCity – the installer of solar systems of which Musk is also chairman – says on its own website that it has been experimenting with a Tesla-branded residential battery at 300 test sites, with another 130 to come. It promises to have a storage product “available again in late summer 2015,” which also fits with the Musk tweet timeline.

The solar company promotes the residential battery as an emergency back-up in case the utility grid fails, “such as after an earthquake or other natural disasters”. That sounds like a product for a niche market: it will be interesting to see how Musk presents it next month.

Start up: Nintendo’s mobile money, Nest misses summer, the non-voice phone, why Tidal will fail, and more

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Carphone Warehouse: not the place to look for an Apple Watch. Photo by morebyless on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. None is a leftover April Fool’s. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

DeNA, in Nintendo pact, aims for games bringing in over $25m/month » Reuters

Japanese online game maker DeNA Co Ltd on Wednesday said it wants its new partnership with gaming giant Nintendo Co Ltd to yield titles that bring in over 3bn yen ($25.02m) a month.

The alliance, announced on March 17, will bring Nintendo characters such as Super Mario and Donkey Kong to smartphones, and see their jointly developed games available through phones and tablets as well as Nintendo’s Wii U and 3DS consoles.

DeNA Chief Executive Isao Moriyasu said the partners would release their first game later this year, but was coy on which character from Nintendo’s trove of intellectual property (IP) would be featured.

“We want to create games that will be played by hundreds of millions of people,” Moriyasu told Reuters in an interview. “We want to create multiple hit games rather than aiming to succeed with just one powerful IP element.”

Ambitious, but should be feasible. Nintendo takes in roughly 25bn yen per month in software sales at present.

With the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, Samsung tries to regain its footing » NYTimes.com

Farhad Manjoo:

In the international market for phones, Samsung’s Galaxys are relatively expensive. They sell for about the same price as Apple’s latest devices, $199 and up with a two-year contract, or more than $650 without a contract. But powerful phones made by low-priced Chinese sellers, like the OnePlus One, often sell for less than half the price of high-end Samsung and Apple devices.

If you pay the premium price to Apple, you get a phone with a well-designed operating system, no overlapping preloaded apps, and a host of services that often work very well, like iMessage, Apple Pay and expanding compatibilities with Apple’s personal computers and devices like the Apple TV and, soon, the Apple Watch. You can criticize Apple’s sticky ecosystem as a form of consumer lock-in, but Apple sure has built a luxurious prison, and customers are willing to pay extra for it.

If you pay that premium to Samsung, you don’t get a whole lot more than you can get on, say, a phone made by Xiaomi, OnePlus or any of a dozen smaller players.

That, indeed, is the problem.

Voice out of vogue for UK mobile phone users » eMarketer

In December 2014 polling from multichannel solutions provider Oxygen8 Group, voice didn’t even make the top 10 list of mobile services used by mobile phone users. Communication needs are more likely being met by other data-led services. For example, according to the survey, the most popular service was messaging, cited by 90.0% of respondents. Email and social media, with respective response rates of 83.0% and 77.6%, also fared well.

Energy companies around the world infected by newly discovered malware » Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

The United Arab Emirates was the country most targeted by the attackers, followed by Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Kuwait.

Computers are initially infected with Laziok through spam e-mails coming from the moneytrans[.]eu domain. The e-mails contain a malicious attachment that exploits a Microsoft Windows vulnerability that was patched in 2012. The same vulnerability has been exploited in other attack espionage campaigns, including one that used the Red October malware platform to infect diplomatic, governmental, and scientific organizations in at least 39 countries. The Laziok exploit typically came in the form of an Excel file.

Patched in 2012, but not patched. The state of security today.

Tidal and the future of music » stratechery

Ben Thompson:

even if Jay-Z and company were truly independent, they would be heavily incentivized to avoid exclusivity as well: remember that music has high fixed costs but (especially on the Internet) zero marginal costs. That means the best way to make money is to sell as many units as possible in order to spread out those fixed costs. That, by extension, means the optimal strategy for whoever owns the music is making it available in as many places as possible – the exact opposite of an exclusive.

This ultimately is why Tidal will fail: it’s nice that Jay-Z and company would prefer to garner Spotify’s (minuscule) share of streaming revenue, but there is zero reason to expect Tidal to win in the market. Tidal doesn’t have Spotify’s head-start or free tier, it doesn’t have Apple’s distribution might and bank account, and it doesn’t have any meaningful exclusives3 — and to be successful, you need a lot of exclusives; it’s too easy and guilt-free to pirate (or simply skip) one or two songs.

And now stay tuned…

Apple’s music strategy looks increasingly risky » Above Avalon

Neil Cybart:

Apple’s strategy with music streaming continues to be a work in progress, but from what we know, curation and discovery will be two main tenets of a service that uses music exclusives as a carrot to entice users. In what could be a major negative, Jimmy Iovine reportedly was unable to get the cost for this music streaming service down to $5/month, with record labels demanding Apple remain steady at the “me-too” $9.99/month price. The primary problem with this chain of events is that music executives are hardly in a position to be dictating pricing and business strategy in an industry that may be fundamentally broken, yet again, by technology.

Music streaming is split into free and paid and there is risk that without a free offering, Apple may not reach enough scale to force consolidation among streaming services. A $5/monthly price was thought to alleviate some of this risk, but with Apple possibly needing to ship at $9.99/month, one has to wonder if management is pleased with how the product is shaping up.

One theme that permeates this discussion is Apple’s forced hand. With iTunes Radio, a seemingly “me-too” product compared to Pandora, Apple has seen moderate levels of success, but nothing that would jump out to an observer as ground-breaking. Apple risks a very similar fate with a paid music streaming service: garnering enough success to warrant respect with the endeavor (mostly because the bar is set so low), yet unable to capture the music industry like it was 2005 again. In essence, Apple would be stuck in catch-up mode.

Without a $5-per-month tier, the music industry is never going to break YouTube’s grip – which is essentially ad-supported streaming where the labels don’t get the same cut as they would from a paid service.

Nest confused by BST » Nest Community

Britain switched to “summer time” (equivalent to US’s Daylight Savings) at the weekend, going an hour ahead of GMT. Seems that Nest didn’t get the message:

The switch to BST seems to have confused my Nest! I have a manual schedule setup, auto schedule is disabled and the Nest didn’t come on at the new time this morning!

Only UK affected, said Nest. (Well, duh.) Puny humans and their clock-changing. (Apple was caught out for years by DST changes, which its alarms didn’t keep up with.)

IEEE waves through controversial FRAND patent policy » EE Times

John Walko, in February:

IEEE’s new standard on patents that lowers royalty fees is making some members angry.

The IEEE’s decision to approve a bitterly contested change to its patent policy, has, perhaps unsurprisingly, caused bitter divisions among its members. The revised rules would see the royalty fees large vendors have to pay reduced significantly, particularly in the wireless sector.

Compensation for a company’s IPR would now be based on a percentage of component price rather than the whole device, as is generally the norm.

Another consequence of the revised approach to royalties is a more realistic definition of what represents Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) when it comes to valuing a company’s standards-essential patents (SEP) such that the inventors get a fair return on sometimes huge investments into developing innovations, while at the same time not building barriers to entry for new products and new suppliers.

I missed this at the time; but it’s pretty dramatic. Lots of lawsuits have previously involved demands for royalties on finished products, which – if you think about it – is daft: if an essential patent only affects some tiny part of the operation of a device (eg Wi-Fi on the Xbox 360, as an example) why should Microsoft have to pay a proportion of the finished price?

This doesn’t have “non-practising entities”, aka patent trolls, pleased. Here’s Bill Merritt of Interdigital (an NPE) fulminating about it – and saying it won’t play ball.

Seems minimal, but this could have big long-term effects.

Sony Mobile aims to ship 38 million smartphones in FY2015, say sources » Digitimes

Daniel Shen and Steve Shen:

Sony Mobile Communications aims to ship 38m smartphones in fiscal 2015 (April 2015-March 2016), down slightly from 39.2m units shipped in the previous fiscal year, according to sources at Taiwan’s handset supply chain.

The lower shipment target comes as the Japan-based vendor is still overhauling its handset business and has also shifted its focus to the mid-range to high-end segment, said the sources.

Despite the absence of new orders from Sony Mobile since the fourth quarter of 2014, Taiwan’s ODMs have begun shipping some new models to the Japan-based vendor recently, including the Xperia E4 from Arima Communications, Xperia E4g from Compal Electronics and Xperia M4 Aqua from Foxconn/FIH Mobile.

Sony seems to be keeping focus on waterproofing, removable batteries and SD cards – unlike Samsung. How’s this going to play out?

Carphone Warehouse cut off from Apple Watch launch » Telegraph

Chris Williams:

Carphone’s UK chief executive, Graham Stapleton, said that the 800-strong high street chain will not be part of the launch next month.

He added: “We would love to be able to stock the Apple Watch. I’ve got to be careful what I say but I think they are just going another way with it. We have not been given the opportunity.”
Instead of selling its smartwatch thorough the same channels as the iPhone, Apple will court high-end fashion shoppers in more exclusive locations, as it charges prices as high as £13,500 for the top-of-the-range model. Window displays at Selfridges’ flagship Oxford Street store, for instance, were concealed behind Apple-branded hoardings on Tuesday in preparation for the launch.

Colour me totally unsurprised that Apple isn’t selling the Watch through CPW – which, for American readers, is like Best Buy for phones.