Start up: Apple’s VR effort, why zebras really have stripes, the PC mergers, Facebook v your battery, and more

Posted on by
1

Call a locksmith in the US and their yield – and your loss – might be higher than you expect. Photo by zoomar on Flickr.

Did you sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email? Then you’re reading this on email. You clicked a confirmation link to say it wasn’t spam. Well done.

A selection of 11 links for you. Made of unobtanium and polished with unicorn tears. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Apple builds secret team to kick-start virtual reality effort » FT.com

Tim Bradshaw:

The company’s latest acquisition in the area is Flyby Media, an augmented reality start-up that lets mobile devices “see” the world around them. Flyby’s team worked closely with Google in developing software for its 3D positioning technology Project Tango.

Apple has been building prototypes of possible headset configurations for several months.

Apple joins a growing focus in Silicon Valley on VR and AR as companies from Facebook and Google to Microsoft and Samsung eye the next big technology platform.

The news comes after the Financial Times reported that Apple had hired Doug Bowman, a leading VR researcher.

Tim Cook, chief executive, declared earlier this week that the technology had broad appeal. “It is really cool and has some interesting applications,” Mr Cook said on Tuesday, as Apple reported iPhone sales growth had slowed to a halt.

Bradshaw has had scoop after scoop since moving to San Francisco.
link to this extract

 

To lions, zebras are mostly gray » The Atlantic

Ed Yong:

“At most distances, the zebras are going to look to a lion like a gray waterbuck,” says [Tim] Caro [of University of California, Davis]. “Those stripes are going to fuse together and be indistinguishable.”

That rules out both the blends-among-trees idea and the breaks-up-outline one — neither can possibly be true if the predators can’t see the stripes. “If the stripes are doing something exciting, they’ll be doing it close up, by which point the predators have probably realized the zebra is there, because they can smell or hear it,” says Caro. Zebras, being very noisy browsers, are hardly stealthy.

“It’s the first proper test of a very longstanding and prominent idea,” says Martin Stevens from the University of Exeter, who studies camouflage. Its only flaw is that the team didn’t specifically measure how closely a zebra matches its background environment, in either color or brightness. Still, “I very much doubt zebra stripes do work in concealment,” adds Stevens.

So, if not camouflage, then what?

Caro, who has been studying zebras for a decade and has written a forthcoming book about their stripes, thinks he knows the answer. “I’ve come to the conclusion that really, it just has to be biting flies,” he says.

You what now? But yes, it is.
link to this extract

 

Supply chain braces for possible merger of Vaio, Toshiba, Fujitsu PC units » Digitimes

Aaron Lee and Steve Shen:

Japan-based PC brand vendors Vaio (sold from Sony), Toshiba and Fujitsu reportedly are ready to merge their notebook businesses into a company, a move which will affect Taiwan-based notebook ODMs, particularly Pegatron Technology, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.

Pegatron received over 50% of Toshiba’s notebook orders in 2015 and has also led other rivals to win over 50% of the vendor’s request for the quotation (RFQ) for notebook orders for 2016, the source indicated.

However, Pegatron has recently been notified by Toshiba to halt production of 300,000 units of mainstream models which are scheduled to be shipped soon, indicating that the merger talks between the three Japan-based companies are likely to be finalized shortly, said the sources. Pegatron declined to comment on its orders.

Consolidation among smaller players. Inevitable, given the market. But which brand will they merge under?
link to this extract

 

Following Apple’s move, Samsung rolls out adblocking to Android devices » TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

Soon after Samsung’s announcement of an API for content blocking], ad blocker makers launched versions of their apps for supported Samsung phones. This includes Crystal and Adblock Fast, which were among the first out of the gate. The latter claims over 200,000 users for its app that’s also live on Chrome, Opera and Safari. It offers seven optimized filtering rules which make websites run, on average, 51 percent faster, the company says.

Crystal offers a similar filter list, and blocks tracking technology, malware and social networking annoyances, while also offering users the ability to support sites that conform to the Acceptable Ads criteria by allowing non-intrusive advertising.

Expect more to follow. The question now will be whether or not Samsung owners will rush to install these applications, as the iOS audience once did. Even if they don’t show up in droves, the move by Samsung, which had a 22.2% share of the smartphone market in 2015, could see other Android smartphone makers doing the same, as the tech could be seen as a competitive advantage.

Only for Samsung Galaxy devices running Android 4.0 and above, but that’s still a lot. Samsung is clearly responding to Apple; how long before adblocking is natively included in mobile browsers, and how long before it’s enabled by default?
link to this extract

 

Uninstalling Facebook app saves up to 20% of Android battery life » The Guardian

Samuel Gibbs:

Prompted by [Russell] Holly’s revelation that life on Android was better without Facebook’s app, Reddit user pbrandes_eth tested the app’s impact on the performance of an LG G4.

They found that when the Facebook and Facebook Messenger apps were uninstalled, other apps on the smartphone launched 15% faster. They tested 15 separate apps, and documented the findings, leading other reddit users to test other devices. They found similar results when testing for app loading performance.

After reading Holly’s piece, I had also decided to explore other options for accessing Facebook, to see if, rather than app loading, I could improve my smartphone’s battery life.

I left the Facebook Messenger app installed, but swapped the Facebook app for an app called Metal, which acts as a wrapper for Facebook’s mobile site. Over the course of a day my Huawei Nexus 6P had 20% more battery. This was true on average for every day for the week tried.

In Metal I was using the same notifications and accessing the same features as I had just a week earlier through the Facebook app, so why the difference?

Because the Facebook app uses every trick it can to find out what you’re doing, all the time. I deleted the main app on iOS ages ago (and might do the same for Messenger) and only access it through the mobile site, on a browser. This has two advantages: your battery life improves by many, many hours, and if you use an adblocker, the ads will be blocked.
link to this extract

 

Secret motor found on cyclist’s bike at world championships » Reuters

Ian Chadband:

The motor was discovered inside the frame of the machine being used by teenager Femke Van den Driessche at the world cyclo-cross championship in Zolder, Belgium, Bryan Cookson, the president of the International Cycling Union (UCI), said.

“It’s absolutely clear that there was technological fraud. There was a concealed motor. I don’t think there are any secrets about that,” Cookson told a news conference.

Yet the 19-year-old Van den Driessche denied suggestions she had deliberately used a motorized bike in the women’s under-23 race and was in tears as she told Belgian TV channel Sporza: “The bike was not mine. I would never cheat.”

Van den Driessche said the bike looked identical to her own but belonged to her friend and that a team mechanic had given it her by mistake before the race.

The bike was later seized after she had withdrawn from the race on Saturday with a mechanical problem.

I would like to know (1) how the motor worked (2) if her story is true, why the friend’s identical-looking bike had a hidden motor.
link to this extract

 

Worldwide shipments of slate tablets continue to decline while detachable tablets climb to new high » IDC

Total shipments for 2015 were 206.8m, down -10.1% from 230.1m in the prior year. Despite the market’s negative trajectory overall, shipments for detachable tablets reached an all-time high of 8.1m devices.

The transition towards detachable devices appears to be in full swing as pure slate tablets experienced their greatest annual decline to date of -21.1%. On the other hand, detachable tablets more than doubled their shipments since the fourth quarter of last year.

“This quarter was unique as we had new detachables in the market from all three of the major platform players,” said Jitesh Ubrani, Senior Research Analyst with IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Device Trackers. “Despite lukewarm reviews, the iPad Pro was the clear winner this season as it was the top selling detachable, surpassing notable entries from Microsoft and other PC vendors. It’s also important to note that the transition towards detachable tablets has presented positive opportunities for both Apple and Microsoft. However, Google’s recent foray into this space has been rather lackluster as the Android platform will require a lot more refinement to achieve any measurable success…”

…”One of the biggest reasons why detachables are growing so fast is because end users are seeing those devices as PC replacements,” said Jean Philippe Bouchard, Research Director, Tablets at IDC. “We believe Apple sold just over two million iPad Pros while Microsoft sold around 1.6 million Surface devices, a majority of which were Surface Pro and not the more affordable Surface 3. With these results, it’s clear that price is not the most important feature considered when acquiring a detachable – performance is.”

That last quote is going to rile some people who insist you need a “full-fat” OS to do “real work” and that the iPad can’t “perform”. (They’ve usually not used one for years.)

This is getting confusing, though. The “detachables” are ranked with the “slates” for sales purposes but treated as different in categorisation.

link to this extract

 

If the Hull Daily Mail website were a printed paper » YouTube

Terry Kent:

We are trying to demonstrate to the Hull Daily Mail Local publication (owned by parent company Local World )what it is like to read their news website(s) online.

Seems pretty accurate. You may know some sites like this yourself. (It’s not owned by the Daily Mail group, by the way.)
link to this extract

 

With a bet on a platform strategy, BuzzFeed faces business challenges » Digiday

Laura Moses finds some ad buyers not quite thrilled with what’s on offer:

buyers sometimes find BuzzFeed is more interested in what pops on platforms than what moves the needle for brands.

“We send a brief to BuzzFeed and what comes back is content that is no longer consistent with the brief,” said one ad buyer who requested anonymity because they do work with BuzzFeed.

Ian Schafer, CEO of digital agency Deep Focus, said clients have cooled on BuzzFeed’s content creation abilities, pointing to instances where clients used BuzzFeed for distribution but had the content created elsewhere.

“While brands are still in love with BuzzFeed’s distribution model, they don’t have the same blind faith in BuzzFeed from a branded content creation standpoint,” he said. “BuzzFeed has been skating on the ‘Dear Kitten’ example, but I can name like five of them from The New York Times. [The Times] is more able to deliver high-quality things that you remember.”

link to this extract

 

Google signals Apple-like direction for Nexus phones » The Information

Amir Efrati:

In the future, based on comments from Googlers to colleagues and outsiders, hardware makers will be much more like order-takers, similar to the way contract manufacturers like Hon Hai (Foxconn) follow Apple’s directions for producing the iPhone. Mr. Pichai also has said future Nexus phones may have only Google’s brand on them.

Google may be better off working directly with contract manufacturers rather than phone brands themselves under the new arrangement. But Google likely doesn’t yet have enough hardware expertise to go that route for phones the way Apple does.

Several of the phone brands might not participate in the program rather than capitulate to Google in such a way. One company that has been in talks with Google for a Nexus phone this year is HTC, says one person briefed on the matter. The person added that given the new arrangement Google has been aiming for, participation has been a controversial topic inside of HTC. After all, HTC was once was a contract manufacturer of phones that turned itself into the first major consumer brand for Android phones. It produced the first ever Android phone in 2008 and the first ever Nexus phone with Google in 2010. But for a variety of reasons, HTC’s consumer brand fell as quickly as it rose and the company is now a shell of its former self, though it still makes high-quality phones and is pushing into virtual reality and wearable devices.

Google has been comfortable with HTC’s engineering chops, and because of its experience producing devices, it might make sense as a partner for Google’s Nexus ambitions in the near term. While HTC is proud of its consumer brand, the company is likely desperate for more revenue and unit-sales volume. It’s possible there are financial or other considerations in its agreement with Google that make it more palatable. Spokespeople for Google and HTC did not comment.

What if… Google bought HTC? It could pick it up for loose change and have a sub-scale phone manufacturer and VR device maker which it could get to do just what it wants, aiming at the high end.
link to this extract

 

Fake online locksmiths may be out to pick your pocket, too » The New York Times

David Segal, with a terrific piece that uncovers all sorts of fakery around one of the real “captive market” situations – people who need a locksmith in a hurry and hit Google to find one:

Today, a well-oiled system keeps young Israelis flowing to the United States for locksmith jobs. Companies beckon on Israeli employment websites such as Maka (Hebrew for “score”). Among those currently hiring are Green Locksmith, Locksmith Garage, CT Locksmith and Mr. Locks. The latter, which claims its main office is in TriBeCa, promises that employees will earn as much as $4,000 a month and says it is looking for people “who are not afraid of new things.” Like many of these companies, Mr. Locks covers itself by stating — in Hebrew and on a site that caters to Israelis — that it is looking for United States citizens.

Many of the recruits later establish their own lead-gen operations, which then recruit more talent. This has increased competition and made deceiving Google an ever more esoteric pursuit. That was evident during a conversation with Roy Alverado, the owner of Locksmith Force, the company that created the fake pink building in Sun City. He insisted that he ran an authentic local business, with trained and courteous locksmiths.

As for that fake building: “We wanted to have a store in that area, but the rents were too high,” he said. He told a web design firm to create a building using Photoshop. Actually, all but one of the buildings are Photoshop creations, since Locksmith Force’s sole physical location is in Phoenix, Mr. Alverado said. The more buildings on the site, he candidly stated, the more people would believe they were calling someone who could show up at a car or house quickly.

Mr. Alverado said those fake buildings were necessary because getting to the first page in Google results now took ingenuity and cunning.

The “locksmith problem” has been well-known for years, inside and outside of Google. Trouble is, Google has little incentive to fix it; it makes money from people clicking on ads in desperation. (The headline’s slightly off; there are real – not fake – locksmiths, but they’re looking to gouge you if you hire them.)
link to this extract

 

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: smartwatches’ app gap, games and VR, smart luggage risks, Apple’s China rivals, and more

Posted on by
1

Uber aims to dominate – but is that because governments no longer can? Photo by afagen on Flickr.

You can now sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 11 links for you. Don’t put them anywhere Kanye West wouldn’t. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Smartwatches need to get smarter » Re/code

Walt Mossberg:

I don’t think the smartwatch needs one “killer app,” but I do believe it needs a capability more compelling than what’s out there so far. It needs to do something, all on its own, that’s useful, quick, secure and cool.

I have no crystal ball on this question, but I believe that one way to make the smartwatch indispensable is to make it a sort of digital token that represents you to the environment around you.

For instance, while the phone often is faster and easier for, say, using maps, the watch is much better positioned for communicating with smart items in your home, or even your car. It’s likely to be on your person more than your phone is, it knows who you are and it can be secured to be used by only you. So, with your permission, it could open your door, tell your thermostat you’re home, maybe even start your car remotely.

With your permission, it could open your door, tell your thermostat you’re home, maybe even start your car remotely.

In stores, you could opt in to letting the watch not just pay for items, but order frequent purchases automatically, as you approach. These tasks can be set up and customized on a bigger screen once, and then just happen, effortlessly and often, with the watch.

It’s the proximity thing – which Apple sort-of talked about with a hotel door that could be opened by the Watch when it was first unveiled. Then again, this model relies on the much-vaunted Internet of Things, and we know how swimmingly that’s going.
link to this extract

 

Cheap cab ride? You must have missed Uber’s true cost » The Guardian

Evgeny Morozov:

To put it bluntly: the reason why Uber has so much cash is because, well, governments no longer do. Instead, this money is parked in the offshore accounts of Silicon Valley and Wall Street firms. Look at Apple, which has recently announced that it sits on $200bn of potentially taxable overseas cash, or Facebook, which has just posted record profits of $3.69bn for 2015.

Some of these firms do choose to share their largesse with governments – both Apple and Google have agreed to pay tax bills far smaller than what they owe, in Italy and the UK respectively – but such moves aim at legitimising the questionable tax arrangements they have been using rather than paying their fair share.

Compare this with the dire state of affairs in which most governments and city administrations find themselves today. Starved of tax revenue, they often make things worse by committing themselves to the worst of austerity politics, shrinking the budgets dedicated to infrastructure, innovation, or creating alternatives to the rapacious “platform capitalism” of Silicon Valley.

Under these conditions, it’s no wonder that promising services like [Finnish startup offering an “Uber of public transport”] Kutsuplus have to shut down: cut from the seemingly endless cash supply of Google and Goldman Sachs, Uber would have gone under as well. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that Finland is one of the more religious advocates of austerity in Europe; having let Nokia go under, the country has now missed another chance.

Morozov nails so much of the fake mystique around these companies, but how many people are really listening?
link to this extract

 

GDC: 16% of game developers are working on VR, up from 7% a year ago » GamesBeat

Dean Takahashi:

Virtual reality has the attention of game developers. A survey by the Game Developers Conference shows that 16 percent of all developers are working on VR titles for 2016, compared with just 7 percent a year ago.

In its fourth annual state of the industry survey, the GDC — the big game developer event that draws about 26,000 people to San Francisco in March — found that PC and mobile games are still the top platforms for developers, but VR is growing fast.

The survey was organized by UBM Tech Game Network, the owner of the GDC, and it is based on the feedback of 2,000 game developers from around the world. The GDC 2016 takes place from March 14 to March 18 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.

“This year, VR is the thing that more developers want to do,” said Simon Carless, group executive vice president of UBM Tech, in an interview with GamesBeat. “It hasn’t taken over, but it has grown fast.”

link to this extract

 

Xolo sees slumping sales, triggers employee exits » Times of India

Xolo, a sub-brand of homebred handset maker Lava International, has fallen on tough times, with slumping sales triggering a restructuring and employee exits. Its performance has been a drag on the parent, which, some estimates show, has dropped two positions since last year to the No. 5 spot in the fiercely competitive Indian market.

Marketing and sales teams at Lava and Xolo have been merged as part of a group-level restructuring aimed at reducing duplicate roles and bringing in efficiencies, several people close to the development told ET. Over the past few months, quite a few marketing and sales employees from Xolo have joined competitors, while some have been absorbed by Lava, one of them said. The company has shifted retail sales of Lava-branded devices exclusively to offline channels and Xolo to online platforms.

The Indian smartphone market is going through the same crunches as the broader market, but speeded up about fivefold.
link to this extract

 

How Bluesmart’s connected luggage nearly got me kicked off a flight » The Next Web

Natt Garun:

[The TSA security officer] began sorting through my clothes when I looked up at the X-ray monitor and noticed a square around where the luggage’s battery pack would be. Realizing the potential issue, I explained to the officer what he might have been looking for.

“Can you get it out?” he asked. Unfortunately, it was underneath the lining of the interior, so I couldn’t unless I was willing to cut the bag open and break the plastic box.

At this point a second officer shows up to give me the inevitable pat down, and she starts looking through my luggage. They swab it as part of an Explosives Trace Detection test and the bag alarms.

“Miss, where are you headed?”

“Las Vegas – I’m going to CES and I’m actually reviewing this bag for the event.” I explained the concept of the bag and tried to show them the booklet that came with the luggage. The second officer warns me not to touch the bag while she’s inspecting.

At this point my flight was boarding in 40 minutes, and I asked the officers if I’d make my flight.

“I’d be more concerned about your bag than making the flight right now,” she responded.

And so she took out the entire contents of my bag, patting each section as I stood there mortified that my bras and underwears were laid out for all of Chicago O’Hare to see.

Once the bag was empty, the officer pulled apart a velcro strip at the fold of the bag.

My body turned cold.

Really terrible design. And – a “smart case”? Dumb.
link to this extract

 

Outsiders’ chance » The Economist

Without divine intervention, it is hard to imagine Americans electing either of the Republican front-runners to be president. The lesson the party drew from Mitt Romney’s failure to dislodge Mr Obama in 2012 was that, in an increasingly diverse society, the Grand Old Party needed to widen its appeal. Mr Cruz’s target audience, white Christians, represent less than half the population. The obvious solution was to woo Hispanics, one of America’s fastest-growing electoral groups, who hold some conservative views, though only 27% of them voted for Mr Romney.

That was why, in 2013, a handful of Republican senators, including Marco Rubio, who is running third in the primary contest, joined a bipartisan, and ultimately fruitless, effort to legalise the status of millions of illegal immigrants. “It’s really hard to get people to listen to you…if they think you want to deport their grandmother,” declared Mr Rubio, a son of poor Cuban immigrants, at the time. It is even harder when you call them rapists. Mr Trump is easily the most disliked candidate of either party; 60% of voters disapprove of him.

There is a consolation for the Republicans. The Democrats could nominate someone even less electable.

In case you’d forgotten that the Iowa caucuses – where about 250,000 people can begin to decide who gets to be that nominee – begin on Monday.
link to this extract

 

GPS glitch caused outages, fuelled arguments for backup » Inside GNSS

Dee Ann Divis:

Less than a month after Europe switched off most of its Loran transmitters, a problem with GPS satellite timing signal triggered alarms across the continent and caused an unknown number of outages, including the disruption of some features of critical infrastructure.

The GPS problem was caused by an error in ground software uploaded January 26 as system operators removed space vehicle number (SVN) 23 from service. The long-planned deactivation of SVN 23, the oldest of the GPS satellites, clears the way for a new satellite, the last GPS Block IIF, which is to be launched February 4.

The software problem, however, threw GPS’s coordinated universal time (UTC) timing message off by 13 microseconds, which affected the timing data on legacy L-band signals and the time provided by GPS timing receivers, said 50th Space Wing spokesman James Hodges. The problem did not appear to have affected the GPS systems’s ability to provide positioning and navigation service…

…”Every support contract that we have that involves GPS timing receivers called in to say, ‘We’ve got a problem. What’s happening?’ [Charles] Curry [of Chronos Technology] told Inside GNSS.

link to this extract

 

The future is near: 13 design predictions for 2017 » Medium

Chase Buckley:

With UX Evangelists like Tobias van Schneider, Jennifer Aldrich and Chase Buckley behind the wheel, we are steering towards a brighter future. A future where little big details bring about user delight at every corner, where device agnostic pixel perfection is the norm, and where simple day to day experiences engage, excite, and stimulate users in new and innovative ways.

So where do you fit into all of this? To architect the experiences of tomorrow, you must first design the interactions of today. It is not enough to look in front of you; 2016 is already here. You must look ahead, to the future — to 2017 — where the real paradigm shifting trends of tomorrow lie in wait.

This introduction does feel like something from The Office (Chase Buckley referring to himself in the third person? “Architect” as a verb?) but the ideas, especially “failure mapping”, are great.
link to this extract

 

Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo: the challengers leading China’s charge against Apple » The Guardian

My contribution to the wider wisdom on the topic:

China’s phone market, which accounted for a third of all smartphone sales worldwide in 2015, is already slowing as the number of first-time phone buyers declines and people delay replacement purchases. A year ago, phones were being replaced on average after just 13 months; now that period is lengthening. According to Woody Oh, an analyst at research group Strategy Analytics, total Chinese smartphone sales in October-December actually fell by 4%, to 118m; Apple sold 15.5m phones there, up from 13.5m a year before, while its worldwide sales remained flat at 74.4m.

But that was only enough to make Apple the third-biggest supplier behind local firms Huawei (pronounced “Hoo-wah-way”) and Xiaomi (“she-yow-mee”), which each sold nearly 18m units. And just behind Apple were two more local rivals, Vivo and Oppo.

China’s smartphone market was 438m overall in 2015. That’s about 30% of the entire market.
link to this extract

 

Qwerty Looks Set to Stay on Smartphones » CCS Daily Insight

George Jijiasvlii:

I’ve been learning to touch type using the Dvorak keyboard on my laptop for about a month, practising for about 30 minutes per day. I find the Dvorak layout more comfortable, but still can’t type anywhere near as quickly as I can with qwerty. Made-for-smartphone keyboards are similarly more logical, accurate and faster in theory, but require the dedication of enough time to become proficient in using them. The problem lies in this commitment: changing something that’s become second nature is a difficult task.

Qwerty appears here to stay on physical keyboards and smartphones alike, as I don’t expect new designs will win over the masses or disrupt qwerty’s huge installed base any time soon. But the future of mobile communication might not be about taps, swipes or gestures after all.

Our latest multi-country wearables end-user survey found that about 70% of smartphone owners now use voice commands at least once a week, with 20% using the feature on a daily basis. The past few years have seen intelligent personal assistants like Cortana, Google Now and Siri becoming an integral part of the mobile experience, and I won’t be surprised if we revert back to the most rudimentary manner of communication: speech.

Hadn’t seen that voice data anywhere else. A data point in the desert.
link to this extract

 

Windows Phone is dead » The Verge

Tom Warren:

With Lumia sales on the decline and Microsoft’s plan to not produce a large amount of handsets, it’s clear we’re witnessing the end of Windows Phone. Rumors suggest Microsoft is developing a Surface Phone, but it has to make it to the market first. Windows Phone has long been in decline and its app situation is only getting worse. With a lack of hardware, lack of sales, and less than 2% market share, it’s time to call it: Windows Phone is dead. Real Windows on phones might become a thing with Continuum eventually, but Windows Phone as we know it is done.

Did not think the app situation could get worse on WP, but that links shows that yes, it can. I wrote about why Microsoft keeps Windows Phone (perhaps soon to be rebranded Surface Phone) going. And that remains the reason: it’s not about phones.
link to this extract

 

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: Google’s little big VR, teens in 2016, TalkTalk arrests, Italy v Google, and more

Posted on by
Reply

Death to trolls! Except when they’re human. Photo by Roshan Vyas on Flickr.

You can now sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

Survey: GOP voters want ‘testicular fortitude’ » NYMag

Gabriel Sherman:

On February 1, Iowans will cast the first votes of the 2016 presidential election, and the only thing that’s clear is that this Republican primary is the most unpredictable and surreal campaign in recent memory. But why? To understand the swirl of forces buffeting the party, we traveled across New Hampshire and Iowa and spoke to more than 100 Republican-primary voters. We met them in their homes and at town halls, at a motorcycle dealership and an auto-body shop.

My personal favourite of the many entries is this one:

Claude Greiner, 67, owns several farms
From: Kalona, Iowa
Supporting: Undecided, considering Trump and Rubio

“I don’t think anybody should go hungry — unless they don’t want to work. And I think everybody ought to have health insurance. But I think they ought to work for it and pay for a little of it, too. And we have given a lot of money to charity, because we have been successful, and we’ve tried to give back. But I have one philosophy: Teach a man how to work, don’t give him a fish. Teach a man to fish, don’t give him a fish.”

Uh-huh. By the way, the original phrase was “intestinal fortitude“.
link to this extract

 

Five million Google Cardboard VR viewers have shipped » TechCrunch

Lucas Matney recycles a Google blogpost:

Over five million Google Cardboard viewers have been shipped globally. These come in all shapes and sizes, the NYT Cardboard, the Star Wars Cardboard, Mattel Cardboard etc. Google has effectively invaded the VR scene and given people something to say “wow” about with what is now in many ways an iconic product.

Another milestone is that there have now been more than 25 million downloads of VR compatible apps, and that figure is just from the Google Play store. Google’s first wave of VR has left the company acting as more of an enabler of experiences than a provider of them, we’ll see how that shifts in the future but for the time being it seems it’s being successful at what it has sought to do.

Another interesting stat released is that nearly 350 thousand hours of YouTube content have been watched in Cardboard viewing mode. That’s another number you can expect to see increase; YouTube just hired a former Jaunt exec to act as their “Global Virtual Reality Evangelist.” In a similar vein of content viewing, the company also detailed that nearly 750 thousand VR photos had been taken with the Cardboard Camera.

Pump priming? Cardboard is far and away the most-used VR viewer, and may remain that way for some time to come.
link to this extract

 

Death of a troll » The Guardian

Alina Simone:

It had taken Eris two days to create an entire fake news site to host his fake obituary. The suicide note wouldn’t be enough, he realised. What if his friends thought he had just overdosed on pills, and was alive somewhere, half-comatose? Without convincing evidence that he was already dead, they might try to save him. So he made up a name, bought the “Sullivan County Tribune” URL, and seeded it with articles from other news outlets. He took care to mention that his remains would be cremated (no body, no grave), and fudged some of the details about his family (who had no idea of his “death”), and his exact location (he said he had died in a nearby town).

In Epic Mafia, there is a word for the act of scanning someone’s messages for clues as to whether they are mafia: scumreading. Careful inspection of the Sullivan County Tribune website might have revealed that listed among the newspaper’s staff was one Nikita Petrov – a Russian historian acclaimed for his books about the Soviet secret police, who Eris was known to admire. But no one scumread Eris’s suicide note. Or his obituary. His clues were never found.

A long read – give yourself some time – that gives an insight into the strange minds of people who troll relentlessly.
link to this extract

 

Walgreens tells Theranos to stop sending lab tests to California lab » The Verge

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

The drugstore chain Walgreens told Theranos to stop sending clinical lab tests to its Newark, California lab today. Walgreens has also decided to immediately suspend Theranos laboratory testing services at its store in Palo Alto, California. The decision, which will affect Theranos Wellness Centers located inside Walgreens, comes a day after a warning letter sent to Theranos was made public by the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“Walgreens informed Theranos that tests collected at 40 Theranos Wellness Centers located at stores in Arizona must be sent only to Theranos’ certified lab in the Phoenix area or to an accredited third-party lab for analysis,” a Walgreens statement explains. “No patient samples will be sent to the Newark lab until all issues raised by CMS have been fully resolved.”

Theranos is in trouble. The trouble is deep. It is going to struggle to get out of it. The fascinating part is how long it had been bobbing along without any public questioning – or scientific examination – of its tests.
link to this extract

 

AlphaGo vs. Fan Hui 2p » GoKibitz

The final position of one of the winning games by DeepMind’s AlphaGo against European Go champion Fan Hui. You can replay it; if you don’t understand Go, don’t worry. But it’s a game where an average player (such as me) can’t tell the difference between moves made by the human and by the computer.
link to this extract

 

What teens are like in 2016 » Business Insider

Maya Kosoff:

Too often when writing about what teenagers like, we neglect to talk to the most important group of all: teens.

So we decided to put together a “State of the Union” on the American teenager. To learn what American teenagers in 2016 really like (and what they don’t), we polled about 60 teens from across the country. We spoke with teens ages 13 to 19, in middle school, high school, and college.

We asked them about their digital lives and habits, the apps they use and the games they play, pop culture, and politics. Their answers offer a glimpse into what it’s like being a teenager in 2016. We’ve drawn out the highlights below — along with some data from other sources — so keep scrolling for our guide to teenagers in 2016.

Small sample, but probably representative. Seems like using Facebook wouldn’t be the way to profile them.
link to this extract

 

Q4 2015: smartphones grew 9% annually, driven by LTE, Apple & Chinese brands » Counterpoint Research

Tarun Pathak:

• 3 in 5 smartphones shipped in 2015 were LTE capable i.e. 900 million LTE smartphones were shipped globally in 2015, a breakout year for the mobile industry
• 3 in 5 smartphones shipped in premium segment (>$400) in 2015 were iPhones.
• Close to 850 brands are competing in the smartphone market
• however, the top 20 command almost 85% of the total smartphone shipments in 2015
• The entry-level and premium smartphone segment contributed to a combined more than half of the total shipments in CY 2015
• Local brands, especially from China and India, showed promising growth in smartphone shipments.

I’d guess that pretty much all of the iPhones were in the premium segment, which gives you an idea of its size. One thing about that “entry-level and premium” stat: if they were more than half, then the “middle segment” must be about half too.
link to this extract

 

TalkTalk call centre workers arrested in India » BBC News

TalkTalk has confirmed that three of its India-based call centre workers have been arrested.
The London-based telecoms provider said that it alerted police after carrying out a data security review.

However, a spokeswoman stressed that it had seen no evidence that the suspects had been involved with a high-profile cyber-breach last October.

Nearly 157,000 of TalkTalk customers’ details, including bank account numbers, were stolen in the breach.

The unnamed suspects do not work for TalkTalk directly but are instead employed by Wipro, a local call centre provider, in Kolkata (Calcutta).

“Following the October 2015 cyber-attack, we have been conducting a forensic review to ensure that all aspects of our security are as robust as possible – including that of our suppliers,” the company said.
“Acting on information supplied by TalkTalk, the local police have arrested three individuals who have breached our policies and the terms of our contract with Wipro. We are also reviewing our relationship with Wipro.”

This always looked like an inside job.
link to this extract

 

Grieving family’s horror as hardcore pornography played at funeral for father and baby son » Wales Online

Harrry Yorke:

A City of Cardiff Council spokesman, said: “The council has forwarded a written apology to the family and is carrying out an urgent investigation. There were four television screens used to display visual tributes as part of this funeral service.

“The television screen which showed the inappropriate content was recently installed, replacing a screen which was broken. We are trying to establish if the new screen – which is a SMART television – could have accepted or picked up a broadcast by accident via blue tooth or across a WiFi network.

“The other three screens which aren’t SMART TVs were unaffected. We are clear that it isn’t possible for any member of staff to play or download anything on the computer that links to the screens in the chapel. The screen has now been completely disconnected until audio visual engineers carry out a thorough investigation.”

Hmm. Do we trust this to have been down to the smart TV?
link to this extract

 

Italy tax police believe Google evaded 227 mln euros in taxes -sources » Reuters

Sara Rossi and Manuela D’Alessandro:

The Italian finance police believe Google evaded €227m euros ($247.5m) in taxes in Italy between 2009 and 2013, investigative sources said on Thursday.

The finance police report was due to be delivered to the Internet giant later in the day and comes amid an increasingly angry debate across Europe over taxation of multinationals who park earnings in low-tax nations.

Asked about the Italian report, a Google spokesperson said: “Google complies with the tax laws in every country where we operate. We are continuing to work with the relevant authorities.”

Google’s latest figures show it paid €2.2m of tax in Italy in 2014 on revenues of €54.4m generated in the country. Italy’s Communications Authority estimates Google’s Italian revenues at around 10 times higher.

“Evaded” is pretty strong: that’s used for knowingly misrepresenting your tax affairs. Normally what Google et al do is described as “avoidance”. Note though how this row is not going away, but only intensifying. (Possibly it’s seasonal.) Apple also made a back payment recently in Italy.
link to this extract

 

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: Apple’s conundrum, watch birds migrate!, the 5am startup, and more

Posted on by
Reply

A Go endgame: where would you play next? DeepMind’s systems would know. Photo by chadmiller on Flickr.

Only humans can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. They need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

Apple wants to be a services company » Business Insider

Jay Yarow with a neat summary of Apple’s conundrum:

So, Apple is in this weird cycle: It wants to grow services revenue, but services revenue depends on iPhone sales. Currencies are falling because the global economy is weak relative to the US economy, which is leading Apple to raise prices on the iPhone, which is hurting iPhone sales, which will limit services revenues.

Apple could lower prices of the iPhone to sell more units and then grow services, but it doesn’t seem to want to do that.

Cook said Apple already had a variety of price points, from the low-tier iPhone 5s to the high-end iPhone 6s Plus.

“I don’t see us deviating from that approach,” Cook said.

This makes sense since Apple is a hardware company. If it were a services company, it would lower prices, go for smartphone unit volume, then get more money from that. But it is not a services company.

It is not principally a services company. The money it does make from services is actually pretty substantial, and threatens to overtake iPad revenue. Poor iPad.
link to this extract

 

iPhone Headwinds » Tech-Thoughts

Sameer Singh:

Apple also increased iPhone channel inventory by 3.3m over the quarter compared to a decline of 0.2m in the same quarter last year. Keeping in mind that Apple reports sell-in (shipments), not sales to end users, this implies that iPhone sell-through actually declined by 4.3% YoY, from 74.7m to 71.5m units. This is the first such decline in the history of the product.

In addition to this sell-through decline, Apple’s revenue guidance for the next quarter implies a steeper YoY decline in unit sales. And finally, this was accompanied with a YoY increase in average selling price (ASP) which suggests that the iPhone mix is shifting towards higher end models…

…As Clay Christensen is fond of saying, “Disruption is a process, not an event”. The mechanics of low-end disruption have been working ever since the first Android smartphone was unveiled in 2008. The key test for the iPhone will be the iPhone 7 cycle, starting in fiscal Q1 [Oct-Dec] 2017. In a “redesign year”, it will be easier to gauge whether meaningful product improvements can continue to generate increased demand or if today’s smartphones have already reached “good enough” territory.

The sell-through point is valid (only BlackBerry also gives the same data). The odd thing is that rising ASP: it points to people having the disposable income to buy the pricier models, which argues against the “low-end disruption” thesis.

But the gap between the average selling price of an Android handset and the average selling price of an iPhone has never been larger. That must have knock-on effects. But what?
link to this extract

 

Google AI algorithm masters ancient game of Go » Nature

Elizabeth Gibney:

DeepMind’s program AlphaGo beat Fan Hui, the European Go champion, five times out of five in tournament conditions, the firm reveals in research published in Nature on 27 January. It also defeated its silicon-based rivals, winning 99.8% of games against the current best programs. The program has yet to play the Go equivalent of a world champion, but a match against South Korean professional Lee Sedol, considered by many to be the world’s strongest player, is scheduled for March. “We’re pretty confident,” says DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis.

“This is a really big result, it’s huge,” says Rémi Coulom, a programmer in Lille, France, who designed a commercial Go program called Crazy Stone. He had thought computer mastery of the game was a decade away.

The IBM chess computer Deep Blue, which famously beat grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997, was explicitly programmed to win at the game. But AlphaGo was not preprogrammed to play Go: rather, it learned using a general-purpose algorithm that allowed it to interpret the game’s patterns, in a similar way to how a DeepMind program learned to play 49 different arcade games.

This means that similar techniques could be applied to other AI domains that require recognition of complex patterns, long-term planning and decision-making, says Hassabis. “A lot of the things we’re trying to do in the world come under that rubric.” Examples are using medical images to make diagnoses or treatment plans, and improving climate-change models.

This is a gigantic result; being good at Go requires a subtle intuition and feel for space. (At least, for a human.) It’s far, far more complex than chess. And that this was done by a non-specific program has colossal implications.

As Nature’s leader on the topic comments, as these systems spread into our lives, “The machine becomes an oracle; its pronouncements have to be believed… Intuitive machines will need more than trust: they will demand faith.”

As a side note, DeepMind looks like one of Google’s smartest purchases – perhaps after YouTube.
link to this extract

 

Nest thermostat goes from ‘Internet Of Things’ darling to cautionary tale » Techdirt

Karl Bode:

[Tech writer Stacey Higginbotham’s] Nest device began trying to cook her family in the middle of the night, something Nest first tried to blame on her smart garage door opener, then tried to blame on her Jawbone fitness tracker (Nest never did seem to pinpoint the cause). Her report suggests that an overall culture of “arrogance” at Nest shockingly isn’t helping pinpoint and resolve bugs:

“One Nest partner, who declined to be named to preserve his business relationship with the company, said that Nest being quick with the blame didn’t surprise him, citing a culture of arrogance at the company. When something went wrong during integration testing between his device and Nest’s, problems were first blamed on his servers and team.”

And fast-forward to last week, when researchers putting various internet of thing devices through tests found that the Nest thermostat was one of many IOT devices happily leaking subscriber location data in cleartext (with Nest, it’s only the zip code, something the company quickly fixed in a patch). Granted Nest’s not alone in being an inadvertent advertisement for a product’s “dumb” alternatives. In 2016, smart tea kettles, refrigerators, televisions and automobiles are all busy leaking your private information and exposing you to malicious intrusion (or worse).

It’s a fascinating, in-progress lesson about how our lust for the sexy ideal of the connected home appears to be taking a brief pit stop in reality.

link to this extract

 

Vigilant solutions and the spread of police surveillance » The Atlantic

Conor Friedersdorf:

Throughout the United States—outside private houses, apartment complexes, shopping centers, and businesses with large employee parking lots—a private corporation, Vigilant Solutions, is taking photos of cars and trucks with its vast network of unobtrusive cameras. It retains location data on each of those pictures, and sells it.

It’s happening right now in nearly every major American city.

The company has taken roughly 2.2bn license-plate photos to date. Each month, it captures and permanently stores about 80m additional geotagged images. They may well have photographed your license plate. As a result, your whereabouts at given moments in the past are permanently stored. Vigilant Solutions profits by selling access to this data (and tries to safeguard it against hackers). Your diminished privacy is their product. And the police are their customers.

Sounds a bit similar to the UK police’s Automatic Number Plate Reader network, which extends around the UK, except this is historic too. (Then again, the UK’s ANPR system probably is too.)
link to this extract

 

How to wake up at 5am and build your startup » Medium

Patrick Park (once he’s got past the stuff about how to, you know, get up at 5am, and gets on to the stuff about building your startup):

It’s hard to admit, but no one really knows what they’re doing at first. Even the largest startup unicorns in the world, took a long time to find their footing. AirBnb survived by selling political themed cereal Obama O’s and Cap’n McCain’s. #Slack came out of a failed game “Glitch.” Even YouTube began as a video dating service “Tune in Hook Up.”

Micro-startups work well with the Lean Startup methodology. Not only are micro-startups easier to implement, but provide a shorter feedback loop that keeps you more in touch with your audience. With 75% of all startups failing, would you rather spend 100 days in a basement building a product your customers “might” like or connect with your audience everyday “while” you adapt your startup to address your customer’s pain-points? Don’t build another Blockbuster.

Start with the assumption that you’re wrong. Constantly validate your theories through micro-experiments. When I first started “Krown.io”. I explained the service as an “Annotation Blogging Platform.” That was, until I found out the majority of people have no idea what “Annotations” are. We tried a variation of “Smart Blogging,” “Highlight Blogging,” “Feedback Blogs,” and “Contextual Blogging Platform.” Which surprise, surprise. People still had no idea what we were talking about. So we added a bare-to-the-bones explanation, “Highlight a text and add comments directly on the highlighted text.” Validate your hypothesis.

The startup advice is fine. Waking up at 5am isn’t that hard, but he makes it sound like one of the 12 tasks of Hercules.
link to this extract

 

Lenovo used 12345678 as hard-coded password in SHAREit for Windows » Graham Cluley

Cluley is amazed – as you will be:

The first vulnerability [of four, all of which could be exploited remotely] (CVE-2016-1491) is perhaps the most infuriating. CoreLabs discovered that whenever SHAREit for Windows is configured to receive files, this process creates a Wi-Fi hotspot that is ‘protected’ by the password “12345678”.

Not surprisingly, this password just recently earned a top spot on the latest list of worst passwords you could possibly choose.

What is surprising is the fact that Lenovo would incorporate such an insecure password into its application — and one that does not change, no less!

Then again, I suppose the issue could be worse. In the second vulnerability (CVE-2016-1492), which applied only to SHAREit for Android, there is no password set up to protect the Wi-Fi hotspot when the app is configured to receive files.

To be sure, it doesn’t say much when Lenovo could have mitigated two separate vulnerabilities by adhering to the most basic principles of password security.

But moving right along. The third vulnerability (CVE-2016-1490) discovered by CoreLabs builds upon the insecure Windows password issue discussed above

When elephants do software while dancing. Yes, it was Lenovo which preinstalled Superfish.
link to this extract

 

Mesmerizing migration: watch 118 bird species migrate across a map of the western hemisphere » All About Birds

Pat Leonard:

For the first time, scientists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have documented migratory movements of bird populations spanning the entire year for 118 species throughout the Western Hemisphere. The study finds broad similarity in the routes used by specific groups of species—vividly demonstrated by animated maps showing patterns of movement across the annual cycle.

There’s also a version showing which species is which.
link to this extract

 

Apple India enterprise head Sharad Mehrotra quits, starts up with Hyve Mobility » timesofindia-economictimes

Muntazir Abbas:

Sharad Mehrotra, iPhone maker Apple’s enterprise mobility head in India, has quit and set up a handset company to compete in the world’s fastest-growing smartphone market. Mehrotra, who was with Apple India since October 2007, has cofounded Hyve Mobility , which will launch smartphones using Android, the operating system that rivals Apple’s iOS, by March.

“While consumers today have a lot of options to choose a smartphone, the element of customer delight is seriously missing,” he told ET, adding that it was high time to get into the smartphone market…

…”In the current Android scenario, no brand enjoys customer loyalty and we want to bring the change with our path-breaking products portfolio and service offerings,” said [Aditya] Agarwal, MD of Hyve Mobility.

link to this extract

 

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none noted.

Start up: Apple stalls, Japan’s zombies, Samsung on iOS?, the truth about terror, and more

Posted on by
Reply

But what are your respective ratings? Photo by ChrisGoldNY on Flickr

You can now sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

Apple’s iPhone growth era comes to an end » FT.com

Tim Bradshaw:

Total revenues for Apple’s fiscal first quarter ending in December rose by just 2% to $75.9bn, a marked slowdown compared with 30% growth in the same period a year earlier, as iPhone sales in the US and Japan declined.

Apple increased net profits to $18.4bn, beating its own record set a year ago for the most profitable quarter in US corporate history, with earnings per share up 7% to $3.28, in line with expectations.

However, iPhone unit sales for the holiday quarter were less than 0.5% higher than the same period a year ago at 74.8m, despite chief executive Tim Cook’s firm insistence three months ago that the iPhone “will grow” in the most important period in the Apple calendar.

Wall Street’s fears that the March quarter would see iPhone sales drop for the first time since its 2007 debut were confirmed by Apple’s revenue guidance, which was below analysts’ consensus of around $55bn.

According to a note by RBC Capital Markets before the release of the results, $50bn in sales would imply iPhone unit shipments of 45m, down 26% on the same period a year earlier.

Sic transit gloria mundi. Like many premium smartphone makers, Apple is now hitting the point where the slowing market, combined with the slowing economy, creates a ceiling for sales. Apple legitimately blamed currency, but that’s hurting everyone.
link to this extract

 

Japan must let zombie companies die » Bloomberg View

Noah Smith:

Imagine that you’re a Japanese 26-year-old with big dreams. You graduated from Waseda University, an elite private school, with a degree in electrical engineering. You and your college buddies used to hang around your apartment, watching anime on your LCD television, which was made by Sharp Corp. — the world’s 10th-largest LCD TV manufacturer. Even then, you had ideas about how to improve the product.

Now, after graduating and working for four years in the research division of an LCD manufacturer, you’re sure that you have figured out how to make LCD panels more cheaply, at higher quality. You also believe that you could market these TVs more effectively to young people with cool, fun designs. Instead of giving the idea to the higher-ups in your giant corporation — which, knowing Japan, might get you little more than a pat on the head — you decide to leave your job and start a business with your college buddies. You just know that you can beat lumbering, struggling incumbents like Sharp.

Sharp, which is perennially struggling. But is to be bailed out by the Japanese government. Which makes it a zombie which is blocking progress.
link to this extract

 

I found out my secret internal Tinder rating and now I wish I hadn’t » Fast Company

Austin Carr:

Referred to inside the company as an “Elo score,” a term the chess world uses to rank player skill levels, Tinder’s rating system helps it parse its user base in order to facilitate better matches…

…Tinder CEO Sean Rad confirmed the scoring system to me while I was reporting Fast Company’s recent profile of the company. Rad, who tells me his Elo score is “above average,” stresses that the rating is technically not a measure of attractiveness, but a measure of “desirability,” in part because it’s not determined simply by your profile photo. “It’s not just how many people swipe right on you,” Rad explains. “It’s very complicated. It took us two and a half months just to build the algorithm because a lot of factors go into it.”…

…Rad teased me about it several times over dinner one evening, gauging what my score might be as he swiped through a slew of Tinder profiles on my phone. It was one thing to know my Uber rating, but did I really want to know my Elo score on Tinder? When I asked whether he could look up my rating, Rad responded, “Do you want me to do it now?” All he needed was my email address.

But of course Sean Rad is above average. And that’s not a worrying security hole. Is it?
link to this extract

 

Exclusive: Samsung plans to bring almost all its apps to iOS » SamMobile

Asif S:

We’ve recently received information from our trusted insiders that Samsung is planning to bring most of its apps (if not all) to Apple’s iOS platform later this year.

According to the information that we’ve received, Samsung is working on Gear Fit Manager for iOS. This will allow people who own the Gear Fit to pair it with an iPhone. To compliment the Gear Fit Manager and Gear Manager apps, Samsung will also release the S Health app for iPhone. S Health app can be used to log daily activity, workouts, food intake, and sleep.

In terms of home entertainment, Samsung is bringing iOS support for the Galaxy View. The company is developing the Remote Control and Family Square apps for the iOS, which can be used to remotely control the Galaxy View using an iPhone and allow different users to stream content to the movable display. There are plans to release the Level app for Samsung’s Level audio devices as well, which will enable iPhone users to use these devices and make use of various effects and an official way of control.

Looks like a way of expanding the total addressable market (TAM) for its peripherals and other products to iPhone users. Sensible.
link to this extract

 

The Google Pixel C Review » Anandtech

Brandon Chester and Joshua Ho were really, really unimpressed:

On top of the issues with this specific Android build, Android itself is simply too far behind the competition as far as functionality and apps are concerned. I have commented on this in several Android tablet reviews, but the fact that Google is shipping their own tablet makes it important to go over it once again. Quite frankly, I still have yet to see a single app that has an UI that is both optimized for tablets and is as fluid as its iPad counterpart, and with the iPad offering multitasking while Windows offers an entire windowing system, there’s absolutely no way for the Pixel C and other Android tablets to be competitive. This applies just as much to Google’s own apps as it does to third party ones, and it’s really not a stretch to say that they behave like you’re using a blown up smartphone. In the past few years both Apple and Microsoft have stepped up their games with their respective tablet OSes go, but it feels like Android has never really advanced past the first generation of tablet OSes, which leaves Android badly lagging the competition.

Statements from Google engineers make it clear that Google has some changes coming to Android in the future to bring features like multitasking, but at this point it seems to me that either nobody Google really understands what a tablet should be, or they are unable to come to a consensus to get something developed. Adding multitasking doesn’t do anything to fix the fundamental issue with application quality, and Google doesn’t want to take the first step in making proper applications so that other developers can follow.

Note too that Chester points to terrible graphics transitions – and yet in the GPU benchmarks, the Pixel C beats everything else. Another case where benchmarks don’t tell the whole story.
link to this extract

 

Unpacked: global ad blocker usage on smartphones » Tech.pinions

Ben Bajarin (on a paywalled piece, hence no diagram below) has data much the same as Global Web Index:

over 20% of the global internet audience is already using an ad blocker on their smartphone. 16.1% have not begun using an ad blocker but are interested in doing so. Just over 30% haven’t used an ad blocker and aren’t interested in going through the trouble to install one.

In light of what Matt and I discovered, I decided to slice the answers by demographic to see how different age groups answered the same question.

In line with the discovery Matt [Richman] and I made, ad blocking is most common among the millennial demographic. I can’t stress enough how valuable this demographic is from an advertising standpoint. As ad blocking becomes more the norm with this group, on smartphones and on PCs, it will require significant adjustment. What is also interesting is many of these ad blocking services are not free. Currently over 25% of millennials using an ad blocker paid for it. This has massive consequences for this with advertising-supported business models.

I’ve articulated before my conviction that free-with-ads business models may become things of the past. They certainly are no longer viable in emerging markets.

The point about emerging markets is important: India is a big source of adblocking on mobile, for example.
link to this extract

 

OPPO sold 50m smartphones in 2015 » Gizmochina

OPPO’s R7, R7S and R7 Plus constituted 15m units in sales alone which is an incredible figure. Specifically speaking the smartphones priced between 2000 Yuan [£210,$300] to 3000 Yuan [£320,$450] segment were highest selling smartphones.

That’s up 67% year-on-year. That would put it around fifth in the world, nudging LG and Sony and behind Xiaomi, Huawei, Apple and Samsung. The big Chinese name nobody in the west has heard of.
link to this extract

 

The threat is already inside » Foreign Policy

Rosa Brooks (formerly a senior advisor at the US State Department):

By now, the script is familiar: Terrorists attack a Western target, and politicians compete to offer stunned and condemnatory adjectives. British, Chinese, and Japanese leaders thus proclaimed themselves “shocked” by the Paris attacks, which were described variously as “outrageous” and “horrific” by U.S. President Barack Obama; “terrible” and “cowardly” by French President François Hollande; “barbaric” by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi; “despicable” by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon; and “heinous, evil, vile” by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who possesses a superior thesaurus.

The Paris attacks were all these things. One thing they were not, however, was surprising.

Occasional terrorist attacks in the West are virtually inevitable, and odds are, we’ll see more attacks in the coming decades, not fewer. If we want to reduce the long-term risk of terrorism — and reduce its ability to twist Western societies into unrecognizable caricatures of themselves — we need to stop viewing terrorism as shocking and aberrational, and instead recognize it as an ongoing problem to be managed, rather than “defeated.”

Politicians don’t like to say any of this. But we’re not politicians, so let’s look at 10 painful truths.

Essential reading, really.
link to this extract

 

Xavier Niel explores move to enter UK mobile market » FT.com

Niel set up Free, a French mobile network which has been a great hit, as Daniel Thomas explains:

Interest from Mr Niel’s telecoms group in the British market will worry rivals, given its record of offering low prices that deeply undercut existing offers.

The launch four years ago of Free, Iliad’s mobile offering in France, disrupted the market, leading to an intense price war that slashed profits among the existing three operators. Orange’s proposed acquisition of Bouygues Telecom is an attempt to reverse the effects of the introduction of the low-cost rival.

A similar deal is being proposed in the UK with the purchase of O2 by Three, the UK’s smallest mobile group, which is owned by Hong Kong’s CK Hutchison. If the deal were to go through, it would reduce the number of competitors from four to three.

However, the deal is set to be challenged in the next week by the European competition regulator, which will set out a range of objections given the potential loss of competition for customers as well as third-party mobile providers that use the two networks under wholesale contracts.

The UK mobile market really is very competitive. Adding Free would shake it up even further.
link to this extract

 

Internet of Things security is so bad, there’s a search engine for sleeping kids » Ars Technica

JM Porup:

Shodan, a search engine for the Internet of Things (IoT), recently launched a new section that lets users easily browse vulnerable webcams.

The feed includes images of marijuana plantations, back rooms of banks, children, kitchens, living rooms, garages, front gardens, back gardens, ski slopes, swimming pools, colleges and schools, laboratories, and cash register cameras in retail stores, according to Dan Tentler, a security researcher who has spent several years investigating webcam security.

“It’s all over the place,” he told Ars Technica UK. “Practically everything you can think of.”

We did a quick search and turned up some alarming results [of a sleeping baby in Canada, kitchen in Spain, classroom in China, someone’s house].

The cameras are vulnerable because they use the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP, port 554) to share video but have no password authentication in place. The image feed is available to paid Shodan members at images.shodan.io. Free Shodan accounts can also search using the filter port:554 has_screenshot:true.

Shodan crawls the Internet at random looking for IP addresses with open ports. If an open port lacks authentication and streams a video feed, the new script takes a snap and moves on.

link to this extract

 

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: Apple’s phone expectations, Amazon’s giant backdoor, mobile adblocking grows, and more

Posted on by
1


Virtual reality attracts interest, but where’s the storytelling? Photo by Nick Habgood on Flickr.

Shh! It’s a secret, but you can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 11 links for you. Not attributable to tributaries. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Apple 1Q16 Earnings Preview » Above Avalon

Neil Cybart:

Investor anxiety heading into Apple’s upcoming earnings report is at a multi-year high. Fears surrounding slowing iPhone 6s and 6s Plus sales have morphed into broad questions about the iPhone’s long-term viability. While investors are looking for answers that won’t likely be provided this week, management has a very clear goal with its 1Q16 earnings report and conference call: set expectations for 2016.

Cybart reckons in the just-gone quarter to December (Apple’s first fiscal quarter of its financial year) Apple has sold around 77m iPhones, 18m iPads and 5.7m Macs. He also gives gauges for what is low and high. Apple announces its earnings on Tuesday evening (and LG will have published its own by the time you read this).
link to this extract

IAB chief blasts Adblock Plus as an ‘immoral, mendacious coven of techie wannabes’ » Adweek

Christopher Heine:

When Adblock Plus said it had been “disinvited” from this week’s Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Leadership Summit, it raised virtual eyebrows across the Web. Wasting little time and mincing no words, the IAB’s leader kicked off the event by firing back.

“Now, you may be aware of a kerfuffle that began about ten days ago, when an unethical, immoral, mendacious coven of techie wannabes at a for-profit German company called AdBlock-Plus took to the digisphere to complain over and over that IAB had ‘disinvited’ them to this convention,” CEO Rothenberg told the audience in his opening keynote Monday. “That, of course, is as much a lie as the others they routinely try to tell the world…”

…Eyeo GmbH-owned Adblock Plus’ ticket was pulled, Rothenberg said, “for the simple reason that they are stealing from publishers, subverting freedom of the press, operating a business model predicated on censorship of content, and ultimately forcing consumers to pay more money for less — and less diverse — information. AdBlock Plus claims it wants to engage in dialogue. But its form of dialogue is an incessant monologue.”

Well, they had an invitation (which they had to pay for, like everyone else), and then it was withdrawn. Clearly, no Christmas cards between these two. (I’m going to go to Adblock Plus’s meeting in London in a week or so.)
link to this extract

37% of mobile users are blocking ads » Global Web Index

Jason Mander:

According to GWI’s latest wave of research, it’s a significant 37% of mobile users who say they’ve blocked ads on their mobile within the last month. That’s a pretty sizable number if you consider that these tools have only relatively recently come to the attention of consumers. It also shows just how keen users are to improve their mobile experience and to prevent their data allowances and battery lives from being drained.

No less striking is that another 42% of users say they haven’t blocked ads so far but are interested in doing so in the future. That means almost 80% of the mobile audience could be engaging with blockers before too long – a stat which underlines why this is a trend which is unlikely to burn out any time soon.

Big numbers. People have responded by saying that they’re not seeing those figures, but equally adblockers often block Google Analytics too – so adblocking users are ghosts; you’d have to check against server logs to see what’s really happening. GWI has a large sample base, weighted towards the US and UK, though it doesn’t say how many were sampled for this particular survey.
link to this extract

‘iPhone 5se’ likely to have faster A9/M9 chips & always-on Siri, come in 16/64GB capacities » 9to5Mac

Mark Gurman:

Last week we reported that Apple is preparing to announce a new 4-inch iPhone dubbed the “iPhone 5se” as soon as mid-March. Our report noted that the new iPhone is essentially an upgraded iPhone 5s with a faster processor, Apple Pay, new camera features, and curved glass edges instead of sharp chamfers. Now, we have a few additional details about this new iPhone model. First, we are told that there are different prototypes of the device floating around Apple’s campus: some with the A8 and M8 chips that we discussed in our previous report, and some with the iPhone 6s’s A9 and M9 processors. We’ve now learned that the iPhone 5se is more likely to include variants of the A9 and M9 chips instead of the A8 and M8 lines…

Because the iPhone 7 will include a faster chip potentially known as the A10 processor, Apple likely does not want its new 4-inch iPhone to fall two processor generations behind in just six months.

Gurman has an excellent track record on this stuff. So you can pretty much take this as being what’s on the shipping box. Next question: why has Apple decided to renew the 4-inch phone?
link to this extract

Why VR “storytelling” does not currently work. And can it ever work? » Medium

Mike Cartel (who has experience in creating VR experiences):

Storytelling is a RETROSPECTIVE thing. It always has been. People didn’t sit around the campfire telling stories in the timeframes that they actually occurred. And i’m not aware of realtime books. Linear narrative mechanisms have evolved to break down the constraints of time and emotive viewpoint.
But herein lies the VR Storytelling anachronism.

The hardware has raced forward at an incredible speed. It’s barely three years between Oculus Rift DK1, and Oculus Rift CV1, but the change is extraordinary. But with this charge forward brings a storytelling problem. The new Rift, HTC Vive and PSVR headsets behave and look close to real life. Screen door and latency has been nearly obliterated. The hardware is challenging our brains to differentiate with real life.

Hardware mimics real life, and real life timing. Whilst current non-gaming VR content relies upon existing forms of linear narrative. These things do not co-exist. Yet. But will they ever? Can they ever?

Like him, I recall a time when we were assured that CD-ROMs would usher in an age of “choose your own storyline” storytelling. Instead, we got video games – while storytelling has remained much the same.
link to this extract

The muscular dystrophy patient and the Olympic medallist with the same genetic disorder » ProPublica

David Epstein, who wrote a book about genes and sport, and was then contacted out of the blue:

It seemed absolutely crazy. The idea that an Iowa housewife, equipped with the cutting-edge medical tool known as Google Images, would make a medical discovery about a pro athlete who sees doctors and athletic trainers as part of her job?

I consulted Harvard geneticist Robert C. Green to get his thoughts, in part because he has done important work on how people react to receiving information about their genes. Green was open to discussing it, but he recalls a justifiable concern that had nothing to do with science: “Empowering a relationship between these two women could end badly,” he says. “People go off the deep end when they are relating to celebrities they think they have a connection to.” I was skeptical too. Maybe she was a nutjob.

I had no idea yet that Jill, just by investigating her own family, had learned more about the manifestations of her disease than nearly anyone in the world, and that she could see things that no one else could.

Open this in another tab, and make the time to read it today – you’ll need about 15 minutes. It’s stunning. And (for any criticism of Google’s tax affairs below) it’s also testament to the power of Google Images and search engines and the power of having the world’s scientific information available to everyone. Jill extended two peoples’ lives, including her father’s (and probably her own), because she could access information easily.
link to this extract

Two Y-axes » Kieran Healy

Healy takes to task those who would plot using a single x-axis and two sets of data using two y-axes:

When you’re just looking at data, though, it’s enough to bear in mind that it’s already much too easy to present spurious—or at least overconfident—correlations. Scatterplots do the job just fine, as you can see. (Just don’t pay much attention to the sudden clumpy vertical bits in the plot.) Even here, we can make our associations look steeper or flatter by fiddling with the aspect ratio. Two y-axes give you an extra degree of freedom to mess about that, in almost all cases, you really shouldn’t take. Guidelines like this won’t stop people who want to fool you with charts from trying, of course. But they might help you not fool yourself.

Read and take to heart, graph-plotters. (Including Dr Drang.)
link to this extract

Google obeys tax laws, and gives us awesome services for free. Why complain? » Spectator Blogs

Fraser Nelson:

If Google hoped for some good PR in offering £130 million to settle UK tax claims dating back to the Labour years, it was a miscalculation: Labour regards the offer as “derisory” and the BBC is leading its news bulletins the better to sock it to its rival. Why did Google bother? It has run up against the standard anti-business narrative: that the social worth of businesses can be measured only by how much cash they give to the government. In fact, Google provides its services to millions of Britons (worth at least £11bn, by some estimates) at no cost at all: this is its contribution to society. As for its contribution to the government’s coffers, Google has – from the offset – been following the rules. And for this, it has been lambasted.

I don’t quite buy Google as a “rival” to the BBC. The £11bn (one-off?) calculation comes from an analysis released by – surprise! – Google, compiled by Deloitte. But it’s reasonable – jobs created, work done, and so on.

But at the same time, that rests on the argument that Google’s services aren’t fungible; that if it didn’t exist, that there wouldn’t be other companies offering platforms for digital advertising (leading to the need for SEO), for creating content, for writing smartphone apps and so on. I suspect Yahoo, Microsoft and others wouldn’t necessarily agree.
link to this extract

That Google tax deal » Waiting for Godot

Jolyon Maugham:

Well, here’s what Google UK Limited does.

Now, that doesn’t sound much like selling advertising. And it isn’t. Its business is selling services to other Google companies. And it will charge a modest uplift on its costs – and that modest uplift will comprise its profits.

A consequence of this is that Google UK Limited’s accounting profits will never bear any relationship to the profits Google Inc chooses to report to its shareholders as having been generated in the UK. Those profits generated in the UK will never show up in Google UK Limited’s accounts and be subject to UK tax. Google UK Limited is never going to be hugely profitable.

Indeed if Google Ireland Limited and Google Inc were to choose to buy those services from some other jurisdiction, Google wouldn’t generate any accounting profits here at all.

The accounting profits they generate here they generate because they choose to buy services from here. They choose to make profits here.

We’re all being inculcated into the winding roads of multinational tax planning.
link to this extract

Asustek, Gigabyte to ship 4.2-4.5m own-brand motherboards each in 1Q16 » Digitimes

Monica Chen and Joseph Tsai:

With demand from the PC DIY market continuing to decline, global motherboard shipments dropped from 69m units in 2014 to 54m units in 2015, while shipments in China also slumped from 28m units to 26m.

As for second-tier players, excepting ASRock which was still profitable in 2015, Micro-Star International (MSI), Biostar, Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS) and China-based Colorful all saw their profits from the motherboard business in 2015 drop sharply from 2014.

As for 2016, global motherboard shipments are expected to drop below 50m units, while Asustek and Gigabyte will both be able to maintain their shipments at around 17m units.

Note that point about the DIY market shrinking. (Will VR change that?) Remarkable that two companies have over 60% of the whole market.
link to this extract

Amazon’s customer service backdoor » Medium

Eric Springer:

As a security conscious user who follows the best practices like: using unique passwords, 2FA, only using a secure computer and being able to spot phishing attacks from a mile away, I would have thought my accounts and details would be be pretty safe? Wrong.

Because when someone has gone after me, it all goes for nothing. That’s because most systems come with a backdoor, customer support. In this post I’m going to focus on the most grievous offender: Amazon.com

Amazon.com was one of the few companies I trusted with my personal information. After all, I shop there, I used to work as a Software Developer and I am a heavy AWS user (raking up well over $600/month)

Truly horrendous story. Moral: don’t use a publicly-visible email for your Amazon account. (Now go and change it.)
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: weather-forecasting phones, MPs v BT, Google’s UK tax row, Apple Street View?, and more

Posted on by
1


Smartphones are transforming life in Myanmar. Photo by Timothy Neesam on Flickr.

All the cool kids sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Not sure if they’re viral or bacterial. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The Facebook-loving farmers of Myanmar » The Atlantic

Craig Mod:

For six weeks last October and November, just before Myanmar [formerly Burma] held its landmark elections, I joined a team of design ethnographers in the countryside interviewing forty farmers about smartphones. A design ethnographer is someone who studies how culture and technology interact. A common mistake in building products is to base them on assumptions around how a technology might be adopted. The goal of in-field interviewing in design ethnography is to undermine these assumptions, to be able to design tools and products aligned with actual observed use cases and needs.

Myanmar is especially fertile ground for this kind of work. Until recently the military junta had imposed artificial caps on access to smartphones and SIM cards. Many of the farmers we spoke with had never owned a smartphone before. The villages were often without running water or electricity, but they buzzed with newly minted cell towers and strong 3G signals. For them, everything networked was new.

Fascinating points: brands, how the price of data has dived, apps, and how mobile shops have become pivotal.
link to this extract

Clever app turns everyone into a roving weather reporter » WIRED

Tim Moynihan:

With a free app for iOS, Sunshine wants to be the gold standard for weather accuracy. It hopes to achieve this ambitious goal by using altogether different meteorological instruments: People, iPhones, algorithms, and the draw of community and gamification. The app needs your location to work correctly, but the tradeoff is receiving hyper-local weather reports—Sunshine calls them “Nowcasts”—and becoming part of the data-aggregation process.

Using crowdsourced reporting, readings from the barometric pressure sensor in the iPhone 6 and latest iDevices, and predictive algorithms that overlay all that information on a map to deliver 18-hour forecasts, Sunshine generates what Stroponiati calls “weather forecasting at the street level.”

“It’s a weighted scheme of a user’s experience, community appreciation [you can upvote other users], and how much activity,” Stroponiati says. “Users that update often but also get a lot of upvotes get more weight. There is a whole gaming scheme behind it with local leaderboards and titles … As you get more points, you change titles and climb higher on the leaderboards.”

Was liking it until the gamification stuff. (Perhaps that’s necessary?) When she was still at Google in July 2009 I interviewed Marissa Mayer, who put forward exactly this sort of idea as what smartphones would enable.
link to this extract

Can DCMS safely ignore over 120 MPs protesting over constituency broadba[n]d » Computer Weekly

Philip Virgo:

The British Infrastructure Group report publicised in the Daily Telegraph today uses available data (assembled by the House of Commons Library) but puts on it a rather different interpretation to that recently used by BDUK to boast of its achievements to date and thsoe in the pipeline. The consequent call for action is backed by 120 MPs. Whether the break up of BT is the right action is another matter. If it were to be the right “answer” that raises the more interesting questions of whether “merely” separating out Openreach would achieve the objective of stimulating BT to invest in infrastructure (back haul as well as local loop) as opposed to content (alias subsidising premier league football) and whether that would be enough.

Can BT afford the scale and nature of investment necessary to build the communications infrastructure needed to underpin a “smart society”? A ‘smart society” is one in which everything is interconnected: from smart phones, TVs, toys and consumer goods, through smart meters, cars, buildings, telecare and telemedicine to smart grids and cities. It is also one in which those dependent on on-line medical devices (for example) may die when networks go down.

It is not just that BT has not maintained its previous rate of investment in recent years – it does not appear to have plans to increase it in the future and may find it hard to do so.

The BIG report, and others that have come out over the weekend, do make it seem like Openreach is very unloved, not just by customers but also by legislators.
link to this extract

How to save Wikipedia: Start paying editors … or write for machines » The Register

Andrew Orlowski:

Imagine that one giant manufacturer dominated the car market. The cars it made weren’t very good, but they were much cheaper and easier to buy than cars from anyone else, so the car company had ended up dominating the market.

These cars would often break down, spew noxious gasses, and a lot of the time, didn’t go where you wanted them to go.

Car travel was unreliable and sometimes even dangerous. People kept using them hoping that the crashes would happen to somebody else, and the health consequences of the pollution wouldn’t hit them for years.

For us, it isn’t difficult to imagine a better world, a world of reliable and safe cars.

Wikipedia at 15 is the monopoly car company of digital knowledge.

link to this extract

Apple Maps vehicles » Apple

Apple is driving vehicles around the world to collect data which will be used to improve Apple Maps. Some of this data will be published in future Apple Maps updates.

We are committed to protecting your privacy while collecting this data. For example, we will blur faces and license plates on collected images prior to publication.

As Benedict Evans points out, the blurring and publication mentions immediately point to a Street View competitor. (Microsoft also has a Street View product, as I recall, which even came before Google’s.)
link to this extract

Keeping up with Tim Cook’s Apple » Delusions Of Grandeur

Rob Rhyne:

Apple is moving at a blistering pace. Everywhere you look, a bearded neck slams Apple’s software quality. I agree that Apple has shipped some terrible bugs the past few years, but what did you expect? Apple is shipping software at an absurd rate.

When you consider the amount of technology they’re putting out to support new hardware and the number of people who use their software, it’s a mathematical reality that bugs will get out. Some of them can be nasty.

Those assailing Apple’s software quality fail to recognize the particulars of what Apple has shipped and how they have to ship it. If you take time to understand the problems facing a platform vendor and consider Apple’s scale, you might wonder how more bugs haven’t slipped out.

What Apple has accomplished in the past few years is astonishing, but you need to understand the details of how software frameworks are developed and shipped before you can truly appreciate it.

What we need is a graphic of how the hardware and software frameworks have expanded over the past few years. There really isn’t a company that is doing this much on so many fronts at such scale.
link to this extract

How Larry Page’s obsessions became Google’s business » NYTimes.com

Conor Dougherty:

Many former Google employees who have worked directly with Mr. Page said his managerial modus operandi was to take new technologies or product ideas and generalize them to as many areas as possible. Why can’t Google Now, Google’s predictive search tool, be used to predict everything about a person’s life? Why create a portal to shop for insurance when you can create a portal to shop for every product in the world?

But corporate success means corporate sprawl, and recently Google has seen a number of engineers and others leave for younger rivals like Facebook and start-ups like Uber. Mr. Page has made personal appeals to some of them, and, at least in a few recent cases, has said he is worried that the company has become a difficult place for entrepreneurs, according to people who have met with him.

Part of Mr. Page’s pitch included emphasizing how dedicated he was to “moonshots” like interplanetary travel, or offering employees time and money to pursue new projects of their own. By breaking Google into Alphabet, Mr. Page is hoping to make it a more welcoming home for employees to build new businesses, as well as for potential acquisition targets.

It will also rid his office of the kind of dull-but-necessary annoyances of running a major corporation. Several recently departed Google staff members said that as chief executive of Google, Mr. Page had found himself in the middle of various turf wars, like how to integrate Google Plus, the company’s struggling social media effort, with other products like YouTube, or where to put Google Now, which resided in the Android team but was moved to the search group.

Observation by Above Avalon’s Neil Cybart (former Wall Street analyst): “The continued lack of focus is noteworthy.”
link to this extract

Yes, Google’s UK back-tax payment is derisory. Here are the numbers that show it. » The Overspill

I used the public data to do some calculations:

The UK is the only region besides the US for which Google breaks out revenue in its quarterly earnings, because – for whatever reason – the UK represents 10% or more of Google’s total revenue. (Public companies are generally obliged to cite countries or regions which generate more than 10% of revenue in their results.)

Google doesn’t, however, break out profits for any region; it just gives a single figure for operating and net profit.

But what if we were to try to estimate how much profit Google has made in the UK, and then compare that to the tax it has paid, and the tax that it recently paid in a settlement with the UK’s tax authorities, HM Revenue & Customs?

This article from The Register is good background too.

link to this extract

Google’s 2.5% UK tax rate » ITV News

Robert Peston:

Google and HMRC would of course argue that for taxable purposes my calculation of its UK profits is wrong.

They would say that there is a global convention that the profits in the UK should be measured as a margin or increment on top of what it would cost Google to operate here if all its operations were subcontracted to a third party.

Those notional taxable profits would appear to be a bit more than a couple of hundred million quid for for the 18 months to the middle of last year.

And the British taxman would want credit for increasing that margin or increment in its latest negotiations with Google, to capture (in a way that I freely admit I don’t understand) a new assessment of the maturity of its UK business and the low risk of operating here.

They would argue that it would be wholly inappropriate to tax Google on profits measured as I suggested, because most of the costs and business risks of developing Google were taken in the US – and therefore it is only fair that the bulk of the taxable profit of this global giant should be attributable to the US.

In other words, the British taxman and Google would both insist that the Chancellor and the Exchequer are getting quite as much tax as they deserve – perhaps even more – given that multinationals conventionally pay most tax in their homeland (or America in this case).

Here is the punchline. George Osborne, who is struggling to reduce the government’s deficit and needs every penny of tax he can lay his hands on, would seem to concur that he is not being short-changed by mighty Google.

Peston’s calculations are the same as mine.
link to this extract

Google paid Apple $1bn to keep search bar on iPhone » Bloomberg Business

Joel Rosenblatt:

The revenue-sharing agreement reveals the lengths Google must go to keep people using its search tool on mobile devices. It also shows how Apple benefits financially from Google’s advertising-based business model that Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has criticized as an intrusion of privacy.

Oracle has been fighting Google since 2010 over claims that the search engine company used its Java software without paying for it to develop Android. The showdown has returned to U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco after a pit stop at the U.S. Supreme Court, where Google lost a bid to derail the case. The damages Oracle now seeks may exceed $1 billion since it expanded its claims to cover newer Android versions.

Annette Hurst, the Oracle attorney who disclosed details of the Google-Apple agreement at last week’s court hearing, said a Google witness questioned during pretrial information said that “at one point in time the revenue share was 34 percent.” It wasn’t clear from the transcript whether that percentage is the amount of revenue kept by Google or paid to Apple.

It’s a good point: if Apple is so critical of Google’s business model, why is it happy to take money to let it run that business model on iOS? True, Safari blocks third-party cookies (including DoubleClick, the ad network Google owns) – until you sign in to Google. But still a point of contradiction, rather like iAds.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none noted (though tax manoeuvres are notoriously complicated, so I’m expecting feedback on that).

Yes, Google’s UK back-tax payment is derisory. Here are the numbers that show it.

Posted on by
7


Google UK: it’s either gigantically expensive to run, or there are tax shenanigans going on. Photo by osde8info on Flickr.

The UK is the only region besides the US for which Google breaks out revenue in its quarterly earnings, because – for whatever reason – the UK represents 10% or more of Google’s total revenue. (Public companies are generally obliged to cite countries or regions which generate more than 10% of revenue in their results.)

Google doesn’t, however, break out profits for any region; it just gives a single figure for operating and net profit.

Update: note that this post doesn’t take into account any of the amazing workarounds that companies use to shift “activity” from one place to another; for example, Google doesn’t even accept that it has a “place of activity” in the UK. For instance, look at Jolyon Maugham’s analysis, and especially the comments that follow it.

But what if we were to try to estimate (in a fag-packet way) how much profit Google has made in the UK, and then compare that to the tax it has paid, and the tax that it recently paid in a settlement with the UK’s tax authorities, HM Revenue & Customs?

Tax, of course, is payable on profit, not revenue. And it’s helpful too to compare Google with other UK media companies which sell advertising and have other activities.

So take a look at the tax paid by another UK-based media company of comparable size – ITV.

ITV’s interim results (for the six months to end June 2015) show six-month revenues of £1.53bn, with profit before tax of £391m, compared to profits for the same period in 2014 of £312m. And here’s the profit before tax figures (for six months).

Screenshot 2016-01-24 17.29.39On which it paid tax of £81m (first six months of 2015) and £64m (first six months of 2014) – an effective tax rate, as it points out, of 21%.

Screenshot 2016-01-24 17.29.27.png

Now let’s move on to Google. Its UK revenues are as follows – all given in US$:

Screenshot 2016-01-24 17.35.09

Note that these are a LOT more than ITV’s. But how do we get from this to its profits? The simple way is just to adopt the overall profitability of Google, the corporation. As a rough-and-ready way of approaching Google’s UK profits, it will have to suffice. The UK doesn’t have the expense of the “moonshot” operations such as self-driving cars; most of the activity is around advertising, though there is also an Android development team (whose work is allegedly actually “happening” in California for tax purposes) and various building works which will all affect immediate profitability because they’re expensive.

But let’s try anyway. Let’s use Google’s overall operating profit margin for each quarter, and use that to calculate the UK profits. It’s not perfect, but it’s a start.

I’ve done that in the table below, using the data from Google’s accounts, and its operating profit/revenue (hence operating profitability margin) to calculate a notional profit; then I’ve multiplied by the prevailing exchange rate (which has varied a lot over the years); and then I’ve multiplied the notional profit by 21% to get the “tax payable”.

Screenshot 2016-01-24 18.19.02

Screenshot 2016-01-24 18.31.14

The numbers are staggering. Google’s UK division has probably made profits of more than 7 billion pounds since the fourth quarter of 2005 (which I used simply because I couldn’t get exchange rates going further back) on revenues (stated) of $39bn – generating an assumed profit of $11.56bn, or £7.11bn.

And the tax payable on that amount? Assuming that same 21% rate as ITV, the total tax payable would be just short of £1.5bn.

And.. how much tax has Google paid in the UK?

The latest stories to emerge of the deal with HMRC suggest that Google is paying back tax to cover just that period to 2005.

“We have agreed with HMRC a new approach for our UK taxes and will pay £130m, covering taxes since 2005,” a Google spokesman said. “We will now pay tax based on revenue from UK-based advertisers, which reflects the size and scope of our UK business.”

How much tax has Google paid in the UK? A total of £200m if you include this latest £130m amount, apparently. Which works out to a tax payment rate of 2.8%. Sure, there may have been lots and lots of costs involved in setting up Google, which are offset against tax. But I doubt they’re bigger than ITV, for instance, has to pay.

Google’s deal with HMRC has been called “derisory”. The figures here suggest that that description is absolutely correct. If Google is generating this much revenue in the UK – a fact which it states in its earnings reports, for which its executives are legally liable – then it would be terrific if it could explain quite how it is so dramatically expensive to run such a business that it generates such pitiful profits. Update: the explanation given by tax experts is that the revenues are *generated* in the UK, but *booked* in Ireland, so that the “profit” arises in Ireland, which doesn’t tax it. This “generated in UK but booked in Ireland” point is the one which led to an almighty furore in 2013 when Matt Brittin of Google

stood by evidence he gave last year that all the company’s European sales were routed through its operation in Ireland and so were not liable to UK taxes.

To which the committee chairman, Margaret Hodge, responded:

“You are a company that says you do no evil and I think that you do do evil in that you use smoke and mirrors to avoid paying tax.”

Among the criticisms of the deal with HMRC are that it must have been done with some sort of principle in the minds of those who agreed the deal for HMRC – in which case it would be useful for other companies to know what principles exactly are in play. It’s time for transparency on this.

Start up: Google’s ad stop, hacking phishers, the lost phone mystery, the adblocking browser and more

Posted on by
Reply

A game with these will give you an insight into production processes. Photo by judy_and_ed on Flickr.

You can now sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

Why is your team falling behind? Ask ‘The Penny Game’ » Atomicobject

Eric Shull:

The book Velocity describes an enlightening simulation, a model of a simple manufacturing line. The game uses pennies and dice to represent pieces of work flowing through stations in a factory. It may be simple, but the penny game can improve our understanding of how software teams work, how the interaction of variable processes affect the system as as whole.

In the penny game, pennies come in at one end of the line, are processed by each station, then exit at the other end. This would be rather mundane but for one complication: each station does not always process the same number of pennies.

In the simulation, rolled dice indicate how many pennies each station is allowed to move.

This is fascinating – and gives you real insight into the problems that have to be overcome in manufacturing to tight deadlines. Imagine now if you were processing millions of “pennies”, except they were phones.
link to this extract

 

Google disabled 49% more ads in 2015 » WSJ Digits blog

Alistair Barr:

More than 1,000 of Google’s 60,000 employees monitor and remove ads, an important task because the company gets about 90% of its revenue from advertising. It’s also been hit financially for not adequately monitoring ads. In 2011, the company agreed to pay $500m to settle allegations by the U.S. Department of Justice that ads for Canadian online pharmacies contributed to the illegal importation of prescription drugs. In the settlement, Google acknowledged it acted “improperly.”

Google blocked more than 12.5m ads in 2015 for drugs that were unapproved or that made misleading claims, up from 9.6m a year earlier.

Ads making misleading weight-loss claims were a big source of user complaints last year, prompting Google to suspend more than 30,000 websites from its ad systems. It declined to give a comparable number for 2014.

Rob Leathern has the growth figure for ad disabling: it’s growing by 50% annually, but still a long way short of catching them all.
link to this extract

 

How I stumbled upon thousands of Facebook passwords » Medium

“Rukshan”, a Colombo-based medical undergrad and hacker, received a Facebook phishing email and twiddled around with the phishing page:

after modifying the url I checked the folder which contained the php script that handles the post requests and I knew at that moment I hit the jackpot.

There was no index.html file to make sure no one else see the files in that directory or any .htaccess modification, well like I said phishing people are too bored to do all these tech stuff anyway, they’d rather get the passwords and go away.

So I opened the password.html file and I was greeted to the sight of hundreds of Facebook passwords, and by looking at the credentials one there was a pattern:

•Almost all of these accounts belonged to girls who are in their early 20s or teens.
• Almost all of the accounts belonged to females who are from Colombo.

Neat idea; neater still would be to wipe the files. But that would be one sizeable hack further (and probably illegal).
link to this extract

 

Why don’t you have an Android version? (Or why we develop for iOS first) » Impossible Ventures

Joel Runyon:

Android users may download more apps, but they spend less money than iTunes users.

But that’s not just fake studies either, in our experience with Paleo (io) – a top 20 app in iTunes and ranked even higher in Google Play – we make about 3x the sales on our iTunes listing as we do on Google Play (even though we have a higher ranking in Google Play than iTunes).

Which brings me to the next point: apps are not free to make.

As an app developer, you have to spend time & money on this concept that you have in your head to bring it to reality. The  MVP on an app can cost anywhere between $2k and $20k to build and launch. It might not seem like much if you spend all your time raising VC money and have a $1M+ in the bank, but it can add up if you’re bootstrapping.

In fact, with every dollar you spend, there’s a very real cost (along with another equally as real, opportunity cost).

Of course the argument is completely different in Asia, where it’s generally Android-first (except in Japan, and who knows in China?).
link to this extract

 

Finding the tennis suspects » Medium

Russell Kaplan, Jason Teplitz, and Christina Wadsworth:

The tennis world was sent reeling when BuzzFeed News and the BBC jointly published The Tennis Racket, which revealed “evidence of widespread match-fixing by players at the upper level of world tennis”. But BuzzFeed refused to publish the names of those players.

We dove into the data and found the names ourselves.

Unless you follow tennis really closely you won’t have heard of any of the names but one, and I do wonder if that one is thrown up by some weird quirk of the analysis. Seems robust, though. I think this might dissuade players – and administrators – from trying to hide this in future, knowing that there are people analysing public data for oddities. Will it put off the gamblers, though?
link to this extract

 

Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones? » Fusion

Kashmir Hill:

It started the first month that Christina Lee and Michael Saba started living together. An angry family came knocking at their door demanding the return of a stolen phone. Two months later, a group of friends came with the same request. One month, it happened four times. The visitors, who show up in the morning, afternoon, and in the middle of the night, sometimes accompanied by police officers, always say the same thing: their phone-tracking apps are telling them that their smartphones are in this house in a suburb of Atlanta.

But the phones aren’t there, Lee and Saba always protest, mystified at being fingered by these apps more than a dozen times since February 2015. “I’m sorry you came all this way. This happens a lot,” they’d explain. Most of the people believe them, but about a quarter of them remain suspicious, convinced that the technology is reliable and that Lee and Saba are lying.

“My biggest fear is that someone dangerous or violent is going to visit our house because of this,” said Saba by email. (Like this guy.) “If or when that happens, I doubt our polite explanations are gonna go very far.”

It’s billed as “a tech mystery”, and it really is.
link to this extract

 

Brave is the name, ad-blocking the game of new browser » Computerworld

Former Mozilla CEO (for 11 days) Brendan Eich is behind a new browser for desktop and mobile which blocks all ads and tracking by default:

“We are building a new browser and a connected private cloud service with anonymous ads,” Eich said.

In effect, Brave will first scrub websites of most of their ads and all tracking, then replace those ads with its own. But the latter will be aimed not at individuals but at the anonymous aggregate of the browser’s user base. If enough people gravitate to the browser, Brave will share its ad revenue with users and content publishers.

“We will target ads based on browser-side intent signals phrased in a standard vocabulary, and without a persistent user id or highly re-identifiable cookie,” Eich said. “By default Brave will insert ads only in a few standard-sized spaces. We find those spaces via a cloud robot.”

No user data will be recorded or stored by Brave, Eich promised.

Elsewhere, Eich said that 55% of Brave’s revenue would be shared with site publishers, and 15% with users, who could then turn that money over to their favorite sites or keep it.

Al Hilwa, an analyst with research firm IDC, applauded the concept of creating an alternate revenue stream from traditional advertising, but wondered whether the browser could compete, even in the niche that Eich described. “This is a laudable idea, but fighting ‘free’ is always risky,” said Hilwa in an email reply to questions.

Not sure the world has an appetite for a new browser, but one can envisage adblocking becoming built in and then enabled, just as pop-up blocking in browsers went from “pop-up what?” to “optional” to “on by default”.
link to this extract

 

Apple pushes to bolster market share in India » WSJ

Newley Purnell:

India’s smartphone market is expanding quickly and by next year it should overtake the U.S. as the world’s second-biggest behind China, according to research firm IDC.

Just 35% of mobile phones sold in India now are smartphones, meaning there is room for growth as people upgrade from basic devices. Indian consumers, however, tend to purchase inexpensive devices: The average smartphone selling price in the country is likely to fall to $102 in 2018 from $135 in 2014, IDC says.

Apple’s problem has been that the sweet spot for smartphone sales in India has been handsets that cost less than $150. In a country where the average person earns about $1,500 a year and even middle-class consumers make less than $8,000 a year, the standard iPhone — which usually costs between $500 and $1,000 without a data plan — was just too expensive for most people to consider.

“Buying an iPhone is so expensive,” said Sakshi Maurya, a 20-year-old university student in New Delhi. She said she doesn’t understand why an iPhone is five times as expensive as some locally available Android phones. “It’s a luxurious thing.”

India poses a particular marketing challenge for Apple: it’s a mixture of very tech-savvy buyers and low-income buyers. Which does it target first, and how?
link to this extract

 

iPhone 6S/6S Plus underperform year-ago sales » Consumer Intelligence Research Partners

CIRP finds that the new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus accounted for 67% of total US iPhone sales, with iPhone 6s at 48% and iPhone 6s Plus at 19%. In the December 2014 quarter, iPhone 6 and 6 Plus accounted for 75% of total US iPhone sales with 30% iPhone 6 Plus.

“The iPhone 6s and 6s Plus did quite well,” said Josh Lowitz, CIRP Partner and Co- Founder. “Yet, they did not dominate the same way that iPhone 6 and 6 Plus did a year ago. The total share of the new flagship models fell below the share of the then-new phones in 2014, and the large-format iPhone 6s Plus share of sales dropped compared to the iPhone 6 Plus as well. Customers continue to choose the year-old iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, and even the two-year old iPhone 5S.”

CIRP can’t say whether total sales are higher or lower (it samples 500 buyers of Apple devices in the previous quarter), just the mix. This looks like a subtle price deflation of the iPhone as people opt for 2014’s models over 2015’s – after all, they look the same to other people, even if the newer models has extra features.
link to this extract

 

Issue 3434 – android – Add APIs for low-latency audio – Android Open Source Project – Issue Tracker

On Tuesday, Apple released its “Music Memos” app, which is intended to let musicians (of any standard) record little musical thoughts that come to them on the guitar or piano directly to their iPhone or iPad, and add musical accompaniment.

Android doesn’t have that, because as has been noted here before its audio latency is too long – over 10 milliseconds, which is the longest pro musicians can bear. So how long have developers been prodding Google to improve Android’s audio latency?

I am developer of real-time audio signal processing applications. I am interested in creating
applications for sale in the android marketplace, but found that android has no method for real-
time low latency audio.

This is the first entry in a bug/feature request which continues to the present (latest entry is June 2015). The date of the entry? July 31, 2009 – slightly over nine months after the first Android phone. Is six and a half years a long time for a feature request to lie open? (And here’s Google’s official list of device latencies. Look for any at 10ms or below.)

Apple effectively gets 100% of the professional audience through this feature.
link to this extract

 

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: the open data economy, Samsung sued on software updates, Google v Isis, deaf developing, and more

Posted on by
1
Zano drone: hardly any were built

Zano’s much-promised drone turned out to be a flop, not a flyer. Photo: Torquing Industries.

Hell, you might as well sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

The economic impact of open data: what do we already know? » Medium

Jeni Tennison and Jack Hardinges of the Open Data Institute:

Open data fuels economic growth. Many believe in the theory and ask for the proof. A new report by Nesta and the ODI adds to the evidence of the impact of open data. The report’s analysis, undertaken by PwC, examines the effects of the Open Data Challenge Series (ODCS) and predicts the programme will result in a potential 10x return (£10 for every £1 invested over three years), generating up to £10.8m for the UK economy.

Seems amazing that ten years ago I was having to fight government departments tooth and nail to persuade them that releasing open data could have an economic benefit.
link to this extract

 

‘Hateful Eight’ producer on piracy: “Aspirin ain’t curing the plague” » Hollywood Reporter

Richard Gladstein, producer of Hateful Eight:

the “Fair Use” provision and debate has also proven to be an extremely useful tool for those looking to distract from or ignore the real copyright infringement issue: piracy.

Such distractions include Google’s recent announcement that they will be offering legal support to “a handful of videos that we believe represent clear fair uses which have been subject to DMCA takedowns.” Fred von Lohmann, legal director of copyright at Google, noted in a recent post on Google’s Public Policy blog: “More than 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.” As the third most visited site on the web, YouTube occupies an important place in the discussion of online copyright infringement.

The criteria and definition of what constitutes fair use is a long-cherished and worthy debate. In fact, I agree with Mr. von Lohmann when he says, “Some of those uploads make use of existing content, like music or TV clips, in new and transformative ways that have social value beyond the original.”

However, it should be noted that the search behemoth won’t be defending every takedown notice, but said they will select a “small number of videos” they believe “will make a positive impact.” Would you care to guess how many videos they’ve selected? Turns out, it’s four. Jonathan Bailey at Plagiarism Today points out, “That’s 0.0000005% of all users.”

As Stephen Carlisle, Copyright Officer of Nova Southeastern University, describes it:

“The new policy is really nothing more than a publicity stunt, designed to encourage more people to upload to YouTube videos of dubious legality, while at the same time acting as an intimidation tactic to discourage the filing of valid takedown notices.”

link to this extract

 

Being a deaf developer » Cruft

Hollie Kay:

I’ve been deaf since infancy. It is not profound; my hearing loss is described as moderate to severe and is mostly problematic at higher frequency ranges, the range at which most human speech happens. I rely on lip-reading and identifying vowel patterns to understand spoken language. Particular struggles are:

• recognising consonants, especially sibilants and unvoiced consonants (all consonants are high frequency sounds, and the unvoiced and sibilant consonants don’t activate the vocal chords)
• the beginning of sentences
• the end of sentences

Some deaf people successfully become programmers. It’s mostly thought-based, often solitary work, where all your output is written down. Specifications and bugs come to you (in an ideal world, at least) on paper and in ticketing systems instead of through other people’s noiseholes. Some areas aren’t quite so fabulous (I’m looking at you, interminable conference call meetings involving 15 people sitting in a circle around a gigantic table), but adjustments are always possible.

The stereotype of a programmer as a solitary eccentric who’s allergic to human company is unfair and inaccurate. As a group, we’re a very social bunch.

The Tim Berners-Lee quote about accessibility further down in the article is worth bearing in mind.
link to this extract

 

Vladimir Putin’s internet adviser owns a torrent site » TorrentFreak

“Andy”:

Last week Putin signed a decree that officially enlisted [Herman] Klimenko and it didn’t take long for him to address the issue of Internet piracy. However, instead of tough talk, Klimenko criticized web-blocking and suggested that copyright holders should wait for a better economic situation before “terrorizing” on the issue of piracy.

“Consumption of copyright content increases with economic growth, and when the situation is very serious, I think people do not have to unnecessarily terrorize these issues,” Putin’s adviser said.

“Pushing hard now on this topic, I think, is not worth it. When the economy improves, you should return to this issue.”

While Klimenko’s comments at least in part sound reasonable, copyright holders would’ve been disappointed by his lack of support. What they will be even more disappointed over is the allegations now surfacing about Klimenko’s links to online piracy.

link to this extract

 

How Zano raised millions on Kickstarter and left most backers with nothing » Medium

Mark Harris:

bumps in the road kept popping up. In late May, Crowther posted that some of Zano’s plastic parts had been delayed due to a tooling issue. The decision not pursue a pilot build was coming back to bite Torquing. Additions that Reedman made to his initial design, and the fact that some of the plastics supplied were heavier than expected, had ballooned Zano’s weight from 55g as a prototype to 70g in pre-production. With the original propellers, the Zano could now fly for only a couple of minutes between charges — a far cry from the 15 minutes that Reedman had promised.

A bigger battery could increase flight time, and Reedman told me he was trying to boost the battery size from 750 mAh (milliampere hours, a measurement of discharge capacity over time) to 1,000 or 1,100 mAh before he left Zano. A review of comparable batteries designed for drones (from makers and third-party replacements) finds even custom-fit modules would weigh at least 30g for 1,000 mAh, seemingly impractical without further design changes.

His solution at the time was to send back the original propellers for larger ones. However, says Reedman, “As far as [the Chinese supplier] was concerned, the propellers did work so therefore are not faulty and would not accept returns.” Torquing was left having paid for tens of thousands of propellers it could not use.

Harris is a terrific journalist (he’s done sterling work on Google’s self-driving car problems) who was commissioned by Kickstarter itself to dig into what happened to the biggest-ever Kickstarter funding and flop. Earlier, he doesn’t say the promo video was faked, but if anyone could explain how it was not faked, I’m all ears. (I was a Zano backer. Win some, lose some.)

The key lesson seems to be: cap the amount you’ll allow to be raised, especially for complex devices. But there are lots of other lessons too.
link to this extract

 

Google: ISIS must be ‘contained to the dark web’ » Wired UK

Matt Burgess, reporting on a talk called “Waging a Digital Counterinsurgency”:

[Jared] Cohen, who heads up the Google department that is building products to help against oppression, said the “echo chamber” created by hordes of fake social media accounts “shouldn’t be neglected. He said: “The reality is what Isis is doing with technology ranges from communication to spamming, to all sorts of tactics that you’re probably more familiar with fraud and spam and various scams you’ve received in your inbox.”

“To me Isis is not a tech savvy organisation.”

One possible tactic, according Yasmin Green, also of Google Ideas, is to show targeted advertising to those who have been identified as looking at the propaganda.

Green said adverts may be able to “connect, distract, disrupt, and maybe sell a different product” to those with fighting for Isis in their eyes. The approach is also one that has been endorsed by the British government with internet minister Baroness Shields saying tech companies can do more to promote anti-extremist messages on their services.

If Cohen thinks Isis isn’t tech-savvy, then how has it got so much social media going on that a “digital counterinsurgency” is needed? And a solution consisting of targeted advertising? This is truly seeing nails everywhere because your toolbox only contains a hammer. In a few years, will Cohen be suggesting self-driving tanks to fight the war?
link to this extract

 

Samsung sued by consumer watchdog for failing to update its phones » AndroidAuthority

Bogdan Petrovan:

Consumentenbond, an influential non-profit organization looking after the interests of consumers in the Netherlands, is taking Samsung to court over its failure to provide [software] updates in a timely manner.

In a press release (PDF, English language), the group says it reached out to Samsung on December 2, but in the absence of a proper response, it “issued injunctive relief proceedings against” the Korean giant.

Consumentenbond considers Samsung is guilty of unfair trade practices, as consumers are not informed upon purchase how long they will receive software updates. The group demands “clear and unambiguous information” on updates and security patches, and wants Samsung to actually release updates for at least two years from the date of purchase.

Consumentenbond says 82% of the Samsung phones it checked were not updated within two years of their introduction. All manufacturers should be held to this high standard, according to the consumer watchdog, which noted that Samsung is the “undisputed leader” of the Dutch phone market.

This last demand seems rather hard to put in practice. Consumentenbond wants Samsung to support every device it sells for two years, regardless of how old it is. In practice, that would force Samsung to ensure updates for four years or even more.

And this would be bad because..? Definitely a lawsuit to watch, especially if other consumer organisations take up the same cause around Europe.
link to this extract

 

HTC denies plans to spin off VR business unit » Digitimes

Wei-Yan Lin and Steve Shen:

HTC has denied a media report indicating that it plans to spin off its virtual reality (VR) business unit to form an independent company in a bid to boost its VR business. The company said it will continue to dedicate resources to the development of VR products to create maximum value for its shareholders.

link to this extract

 

When Will We See A New Apple Watch? » TechCrunch

Matthew Panzarino:

Several things that I’ve heard (from several sources) indicate to me that we won’t see a major new hardware model of the Apple Watch in March. Design partnerships, accessories, that kind of thing maybe but not a “Watch 2.0” with a bunch of new hardware features. I could be wrong, of course, but I’ve heard enough to put it out there.

I’ve now heard a bit more that suggests that Apple might ship a minor revision of the Apple Watch that includes a FaceTime camera and not much else — but still that it would not be a full “Watch 2.0” with casing changes and major improvements. Still no word on timing but that could explain the reports of a camera have been showing up. Like I said, tea leaves!

I spoke to Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin, who says that supply chain checks are showing no movement that would indicate a new Watch model in production as of yet.

Which makes it sound like June (WWDC) at the earliest, September more likely. That would give time for the technology to improve enough to make it an obvious replacement for those who want an upgrade, and a more attractive product for those who wavered.
link to this extract

 

‘No layoffs … this week’: Marissa Mayer’s twisted joke kills morale » New York Post

James Covert and Claire Atkinson:

“She said there are going to be no layoffs ‘this week,’ and many of the employees laughed at her,” said one insider, who, fearing retribution, asked not to be named.

“This is the reason employee morale is so low,” the insider added, noting that most workers took the scary remark as twisted confirmation that Yahoo!’s embattled chief executive is sharpening the ax.

Mayer, who returned to her duties at the struggling Internet pioneer just a few weeks after giving birth to twins on Dec. 10, made the less-than-reassuring comment in response to a question at an internal “Friday FYI” meeting on Jan. 8, sources said.

Word of the gaffe has been “spreading like wildfire” through Silicon Valley, another insider said, calling it the latest example of a chronically tone-deaf CEO in a crisis.

Nothing is going right for Mayer with Yahoo. Nothing at all, anywhere. But then, when did it last go right for Yahoo in anything? 2005?
link to this extract

 

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: