Start up, May 28: LG Urbane reviewed, crashing iOS, who really bought Re/Code?, Meeker’s 2015, and more

Posted on by
Reply


Strong feelings, and not about the video game. Photo by gato gato gato on Flickr.

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

Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends for 2015

Have to admit I haven’t read it (found it late) but it’s always essential reading. Download and peruse.

Apple’s ‘Proactive’ to take on Google Now with deep iOS 9 search, Augmented Reality Maps, Siri API » 9to5Mac

It’s that Mark Gurman guy again:

Apple began to lay the groundwork for Proactive with its acquisition of a personal assistant app called Cue in 2013, seeking to relevantly broaden iOS’s Spotlight and Safari search results. iOS 8’s ability to display Wikipedia Search results within Spotlight was the first taste of the Proactive initiative, and was partially designed to reduce iOS’s search reliance on Google. Sources say that Apple’s internal iOS usage metrics indicate that Google clicks have indeed fallen since iOS 8’s release last fall. Now Apple wants to take Proactive to the next level, and it may do so with iOS 9’s introduction at the annual Worldwide Developers Conference on June 8. While Apple has positioned Siri as an “intelligent personal assistant” since the fall 2011 launch of the iPhone 4S, Proactive will go much further to integrate with your data. To begin with, Proactive will become a new layer within the iOS operating system, replacing the pulldown Spotlight menu currently found on the iOS Home screen.

But he says there’s also disagreement about whether to launch this in iOS 9, which was sorta going to be the “Slow down, Snow Leopard” release. (Also, “augmented reality” always sounds cool and then disappoints. I’ve tried it. It ain’t all that.) I’d love to see the metrics around Gurman’s stories compared to those for Re/Code. I think he might be ahead in pure readership. But of course he doesn’t have a giant conference attached.

Bug in iOS Unicode handling crashes iPhones with a simple text » AppleInsider

AppleInsider reader Kaitlyn on Tuesday discovered that receiving the Unicode characters seen in the screenshot above through Apple’s iOS Messages app triggers iPhone restarts, lockouts from Messages, Springboard crashes and more. A thread on Reddit narrowed down the system crash and reboot errors to iOS Unicode handling. More specifically, the Unicode string in question is part of a much longer block of text that cannot be fully rendered in Notifications.

If you’re thinking this sounds retro, that’s because it is: same sorta bug (different string) did the same thing back in August 2013. Wonder how long the fix will take. Also: Apple Watch apparently not susceptible, which is super-puzzling.

A series of wholly unrelated observations about Vox Media’s acquisition of Recode » The Awl

Matt Buchanan points out that if you pull the threads of both companies for long enough, you end up – from both – at Comcast, where its venture arm is trying to sell a company to the main arm. Trebles all round, or something. Also, take a look at the tags on the story. (Via Charles Knight.)

The Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland seizes documents at FIFA » Swiss Attorney General

Now, I don’t usually care about football (soccer to you Americans), but the evident corruption in FIFA (the “world governing body for football”) has been evident for years. Now, finally, something is happening – but not on just one, but two fronts:

In connection with irregularities surrounding football tournaments, two separate proceedings must be distinguished: The Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland (OAG) is conducting a Swiss criminal investigation regarding the allocation of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. For inquiries regarding this Swiss criminal investigation, please contact the OAG. In separate proceedings, and independently of the Swiss criminal investigation of the OAG, the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York is conducting a criminal investigation into the allocation of media, marketing and sponsoring rights for football tournaments carried out in the United States and Latin America. The Federal Office of Justice (FOJ) supports this criminal investigation as part of international legal assistance.

International Olympic Committee next?

Charles Johnson: world’s worst troll removed from Twitter » News.com Australia

Emma Reynolds:

Chuck is now raising money on his far-right website GotNews.com to have himself reinstated following this “censorship”. But his previous threats of legal action have never led to anything, with a website dedicated to the many times he has planned to sue for libel.

The list of things he has got egregiously wrong – on purpose? – is astonishing. But his whole schtick is about outrage and extremism. It’s more the attention paid to such people that’s the problem. When they’re just shouting to themselves, it means nothing.

Shipments of 2-in-1s to grow over 60% on year in 2015, says MIC » Digitimes

Notebook shipments, which are being impacted by tablets, are expected to drop 2.7% on year to reach 167m units in 2015, but 2-in-1 device shipments are expected to grow 62.5% on year to reach 13m units due to Microsoft’s aggressive promotions, according to figures from the Market Intelligence & Consulting Institute (MIC).

Compare to the estimated 7m Chromebooks: these are both still niche markets.

LG Watch Urbane review: why Android Wear trails Apple’s Watch » WSJ

Geoffrey Fowler:

The Urbane falls behind in its approach to the fundamental smartwatch problem: When technology is attached to our bodies, there’s a thin line between help and nuisance. Android Wear is the annoying little brother of operating systems. It really wants your attention, and to keep you swipe-swipe-swiping away on its little screen. A smartwatch’s purpose is to keep you plugged in so you don’t have to be glued to your phone. Since I started wearing an Apple Watch two months ago, I check my phone roughly 25% less, according to Moment, an app that monitors my habits. Ideally, a smartwatch should give you just enough information to keep your smartphone anxiety in check, but not so much that you’re tempted to keep looking at your wrist. The Urbane’s default settings do the opposite. When I just want to check the time, the Urbane often teases me with a notification “card” on the bottom of its screen. You’ve got four new emails! It’s 68 degrees today! You can quickly swipe it away, but after that one’s gone, there’s usually another card waiting.

Lots of room for improvement – but it’s still very early days. (Hadn’t heard of Moment before. “TRACK HOW MUCH YOU AND YOUR FAMILY USE YOUR PHONE”. Are you brave enough? Um, and it has a Watch version.)

Infomercial GIfs, because real life is hard. » Imgur

Zero tech in this collection of “how hard life is because we don’t have X tech that the informercial will sell you”. Lots of solutions looking for problems – happily, we don’t see the solutions, just guess at them (and, often, the problems). The most impressive, in my view, is the woman in the second GIF who juggles the bottle. That’s really hard to do badly well.

Start up: Ive v the SEC, Android M and the batteries, adblock apocalypse, and more

Posted on by
2


Imagine acting with this in front of you. Now read the first link.

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

Behind the scenes: Car Share, BBC1 » Broadcast

George Bevir:

The premise of BBC comedy series Car Share is simple enough: two colleagues (played by Peter Kay and Sian Foulkes) are forced to travel to work together as a result of a company car share scheme.

But with the action taking place inside a rather compact Fiat 500, the technical setup required to film the Goodnight Vienna production was anything but straightforward.

Kay and Foulkes made it look like two people in a car; seen from their view, you see how difficult it would really be to “act natural”. And what a hell of a rig. (Link via Dave Lee.)

Jony Ive’s “promotion” by Apple is driven by money and fear of SEC disclosure » Forbes

Eric Jackson makes a good case that Ive’s promotion to a non-managing role means that he won’t count as an “executive officer” and so his pay won’t have to appear on SEC filings (which Jackson thinks it should have for the past two years). A lawyer emails him:

Part of a company’s competitive advantage is having an employee that everyone else would salivate over having and not having to give your competitors the data points for exactly what it would take to lure that person over, assuming money would be a big factor for that person’s decision to move (which you point out it almost always is). As we’ve seen, more disclosure of exec comp has had a major correlation to the exponential increases in exec comp over the past 20-25 years. If I ran Apple and had a Jony Ive on my team, I’d put his comp in the same vault as the concept design for the iPhone 7 and Apple Watch 2. It would be treated as a trade secret.

[Rumor] Google taking renewed focus on battery and RAM in Android M, Dev preview expected again this year » Android Police

Liam Spradlin:

According to our information, battery is set to be a big focus in Macadamia Nut Cookie, with Google emphasizing performance and smarter use of features that might drain your battery.

Google is apparently urging its own teams to focus on battery performance by cutting location checkins when possible, trimming down RAM usage, and reducing activity off-charger and when the device’s screen is off. Presumably this renewed focus on performance will extend to Google’s own Play Services package, which frequently manages to wiggle its way to the top of battery usage stats.

According to our info, Google will discuss these changes at I/O.

It’s hard to say how these efforts will materialize in Android M. Google, with additions to L like JobScheduler and Project Volta, has already taken aim at improving battery and performance on Android, but familiar battery life complaints still linger on for many users, even on the Nexus 6 and Nexus 9, Google’s flagship Lollipop devices.

Commenters unimpressed: “every year they say this”.

When Stephen Fry met Jony Ive: the self-confessed fanboi meets Apple’s newly promoted chief design officer » Telegraph

Stephen Fry:

ID [industrial design] is about the physical devices themselves while HI [human interface] is about the images, interactions, sounds, flow and feel of the software that we interact with as we use them.

With control over both, Ive has been able to migrate the mobile and desktop operating systems from their old-fashioned skeuomorphic rendering of app icons as real world representations (ring binders and even torn page effects on the contacts and calendars apps, for instance) into a brighter, clearer set of exquisitely designed images that speak for themselves. Ive’s inventiveness can perhaps most starkly be expressed by revealing that he has nearly 5,000 patents to his name. To give you some point of comparison, Edison was granted 2,332.

If nothing else Ive has done Britain a huge favour. Apple has recently developed a standard British power plug whose prongs fold elegantly back flush into their body. Easily stowed, no agony if accidentally trod on. A separate and wholly different solution to that offered by the Mu Plug which solves the problem in another way.

“It took ages to solve,” Ive says wistfully.

Of note: this piece is in the UK’s Telegraph, which seems to have the scoop (except it’s not written by a journalist); photos are taken by Gabriela Hasbun, a freelance photographer in San Francisco. Notable how the Telegraph is being chosen in the UK for Apple’s announcements.

Adblocks’ doomsday scenarios » Monday Note

Frederic Filloux:

In coming weeks, a large analytic firm will release disturbing figures on the state of the ad blocking scene. According to someone who has advanced knowledge of the data, on desktop computers and on critical segments of the digital audience, the use of ad blocking keeps rising exponentially.

Along with The Netherlands, the German market is by far the most affected one by the ad blocking phenomenon. There, ad block use approaches 40% of the internet population. The reasons for the epidemic are unclear…

…but if you read the comments, people will give you their views. A common refrain is that ads are often used to plant malware – a charge that publishers can’t deny, but which equally isn’t their fault. It never used to be a problem (per se) in print days.

The mystery of the power bank phone taking over Ghana » Quartz

Emmanuel Quartey noticed a bulky phone his friends were using:

I fired up Gmail and clicked the first email in my inbox — a promotional message by e-commerce startup, Jumia where it was the featured deal.
Since then, this phone keeps popping up everywhere I go. It’s obviously very popular, and it’s clearly taking off. But why?
Why’re some of my most stylish, most tech-savvy friends — all of whom already own smartphones — suddenly lugging this thing around?
This is what I’ve found.

Here’re some basic details about the phone:
Costs between 100 and 150 Ghana Cedis (about 25 to 38 USD)
Can hold up to 3 SIM Cards
Has built-in FM radio
Comes with Facebook and WhatsApp pre-installed
Doubles as a power bank to charge small electronics
LED flashlight

10,000 mAh battery = super long life. But then again, why not just have rechargeable battery packs? Answer: because these featurephones don’t have standard connectors.

Global smartphone growth expected to slow to 11.3% in 2015 as market penetration increases in top markets » IDC

The research company says:

smartphone shipments are expected to grow 11.3% in 2015, which is down from 27.6% in 2014. This is on par with IDC’s previous smartphone forecast of 11.8% growth in 2015. While overall smartphone growth will continue to slow, many markets will experience robust growth in 2015 and beyond, and worldwide shipment volumes are forecast to reach 1.9bn units annually by 2019.

IDC expects 2015 to bring two notable milestones. First, IDC projects this to be the first year in which China’s smartphone growth, forecast to be 2.5% in 2015, will be slower than the worldwide market. Second, and somewhat related to the China forecast, Android smartphone growth is also expected to be slower than the worldwide market at 8.5% in 2015. IDC believes both trends will persist throughout the forecast period, which now goes to 2019.

China smartphone shipments shrank year-on-year in the first quarter of 2015, IDC says, claiming saturation. This doesn’t quite make sense though. There are hundreds of millions of people in China, and elsewhere, without a smartphone. The block on growth is down to price, and perceived need: if you can’t get data, what’s the use?

Start up: a Microsoft BlackBerry bid?, Firefox’s dead mobile dream, Montblanc’s smart watchband, and more

Posted on by
Reply


Fitness lies within. Photo by cactusbeetroot on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Counted by computer. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Mozilla overhauls Firefox smartphone plan to focus on quality, not cost » CNET

Scoop by Stephen Shankland:

Mozilla has revamped its Firefox OS mobile software project after concluding that ultra-affordable $25 handsets aren’t enough to take on the biggest powers of the smartphone world, CNET has learned.

The nonprofit organization rose to prominence with the success of its Firefox Web browser a decade ago, but it’s having trouble achieving the same success with its Firefox operating system for smartphones. According to a Thursday email from new Chief Executive Chris Beard, Mozilla has changed its strategy to a new “Ignite” initiative that emphasizes phones with compelling features, not just with lower price tags. It’s also considering letting its operating system run apps written for its top rival, Google’s Android.

The idea that Firefox OS could undercut Android was always ridiculous, because Android volumes brought prices down so quickly. This won’t work either though – there’s no “quality gap” in the middle, and certainly not in the high end. Firefox may be destined for obscurity by the world’s move to mobile.

Montblanc to Apple: our Swiss smartwatch will outlast yours » Bloomberg Business

Corinne Gretler on Montblanc’s “e-strap”, which attaches to the strap, rather than replacing the watch itself:

The device is the first luxury Swiss product to directly compete with the Apple Watch, which costs $349 for the most basic version and $17,000 for an 18-karat gold model. The e-Strap and compatible timepieces will appear in Montblanc boutiques and retailers such as Bloomingdale’s in the U.S.

“The pricing is reasonable,” said Patrik Schwendimann, an analyst at Zuercher Kantonalbank. “If it turns out to be just a fad, at least the consumer still has a nice, normal watch they can continue to wear.”

The e-Strap consists of a stainless steel display attached via a leather strap and designed to be on the backside of the wrist when the watch is on the front. A two-line touchscreen displays e-mails when they arrive.

When connected to a smartphone, Montblanc’s device can select songs and jump through playlists. It has an activity tracker that allows users to set targets for calories burned and steps taken. The e-Strap can also trigger the phone’s camera, facilitating easier “selfie” shots and group photos.

The e-strap is amazingly ugly; I can’t imagine anyone who would buy a Montblanc buying one, let alone using one, to go with their watches which cost (deep breath) $3,700 to $5,800.

One begins to see why Jonathan Ive considered that Switzerland might be screwed.

Samsung layoffs at Milk Music, Milk Video Unit; Kevin Swint exits » Variety

Janko Roettgers:

Samsung’s Media Solutions Center America, which is responsible for the company’s Milk Music and Milk Video services, has been hit by layoffs and a key exec departure over the last couple of weeks, Variety has learned. These events have occurred as Samsung executives take a closer look at many of its business units, which could spell trouble for the company’s content plans going forward.

Media Solutions Center America saw dozens of staffers laid off earlier this month, according to multiple sources. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but one source estimated that as much as 15% of the staff may have been affected. I’ve been told that MSCA employed around 250 people total before the cuts went into effect.

Samsung said it remains committed to delivering “engaging, connected entertainment experiences through its Milk platform.”

Flashback on Samsung denials:
November 2014: Samsung denies ChatOn to close
December 2014: ChatOn to close by March 2015.

Filling the green circle » Marco.org

Marco Arment:

Ever since getting the Apple Watch, not only have I been getting more consistent exercise, but I’m pushing myself further. I take more walks, and I walk faster and further than ever before. I’ve been walking hops around the same streets for four years, but now I’ve been discovering new streets and paths just to extend our walking distance and try to beat my previous walks.

I’ve never cared before, but now, I care.

Apple Watch: a Skinner box in a smartwatch’s clothing.

The new Google Photos app will automatically group your images by faces and recognized objects like cars, skylines, and food » Android Police

Ryan Whitwam:

Google’s current Photos app uses some image processing smarts to piece together auto-awesome compilations and Stories, but the new Photos experience pushes the limits of computer vision. Not only does it pick out and identify faces, it recognizes objects like cars and food. It’s not perfect, but it’s sometimes creepily accurate.

Hmm. Is this one of those “because we can!” features, or something that’s actually really useful? Apple has had a “faces” feature in iPhoto and now Photos (only on desktop), so that is certainly helpful. But “objects”?

DxOMark reviews the HTC One M9, ranks it 22nd best mobile camera on the market » Android Police

Jeff Beck:

DxOMark just released their review of the HTC One M9’s camera. I’m not going to beat around the bush, the results aren’t great (not that any of us here at AP are all that surprised). The HTC One M9 scored a rather abysmal cumulative score of 69, placing the Taiwanese manufacturer’s latest flagship in 22nd place on DxOMark’s top mobile camera list.

Also behind the iPhone 4S (yes, the 2011 device), GoPro Hero3 and Amazon Fire Phone, as well as pretty much everything else. Hard to know to what extent DxOMark’s marks are objective, but this isn’t promising for HTC if it was hoping to pull in new users who care about this stuff.

Edward Snowden comments on ‘Just days left to kill mass surveillance under Section 215 of the Patriot Act’ » Reddit AMA

Edward Snowden in a thread in his reddit AMA, about the recently discovered weakness in SSL caused by 1990s crypto regulations, on what you’d do if you saw some encrypted traffic that looked like it needed investigation:

You then flag those comms and task them to CES [the NSA’s Cryptographic Exploitation Service] for processing. If they’ve got a capability against it and consider your target is worth using it against, they’ll return the plaintext decrypt. They might even set up a processor to automate decryption for that data flow going forward as matching traffic gets ingested as they pass the mass surveillance sensors out at the telecom companies and landing sites. If you don’t meet CES’s justifications for the capability use or they lack a capability, you get nothing back. In my experience NSA rarely uses meaningful decryption capabilities against terrorists, firstly because most of those who actually work in intelligence consider terrorism to be a nuisance rather than a national security threat, and secondly because terrorists are so fantastically inept that they can be countered through far less costly means.

Terrorists: a nuisance rather than a national security threat, and in general fantastically inept. That actually sounds about right. It’s just that sometimes they aren’t, and they aren’t.

‘Buy Buy’ BlackBerry? Microsoft could make offer for sleeping phone giant, rumors say » Somedroid

Rumors have been circulating recently that companies are lining up to acquire Blackberry. The shortlist includes Microsoft, Xiaomi, Huawei and Lenovo for now —  last month, Samsung was reportedly also on the list but backed out after getting a $7.5bn asking price.

As of now, Microsoft seems to be preparing a $7bn offer for the company — that’s a 26% premium for the stock.

If Microsoft does buy it, that would be the second failing phone company it has bought. Personally, I don’t see the point.

BlackBerry laying off workers in handset unit » Re/code

Ina Fried:

BlackBerry confirmed on Saturday that it plans to cut jobs in the unit responsible for its smartphones as it seeks to make that shrinking business profitable.

The company said it has “made the decision to consolidate (the) device software, hardware and applications business, impacting a number of employees around the world.”

BlackBerry did not quantify the number of workers that would be affected.

Fried’s piece has the full statement from BlackBerry, which includes the quote

“One of our priorities is making our device business profitable. At the same time, we must grow software and licensing revenues. You will see in the coming months a significant ramping up in our customer-facing activities in sales and marketing.”

The device business isn’t profitable and would need huge changes – principally cuts in running costs, or a huge leap in handset ASPs – to become so.

Start up: explaining BlackBerry’s demise, Samsung S6 sales concerns, Apple Watch shipments, and more

Posted on by
Reply


Remember? Photo by BitchBuzz on Flickr.

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

Samsung silent on disastrous Galaxy S6 sales » Forbes

Gordon Kelly:

70 million.

Earlier this year that was the number of Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge smartphones Samsung claimed it would sell in 2015. Samsung also claimed to have taken 20m pre-orders prior to both phones’ release. Sadly one month on the reality looks disastrously different…

Korean news agency Yonhap reports that it has taken a month for sales of the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge to reach 10m. Speaking to Yonhap a ‘high-ranking Samsung official’ confirmed this figure for the first time.

Trying to put a positive spin on it the official said: “The sales of the Galaxy S6 series have already surpassed 10 million.”…

…Consequently for combined sales of the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge to only pass 10m in a similar timeframe to the S5 and S4 represents a disastrous return. This is particularly true for the cheaper Galaxy S6 given Samsung has already confirmed demand for the Edge variant has been unexpectedly high.

All of which poses the obvious question: if Galaxy S6 Edge sales are performing above expectations, just how bad are Galaxy S6 sales?

Determined to get to the bottom of this I delayed this post in order to get official comment from Samsung. The company asked for 24 hours to respond, but eventually chose not to dispel any of the negative connotations or correct Yonhap’s figures. Instead its formal statement to me today was simply: “No Comment”.

Disastrous? Disappointing? Samsung supporters say the S5 was launched in 125 countries, the S6 in just 20 – so this 10m figure is “better” than last year’s. However that doesn’t explain how it could make such huge claims for preorders which then don’t seem to have been backed up by newer data.

There’s a growing suspicion in the tech world that the S6 isn’t succeeding as Samsung needs it to – because the business challenge is different from three years ago when the S3 was such a hit.

Apple Watch orders fell sharply after the first day and haven’t grown since, a shopping data firm says » Quartz

Dan Frommer:

Apple has taken orders for almost 2.5m watches in the US through Monday, May 18, according to Slice’s projections, which are based on more than 14,000 online shoppers. More than half of those orders were placed on April 10, the first day Apple accepted watch pre-orders in the US and eight other countries, according to Slice.

Since the first day—which we’ve excluded from this next chart to focus on detail—US orders have generally remained under 30,000 per day, according to Slice’s projections. Note the spike on April 24, the day US pre-orders started arriving—and when people started posting their initial Apple Watch experiences and real-life photos.

…One Wall Street analyst, Morgan Stanley’s Katy Huberty, recently increased her projection of first-year global Apple Watch shipments to 36m, based on survey results showing increased purchase intentions among US consumers. A second firm, however, just reportedly decreased its estimates to less than 15m watches, based on weak demand. To reach 36m shipments, Apple would need to average almost 100,000 per day worldwide.

30,000 in the US alone (if we assume the data is correct). Could the rest of the world triple that? Even if not, it means Apple has taken over the smartwatch market at a stroke.

Tracking protection for Firefox at Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2015 » Monica Chew

My paper with Georgios Kontaxis got best paper award at the Web 2.0 Security and Privacy workshop today! Georgios re-ran the performance evaluations on top news sites and the decrease in page load time with tracking protection enabled is even higher (44%!) than in our Air Mozilla talk last August, due to prevalence of embedded third party content on news sites. You can read the paper here.

That 44% figure shows how the desire to know more about the audience in order to monetise the audience better is hurting the audience’s experience. That’s the sort of thing that drives adblocking.

The peak of ‘free’ on the Internet » Mashable

Jason Abbruzzese:

maybe we’ll look back at this point in time wistfully, telling tales of freely streaming music and viral videos. Perhaps the best days of the internet are behind us and its now just a platform on which mega-conglomerates can make money.

Or maybe this will come to be seen as a point where the internet’s initial promise of democratized distribution began to be fully realized. There’s a certain shabby charm in the weird old web with its terrible banner ads and dark humour. You can still find it, mostly on reddit.

The bottom line is that just about everything is online these days in every medium and almost all of it is free. As subscription services grow in number and popularity, that’s going to inevitably form a smaller part of the overall internet. The bottom line is that just about everything is online these days in every medium and almost all of it is free. As subscription services grow in number and popularity, that’s going to inevitably form a smaller part of the overall internet.

I think smartphones’ essentially closed nature – that they tend to be endpoints for app content – makes subscription models easier, for those which can charge for them. (A point Abbruzzese makes.) But there are still 750m or so PCs in the hands of consumers. That’s a lot of computing power able to crack DRM.

Analyzing the iPhone user base » Above Avalon Premium Recap

Neil Cybart, in a post that would normally be via premium access only:

Running basic arithmetic with that 48m number [of iPhone 6/6 Plus sold in January-March] and Tim Cook’s comments about the installed base, I get an iPhone installed base of approximately 475 million users. Is this an exact number? No. Is this a good estimate of roughly the number of people with an iPhone (all models)? Yes.  

With this estimate in hand, we can start to break out the iPhone base by model. iPhone 6 has been outselling 6 Plus by approximately 2.5x, while both have been outselling the iPhone 5s and 5c by nearly 4-to-1. Taking into account these ratios, I suspect the current iPhone user base breakout looks something like:

iPhone 6: 85 million users
iPhone 6 Plus: 35 million users
Older (5s, 5c, 5, 4s): 355 million users
Total: 475 million users

He then breaks it down further; turns out the bulge in ownership is of the 5S, at 125m users. (You can sign up for Cybart’s premium analysis on his website. Also: is there any equivalent premium analysis for Android?)

NSA planned to hijack Google App Store to hack smartphones » The Intercept

Ryan Gallagher:

The document outlines a series of tactics that the NSA and its counterparts in the Five Eyes were working on during workshops held in Australia and Canada between November 2011 and February 2012.

The main purpose of the workshops was to find new ways to exploit smartphone technology for surveillance. The agencies used the Internet spying system XKEYSCORE to identify smartphone traffic flowing across Internet cables and then to track down smartphone connections to app marketplace servers operated by Samsung and Google. (Google declined to comment for this story. Samsung said it would not be commenting “at this time.”)

As part of a pilot project codenamed IRRITANT HORN, the agencies were developing a method to hack and hijack phone users’ connections to app stores so that they would be able to send malicious “implants” to targeted devices. The implants could then be used to collect data from the phones without their users noticing.

Irritant horn. Such fabulous names the random two-word generator throws up. Wonder what the scheme that must have existed to do the same to iOS apps was called?

The inside story of how the iPhone crippled BlackBerry » WSJ

Extract from “Losing the Signal”, a book by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff:

If the iPhone gained traction, RIM’s senior executives believed, it would be with consumers who cared more about YouTube and other Internet escapes than efficiency and security. RIM’s core business customers valued BlackBerry’s secure and efficient communication systems. Offering mobile access to broader Internet content, says Mr. Conlee, “was not a space where we parked our business.”

The iPhone’s popularity with consumers was illogical to rivals such as RIM, Nokia Corp. and Motorola Inc. The phone’s battery lasted less than eight hours, it operated on an older, slower second-generation network, and, as Mr. Lazaridis predicted, music, video and other downloads strained AT&T’s network. RIM now faced an adversary it didn’t understand.

“By all rights the product should have failed, but it did not,” said David Yach, RIM’s chief technology officer. To Mr. Yach and other senior RIM executives, Apple changed the competitive landscape by shifting the raison d’être of smartphones from something that was functional to a product that was beautiful.

As Horace Dediu pointed out on Twitter, Yach simply misunderstood the new basis of competition. It wasn’t “functional v beautiful”; it was a new axis of functionality, such as the web browser that BlackBerry didn’t offer.

One nitpick: the writers call mid-2007 RIM (as it was) “the world’s largest smartphone maker”. Nokia was shipping more smartphones, and its smartphone revenue was larger too.

BlackBerry, it’s revealed, didn’t have the flexibility of thinking to adjust to the changed world; the awful Storm (1m sold, 1m needing replacement) was perhaps its nadir.

The lesson of “don’t forget all the parts move” » Learning by Shipping

Steve Sinofsky on the BlackBerry excerpt:

While hindsight is always 20/20, when you are faced with a potentially disruptive situation you have to take a step back and revisit nearly all of your assumptions, foundational or peripheral, because whether you see it or not, they are all going to face intense reinvention.

In disruptive theory we always talk about the core concept that disruptive products are better in some things but worse in many of the things (tasks, use cases, features) that are currently in use by the incumbent product. This is the basis of the disruption itself. In reading the excerpt it is clear that out of the gate this reality was how the RIM executives chose to view the iPhone as introduced as targeting a different market segment or different use cases…

…There’s a natural business reaction to want to see a new entrant through the lens of a subset of your existing market. Once you can do that you get more comfortable doing battle in a small way rather than head-on.  You feel your market size will trump a “niche” player.

Sinofsky also wrote usefully on this topic in 2013. Read both posts along with the WSJ’s BlackBerry one.

Google seeking Taiwan partners to promote Chromebook, say makers » Digitimes

Google recently launched an education-use Chromebook for sale at US$99, the sources noted. In a bid to market inexpensive Chromebooks in emerging markets, Google has adopted chip solutions developed by China-based Fuzhou Rockchip Electronics and won support to launch models from China-based vendors Haier and Hisense as well as India-based Xolo and Indonesia-based Nexian, the sources indicated.

Google shipped 6.5m Chromebooks in 2014, mostly for educational use in the North America market, and expects to ship 8m units in 2015, the sources said.

Also talking to Acer and Asus. Trouble for PC makers is that Chromebooks are an even greater example of the “value trap” than Windows. If you’re selling stuff for $99 and the margin is low, you need huge scale to make any profit at all. And the scale so far is tiny.

Start up: dual-app iPads?, Pebble’s cash call, improving S6 battery life, Chromebook sales and more

Posted on by
Reply


S6 discharging too fast? This might sort it. Photo by AndyArmstrong on Flickr.

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

Future of iPad: dual-app viewing mode, then J98/J99 ‘iPad Pros,’ multi-user support » 9to5Mac

Mark Gurman:

Facing slowing growth for the first time since the iPad’s 2010 debut, Apple is working on several significant software and hardware updates to reinvigorate the tablet over the next year. Apple is developing a dual-app viewing mode, 12-inch iPads codenamed “J98″ and “J99,” as well as support for multi-user logins, according to sources briefed on the plans. First planned for debut last year, the split-screen applications feature for the iPad could be introduced as soon as June at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, while multi-user login support and the 12-inch iPads will apparently arrive later…

In Gurman we trust. He’s never told us they’re working on a TV. And these improvements would help the iPad in businesses, which is the next frontier for tablet penetration.

Adult dating site hack exposes millions of users » Channel 4 News

Geoff White:

Channel 4 News has been investigating the cyber underworld, discovering which websites have been hacked and exposing the trade in personal information of millions of people through so-called “dark web” sites.

The investigation led to a secretive forum in which a hacker nicknamed ROR[RG] posted the details of users of Adult FriendFinder. The site boasts 63 million users worldwide and claims more than 7 million British members. It bills itself as a “thriving sex community”, and as a result users often share sensitive sexual information when they sign up.

The information of 3.9m Adult FriendFinder members has been leaked, including those who told the site to delete their accounts…

…The front page of Adult FriendFinder, which is based in California, features photos of dozens of attractive young women. Yet the hacked data, contained in 15 spreadsheets, reveals how few females appear to use Adult FriendFinder.

Among the 26,939 users with a UK email address, for example, there are just 1,596 who identified as female: a ratio of one woman to every 16 men.

How.. unsurprising.

Rumor has it that Pebble is on the rocks even with $18m in the bank » TechCrunch

John Biggs:

Smartwatch maker Pebble seems to be in some trouble. According to sources close to the company, the company is having trouble maintaining its growth and has turned to a Silicon Valley bank for a $5 million loan and $5 million line of credit. Valley VCs have been turning down the company’s requests for new capital.

Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky offered no comment.

Actually this feels like cashflow: it has to commit factory time to make those watches, and VC money isn’t what it needs; it needs a line of credit to pay for that. Whether it’s in trouble is a different question. I’d be surprised if it were.

Few business takers yet, but ​Chromebook sales grow to 7.3 million this year » ZDNet

Liam Tung:

The number of the low-cost Google-powered laptops sold this year is on track to grow 27m, up from 5.7m units in 2014 to 7.3m in 2015, research from analyst house Gartner shows.

The Chromebook’s growth contrasts markedly with the shrinking global PC market. However, sales of the devices remain heavily skewed towards the US and within that market, they’re largely used in schools, despite growing interest from consumers in the country.

In 2014, the US accounted for 84% of all Chromebooks sold, with 60% of sales coming from education, 39% from consumers, and 1% from business.

Last year, noting signs of growing interest among businesses for Chromebooks, Gartner forecast that by 2017 sales to the education sector could rise to over 6m units, driving total sales for the year to 14 million laptops sold.

Its outlook for the next two years is more conservative, with the analyst predicting shipments to rise to 7.9m by 2016, suggesting growth of under 10% for next year.

This in a market of about 300m PCs per year. Not the dramatic displacement that had been expected. Chromebooks began in 2009. Do they really offer too little utility, or are people too wedded to Windows even though cloud services would serve them fine?

Not so fast: connected cars could cause data traffic jams » Reuters

Eric Auchard:

Traffic jams in the future could cause potentially dangerous data snarl-ups as cars packed with entertainment, safety and navigation features vie for airwaves with smartphones, tablets and networked features in other vehicles, according to a study.

By 2024, mobile networks will see machine-to-machine (M2M) connections jump 10-fold to 2.3 billion from 250 million in 2014. Half these links will be automotive, said the study published on Thursday by Machina Research.

On the roads, about one in five vehicles worldwide will have some form of wireless network connection by 2020, or more than a quarter of a billion connected vehicles, according to a forecast from technology research firm Gartner.

This one tweak could boost battery life on your Galaxy S6 or S6 Edge » ZDNet

My ZDNet colleague, Matthew Miller, bought and then returned a Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge. He liked the phone, but in the end, the poor battery life he experienced was a deal-breaker.

That’s the same problem Business Insider’s Antonio Villas-Boas found after using a Galaxy S6, essentially the same handset but without the curved edge displays, for a month. Villas-Boas learned that one single setting solved his battery life issues, however.

“I switched off Google Now, Google’s digital assistant, and my battery life skyrocketed to last me about 36 hours on a single charge with relatively decent usage, including music streaming, but without using Bluetooth or GPS. I charge it every night, but I usually have just under 50% battery left before I go to bed.”

That’s interesting for a few reasons. First of all, if it addresses the short run-time on a single charge, the setting change provides a reasonable workaround for Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge owners.

Second, there’s something else going on with Google Now on these particular handsets: The always listening feature of Google Now stopped working on these two handsets for many people in the middle of April. Google is aware of the problem, publicly noting on April 23 that it is actively working on a solution.

Some suggestions that Google Now is optimised (somehow) for Qualcomm processors; the S6 and S6 Edge uses Samsung’s own Exynos. That’s a problem is Google Now is killing the battery, though.

The clock is ticking for Dropbox » Business Insider

Eugene Kim, with a good investigative piece:

After coming out of Y Combinator in 2007, Dropbox hit 100 million users by 2012, and 300 million by 2015. That rapid growth made some people feel like they’d already made it. “There wasn’t that sense of ‘We haven’t won yet,'” this former employee says.

This person also tells us that DfB growth was “not stellar” as of the middle of last year.

Another person who left Dropbox last year said that the company has become noticeably slower as it’s gotten larger. (Dropbox went from 500 to 1,200 employees in the past 12 months.)

For example, a simple team change request had to go through multiple HR managers, creating a culture of heavy “process” that many engineers dislike.

In fact, in one of the internal surveys that asked if the engineers felt they were empowered to perform at full potential, almost half of them said “No,” according to this person.

What’s Dropbox’s USP?

Myntra sales dip 10% in app-only mode, rivals Amazon, Snapdeal, eBay to play safe for now » The Economic Times

Varun Jain:

Myntra.com, India’s largest online fashion retailer, has seen a 10% drop in sales since it shut its website and turned a mobile app-only etailer last week. The company, owned by Flipkart, had factored in such a decline and hoped to return to the level of sales prior to the move in the coming weeks, according to a source. Its closest rivals, Snapdeal and Amazon, however, said they had no plans to wind up their websites and focus only on mobile phone users.

“Our data shows that there are still many customers who use PCs to shop online. We do not want to force our customers to use one specific medium to shop on Snapdeal,” a Snapdeal spokesperson said.

The app-only approach seems to follow this logic: if you’re dependent on web visits for traffic and hence revenue, you’re vulnerable to someone who has better SEO or the vicissitudes of the dominant search engine. Better therefore to build up a loyal audience on the app, and drive people there through advertising.

Start up (May 21): Cisco in Russia, more Google Maps malarkey, a Watch forecast cut, and more

Posted on by
Reply

Somehow this didn’t publish on May 21 as it should have. Bah.


Android Wear lets you do all sorts of watchfaces. Photo by leolambertini on Flickr.

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

After sanctions, Cisco altered sales records in Russia » BuzzFeed News

Aram Roston and Max Seddon, with a blockbuster piece:

After Western sanctions began shutting down sales of high-tech internet equipment to Russia’s military and security forces, employees at technology giant Cisco Systems Inc. altered sales records and booked deals under a false customer name, according to internal company documents. The intent, according to a confidential source with deep knowledge of Cisco’s Moscow operations, was to dodge the sanctions by masking the true customers behind more innocuous-sounding straw buyers.

Nonononononotatall we were just correcting some errors, says Cisco.
Remind me again about how Buzzfeed is just cat pictures and listicles?

Sex, monsters and outrage » Public Address

Joshua Drummond on the outrage (overhyped) about students in a sex education class being handed literature that, um, outraged some people:

By analogy, it’s a lot like students studying World War Two. Some knowledge of the Nazis’ peculiar, perverted ideology and the conditions in which it flourished is necessary to understand how the war got going. But no-one’s being taught that Nazis are rad, any more than they’re being taught that unmarried women are sluts in this particular case. The lesson was – and why not have some fun with paraphrasing – intended to point out the unfortunate truth that there are a lot of dicks in the world and some of them try to force their dickery on others. I’d have thought this was a pretty important lesson, especially when it comes to sexual health, and where better to experience it than in the (relatively) safe space of a health education class?

No! said Labour education spokesperson Chris Hipkins, who thundered mildly: “It’s fine for schools to be using stuff to provoke kids into thinking but there’s a fine line between provoking critical thought and something that’s offensive. That, I think, crosses the line.”

Well, I suppose that’s up for debate. Should students be privy to the extremist views of nutcases?

What’s most worrying is that, as always happens, the initial distortion gets far more broadly distributed than the correction.

Think about that: the wrong stuff always gets the broader distribution.

Facebook’s Internet.org comes under fire for being a walled garden » Fortune

Mathew Ingram:

In effect, says the EFF, the structure of Internet.org means that Facebook has set itself up as a gatekeeper when it comes to accessing the Internet, and this means that it has “issued an open invitation for governments and special interest groups to lobby, cajole or threaten them to withhold particular content from their service.” Until the social network truly opens up the project to anyone and everyone, Internet.org will “not be living up to its promise or its name,” the foundation says.

Today’s solar panels are fine for tomorrow » Solar Love

Steve Hanley:

An interdisciplinary MIT study led by the MIT Energy Initiative has led to a 332-page report entitled The Future of Solar Energy. Among its key findings are that today’s solar panels are all that is needed to supply the world with many terawatts of clean solar power by 2050 (a terawatt is equivalent to 1,000,000 megawatts). The other main point the study makes is that it will take political will to finally wean the world off of fossil fuels.

I was pointed to this on Twitter by Leonardo DiCaprio. Yup, him. Not personally, you understand.

KGI lowers Apple Watch forecast to 15 million » WatchAware

Abdel Ibrahim, commenting on 9to5Mac reporting on KGI research lowering its estimat for the lead from 20-30m to “just” 15m:

As with any new product, it takes time for things to get going. New features, functions, and even new versions are what will be the most important test for Apple Watch in the coming years. Most V1 products are usually adopted by the comparatively small minority of Apple fans who are interested in the company’s latest gadgets.

15m feels astonishing. For a v1 product? And as Ibrahim points out, that’s a lot more than Android Wear seems to be doing (downloads passed 1m in late February, now around 1.2m).

Proper Google Maps app appears on Android Wear via latest phone app update » Android Central

Andrew Martonik:

The app can be launched from the app launcher or by voice with an “open Maps” command, and when opened you get a full screen top-down map experience. You can scroll around, pinch-to-zoom (barely) and even switch between true North and device direction views. Zoom in/out buttons appear on the top of the screen when you tap it, which is much better than pinching, and you also get a small pin button that lets you quickly scroll through nearby places and navigate to them — though when you fire up navigation from the Maps app on the watch it still corresponds with launching Maps on your phone.

There’s even a neat feature that gives you a simple black and white outline map when the watch doesn’t receive interaction for while, just like the ambient watch faces do.

Aside from the handful of reboots of our phone and watch that were necessary just to get it to run, the app still seems rather unstable. Several times in just a few minutes of playing with the app it has failed to respond or open up navigation properly — we have a feeling that this isn’t quite ready without a new version of Google Play Services or potentially a new version of Android Wear on the watch.

Options for resizing: pinch-to-zoom or prodding a plus/minus onscreen tab. Neither seems ideal. The black/white outline map is horrible. The “list of pins” looks smart.

How do I get rid of the “Try the New Drive” banner? » Google Product Forums

Q: It is super annoying and it won’t go away. I’ve tried going to the new drive and then coming back, but it’s still there. I like the old drive a lot better than the new one and I want to stay on it. This banner is basically trying to force me to use the new drive which I *don’t want to do*. Anyone know if there’s a way to get rid of it??

And wouldn’t you know, there’s a Googler ready with an answer. However…

Apple Watch and Continuous Computing » Stratechery

Ben Thompson has a fantastic examination of the Watch’s potentials, and limits, as well as Apple’s advantages and strategic disadvantage:

it’s clear that what the mouse was to the Mac and multi-touch was to the iPhone, Siri is to the Watch. The concern for Apple is that, unlike the others, the success or failure of Siri doesn’t come down to hardware or low-level software optimizations, which Apple excels at, and which ensures that Apple products have the best user interfaces. Rather, it depends on the cloud, and as much as Apple has improved, an examination of their core competencies and incentives argues that the company will never be as good as Google. That was acceptable on the phone, but is a much more problematic issue when the cloud is so central to the most important means of interacting with the Watch.

A key advantage: lots of people who will buy it and use it, creating a virtuous circle for developers who write for it. (Yes, a calculator for the Watch.)

Breaking News: Howard University shows up as ‘N***er University’ on Google Maps » Seely Security

Bryan Seely:

A few hours ago, Bomani X @AceBoonCoon  updated his twitter feed with yet another one of his shocking discoveries on Google Maps.  Yesterday the world took notice when he posted an image of his Google Maps results where he found that when he searched for the keyword ‘nigga’ or ‘nigger’ , the White House would come up. Unfortunately, President Obama and his family are not the only targets of this deplorable prank. When you run a Google Maps search for ‘nigger university’ you get search results for ‘Howard University,’ a private university in Washington, D.C.

Beginning to look like we’re discovering the limits of useful crowdsourcing. (Though of course the Google search for “miserable failure” of a few years ago was already showing the dangers.)

Driverless cars may cut US auto sales by 40%, Barclays says » Bloomberg Business

Keith Naughton:

US auto sales may drop about 40% in the next 25 years because of shared driverless cars, forcing mass-market producers such as General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. to slash output, a Barclays Plc analyst said.

Vehicle ownership rates may fall by almost half as families move to having just one car, according to a report published Tuesday by the analyst, Brian Johnson. Driverless cars will travel twice as many miles as current autos because they will transport each family member during the day, he wrote.

Large-volume automakers “would need to shrink dramatically to survive,” Johnson wrote. “GM and Ford would need to reduce North American production by up to 68% and 58%, respectively.”…

…When most vehicles are driverless, annual U.S. auto sales will fall about 40% to 9.5%, while the number of cars on American roads declines by 60% to fewer than 100m, he estimated.

“While extreme, a historical precedent exists,” Johnson wrote. “Horses once filled the many roles that cars fill today, but as the automobile came along, the population of horses dropped sharply.”

Hard to argue against that one.

Start up: death to calendars!, S6 hits 10m (is that fast?), why Apple ditched the TV, and more

Posted on by
Reply


Yeah, you know it’s not really necessary. Photo by clagnut on Flickr.

A selection of 12 links for you. Don’t have a meeting about it. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The chokehold of calendars » Medium

Mike Monteiro:

The problem with calendars is that they are additive rather than subtractive. They approach your time as something to add to rather than subtract from. Adding a meeting is innocuous. You’re acting on a calendar. A calendar isn’t a person. It isn’t even a thing. It’s an abstraction. But subtracting an hour from the life of another human being isn’t to be taken lightly. It’s almost violent. It’s certainly invasive. Shared calendars are vessels you fill by taking things away from other people.

“I’m adding a meeting” should really be “I’m subtracting an hour from your life.”

We need a goal-oriented calendar, but first we need to understand why a goal-oriented calendar is necessary.

Here’s the problem with using YouTube as a babysitter for your kids » Huffington Post

Alexander Howard:

Six weeks after a coalition of consumer advocates accused Google of using ‘deceptive and unfair’ ads in its YouTube Kids app, the same group is raising new concerns about access to videos that are inappropriate for children.

“Our new claims are really about deceptive practices,” said Aaron Mackey, a graduate fellow at Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Public Representation, citing Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act.

The coalition, which sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday as a supplement to the previous complaint, includes the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and the Center for Digital Democracy.

The groups allege that the app, which is marketing to children ages 5 and under, allows kids to access inappropriate videos — including some that have nothing to do with children at all. Some of the unrelated videos are unremarkable, like videos of corporate filings. Others, though, will raise eyebrows with explicit language, jokes about drug use and pedophilia, and frank discussions of pornography, violence and suicide.

Wonder if the FTC will act on this.

LG unveils wallpaper OLED panel » The Korea Times

The 55-inch wallpaper OLED panel, presented as one of the company’s future displays at a media event, is only 0.97 mm thick, weighs 1.9 kg and can easily be stuck to a wall with a magnetic mat, or removed from it.

The new product is far slimmer compared with LG Display’s existing flagship 55-inch OLED panel that is 4.3 mm thick.

Come on, that is impressive. Imagine how you’d use that at home.

One big reason Jawbone took debt » Fortune

In fact, $300m of debt, rather than venture capital, as Bloomberg discovered. Dan Primack explains:

For BlackRock, this is obviously an effort at risk mitigation. For Jawbone and its existing shareholders, it’s a bit more complicated.

Yes, Jawbone clearly needs BlackRock’s money. But structuring this deal as debt instead of as equity also allows the San Francisco-based company to maintain a $3bn valuation it reportedly received last fall. That means it needn’t reprice existing employee stock options, and gives it upside flexibility when recruiting new employees. Plus, Jawbone doesn’t take the kind of ‘falling unicorn’ PR hit that could cause potential customers to purchase from more stable vendors.

My spidey sense feels that Jawbone is stuffed, though – especially when you compare it to the hugely profitable Fitbit.

Behind Apple’s move to shelve TV plans » WSJ

Daisuke Wakabayashi:

In an effort to distinguish itself, Apple investigated various display technologies.

In the mid-2000s, it created a prototype display that was transparent, like a pane of glass, when turned off but used lasers to display an image when turned on, according to a person familiar with the matter. That technology never made it past the research phase because it used an enormous amount of power and the image quality was poor. Apple patented the technology in 2010.

Apple had a small team working on the TV set in the years before it put the project on ice, said people familiar with the matter. It considered building TVs with screens offering four times the resolution of high-definition displays.

The price of such 4K displays—named because they have about 4,000 horizontal pixels in an image—have come down in the past few years, but those screens were still prohibitively expensive at the time.

Apple also looked at features that could expand the television’s function in the living room. Using cameras above the screen, Apple experimented with a video-calling feature—described as FaceTime for the television—that sensed who was talking and directed the camera to the speaker. In the end, the people familiar with the matter said the feature didn’t seem compelling enough to drive an entry into a new product area.

Truly sounds like a dud, to be honest, but you can imagine some companies putting it out because WE ALREADY SPENT A TON ON R+D HERE DAMMIT. (A great scoop by Wakabayashi, too.)

The Google-Twitter deal goes live, giving tweets prominent placement in Google’s results » Search Engine Land

Danny Sullivan:

Sometimes, tweets might not appear at all. We asked Google about why tweets might show, what controls exactly where they show, if they’re showing all tweets for a query in chronological order or filtering in some way such as to block obscenity or to surface more popular tweets. The company wouldn’t answer any of those questions.

Google’s blog post on the deal does say:

It’s a great way to get real-time info when something is happening. And it’s another way for organizations and people on Twitter to reach a global audience at the most relevant moments.

So presumably, you’re more likely to see tweets in Google when a hashtag, topic, person or organization appears to be trending or is newsworthy.

Twitter also says there’s no “direct” monetisation. (But of course it gets traffic.) Useful deal for both companies. I can only see them getting closer; their interests are aligning more and more.

Liveblog: What would you do if you woke up one morning and there was no Internet? » Liveblog

Dave Winer:

A question that reveals the problem is to wonder what would happen if you woke up one morning and found there was no electricity. Not much would happen in the world as it’s currently configured without electricity, even though there was a time when it worked fine without it.
I think the Internet is sufficiently integrated into our civilization at this point that if it were to be removed, it would be such an enormous shock to our economy that.. well, that’s why #2 [“Cry”] is also a correct answer. 😉

When you reflect on it, this is a great question to pose.

STRML: Projects and Work

Samuel Reed’s site needs to be visited. It builds itself while you watch. (Don’t worry, it’s HTML5.)

Global shipments of Galaxy S6 series top 10 million » Yonhap News

South Korea’s top tech giant Samsung Electronics Co. said Tuesday its global shipments of the latest flagship Galaxy S6 models surpassed 10m units in about one month after their release.
  
“The sales of the Galaxy S6 series have already surpassed 10 million,” a high-ranking Samsung official said. It marked the first time for the company to confirm the sales figure of the latest flagship.
 
 
The Galaxy S6 boasts Samsung’s first built-in wireless-charging batteries. The offbeat Galaxy S6 Edge also has been grabbing the market’s attention with the industry’s first screen that is curved at both the left and right edges. They started official sales on April 10.
  
The new models’ predecessors, the Galaxy S5 and the Galaxy S4, meanwhile, sold more than 10m units in less than a month. Samsung did not clarify when the 10m sales mark was reached for the Galaxy S6.

To be clear, the timings from “on sale” to 10m were:
S2: five months
S3: 42 days
S4: 27 days
S5: 25 days
The S6 doesn’t seem to have moved faster. But these are all sales to carriers (who may be feeling reluctant to take on stock) rather than sell-through. This story has barely begun.

Here’s how they built the beastly machines for Mad Max: Fury Road » The Credits

Bryan Abrams interviews Jacinta Leong, the art director for the film:

A specific challenge designing the vehicles was achieving aesthetic qualities as well as functionality. Our vehicles had to look amazing, but beyond that, they also had to drive safely at speed!

I’ll use a the GigaHorse for example. The Gigahorse was a stacked pair of Cadillac bodies, powered by a pair of Chevy 502 engines. So it obviously looked intimidating, but how did it actually drive? Engineer Antony Natoli and mechanic Mark McKinley designed a system so the two engines sat in a side by side arrangement and were connected to the transmission. I modelled the system in AutoCAD, and from this file, the plates and components were waterjet cut.

Like this:

Easy to forget how much work goes into films like this – which is part of why I find bittorrenting of films like this unbearably arrogant.

The three problems with Android Wear » Beyond Devices

Compare and contrast Jan Dawson’s view (from July 2014, pre-Apple Watch unveiling):

One of the selling points of Android Wear is its tight integration with Google Now, which has been available for quite some time on smartphones but is only now becoming available on smartwatches. The theory here is good: Google Now is supposed to surface information just when it’s likely to be useful to the user, but the watch allows it to be presented in a much more immediate way than were the user to have to dig through their phone to find it. But the problem is that Google Now, in my experience, still presents information much more on a “just in case” basis than a “just in time” basis, and the stuff that’s “just in time” is often not all that useful.

Bright Young Flacks: “Cameron’s cronies” now drive Silicon Valley’s most sinister propaganda machine » PandoDaily

Paul Carr in a lengthy dig into Rachel Whetstone’s move from Google to Uber:

Everyone in UK politics who I asked about Whetstone was agreed on one thing: She’s the person you bring in if you need to convince everyone that your company isn’t quite as nasty as it appears, and if your current spin doctors aren’t delivering the results you want. First that was Google, and now comes the biggest challenge of her career: Uber.

I have low hopes when it comes to the American business press covering Uber, but even I was surprised at how few journalists bothered to share even the most basic details of Whetstone’s background with their readers. That stuff sits barely below the surface and speaks volumes about the famously ultra-libertarian Travis Kalanick’s decision to replace Plouffe with her at Uber: an Obama liberal booted upstairs to make way for a multi-generation Cameron conservative/libertarian.

There’s more – much, much more.

Why Sony might pull out of smartphones: it’s trying to raise prices in a falling market

Posted on by
4


A message for Sony? Photo by LendingMemo on Flickr.

After my look at the first-quarter performance of various high-end handset vendors – Samsung, Sony, LG, HTC, Apple – plus Microsoft and BlackBerry, it’s time to focus more tightly. First up: Sony, which I think is most likely to pull out of the smartphone business among those presently in it.

Why not LG, HTC, Microsoft or BlackBerry? (Samsung we can be sure will stick with smartphones. Apple, ditto.)

• LG is a rarity: a company that has pulled itself out of the lossmaking mire to come back to success. In part this is because it’s a conglomerate, so it can afford to pile money into its handset division, because (like Samsung) when the handset division does well, it pulls the rest along.

• HTC somehow stutters along. It’s a minor player now, but doesn’t look imperilled as it did last year, when it was posting losses as though it enjoyed it. With cash in the bank, it looks safe for now (though we’ll have to see how the M9 and associated handsets sell).

• Microsoft can bear the losses from handsets pretty much endlessly, and they’re useful for other research.

• BlackBerry has horrendous problems with handset profitability, but handsets are essential to its existence while it doesn’t have a completely solid business in mobile device management; they also lend it a USP, so it’s likely to stick with them even though they don’t make money. Then again, let’s check back when it announces its next set of results in June.

Last man standing

Sony is the one I think is most likely to pull out of this market. It’s in the middle of a huge struggle with its identity, where the only divisions that are performing up to snuff are its image sensor manufacturing and games, while music and films tick over. The mobile side? Not so much.

Here’s how it has been doing – plus its stated ambitions for the coming financial year, outlined in red.

Sony's smartphone aims for 2016

What Sony wants from its smartphones: sell fewer at higher prices, smaller losses.

Sony is aiming to get the average selling price (ASP) of its phones to rise, according to its forecast for next year:

Sony's forecast for smartphone revenues and profits. Well, loss.

Sony’s forecast for smartphone revenues and profits. Well, loss.

Sony presentation: smartphone sales/profit

Extract from Sony’s financial review of 2014 and forecast to March 2015

Specifically, it says it’s going to sell fewer handsets but keep revenue about the same. The figures imply raising handset ASPs from around the $300 mark to over $400.

I don’t think that will work. None of Samsung, LG or HTC has an ASP over $400; for all, the figure has been generally trending down for some time. Apple has a high ASP – over $600 – but it claim all sorts of unique selling points (notably, its brand). Sony is competing with other high-end Android phone makers where it hasn’t been able to stand out.

Also, compare Sony’s ASPs and profitability with LG’s:

Comparing Sony and LG smartphone ASP and profit

Sony’s profit wobbles all over the place – but its ambitions for ASP look wild

They’re both on the same scales: ASP on the left axis, profit per handset on the right. (I ignored Sony’s intangibles writedown for the latest quarter.) LG sells on average for less, but does a lot better from it. Sony swings around wildly – a manifestation of its internal problems. Note also how both firms are seeing falling ASPs (ignoring Sony’s forecast).

The problem for Android handset makers is that the ASP is being driven down relentlessly: entrants such as Xiaomi and big players like Huawei are prepared to set low price expectations, which then make it hard for pricier offerings.

But but but! you say. Sony has a world-famous brand, and it has differentiation from Samsung and LG: its phones are waterproof, you can add SD cards (well, that differentiates them from the top-end Samsung flagship now, at least), and.. hmm.

Not so easy to think of features that really distinguish Sony phones from the others jostling for the top end, is it? Which means that in its aim to push up ASPs while selling fewer phones in turns means concentrating even more on the top-end market. There it is going to bump right into LG, Samsung, HTC and Apple, of which at least two have more powerful brands in this field. While 30m isn’t an ambitious target, the price is.

Not that Sony’s admitting that; it has “financial targets” for the fiscal year to March 2018, where it wants the mobile business to have revenues of between ¥1,000 and 1,250bn ($8.32bn and $10.40bn) with operating income margins of 3% and 5%, which translates to between $416m (lowest revenue, lowest profit) and $520m (highest).

Goals are nice, but Sony’s brand isn’t strong enough in smartphones: I think its strategy may take it in the same direction as PCs, where it fought at the high end (competing, notably, with Apple), making devices that were well-regarded critically but which didn’t sell in sufficient volume to make the business worthwhile. It then threw in the towel as losses grew.

The smartphone business is similar: once you lose scale (as has happened to HTC), it’s really hard to regain it. Sony is aiming to sell half as many phones as LG did in 2014, and only 50% more than HTC did. The incremental sales of camera sensors and phone screens will be nice, but it doesn’t have its own CPU or memory foundry as Samsung does; those factors all help drive Samsung’s profitability. I suspect this will be more like PCs than LG’s smartphone business.

How soon? That rather depends on the smartphone market, and how tolerant Sony’s management are if the strategy doesn’t go according to plan. Give it a few quarters. Then we’ll see if Sony really has the guts for this.

But it also raises a key question. What is the differentiating feature to boost sales for an Android handset today? Waterproofing? SD cards? Removable battery? Great camera? Or is it just price? Sony will have to hope it’s not that.

Start up: Apple v Samsung redux, cornering the DRAM market, what millennials will do to tech

Posted on by
Reply


Speed: Facebook’s got it. Photo by _hadock_ on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Like butterflies, only linkier. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Tools don’t solve the web’s problems, they ARE the problem » QuirksBlog

Peter-Paul Koch:

The web definitely has a speed problem due to over-design and the junkyard of tools people feel they have to include on every single web page. However, I don’t agree that the web has an inherent slowness. The articles for the new Facebook feature will be sent over exactly the same connection as web pages. However, the web versions of the articles have an extra layer of cruft attached to them, and that’s what makes the web slow to load. The speed problem is not inherent to the web; it’s a consequence of what passes for modern web development. Remove the cruft and we can compete again.

The question is, how is Facebook speeding it up, given that it’s going to be shifting the same content? Data compression?

How aging millennials will affect technology consumption » WSJ

Christopher Mims on how the post-1980 “millennials” are moving into a new stage in life:

Data from comScore suggest most switching between Android and iPhone is in favor of Apple, and iPhones have a significantly higher average selling price than Android. So we can assume that, all other things being equal, as millennials age and their earning power increases, their taste in consumer electronics will become more expensive.

This is good news for Apple—and others targeting the higher end of the product spectrum. It’s also fantastic news for pretty much the entire consumer-electronics industry and countless online retailers such as Amazon: A giant demographic bulge is about to enter 20 years of peak earning power. This is a generation that likes its on-demand services, which means the coming decades will almost certainly see more Uber rides and same-day deliveries than ever.

Ad-blocking? No, mobile operators won’t be blocking adverts & charging Google to restore them » Disruptive Wireless

Dean Bubley:

In a nutshell, some European telcos feel they can “get away with” harassing Google and to a lesser degree Apple and Facebook, and get air-cover from their national regulators and the European Commission. While the current trials might have the convenient excuse of “protecting users’ dataplans”, the reality is much more duplicitous – they are jealous that Google has out-innovated and out-maneouvred them, in a similar fashion to their rhetoric about “OTTs”, when they have been asleep at the communications wheel for 20 years…

…[Among advertisers’ countermeasures to such a move] Encryption of content is the most obvious. It is already widespread in mobile, and is growing fast – in some networks, more than 50% is encrypted. There are multiple styles, ranging from SSL built-in to HTTPS traffic, SRTP for WebRTC traffic, through to using compression and proxy servers. Some of these are still theoretically “blockable” based on IP address, but the risk of false positives increases hugely. The inclusion of Google’s SPDY technology into the HTTP2 standard has pretty much ensured this is a one-way ratchet for web traffic in future.

As Bubley also points out, tons of mobile connections are actually made over Wi-Fi. And these points are only the beginning.

Asian component makers take slice of Apple’s iPhone spoils » FT.com

Simon Mundy and Kana Inagaki:

As well as the US-based global market leader Qualcomm, MediaTek must contend with China’s Spreadtrum, a chip designer whose processors are gaining a growing share of the Chinese market. Meanwhile shares in Ningbo-based Sunny Optical, which supplies camera modules to the likes of Xiaomi and Lenovo, have doubled in the past year.

“It’s clear the Chinese brands prefer to have Chinese suppliers,” says Nicolas Baratte, head of technology research for CLSA. “There is a different type of understanding between Chinese companies. The Chinese supply chain is amazingly flexible in terms of tolerance for specification change and redesign, and flexible payment terms.”

Yet with the Chinese market slowing, he adds, some Chinese suppliers — notably phone assembly groups such as Wingtech and Longcheer — are increasingly pinning their expansion hopes on work for faster-growing brands from other countries, especially India.
A reliance on foreign customers has been thrust upon Japan’s handset component suppliers by that country’s dramatic decline in the mobile phone market — but they have responded strongly according to analysts who say Japanese groups account for a third of the parts found in the iPhone, while achieving strong sales of high-tech components to Chinese producers.

EZTV shuts down after hostile takeover » TorrentFreak

A “hostile takeover” by scammers, who got access to the domain details and changed it to their own:

Sladinki007 says that NovaKing must have been devastated by what happened. A life’s work was completely ruined in a few days and access to personal domain names was gone as well.

While EZTV could technically start over using a new name the group’s founder decided to throw in the towel. Too much had already been lost. The group had always been a “fun” non-profit project, and the recent troubles took the fun away.

The scammers, meanwhile, continue to operate both the .it and .ch domain names and are now distributing their own torrents (sourced elsewhere) with the hijacked EZTV brand. They pretend to be the real deal, sending out misleading and false status updates, but they’re not.

Having control over NovaKing’s email address the scammers even reached out to other torrent site operators, claiming that EZTV was back in business. However, most knew better not to fall for it and have retired official EZTV uploader accounts.

So someone who enabled widespread torrenting of TV content (which – astonishingly – doesn’t actually make itself for free) gets scammed and gives up? A “life’s work”? Strike up the world’s smallest violin.

Tipping point ahead: Samsung’s DRAM market share at 40% » BusinessKorea

Cho Jin-young:

Samsung Electronics is riding high with its share of the global DRAM market at 40%.

According to a report on performance in the first quarter of this year published by Samsung on May 17, the company accounted for 43.1% of the DRAM market in Q1 2015, up 2.2% from the number for the entire year of 2014. The figure in Q1 2015 is a nearly 6% increase from the total number for 2013. That data that was mentioned was compiled by market research firm IDC.

Based on market research firm DisplaySearch’s data, Samsung’s share of the global display panel market was 21.8% in Q1 2015, up about 1% from the previous year. The tech giant explained that it is responding to market demand with a full line-up, from ultra large premium displays to those for entry-level UHD and curved TVs.

It made a loss on the TVs, but grew its market share. Could it corner the whole DRAM market? Weird thought.

Apple readies first significant Apple Watch updates, ’TVKit’ SDK for Apple TV » 9to5Mac

Mark Gurman:

Currently in development, the features seek to enhance Apple Watch security, connectivity with other Apple devices, health and fitness features, Wi-Fi capabilities, and integration with third-party applications. Additionally, Apple is also priming major updates for the Apple TV in both the hardware and software departments, including Apple Watch integration. Below, we detail what users can expect from Apple Watches and Apple TVs in the future…

Includes a “Find My Watch” which sounds more like Bluetooth leashing – if the Watch gets some distance away from the phone. There are also promises about health, and others, though they’re also cautioned as “possibly some way off”.

Appeals court finds third trial necessary in first Apple-Samsung case: $380m in damages vacated » FOSS Patents

Florian Müller:

today’s appellate opinion reverses the trade dress-related part of the district court ruling and, on that basis, remands the case for a new trial. A new jury will have to determine damages for all products the first jury found to have infringed an Apple trade dress: the Fascinate, Galaxy S (i9000), Galaxy S 4G, Galaxy S II Showcase (i500), Mesmerize, and Vibrant phones. The total amount of damages (these were only at issue in the 2012 retrial, not the 2013) retrial was over $380m.

The original jury verdict only specified damages by product, but not by product and intellectual property right. That’s why the total damages amount for those products must be redetermined. There’s no way to simply subtract the part that related to design patents.

The Federal Circuit agreed with Samsung that it would have been entitled to judgment as a matter of law (JMOL) on the functionality of the trade dresses on which Apple prevailed. In all other regards, such as invalidity of design and software patents, the Federal Circuit sided with Apple.

Oh good grief. Another trial. Just the other day I was thinking of how Google’s hurried purchase of Motorola for the ludicrous garbillions of dollars belonged to a different age when people thought patents would make a difference in the smartphone struggle. This is nostalgia reflux.

Note though that the appeals court didn’t reverse the jury verdict – as some wilder misunderstanders of legal process had forecast. Judges don’t reverse juries in civil trials without exceptional cause.

Start up: Starbucks gets pass-agg on hacking, what Uber really pays, adblocking for sociopaths, and more

Posted on by
Reply


Check that your backup doesn’t look like this. Photo by Mrs Gemstone on Flickr.

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

Adblockers are immoral » The Next Web

Martin Bryant is editor-in-chief of the site:

It comes up a lot in conversation, especially online. “Oh yes, I can’t imagine viewing the Web without the ads blocked. I accidentally switched my adblocker off yesterday and it was HORRIBLE.”

No, it really wasn’t – it was perfectly fine, you’re just being a snob. The Web works well for me with the ads displayed. It’s a point of principle – helping publishers earn money is something I want to do and feel we all should do if we consume their work. For those few, accidental minutes your adblocker was off, you were helping the publishers of the sites you visit earn income for their content that you access for free.

I hate to go all high-and-mighty-Mr-Morals, but the proud ad-blocking folk out there are happily starving sites (that they rely on for information and entertainment) of vital income. Yes, publishers (including TNW) are increasingly opting to diversify their income with ‘native ads,’ events, deals, education offerings and the like, but display ads are still an important bread-and-butter income stream. Taking delight in denying publishers that revenue shows either sociopathic tendencies or ignorance of economic realities.

There really isn’t a middle ground. If you understand the economics, you’re being selfish. If you don’t understand the economics, you’re being wilfully ignorant these days. And the alternatives (native ads, paid placement?) will surely be worse. But they may soon be inevitable.

TeslaCrypt: Following the money trail and learning the human costs of ransomware « FireEye Threat Research

Nart Villeneuve:

We tracked the victims’ payments to the cybercriminals—available because the group used bitcoin—and determined that between February and April 2015, the perpetrators extorted $76,522 from 163 victims. This amount may seem trivial compared to millions made annually on other cyber crimes, or the estimated $3m the perpetrators of CryptoLocker were able to make during nine months in 2013-14.  However, even this modest haul demonstrates ransomware’s ability to generate profits and its devastating impact on victims.

The online correspondence between the victims and the cybercriminals provides context regarding the effect on peoples’ lives. The victims were spread across the globe from students in Iran and Spain to regular folks in the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Germany, Croatia and Mongolia. Some feared being expelled from school or fired by their employers if they are unable to retrieve their files. Fathers and mothers were devastated by the loss of family photos. The TeslaCrypt ransomware also affected nonprofits, including an organization dedicated to curing blood cancer, as well as small businesses. Many of the victims were simply unable to afford to pay the ransom and gave up.

Some of the conversations are heartbreaking. Weirdly, the extortionists sometimes cut their price for personal circumstances.

Can Google outsell Amazon and eBay? » WSJ

Google will launch buy buttons on its search-result pages in coming weeks, a controversial step by the company toward becoming an online marketplace rivaling those run by Amazon.com and eBay.

The search giant will start showing the buttons when people search for products on mobile devices, according to people familiar with the launch.

The buttons will accompany sponsored—or paid—search results, often displayed under a “Shop on Google” heading at the top of the page. Buttons won’t appear with the nonsponsored results that are driven by Google’s basic search algorithm…

…Some retailers said they worry the move will turn Google from a valuable source of traffic into a marketplace where purchases happen on Google’s own websites. The retailers, who wouldn’t voice their concerns publicly, fear such a move will turn them into back-end order takers, weakening their relationships with shoppers.

Mobile-only (to begin with). Wonder if this will be tried in Europe, where the concern over this is more substantial.

I was an undercover Uber driver » Philadelphia City Paper

Emily Guendelsberger, who was that undercover driver:

it’s no wonder the taxi industry is having so much trouble competing with Uber — taxi companies have to pay to maintain, acquire and insure all the cars in a taxi fleet. Uber’s drivers shoulder that burden themselves, with expenses eating around 20% of total gross fares. And Uber’s gross fares, according to a Business Insider tipster, are expected to hit $10 billion in 2015.

And it makes complete sense for Uber to continue cutting fares to as cheap as possible while flooding the market with more and more drivers and encouraging people to use Uber for shorter and shorter distances — all of which correlate with reduced take-home pay for each individual driver…

…after 100 rides, I felt like I had enough [data] to work with. Over that duration, during which I maintained a 4.83 [star] adjusted rating, high enough to qualify me for Uber’s VIP program, Uber would say I “earned” $17 an hour in gross fares. But subtract the 28% that went to Uber and the 19% that went to expenses, and I actually made $9.34 an hour (plus a grand total of $16 in tips, $10 of which were for meeting up with a guy who left his Porsche keys in my backseat).

Driving for UberX isn’t the worst-paying job I’ve ever had. I made less scooping ice cream as a 15-year-old, if you don’t adjust for inflation. If I worked 10 hours a day, six days a week with one week off, I’d net almost $30,000 a year before taxes.

But if I wanted to net that $90,000 a year figure that so many passengers asked about, I would only have to work, let’s see …

27 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Who’s responsible when a driverless car crashes? Tesla’s got an idea » WSJ

Mike Ramsey:

The Palo Alto, Calif., electric-car maker soon will begin activating semiautonomous features, including the capability to pass other cars without driver intervention, in its Model S sedans. A driver can trigger the passing function by hitting the turn signal, according to people familiar with the technology. That action not only tells the car it can pass, but also means the driver has given thought to whether the maneuver is safe.

While it might seem a minor detail, having drivers activate the turn signal could help auto makers like Tesla avoid a regulatory pile up.

Starbucks blaming passwords, victims doesn’t fix the problem; burning questions about attack remain » Bob Sullivan

Sullivan first pointed to the hacking of Starbucks app passwords, and now has had to tear down the spin put up around it by the company:

these positions are meant to create the impression that there’s nothing wrong with the way Starbucks is processing payments, and in fact, some journalists declared that to be the case. Fortune magazine wrote “Starbucks says its popular mobile app has not been hacked, contradicting multiple media reports that intruders have hijacked the accounts of hundreds of the coffee chain’s customers…” Starbucks actually never denied that intruders had hijacked consumers accounts, and anyone can find victims complaining about just that with a few moment’s work, but some journalists seemed eager to clear Starbucks of any culpability in the issue.

That’s unfortunate, because my email this week makes it clear that plenty of Starbucks customers are pretty angry at the way this issue has been handled, and many of them don’t appreciate being blamed for having their money stolen after they placed their trust in Starbucks.

Green lights for our self-driving vehicle prototypes » Official Google Blog

Chris Urmson, director of the self-driving car project:

We’ve been running the vehicles through rigorous testing at our test facilities, and ensuring our software and sensors work as they’re supposed to on this new vehicle. The new prototypes will drive with the same software that our existing fleet of self-driving Lexus RX450h SUVs uses. That fleet has logged nearly a million autonomous miles on the roads since we started the project, and recently has been self-driving about 10,000 miles a week. So the new prototypes already have lots of experience to draw on—in fact, it’s the equivalent of about 75 years of typical American adult driving experience.

Each prototype’s speed is capped at a neighborhood-friendly 25mph, and during this next phase of our project we’ll have safety drivers aboard with a removable steering wheel, accelerator pedal, and brake pedal that allow them to take over driving if needed. We’re looking forward to learning how the community perceives and interacts with the vehicles, and to uncovering challenges that are unique to a fully self-driving vehicle—e.g., where it should stop if it can’t stop at its exact destination due to construction or congestion.

Samsung’s Tizen Store is available in 182 countries and with 25 apps at launch » Malaysian Digest

At launch, the Tizen Store has 25 apps spread across four categories (games, apps to plan new resolutions, photography and EA games). Of the 25 apps, 14 of them are gaming while photography takes second spot with 6 apps.

There is currently only one device that supports the Tizen Store which is the Samsung Z1. Announced last June, the Samsung Z1 is now only sold in India and Bangladesh. Samsung initially wanted to launch the Z1 and other Tizen-powered smartphones in more markets, but things did not turn out as planned.

“Things did not turn out as planned” is putting it mildly.