Start up: Surface Book review, Google v EC redux, where are the iPad Pro apps?, after Google Flu, and more

Posted on November 11, 2015 by charlesarthur

Is this a perfect app signup? Photo by kastner 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. Aren’t they pretty? I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Final words – the Microsoft Surface Book review » Anandtech

Brett Howse likes it a lot. Apart from the lack of ports. And also..

The other issue with the hardware is one that plagues all 2-in-1 devices which offer a detachable display. Because the display has to house all of the PC components it gets heavy. The Surface Book display/Clipboard is 1.6 lbs (726 grams) and all of this weight is out over the hinge. The Surface Book does better than any other detachable convertible device for balance, but at the end of the day it is still more top heavy than a traditional notebook. On a desk it’s not going to be an issue, but if you do have to type in your lap, depending on the seating arrangement, it may want to tip backwards. This is compounded by the feet on the bottom not having a lot of grip. The Surface Book’s display travel is also limited to prevent it from tipping over, although it does open far enough that it should not be an issue for almost any situation.

The hardware is overall very good. Where the Surface Book is let down though is on software. It’s kind of ironic that the hardware is well done but the software can’t keep up when you consider Microsoft is first and foremost a software company, and one that has only been in the PC market for a couple of years at that. But there have been a lot of issues with software. When the Surface Book first launched, it suffered from display driver crashes along with hue changes and flickering on the screen when doing certain tasks. Luckily these issues seem to have been corrected with a firmware update issues on November 2nd. But there are still outstanding issues. The fact that you can’t close the lid and expect the laptop to actually go to sleep is a terrible bug. Leaving the Surface Book unplugged but sleeping is going to result in a dead battery. Just yesterday, I closed the lid on the Surface Book, only to notice the fans had kicked in and it was very hot.

I find the coexistence of a laptop that can turn into a tablet (Surface Book) and a tablet that can turn into a laptop (Surface Pro) suggestive of a “let’s turn this ship around any way we can” approach. Also, the Surface Book sure is pricey.

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Google faces new round of EU probing over Android mapping apps » Bloomberg Business

Aoife White:

Google faces a fresh round of European Union questions about its Android operating system for mobile devices as regulators quizzed rivals and customers over applications for maps, e-mail and other services.

The EU wants to know whether Google Maps for phones has supplanted portable or in-car navigation devices, such as those produced by TomTom NV and the HERE unit of Nokia Oyj, according to a document sent to companies and seen by Bloomberg.

Officials are also seeking data, such as user numbers, about downloaded or pre-installed mapping apps on devices, as well as costs mapmakers face to produce a mobile-ready app.

Wonder how long that one will take to reach any decision. 2017? 2018?
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Google EU antitrust response argues Amazon, eBay robust competitors » Re/code

Mark Bergen, who has seen a redacted copy of Google’s response to the EC:

Google points to the number of online price aggregators — sites that collate retail prices elsewhere on the Internet — born in Europe: 180 between 2008 and 2014. The EU’s charge sheet, or statement of objections (SO), “focuses on a handful of aggregators that lost free Google traffic, but ignores many that gained traffic,” Google’s lawyers wrote. Google says it drove 20bn “free clicks” to these aggregators in Europe over the past decade.

More critical to Google’s defense is the argument that online marketplaces, like eBay and Amazon, should be considered peers to Google’s shopping service, a position at odds with the EU, which charges that these merchants are “irrelevant” when it comes to price comparisons. Google’s lawyers claim, using internal data, that Web visitors prefer merchant links over aggregators and go directly to Amazon for product searches. (They do.) Google also argues that these giant merchants consider the smaller price aggregators as rivals as well — in the response, Google cites Amazon SEC filings where the e-commerce company lists “comparison shopping websites” and “Web search engines” as competitors. Ergo, Google contends, the EU should see them that way too.

And echoing the company’s internal note to the charges in April, Google spells out how Amazon and eBay are far more dominant as online retailers in Europe than Google’s service.

Pretty much all these points of Google’s were rebutted thoroughly by Foundem (a price aggregation service which complained to the EC) in June.
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Where are Apple’s iPad Pro apps for pros? » Lou Miranda

There’s a big gap in Apple’s pro app lineup, with Aperture being retired along with iPhoto. iPhoto’s replacement is the Photos app, but there is no Aperture replacement yet. What better device to introduce a Photos Pro app than a giant-screened iPad Pro with a pressure sensitive Pencil?

Likewise with Final Cut Pro X. There’s no reason to make it iPad Pro-only, but it would certainly shine on an iPad Pro. This is similar to Macs: sure you can run Photoshop or FCP X on a MacBook Air, but they really shine on a MacBook Pro or Mac Pro. I discussed this at length in my post “There’s No Such Thing as an iPad App“.

So why would Apple release an iPad Pro without its own pro apps?

My feeling is that the iPad Pro is much like Apple TV: the hardware was ready before the software, and Apple is soft-pedaling both, mostly to developers and early adopters. (You could argue Apple does this with every new device, and I wouldn’t argue with you.)

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AI will reorganize the human population » Medium

Silver Keskkula, who is working on the “Teleport” app which aims to find the best place for you to live:

Matching people to locations is hard — there are more things to account for than might be feasible to code into a human understandable model. Although today we’ve managed to keep things simple and are missing a purely machine learning driven parameter from our search, I’m more than convinced that in the very near future we will need to resort to AI to help guide people’s search into where to live (our first tests are quite encouraging).

All and all we’re all just inefficient computational machines running on wetware and largely biased by evolutionary adaptations more suited to the hunter-gatherer era, so getting AI involved in our next wave of migrations might not be such a bad thing.

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This is how you design your mobile app for maximum growth » First Round Review

[Primer CEO] Kamo Asatryan may very well be one of the best kept secrets in the startup ecosystem. He’s one of a small handful of people who have observed hundreds of mobile apps, thought deeply and scientifically about their mechanics, and determined what they could change to grow faster.

To demonstrate his particular brand of magic: Asatryan’s team recently worked with an app that required users to swipe through four screens explaining the product in-depth before they could sign up. Then the permissions screen literally begged them to let the app access their location data. 60% said no and went on to a dead-end experience.

To turn things around, Asatryan tested a radically different approach: assume that users who installed the app already understood the need to provide their location data. This allowed them to axe the long-winded welcome flow and make the permissions request the second screen. The text was changed to say that users needed to “Enable Location Permissions” (making it clear that it would be for their benefit), and they were literally not able to move on from the screen without saying yes. This sounds risky, but after the shift, 95% of users said yes and went on to a much better product experience.

This is a long article, but every single element of it will be useful if you’re in any way involved in designing or critiquing mobile app design. Today’s must-read. (Via Dave Verwer’s iOS Dev Weekly.)
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New flu tracker uses Google search data better than Google » Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

With big data comes big noise. Google learned this lesson the hard way with its now kaput Google Flu Trends. The online tracker, which used Internet search data to predict real-life flu outbreaks, emerged amid fanfare in 2008. Then it met a quiet death this August after repeatedly coughing up bad estimates.

But big Internet data isn’t out of the disease tracking scene yet.

With hubris firmly in check, a team of Harvard researchers have come up with a way to tame the unruly data, combine it with other data sets, and continually calibrate it to track flu outbreaks with less error. Their new model, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, out-performs Google Flu Trends and other models with at least double the accuracy. If the model holds up in coming flu seasons, it could reinstate some optimism in using big data to monitor disease and herald a wave of more accurate second-generation models.

I wrote about the failure of Google Flu Trends in March 2014; in 2008 it had claimed 90% correlation. Google said then it would “welcome feedback”. The old data is still available.
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TLC NAND SSDs: The crippling problem storage makers don’t advertise » PCWorld

Jon Jacobi:

With last week’s release of Crucial’s BX200 SSD, a drive that features TLC (triple-level cell) NAND, it’s time to shine a light on this burgeoning segment of the SSD market—especially as vendors happily quote numbers that would have you believe that these SSDs perform just like any other.

Most of the time TLC SSDs perform quite well. But copy a large amount of data to a TLC drive, and part way through the operation you’ll see something discomforting—a startling drop in write speed. With some drives it’s relatively mild, but in the case of many recent TLC drives, the drop is so drastic you’ll wonder if the SSD is dying. It’s not, but you may wish it was.

While this is true, it turns out you’ll only hit the problem if you’re transferring more data than fits in the disk cache – which could be 3GB or more. Still, a subtle gotcha.
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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shows ‘iPhone Pro,’ reveals how much time he spends on email » IB Times

David Gilbert:

Speaking at the company’s Future Decoded conference in London on Tuesday, Nadella, who took the reins at Microsoft over 18 months ago, demonstrated the power of Windows 10 and gave us a glimpse into what he does and how he works on a day-to-day basis.

Using Delve — an Office 365 app which automatically tracks a user’s activities throughout the week by monitoring calendars, emails and the other productivity tools — Nadella showed the audience that last week he spent a total of 16 hours in meetings, well within his goal of under 20 hours per week.

Nadella failed to meet his goal of spending less than nine hours per week on emails, clocking up 9.6 hours in the past seven days. He also fell short on the time he wanted to spend focusing – which he described simply as “time for work.” Nadella considered himself “focused” for only two hours last week, just half of his assigned goal.

Notice how he didn’t show us what devices – and in particular phone – he uses. (Sure, it will be a Lumia, but which?) The “iPhone Pro” is just an iPhone loaded with Microsoft software. Puzzled by how a machine measures your “focus hours”. How does it know?
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No Comcast app on the new Apple TV » Tech Insider

Tim Stenovec:

Marcien Jenckes, the executive vice president of consumer services for Comcast Cable, told Tech Insider in an interview last week that Comcast isn’t working on an app for the new Apple TV.

“We’re not philosophically against it,” Jenckes said of developing an app for the new device. “We just haven’t seen the need to run out and do that, given the fact that we’re already delivering content to the TVs in a way that has our customers already satisfied.”

If American customers were that satisfied, they wouldn’t be buying set-top boxes and TV sticks by the million.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none reported.

Start up: the Samsung conflict, Google Analytics v Edge, Windows 95 v 10, Android woes and more

Posted on July 31, 2015 by charlesarthur

A smart cap could tell you if your milk had gone off – so much more accurate than someone’s nose. Photo by alisdair on Flickr.

A selection of 11 links for you. Because you can take it. (You’d better, I’m taking a three-week holiday break.) I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Samsung’s profit center » Asymco

Horace Dediu:

Phone operating margins [at Samsung] peaked in Q1 2014 at 20% but are half that level today. These margins have dropped to levels Samsung had in 2009, before the Galaxy launched and before they had any substantial revenues from smartphones.

In contrast, the semiconductor group is growing both revenues and margins. Margins and operating profits are both 50% higher than those of devices.

We also know that Apple is Samsung Semiconductor’s single biggest customer. We can’t be sure how much of the total revenue/profit comes from Apple but if the pattern continues then Apple could be the greatest contributor to Samsung’s profitability in the near future.

How could this be? Wasn’t Samsung supposed to “disrupt” Apple?

The reality is that Samsung’s own smartphones are being disrupted by good-enough Android devices, typically made by Chinese brands. This low-end disruption is also affecting LG, another phone maker and Apple supplier.

Unlike Samsung and LG, Apple is less susceptible to low-end disruption. What Apple offers is a brand promise, an ecosystem, associated products and services and what amounts to a new market. It’s this parallel value network that competes with Android/Google, rather than with Samsung.

I’ll add another data point: the “phone operating margins” actually cover the IM [IT & Mobile] division, which includes PCs and (I believe) cameras. In the latest quarter, the non-phone revenue in the IM division was below US$500m, for the first time in at least four years. That suggests we’re very close to seeing the true profit margin of Samsung’s phone business, as the non-phone business probably doesn’t perturb the very much larger (US$22bn, ie over 44x larger) phone business.

And read Dediu’s post for the killer payoff line.
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Google loses bid to overturn low-cost patent licenses to Microsoft » Reuters

Andrew Chung:

In a setback for Google, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Thursday that the low licensing rate Microsoft pays to use some of Google’s Motorola Mobility patents had been properly set.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said a lower court judge properly determined the patents’ value even though the royalty rate was only a fraction of what Motorola had asked for. Google sold the Motorola handset business to Lenovo last year but kept its patents.

The court also upheld $14.5m awarded to Microsoft for Motorola’s breach of contract to license its patents fairly.

Patents at issue being standards-essential; Motorola kicked it off demanding $4bn per year. Judge James Robart put the royalty rate at $1.8m per year.
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BT hands £129m back to UK.gov after beating rural broadband targets » The Register

Simon Rockman:

Both BT and the Ministry of Fun – or the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, if you prefer – have spun BT’s toeing-the-line-of-a-contractual-obligation as unbridled generosity towards taxpayers.

A statement from the Minister of Fun, John Whittingdale, said:

It’s fantastic to see that the rollout of superfast broadband is delivering for customers and for the taxpayer. The Government was clear from the start that as levels of people taking up superfast broadband went beyond our expectations in areas where we invested public money, BT would reimburse the taxpayer for reinvesting into further coverage across the UK. This now means that BT will be providing up to £129m cashback for some of the most hard to reach areas.
The funding was part of a Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) project which has the aims of:

• provide superfast broadband coverage to 90 per cent of the UK by 2016
• provide basic broadband (2Mbps) for all by 2016
• provide superfast broadband to 95 per cent of the UK by 2017
• explore options to get near universal superfast broadband coverage across the UK by 2018
• create 22 “SuperConnected Cities” across the UK by 2015
• improve mobile coverage in remote areas by 2016

Speaking as someone who keeps finding themselves somehow forever in that “it’s coming in a couple of years, honest” part of the country (which seems to be a lot larger than 5%), I’d prefer Whittingdale to be lighting a fire under BT, and for Ofcom to demand that BT Openreach (which does the infrastructure) be split from the rest of BT.

After all, power generators don’t own the power lines, rail operators don’t own the track; why does BT own the phone lines?
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Enterprises retake lead in tech adoption » Deloitte CIO – WSJ

Apparently a sort of chief information officer-focussed niche of the WSJ, this has the entertaining premise that:

many believe this trend of consumer-originated innovations entering the workplace, dubbed the consumerization of IT, will become the dominant model going forward. But there is strong evidence that the pendulum is swinging back to enterprise-first adoption, with organizations likely to capture more near-term value than consumers in the following four technology areas:

Which areas? Let’s see: wearables; 3D printers; drones; Internet of Things. Not a chance on wearables – enterprise adoption and value will lag far behind consumers (already does). On 3D printing, businesses are already ahead through prototyping, so no contest. On drones, again, armies got there first, so not really at issue. And IoT? It’s such a pain at present for most people that again, it’s left to businesses which have the time and patience to deploy. But I’d bet once IoT stuff becomes prevalent enough, it will be widely used by the ordinary folk.
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The challenge of tracking Microsoft’s new Edge browser in Google Analytics » GeekWire

Even though Edge is now in the wild, tracking usage and adoption of the browser is going to be problematic for many web developers and site owners because tracking for Edge is not yet supported in Google Analytics.

Web developers and designers frequently consult Google Analytics to answer important browser usage questions for their website. Answers to questions like “Do we need to still support IE8?” or “Are there enough users affected by this particular Chrome bug to implement a hack to fix it?” are usually answered by running a browser usage report in Google Analytics. Google Analytics provides an easy way to break down a website’s readers by their OS, browser and browser version, except in the case of Edge.

Taking a look at Google Analytics reports for Operating System Version in Windows, you’ll notice that there is no version 10 listed.

WTH, Google? (Via Richard Burte.)
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UC Berkeley engineers devise 3D-printed ‘Smart Cap’ to check safety of milk, juice » Food Safety News

The “smart cap” has an embedded inductor-capacitor tank as the wireless passive sensor and can monitor the quality of milk and juice wirelessly, the article stated.

“A quick flip of the carton allowed a bit of milk to get trapped in the cap’s capacitor gap, and the entire carton was then left unopened at room temperature (about 71.6 degrees F) for 36 hours,” according to a university news report.

The result shows a 4.3% resonance frequency shift from milk stored in the room temperature environment for that period. This work establishes an innovative approach to construct arbitrary 3D systems with embedded electrical structures as integrated circuitry for various applications, including the demonstrated passive wireless sensors, the article explained.

The Berkeley folk are saying “hey, people will print them out at home!” while everyone else is saying “this would be so useful in mass-produced containers”.

So here’s a picture of the 3D printer that the UC Berkeley people think you’ll want to print out milk carton tops with.
UC Berkely 3D printer
Yeah, I’ll have two – you never know when you might need a spare.
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The fastest-growing mobile phone markets barely use apps » Quartz

Africa and Asia, the two fastest growing mobile markets, aren’t very big on apps.

The overwhelming majority of mobile internet activity in the regions is spent on web pages, according to a report released on 28 July by Opera Mediaworks. In Asia and Africa, websites made up 90% and 96% of mobile impressions, respectively, in the second quarter.

Their habits are a sharp contrast to the US, where apps accounted for 91% of impressions. Globally, there’s a more even distribution, with apps making up 56% of mobile impressions and websites comprising the remainder…

…“A big portion of the mobile audience in mobile-first regions like Africa and [Asia-Pacific] are still using low-end feature phones because of the cost factor,” a spokesman tells Quartz. “This therefore compels them to use the mobile web more than apps, which are usually dominant on smartphones.”

Today’s challenger for the “well duh” prize.
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Windows 10 launched so quietly you may have missed it » The Guardian

Some two-bit hack blathering about a new version of Windows:

Windows 10’s biggest new feature? It’s free if you download it within the next year, and will install on machines running Windows 7 or Windows 8. Its second biggest feature? It isn’t Windows 8, which was released in 2012 and created widespread puzzlement by submerging the traditional desktop interface beneath big, bright “tiles” and getting rid of the familiar, popular Start menu.

That puzzlement soon turned to anger, forcing the ejection of the man who had led Windows 8’s development, Steve Sinofsky, and the introduction of Windows 8.1, which, while it didn’t bring the Start menu, did at least let you start off in desktop mode.

Now, Microsoft breezily says, “the familiar Start menu is back”, as though it had been on holiday rather than unceremoniously dumped.

On reflection, the biggest feature of Windows 10 is that it isn’t Windows 8. Being free is its second-biggest.
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August 1995: A window we will all want to open » The Independent

Some two-bit hack blathering about a new version of Windows:

Microsoft’s computer program lines up with a number of other classic products: the Biro, aerosols, the Sony Walkman, the Boeing 747 jumbo jet, the Mini and the compact disc. It is a piece of technology which has arrived at just the right time to satisfy people’s wants.

Like those other classic products, Windows 95 enhances our personal independence and autonomy, and makes our lives more convenient. It draws everyone deeper into the existence of the “me” generation. Thus, aerosols let you manage your hair, your hygiene, your cleaning as you choose: convenience in a can. A Biro can write for far longer than a fountain pen, and when it’s finished you simply throw it away. The Mini, costing £400 in its first incarnation, made car ownership possible for the young and relatively poor, not just the comfortably well-off. The Walkman provided everyone with their own personal environment: the music (or noise) that you want at the volume you choose.

But like those earlier products, Windows 95 also exemplifies a wider economic and cultural trend. Just as globalisation gives corporations multinational reach, their products link physically and culturally diverse peoples, homogenising aspects of our lifestyles and, literally, connecting us up. Software can be “shipped” over a telephone line across borders; Windows 95 will be the same in Australia or the Arctic.

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CNET’s early coverage of Windows 95, back in 1995 » YouTube

CNET’s first impression of Windows 95 was that it would create a huge impact, what with the long file names, taskbar and a recycle bin for unwanted files. Check out this vintage review along with Microsoft’s own promotional video that went with the launch.

Here’s the video:

(The presenter is Richard Hart.)

How far we’ve come. No, don’t disagree. Look at that video of the Fonz.
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The security flaw Google built into Android » MIT Technology Review

Tom Simonite:

Google can’t push you an update for Android. It hands out the operating system to device manufacturers for free. They get to tinker with it to add features or apps of their own and are the only ones—along with cellular carriers in some cases —that can push updates to the devices they sell. Google does bind companies that use Android with some restrictions (for example to do with using its app store) but doesn’t require them to push out security updates quickly.

That leaves users of Android devices unable to avail themselves of what security experts say is the most important strategy for staying safe, at least according to researchers at none other than Google itself. They reported last week on a survey that asked computer security pros how they stay safe. Applying security updates emerged as the experts’ number one priority.

Google has lately come up with workarounds for Android’s flawed security model. It has shunted many key functions into apps that it can push updates to via its app store. But that doesn’t cover all of Android, and the app store doesn’t have a way to signal to you whether an app wants to update for security reasons or just to add new features.

The text message vulnerability revealed today can’t be fully fixed by upgrading apps. And it’s not unlikely that most vulnerable phones will never get the security patches for Android that Google has developed and will offer up to manufacturers and cellular operators.

Android has done spectacularly well, but one feels that it’s overdue its Blaster moment.
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Start up: Apple’s transit plans, app monetisation, Samsung’s S6 rebuttal, bitcoin booboo, and more

Posted on June 2, 2015 by charlesarthur

Surely not caused by a Google car. Photo by Oakland Pirate on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Free like nitrogen. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Californians are OK with Google self-driving cars and are ready to ban non-self-driving cars » Emerging Technologies Blog

One of the blog’s readers gave their experience:

It’s safe to cut off a Google car. I ride a motorcycle to work and in California motorcycles are allowed to split lanes (i.e., drive in the gap between lanes of cars at a stoplight, slow traffic, etc.). Obviously I do this at every opportunity because it cuts my commute time in 1/3. Once, I got a little caught out as the traffic transitioned from slow moving back to normal speed. I was in a lane between a Google car and some random truck and, partially out of experiment and partially out of impatience, I gunned it and cut off the Google car sort of harder than maybe I needed too… The car handled it perfectly (maybe too perfectly). It slowed down and let me in. However, it left a fairly significant gap between me and it. If I had been behind it, I probably would have found this gap excessive and the lengthy slowdown annoying. Honestly, I don’t think it will take long for other drivers to realize that self-driving cars are “easy targets” in traffic.

Why do we assume everyone can drive competently? » Remains of the Day

Eugene Wei just avoided a cycling crash when a car turned into his cycle lane without warning:

For the next two blocks, I played my near collision on loop in my head like a Vine, both angry at the driver’s reckless maneuver and relieved as I tallied up the likely severity of the injuries I had just managed to escape by less than a foot of clearance. This is not an unusual occurrence, unfortunately. When I bike, I just assume that drivers will suddenly make rights in front of me without turning on their turn signal or looking back to see if I’m coming in the bike lane to their right. It happens all the time. It’s not just a question of skill but of mental obliviousness. American drivers have been so used to having the road to themselves for so long that they feel no need to consider anyone else might be laying claim to any piece of it. Though the roads in Europe are often narrower, I feel a hundred times safer there when biking there than I do in the U.S. All that’s to say I agree wholeheartedly with the writer quoted above that self-driving cars are much less threatening than cars driven by humans. As an avid cyclist, especially, I could think of nothing that would ease my mind when biking through the city than replacing every car on the road with self-driving cars.

iOS 9 Transit Maps to launch in a handful of cities in North America, Europe & China » 9to5Mac

Mark Gurman, for it is he:

While Apple plans to debut its own mass transit directions service for Maps in iOS 9 as soon as June, the rollout will not be as ambitious as some users may have hoped. In its first iteration, Apple’s Transit service will only support approximately a half-dozen cities across the United States, Canada, and Europe, in addition to China, according to sources… In the United States, the planned launch cities are San Francisco and New York, two major metropolitan areas that are known for public transportation, while Toronto will be likely Canada’s sole representative for the iOS 9 Maps Transit feature at launch. In Europe, Apple is said to be gearing up to first launch the feature in London, Paris, and Berlin.

Google has been miles ahead in this for years (which made iOS 6 retrograde). Three years on, there are already lots of apps – especially Citymapper – which offer services like this. But it’s the integration that Apple has really lacked.

Google’s answer to the big problem with wearables » WSJ

Alistair Barr:

Wearable gadgets like smartwatches have seen a lot of hype but little commercial success. An obvious obstacle is that teensy touch screens can make such devices difficult to control. Google thinks it has an answer: a minuscule radar system that senses hand gestures. The company’s Advanced Technology and Projects research group shrank a radar system into a package roughly the size of a micro SD card, small enough to fit in a smartwatch. It beams a signal wide enough to capture hand motions and gestures and turn them into control signals, according to Ivan Poupyrev, who led the initiative called Project Silo. The tiny radar could let people control tiny-screen devices without having to touch them, he said during a session at the Google I/O 2015 developer conference. For instance, it transforms a twisting motion between thumb and forefinger into commands to scroll up and down a smartwatch’s screen. Poupyrev demonstrated by changing the hours and minutes on a small screen by rubbing his thumb and finger near to the radar gesture sensor. He also played a simple soccer game, his finger motions in midair near the sensor shooting an onscreen ball into a goal. ATAP plans to release the system to developers later in 2015, Poupyrev said.

This is one of those things that looks cool in demos, but I suspect could be prone to everything that real life is – mess-ups. Remember Leap Motion, another gesture control system? Went nowhere because waving your hand in the air isn’t a natural way to control things – because it’s prone to misinterpretation. Google might get this right, but it needs a ton of figuring out.

Apps spearhead Google’s battle with Apple » FT.com

Richard Waters and Tim Bradshaw:

Apple’s App Store accounts for about 45% of the revenue that developers make from apps, compared with 29% for Google’s Play, according to Digi-Capital. But counting in the income from handsets in China — where Google’s apps are blocked, meaning it makes no money — pushes the overall Android share to 52%, Digi-Capital calculates. Last week, matching — and trying to surpass — Apple was a strong subtext of Google’s pitch to developers. New features included Android Pay, a rival to Apple Pay and a fresh attempt to break into mobile payments after the disappointment of Google Wallet. A new Google Photos app — with the promise of software that can automatically organise libraries of pictures — also echoed capabilities that are already offered by Apple. But in other areas, Google seemed unprepared. While smartwatches based on last year’s Android Wear technology have been put in the shade by the launch of Apple Watch, Google had little new to show off in response. This was a sign that it is surrendering early leadership in wearables to Apple, according to Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Kantar Worldpanel.

The download share of Android in China is 62.8%, compared to 22.2% for Google Play, and 13.9% for Apple. Remarkable that non-Google Android is so big – but it only takes 23.8% of revenue, against 28.6% for Google Play, and 44.7% for Apple.

Hello world: Windows 10 available on July 29 » Microsoft Windows blog

Terry Myerson:

We designed Windows 10 to create a new generation of Windows for the 1.5 billion people using Windows today in 190 countries around the world. With Windows 10, we start delivering on our vision of more personal computing, defined by trust in how we protect and respect your personal information, mobility of the experience across your devices, and natural interactions with your Windows devices, including speech, touch, ink, and holograms. We designed Windows 10 to run our broadest device family ever, including Windows PCs, Windows tablets, Windows phones, Windows for the Internet of Things, Microsoft Surface Hub, Xbox One and Microsoft HoloLens—all working together to empower you to do great things. Familiar, yet better than ever, Windows 10 brings back the Start menu you know and love.

“Speech, touch, ink and holograms” is quite enticing. (That’s Hololens, of course.)

Asus brings a choice of sizes to Android Wear with ZenWatch 2 » The Verge

Vlad Savov:

The ZenWatch 2 runs the latest version of Android Wear, which was recently introduced with the LG Watch Urbane, however Asus’ watch is still a long way from actually being released. Asus tells us that it will reveal the full specs, pricing, and availability information during IFA in Berlin this September — leaving this as more of a promise than an actual product. The goal is to keep prices consistent between the two watch sizes, leaving the choice of strap to determine the particular cost. Update: The original article speculated that Asus’ metal crown will function like the digital crown in the Apple Watch, however we’ve now confirmed with Asus that it’s simply an external button and not a physical scroll wheel.

1) Doesn’t this Osborne [kill by preannouncement] the existing Zenwatch, even though there’s no price etc etc for the 2? 2) Which company will be the first, do we think, to mimic Apple’s digital crown and risk the sure-to-ensue lawsuit?

Samsung says S6 sales meet internal forecast » Korea Times

Kim Yoo-chul:

A Samsung spokesman in Seoul refused to release any official information on sales; but the company is expected to unveil figures at its upcoming investor relations forum on [Wednesday] June 3. Such remarks come a few days after Samsung Electronics Corporate Affairs President Park Sang-jin told reporters that the firm has been seeing a steady increase of sales on international markets. “You have to wait and see; however, the S6 and S6 Edge sales will be far higher than those of the S5” he said. The two models were unveiled during the Mobile World Congress 2015 event at the beginning of March. Both models were made available for purchase in April. Citing a report by CounterPoint Research, a research firm, eBEST Investment analyst Kim Hyun-yong said Samsung sold 6.1m S6s and S6 Edges in April. He added 305,000 S6s were being sold daily since the devices’ availability ― better than the S5 and S4’s 124,000 and 241,000 per day, respectively.

I’m finding it hard to believe that the S6 (and Edge?) is selling triple the number of the S5, and 50% more than the S4, at a time when Samsung is down in China and seen sales declines for months, and the S6 is on sale in fewer countries than the S5 was. Though with Samsung it’s hard to know what “sales” means – usually, it’s “sell-in”, as in sales to carriers.

Bitcoin app issues critical update after rare bug leads to total crypto breakdown » The Guardian

Alex Hern:

Bitcoin wallets are typically created by randomly generating a public address and a related private key. As a result, it is important for address and key to be truly random, or else it may be possible to guess the private key by looking at the public address. [Bitcoin wallet app] Blockchain used two sources of random numbers, in what ought to have been a belt-and-braces approach: it pulled a random number from the Android operating system’s built-in random number generator, and then connected to online service Random.org to get a second random number, which it combined with the first. Unfortunately, on some Android phones (reportedly including devices from the Sony Xperia range), the built-in random number generator failed to report back to the blockchain app. Normally, this should have been survivable, because the app used a second source of random numbers. But on 4 January, Random.org strengthened the security of its website, requiring all visits to be made over an encrypted connection. The blockchain app, however, continued to access the site through an unencrypted connection. So rather than getting a random number, as expected, it got an error code telling it that the site had moved. It then used that error code as the random number, every single time.

Not quite bitcoin itself screwed (it’s far too robust) but those using that app could find themselves all sharing a wallet.

Putting iOS and Android apps on Windows 10 is a white flag to rivals – and a red flag for developers

Posted on May 11, 2015 by charlesarthur

We just need some firmware in here and everything will be fine. Photo by 4nitsirk on Flickr.

Microsoft announced at its BUILD conference that it will be providing a way for iOS and Android developers to port – sorta kinda – their mobile apps to Windows 10, so they don’t have to rewrite them from scratch in its coding language.

As Peter Bright described it at Ars Technica:

[In “Project Islandwood] Microsoft has developed an Objective C toolchain and middleware layer that provide the operating system APIs that iOS apps expect. A select group of third parties have been using the Islandwood tools already, with King’s Candy Crush Saga for Windows Phone being one of the first apps built this way. King’s developers had to change only a “few percent” of the code in order to fully port it to Windows Phone.

For Android, there is Project Astoria. Rumors of Android apps on Windows have been floating around for some time, and in Windows 10 Microsoft is delivering on those rumors. Astoria will allow Android apps to run in Windows. Specifically, Windows Mobile (and yes, that’s now officially the name for Windows on phones and sub-8 inch tablets) will include an Android runtime layer that’ll let them run existing Android apps (both Java and C++) unmodified.

Bright then followed up ~~on Monday~~ last Friday (thanks Walt) with an analysis which goes much more deeply into the mechanics of how it will be done, but also points to two examples where companies have tried to make up for the lack of apps on their platform by enabling others effectively to run on them: IBM’s OS/2 platform, and BlackBerry’s BB10.

The point about OS/2 is well-remembered, delving back into PC history when Windows was young and IBM was trying to keep control of the burgeoning PC platform. It failed, because IBM couldn’t update OS/2 fast enough to keep compatibility with the fast-expanding Windows 3.x API base; but also, developers didn’t want to get distracted by having to look after more than one platform.

Indeed, when it comes to porting, Bright observes that “neither OS/2 nor BB10 has made a success of this capability”. He could also have added Amazon’s Android fork, and the Nokia X, which used AOSP (Android Open Source Platform) and tried to replace Google services with Microsoft ones.

We surrender to your platform

The trouble with “compatibility mode” is that it’s so evidently a white flag on the part of the company that enables it. In effect, the company is saying: we can’t attract enough developers to write natively for our platform, so we’ll try to piggyback on the more successful one.

But that’s also a giant red warning flag to developers on that platform. By effectively telling them that other platforms are more successful, it calls into question the future of the development tools on the platform, and the user base; it accepts that there are both more users and more developers elsewhere.

I don’t think Islandwood and Astoria will work. Not because they technically won’t work – Microsoft has scads of smart people who can do clever things with code – but because this is a technical solution to a business problem.

Even worse, it’s a technical solution that makes the business problem worse. If you subscribe to the idea of “moats and castles” (that businesses aim to surround themselves with an advantage that rivals can’t cross), then effectively dumping your own developer kit on mobile so that you can lure people from rival platforms strengthens the rivals’ moats – their loyal cohorts of third-party developers. Why would anyone write first for mobile on Windows, given these two projects?

The business problem

Microsoft’s user base for Windows Phone is around 70m-80m worldwide, out of a total smartphone user base of around 2 billion. Superficially this sounds like the late 1990s, when Apple was just about able to eke out an existence by having around 50m-60m out of 1.5bn PCs.

The crucial difference though is that Apple had the high-end users, who were willing to pay a premium for Apple’s qualities (principally in desktop publishing and graphic design, and lots of consumers in the US). Windows Phone occupies the low end. Its users don’t monetise well. That means developers don’t concentrate on them. A little experiment for you: today, when you see an ad for an app, notice how many mention availability on Windows Phone. If you get above zero, you’re lucky (or browsing a Windows site).

The category error

But, say the the Windows diehards, the access to 1.5 billion PCs and, ahem, Windows Phone will prove irresistible to all those developers currently writing for iOS and Android. All those PCs! Who wouldn’t want to be on those?

This is wrong, for two reasons: context and support costs.
1) apps written for mobile do not, in the main, translate to the desktop/laptop. What would Snapchat on the desktop be like? Or Uber? Apps that rely on the camera or geolocation don’t make sense; others can in general be done in the browser (example: Facebook). John Kneeland pointed this out back in February, before we knew about these initiatives. What he wrote remains true:

The most interesting developers and companies today aren’t shrinking down desktop experiences. They are building entirely new experiences that wouldn’t make any sense — or even be possible — on a PC.

2) the cost of “writing” the app is only the start; after that you have support, updates and compatibility. Imagine an iOS developer who has written an app for iOS 8 (presently covering 81% of users) considering this.

If they’re sensible, they’ll look first at monetisation via Android – after all, it’s the far bigger market, which has a premium (= willing to pay) segment that rivals iOS in size. So they do that. And then clean up, perhaps, with the iPad market too.

Now – Windows Phone via compatibility mode or Android tablets? If they write for “Windows Phone compatibility” they’ll have a product that will need special tweaking on a new platform where because of the comparatively low number of users, a few bad reviews could spell doom. Even if they get it right, Apple will introduce iOS 9 in the autumn, which might or might not tweak or twerk the existing APIs, and will surely kill off some of the older ones. How long will it take Microsoft to update to those? One thing’s for sure – iOS new version adoption will run ahead of Microsoft’s ability to update. This means there are now two versions of the app, on slightly different APIs, not entirely compatible.

When iOS 9 comes out, the iOS developers’ attentions will be on bugfixing and customer support there. This means (because people are finite) less time to attend to the Windows Phone customers. Things don’t get fixed there, bad reviews get left, the app sinks down the store, and.. what was the point of writing for this thing again?

As for Android developers – if we assume that they haven’t already done an iOS version, then do you think they’d want to write something for a platform with over 500m mobile devices in use, or one with 1.5bn users… except that for almost all of those 1.5bn, their app will make no sense at all (if they’re even able to load it – for don’t forget that about half of those PCs are in businesses, and probably locked down)?

Again, this isn’t hard to figure out.

A good try, but doomed

Microsoft had to do something, and people who like clever technical solutions are delighted by this clever technical solution to the fact of developer indifference and incompatible software. But it doesn’t change the fundamental truth: Windows Phone (v10 or whatever) is too small to matter in platform terms on mobile.

Microsoft is surely interested in keeping the mobile side going, as much as anything because of all the lessons it teaches you about things like power management, chip integration, sensor management, and a multitude of other things that are important.

History tells us that software compatibility is a losers’ move. Far better to move the fight to a new battleground and win there – as Apple did, first with the iPod and then the iPhone and then the iPad and then (thus far) the Apple Watch. Seems like a working strategy.

Update: some responses on Twitter have been along the lines of “Oh, no, really, developers will love it!”

Why, I ask? “Azure! The developer environment! Access to Xbox! It’ll get people to switch to Windows!”

In order:
• developers don’t need Windows 10 to use Azure. Vesper, which is resolutely iOS-only, uses Azure, for instance.
• if there’s one thing developers likely don’t want to get accustomed to, it’s yet another developer environment if the payback is small. Also, is there any developer who hasn’t heard that Windows (desktop) has a lot of users? The point is that Windows 10 is not magically going to make those desktop users into mobile users, for the reasons discussed above. iOS and Android have 95% of pretty much any market that’s worth squeezing developer money from. If anyone wants to tell me which niches monetise better on Windows Phone than on iOS and/or Android, I’m all ears.

• Xbox access isn’t worth much. There are about as many Xbox users as Windows Phone users (of the order of 70-80m; Xbox One is replacing Xbox 360, and any new buyers are balanced out by those abandoning as they get older). Games are notoriously difficult to write well; developers need to write “close to the metal”. Porting mobile games to the Xbox isn’t a sensible strategy.

• people do switch to Windows Phone from other platforms. However, just as many (if not more) flow back to the other two platforms because they aren’t happy with the app situation. And if this works, then what’s the reason for switching to Windows? So that you can get the apps that you already had on the smartphone platform you were on before? That doesn’t make sense.

I’m happy to be proved wrong, of course – if those who say I’m going to be wrong are willing to put up some solid numbers here (in the comments) that we can refer back to in a year or so, such as forecast Lumia sales, or Lumia installed base, or forecast length in 2016 of the app gap between other platforms and Windows Phone/10.

I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Say hi or leave a comment.

Start up: China’s smartphone wall, Glass stops?, PC slowdown ahead, Monument Valley sales stats, and more

Posted on January 16, 2015 by charlesarthur

Lots of this, but hard to sell more? Photo by japp1967 on Flickr.

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

Smartphones at tipping point in China » Forbes

Doug Young:

The year ahead will be a pivotal one for smartphone makers in China, where around a dozen domestic manufacturers are all vying for a piece of a market that is the world’s largest but also one that’s contracting due to saturation. Leading players include Huawei, Lenovo , ZTE and Xioami, all of which are well funded and have the resources to survive the slowdown. But smaller, newer names like Oppo, OnePlus and Smartisan may not be so lucky, and I expect that 2 or 3 will be forced to close before 2015 ends.

Sales of all phones fell by 22% to 452m units: 64% fall in 2G phones, 46% fall in non-smart 3G. Total of 1.28bn users, implying penetration of 95%. Smartphone shipments actually dropped by 8.2% overall to 389m units. And quite a few of those might be sitting on shelves.

Intel forecast misses estimates, signalling deeper PC slump » Bloomberg

Intel Corp, the largest maker of chips that run personal computers, forecast first-quarter sales that may fall short of analysts’ estimates, sparking concern that the PC industry is headed for a steeper decline.

Revenue will be $13.7bn, plus or minus $500m, the company said today in a statement. On average, analysts had estimated sales of $13.8bn, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

While corporate demand for new machines helped moderate the PC market’s deterioration last year, the industry has failed to attract enough consumers with new slim laptops designed to compete with tablets and smartphones. Users have learned to live without the keyboards and larger screens of the computers powered by Intel’s processors, said Gus Richard, an analyst at Northland Securities Inc.

“Why would the consumer ever want to buy a PC?” said Richard, who has the equivalent of a hold rating on Intel stock. “The first thing that people do in the morning is check their smartphones.”

Incomes and revenues up, but outlook down.

Apple’s diversifying and maturing user base » Tech.pinions

Jan Dawson:

Apple has gone from tens of millions of Mac users to hundreds of millions of iPhone customers and to a billion iOS devices sold. Whereas Apple once served a fairly small number of specific niches, it now serves almost every kind of customer imaginable: from the power user to the first time smartphone owner, from the wealthy American to the rising Chinese middle class. It’s also increasingly being adopted in the enterprise market and the IBM deal will only accelerate this trend. To be sure, Apple still isn’t universal in its appeal, especially since its devices tend to be costlier than those from other manufacturers, particularly in markets where phones aren’t heavily subsidized. But Apple’s customer base is becoming ever more diverse over time.

The other thing that’s happening is Apple’s customer base is maturing. I don’t mean it’s getting older (though that is almost certainly the case), but an increasing proportion of its customer base is using its third, fourth or fifth Apple device. These customers are becoming accustomed to a certain way of doing things, becoming “trained” in the Apple way of delivering tightly coupled software and hardware. Their expectations of how Apple will act, therefore, start to harden over time, leading to less flexibility in response to major changes in iOS and OS X.

As he explains, that has deeper – perhaps Microsoft-like – implications.

Monument Valley sales data » UsTwo

An infographic (apologies) but packed full of fascinating detail about the sales and revenues by country and platform for the twisty mindbending game. For all those saying it was “too short”, only 50% completed it, according to the data.

The data also provides an interesting comparison with these estimates of its sales.

RadioShack prepares bankruptcy filing » WSJ

RadioShack Corp. is preparing to file for bankruptcy protection as early as next month, people familiar with the matter said, following a sputtering turnaround effort that left the electronics chain short on cash.

A filing could come in the first week of February, one of the people said. The Fort Worth, Texas, company has reached out to potential lenders who could help fund its operations during the process, another person said.

Might get sold to a private equity company. Cumulative losses over the past seven quarters: $770m or so. Electronics is tough; started in the 1920s but couldn’t adapt to the web age.

And next…

Sony announces that it will close all stores in Canada » Androidheadlines.com

Cory McNutt:

As Sony struggles to reinvent itself, they made a rather surprising announcement – Sony is closing all fourteen of its Sony Stores in Canada over the next two months. Toronto had the heaviest concentration with five Sony Stores and one Sony Style Store. There are three Sony Stores in Vancouver, two in Calgary, and just one in Ottawa, Edmonton, Montreal and Quebec City. The employees were informed in an announcement today and then released a news statement to The Citizen.

Toronto had six Sony stores?! If you’ve got a good memory you might remember that in February 2014 Sony said it would shut 20 of its 31 US stores by the end of 2014. Wonder how those 11 are doing.

BlackBerry shares slide 16% after denying Samsung talks » MarketWatch

Shares of BlackBerry fell more than 16% in premarket trade Thursday after the company denied reports that it was approached by Samsung Electronics regarding a potential $7.5bn takeover. The stock was up as much as 28% on Wednesday after Reuters reported that the two had been in talks about a possible deal. Reuters late Wednesday said Samsung approached BlackBerry with a buyout price range of $13.35 to $15.49 a share. Samsung reportedly called the report “groundless.” BlackBerry in a post on its website said it has not engaged with discussions with Samsung with respect to “any possible offer to purchase BlackBerry.”

Hey ho. Still a lot of road to go though. Patents? QNX? Corporate accounts? Samsung could want all or part of them. Then again, BlackBerry has been “sold” about 10 times in the past two years by market rumours.

Goodbye » SuperSite for Windows

Paul Thurrott is moving on. But the site will remain:

What changed over time is just the usual work-related stuff. Penton purchased Duke Publishing several months after I signed on, in August 2000, and over time the impact of being part of a big company weighed ever more heavily on me. For many years, I was insulated from this as the Duke team in Colorado effectively sheltered me. But as my friends and coworkers were in some cases promoted within “big Penton” (as I thought of it) or were laid off—hey, it’s a big company with priorities that extend far beyond my little group—the layers between me and the corporation around me grew thin and then disappeared.

This isn’t a dig at Penton. It’s a great company, and was a wonderful benefactor for all these years. And I’m friends with—and care deeply for—many people at Penton. I’m just not fit for corporate life. I need to be on my own or with a smaller team to thrive, and over the course of the past I year I felt increasingly that it was time to move on. I do so with a deep sense of regret because I know I’m letting down some people whom I care for, and because I’m leaving behind the legacy of this site.

But I’m also hopeful for the future. I plan to continue doing what I do at thurrott.com and I’ve partnered with some new friends to make that happen.

Everyone’s going individual, have you noticed? Also, everyone seems to be doing it with email newsletters. (Pause for thought.)

Google makes changes to its Glass project » WSJ

Alistair Barr:

Glass is moving from the Google X research lab to be a stand-alone unit led by Ivy Ross. Ms. Ross and her team will report to Tony Fadell, a former Apple executive who heads Nest Labs, the smart-home device company Google acquired for $3.2 billion in February 2014. Mr. Fadell will still run Nest, but he also will oversee Glass and provide strategic guidance to Ms. Ross.

Google will stop selling the initial version of Glass to individuals through its Explorer program after Jan. 19. Google will still sell Glass to companies and developers for work applications.

Google plans to release a new version of Glass in 2015, but it hasn’t been more specific about timing.

The changes usher in a new strategy for Glass that will shun large, public tests of hardware prototypes in favor of the approach used by Apple and Nest, which develop consumer gadgets in secret and release them as fully finished products.

Does that mean we’re not going to hear any more about that bloody self-driving car and the diabetes-diagnosing contact lenses until they’re actually ready, rather than five or more years from ready?

Start up: PC sales droop, app store revenues, security on Android and Microsoft, Apple Watch promise, and more

Posted on January 13, 2015 by charlesarthur

Not so many of these. Pic by PeeZeeZicht on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Do not use as a sterile swab. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

PC leaders continue growth and share gains as market remains slow » IDC

Worldwide PC shipments totalled 80.8m units in the fourth quarter of 2014 (4Q14), a year-on-year decline of -2.4%, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker. Total shipments were slightly above expectations of -4.8% growth, but the market still contracted both year on year and in comparison to the third quarter.

Although the holiday quarter saw shipment volume inch above 80m for the first time in 2014, the final quarter nonetheless marked the end of yet another difficult year – the third consecutive year with overall volumes declining. On an annual basis, 2014 shipments totaled 308.6m units, down -2.1% from the prior year.

Gartner gives 4Q 2014 a +1% growth, to 83.7m, and the whole year essentially level at 315.9m. Gartner includes 2-in-1 units, where IDC doesn’t. And growth came from enterprise – consumer sales kept falling.

Also remarkable: Apple shows as fifth largest, ahead of Asus, for IDC, with 5.75m; Gartner reckons Asus shipped 6.2m units (because it includes 2-in-1s).

App Annie Index Market Q3 2014 » App Annie

Google Play worldwide quarterly downloads were about 60% higher than iOS App Store downloads in Q3 2014, roughly the same lead as last quarter.

Emerging markets continued to show remarkable growth on Google Play and have helped drive the store’s impressive download growth over the last year. In the Q3 2013 Market Index, Google Play downloads were only 25% higher than iOS App Store downloads.

iOS retained its strong lead in app store revenue over Google Play. In Q3 2014, iOS App Store’s revenue was around 60% higher than Google Play’s.

Japan, iOS’ second largest market behind the US, led revenue growth in Q3 2014.

So iOS gets 62% of the downloads (100/160) but 160% of the revenue – in other words, 2.5x as much revenue per download on average (160/(100/160)). That gap is likely to expand as Android reaches more emerging markets. If you want to reach lots of users with a free app, Android is increasingly the place to go (other things being equal); if you want the money, it’s iOS.

Lots of other fascinating trends, including Indonesia’s growth and what is driving Google Play download growth.

Slick, useful apps put the wow in Apple Watch » WSJ

Chris Mims:

I’ve seen some of the applications that will launch for the Apple Watch when it makes its debut as early as March, albeit in simulation, and some are extraordinary. Along with the details Apple has already released about how the watch will work, it’s convinced me Apple Watch will be a launching pad for the next wave of billion-dollar consumer-tech startups…

To use a historical analogy, the shift to mobile is one reason messaging supplanted email. Email was a product of a particular set of behaviours, including sitting down at a computer at a designated time and putting a certain amount of thought into responses. BlackBerry turned email into something like messaging, and touch-screen smartphones made it apparent that email was itself an anachronism, merely one conduit among many for what has become real-time communication.

Consider the same sequence of events for contextual information—that is, alerts delivered at a particular time and place, such as reminders. Our phones buzz, we pull them out of our pockets or purses, read a push alert, swipe to unlock, wait a split second for an app to load, then perform an action that might have been designed with more free time and attention in mind than we have at that moment, if we’re on the go or preoccupied. All that friction is one reason, I suspect, why location-based social networks like Foursquare never took off.

An insightful piece; Mims isn’t just lauding the idea of a watch, but the interaction model. (Subscription required.)

A call for better coordinated vulnerability disclosure (CVD) » Microsoft Security Response Center

Chris Betz is Microsoft’s ~~Google’s~~ senior director of the MSRC, and one might guess that he’s mightily pissed off just now:

CVD philosophy and action is playing out today as one company – Google – has released information about a vulnerability in a Microsoft product, two days before our planned fix on our well known and coordinated Patch Tuesday cadence, despite our request that they avoid doing so. Specifically, we asked Google to work with us to protect customers by withholding details until Tuesday, January 13, when we will be releasing a fix. Although following through keeps to Google’s announced timeline for disclosure, the decision feels less like principles and more like a “gotcha”, with customers the ones who may suffer as a result. What’s right for Google is not always right for customers. We urge Google to make protection of customers our collective primary goal.

Google gave Microsoft 90 days to fix the vulnerability – and declined to hold back to 93 days so the fix could be rolled out. Just a bit childish?

However Google has form on this: in 2010 one of its researchers, TravisOrmandy, gave Microsoft just five days to issue a fix – and then issued proof-of-concept code when it didn’t hit that deadline. The POC was exploited in the wild.

On the other hand, Jonathan Zdziarski points to this 2005 paper (PDF) which uses empirical data to indicate that “Our results suggest that early disclosure has significant positive impact on the vendor patching speed”. Sure, but Microsoft was patching. It just wanted to do it on its own, clear, schedule; Google’s assumption is that it knows Microsoft’s security priorities better than Microsoft does.

Google under fire for quietly killing critical Android security updates for nearly one billion » Forbes

Thomas Fox-Brewster:

Android smartphone owners who aren’t running the latest version of their operating system might get some nasty surprises from malicious hackers in 2015. That’s because one of the core components of their phones won’t be getting any security updates from Google, the owner of the Android operating system.

Without openly warning any of the 939 million [devices] affected, Google has decided to stop pushing out security updates for the WebView tool within Android to those on Android 4.3, better known as Jelly Bean, or below, according to appalled security researchers. That means two-thirds of users won’t receive cover from Google, the researchers noted.

It’s a wonder that Microsoft can resist discovering a few exploits and publicising them. But it seems that Rapid7 and Rafay Baloch have been churning them out pretty regularly, so no need to bother.

Apple also stops security fixes of iOS version [x-2] – but the proportion, and number, using those is generally tiny: at present it’s 4% by Apple’s figures – compared to 60.1% running a version of Android below 4.4.

Samsung considers rolling out Windows phone » Korea Times

This is one of those “all the promise at the front, all the disappointment at the back” stories. Begin:

In a move to cut reliance on Google’s Android mobile operating system, Samsung Electronics is considering releasing cheaper handsets running on Microsoft’s Windows 8.1 platform, sources said Sunday.

“Samsung has run pilot programs on the stability of Windows 8.1 software on devices. It is interested in promoting Windows mobiles,” said an official directly involved.

But the key issue is whether Samsung and Microsoft will settle their ongoing legal dispute over royalties.

“If the companies settle their litigation, then Samsung will manufacture handsets powered by the Microsoft-developed mobile platform,” the official said. “The timing could be the third quarter of this year at the earliest.”

Third quarter? Gah. That’s not going to move the needle – if Windows Phone is still a thing in the third quarter.

Vodafone UK’s CEO talks 4G and the future of the network » Vodafone blog

“For us it’s about having the strongest network,” [CEO] Jeroen [Hoencamp] says of 4G. “One of the things that makes us different from others is that we have our ‘low band spectrum’. What that means is that our 4G is on a lower frequency, which travels further and deeper indoors. Forget all the technicalities, though: all it means is that we can offer great indoor coverage, and that’s important because the bulk of mobile activity actually takes place indoors – whether people are at work and at home.

“Wherever we build 4G, we’ve proved that we can deliver great unbeatable 4G speeds and coverage, but it’s not a race to have the highest speeds because when it comes to mobile, speed only gets you so far.”

Jeroen explains that you need to have something extra to make that speed worth having:

“We could build a network just to achieve massive speeds,” he says, “but the reality is that you don’t currently need anything beyond 20Mbps on a mobile device. Even for streaming video you only need a couple of megabits per second, so we think less about absolute speed and more about using that bandwidth to enable more customers to enjoy great content on the move, even in the busiest places and at the busiest times.”

He also claims that “customers don’t buy 4G for the latest technology – they switch to Vodafone 4G because there’s particular content they want to access.” This sounds half-right – who cares about a snazzy tech name – but you can get what you want on any network. “The strongest 4G signal” sounds like something Vodafone is going to built an ad campaign around, though.

Here’s what happens when you install the top 10 Download.com apps » How-To Geek

Lowell Heddings watched his PC suffer so that you wouldn’t have to. It’s all pretty predictable (and horrible, and entertaining), but here’s the payoff:

Freeware software vendors make almost all of their money by bundling complete nonsense and scareware that tricks users into paying to clean up their PC, despite the fact that you could prevent the need to clean up your PC by just not installing the crappy freeware to begin with.

And no matter how technical you might be, most of the installers are so confusing that there’s no way a non-geek could figure out how to avoid the awful. So if you recommend a piece of software to somebody, you are basically asking them to infect their computer.

Also read the comments, where one person claiming to run a freeware download site (it seems) says that they’ve been offered up to $1.50 per download to bundle software. Multiply by a few million…

You wondered why innovation died on the desktop? Partly it was the rise of mobile. But it is also the prevalence of this sort of thing. Imagine if you were wary of recommending any less-known app to anyone on the grounds that it could screw up their phone and spill their life out.

Start up: inside the Fire Phone debacle, a selfie stick successor, CES beats the bedroom, CNN’s last-ever video, and more

Posted on January 7, 2015 by charlesarthur

The Mayday button on the Amazon Fire Phone. Perhaps should have been used before it went on sale. Photo by TechStage on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Do not use as a flotation device. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The real story behind Jeff Bezos’s Fire Phone debacle and what it means for Amazon’s future » Fast Company

Austin Carr, in a terrific long read, explaining how the Fire Phone project began in 2010, and had Bezos as a micro-manager:

Some designers bristled at Bezos’s presence and privately questioned his taste, while others who were wowed by his wide-ranging insights loved his approach. Regardless, Bezos’s heavy hand certainly took getting used to, even for Chris Green, Lab126’s VP of industrial design. “In the beginning, Chris would take Jeff’s feedback a bit literally,” says Randall, the former Lab126 VP, “and there was many an evening spent over beers and sushi counseling him, saying, ‘Calm down, it’s going to get better.’”

Bezos drove the team hard on one particular feature: Dynamic Perspective, the 3-D effects engine that is perhaps most representative of what went wrong with the Fire Phone. Dynamic Perspective presented the team with a challenge: Create a 3-D display that requires no glasses and is visible from multiple angles. The key would be facial recognition, which would allow the phone’s cameras to track a user’s gaze and adjust the 3-D effect accordingly. After a first set of leaders assigned to the project failed to deliver, their replacements went on a hiring spree. One team even set up a room that they essentially turned into a costume store, filling it with wigs, sunglasses, fake moustaches, and earrings that they donned for the cameras in order to improve facial recognition. “I want this feature,” Bezos said, telling the team he didn’t care how long it took or how much it cost.

Turns out Bezos isn’t as good a micro-manager for building a phone as Steve Jobs. Result:

According to three sources familiar with the company’s numbers, the Fire Phone sold just tens of thousands of units in the weeks that preceded the company’s radical price cuts.

Was it perhaps somewhere around the 35,000 that I estimated in August? My range was between 26,000 and, generously, 35,000. I’d love to hear the actual figure.

The whole piece, though, gives terrific insight into how Bezos can get it wrong. He thought a single phone – one piece of hardware – could reshape Amazon’s brand, and turn it from a “get stuff cheap online” one, into a “we customers love you, take our money” brand. The two aren’t the same.

February 2014: What the world really needs: A telescopic SELFIE STICK » The Register

Simon Rockman in February 2014:

Mobile World Congress is often as interesting for the silly gadgets as it is for the mainstream announcements.

This (right) is the Selfie Stick, an extendable pole with a Bluetooth control for your phone.

The Selfie comes in two versions: a general one and one for Samsung phones where you have focus control.

Hahahahahawhatdo you mean they’re sold out everywhere?

The first wearable camera that can fly » Nixie

Wearable and flyable

The first wrist-band camera quadcopter.
Nixie flies, takes your photo, and comes back to you.

This feels like it could easily be one of those Great Ideas that is too easily bungled in the execution, but if it works well it could put selfie sticks out of business. Until selfie stick owners swat them out of the sky.

CES, the World’s Largest Trade Show, Is Too Big for Vegas » Bloomberg

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas has a problem that many events would love to have: It’s become too big. And it doesn’t want to get any bigger.

With as many as 160,000 visitors to CES—the world’s largest annual trade show—the Nevada city’s sprawling hotels are stretched to the limit. Last January’s gathering of gadget-loving geeks somehow packed in a full 10,000 more people than Las Vegas has rooms for them to sleep in.

The Consumer Electronics Association, the folks who put on the conference and expo, says CES 2015 will have the equivalent of 35 football fields, or about 2 miles of floor space, filled with phones, televisions, smartwatches, washing machines and throngs of people trying to see it all. “In order to enhance the experience for our attendees, we aim to keep attendance between 150,000 and 160,000 so that everyone can get where they need to go,” says CEA Vice President Karen Chupka.

That’s OK – they can sleep in the lines for press conferences showing off LG’s new dishwasher. Actually, the graph with the story suggests that attendees has exceeded the number of available hotel rooms since 2012. I’m pretty sure I slept there in 2012. Could it be that, shock, some people share rooms? Also, how’s AirBnB coming along there? And might some attendees, um, live in Vegas?

The weirdly-synched life of the Google Nest household » The Register

Richard Chirgwin:

At first glance it looks like the typical Utopian vision of Silicon Valley, but Vulture South took a second look and asked ourselves: “what kinds of life does Google think we live?”

The short answer: wealthy, lazy, and either lonely or in a strange 1950’s-sitcom family synchronisation. Everybody rises and sleeps at the same time, everybody leaves and arrives together, and we’re rich enough to have ‘leccy cars but too poor to charge them.

The most obvious believer in the synchronised family is appliance giant Whirlpool. Its Nest integration can “let your washer and dryer know when you’re home and they will automatically switch to quiet mode”. Unless only one occupant is recognised, that means the only time the appliances are allowed to let their hair down and party is when everyone’s away.

The August Smart Lock will tell Nest to change your thermostat settings when you arrive (warm the house up) or leave (switch off the heating) – which begs the question “what if I lock the front door while other people are still at home?” At least the Kwikset Kevo smart lock understands that more than one person might be in a household.

The Withings Sleep System: when you go to sleep it will “let your Nest Thermostat to a comfortable nighttime temperature. Wake up and it will tell Nest you’re ready to start the day.” Once again, the idea that a household might have sleep and wake times staggered by hours seems alien to the developer.

This is my general objection to “internet of things” and “homes of the future” visions: they don’t account for how we actually live. Them: Look, you’ll be able to get your coffee maker to make coffee before you get out of bed! Me: so I’ll have had to put the coffee in the night before. As I have to go downstairs to get the coffee, why not just make it fresh while I’m there?

And so on. Most IOT/HOTF concepts seem to come from 20-somethings who have no concept of running a household. Hence, I think, their limited success.

This is the video CNN will play when the world ends » Jalopnik

Michael Ballaban, who unearthed this Holy Grail-style rumoured-but-until-now-never-confirmed video, which has the notice:

“HFR till end of the world confirmed.”

Hold for release. CNN, once ever so thorough in its factchecking, knew that the last employee alive couldn’t be trusted to make a call as consequential as one from the Book of Revelation. The end of the world must be confirmed.

That leaves open a whole host of unanswered questions. If this is the last CNN employee alive, in the last CNN bureau on Earth, who do they confirm it with? What does confirmation look like? Who can be the one to make that determination, to pronounce the universe itself dead? Is it Wolf Blitzer himself, ever a fan of the Washington Wizards, and thus a man who would know death when he saw it? Would it be Rick Davis, CNN’s head of standards of practices, who has been with the company since its birth and who thus would know CNN’s journalistic practices better than anyone?

Or would it be some sort of living embodiment of CNN itself, ready to proclaim its own demise, as Judgment Day is truly the only thing able to bring about the long-anticipated death of cable news?

And who would be around to watch it?

Um.. that CNN employee? The machines grinding us into nanoparticles to feed into their hoppers? Take your pick.

Breach puts Morgan Stanley client data up for sale » NYTimes.com

Nathaniel Popper:

the bank traced the breach to a financial adviser working out of its New York offices, a 30-year-old named Galen Marsh, according to a person involved in the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Mr. Marsh, who had been with Morgan Stanley since 2008, was quickly fired and is currently the subject of a criminal investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a person briefed on the investigation said. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority is also examining the matter.

Morgan Stanley said on Monday that it had determined that Mr. Marsh took data on about 10% of its 3.5 million wealth management customers, including transactional information from customer statements.

The bank said that Mr. Marsh did not take any sensitive passwords or Social Security numbers, and that it had not found any evidence that the breach resulted in any losses to customers. A lawyer for Mr. Marsh, Robert C. Gottlieb, acknowledged on Monday that his client did take the information in question but said that he did not post it online, share it or try to sell it.

Afghanistan war logs: insider breach. NSA/GCHQ documents: insider breach. Morgan Stanley: insider breach. Sony Pictures..?

Hit mobile game Monument Valley and piracy: ‘Only 5%’ of Android players paid for it » VenureBeat

Jeff Grubb:

Piracy is still a big problem on Android.

Developer Ustwo had one of the break out mobile hits in 2014 with its isometric puzzler Monument Valley, but a successful game is not impervious to piracy. The studio confirmed on Twitter today that Monument Valley has had an especially tough time with “unpaid installs” on Android. The company said that 95% of the people playing the game on Google’s mobile operating system did not buy it — although, Ustwo did explain that a small number of those installs are legitimate and were not illegally downloaded. This makes a big dent in Ustwo’s earnings since Monument Valley is a premium-priced game that does not have in-app purchases like Candy Crush Saga or other lucrative mobile releases. Gaming on smart devices surpassed $21bn last year, but it potentially could have more if it weren’t for piracy.

The paid rate was much better on iOS, but it’s still alarming. Ustwo said that 40% of the people who have the game on an Apple mobile device paid for it. Again, that means the majority did not give the developer money.

Depressing numbers, for a game that costs just $4. There’s certainly piracy on iOS – but the astronomical amount on Android really isn’t good news. Does this get factored into the quotes about “revenues from app stores” we see?

There is some confusion over the iOS figure though: it’s not clear whether someone who buys on the iPhone and then downloads to their iPad counts as an “unpaid install”. We also don’t know if that’s how it works on Android – though do 95% of Android owners have multiple devices?

Start up: Twitter’s app suck, Share That Economy!, Uber’s permissions overreach, solar panel boost and more

Posted on November 27, 2014 by charlesarthur

A selection of 8 links for you. Do not deploy near naked flame.

What is app graph on Twitter? >> Twitter Help Center

To help build a more personal Twitter experience for you, we are collecting and occasionally updating the list of apps installed on your mobile device so we can deliver tailored content that you might be interested in. If you’re not interested in a tailored experience you can adjust your preferences at any time (read below). Additionally, if you have previously opted out of interest-based ads by turning on “Limit Ad Tracking” on your iOS device or by adjusting your Android device settings to “Opt out of interest-based ads,” we will not collect your apps unless you adjust your device settings.

Sure, that’s–– pardon? What do Twitter’s engineers think they can extract from this? If you have Uber, Lyft and Hailo installed, will they suggest you follow taxi drivers? Or just the accounts for those apps? If you look at it askance, the idea half makes sense. The other half doesn’t.

Bah Humbug: Microsoft’s affordable smartphone strategy dashes hopes for a real flagship >> ZDNet

There is also no flagship currently available to match the latest iPhone 6 or Android models. The last high-end Windows Phone device was the Nokia Lumia Icon, available only on Verizon and powered by a 2013 processor. It was released in February 2014 while AT&T’s exclusive Lumia 1520 was released in October 2013.

ZDNet’s Ed Bott questioned whether it was too late for Windows Phone back in September and even though I have been an advocate for the platform for years, I am extremely disappointed that Microsoft continues to ignore the high-end smartphone buyer with a focus on the affordable phone market. Those just concerned about pricing are not vocal advocates for the platform and if Microsoft ever wants to gain more than 3% of the smartphone market they need to throw a bone to the smartphone enthusiast.

Seriously, what? The top end is saturated: Apple and Samsung have it mapped out, with a little room for Sony, LG and HTC. Nokia tried and dismally failed at the “high-end flagship” game, and Stephen Elop has the scars to remind him of it.

“Affordable” smartphones are where the volume is. China is the world’s largest smartphone market; India will join it soon. Ignoring the saturated American market is pretty wise if you’re trying to attract new buyers.

UK urged to back ‘sharing economy’ >> Yahoo News UK

The UK should do more to support “sharing economy” platforms like Airbnb, TaskRabbit and Zipcar, according to a government-commissioned review.

The Unlocking The Sharing Economy review was commissioned in September by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and led by Debbie Wosskow, the chief executive of the start-up Love Home Swap.

It makes more than 30 recommendations to help people make the most of their homes, cars and other assets to “build a nation of everyday entrepreneurs”.

The review calls for a start-up incubator and innovation lab for British companies in this field, suggests that Jobcentre staff promote sharing economy platforms to jobseekers and suggests more car-pooling lanes in high congestion areas.

It calls for “fair terms of entry to the accommodation market” and suggests that “someone renting out a spare room is not subject to the same level of regulation as a business renting out 100 rooms all year round”.

How surprising that a review written by someone working in the “sharing economy” should conclude that the sharing economy shouldn’t be troubled by those “regulation” things. Will the sentiment be the same when (it’s surely when) someone dies from a faulty storage heater pumping out carbon monoxide in a “sharing economy” rental?

Notable too that none of the stories writing this up quoted opposing voices such as the British Hospitality Association – which complained of “targeted favouritism” that benefited “a select few multibillion pound foreign corporations over local small businesses” – the latter make most of the BHA’s members.

Permissions asked for by Uber Android app >> Hacker News

Discussion around the discovery of quite how much the Android version of Uber sends back to the mothership:

TLDR: Uber’s Android app is literally malware.

Since the website is currently down, this person reverse-engineered Uber’s Android app and discovered it has code that will “call home” aka send data back to Uber with your:
– SMS list [edit: see other comments re SMSLog, SMS permission is not currently requested] – call history – wifi connections – GPS location – every type of device fingerprint possible (device IDs)
It also checks if you’re phone is rooted/jailbroken and if it’s vulnerable to Heartbleed… which it also calls home.

From my understanding, which the author somehow missed, is that it is using http://www.inauth.com SDK which provides ‘malware detection’. This SDK is popular in the ‘mobile finance industry’ and the banking sector. Also notably one of the founders is former DHS/FBI.
Two possible theories: it is being used for fraud detection and/or an intelligence gathering tool.

“Malware” seems overstated, but it certainly goes as far as it possibly can – so, like its owner company.

The only way to save Google Glass is to kill it >> WIRED

Marcus Wohlsen:

“Why not license it out and get out of the hardware business altogether?” asks J.P. Gownder, who covers the wearable device market for Forrester Research.

Gownder himself believes it’s too early to sound the death knell for Glass as a consumer product, though he does say Google has a tough job ahead if it hopes to get consumers to embrace something so unfamiliar. “People don’t know what to do with these devices,” he says.

Apple, meanwhile, has a powerful channel for introducing the gadget-consuming public to new products in the form of its stores. If people are skeptical of what an Apple watch can do, for instance, they will be able to go into an Apple store and try one on. Not so with Google, which has reportedly even closed the few physical locations it had set up to introduce people to Glass.

Gownder is convinced that Glass and other heads-up displays have a strong future in the world of work, where everyone from surgeons to petroleum engineers will find them incredibly useful for specific tasks. As a general-purpose device, however, a kind of smartphone for the face, the advantages aren’t so clear.

There’s a similar piece at MIT Technology Review. Google’s introduction of Glass – make a super-happy video showing someone using it to buy ukelele songs – was clearly wrong. It’s a tool for commerce, not users.

FTC shuts down massive “PC cleaner” scam >> Gigaom

Jeff John Roberts:

On Wednesday, the FTC and the State of Florida announced court complaints against dozens of individuals and companies that reportedly swindled over $120m from consumers, many of them seniors.

While these type of scams have been around for years, the court documents provide an especially clear picture of how the scams work.

According to the FTC, the crooks typically try to hook the victims with an internet ad that promises a free scan for virus or malware. That scan inevitably detects a “problem”…

It’s depressing how impossible this scam is to root out. It’s a modern form of the penny stock pump’n’dump.

Floating feasts >> New Yorker

This, from David Owen, is about the challenge of keeping the passengers on the second-largest cruise ship in the world, with 8,100 people aboard:

One of the few exceptions to Royal Caribbean’s made-fresh policy is French fries. “If we made them ourselves, we’d need four or five guys doing nothing but pushing potatoes through a cutter all day,” Dearie said. Handmade fries, furthermore, droop quickly; the frozen fries the ship uses, like the ones served in many fast-food restaurants, have a coating that keeps them crisp and hot for longer. (The coating on Oasis fries is made from rice flour and modified starch.) We watched a cook tending a large deep fryer. Piled on a counter to his left were a dozen bags the size of pillows. “That’s about five minutes’ worth,” Dearie said.

Guests in Opus consume roughly six hundred pounds of fries in an evening, Dearie said, and fry consumption rises with the number of Americans on board and the number of children—as does pizza consumption.

Now consider the challenge of putting together smartphones (say) from components sourced from multiple places in time for the fourth-quarter rush. (The article is fantastic. Set aside some time.)

Australian engineers have boosted solar cell efficiency by five times more than ever before >> ScienceAlert

We could soon be able to convert more of the Sun’s energy into power using fewer solar panels, thanks to a new breakthrough by Swinburne University of Technology researchers in Australia.

Working with researchers from Nankai University in China, the team has managed to enhance the efficiency of silicon solar cells by 3.8% – almost five times more than the current record.

“One of the critical challenges the solar cell faces is low energy conversion efficiency due to insufficient absorption from the thin silicon layer,” said micro-photonics expert Min Gu at Swinburne University of Technology, who worked on the project.

To achieve the impressive upgrade, the engineers synthesised one-dimensional graphenised carbon nanofibre, and used it to help solar cells capture sunlight more efficiently.

I was speaking the other day to someone who installs solar panels for a living, who said that in the past five years efficiencies of the panels he installs has improved by 25%. That’s about 4.5% compound per year. So this doesn’t look like a giant leap. Sorry.