Start up: inside Apple’s A9X, Amazon unlimited?, VTech hacked, YouTube v Palestine, and more

Posted on November 30, 2015 by charlesarthur

This could be the prelude to hypothermia. But what does that feel like? Photo by Nicolas Valentin on Flickr.

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

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

All-in-one PC shipments to drop over 10% in 2015 » Digitimes

Aaron Lee and Joseph Tsai:

All-in-one PC shipments may drop a double-digit percentage on-year in 2015 due to weaker-than-expected demand. Shipments in 2016 are unlikely to see any major growth and may stay flat from 2015, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.

The largest all-in-one PC vendor, Lenovo, is expected to see flat shipment performance and a worldwide market share of around 30% in 2016. Despite the fact that the China government has recently lifted restrictions on opening internet cafes in the country which has boosted demand for all-in-one PCs, Lenovo will not benefit much from related demand since most Internet cafe players require customization, an area that Lenovo is having difficulties to coordinate, causing the opportunities to be mainly seen by second-tier and China white-box makers, the sources noted.

As for the second-largest, Apple, its iMac shipments are expected to grow 5% on year in 2016. iMac’s main manufacturer, Quanta Computer, reportedly has increased its personnel for the product line for 2016, but the ODM declined to comment on market speculation.

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Inside the Apple A9X chip » The Motley Fool

Ashraf Eassa on the chip powering the iPad Pro:

Following is a die shot of the A9X, courtesy of Chipworks:

Chipworks’ Dick James tells me that he sees a 12-cluster GPU, two CPU cores, and an absence of the level-three cache memory found inside the A9 chip (I’ll explain why I think Apple didn’t include it later in this article). I agree with his assessment. The two CPU cores can be seen in the green box, and I believe that inside of each blue box are two GPU clusters, for a total of 12 clusters…

According to Chipworks, the chip measures in at approximately 147 square millimeters, a whopping 40% larger than the size of the TSMC-built variant of the A9 chip inside of the iPhone 6s/6s Plus. This is an absolutely huge increase in area (and by extension transistor count) from the A9, which no doubt means that this monster of a chip is far more difficult to manufacture, especially on a relatively new manufacturing technology.

Two CPU cores? Bah. Surely it should be at least eight to be worth talking about?
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Is Amazon’s online storage really ‘unlimited’? Read the fine print » ZDNet

Ed Bott:

It’s a trial offer, with the price for the second and subsequent years rising to $60, and renewing automatically unless you say no.

I can tell that some of you are ready to begin migrating the 10 terabytes of data you stored in Microsoft’s OneDrive before they killed that golden goose. May I suggest you first read the Amazon Cloud Drive Terms of Use?

When you do, you will discover that that word, unlimited, does not mean what you think it means.

And you might find that if you really have a lot of data to store that you won’t be able to after all, because they ~~research~~ reserve the right to suspend or terminate “if we determine that your use violates the Agreement, is improper, substantially exceeds or differs from normal use by other users, or otherwise involves fraud or misuse of the Service…” (Emphasis added.)
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Israel to coordinate with Google and YouTube to censor Palestinian videos of conflict » Informed Comment

Saed Bannoura:

The Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, Member of Knesset Tzipi Hotovely, held meetings this week with representatives of YouTube and Google, to find ways of cooperating to censor Palestinian videos from occupied Palestine, videos she dubbed as “inciting violence and terrorism.”

Israeli daily Maariv said Hotovely will be working with Google and YouTube officials in a joint mechanism that will be in charge of “monitoring and preventing” any publication of materials deemed by Tel Aviv to be “inflammatory.”

Hotovely announced in a Hebrew-only press release that she met with YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, and Google’s Director of Public Policy, Jennifer Oztzistzki, at Google’s Silicon Valley Offices.

Hotovely said that she received a comprehensive review mechanism for companies to monitor the films that allegedly incite violence, claiming that the supposed ‘incitement videos’ drive young children to go out and stab: “The attacks daily in Israel are the result of youths and children incited by the education system and the social networks, this is a daily war of incitement.”

You can’t be a video hosting service without getting caught in the politics of an area. And of course “incitement to violence” is over the boundary of free speech pretty much everywhere.
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As freezing persons recollect the snow: first chill, then stupor, then the letting go » Outside Online

Peter Clark with a scary description of what happens as hypothermia sets in:

When your Jeep spins lazily off the mountain road and slams backward into a snowbank, you don’t worry immediately about the cold. Your first thought is that you’ve just dented your bumper. Your second is that you’ve failed to bring a shovel. Your third is that you’ll be late for dinner. Friends are expecting you at their cabin around eight for a moonlight ski, a late dinner, a sauna. Nothing can keep you from that.

Driving out of town, defroster roaring, you barely noted the bank thermometer on the town square: minus 27 degrees at 6:36. The radio weather report warned of a deep mass of arctic air settling over the region. The man who took your money at the Conoco station shook his head at the register and said he wouldn’t be going anywhere tonight if he were you. You smiled. A little chill never hurt anybody with enough fleece and a good four-wheel-drive.

But now you’re stuck.

(Via Eugene Wei.)
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A 59-year-old woman reviews the Apple Watch in real life » Privilege

“Lisa”:

I do think it’s important that we women and we midlifers engage in the tech cycle, if only to ensure that the Brave New World isn’t designed just for 28-year old men.

I first realized I liked the watch as I pushed a cart through Whole Foods. I’d invited my family over for dinner, and was doing the grocery shopping. I’d texted both my sister-in-law and sister to find out if their kids would be OK with the menu. The replies came as I passed the tortilla section. And I did not have to stop, block the aisle, and find my phone in my bag – just pressed the Message smile emoji. A lightweight interaction.

Besides, the Watch is very good-looking, as Mom might say.

But let us review and deconstruct. Not literally. Taking apart solid state devices is not my idea of fun.

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100 million LTE phones shipped in China in Q3 2015 » Counterpoint Technology Market Research

Neil Shah:

This has been primarily driven by a meteoric rise in consumers adopting LTE technology as the always-on high speed mobile internet becomes the crux of Chinese consumers’ lives aided by competitive pricing by China Mobile. More than 200m 4G LTE subscribers have been added at the end of Q3 2015 compared to exactly a year ago. China’s LTE subscriber base also crossed 300m users during the quarter. It took just 20 months to cross 300m 4G subs, whereas for 3G subs it took more than 50 months.

Mature Chinese smartphone user base are upgrading their digital lives faster than any other mobile user on this planet. The growing traction of mobile-centric commerce, rise of O2O services, content consumption (video, audio and so forth) coupled with deeply integrated social and messaging communication is making high quality ubiquitous mobile internet a basic need for the Chinese consumers.

Huawei was the no 1 LTE phone supplier with slightly less than one-fifth of the market, followed by Xiaomi, Apple, Oppo and Vivo.

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One of the largest hacks yet exposes data on hundreds of thousands of kids » Motherboard

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:

The personal information of almost 5 million parents and more than 200,000 kids was exposed earlier this month after a hacker broke into the servers of a Chinese company that sells kids toys and gadgets, Motherboard has learned.

The hacked data includes names, email addresses, passwords, and home addresses of 4,833,678 parents who have bought products sold by VTech, which has almost $2 billion in revenue. The dump also includes the first names, genders and birthdays of more than 200,000 kids.

What’s worse, it’s possible to link the children to their parents, exposing the kids’ full identities and where they live, according to an expert who reviewed the breach for Motherboard.

That expert being Troy Hunt, who has a long writeup on how crap VTech has been. All this harvesting of personal data ahead of inevitable hacks? No way to delete your account (hardly any companies give you that option).
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Report: Apple plans to nix 3.5mm port on iPhone 7, require Lightning for wired headphones » 9to5Mac

Citing a reliable source, a report from Japanese blog Macotakara claims that Apple plans to remove the 3.5mm headphone port from the upcoming iPhone 7, helping to achieve a “more than 1mm” reduction in thickness compared to the iPhone 6s. While the screen shape and radius will remain similar, the device will once again become Apple’s thinnest iPhone ever, albeit with a new restriction: headphones will only be able to connect over Lightning or Bluetooth…

Macotakara says that the 3.5mm port “can hardly be thinner because it is the world standard,” which is accurate, though the current-generation iPod touch is 1mm thinner than the iPhone 6s despite having a 3.5mm port inside. It should be noted that Apple actively contemplated switching to the smaller but less popular 2.5mm headphone port standard many years ago, abandoning the plan after users complained about the original iPhone’s recessed 3.5mm port.

Will be good business for Bluetooth headphone companies. Such as Beats?
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More China firms developing own ARM-based chips » Digitimes

Monica Chen and Jessie Shen:

China-based ZTE has received a cash injection from the government enabling the company to accelerate the development of its own application processors, while Lenovo also intends to develop ARM-based chips in-house, according to industry sources.

ZTE has received CNY2.4bn (US$73.8m) from China’s National IC Industry Investment Fund, which will help it accelerate the mobile chip development, said the sources.

Huawei has its subsidiary HiSilicon provide ARM-architecture SoCs, which are found in many of the smartphone vendor’s models including high-end ones, the sources indicated. Huawei’s increasing use of HiSilicon chips is already unfavorable to the existing suppliers including MediaTek and Qualcomm.

All essentially trying to differentiate themselves from rivals. Didn’t know about Huawei’s subsidiary, but it makes sense for a network infrastructure company to have a chip designer.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Start up: journalism v Sean Rad, the Lumia 950 zombie?, Pepsi phones, and more

Posted on November 23, 2015 by charlesarthur

Too few of these getting sold. Photo by Yuxuan.fishy.Wang on Flickr.

Alternatively, you can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. There’s a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Aren’t they fluffy? I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

An Open Letter to Tinder’s Sean Rad from Vanity Fair’s Nancy Jo Sales | Vanity Fair

Nancy Jo Sales, who wrote a fabulous piece about how dating has changed (including Tinder), which some seemed to think meant she should “seek a quote from Tinder” before publishing. Rad, in the Evening Standard, suggested he had “information” about Sales:

Sean, you and I both know that when you spoke of me as “an individual,” you were talking about me personally. And you seemed to speak from a place of emotion, admitting that you were “upset” about my piece in Vanity Fair—which wasn’t actually just about Tinder per se, but changes in the world of dating, with the introduction of dating apps overall. This was something I tried to point out in my response to an avalanche of tweets directed at me, one night in August, when someone at Tinder decided that he or she would try to besmirch my reputation as a journalist as well. Your Twitter account admonished me: “Next time reach out to us first . . . that’s what journalists typically do.”

I don’t know what you and your colleagues at Tinder think journalism is, but I don’t believe it’s the same as what most journalists think it is. Our job is to report on what real people say and do, and how this impacts our world. It’s not our job to parrot what companies would like us to know about their products. Our job is an important one, and when the heads of companies decide to go after journalists personally, then I think we’re in very dangerous territory—not only for journalists, but for the whole practice of journalism, without which we can’t have a democracy.

This last paragraph. Oh yes, oh yes. I grow so weary of publications which think that a company announcing the new model of a phone or some new tweak to their software merits a breathless single-sourced story.
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Match Group Inc – Free Writing Prospectus » US Securities and Exchange Commission

On November 18, 2015, the Evening Standard (the “Standard”), an online and print news service, published an article based on an interview with Sean Rad, the Chief Executive Officer of Tinder, a subsidiary of the Company. The article is described in relevant part in the following paragraph and the full article is attached hereto.

The article was not approved or condoned by, and the content of the article was not reviewed by, the Company or any of its affiliates. Mr. Rad is not a director or executive officer of the Company and was not authorized to make statements on behalf of the Company for purposes of the article. The article noted that “Analysts believe the [Tinder] app, which launched in 2012, has around 80 million users worldwide and records 1.8 billion “swipes” a day.” While these statements were not made by Mr. Rad, the Company notes that they are inaccurate and directs readers to the Preliminary Prospectus, which states that for the month of September 2015, Tinder had approximately 9.6 million daily active users, with Tinder users “swiping” through an average of more than 1.4 billion user profiles each day.

Evening Standard routinely publishes articles and is unaffiliated with the Company and all other offering participants, and, as of the date of this free writing prospectus, none of the Company, any other offering participant and any of their respective affiliates have made any payment or given any consideration to Evening Standard in connection with the article described in this free writing prospectus.

The statements by Mr. Rad were not intended to qualify any of the information, including the risk factors, set forth in the Registration Statement or the Preliminary Prospectus and are not endorsed or adopted by the Company.

I can’t actually find that 9.6 million daily active user figure in the Preliminary Prospectus in the link. Still, nice to know.
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Edward Snowden and the Paris attacks » Business Insider

Natasha Bertrand:

some experts are skeptical that revelations regarding the NSA’s ability to access encrypted data and the encryption methods adopted by companies in the wake of the Snowden disclosures had any effect on the ways terrorists have chosen to communicate.

“There is no evidence at all that the Snowden leaks contributed or altered the kind of terrorist activity that ISIS and Al Qaeda do,” Dave Aitel, CEO of the cybersecurity firm Immunity, Inc., told Business Insider.

“Al Qaeda was using high-grade operational technology long before the leaks — and they knew the NSA was their prime enemy long before Snowden,” he added. “For Morell to say the intel gaps that facilitated the Paris attacks fall into Snowden’s lap is a fantastic work of intellectual fiction.”

Indeed, Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups have been using their own encryption software since at least 2007, beginning with a program known as “Asrar al-Mujihideen” (Secrets of the Mujahideen). They extended that program to other devices, such as cellphones and text messaging, as the technology became available.

“Nothing has changed about the encryption methodologies that they use,” Evan Kohlmann, a partner at the private security firm Flashpoint Global Partners, told NBC in 2014. “It’s difficult to reconcile that with the claim that they have dramatically improved their encryption technology since Snowden.”

Paris seems to have been organised by plain old text message.
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Pepsi Phone P1 is official: 5.5in 1080p display, 4G LTE and fingerprint sensor for $110 » Fone Arena

Srivatsan Sridhar:

After the leaks, Pepsi Phone P1s has gone official in China. It features a 5.5-inch (1080 x 1920 pixels) 2.5D curved glass display, is powered by an Octa-Core MediaTek MT6592 processor and runs on dido OS based on Android 5.1 (Lollipop). It has a aluminum unibody design and even has a finger print sensor on the back. It has a 13-megapixel rear camera on the back and 5-megapixel front-facing camera.

It has 4G LTE connectivity and dual SIM support that lets you use the second nano SIM slot as a microSD slot when required. Pepsi is just licensing its branding, and Shenzhen Scooby Communication Equipment Co., Ltd will manufacture the phone. The standard version of the phone is called P1 and the China Unicom version with FDD-LTE support is called P1s.

Phones are now just branding exercises; those specs would have been flagship two years ago. Interesting question: why hasn’t Coca-Cola done this? Probably because it doesn’t need to – Pepsi is playing catch-up in the branding stakes.
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Pepsi phone: can it “change the game”? » Counterpoint Technology Market Research

Neil Shah:

The smartphone space is already looking like a FMCG [fast-moving consumer goods, akin to supermarkets] space where the goods are moving faster than ever and has become highly commoditized with value shifting beyond hardware to brand, content, software, commerce and services.

This offers a perfect opportunity for Pepsi to find some synergies in leveraging its strong brand to this consumer electronics FMCG segment which is smartphone (a highly personal good) and drive its brand further.

This could turn out to be a great and disruptive move if Pepsi plays its cards right and strike key partnerships across different markets to promote Pepsi brand via phones.

As we said, smartphone is “highly personal device” and this could give unique insights about consumers and we believe its the marketing dollars well spent more than Super Bowl commercials to consistently and continuously learn about consumers’ habits on phone as most users now have almost most of their lives use-cases linked to their phones.

We see “Pepsi Phone” as a great marketing & marketing research tool for Pepsi.

Remember when pretty much every FMCG company had its own music download store? I think this will pan out like that. (Count how many FMCG companies still operate their own music download store.)
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Chrome Extensions – aka total absence of privacy » Detectify Labs

We signed up for one of the services which provides this information gathered by the Chrome extensions. We were able to see the following:

• Common URLs used by employees on targeted companies.
• Internal network URLs, exposing internal network structure as well as completely separated websites for internal use only.
• Internal PDFs being placed on AWS S3 referencing competitors.
• Pages which only one person had visited. We tested this out. One of the guys in the office using one of the plugins created a local website, page X, which didn’t link anywhere, but while being on the site he changed the address bar to page Y. He was the only visitor of page X. Two weeks later page X ended up in the “Similar sites” of page Y with “Affinity: 0.01%”.

Technical Details – how they are doing it

• They are running the tracking scripts in a separate background instance of the extension, but can still get access to all information about your tabs. By doing this, your network traffic of a web page will not disclose that requests are being done to a third party. This bypasses all Content Security Policy-rules and Chrome extensions – such as Ghostery – that tries to prevent tracking, since the requests are being done inside the extension itself.

Plus obfuscation, subdomains for extensions and more. Isn’t the web fun?
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China’s chip acquisitions send ripples across industry – News & Trends – EETA

Junko Yoshiba:

The technologies and IP targeted by China include disk drives, CMOS image sensors, servers, memory chips and advanced semiconductor packaging and test services.

For the moment, the biggest prize sought by a private fund such as Tsinghua Unigroup appears to be NAND memory chips. In August, the firm made an informal $23bn takeover offer for US giant Micron Technology. The Idaho-based chipmaker rejected the deal outright, conceded that it might endanger US national security.

In an interview with Reuters this week, the Tsinghua Unigroup chair, Zhao Weiguo, said his firm plans to about $47bn “over the next five years in a bid to become the world’s third-biggest chipmaker.” To put the matter into perspective, this five-year investment target roughly equals a year’s revenue at Intel. (Intel’s 2014 revenue was $55.9bn.)

Over the past two years, Tsinghua has spent more than $9.4bn on acquisitions and investments at home and abroad. These include the purchase of stakes in US data storage company Western Digital Corp. and Taiwan’s Powertech Technology Inc. Without disclosing specifics, the chair revealed that the company is about to close another investment deal, a minority stake in a US chip company, as early as the end of this month, Reuters reported.

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Who turned my blue state red? » The New York Times

Subtitle of this article by Alec MacGillis of ProPublic is “Why poor areas vote for politicians who want to slash the safety net”; for non-US readers, “blue” states vote Democrat, and “red” ones Republican:

The people in these communities who are voting Republican in larger proportions are those who are a notch or two up the economic ladder — the sheriff’s deputy, the teacher, the highway worker, the motel clerk, the gas station owner and the coal miner. And their growing allegiance to the Republicans is, in part, a reaction against what they perceive, among those below them on the economic ladder, as a growing dependency on the safety net, the most visible manifestation of downward mobility in their declining towns.

These are voters like Pamela Dougherty, a 43-year-old nurse I encountered at a restaurant across from a Walmart in Marshalltown, Iowa, where she’d come to hear Rick Santorum, the conservative former Pennsylvania senator with a working-class pitch, just before the 2012 Iowa caucuses. In a lengthy conversation, Ms. Dougherty talked candidly about how she had benefited from government support.

Pulling the ladder up.
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Jawbone lays off 60, 15% of staff globally, closes NY office » TechCrunch

Ingrid Lunden:

TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that the company yesterday [Thursday] laid off around 60 employees, or 15% of staff. It’s a global round of layoffs affecting all areas of the business; and as part of it Jawbone is also closing down its New York office (which was concentrated on marketing) and downsizing satellite operations in Sunnyvale and Pittsburgh.

In an emailed statement, a spokesperson said the layoffs are part of a wider “streamlining.”

“Jawbone’s success over the past 15 years has been rooted in its ability to evolve and grow dynamically in a rapidly scaling marketplace. As part of our strategy to create a more streamlined and successful company, we have made the difficult decision to reorganize the company which has had an impact on our global workforce,” he said. “We are sad to see colleagues go, but we know that these changes, while difficult for those impacted, will set us up for greater success.”

Seventh among wearable device vendors, with a market share of 2.8%; Fitbit by comparison is No.1 (ahead of Apple) with 24.3%, selling 4.4m. Can’t see a market for that many non-smartwatch vendors except the really specialist, eg athletics.
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Microsoft Lumia 950 review: can a smartphone be your PC? » WSJ

Joanna Stern loves the hardware, though notes the mobile apps are limited or out of date (Instagram hasn’t been updated for two years), then tries the “Continuum” system, plugging it into (just) a monitor:

this made for a decent basic desktop computing experience—decent enough for me to write this entire review and not spend every minute pining for my laptop. Word, Excel, PowerPoint all look and feel like they do on a laptop, and the Edge Web browser loads desktop sites instead of mobile ones.

The problem is, despite the hexa-core processor and 3GB of RAM, the system feels out of power. Having just five or six open tabs reminded me of the dial-up modem days. Not only were sites slow to load over Wi-Fi, but the entire system and browser got bogged down. Besides, Google’s Chrome is just a far better desktop browser, feature-wise.

But that’s not the worst of it. Remember those app problems? Because this is Windows 10 Mobile and there is no Intel chip inside, Windows desktop apps don’t work. That means no downloading the desktop version of Spotify or Slack or iTunes. You can’t run mobile apps on the big screen, either. For example, I couldn’t open the Windows Phone Spotify app in the desktop PC mode, but I could run it on the phone while I did work on the computer monitor.

Ah, Windows RT is back. Or risen from its zombie grave. (Via Mike Hole.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Start up: inside a content factory, US reacts to Safe Harbour sinking, why Surface?, Android lemons and more

Posted on October 14, 2015 by charlesarthur

In China, such literalism might really happen. Photo by GotCredit on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Fee fi fo fum. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The Chicago End-Times » The Awl

Sam Stecklow on the “content factory” at the Chicago Sun-Times, churning out meaningless content because ads:

Network staffers were concerned with the quality of work they were being asked to do, too. Marty Arneberg, a former intern, told me, “When I was applying to jobs, I would send very few Sun Times Network articles. I would mention in my résumé, forty hours a week I worked here, but I would not send them any examples. Because it was such a content factory, you just had to pump stuff out all the time. It was just like, get it out there, we need some pageviews now.” A former editor told me, “I wouldn’t read most of what I wrote if given the choice.” He added, “Spending more than thirty minutes on any article was generally frowned upon.” Arneberg told me that a “post got me the most pageviews of any post that I wrote and it was complete bullshit. It was a total hoax,” he said. “The weird thing is, when it came out that that was a hoax, nobody spoke to me. Nobody said anything, like, ‘Hey, you gotta watch out for that.’ It was just ignored.”

The question of whom, exactly, Sun Times Network is supposed to be for is one I asked everyone I interviewed for this story, and none of them could provide a good answer. I can’t either.

Stecklow’s descent into the toxic hellstew is well-described; it’s like a modern version of The Jungle. This is where content is heading. And not long after that, the stories will be “written” by computers, and you’ll wonder why we don’t just get computers to read them too, and go and do something more worthwhile, such as digging ditches. Oh, and reading The Awl.
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The company behind Relish wireless broadband makes a big loss » Engadget

Nick Summers:

Relish’s dream to connect London homes with wireless broadband, rather than traditional landlines, could be in trouble. UK Broadband, the company behind the service, has reported losses of £37.5m for 2014 – almost four times what it was the year before. To make matters worse, turnover slipped from roughly £2m to £1.5m over the same period. Relish was launched in June 2014 as a simpler, but capable broadband alternative to the likes of BT, Sky and Virgin Media. Instead of copper and fibre cables, the company relies on 4G connections to deliver the internet to its customers. The advantages are plentiful — you don’t need to pay for a landline, and because Relish’s network is already up and running, you don’t need an engineer to install anything. Once you’ve signed up, a router is sent round within the next working day and you can instantly get online. The concept is similar to the mobile broadband packages offered by EE, Three and other UK carriers, although here there are no restrictive data allowances. So what’s gone wrong?

Nobody, it seems, knows.
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China is building the mother of all reputation systems to monitor citizen behaviour » Co.Exist

Ben Schiller:

“They’ve been working on the credit system for the financial industry for a while now,” says Rogier Creemers, a China expert at Oxford University. “But, in recent years, the idea started growing that if you’re going to assess people’s financial status, you should equally be able to do that with other modes of trustworthiness.”

The document talks about the “construction of credibility”—the ability to give and take away credits—across more than 30 areas of life, from energy saving to advertising. “It’s like Yelp reviews with the nanny state watching over your shoulder, plus finance, plus all of these other things,” says Creemers, who translated the plan.

The system, overseen by the State Council, is made possible by two factors. One, it’s now possible to gather information about behavior as never before. As we use the Internet and different devices, we’re leaving behind a huge footprint of data. Second, the Chinese government sees no reason to safeguard its citizens’ data rights if it thinks that data can benefit them, says Creemers.

“In Europe and the U.S., there’s a notion that the state should be constrained, that it’s not right to intervene in people’s lives, unless for justified reasons. In China, the state has no qualms about that. It says ‘data allows us to make society for better, so we’re going to use it,'” he says.

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Behind the European privacy ruling that’s confounding Silicon Valley » NYTimes.com

Robert Levine:

American technology firms are especially worried because they routinely transfer so much information across the Atlantic. “International data transfers are the lifeblood of the digital economy,” said Townsend Feehan, chief executive of IAB Europe, which represents online advertising companies including Google as well as small start-ups. The ruling “brings with it significant uncertainty as to the future possibility for such transfers.”

As Mr. Schrems sees it, however, what is at stake is a deeper conflict between the European legal view of privacy as a right equivalent to free speech and that of the United States, where consumers are asked to read and agree to a company’s terms of service and decide what’s best for themselves. “We only do this in the privacy field — dump all the responsibility on the user,” Mr. Schrems said. He pointed out that consumers are not expected to make decisions about other complex issues, like food or building safety. “In a civilized society,” he said, “you expect that if you walk into a building it’s not going to collapse on your head.”

But if it collapses on your head and kills you, then you sue! No, hang on. (Bonus point to Levine for the handwringing quote from the advertising industry.)
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Microsoft Surface: from cross-bearer to standard-bearer » Fast Company

Ross Rubin:

As the Surface Pro customer base has grown, it’s likely that Microsoft is just accommodating potential customers who prefer a more laptop-like device than the Surface Pro 4, which is still a tablet propped up with a kickstand.

While Microsoft is quick to compare its “ultimate laptop”—which starts at $1,500 and goes way, way up—to Apple’s portables, it will walk a far narrower tightrope in competing with its own hardware partners with the Surface Book. Not only does the first model stand to do battle with the best that HP, Dell, Acer, and Lenovo have to offer, but the company is poised to come downmarket with a lower-priced mainstream version, as it did with the $500 Surface 3.

The Surface experience story isn’t quite as good as it looks on paper. Even with the considerable reconciliation of Windows 10 and the arrival of a touch-optimized Office as well as other universal apps, Windows’ interface is still in transition. Many people with Surfaces spend much of their day working not so differently than they would with a no-touch Windows 7 laptop. Even on the marketing side, Microsoft needs to rethink the Surface Pro, which it’s been promoting as the tablet that can replace your laptop. Now that the company wants to sell you a laptop, where does that leave the Surface Pro?

This is slightly the problem: why Surface Pro, if there’s Surface Book? Rubin also thinks there’s a Surface iMac (for want of a better name) brewing in Redmond. This seems unlikely though – the sales figures would be so miniscule it would never make money for anyone. Speaking of which…
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Why Apple is still sweating the details on iMac » Medium

Steven Levy was given access to Apple’s Ergonomic Design Lab to get the inside story of how the new iMacs and Magic Mouse and so on were built. But what are they for? Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of marketing, explains:

“The job of the watch is to do more and more things on your wrist so that you don’t need to pick up your phone as often. The job of the phone is to do more and more things such that maybe you don’t need your iPad, and it should be always trying and striving to do that. The job of the iPad should be to be so powerful and capable that you never need a notebook. Like, Why do I need a notebook? I can add a keyboard! I can do all these things! The job of the notebook is to make it so you never need a desktop, right? It’s been doing this for a decade. So that leaves the poor desktop at the end of the line, What’s its job?”

Good question. And the answer?

“Its job is to challenge what we think a computer can do and do things that no computer has ever done before, be more and more powerful and capable so that we need a desktop because it’s capable,” says Schiller. “Because if all it’s doing is competing with the notebook and being thinner and lighter, then it doesn’t need to be.”

But – take note – no intention of introducing a touchscreen iMac. None at all, says Schiller: “The Mac OS has been designed from day one for an indirect pointing mechanism. These two worlds are different on purpose.”
link to this extract

Android security a ‘market for lemons’ that leaves 87% vulnerable » ZDNet

Liam Tung:

“The difficulty is that the market for Android security today is like the market for lemons,” Cambridge researchers Daniel Thomas, Alastair Beresford, and Andrew Rice note in a new paper.

“There is information asymmetry between the manufacturer, who knows whether the device is currently secure and will receive security updates, and the customer, who does not.”

Their analysis of data collected from over 20,000 Android devices with the Device Analyzer app installed found that 87% of Android devices were vulnerable to at least one of 11 bugs in the public domain in the past five years, including the recently discovered TowelRoot issue, which Cyanogen fixed last year, and FakeID.

The researchers also found that Android devices on average receive 1.26 updates per year.

“The security community has been worried about the lack of security updates for Android devices for some time,” Rice said.

The “security community” hasn’t had much effect, then. The study was part-funded by Google.
link to this extract

US says Apple e-books antitrust monitor no longer needed » Reuters

Nate Raymond:

The US Justice Department has determined that Apple Inc has implemented significant improvements to its antitrust compliance program and that a court-appointed monitor’s term does not need extended, according to a court filing.

The Justice Department in a letter filed late Monday in Manhattan federal court said its recommendation was despite Apple’s “challenging relationship” with Michael Bromwich, who was named monitor after the iPad maker was found liable for conspiring to raise e-book prices.

The Justice Department said its decision to not recommend extending the monitorship beyond its two-year term was “not an easy one,” as Apple “never embraced a cooperative working relationship with the monitor.”

But the department said it was giving greater weight to Bromwich’s “assessment that Apple has put in place a meaningful antitrust compliance program than to the difficult path it took to achieve this result.”

Apple is still considering an appeal to the Supreme Court. The antitrust thing must feel like a stain.
link to this extract

No, wait! 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.

Start up: Apple’s AI hires, Spotify’s smart music, why refugees have smartphones, and more

Posted on September 9, 2015 by charlesarthur

What’s the motive for downloading the top 40 every week from a torrent site? Completism? Photo by DigitalTribes on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Handle with care. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Exclusive: Apple ups hiring, but faces obstacles to making phones smarter » Reuters

Apple has ramped up its hiring of artificial intelligence experts, recruiting from PhD programs, posting dozens of job listings and greatly increasing the size of its AI staff, a review of hiring sites suggests and numerous sources confirm.

The goal is to challenge Google in an area the Internet search giant has long dominated: smartphone features that give users what they want before they ask.

As part of its push, the company is currently trying to hire at least 86 more employees with expertise in the branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning, according to a recent analysis of Apple job postings. The company has also stepped up its courtship of machine-learning PhDs, joining Google, Amazon, Facebook and others in a fierce contest, leading academics say.

But some experts say the iPhone maker’s strict stance on privacy is likely to undermine its ability to compete in the rapidly progressing field.

It’s certainly the case that Apple’s privacy stance is, as Sameer Singh says, its “strategy tax” (a strategy tax is an approach to a business area that prevents you exploiting it to the maximum: “Windows everywhere” was Microsoft’s strategy tax that prevented it doing mobile really well, Google’s is the need to collect data). The question is how much you do need that pooled personal information (as opposed to anonymous information) to do this well.
link to this extract

Field Notice: FN – 63697 – Protective Boot on Certain Network Cables Might Push the Mode Button and Cause an Unexpected Reset on the 48-Port Models of Cisco Catalyst 3650 and 3850 Series Switches » Cisco

“Certain” network cables being “pretty much every Ethernet cable you buy”. Like this:

Design screwups like this deserve their own Tumblr. Of note: the Cisco 3650 was released on October 10 2013; this note is dated October 30 2013. Of course it wasn’t caught in testing, but one suspects that customers discovered this pretty much on day one.
link to this extract

Inside Spotify and the future of music » Tech Insider

Alex Heath:

Spotify’s progress in sorting its library of 35 million songs can be traced back to The Echo Nest, a music intelligence company that was created within the MIT Media Lab a decade ago. Spotify bought The Echo Nest last March in what was reported to be a $100m deal.

Jim Lucchese, CEO of The Echo Nest, tells Tech Insider that his team of about 70 people are focused on delivering “the right listening experience at the right time” within Spotify.

They do this by analyzing the makeup of every song, how people are talking about music online, and how people are listening to it. While the company continues to work with clients like Rdio, Microsoft, Sirius, and Vevo, as it did before it was sold, its most cutting-edge work is developed and honed for Spotify.

One of The Echo Nest’s first projects for Spotify, reported last September on FiveThirtyEight, was developing dossiers of every user’s listening habits, which are now called “taste profiles.”

Ajay Kalia, who oversees the project, tells us they realized early on that there’s an important distinction between the music you listen to and music you actually like.

For example, just because I play a lot of instrumental, ambient music while I’m at work doesn’t mean that I have a particular affinity for those kinds of artists. And just because your significant other plays a lot of country music while you’re both in the car doesn’t mean you want a bunch of country playlists shoved at you.

This “listen to but not like” has often been the problem about music. This makes it sound as though Echo Nest is human-curated, which it really isn’t.
link to this extract

Google nears re-entry to mainland China » The Information

Amir Efrati:

As part of its broader China push, Google is expected to offer new incentives to phone makers to upgrade Android phones to the latest versions of the operating system, says one person briefed on its plans. The company wants more phones to run the advanced version of Android so that the software platform and experience can be more consistent for app developers and consumers.

As more Chinese app developers look to extend their apps beyond China’s borders and more non-Chinese app makers try to tap the Chinese market, Google wants to ensure all the apps work well across Android devices globally. Thus, hardware partners that will distribute Android Wear or Google Play in China will need to adhere to certain global compatibility standards, says the person familiar with the plan.

For its app store, Google has promised authorities that it will follow local laws and block apps that the government deems objectionable, say the people familiar with Google’s plans. In some parts of the world and among Internet policy wonks, this move will be viewed as a back-tracking from Google’s posture following its departure from China in 2010. At that time Google ended its engineering operations in China and moved its Chinese-language Web-search engine to a Hong Kong-based Web domain, out of reach of mainland China officials, after being breached from a cyber attack that it linked to the Chinese government.

Authorities denied involvement in the attack, which successfully breached many American companies and is known as Operation Aurora. At the time, though, Google co-founder Sergey Brin publicly compared China to the totalitarian Soviet Union in which he grew up. (Mr. Brin is now part of Alphabet, Google’s soon-to-be parent company, and isn’t involved in Google’s day-to-day affairs.)

Some forces within Google always believed that the company’s and Mr. Brin’s response was rash. It should have viewed the China-based hacking, which occurred in late 2009, as a natural consequence of being a major tech company in an age of increasing cyber attacks by all governments.

A long extract (but it’s a long article). That last paragraph is telling; Eric Schmidt was the pro-China voice, Brin the no-to-China voice, and Larry Page effectively had the casting vote back in 2010. Sundar Pichai clearly leans towards Eric Schmidt’s stance: better to deal than to stand on principle.
link to this extract

Police raid fails to dent UK Top 40 music piracy » TorrentFreak

Police arrested a Liverpudlian who was a determined uploader of the top 40 releases to torrent sites:

Yet again it appears that the arrest last week was a case of rightsholders and police targeting low-hanging fruit. Using widely available research tools we were able to quickly uncover important names plus associated addresses, both email and physical. It seems likely that he made close to no effort to conceal his identity.

Due to being in the police spotlight it will come as little surprise that there was no weekly upload of the UK’s Top 40 most-popular tracks from OldSkoolScouse last Friday, something which probably disappointed the releaser’s fans. However, any upset would have been very temporary indeed.

As shown below, at least four other releases of exactly the same content were widely available on public torrent sites within hours of the UK chart results being announced last Friday, meaning the impact on availability was almost non-existent.

But who, seriously, actually wants to listen to all the top 40 tracks week after week? It would be pretty numbing even if you worked in the business. I bet this guy barely listened to the music. He, and the downloaders who waited avidly for the songs, strike me as more like stamp collectors: uninterested in what is conveyed, obsessed with completing sets.
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iPhone supply chain makers set to see strong sales in September, say sources » Digitimes

Monica Chen and Steve Shen:

Incoming parts and components orders for the new iPhones are even stronger than orders for the iPhone 6 devices in the corresponding period of a year earlier, indicated the sources, adding that shipments of updated iPhones will once again squeeze sales of other vendors including Samsung Electronics, Sony Mobile Communications and LG Electronics, commented the sources.

Thus, sales of the new iPhones are expected to dominate smartphone sales globally in the fourth quarter of 2015 as current sales of LG Electronics’ G4, HTC’s One M9/M9+ series products and Sony Mobile’s Xperia Z3+ have been lower than expected, indicated the sources.

To lessen the impact of the release of the new iPhones, Samsung has been implementing a “Ultimate Test Drive” program that encourages current iPhone users to pay US$1 to test its Galaxy Note 5 or Galaxy S6 Edge+ for one month.

Good luck with that, Samsung.
link to this extract

Academic study reveals urban and rural broadband speed gaps » ISPreview UK

Mark Jackson:

The study (‘Two-Speed Britain: Rural Internet Use‘) claims that more than 1 million people in Britain are “excluded or face challenges in engaging in normal online activities because they live in remote rural areas“, where slow or non-existent Internet connectivity is still a serious problem.

The report separated areas into several groups and examined each separately: Deep Rural (remote), Shallow Rural (less remote) and Urban internet users. It reveals that just 5% of those in Urban areas had an average broadband speed below 6.3Mbps, but in Deep Rural areas only 53% could achieve this “modest speed“.

Furthermore the gap is unsurprisingly found to be most pronounced in upland areas of Scotland, Wales and England, but also in many areas in lowland rural Britain. It affects 1.3 million people in deep rural Britain, and 9.2 million people in less remote areas with poor internet connection (or ‘shallow’ rural areas).

The report itself isn’t available for download (yet?) because neither Oxford University nor dot.rural has actually put a usable link up.
link to this extract

Surprised that Syrian refugees have smartphones? Sorry to break this to you, but you’re an idiot » The Independent

James O’Malley, in somewhat straightforward mood:

So we know that Syria isn’t dirt poor and we know that there’s a lot of mobile phones: but why smartphones? Well, why not? In the West many people own desktop computers, laptops and tablets as well as smartphones. But if you had to give up many of your possessions and live on $1850/year, after clothes and food, what would you buy next? It is hard to think of a more useful thing to own than a smartphone, especially if you’re fleeing your home.

Even when utility isn’t considered, the reason Syrians are using smartphones and not old Nokia 3210s is the same reason that benefits claimants have (gasp!) “flatscreen” TVs… have you tried buying any other kind lately? Budget Android smartphones can be picked up for well under £100, and come with cameras, large screens and everything you would expect from a modern phone. As we’re now in the habit of replacing our phones with a new model every year or two the price of slightly older phones also drops significantly.

The headline certainly falls into the “no mimsy hedging here” bucket.
link to this extract

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

Posted on June 5, 2015 by charlesarthur

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

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

The UX of Commercial Drones » UX Magazine

Dan Saffer:

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

“We included plasters in case you get hurt!”

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

John Markoff:

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

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

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

Daniela Hernandez:

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

You could pick up the phone and ask them…

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

Jillian D’Onfro:

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

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

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

Parmy Olson:

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

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

Leo Mirani:

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

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

Twitter just killed Politwoops » Gawker

JK Trotter:

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

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

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

Start up: tablets sink further, Indiegogo’s vaporware campaigns, pricing Apple Watch, and more

Posted on May 1, 2015 by charlesarthur

Available in Lego before it reached Windows Phone. Photo by Ochre Jelly on Flickr. (See their photostream for how they achieved this “impossible” shot.)

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

Game of fear: the story behind GamerGate » Boston Magazine

Zachary Jason with a fabulously detailed yet clear recitation of what most of us know:

[Eron] Gjoni, a software engineer, had set out to construct a machine to destroy his ex. Every written word Quinn had ever entrusted with him—all of her flirtations, anxieties, professional grudges, and confessions about her family and sex life—would serve as his iron and ore. He scoured their entire text and email history, archiving and organizing Quinn’s private information on his laptop and cell phone. Then he typed it all in black and white — minus, of course, the tones in their voices, their laughter and tears, and any context whatsoever.

Of course, Gjoni could have just deleted the document, along with Quinn’s phone number and email address, and tried to woo one of the millions of other women on OkCupid or joined any of the roughly 5,000 other dating sites. He could have posted his thoughts on a blog and omitted her name. After several days, though, Gjoni decided to go through with it—after all, he was protected by the First Amendment, right?

Gjoni comes across as being somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Also, a real jerk.

For the second straight quarter the worldwide tablet market contracts amid competition from alternative devices » IDC

Apple still leads the overall market despite five consecutive quarters of negative annual shipment growth. Apple shipped 12.6m iPads in the first quarter, capturing 26.8% of the market in volume and declining -22.9% when compared to 1Q14. Samsung (19.1% share) maintained its second place in the market despite a -16.5% decline in shipments compared to the same period last year. Lenovo (5.3% share), Asus (3.8 %) and LG (3.1%) rounded out the top 5 positions. LG’s year-over-year growth was notable as it continues to benefit from US carriers’ strategy to bundle connected tablets with existing customers.

“Although the tablet market is in decline, 2-in-1s are certainly a bright spot,” said Jitesh Ubrani, Senior Research Analyst, Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker. “While 2-in-1, or detachables, still account for a small portion of the overall market, growth in this space has been stunning as vendors like Asus, Acer, and E-FUN have been able to offer products at a fantastic value; and vendors like Microsoft have been able to drive growth at the high end with devices like the Surface Pro 3.”

The smallest figure that IDC splits out is 1.4m, for LG, which implies that the Surface shipped fewer. Tablets took off fast; now they’re awaiting the replacement cycle.

Windows will win your heart by not caring » Remotely Mobile

Benjamin Robbins on Microsoft’s BUILD announcements:

In short, Microsoft has clearly shown it doesn’t care; but in a good way. They don’t care which apps you want to use, they’ll support them. They don’t care which operating system you want to develop on, they’ll support it. They don’t care if you are on a phone or a PC, they just seamlessly switch between the two experiences.This is huge for all of us end users. Why? Because in the end we don’t really care either. We just want to be able to use the apps and services we think are best to get the task done and move on. I don’t want to fight the OS, app, or device. I just want to do my work and be done with it. This is where mobility is ultimately pushing us and it’s great to finally have someone not care either.

New Apple Watch has lowest ratio of hardware costs to retail price, IHS teardown reveals » Business Wire

The much-anticipated new Apple Watch has the lowest hardware costs compared to retail price of any Apple product IHS Technology has researched, according to a preliminary estimate by IHS and its Teardown Mobile Handsets Intelligence Service. The teardown of the Apple Watch Sport by IHS Technology estimates that the actual hardware costs are only about 24 percent of the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP). Estimated hardware cost to MSRP ratios for other Apple products reviewed by IHS are in the range of 29 to 38%.

The teardown of the Apple Watch Sport 38 mm by IHS Technology shows a bill of materials of $81.20 with the cost of production rising to $83.70 when the $2.50 manufacturing expense is added. The retail price of the Apple Watch Sport 38 mm is $349.00. The IHS Technology analysis does not include logistics, amortized capital expenses, overhead, SG&A, R&D, software, IP licensing and other variables throughout the supply chain such as the EMS provider.

That’s some low manufacturing expense for what the Watch looks like. And of course even if it’s right, that’s just the gross margin. Look at what it doesn’t include too.

Play Monument Valley on your Windows Phone today » Windows blog

Monument Valley: a fantasy world of impossible architecture and a beautiful, silent princess awaits you! Today we’re excited to share that Monument Valley is available to download from the Windows Phone Store.

Originally released on iOS just over a year ago. I wonder how many Windows Phone users have not heard of or played this on a friend’s phone. Or an iPad?

China is rewriting the rules of the mobile game, and Apple is still winning » The Verge

Vlad Savov:

The recognition of China’s importance is evident everywhere in the mobile industry. HTC is, for the first time, introducing two flagship smartphones this year, with the One M9+ being tailored to the needs and preferences of the Chinese market. In February, around the turn of the Chinese New Year, Lenovo brought Motorola back to China, setting it up as a sort of exotic alternative to local offerings, one where user customization is paramount.

But no one has benefited from China’s growing appetite for smartphones more than Apple. Even as the developed world was becoming saturated with iPhones, Apple kept expanding its sales with the help of China. The iPhone first became available in China in 2009, relatively early in its now gloried history, and has kept growing in line with the country’s expansion in disposable income and smartphone demand. This past quarter, Apple sold more iPhones in China than in the United States, belying prognostications that the Chinese market wouldn’t be receptive to such a premium, high-margin device.

As I criticised The Verge yesterday for not seeking out points of view, I should point to this as exactly the opposite: Savov gets comments from analysts who know and understand the market to produce an insightful piece. (Though Nokia used to be HUGE in China, Vlad. Until Q1 of 2012, when its mobile revenue there halved, and halved again within a year.)

comScore ranks top UK digital media properties for March 2015 » comScore, Inc

More than 47.5 million UK unique visitors accessed the Internet in March 2015 across desktop and mobile (smartphone and tablet) platforms. 45.1 million visitors accessed the Internet via desktop while 36.4 million users browsed the web via mobile.

According to comScore MMX Multi-Platform, which provides an unduplicated view of usage across desktop, smartphone and tablet, Google Sites ranked as the top property with nearly 46 million combined desktop and mobile Internet users. The majority of Google Sites’ audience visited from both desktop and mobile platforms (66%), while 28% visited exclusively from desktop and 5% were mobile-only users. BBC Sites was the second most popular online property with a multi-platform audience of 40.6 million, 36% of which were mobile-only.

There is so much to extract from the short table in the release. For instance: Google gets 96.7% of the total audience; Amazon gets 77% of it, and more people access Amazon mobile-only than desktop-only; Mail Online, Sky sites, Apple, Trinity Mirror, Twitter and LinkedIn get more visits via mobile-only (which is 5% of the total audience) than desktop; all the media groups get more visitors via mobile-only than desktop-only.

If you re-sort it by mobile-only, Sky actually comes top – and Google comes last.

One to really mull over. Can hardly accuse the news organisations of being behind the times.

[Update: Indiegogo Investigating] Indiegogo continues to have no standards, allows $50,000 flex-fund campaign for vaporware modular smartphone » Android Authority

David Ruddock:

While it has served as a legitimate platform for fans to support products and content they genuinely believe in and want to see become a reality, it is also ripe for scamming and incompetence. Case in point: Fonkraft, a $50,000 Indiegogo campaign that allegedly will culminate in the production of a Project Ara-style modular smartphone.

To date, the flex-funded (as in, even if it doesn’t reach the goal, the project still gets what money was raised) campaign has amassed over $25,000 from people who probably know no better, with over 130 phones funded by supporters. The team behind the campaign? Literally two people, neither of whom state where it is they previously worked (no LinkedIn profiles, either – or any easily locatable social media profiles – surprise!), what specific experience they have in the phone industry, or how they plan to build a phone with two people and $50,000…. or less, since it’s a flex-fund campaign. For the record, Ubuntu wouldn’t even build a regular phone for less than $32 million.

Also, these guys provide literally no insight on how their product would actually work in a technical sense. You just have to believe!

Incredible that IndieGoGo lets people keep money raised even if it doesn’t reach the goal. It’s an open invitation to those with absurd optimism or bad intent.

Apple iPhone captures 12% smartphone market share in China in Q1 2015 » Strategy Analytics

According to the latest research from Strategy Analytics’ Handset Country Share Tracker(HCST) service, China smartphone shipments grew 17% annually to reach 110m units in the first quarter of 2015. Xiaomi maintained first position, but Apple is rapidly closing the gap with 12% marketshare in second place.

China smartphone shipments grew 17% annually from 93.6m units in Q1 2014 to a 109.8m in Q1 2015. China smartphone growth on an annualized basis has slowed from 39% to 17% during the past year, due to increasing penetration maturity. This is the first quarter that China’s smartphone annual growth rate has been lower than the global average since 2010.

Xiaomi, Apple, Huawei are the top three. Notice the company that’s missing from that list. Seems Samsung sold below 11.2m smartphones in China in Q1. Is the S6 going to bring it back?

Start up: Wikipedia’s oldest hoaxes, Android’s audio problem, EC seeks transparent search, and more

Posted on April 21, 2015 by charlesarthur

No, adding these chips won’t make you smart. Less hungry, maybe. Photo by malias on Flickr.

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

Android’s 10 millisecond problem: the Android audio path latency explainer » Superpowered

Gabor and Patrick, who founded the audio-based software company:

Even though music apps make up only 3% of all downloads in the iOS App Store, the Music app category is the 3rd highest revenue generating app category after Games and Social Networking. Which suggests that music apps monetize disproportionately well on platforms that offer low latency performance such as the App Store/iOS devices.
On Android, it is a different story. In the Google Play store, the Music category is not even a top five revenue producing app category.

The overwhelming majority of Android devices suffer from too high audio latency, preventing developers from building apps that would satisfy consumer demand on Android.

As such, Google and Android app developers are leaving billions of dollars on the table for Apple and iOS developers because of Android’s 10 Millisecond Problem.

For the purposes of this explainer, roundtrip audio latency is simply the difference in time between when an audio input is introduced into a mobile device, undergo some sort of needed processing, and exits the same device. As any musician will tell you, we as humans are most comfortable with latencies of ~10 milliseconds. Anything significantly higher tends to disturb us.

Most Android apps have more than 100 ms of audio output latency, and more than 200 ms of round-trip (audio input to audio output) latency. To give you a quick example from the Oscar winning film Whiplash, it’s like the drummer is dragging by a half beat behind the band!

This has been a problem on Android for years; the analysis suggests it may be insoluble. (List of latencies here; some are really long.) The discussion on Hacker News is worth browsing too. (Via Benedict Evans.)

The story behind Jar’Edo Wens, the longest-running hoax in Wikipedia history » The Washington Post

Caitlin Dewey:

On Monday night, [Gregory] Kohs [a former Wikipedia editor who is now a prominent critic] wrapped up an experiment in which he inserted outlandish errors into 31 articles and tracked whether editors ever found them. After more than two months, half of his hoaxes still had not been found — and those included errors on high-profile pages, like “Mediterranean climate” and “inflammation.” (By his estimate, more than 100,000 people have now seen the claim that volcanic rock produced by the human body causes inflammation pain.)
And there are more unchecked hoaxes where those came from. Editors only recently caught a six-year-old article about the “Pax Romana,” an entirely fictitious Nazi program. Likewise “Elaine de Francias,” the invented illegitimate daughter of Henry II of France. And the obvious, eight-year-old hoax of “Don Meme,” a Mexican guru who materializes at parties and mentors hipster bands…

…“I think this has proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it’s not fair to say Wikipedia is ‘self-correcting,’” Kohs said.

We put a chip in it! » Tumblr

It was just a dumb thing. Then we put a chip in it. Now it’s a smart thing.

Such as for example these socks:

Elon Musk had a deal to sell Tesla to Google in 2013 » Bloomberg Business

Ashlee Vance, with an extract from a forthcoming book:

“The word of mouth on the [Model S] car sucked,” Musk says. By Valentine’s Day 2013, Tesla was heading toward a death spiral of missed sales targets and falling shares. The company’s executives had also hidden the severity of the problem from the intensely demanding Musk. When he found out, he pulled staff from every department — engineering, design, finance, HR — into a meeting and ordered them to call people who’d reserved Teslas and close those sales. “If we don’t deliver these cars, we are f—ed,” Musk told the employees, according to a person at the meeting. “So I don’t care what job you were doing. Your new job is delivering cars.”
Musk fired senior executives, promoted hungry junior employees, and assigned former Daimler executive Jerome Guillen to fix Tesla’s repair service and get its glitchy cars back on the road. He also proposed what eventually became his public guarantee of the resale price of the Model S: Unsatisfied buyers would get their money back from Musk personally if they couldn’t sell their car at a price comparable to that of another luxury model.

When in charge at Microsoft, Bill Gates used to insist that executives bring him at least one piece of bad news along with any good news. This is what happens when they don’t. Good on Musk getting the turnaround to happen through such a resourceful approach, though. Ah, but what might have been for Google.

EU to investigate transparency of Internet search results: document » Reuters

Julia Fioretti:

In a draft of the Commission’s strategy for creating a digital single market, seen by Reuters, it says it will “carry out a comprehensive investigation and consultation on the role of platforms, including the growth of the sharing economy.”
The investigation, expected to be carried out next year, will look into the transparency of search results – involving paid for links and advertisements – and how platforms use the information they acquire.

European Commission Vice-President Andrus Ansip is expected to formally announce the new strategy on May 6.

The transparency of search results came under particular scrutiny this week when the European competition chief accused Google of cheating competitors by distorting web search results to consistently favor its own shopping service.

There are concerns in Europe over how Internet companies such as Facebook and Amazon use the huge amounts of personal data they acquire.

The inquiry will also look at how platforms compensate rights-holders for showing copyrighted material and limits on the ability of individuals and businesses to move from one platform to another.

Don’t hold your breath for when this will report, though, or whether any of it will be implemented.

China smartphone shipments shed 30% sequentially in 1Q15 » Digitimes Research

Kristina Shih:

Shipments of smartphones by China-based vendors declined by nearly 30% sequentially to 91.8m units in the first quarter of 2015 due to sluggish demand both at home and overseas, as well as reduced production affected by the traditional Lunar New Year holidays, according to Digitimes Research.
Vendors which have a high ratio of export sales saw their shipments decline by over 40% sequentially in the first quarter, and those which focus more on the domestic market suffered declines ranging from 20-25%, Digitimes Research has found.

Huawei’s shipments were less affected by market factors, reaching 13.5m units in the first quarter and making the company the number vendor in the quarter. Xiaomi came in second with shipments totaling 10m units as it lowered the prices of some old models to boost sales.

Of course sequential changes don’t matter when you’re trying to analyse larger trends, but they hurt Digitimes’s intended audience of supply chain companies. That’s quite a drop; usually total worldwide mobile phone sales drop by about 10% from Q4 to Q1.

Instagram develops app for Apple Watch » FT.com

Tim Bradshaw and Hannah Kuchler:

Instagram, which built a billion-dollar business on smartphones, is making its first foray into wearable technology with a new app for the Apple Watch.
The popular photo-sharing app, which is owned by Facebook, will use the smartwatch to help users keep up with their closest friends through alerts as soon as they post a picture…
…“I think the Watch is really about quick information and notifications,” [Instagram designer Ian] Silber told the Financial Times. “It’s a huge use case that’s going to be a little bit different.”

So there’s going to be a version for a device that has only just launched, while the Windows Phone version hasn’t been updated for over a year. The power (or lack of it) of an ecosystem.

The great mobile divergence: how the app universe went beyond universal apps » John Kneeland

Kneeland nails the point that I also made: that just because app developers can write once for any Windows version (phone, PC, Xbox) doesn’t mean they will:

The value of a universal app is that you could write an app and have it easily working on all Windows platforms. If I had a bank app, an airline booking app, a casual game, or another app I was already planning on making for PCs, then sure, the idea of universal apps makes sense…
But what good is a Lyft app on a desktop? What good does the Luxe parking app do on my Xbox? What would Instagram even do on my ThinkPad? How could I use a barcode scanning price comparison app on a PC tethered to my desk? Is a PC going to count my steps or monitor my heart-rate in real-time? Can it help me navigate traffic with Waze? What good is a Starbucks card app (or any store app, or any mobile payments solution for that matter) going to do on a device that isn’t mobile? Heck, what would Grindr do if limited to a desktop—find romantic leads within my specified IP address blocks?

(Thanks Tero Alhonen.)

Start up: FTC rebuts critics, Mars One or Capricorn One?, failures of tech criticism, how open is ResearchKit?, and more

Posted on March 26, 2015 by charlesarthur

Flooded view in Oxford. Photo by the.approximate.photographer on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. None includes Jeremy Clarkson or One Direction. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Statement of Chairwoman Edith Ramirez, and Commissioners Julie Brill and Maureen K. Ohlhausen regarding the Google Investigation » Federal Trade Commission

The Federal Trade Commission conducted an exhaustive investigation of Google’s internet search practices during 2011 and 2012. Based on a comprehensive review of the voluminous record and extensive internal analysis, of which the inadvertently disclosed memo is only a fraction, all five Commissioners (three Democrats and two Republicans) agreed that there was no legal basis for action with respect to the main focus of the investigation – search. As we stated when the investigation was closed, the Commission concluded that Google’s search practices were not, “on balance, demonstrably anticompetitive.”

Contrary to recent press reports, the Commission’s decision on the search allegations was in accord with the recommendations of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, Bureau of Economics, and Office of General Counsel.

Some of the FTC’s staff attorneys on the search investigation raised concerns about several other Google practices. In response, the Commission obtained commitments from Google regarding certain of those practices. Over the last two years, Google has abided by those commitments.

I’d just like the full report published. Or reports – there seem to have been one from the competition bureau and one from the economic bureau.

Winter testing of the Oxford Flood Network » Nominet R&D blog

Bryan, who helped build it:

It’s been an extremely useful period for us all and in particular we’ve learnt a great deal about deploying devices in real conditions.

There are the hardware considerations: dull but important issues such as fixings become all important; how exactly do you fix a sensor to a disused 60cm cast iron pipe? (see photo below for the answer)

There are the radio considerations: how do you realistically achieve a 250m connection across wooded areas?

There are system deployment considerations: how do you remotely reboot a Raspberry PI gateway that is held securely in someone else’s property?

And there are some basic user interface considerations: how big do the buttons on a mobile app need to be when your fingers have gone numb from standing in a wet muddy field in December?

The key thing to remember about the Internet of Things is that it is where the physical world meets the digital world. The physical world is complex and messy. A warm, protected office (where applications are inevitably built) can hide that messy world.

I find this enormously encouraging. Flood level and river data is the one key public dataset that the Environment Agency still won’t make publicly available for free commercial reuse; it’s been a sticking point for the Free Our Data campaign (nine years old this month, but pretty much sorted since 2010). Let’s get it sorted.

Mars One finalist speaks out, says Dutch non-profit likely scamming its rubes » Ars Technica

Megan Geuss:

there was an insidious side to the dream that Mars One put forward. So much of it didn’t add up. The $6 billion budget seemed ridiculously low, and the company was light enough on details and partnerships to suggest that something was either very secret or very suspect.

[Joseph] Roche [a professor at Dublin’s Trinity School of Education, with a PhD in physics and astrophysics, and a Mars One finalist] now seems to think it’s the latter, saying that not once did he ever meet with someone from Mars One in person, despite the fact that he was selected to be one of the “Mars One Hundred”—the lucky 100 people who advanced to the next level in the competition over spaceship seats.

The professor told Keep that ranking within Mars One is points-based; when you are selected to advance through the application process, you join the “Mars One Community,” and you are given points as you move through each next level. The points are arbitrary and have nothing to do with ranking, but “the only way to get more points is to buy merchandise from Mars One or to donate money to them,” Roche told Keep. So, in essence, people are likely paying their way to a final round.

Even so, that’s not going to raise $6bn, unless they’ve got Bill Gates aboard. (Have they?)

BlackBerry is about to hit bottom » Quartz

Dan Frommer:

BlackBerry’s turnaround strategy—focusing on software as its smartphone business has declined—has not been pretty. But the worst may be here.

When BlackBerry reports its fourth-quarter results on Mar. 26, it could post its lowest revenue number in nine years. That’s the warning from RBC analyst Mark Sue in a research note this week.

Sue predicts that BlackBerry’s fourth-quarter sales could drop to $661m, down 32% year-over-year and well below the Wall Street consensus of around $800m. BlackBerry hasn’t reported revenue that low since 2006, just as the smartphone industry was set to explode.

But after you hit bottom, you rise. At least that’s what RBC is forecasting, along with 1.3m phones shipped and perhaps a little profit in the future. (BlackBerry’s results are on Friday.)

The Taming of Tech Criticism » The Baffler

Evgeny Morozov reviews Nick Carr’s new book “The Glass Cage”, and makes many insightful points about how much technology criticism (including, he argues, Carr’s) can’t see the wood for the trees:

Take our supposed overreliance on apps, the favorite subject of many contemporary critics, Carr included. How, the critics ask, could we be so blind to the deeply alienating effects of modern technology? Their tentative answer—that we are simply lazy suckers for technologically mediated convenience—reveals many of them to be insufferable, pompous moralizers. The more plausible thesis—that the growing demands on our time probably have something to do with the uptake of apps and the substitution of the real (say, parenting) with the virtual (say, the many apps that allow us to monitor kids remotely)—is not even broached. For to speak of our shrinking free time would also mean speaking of capital and labor, and this would take the technology critic too far away from “technology proper.”

It’s the existence of this “technology proper” that most technology critics take for granted. In fact, the very edifice of contemporary technology criticism rests on the critic’s reluctance to acknowledge that every gadget or app is simply the end point of a much broader matrix of social, cultural, and economic relations. And while it’s true that our attitudes toward these gadgets and apps are profoundly shaped by our technophobia or technophilia, why should we focus on only the end points and the behaviors that they stimulate? Here is one reason: whatever attack emerges from such framing of the problem is bound to be toothless—which explains why it is also so attractive to many.

I think Morozov has by far the better perspective on this than Carr, because he isn’t grounded in an American social view.

ResearchKit and open source » Rusty Rants

Russell Ivanovic looks more closely and queries where the “open source” bit is:

ResearchKit, just like most other iOS frameworks, is a set of tools for building an iOS app that simplifies some of the things you’d need to do to collect patient data. The intention of open sourcing this part of it seems to be to encourage developers to build modules for it which would all be iOS only as well. Apple states as much in their technical document:

…developers are encouraged to build new modules and share them with the community

So, currently at least, there’s no open source server components, no open format for exchanging data and an iOS only open source framework that Apple want developers to build modules for. Don’t get me wrong, this still sounds like a huge step forward for medical research data collection. What it doesn’t sound like though is Apple’s altruistic gift to the world from which they receive no benefits.

China market buoying iPhone shipments » Digitimes

Cage Chao and Jessie Shen:

In China, sales of Apple’s iPhone 6 reached 15-20m units in the fourth quarter of 2014, the sources noted. China-sales of the 6-series are set to remain at similar levels in the first quarter of 2015, the sources said.

Judging from current order visibility, the sources estimated that 45-50m iPhone 6 devices would be shipped worldwide in the second quarter of 2015 with China contributing one-third of total shipments…

…While sales of Apple’s iPhone 6 series have been strong since launch, sales of Android-based smartphones have not picked up, according to industry sources. Except Samsung Electronics, which has started to enjoy growth in sales of its recently-announced Galaxy S6, other Android phone makers have seen their sales thus far in 2015 lower than a year earlier, the sources indicated.

Sources at Taiwan-based IC design houses have revealed that orders placed by their Android device customers have been weaker than expected which may affect their sales performance in the first quarter. The IC design houses said they are also cautious about orders placed by Android phone makers for the second quarter.

The iPhone figures feel like lowballing – Apple will probably pass 50m units for the quarter. It’s the part about Android phones that is intriguing. Is it just the Taiwan IC houses feeling the pinch?

What happened, and what’s going on » AllCrypt Blog

Read this, and feel the hairs stand up on the back of your neck:

We are not sure if AllCrypt was targeted, or if it was a “fortunate” thing for the hacker. Our hypothesis is this: The user’s email account was breached, and in looking through the emails, saw that he had some admin rights for AllCrypt.com. In that account were emails from myself and our MD. After playing on AllCrypt for some time, the hacker tries to do a WordPress password reset for all of the allcrypt related emails he sees. My personal email was not the email for the main admin blog account, and either was the user who’s email was breached. Our MD, however, did use his personal email. A password reset was issued, and sent to the MD.

The massive screwup that led to the loss of funds is when the MD forwarded that email to myself and the tech team member. He forwarded the password reset link. To the breached email account.

The hacker reset the MD’s password, and had administrative access to the blog. Access which allows uploading of new files/plugins for WordPress.

The hacker first uploaded a file, class.php. After we examined it, we discovered that it grants web-based command line access to any files the web user has access to. Namely, the entire http tree. Quick looks through the web source files is all it takes to see the hostnames, login names, and passwords for the database. The database credentials WERE protected in a ‘hidden’ file in a non-www accessible directory, however, anyone smart enough to read code can find the include lines that point to that file. The www user must have read access to that file, so the class.php the hacker uploaded also had read access.

Then, using WordPress, he uploaded adminer.php – a web based database management tool similar to PHPMyAdmin. It was a simple task to then query the database.

The hacker created a new user account on AllCrypt, used adminer.php to UPDATE userbalances SET balance=50 WHERE userid=whatever AND symbol=BTC to set his balances to whatever he wanted. Then he began to issue withdrawals. Lots of them.

You hosted WordPress and your bitcoin exchange on the same server. Also includes “Angry questions and contrite answers” section.

Samsung beaten by local smartphone brand in the Philippines » Tech In Asia

Judith Balea:

Philippine budget phone maker Cherry Mobile beat South Korean giant Samsung as the leading smartphone brand in the Philippines in 2014, IDC said today. It was the second straight year that Cherry has whipped Samsung in the nation.

According to the research firm, Cherry cornered 21.9% of the Philippine market in terms of volume of smartphones shipped in 2014, overtaking Samsung, whose share declined further to 13.3%.

Cherry has held the spot as the number one smartphone vendor in the Philippines since 2013. That year, it captured 24.3% of the market, and Samsung held 19.9%, based on data provided by IDC to Tech in Asia.

However, the smartphone market expanded by 76% yoy (from 7.2m to 12.6m), so Samsung’s shipments actually increased by 17.6% (from 1.42m to 1.68m). Big headline, but pretty much a rounding error for Samsung.

Start up: web design for 2015, Nexus 6’s long slipway, hacking journalism under threat?, Zoë Keating v YouTube redux, and more

Posted on January 27, 2015 by charlesarthur

In 2012 the Nexus 6 designers were expecting to deal with these to unlock the phone. Photo by kevin dooley on Flickr.

A selection of 7 links for you. Refrigerate before use. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The challenge for web designers in 2015 (or how to cheat at the future) » Memespring

Richard Pope:

The 7 years of the Apple App Store and the android equivalents have, in effect, been mass, micro funded experiments in UI design for small, touch sensitive devices with lots of sensors and outputs. They have generated winning patterns like:

Checkboxes replaced by switches
Check-ins
Edit without save button
Everything can be contextual, any bit of UI can disappear between pages
Everything has it’s own settings page
Floating buttons
Keeping primary navigation off canvas (hidden behind the page)
Minimal or zero page header (the context an old school page header / nav gives seems less important when you are holding the app in your hand.)
Multiple, focused apps for the same service
Offline by default
Overscroll to refresh
Reserving dropdown menus for actions on the current context
Search scoped to their current context (the app)
These are patterns that people use day in day out on facebook, Gmail and WhatsApp. These are the new normal, what people expect.

But with a few notable exceptions – eg the mobile versions of Wikipedia and Forecast – these are not patterns that are making their way on to the web.

So, here is the challenge for anyone designing and building for the web in 2015.

He also points out what you can do with HTML5 browsers now too. Worth considering.

Dennis Woodside on Motorola, Google and the future of Dropbox » Telegraph

Matt Warman spoke to Woodside, formerly chief executive at Motorola, and now chief operating officer at Dropbox:

the 6-inch Nexus 6, he can now admit, was stymied by just one of those big players [which he previously criticised for keeping prices high]. A dimple on the back that helps users hold the device should, in fact, have been rather more sophisticated. “The secret behind that is that it was supposed to be fingerprint recognition, and Apple bought the best supplier. So the second best supplier was the only one available to everyone else in the industry and they weren’t there yet,” says Woodside. Nonetheless, he adds, the addition of fingerprint recognition, “wouldn’t have made that big a difference.”

Here’s what’s interesting about this. Apple bought Authentec in mid-2012 (for $356m). The Nexus 6 was released in September 2014. Motorola’s development of that smartphone was so far in train that it didn’t have time to change the design of the back fascia from dimpled to flat.

Smartphones take two or more years to design and implement. Consider that: what comes out now was being worked on in early 2013.

Kudos to Woodside for admitting fingerprint recognition wouldn’t have made much difference. As it wasn’t being tied into a payment system, it would have been a gimmick – and those don’t add lasting value.

We should all step back from security journalism » Medium

Quinn Norton:

Part of Barrett Brown’s 63 month sentence, issued yesterday, is a 12 month sentence for a count of Accessory After the Fact, of the crime of hacking Stratfor. This sentence was enhanced by Brown’s posting a link in chat and possessing credit card data. This, and a broad pattern of misunderstanding and criminalizing normal behavior online, has lead me to feel that the situation for journalists and security researchers is murky and dangerous.

I am stepping back from reporting on hacking/databreach stories, and restricting my assistance to other journalists to advice. (But please, journalists, absolutely feel free to ask me for advice!) I can’t look at the specific data another journalist has, and I can’t pass it along to a security expert, without feeling like there’s risk to the journalists I work with, the security experts, and myself.

Brown’s sentence wasn’t quite as simple as “linking to stolen stuff”, but Norton’s concern is understandable – especially given the tendency of US law enforcement to go like a runaway train after hackers, and those defined as hackers, of all stripes.

Zoe Keating’s experience shows us why YouTube’s attitudes to its creators must change » Music Industry Blog

Mark Mulligan weighs in on the Zoë Keating row linked here on Monday:

it is the Content ID clause that is most nefarious. Content UD is not an added value service YouTube provides to content owners, it is the obligation of a responsible partner designed to help content creators protect their intellectual property. YouTube implemented Content ID in response to rights owners, labels in particular, who were unhappy about their content being uploaded by users without their permission. YouTube’s willingness to use Content ID as a contractual lever betrays a blatant disregard for copyright.

Ben Thompson is much more straightforward: on Stratechery.com he analyses Keating’s position, and suggests – for her particular situation, as a niche player seeking the most eager fans – that she should tell YouTube to take a hike. Especially when you look at her income breakdown: 60,000 tracks (roughly) sold on iTunes generated $38,195, while 1.9m YouTube views (mostly of her music on other peoples’ videos) earned $1,248.

Would the iTunes sales have happened without the YouTube views? Quite possibly not – but using ContentID as a lever, as Mulligan says, is to aggressively deny her copyright.

Digital music sales on iTunes and beyond are now fading as fast as CDs. – The Atlantic

Derek Thompson has some shudder-making figures:

how about the hits? The top 1% of bands and solo artists now earn about 80% of all revenue from recorded music, as I wrote in “The Shazam Effect.”

But the market for streamed music is not so concentrated. The ten most-popular songs accounted for just shy of 2% of all streams in 2013 and 2014. That sounds crazy low. But there are 35m songs on Spotify and many more remixes and covers on SoundCloud and YouTube, and one in every 50 or 60 online plays is going to a top-ten song. With the entire universe of music available on virtual jukeboxes, the typical 3.5-hour listening session still includes at least one song selected from a top-ten playlist that accounts for .00003% of that universe. The long tail of digital music is the longest of tails. Still, there is a fat head at the front.

China buying more iPhones than US » FT.com

Analysts at UBS estimate that China accounted for 36% of iPhone shipments in the most recent quarter, compared with 24% for the US. During the same period last year, 29% of units were sold in the US and 22% were in China, UBS said.

Predictable enough, given the size of China, and the fact that the US is essentially saturated. The fact that two markets probably account for 60% of all iPhone shipments – around 36m phones in the quarter – is perhaps a concern for Apple. It’s much the same for Samsung: losing its lead in China has hurt it and left the US as its key market.

However, this rather gives the lie to those stories from September which said that Apple was washed up in China when smugglers had to cut prices of the iPhone 6 – ignoring the fact that the devices were going to go on sale officially in a few weeks. Nope, then the problem was that

Four years ago, the iPhone 4 was a status symbol, with the black market booming before the product was officially introduced. Today, the iPhone is simply one option among many, as local companies like Xiaomi and Meizu Technology rival Apple in terms of coolness while charging less than half the price.

Demographics of key social networking platforms » Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project

Tons of demographic data (including age, ethnicity, gender, education, income and location) about the online over-18s in the US:
• 71% use Facebook (more women than men, strong in 18-29);
• 23% use Twitter (men strongly growing, skews towards degree-qualified);
• 26% use Instagram (53% of 18-29s; also strong among Hispanics and African-Americans);
• 28% use Pinterest (up from 21% in August 2013; 3:1 women:men, strongly skewed to white)
• 28% use LinkedIn, strongly up among women since 2013, but now equal across sexes; skews strongly to university education

The whole study is fascinating: Facebook growth is slowing down, but it’s still “home base”, and used most daily.

Start up: Google buying Softcard?, examining Uber’s numbers, why Windows 10 can’t fix Windows Phone, examining Samsung’s loss in China, and more

Posted on January 20, 2015 by charlesarthur

Does more Uber mean less of this? Photo of Toyota manufacturing in the UK by Toyota UK on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. Tested on humans for irritancy. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google is in talks with mobile payments company Softcard » TechCrunch

The price may be under $100m, according to our sources. That is either a huge bargain or a testament to Softcard’s difficulties as an enterprise: sources tell us that AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile — the three carriers that started Isis in 2010 — have collectively invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the joint venture.

Softcard earlier this month laid off about 60 employees and has been in a consolidation phase.

Softcard says it has 200,000 merchants in the US able to use its app, which isn’t available on iOS (but is on Android and Windows Phone). Sounds like morale there has been rock-bottom. But Apple Pay has brought it all back to life. At least, it ought to.

Gabe Rivera on tech media: ‘A lot of intellectual dishonesty’ » Digiday

Gabe Rivera is in charge of Techmeme, and so looks at lots and lots of sites’ stories:

On the down side are a lot of things you’ve heard already. Like the pervasiveness of churnalism, and how writers at news publications aren’t nearly as knowledgeable as they should be to cover their beat. These are real problems, but hard to counter given the tight supply of good writers. Another problem: lying by omission, hyperbole and other forms of intellectual dishonesty are creeping into more tech reporting.

Q: Is that a digital media problem or a tech reporting problem?
A: Intellectual dishonesty has plagued media even in the decades and centuries before digital, but I think it’s seen a big increase in tech reporting in just the last couple of years. As more reporters and commentators turn their attention to the flourishing tech industry, an increasing number are relying on bogus arguments to cut through the din.

Estimating G+ User Activity » Ello

From #Dredmorbius:

This is an analysis which estimates active G+ users, defined as those who’ve made a post to G+, not simply commented on a YouTube video, in the month of January, 2015. It’s based on pulling Google’s on Profile sitemaps and sampling profile pages based on them. You should be able to replicate the process yourself (or with a hackishly-minded assistant) using the methods described.

Summary of findings:
• There are about 2.2 billion G+ profiles total.
• Of these, about 9% have any publicly-posted content.
• Of those, about 37% have as their most recent activity a YouTube comment, another 8% profile photo changes (45% of all “active” profiles).
• Only 6% of profiles which have ever been publicly active have any post activity in 2015 (18 days so far).
• Only around half of those, 3% of active profiles, are not YouTube comments.

That is, 0.3% of all G+ profiles, about 6.6 million users, have made public G+ post in 2015. That’s ~367,000 users posting daily if each posts only once (the actual post frequency will vary somewhat).

This doesn’t include non-public posts or comments, or lurkers, but it’s a pretty clear indication of the level of publicly visible activity on G+.

One wag asks in the comments how this compares to Ello. More to the point, though, you could work through this data pretty easily given a suitably large system. A big data problem, but not a hard one.

Uber’s claim to be a Euro jobs-creator is full of Volkswagen-sized holes » PandoDaily

Michael Carney:

According to the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (EAMA), the auto industry employs 12.9 million people across the continent, representing 5.3% of the total workforce. What’s more, the industry’s high-skilled manufacturing jobs represent a full 10% of such jobs in the EU. The auto industry also represents 6.9% of the EU GDP. So the question is, what would happen if Uber eliminated the need for 400,000 of these vehicles?

It’s a complicated question that belies a straightforward answer. But if we make the admittedly simplistic assumption that a one percentage point reduction in autos demand equates to an equal one percentage point reduction in employment within the sector, the impact of Uber’s expansion begins to look much less positive.

Those 400,000 vehicles eliminated represent approximately 2.4% of the 16.2m vehicles (cars, vans, trucks and buses) produced per year in the EU. Applying this percentage to the employment within the sector and we get approximately 320,000 jobs. So, while Uber is making headlines with promises of creating 50,000 new jobs – low-skill, low-stability “jobs” at that – behind the scenes, the company is threatening more than six-times as many jobs in one of Europe’s most critical industries.

No love lost between Pando and Uber. But the logic here is pretty straightforward. I’m dubious about the benefits of privatising taxi regulation to a single private company which can dismiss people (and ban would-be riders) at its own whim, with no recourse.

Samsung loses connection with Chinese consumers in 2014 » Caixin

Lots of data about percentage share (and some shade, as they say, thrown on Samsung’s TouchWiz), but this is the key part:

Chinese smartphone makers grabbed market share from Samsung by improving the design and quality of their products, the industry analyst said. Many devices sell for less than 1,000 yuan. For 1,500 yuan a consumer could get a Xiaomi model called the Mi 3 that has similar specifications as the Samsung Galaxy S5, which costs about 3,000 yuan.

Chinese smartphone makers, such as Xiaomi, were also trying to improve the Android operating system and provide more apps so users had a better experience, improvements Samsung was not making, the analyst said.

Samsung usually set the prices of its phone high, then brings them down, one of its dealers said. He mentioned the Galaxy Note 3, whose price was slashed by 500 yuan within a week of it launch, something that would annoy people who bought the device early.

Chinese smartphone makers took a different approach. They start out with low prices, and months later unveil upgraded versions of the phones for the same price, a strategy that seems to agree with Chinese consumers.

(500 yuan = £50 or so.)

Why Windows 10 can’t fix Windows Phone » Beyond Devices

Jan Dawson has a bucket of ice water for those who think the opposite:

First, the theory: in Windows 10, Microsoft is creating a single operating system which will run across different form factors, with much of the underlying code shared and the rest tweaked by device type and size. This will allow developers to create apps which run 90% of the same code, with just some customizations for different device types and sizes. This, in turn, will allow Microsoft to tap into the vast number of Windows PC developers, who will now be able to port their apps to Windows Phone will very little additional work, which will drive a large number of new apps to the mobile platform, reducing the app gap relative to iOS and Android.

However, there’s a fundamental flaw in this argument, which is that the apps Windows Phone is missing simply don’t exist as desktop apps on Windows. Just think about it for a moment, and you’ll realize it’s empirically obvious.

But he goes beyond the thought experiment, and actually examines what’s available on the app stores, and on Windows. Not just empirically obvious, but empirically demonstrated.

And now look at this next link.

February 2011: How can Nokia get enough app developers to work on Windows 7 Phone versions of their products? » Quora

The question is from February 2011, and Horace Dediu offered this answer – which remains true, and can be expanded to other “ecosystem” questions (cough *wearables* cough):

There’s a persistent assumption that ecosystems are based on economic logic. That’s analogous to suggesting that acting talent is attracted to Hollywood because every aspiring actor calculates their expected income based on odds of success minus the cost of living there and the cost of learning to act.

This logic also implies that alternative film-making hubs may try to re-create the attraction of Hollywood by subsidizing actors, providing acting classes and offering discount agencies.

These methods are unlikely to work. They only signal to actors that the film industry in that hub is ineffective.

Talent is attracted to a platform because of that platform’s potential to solve the job that the talent is seeking to hire it for. They want to be stars. A platform needs to offer the opportunity for stardom. That’s not something money can buy.

As we now know the answer to this one (it couldn’t), the answer becomes illuminating. The other responses are worth reading too – especially one by Mark Dagon Hughes, who writes for iOS.

Ambiq Micro has made a chip that consumes 10 times less energy » Tech News and Analysis

Stacey Higginbotham:

Ambiq manages these lower wattages by never going above a certain voltages when sending power through the chip. Most chips send their signalling information, which determines if it is sending zeros or ones, at between 1 and 1.8 volts, but the Ambiq chip sends its information 0.5 volts. That means it uses much less energy overall. Ambiq has built out this technology on about $30 million in funding.

It does this without requiring fancy changes in manufacturing or a new way of writing software, which means it can be designed into existing products easily. Ambiq CEO Mike Salas says he expects to see Ambiq microcontrollers in shipping products by the middle of the year. Its microcontrollers will compete with those already on the market from Atmel, ST Microelectronics and other large chipmakers.

Here’s the press release from Ambiq explaining how it does it:

“Ambiq Micro’s SPOT platform operates transistors at subthreshold voltages (less than 0.5V), rather than using transistors that are turned all the way “on” at 1.8V. It uses the leakage current of “off” transistors to compute in both digital and analog domains.”

Intrigued about how it runs transistors on leakage current, which is something that designers generally try to reduce.

This is how Xiaomi keeps the cost of its smartphones so low » TechCrunch

Jon Russell spoke to Hugo Barra, who explained:

“A product that stays on the shelf for 18-24 months — which is most of our products — goes through three or four price cuts. The Mi2 and Mi2s are essentially the same device, for example,” Barra explained. “The Mi2/Mi2s were on sale for 26 months. The Redmi 1 was first launched in September 2013, and we just announced the Redmi 2 this month, that’s 16 months later.”

That’s important because the longer runway for devices gives Xiaomi leverage to secure better component deals with its suppliers.

“The reason we do these price cuts is because we’ve managed to negotiate component cost decreases [with our suppliers] over time, which ends up leaving us with a bigger margin than we’d like to have, so we do a price cut,” Barra added.

Ben Thompson did a similar (and I’d say better) interview with Barra, which is on Stratechery; subscriptions are cheap and recommended.

In Thompson’s interview, he ranges over the problems for rivals of channel conflict, what Apple has done with Android’s ideas, and handset profitability. I’d say Thompson’s interview is better than Russell’s – in part because it doesn’t use the grandstanding tone that so many ~~trade papers~~ tech blogs do; Thompson assumes intelligence in his readers. Thus:

Barra: Component prices, like if you look at a chipset today, if you want to buy the same chipset a year from now, the price would have dropped much more than 50%, sometimes the price will have dropped 90% for that same component. So the bill of materials for a product will fall dramatically over time.

Thompson: How much? What percentage?

HB: Well, the Mi 2 S started selling at ¥1999, and the last time we were selling it before we had to take it off the market because we could no longer source components otherwise we would have kept making it, was ¥1299. So the price dropped substantially, what are we talking about here, 40%. The [bill of materials] dropped a lot more than that.

BT: Ballpark?

HB: I don’t know.

BT: But at ¥1299 it was more profitable than at ¥1999.

HB: Yes, certainly, at least ¥1999 at the beginning.

Bought our Samsung Smart TV two months ago, now… » Tumblr de Chartier

David Chartier:

Bought our Samsung Smart TV two months ago, now it’s showing popup ads for apps and services. To clarify: what you see is my Apple TV in the ‘background’ (running a photo screensaver) and a Samsung ad for Yahoo Broadcast Interactivity popping up on top of my Apple TV.

A POPUP AD ON MY TV.

Under no circumstances, scenarios, case studies, fictional situations, or boardroom fantasies is this acceptable. None. No, if you think you have an argument or a circumstance under which these ads are acceptable, you are wrong and there’s a great chance you are not a very good person.

Best part so far: I couldn’t use Samsung’s clunky touchpad remote to uncheck the “prompt me for interactive features” option, and now I can’t find the “SyncPlus App” in the Smart Hub to shut them off. I could be missing it, but so far it’s just not there, and these options aren’t anywhere in Settings.

Solution turns out to be easy: search the Samsung Smart TV App Store for SyncPlus and install that and turn off the ads. Voilá! Or perhaps just don’t connect the smart TV to the internet? That works for me. (UK readers say they haven’t seen this. Yet.)