Tag Archives: china

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

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

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

Smartphones at tipping point in China » Forbes

Doug Young:

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

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

Intel forecast misses estimates, signalling deeper PC slump » Bloomberg

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

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

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

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

Incomes and revenues up, but outlook down.

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

Jan Dawson:

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

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

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

Monument Valley sales data » UsTwo

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

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

RadioShack prepares bankruptcy filing » WSJ

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

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

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

And next…

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

Cory McNutt:

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

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

BlackBerry shares slide 16% after denying Samsung talks » MarketWatch

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

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

Goodbye » SuperSite for Windows

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

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

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

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

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

Google makes changes to its Glass project » WSJ

Alistair Barr:

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

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

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

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

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

Start up: India blocks Xiaomi, Chinese app habits, Office gets Bing, hacking smartwatches, and more

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Refuelling a Toyota Prius. By the time he’s grown up, it might have paid for itself. Photo by Chris Yarzab on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Slippery when wet. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Breaking News: Delhi High Court grants injunction against Xiaomi >> Spicy IP

[On Monday] the Delhi High Court granted an ex parte injunction order against Chinese operator Xiaomi for infringement of Ericsson’s patents. The patents in question are Standards-Essential Patents (SEPs) which are subject to FRAND (Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory) terms. However, they may also be the same patents which are the subject matters of litigation Ericsson has mounted against Micromax, Gionee and Intex. As Shamnad Sir noted earlier today, while Ericsson has largely favourable orders against Micromax and Gionee, the same cannot be said for its case against Intex. Therefore, when the same patents are potentially in question under other cases as well, there was no need for the Courts to rush to grant an injunction against a new defendant, namely Xiaomi.

At this juncture, it is more interesting to note the reasons provided for granting the said injunction. One factor that the Court found persuasive was that Xiaomi had not responded to Ericsson’s repeated communications  (6 in number from July 2014). However, it must be questioned whether Xiaomi’s purported laxity in this matter is a sufficient reason to grant an injunction against them. More so, when an alternative remedy in the form of damages is available which is one of the cardinal principles that goes against the granting of injunctions.

This ex parte order injuncts Xiaomi from selling, advertising, manufacturing or importing devices that infringe the SEPs in question. The judge also directed the Customs officials to stop the imports under the IPR Rules, 2007. Moreover, local commissioners have been appointed to visit Xiaomi officers to ensure the implementation of these orders.

This is going to put a whole new complexion on Xiaomi’s expansion – and profitability – outside China, and probably means it won’t be coming to the US any time soon.

Chinese mobile app UI trends >> Dan Grover

Slightly to his surprise, San Francisco native Grover finds himself a product manager on Chinese messaging app WeChat, in Guangzhou; from the photo, it’s Shenzhen, as that’s where WeChat is headquartered. This isn’t the cheesy opener to a TV series, unless you make it so:

Moving to a new country has meant learning how to do lots of things differently: speaking a new language, eating, shopping, getting around. In a few months, I’m surprised at how acclimated I’ve become to what, at first, seemed such an overwhelmingly alien place.

This has applied to my digital life too. I’ve replaced all my apps with those used here, owning both to my keen interest as someone in the tech industry, and to “go native” to the extent I can. Since then, I’ve similarly become blind to the adaptations required there, too.

One day, for the fun of it, I started writing a list in my notebook of all the things that are different between apps here and those I’m accustomed to using and creating back in the US. When I finished, I was surprised by how long the list was, so it seemed fitting to flesh it out into a post.

You’ll look at it and say “oh, that’s why feature X that I never use is in iOS 8”. Plus much more. China may be like Japan – a harbinger of some of the mobile future, but not all. The trouble is figuring out which bits are which.

How the Prisoner’s Dilemma explains the lack of forked Android phones outside China >> Tech-Thoughts

I’ve taken liberties with the headline on Sameer Singh’s article, but that’s basically what he’s doing:

[in the classic minimax game] the best payoff for both prisoners will be achieved if both remain silent. But the best individual payoff requires each to betray the other. So the only rational course for any self-interested party (like profit-generating enterprises) is to betray each other. In the case of Android OEMs, it may benefit the whole industry (from a differentiation and profit standpoint) to fork Android and exclude Google services. But the threat of selling a non-competitive forked device, while others sell devices with Google services is too great for this to ever happen.

The rest is insightful too. Sameer’s been quiet for a while; pieces like this contribute greatly to our understanding of ecosystems:

There are close to 2 billion smartphone users today and that will grow to roughly 4 billion over the next few years. However, the purchasing power of these users will be far lower than that of the existing user base, i.e. they will probably buy $25-$50 devices and not $600 or even $200 devices. How do you monetize a user who can only afford to pay $25-$50 for a phone?

The answer: services, dear boy, services.

PC makers may beat Apple to the punch with new ‘fingerprint ID’ sensors built into notebook touchpads >> Apple Insider

Calling it the “first solution to integrate fingerprint ID technology into the TouchPad,” the Synaptics SecurePad is a 4-by-10-millimeter sensor on the surface of a notebook’s cursor controls. The SecurePad activates with the touch of a finger, and like Apple’s Touch ID, it supports fingerprint detection at any angle.

The Synaptics SecurePad is a Fast Identity Online-ready authenticator supporting the use of password-free security. It will allow PC makers to implement fingerprint scanning technology without the need to duplicate hardware components, allowing for simpler integration into existing notebook designs.

Once a user scans their fingerprint when prompted for a password, SecurePad initiates a cryptographically secure challenge and response with an online service provider. The Synaptics solution does away with storing password databases in the cloud, further improving security with FIDO-compliant partners.

Useful for enterprise PCs; unclear whether there will be much demand for it from consumers (though users of iOS devices with TouchID might like the idea). It all rests on the execution.

Microsoft begins integrating Bing search into Office >> ZDNet

Microsoft is beginning to integrate its Bing search technology into Office, starting with Word Online, company officials announced on December 10.

Microsoft is calling the new embedded search capability “Insights for Office”. Microsoft is rolling out the capability worldwide (everywhere where Bing is available) starting today, December 10. The rollout should be complete within the next few days, officials said.

Users don’t need to do anything to get the new capability; it will just be added to Word Online automatically. The new “intelligent search experience,” as Microsoft officials are calling this, isn’t ad supported. It’s free.

Bill Gates wanted to include Microsoft’s search solution in Office back in 2003, but antitrust concerns, and the Office team’s refusal to help the search team, killed it. (Source: my book, Digital Wars – US version. Just the present for you or someone like you.)

With $2 Gas, the Toyota Prius Is for drivers who stink at math >> Businessweek

It would take almost 30 years of fuel savings from the hybrid Prius to cover its price premium over the little Chevy Cruze, although that doesn’t account for the Chevy buyer marking savvy investments with her savings in the meantime. It doesn’t matter since we will all be flying around in futuristic Teslas before the Prius pays off. The all-electric Nissan gets a lot closer: The all-electric Nissan Leaf, without any gas stops, take just 3.8 years on the road to beat the cheaper sticker price of the Cruze.

The Cruze gets a respectable 30 miles per gallon of combined highway and city driving, but its real strength is relative affordability. Without a second engine and a massive battery, the average Cruze had a $21,322 sticker price last month, compared with almost $31,973 for a Prius and $32,933 for a Leaf. Even after federal tax breaks, Cruze buyers start with an advantage of $8,151 over the Prius and $4,111 over the Leaf. That’s a lot of gas money.

For the 13 states with no hybrid incentives, this is where the equation stops.

This is the real reason why the US hasn’t made any progress on electric cars: the lack of tax incentive. True, the idea that carbon emissions are a problem is relatively new, but the US’s dependence on foreign oil (and hence oil) was seen as a problem as far back as Jimmy Carter’s time in the 1970s.

Eric Young on Twitter: “”I work for 1 of largest credit issuers n world…”

Eric Young quoting a source at “a major [US] bank: “I work for 1 of [the] largest credit issuers n [in the] world. We processed way more Apple Pay transactions than all of Google Wallet since its beginning”.

I’ve calculated there have been 20m Google Wallet downloads (it’s US-only), and people who should know have subsequently suggested that perhaps one-tenth of those are active. Apple Pay is very likely far past Google Wallet for number of active users in the US, even though Google Wallet came out in 2011 – and Apple Pay in September.

Mobile Enterprise Apps >> Apple

The first fruits of the collaboration with IBM, yielding what Apple calls “a new class of apps — entirely reimagined for the mobile enterprise, made for iOS, and designed to empower employees wherever their work takes them”. I was struck by the one for pilots, and this one for law enforcement officers:

With the Incident Aware app, police officers can know each other’s whereabouts with greater insights in emergency situations. When law enforcement officials receive an emergency call, responders can go in with a bird’s-eye view of the scene’s perimeter that includes GPS map data, the location of those involved in the incident, and live video feeds updated in real time on their iPhone devices. This powerful and intuitive app can even access police records to calculate risk, letting other law enforcement stakeholders know where and when other responders will appear.

It relies of course on Apple Maps, which will really up the stakes on getting that right and up-to-date.

Data sent between phones and smartwatches wide open to hackers >> Ars Technica

The growing number of smart devices that interoperates with smartphones could leave text messages, calendar entries, biometric data, and other sensitive user information wide open to hackers, security researchers warn.

That’s because most smart watches rely on a six-digit PIN to secure information traveling to and from connected Android smartphones. With only one million possible keys securing the Bluetooth connection between the handset and the smart device, the PINs are susceptible to brute-force attacks, in which a nearby hacker attempts every possible combination until finding the right one.

Researchers from security firm Bitdefender mounted a proof-of-concept hack against a Samsung Gear Live smartwatch that was paired with a Google Nexus 4 running Android L Preview. Using readily available hacking tools, they found that the PIN obfuscating the Bluetooth connection between the two devices was easily brute forced. From that point on, they were able to monitor the information passing between the watch and the phone.

Trying to feel anxious. Somehow can’t summon up the necessary level of worry about someone seeing a calendar alert.

Start up: Sony-signed malware, robots watching videos, Nexus 6’s lost finger lock, are tablets desktops?, and more

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I love robots, by Duncan on Flickr.

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

Swedish police raid The Pirate Bay, site offline >> TorrentFreak

This morning, for the first time in months, The Pirate Bay disappeared offline. A number of concerned users emailed TF for information but at that point technical issues seemed the most likely culprit.

However, over in Sweden authorities have just confirmed that local police carried out a raid in Stockholm this morning as part of an operation to protect intellectual property.

“There has been a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm. This is in connection with violations of copyright law,” read a statement from Paul Pintér, police national coordinator for IP enforcement.

‘Destover’ malware now digitally signed by Sony certificates >> Securelist

Functionally, the backdoor contains two C&Cs [command & control servers for computers taken over by the malware] and will alternately try to connect to both, with delays between connections:

208.105.226[.]235:443 – United States Champlain Time Warner Cable Internet Llc

203.131.222[.]102:443 – Thailand Bangkok Thammasat University

So what does this mean? The stolen Sony certificates (which were also leaked by the attackers) can be used to sign other malicious samples. In turn, these can be further used in other attacks. Because the Sony digital certificates are trusted by security solutions, this makes attacks more effective. We’ve seen attackers leverage trusted certificates in the past, as a means of bypassing whitelisting software and default-deny policies.

We’ve already reported the digital certificate to COMODO and Digicert and we hope it will be blacklisted soon. Kaspersky products will still detect the malware samples even if signed by digital certificates.

Everyone says “ooh! Thailand again!” (a previous part of the hack was linked to a hotel in Bangkok) but nobody says “hmm, Time Warner.” What if the hackers are based in the US? (Speaking of which, has Re/Code walked back – as one says – on its claim that North Korea was behind the Sony hack?)

Android source reveals scrapped Nexus 6 fingerprint sensor >> Ars Technica

Methods like “FINGERPRINT_ACQUIRED_TOO_FAST” and “FINGERPRINT_ACQUIRED_TOO_SLOW” in the fingerprint API suggest it supported a “swipe” style fingerprint reader, which, unlike Apple’s stationary fingerprint reader, requires the finger to be moved across a sensor at the right speed. Another file said the system would show a picture indicating which part of the finger would need to be scanned next, which again points to it being more like a swipe reader and less like a whole-fingerprint scanner.

The fingerprint API would be open to multiple apps, with a comment saying Google had built “A service to manage multiple clients that want to access the fingerprint HAL API.” Presumably this would allow apps like Google Wallet to use your fingerprint as authentication.

Motorola had a fingerprint scanner in the Atrix in 2011. Sucked.

The real reason why Google is dropping the tablet v desktop distinction – it’s the user context, stupid! >> Search Engine Land

Looking at the huge amount of search query data that they have access to, Google picked up on a pattern in the way people use their devices. What they noticed is that user context trumps everything else.

“User context” refers to the time, location and device from which a search is conducted, and as [group product manager of Global Mobile Search Ads at Google] Surojit [Chatterjee] put it: “User context drives what people search for, and the actions they take. So for example, say I am at home in the evening, and I’m doing a search. The actions that I will take will be largely the same if I’m using a smartphone, tablet or notebook, because the context is the same. Particularly between notebook and tablet, the query patterns are very similar.”

Similarly, the types of searches that we typically think of as “mobile” searches are the ones that people make when they’re out and about, away from home or work – and that user context is actually far more important than the physical device they are using.

Also: “Currently, 80% of tablet traffic occurs in the home, in the evening, and Google is much more interested in user context vs. user hardware.”

In other words, tablets are the new laptops/desktops.

Korea’s shrinking market: domestic smart device market size likely to shrink for two years >> BusinessKorea

[Research company IDC] mentioned a decline in smartphone supply as the main culprit of the negative growth of the domestic market. The smartphone segment used to account for 80% of the overall smart device market, but the domestic supply is forecast to drop by 20.5% to 17.54m units and the sales by 29.2% to 12.345trn won (US$11.1bn) this year.

“The smartphone market has already reached a saturation point, and the market downturn has been accelerated by the recent suspension of the business of mobile carriers, the Terminal Distribution Structure Improvement Act and the crisis of Pantech,” IDC Korea explained.

Non-tablet PC demand is on the decline as well, with more and more people using their smartphones and tablet PCs instead of conventional PCs.

That’s a steep drop in Samsung’s and LG’s homeland.

OMG! Mobile voice survey reveals teens love to talk >> Official Google Blog

Mobile voice searches have doubled in the past year, says Google, which commissioned a study of 1,400 US adults so it could commission an annoying infographic:

We weren’t surprised to find that teens — always ahead of the curve when it comes to new technology—talk to their phones more than the average adult. More than half of teens (13-18) use voice search daily — to them it’s as natural as checking social media or taking selfies. Adults are also getting the hang of it, with 41% talking to their phones every day and 56% admitting it makes them “feel tech savvy.”

Those numbers feel high. Would love to know how they break down between smartphone platform; Google doesn’t specify that, and doesn’t show what the actual questions on the survey are.

Given that about half of smartphone owners in the US have iPhones, could it be that a significant portion of those people who use voice commands (because that’s what the survey asks about – not voice search) were actually asking Siri to do stuff?

Note though how Google cleverly elides from “voice search” (what it offers in the Google app) to voice commands – which don’t necessarily involve Google at all.

Digitimes Research: Lenovo mobile device shipments to lead Samsung by 9 million units in 2015 >> Digitimes

Note that by “mobile” it’s excluding smartphones, which might strike some as contrary. But anyway, Jim Hisiao and Joanne Chien report:

Despite difficulties to achieve further shipment growths for its tablet business, Lenovo with its advantage as the largest notebook brand vendor worldwide and aggressive promotions of its inexpensive and phone-enabled tablets is expected to achieve 50m in total tablet and notebook shipments in 2015, widening its gap with Samsung to 9m units.

Because tablet demand will weaken in 2015, Lenovo’s and Samsung’s strategies for the mobile computing device market are expected to focus on maintaining their tablet shipments. Digitimes Research believes Lenovo’s shipments for tablets with phone functions to emerging markets in 2015 are expected to remain strong…

…Samsung’s aggressive expansion of its tablet product line in the first half of 2014 did not receive a good response from the market. Since the company is expected to turn conservative about its tablet business and place most of the resources on the smartphone business in 2015, Digitimes Research expects the Korea-based vendor’s tablet shipments to drop to 36m units in the year.

As for the notebook business, after phasing out from the market in the second half of 2013, Samsung’s shipment volume has dropped rapidly and is only expected to reach 5m units in 2015.

Samsung’s essential weakness compared to Lenovo is its failure to make any profit from selling PCs.

Editorial: No comments. An experiment in elevating the conversation >> St Louis Post-Dispatch

Last Sunday, we challenged our region to have the serious discussion on race that it has been avoiding for decades. Such difficult discussions are made more challenging when, just to present a thoughtful point of view, you have to endure vile and racist comments, shouting and personal attacks.

If you’ve watched many of the talking heads on cable television try to discuss the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, you know what we’re talking about. Unfortunately, sometimes comments on newspaper stories and columns have a similar effect.

In fact, it has a name: “The nasty effect.”

That’s what University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers Dominique Brossard and Dietram Scheufele dubbed the negative effect certain comments can have on a reader’s understanding.

Comments on general news sites are a waste of the readers’ (and arguably writers’) time. I wonder how much further this trend will go.

Apple trial continues, without a plaintiff for now >> Associated Press

U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers scolded Marianna Rosen and her attorneys on Monday for not providing more complete information about the iPods Rosen had purchased. That came after Apple lawyers successfully argued that the devices purchased by Rosen were not among those affected by the lawsuit.

But the judge also rejected Apple’s argument that the case should be dismissed because it’s too late to name a new plaintiff. She ordered the attorneys suing Apple to identify a new person, by Tuesday, who can serve as a lead plaintiff.

Both sides estimate about 8 million people bought iPods that are potentially affected by the lawsuit, which focuses on Apple’s use of restrictive software that prevented iPods from playing music purchased from competitors of Apple’s iTunes store. The plaintiffs say that amounted to unfair competition and that Apple was able to sell iPods at inflated prices because the software froze makers of competing devices out of the market.

Apple is carving out entirely new areas of law. There was the antitrust case where it had the minority share (in ebooks), and now a class action (also with antitrust implications) where none of the plaintiffs shows up. Presumably a suitable plaintiff will have to show that they bought music from Real and that it was deleted… but that they then couldn’t reload it or play it on any device, or only on the iPods? Did Apple explicitly promise that they would be able to buy music bought from anywhere on it? (I don’t think so.) The limits of this case aren’t clear.

Robots, not humans, fake 23% of web video ad views, study finds >> Bloomberg

Computers being remotely operated by hackers account for almost one in four views of digital video ads worldwide, according to a study that estimates such fraud will cost advertisers $6.3bn next year.

The fake views, which also account for 11% of other display ads, often take place in the middle of the night when the owners of the hijacked computers are asleep.

The result is retailers, automakers and other companies paying for web advertisements that are never seen by humans, or are seen by fewer people than they are paying for, according to the report released today by the Association of National Advertisers, whose members include Wal-Mart Stores, Ford Motor Co. and Wendy’s.

“We’re being robbed,” said Bob Liodice, president and chief executive officer of the New York-based association, which has 640 members that spend more than $250bn a year in advertising. “This isn’t about system inefficiencies or process sloppiness. This is about criminal activity.”

Between this and Google’s announcement that half of all online ads aren’t actually viewed, a lot of the basis for the online advertising business begins to look a bit shaky.

China’s polluted soil is tainting the country’s food supply >> Businessweek

A new study from the China National Environmental Monitoring Center examines the results of nearly 5,000 soil samples from vegetable plots across China. Roughly a quarter of the sampled areas were polluted. The most common problem is high soil concentrations of heavy metals—such as cadmium, lead, and zinc—which leach out from open mines and industrial sites and into surrounding farmland.

Plants grown in tainted soil can absorb heavy metals. People who ingest high levels of heavy metals over an extended time can develop organ damage and weakened bones, among other medical conditions.