Tag Archives: kindle

Start up: trouble with bots, big data’s fable, Google and the White House, beware iCloud phishers, and more

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Google search for various speech-related commands
“Call mom” has overtaken “call home” in Google search – probably voice commands. Dad still lingers a way behind.

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A selection of 11 links for you. Well, it is Monday. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How big data creates false confidence » Nautilus

Jesse Dunietz:

»If I claimed that Americans have gotten more self-centered lately, you might just chalk me up as a curmudgeon, prone to good-ol’-days whining. But what if I said I could back that claim up by analyzing 150 billion words of text? A few decades ago, evidence on such a scale was a pipe dream. Today, though, 150 billion data points is practically passé. A feverish push for “big data” analysis has swept through biology, linguistics, finance, and every field in between.

Although no one can quite agree how to define it, the general idea is to find datasets so enormous that they can reveal patterns invisible to conventional inquiry. The data are often generated by millions of real-world user actions, such as tweets or credit-card purchases, and they can take thousands of computers to collect, store, and analyze. To many companies and researchers, though, the investment is worth it because the patterns can unlock information about anything from genetic disorders to tomorrow’s stock prices.

But there’s a problem: It’s tempting to think that with such an incredible volume of data behind them, studies relying on big data couldn’t be wrong. But the bigness of the data can imbue the results with a false sense of certainty. Many of them are probably bogus — and the reasons why should give us pause about any research that blindly trusts big data.

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Google’s remarkably close relationship with the Obama White House, in two charts » The Intercept

David Dayen:

»[Mikey] Dickerson led the U.S. Digital Service, a new agency whose mission was to fix other technology problems in the federal government. Ex-Google staffers were prevalent there as well. Dickerson attended nine White House meetings with Google personnel while working for the government between 2013 and 2014.

Meetings between Google and the White House, viewed in this context, sometimes function like calls to the IT Help Desk. Only instead of working for the same company, the government is supposed to be regulating Google as a private business, not continually asking it for favors.

Much of this collaboration could be considered public-minded — it’s hard to argue with the idea that the government should seek outside technical help when it requires it. And there’s no evidence of a quid pro quo. But this arrangement doesn’t have to result in outright corruption to be troubling.

The obvious question that arises is: Can government do its job with respect to regulating Google in the public interest if it owes the company such a debt of gratitude?

Google doesn’t think its activities present an antitrust problem. It doesn’t feel constrained from holding incredible amounts of data. But should Google be in a position to make that determination itself? How much influence is too much influence?

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It’s a very, very comprehensive look at how close Google is to the White House. Would it be any different under Clinton?
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SMS phishing attackers continue to pursue Apple users » WeLiveSecurity

Graham Cluley:

»A week ago I reported on my personal blog how criminals were spamming out SMS messages that claimed to come from Apple, but were actually designed to steal personal information for the purposes of identity theft.

The messages all used a cunning piece of social engineering – posing as a notice from Apple that their Apple ID was due to expire that very day – to get unsuspecting users to click on a link to a phishing website.

The SMS messages were even more convincing because they referred to recipients by name, most likely fooling some into believing that there was a genuine reason to act upon the alert and visit the site pointed to by the criminals.

Although the site the criminals were initially using – appleexpired.co.uk – was quickly blocked by the major web browsers and taken down, that didn’t take the wind out of the criminals’s sails.

In the days since it has become clear that the identity thieves have registered a series of other domains – all claiming to be related to Apple or Apple ID. Examples have included icloudauth.co.uk, mobileicloud.uk, and icloudmobile.co.uk.

«

There was a big run of these over the weekend; my wife received two, which used her name. They do come via SMS; it seems that once someone’s address book is hacked, messages are then sent out to people in the address book. Standard phishing attack, jumping from one victim to the potential next.

Apple needs to be proactive and set up a way for people to forward these to its security team. And make two-factor authentication easier to implement. (Too late for those who have been hit.)
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Microsoft Android patent-licensing revenue falling » Business Insider

Matt Rosoff:

»Microsoft missed earnings expectations by a couple of cents per share on Thursday afternoon because of an unexpected tax adjustment that skimmed $0.04 off its earnings per share.

In the release, Microsoft noted that its patent-licensing revenue was down 26% from a year ago. And it’s because of Android.

Android phones are still selling just fine, but the market is dominated by cheap handsets being sold in developing countries like China and India.

“The mix of devices in that market has shifted to the low end,” said Chris Suh, Microsoft’s head of investor relations.

Microsoft’s cut is also sinking. Suh also noted that not every Android manufacturer has a licensing deal with Microsoft. He didn’t name names, but Chinese phone makers typically take a very loose approach toward licensing American intellectual property, and as those inexpensive phones take over the world, Microsoft doesn’t benefit as much.

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Well, OK, but there may be another part to the drop. Read on..
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April 2015: Microsoft reportedly cutting patent fees in exchange for pre-installed apps » AndroidAuthority

Rob Triggs, in April 2015:

»Last month, Microsoft announced a global partnership with Samsung and other hardware manufacturers to bring its mobile productivity services, such as its Office suite, to consumers and business users. But there may be more to it than simply offering customers compelling services, DigiTimes Research suggests that Microsoft is tempting Android manufacturers to pre-install its software in exchange for discounts on its licensing fees.

Android hardware manufacturers have all signed a patent licensing agreement with Microsoft for various essential technologies developed by the company. However, according to findings from Taiwan’s and China’s smartphone/tablet upstream supply chain, Microsoft is offering discounts to those who pre-install Office programs such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, as well as OneDrive and Skype onto their Android devices. So far, 11 hardware partners are signed up to the deal.

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As search changes, Google changes » Search Engine Land

Adam Dorfman:

»Recently, a company known as MindMeld, which provides voice search technologies, surveyed US smartphone users and found that 60% had started using voice search within the past year. You can also see a rise in search queries that are clearly voice commands when you look at Google Trends for phrases such as “call mom,” which are highly unlikely to be typed into a search box.

Voice search is no longer coming. It’s here.

These changes do not bode well for Google’s traditional revenue model, which relies on serving up ads while you search on Google.com. The user interface of talking to your mobile phone or wearable device to order a pizza does not leave any room for a paid search ad. So it’s not surprising that display advertising spend is overtaking search ad spend, and the gap between the two will widen over the next few years.

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But, as Dorfman points out, Google is adapting. That graph of “call mom” is definitely one which would merit playing around with using a few other search terms. Here’s “Call home” against “call Mom” against “call Dad” and “call John” and “call Mary” (also at top of page).
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Amazon unintentionally paying scammers to hand you 1000 pages of crap you don’t read » Consumerist

Kate Cox on a scam related to Kindle Unlimited:

»if you read 75 pages on your Kindle today, then turn the WiFi on and sync it, Amazon will mark you at page 75. If you never pick up the book again, that’s your furthest synced point. If it’s a 300 page book and you finish it, page 300 is your furthest synced point.

But e-books don’t have to be linear. You might, for example, open up a new Kindle book and find it has a link on the first page, to take you to a later chapter or a table of contents or another language. Tapping that link could put you hundreds of pages into the book — which means that the author of that file is now making money off you, even if you haven’t read a word… or even if there’s not a single real word there to be read.

And that is exactly what’s happening. Scammers are basically uploading “books” that are nothing but files full of nonsense with some link on page 1 that puts readers on page 300 or 3000 (the maximum page length for which Amazon will pay out) almost instantly. In between there’s nothing but nonsense, but the scammer can use click farms to drive up the ranking of their book and so people download it anyway.

The user hasn’t paid for this book directly, because they have an unlimited subscription, so they just close the file, forget about it, and move on to the next. But if dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of readers get tricked into the same maneuver, that “author” has just made a decent amount of money for something like 15 minutes’ worth of total work.

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Bangladesh Bank exposed to hackers by cheap switches, no firewall: police » Reuters

Serajul Quadir:

»Bangladesh’s central bank was vulnerable to hackers because it did not have a firewall and used second-hand, $10 switches to network computers connected to the SWIFT global payment network, an investigator into one of the world’s biggest cyber heists said.

The shortcomings made it easier for hackers to break into the Bangladesh Bank system earlier this year and attempt to siphon off nearly $1 billion using the bank’s SWIFT credentials, said Mohammad Shah Alam, head of the Forensic Training Institute of the Bangladesh police’s criminal investigation department.

“It could be difficult to hack if there was a firewall,” Alam said in an interview.

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The Internet of Astonishingly Insecure Things.
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Bots won’t replace apps. Better apps will replace apps » Dan Grover

Grover points out the nonsense of people thinking AI-driven chatbots will take over from touch-and-choose visual interfaces:

»It shouldn’t require any detailed analysis, then, to point out the patent inanity of these other recent examples of bots and conversational UI proffered by companies on the vanguard of the trend:

This notion of a bot handling the above sorts of tasks is a curious kind of skeumorphism. In the same way that a contact book app (before the flat UI fashion began) may have presented contacts as little cards with drop shadows and ring holes to suggest a Rolodex, conversational UI, too, has applied an analog metaphor to a digital task and brought along details that, in this form, no longer serve any purpose. Things like the small pleasantries in the above exchange like “please” and “thank you”, to asking for various pizza-related choices sequentially and separately (rather than all at once). These vestiges of human conversation no longer provide utility (if anything, they impede the task). I am no more really holding a conversation than my contact book app really is a l’il Rolodex. At the end, a single call to some ordering interface will be made.

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Earlier Grover points out that the “quick and easy way to order pizza with your chatbot” takes 73 precise clicks (of virtual keys), whereas doing it through the visual menu interface on the Pizza Hut app takes 16 fat-fingered ones.

Case closed.
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Four fresh presentations, four key charts » Creative Strategies, Inc

Ben Bajarin looks at why people who have a PC aren’t upgrading, what people like about wearables, who wants virtual reality, and also whether people in India are interested in PCs:

»My gut told me there was an interesting opportunity brewing in India. I decided to commission a study, in collaboration with local researchers, to see if India was ready to move beyond the smartphone. We focused on the regions in India where PCs, smartphones, and tablets have the highest penetration — Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Chennai. We did a mix of online studies, focus groups, and 1:1 interviews of 525 Indian consumers in this market.

The theory was simple. As consumers in India mature and have owned more than a few smartphones, they will look to more traditional PC form factors to use for work, school, and more. But with Windows PC penetration in India at less than 10% of the total population and Windows largely being an enterprise/workplace requirement in India, our theory was Android would be more popular as an operating system. As it turns out, it was for the overwhelming majority of consumers looking to buy their first PC in India. Which is encouragingly high for a market that began their journey on the internet on a smartphone.

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Microsoft, Google end regulatory disputes » WSJ

Stephen Fidler and Sam Schechner:

»According to a person familiar with the matter, the two companies have agreed to talk to each other first in the future before taking any problems to regulators.

The change reflects the shift in approach that followed Microsoft’s 2014 appointment of Satya Nadella as its new chief executive. Mr. Nadella has taken a less combative stance than his predecessor Steve Ballmer, according to a person familiar with the matter.

“The relationship between the two companies has changed,” the person said, adding that “Nadella has made most of the difference.”

Microsoft’s business priorities also have changed, among other things, with the growth of cloud computing.

The relationship between the two companies began publicly to thaw last year as they worked together to settle their long-running patent war involving roughly 20 pending lawsuits, said a person close to Google.

Microsoft also resigned from FairSearch, a group of digital companies—including Nokia Corp. and Oracle Corp.—that are prominent Google complainants. In addition, the software maker has discouraged ICOMP, another lobby group of which it was a member, from pursuing Google.

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Wow. Going to be interesting to see whether Icomp and Fairsearch can continue without funding from Microsoft.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Start up: evaluating ebooks, EU’s tax quiz, no more Here on Windows, two cameras on iPhone 7?, and more

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Hey, what if you put them in the back? Wouldn’t that get readership up? Photo by San Antonio Food Bank on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Moneyball for book publishers, for a detailed look at how we read » The New York Times

Alexandra Alter and Karl Russell:

»Andrew Rhomberg wants to be the Billy Beane of the book world.

Mr. Beane used analytics to transform baseball, famously recounted in “Moneyball,” a book by Michael Lewis. Now Mr. Rhomberg wants to use data about people’s reading habits to radically reshape how publishers acquire, edit and market books.

“We still know almost nothing about readers, especially in trade publishing,” said Mr. Rhomberg, the founder of Jellybooks, a reader analytics company based in London.

While e-books retailers like Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble can collect troves of data on their customers’ reading behavior, publishers and writers are still in the dark about what actually happens when readers pick up a book. Do most people devour it in a single sitting, or do half of readers give up after Chapter 2? Are women over 50 more likely to finish the book than young men? Which passages do they highlight, and which do they skip?

Mr. Rhomberg’s company is offering publishers the tantalizing prospect of peering over readers’ shoulders. Jellybooks tracks reading behavior the same way Netflix knows what shows you binge-watch and Spotify knows what songs you skip…

…On average, fewer than half of the books tested were finished by a majority of readers. Most readers typically give up on a book in the early chapters. Women tend to quit after 50 to 100 pages, men after 30 to 50. Only 5% of the books Jellybooks tested were completed by more than 75% of readers. Sixty percent of books fell into a range where 25% to 50% of test readers finished them. Business books have surprisingly low completion rates.

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Amazon comments on “table of contents” crackdown, inadvertently confirms Kindle Unlimited page count scam » The Digital Reader

Nate Hoffelder:

»As David Gaughran explained, and as was laid out in detail over on KBoards, scammers were using tricks “such as adding unnecessary or confusing hyperlinks, misplacing the TOC, or adding distracting content” to artificially  inflate the number of pages read by Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

This statistic matters because in July of last year Amazon started paying authors and publishers with ebooks in Kindle Unlimited by the number of pages read, rather than the number of times an ebook is borrowed. This was generally viewed as a response to authors who were cheating the system by uploading really short works and getting paid each time one was borrowed, and it was supposed to level the playing field by making sure that longer works are valued the same as a short story.

That’s the way things were supposed to work, but alas, the scammers are smarter than that.

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They always are.
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Apple, McDonald’s, Google and IKEA to face EU lawmakers over tax deals » Reuters

Foo Yun Chee:

»Apple, Google, McDonald’s and IKEA will be asked about their European tax deals on Wednesday as EU lawmakers ratchet up the pressure on multinationals to pay more tax on their profits locally.

The hearing, organized by the European Parliament’s tax committee, follows a similar event in November last year when Anheuser-Busch InBev, HSBC, Google and eight other companies were quizzed on the same subject.

While the committee has no power to order changes, the hearing reflects the political concerns over multinationals avoiding local tax liabilities.

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Schell: Nintendo probably working on VR gaming device » GamesIndustry.biz

James Brightman:

»Here’s a quick overview of [Carnegie Mellon professor and game designer Jesse Schell’s] predictions:

1. This isn’t some fad, it’s going to stay. VR headsets in the market permanently starting this year.

2. By the end of 2017, 8m gamer headsets (meaning console/PC) will be sold. Schell adds it up as follows: 4m PlayStation VR headsets, 3m Oculus Rifts, and 1m Vives.

3. Schell said that “it’s like all of us have entered into a great conspiracy to bore gamers to death” and they are ready to buy new stuff. In general, there will be four mobile headsets for each gamer headset, he said.

4. Headset sales are going to double each year until saturation is reached, so by 2022 there will be 512m gamer headsets and 2bn mobile VR headsets.

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Note that the HTC Vive won’t be setting the world on fire. And some people think that those are ambitious forecasts.
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Here Maps drops support for Windows Phone and Windows 10 » The Verge

Tom Warren:

»[Nokia-owned] Here is announcing today that it plans to pull its mapping apps for Windows 10 on March 29th, and “will limit the development of the apps for Windows Phone 8 to critical bug fixes.” If you own one of the latest Lumia 950 handsets then Here maps will stop working after June 30th. If you’re still on a Windows Phone 8.1 device then Here maps will keep working, unless you upgrade to Windows 10 Mobile once it’s available in the coming weeks.

“We made the Here apps compatible with Windows 10 by using a workaround that will no longer be effective after June 30, 2016,” explains Here spokesperson Pino Bonetti. “To continue offering the HERE apps for Windows 10 would require us to redevelop the apps from the ground up, a scenario that led to the business decision to remove our apps from the Windows 10 store.”

Here is the latest in a line of high-profile apps that have started disappearing from Microsoft’s Windows Phone store. American Airlines, Chase Bank, Bank of America, NBC, Pinterest, and Kabam have all discontinued their Windows Phone apps in the past year. These huge apps have simply disappeared or will no longer be updated.

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I remember when people were telling me here that Windows 10’s compatibility mode would solve everything in mobile, especially the app gap.
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Explaining the struggles of Apple Pay and mobile payments » Tech-Thoughts

Sameer Singh:

»From the perspective of mainstream consumers, mobile payments are no more “mobile” than a credit card or cash. Security and privacy have never been a draw except for a vocal minority. The only benefit left is transaction processing time or “convenience”. Last year, most early adopters (and some analysts) argued that mobile payments were so much more convenient than existing payment solutions that it was only a matter of time until adoption exploded. Except, it hasn’t. And the longer you think about it, the more superficial this “convenience” argument seems.

If a “normal” iPhone user has to make a trip to the closest big box retailer, say Walmart, would Apple Pay improve his experience? Does saving ten seconds at the checkout counter matter when he has to wait ten minutes for his groceries to be scanned and bagged anyway? Even if the wait is a few minutes for other types of in-store purchases, the added convenience is minimal. At the very least, it isn’t enough of an experience boost to change the deeply-ingrained habit of pulling out a credit card. Now, if the credit card itself could save a few seconds, it would be actively utilized. And that’s a selling point for contactless payments, not for mobile payments.

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True, but that’s only applicable in the US (where the survey comes from), where amazingly insecure but fast-to-use credit cards have been in use for decades; in Europe chip-and-PIN has been in use for much longer. Singh points out that in-app purchases are a better use, but I’d love to know how much Apple Pay is used for travel in London, where it’s accepted on the underground.
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Egypt’s dirty wheat problem » Reuters

Eric Knecht, with an excellent investigation:

»President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has made ending corruption – including graft in the wheat industry – one of his government’s priorities. In 2014, his government rolled out a system of smart cards designed to stop unscrupulous bakeries selling government-subsidised flour on the black market.

Cairo says the system has been a big success, saving millions of dollars in bread subsidies, reducing imports, and ending shortages that once prompted long queues outside bakeries across the country. Supplies Minister Khaled Hanafi told Egyptian reporters in late 2014 that roughly 50 percent of the country’s flour supply was stolen. In December last year he told Reuters that the new system had saved more than 6 billion Egyptian pounds ($766 million) worth of flour.

But industry officials, traders and bakers say those reforms have failed – and even made abuse of the system worse.

Eight sources in the wheat industry said the smart card system could be hacked, allowing some bakers to falsify receipts and request far more subsidised flour than they officially sold. Instead of reducing the amount of flour the state paid for, the critics said, the smart card system actually increased it. That triggered a wave of fraud higher up the supply chain that the sources say cost the country hundreds of millions of dollars last year.

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Bread (or the lack of it) was one of the principal causes of the Arab spring, in Egypt and elsewhere. So this matters.
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Google faces challenges in encrypting Android phones » WSJ

Jack Nicas:

»“There is a push and pull with what Google wants to mandate and what the [manufacturers] are going to do,” said Andrew Blaich, lead security analyst at Bluebox Security Inc., which helps secure mobile apps. In some ways, Google is “at the mercy of the larger (manufacturers) like Samsung and LG that are driving the ecosystem.”

When phones aren’t encrypted, law enforcement can more easily view their contents. Authorities use specialized software to crack passcodes on locked—but unencrypted—Android devices in about an hour, said an investigator for France’s Gendarmerie Nationale.

The Manhattan district attorney said in November that investigators can bypass passcodes on some older Android devices, while Google can remotely reset passcodes on others. His office said encryption “will make it impossible for Google to…assist with device data extraction.”

Google said it complied with 63% of 65,500 government requests for user data in the 12 months ending in June 2015.

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Apple iPhone 7 Plus dual camera module leak suggests advanced AR and 3D scanning capabilities » Pocket-lint

Luke Edwards:

»Sources of Pocket Now based in Taiwan have leaked the dual-lens camera module that they claim will appear in the iPhone 7 Plus. There is no word on it being in the standard iPhone 7 though. The source claims that the camera will be a first for the way it works.
The dual-camera will shoot one 12-megapixel standard focal length photo while the other lens will shoot a 12-megapixel shot in telephoto with up to three times zoom. That helps to explain the varying lens sizes shown in the module.

Apple recently bought Israeli start-up LinX which specialises in gathering camera depth information. This can allow for tricks like removing the subject from the background by gauging depth. It could conceivably also allow the phone the ability to scan real world objects into a virtual representation, or help to offer better depth for augmented reality applications.

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Set a baseline, build on it. Suggests built-in VR/AR capabilities would be about three years out.
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Radio Times: 6,000 readers’ views on BBC ignored by government » The Guardian

John Plunkett:

»The government has rebuffed a request to reopen its consultation into the future of the BBC after the Radio Times claimed 6,000 of its readers’ responses had been ignored.

The magazine said the government had never asked for the password to open an encrypted memory stick on which the responses were sent.

The culture secretary, John Whittingdale, said earlier this month that “every response we received matters. Every response we received has been read”, but the Radio Times said it had “serious concerns” that the “important voice” of its readers on the future of the BBC had been ignored.

Radio Times editor Ben Preston, writing under the headline “A broken promise”, in the new issue of the Radio Times published on Tuesday, said: “Is this shameful mess the result of a conspiracy or a cock-up? Or both?”

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A very neat way to expose lying by the government. But this sort of action by Whittingdale’s dogma-crazed team is exactly what leads to people first becoming indifferent to politicians (“it won’t make any difference”), and then angry when it’s about something that does affect them. And then you get Donald Trump. (Don’t think the anger exposed by Trump will go away if he doesn’t win. It will continue boiling underneath.)

That’s why Whittingdale should apologise, admit the error, and read the submissions. He should also have a TV tuned to any of the main American networks on in a corner of his office, so he discovers what life without the BBC, and with a million adverts per hour, is like.
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The snooper’s charter is flying through parliament. Don’t think it’s irrelevant to you » The Guardian

Scarlet Kim:

»Should the British bill pass in its current form, the UK government will have the power to force Apple and other technology companies to undermine the security of their products and services. The bill permits the agencies to hack – the government calls this “equipment interference” – to obtain “communications” or “any other information”, including through surveillance techniques, such as remotely “monitoring, observing or listening to a person’s communications or other activities”.

The bill authorises agencies to compel “telecommunications providers” to assist them in effecting a hacking warrant, unless “not reasonably practicable”. Apple has pointed out that the term “telecommunications provider” is so broadly defined as to expand the government’s “reach beyond UK borders to … any service provider with a connection to UK customers”. Apple and other technology companies have spoken against many provisions of the investigatory powers bill. In particular, they have noted that the bill “seems to threaten to extend responsibility for hacking from government to the private sector” and rejected “any proposals that would require companies to deliberately weaken the security of their products”.

«

And yet it is just barrelling through Parliament, without any reflection. The result is obvious – Apple will build a phone that even it cannot hack. (Software updates are something the user has to agree to.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: Google to merge Android and ChromeOS, tablets dwindle, online ad scams, and more

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E-reader ownership has dropped significantly in the US. Photo by Simply Bike on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Alphabet’s Google to fold Chrome OS into Android » WSJ

Great exclusive by Alistair Barr:

Alphabet Inc.’s Google plans to fold its Chrome operating system for personal computers into its Android mobile-operating system, according to people familiar with the matter, a sign of the growing dominance of mobile computing.

Google engineers have been working for roughly two years to combine the operating systems and have made progress recently, two of the people said. The company plans to unveil its new, single operating system in 2017, but expects to show off an early version next year, one of the people said.

Also says that Chromebooks will be renamed, but Chrome the browser will retain its name. So this would leave Apple, with the iOS-OSX split, as the only one with separate OSs. It seems Android will get primacy on the desktop. What, though, does that mean for Chromebooks and the progress they’re making in the education market?
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Tablet shipments decline by 12.6% in the third quarter as many vendors get serious about moving from slate offerings to detachables » IDC

At the close of 2014, IDC estimated the installed base of tablets to be 581.9m globally, which was up 36% from 2013 but slowing quickly. With mature markets like North America, Western Europe, and Asia/Pacific well past 100m active tablets per region, the opportunities for growth are getting fewer. 

“We continue to get feedback that tablet users are holding onto devices upwards of four years,” said Ryan Reith, Program Director with IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Device Trackers. “We believe the traditional slate tablet has a place in the personal computing world. However, as the smartphone installed base continues to grow and the devices get bigger and more capable, the need for smaller form factor slate tablets becomes less clear. With shipment volumes slowing over four consecutive quarters, the market appears to be in transition.”

In response to these challenges, the industry is seeing growing interest from vendors in new form factors, with detachable tablets becoming a clear focus for many. While detachable tablets have held just a single digit percentage of the overall tablet market, IDC expects this share to increase dramatically over the next 18 months. However, the shift toward detachables presents some new challenges. In particular, the mix of traditional PC OEMs that are evolving their portfolios to include detachables will face pressure from the traditional smartphone OEMs, many of which have become accustomed to delivering extremely low-cost products.

Apple is kinda-sorta doing the detachable thing with the iPad Pro, but the detachables market really looks like one where Windows devices are best placed. So will IDC start calling them PCs or tablets?
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The online ad scams every marketer should watch out for » Harvard Business Review

Ben Edelman has a collection of subtle and less subtle ways that you could spend far too much. This is the first, and in some ways the most obvious:

A first manifestation of the problem arises in sponsored search. Suppose a user goes to Google and searches for eBay. Historically, the top-most link to eBay would be a paid advertisement, requiring eBay to pay Google each time the ad was clicked. These eBay ads had excellent measured performance in that many users clicked such an ad, then went on to bid or buy with high probability. But step back a bit. A user has already searched for “eBay.” That user is likely to buy from eBay whether or not eBay advertises with Google. In a remarkable experiment, economist Steve Tadelis and coauthors turned off eBay’s trademark-triggered advertising in about half the cities in the U.S. They found that sales in those regions stayed the same even as eBay’s advertising expenditure dropped. eBay’s measure of ad effectiveness was totally off-base and had led to millions of dollars of overspending.

Others include retargeted display ads, affiliate cookies and adware.
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Microsoft Band 2 review: An identity crisis on your wrist » The Verge

Tom Warren Lauren Goode:

after wearing the newest version of Microsoft Band for the past three weeks, I can’t help but think that the real answer [to why Microsoft made it at all] is that Microsoft isn’t in it for the hardware. Instead, my best guess is that it hopes to get people using the Microsoft Health software — and maybe get some other hardware makers to make stuff for its platform. Despite welcome improvements over last year’s Microsoft Band, this new Band sort of baffles me.

It’s been redesigned, but is only slightly less clunky than before. It’s a fitness tracker, but with the short battery life of a smartwatch. It works with surprisingly great software, but good luck syncing your data to said software. On top of that, it’s more expensive than last year’s Microsoft Band — $249, up from $199 — and more expensive than a lot of other step-counters. The argument there is that it’s not as costly as a smartwatch or a high-powered dedicated fitness watch, but considering that at this point it could be perceived as an also-ran, you’d think Microsoft would aim for a more appealing price point.

It all leaves me wanting to like the Microsoft Band, but I can’t say I’d spend $249 on it.

So pricey, clunky, battery life comparable to things that do more.. what’s not to love?
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US smartwatch market not ready for prime time yet » Kantar Worldpanel

Smartwatches have been on the market for several years. The Pebble Smartwatch debuted in 2012, establishing the category as it is known today. Yet, only 1% of the current smartwatches now in use in the U.S. were purchased in 2013, and 14% were bought in 2014.

Smartwatch ownership follows the classic early adopter profile – more than two-thirds of smartwatch early adopters are male, and one out of three are between the ages of 25 and 34. Vendors like Apple use greater attention to design and personalization to appeal to non-tech lovers. The results of those efforts have not yet completely materialized.

“Looking at where smartwatches have been purchased, the channels preferred by buyers have more in common with other consumer electronics goods than with jewelry,” said Carolina Milanesi, chief of research at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech. “33% of smartwatch buyers got them online, 17% bought them from a consumer electronics store, and 11% of owners received their smartwatch as a gift.”

Survey conducted in August, but the principal complaint among non-buyers was price. Meanwhile, 92% of those intending to purchase associate Apple with the category. Thin times for Android Wear.
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U.K. government: no end-to-end encryption please, we’re British… » TechCrunch

Speaking during a debate on encryption in the House of Lords yesterday, Baroness Shields, the Minister for Internet Safety and Security — and a former European VP at Facebook — dubbed the rise of end-to-end encryption as “alarming”.

“There is an alarming movement towards end-to-end encrypted applications,” she said. “It is absolutely essential that these companies which understand and build those stacks of technology are able to decrypt that information and provide it to law enforcement in extremis.”

Shields’ comments came in response to a question which made direct reference to the use of messaging app WhatsApp by ISIL extremists.

“The Prime Minister did not advocate banning encryption; he expressed concern that many companies are building end-to-end encrypted applications and services and not retaining the keys,” added Shields.

Despite reiterating Tory attacks on end-to-end encryption, Shields did specify that it is not, in fact, government policy to push for the creation of backdoors in services.

Joanna Shields used to be in charge at AOL Europe too. And we wanted more people with experience of tech to be in government? Doesn’t seem to be making any difference to the general level of knowledgeability.
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Line app in big trouble as active user growth stalls » Tech In Asia

Steven Millward:

The company behind Line this morning revealed that the messaging app has grown to 212 million monthly active users (MAUs). Of those, 65% are in Line’s four core markets – Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia.

Although the number is going up, it’s actually terrible news for the messaging app. It’s already failed to topple the dominance of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, and now Line’s MAU count is growing very slowly – it’s up just 10 million in the past six months. It went up only one million in the three months from June to September.

WhatsApp added 100 million MAUs in the five months from April to September and now stands at 900 million.

Twitter has a similar problem in the US. Is growth the only answer for messaging apps?
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Android and the Innovator’s Dilemma » Tech.pinions

Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies:

Once the market embraces good enough products, the innovator can no longer push premium innovations as their value is diminished once a good enough mentality sets in. Android devices in the $200-$400 range are good enough for the masses leaving Samsung’s $600 devices and above stranded on an island.

One of the most interesting observations about all of this is the innovator’s Dilemma was supposed to impact Apple. This was a fundamental tenet of most bull cases. When the market for smartphones became filled with good enough devices at very low prices, why would anyone buy an iPhone? Yet this is impacting Samsung exactly according to the guidebook — but not Apple. The fundamental lesson to learn here is the innovator’s dilemma, in this case, only applies to Android land because all the hardware OEMs run the same operating system. As I’m fond of saying, when you ship the same operating system as your competition you are only as good as their lowest price. This is the curse of the modular business model.

This is also why Samsung had hopes for Tizen. They actually knew this was coming. I know this because I discussed it with them in 2013 and was convinced they understood this was their fate if they continued to sell out to Android. Unfortunately, Android was their only option given its momentum. I’ll make a prediction. Samsung will be out of the smartphone business within five years.

Emphasis there Bajarin’s own (and that’s a pretty notable prediction). The article is subscriber-only; you can get one-off logins for particular articles or buy a subscription for more.
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American demographics of digital device ownership » Pew Research Center

Smartphones owned by 68% (notably less in rural areas), tablets owned by 45% (statistically unchanged from 42% in 2014), games consoles owned by 40% (unchanged since 2010), portable games consoles by 14% (unchanged from 2009), 40% have MP3 players (barely changed from 43% in 2013).

Here’s the drama:

Some 19% of adults report owning an e-reader – a handheld device such as a Kindle or Nook primarily used for reading e-books. This is a sizable drop from early 2014, when 32% of adults owned this type of device. Ownership of e-readers is somewhat more common among women (22%) than men (15%).

The Kindle is flickering out.
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Flipboard, once-hot news reader app, flounders amid competition » WSJ

Douglas Macmillan:

Flipboard, once hailed as the best iPad app by Apple Inc., now is fighting for survival in a sea of competition that includes Apple itself.

In recent weeks, the news reader app’s co-founder, Evan Doll, and its chief technology officer, Eric Feng, have left, adding to the talent drain in the past year that includes the heads of finance, product and revenue.

The exodus comes as Flipboard’s investors, which bet $210 million on the company, have put more pressure on co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Mike McCue to revive the business model or find a buyer, according to people familiar with the matter.

What’s Flipboard’s USP? It says that it has 80m users, up from 41m at the start of the year. That’s impressive – but Apple News is likely to eat it by default.
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BBC iPlayer app coming to Apple TV ‘in coming months’ » BBC News

Leo Kelion:

The BBC has confirmed that its iPlayer service is coming to the new Apple TV.

The catch-up app is not ready to launch alongside the revamped set top box when it goes on sale this week, but the broadcaster signalled it would be soon.

iPlayer was absent on earlier Apple TVs, despite the fact it is on other platforms including Amazon’s Fire TV, Roku, Google Chromecast, Sky’s Now TV box and several video game consoles.

One analyst said the move should aid sales of the new kit in the UK.

“Available on over 10,000 devices, BBC iPlayer is one of the biggest and best on-demand video services in the world, and has transformed how UK audiences watch programmes online,” said the BBC’s director-general Tony Hall.

The BBC wasn’t going to, but then two developers in Bournemouth demonstrated that it was damn easy to write the app. For non-UK readers, the BBC iPlayer is the biggest source of legitimate streaming TV viewing (live or catchup) in the UK; the lack of an iPlayer icon on the old Apple TV hobbled it terribly. (Yes yes Airplay but that ties up your device.)
link to this extract

Start up: Facebook’s dwindling teens, Safe Harbour or balkanisation?, the privacy tsunami, and more

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No, really, no difference. Move along there and find another story. Photo by Bob Jouy on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Soluble in alcohol. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook is big, but big networks can fall » Bloomberg View

Megan McArdle:

Looking at the most recent Pew study on Internet usage among young people,  I see that 71% of teens use Facebook, with the median user having slightly less than 150 friends; 41% of them report that they use Facebook most often. But when I look at a similar Pew study from 2013, it looks to me as if 76 percent of teens were using Facebook, with a median number of 300 friends, and 81% of social media users reported that they used Facebook most often. If I were Facebook, those numbers would keep me awake at night – not because Facebook can’t survive with only 70% of the market, but because a network that is getting smaller and less valuable to its users is a network that is very vulnerable to disruption.

What’s actually astonishing is just how evanescent such strategic advantages have proven. Fifteen years ago, people worried that Microsoft’s network-effect advantages made it unstoppable; now it’s an also-ran in everything new-market except gaming consoles. The rotting corpses of old social media sites litter the landscape. And of course, finding a place to send Aunt Maisie that birthday telegram is getting darned hard.

She also makes a point about network effects: the thing about “all your photos are in Facebook” isn’t a network effect, but a switching cost – a quite different thing.
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Apple says battery performance of new iPhone’s A9 chips vary only 2-3% » TechCrunch

Matthew Panzarino:

In a statement to TechCrunch, Apple said that its own testing and data gathered from its customers after a few weeks with the device show that the actual battery life of both devices varies just 2-3%. That’s far, far too low to be noticeable in real-world usage.

With the Apple-designed A9 chip in your iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus, you are getting the most advanced smartphone chip in the world. Every chip we ship meets Apple’s highest standards for providing incredible performance and deliver great battery life, regardless of iPhone 6s capacity, color, or model.

Certain manufactured lab tests which run the processors with a continuous heavy workload until the battery depletes are not representative of real-world usage, since they spend an unrealistic amount of time at the highest CPU performance state. It’s a misleading way to measure real-world battery life. Our testing and customer data show the actual battery life of the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, even taking into account variable component differences, vary within just 2-3% of each other.

Though there have been a bunch of articles and videos about how much power one chip or the other uses, the tests have largely been what Apple calls ‘manufactured’. Basically, they are unrealistic machine-driven tests that do not and can not reflect real-world usage.

So this year’s iPhonegate lasted slightly less than 24 hours. Apple is even managing to balance supply and demand here too.
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EU Safe Harbour ruling a ‘nightmare’: Wikipedia founder » CNBC

Arjun Kharpal:

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, said the regulatory issues that could come with this might be a problem for some businesses.

“You want your data to be secure, you don’t really care or you shouldn’t have to care where it sits,” Wales told CNBC in an interview at IP EXPO Europe in London.

“If I’m in Europe I hope they are near me on a server in Europe, but other than that I want them to provide the best technical experience for me. And if they suddenly have all those requirements and have to keep certain pictures in certain places, it just sounds like a nightmare, so I like the idea of uniformity in the law so that we can all not worry about it.”

Wales added in a separate session with reporters that the ECJ ruling could lead to a “balkanized era where data has to be secure very specifically across many many different jurisdictions”.

Great point. So does this mean he’ll be lobbying the US to implement strong data protection rules that match those of Europe? I do hope so. I mean, that’s the best way to protect everyone’s interests, isn’t it, Mr Wales?
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Why is it so hard to convince people to care about privacy? » The Guardian

Cory Doctorow:

The only way to be sure you don’t leak data is to not collect or retain it, and Big Data’s hype and the cheapness of hard drives has turned every pipsqueak tech company into a Big Data packrat with a mountain of potentially toxic personal info on millions of people, all protected by a password that’s simple enough for a CEO to remember it.

Every week or two, from now on, will see new privacy disasters, each worse than the last. Every week or two, from now on, will see millions of people who suddenly wish there was more they could do to protect their privacy.

For privacy advocates in 2015, the job is clear: have a plan in your drawer. A plan: how to safeguard your privacy, how to understand your privacy, how to understand the breach. A plan that explains that your lack of security isn’t a fact of nature, it’s the result of conscious decisions made by people who were either hostile or indifferent to your wellbeing, who saved or made money through those decisions. A plan that shows you what you can do to keep you and yours safe – and whose head your should be demanding on a pike.

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Get AMP’d: Here’s what publishers need to know about Google’s new plan to speed up your website » Nieman Lab

Joshua Benton:

What’s it all mean for publishers?

As I said, AMP [Accelerated Mobile Pages] is full of terrific ideas. It really does speed up load times.

But that success comes with tradeoffs. For most publishers, you’re being asked to set up two parallel versions of your stories. (Unless you really think you won’t need to ever do anything outside what AMP allows on any page, which is unrealistic for most.) That takes significant time and resources. You’re being asked to set aside most or all of the ad tech and analytics that you use. You’re trading in open web standards for something built by Google engineers who, despite what I don’t doubt are the best of intentions, have incentives that don’t line up perfectly with yours. And you’re becoming an disempowered actor in a larger Silicon Valley battle over ad tech. (Google advocating something that blocks enormous slices of contemporary ad tech can’t be viewed in isolation from the fact Google is the dominant force in online advertising, and as interested as any company is in extending its power.)

And it’s yet another case of a technology company coming along to promise a better experience for users that takes one more bit of power away from publishers.

The fact that publishers’ interests aren’t exactly aligned with Google’s shouldn’t be overlooked. And Google’s interests aren’t aligned with third-party ad networks at all, except that they all want to serve up ads. (Meanwhile, iOS 9 content blockers still block ads on the AMP demo.)
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This is why Android Pay is asking you for a ‘Google Payments PIN’ when making purchases » Android Central

Andrew Martonik:

when you have a card from one of these supported banks (check the latest list from Google here) in Android Pay, it’s amazingly seamless to make payments. Just unlock your phone, tap the terminal and you just paid.

Confusingly, though, Android Pay actually lets you add unsupported cards to the app as well.

This is a hold over from the old days of Google Wallet, which had an entirely different system that worked without the cooperation of the banks. With Google Wallet, every time you made a transaction it actually made that purchase with a virtual prepaid debit card from “Bancorp Bank” and then that same amount was subsequently charged to your own bank. It was clunky, less secure and downright confusing to everyone involved — and the most annoying user-facing part of this system is the need for an extra PIN code to make a payment.

As Google Wallet hands the reigns over to Android Pay in this transition of mobile payments, this legacy system of using an unsupported card is actually still baked into Android Pay — though Google isn’t exactly promoting it as such. This is partially due to the fact that you can bring previously-used debit and credit cards from Google Wallet into Android Pay, and partially because Android Pay just doesn’t support that many banks yet — just 10 at the time of writing.

My first reaction was that this is a poor user experience; why make people who are new to Android Pay have to use a PIN? Then I realised that most Americans aren’t used to PINs for purchasing, and are just adjusting to chip-and-sign. So this might be faster. (The fact that you might have two cards, and one will require a PIN and one won’t, seems like bad design though.)
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Former Reuters journalist Matthew Keys found guilty of three counts of hacking » Motherboard

Sarah Jeong:

In 2010, Keys posted login credentials to the [his then former employer] Tribune Company content management system (CMS) to a chatroom run by Anonymous, resulting in the defacement of an LA Times article online. The defacement was reversed in 40 minutes, but the government argued the attack caused nearly a million dollars in damage…

…”This is not the crime of the century,” Segal said, adding that nonetheless Keys should not get away with his acts. At minimum, he may receive probation. Sentencing is scheduled for January 20, 2016.

Keys said he was disappointed with the verdict, and worried about the sentence affecting his ability to work. However, he also expressed his intention to appeal the conviction, and was optimistic it would be overturned.

Keys added that a few months after his first story about Anonymous, he was approached by the FBI, but Keys refused to allow them to scan his computer. He was indicted a couple of years later.

In order to be convicted under the CFAA, the damage had to exceed $5,000. The government claimed that Keys caused $929,977.00 worth of damage. During the trial, the defense tried to cast doubt on the total damages, claiming that the expenditures in response to the hack were not reasonable, and Tribune employees had grossly inflated the hours spent on incident response.

Lesson 1: change passwords ex-employees had access to. Lesson 2: don’t post passwords of companies that you used to work for on Anonymous chatboards.
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Will digital books ever replace print? » Aeon

Craig Mod used to read only ebooks (on Kindle) but now finds he has fallen out of love with it in favour of the physical form again:

Take for example the multistep process of opening a well-made physical edition. The Conference of the Birds (2009), designed by Farah Behbehani and published by Thames and Hudson, is a masterclass in welcoming the reader into the text.

The object – a dense, felled tree, wrapped in royal blue cloth – requires two hands to hold. The inner volume swooshes from its slipcase. And then the thing opens like some blessed walking path into intricate endpages, heavystock half-titles, and multi-page die-cuts, shepherding you towards the table of contents. Behbehani utilitises all the qualities of print to create a procession. By the time you arrive at chapter one, you are entranced.

Contrast this with opening a Kindle book – there is no procession, and often no cover. You are sometimes thrown into the first chapter, sometimes into the middle of the front matter. Wherein every step of opening The Conference of the Birds fills one with delight – delight at what one is seeing and what one anticipates to come – opening a Kindle book frustrates. Often, you have to swipe or tap back a dozen pages to be sure you haven’t missed anything.

Because the Kindle ecosystem makes buying books one-click effortless, it can be easy to forget about your purchases. Unfortunately, Kindle’s interface makes it difficult to keep tabs on those expanding digital libraries: at best, we can see a dozen titles at a time, all as inscrutably small book covers. Titles that fall off the first-page listing on a Kindle cease to exist. Compare that with standing in front of a physical bookshelf: the eye takes in hundreds of spines or covers at once, all equally at arm’s length. I’ve found that it’s much more effortless to dip back into my physical library – for inspiration or reference – than my digital library. The books are there. They’re obvious. They welcome me back.

The pile of unread books we have on our bedside tables is often referred to as a graveyard of good intentions. The list of unread books on our Kindles is more of a black hole of fleeting intentions.

The comparison of a bookshelf to the limited real estate on a screen is so important in many contexts: when we got into a supermarket or bookshop we can scan hundreds of items at once. How many on a screen when you don’t know what you’re searching for?
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Sony buys Belgian image sensor technology firm » Reuters

Ritsuko Ando:

Japan’s Sony Corp said it bought Belgian image sensor technology company Softkinetic Systems for an undisclosed sum, stepping up investment in an area that has become one of its strongest amid weak sales of its TVs and smartphones.

Softkinetic specializes in a type of technology that helps measure “time of flight”, or the time it takes for light to reflect off an object and return to an image sensor, Sony said.

Put like that, it sounds like “you’re measuring light round trips? Those are nanoseconds, right?”. Judging from the site, though, it’s more about location in 3D and general position sensing and mapping in domestic environments. So does this mean we’ll go to 3D photos next?
link to this extract

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Amazon: ever-growing behemoth, or topped out?

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An Amazon warehouse. Photo by hnnbz on Flickr

It’s the London Book Fair this week, and I was kindly invited to speak at its Digital Minds session on Monday. These are the slides that I created for the talk. (Plus the CC-licensed photo, as above.)

Obviously, for book publishers the terror over the past few years is that Amazon is going to eat up everything, laying waste to the old book-buying system and forcing down the prices they can ask while at the same time everyone dumps paper books in favour of Kindles.

For publishers, that looks like the worst kind of lock-in.

But I prefer a data-driven approach: look at the numbers, and the numbers in a broader context. Amazon provides pretty clear financial results (with useful breakdowns by geography and segment), and there are also useful datasets from book publishers about the size of the UK market. (I focussed on the UK market because that’s what was available, but if anyone wants to pay me to do a bigger study relating to other countries, get in touch :-))

Here’s the presentation:

A few words to add extra context (since I did actually talk too – this wasn’t just a mime show). The numbers relate to the slide number.

5) and 6) yeah, Amazon does sell beer, but my more general point is that these declines in numbers (of petrol filling stations and pubs open in the UK) are due to structural changes in society, not something Amazon has done. If you ascribe changes to the wrong cause, you’ll come up with the wrong solution to it.

7) Clearly, the decline in independent bookshops (overlaid onto the right-hand chart, showing the growth in book sales and ebook sales) predates ebooks – though not Amazon itself. This doesn’t look at concentration of the industry; I didn’t look at the simple number of books published. I think that has gone up, even excluding ebooks.

9) figures taken from Amazon’s results, and using a four-quarter moving average. The international media sales (red line) actually went negative in the most recent quarter, while US media sales (blue line) went to just 1%. “Media” covers everything from books to DVDs.

10) data from the Pew Research Center in the US, which does very robust studies. They haven’t found any growth in ereader ownership since January 2014. There’s a natural ceiling on ereader desire-to-buy.

11) Ereaders are popular with people who read a lot of books. The difference between the median and mean numbers here tell us this is a skewed population – those who read a lot really read a lot. They’re likely to have an ereader. But not everyone will get an ereader. The eager buyers have bought one.

13) See? New sales of Kindles have pretty much halted. Other more recent stories confirm this.

14) 30m Kindles sold in total is a lot – but compare that to total population in the US+Europe of about 500m. It’s not taking over the world.

15) 16) Amazon turns out not to be so great at making hardware that people want to buy.

17) Even in tablets, the rest of the market is growing, but the Kindle Fire HD isn’t doing much. Total about 30m sold (my calculation), also throughout US and Europe – but doubt there’s a lot of book reading going on with them; they’re for other media.

20) You may be able to think of another ebook that a “standard” publisher was able to turn into a bestselling book that was then made into a big film. (The Martian is being made into a film with Matt Damon. Looking forward to that.)

22) Amazon’s FCF (free cash flow) is a hot topic, at least in some quarters. The company shows very little profit, but its FCF is great. Isn’t it?

23) Well, the use of capital leases means that – rather as with the Labour government and PFI – the spending is all being pushed off the balance sheet and into a sort of future reckoning. Great as long as nobody worries about it; bad if Wall Street does worry about it.

24) you can just skip to this one if you want the conclusions.

Thanks for reading. I’m happy to come and give speeches at all sorts of events on topics like this.

Start up: YouTube’s war on loudness, American’s price fears, Sharp’s cost cuts, and more

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Loudness: YouTube’s getting rid of it. Photo by jonlclark on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Delight oozes from every pore. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Map: The strange things people Google in every state » The Washington Post

Ana Swanson:

What strange goods and services is your state researching on Google? Apparently California has been looking into the price of facelifts, tummy tucks, swimming pools and marriage licenses, while Oklahoma is curious about the cost of breast lifts, liposuction, gas and daycare, according to Fixr.com, a cost-estimating website.

Fixr created the map below with Google Autocomplete, typing “How much does * cost in Sacramento, California?” into Google for each state or state capital, and then marking down the most commonly searched-for good or service.

Fun. Also, scary.

Sharp to ax more than 10% of Japanese workforce: Nikkei » Reuters

Sharp Corp is cutting more than 10% of its Japanese workforce starting in April, according to a Nikkei report.

The embattled electronics manufacturer will slash about 3,000 jobs through voluntary retirements and expects to book about 30bn yen ($250m) in retirement-related expenses for 2015, the business daily said.

Sharp’s could also shed its North American television business as part of its plans to restructure operations in unprofitable businesses, the Nikkei said.

Embattled.

YouTube just put the final nail in the Loudness War’s coffin » Production Advice

Ian Shepherd:

What does this mean ?
It means that YouTube have been using loudness normalisation on their music videos – and they’ve been doing it since December last year. Everything plays at a similar loudness, regardless of how it was mastered. And no-one has noticed.

Hear it for yourself – this playlist is composed almost entirely of current releases, with a wide variety of loudness on CD – and some of them are REALLY loud:

So for example, at the more dynamic end of the spectrum, Mark Ronson & Bruno Mars’ massive hit ”Uptown Funk” measures -12 LUFS (DR 8 on the TT Meter) on CD. Whereas “Love Me Like You Do” by Ellie Goulding is squashed up to -8 LUFS (DR 5) on CD, and later in the playlist, Madonna’s “Living For Love” clocks in at an eye-watering (and heavily distorted) -7 LUFS (DR 4!)

But on YouTube, all of them are being played back at a similar loudness of roughly -13 LUFS.

What this means is that songs with greater dynamic range – from quiet to loud – will be able to stand out. And those which just crank the volume to 11 won’t.

Interesting too that as with app review, Google has quietly done this and made no noise about it.

Kindle Cover Disasters » Tumblr

Words can’t describe how great this is. Let’s see if an image will…

Nah, you have to see them collected together to get the full horror.

Unscrupulous website adverts again redirecting some users to App Store from Safari » 9to5Mac

Benjamin Mayo:

Website advertisement companies have found a way to circumvent the protections introduced in iOS 8 to stop users from being kicked to the App Store because of certain cleverly-coded JavaScript advertisements.

I am now experiencing this myself, and it makes browsing on the iPhone unusable. Browsing to websites such as Reddit and Reuters and others now automatically open the App Store. In many cases, there is no way for me to read the actual content on the pages. You can see this happen in this video.

The sites he has problems with – Reddit, Macstories, Venturebeat, and more – load OK on the iPhone I’m using, but after the page has loaded the “data” dial keeps spinning, which implies it’s trying to load something. Mayo might have something set up differently. And this is definitely a problem. It also affects Android users. The blame is clearly on unscrupulous advertisers.

When will Apple build a weightless laptop? Let 26 years’ data tell us » The Overspill

I looked at trends in the weights, volumes and densities of Apple laptops:

when you start adding in the data about various laptop launches, trying to focus on the ones which are 12in or 13in (so that the screen size, and hence weight, is comparable), you find a definite trend.

It’s this: if we were relying on straight-line trends, we’d have weightless MacBooks by 2017. Yes. Perhaps they’d be airtight and filled with helium? Why not?

(Does this make me a link farm? Hope not.)

Google Play finally surpasses iOS in mobile game sessions » Chartboost

In parallel with Android’s game session growth, CPIs (Cost Per Install) — which can be used an approximation for lifetime value (LTV) — have surged by 41% from February 2014 to February 2015.

As we all know, app installs have become a major business. And as mobile gaming continues to be the leading driver of mobile revenues, a shift of gaming sessions in Tier 1 markets could be an early indicator of Google Play approaching parity with the iOS App Store.

It’s not a huge surprise to our CEO and co-founder Maria Alegre who says that over the past year she’s noticed developers have been thinking about more than one platform when launching campaigns. “While iOS has typically been where game developers start with user acquisition, we see the window of exclusive focus on iOS shrinking,” she says.

Alegre believes 2015 will indeed be the year where Android becomes more relevant than iOS. Though iOS will continue to have higher unit economics, the differences between iOS ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) and Android ARPU are shrinking — while Android’s mobile game sessions are growing month over month. “That combination of higher traffic and smaller difference between ARPU will make Android overall a more attractive business opportunity,” she predicts.

The report covers North, South and Central America. Not surprising that Android total sessions would pass iOS, since once you add in south and central America, Android ownership hugely outnumbers iOS (most of which will be in the US and Canada). (The full country data – available through the report – shows some weird changes, such as huge increase in iOS gameplay in Spain and Finland. Go figure.)

The surprise is in the suggestion that Android ARPU in the Americas is approaching that of iOS, since you’d expect many of the new Android users to be non-premium. Either iOS ARPU is falling generally, or something odd is happening with Android premium.

Tumult Hype Professional » TumultCo


Jonathan Deutsch came to my notice through a fantastic, simple app called Hyperedit (which lets you write HTML/PHP/CSS code and see it directly rendered in an adjacent screen). Since then he’s been employed by Apple, and then left Apple, and now has Tumult Hype Pro, which uses HTML5 capabilities.

I wish I were capable enough to use this program to anything like its capabilities.

Start up: make like Apple?, Samsung sells off fibre optic, authors v Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s PR push and more

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Spring-making machine: photo by Mitch Altman, taken in Shenzhen, China, November 2014

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

No, you can’t manufacture that like Apple does >> Medium

What happened when Apple wanted to CNC machine a million MacBook bodies a year? They bought 10k CNC machines to do it. How about when they wanted to laser drill holes in MacBook Pros for the sleep light but only one company made a machine that could drill those 20 µm holes in aluminum? It bought the company that made the machines and took all the inventory. And that time when they needed batteries to fit into a tiny machined housing but no manufacturer was willing to make batteries so thin? Apple made their own battery cells. From scratch.

Pretty much no company, big or small, can afford to do these things. Yes, Apple has done a great job building many of these products and yes, consumers have come to love many of these difficult-to-manufacture features. But you are not Apple. So long as you’re providing value to your customers, taking the fit and finish of your product down a notch is okay. Especially for your first few production runs.

So what should you avoid? Here’s a few things that Apple often does that can cause problems for a startup.

The “white plastic” one in the list that follows is so obvious when you think about it, but non-obvious until it’s pointed out (or seen).

Samsung Electronics exits fibre optics amid sharper focus on reviving smartphones >> Reuters

Samsung Electronics agreed to sell its fibre optics operations to US specialty glass maker Corning Inc, exiting another non-core business to focus on shoring up underperforming key areas like smartphones.

Terms of the sale, including plants in China and South Korea, weren’t disclosed. Announced by both parties on Tuesday, the South Korean firm’s second exit from a business line this quarter comes as it braces for its lowest annual profit in three years, squeezed by stiff competition…

…The firm also said in October it will halt its light emitting diode lighting business outside of its home country, which was also considered a non-core business.

Best >> stratechery

Ben Thompson on disruption, and what Clayton Christensen’s theory lacks because it doesn’t include user experience as a factor:

That’s the thing though: the quality of a user experience has no ceiling. As nearly every other consumer industry has shown, as long as there is a clear delineation between the top-of-the-line and everything else, some segment of the user base will pay a premium for the best. That’s the key to Apple’s future: they don’t need completely new products every other year (or half-decade); they just need to keep creating the best stuff in their categories. Easy, right?

He’s totally right that Apple should have bought Dropbox; but Steve Jobs couldn’t see the inherent, coming value of the cloud – even though it was Jobs, in 1997, who told developers about the importance of network computing and not having to worry about locally stored data.

Android 5.0 Lollipop delay for HTC One and One M8 Google Play Editions >> TechRadar

The reason for the first delay was pretty vague, with Google simply stating that it would “need to re-spin SW”. If we were to Google Translate that confusing statement into plain English, we’d guess that it meant Google needed time to tweak and update the Android 5.0 Lollipop software.

That delay pushed back the expected Lollipop update to December 1. However that date came and went with no sign of the update.
 
It soon emerged that the Lollipop Update has been delayed once again, with Mo Versi, HTC’s VP of Product Management, reporting that the delay this time is due to Google being too busy at the moment, but that we should expect the update soon.

Just to be clear – that’s for the stock Android versions of the HTC One and M8, not those with HTC’s Sense skin. “Too busy” is a great reason.

Author discontent grows as Kindle Unlimited enters its fifth month >> The Digital Reader

Nate Hoffelder:

When Kindle Unlimited launched in the US 4 months ago there were many questioning whether it was good or bad for authors, and if the chorus of complaints over the past few days are any indication then the answer will be no.

HM Ward kicked off the discussion on Friday when she revealed that she was pulling out of KDP Select, the program Amazon uses to funnel indie ebooks into Kindle Unlimited.

Ward withdrew her books not because the average payment had dropped to only $1.33, but because her total revenues had fallen by 75%

Kindle Unlimited is Amazon’s ebook subscription service. All the news from authors seems not to be positive.

Apple had a rough morning >> Bloomberg View

Matt Levine with a terrific explanation of the “flash crash” of Apple stock, which seems to have mostly been driven by computer-based high-frequency trading. Because no human reacts that fast:

You’ve lost several thousand dollars on your Apple trades. Maybe you should cut your losses and get out? Again, you are not, like, pondering this in your heart of hearts: You are an algorithm, and you are programmed with some loss limits, so you cut your losses and start selling. So instead of dampening volatility, you actually start increasing it.

Chesterton’s Fence >> The Epicurean Dealmaker

GK Chesterton argued:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

This is clearly why Chesterton never got venture funding in Silicon Valley.

The real reason Amazon is telling us about its robots >> Huffington Post

Timothy Stenovec applies a suitably sceptical eye to the news, recalling how coincidentally a year ago Amazon told 60 Minutes about its drone plans:

This year, Amazon appears to be trying the same thing again – only this time, it’s with robots. The company recently invited a select group of journalists – I was not one of them – to tour one of its California warehouses and watch robots move 750-pound shelves of products. Amazon says it uses 15,000 such robots in its facilities, and that the machines, a result of Amazon’s $750m purchase of robot-maker Kiva Systems in 2012, will cut costs, save you money and help get products to you faster.

There was no news of Amazon’s robot fleet until just after midnight on Monday, when suddenly a flood of stories appeared – suggesting that the news was “embargoed,” a term for the common media practice of agreeing not to publish certain information until a certain time.

The robots are interesting, and every journalist knows about having something to please the editor for a Monday morning. Perhaps brick-and-mortar stores could start PR schemes where they show how they’re paying tax?

This “smart” ring is another reason to never trust Kickstarter videos >> Gizmodo

With $880,998 in funding, well exceeding its $250,000 asking price, Ring was a smart device that was meant to Bluetooth control everything in your life — except that it doesn’t. Not by a long shot.

We debunked the thing outright as soon as it showed up on Kickstarter in March, but that didn’t stop thousands of backers from signing up for the product and who are now probably regretting that $269 monetary decision. YouTube user Snazzy Labs breaks down every facet of the ring, and why it’s such a terrible, terrible waste of money.

“Comically unusable” is among the more generous phrases used by Snazzy Labs (cool name bro) in the video, which is worth watching just to see how wearables should not be done, ever.

Santa or the Grinch: Android tablet analysis for the 2014 holiday season >> Bluebox Security

Bluebox Labs purchased over a dozen of these Black Friday “bargain” Android tablets from big name retailers like Best Buy, Walmart, Target, Kmart, Kohl’s and Staples, and reviewed each of them for security. What we found was shocking: most of the devices ship with vulnerabilities and security misconfigurations; a few even include security backdoors. What seemed like great bargains turned out to be big security concerns. Unfortunately, unsuspecting consumers who purchase and use these devices will be putting their mobile data & passwords at risk.

(Via John Moltz.)