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

Posted on November 23, 2015 by charlesarthur

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Natasha Bertrand:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Srivatsan Sridhar:

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

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

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

Neil Shah:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technical Details – how they are doing it

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

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

Junko Yoshiba:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ingrid Lunden:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Microsoft’s per-handset profit, or the lack of it – and its impact on Windows Phone’s future

Posted on April 28, 2015 by charlesarthur

How much did this Lumia 920 cost to make? And will it have a successor? Photo by Whatleydude on Flickr.

In case anyone was in any doubt, Microsoft’s results last week demonstrated once more what we’re coming to know about the mobile handset industry: it’s damned hard to make any money in it. When I published a fairly simple analysis of the state of the top-end Android handset market (with a comparator to Apple’s iPhone profits), people were apparently flabbergasted by how thin the per-handset operating margins were on these devices which sold for hundreds of dollars.

Estimated Android handset operating profit Q4 2014

See the original post for more detail and caveats.

But Microsoft showed that it’s not even able to generate gross margin while selling millions of handsets. (Gross margin is the difference between how much it costs you to make the item – usually factory costs and distribution costs – and what you get for it. Gross margin normally excludes R&D and sales & marketing costs; to get the operating profit, you subtract those costs too, so operating profit is always less than gross margin.) My analysis of Android handset makers looked at operating profit.

Negative gross margin takes some doing; spending more making stuff than you take in for it is exceptionally bad business. But Microsoft Mobile did, officially: take a look at Microsoft’s 10Q for the calendar first quarter of 2015.

It says

Phone Hardware revenue was $1.4bn in the third quarter of fiscal year 2015, as we sold 8.6m Lumia phones and 24.7m non-Lumia phones. We acquired NDS in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2014. Phone Hardware gross margin was $(4) million in the third quarter of fiscal year 2015. Phone Hardware cost of revenue, including $147m amortization of acquired intangible assets, was $1.4bn.

For those unversed in accountancy notation, that “$(4) million” means “minus $4 million”. Accountants use brackets rather than a minus sign because it’s easy to overlook a minus sign and create a horrendous hash in your calculations.

For the nine months,

Phone Hardware revenue was $6.3bn in fiscal year 2015, as we sold 28.5m Lumia phones and 107.3m non-Lumia phones. Phone Hardware gross margin was $805m in fiscal year 2015. Phone Hardware cost of revenue, including $401m amortization of acquired intangible assets, was $5.5bn.

This does take some untangling. In my analysis, I’m going to ignore the writeoffs (amortisation) of intangible assets – essentially, goodwill (“how much more we paid than the physical assets are worth”) being written down. This actually makes the gross margin look better – as in, in positive territory. That’s a start.

Pause for history

Some brief history. When Nokia made phones, it used to provide wonderfully detailed results, in which it would tell you how many featurephones and smartphones it had sold, and at what average selling price (ASP). This made it easy to see how its business was going. It didn’t give you gross margins – only operating margin for the whole phone business. In general, though, we knew its featurephone business was profitable, and that once it moved to the Windows Phone Lumia range, the smartphone side lost a ton of money.

Enter Microsoft, buying Nokia’s phone business – including featurephones – for €5.4bn, which was completed on April 25th 2014. That’s when the featurephone and Lumia sales start showing up in Microsoft’s results, and we shift to the “gross margin” measurement. (Microsoft does this because Steve Ballmer reorganised it to an Apple-style “apportion all cost across the board”, rather than making each division its own profit-and-loss fiefdom.)

Given the Lumia ASP and sales figures at Nokia, you could work out the ASP of featurephones, and their contribution to revenues. What I’ve done in the table below is use Nokia’s featurephone and Lumia ASP (converted from euros to dollars at the prevailing rate at the end of each quarter) and try to carry that forward to estimate the recent ASPs of Lumia handsets under Microsoft’s ownership, and their contribution to revenues.

If you estimate the ASP for featurephones based on the Nokia numbers, you can figure out those for the Lumia phones at Microsoft.

A few things to note: I’m assuming that featurephone ASPs are falling. Even with that, there’s a clear fall in the ASP of the Lumia phones – from (a really quite high) $238 in the second calendar quarter of 2014 to the present. There hasn’t been a flagship phone released in that time, so perhaps not surprising.

Also, smartphone revenue has flipped from being the minority source at Nokia to being the majority source now (even at $20 featurephone ASP, it’s still like that) because featurephone sales are collapsing, while those of smartphones are remaining fairly static – like this:

Estimated split of smartphone and featurephone revenue at Microsoft

Based on ASP assumptions, you can figure out how much revenue smartphones and featurephones generate. That’s not profit, though.

Now we move on, to seek out gross margin. There’s no data from Microsoft about the separate gross margins of the featurephones or Lumias. We don’t know how much they cost to build, or which might be profitable. So we have to use estimates and what people tell us.

Fortunately, we do have some indication of how profitable Nokia featurephones were. In an interview in April 2013, Nokia’s director of platform and content said that the profit margins on the $20 Nokia 105 were the same as those on the Lumia phones. How much might that be? Again, we don’t know, but it can’t be a lot. Putting it at $5 seems reasonable.

We have the figures for total gross margin; we also have the intangibles writeoff in the financials. So that gives us a “real” gross margin (ie the day-to-day gross margin for the quarter, excluding accountancy writeoffs):

Microsoft gives quarterly figures for intangible writeoffs; subtracting that gives the hardware gross margin.

Now we make assumptions about featurephone gross margin. I’ve gone for $5, falling to $4 as the average price of the handset falls from $20 to $15.

From this, and from the data we’ve got about total phone shipments, it’s quite simple to back-calculate to come out with figures for the total contribution to gross margin by featurephones and Lumias.

Progress! GM and profit gives Lumia data

If we assume per-handset profit on featurephones, we can use that with the GM data to figure out how much Lumias cost to make. And we have the ASP..

Which tells us what? The CQ2 figure is anomalous – Microsoft mentions an intangibles writeoff in that period, but doesn’t specify how much (unlike other periods). It’s likely the total gross margin was larger if you ignore that, which would put the gross margin per Lumia into the black.

What we also see is that even if we allow a miniscule per-handset gross margin for each featurephone, we see a rapidly falling gross margin for the Lumia line. Here’s an alternative scenario, if we think that the featurephones have a $8 gross margin, falling to $6 in the latest quarter:

What if featurephones have higher profit?

Giving a per-handset profit of $8 for featurephones makes the Lumia business look much worse. It’s unlikely, though.

On this higher profit for featurephones, the Lumia gross margin goes into negative territory. You can argue that’s too high a margin for a featurephone. Doesn’t matter though – the direction of travel is clear: the Lumia barely washes its face.

And this, don’t forget, is before you include the costs of sales and marketing – all those Lumia ads! – and research and development. Here’s the R+D impact:

Three months ended March 31, 2015 compared with three months ended March 31, 2014: Research and development expenses increased $241 million or 9%, mainly due to increased investment in new products and services, including NDS expenses of $212 million.

For the nine months:

Research and development expenses increased $694 million or 8%, mainly due to increased investment in new products and services, including NDS expenses of $815 million. These increases were partially offset by a decline in research and development expenses in our Operating Systems engineering group, primarily driven by reduced headcount-related expenses.

A little digging shows the R+D costs for the NDS (Nokia Devices and Services) segment by quarter. That gives us a sort of “halfway” operating profit once you deduct R+D, which shows that the division has moved into the red even before you consider sales and marketing costs.

R+D by quarter for Microsoft's mobile business

R+D numbers are mentioned in the quarterly 10Q. To get towards the operating profit (or loss), we need to subtract that.

That’s not profit

To figure out whether the handset division makes an operating profit we’d have to know the sales and marketing costs. It’s pretty improbable that those were anything less than $300m per quarter (that’s $10m per day, worldwide). Which means that Microsoft’s handset division has been loss-making since it took it over, despite those profitable featurephones, and ignoring the writedown of intangibles.

On a per-handset basis, if you allow $300m per quarter for sales and marketing (into which we’ll also roll administration), then you get a clear picture: Lumia handsets don’t make an operating profit at all.

Don’t forget, this relies on assumptions around featurephone profitability and price.

But hey, you say, that’s all assuming that featurephones are making $5 per handset. What if it’s $0? No problem – that’s the fun of spreadsheets. You can play with assumptions:

Lumias still show a per-handset loss. (Remember this is with featurephone pricing of $15 in the latest quarter.)

OK, dammit – what if featurephones lose $5 per handset? Lumias still plunge into operating loss in the latest quarter – and remember, this is ignoring intangible writeoffs, and allowing just $10m per day worldwide for sales and marketing:

Even at a $5 loss per featurephone, Lumias aren’t moneymakers at the operating level (on my assumptions).

You might have thought that Android handset makers had it tough, but at least – at the top end – they’re ekeing out something.

(Yes, these numbers are based on assumptions about featurephone pricing and margin, but I’d defend them as all being reasonable based on what we know about the business in the present and past.)

Update: thanks to Vlad Dudau of Neowin, who pointed me to Microsoft’s discussion of its results, where they say

We have made significant progress in reducing the operating expense base in the Phone business, moving from an annualized rate of $4.5bn at acquisition to a run rate under $2.5bn.

Opex is R+D plus sales+marketing and things like general+administration; an annualised run rate of $2.5bn is $625m per quarter – which is slightly more than I was allowing there. That would make the Lumia margins worse.

Microsoft adds:

That said, the changing mix of our portfolio to the value segment and the significant negative headwind from FX [foreign exchange rates] will impact our ability to reach operational break even in FY16.

So, no good news in the offing. (/Update.)

Why carry on, then?

Why, then, does Microsoft persist with Windows Phone? It can’t really think that it’s somehow going to come good and suddenly take off to challenge iOS and Android. The idea (which some outside Microsoft cling to) that the introduction of Windows 10, where apps can be written for both desktop and mobile, will suddenly lead to a huge uptake (by businesses?) is pie in the sky. Mobile and desktop have different design demands. Corporations with mobile needs haven’t been sitting on their hands for the past five years waiting for Windows Phone to reach a sort of maturity; they’ve been hiring people who can hook into their systems using iPhones and Android phones. Under Satya Nadella, Microsoft has recognised this, offering Office and other key software on rival platforms to capture (or retain) users and revenue.

You can’t justify it on “they’ll make it back in profits on services”; the 80m or so Lumia owners around the world aren’t the high-end users, but low-end ones who are less likely to spend on apps, or pricey Microsoft products.

So why? Two clear reasons. First, it’s important to keep playing in this space; Microsoft needs to have a mobile offering because it’s impossible to say where in the future a mobile-focussed offering might be key.

Secondly, though, is that more simple one: pride. Couple that with the inertia of a big organisation, and the fact that in the scheme of Microsoft’s profits the losses from the mobile division (about $500m, ignoring intangibles, over the past three quarters) are piffling, and there’s no reason to stop.

However, things could change. I’ve argued previously that Nadella should just give up on Windows Phone, and move to an Android fork. Not long after I argued that, Nokia (then still Finnish-owned) introduced the Nokia X, using Microsoft services and AOSP (Android without Google services on top). Microsoft rapidly killed it.

But now Microsoft is preinstalling its apps on the Samsung Galaxy S6 – and more importantly, has a “strategic partnership” with Cyanogen. The latter is a huge, and smart, move: it seems to me the easiest way for Microsoft to make a real impact on mobile.

If the Cyanogen move takes off, though, I could see Windows Phone withering. Why bother with loss-making hardware when you can piggyback on the world’s most successful mobile OS (that’s Android/AOSP) for the pure gravy of services profit? I wouldn’t.

Other posts you might find interesting:
• Android OEM profitability, and the most surprising number from Q4 2014

• Why Google’s struggles with the EC – and FTC – matter

• How Gresham’s Law explains why news sites are turning off online comments

Start up: who’ll buy HERE?, Loon gets ready, Vermeer and the Apple Watch, web v native redux, and more

Posted on April 24, 2015 by charlesarthur

A Project Loon balloon. Photo by theglobalpanorama on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Links as in, you know, links. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Microsoft’s Q3 2015: Surface and Lumia up, but profit down » The Verge

Tom Warren:

Microsoft sold 8.6m Lumia devices in the most recent quarter, and the company says that’s an 18% increase over the prior year. Microsoft completed its acquisition of Nokia around this time last year, and neither company revealed Lumia sales at the time, but it’s safe to say they’re rising again. Either way, Windows Phone revenue has dropped by 16%.

While Microsoft is heading towards finalizing Windows 10 in the coming months, the PC market is still fragile. OEM revenue for Windows decreased by a massive 22% this quarter, following an equally bad quarter over the holiday period. Part of this decline is related to less business PC sales, and the general PC market as a whole. Office appears to be a mixed bag for Microsoft. While it’s helping drive commercial revenues, Office consumer revenues declined 41% due to the transition to Office 365 and weaknesses in Japan where Office is popular on PCs. However, Office 365 Consumer subscriptions have grown to 12.4m, so Microsoft is continuing to convince consumers that the cloud is the future.

If 8.6m is an 18% increase, a total of 7.3m were sold (well, shipped) in Q1 2014. The fall in revenue maybe isn’t surprising as the Lumia line has all been focussed on the lower end.

Surface revenue was up 44% year-on-year to $713m. As usual, no news on how many sold.

How Uber surge pricing really works » The Washington Post

Nicholas Diakopoulos:

is Uber’s surge pricing algorithm really doing what they claim? Do surge prices really get more cars on the road?

My analysis suggests that rather than motivating a fresh supply of drivers, surge pricing instead re-distributes drivers already on the road.

I collected four weeks worth of Uber’s dynamic pricing information from their own publicly available data for five locations in Washington, DC. Every 15 seconds between March 15 and April 11, I pinged their servers and collected the surge price and estimated waiting time for an UberX car at those locations. Though only a tiny sliver of all of Uber’s data, it provided an initial window into how their algorithms are working…

…So, why don’t surge prices work to get new drivers on the road? It might simply be that surge prices jump around too much.

Reverse-engineering these algorithms seems to be the way forward.

Nokia targeting Apple, Alibaba and Amazon in maps-unit sale » Bloomberg Business

Nokia Oyj, the Finnish company selling its money-losing maps business, is trying to drum up interest from some of the biggest names in technology including Apple Inc., Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Amazon.com Inc., people with knowledge of the matter said.
Those companies as well as Facebook Inc., a group of German carmakers, and private-equity firms are among the companies looking at Nokia’s maps operations, known as HERE, highlighting the ubiquity and utility of location-based services. Nokia is seeking more than €3bn ($3.2bn) from a sale of the unit, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.

Bought it for €8.1bn in 2008; valued at €2bn in the accounts last year. Big lossmaker; the question is how any company that bought HERE would be able to make the purchase worthwhile in monetary terms.

Google’s Project Loon close to launching thousands of balloons » Computerworld

Martyn Williams:

Google says its Project Loon is close to being able to produce and launch thousands of balloons to provide Internet access from the sky.

Such a number would be required to provide reliable Internet access to users in remote areas that are currently unserved by terrestrial networks, said Mike Cassidy, the Google engineer in charge of the project, in a video posted Friday.

The ambitious project has been under way for a couple of years and involves beaming down LTE cellular signals to handsets on the ground from balloons thousands of feet in the air, well above the altitude that passenger jets fly.

“At first it would take us 3 or 4 days to tape together a balloon,” Cassidy says in the video. “Today, through our own manufacturing facility, the automated systems can get a balloon produced in just a few hours. We’re getting close to the point where we can roll out thousands of balloons.”

Why Apple Watch margins should set a new record for Apple » carlhowe.com/blog

Carl Howe with a new thought experiment:

Last week, I asked readers to imagine how they’d manufacture a million Origami lobsters out of paper. I’m going to continue that though experiment theme this week with a different question. If you’re not interested in such context, skip ahead to the next section where we’ll dive into revisions to the model I posted last week.

Meanwhile, this week’s thought experiment question is this:

What were the parts cost and gross margin of a Johannes Vermeer painting in his day?

Johannes Vermeer, of course, was a modestly successful 17th century Dutch painter, known for such paintings as Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Music Lesson. Art historians the world over praise his works for their subtle portrayal of light and his use of brilliant and lifelike color. Today, historians attribute 34 surviving paintings to undoubtedly be Vermeer’s work. While priceless due to their rarity, owners who have sold Vermeer paintings have invariably seen prices in the tens of millions of dollars.

But what did they cost to paint?

In other words, why do we think it’s OK for art to have high added value, but not technology? The whole post is wonderful.

In Google case, do what’s best for consumers » TheHill

Thomas Lenard:

Since the FTC closed its [antitrust investigation] case in 2013, the search space has become, if anything, more competitive. In addition to competition from general search engines such as Bing, Google faces competition from Facebook, Apple (Siri) and Amazon — all of which perform search functions. There is vigorous competition in shopping sites in Europe with Amazon and eBay being the major players. Numerous local shopping sites provide additional competition. In fact, Google is a minor player with a very small share of this (online shopping) market. And there is a whole new world of apps through which consumers search for a variety of information, including product information.

Thus, despite the fact that Google’s share of general search is higher in Europe than in the U.S., it is unlikely the European authorities will now find harm to consumers or to competition where the U.S. authorities didn’t.

Lenard is a senior fellow at the Technology Policy Institute, whose “supporters” include Amazon, Facebook, Intel, the MPAA, Motorola, Yahoo and – hey! – Google. I include this to show the way that one can distort reality by chucking some names in: look at all the alternative search engines! Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, er, Yandex.. but the reality is that none has more than a tiny fraction of the market in Europe. It’s like Microsoft suggesting that there are loads of desktop OSs – MacOS, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, umm..

And while Google might be a minor player in the local shopping market, the EC data (and to some extent Google itself) suggests it would be nowhere if Google Shopping had to compete in the same way as all the other shopping sites – and hadn’t penalised the search ranking and access to AdWords of rivals (who then complained).

And, finally, “harm to consumers” isn’t the EC test for antitrust. It’s the US test.

Skipping the web » Remains of the Day

Eugene Wei:

Having grown up in the U.S., the web was one of the first and still longest-running touchpoint to the internet. My first was using newsgroups in college, and the web came about towards the end of my undergrad days. I can understand why so many in the U.S. are nostalgic and defensive of the web as a medium. Seeing so much content and online interaction move behind the walls of social networks seems like an epic tragedy to many, and I empathize.

Many people in India, China, and other parts of the world, where bandwidth is low and slow, and where mobile phones are their one and only computer, have no room for such sentimentality. They may never have experienced the same heyday of the web, so they feel no analogous nostalgia for it as a medium. Path dependence matters here, as it does in lots of areas of tech, and one of the best ways to detect it is to widen your geographic scope of study outside the U.S. Asia is a wonderful comparison group, especially for me because I have so many friends and relatives there and because I still interact with them online at a decent frequency.

In the U.S., many tech companies were lauded as pioneers for going mobile first when in Asia companies are already going mobile only.

Mobile malware is like Ebola – an overhyped threat » Net Security

Reporting from the RSA Conference 2015:

In 2012, monitoring 33% of US Mobile Data Traffic, Damballa saw 3,492 out of a total of 23M mobile devices – 0.015% – contacting a domain on the mobile blacklist (MBL). In Q4 2014, monitoring nearly 50% of US Mobile Data Traffic, only 9,688 out of a total of 151M mobile devices contacted mobile black list domains (.0064%). The National Weather Services says the odds of being struck by lightning in a lifetime are 0.01%.

“This research shows that mobile malware in the Unites States is very much like Ebola – harmful, but greatly over exaggerated, and contained to a limited percentage of the population that are engaging in behavior that puts them at risk for infection,” said Charles Lever, senior scientific researcher at Damballa. “Ask yourself, ‘How many of you have been infected by mobile malware? How many of you know someone infected by mobile malware?’”

Start up: so who did hack Sony? Apple on Pay, Pegatron workers, BlackBerry’s phone timing, and more

Posted on December 19, 2014 by charlesarthur

“Hey, from here you can see the posters for The Interview coming down!” Photo of Pyongyang, North Korea, by orangetruck1 on Flickr. (Searching Flickr for CC-licensed photos of “North Korea” yields some strangely anodyne pictures from “North Korea travel”.)

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

Why the Sony hack is unlikely to be the work of North Korea >> Marc’s Security Ramblings

Marc Rogers, with the only piece you need to read on the Sony hack, making 10 points (a couple excerpted here):

It’s clear from the hard-coded paths and passwords in the malware that whoever wrote it had extensive knowledge of Sony’s internal architecture and access to key passwords. While it’s plausible that an attacker could have built up this knowledge over time and then used it to make the malware, Occam’s razor suggests the simpler explanation of an insider. It also fits with the pure revenge tact that this started out as.

4. Whoever did this is in it for revenge. The info and access they had could have easily been used to cash out, yet, instead, they are making every effort to burn Sony down. Just think what they could have done with passwords to all of Sony’s financial accounts? With the competitive intelligence in their business documents? From simple theft, to the sale of intellectual property, or even extortion – the attackers had many ways to become rich. Yet, instead, they chose to dump the data, rendering it useless. Likewise, I find it hard to believe that a “Nation State” which lives by propaganda would be so willing to just throw away such an unprecedented level of access to the beating heart of Hollywood itself.

5. The attackers only latched onto “The Interview” after the media did – the film was never mentioned by GOP right at the start of their campaign.

CNN was reporting on Thursday night that (unnamed) hackers stole a sysadmin’s credentials to get access to the company’s system. That fits with everything we know, though that’s not unknown for hackers who aren’t nation states; it’s been used by external hackers trying to get into companies for ages. What doesn’t fit a nation state attack is what Rogers points to in No.4: if North Korea wanted, it could ruin Sony silently.

What still puzzles me is why US sources are indicating that they think it is North Korea. Perhaps I’m too disbelieving it would do something weird like this.

Apple Pay will change marketing, not just payments >> Business Insider

If you think Apple Pay is only about payments, you’re not alone. UBS recently noted that Apple Pay (unlike Google Wallet) doesn’t let you “push” offers to people, and speculated that flaw would keep some merchants away from the platform.

[CEO of Vibes, Jack] Philbin disagrees because Apple already has a way for merchants to push these offers: Passbook.

“The marketing is done through Passbook,” said Philbin. “Apple Pay is just the payment functionality.”

Passbook has been around since 2012. What’s changed is that iPhone users are paying a lot more attention to their mobile wallets now that there’s an easy way to pay for things from their phones as well.

Vibes’ clients — which include retailers like Gap, The Home Depot, and Bloomingdales— saw a 54% increase in people installing coupons or loyalty cards into Passbook from September to October, which Philbin attributes to the introduction of Apple Pay.

Apple ‘failing to protect Chinese factory workers’ >> BBC News

Filming on an iPhone 6 production line showed Apple’s promises to protect workers were routinely broken. It found standards on workers’ hours, ID cards, dormitories, work meetings and juvenile workers were being breached at the Pegatron factories.

Apple said it strongly disagreed with the programme’s conclusions. Exhausted workers were filmed falling asleep on their 12-hour shifts at the Pegatron factories on the outskirts of Shanghai.

One undercover reporter, working in a factory making parts for Apple computers, had to work 18 days in a row despite repeated requests for a day off. Another reporter, whose longest shift was 16 hours, said: “Every time I got back to the dormitories, I wouldn’t want to move.

“Even if I was hungry I wouldn’t want to get up to eat. I just wanted to lie down and rest. I was unable to sleep at night because of the stress.”

Apple declined to be interviewed for the programme but said “”We are aware of no other company doing as much as Apple to ensure fair and safe working conditions.We work with suppliers to address shortfalls, and we see continuous and significant improvement, but we know our work is never done.”

Pegatron’s Wikipedia entry doesn’t say who else it makes things for. Its corporate social responsibility report for 2013 (PDF) says “‘Joyful Working; Happy Living’ is Pegatron Group’s caring philosophy to employees.” Some employees, perhaps.

Former Apple supplier Wintek shutters China plants >> FT.com

Taiwanese group Wintek, formerly a major supplier of touchscreens for Apple’s iPhone and iPad, has shuttered two plants in southern China and axed 7,000 jobs, leaving unpaid suppliers to chase debts of Rmb230m ($37m).

Armed police surrounded the plants in the city of Dongguan as workers collected their final pay this week, while suppliers demonstrated in front of the factories.

The company sought insolvency protection in October, filing in Taiwan for a restructuring of more than NT30bn ($961m) in debts owed to both local and mainland lenders and suppliers.

The move to in-panel technology with the iPhone 5 didn’t go Wintek’s way; now it’s laying off thousands of staff and may go bust. Keeping up with Apple’s demands is tough.

Stop the presses! >> Counternotions

Kontra, on the dire “reporting” of the (untrue) suggestion by the replacement plaintiff’s lawyers that Apple had deleted songs on peoples’ iPods (it hadn’t):

Yes, journalism isn’t exact science, but from epidemiology to space exploration, from technology reporting to business coverage, the sheer amount of fact-free, opinion-framing ‘news’ is now exceeding our collective ability to notice, care or correct. Yes, journalism has always been messy, but the speed with which it’s generated, aggregated and distributed may now be overwhelming us. Yes, we have ever growing access to filtering software to shape our own sphere of coverage, and yet tens of millions of people read, and likely most believed, that Apple had deliberately and secretly deleted competitors’ songs from users’ iPods, an impression which may never be sufficiently corrected.

All people needed to do was say “Apple deleted songs, court told” and they’d have been factually correct, even if the claim is bunkum.

Sony Pictures employees now working in an office “from ten years ago” >> TechCrunch

John Biggs:

She works for Sony Pictures. She said she’s now working in an office on lock-down, a throw-back to an earlier time when the Internet wasn’t around.

“We are stuck in 1992 over here,” she said.

She requested anonymity but agreed to talk a bit about her day-to-day experience as a Sony Pictures Employee post-hack. She said things were getting back to normal and were, in some ways, more pleasant.

But the thing that bothers her most is the need to depend on old technology to do new work, now.

“We had barely working email and no voicemail so people talked to each other. Some people had to send faxes. They were dragging old printers out of storage to cut checks,” she said. “It was crazy.”

…“My bank account was hacked [on the day of the first attack,]” said our source who works at SPE offices in Los Angeles. “At first we just thought it was total coincidence.”

Now she suspects someone found something in the email dump that allowed them to access her accounts.

Smart journalism from Biggs.

Why the BlackBerry Classic is critical to the new BlackBerry >> CNET

Roger Cheng:

CEO John Chen made a few remarks, then pulled out the Classic for a photo opportunity. But as the presentation went on, it was clear whom the company was targeting: the IT guy working in a highly regulated business.

The conversation dashed past the typical walkthrough of the Classic’s features, spending a healthy chunk of time on the phone’s enterprise software capabilities and looping in guests like the chief information officer for Citco Fund Services, the founder of Niederhoffer Capital Management and the chief operating officer of Ontario-based Mackenzie Richmond Hill Hospital.

It’s a far cry from Alicia Keys, the pop music sensation BlackBerry once played up as its “global creative director.”

The timing of this launch fascinates me: two days before BlackBerry announces its quarterly results. Look back to September, and BlackBerry launched the Passport on 24 September – two days before it announced (not great) results.

And yes, BlackBerry’s quarterly results are today (Friday) at 1300GMT. Analyst forecasts are for $936m in revenue (a fall against the year-ago period) and a 5c per share loss. Perhaps we’ll hear how many Passports were sold, and whether it has a future.

Different relationships with their phones: iPhone versus Android >> The Network Garden

Mark Sigal did some user testing:

in the new app that we are building, one question in user testing was how important having a desktop web version of the functionality would be.

Get this, 90% of the Android users thought it was pretty important, most commonly because the test user saw the PC as the central part of their computing experience — even though the app is for a highly mobile type of action.

By contrast, 90% of the iPhone users looked cockeyed at the question, noting that the action is designed for palm in the hand, on the go types of behaviors, adding (I’m paraphrasing) that their iPhone is their hub, not the PC.

Same questions. Same product feature for feature; a variety of young to middle age males and females, and the only difference is iPhone versus Android.

His blog is worth reading more generally.

Nokia publishes maps on your iPhone, leaves Lumia in the shadows >> IT Vikko

This is a link to the Google Translation of this page (the headline is from the Bing translation, but it doesn’t have a static URL):

Nokia is not planning to upgrade in the near future the Here Maps application for Lumia phones. “When Nokia made handsets, we were a little different. Now, we are developing application on the basis of a realistic markets.”

Ouch. Harsh divorce; the parent doesn’t want to see its child any more.

Start here: Firefox dumps Google, 50m Lumias?, Galaxy Note v iPhone 6+ screens, Uber accounting, and more

Posted on November 20, 2014 by charlesarthur

Search no further for Yahoo if you use Firefox. Well, maybe.

A selection of 11 links for you. Ventilate room thoroughly.

New search strategy for Firefox: promoting choice & innovation >> The Mozilla Blog

Today we are announcing a change to our strategy for Firefox search partnerships. We are ending our practice of having a single global default search provider. We are adopting a more local and flexible approach to increase choice and innovation on the Web, with new and expanded search partnerships by country:

• United States

Under a new five-year strategic partnership announced today, Yahoo Search will become the default search experience for Firefox in the U.S.
Starting in December, Firefox users will be introduced to a new enhanced Yahoo Search experience that features a clean, modern interface that brings the best of the Web front and center.

Wow. A few days ago I wrote “I’m certain that no matter what price Mozilla demands (it presently gets about 90% of its revenue from Google kickbacks on searches), Google will pay it. Why? Because the cost of losing 20% of the desktop to Microsoft search at once is far greater than the odd millions it shovels Mozilla’s way.” So, that’s me wrong.

It’s not clear yet whether Google dumped Firefox, or Yahoo outbid Google; the latter seems unlikely, unless Google substantially cut its offer from the previous $300m three-year deal. Last time, Microsoft pushed up the bidding up to try to get Bing there; Google outbid it. No doubt the details will emerge in the coming days, or hours. Also unclear: what the default search will be in European countries. (Russia: Yandex; China: Baidu.) Quite a coup for Marissa Mayer, though.

Firefox does have a problem, though: it’s nowhere in mobile, and that’s increasingly where the search volume is. Update: Mozilla tells me that Google will remain the default for now in Europe.

Reaction on Twitter is that people will just switch the default back to Google. There’s sure to be some sort of search volume target in Yahoo’s deal; if too few searches come to Yahoo, Mozilla will lose out financially.

Passenger stuck with $1,171 Wi-Fi bill on Singapore Airlines flight >> WSJ Digits blog

Jeremy Gutsche, chief executive of Toronto-based innovation consultancy Trend Hunter, says he unwittingly accrued the charges on a flight last week from London to Singapore.

Gutsche says he signed up for a 30 megabyte Internet plan, which cost $28.99, and was aware that he would be responsible for data beyond that limit. But he was stunned when he learned upon landing that viewing some 155 pages — mostly checking email and uploading a PowerPoint document — had resulted in $1,142 of overage fees, he said in a blog post and on Twitter.

PowerPoint considered… expensive. (It was about 4MB, Gutsche says.)

Display color accuracy shootout >> Displaymate

Ray Soniera:

Some manufacturers and models provide better color accuracy than others. We have taken the six best mobile displays from our Display Technology Shoot-Out article series over the last year and compared their color accuracies all together side-by-side with detailed and very revealing measurement results. Since we only test the best performing displays to begin with, they were already known to have fairly good color accuracy, so we’ll learn which are the Best of the Best, and the reasons why…

But why is color accuracy important? Poor to mediocre color accuracy has been the rule since the dawn of color TVs in the 1950s, and people are also accustomed to seeing mediocre color prints from their film and now digital cameras. But the technology is already available that makes it possible for today’s consumer displays to be as color accurate as the best studio production monitors that cost $50,000 ten years ago. And once you get used to beautiful accurate colors on a display you won’t want to go back…

TL:DR: Samsung’s Galaxy Note 4 comes out top, Surface Pro 3 next, iPhone 6 Plus and iPad Air 2 are good on skin tones but score badly on others. Not clear who makes Apple’s screens.

Samsung preps new mobile video service >> The Information

Jessica Lessin:

Samsung Electronics is rebooting its mobile video strategy in a test of whether short-form video content can drive mobile revenues just as games have.

The South Korean company has earmarked several tens of millions of dollars to invest in short-form video for a new mobile product, according to people Samsung talked to about the effort. Internally, the product had gone by the code name Volt but will launch under another one.

The initiative is being overseen by John Pleasants, a gaming veteran who managed Disney’s mobile services and gaming business before joining Samsung as executive vice president of media solutions in June. While the initial business model for the service, which could also include music, isn’t clear, over time the company is looking to create media services for which it could charge a few dollars a month, said one of the people briefed.

Possibly might work in South Korea; can’t see it getting any traction in the US or Europe. Nokia used to think it could charge people a few dollars a month for mapping services, which is why it bought Navteq for $8.1bn in 2007, two years after Google Maps launched and a year before Android did. Nice timing, Nokia. Similarly, “short-form video” is already plentiful – and free.

What Uber drivers really make (according to their pay stubs) >> Buzzfeed

Johana Bhuiyan:

So we calculated Khalid’s new average of net income per hour over the five weeks I had access to by distributing his two largest expenses of being an Uber driver (rent and insurance) of approximately $641.67 over hours worked per week and subtracted that hourly expense from the net income per hour based on his pay stubs. His original average hourly net income without expenses was $32.90. Accounting for two weeks where he was technically in debt and could not cover both his rent AND insurance because he did not make enough, Khalid’s new average including expenses was a net income of $10.36.
Even drivers who own their vehicles and don’t have to worry about rental payments still come up against concerns.

Telling that NY general manager Josh Mohrer, who offered reporters the chance to verify his claims that Uber drivers make an average of $25 per hour (before expenses) is being investigated by Uber for allegedly tracking Bhuiyan.

I deleted the Uber app months ago over its tactics against Lyft. It seems that every day brings another reason to make its icon do the bee dance on your phone screen before you zap it.

GT Advanced creditors chafe at settlement deal with Apple >> Re/code

Holders of GT Advanced’s notes, including Aristeia Capital and an affiliate of Wolverine Asset Management, said in court papers that the “extraordinary allegations against Apple … call into question the adequacy of the settlement agreement.”

The noteholders cited allegations that Apple breached its contract and acted unfairly as GT Advanced’s lender. The noteholders also said Apple’s claims on GT Advanced’s equipment may be unsecured. This would put Apple among the last creditors to be paid, not the first as Apple’s deal anticipates.

Apple has denied GT Advanced’s allegations. In court filings, Apple has called the accusations “scandalous and defamatory” and “intended to vilify Apple and portray Apple as a coercive bully.”

Likely to run and run. (Reminder: I wrote about the travails at GTAT last week.)

Apple plans to push Beats to every iPhone >> FT.com

Matthew Garrahan and Tim Bradshaw:

Apple’s revamped Beats service will operate on a paid subscription model. The service, which is likely to be rebranded under the iTunes label, will form part of a three-pronged music strategy for Apple, alongside downloads and iTunes Radio, which it launched in 2013. The trio will challenge not only Spotify, whose paid streaming service has more than 10m subscribers, but also Pandora and Soundcloud.

Apple is preparing to put its new Watch on sale in early 2015, to which the new music push could be linked.

200m iTunes accounts, and many more iPhones than that in use. Obstacles: song/artist licensing (Beats and iTunes Radio are both only available in the US); price; getting those already on subscription services to switch.

Techcrunch’s Josh Constine originally reported this in late October, but the FT adds timing (March) and the app install.

More than 50 million Lumias activated, 320,000 apps in store and more interesting Windows Phone stats from Microsoft >> WM Power User

[Microsoft] also revealed [at a blogger conference] there were 320,000 apps in the store, up from 300,000 in August 2014.

Another very interesting item was that 50m Lumias have been activated to date [worldwide]. While this does not tell us how many Windows Phones are still in use, with Lumias being more than 90% of Windows Phones in use according to AdDuplex, it does set some kind of upper limit.

According to Nokia’s/Microsoft Mobile’s financials, 67m Lumias have been shipped since 3Q 2011. So this doesn’t quite square: where are the other 17m?

Meanwhile if AdDuplex’s 90% is right, then that’s an upper limit of 55m Windows Phone devices active – about as many as active BlackBerry subscribers (not BBM users), and a long way from the 350m or so iPhones (500m-odd iOS devices) and billion-plus Google Android devices. In fact, AOSP (non-Google Android, used in China) is about as big as iOS.

That makes Windows Phone the fourth ecosystem. Still, one of the slides in the presentation says it’s outsold the iPhone in 24 countries, so that’s OK.

Report: Android One facing stiff competition and low sales in India >> Android Authority

Android One was announced at Google I/O earlier this year, and with it, a promise that Mountain View would be handling all of the updates for these low-priced devices aimed at developing countries. Though some might not be aware, not one but three One devices launched in India mid-September, but the problem is not one of them has done well. Those trying to find out why need only look at Samsung’s plight: stiff competition.

Consumer sales is a game of numbers, and for the last two weeks of September, a total of 230,000 units running Android One were imported into India. But it gets worse: only 200,000 devices were imported for the entire month of October, according to data shared with The Economic Times by local marketing firm Cybex Exim Solutions. To put things into even better perspective, “for the month of October, roughly 8m smartphones were shipped into [India], of which Android One would be just about 2.5%,” a source told The Economic Times. Compare this with the extremely rosy expectations that were originally had.

The original extremely rosy expectations came from chipmaker MediaTek which expected 2m sales by the end of the year . Could be tough to meet. Small onboard storage, online-only sales and supply problems are listed as parts of the problem.

Helping users find mobile-friendly pages >> Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

Starting today, to make it easier for people to find the information that they’re looking for, we’re adding a “mobile-friendly” label to our mobile search results…

…We see these labels as a first step in helping mobile users to have a better mobile web experience. We are also experimenting with using the mobile-friendly criteria as a ranking signal.

“Ranking signal” means “we might demote you if you’re bad on mobile”. Questions: (1) how large or small does a screen have to be to count as “mobile”? Or is it dependent on access method, eg 3G = mobile, Wi-Fi = fixed? (2) how strong will the signal of being non-mobile be?

Also: Google first said it would do this “in the near future” 18 months ago. Clearly it wasn’t so near. What made it harder?

Rides of Glory >> Uber Blog

Cab service Uber thinks it has erased the “walk of shame” (ask your parents, kids) and replaced it with the “ride of glory”. Morning glory? Anyhow:

One of the neat things we can do with our data is discover rider patterns: are there weekend riders that only use Uber post-party? What about the workday commuters who use us every morning? It was while playing around with this idea of (blind!) rider segmentation that we came up with the Ride of Glory (RoG). A RoGer is anyone who took a ride between 10pm and 4am on a Friday or Saturday night, and then took a second ride from within 1/10th of a mile of the previous nights’ drop-off point 4-6 hours later (enough for a quick night’s sleep). (This time window may not be the best, but small changes don’t change the overall pattern.)

RoGer. Haha. Though it might just be people getting together for an all-night coding session starting their principled cab-offering rival, eh? (Anyhow, Boston comes out top, well ahead of New York, though this probably takes no account of the number of users, number of cabs, or any other relevant piece of statistical information.)