Tag Archives: mobile

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

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

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

Google is in talks with mobile payments company Softcard » TechCrunch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Estimating G+ User Activity » Ello

From #Dredmorbius:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Carney:

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

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

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

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

Samsung loses connection with Chinese consumers in 2014 » Caixin

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

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

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

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

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

(500 yuan = £50 or so.)

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

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

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

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

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

And now look at this next link.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stacey Higginbotham:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jon Russell spoke to Hugo Barra, who explained:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thompson: How much? What percentage?

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

BT: Ballpark?

HB: I don’t know.

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

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

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

David Chartier:

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

A POPUP AD ON MY TV.

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

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

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

Start up: Samsung’s leukaemia compensation, Glass’s failure dissected, Pinterest v single ladies, unwritten Bitcoin tales, and more

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Encryption (look closely). Photo by iceplee on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Do not apply to sensitive areas. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Hutchison may bid $13.6bn for UK’s O2, Sunday Times says » Bloomberg

Hutchison Whampoa Ltd. (13), the conglomerate controlled by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, is in early talks to bid for UK mobile operator O2, the Sunday Times reported, citing sources it didn’t name.

Hutchison, which owns the Three mobile network in the UK, may pay O2’s owner Telefonica SA (TEF) as much as £9bn ($13.6bn) for the carrier, the newspaper said.

Telefonica has hired investment bank UBS AG to explore options for O2, according to the Times. The company, which is looking for ways to exit the UK to help pay off debts, may also consider selling shares of O2 to the public. Hutchison has hired Moelis & Co (MC) to look for possible deals in the UK, the newspaper said.

Telefonica has around €41.2bn of debt as of September and all its numbers (revenue, operating profit, EPS) are going negative. This would go some way to sorting some of that out.

Amid Bitcoin’s Bloodbath, Silence From Silicon Valley Press » RealClearMarkets

Andy Kessler:

So Tim Draper [who bought the bitcoins seized by the FBI in an auction in July and December 2014] invests some $18m in about 32,000 Bitcoin and today (wait for it…) they’re worth a whopping $6.7m, losing 63% in six months. Don’t get me wrong. I like Tim Draper. He’s a bit quirky and has an awful taste in ties. [Alternative successful auction bidder Barry] Silbert’s stake is now worth $10m – down 43% in a rotation of the moon. My point is less about the epic FAIL of their at the time hyped Bitcoin investing prowess. Jeez, we all make mistakes. No, my beef is more about the coverage.

Sure, Draper lost $11 something million in six months. Fool…money…etc. But my problem is that you wouldn’t know any of this from reading the Silicon Valley press, websites or blogs. Nothing. Pando Daily has run 14 stories on Bitcoin in the last month. But type “Tim Draper” into the search box in Pando. Nothing about the price drop. Try it at Techcrunch. Bupkis about the shellacking. My friend Kara Swisher at Re/Code? Zippo. Well, a pointer to an article in the New Statesman. Any mention of Draper or Second Market in that article? Nope. The new Valleywag? Surely old “Fake Steve Jobs” Dan Lyons is all over this? Oops. Not a peep. Venture Beat? Nah.

Um, good point.

Google Glass for work: still going strong » Business Insider

Julie Bort:

Google is instead shifting its attention to focus on the one area where Glass has done reasonably well: businesses. The Glass for Work program has about a dozen partners involved, all of whom are still writing apps for the device, our source says.

A business that wants ” a 100 [pairs of Glass] tomorrow, they can get it. They want 1,000 tomorrow, they can get it,” this source told us, and Google confirmed.

“We’ll continue to invest in our Glass at Work offering for enterprise developers and companies,” a spokesperson told us.

We’re not going to pretend that Glass for Work is a major focus or priority at Google. Other sources at the company have indicated to us that it isn’t, at least not yet.

But within the Glass for Work community, the death of the so-called Explorers program (in which Google sold the device to individuals for $1,500 a pop) is being met with a shrug.

Makes sense. Glass has also looked much more sensible as a product for specialist product niches than for consumers.

Pinterest congratulates single women on marriage » NYMag

A whole bunch of women are tweeting about an email they received from the manic pixie dream start-up that congratulated them on their impending nuptials. Super thoughtful— except most of them don’t even have significant others.

Some of the users think it’s because they’ve been pinning wedding-related objects like invitations and dresses to their boards…

Algorithms considered harmful.

“Open data could improve rail travel for disabled passengers” say industry and passenger groups » Open Data Institute

Developers are already creating applications that turn data about train times, accessibility and facilities at stations into information that’s easy to access for those with disabilities. There are many existing applications that are useful for people with disabilities to help plan their journeys, including Twitter, Station Master (comprehensive 3D maps that show steps, lift access and ticket points of London Underground stations), Rail Point (live travel updates) and Realtime Trains (help users track their trains and find their platforms in advance).

So what is stopping more products and services from being developed to benefit commuters with disabilities?

For Google Glass to succeed, Tony Fadell needs to rip out the camera » Co.Design

Mark Wilson:

people don’t always just get used to it, and I learned that from my own case study with a wearable camera. After my son was born, I attempted to wear a Narrative camera most of the time. The Narrative is a diminutive, auto-shooting camera, the size of a small lapel pin, optimized to capture candid moments in your life. But family member after family member would spot it, ask what it was, and slowly tense in my presence, even when I’d promise these photos were private and wouldn’t be shared on Facebook. The next time they’d visit, their eyes would lower to my chest pockets again.

Nobody likes worrying they’re being recorded, and a subtle, spy-worthy piece of hardware does nothing to alleviate that concern. It made me realize that smartphone cameras didn’t offend anyone, because they live in a pocket, and it’s always obvious when someone’s taking a photograph with one. Along the same lines, I believe an embedded photographer photographing us with a large SLR would have offended my guests less than my tiny lapel camera. A few weeks into the experiment, I removed the Narrative to never wear it again, even though it captured some great shots.

Andrew Bower: The encryption ban makes us look like the Thick Party » Conservative Home

Opening paragraphs:

This week the Prime Minister introduced a policy of banning strong encryption in the UK in order to deny terrorists ‘safe spaces’ in which to operate. Sounds robust, doesn’t it? In practice such a policy is impossible to implement and so would never yield any security benefit. It would, however, leave all of us vulnerable to trivial cyber-attacks and David Cameron’s vision of a Digital Britain in tatters…

…By mobilising against encryption the government is contradicting the advice of its Information Commissioner on data protection for organisations and its own advice to the general public about being safe online.

About the author: “Andrew Bower works in the ‘Silicon Fen’, graduated in Computer Science from Cambridge University and has served as an Conservative Association officer.”

For non-UK readers, this means a member of prime minister David Cameron’s own party, the Conservatives, is telling him on a prominent site for his own party that his idea is complete and utter tosh.

Well, let’s hope one of his advisers reads it, at least.

Samsung to compensate all leukaemia-stricken workers » Korea Times

Kim Yoo-chul:

Samsung Electronics will compensate all former workers who contracted leukaemia and other diseases after working at its display and semiconductor facilities, the company said on Friday.
 
“Samsung Electronics will compensate all former workers who have developed leukaemia or incurable diseases, the families of the deceased and also current employees battling illness at our display and semiconductor plants,” said Samsung Electronics’ chief negotiator Baek Soo-hyun.

He made the remarks at a new round of compensation talks in downtown Seoul to resolve leukaemia-related issues with representatives of affected families.

“Samsung Electronics decided to widen the company’s scope of those who will be compensated,” Baek said during the talks. “In accordance with that principle, we will include all workers who’ve been suffering from acute lymphoid leukaemia-related diseases.”

This has been a long-running dispute in which relatives have sought compensation. This resolution is good.

iPad observations heading into Apple earnings » Above Avalon

Neil Cybart:

Where do iPad sales go from here? Exhibit 4 highlights three possibilities: 1) increase and start to  track iPhone adoption, 2) remain relatively steady to slightly down until a more sustainable sales level has been reached, 3) decline due to other reasons. My 2015 iPad estimates run with a scenario that falls somewhere between options 2 and 3.

Cybart, a former Wall Street analyst (though not of Apple), reckons Apple will sell 59m-60m iPads this financial year (from Oct 2014-Sep 2015), with shipment growth only showing in the April-June quarter. Why? It’s complicated.

Start up: more on AMOLED deterioration, Panic in the stores, tracking the trolls, questions for 2015 and more

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AMOLED screens. What will they look like in a few years’ time? Photo by RafeB on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. May contain nuts. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Are AMOLED displays at risk of burn-in? >> PC Pro

Paul Ockenden:

The blacks are better on an AMOLED screen, since its pixels are turned off and emit no light; IPS black pixels merely attempt to block the backlight, with only partial success. AMOLED screens aren’t as sharp as IPS panels, however, and can be more difficult to read in bright sunlight. To my mind, however, the biggest problem with AMOLED displays is that they suffer from screen burn.

The problem is the “O” in the AMOLED acronym, which stands for “organic”. The organic compounds used in AMOLED displays are polymers or copolymers, such as polyfluorene (PFO) and polyphenylene vinylene (PPV), both of which degrade with use.

This is partly due to the fact that the chemistry involved in creating the electroluminescence is irreversible, so the luminous pixels degrade as they’re used up, like a battery. These organic materials tend to crystallise, too – an effect that is exacerbated at higher temperatures. That’s something to bear in mind the next time your phone becomes warm while you’re playing a game or watching a video.

The answer to the headline’s question is “yes”. This seems like the sort of thing that would be easily overlooked by reviewers who use a device for a few days and praise its “gorgeous AMOLED screen“. But come back in a couple of years, and is it still?

The 2014 Panic report >> Panic Blog

Cabel Sasser:

This is the biggest problem we’ve been grappling with all year: we simply don’t make enough money from our iOS apps. We’re building apps that are, if I may say so, world-class and desktop-quality. They are packed with features, they look stunning, we offer excellent support for them, and development is constant. I’m deeply proud of our iOS apps. But… they’re hard to justify working on.
Here’s a way to visualize the situation. First up is a sample look at Units Sold for the month of November 2014: Wow! 51% of our unit sales came from iOS apps! That’s great!

But now look at this revenue chart for the same month… Despite selling more than half of our total units, iOS represents just 17% of our total revenue.
There are a few things at work here:
1. We’re not charging enough for our iOS apps. Or Mac users are simply willing to pay more for apps. Or both.
2. We’re not getting the word out well enough about our iOS apps.
3. The type of software we make just isn’t as compelling to iOS users as it is to Mac users. Our professional tools are geared for a type of user that simply might not exist on the iPad — admins and coders. We might have misjudged that market.

It’s really hard to say for sure. One thing is for certain: we are more likely to increase the price of our iOS software over time in an effort to make it make sense. And we’re less likely to tackle any huge new iOS projects until we get this figured out.

The problem with getting enough revenues from the iOS store, quite apart from the hassle Panic had when one of its apps was yanked from the store by Apple, is one that will be echoed by many companies. The question is whether it’s inherent to mobile – that niche apps (high value-added, small user numbers) – or to Apple’s store structures, which don’t allow trials (for example).

Global smartphone market to record de-growth [in value] for the first time in 2015, semiconductor to advance as high return industry >> ETNews Korea

It has been forecast that 2015 will be a year in which the global smartphone market will record the first negative growth in history based on the amount. Although a growth is expected based on the forwarding volume, the rate at which average selling price (ASP) decreases has accelerated. The global smartphone market scale in 2014 is estimated at $298.1bn, which increased by 10% from the year before. However, it is forecast that the scale will decrease by 4.3% to $285.2bn next year.

Stock market analyst Kim Hye-yong from Woori Investment and Securities forecast, “The global smartphone ASP this year [2014] is $234.50, which decreased by 13.9% from last year. Next year [2014], it will drop by 16.3% to $196.”

According to Kim, common carrier subsidy policy is not working in the emerging market that centers on the open market and, as a result, high-end smartphones are not selling well across the world. He estimated that Chinese companies, despite their growth on the outside, will record a deficit or just about meeting the breakeven point as their profitability is insufficient.

The Death Of Expertise >> The Federalist

Tom Nichols:

I am (or at least think I am) an expert. Not on everything, but in a particular area of human knowledge, specifically social science and public policy. When I say something on those subjects, I expect that my opinion holds more weight than that of most other people.

I never thought those were particularly controversial statements. As it turns out, they’re plenty controversial. Today, any assertion of expertise produces an explosion of anger from certain quarters of the American public, who immediately complain that such claims are nothing more than fallacious “appeals to authority,” sure signs of dreadful “elitism,” and an obvious effort to use credentials to stifle the dialogue required by a “real” democracy…

…I fear we are witnessing the “death of expertise”: a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laymen, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers – in other words, between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all…

…None of this ignorance stops people from arguing as though they are research scientists. Tackle a complex policy issue with a layman today, and you will get snippy and sophistic demands to show ever increasing amounts of “proof” or “evidence” for your case, even though the ordinary interlocutor in such debates isn’t really equipped to decide what constitutes “evidence” or to know it when it’s presented. The use of evidence is a specialized form of knowledge that takes a long time to learn, which is why articles and books are subjected to “peer review” and not to “everyone review,” but don’t tell that to someone hectoring you about the how things really work in Moscow or Beijing or Washington.

This is a storming essay about the ways in which the value of real domain expertise is being degraded and devalued. Read it and gape.

20 questions for 2015 >> Benedict Evans

I wrote a detailed post a few weeks ago looking at some of the key structural questions in mobile – with the platform wars over (their first phase, at least), what’s happening to Android, what will happen to interaction models and so on. But it’s also worth looking at just how much could change just in 2015 – or even in January. Everything is wide open. So, here, in no special order, are 20 questions for 2015, any one of which would change things a lot. I’ve written about most of these topics already in 2014 – in 2015 they’re even more interesting.

Apple questions for 2015 >> Above Avalon

Neil Cybart:

In recognition of the beginning of a new year, I want to share my running list of questions that I have been keeping for Apple in 2015. By no means is this an exhaustive list, but rather things that I know to be on the lookout for.

It’s a pretty long list, if not exhaustive. Some key questions in there, with designer Marc Newson, SVP operations Jeff Williams and ex-iOS chief Scott Forstall all in there. Plus would you believe in an Apple Pen?

Meet the dogged researchers who try to unmask haters online >> MIT Technology Review

Adrian Chen:

Internet hatred [näthat] is a problem anywhere a significant part of life is lived online. But the problem is sharpened by Sweden’s cultural and legal commitment to free expression, according to Mårten Schultz, a law professor at Stockholm University and a regular guest on Troll Hunter, where he discusses the legal issues surrounding each case. Swedes tend to approach näthat as the unpleasant but unavoidable side effect of having the liberty to say what you wish. Proposed legislation to combat online harassment is met with strong resistance from free speech and Internet rights activists.

What’s more, Sweden’s liberal freedom-of-information laws offer easy access to personal information about nearly anyone, including people’s personal identity numbers, their addresses, even their taxable income. That can make online harassment uniquely invasive. “The government publicly disseminates a lot of information you wouldn’t be able to get outside of Scandinavia,” Schultz says. “We have quite weak protection of privacy in Sweden.”

Imagine what the childish (and sometimes dangerous) doxxing wars being played out over various hashtags would look like if every country made available the amount of information that Sweden does. Stieg Larsson, author of the “Dragon Tattoo” books and an investigator into far-right hate groups, didn’t get married because doing so would have required him to state his place of residence.

What it would really take to reverse climate change >> IEEE Spectrum

Ross Koningstein and David Fork were in charge of Google’s “moonshot” announced in 2007 to come up with renewable energy sources that cost less than coal. It was shut down in 2011:

Our reckoning showed that reversing the trend would require both radical technological advances in cheap zero-carbon energy, as well as a method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering the carbon.

Those calculations cast our work at Google’s RE<C program in a sobering new light. Suppose for a moment that it had achieved the most extraordinary success possible, and that we had found cheap renewable energy technologies that could gradually replace all the world’s coal plants—a situation roughly equivalent to the energy innovation study’s best-case scenario. Even if that dream had come to pass, it still wouldn’t have solved climate change. This realisation was frankly shocking: Not only had RE<C failed to reach its goal of creating energy cheaper than coal, but that goal had not been ambitious enough to reverse climate change.

We’re a long way down the climate change road; what would really be needed would be an all-in effort on something like fusion and solar power.

No credit >> All this

Dr Drang:

Thursday night I got a fraud notice via text and email. When I called the bank, I found several charges from an online video game company that my older son uses. He’d made a single purchase, which went through, and then fifteen minutes later four or five charges from that same vendor were attempted and blocked. Was this a programming error at the game company? fraud by the company? fraud by some third party masquerading as the game company? Don’t know. I do know it wasn’t because my son was buying things by mistake—he’s eighteen and has enough experience online to know better. The bank cancelled the credit card and we canceled his game account. Happy New Year.

As I said, this will be our fifth card in the past twelve months. We started 2014 with a card we’d had for a couple of years, but it was replaced in early February after the Target breach. Sometime in spring, the bank caught a fraudulent charge at a Kmart in Chicago, so our 3–4 month old card was cancelled and a new one issued. That one lasted all the way to October, when it was cancelled because of the Home Depot breach. And now this.

When the new card arrives on Monday, I’ll go through the list of accounts and change them all to the new number. My list is on paper, but this time I’m going to switch to a system like Jamie Phelps’s, that’ll allow me to just click a single link instead of dig my way through a series of pages for each account.

It’s puzzling how European banks and retailers were able to coordinate the introduction of Chip+PIN – which would kill this sort of fraud almost dead – and yet the US has completely failed at it. The UK introduced Chip+PIN in 2004. The problem hasn’t gone away – it’s forced it to different places, principally online, where phishing is still a big problem that await Apple Pay-style methods to reduce them.

Start up: botnets worsen, who really hacked Sony?, mobile PCs in 2015, LizardSquad in detail

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This stuff doesn’t work on mobile, apparently. Photo by Justin in SD on Flickr.

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

Botnet summary 2014 >> Spamhaus

To nobody’s surprise, botnet activity appears to be increasing. The majority of detected botnets are targeted at obtaining and exploiting banking and financial information. Botnet controllers (C&Cs) are hosted disproportionately on ISPs with understaffed abuse departments, inadequate abuse policies, or inefficient abuse detection and shutdown processes. Botnet C&C domains are registered disproportionately with registrars in locations that have lax laws or inadequate enforcement against cybercrime.

In 2014, Spamhaus detected 7,182 distinct IP addresses that hosted a botnet controller (Command & Control server – C&C). That is an increase of 525 (or 7.88%) botnet controllers over the number we detected in 2013. Those C&Cs were hosted on 1,183 different networks.

Depressing.

New York Times bets on native ads to drive mobile-ad revenue >> Media – Advertising Age

The New York Times is looking at native advertising, sponsorships and video to wring more money from readers coming to the Times on their mobile phones, according to Mark Thompson, president and CEO of The New York Times Co.

Just 10% of the Times’ digital advertising revenue was from mobile ads in the third quarter, but more than half its digital traffic came through mobile devices. Although mobile ad revenue is “growing rapidly,” this gap represents a “significant delta,” Mr. Thompson said at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference in New York on Tuesday.

“It’s a challenge to overcome, but we will overcome it,” he said.

This seems like a natural and necessary evolution, given the low rates of mobile. They won’t make up for desktop, which in turn didn’t make up for print. Advertising rates are falling to zero.

What is going to happen >> AVC

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson with his list of predictions, from which we’ll pick these two:

4/ After a big year in 2014 with the Facebook acquisition of Oculus Rift, virtual reality will hit some headwinds. Oculus will struggle to ship their consumer version and competitive products will underwhelm. The virtual reality will eventually catch up to the virtual hype, but not in 2015.

5/ Another market where the reality will not live up to the hype is wearables. The Apple Watch will not be the homerun product that iPod, iPhone, and iPad have been. Not everyone will want to wear a computer on their wrist. Eventually, this market will be realized as the personal mesh/personal cloud, but the focus on wearables will be a bit of a headfake and take up a lot of time, energy, and money in 2015 with not a lot of results.

I’m very interested in trying Oculus Rift. Wearables are a tough sell anyway. However, Apple isn’t positioning its Watch as any part of what has gone before.

FBI briefed on alternate Sony hack theory >> Politico

Tal Kopan:

Researchers from the cyber intelligence company Norse have said their own investigation into the data on the Sony attack doesn’t point to North Korea at all and instead indicates some combination of a disgruntled employee and hackers for piracy groups is at fault.

The FBI says it is standing by its conclusions, but the security community says the agency has been open and receptive to help from the private sector throughout the Sony investigation.

Norse, one of the world’s leading cyber intelligence firms, has been researching the hack since it was made public just before Thanksgiving.

Norse’s senior vice president of market development said the quickness of the FBI’s conclusion that North Korea was responsible was a red flag.

1) a riled insider or insiders is a far, far more likely path to this hack
2) there’s no way in the world, now that the FBI has said that North Korea did it, and President Obama has echoed that, that the FBI or US government will ever admit to being wrong unless it is part of some gigantic diplomatic deal with North Korea. One has to wonder what NK would give the US in return for making the US eat humble pie in public.

Competition to intensify in flagging mobile PC market in 2015 >> TrendForce

Google’s low-cost Chromebook notebook computer performed well this year, benefiting from its cloud storage capacity and strong data security capabilities. But Chromebook sales were affected by Microsoft’s subsidized low-cost Windows notebooks. In 2014, Google sold about 6.5m Chromebooks and the device’s market penetration [of the mobile market] reached 4%. But if Chromebook uses the 2-in-1 PC concept, it will be difficult for Google to keep the device’s price low, Chen said. TrendForce forecasts Chomebook sales will increase slightly to 8m units in 2015. 

This year, Microsoft and Intel both launched subsidy plans for their notebooks and tablets, which had reduced their revenues. “Because they lower manufacturers’ costs, subsidies indirectly benefit consumers, but it will be better if Microsoft and Intel can find more substantial ways to develop the market, such as by utilizing the 2-in-1 concept or cloud computing,” [Caroline] Chen [Trendforce notebook analyst] said. 

Notably, this group describes the expected 12.9in iPad as a “2-in-1” device, not a tablet. There’s a certain amount of disagreement between analyst companies on what is a PC, what’s mobile, what’s a 2-in-1, and what’s a tablet; it can make decoding what they say really tricky.

May 2014: Samsung says new Galaxy S5 smartphone is off to a strong start >> WSJ

Noted here for its hindsight value, from an interview in May 2014:

J.K. Shin, who also heads Samsung’s mobile business, said in an interview at company headquarters that sales of the new smartphone reached more than 11m units since its launch in early April, outpacing the Galaxy S4, which sold about 10m in the first month after it was unveiled last year.

Speaking halfway into Samsung’s second quarter, Mr. Shin also said he thinks strong Galaxy S5 sales will lead to higher mobile profit margins and market share in the quarter. He declined to provide specific figures.

“It’s been a month since we began selling the S5, and out of the gate, sales are much stronger than the Galaxy S4,” Mr. Shin said, noting sales were especially good in developed markets such as the U.S., Australia and Germany.

The comments from the top executive at the world’s biggest smartphone maker paint a rosier picture of Samsung’s mobile business than many analysts and investors had been expecting.

What then happened is that Samsung made 20% more S5s than it had S4s, but sold 10% fewer. This meant oversupply in the channel (wholesalers/carriers) and forced price cuts, and so lower profits and slower sales.

Worth considering when you next see a chief executive interviewed, and weigh up what analysts are expecting.

Samsung Electronics should announce its preliminary 4Q results some time next week.

Here’s why The Hunt’s app developer hearts Android >> VentureBeat | Dev | by Barry Levine

While “the conventional wisdom is build first for iOS,” he said, “if we had to do it all over again, I would launch on Android first,” or at the same time as iOS. More than half of The Hunt’s downloads are to Android devices.

The Hunt’s Android version launched last month, and its iOS version came out last year.

The Hunt allows its three million, mostly female users to post a picture of some product they’ve seen online — such as a photo of a dress in a news story — and get feedback from the community of retailers and fellow shoppers about where that item or something similar is sold.

Weingarten noted that his company has “a very successful iPhone app, [with] thousands of daily downloads.”

“I’m not being negative about Apple.”

But, he pointed out, his company is “seeing much stronger engagement rates on Android.”

As one example, more than a third of Android users who have downloaded the app have started Hunts, while only 20% of iOS users have. Additionally, 40% of iOS weekly users are following to see if their Hunt queries have found the product in question, while half of Android users are.

Be good to know some more of the demographics of the users showing these behaviours. An interesting data point though.

Inadvertent algorithmic cruelty >> Eric Meyer

Yes, my year looked like that.  True enough.  My year looked like the now-absent face of my little girl.  It was still unkind to remind me so forcefully.

And I know, of course, that this is not a deliberate assault.  This inadvertent algorithmic cruelty is the result of code that works in the overwhelming majority of cases, reminding people of the awesomeness of their years, showing them selfies at a party or whale spouts from sailing boats or the marina outside their vacation house.

But for those of us who lived through the death of loved ones, or spent extended time in the hospital, or were hit by divorce or losing a job or any one of a hundred crises, we might not want another look at this past year.

To show me Rebecca’s face and say “Here’s what your year looked like!” is jarring.  It feels wrong, and coming from an actual person, it would be wrong.  Coming from code, it’s just unfortunate.  These are hard, hard problems.  It isn’t easy to programmatically figure out if a picture has a ton of Likes because it’s hilarious, astounding, or heartbreaking.

This post has been widely shared, but it is worth reflecting on from a distance. Algorithms have dangerous power because once we start them off, it’s really hard to stop them.

Lizard Squad kids: a long trail of fail >> Krebs on Security

In a show of just how little this group knows about actual hacking and coding, the source code for the service appears to have been lifted in its entirety from titaniumstresser, another, more established DDoS-for-hire booter service. In fact, these Lizard geniuses are so inexperienced at coding that they inadvertently exposed information about all of their 1,700+ registered users (more on this in a moment).

These two services, like most booters, are hidden behind CloudFlare, a content distribution service that lets sites obscure their true Internet address. In case anyone cares, Lizardstresser’s real Internet address currently is 217.71.50.57, at a hosting facility in Bosnia.

In any database of leaked forum or service usernames, it is usually safe to say that the usernames which show up first in the list are the administrators and/or creators of the site. The usernames exposed by the coding and authentication weaknesses in LizardStresser show that the first few registered users are “anti” and “antichrist.” As far as I can tell, these two users are the same guy: A ne’er-do-well who has previously sold access to his personal DDoS-for-hire service on Darkode — a notorious English-language cybercrime forum that I have profiled extensively on this blog.

One of the duo alleged to make up Lizard Squad is a 22-year-old Briton who has been arrested and bailed by Thames Valley Police. He’s on Twitter, has been interviewed by Sky News, and denies having taken part in any hack (or DDOS?) of Sony or Microsoft; he claims just to be the group’s spokesman, if his Twitter feed reflects his views.

Let’s see how that works out. He also says the alleged offences for which he has been bailed include some from 2013.

Start up: smartphone epochs, UK buyers slow on tablets, OnePlus faces India patent suit, Uber redux, and more

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Ahh – a Nokia smartphone. Photo by David Roessli on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Slippery when wet. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The Innovator’s Stopwatch. Part 2 >> Asymco

Horace Dediu:

As diffusion proceeds through each adopter category, the product is re-positioned to address each group’s presumed behavior. Innovators (first 2.5% of the population) are offered novelty, a chance to experiment and uniqueness of experience; early adopters are offered a chance to create or enhance their position of social leadership; the early majority build imitate the leadership of the early adopters and justify it with productivity gains; the late majority are skeptics but, given a set of specific benefits, join the earlier adopters. Finally the laggards reluctantly agree to adopt as their preferred alternative of not adopting disappears.

The theory suggests that a firm can be successful if they modify their marketing and perhaps product mix to accommodate these adopter categories in a timely manner.

If this is the case however, why is it that those who have access to these data (i.e. who is buying and when) not to do the right thing?

Really you have to read it for the graphs, showing the rise and fall of Palm/WinMob, Nokia, Samsung (projected), and the rise of China and India. But what about Apple?

Mobile Innovation: we need to get past the App Store duopoly >> Continuations

Albert Wenger, of VC firm Union Square Ventures:

Many people have pointed to the amazing commerce integrations in WeChat in China as an example of what can be done. What fewer have said though is that China does not have an app store duopoly. So WeChat has been free to innovate on commerce without having to live in the confines of what Apple or Google deem appropriate (and hence not in conflict with their own ambitions). As far as I can tell Chinese smartphones work just fine and any claim that centralized app stores are required for security or quality control is simply a pretense for wanting to extract more economics. The price of Chinese phones also does away with the claim that cross subsidization is required for adoption or phone innovation.

I thought USV was sure that Android was going to be the only app store anyone would need. Now it isn’t? Also, why not just go HTML5, as some of the commenters suggest?

Huawei, with 30,000 patents in China, is preparing to sue Xiaomi >> Patently Apple

local first-generation smartphone manufacturer rivals in China such as Huawei and ZTE are now going after Xiaomi where they know they’re weak: Patents. With Ericsson’s success against Xiaomi in India, both Chinese rivals are now racing to file lawsuits. 

A Korean report tapping into industry sources stated that earlier this week Huawei and ZTE were known to be preparing to sue Xiaomi, OPPO, and Bubugao for infringement of their patent rights.

Earlier, Huawei and ZTE sent out a warning letter to these companies asking them to stop infringing on their patents and pay legitimate royalties. However, as they did not respond, Huawei and ZTE decided to take legal action against them.

An industry source added that “It was confirmed that China’s second-generation smartphone manufacturers had been violating four to five patents related to communications technology, including WCDMA, which is used in 3G mobile communications.”

Huawei and ZTE are strong patent holders, collecting more than 70 percent of relevant royalties in China’s mobile phone market. Huawei has nearly 30,000 of the 39,000 mobile phone patents in China. It has also registered 7,000 patents this year alone.

Oh dear, it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.

OnePlus has been ordered to stop selling the OnePlus One in India after legal action by Micromax >> Android Police

Ryan Whitwan:

Micromax—which plans to launch its YU brand with Cyanogen soon—has gone to the Delhi High Court to allege OnePlus is infringing on its exclusive licensing of Cyanogen OS. The court agreed, and now OnePlus is barred from selling, marketing, or even importing its devices in India. Additionally, the company is not permitted to ship any device in India that bears the Cyanogen logo or branding even after it gets the OS situation worked out.

As we recently discussed, OnePlus says it was only notified of the exclusive agreement between Micromax and Cyanogen two weeks before the OPO was to launch in India. It plans to have a custom ROM of its own ready by February, with a beta release sooner. However, the devices shipping in India right now still have CyanogenMod installed. They won’t get official support or updates, but apparently that’s not good enough for Micromax.

Dixons Carphone shines but we’re not taking the tablets >> London Evening Standard

Computer tablets have failed to capture the [UK] consumer’s imagination this Christmas — they were tipped to be the biggest festival seller but sales have actually fallen, according to the boss of Dixons Carphone.

Seb James, chief executive of the newly merged phone and electricals retailer, suggested most people already had one and a technology shift was needed before people buy new versions.

His comments come as the company, created from a merger of the Currys, PC World parent and Carphone Warehouse, reported its first set of half-year results since the deal this year.

Sales rose 5% to £5.02bn in the six months to beginning of November. However, the company made a £20m loss before tax, thanks to the £100m spent on the merger — lawyer and banker fees alone amounted to about £11m.

Wonder what form a “technology shift” would need to take to get people buying a new round of tablets.

Uber: Exec accessed reporter’s private trip info because she was late >> Naked Security

Lisa Vaas:

In a letter to Senator Al Franken, Uber says it accessed a reporter’s account because “She was 30 minutes late” to a meeting and an executive wanted to know when she’d show up so he could meet her in the lobby.

And flash his iPhone at her. And tell her that he was tracking her, according to a report from The Guardian.

In fact, Uber New York General Manager Josh Mohrer reportedly poked at BuzzFeed reporter Johana Bhuiyan’s personal data twice, on both occasions tracking her movements without her permission.

As an excuse, it’s lame. As a reason, it’s also lame. That hasn’t stopped Uber’s general counsel saying in the letter that it has a “strong culture of protecting [passenger] information.” Except when it doesn’t, clearly.

And as Franken pointed out in response, the letter doesn’t answer his questions – viz, what “legitimate” business purposes are for accessing customer data inside Uber.

Smartphone Comparison Chart >>Gnod

Interactive, and covering pretty much everything available in the US. Helpful if you are a specification freak; otherwise, more of a curio, though one on which you could waste an easy half an hour.

Shifting Freebase over to Wikidata >> Freebase on Google+

When we publicly launched Freebase back in 2007, we thought of it as a “Wikipedia for structured data.” So it shouldn’t be surprising that we’ve been closely watching the Wikimedia Foundation’s project Wikidata[1] since it launched about two years ago. We believe strongly in a robust community-driven effort to collect and curate structured knowledge about the world, but we now think we can serve that goal best by supporting Wikidata – they’re growing fast, have an active community, and are better-suited to lead an open collaborative knowledge base.

So we’ve decided to help transfer the data in Freebase to Wikidata, and in mid-2015 we’ll wind down the Freebase service as a standalone project. Freebase has also supported developer access to the data, so before we retire it, we’ll launch a new API for entity search powered by Google’s Knowledge Graph.

Google bought MetaWeb in 2010; this move, giving the responsibility to the crowd, suggests either that upkeep was too expensive, or that Google has found better ways to do it internally.

Start up: periodic Health, iPods not guilty, Xiaomi’s reprieve, Samsung’s pay plan, Sony’s TV squeeze, and more

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NOT GUILTY YOUR HONOUR. Photo by Jacob Christensen on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Do not return after lighting. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How self-tracking apps exclude women >> The Atlantic

Rose Eveleth:

[Menstruation-tracking site] Monthly Info was really designed for Rivers, but she added a user signup system mostly because it was easy. And people signed up. A lot of people. “It kind of took off on its own from there and grew to over 100,000 users,” she said. “There was apparently a need for something like this, because it didn’t take much energy to make or grow.” Now, there are hundreds of period-tracking apps on the market. Considering the gender imbalance in tech, it’s fair to guess most of them are made by men. Rivers joked that it’s not hard to spot a fertility-tracking app designed by a man. They focus on moods (men want to know when their girlfriends are going to be grouchy) and treat getting pregnant like a level in a video game. “It feels like the product is mansplaining your own body to you,” said Rivers, who is now an engineer working on other projects. “‘We men don’t like to be blindsided by your hormonal impulses so we need to track you, like you’re a parking meter.’”

Utterly brilliant article. To my great embarrassment, I’d never noticed that Apple’s Health app doesn’t include an option to record days when you menstruate – which for 50% of the population is a really big deal, and a significant omission. (And nobody pointed it out to me, until now.)

But as Eveleth shows, it’s a problem that’s common across the whole “tracking” field. (Also: 420 comments. None of the ones I scanned worth any of your time.)

Jury finds Apple not guilty of harming consumers in iTunes DRM case >> The Verge

An eight-person jury has decided that Apple is not on the hook for what could have been more than $1bn in a trial centering on extra security measures the company added to iTunes and iPods starting in 2006.

Delivering a unanimous verdict today, the group said Apple’s iTunes 7.0, released in the fall of 2006, was a “genuine product improvement,” meaning that new features (though importantly increased security) were good for consumers. Plaintiffs in the case unsuccessfully argued that those features not only thwarted competition, but also made Apple’s products less useful since customers could not as easily use purchased music or jukebox software from other companies with the iPod.

The decision means Apple did not violate antitrust laws, something that would have potentially led to damages of more than $1bn.

Plaintiff’s (singular) attorney planning an appeal. Here’s part of what his summing up against Apple said:

I’ve been trying to think of an analogy, and I’ve been living on Snickers bars for the past couple weeks. Now if the Snickers bar was bigger, or contained more chocolate, that would be better. But if that Snickers bar had a preservative in it that was toxic — that was lethal — that would not be an improved Snickers bar.

This probably had the effect of making the jury both hungry and unsure if he was all there.

Xiaomi’s India ban partially lifted >> Tech In Asia

Last week, Chinese phone maker Xiaomi was hit with a sales ban in India. Today, that has been partially lifted by the Delhi High Court, reports The Hindu.

Today’s ruling allows Xiaomi to sell only Qualcomm-powered smartphones in India, and only until January 8, 2015. This allows Xiaomi to sell three of the four models it had launched in India – the Redmi Note 4G, the Mi3, and the Redmi 1S. The MediaTek-powered Redmi Note remains fully banned.

This is a temporary reprieve for Xiaomi – its intellectual property battle in India is far from over. We’ve contacted Xiaomi to ask when its online sales will recommence (Update: No comment for now).

Google faces €15m fines over privacy breaches in Netherlands >> The Guardian

Chris Johnston:

The search company is failing to abide by the data protection act in the Netherlands by taking users’ private information such as browsing history and location data to target them with customised ads, according to the country’s Data Protection Authority (DPA).

The Dutch regulator has given Google until the end of February to change how it handles the data it collects from individual web users.

Google has also been under investigation in Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain for its handling of user data since introducing new company guidelines two years ago.

Jacob Kohnstamm, DPA chairman, said: “This has been ongoing since 2012 and we hope our patience will no longer be tested.”

Holland isn’t alone – other European countries are looking to fine Google over this. The amounts, though, are piddling compared to its profits.

Samsung in talks with LoopPay for wireless phone payments >> Re/code

Jason Del Rey:

Samsung has discussed a deal with a payments startup that would help the smartphone maker unveil a wireless mobile payments system in 2015 to rival Apple, according to multiple sources.

The technology would allow people with certain Samsung phones to pay in the vast majority of brick-and-mortar stores by waving their phones instead of swiping with a credit card or cash.

It is not yet clear if Samsung has reached a deal with the startup, Burlington, Mass.-based LoopPay. One source said the deal could still fall apart. A prototype of the payments system working on a Samsung phone has been created, the other source said…

…LoopPay’s technology can wirelessly transmit the same information stored on a debit or credit card’s magnetic stripe to a store’s checkout equipment without swiping a card.

1) It’s a copy of the credit/debit card details, so not as secure as Apple Pay (which sends a one-time encrypted version, aka “tokenisation”). LoopPay “hopes” to use tokenisation.

2) How long before Google shows up at Samsung’s door and tells it to quit harshing on Google Wallet’s mellow?

When does your OS run? >> Gustavo Duarte

Here’s a question: in the time it takes you to read this sentence, has your OS been running? Or was it only your browser? Or were they perhaps both idle, just waiting for you to do something already?

These questions are simple but they cut through the essence of how software works. To answer them accurately we need a good mental model of OS behavior, which in turn informs performance, security, and troubleshooting decisions. We’ll build such a model in this post series using Linux as the primary OS, with guest appearances by OS X and Windows. I’ll link to the Linux kernel sources for those who want to delve deeper.

The fundamental axiom here is that at any given moment, exactly one task is active on a CPU.

A good introduction for just what your computer is up to when you aren’t looking. Or are looking. Educational value: high.

Russia – heading for recession, mobile market will contract >> Counterpoint Technology Market Research

Peter Richardson:

The Russian mobile device market has held up surprisingly well in 2014. However device manufacturers, who have been swallowing price rises to a substantial degree so far, cannot hold out much longer. OEM’s supply chains are dollar denominated. We fully expect handset OEMs will start passing on the higher Ruble prices to their channels and likely to the end consumer. A device with an ex-factory price of $100 this time last year would have translated to 3300 Rubles. Today (16th December 2014), the same device costs over 7100 Rubles. Given how tight margins are, no OEM can swallow that rate of change.

Most consumers will tend, on average, to pay approximately the same amount when they change their mobile phone. Given the rapid advance in technology this means that someone upgrading after two years will be able to buy a substantially better product than the one they have been using. Displays, processors, memory size, camera sensors and other parts of the phones improve at greater or lesser speeds, but all do improve.

However for the Russian consumer in 2015, this will no longer hold true.

He forecasts a total market of about 40-44m devices in 2015, down from 51m or so in 2014. “Super-premium” products won’t be affected as much – the rich tend to stay rich (or are non-ruble-denominated, so they actually get richer).

Comments aren’t dead. They’re just broken. — Medium

Mat Yurow (of the New York Times’s audience development team):

Currently, comment threads do a lousy job of surfacing the best content — paving the way for vitriol to rise to the top. Again, much of this can be attributed to design.

As previously stated, comments about an article are typically aggregated in a single module at the bottom of the page. But what exactly is someone supposed to comment on at the bottom of the article? A specific passage, the article as a whole, the weather? Without any sort of direction, it’s easy to image how things can spiral out of control.

Conversation requires context. Context provides the connectivity and relevance that users have come to expect on the internet. In an era of algorithms, we are conditioned to expect a personalized and finely-curated experience across the web.

Medium’s method of putting “comments” out of sight beside the actual article is better, but still doesn’t answer the argument – which also arises – of how, exactly, comments are meant to feed into the story above/beside. Is the story meant to change because of the comments? What’s their purpose, other than to show that people have fingers and keyboards?

Sony’s TV business mends, but will it be enough? – WSJ

Eric Pfranner and Takashi Mochizuki:

In the third quarter of this year, Sony had an 8% share of TV revenue world-wide, well behind Samsung Electronics Co. at 27% and LG Electronics Inc., another South Korean manufacturer, at 15%, according to research firm DisplaySearch. Sony predicts sales in its home entertainment and sound segment, which includes TVs as well as hi-fi systems, DVD players and other audiovisual devices, will shrink to around ¥1.1trn ($9.2bn) in its fiscal year ending in March 2018. For the current year, the company is expecting segment sales to rise slightly to ¥1.2trn.

The TV unit will post a slim operating profit for this year, with the margin rising to between 2% and 4% by fiscal 2018, Sony forecasts.

Some analysts say that short of a 5% margin, it makes little sense for Sony to keep making TVs, and the company should focus instead on its more promising operations, including PlayStation videogames, smartphone camera sensors, movies and television programming.

The TV set business is so cut-throat that it’s incredible. Sony’s business, meanwhile, is suffering death by a thousand cuts: first the PC, then the TV, until it has just the Playstation, components and Sony Pictures Entertainment to bolster it. And the latter isn’t having a great time lately.

Switch (or: what will the fourth wave of mobile carriers be like?)

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Photo by Vern on Flickr

About 20 years ago, I signed up to a mobile network for the first time. It was the UK, and there was a choice of three: BT’s Cellnet, Vodafone, and a newcomer called Orange.

Orange had an advertising campaign which focussed on a number of benefits of its new system: among others, that it would bill you per-second, rather than per-minute as the longer-established pair did. (That is, if you made a call lasting 10 seconds, you would be billed just for those seconds on Orange; on the other two, you’d be billed for a minute.)

Here’s the launch video (via Benedict Evans)

Note some of the lines in this: “In the future, we won’t change what you say, just how you say it; we’ll think it’s strange that voices ever travelled down wires; no one will be tied down; the skies will be clearer because the world of communications will be wire-free”. And it ended with the fantastic tag-line “the future’s bright, the future’s Orange”, which became the punchline of many jokes – thus demonstrating how Orange embedded itself into a fast-growing market of mobile users.

I stayed happily with Orange for a long time. In 2011 I added a data bundle – 500MB per month, costing £5, on the advice of Susi Weaser (who told me, Bill Gates-style, that 500MB was enough for pretty much anybody). I moved to a SIM-only contract too – so I brought the phone, and Orange simply supplied the service. (I’m not an early adopter of most technologies; I’m generally quite price-sensitive.)

This week, I finally switched away from Orange, to a SIM-only plan on Three. There were a number of reasons:
• for the same price, Three offers me unlimited data
• for the same price, Three offers me twice as many talk minutes (not that I ever used them up on Orange, but headroom is nice)
• for the same price, I get free calls to voicemail – in the latest version of my SIM contract, Orange had begun charging voicemail calls at 35p/min, which meant that I simply stopped checking my voicemail
• for the same price, I get free calls to 0800 (freephone) numbers
• for the same price, Three offers its “Feel At Home” data roaming service, so that when you go abroad in the US and a number of European and Scandinavian and Asian countries, any data you use is treated (and priced) as though you were at home. (By contrast with Orange you had to call to get “roaming bundles” activated, which didn’t always happen, and you couldn’t set up roaming bundles for both the US and Europe at once; only one could be “active”, which meant you had to call them if you went from one to the other; and the detail of what the roaming bundles were differed between the Orange “Roaming Angel” app and the people on the phone.)
• for the same price, I’ll get 4G as and when Three rolls it out (and it already offers HSPA+, which is damn fast anyway)

As well as these factors – which have been around for years – Orange had also messed up my billing, and not fixed it when I pointed it out to them. So this week it lost not just my business, but also my daughter’s (she was on the same bill as me); when my son’s SIM-only contract expires next year, I expect I’ll move him too.

I know that there’s a minus – that Orange’s network has wider coverage than Three’s. But this is just a matter of build-out; Orange had less coverage than Vodafone or O2 when I chose it all those years ago. You can’t go higher than 100% coverage, and as it happens Three piggybacks on a lot of EE’s network anyway.

Obviously there’s a lesson of “don’t annoy the billpayer” to all this. But I think there’s a wider significance, about the difference between the offerings of those carriers.

Wave upon wave

Cellnet (which became O2) and Vodafone were the “first wave” of mobile carriers: they had a (government-established) duopoly, they charged a lot, they used the old landline model of per-minute billing, they were cosy.

The arrival of Orange – the “second wave” – shook them up. The arrival later of T-Mobile (owned by Deutsche Telekom) expanded peoples’ options dramatically. The 1999 price war between supermarkets to introduce cheap pay-as-you-go (PAYG, aka prepaid) phones expanded the user base enormously.

Three, which started in the UK in 2003, represents the “third wave” of mobile, focussed on data, even though it predated the modern smartphone by years. Part of its USP when it launched was video calling: its network was so modern, it pointed out (because it was all 3G) that you could make video calls.

Unfortunately, few people had phones that made video calling worthwhile at the time, and the whole idea seemed nonsensical. “I don’t want people to see me in a call!” people said, even though webcams were a coming (if not already pervasive) thing. The lack of data easily available to stream also meant that there wasn’t much to do with a 3G phone; remember, until 2005 there was no Google Maps, no YouTube, no Spotify, and very few phones built to do anything useful with large amounts of data. (Here’s a splendid overview of Three’s past 10 years.)

Three’s data offering set it apart from the other networks by taking data as the assumed part of our forthcoming life, just as Orange did with per-second billing. There’s a wider comparison: look at Aaron Levie of Box, who says that it’s an assumption within the company that over time, storage will cost nothing, and that bandwidth is heading the same way, so you have to build valuable services on top.

Since Three, lots of other networks have jumped onto the data bandwagon; some of the networks are pretending to disrupt themselves (particularly O2 with its MVNO offering GiffGaff).

One could argue that Three hasn’t disrupted much; that there isn’t a lot of evidence that people want what it offers. It’s the smallest of the four networks (EE – comprised of Orange and T-Mobile, which are “gradually merging” in a move that is as smooth as “gradually changing from driving on the left to the right” – Vodafone and O2).

Deeper into the data

However, look at what the other networks are doing. Orange got them to move to per-second billing. Data is becoming more easily available. And with smartphone penetration now tipping towards 80%, and demand for data going up (helped along by EE’s TV advertising for 4G), I think we’re moving towards the “fourth wave” of carriers.

To be clear, the waves were
– first wave: introduces mobile, 30 years ago
– second wave: introduces mobile-only features and capability, 20 years ago
– third wave: assumes that we will shift from voice to data, and be data-first

So what does a fourth wave mobile carrier do? What are the assumptions it is built on?

Look at the wider context.
• Smartphone prices are falling
• Smartphones are increasingly available unlocked (even, mirabile dictu, in the US) which means you can switch a phone you’ve purchased between carriers
• Buying a phone through a mobile contract is a mug’s game; the effective interest rate is far above what you’d pay on a credit card if you bought it outright
• we want data everywhere, all the time

In that sense the data scenario reminds me of the switch between dialup and broadband. Lots of dialup services flourished charging per-minute on dialup; the spread of broadband adoption drove them to the wall, mostly, and shifted the source of profit to other places entirely: the wireline suppliers, and web properties such as Google or Amazon.

A “fourth wave” carrier will have to
• accept that its customers might switch carrier at any time (either joining, or leaving)
• offer data in very large amounts compared to what went before
• consider that data-heavy offerings as come-ons won’t work to retain customers (because those customers will be able to get the same elsewhere); so free video or music offerings aren’t as tempting as with third-wave carriers
• therefore, find a different dimension in which to compete

All the carriers have been trying things in the physical world – there are cinema tickets, offerings for festivals, Wi-Fi at underground stations, subscriptions to music services, and so on. It’s hard to judge, but it’s not clear that we really want our carriers to be the providers of frou-frou extras.

For readers in the US, few of these things are yet available. Prices are high; switching costs are very high; competition is minimal; and though AT&T has had large data offerings, the extra cost is dramatic. John Legere is trying to turn T-Mobile (separate of the UK/European one) into a disruptive force, but he has his work cut out because PAYG isn’t big, while the US is, and inertia is hard to overcome. (Just look at me; I probably could have benefited from switching a couple of years ago at least.) If the US carrier market went through some upheaval, customers would surely benefit in terms of lower pricing.

The next dimension

What’s the extra dimension? If we look at the shift that happened in the dialup-to-broadband shift, it was away from clunky interaction to smooth web interaction, and the control of your own information. Customer service is an obvious way to set a service apart; having a really good web-controlled experience where you can control your account without having to hang on a line listening to endless hold music, and then struggling with VOIP calls, is the way forward. Orange/EE has tried this, though Three definitely does it better.

Is the extra dimension in faster connectivity? For a while – EE is converting customers there to pricier contracts (though I see little evidence of people changing network for it). But the tradeoff is that if the service doesn’t seem to be much extra benefit, especially compared to the price, you can lose: already there are complaints that 4G contention in cities means you don’t actually see the extra speed.

That doesn’t leave much room for differentiation or profit, does it? That though is what has happened to the mobile carrier industry: it has been commoditised piece by piece. It’s the fifth utility, alongside water, electricity, gas and broadband. The giant profits of the past aren’t coming back.

The plaintive wail heard again and again from carriers is that they don’t want to become “dumb pipes”. Unfortunately that’s their lot. This doesn’t mean there’s no way to differentiate themselves; only that they have to think in different directions from the ones they have before, and attract customers for the service they provide rather than the extras they bolt on. It shouldn’t be such a radical idea.

After all, it’s what I joined Orange for; and why, in the end, I left. The waves keep coming.