Tag Archives: web

Start up: Samsung’s US chance, Google’s RTBF extension, hacking Isil, bionic feels!, and more

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The world of professional bridge is struggling with accusations of cheating. But how do you prevent people communicating in code, if they can communicate? Photo by jaxx2kde on Flickr.

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

Sizing the US opportunity for Samsung Galaxy S7 & S7 edge » Kantar Worldpanel

Carolina Milanesi:

»By the end of January [2016], the Galaxy S6 represented only 9% of Samsung’s installed base in the US, and the Galaxy S6 edge a mere 2%. The Galaxy S5 remained the most popular device in the installed base, representing 21.5% followed by the Galaxy S4 – now a three-year-old phone – at 14.2%.

Between February 2015 and January 2016, only 26% of Samsung smartphones in use were upgraded. This creates a huge opportunity for Samsung to persuade consumers it is time to upgrade to the new devices.

Of the 26% of Samsung devices that were upgraded, the greatest percentage (27.5%) chose the Galaxy S5, 26.2% the Galaxy S6: 9.4% the Galaxy Note 4: 7.9% the Galaxy Note 5: and 5% the Galaxy S6 edge. The rest of the upgrades were divided among 33 different models, demonstrating how wide the Samsung offering remains in the US market, despite all the attention being given to its flagship products.

Only 3.6% of current Galaxy S6 owners said they are planning to upgrade their smartphone in the next 12 months. This should not worry Samsung, however, as we have shown that a significant opportunity remains among owners of older phones, making them a much easier target for the Korean brand.

«

Suggests that the S6 and S6 Edge really weren’t a big hit, as the S4 has a higher share than both together.
link to this extract

 

Dirty hands » The New Yorker

David Owen, with a fantastic piece about cheating in the world of professional bridge:

»When Brogeland made his first announcement, his evidence against Fisher and Schwartz consisted solely of what he believed to be a collection of suspicious hands; he still didn’t know how they might be exchanging information. A few days later, he created a new Web site, called Bridgecheaters.com, and posted three YouTube videos from the 2014 European Team Championships, which Fisher and Schwartz’s team had won. Each video had been shot from a camera mounted near the table. It showed all four players, as well as the table paraphernalia of modern tournament bridge: four bidding boxes (containing each player’s pre-printed bidding cards); a felt-covered bidding tray (on which the players place bidding cards before sliding it back under the screen); and a plastic duplicate board (a flat, rectangular box in which four pre-dealt hands have been delivered to the table). Brogeland asked for help from other players, and the search for evidence immediately became a collaborative international project.

«

As you read it, you realise that every human element in bridge – speaking, coughing, card movement, any physical movement – makes it feasible to create a code to cheat; the only way to prevent it would be to have people playing via screen, without words or gestures. Which would take away everything that might make it fun.
link to this extract

 

Google finally extends right-to-be-forgotten rules to all search sites, including dot-com » Ars Technica UK

Kelly Fiveash:

»Google has responded to European Union data watchdogs by expanding its right-to-be-forgotten rules to apply to its search websites across the globe.

In 2014, search engines were ordered by Europe’s top court to scrub certain listings on their indexes. Google—which commands roughly 90 percent of the search market in the EU—claimed at the time that such measures amounted to censorship of the Internet.

However, the landmark European Court of Justice ruling in fact stated that search engines were required to remove links that are old, out of date or irrelevant, and—most significantly of all—not found to be in the public interest.

Indeed, the right-to-be-forgotten may seem evocative to privacy campaigners, but as the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office has previously stated, “there is no absolute right [under the ruling] to have information removed.”

«

Google’s blogpost on the topic says “We’re changing our approach as a result of specific discussions that we’ve had with EU data protection regulators in recent months”. No mention of the swingeing fines the regulators threatened.
link to this extract

 

Bionic fingertip gives sense of touch to amputee » Reuters

Matthew Stock:

»A bionic fingertip has given an amputee the sensation of rough or smooth textures via electrodes implanted into nerves in his upper arm.

Scientists from EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) and SSSA (Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Italy) successfully allowed amputee Dennis Aabo Sørensen to receive this sophisticated tactile information in real-time.

The research, published in science journal eLife, says Sørensen is the first person in the world to recognize texture using a bionic fingertip connected to electrodes surgically implanted above his stump.

The nerves in Sørensen’s arm were wired to a machine with the fingertip attached to it. The machine then controlled the movement of the fingertip over pieces of plastic engraved with different textures, either rough or smooth. When the fingertip moved across the plastic, its sensors generated an electrical signal which was translated into a series of electrical spikes that mimic the language of the nervous system. This was then delivered to Sørensen’s nerves.

«

Odd – and a little sad – how little of the billions washing around Silicon Valley are being used to set up companies to do things like this.
link to this extract

 

AlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol in first game of historic man vs machine match » Go Game Guru

You probably heard the news that Google’s DeepMind system AlphaGo beat the best player in the world. Here are the reactions of the pros (“9p” means “9-dan professional”, ie the highest level):

»Lee Changho 9p said,  “I’m so shocked by AlphaGo’s play!”

Meanwhile Cho Hanseung 9p remarked, “AlphaGo is much stronger than before, when it played against Fan Hui 2p! When Google said the odds were fifty-fifty, it seems they weren’t joking. I still can’t believe its performance even though I just saw it with my own eyes.”

In a post-game interview, Lee Sedol was visibly startled by AlphaGo’s strength. “I was so surprised. Actually, I never imagined that I would lose. It’s so shocking. Regarding the game, I got off to a bad start and AlphaGo played well right until the end. Even when I was behind, I still didn’t imagine that I’d lose. I didn’t think that it would be able to play such an excellent game. I heard that the DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said that he respects me as a Go player, but I have great respect for both of them [referring to Demis Hassabis and Eric Schmidt] for making this amazing program. I also respect all the programmers who helped to make AlphaGo.”

«

The second game should finish around 0800 GMT on Thursday.
link to this extract

 

Exclusive: 1736 documents reveal ISIS jihadists personal data » Zaman Al Wasl

»Zaman Al Wasl has exclusively obtained the personal data of 1736 ISIS fighters from over 40 countries, including their backgrounds, nationalities and hometown addresses.

The document that branded by ISIS as confidential is shedding the light on the inner circle of the de facto a state which has its own institutions and official documents as well data bank.

Two thirds of ISIS manpower are from Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt. 25% of ISIS fighters are Saudis, the data disclosed.

While Turkish fighters are taking the lead among ISIS foreign fighters, French fighters come next.

Syrians are just 1.7 % of the total number of fighters. The Iraqis make 1.2.

Expert told Zaman al-Wasl that Iraqis and Jordanians can make the backbone of ISIS but most of them are based in Mosul and ISIS-controlled areas in Ramadi.

The most notably that ISIS fighters do not know the real names of their fellow fighters since they used to have code names, or names de guerre, and for security issues they have been obliged to follow high ranks of secrecy.

The documents have been written and organized by the General Administration of Borders, and ISIS commission that tracks all Jihadists data.

The data document is including 23 fields, starting with the Jihadist’s first name, last name, code name, date of birth and nationality. The jihadist who cross the the Islamic State’s borders for the first time is ought to acknowledge the Borders Administration everything about himself, even what he wants to be in ISIS, a fighter or a suicide bomber.

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Hacking is damned annoying thing.
link to this extract

 

Maybe we could tone down the JavaScript » fuzzy notepad

Alex Munroe is kinda annoyed about pages which insist on a ton of Javascript:

»These aren’t cutting-edge interactive applications; they’re pages with text on them. We used to print those on paper, but as soon as we made the leap to computers, it became impossible to put words on a screen without executing several megabytes of custom junk?

I can almost hear the Hacker News comments now, about what a luddite I am for not thinking five paragraphs of static text need to be infested with a thousand lines of script. Well, let me say proactively: fuck all y’all. I think the Web is great, I think interactive dynamic stuff is great, and I think the progress we’ve made in the last decade is great. I also think it’s great that the Web is and always has been inherently customizable by users, and that I can use an extension that lets me decide ahead of time what an arbitrary site can run on my computer.

What’s less great is a team of highly-paid and highly-skilled people all using Chrome on a recent Mac Pro, developing in an office half a mile from almost every server they hit, then turning around and scoffing at people who don’t have exactly the same setup. Consider that any of the following might cause your JavaScript to not work:

• Someone is on a slow computer.
• Someone is on a slow connection.
• Someone is on a phone, i.e. a slow computer with a slow connection.
• Someone is stuck with an old browser on a computer they don’t control — at work, at school, in a library, etc.
• Someone is trying to write a small program that interacts with your site, which doesn’t have an API.

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And he’s only just getting started.
link to this extract

 

How the smartphone shapes millennials’ online activities » Global Web Index

Chase Buckle:

»From a marketing perspective, the term Millennial is increasingly becoming synonymous with mobile. And for good reason – almost 90% own a smartphone and these internet users clock up on average over 3 hours per day online via mobiles (rising to over 4 hours in Latin America and the Middle East). That means they’re spending up to 5x longer per day online on mobile than older age groups.

Understandably, this enthusiasm for smartphones is having a huge impact on their online activities. Our latest research shows that Millennials overwhelmingly cite smartphones as their most important device for getting online, and we’re seeing more-and-more staple internet activities take place on mobile.

«

What I notice about the above graphic is that in the past month, about 76% used a search engine on mobile – and (slightly) more used a social network. By contrast on desktop, it would probably be 100% and 100%. Plus these are the millennials; for those who are older, both uses will be less. That search engine use is Google’s problem on mobile: lots of people don’t do search on a daily basis on mobile.
link to this extract

 

We need to save online journalism from ad blocking – and here’s how » Alphr

James O’Malley:

»Historically, journalism has had two major sources of income: Advertisers and readers. But now publishing is being squeezed from both ends. Thanks to the internet, and the explosion in ‘content’ (that’s what we call it now), people are very reticent to pay to read news, like they would have done for a print newspaper. And now thanks to ad-blockers, fewer people are looking at the adverts.

So what to do? How can a business model be found that will make journalism pay? Is there anything that can save this noble trade?

Bizarrely, the solution to this problem has already been invented. Six years ago. By one of the last people you’d expect to have an interest in paying people for their work.

Flattr was co-founded in 2010 by Peter Sunde, who is better known as one of the co-founders and former spokesperson for The Pirate Bay. Given that his website is responsible for distributing huge swathes of pirated content, you can’t help but wonder if Flattr was his attempt at atonement.

Flattr is a “microdonation” platform. The idea is that you sign up and allocate a fixed amount of cash to pay in every month – say £10 for the sake of argument – and then if you’re reading an article online that you like, you can click the “Flattr” button nestled amongst the existing social media sharing links. At the end of the month, your £10 is then divided up between the publishers of the articles that you’ve chosen to flattr. So if you flattr two articles, they earn £5 each. If you flattr ten, then each gets a pound. And so on.

The genius is that it solves the biggest problem with any micropayment system: Friction.

«

Neat idea. The problem now is just adoption by publishers and readers (and getting users of adblockers to see it in the first place).
link to this extract

 

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: Apple Music?!, preserving the web, watch wars, Sony’s parsimonious storage, and more

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Layered Movements
Where’s the Bluetooth module? Photo by Kellar Wilson on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Not to be sold separately. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

What changes at Medium and Yahoo Pipes teach us about the persistence of the web » Scripting.com

Dave Winer:

What we need, and still don’t have, is a systematic way of publishing to the future. Such a system would allow you to pay a fixed sum to keep your content at a specific address for the foreseeable future. No one can make a guarantee, we don’t know what the future holds, but every effort has to be made, upfront, to be sure that the content has the best chance to survive as long as possible. # It would be nice if a visionary entrepreneur would get involved, and an educational institution, perhaps, and/or an insurance company, the kinds of organizations our society creates to be long-lived. It would be great to get input from Stewart Brand and his colleagues at the LongNow Foundation.

Not a bad idea. But isn’t that what the Internet Archive is doing? Winer responds to that: “long-lived context is not the same thing as having a snapshot” [as the IA does].

iPad update won’t work on old devices » Business Insider

Tim Stenovec:

the bad news is that the new features may not work on your iPad, unless it’s one of the newest models. And Split View, which allows you to use two apps at the same time, and is one of the best new features, only works on the iPad Air 2, Apple’s latest iPad, which starts at $499 and was released last fall.

The cynic would say the fact that the new features, which are part of a software update coming later this year, only working on the latest and greatest iPads is a ploy to get you to upgrade your iPad. Apple has struggled with relatively sluggish iPad sales — the company still sells millions each quarter, more tablets than any other single company — but sales continue to fall…

…Of course, using two apps at the same time, or watching a video in the background while doing something else on your iPad, certainly requires more processing power than just using one app, so it may be that the features only work well enough for Apple to include it on its latest and most powerful iPad.

Yeah, but the cynic will disregard that sort of logical argument. All software can run on all hardware, regardless of age, according to the cynic.

Apple Music: a platform play with hidden nuance » Music Industry Blog

Mark Mulligan:

Apple continues to be ridiculed for its failed Ping! music social network. While it was no killer app it nonetheless represented an attempt to turn iTunes into a music platform. Now that same strategy has been rekindled with the launch of Artist Connect. This is Apple’s attempt to turn itself into an artist-fan engagement platform. Artist-fan engagement is the gold dust of the digital era music business. It’s the scarce, invaluable commodity that music fans crave in a post-scarcity music world…

…while DIY sites of various guises are niche, Apple presents the opportunity to reach more than a hundred million of the world’s most valuable (i.e. highest spending) music fans. Sure some of them now pay for Spotify but they’re still iTunes users also. If Apple’s featureset for artist is strong enough, expect strong uptake, especially from the bigger labels and artists.

Chart: Apple Music vs. Spotify, Pandora, Rhapsody and the rest of the streaming competition » GeekWire

Todd Bishop and James Risley:

Apple unveiled its new $9.99/month streaming music service this morning, staking its claim in a market with a large number of existing competitors. Established players include radio services like Pandora, freemium services like Spotify, and industry veterans like Seattle-based Rhapsody. This chart, created by GeekWire, shows how Apple compares to many of these existing services.

The missing element: how many devices is each one effectively preinstalled on? Yeah, Apple Music gets an advantage there. (I admit that I was surprised by the introduction on Android. But it makes perfect sense.)

Apple previews new Apple Watch software » Apple

Coming in autumn (when the new phones come out, one assumes):

Additional watchOS 2 features include: • Nightstand Mode that transforms Apple Watch into a bedside alarm clock, with the Digital Crown and side button serving as snooze and off buttons for the alarm;
• the ability to use merchant rewards and store-issued credit and debit cards with Apple Pay™, which can be added to Wallet;
• support for Transit in Maps*, so you can view detailed transportation maps and schedules, including walking directions to the nearest stations with entrances and exits precisely mapped;
• workouts from third-party fitness apps contributing to your all-day Move and Exercise goals;
• using Siri® to start specific workouts, launch Glances and reply to email; and
• Activation Lock, which lets users secure their Apple Watch with their Apple ID, preventing another user from wiping or activating the device if it is lost or stolen.

That last touch is neat – you remember the discovery of how easily the Watch could be stolen and wiped. Now it has something that sets it apart from any Rolex or other expensive watch (well, apart maybe from an engraved one): stealing it becomes pointless. Lots of stuff that feels as though it just didn’t make the cut for version 1.

Can the Swiss watchmaker survive the digital age? » NYTimes.com

Clive Thompson:

[Frederique Constant watch designer Pim] Koeslag faced a significant problem, though: He had never worked with chips and sensors before. He didn’t even own a soldering iron. Swiss watchmakers don’t need them; their devices are put together with screws and screwdrivers. He led me to a large microscope and placed one of the chip sets under it. When the image appeared on a large computer screen, he zoomed in on the Bluetooth antenna, which looked like a dark, square block. Getting that into the right spot caused him a great deal of trouble, he said. “Under the microscope, we actually welded it on, by hand,” he said.

Well, I guess that answers the question in the headline. Turns out the Swiss watch industry is terrified of the smartwatch’s effect on the $1,200 price segment on their watches which have an accuracy of around 2 seconds per day. Per day?!

Freemium is hard » Marco.org

Marco Arment on how Shuveb Hussain saw app purchases plummet when he went ot freemium:

Freemium is hard. Its effectiveness depends on where you can put that purchase barrier in your app. Many app types simply don’t have a good place for it. In this case, Shuveb faces the fatal combination of two major problems: • His app is a lightly used utility, but he only stands to make money from heavy use. His free tier is good enough for most users.
• His purchase barrier — more than one article per day — discourages more frequent use, which hinders habit-building. When faced with a paywall, most people will try to avoid it unless there’s a compelling reason to pay. The few customers who hit Comfy Read’s paywall probably just think, “I guess I won’t send this article to my Kindle,” or “I guess I’ll use another app for this.” Users aren’t given the chance to let the app become a crucial part of their workflow or build any loyalty toward it, which would make them more willing to pay, before hitting a paywall.

Sony cripples the ‘8GB’ Xperia M4 Aqua » Xperia Blog

We have the European E2303 retail model of the Xperia M4 Aqua, which is SIM free so should have less bloatware than carrier versions. It is running firmware build 26.1.A.1.100 and the screenshots you see below are straight out of the box without installing any new apps. You can see that out of 8GB of storage, 4GB is taken up by Android 5.0 and just over 2GB of pre-installed apps. For our model, this leaves a paltry 1.26GB for our own apps, media, photos and videos. No problem, you might say – just delete some unwanted apps. However, most of the apps are baked in and cannot be uninstalled.

Largest one: Facebook (why?), followed by Google Play Services (124MB) and Android System WebView (120MB) and Google+ (110MB). There’s also Chrome in the list. You can use an SD card, but that’s not ideal. Sony also claims – apparently wrongly – that there’s 3GB of free space. (For comparison, the 8GB iPhone 5C has 4.9GB free for users.)

Start up: Apple v Samsung redux, cornering the DRAM market, what millennials will do to tech

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Speed: Facebook’s got it. Photo by _hadock_ on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Like butterflies, only linkier. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Tools don’t solve the web’s problems, they ARE the problem » QuirksBlog

Peter-Paul Koch:

The web definitely has a speed problem due to over-design and the junkyard of tools people feel they have to include on every single web page. However, I don’t agree that the web has an inherent slowness. The articles for the new Facebook feature will be sent over exactly the same connection as web pages. However, the web versions of the articles have an extra layer of cruft attached to them, and that’s what makes the web slow to load. The speed problem is not inherent to the web; it’s a consequence of what passes for modern web development. Remove the cruft and we can compete again.

The question is, how is Facebook speeding it up, given that it’s going to be shifting the same content? Data compression?

How aging millennials will affect technology consumption » WSJ

Christopher Mims on how the post-1980 “millennials” are moving into a new stage in life:

Data from comScore suggest most switching between Android and iPhone is in favor of Apple, and iPhones have a significantly higher average selling price than Android. So we can assume that, all other things being equal, as millennials age and their earning power increases, their taste in consumer electronics will become more expensive.

This is good news for Apple—and others targeting the higher end of the product spectrum. It’s also fantastic news for pretty much the entire consumer-electronics industry and countless online retailers such as Amazon: A giant demographic bulge is about to enter 20 years of peak earning power. This is a generation that likes its on-demand services, which means the coming decades will almost certainly see more Uber rides and same-day deliveries than ever.

Ad-blocking? No, mobile operators won’t be blocking adverts & charging Google to restore them » Disruptive Wireless

Dean Bubley:

In a nutshell, some European telcos feel they can “get away with” harassing Google and to a lesser degree Apple and Facebook, and get air-cover from their national regulators and the European Commission. While the current trials might have the convenient excuse of “protecting users’ dataplans”, the reality is much more duplicitous – they are jealous that Google has out-innovated and out-maneouvred them, in a similar fashion to their rhetoric about “OTTs”, when they have been asleep at the communications wheel for 20 years…

…[Among advertisers’ countermeasures to such a move] Encryption of content is the most obvious. It is already widespread in mobile, and is growing fast – in some networks, more than 50% is encrypted. There are multiple styles, ranging from SSL built-in to HTTPS traffic, SRTP for WebRTC traffic, through to using compression and proxy servers. Some of these are still theoretically “blockable” based on IP address, but the risk of false positives increases hugely. The inclusion of Google’s SPDY technology into the HTTP2 standard has pretty much ensured this is a one-way ratchet for web traffic in future.

As Bubley also points out, tons of mobile connections are actually made over Wi-Fi. And these points are only the beginning.

Asian component makers take slice of Apple’s iPhone spoils » FT.com

Simon Mundy and Kana Inagaki:

As well as the US-based global market leader Qualcomm, MediaTek must contend with China’s Spreadtrum, a chip designer whose processors are gaining a growing share of the Chinese market. Meanwhile shares in Ningbo-based Sunny Optical, which supplies camera modules to the likes of Xiaomi and Lenovo, have doubled in the past year.

“It’s clear the Chinese brands prefer to have Chinese suppliers,” says Nicolas Baratte, head of technology research for CLSA. “There is a different type of understanding between Chinese companies. The Chinese supply chain is amazingly flexible in terms of tolerance for specification change and redesign, and flexible payment terms.”

Yet with the Chinese market slowing, he adds, some Chinese suppliers — notably phone assembly groups such as Wingtech and Longcheer — are increasingly pinning their expansion hopes on work for faster-growing brands from other countries, especially India.
A reliance on foreign customers has been thrust upon Japan’s handset component suppliers by that country’s dramatic decline in the mobile phone market — but they have responded strongly according to analysts who say Japanese groups account for a third of the parts found in the iPhone, while achieving strong sales of high-tech components to Chinese producers.

EZTV shuts down after hostile takeover » TorrentFreak

A “hostile takeover” by scammers, who got access to the domain details and changed it to their own:

Sladinki007 says that NovaKing must have been devastated by what happened. A life’s work was completely ruined in a few days and access to personal domain names was gone as well.

While EZTV could technically start over using a new name the group’s founder decided to throw in the towel. Too much had already been lost. The group had always been a “fun” non-profit project, and the recent troubles took the fun away.

The scammers, meanwhile, continue to operate both the .it and .ch domain names and are now distributing their own torrents (sourced elsewhere) with the hijacked EZTV brand. They pretend to be the real deal, sending out misleading and false status updates, but they’re not.

Having control over NovaKing’s email address the scammers even reached out to other torrent site operators, claiming that EZTV was back in business. However, most knew better not to fall for it and have retired official EZTV uploader accounts.

So someone who enabled widespread torrenting of TV content (which – astonishingly – doesn’t actually make itself for free) gets scammed and gives up? A “life’s work”? Strike up the world’s smallest violin.

Tipping point ahead: Samsung’s DRAM market share at 40% » BusinessKorea

Cho Jin-young:

Samsung Electronics is riding high with its share of the global DRAM market at 40%.

According to a report on performance in the first quarter of this year published by Samsung on May 17, the company accounted for 43.1% of the DRAM market in Q1 2015, up 2.2% from the number for the entire year of 2014. The figure in Q1 2015 is a nearly 6% increase from the total number for 2013. That data that was mentioned was compiled by market research firm IDC.

Based on market research firm DisplaySearch’s data, Samsung’s share of the global display panel market was 21.8% in Q1 2015, up about 1% from the previous year. The tech giant explained that it is responding to market demand with a full line-up, from ultra large premium displays to those for entry-level UHD and curved TVs.

It made a loss on the TVs, but grew its market share. Could it corner the whole DRAM market? Weird thought.

Apple readies first significant Apple Watch updates, ’TVKit’ SDK for Apple TV » 9to5Mac

Mark Gurman:

Currently in development, the features seek to enhance Apple Watch security, connectivity with other Apple devices, health and fitness features, Wi-Fi capabilities, and integration with third-party applications. Additionally, Apple is also priming major updates for the Apple TV in both the hardware and software departments, including Apple Watch integration. Below, we detail what users can expect from Apple Watches and Apple TVs in the future…

Includes a “Find My Watch” which sounds more like Bluetooth leashing – if the Watch gets some distance away from the phone. There are also promises about health, and others, though they’re also cautioned as “possibly some way off”.

Appeals court finds third trial necessary in first Apple-Samsung case: $380m in damages vacated » FOSS Patents

Florian Müller:

today’s appellate opinion reverses the trade dress-related part of the district court ruling and, on that basis, remands the case for a new trial. A new jury will have to determine damages for all products the first jury found to have infringed an Apple trade dress: the Fascinate, Galaxy S (i9000), Galaxy S 4G, Galaxy S II Showcase (i500), Mesmerize, and Vibrant phones. The total amount of damages (these were only at issue in the 2012 retrial, not the 2013) retrial was over $380m.

The original jury verdict only specified damages by product, but not by product and intellectual property right. That’s why the total damages amount for those products must be redetermined. There’s no way to simply subtract the part that related to design patents.

The Federal Circuit agreed with Samsung that it would have been entitled to judgment as a matter of law (JMOL) on the functionality of the trade dresses on which Apple prevailed. In all other regards, such as invalidity of design and software patents, the Federal Circuit sided with Apple.

Oh good grief. Another trial. Just the other day I was thinking of how Google’s hurried purchase of Motorola for the ludicrous garbillions of dollars belonged to a different age when people thought patents would make a difference in the smartphone struggle. This is nostalgia reflux.

Note though that the appeals court didn’t reverse the jury verdict – as some wilder misunderstanders of legal process had forecast. Judges don’t reverse juries in civil trials without exceptional cause.

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

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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: Roombas v dogs, native v web redux, Intel’s mobile loss, Samsung slims, and more

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“Hatin’ on Roomba” by obloquy on Flickr

A selection of 8 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Send links, comments, etc there, or drop them at the end of the article.

Intel to combine PC and mobile chip divisions to reflect market shifts >> Computerworld

The Mobile and Communications Group, as it’s known, will be broken up. The teams that develop mobile processors will join the new client group, while the remainder, which builds modems, will be part of a new wireless R&D group.

Herman Eul, who leads the mobile group today, will oversee the move to the new structure until at least the end of the first quarter, with a new role for him to be announced after that, Mulloy said.

The reorganization comes as Intel battles to improve its position in the market for smartphones and tablets, which is dominated by chips based on designs from Arm Holdings, a UK competitor.

The Mobile and Communications Group reported an operating loss of more than US$1bn in the third quarter, in part because it’s been making payments to tablet makers to encourage them to use its chips. As a result of those and other efforts, Intel has said it aims to get its processors into 40m new tablets this year.

Ah. A good way to bury bad losses.

Samsung plans to cut smartphone models by up to 30% in 2015 >> WSJ

Here we are in November 2014:

Samsung Electronics said it would reduce the number of smartphone models it offers next year, part of a move to cut costs to combat declining profit.

The South Korean technology major said it would cut the number of models by about 25% to 30%, Robert Yi, head of investor relations, said during a presentation in New York. His remarks were confirmed by a company spokesman Tuesday.

Samsung didn’t disclose the exact number of models that would be affected by the reduction.

Yeah, so cost-cutting. But now – with thanks to Stefan Constantine – let’s revisit Nokia in April 2011:

An unnamed Nokia Executive, in an interview with the Hindustan Times, has said: “We will be launching 40 models in 2011 of which at least 30% would be smartphones.” This news isn’t exactly making us bust out the champagne because that’s right around how many models Nokia has been releasing every year for the past five years. The Finnish firm has consistently told us that they’re going to take a “more wood behind fewer arrows” approach, meaning that they’ll come out with less new models, but said models would be further refined, but we’ve yet to actually see that materialize.

“Fewer models” seems easy to say, but when your business has been about “lots of models” is hard to do.

Google’s secret NSA alliance: The terrifying deals between Silicon Valley and the security state >> Salon.com

Remember when Google’s servers were broken into by Chinese hackers at the end of 2009? Shane Harris points out that something more happened afterwards:

On the day that Google’s lawyer [David Drummond] wrote the blog post [condemning China], the NSA’s general counsel began drafting a “cooperative research and development agreement,” a legal pact that was originally devised under a 1980 law to speed up the commercial development of new technologies that are of mutual interest to companies and the government. The agreement’s purpose is to build something — a device or a technique, for instance. The participating company isn’t paid, but it can rely on the government to front the research and development costs, and it can use government personnel and facilities for the research. Each side gets to keep the products of the collaboration private until they choose to disclose them. In the end, the company has the exclusive patent rights to build whatever was designed, and the government can use any information that was generated during the collaboration.

It’s not clear what the NSA and Google built after the China hack. But a spokeswoman at the agency gave hints at the time the agreement was written. “As a general matter, as part of its information-assurance mission, NSA works with a broad range of commercial partners and research associates to ensure the availability of secure tailored solutions for Department of Defense and national security systems customers,” she said. It was the phrase “tailored solutions” that was so intriguing. That implied something custom built for the agency, so that it could perform its intelligence-gathering mission.

According to officials who were privy to the details of Google’s arrangements with the NSA, the company agreed to provide information about traffic on its networks in exchange for intelligence from the NSA about what it knew of foreign hackers. It was a quid pro quo, information for information.

Must-read. Including this:

Google’s Sergey Brin is just one of hundreds of CEOs who have been brought into the NSA’s circle of secrecy. Starting in 2008, the agency began offering executives temporary security clearances, some good for only one day, so they could sit in on classified threat briefings.

Starts slow. Goes deep, deep.

4K lens development limited by physics >> TVTechnology

Craig Johnston:

Large venue live sports production promises to be a huge market for 4K production equipment in what could be the very near future. And while there are 4K cameras aplenty, switchers that can be upgraded and a host of other 4K equipment ready to go, there’s no long focal-range, highly telephoto 4K lenses to mate with the Super 35 single-sensor cameras.
 
The motto of high quality lens makers might as well be: “Physics will fight you.”

“When we talk about a 100×1 zoom, and the 35mm sensor, 4K, we’re talking about something we don’t think is very practical today,” said Larry Thorpe, national marketing executive at Canon USA Inc. “Once you jump from 2/3-inch imagers up to something like a Super 35, you set a baseline in element sizes, so the lens by definition is going to be larger.”

Long story short, it’s going to be expensive, or perhaps just not feasible.

Samsung strikes chip deal with Apple >> Korea Times

“Apple has designated Samsung as the primary supplier of its next A-series chips powering iOS devices from 2016 as the alliance with GlobalFoundries (GF) enabled Samsung to cut off capacity risk,” a source familiar with the deal said.

The value of the deal is said to be worth “billions of dollars,” according to the sources.

Production of the APs will start early next year at Samsung’s local factory in Giheung, Gyeonggi Province, and the volume will grow as Samsung plans to use its facilities in Austin, Texas and the GF-owned factory in New York for increased output, another source said.

That will be about 80% of the application processors for iOS devices. Good for Samsung, though doesn’t really get its flywheel (make chips and screens for more profitable devices such as its own smartphones) turning.

Nokia partners with Foxconn to take on Apple with tablet device >> FT.com

Daniel Thomas:

Ramzi Haidamus, Nokia’s technology chief, said the N1 tablet would be as good as Apple’s iPad mini but cost less. He added that it was just the first consumer product that would be designed and labelled as Nokia devices.

“It’s the first of many coming – more SKUs [items for sale], more sizes, more features,” he told the Financial Times in his first interview since becoming head of Nokia’s technology division three months ago. “We will go beyond tablets for sure.”

Nokia is prohibited from making smartphones until 2016 under the terms of the sale of its handset business to Microsoft. But Mr Haidamus said that “we will be looking at going into the cell phone licensing business post-Microsoft rights”.

The N1 is the first Nokia-branded consumer device brought to market following the sale of the Lumia and Asha businesses to Microsoft. Nokia did not manufacture tablets. 
The company said it would be the first tablet operated by a “predictive engine” that gradually learnt a user’s habits and created customised shortcuts to commonly used apps, contacts and web content.

The tablet has a 7.9 inch screen, a 2.4Ghz 64-bit quad-core processor, 2GB of memory and 32GB of storage.

Foxconn also makes lots of Apple devices, and is partnering with BlackBerry too. Big ambitions. Can’t see Nokia’s tablet making much impression on the Chinese market though.

Native apps are part of the web >> Daring Fireball

John Gruber wrote the complete rejoinder (with some pointed notes about paywalls and free sites) to Christopher Mims’s “web is dying” piece from the previous roundup:

Users love apps, developers love apps — the only people who don’t love apps are pundits who don’t understand that apps aren’t really in opposition to the open Internet. They’re just superior clients to open Internet services. Instagram didn’t even have a web interface for years, but native app clients for iOS and Android didn’t lock Instagram into anything. Their back-end is just as open as it would have been if they had only had a web browser client interface. They just wouldn’t have gotten popular.

I spoke about this four years ago at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference, in a talk titled “Apple and the Open Web: A Love Story”. The gist of it being that native iOS apps (and native apps for Android, Mac OS X, Windows, and everything else) aren’t in opposition to the “web”. They live on top of the web. A new layer. They are alternatives to websites that run in web browsers. They’re just better clients.

Clear thinking is easy to recognise when you see it. This is an example. Although the debate goes on: Tim Bray says on Twitter: “What @gruber says is correct, but native apps have gatekeepers, browser apps don’t. Call me old-fashioned, but that really bothers me. It doesn’t trump all the other issues, but it’s a big deal.” (The discussion continued on Twitter.)

When dogs and robots collide, somebody needs a talking to >> WSJ

This dates from 2008, but is still relevant:

To keep the peace at home, Keith Hearn had to scold his new robotic vacuum cleaner.

The trouble started when Mr. Hearn first turned on his Roomba automatic cleaner. When the device started scooting around the floor, Mr. Hearn’s dog, Argos, attacked it.

Seeking help, Mr. Hearn found an online forum dedicated to the hundred-dollar Roomba buzzing with similar stories of pet assailants. Owners were offering advice. Among the most popular: chastise the vacuum in front of the dog.

And so, with Argos looking on, Mr. Hearn shook his finger at his gadget and sternly called it “a bad Roomba.” Argos appeared to be mollified. “After that, he never tried nipping at it again,” says Mr. Hearn, a software engineer in San Carlos, Calif.

We’re only just beginning to get self-organising devices in the home, but where will pets fit into the internet of things? They have their own social structures that they believe exist.