garytouet

The Verge:

There are a couple of significant downsides that temper my enthusiasm for the new Gear. First and foremost is the speed and intuitiveness of the user interface — or rather, the lack thereof. There's a tangible lag to anything you do with the Gear, while the swipe gestures are hard to figure out and do different things depending on where you are in the menus.

Add to that a bad speaker, short battery life and a price at $299, what’s incredibly great?

I get that it’s the first release and that it is going to get better over time, but it certainly looks like something rushed out in case Apple comes out with a watch too.

The NT Times has gathered many bits of information about Jeff Bezos, Amazon and what Bezos might do with The Washington Post. Among very interesting bits about his personality, testimonies from early employees, there is a description of Amazon’s current business model. Nothing new really, but a good reminder that Amazon’s goal is not profitability for the moment:

Though indisputably one of the great marvels of the age, Amazon is a curious beast that offers few obvious lessons for how a newspaper like The Post might become profitable. Financial writers have noted that Apple makes more than twice as much money in a quarter than Amazon earned during the last decade. Last quarter, Amazon had a net loss of $7 million. But Wall Street loves Amazon anyway, despite its slim margins. Amazon tends to give its profits directly to its customers. It sells to them at a discount, will often ship free and, if a customer wants to return an item, will refund the money before even receiving the return. Sometimes it will even do more. Say you buy a book, and then decide it’s not for you. You tell Amazon you are returning it. You might get a message like this: “Keep this item and receive a refund! It’s on us!” That’s a sure way to win friends and lose money. But Wall Street believes that the company will someday monetize tens of millions of customers — in other words, make a real profit each time it sells them something. Maybe next year. Or the year after. From the very beginning, Mr. Bezos has made Amazon an investment story about the company’s potential rather than its reality.

Steve Wozniack actually commented on Gizmodo’s ‘Jobs’ review. His comment has been republished by the site as an article:

I saw Jobs tonight. I thought the acting throughout was good. I was attentive and entertained but not greatly enough to recommend the movie. One friend who is in the movie said he didn't want to watch fiction so he wasn't interested in seeing it. I suspect a lot of what was wrong with the film came from Ashton's own image of Jobs. Ashton made some disingenuous and wrong statements about me recently (including my supposedly having said that the 'movie' was bad, which was probably Ashton believing pop press headlines) and that I didn't like the movie because I'm paid to consult on another one. These are examples of Ashton still being in character. Either film would have paid me to consult, but the Jobs one already had a script written. I can't take that creative leadership from someone else. And I was turned off by the Jobs script. But I still hoped for a great movie.

I still can’t decide if I’ll go or not. The film could be a good entertainment as long as I don’t expect the script to stick to reality.

For The Verge, Alexis Ohanian (co-founder of Reddit) visits New York City start-ups. He met in the second episode with RapGenius’s founders. A 20-minute video well worth watching.

Not a big fan of the founders’ style and attitude though, but I love how simple their idea is and how well it is executed. I use the website daily, not to annotate, but to understand rap lyrics. A true goldmine.

Techcrunch:

BlackBerry, the embattled Canada-based handset maker, today finally called a spade a spade. The company halted trading in its shares to announce what some might argue was inevitable: the company says it is now exploring strategic alternatives, including a possible sale or JV or other partnership. A committee chaired by Timothy Dattels and including CEO Thorsten Heins, along with Barbara Stymiest, Richard Lynch and Bert Nordberg, has been formed to look for alternatives.

Dell bought his company back from shareholders, now its BlackBerry’s turn. Hopefully, this can be a suitable solution.

The whole video is amazing. The last two minutes are mind-blowing.

OpenSignal used its own app (available on iOS and Android) to visually represent Android’s fragmentation:

Fragmentation is both a strength and weakness of the Android ecosystem. When comparisons are made between Android and iOS the issue of different API levels, and the vastly different devices running them, is often emphasised. In this report we examine the extent of Android fragmentation and analyse its impact on both users and developers.

Even though the report is specific to OpenSignal, it gives a good representation of the disparity among Android devices. The number of different versions and screen sizes out in the wild must give headaches to app developers.

Google’s strategy worked. The company has a wide range of devices into consumers’ hands to whom they can show ads to. This is to the detriment of app developers, who have to put in so much work. iOS, on the other hand, makes it so easy to build an app that it makes more sense to go ‘iOS first’.

'I does what I likes and I likes what I do.'

A tribute to the film of my childhood.

The Verge:

Elon Musk has made his name on big ideas, whether it's space tourism or the electric car — but his latest project, mysteriously dubbed the Hyperloop, may be more revolutionary than anything he's done. It started with a simple promise: the ability to travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco in half an hour. As time went on, Musk added more. It would be low-friction, and use such minimal power that the entire thing could be run on electricity from solar panels installed above the tracks. It would use small pods, leaving "whenever you arrive" instead of cleaving to a schedule like an airliner.

Nobody really knows how this is going to happen yet, so we’re listening and waiting for more information, but what a futuristic project this is.

The whole video is impressive and worth watching, but what stroke me the most can be found around the 2min20s mark. Just look at Tobey Maguire acting. DiCaprio and him are in a car facing a camera. There's nothing around them but green screens and Maguire fakes it so well.

Sighted in Paris this afternoon.

Nothing better than a construction site uniform to walk your plastic trucks on a Sunday afternoon.

The Instagram Blog:

Today, we’re thrilled to introduce Video on Instagram and bring you another way to share your stories. When you go to take a photo on Instagram, you’ll now see a movie camera icon. Tap it to enter video mode, where you can take up to fifteen seconds of video through the Instagram camera.

Facebook is obviously going after Vine, the Twitter video-sharing app.

Jay-Z’s new album is announced for July, 4th.

Great endorsement deal for Samsung. They must have dropped a lot of dollars to get Jay-Z to accept. Funny how hard Samsung needs to advertise its products.

Peter Gelling, for the GlobalPost, as an introduction to his article:

This is satire. Although the news is real, very little actual reporting was done for this story and the quotes are imagined. It is the first installment of an ongoing series that examines the language journalists use to cover foreign countries. What if we wrote that way about the United States?

Brilliant exercise. Very well done. Not sure though what in this story is satire.

The Telegraph reports (from a British perspective):

The reforms are designed to encourage radical consolidation of European mobile network operators. A source familiar with the plans said the European Commission believes there are far too many companies offering services across the 27 member states and that the fragmentation is a barrier to badly-needed investment. Without upgrades, mobile networks will buckle under the pressure of the rapid growth in internet traffic, it is feared. “There are around 100 operators in Europe and only four in the US,” the source said. “That’s not sustainable if we’re going to have a single market and investment. Europe has less 4G mobile broadband than Africa at the moment.” “Consolidation is not the aim. The aim is a single market, but if it means we get fewer, stronger operators, that’s good.” With no roaming fees, officials believe the single market will mean foreign operators will be able to compete for British customers, and vice-versa. They are likely to form airline-style alliances that will lead to mergers, it is hoped.

Note: These propositions from the European Commission are yet to be adopted by the European Parliament and European Council. It’s good news though. Hopefully, it will be adopted in July 2014, as the Commission wishes.

A few thoughts:

• It seemed like a long keynote to me, close to two hours. They showed a lot of stuff.
• I was surprised by the Mac Pro sneak peak and the announced release of iOS 7 later this fall. Maybe they did it in the past, but I remember Apple announcing products going for sale in the very near future. Here, they made two major announcements way ahead of release without no precise release dates. I think they're obviously addressing the recent media's and Wall Street's claims about their lack of innovation.
• On that note, I loved Schiller's "Can't innovate anymore, my ass!". I guess he is going to take a lot heat for that.
• The atmosphere on stage was relieved, very humorous.
• I could not help but think about Scott Forstall when Federighi cracked his jokes about the torn-off pages in the Calendar app, stitches, the green marker felt in Game Center. He and Steve Jobs were big supporters of such graphic elements. The new user interface surely is polarising. Many will say it is inspired by Windows Metro. I agree. This is a big change for iOS. I am impatient to try it out.

Apple still is the only company that can make me sit for a two-hour keynote and bring me so such enjoyment.

This new film is about two old-school salesmen, who find an internship at Google, and battle with young and savvy geniuses to get recruited.

Dieter Bohn for The Verge warns us:

It’s incredibly difficult to watch The Internship as simply a movie and not as a two-hour long recruitment ad designed to congeal the vaguely warm feelings most people harbor for the company into a wet pap of "Googly" propaganda. You can watch The Internship as the classic buddy comedy it tries to be — but you shouldn't.

Fortune sums up Strategy Analytics’ blog post:

The data show that Apple's iPhone 5 overtook Samsung's Galaxy S3 by some 12 million units in the last quarter of 2012 to become the world's bestselling smartphone. That's not terribly surprising. What is surprising is that according to Strategy Analytics the iPhone 4S -- discounted by Apple when the new model came out -- also overtook the Galaxy S3.

This will read strange to the ones claiming that Apple’s decline has already started.

The New York Times:

SAN FRANCISCO — For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees. After surreptitiously tracking the intruders to study their movements and help erect better defenses to block them, The Times and computer security experts have expelled the attackers and kept them from breaking back in. The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings. Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network. They broke into the e-mail accounts of its Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who wrote the reports on Mr. Wen’s relatives, and Jim Yardley, The Times’s South Asia bureau chief in India, who previously worked as bureau chief in Beijing.

The whole article is well worth reading. The story is both shocking and intriguing.

There are plenty of details missing. I hope we will know more soon.

Though, something is striking. This is now out. Why? Isn’t it the goal of these attacks to scare future informants? Why choose to reveal this? Is China the only country guilty of such attacks in general? What impact has this article on the countries’ relationships, populations?

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal too.