February 2012
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“Holograms give plenty of advantages. You can walk through walls, move at the...”
– Dmitry Itskov, a 31-year-old Russian media mogul, wants to implant his brain in a robot within 10 years. In 30 years, he’ll move to a hologram because he’s a big Star Wars fan. (Via Danger Room)
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Foursquare Ditches Google for OpenStreetMap →
Ever since Google Maps instituted a significant charge, more and more lean-minded startups have been taking control of their map stack and shifting to OpenStreetMap. I’m excited to see a larger fish like Foursquare take the plunge with a platform that only gets better with use.
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Where is Premium Email?
Developers: please think twice before building small, niche services atop existing, entrenched, ad-supported platforms and consider creating premium versions of the functions said platforms provide. When users are spooked by successive privacy news stories, ask them how much their privacy and data is worth. Answer with your product.
For example: I’d like to see a start up set out to become...
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“People who don’t have money don’t understand the stress. Could you imagine what...”
– Alan Dlugash, a partner at accounting firm Marks Paneth & Shron LLP in New York who specializes in financial planning for the wealthy, is having some trouble dealing with shrinking bonuses.
The Rich Person Gaffe (RPG) is more and more frequent these days. I’d bet it’s on the rise...
Bottlenose Dolphins Greet Each Other with... →
Nicola Quick and Vincent Janik from the University of St Andrews have found that groups of bottlenose dolphins do something similar. When they meet one another in the wild, they exchange “signature whistles”. These whistles are unique to each individual, and they’re strikingly similar to human names. And it seems that they’re a standard part of a dolphin’s meet-and-greet etiquette.
And:
...
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“First, Thibodeau and Boroditsky asked 1,482 students to read one of two reports...”
– Not Exactly Rocket Science describes a Stanford experiment illustrating the power of metaphors and language.
The words you use matter.
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“In all our stories, especially matters of controversy, we strive to consider the...”
– NPR’s new Ethics Handbook
An important clarification.
“Google’s Andy Rubin led the charge to acquire Motorola, but the Android...”
– The Verge
How is this supposed to be comforting behavior to investors or carriers?
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“Ah the 90’s, when technology fueled economies but didn’t disrupt...”
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“One of the goals we had in designing our letter distribution was to give players...”
– IEEE Spectrum on Words with Friends, explaining why I put up with EA’s horrible, official Scrabble app instead of using Words with Friends. (Scrabble doesn’t need explosive moments and easy words. Many, if not most, games are better not being ‘optimized’.)
“He could easily not have known, because as you can imagine, at these kinds of...”
– Henri Leclerc, a lawyer for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, whom has been detained for questioning regarding a prostitution ring alledgedly opperating in France and Belgium.
Nick Kam comments, “The French are unabashed caricatures of themselves.” (Via NYT)
From The: "Um, What?!" Department
parislemon:
Google now asks you to enter your credit card as part of the Gmail signup flow. Bold. twitter.com/rmatei/status/…
— Robert Cezar Matei (@rmatei) February 22, 2012
This is going to go over well.
Sure Google, why not continue to saddle your best products with your flailing ones? Rather than improve G+ or Wallet so people want to use them, plant them as roadblocks ahead of search...
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Crisp: JSON Pretty Print formatting in BBEdit →
A pretty print filter for BBEdit that just made my day much, much easier.
“Nuclear power supplies three-fourths of France’s electricity, yet in one poll...”
– The Economist
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Replacing Torture with Journalism & Data Science →
Wired’s Danger Room interviews Marc Ambinder, a former reporter for The Atlantic and National Journal, who’s just written a book on JSOC, or Joint Special Operations Command. The whole interview is fascinating.
Here, Ambinder describes JSOC’s intelligence gathering tactics, which take a page from journalism, detective work, and data science:
DR: What were some of the...
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The Problem isn't Browser Exploits, it's that...
Microsoft: Hey Google, you're breaking our browser's privacy settings and getting more data because of it. Cut it out.
Google: A bunch of academics say your privacy settings were already broken. (Plus, Facebook's doing it too).
Facebook: Oh hi Microsoft, your browser is old so we thought nobody would notice.
Internet Explorer Users: What the hell is going on?
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“When Wolfgang Schäuble proposed that Greece should postpone its elections as a...”
– Wolfgang Münchau says Greece must default if it wants democracy. When an FT columnist calls a German-led bailout “unethical” and an attempt to “insulate the government from the outcome of democratic processes”, we should probably take note.
Münchau reasons that German moves...
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“Greece is now officially a ward of the international community. It has no real...”
– Felix Salmon deftly breaks down the Greek bailout deal. The downside scenarios put forth by the Eurozone are incredibility optimistic, yet still are weak enough that Greece won’t be able to borrow from private market for years to come.
He’s not optimistic:
More to the point, the...
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Hollywood's Next Great Business Model: Praying... →
parislemon:
It seems like Hollywood is eyeing two business models in order to preserve their precious DVD sales (which are tanking more each day):
1) Make it basically impossible to rent a film. It used to be that you could rent a movie the day it came out for sale on DVD. Then it was 30 days later. Now it’s 56 days later. And you can’t even think about renting the films for 28 days.
...
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The Economist: Why Jeremy Lin Matters in China →
One of the reasons I love the Economist is their news cycle duration: a weekly rhythm allows them to absorb and then thoughtfully weigh in on viral subjects, which tend to carry lots of noise as they emerge. This piece on Jeremy Lin is a prime example:
Mr Lin has quickly amassed a huge following among Chinese basketball fans (and this country does love basketball). This poses a bit of a...
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Building a Coffin for Mobile Ad Revenues →
interactioned:
Google’s mobile revenue problem just got harder to solve. As Julia Angwin and Jennifer Valentino-Devries reported in the Wall Street Journal:
The companies used special computer code that tricks Apple’s Safari Web-browsing software into letting them monitor many users. Safari, the most widely used browser on mobile devices, is designed to block such tracking by default.
...
“However, the Safari browser contained functionality that then enabled other...”
– Rachel Whetstone, Senior Vice president of Communications and Public Policy at Google, respond’s to the WSJ’s report claiming Google has been bypassing Safari’s third-party cookie restrictions.
This statement would be comforting if she had detailed what information these cookies...
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140 Characters Go Farther in China
James Fallows, covering Jeremy Lin’s reception in China, quotes a tweet:
On Feb. 12, Mao Maozi, a cameraman with the state-run Shanghai Education Television network, tweeted an answer to that question on Sina Weibo: “If Jeremy Lin lived on the mainland, he would either be a semi-literate CBA [Chinese Basketball Association, China’s state-run professional league] player or an...
Ebooks made with curated Instapaper folders are the new mixtapes.
Desperation: Groupon Tests $30 “Groupon VIP”... →
From PandoTicker:
In an e-mail sent to a limited batch of “Groupon addicts” this morning, Groupon outlined the features of the $30-per-year plan: early access to deals, access to expired/sold out deals, and the ability to refund Groupons even after they’ve expired.
I wonder if this will work as well as the $600 TiVo and premium-priced BlackBerrys.
More Businesses Call Delaware Home than People
According to the Delaware Division of Corporations’s 2010 Annual Report, over 909,000 businesses are incorporated in Delaware (as of the end of 2010). An estimated 907,135 people reside in the state.
Over half of US publicly-traded companies and 60% of the Fortune 500 are incorporated in the state. Here’s more on Delaware corporate law.
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Mountain Lion in China →
Jason Snell on the big updates for Apple’s soon-to-be largest market:
Mountain Lion will offer better suggestions and corrections via a dynamically updated dictionary, something an Apple representative told me was because Chinese word usages are evolving rapidly. Apparently English words are often inserted in Chinese text, so Mountain Lion allows the mixing of Pinyin and English without...
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If Mountain Lion’s AirPlay allowed me to use my TV as a wireless, non-mirrored display I would be all over this beta.
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On Mountain Lion and the Lack of a Big...
Sure, it’s surprising that Apple introduced Mountain Lion with private briefings rather than a formal Keynote. Perhaps this is the mark of a post-Steve Apple finding its footing. Or maybe the breadth of Apple’s coverage is growing beyond what a reasonable Keynote schedule will allow.
My guess? I think Apple knows it couldn’t hold a major press event where three of their top ten...
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“The changes and additions in Mountain Lion are in a consistent vein: making...”
– John Gruber.
We’re crossing a line in operating systems and beyond where technology has advanced sufficiently to mostly mimic natural experiences and users have sufficiently acclimated to technology to make up the difference.
Jim Gaffigan's Next Special will be Available for... →
Louis CK, Double Fine, Jim Gaffigan…
Who’s next?
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“Really rustic, but still kind of normal.”
– The magic formula Olive Garden chefs look for, according to Marie Grimm, director of culinary development for the chain. (Via WSJ.com)
“Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has apparently found rare Joy Division and New Order...”
– NME
“What sort of weird little monster can we create from a wolf?”
– How dog-people must talk, according to Megan, after she saw this year’s Best in Show:
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“The app, currently available only for iPhone, though an Android version is in...”
– Habiburrahman Dstageeri, a 31 year old computer scientist, has built an app to help Muslims pilgrims. (Via The Economist)
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Readers outside the tech sphere are upset about Path because they understand “address book.” They’ve never understood keywords, behavioral targeting, demand side bidding, or cookie based data.
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“Part of the problem with the place is that there’s absolutely nothing in the...”
– Buzz Andersen on San Francisco. The whole piece is worth reading, as is his follow up.
While I agree with his assessment, I disagree that San Francisco’s over-tolerance is purely a bad thing. In fact, it’s almost certainly it’s best asset, as David Cole asserts, creating an...
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NFC Payment Systems are Just Another CueCat
NFC payment systems, like Google Wallet, remind me of the CueCat.
Launched in 1999, the CueCat was a little plastic cat (really) that let you scan proprietary barcodes on magazine advertisements or other printed material. Scanning a “cue” launched an advertiser’s webpage. Despite $185 million invested , the CueCat was a spectacular failure.
In hindsight, the CueCat’s...
