China moves to end Apple, Samsung phone subsidies

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China Daily:

China should end smartphone subsidies to overseas vendors and give more support to local brands, industry insiders said on Tuesday, as telecom carriers pledged to cut operating expenses and Apple Inc gets ready to debut its next-generation iPhone.

Xiang Ligang, a telecom researcher in Beijing, said cutting carriers’ subsidies to foreign-made handsets will not only reduce carriers’ operating expense but also leave local players with more market demand.

The perception is that buyers of high end phones are price insensitive and will buy the phones even without the subsidies.

Forget your Tesla S key fob? Use your iPhone instead

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The new Tesla S electronics update will communicate with your iPhone (there’s no Android support), sending you notifications and allowing you to use your iPhone to start your car. The question has been asked before about the security of remote start systems like this. No car is theft proof. And the convenience seems high enough to be worth the potential risk.

Steve Ballmer steps down from the Microsoft board

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From Ballmer’s letter to Satya Nadella:

Given my confidence and the multitude of new commitments I am taking on now, I think it would be impractical for me to continue to serve on the board, and it is best for me to move off. The fall will be hectic between teaching a new class and the start of the NBA season so my departure from the board is effective immediately.

Understandable, and handled professionally.

Apple pops the $100 barrier

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Apple stock today popped through the $100 per share barrier for the first time since they split the stock 7-1. That makes for a pre-split price of $700 a share. An important psychological step for Apple investors.

Every Hitchcock cameo

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[VIDEO] I’ve long been a fan of Alfred Hitchcock. Rear Window, North by Northwest, The 39 Steps, all great films, in my opinion. One of my favorite elements of Hitchcock’s filming was his Easter egg gift to his fans. He appeared in some form or another in every one of his movies. Usually, he was an extra in a scene with no lines. Sometimes, he was simply in a picture hanging on a wall.

Here’s a multipage article laying out all of those cameos. But there’s no substitute for seeing this for yourself. Watch the video below for a nice sampling. No, these are not all of them and yes, there are some typos, but I loved the effort. Gosh, Psycho, Strangers on a Train, The Man Who Knew Too Much. So many more.

A Facebook design story

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Sometimes design is more about recognizing the true nature of a need and not as much about aesthetics.

Google’s attempt to solve their jarring fragmentation problem

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There are a number of reasons developers develop for iOS first, or avoid Android completely. Perhaps the top two reasons are OS fragmentation and device fragmentation, both of which drive up the development costs (more use cases to build for, more use cases to test for).

This post from GigaOM makes the case that Google has solved these problems, at least in part. The key is Google’s Play Services.

Play Services, introduced in 2012, is effectively a background download of core services required to run apps on Android. Putting the OS install numbers to one side for a moment, this is the stat that matters to developers – over 93 percent of all Android users are running the latest version of Google Play Services.

More importantly, Google has been slowly moving core Android features, APIs and app elements out of the OS and into Google Play Services — meaning developers can ensure their apps run smoothly (with all the new features they plan to implement) across all devices carrying the latest infrastructure.

The design of the original Apple mouse

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Jim Yurchenco was just beginning his incredible design career when he was asked to design a mouse for a revolutionary new computer Apple was working on, the Lisa.

Yurchenco started looking at other input devices to see how it could all be done more elegantly. He found his answer in an Atari arcade machine. Its trackball seemed perfect for the job.

The Atari machine differed from the Xerox mouse in a few key ways. For one, its trackball wasn’t forced up or down. Instead, it just floated. Yurchenco tried doing the same and found the mouse functioned just fine if you let gravity do the work. Moreover, it resulted in less friction and fewer parts. That was one key insight. The Atari machine also used optics to track the trackball’s movement, relying on interrupted beams of light instead of mechanical switches. By borrowing this concept, Yurchenco further streamlined the internal components. That was insight number two.

The third insight came in how you use the thing. At first, Yurchenco remembers, everyone assumed mice had to be phenomenally accurate to deliver a good experience. “Suddenly we realized, you don’t care if it’s accurate!” he recalls. People don’t pay attention to what their hand is doing when they use a mouse; they just care about where the cursor goes. “It’s like driving a car. You don’t look at where you’re turning the steering wheel, you turn the steering wheel until the car goes where you want.”

Terrific read. While you are at it, spend a few minutes with Jim Yurchenco’s design philosophy in the video embedded below.

Thrilling selfies taken from great heights

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Some great selfies, some more dangerous than others, but thrilling nonetheless.

Maybe it’s because I just came across the 10,000th social media selfie I’ve seen this month that’s making me snap. It was another of those inane pics taken in the safe confines of a bar that looks like every other, so I burned the morning looking for more dangerously-shot selfies. In particular the famous ones I’d seen those Russian maniacs shooting high up in the Dubai sky.

Apple beats Bud, Nike and GE to win the 2014 Emmy for Best Commercial

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[VIDEO] Ad Week:

The spot, created by TBWA\Media Arts Lab and directed by Lance Acord of Park Pictures, shows a teen at Christmas who seems anti-socially glued to his iPhone, though it turns out it’s for heartwarming reasons. It beat out four other nominees for the prize. Two of them were Super Bowl ads by Anomaly for Budweiser—”Hero’s Welcome” and “Puppy Love.” The other two were BBDO’s “Childlike Imagination” for GE and Wieden + Kennedy’s “Possibilities” for Nike.

The commercial took three days to shoot and was filmed in a historic house located on the edge of the River Valley in snowy Edmonton. Beautifully done.

Nintendo rises after report Pokemon game to debut on iPad

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This is a tricky piece of news.

Nintendo Co. (7974) jumped in Tokyo trading after its new Mario Kart 8 video game surpassed 1 million units in U.S. sales and affiliate The Pokemon Co. said an online trading-card game will be released as an application for Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s iPad.

The Pokémon game is owned by The Pokémon Company, which is affiliated with Nintendo (Nintendo has certain licensing and marketing rights) but not owned by Nintendo.

“We have been here many times before in regards to Nintendo’s tentative plans to introduce some of its characters for smart devices,” Amir Anvarzadeh, a manager of Japanese equity sales at BGC Partners Inc. in Singapore, said by e-mail. “This latest Pokemon cards plan which is already out on PCs is hardly a change in its direction.”

This is not quite correct.

Hyperlapse

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[VIDEO] You’ve no doubt seen time lapse videos, where the action in a video is speeded up by trimming a video to show only one frame in ten, say. Time lapse videos are jumpy.

Microsoft’s research labs have introduced a new form of time lapse video, called Hyperlapse. Words don’t do it justice.

Humans need not apply

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[VIDEO] The video below is long, but thoughtful and riveting. It make the case that just as horses have been replaced by technology, humans are next. If that sounds like silly logic, invest one minute, just to see what you think.

From the narrative:

Self driving cars aren’t the future. They’re here and they work. Self-driving cars have driven hundreds of thousands of miles up and down the California coast and through cities, all without human intervention. The question is not if they’ll replace cars, but how quickly. They don’t need to be perfect, they just need to be better than us. Human drivers, by the way, kill 40,000 people a year with cars, just in the United States. Given that self-driving cars don’t blink, don’t text while driving, don’t get sleepy or stupid, it’s easy to see them being better than humans because they already are.

Self driving cars replacing human drivers is already a done deal. That die is cast. This is just one small example of what is coming.

30 year old blood test billionaire

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Elizabeth Holmes is only 30 years old, but has a lifetime of success. Back in 2003, Holmes was a sophomore at Stanford University and envisioned a process of performing blood tests with a device that required much less blood (just a drop) than existing blood tests (normally requiring a vial or two of blood).

This is a fascinating story, one that reminds me in many ways of Steve Jobs and Apple.

Selling the first telephone

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The network effect is the idea that the value of a product or service is dependent on the number of others using it. If you are breaking ground on a new business area that depends on the network effect, this anecdote offers some terrific insight.

The anecdote goes this like: One telephone has no value. Two telephones have a wee bit of value. After 100 phones, you may know someone with a phone, and if so, then there is value in you signing up for telephone service. After 100,000 phones, you very likely know many people with phones. And at 1,000,000 phones, many of your friends, colleagues, and family will have phones, making the service highly valuable.

Interesting read, especially if you’ve got a bit of the entrepreneur in you.

Pandora CFO, Beats “not a competitive service”

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Here’s one for Gruber’s Claim Chowder file. Pandora CFO Mike Herring, speaking with Oppenheimer Securities analyst Jason Helfstein at an investment conference:

I don’t have much comment on Beats. Frankly, it’s not a competitive service in any form today. iTunes Radio is much more of it, competitive service and really had no impact on us long-term.

Apple bans benzene and n-hexane from supply chain, goes public with regulated substances spec

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From a letter released today by Lisa Jackson, former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and now Apple’s environmental director:

Recently, we received some questions about whether the chemicals benzene and n-hexane are used in the manufacturing of our products. Apple treats any allegations of unsafe working conditions extremely seriously. We took immediate investigative action, sending specialized teams into each of our 22 final assembly facilities, and found no evidence of workers’ health being put at risk. We’ve updated our tight restrictions on benzene and n-hexane to explicitly prohibit their use in final assembly processes.

All the world’s a stage

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[VIDEO] Iain Anderson had his daughter recite the famous All the world’s a stage monologue from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, one line at a time.

This is fascinating to watch, certainly, but it also raises an interesting point. I found the meaning in this monologue much clearer, much easier to digest, because it was broken up into fragments, each of which was filmed as an individual scene. There’s a lesson there for teachers, I think. Regardless, enjoy.

The thing that broke the net yesterday

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There was trouble on the internet yesterday.

Tuesday Morning, various networks experienced outages from 4-6am EDT (8-10am UTC). [It] appears the outage was the result of a somewhat anticipated problem with older routers and their inability to deal with the ever increasing size of the Internet’s routing table.

Older routers were designed to handle an impossibly huge, not possible to pass, 512K router table entries. So big. No chance this could ever be an issue. Except now we’re hovering right around that threshold and some older routers with that limit are being tested and found wanting.

Amazon introduces mobile card reader to compete with Square, PayPal

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PC World:

Amazon.com has introduced a card reader coupled with smartphone and tablet apps that aim to provide small businesses with a way to accept payments on these devices.

At least in the short term, this is excellent news for both consumers and small businesses, as Amazon will push down the per transaction fee, down to 1.75 percent per swipe til the end of the year, then rising to 2.5 percent per swipe which is still lower than Square and PayPal Here.

Apple’s new “Achieve big things” iPad email campaign

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The ad features links to buy an iPad Air and a retina iPad mini, as well as sections that highlight Apple’s productivity suite (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote), Microsoft’s Office iPad apps, and the Your Verse campaign.

Google consortium to build trans-Pacific, undersea fiber-optic cable

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From the NEC press release:

A consortium of six global companies announced that they have signed commercial agreements to build and operate a new Trans-Pacific cable system to be called “FASTER” with NEC Corporation as the system supplier. The FASTER cable network will connect the United States to two landing locations in Japan.

The Disney, Amazon feud

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WSJ:

Price isn’t the only issue keeping “Maleficent” and “Captain America” off of Amazon.com Inc. AMZN +0.48% ‘s virtual shelves.

Walt Disney Co.’s dispute with the giant online retailer also encompasses promotion and product placement on the Amazon website, as well as questions over who makes up the difference when Amazon loses money to match the prices of competitors, said a person with knowledge of the matter.