iPad Mini now on sale, not for in-store pickup

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Ran a little Twitter survey this morning. The new Retina mini appears to be available for purchase now in the US, Australia, Canada, Singapore and throughout much of Europe. That’s who I’ve heard from so far. Poll results show shipping in 1-3 days for the WiFi model, 5-10 days for the cellular model, though Belgium, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland show shipping as 5-10 days for both models. The models range from 16GB up to 128GB.

In the US online Apple Store, as of 6:30 am ET, the 16GB and 32GB WiFi-only models show as ready to ship in 1-3 days and everything else is marked to ship in 5-10 days.

Amazon and USPS to offer Sunday delivery

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This is huge news, both for Amazon and for the US Postal Service. Starting with LA and New York, Amazon Prime customers will now get package delivery on Sundays at no extra charge.

Amazon prime customers – who pay a $79 annual charge – will now be able eligible for free two-day shipping on millions of items, and can receive their packages on Sunday. The company announced on Monday that it has teamed up with the U.S. Postal Service and plans to roll the service out to a large portion of the U.S. in 2014 including Dallas, Houston, New Orleans and Phoenix.

USPS has really been struggling, with 7 consecutive quarters in the red.

The semi-independent government agency has suffered in recent years with the introduction of email and the drop in sales from stamps as well as a 2006 congressional mandate to prefund up to 75 years of its future retirees’ health care.

Earlier this year, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe made pleas to lawmakers to allow the financially troubled Postal Service to switch to a five-day delivery schedule for first-class mail in an effort to reduce costs to return the organization to financial stability.

Package deliveries – which was never part of this plea – continues to grow and Donahoe said in the press release on Monday that the Postal Service is very happy to offer shippers like Amazon the option of Sunday deliveries. Research on the websites of rivals FedEx and UPS suggest that the two companies do not currently offer a Sunday delivery service. Both were not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.

The internet and e-commerce have been tremendously disruptive to the Postal Service. This plan will help the USPS find a financial model that allows them to prosper instead of fade. A real win/win.

Dead bodies on Mount Everest

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Ever since I read the book Into Thin Air, by John Krakauer, I’ve been fascinated by attempts to reach the peak of Mount Everest. Incredible how many people died trying to reach the summit or, having reached the top, died on the descent.

They are grisly, but these pictures are a part of the Everest story.

New PBS Jimi Hendrix documentary

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Love the American Masters series.

Hear My Train A Comin’ traces the legendary guitarist’s remarkable journey from his hardscrabble beginnings in Seattle, through his stint as a US Army paratrooper and as an unknown sideman to R&B stars until his discovery and ultimate international stardom. With previously unseen footage of the 1968 Miami Pop Festival, home movies, and interviews with those closest to Jimi Hendrix.

Redesign of bulky UK USB charger

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This is one clever design. Take a bulky UK iPad charger and give it a twist so it folds flat. Perfect for travel. Terrific job.

The evolution of the iPhone

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Interesting infographic. Take a look, see if it all looks right to you, then read the comment below it.

Review of the iPad Air personal hotspot

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Took the iPad Air personal hotspot for a spin this morning. Could not have been a more positive experience.

I travel a lot, and frequently find myself without a net connection. Some of what I do can be done on a cellular iPad, but there are many times when I need to work on my laptop. In the past, I’ve turned to personal hotspots from various carriers, but I’ve never been happy with the reliability and the cost is high for the bandwidth you get.

The iPad Air data plan is $50 per month for 5GB of data. My previous data plan was $30 for 3GB and I rarely used more than 500MB. I look at this as paying an extra $20 per month for the hot spot. Not quite right, but close enough. I’m used to paying between $45-$75 per month for other cellular hotspot solutions. On the cost side, this is a bargain, assuming you can live with the 5GB limit. For me, this is not an issue.

Setup is a breeze, far simpler than any hotspot I’ve ever used. On your iPad, go to Settings / Personal Hotspot and tap the switch to turn it on. That’s it. You’ll have the choice of using the hotspot over WiFi, USB (plug the iPad into your computer) or Bluetooth (you’ll be prompted to enable Bluetooth – I did not do that). Your hotspot will come with a default password that is different for each iPad. Tap on the password to change it.

Back on your computer, the iPad WiFi will appear in the list of WiFi networks as the name of your iPad. For me, the iPad appeared as “Dave Mark iPad Air”. I joined the network, typed in the password, and I was in.

The network speed is fast. I ran a benchmark and found the speed to be about 9MB download and 2.25MB upload. Not as fast as FiOS but still pretty zippy. I did not notice any slowdown when sending emails or browsing the web. Obviously, file downloads will be slower, relative to my broadband connection, but that’s to be expected.

I had a friend log in with a Windows machine and her experience was just as positive. She was able to play World of Warcraft and not notice a bit of difference between WoW on broadband and WoW on a hotspot.

Bottom line, the personal hotspot on my iPad Air is a home run. Simply brilliant.

BlackBerry board rejects break-up proposals from Apple, others

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According to Reuters, BlackBerry’s board has had discussions with Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Google, Lenovo and others about selling BlackBerry intellectual property, similar to the patent purchases from bankrupt Nortel back in 2011.

An ex-employee’s perspective on Amazon and the “profitless business model” fallacy

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Eugene Wei worked for Amazon from 1997-2004. The linked blog post explores Amazon’s push for revenue growth while forsaking profits, at least for the short term.

Does Amazon lose money on sales of some individual items? For sure. The first Kindle ebooks that were priced at $9.99 when Amazon had to pay more than that per copy to publisher were one example. Giant, heavy electronics items that Amazon sometimes ships for free when the shipping cost is clearly non-trivial and cost more than the usual thin margins on such goods are another.

But those represent a tiny fraction of the whole:

The vast vast majority of products Amazon sells it makes a profit on. Over time, more of these products that inadvertently sell at a loss will be corrected so that no longer happens, and what remains will be products Amazon intentionally uses as loss leaders.

And then there’s Marketplace sales:

The platform of Amazon is profitable, too. When other people sell products on Amazon Marketplace the gross margin is huge. I sell a used book on Amazon, it takes a cut of the transaction, I am the one packing and shipping that item to the buyer. You don’t have to be a financial whiz to understand the cost of that transaction to Amazon is minimal.

If Amazon tends to make money on the vast majority of its transactions, why doesn’t it generate boundless profits?

Because Amazon has boundless ambition. It wants to eat global retail.

Given that giant mission, Amazon has decided to continue to invest to arm itself for a much larger scale of business. If it were purely a software business, its fixed cost investments for this journey would be lower, but the amount of capital required to grow a business that has to ship millions of packages to customers all over the world quickly is something only a handful of companies in the world could even afford.

Fascinating read.

Hands on with the Xbox One, a living room of possibility

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If Apple is going to make inroads into the console gaming space, this is an experience they will have to exceed. The Kinect voice recognition has gotten better than on the 360 (as you’d expect), and more solidly integrates with the OS.

Voice controls are now a system-level process that runs in the background while you’re using an app or game. You can call out, “Xbox, snap friends” while playing a game to bring up your friends list on the side of the screen, without even pausing. Then there are the handy app-specific shortcuts activated by voice commands. “Xbox, watch Comedy Central” let me jump straight to watching the channel even from another app, for instance.

This is certainly a step towards the magical computer/living room holy grail of integration. Just a step, since this is not a desktop experience. You won’t be editing documents or creating emails on your Xbox One. But definitely a solid step forward.

Aside from voice, the most significant system-level feature enabled by the Kinect is the ability of the Xbox One to log a user in automatically based only on their visuals. The first time you set up the system, it takes you through a 30-second process where you log in to your Microsoft account. Kinect then builds a personal profile it will associate with that account based on facial recognition but also the camera’s basic skeletal model of your body. This process forms a unique biometric ID that the Kinect uses to automatically identify a user, logging them in to Xbox Live and bringing up a personalized menu that includes their recent apps and favorite items.

Another step forward. Touch ID works well on a phone and is a solid security solution. But it is still an active solution (meaning you need to take an action to achieve your goal). The ability to walk up to your Xbox One and have it automatically log you in is a passive solution. Remains to be seen how secure this form of biometric profiling is, but not so sure security is as big a requirement in the living room, where you have more control over physical access than you do with your laptop or phone.

The process of unlocking your device based on some form of biometric has lots of room for improvement and is a real opportunity for the company that gets it right. There are keyless deadbolts for your front door that allow you to unlock your front door remotely via a Bluetooth signal from your phone. There’s an app that lets you knock on your phone to unlock your computer, also accomplished via Bluetooth (read the comments before you buy).

Point is, this is a wide-open, wildly innovative field. Apple has a real opportunity here. The living room is like the Wild West. Still untamed, still full of possibility.

Reddit thread on the scariest books

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Love lists. Always fascinating to see what other people think of as scary. To me, the scariest books are the early works of Clive Barker and almost anything by H. P. Lovecraft.

MIT-designed public benches offer solar power, net connection

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Designed by an MIT research team, the so-called “seat-e” is a public bench that provides a range of services:

Installed recently at the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, each of these two sleek, backless benches has a solar panel on one side to provide power to recharge cellphones, a connection to the Internet, and for night lighting. Soon they also will have sensors to detect for air pollution — even telling whether someone nearby is smoking.

Love this.

Kinect and sign-language translation

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This is amazing. This effort bridges the gap between sign languages such as ASL and spoken/written language. Watch the video. Brilliant.

Apple Stores to offer limited range of in-store iPhone 5s & 5c repairs

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Traditionally, if you brought your damaged iPhone in to an Apple Store for repair, they would have to give you a brand new (to you, at least) phone, then send your damaged phone out for repair or recycling.

According to 9to5 Mac (see the headline link), that process has changed for the iPhone 5c and 5s.

Apple is gearing up to soon begin hardware repairs for the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c in its chain of retail stores, according to sources with knowledge of the upcoming initiative. These sources say that Apple Stores will be able to replace several parts of the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c on-site, meaning that Apple will no-longer need to fully replace iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c units with damage or other problems…

The sources say that Apple will be providing its stores with special machinery to replace the touchscreens on both the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c. These machines will be used specifically to calibrate the displays. The screen replacements cost $149 for each device, and this price point is significantly more affordable than the several-hundred dollars required to completely replace a device with a damaged/cracked screen.

In addition to displays, Apple will have the capability to replace the volume buttons, vibrating motor, rear-camera, and speaker system on the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c. Apple Stores will be able to replace the conventional Home button on the iPhone 5c, but it does not appear that Apple will be able to conduct swaps for the Touch ID-based button on the iPhone 5s

This is good news all around. Better for the environment, and a potentially cheaper and faster path for an out of warranty problem with your phone.

Internet Archive building damaged by fire

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This is the group that runs the Wayback Machine. As you’d expect, their data is all online, so the data loss was limited to documents that were in the scanning center. But they are a non-profit and the fire damage is substantial.

An early estimate shows we may have lost about $600,000 worth of high end digitization equipment, and we will need to repair or rebuild the scanning building. It is in difficult times like these that we turn to our community.

Here’s a link to the blog post describing the fire. Consider making a donation.

The canary in Apple’s government information requests report

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As Jim (and many others) reported yesterday, Apple has published a transparency document, detailing governmental requests seeking information about individual users or devices.

At the very end of the main body of the report are these two sentences:

Apple has never received an order under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. We would expect to challenge such an order if served on us.

As stated in the linked article, if Apple is ever served with a Section 215 order, they will not (unless they are granted some relief) be able to publicly discuss that fact. But, if Apple continues to publish transparency reports, the sentences quoted above will obviously be left out. A bit of a canary in a coal mine. Good move, Apple.

Beautiful Kickstarter redesign of ice cream scoop

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Dr. Karl Ulrich, Vice Dean of Innovation at the Wharton School, is an ice cream scoop collector. He turned his attention to designing the perfect scoop, and I think he got it right.

The big picture on Samsung’s smartphone sales

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Thoughtful analysis on the nature of Samsung’s smartphone sales.

In a meeting with its concerned investors on Wednesday, the head of Samsung Mobile revealed numbers illustrating that the company sold fewer high end smartphones than Apple this year, and that only about a third of the company’s total “smartphone” shipments are of a class really comparable to the iPhone.

This is a problem for Samsung. They are seeing the beginning of market saturation for their high-end smartphones, are relying on older/lesser model sales to bolster revenues. With minimal exceptions, all of Apple’s phone sales are high-end smartphones. And that’s where the margins are. Hard for Samsung to keep this going, especially without making inroads on battery life and processing power (still no 64-bit devices).

Lots to absorb, worth a read.

Apple to build sapphire glass manufacturing plant in Arizona

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Apple is repurposing this First Solar facility to create sapphire glass:

Apple will build a new 700-employee manufacturing facility in Mesa, Arizona, to make sapphire glass, according to releases from the State of Arizona and GT Advanced, a New Hampshire-based materials manufacturing company. Apple purchased the vacant manufacturing building from First Solar, and has contracted with GT Advanced to “own and operate furnaces and related equipment” at the facility.

Question is, how will Apple use sapphire glass. An alternative to Corning’s Gorilla Glass 3 for smart-phones? As a crystal for a smart-watch? Time will tell.

Nike Move+ app goes live, takes advantage of iPhone 5s M7 motion chip

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First shown off in October’s iPhone 5s rollout, the Nike Move+ app went live yesterday. If you’ve got an iPhone 5s, you can take advantage of the app to see where and how much you move during the day. I suspect this is the first of many such apps that will take advantage of the M7 motion coprocessor. Another marketing discriminator for the iPhone 5s.

The incredible memorial to flight UTA#772 in the middle of the Sahara

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First things first, open up a new Google Maps window and copy and paste these coordinates:

16°51′53″N 11°57′13″E

This should put you in the middle of Niger, Africa, smack-dab in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Start zooming in. Keep going. Eventually, the memorial to UTA Flight #772 will appear.

Flight #772 was taken down by a suitcase bomb back in September, 1989. Switch over to satellite view and you’ll get a sense of what the memorial looks like from the air. Then, follow the headline link to see pictures of the construction of the memorial, using pieces of the wreckage from the crashed jet.

Tragic and beautiful.

BlackBerry scraps bid to find buyer, replaces CEO, gets $1 Billion investment

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BlackBerry has given up trying to sell itself on the open market, instead turning to debt sale to keep the doors open.

The company said that rather than bid for the company, Fairfax Financial will lead a group of investors pouring $1 billion into the troubled handset maker with its CEO Prem Watsa, becoming lead director. Former Sybase CEO John Chen will serve as interim CEO and executive chairman once the investment is completed, which BlackBerry said should be within the next two weeks.