Business

The quest for a billion-dollar red

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Bloomberg:

The world lacks a great all-around red. Always has. We’ve made do with alternatives that could be toxic or plain gross. The gladiators smeared their faces with mercury-based vermilion. Titian painted with an arsenic-based mineral called realgar. The British army’s red coats were infused with crushed cochineal beetles. For decades, red Lego bricks contained cadmium, a carcinogen.

Yikes!

More than 200 natural and synthetic red pigments exist today, but each has issues with safety, stability, chromaticity, and/or opacity. Red 254, aka Ferrari red, for example, is safe and popular, but it’s also carbon-based, leaving it susceptible to fading in the rain or the heat.

And:

Subramanian, more scientist than chief executive, is now hunting for a similarly safe, inorganic red derivative of YInMn—something that could put Ferrari red, which is worth an estimated $300 million annually, well in its rearview mirror.

Fantastic article. Had no idea this market was so huge.

Giant wave of Gmail spoofing hits over the weekend

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Under the topic “My account is sending spam emails”, this from a giant, ever-growing thread in Google’s Gmail product forum:

My email account has sent out 3 spam emails in the past hour to a list of about 10 addresses that I don’t recongnize. I changed my password immediately after the first one, but then it happened again 2 more times. The subject of the emails is weight loss and growth supplements for men advertisements. I have reported them as spam. Please help, what else can I do to ensure my account isn’t compromised??

This is followed by a wave of people with similar experiences. Making my way through the thread, it appears that this is a weakness in a specific DNS implementation, a hole in the system that makes spoofing via Canadian national telecommunications company Telus open to anyone.

This from Telus’ official Twitter account:

https://twitter.com/TELUSsupport/status/988060048843657216

And see this Hacker News post for more of a deep dive.

Another example of how delicate our tech infrastructure can be.

Chat: Google’s big shot at killing Apple’s iMessage

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The Guardian:

Google has unveiled a new messaging system, Chat, an attempt to replace SMS, unify Android’s various messaging services and beat Apple’s iMessage and Facebook’s WhatsApp with the help of mobile phone operators.

Unlike traditional texting, or SMS, most modern messaging services – such as Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or Apple’s iMessage – are so-called over-the-top (OTT) services, which circumvent the mobile phone operator by sending messages over the internet.

Chat is a successor to SMS:

Instead of using OTT, it is based on rich communication services (RCS), a successor to SMS (short message standard), which has been used by people all over the world since 1992 and is still the fallback for most.

And:

With Chat, Google is unifying all the disparate versions of RCS under one interoperable standard that will work across networks, smartphones and operating systems. In doing so it hopes to take the surefire nature of SMS – anyone can send anyone else with a phone a message without them requiring a specific account or app – and bring it up-to-date with all the features modern chat demands.

On the potential for Chat killing iMessage, I defer to this excellent comment from The Overspill:

if Google even looks as though it is positioning this as a way to “kill iMessage”, Apple will never support it, and if Apple doesn’t support it then operators are going to wonder why they’re letting Google screw up their golden goose, and they won’t support it after all. Google can preload it on Android phones, but that’s not “killing iMessage”; it’s “providing an alternative to iMessage”, which WhatsApp and latterly Facebook Messenger have done for years without “killing” iMessage.

And John Gruber’s take on the same topic, different article:

It is unconscionable for Google to back a new protocol that isn’t end-to-end encrypted. End-to-end encryption is table stakes for any new communication platform today. Apple should ignore this — if it’s not secure it should be a non-starter.

I agree with all of the above. I don’t see any danger to iMessage. But I do see this meshing with Google/Android’s place in the market. Chat’s penetration will likely be at the base of the pyramid, the larger, lower priced, smaller margin part of the market. Apple’s sweet spot has always been about halfway up the pyramid: smaller, but higher priced, with larger margins.

Note also that here’s another place where Amazon has no seat at the table. With no mobile phone of their own, Alexa can send a text via the Internet, but has to ride on iOS or Android infrastructure when out and about.

Recode survey: Amazon has most positive impact on society of any major tech company

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In a nutshell, the survey’s top 3:

  • Amazon, 20%
  • Google, 15%
  • Apple, 11%

The survey was implemented by SurveyMonkey.

What I’d really love to see is some detail on people’s thinking on this. What is the positive impact from Amazon? Is it about getting goods so quickly and reliably? Amazon Echo and Alexa? Something else?

And is Google’s positive mostly about search?

I also wonder if Apple would have won this survey hands down 8 years ago, when the iPhone was still exploding but Android hadn’t quite taken off yet. Interesting.

Why AirPods, other Bluetooth headphones cut out when crossing a busy street

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This whole thing started with this tweet from The Economist’s Hal Hodson:

Twitter, a mystery: I’ve been walking around New York a lot the past few days, AirPods in, tunes going, great vibes. Almost every time I cross a street, though, they cut out. Why? Crossing roads is the only time the cut. Can not figure it out

This appears to happen consistently, and to a lot of people. Here’s mystery solved, via a sequence of tweets from The Verge’s Dan Seifert.

First:

I know the exact spot when crossing 5th Ave in front of the library where every pair of Bluetooth headphones will cut out. to the step.

Experience the same in the middle of Grand Central Terminal. to the step.

And then, the answer:

I’ve asked headphones makers why this happens in past and here’s best explanation I’ve received:

BT needs surfaces to bounce off to work efficiently (walls, ceilings, etc). very different from WiFi. in the middle of the street is farthest from large flat surfaces.

Which begs the question, how come my AirPods work in the middle of a field?

You may wonder why this doesn’t happen in an open field?

Bluetooth doesn’t have any other signals to compete with out there, doesn’t need to be at peak efficiency.

Any Bluetooth experts out there want to weigh in here? This is fascinating to me.

Plover: Simple, clever, and free, in-browser transfer of large files

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Have some large files you’d like to send? Too big for email and don’t want to have to sign-up for a service like DropBox? Check out Plover.

Here’s how it works:

  • Go to the website, plover.io
  • When the page loads, note that you’ll be an animal in a location

For example, I just loaded the page and found that I am a panther in blue-foreign-spring. All I need to do is grab a link to this page and text it to a friend. When they follow the link, they’ll appear on the same page as a different animal.

To construct the link to the current page:

  • Append the location to plover.io

In my case, the link to my page would be plover.io/blue-foreign-spring. There’s also a link to the room on the page you can control-click and copy. Either works.

Once you see your friend’s animal appear on the page, drag and drop a file on their animal, or click their animal and browse/choose a file.

Easy peasy. Try it yourself. You can open a second browser tab, head to plover.io, and you’ll get a second animal in the same location. Drag a file to send it from yourself to yourself. Not particularly useful, but it’ll show you how this works.

Big fan. Nicely done, Plover. Podcasters with big audio files, give this a try, let me know if this works for you.

What to do if your iPhone is stolen, what you can do now to make that less painful

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Nice writeup by Andrew Orr for The Mac Observer. This is one of those posts that worth scanning now, while you are feet up with a cup of coffee, rather than in a state of panicked response to your phone gone missing.

One note: Ignore the link to “How to Set Your iOS Device Data to Auto-Destruct” on that page. As pointed out in the comments, it’s outdated and no longer accurate.

UPDATE: Outdated link was deleted from the Mac Observer article.

eBay for iOS gains barcode scanning, lets you complete listing process in seconds

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Mitchel Broussard, MacRumors:

eBay today announced a new update for its iOS and Android apps, aimed at further simplifying the item listing process. The headlining feature of the update is a new barcode scanner, allowing sellers to quickly scan the box of an item (if they still have it), select a condition, and click “list your item.”

The barcode scanner will automatically populate the listing with all of the requisite details (images, description, suggested starting price), and the process can be finished “within seconds,” according to eBay. If you don’t have the item barcode you can still search for it by typing in a description, which should populate the listing at around the same rate as the barcode scanner.

Great idea.

James Comey’s new book, privacy, and Apple

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9to5Mac’s Ben Lovejoy just finished reading James Comey’s new book, A Higher Loyalty. Politics aside, a section of the book deals with the FBI’s battle with Apple to access an iPhone used by a San Bernardino gunmen, detailed on this Wikipedia page.

Ben briefly excerpts Comey’s book, interleaving his own take with relevant passages. Short and worth the read.

The sad, gradual decline of the fade-out in popular music

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Slate, from a few years ago:

The fade-out—the technique of ending a song with a slow decrease in volume over its last few seconds—became common in the 1950s and ruled for three decades. Among the year-end top 10 songs for 1985, there’s not one cold ending.

Fadeouts are gone from popular music.

Advances in technology played a big part in the rise of the fade-out. Electrical recording emerged in the 1920s, allowing studio engineers to increase or decrease amplification. And achieving the effect became even easier when magnetic tape recording became widely available in the ’40s and ’50s. Many early fade-outs were added simply because engineers were short on time: To meet the demands of radio, or the limited runtime of one side of a vinyl single, they had to make the record fade out early.

And:

Done right, the fade-out is a song’s parting gift to the attentive listener. “Thanks for staying ’til the end,” it says. “Here’s a little somethin’ for ya.”

But what caused the fade-out to, well, fade out?

Let’s shift our accusatory fingers, then, to the iPod. That’s where our itchy thumbs have been stationed since Apple introduced the device in 2001. With a mere depression of the fast-forward button to get to the next tune, why wait out those last dwindling seconds?

This is a fascinating read. Especially the examples where little easter eggs are hidden in the lower volumes of the fade.

[H/T Brother Stu

Amazon touts 100M Prime users as Apple quietly passes a quarter-billion paid subscriptions

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Daniel Eran Dilger, AppleInsider:

Apple now has a customer base of more than 250 million paid subscriptions across its Services offerings of Apple Music, iCloud and App Store continuing payments. Viewed against Amazon’s recent announcement of 100 million Prime members, that figure is substantial. But Apple is also adding around 30 million new subscriptions every quarter.

Fascinating perspective comparing Apple and Amazon subscription numbers. As I’ve said many times, it’s all about the ecosystem. HomePod brings Apple Music subscribers, enough to justify the development cost. iOS devices bring iCloud subscriptions. There’s a steady contribution of subscription money flowing in from HBO, Hulu, Netflix, etc. It all contributes to the services bottom line.

Amazon announce plans to ship smart TVs with Fire TV, Alexa built in

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Amazon press release:

Amazon and Best Buy today announced a collaboration to bring the next generation of Fire TV Edition smart TVs to customers in the United States and Canada. As a first step in the partnership, Best Buy will launch more than ten 4K and HD Fire TV Edition models from Insignia and Toshiba, beginning this summer.

And:

The newly designed smart TVs come with the Fire TV experience built-in, uniquely bringing together live over-the-air TV and all your streaming content into one easy-to-view location. Connect any HD antenna and instantly use Alexa to search for and watch broadcast TV, or choose from a vast catalog of streaming TV episodes and movies from Netflix, Prime Video, HBO, PlayStation Vue, Hulu, and many more. Fire TV Edition includes a Voice Remote with Alexa, making it easy to launch apps, search for TV shows, play music, switch inputs, control smart home devices, and more. It can also be paired with any Echo device allowing you to easily use your voice to control your TV experience hands-free with Alexa.

I see this as a real challenge to Apple and Siri, as well as to Google. But I also worry about privacy and security implications. So much to unpack here.

There’s also the concept of buying two different technologies that are evolving at different rates, bundled together into one expensive, inseparable package. How often do you replace your TV? And how often do you replace your TV box (think Apple TV or ChromeCast)? If they are one and the same, seems to me it’d be problematic to change one without changing the other.

Wonder what Apple has planned on this front.

New iPad and Apple Pencil in hand. Now what?

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I just got a new iPad and Apple Pencil.

First things first, the new 9.7″ iPad (AKA, the education iPad, or the sixth-generation iPad) is terrific. If you are moving from a previous 9.7″ iPad, there’s nothing but plusses here. A brilliant screen, faster processor and, best of all, Apple Pencil support.

As you might expect, the first thing I wanted to do was make some pretty pictures, put the Apple Pencil through its paces. I played a bit with Apple’s built-in apps, and was able to use the Apple Pencil as a pointer in all the ones I tried, and for simple drawing (freehand line drawing using Markup) in some. But nothing really scratched that artistic itch, though Notes came the closest.

So I turned to Serenity Caldwell, iMore’s artist-in-residence. Pop over to the main Loop post for a bunch of useful links.

Animoji as characters in short film

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[VIDEO] I found this interesting. A short film (embedded in the main Loop post), with animoji used to deliver the dialog. Wondering if this approach will find its way into a feature film or TV show. Seems to me a logical path for some show on Apple’s content schedule.

[H/T The Film Student Podcast]

Run a bunch of old-timey Macintosh software in your browser

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We’ve run this sort of thing before, but every time it comes back up, I have so much fun with it, I feel the need to share it again.

This is archive.org at its best, sharing the original Macintosh experience in all its (glacially slow) glory.

Follow the link, pick a program, and click to launch. Enjoy the deep dive.

[Via SwissMiss]

Apple iOS App Store is trouncing Google Play in services, subscriptions

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Daniel Eran Dilger, AppleInsider:

Apple’s U.S. customers installed 45 new iPhone apps in 2017, a growth of 10 percent over last year, while Services revenue from In-App Purchases and Subscriptions expanded by 23 percent–driven by games, music and video streaming and dating services. And overall, Apple’s U.S. App Store customers drove significantly higher revenue per user ($58) than Google Play ($38).

Daniel walks through the details in this SensorTower smartphone device analysis.

Apple’s “Do not disturb” distracted driving prevention feature seems to be working

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Everquote study:

Distracted driving is a national epidemic. Our Safe Driving Report revealed that 92% of the drivers in the United States use their phones while behind the wheel.

And:

Taking just five seconds to send or read a text at 55 miles per hour is like driving an entire length of a football field while blindfolded, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Here’s the link to the NHTSA’s distracted driving page, where that last little nugget came from.

From their study of more than 500,000 drivers:

The results showed that 70% of EverDrive iPhone users kept their DND feature enabled; one in four (27%) iPhone users disabled the feature. Of those users enabling the feature, phone use while driving decreased by 8%.

A slice of goodness from Apple that puts your safety first, taking steps to actually prevent you from using their product. Will more of this product curbing emerge over time, steps to help reduce smartphone addiction?

[Via Business Insider]

Ranking America’s fast-food desserts

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Eater:

America’s fast-food desserts straddle two very different categories: our country’s most horrific edible disasters and our most cherished culinary treasures. For every gem like the Orange Julius, a pulse-quickening emulsion of citrus and dairy, there is the Burger King Lucky Charms Shake (RIP), a Breaking Bad-like chemistry experiment gone wrong. There are the old nostalgic treats, like that McDonald’s soft serve, that don’t stand the test of time — and others, like the Taco Bell cinnamon twists, that do.

This is a ranking of those treats.

A surprisingly fun (and possibly horrifying) read. And now I’m hungry.

How to use Workflow with Reminders

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This detailed tutorial really puts Workflow through its paces. If you’ve not yet spent quality time with the iOS Workflow app, this is a wonderful way to get started. Nice job by iMore’s Matthew Cassinelli.

watchOS 4.3.1 suggests future support for third party watch faces

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First things first, I do love these deep dives by people like Guilherme Rambo. This is not a leak, but more of a grind-it-out, pay attention to the details analysis.

In this case, Guilherme came upon some code with a log message that said:

“This is where the 3rd party face config bundle generation would happen”

From Guilherme:

It’s clear from the wording of the message that this feature is not implemented at the moment, but it’s definitely something Apple has planned. This new capability could come as soon as watchOS 5, or be dropped altogether. I personally hope they go forward with it since it’d be pretty cool to be able to install new watch faces on my Apple Watch.

Coincidentally, this past Friday we posted this thread of 3rd party FitBit watch faces. It ain’t pretty.

An apology for the modern Internet, from the people who helped make it

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This is a fascinating piece, a step-by-step on how something promising went south. This is a group interview, with notables like former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao, Facebook ad-tech entrepreneur Antonio García Martínez, virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, free software activist Richard Stallman, and many more.

The flow of this article is, how things went wrong in 15 steps. Terrific read.

Motherboard: Cops around the country can now unlock iPhones, records show

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Motherboard:

Police forces and federal agencies around the country have bought relatively cheap tools to unlock up-to-date iPhones and bypass their encryption, according to a Motherboard investigation based on several caches of internal agency documents, online records, and conversations with law enforcement officials.

And:

Regional police forces, such as the Maryland State Police and Indiana State Police, are procuring a technology called ‘GrayKey’ which can break into iPhones, including the iPhone X running the latest operating system iOS 11.

Is this whack-a-mole? Will Apple be able to change iOS to break GrayKey? And, if so, how long will it take for GrayKey, or another technology, to ship a replacement?

A thread of third party watch faces

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A longstanding request from Apple Watch fans is support for third party custom watch faces.

The thread below is a review of third party FitBit faces:

https://twitter.com/jetscott/status/984159594959331329

Click or tap on the first one, then start scrolling. My favorite comment, from Benjamin Mayo:

When you look at the examples in this thread, you start to think Apple might have a point in not allowing third party faces on Apple Watch.

Scroll through the thread, read the comments. Interesting.

[H/T Benjamin Mayo]

Chinese man caught by facial recognition at pop concert

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BBC News:

Chinese police have used facial recognition technology to locate and arrest a man who was among a crowd of 60,000 concert goers.

The suspect, who has been identified only as Mr Ao, was attending a concert by pop star Jacky Cheung in Nanchang city last weekend when he was caught.

Police said the 31-year-old, who was wanted for “economic crimes”, was “shocked” when he was caught. China has a huge surveillance network of over 170 million CCTV cameras.

The future.

Google’s solution to figuring out who is talking

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Google Research Blog:

People are remarkably good at focusing their attention on a particular person in a noisy environment, mentally “muting” all other voices and sounds. Known as the cocktail party effect, this capability comes natural to us humans. However, automatic speech separation — separating an audio signal into its individual speech sources — while a well-studied problem, remains a significant challenge for computers.

This is a major hurdle for smart speakers like HomePod and Google Home. While this post focuses on the cocktail party problem (separating individual voices when multiple people are speaking), it is part of a longer problem thread, that of identifying an individual speaker’s voice.

Consider HomePod. If HomePod Siri knew who was speaking, she could be more specific in her response. If I ask Siri to send a text, Siri could look up contacts in my database, but if my wife asked, Siri could use her contact database.

Google Home already solves this problem. And they are well on their way to solving the cocktail party problem as well.

Imagine a day when hearing aids feature the technology to distinguish speakers, offer signal boost on a voice-by-voice basis, let you know who said what, perhaps with the aid of your iOS device.

If this interests you, there’s a series of videos embedded in the Google blog post that shows the current cocktail party tech in action.

Reasons for HomePod optimism despite reports of disappointing sales

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First things first, take a look at this Bloomberg article, which started a wave of discussion about alleged stumbling HomePod sales:

At first, it looked like the HomePod might be a hit. Pre-orders were strong, and in the last week of January the device grabbed about a third of the U.S. smart speaker market in unit sales, according to data provided to Bloomberg by Slice Intelligence. But by the time HomePods arrived in stores, sales were tanking, says Slice principal analyst Ken Cassar. “Even when people had the ability to hear these things,” he says, “it still didn’t give Apple another spike.”

Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac, responds in this linked op-ed:

HomePod is a much more expensive speaker than its rivals, and is only useful for a particular slice of the market: those who own an iPhone and either have an Apple Music subscription or have all their music in iTunes and subscribe to iTunes Match. It’s not reasonable to expect sales of a $350 speaker with a limited market to rival those of a $50 device aimed at the mass-market.

Ben’s piece goes into much more detail, addressing the gloom and doom of the Bloomberg piece. Well reasoned, worth reading both.

I do think it is way too early to judge this market. Apple is in the premium space, Google Home and Amazon Echo are based in the commodity space. To me, the key to HomePod growth is Apple’s R&D investment in improving Siri intelligence. If Apple improves the Siri experience, they’ll automatically make HomePod more appealing.

I can’t imagine a more important Apple technology to invest in than Siri. Siri impacts every aspect of the Apple ecosystem and is immensely leverage-able. Siri is the rising tide that lifts all boats.

How to sign PDF documents on iPhone & iPad

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Christian Zibreg, iDownloadBlog, does a really nice job walking through the process of using the iOS Markup tools to sign PDF documents. Terrifically useful.