Business

Apple invested in China’s Didi Chuxing, Didi just bought out Uber’s Chinese operations

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Bloomberg:

Didi Chuxing, the dominant ride-hailing service in China, said it will acquire Uber Technologies Inc.’s operations in the country, ending a battle that cost the two companies billions as they competed for customers and drivers.

And:

The truce brings to an end a bruising battle between the two companies for leadership in China’s fast-growing ride-hailing market. Uber has been spending at least $1 billion a year to gain ground in China, while Didi offered its own subsidies to drivers and riders to build its business.

Didi Chuxing and, as an investor, Apple are now in the driver’s seat (sorry) in China.

Jack off

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John Gruber explores a tree of possibilities:

The question is, what will Apple ship in the box with the new iPhones? I see the following options:

  • Wireless ear buds.
  • Wireless ear buds and this adapter.
  • Lightning ear buds.
  • Lightning ear buds and this adapter.
  • The existing 3.5mm ear buds and this adapter.

At the bottom of the piece:

The bottom line: this move should be about moving away from wired headphones period, not moving from one wired jack to another. The best way to achieve that is for Apple to ship wireless ear buds in the box.

Great stuff.

Celebrating Brooklyn’s first Apple store

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Apple’s newsroom:

Thousands of customers turned out Saturday for the grand opening of Apple Williamsburg, the first Apple store in Brooklyn. Customers began queuing Friday on Bedford Ave before midnight, and when the store opened at 10 a.m. Saturday the line stretched around the block.

iTunes phishing scam, well done, but easily detectable

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The Telegraph:

Apple’s iTunes customers are being warned to delete “scam” emails that are being sent to some customers claiming they have been charged more than £20 to download a song.

Reports have surfaced on social media of iTunes users receiving an email claiming to be from Apple, detailing an alleged recent song purchase from the iTunes Store that costs £23.34.

Phishing continues to thrive because it works, at least to enough of a degree that it is profitable overall. As always, be vigilant, hover over links to verify before clicking on them.

Apple said to redesign online store app with recommendations

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Mark Gurman and Alex Webb, writing for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. plans to roll out a redesigned version of its Apple Store mobile app for selling devices that will use a customer’s buying history to recommend further purchases, taking a page from Amazon.com Inc.’s playbook. The updated retail app could be rolled out in the next two weeks, according to people familiar with the intended revamp. It’s likely to include a “For You” tab that suggests products based on prior orders, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the project isn’t yet public. While there are currently separate Apple Store apps for the iPhone and iPad, the new app will work on both devices and have the same basic features and interface.

A new way to fight back when hackers take your data hostage

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The Washington Post:

Imagine having all the files on your computer — your documents, your photos, your videos — locked and held hostage by hackers who demand a payout just because you opened the wrong email attachment or clicked the wrong link. That’s the nightmare scenario facing victims of ransomware, a type of malware that quietly encrypts files on a computer so that only a digital key held by the attacker can release them.

But a new initiative called No More Ransom may offer a glimmer of hope for victims. The project, a collaboration among Europol, the Netherlands’s national police and cybersecurity firms Intel Security and Kaspersky Lab, launched a website Monday featuring tools that can help some victims decrypt their data without paying off the criminals.

Read on for more details.

The tireless, automated bots that will play Pokémon Go for you

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One of the first things I thought of when I first experienced Pokémon Go was how dependent the game was on location and how easy that would be to spoof. It didn’t take long for developers to bring that idea to life:

A new wave of PC-based Pokémon Go “bots” take the hacking a step further, spoofing locations and automating actions to essentially play the game for you while you sit in the comfort of your own home.

There are a number of competing bots out there, from the open source Necrobot to the pre-compiled Pokébuddy to MyGoBot, which recently started charging $4.99 for its automation tool following a three-hour free trial. All of them work on the same basic principles, sending artificial data to the Pokémon Go servers to simulate an extremely efficient, entirely tireless player.

This same sort of thing happened in the early days of World of Warcraft. It took some time, but the folks at Blizzard figured out how to tell if robots were playing for you and took a hard line, suspending accounts that leveled up impossibly quickly or were otherwise found to be cutting corners in some automated fashion. I suspect Niantic will learn this same lesson, or things will go south pretty quickly.

Apple’s employee number one

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Craig Cannon, interviewing Apples’ first employee (beyond Steve Jobs and Woz), Bill Fernandez:

Craig: So at what point do Woz and Jobs come together and decide that they want to start working on Apple?

Bill: Okay, well during this Hewlett-Packard period when Woz and I were both there, Woz in the after hours designed his own Pong game. Pong was the first really popular, you know, video game that bars and pizza shops and restaurants could buy and put it in stores and people would come and put quarters in and play. So he built his own circuitry and used it with a small black and white TV set as the display.

Then a couple of things happened. He started working on building his own computer and he started attending the Homebrew Computer Club that was happening at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, SLAC.

So all of those things happened at the same time and then as his computer came together he would take it and show it off after the meetings. At some point there was enough interest shown that Jobs became aware of this. I don’t know if he went to the Homebrew Computer Club or just when he and Woz were together Woz was talking about it. Basically Jobs said, “You know, we could make printed circuit boards and just sell the computer already assembled so people wouldn’t even have to buy all the parts on the open market and figure out how to wire them together. We could just do it for them.” And so that was the beginning of Apple Computer.

Jobs got a printed circuit board made and he figured out where to get all the parts. They decided what to name the company and then, this is funny, Jobs got a front office front. There was a company at 770 Welch Road. If you look at the old literature that was their address, Apple’s mailing address. So there was this company on the second floor that had people who would answer the phone and depending upon what number was called would say, “Hello, this is Apple Computer, how can I help you?” And would receive packages mailed to Apple Computer and would mail things from Apple Computer. Jobs was working in his father’s garage and in his bedroom, you know, and this was like our front to make it look legit.

This is a nice, long interview, with lots of edge-on views of the stuff of legend, the birth of Apple.

Motorola confirms that they will not commit to monthly Android security patches

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Ars Technica:

When we recently reviewed the Moto Z, we said that the device would not be getting Android’s monthly security updates. Motorola doesn’t make this information officially available anywhere, but when we asked Motorola reps at the Moto Z launch event if the company would commit to the monthly updates, we were flatly told “no.”

And:

Motorola has clarified the update situation of the Moto Z and Moto G4, calling Android’s monthly security updates “difficult” and deciding not to commit to them.

Tough to say no to an update that patches a known security vulnerability.

From Moto:

We strive to push security patches as quickly as possible. However, because of the amount of testing and approvals that are necessary to deploy them, it’s difficult to do this on a monthly basis for all our devices. It is often most efficient for us to bundle security updates in a scheduled Maintenance Release (MR) or OS upgrade.

That delay is no small thing, security-wise.

Top Australian banks pursue collective boycott of Apple Pay

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Graham Spencer, writing for MacStories:

In a rather extraordinary move, four of Australia’s largest banks have written to Australia’s competition regulator requesting permission to join together in a collective boycott whilst they negotiate with third-party mobile wallet services including Apple Pay, Android Pay and Samsung Pay.

And:

At the heart of their request is the claim that third party wallet providers have the power to “impose highly restrictive terms and conditions”. The banks point out that 90% of smartphones sold in Australia run iOS or Android, and Samsung is the leading manufacturer of Android phones. Therefore, they claim, Google has significant bargaining power over Android, Samsung over Galaxy phones, and Apple over iPhones. But it is Apple that the banks say “has particularly significant bargaining power in negotiations relating to Apple Pay due to its control of both a key operating system and key mobile hardware”. They point out that in Australia the iPhone has a share of 41.2% of the market and Apple sells the two most popular phones on the market.

And:

The banks also make the argument that Apple has refused to permit third-party apps from accessing the NFC functionality contained in recent iPhones, unlike other manufacturers. They argue that it is inconsistent with other hardware and software features Apple has introduced such as the iPhone camera, accelerometer, and Touch ID sensor which are available to third-parties.

This is a first domino, a potential precedent.

Apple earnings call expectations

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If you are interested in Apple’s upcoming earnings call, spend a few minutes looking through these Above Avalon charts, which lay out the numbers, making it easy to see the numbers Apple needs to hit to meet expectations.

Terrific job by Neil Cybart pulling these together.

How Pokémon Go took 20 years to become an overnight success

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This is the story about the ten levels John Hanke had to achieve in his life in order to create Pokémon Go.

Here are the first four levels:

1st Level up: In 1996, while still a student, John co-created the very first MMO (massively multiplayer online game) called ‘Meridian 59’. He sold the game to 3DO to move on to a bigger passion: mapping the world.

2nd Level up: In 2000, John launched ‘Keyhole’ to come up with a way to link maps with aerial photography, and create the first online, GPS-linked 3D aerial map of the world.

3rd Level up: In 2004, Google bought Keyhole and with John’s help, turned Keyhole into what is now ‘Google Earth’. That’s when John decided to focus at creating GPS-based games.

4th Level up: John ran the Google Geo team from 2004 to 2010, creating Google Maps and Google Street View. During this time, he collected the team that would later create Pokémon Go.

Read the rest. Interesting to watch this all unfold.

ARM: The $32B Pivot and Revolution

Written by

Jean-Louis Gassée, writing for Monday Note:

In the old days, circuits were prototyped by hand using a primitive breadboard. After the circuit was debugged and pronounced fit, it was translated into masks for printed circuit boards.

As integrated circuits grew to comprise thousands and then millions of logic elements, breadboards were virtualized: The circuit-to-be was designed on a computer, just as we model a building using architectural Computer Assisted Design (CAD).

A multibillion industry of software modules that could be plugged into one’s own circuit specifications soon emerged. Companies such as Synopsys, Cadence, and Mentor Graphics offered circuit design tools, and an ecosystem of third-party developers offered complementary libraries for graphics, networking, sensors… The end result is a System On a Chip (SOC) that’s sent off to semiconductor manufacturing companies commonly called foundries.

This was the fertile ground on which ARM has prospered. ARM-based chips aren’t simply more efficient and cheaper than Intel’s x86 designs, they’re customizable: They can be tuned to fit the client’s project.

And this on Intel’s reaction to ARM:

Intel didn’t get it. “Just you wait!” the company insisted, “Our superior semiconductor manufacturing process will negate ARM’s thriftier power consumption and production costs!” But that opportunity has passed. Intel miscalculated the iPhone, failed to gain any traction in the Android market, and had to resort to bribing (er…incentivizing) tablet manufacturers to use their low-end Atom processors. Earlier this year, they threw in the towel on mobile and are now focused on PCs and Cloud data centers.

Great post.

Ridable luggage

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[VIDEO] Fascinating. Seemingly well constructed, practical, ridable luggage. Not sure of the audience for this, but I would love to give this a try, just to get a sense of how practical this is. Amazing to me that they fit the battery and motor inside, with plenty of packing room left over, yet all within the confines of a bag that fits the standards for an on-flight bag.

This is an IndieGogo campaign, not quite fully funded with a month left to go. At $995, this is an expensive gadget, but clearly they’ve found more than $40K worth of takers so far.

Apple Watch sales down 55% since last year, overall watch sales down 32%

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Seeking Alpha [Free reg-wall]:

For the first time, the worldwide smartwatch market saw a year-over-year decline of 32%, according to preliminary data from the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker. Smartwatch vendors shipped 3.5 million units in the second quarter of 2016 (2Q16), which was down substantially from the 5.1 million shipped a year ago. Apple held the top rank by shipping 1.6 million watches. However, it was the only vendor among the top 5 to experience an annual decline in shipments. In fairness to Apple, the year-over-year comparison is to the initial launch quarter of the Apple Watch, which is in many ways the same product offered in the most recent quarter with price reductions.

Also in fairness to Apple, I see this as a bit of pent-up demand, the lull in anticipation of new hardware.

Apple Support, Night Shift, and Twitter videos

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As I’ve said before, I am a big fan of Apple’s @AppleSupport Twitter presence. They do a terrific job guiding folks to answers when they are stuck. They also periodically post useful tips.

In this recent tweet, Apple Support embedded a video explaining how to set up Night Shift in iOS 9.3.

I found this interesting for several reasons. First, the video itself was well done, as is most Apple video. But this is the first time I’ve noticed this approach, the rolling out of an internal video via @AppleSupport.

Obviously, Night Shift is not brand new, and this video likely was made some time ago. Has anyone seen it before? If so, can you tweet me a link?

Wondering if Apple is planning on a regular series of these sorts of videos.

Thought on Apple and Formula One

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Interesting piece from Joe Saward, longtime Formula One blogger:

The suggestion last week that Apple may be discussing the acquisition of the Formula One group has led to a lot of interest and a lot of opinion. Traditional technology people argue it would never happen because it’s not the way Apple works. The company buys small clever companies and use the technology under the Apple brand. They don’t need the kind of advertising that F1 provides. So why would they buy it? The answer, it seems, is not to do with advertising, but rather with sales. Apple has built its empire on the iPhone and the iPad. The company has sold 800 million iPhones and, as a result, is now the biggest company in the world. But sales are slowing gradually and competition is increasing and Apple is following the Steve Jobs philosophy and looking for new ideas which reinvent the way we live.

I am relatively new to Formula One, but I am definitely a fan and totally get the attraction. The Formula One cars are attractive, fast, powerful, incredibly high tech and, at the same time, incredibly fragile. There’s big money pouring into the sport and there’s an opportunity for Apple to buy the whole thing, to funnel an entire sport through Apple TVs.

Heineken recently entered F1 believing the sport will bring it 200 million new customers. OK, it’s beer, but if Apple saw similar potential, the impact could be dramatic. AppleTVs cost $200 each, but selling 200 million of them could generate $40 billion. With such vast numbers, one could imagine Apple being willing to perhaps even consider broadcasting the sport free-to-air, and generating money only from the sale of the devices.

Fascinating read. I’d love this investment for Apple.

Apple regains status as world’s favorite company

Written by

CNET:

Each year, FutureBrand looks at the 100 biggest companies by market capitalization, asks 3,000 consumers and industry professionals in 17 countries about them and produces a ranking of what it calls perception strength, rather than financial strength.

This year shows Apple regaining the top spot, after last year’s painfully abject slide into second place behind Google.

And:

Those of drier countenance and Android phones will realize quickly that Google is no longer one of the 100 largest companies by market capitalization. It’s now part of Alphabet, so Apple didn’t have to contend with last year’s winner.

It did, though, have to compete with Alphabet, whose self-driving car must have suffered a software malfunction — as it only propelled the company to 21st place.

Of course, this must be mostly down to the idea that many consumers might not have heard of Alphabet at all.

I still find the move to Alphabet confusing. It’s a holding company, but it was named without connection to one of the biggest brands in the world, a brand it was built to contain.

Mossberg: I just deleted half my iPhone apps — you should too

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Walt Mossberg, writing for The Verge:

Over the past few days, I’ve methodically deleted 165 apps from my iPhone, about 54 percent of the 305 apps I had on the phone when I started culling the herd. When I was done, I had significantly decreased the phone’s clutter: I’d gone from 15 home screens to eight, and reclaimed nearly 8GB of free space, about a 24 percent gain in my case.

And:

But this isn’t one of those columns about digital housecleaning or how to free up more space on your iPhone, valuable as those are. It’s easier to save space by offloading most photos, video, and music to the cloud anyway. No, this column is really about the fact that I think the novelty of the app itself has worn off. We’ve reached peak app.

And:

Before going on, I want to make it clear that I am not against apps as a software type. Just the opposite: I believe them crucial to mobile devices. I personally find that, for many targeted tasks, a well-designed app is much better to use on even a large phone than is a mobile web browser, even if both the app and a web page are tapping the same online services.

For instance, I’d use Facebook and Twitter much less on my phone if I had to use them through the browser, partly because they make it easy to open and close referenced web pages right inside their apps, with just a click.

And it’s still possible to create a sensation with a great app that introduces genuinely new experiences — like Pokémon Go with its augmented reality interface. But one reason that Pokémon is so newsworthy is that such blockbuster apps are rarer and rarer.

It’s easier to make a wave in a pond than an ocean, and that’s where we are now. The same is true in the businesses of movie/TV/journalism production. It is harder and harder to make content that stands out in that ocean of content that you’re competing against. That is the nature of any maturing business.

Pokémon Go could generate billions for Apple

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CNBC:

Needham & Co. Managing Director Laura Martin estimates that “Pokemon Go” could generate $3 billion in revenue for Apple in the next 12 to 24 months as the game expands into more countries. Since the game achieved penetration of 6 percent of the U.S. population after just 10 days, Martin predicts 20 percent penetration at maturity.

And here’s the key:

“I think the point is that while Nintendo has gone up 20 billion and they do have IP risks, Apple does not,” Martin said on CNBC’s “Halftime Report.” “It is hedged because the next genius that makes a hit game, Apple shares on that one too. So while this one may be transitory, Apple has an option on all future hit games over the iOS platform.”

At the core of the App Store’s business model is this risk disparity. Apple took the vast majority of their risk at inception, when they built the App Store infrastructure. Now that risk has been paid for and the current risk all lies with the developers.

Exploring the App Store’s Top Grossing chart

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Graham Spencer takes you on a behind-the-scenes guided tour through the App Store’s Top Grossing chart.

From the wrap-up:

If you regularly browse the App Store’s Top Charts most of these results would likely serve to confirm what you had already assumed. Most obviously, if you were to randomly pick an app from the Top 200 Grossing charts, chances are extremely high that you would pick a free app with IAPs and it would most likely be a game. But what is particularly suprising is the degree to which free apps with IAP dominate the charts with essentially no paid apps or no apps without IAPs.

Some fascinating numbers here.

Financial Times starts blanking out scattered words in articles for users with ad-blockers

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Ad Age:

On Wednesday, the newspaper began blanking out, for some users, a percentage of words in articles symbolizing the percentage of the company’s revenue that comes from advertising.

The proportion of words blocked isn’t scientific, and the Financial Times doesn’t break out the exact chunk of revenue that comes from ads, said global advertising sales director Dominic Good. “It’s more illustrative than specific,” he said.

The test group comprises registered desktop computer visitors who don’t pay for a subscription, about .075% of the company’s desktop traffic. Some ad-blocking members of this group won’t see any new messaging, some will be asked to whitelist the website’s ads but can still read regardless, some will see articles with many words blanked out if they won’t whitelist the site, and some will be blocked outright if they don’t whitelist the site.

The company will evaulate the results after three or four weeks.

I wonder if this is a potential move to open up the gates, allow visitors through the paywall who agree to accept advertising. Interesting to see how this plays out.

Twitter opens account verification to the masses

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Until now, that blue checkmark next to your Twitter account name could only be awarded by Twitter, using a mysterious internal award process.

Now that’s changed. For the first time, people can apply for that blue checkmark themselves.