This article was translated from Swedish using Google Translate.
After the financial crisis of 2008, the country has not recovered.
“We had two pillars that supported us. Nalle Wahlroos described it pretty well when he said that iPhone struck down Nokia and iPad hit the forest industry. “
So Steve Jobs struck Finland?
“Yes, Steve Jobs took our jobs,” said Alexander Stubb.
TechCrunch:
Nielsen’s U.S. music report on the first half of 2014 shows digital music consumption rapidly shifting from downloads to streaming. On-demand streaming was up 42% over the first half of 2013, racking up 70 billion play in the first half of 2014. Meanwhile, digital track sales fell 13% to 593.6 million and album sales fell 11.6% to 53.8 million. The report on US trends (not international) makes Apple’s acquisition of Beats looks smart, as its iTunes download sales model is quickly dying out. As a whole, dismal digital and physical sales dragged total music sales plus streaming industry down 3.3%.
Tech Crunch:
Amazon is refusing to comply with a request from the Federal Trade Commission to implement stricter controls that would prevent children from making in-app purchases.
Reuters:
Goldman Sachs Group Inc said a contractor emailed confidential client data to a stranger’s Gmail account by mistake, and the bank has asked a U.S. judge to order Google Inc to delete the email to avert a “needless and massive” breach of privacy.
This raises some questions. Who owns a specific piece of email? Who has the right to delete it? Is it owned by the sender? The recipient? Google?
She’s got a tough and important job:
Harvey was the 25th employee at Twitter, where her official title is vice president of trust and safety, but she’s more like Silicon Valley’s chief sanitation officer, dealing with the dirtiest stuff on Twitter: spam, harassment, child exploitation, threats of rape and murder.
Fascinating read.
Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office said it would look into the Facebook experiment. That’s one problem for Facebook. Another is a potential class-action suit:
Critics of Facebook’s study have raised the specter that the company could face a class-action lawsuit over the study. According to a report in Forbes, the company added mention of research to its terms of service months after the study was conducted.
Google completed its long rumored acquisition of Songza for a reported US$39 million. Songza is a music curation service that lets you select playlists based on elements like genre, mood, and decade. It runs on iOS, Android, ChromeCast, and the web.
Unfortunately, the article is behind a paywall. In a nutshell, Apple replaced last year’s winner, Berkshire Hathaway. Apple won the award two years ago as well.
[VIDEO] Apple rolled out the latest iPhone 5s ad yesterday. This one was called Parenthood. The ad was part of the With the power of iPhone 5s, you’re more powerful than you think series. It featured the song The Life of Dreams by Julie Doiron.
This is a heartbreaking story, made harder by the fact that I met one of the principals of this story, Marcin, when I was in New York visiting another startup. I liked Marcin and I liked the concept. Unfortunately, the business model was just not strong enough. Lessons here for everyone.
Apple announced a 16GB iPod touch with a 5 Megapixel camera for $199. Not too shabby. Though it’s clearly not a replacement for the iPhone, if you have regular WiFi access, this is a pretty nice alternative, one that doesn’t come with a monthly contract.
You’ll need to activate the phone in-store.
Huge audience, especially for today’s matches.
Today, the Supreme Court ruled against Aereo. Looks like that’s the end of the line for this experiment.
Seems like the deal will be approved. That it is a question of tinkering if the Commission sees any competition issues.
ComputerWorld:
The LTE Chromebook Pixel was originally sold with a free two-year mobile broadband plan from Verizon — 100MB per month, with the option to purchase more data on a pay-as-you-go basis as needed. But as I reported yesterday, Verizon stopped honoring the plans halfway through that two-year term. Customer support agents for the carrier have been telling Pixel owners they weren’t aware of any two-year commitment, despite clear online documentation to the contrary.
Google fixed the problem with a $150 gift card.
Last December, Jeff Bezos raised the possibility of Amazon-branded drone based delivery.
I do love the impractical fantasy of that idea but, alas, the FAA has officially put the kibosh on it.
9to5mac:
A court has fined lawyers Quinn Emanuel and Samsung a total of $2M for misusing confidential details of a patent deal struck between Apple and Nokia.
The documents were supplied by Apple to Samsung’s lawyers purely so that it could see that Apple was telling the truth about its patent deals with other companies. The documents were marked “for attorney’s eyes only” and were not to be revealed to Samsung executives.
Typical.
Last September, Nest announced their Nest Developer Program. In preparation for tomorrow’s Google I/O conference, the Nest Developer Program is now active. If you watch the video embedded below, you’ll get a sense of Nest’s vision for the home. Clearly, … Continued
Have a web site? The time it takes for your page to load can vary widely, depending on the DNS lookup speed of your hosting service.
SolveDNS collects lookup speeds for a variety of hosts, built an easy to read chart. Amazing how big a range there is in lookup time.
Apple loves to disrupt things. The iPod and iTunes disrupted the music industry. The iPhone disrupted the telecommunications industry. And so on.
Next up? The electronic medical records model, something that effects everyone who has any sort of health care.
Disney bought Marvel for $4 billion, turned it into a cash cow. Disney bought Lucasfilm for $4 billion a year later, looks to have the same plans in mind.
New York Times:
For several months, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been investigating a wave of so-called denial-of-service, or DDoS attacks, against web start-ups. In each case, attackers knock their victims offline using a flood of traffic and refuse to stop until victims pay their ransom in Bitcoins.
Among the businesses targeted in the initial wave of attacks were Vimeo, the video-sharing company; Meetup, a company that connects groups offline; Basecamp, a project management software company; Bit.ly, the link-shortening service; Shutterstock, the stock photography agency, and MailChimp, the email marketing provider. In nearly every case, the amount demanded was typically low, in the $300 range. And in some cases, one security consultant said, the victims paid the ransom.
Google has added a “parental status” item to its AdWords dashboard. Is this one step too far? Was this inevitable?
Yahoo currently provides the data that powers the built-in iOS weather app. That is about to change.
The situation Yahoo finds itself in is due to a very crafty deal engineered by former Yahoo board member and Weather Channel CEO David Kenny, who has essentially shoved Yahoo off the key smartphone to be replaced by a new offering that he has been developing since he took over the weather news and information service last year.
There’s been a lot of talk over the past few days about Amazon trying to buy developers by giving them $5,000 to build an app for the Fire Phone, up to a max of $15,000 for three apps. When I first heard this story, I thought Amazon’s plan was misguided, that they’d lay out a ton of money to buy their way into undisciplined relevancy, with an indiscriminate copy of apps that are available on Google Play and other Android app stores. Sort of a “me too” strategy.
But that’s not quite right.
The Supreme Court yesterday handed down a decision in a landmark case, known as Alice Corp v CLS Bank. Here’s a link to the decision.
In a nutshell, Alice Corp was issued a patent for a computer implemented payment system. CLS Bank argued that the patent was invalid because it took an existing system and simply implemented “well known” steps on a computer.
What took you guys so long?
Airbnb and Uber are two darlings of disruption, adored by one segment of the population (their users) and despised by the people they disrupt.
If something goes wrong—a party breaks out, somebody gets robbed, the cops show up, someone slips and falls—it’s not the tenant, or some sharing-economy guru in Silicon Valley, who’s going to be held responsible. It will be the owner’s problem. That’s why at the first hint of Airbnb usage, Podziba explains, “I tell them to do what I did: Get surveillance cameras. Hire a private investigator. And do the necessary steps to get them out.”
Traditional television is static. Here’s your list of channels, watch what you like. If you have a DVR, you can time shift your shows, record them to watch later. On-demand offers another level of time shifting and access to a library of content, some of which you have to pay for. DVR and On-demand extend the traditional TV model, making it a bit more dynamic.
Apple TV and its WatchESPN app take this one step further.