Business

Friction free parking

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Über succeeded by reducing the friction from the process of getting a taxi. You pick up your phone, tap a few times, your car is on its way. If you like, you can text or call your driver directly and watch the driver’s progress on a map built into the Über app. When you are done, leave your wallet in your pocket. The billing is done automatically with an electronic receipt arriving in email to complete the process.

There have been a number of efforts at bringing that same friction reduction to the process of public parking. The linked article explores one system that shows how far we’ve come, how far we still have to go.

Yahoo spends $58 million to fire its chief operating officer

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Washington Post:

$58 million for 15 months of work.

That’s what Yahoo’s chief operating officer Henrique De Castro got in severance pay when he was sent packing on Jan. 16, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing made public on Wednesday.

Ouch.

Assaulted for wearing Google Glass, but not for privacy reasons

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Kyle Russell writes for Business Insider. He was wrapping up an assignment, covering a protest of a Google lawyer turned part-time landlord, when someone ran up to him and grabbed his Google Glass from his face.

The story is less about this assault and more about the impact well heeled startups are having on the local communities. As the money floods in, housing prices rise, taxes increase, and local residents are prices out of their homes. Anger and resentment brews. Can this be fixed? A thoughtful read.

Alpine to sell stand-alone CarPlay consoles

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Nikkei.com:

While a slew of carmakers will soon start offering vehicles that come standard with a CarPlay interface built in, the Japanese company’s device is to be the first aftermarket product compatible with the system. It will first be available in the U.S. and Europe and likely cost around $500 to $700.

The device will connect to an iPhone 5 or later by wire. Drivers will be able to view maps on its screen, likely 7 inches, and use voice commands to access messages, make calls and play music. The system will be able to read messages and directions aloud.

This looks pretty cool. A real boost for CarPlay.

Google pilot program tracks online clicks all the way to brick and mortar purchases

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Wall Street Journal:

The company’s new pilot program involves AdWords, its biggest advertising program, in which advertisers place links next to Internet-search results. Google gets paid when users click on an ad and visit the advertiser’s website.

But while tracking clicks is an effective way to measure a Web ad’s impact on online sales, the system breaks down when shoppers enter a physical store, where their behavior is harder to monitor.

“Clicks are just the beginning, and everyone knows that there’s more value to tying ads to purchases,” said Benny Arbel, chief executive of myThings, an advertising-technology company that works with Google but isn’t involved in the pilot program. “If Google can demonstrate that people did not just click on an ad but that they actually bought something, that is the Holy Grail.”

This will mean a big new source of revenue for Google and a wealth of new data they will be able to collect about their users’ habits.

Thoughts on asking users for iOS permissions

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Asking a user for permission to send them push notifications or to access their private data can be a little bit of a minefield.

For many apps, not getting access to a phone’s sensors or data can change the entire user experience. For example, if an app depends on where the user is standing, declining access to location could render the app useless. More subtly, if push notifications play a critical role in getting your user to form a habit of using your app, declined access could lead to you losing them forever.

Making it all worse is that when a user taps “Don’t Allow”, there is no easy way for them to reverse that decision.

If you are interested in user interface/experience, this is some good food for thought.

How Uber plans to challenge Amazon on same day delivery

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I would not have made the connection from Uber to same day package delivery, but once you see the logic, hard to punch a hole in it. They are leveraging their existing GPS tracking infrastructure.

How the Heartbleed vulnerability works

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I’ve been reading about the Heartbleed bug, trying to understand how it does what it does, how a hacker could use the vulnerability to gain access to your data.

If you have not heard of Heartbleed, read this, which was posted last night.

Read the main post for my ham-handed attempt at explaining how this vulnerability works.

Microsoft to compete with Amazon and Netflix with their own original programming

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Bloomberg:

Microsoft Corp. is going Hollywood with a cast including comedians Sarah Silverman and Seth Green, aspiring World Cup players and eerily human robots.

All are involved in shows that Microsoft’s new Xbox television studio plans to roll out globally starting in June. Helmed by former CBS Corp. honcho Nancy Tellem, who Microsoft hired 19 months ago to build a TV powerhouse from the ground up, the studio now has six series lined up — including a science-fiction thriller called “Humans” about humanoid robot workers — and more than a dozen projects in development.

This is Microsoft’s not-so-Trojan horse into the living room, building dependence on the Xbox One for accessing web-based programming on your TV, competing with Apple TV, Fire TV, and Google’s evolving TV solution.

Israeli firm shows off nanotech that can charge a phone in 30 seconds

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[VIDEO] Wall Street Journal:

StoreDot Ltd., a Tel-Aviv based start-up, says it hopes to at least make the charging process faster–unveiling Monday a prototype charger that promises to take you battery from a tiny sliver of red to 100%, all in about 30 seconds.

My natural reaction is a healthy skepticism. That said, here’s an article from last October on StoreDot’s work with bio-organic LED displays, and another from November on biological semiconductors. There’s certainly some science behind the show. Video embedded in the post.

Statistical analysis of the Apple App Store

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If you in any way make your living, or hope to make your living, via the App Store, I think you’ll find this fascinating. For example:

I ran a simple query on my data to determine the distribtion of user ratings. I found that 60% of apps do not have any user ratings

I’m surprised by this. Zero ratings. Not one person took the time to rate 60% of the apps. To me, that means 60% of the apps never get found, never find an audience.

Not so great review of Amazon Fire TV

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I didn’t ask for games. I didn’t ask for photos. I asked for a streaming media solution that could do things right: Something easy to pick up, simple to use, and something that actually made the experience of playing and navigating through multimedia, dare I say it, fun.

Amazon promised all of the above with Fire TV, which the company unveiled Wednesday at an event in New York City. Unfortunately, the device doesn’t live up to its own hype. Perhaps Amazon’s homegrown solution was a bit premature and its ambitions too lofty, because while Fire TV can do almost everything, little of it is done right.

Ouch.

Last year, 71 million people watched other people play video games

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I remember the first time I saw the X Games on TV. Snowboarding? On TV? It just seemed odd. But now snowboarding has also become mainstream, a big draw in the Winter Olympics.

Turns out, this same thing is happening with video games. Though I shudder to think that video games will ever make its way into the Olympics, there is no doubt that watching other people play video games has gone mainstream.

Treasure trove of data on app and book sales from Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft

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Follow the headline link for a wealth of data on app sales from the iOS and Mac App Stores, Google Play, Amazon, Windows Phone and PC. For eBooks, there are numbers for Apple iBooks and Kindle. This data has been available for years and is well known in the developer community, but not so well known in the general tech community.

Facebook’s very public dispute with Eat24

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Eat24 is a food delivery service, with a pretty sizable following on Facebook. All that is about to change.

From the Eat24 blog:

Dear Facebook,

Hey. It’s Eat24. Look, we need to talk. This isn’t easy to say since we’ve been together so long, but we need to break up. We’d love to say “It’s not you, it’s us” but it’s totally you. Not to be rude, but you aren’t the smart, funny social network we fell in love with several years back. You’ve changed. A lot.

Eat24 spent years accumulating fans and likes on Facebook and is so upset with changes Facebook is making, they are deleting their entire Facebook presence.

Apple’s war on Samsung has Google in crossfire

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New York Times:

Some features in Samsung devices that Apple objects to are part of Google’s Android operating system, by far the most popular mobile operating system worldwide, running on more than a billion devices made by many manufacturers. That means that if Apple wins, Google could have to make changes to critical Android features, and Samsung and other Android phone makers might have to modify the software on their phones.

Why Google is splitting their stock

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On Thursday, April 3rd, Google will split their stock, creating two stocks, each of which will start at approximately half the current share value. I thought the logic behind the split was interesting.

Access any Tesla S with only a 6 character password over the net

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I don’t find this worrisome, since if someone wants access to a Tesla S, they’d find a way to break in. But I do find it interesting.

Tesla Motors Inc’s electric vehicles can be located and unlocked by criminals remotely simply by cracking a six-character password using traditional hacking techniques, according to newly released research.