Business

Supreme Court to hear software patent case

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Up to this point, software has only been eligible for limited patent protection. The general thinking is that abstract concepts cannot be patented. The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear the case Alice Corporation Pty. Ltd. v. CLS Bank International.

Software that interprets your facial expressions

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When you are in a face-to-face conversation, the person on the other side is constantly reading and interpreting your facial expressions, looking for feedback. If you offer a puzzled look, they might rephrase their words, without you having to ask.

Drone feasibility analysis

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Thoughtful analysis from MIT Technology Review that slices through the hype and paints a realistic picture of the limitations Amazon will face in bringing drones into service.

Drone delivery service in China

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Interesting article on the emergence of drone delivery in China. With fewer regulatory hurdles to overcome, Chines drone delivery is being explored by a number of companies.

Tesla takes on lawmakers with loaner cars and star power

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Tesla is a non-traditional automaker and faces a constant battle against lawmakers protecting the existing auto sales infrastructure. This article lays out the Tesla strategy to battle that entrenched mindset.

Microsoft takes on Google Chromebook in this tin-eared ad

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If you are going to create an attack ad, it better be either irrefutably in-the-right or incredibly clever. This ad makes the case that the Chromebook is not a real laptop, that when it is not connected to the internet, it is “pretty much a brick.” I don’t own a Chromebook, and I’m not necessarily a Chromebook fan, but fair is fair. A “brick”? It took me all of 2 minutes reading reviews to dispel this myth.

I get the fact that the Chromebook might not be as useful when you are not connected to the net, given that it was designed with Google’s online suite of apps in mind. But not one review I read implied that the Chromebook is useless when off-line.

How Apple might incorporate PrimeSense 3D tech into its products

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Juli Clover’s take on the 3D object sensing technology Apple just acquired when they purchased PrimeSense. As much as she sees, my guess is, Apple sees much more. Object sensing technology has been around since the 1970s, when Patrick Winston first wrote about computer vision and described the artificial intelligence algorithms needed for a computer to distinguish the corners that make up a room.

Could this be the last wave of consoles?

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This article from MIT Technology Review argues that the near-simultaneous release of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One may mark the last wave of consoles, at least as we know them. Not so sure I agree with that, but the article makes some interesting points. Though this generation of consoles is clearly superior to the ones they replace, the technological leap is clearly much smaller than the previous one. In addition, the gaming market has become fragmented, with smartphone and tablet gaming grabbing a significant and, depending how you calculate things, perhaps majority slice of the pie.

Downloadable games such as Angry Birds and Minecraft, which play on mobile phones and basic PCs, now constitute a major part of the industry (in April this year, Angry Birds developer Rovio estimated that its games have been downloaded 1.7 billion times, while in 2012, Minecraft earned its independent creator, Markus Persson, more than $100 million).

There’s no question that franchises like Call of Duty are still selling big. The argument is that the value perception of each new console release is declining and the number of consoles sold is declining accordingly.

Each new iteration of hardware brings a historical downward trend in console sales. Sony’s wildly successful PlayStation 2 sold 150 million consoles. Its successor sold 80 million. It appears that Sony and Microsoft both lose a lot of money on these devices. For these reasons, some people think this new generation of console hardware (including Nintendo’s beleaguered Wii-U, which has failed to capture consumers’ imaginations) may be the last.

For consumers, the decline in consoles is not only a symptom of broader choice (in the 1990s, consoles and PCs were the only way to play complex screen games) but also one of diminishing returns. Martin Hollis, designer of the seminal Nintendo 64 movie tie-in Goldeneye 007, told me: “With each iteration, the multiple of increased power matters less. Looking back, PlayStation 2 was a huge leap from PlayStation. But PlayStation 3 was a much smaller leap. Each time we climb a curve of diminishing returns.” Hollis, like many others, believes that most people who only casually play video games will remain unconvinced by the difference between the new versions of the consoles and the previous ones.

From a gaming point of view, smartphones, tablets, cloud solutions (like Steam and Gaikai) and consoles are all converging. Just as iOS and Android emerged as the last OS standing in the great smartphone dust-up, I suspect there will be just a few players left standing once the gaming chaos resolves itself.

Top 20 most shared video ads of 2013

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These are fascinating. Here’s the most shared ad. It’s called Dove Beauty Sketches, and it’s from ad agency Ogilvy Mather.

Shopkick uses iBeacon tech in Macy’s pilot program

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Walk into Macys’ Herald Square or Union Square store, a ShopKick notification arrives on your phone, and the marketing campaign kicks in.

Using technology Shopkick developed itself based on capabilities Apple built into its latest mobile software, customers with iPhones and even some Android handsets can have their Shopkick app “woken” up by a signal from Bluetooth transmitters when they enter the store, even if their phone is in sleep mode. As a customer who has opted in walks through the store, they might see special offers based on the products they are near, said Cyriac Roeding, Shopkick’s CEO.

Note the phrase “technology Shopkick developed itself”. This is iBeacon technology, but not Apple-made beacons.

Roeding said his transmitters, dubbed shopBeacons, were created based on a protocol embedded in Apple’s iOS 7 mobile operating software. Apple hasn’t broadly released the most recent version of iBeacon’s technical specifications.

There is so much to discover here. How will consumers react? Over time, will the notifications be seen as a benefit or marketing noise? Will this enhance the shopping experience? The potential is certainly there.

The things that make the Xbox One different

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Adam Najberg shares his initial thoughts on the Xbox One. If you are planning on buying an Xbox One or have one on preorder, this is well worth a read. More importantly, I think anyone involved in the gaming space, especially on the hardware side, might take a look as well. There are lessons to be learned.

Apart from a dearth of titles — the Xbox One is launching with 23 games — my main beef with the Xbox One is that games take longer than I want to download, because of their large size and my relatively slow 30 Mbps Internet connection.

Thankfully, games let you start playing well before they’re fully downloaded, and keep downloading in the background until they’re done. And there aren’t enough games that allow you to skip over cinematic scenes. I’m hoping developers and publishers get less self-impressed and let us get to the gameplay faster as fascination with the new consoles’ capabilities diminishes.

One quibble. I get that 30 Mbps is not the fastest connection available, but I would hardly qualify it as relatively slow. Not picking on the author, just making the point that if an experience is a problem at 30 Mbps, it’s a problem for a large slice of your audience.

After laying hands on both consoles, though, I can see where Microsoft and Sony have diverging views of the future and what role your living room will play in it.

Sony has coalesced around the gaming community, trying to grab gamers in an even tighter embrace than ever before.

Microsoft is looking to breed total dependence for games, social media, communications and entertainment through one device. The hope is that gamers who cut their teeth on the Xbox 360 will still gravitate toward the Xbox One and its enhanced multiplayer gaming. Now, though, there’s a whole new, younger and more-easily-distracted generation of gamers coming online, the kids with their smartphones or iPad Minis in their lap as they play, chatting, listening to music or watching a video. With Xbox One, Microsoft is hoping to move their second screen onto the first screen.

It’ll be interesting to watch all this play out. To me, this Microsoft and Sony, burning their powder trying to fine tune their console-based living room experience while Nintendo frets on the sidelines and Apple and Google plot their longer view. Such fun.

iPad stand you can fit in your pocket

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The TwoHands iPad stand from Felix is like a long, thin hair clip. Squeeze the short end and the legs grasp the sides of the iPad. Works on most tablets, in portrait and landscape. Love this design. Also love the domain name. Presumably felix.com was already taken. This is a good second choice.

Coin, the all-in-one card

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Coin is an editable card that holds all of your credit/debit and loyalty cards. Fascinating.

Stores using location tech to assist (and follow) shoppers

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Scenarios like this one are becoming more and more common as location tech gains a foothold in retail:

You’ve just tossed a jar of peanut butter in your grocery cart when your smartphone buzzes. You glance down at the screen to see a message that seems downright clairvoyant: Buy some jelly. Get $1 off.

Convenient? Certainly. Creepy? Maybe.

In September, Apple introduced the iBeacon. But retailers are exploring many other options for indoor positioning and tracking, including low-power Bluetooth (used by the iBeacon and others), videocameras, sound waves, and magnetic fields. The goal is to enhance the brick and mortar experience to rival that of online retailers.

The technology could eventually give retailers capabilities rivaling those of online stores. On the Web, behavioral ads use records of a person’s browsing history to propose products. Now pharmacies or home improvement stores wanting to sell Kleenex or two-by-fours could soon do the same thing (see “It’s All E-Commerce Now”).

“Not much is known about what shoppers do in stores until they check out at the cashier,” says Todd Sherman, chief marketing officer for Point Inside, a Bellevue, Washington, startup that’s among a score of companies that have raised venture capital funding to perfect indoor tracking and advertising techniques. “This way, you can see what they’re interested in [and] see where they’re going.”

The data culled from shopper cell phones can be incredibly useful.

Forest City Enterprises triangulates on cellular signals to monitor foot traffic in most of the nearly 20 shopping centers it owns or manages. It says the data helped it decide where to move an escalator that was interfering with an entrance. The company also measures how long visitors stay after a fashion show or concert. Stephanie Shriver-Engdahl, Forest City’s vice president of digital strategy, says the company wants to know, “Do they get one soda, hop in the car, and leave? Or are they staying longer?” In the future, foot-traffic data could be used to set lease prices, she says.

There is an obvious convenience to buying online. But brick and mortar has benefits as well and traditional retailers are focusing on enhancing the experiences storefronts offer that cannot be matched by online merchants.

The details in the Samsung Apple patent retrial

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There’s been a lot of coverage on the Apple Samsung patent retrial. This article does a good job of boiling down both the numbers and the arguments being put forth by each side.

Samsung’s expert’s key argument:

An expert hired by Apple had determined the company was due $114 million in lost profits because of Samsung’s use of technology under Apple’s patent No. 7,844,915, also known as “pinch to zoom.” The ‘915 patent covers technology that can distinguish whether a user is scrolling with one finger versus using several touch points at once for a pinch-to-zoom action.

However, Michael Wagner, an accountant and lawyer hired by Samsung, said there’s no evidence from either company that shows consumers bought Samsung devices because they liked that particular touch-screen feature. As a result, he believes Apple should receive no money for lost profits.

“I believe people bought these phones for other features,” Wagner said. That includes bigger, AMOLED screens; faster processors; and 4G LTE.

And from Apple’s side:

One expert, MIT professor John Hauser, estimated three Apple patents, including the ‘915 patent, adds about $100 in value to a $199 smartphone or $90 in value to a $499 tablet. [Apple’s accountant, Julie] Davis said Apple lost out on $114 million in profits because of the Samsung copycat devices. She also calculated Samsung’s profits to be $231 million, and said reasonable royalties owed to Apple total $35 million. Apple estimates it would have sold 360,000 devices if Samsung hadn’t released infringing rivals.

The article also covers the “lost profits” aspects of this precedent setting case.

The real story behind tablet market share reporting

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This is some incredible compelling analysis. I would urge anyone interested in the methodology behind PC/tablet/phone market share “reporting” (and I do use that term loosely) to read this top-to-bottom.

Things start off with a bit of history.

Following a routine that began in the 1990s, Gartner and IDC spent the 2000s noting that Apple’s Mac market share was virtually irrelevant, afloat in an ocean of PC sales without giving much regard to the fact that Apple enjoyed very high share in some market segments (such as education and graphic design) and essentially none in others (such as enterprise sales, kiosks and cash registers).

Then came the iPod, then the iPhone, then the iPad, with Mac sales rising as the Mac-iOS ecosystem evolved and expanded.

And that’s when this article really gets interesting. In a nutshell, a case is made that IDC, Gartner, and Strategy Analytics (the big three) set out to torpedo Apple’s perceived market share.

There’s little mystery of who shot down the iPad’s market share or what weapon they’re using: all three major market research firms rapidly fire off headline bullets clearly aimed at wounding the perception of Apple’s tablet. One can, generally, only speculate about why this is occurring.

However, Strategy Analytics has offered some unusual transparency regarding its motive for carving out a very specific market and then stuffing the pie chart with “tier two” volume to the point where the world’s best selling tablet is crushed down into an embarrassing statistical sliver of shrinking “share.”

Read the article. Fantastic.