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Oculus defends sale to Facebook

If I just made $2 billion, the last thing I’d be doing is defending the sale—I’d be knee-deep in Heineken bottles.

BlackBerry CEO declares war on leaks

In my short time leading BlackBerry…

Blah, blah, blah

But, when curiosity turns to criminality, we must take strong action.

Blah, blah, blah

This may mean you see a few less blog posts with photos and rumors…

Nobody gives a sweet flying shit.

Bruce Tognazzini on the iWatch

askTog:

Before delving into what an Apple smartwatch might look like, we need to understand why, right now, people not only think they don’t need a smartwatch, they flat-out don’t want a smartwatch.

Long piece on the subject but Tog brings up some interesting points as to what he sees as the advantages and disadvantages of a smart watch.

Here’s what the first Macworld looked like in 1985

SFGate:

The first MacWorld in 1985 looked much different than the current incarnation, which peaked with more than 50,000 attendees at Moscone Center several years ago.

The show starts this week and, while it is the barest shadow of what it was in its glory days, it’s still a show I miss going to if only for the friends and colleagues who are there.

Basecamp postmortem

It’s always important to understand what happened in attacks like Basecamp suffered through.

Why Facebook bought Oculus

If you ask me, that is the real story here — realization that there is a glass ceiling to advertising especially as we shift gears and move away from the old desktop advertising ecosystem to a smaller, pocketable ecosystem that is less prone to cheap optimization tricks and is also limited by available attention…

I buy that argument, but Zuck said they don’t plan to make money from selling the Oculus hardware and would use it for advertising and virtual goods. If Facebook is looking for additional revenue streams, I’m not sure they found it.

NYT launching two new subscription products

The New York Times plans to launch two new subscription products on April 2: NYT Now, a standalone iOS app that costs $8 a month, and Times Premier, which the company describes as a “premium subscription service designed for The Times enthusiast.”

The premium product will cost $45 every four weeks.

Apple engineer recalls the iPhone’s birth

Wall Street Journal: Mr. Christie’s team devised many iPhone features, such as swiping to unlock the phone, placing calls from the address book, and a touch-based music player. The iPhone ditched the keyboard then common on advanced phones for a … Continued

Facebook buys virtual reality company for $2 billion

Zuckerberg said Facebook was not interested in becoming a hardware company and did not intend to try to make a profit from sales of the devices over the long term. Instead, he said Facebook’s software and services would continue to serve as the company’s underlying business, potentially generating revenue on Oculus devices through everything from advertising to sales of virtual goods.

Personally, I find this purchase odd.

Kaleidoscope 2.1 Public Beta

Kaleidoscope is one of the world’s best tools for spotting differences in images and text. Now it supports the ignoring of leading, trailing and line-ending whitespace too. Kaleidoscope integrates directly with Git, Subversion, Mercurial, P4, and Bazaar to fit perfectly in your workflow.

HTC One (M8)

I always felt bad for HTC. I think they made a good product, but didn’t have the marketing budget to compete with Samsung, which meant people didn’t pay much attention. I’m not sure the new phone will change that.

Amplified: Glass, Charge Thyself

Jim and Dan talk about Google Glass and its myths, escaped water buffalos, Peter Gabriel and his flute, Pandora, Spotify, and iTunes Radio (now with NPR), “The Techtopus”, wage suppression, and more.

Apple tests Related Search on App Store

The new related search suggestions mark one of Apple’s first attempts to augment App Store search results with visual semantics for apps. In testing the feature, I was able to get suggestions for specific sub-categories such as “business news” and “video game news”, “writing” and “story ideas”, or “healthy cooking” and “food recipes”; each set of related searches included new results that were more specific and relevant to the suggested search.

I like this. Anything Apple can do to show more relevant results will help them and the user.

Your words

Matt Gemmell has a really nice piece explaining why he doesn’t post on sites like Medium and instead writes for his own site.

NPR on iTunes Radio

Digital streams of Morning Edition, All Things Considered and hourly newscasts will be available on a new 24-hour streaming NPR channel on iTunes Radio.

Great news for everyone.

Voila: Screen Capture & Screen Recorder for Mac [Sponsor]

Record anything on your screen, edit it with powerful yet efficient tools and share them with just one-click!

Voila Mac Screen Capture Tool from Global Delight makes screen captures a piece of cake with its intuitive and brilliant features. Capture in HD, edit and annotate with tools like arrows, text, stamps, callouts and much more while being able to share instantly to the likes of YouTube, Dropbox, Evernote, Tumblr, Flickr and more!

Voila is especially useful for educators, students, designers, corporates and the like who need brisk, high-performance and solid screen captures without breaking a sweat. Creating tutorials, training manuals, lessons, DIY videos etc. is now super easy and you also get to manage them expertly with Voila’s smart organizational abilities. It’s that simple!

Go ahead and give it a Try! Download Voila now and enjoy 15 day Free Trial.

Pixelmator

My thanks to Pixelmator for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. Pixelmator is one of the apps that I use every day and have for years. It’s very powerful, but yet approachable, allowing new users to instantly manipulate their images. There is no better image editor.

Soccer broke my brain

A riveting, first person essay about concussions.

The grass and goals are spinning when I stand up. My vision is laced with black spots. It is alarming, but I make an athlete’s calculus, measuring these symptoms against the need to show some grit to this skeptical audience. After a brief break, I rejoin practice. Passes and players ricochet past me and I can’t get anywhere quick enough. I can’t read plays as they unfold. The black spots linger. I’ve slammed my brain hard against my skull.

The daily routines of geniuses

A fascinating read. Here’s just a taste:

Jane Austen asked that a certain squeaky hinge never be oiled, so that she always had a warning when someone was approaching the room where she wrote. William Faulkner, lacking a lock on his study door, just detached the doorknob and brought it into the room with him.

High-Octane Rock drum loops

Perfect for fans of John Bonham, Simon Phillips, Alex Van Halen, and Dave Grohl, this is the groove inspiration you’ve been looking for – a powerful source of rock drum loops inspired as much by the classic grooves of rock as much as more contemporary rock styles. Just pure, live rock drums. No beat detective. No sequenced samples. This is live, steaming, sweaty, raw rock and roll – the way it was meant to be.

Sounds perfect.

Google begins damage control for Google Glass

The Google Glass team posted “The Top 10 Google Glass Myths” trying to stem the tide of bad press. They didn’t mention how creepy the company is—perhaps that’s for another “Top 10” list.

Time is ticking for Apple to announce an iWatch, say analysts

CNBC:

Apple needs an iWatch sooner rather than later, or the company will risk losing its innovative edge to rivals, analysts say.

“They only have 60 days left to either come up with something or they will disappear,” said Trip Chowdhry, managing director at Global Equities Research.

The single stupidest thing ever written about Apple. When you’ve been doing this as long as I have, you’ll know that’s saying something.