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Someone on Reddit dug this up. Seems so very right. Heh.

I don’t subscribe to many newsletters, but Dave Pell’s Next Draft is definitely worth it. The newsletter is free and a great daily read.

The Air Force is replacing 5,000 of its BlackBerry devices with Apple smartphones, in a broader move to eradicate the legacy devices in favor of more modern commercial technologies.

I wonder if the BlackBerry CEO will yell at the US military like he did with the CEO of T-Mobile.

Mashable:

The 2014 American International Toy Fair this week ushered in a collection of the hottest toys due out this year — from a Siri-like teddy bear and an augmented reality bedtime stories to a board game that teaches coding to pre-schoolers — but scattered within the shiny and new is the bizarre and wacky.

Gotta feel bad for today’s kids. Some of these toys are really lame.

Explore the majesty of nature in breath-taking 3D with Professor Brian Cox as your personal tour guide.

This is such an amazing app. Interesting note: This is built on the same platform that powers The Loop Magazine. The same developers built both apps.

Wow, this is great.

Remember the negative film about Samsung I mentioned the other day—now Samsung is trying to get newspaper coverage of the film killed too.

With more than 120 million smartphones sold in the U.S. in 2013, Apple’s iPhone accounted for nearly half of those, taking a 45 percent share in its home market last year, new data released by the NPD Group on Thursday reveals.

Samsung had 26%.

Om is a good friend and I’ll really miss his writing.

Benedict Evans has some interesting thoughts on Google. Of note: this is one of the only articles I’ve read on Google lately without using the word “creepy.”

It’s Willie. What else needs to be said.

Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it’s all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out… And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen.

Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.

Why do I think Facebook doesn’t share these views.

Screens is a screen sharing VNC client for the iPhone and iPad. I’ve been using it since it was first released and love it.

Two separate sources have told me that’s how much Google (GOOG) offered to purchase WhatsApp. The bid did not come with promise of a board seat, unlike the Facebook agreement.

I’m not surprised.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk today confirmed in an interview with Bloomberg that his company “had conversations” with Apple. Musk went on to say that he could not comment on whether the conversations had revolved around any kind of acquisition, but he did confirm that at the current time, an acquisition of Tesla seems “very unlikely.”

The fact the two companies talked means nothing—they could have been talking about iOS integration instead of an acquisition. However, if Apple were going to get into the car business, Tesla would be the perfect partner. They are cool, environmentally friendly, and they care about design and the user.

Facebook Inc will buy fast-growing mobile-messaging startup WhatsApp for $16 billion in cash and stock, as the world’s largest social network looks for ways to boost its popularity, especially among a younger crowd.

These prices are out of control.

The Atlantic:

A new study from the Transportation Research Initiative at the University of Michigan looks at global driving fatalities with up-to-date World Health Organization data. Around the world, deaths in fatal car crashes are 1/6th as likely as dying from a common health problem, like heart disease. In the U.S., where road crashes account for just 2 percent of deaths, individuals are 13 times more likely to die from cancer.

Here is the map of driving fatality rates per capita, with the most deadly countries (led by Namibia) in red and the safest countries (led by the Maldives) in green.

Of course Maldives is the safest – they’ve only got ten cars in the whole country. Good to see the countries I drive in most often are relatively safer for any number of reasons.

Even Google knows how creepy Google Glass is.

Civic groups and the production crew of the Korean film based on the death of a Samsung Electronics employee claimed Wednesday that Lotte Cinema abused its position as one of the nation’s leading cinema chains to block moviegoers from seeing the film.

“Another Family” is about a real-life father’s quest for truth about the leukemia death of his young daughter who had worked at one of Samsung’s semiconductor plants for four years.

The Vancouver Sun:

A new survey shows that four Canadian cities – led by Vancouver – are the highest ranking in North America for quality of life.Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal take the next three places respectively in the 2014 Mercer Quality of Living rankings.

I live here and it really is a spectacular city.

Yahoo News:

When the co-pilot on flight ET-702 from Addis Ababa to Rome locked himself in the cockpit while the pilot went to the bathroom and announced a hijacking, Italian and French fighter jets were scrambled to escort the plane through their respective airspaces.

But although the co-pilot-turned-hijacker quickly announced he wanted to land the plane in Switzerland, where he later said he aimed to seek asylum, Switzerland’s fleet of F-18s and F-5 Tigers remained on the ground, Swiss airforce spokesman Laurent Savary told AFP.

This, he explained, was because the Swiss airforce is only available during office hours. These are reported to be from 8am until noon, then 1:30 to 5pm.

If only the bad guys kept the same hours.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher:

Public speaking is tough. You’re trying not to say “um” too much or speak too fast or crash your presentation or poop your pants or do any of the million horrible things that, in those first few minutes you’re up on stage, feel way too possible.

Very funny, but so true.

I was exciting when Apple announced the first iTunes Festival in the US this morning, but I’m even more excited now. When the iTunes Festival page went live it showed an artist not mentioned in the press release: Willie Nelson.

Of course, Candy Crush’s ridiculous strength could also be King’s greatest weakness.

We’ve seen this before.

The new version of Samsung’s Gear smartwatch will run on Tizen, not Google’s Android operating system, the latest attempt by the South Korean electronics giant to develop more of its own software and services, according to three people familiar with the situation.

Samsung will unveil the updated Gear watch, and a new HTML5 version of the Tizen operating system, at an event at the Mobile World Congress later this month in Barcelona, Spain, the people said.

If true, this is the first of Samsung’s devices to use the new operating system, but it won’t be the last. Google should be very worried.

Sweet Jesus, where does CNBC coming up with these assholes. For a good analysis of what this moron said, go check out what John Moltz has to say.

BlackBerry Ltd Chief Executive John Chen fired a salvo at T-Mobile US Inc on Tuesday, calling ill-conceived a promotion run by the company that encourages customers using BlackBerry smartphones to upgrade to iPhones.

I’d be pissed off if I ran a company that made shitty products. Chen should worry about fixing that first.

Some nice examples illustrating the points.

This is a really good look at advertising and how the old school buyers are trying to deal with Amazon and Apple. Buyers are used to getting information, but neither company will share customer habits or other data with them. Welcome to the 21st Century. Guess who is sharing customer information more freely? Google.