UK-based analyst Juniper Research released a new study today that showed the number of “contactless” Apple Pay users nearly doubled with the total number of Apple Pay users reaching 86 million by the end of 2017. Android Pay (Google) and Samsung Pay usage also had big increases in usage. However, according to the study, Apple was expected to dominate the contactless payment market over the next 4 years.
Take these studies with a grain of salt but (having never used the alternatives) I’ve found Apple Pay on my phone, even for internet transactions, frighteningly easy and compelling to use.
Qualcomm Inc. fired back at Apple Inc. in their legal battle, defending its business model and seeking damages from Apple over withheld payments for technology used in iPhones.
Qualcomm, whose chips and patents are widely used in smartphones, accused Apple of mischaracterizing the chip maker’s business and encouraging international regulators to attack it.
Now you can send Starbucks Gifts with iMessage with Apple Pay. Be one of the first to send a $5 or more Starbucks Gift via iMessage and receive a $5 Starbucks Gift for yourself – while supplies last.
Do something nice for a Starbucks fan in your life.
In one of the most famous cases of actors turning down roles, Will Smith did just that for the role of Neo in The Matrix. The role instead went to Keanu Reeves and Will Smith went onto do Wild Wild West.
But let’s put on our alternate reality goggles and see what The Matrix would’ve looked like had Will Smith accepted the role of Neo.
I didn’t know Smith had turned down The Matrix. But to turn it down to do the awful “Wild Wild West”? That’s gotta hurt.
We geeks who spent hours of our adolescence playing Dungeons & Dragons always had to explain what we were doing to parents and grandparents who didn’t understand the appeal of pretending to be elves and wizards.
But the new YouTube series “D&D AARPG” on the Geek & Sundry channel takes it a step further and invites seniors to actually play D&D themselves for the first time.
In the first episode of “D&D AARPG,” which aired in February, the seniors choose their characters and get the hang of pretending to be druids, dwarves and elves. The second episode, posted on April 6, shows the seniors having even more fun during their quest. Dungeon/game master Amy Vorpahl does a great job impersonating witches, ogres and other characters to the seniors’ delight.
These are really fun videos to watch. They bring me back to my D&D playing days in high school and college.
djay Pro, Algoriddim’s award-winning DJ application, is available for macOS, iOS, and Android. Now it’s also on Windows 10, bridging a native desktop and touch experience across every platform and fulfilling our mission of making everyone a DJ. Anywhere. Any time. Any platform.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai: “I stand with airline pilots, flight attendants, and America’s flying public against the FCC’s ill-conceived 2013 plan to allow people to make cellphone calls on planes. I do not believe that moving forward with this plan is in the public interest. Taking it off the table permanently will be a victory for Americans across the country who, like me, value a moment of quiet at 30,000 feet.”
For as long as there have been cars, there has been a need to store them when they are not moving—which, these days, is about 95% of the time. Washington, DC, had a parking garage in 1907, before Ford produced its first Model T.
Parking can seem like the most humdrum concern in the world. Even planners, who thrill to things like zoning and floor-area ratios, find it unglamorous. But parking influences the way cities look, and how people travel around them, more powerfully than almost anything else.
Parking isn’t one of those things you think about until you can’t find a space. But is surprising how it can affect the livability of an area.
Astrologers regularly blame Mercury retrograde for a variety of everyday communication problems. But underneath those interpretations lies a much more interesting story about the limits of our Earth-bound perspective and the discovery of the solar system.
Really good explainer of the seemingly bizarre movement of Mars and Mercury in our night sky.
In 2012, Twitter fought the New York District Attorney so protect tweets sent by an Occupy Wall Street protester, and in 2014 it sued the U.S. government so that it could share these kinds of user information requests more publicly. Then in 2015, Twitter successfully protected the identity of two anonymous users who were being sued for defamation.
And the company also gets into legal fights where it doesn’t even have a stake. In early 2016, Twitter signed an amicus brief alongside Google in support of PubPeer, a website that allows people to comment anonymously on scholarly articles. PubPeer was being sued by a professor who received unflattering anonymous comments about his work.
What were you doing when you were 12? Getting quite good at Guitar Hero? Clumsily finding your way around a real instrument? Maybe even attempting a jam session with some of your mates?
Let’s face it, you weren’t going on tour through South America with a Grammy award-winning, platinum-selling metal band, were you? Not unless you’re Tye Trujillo, who has just signed up to play for Korn while their bassist Reginald “Fieldy” Arvizu is unable to tour with them.
Robert Trujillo is one of my favorite bassists of all time and there’s no doubt that his son is very talented too. This is pretty amazing.
I can’t speak to what the other five types of users need, but I have a pretty good idea of what I’d want as an iOS developer who uses a Mac every day. Not that anyone in Cupertino is asking me, but if they did I’d say this is my dream Mac.
A very nice article on what’s needed from a developer’s point of view.
The Living Computers: Museum + Labs in Seattle is home to some of the most noteworthy machines ever created. But a new exhibit opening this week will showcase what one official at the Paul Allen-founded institution called “the most important computer in history.”
Lāth Carlson, executive director of Living Computers, added to that designation by saying the metal box with a keyboard is “also the most boring to look at.” But for fans of computing and Apple in particular, the Apple I that once sat in founder Steve Jobs’ office is exciting for a whole host of reasons.
This is definitely a museum I’ll check out next time I’m in Seattle.
Apple’s obsessive secrecy, coupled with the extreme demands it makes of its manufacturers and the competition to join their ranks, means its suppliers dare not put a foot wrong. Apple’s patronage is a blessing when everything is going well but it can quickly become a curse. The consequences of a break-up can be devastating, as London-listed chip designer Imagination Technologies discovered this week.
It has been said of being a supplier to Walmart that, “it’s the best and worse thing that can happen to your company”. I’ve heard the same about Apple.
Masa begins by grating wasabi—the real stuff, the prohibitively expensive and difficult to grow stuff—not the powder found in many restaurants. After grating, the wasabi gets a caress with a knife, and the care with which it is treated makes one unspoken lesson clear—ingredients, the best of all ingredients, are a prerequisite for impeccable sushi. We chat as he works, turning out beautiful pieces of sushi, works of art in miniature.
I’ve only had the opportunity to be in a “fancy’ sushi restaurant a couple of times but watching the master chef is always an amazing experience.
Diller’s act depended on an endless supply of gags. “Someone clocked me one night at 800 one-liners,” Diller told NPR.
Diller’s one-liners didn’t come out of a book. She kept her jokes in a steel cabinet on tens of thousands of index cards, categorized by subject and filed into 48 drawers. In 2003, Diller donated her joke archive to the Smithsonian.
The Transcription Center is enlisting volunteers to enter all of Diller’s gags into a digital database. As data entry jobs go, this one is not typical.
I’ve been doing this for the past week. It’s a lot of fun.
My thanks to Daylite for sponsoring The Loop this week.
Want to know what your sales or marketing team is working on without having to interrupt them? Now you can get a quick overview of what each team is working on with Team View in Daylite on Mac.
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This week I’m joined by Shawn Blanc, who has built a business through blogging, setting up speciality web sites, and designing courses for people to purchase. He is a really interesting guy and has some valuable opinions on efficiency in your life.
It was a June day when I began my career as a national journalist. I stepped into the Detroit Bureau of The Wall Street Journal and started on what would be a long, varied, rewarding career. I was 23 years old, and the year was 1970. That’s not a typo.
So it seems fitting to me that I’ll be retiring this coming June, almost exactly 47 years later. I’ll be hanging it up shortly after the 2017 edition of the Code Conference, a wonderful event I co-founded in 2003 and which I could never have imagined back then in Detroit.
I didn’t make this decision lightly or hastily or under pressure. It emerged from months of thought and months of talks with my wise wife, my family, and close friends. It wasn’t prompted by my employer or by some dire health diagnosis. It just seems like the right time to step away. I’m ready for something new.
“Uncle Walt” as he was known (sometimes disparagingly) to many in the tech media has been around for a very long time. His retirement is hard earned and very well deserved. It’s doubtful his like will be ever seen again in the tech media. The “I’m ready for something new” is interesting. Don’t be surprised to see Mossberg turn up elsewhere in a management role at some Silicon Valley company.
Alas, all good things must come to an end. Today, NASA will announce the details regarding its Cassini spacecraft’s Grand Finale—a resplendent ending to its 20-year-long adventure in space, which will begin later this month. From late April to September 15th, Cassini will perform 22 dramatic dives between Saturn and its rings. Then, the brave little orbiter will plunge itself into Saturn’s atmosphere and burn up like a meteor—all while sending information back to Earth.
To be fair, going out in a blaze of glory (literally) is the most dignified way to go. Before she leaves us forever, let’s take a look back at some of Cassini’s greatest hits.
When I was younger, I would have wanted some of these gorgeous images as posters on my bedroom wall.
Fate of the Furious is about to be released in theaters and we are excited. The Fast and The Furious franchise is one of our favorite guilty pleasures, so we knew we’d have to make a video looking back on the history of the series. Here at Burger Fiction, we live our lives a quarter mile at a time.
There is no better example of a guilty pleasure for me than these movies. Objectively, they are not very good and sometimes, they are downright awful but the stunts and the general “so bad it’s good” feel makes me love them all the more.
So I’ve been playing with Apple’s new Clips app, had a few thoughts.
First things first, I had zero expectations for Clips. My experience was almost universally positive. Clips is both easy to use and fun.
To get started, I downloaded Clips here. I launched the app, and immediately was in video creation mode, with the camera facing me. To start recording, press the big red “Hold to Record” button. Let go when you are done recording. Dead simple.
To add captions, tap the first of the four tool icons above the video pane (looks like a cartoon balloon). Drag up and down and select from 8 caption formats (bottom right is none). Now, as you record, your words are parsed and appear in your selected format, perfectly synced to your lips. This is really well done, perfect use of iOS’s speech-to-text engine.
The other tool buttons let you select a look (the video I post below was done using the Comic Book look), add a sticker (drag it around the frame), and a canned clip (I used The End in mine). You can also add music to the background and combine multiple clips into a single, exportable clip.
Here’s a quick sample I did, just to give you a sense of things:
Here's a sample Clips movie. I have to say, Clips is both easy to use and a lot of fun! ?? pic.twitter.com/d4jft8RjtM
Clips does a nice job packaging all this together in an easy to use format. I appreciate being able to share this to Twitter without having to render the video or stage it in some intermediary format or site. Of course, Twitter does impose a size limit here, so this only works with small videos, but I suspect we’re going to see a lot of these.
A few side notes:
Clips gained full access to my photos and videos without ever asking permission. Seems to me Apple is bypassing their own privacy rules here, though this might be standard for Apple’s own apps.
The Clips icon looks very similar to the FaceTime icon. Different colors, but close enough to make them hard to distinguish. My 2 cents? Apple should change one of them.
Bottom line, I love Clips and look forward to making more of them.
I’m currently in the process of building a new Hackintosh rig for 2017, so imagine how surprised and happy I was to hear that Nvidia is working on beta drivers for its GPUs with the latest Pascal architecture. Up until today, I had just settled on being relegated to a Radeon RX 480, or a Maxwell-era Nvidia card.
And:
With today’s announcement, the Hackintosh just got exponentially more appealing. Nvidia’s announcement is positive for a variety of reasons: there’s the prospect of using an eGPU setup with a MacBook Pro, along with future prospects of Nvidia cards powering future Mac Pro hardware.
As I’ve mentioned before, if you do decide to build a Hackintosh, start here.
> Starting today, we will no longer serve ads on YPP videos until the channel reaches 10k lifetime views. This new threshold gives us enough information to determine the validity of a channel. It also allows us to confirm if a channel is following our community guidelines and advertiser policies. By keeping the threshold to 10k views, we also ensure that there will be minimal impact on our aspiring creators. And, of course, any revenue earned on channels with under 10k views up until today will not be impacted.
YPP is the YouTube Partner Program. That’s the YouTube arm that gets you paid for your ad related views.
On the plus side, this is going to make it easier for YouTube to vet, to validate their channels. They won’t have to look at any content with less than 10K views. This should eliminate a lot of copycats and landgrabbers, making search easier for visitors. Visit Social Media Daily’s website to learn how to maximize viewer engagement. And then, you can purchase high quality and active YouTube subscribers from Zeru.
On the down side, this will make it harder for indie YouTube creators to make money any money before they grow their audience. VidIQ is what most Youtubers use to grow their following. But given that 10K views translates (very, very approximately) to about US$10, this seems a reasonable threshold.
