If you have even the slightest interest in building a startup, if you have even the tiniest entrepreneurial bone in your body, read this story. Inspirational and educational.

Side note: MVP is Minimal Viable Product, the idea of the smallest, cheapest thing you can build to test out your idea before you commit that big chunk of cash.

[H/T David Lawrence XVII (known to many as the Puppet Master from Heroes)]

Tyler Fisher and Jacob Ganz, writing for NPR Music:

Recently, the rapper Jay Z relaunched the subscription streaming music service Tidal, which includes the option to listen to high-definition audio for $19.99 per month. Tidal’s HiFi, with its uncompressed audio files, promises a better listening experience than any other streaming service on the market.

Many listeners cannot hear the difference between uncompressed audio files and MP3s, but when it comes to audio quality, the size of the file isn’t (ahem) everything. There are plenty of other ingredients to consider, from the quality of your headphones to the size of the room you’re sitting in to, well, your own ears.

Follow the headline link to try your hand at picking the highest quality stream from three different choices. You’ll have six different samples to work through. I did surprisingly poorly. I guess I’m not a good candidate for Tidal’s HiFi service. Are you?

Techcrunch:

“I’m speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information,” said Cook. “They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong. And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be.”

Cook went on to state, as he has before when talking about products like Apple Pay, that Apple ‘doesn’t want your data.’

“We don’t think you should ever have to trade it for a service you think is free but actually comes at a very high cost. This is especially true now that we’re storing data about our health, our finances and our homes on our devices,” Cook went on, getting even more explicit when talking about user privacy.

I love that Cook continues to bang this drum.

I can’t imagine how much data Heineken is pushing through the cloud.

Macworld:

FireWire is emblematic of everything that’s great about Apple as well as everything that’s not, and of a particular mindset among some Apple users.

It was technically hugely sophisticated, removing much of the burden for the data interchange from the main CPU; unlike USB, which required a host computer, FireWire was essentially a peer-to-peer networking technology, and it could transfer at full speed in both directions simultaneously, unlike USB.

But it was also, ultimately, expensive to implement, and although variants were supported by other companies (notably Sony), it struggled to get traction outside of the Apple ecosystem.

I have a soft spot for FireWire (I took delivery of the very first FireWire Drive in Canada). For those of us who remember not only the days of slow USB 1 but also back to ADB and (shudder) SCSI, it was a great way to move lots of data extremely quickly. I still have a bunch of FireWire cables I don’t have the heart to throw out.

Seasonality Pro offers meteorologists and advanced weather enthusiasts a powerful way to explore current weather model data on iOS. View weather forecast model data at full resolution quickly while on the go.

That’s some detailed weather.

Just in case you were wondering.

Huffington Post:

In a series of trials, the Department of Homeland Security was able to smuggle fake explosives, weapons and other contraband past airport screeners in major cities across the country, according to ABC News. Officials briefed on the Homeland Security Inspector General’s investigation told the station that the TSA failed 67 out of 70 tests conducted by the department’s Red Teams — undercover passengers tasked with identifying weaknesses in the screening process, NJ.com reports.

During the tests, DHS agents each tried to bring a banned item past TSA screeners. They succeeded 95 percent of the time.

In yet another example of the “security theater” that is the TSA, this latest in a long line of embarrassments should cause the related departments to seriously look at whether or not the TSA is even worth the effort, money and resources it takes to keep such a sad sack organization propped up.

Techcrunch:

Apple’s HomeKit is finally starting to roll out to actual consumers, via the first crop of HomeKit-enabled accessories from third-party manufacturers. This means you’ll soon be able to get your hands on a range of products for the connected home that work with Siri on your iOS device, and that you’ll be able to do so as soon as today, since some of the new HomeKit accessories start shipping now.

The accessories in question range from sensors, to lights, to thermostats, to smart outlets, and come from a group of accessory-makers with a trusted reputation in the connected home industry. HomeKit may have taken a while to arrive, but it’s doing so in grand fashion, with a practical lineup to get your home connected to your iOS ecosystem in an essential way.

I bet we’ll see more announced and demoed at WWDC next week. It will be interesting to see the early adopters’ reaction to these and how they work right out of the box. The tech is far too new for me to invest in just yet but it is definitely the future and I’m looking forward to seeing what developers come out with.

Nice photo gallery from The Telegraph shows the history of the iPhone. Amazing to me that the iPhone has been out long enough, has had such a massive impact on the world, that we think if it as having a history. But it certainly does.

[H/T Rob Richman]

Jeff Benjamin, writing for iDownloadBlog, talks you through everything you’ve ever wanted to know about managing alarms on your Apple Watch, including a link to this tutorial that shows you how to add alarms as a complication to your watch face.

Lory Gil, writing for MacRumors, lays out two lists: One with your Apple Watch in the wild with no iPhone and no WiFi, and one with no iPhone but with WiFi. Good stuff.

Most devices require a minimal voltage to continue functioning. When your alkaline battery drops below that threshold, it still has 80% of its voltage left, but it is essentially useless.

This is where Batteriser comes in. It’s essentially a voltage booster that sucks every last drop of useable energy from ostensibly spent batteries. So, instead of using just 20 percent of all the power hidden inside of your Duracells and Energizers, Batteriser makes effective use of the remaining 80 percent.

Voltage boosters are nothing new, but Batteriser scales down the technology to the point where it can fit inside a stainless steel sleeve less than 0.1 mm thick. Roohparvar says the sleeves are thin enough to fit inside almost every battery compartment imaginable, and the combined package can extend battery life between 4.9x for devices like remote controls and 9.1x for various electronic toys.

“The Batteriser has boost circuitry that will boost the voltage from 0.6 volts to 1.5 volts and will maintain voltage at 1.5—which is a brand new battery,” Roohparvar says. “There’s actually no IP [intellectual property] in the boost circuitry. Our technology is really a miniaturization technique that allows us to build the sleeve. We have some IP in some of the IC circuits that are in there, but the key is we’ve been able to miniaturize the boost circuit to a point that no one else has been able to achieve.”

Too good to be true? Snake oil? My gut says, this is the real deal. And the test is simple enough to run. Run down the batteries, then add the sleeve, reinsert. If it works as advertised, we’ve got a winner.

Side note: Read the linked article. There’s a fascinating story about industrial espionage that sounds like it came from the marketing department, but still interesting.

Ben Lovejoy, writing for 9to5mac:

Apple was an early adopter of the Thunderbolt standard, which allowed a single port to be used for both high-speed data transfer and DisplayPort monitor connections. Intel’s integration of the two standards would allow Apple to replace the Thunderbolt port in the MacBook Pro range while still maintaining full compatibility with existing peripherals.

Full compatibility, with the purchase of an adapter. Not a fan of port changeover, though the market clearly is. Money out of our pockets to buy adapters, money that drives the accessory/adapter market.

That said, I am a fan of standards, especially when it reduces the total number of cables I need to worry about. The move towards USB as a standard for cell phone chargers broke the cycle of waste, reducing the replacement charger options from a river of models to a handful, all of them with a USB plug on one end of the cable.

The move to USB-C is a short term pain, a long term gain.

Karen Webster, writing for PYMNTS.com:

Unlike Apple and Apple Pay, Android Pay is not really an “Android” play, it is a Google Android Play, and the two aren’t the same.

Google, of course, has been regarded as the unofficial godfather of Android since it acquired it in 2005, but Android is an open source software platform that can be licensed, and modified out the wazoo, by anyone who wants to use it.

Which means that it has a huge fragmentation problem staring it right in the face – a huge obstacle when trying to replicate an Apple-like strategy.

And:

At its launch, Google announced that Android Pay would be supported on devices running KitKat and higher. That’s roughly 44 percent of Android enabled devices, and none of those that operate a forked version of Android, like the Amazon Fire phone, for instance or Samsung’s Tizen.

That means that despite Android having a humongous share of the operating system market worldwide, its potential Android Pay customer funnel is reduced by the number of consumers with handsets that have both NFC capabilities and that are running a current version of Android. By comparison, more than 80 percent of iPhones have upgraded to its most recent operating system, iOS8.

Then there’s the process of getting Android Pay onto handsets manufactured by other companies. Apple, as Karen points out, doesn’t have to do diddlysquat.

Fantastic analysis.

Re/code:

To create each of the seven spots, the Apple team engaged in a little bit of benign online creepery. For instance, one of the featured videographers, Cielo de la Paz, had posted photos to Flickr, “and I hadn’t tagged them or anything. They must have been doing a search for photos shot on the iPhone, because they found me out of pure luck and asked if they could use my photo” for their iPhone 6 World Gallery campaign, which launched at the beginning of March.

For the TV spots, “they were like, ‘you have good photos — do you have good videos?” and I was like “um, maybe?”

Simple, effective, minimal…typically Apple.

Deal with it.

Wall Street Journal:

More than a decade after it revolutionized music ownership with digital downloads through iTunes, Apple Inc. is again trying to change how consumers listen to their favorite songs with a new subscription streaming service and a renewed push into Internet radio.

At its developers’ conference next week, Apple is expected to announce a new set of music services, putting the company in competition with Spotify, the world’s leading streaming service, as well as Internet-radio player Pandora and even traditional broadcast stations.

These stories are leaking now ahead of next week’s WWDC. While the fine details may be wrong, it’s pretty common knowledge that Apple will announce their Beats (or whatever it will be called) streaming service next week. The biggest question is what will that service entail feature-wise. This WSJ article might have some of that information correct.

The Irish Examiner:

Here, deep within the walls of not only the world’s largest company but one of its most secretive too, we’re discussing the start-up spirit of a business recently valued at $1trn (€900bn) with a guy responsible for the logistics of more than a hundred international Apple retail stores in one of the few European countries in which there are none.

Not an extensive piece but still interesting to see Apple continue to open up a bit more to the press and letting us see behind the curtain more and more.

Forbes:

Chieh Huang knows something about upward mobility. After his parents emigrated from Taiwan, his mother worked as a cashier at a Baltimore restaurant. But education was always a priority, and despite his modest upbringing, he ended up at John Hopkins University and Fordham Law School, which set him on a course to become a successful entrepreneur. He sold his first company, a gaming studio, to Zynga in 2011, and he’s currently CEO of Boxed, an online retailer that sells items in bulk (think e-Costco) and has raised more than $30 million.

Now Huang wants to give all his employees at Boxed a shot a the same kind of upward mobility. To that end, he’ll pay for the college education of any children of Boxed workers, no strings attached.

Another great story of a CEO who, even while recognizing the limits of his plan, is still willing to go ahead to help his employees and their families.

FX Guide:

Hundreds of visual effects artists, led by overall visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson, would spend considerable time crafting more than 2000 visual effects shots and helping to transform the exquisite photography into the final film that at times feels almost like a single car chase. Even more plate manipulation would also be carried out by colorist Eric Whipp, weaving in a distinctive graphic style for the film with detailed sky replacements and unique day for nights.

I’m a complete sucker for anything related to explaining the visual effects of movies. It fascinates me how these geniuses create onscreen reality. This is a long exposition of some of the effects for this summer’s blockbuster hit. Fair warning though – there may be some spoilers included in the text.

Jean-Louis Gassée, writing for Monday Note:

Laying out the Apple Watch Concepts and Facilities isn’t hard. Borrowing from Horace Dediu’s The Battle For The Wrist and Ben Thompson’s Apple Watch And Continuous Computing, and having followed a path similar to Farhad Manjoo’s Bliss, but Only After a Steep Learning Curve, I now have a structured mental picture:

• The watch face and its “complications” (a term inherited from traditional watchmaking) showing additional information such as activity level, weather or calendar.
• Notifications, pings from applications from apps such as Messages, voice-mail or Uber
• Glances at the bottom of the screen: a series of quickly accessed views into things such as heart rate, stocks, schedule, a world clock or music playing.
• The Applications layer accessed with one click of the Watch crown, they range from monitoring one’s physical activity to Maps, Messages, Mail, Twitter, Uber, Yelp and others.
• And under everything Siri allows input into activities hard to access through the small screen, such as dialing a call, looking for a place on the map or replying to a message.

Through trial and error, I got the hang of the key building blocks and their customization through the companion app on the iPhone. Once I got there, life became pleasant.

There’s lots to process here. There’s both good and bad, but mostly good, and always interesting.

Christopher Meinck, writing for everythingiCafe:

One of the more unique features on the Apple Watch is Force Touch, thanks to the display which can sense a long, hard press. It might show up in the iPhone 6s, provided support gets introduced in iOS 9. That would certainly make sense, since it’s also available on some of the newer MacBooks. Force Touch allows you to unearth hidden menu options. In some ways, these have an Easter Egg feel to them. But these are far more than just a neat trick. Often, you’ll find that Force Touch options make it easier to do things. There are no visible interface tips to advise that Force Touch is an option, so we’ve compiled a list of the 12 ways you can use Force Touch on Apple Watch.

Click the headline link for the details.

Submit.co is a useful list of press contacts, organized as a sortable spreadsheet. Definitely worth saving. There are lots of holes in the list (Daring Fireball, 9to5mac, The Loop are just a few examples), so you’ll want to supplement with your own press list.

[Via iOS Dev Weekly]

The National Geographic channel is running a mini-series, starting tonight, subtitled “The Competition to Control the Personal Computer, 1974-1999”.

The web site itself is pretty interesting, offering an interactive timeline contrasting Jobs and the evolution of Apple against Gates and the evolution of Microsoft.

Note that if your sound is on, and you leave the site open then switch to another tab, you’ll hear some odd background noises. Anyone recognize that sound?

Cade Metz, writing for Wired:

DAVID COZ WORKED in Google’s Paris office, but what he really wanted was a job at the mothership in Silicon Valley.

Last spring, the French-born Coz turned up at Google headquarters in Mountain View hoping to chat about his latest project with anyone who would listen. “I came with my prototype and my luggage,” he says, “and I met with 10 or 15 people.” One of them was Christian Plagemann, a Google research scientist exploring new interfaces for consumer electronics devices. Though they’d never met, Coz showed him the prototype: a pair of virtual reality goggles made out of cardboard.

Sometimes the best ideas just walk in the front door.

Jonathan Lace, writing for Apple Insider, walks you through the settings that affect your iCloud storage, helps you free up some space.

Even if none of this is new to you, this is one of those links you might save and pass along the next time you see someone struggling with this.