In the first half of this year, tweets will start to be visible in Google’s search results as soon as they’re posted, thanks to a deal giving the Web company access to Twitter’s firehose, the stream of data generated by the microblogging service’s 284 million users, people with knowledge of the matter said Wednesday. Google previously had to crawl Twitter’s site for the information, which will now come automatically from Twitter.
At the heart of the deal:
There’s no advertising revenue involved in the deal between Twitter and Google, one of the people said. That suggests Twitter will receive data-licensing revenue, which was $41 million in the third quarter, up from $16 million a year earlier.
Your tweets were always searchable. Now they’ll just appear in Google’s results much more reliably and in closer to real time.
Fourteen of 23 top hospitals contacted by Reuters said they have rolled out a pilot program of Apple’s HealthKit service – which acts as a repository for patient-generated health information like blood pressure, weight or heart rate – or are in talks to do so.
The pilots aim to help physicians monitor patients with such chronic conditions as diabetes and hypertension. Apple rivals Google Inc, and Samsung Electronics, which have released similar services, are only just starting to reach out to hospitals and other medical partners.
HealthKit is definitely gaining in traction at prestigious programs, from Duke University in North Carolina and Oschner Health System in Louisiana to Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota.
Four years ago, we wrote about YouTube’s early support for the HTML5 <video> tag and how it performed compared to Flash. At the time, there were limitations that held it back from becoming our preferred platform for video delivery. Most critically, HTML5 lacked support for Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) that lets us show you more videos with less buffering.
Over the last four years, we’ve worked with browser vendors and the broader community to close those gaps, and now, YouTube uses HTML5 <video> by default in Chrome, IE 11, Safari 8 and in beta versions of Firefox.
YouTube was one of the first major supporters of Flash and one of the last to move on. Flash is not supported at all on iOS. As to Android, there’s this from Adobe’s Flash Player Help document:
Adobe Flash Player is no longer available in Google Play Store for downloading. However, Android users can download and install Flash Player from the Archived Flash Player versions page. This document provides the steps on manually installing Flash Player on Android devices.
And now, the Flash team must be thinking, “Et tu, YouTube?”
“In the US, Apple iOS overtook Android for the first time since this time in 2012, albeit by the slimmest 0.1% margin,” reported Carolina Milanesi, chief of research at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech. “While the success of the iPhone 6 and 6Plus is unprecedented, this quarter’s performance also points to Apple having its strongest portfolio ever. With a range of devices available at different price points in both contract and pre-pay Apple was able to take advantage of a weaker Android offering at the premium end of the market.”
The company said that Apple’s share of the market is now at 47.7 percent. The research show that Apple is not only appealing to existing customers-it is also converting Android users: 12% of iPhone buyers during Q4 2014 were former Android users. iPhones are also attracting first-time smartphone buyers as 27.7% of iPhone sales in Q4 went to previous featurephone owners.
The research company noted that Apple sales grew in the US, Europe and China. More specifically, across Europe, Android’s share declined by 3.8 percentage points year-on-year to 66.1% while iOS rose by 6.2 percentage points. Great Britain had the biggest impact on the decline as iOS grew its share of sales by 13.1 percentage points compared to this time last year with Samsung, LG and Sony all losing market share both year over year and over the previous quarter.
Customer loyalty for Apple during the period was at 87 percent, while Samsung’s—the strongest in the Android ecosystem—was down at 62 percent.
Apple products also topped the gifting market for the 2014 holidays. iPhones represented 57 percent of all smartphones given as gifts while iPads made up 33.7 percent of all gifted tablets. The iPhone 6 was the single most gifted smartphone while the iPad Air was the most gifted tablet.
Set backstage at three iconic product launches and ending in 1998 with the unveiling of the iMac, “Steve Jobs” invites audiences behind the scenes of the digital revolution to witness an intimate portrait of the brilliant man at its epicenter.
There’s a lot of misunderstanding out there about mental health. Some people are up, some people are OK, and some people are down. Everyone gets down from time to time. Pull your socks up, and get on with it. Hold it together.
It’s reasonable advice – as long as you’re just feeling down.
For some people, though, down doesn’t cover it. They can’t just get on, because their feet can’t find the bottom.
There’s a predator down there. That’s the truth. Black as pitch, and silent in motion. It can see perfectly even where no light penetrates – in fact, especially there. It’s surprisingly warm to the touch, but it can drain all the heat out of a room in moments.
As one who suffers from depression, Matt’s piece really hit home for me.
It is a pretty damning indictment that Microsoft had to spend hundreds of millions on front end apps for its own platform –Microsoft Exchange — and it should send alarm bells ringing.
Microsoft has a long history of not getting product trends. They didn’t get the iPod, tablets, iPhone and a host of other products that it could have made a lot of money on. Microsoft is profit-focused, which means it makes shitty products. Apple is product-focused, which means people buy the quality and Apple makes a lot of money. Reading this, Microsoft will have no idea what the difference is.
On his way to games, while his teammates on the bus would be mentally preparing to take the ice, James had to prepare for something else: the hatred that would inevitably be thrown at him due solely to the color of his skin.
I love hockey but it has a very recent and very ugly history of racism.
Jim and Shawn talk about Super Bowl ads, TUAW, music creation and good bourbon!
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Apple appears to be testing a pool of cars near San Francisco that are equipped with powerful camera rigs. A Claycord blog has published photos of a car that CBS affiliate KPIX 5 has confirmed is leased to Apple. The mysterious cars have been spotted a number of times over the past several months in and around San Francisco. A video, published on YouTube in September, also shows a complex camera rig mounted on the roof of a similar Dodge minivan in New York. Both of the cars near San Francisco and New York appear to be equipped with the same LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) camera system.
This is interesting but not hugely surprising. Apple is continuing to make its Map.app and technology behind it better all the time.
This is a cover of Family of the Year’s Hero. It’s been around for a few years, but I just bumped into it today.
First things first, this is a great recording, all captured by a single well placed mic. Much more importantly, this is a brilliant performance, from beginning to end, by two kids.
And best of all, there’s that moment, about 2:35 in, that just took my breath away. I can only imagine how many takes they had to do to get it right.
Kirk McElhearn’s piece on the origins of noise canceling headphones would be worth the read just for that background, but my favorite part is this bit:
A great example of effective noise cancellation is the Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound. Back in 1974, sound man and chemist extraordinaire Owsley Stanley came up with a setup for the band that was distortion-free, and also served as monitors, so the band could hear themselves play without having blowback monitors on the stage in front of them.
If you are interested in some music history, take a few minutes to read about Owsley Stanley, the Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and, on a related topic, the origins of a more well known Wall of Sound. Owsley was a chemist, in the drug sense of the word, cooking LSD for the Dead and others. But he was truly a gifted sound engineer and is famous for the high quality of his live recordings (no pun intended).
The original Wall of Sound was an important recording technique developed by the infamous Phil Spector that influenced a generation of sound engineers and an incredible number of famous recordings.
Even if iPhones do get replaced at a much faster pace than Macs and iPads, it’s undeniable that most iPhone users don’t have a Mac. Your average Apple customer is an iPhone user.
For the last two years, the iPhone has provided more than half of Apple’s corporate revenue, and in the most recent quarter it was more than two-thirds of the revenue. Apple is rapidly becoming iPhone Inc., maker of smartphones and… various other devices.
And:
For the Apple Watch to become a hit product, it just needs to please a bunch of iPhone users. The iPhone market is large enough that the Apple Watch doesn’t need to stake out new ground for Apple, at least not yet. (I don’t think the Apple Watch will ever connect to Android devices, but it’s possible that one day the Watch might be such a device unto itself that it simply won’t care if you have a phone nearby, or what’s on it.) It’s going to be years, if ever, before the Apple Watch becomes a product that isn’t made for iPhone users.
It’s become an iPhone world, true, but it’s all about the ecosystem. Apple is too smart not to recognize that all the (profitable) elements in the ecosystem are supportive timbers that each do their part to keep the ecosystem upright and working.
But I still have to lament the lack of progress in a product like the Apple TV. This is a product that’s seen very little hardware improvement in ages, with software that’s in desperate need of a rethink. It’s been passed by in every way by its competitors.
To me, this is the center of Jason’s argument. Is Apple TV an important part of the ecosystem? It should be. The migration of eyeballs from traditional television to net-based programming is incredibly important, from a strategic standpoint. Apple ignores this part of the ecosystem at its peril.
What happens when an app — marketed as compatible with current iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches — is never updated for the latest version of iOS, and either stops working after an iOS upgrade, or never works at all on new devices? That’s the situation buyers of Square Enix’s $18 The World Ends with You: Solo Remix (and $20 iPad version) have found themselves in since iOS 8 was released. The game’s description claims that it “requires iOS 4.3 or later” and is compatible with devices that shipped with iOS 8, but it wasn’t actually iOS 8-compatible. Yesterday, Square Enix publicly flip-flopped on whether it would leave the game unplayable or fix it. Before changing its tune, the company told customers that they’d need to continue to keep using iOS 7 in order to play the game — an unrealistic alternative, though one that’s faced by users of numerous iOS apps that aren’t being updated by their developers.
Obsolescence is not a big deal for a 99 cent app, but a line exists, and that line is clearly crossed with an app priced at $20, or even $18.
A tough situation. You can’t force a developer to build an update. And it’s not quite fair to force a developer to refund money when the product they built actually runs on the OS for which it was built.
Should Apple refund a customer’s money when an app no longer runs on an updated version of iOS? That feels closer, but still, is it fair to penalize Apple for pushing the platform further along?
Researcher IDC said Amazon showed the steepest annual decline among the five major tablet makers, with worldwide shipments of its Kindle Fire devices falling by as much as 70 percent compared with the holiday 2013 period.
A spokesperson for the retailer criticized IDC’s methodology, saying “our most affordable tablet ever, the Fire HD 6 at $99, which is one of our high volume products, wasn’t included in the report.” She declined to discuss sales.
Well Amazon, you know how to solve the problem. Simply report sales figures.
Phone Expander is designed to make it easy for a user to easily save space on their iOS device by deleting cache files inside apps, easily remove large apps installed on the device, remove pictures or videos (backing them up to the desktop first) and soon, manage music on their devices.
I ran the app on my (backed up) iPhone and it allowed me to recover a little over 2.5 GB. Not a lot but every little bit counts.
With Apple Pay, Apple leveraged its business model, cultural influence, and customer base to enter arguably the most heavily-regulated international system on Earth in a way that everyone already in the system had a reason to like. This is an incredible accomplishment, and no other company could have done it.
Matt makes a great point, one often made by many others, that Apple will and can succeed because of its tight control and integration of both hardware and software.
Giraffedata—a 51-year-old software engineer named Bryan Henderson—is among the most prolific contributors, ranking in the top 1,000 most active editors. While some Wikipedia editors focus on adding content or vetting its accuracy, and others work to streamline the site’s grammar and style, generally few, if any, adopt Giraffedata’s approach to editing: an unrelenting, multi-year project to fix exactly one grammatical error.
Henderson has now made over 47,000 edits to the site since 2007, virtually all of them addressing this one linguistic pet peeve. Article by article, week by week, Henderson redacts imperfect sentences, tightening them almost imperceptibly. “I’m proud of it,” says Henderson of the project. “It’s just fun for me. I’m not doing it to have any impact on the world.”
You’ve got to admire the dedication if nothing else.
Want to read at night but find the dimmest brightness setting too bright for you (or for your partner)? Apparently there’s a way to dim your iOS device even dimmer that its traditional brightness settings allow, using a little trick from the Accessibility Settings. Nice.
The ad — which is strongly evocative of Apple’s holiday campaign in the United States — celebrates the importance of family, even as it underscores the growing importance of China as a market for Apple.
Apple’s commercial depicts a young girl using the company’s products to create a memento for her grandmother incorporating a popular song from the 1940s, “Forever Smile,” sung by acclaimed Chinese singer and actress Zhou Xuan, who earned the nickname “Golden Voice.”
The spot is aware of Chinese culture without resorting to token motifs (no lanterns, dragons or other clichés). Indeed, it was produced by award-winning Asian filmmaker Ann Hui On-Wah, art director William Chang Suk Ping and cinematographer Christopher Doyle.
This is not the first Apple ad to run in China (that’d be this one), but the first created specifically for China.
The iPhone maker sold $6.5 billion in bonds on Monday, including a round of 30-year debt that will pay 3.5% annually. That is even lower than Apple’s $17 billion bond sale in April 2013, when a 30-year bond yielded about 3.9%.
Apple’s deal is the largest U.S. high-grade corporate-bond sale so far this year, according to S&P Capital IQ LCD. Apple tapped the debt market less than a week after reporting a 38% jump in its latest quarterly profit.
Why is Apple trying to raise money?
Apple in a prospectus said it plans to use proceeds for general corporate purposes, including share buybacks. Bond investors are typically wary of companies that sell debt to buy back shares, because it effectively means a company is taking cash from bondholders to pay shareholders.
But in Apple’s case, investors said those concerns are assuaged in part by the company’s record-setting profit in the latest period, the gangbusters sales pace of its latest iPhone release and its significant cash reserves.
Adding to the attraction of the Apple bonds is the vast number of them outstanding, which makes them easy to trade when banks generally are cutting back on bondholdings and making trading more difficult.
> Amazon.com Inc., aiming to bolster its brick-and-mortar operations, has discussed acquiring some RadioShack Corp. locations after the electronics chain files for bankruptcy, two people with knowledge of the matter said. > > Amazon has considered using the RadioShack stores as showcases for the Seattle-based company’s hardware, as well as potential pickup and drop-off centers for online customers, said one of the people, who asked not to be named because the deliberations are private. > > The possible move, discussed as part of RadioShack’s looming trip to bankruptcy court, would represent Amazon’s biggest push into traditional retail. Amazon joins other potential bidders, including Sprint Corp. and the investment group behind Brookstone, in evaluating RadioShack stores, people familiar with the situation said. RadioShack has more than 4,000 U.S. locations and is moving toward a deal to sell a portion and close the rest, according to some of the people. Sprint has discussed buying 1,300 to 2,000, they said.
I imagine Amazon is looking for a place where they can demo the Fire phone, Amazon Echo, and Amazon Kindle devices. Maybe they’ll keep copies of the Washington Post by the checkout.
If Radio Shack does shutter its doors, I will miss them. Where else can I buy solder? Resistors? Wire? I guess Amazon wins again. If you are struggling with your business debts, consider consulting with company insolvency specialists to avoid bankruptcy.
The story of how avocados went from being an obscure West-Coast cash crop to the juggernaut of the Midwestern produce section is one of extreme feats of marketing and major shifts in ideas about nutrition. It is a story of a desperate renaming, a PR Hail-Mary, and of the changing nature of the Super Bowl. It is a tale best enjoyed with a squeeze of lime and generous sprinkling of cilantro.
Growing up in Nova Scotia, I never even saw an avocado. This story of its rise to become “America’s favorite fruit” is fascinating.
Not many know this but Google Earth had a bigger brother called Google Earth Pro and while the ‘lil sibling was free, getting the pro version was $400/year. No small change.
I guess there were not too many hoppers on that offer and now Google is releasing Google Earth Pro for free.
What can you do with the pro version? For starters, you can export bigger images, the regular version supported only 1000×1000px photos, while the pro version enables you to dump 4800×3200px photos which should be good enough for 4K resolution.
You have to jump through a bunch of hoops to grab the software but for those who can put it to use, it’s pretty cool.
Now there are signs that the companies are more likely to be ferocious competitors than allies. Google is preparing to offer its own ride-hailing service, most likely in conjunction with its long-in-development driverless car project. Drummond has informed Uber’s board of this possibility, according to a person close to the Uber board, and Uber executives have seen screenshots of what appears to be a Google ride-sharing app that is currently being used by Google employees. This person, who requested not to be named because the talks are private, said the Uber board is now weighing whether to ask Drummond to resign his position as an Uber board member.
Google is a big investor in Uber, and has been from the beginning. However, this isn’t the first time a Google employee sat on a company’s board and then decided to enter the same market. Eric Schmidt sat on Apple’s board and witnessed the development of the iPhone.
Sources tell us Uber is hiring more than fifty senior scientists from Carnegie Mellon as well as from the National Robotics Engineering Center, a CMU-affiliated research entity. Carnegie Mellon, home of the Mars Rover and other high-profile robotics projects, declined to comment at this time, as did scientists mentioned by our source. Uber has “cleaned out” the Robotics Institute, said the source.
Elgato Thunderbolt 2 Dock enables you to connect everything to your MacBook or Ultrabook at once. With two Thunderbolt 2 and three USB 3.0 ports, simultaneously connect all of your devices with only one cable. Built-in HDMI enables you to directly connect a display of your choice up to 4K resolution, while enjoying increased network performance with built-in Gigabit Ethernet and crystal-clear conference calls through the separate microphone input and amplified audio output.
“You know how every once in a while you buy the $40 bottle of wine instead of the $8 one, thinking you’re gonna have a special dinner or something?” Senior Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson wrote over instant message. “And you get home, and you make the salmon or the pasta or whatever and you light the candles? And you pour the wine, swirl it like they do in Sideways so that it looks like you know what you’re doing… you bring it to your lips and after smelling it—it smells like wine—you have a sip? And it’s like… yeah, I guess this tastes good or something, but really it just tastes like wine?
“The Pono Player is kinda like that, but for music.”
I’m not an “audio snob” so I have no need for the Pono Player but is it of interest to any of our sharp-eared Loop readers?
Forever 21 has been pirating Photoshop, according to a new lawsuit from Adobe, and it’s facing serious fines as a result. The suit was filed yesterday in California District Court, alleging that Forever 21 pirated 63 different instances of Adobe software including copies of Photoshop, Acrobat, and Illustrator. Autodesk and Corel also joined Adobe in the suit, based on pirated copies of Autodesk, WinZip and PaintShopPro, among others. According to the complaint, Forever 21 “continued their infringing activities even after being contacted by Adobe regarding the infringement.”
How the heck did Adobe find out about this? Was there a whistleblower inside Forever 21?
