Much respect Sesame Street.

“Dollar for dollar, the Sound Blaster ROAR produces the best sound of any portable Bluetooth speaker I’ve heard.”

– Tom’s Guide

The compact Sound Blaster Roar boasts of two 1.5-inch high-frequency drivers, a dedicated 2.5-inch subwoofer, and a pair of side-firing passive radiators. Now, all these drivers will only sound as good as the music you play through them, and the Roar supports aptX and AAC over Bluetooth for high-quality audio streaming.

All this, while adding other features like NFC support, a USB port for charging, an integrated MP3 player through its microSD card slot that also allows you to record calls taken with the built-in speakerphone.

The Red Dot Design Award-winning Roar has received consistent 5-star reviews on Amazon since its launch. Now available at $149.99 via Creative.com and Amazon.com.

A very thoughtful post from Om Malik. I found myself nodding my head on more than one occasion while reading it.

Ben Thompson, in his stratechery post:

This telling of the story of iTunes and the iPhone suggests that this focus on the user experience not only defends against disruption, but it also provides an offensive advantage as well: namely, Apple increases its user experience advantage through the leverage it gains from consumers loyal to the company. In the case of iTunes, Apple was able to create the most seamless music acquisition process possible: the labels had no choice but to go along. Similarly, when it comes to smartphones, Apple devices from day one have not been cluttered with carrier branding or apps or control over updates. If carriers didn’t like Apple’s insistence on creating the best possible user experience, well, consumers who valued said experience were more than happy to take their business elsewhere. In effect, Apple builds incredible user experiences, which gains them loyal customers who collectively have massive market power, which Apple can then effectively wield to get its way – a way that involves maximizing the user experience.

Fantastic piece.

At a recent payments conference, Mike Cook, head of Walmart’s payment business and a driving force behind MCX and CurrentC, took the opportunity (from the audience), to quiz Visa exec Jim McCarthy (on stage) about Apple Pay being afforded the lowest possible fee, the so-called “card present” fee.

Before you watch the video (part of this re/code article), a bit of background. As the name implies, card present means the credit card being charged is actually in the store, as opposed to the higher priced card-not-present fee that applies for typical in-app payments. The thinking goes, if the card is physically present, there’s less of a chance for fraud. EMV (mentioned in Jim’s first answer) is the chip part of the chip-on-card credit card solution.

There’s a lovely bit of human dynamic here. You get the sense that the people on the panel are used to Walmart’s Mike Cook grousing about Apple Pay, that this is all a bit of an inside joke at this point.

That dynamic aside, this is an excellent discussion of the primary issues faced by MCX. Why does Apple Pay qualify for the lower card-present rate when the QR-code solutions, like Level Up, do not? Obviously, the answer is security.

The Roosevelts:

Using 80GB worth of photos captured by astronauts aboard the International Space Station between 2011 and 2014, timelapse filmmaker Guillaume Juin created this awe-inspiring video of the Earth entitled “Astronaut.” And thanks to the incredible cameras aboard the ISS, this footage rivals the best visual effects that Hollywood has to offer.

Mind blowing. Watch on the biggest screen you possibly can.

NPR:

America’s master clock is one of the most accurate clocks on the planet: an atomic clock that uses oscillations in the element cesium to count out 0.0000000000000001 second at a time. If the clock had been started 300 million years ago, before the age of dinosaurs began, it would still be keeping time — down to the second.

Try that with your fancy-schmancy Apple Watch.

TorrentFreak:

It may sound absurd, but taking a picture of the Eiffel Tower at night and sharing that online may be copyright infringement. The stance is confirmed by the Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel, who note the following on their website.

“Daytime views from the Eiffel Tower are rights-free. However, its various illuminations are subject to author’s rights as well as brand rights. Usage of these images is subject to prior request from the Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel.”

A weird and little known quirk of copyright law. So, you can take and sell daytime shots of the Eiffel Tower to places like stock photography sites but not of the night time shots because the evening light show on the tower (which is quite lovely) is copyrighted.

Today is the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I always thought the wall was taken down in response to purposeful social change. But read the linked story. It was all the result of a colossal chain of clumsy bureaucratic error.

One tiny anecdote from a much larger story:

When one of the regime’s most loyal subordinates, a Stasi officer named Harald Jäger who was working the Nov. 9 night shift at a crucial checkpoint in the Berlin Wall, repeatedly phoned his superiors with accurate reports of swelling crowds, they did not trust or believe him. They called him a delusional coward. Insulted, furious and frightened, he decided to let the crowds out, starting a chain reaction that swept across all of the checkpoints that night.

Fascinating.

I can’t imagine either side had this in mind when these negotiations started. This is just ugly.

Many thanks to Pixelmator for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed. Pixelmator for iPad is a powerful image editor that gives you everything you need to create, edit, and enhance your images. It lets you work seamlessly between Mac and iPad and even work effortlessly with Photoshop images. Packed with powerful creative tools and engineered to harness the full iOS and 64-bit architecture power, Pixelmator for iPad is a real image editor right at your fingertips.

I really like Unread on my iPhone. It’s all about gestures and swiping to navigate the app, which is a nice way to do an RSS reader. There’s an iPad version too—I bought both.

Here’s one story of a bent iPhone and Apple’s response:

Following Apple’s instructions, I used my bent iPhone to schedule an appointment at the Apple Store’s Genius Bar for the following morning. I went to the store for my appointment, explained the situation to the employee, who then confirmed that the device was indeed bent without any obvious signs of abuse. I was then given a replacement iPhone and sent on my merry way. The whole process took less than a half an hour. From the time that I discovered my iPhone was bent to having a new phone in my hand was about 12 hours. Apple replaced the damaged phone under warranty at no cost to me, even though I had originally purchased the device from AT&T and not Apple itself. I’d never paid for any extended warranty or AppleCare Plus.

Your mileage may vary.

Quartz:

Language barriers in globalization are hardly a new issue. So why the sudden drive for polyglotism? It’s simple: As mobile operators and web giants try to expand their markets by bringing more people online, we have reached a tipping point where the imbalance of content on the internet has become too stark to avoid.

“A lot of the content online is about very few places and those are the places you might imagine: Western Europe, Japan, Korea, North America,” says Mark Graham, an associate professor who looks at information geographies at the Oxford Internet Institute. “And a lot of the contribution to the internet comes from those very same places.”

The English domination of the web is completely divorced from the language’s presence in the human population. “Just over half (55.8%) of Web content is estimated to be in English despite the fact that less than 5% of the world’s population speak it as a first language, with only 21% estimated to have some level of understanding,” according to GSMA and Mozilla (pdf). “By contrast, some of the world’s most widely spoken languages, such as Arabic or Hindi, account for a relatively small proportion of the Web’s content (0.8% and less than 0.1% respectively).”

My two cents? I think the net of the future will not shift away from English but, rather, offer more local content and much more content in other languages. Just as Facebook, Google and others are evolving new strategies to reach new, untapped markets as their existing customer bases become saturated, the net will evolve as needed to reach everyone on the planet.

Some light Saturday reading. A short story by Holli Mintzer about a school project and a lovable green frog.

So Anji decided to pick the easiest-looking project off the list of options: Design an AI that mimics the behavior of a public domain character. There was a list of characters to choose from, mostly stuff she’d never heard of. She picked Kermit the Frog because, she figured, there was a ton of footage of Kermit, even if it was mostly fifty years old, and she could just feed old TV shows to a bot until it started acting enough like Kermit to get her a passing grade.

Only it wasn’t that easy. For one thing, the bot was too stupid to understand that it was meant to be Kermit. Anji used off-the-shelf open-source language- and image-parsing software, so the bot would understand what it what watching, but she had to write a program to key the bot to Kermit in particular. It took forever. It was actually a pretty good challenge, writing a program to convince the bot that it was Kermit the Frog, that the little fuzzy green thing in the old video was itself—that it had a self, for that matter. She ended up using concepts and bits of code from the other classes she was taking, pulling a few all-nighters at the library with books on AI design, and just plain making stuff up in a few places. Her code wasn’t anything like elegant, but Anji found herself liking the project a lot more than she’d expected to, even as it got harder.

She also found herself liking Kermit a lot more than she’d expected to. Anji had never really watched the Muppets before; her parents, like most parents she knew, had treated TV as only slightly less corrupting an influence than refined sugar and gendered toys. But The Muppet Show was really funny—strange, and kind of hokey, but charming all the same. She ended up watching way more of it than she needed just for the project.

Enjoy.

A lot of new changes for one of my favorite apps.

Gigaom:

Since GT Advanced Technologies declared bankruptcy in early October, the vast majority of documents detailing its deal with Apple to supply sapphire crystal have been under seal.

On Tuesday, Judge Henry Boroff issued an order unsealing an statement signed by GTAT CEO Daniel Squiller as well as its attached documents, which include details on the reasons GTAT filed for bankruptcy and its business relationship with Apple, its largest creditor. On Friday, the Squiller statement entered the public record.

There’s never been any doubt that Apple plays hard ball with its suppliers. I’ve spoken to many companies who have to deal with the company and the stories all have one thing in common – you don’t negotiate with Apple. They dictate the terms to you.

I needed a good laugh today and this did it. We all hate spammers, so I have no sympathy for this guy.

Superior Drummer and EZDrummer are two of the best products on the market for people that want production-level drums in their songs. And Toontrack loves Metal!

There are a number of drag and drop utilities available for the Mac. They all work by inserting themselves in the drag and drop command chain, intercepting a drag event and then presenting their interface to receive and process the drop.

FilePane is an interesting take on this approach. Start a drag, when the FilePane window appears, drop your item on the pane. You’ll then have the ability to choose from a set of context sensitive options. Drag an image, you can resize, mail, share, or zip the image or, perhaps, make the image your desktop picture.

Drag text or documents and you can do all sorts of things. Convert to PDF, print, create new folders and documents, save and edit text in Safari and other apps, share, airdrop, and lots more.

MacWorld gave it 4.5/5 stars. Just saying.

Here’s a link, in case you want to check it out for yourself.

Amazon has announced, but not yet released, a Siri-like device for your living room or kitchen. It’s called Amazon Echo.

Echo plugs into the wall and your house wifi. Configuration is via an app or browser:

Connect to your home network with a simple setup, guided by the free companion app on Fire OS and Android, plus desktop and iOS browsers.

Interesting that there’s not an iOS app. Clearly, Amazon has the resources to build one. This feels like a tactic, though a bit ham-fisted.

Echo is always on, much like “Hey Siri” or “OK Google”, always listening for its name, a name that you get to choose. Like Siri, you can ask Echo questions or give it commands, as long as they fit into its knowledge domain. Watch the video below to get a sense of how broad that domain really is. And, I suspect, that domain will continue to grow over time.

I think Amazon will sell a ton of these. Why? Because they are filling a niche that is completely unserved right now. The butler robot is coming, but it is not here yet. And your cell phone is in your pocket and requires some amount of effort to access. Like that butler robot, Echo will be forever waiting for your command, waiting to serve you up some cloud-based information, assist you with a reminder, or help make an Amazon purchase, perhaps.

One key here is that Echo does not require a subscription fee. If you do not have a Siri-like capability on your cell phone, this adds that capability, and in a form that works well in your home.

I wonder if Echo will be able to access an existing reminder/calendar system? Given the lack of an iOS setup app, is it fair to assume that any bridge to your personal calendar will be limited to Android? Time will tell on this one.

I see this as a missing piece in the move toward home automation. This seems like a natural front end for Apple HomeKit. What Siri is no doubt headed for, but without having to pull my phone out of my pocket. The tiny time savings of not having to pull your phone out of your pocket might seem like a foolish thing on which to base a business strategy, but I do think it will work. Until it gets commoditized and everyone is selling one.

Interesting piece from Seeking Alpha (reg-wall):

Once paying for purchases at retail with a smartphone becomes commonplace, regardless of whether you believe Apple will roll out its own AppleCard, the credit card companies will fall one by one, starting with American Express. How can it possibly be prestigious to carry a Platinum or Black card when the card never leaves your wallet? Is it worth $300 or more per year when mostly what you’re paying for is a string of numbers punched into a smartphone that no one will ever see? As plastic credit cards disappear, which will accelerate with adoption, the ubiquitous Visa, MasterCard and American Express logos at retail establishments will be supplanted, and only one symbol will remain – a very large Apple.

Not sure the credit card companies “will fall”. Even without the “prestige” that comes along with showing off your black card, there are still plenty of differentiators: Air miles, cash back, concierge services, just to name a few. But that small part of business culture, pulling out a gold, platinum, or black credit card, will no doubt fall to the change brought by the acceptance of NFC.

A side point: I wonder who thought of Apple Pay in the first place. Was this inherited from Steve Jobs? The idea might have evolved from the iTunes/iPhone disruption model, but I don’t recall ever seeing Apple Pay attributed to Steve. Doesn’t sound like Jony either.

I think Apple Pay is a phenomenal business idea. Just wondering if this is Tim’s brainchild.

Time to get out of there and get back to making music.

The Daily Dot:

If you were previously in denial that the Christmas season had already begun, the arrival of the annual Christmas ad from British retailer John Lewis is sure to dispel that belief.

They had me at “penguin”.

Macworld:

With the news that Microsoft is making all of its mobile Office apps free—the iPad and upcoming Android tablet versions—you knew there had to be some caveats.

I’m glad I don’t have to use Office any more but for those of you who do, my sympathies and this article will help you figure out this news.

EW:

Set in the high-stakes world of a live sports news program, the Aaron Sorkin-scribed dramedy followed the behind-the-scenes exploits of fictional “Sports Night” coanchors Casey (Peter Krause) and Dan (Josh Charles), their brilliant producer Dana (Felicity Huffman), harried associate producer Natalie (Sabrina Lloyd), gruff executive Isaac (Robert Guillaume), and whip-smart researcher Jeremy (Josh Malina).

Such a shame this show wasn’t a hit. While set in a sports world, it wasn’t specifically about sports but about the workplace and relationships much like Sorkin’s other shows. It also had amazing actors and Sorkin’s typical great writing.