This will impact a lot of companies, Google being a bit of a poster child here.

The government is phasing out what is known as the “double Irish” provision. It allows corporations with operations in Ireland to make royalty payments for intellectual property to a separate Irish-registered subsidiary. That subsidiary, though incorporated in Ireland, typically has its home in a country that has no corporate income tax.

Take Google. Its Dublin headquarters are its main hub outside the United States, employing more than 2,500 people. A Dublin-based subsidiary for Google generates revenue, mostly from online advertising, and then pays it in royalties to a separate Google unit that is registered in Ireland but is resident in Bermuda for tax purposes.

It’s important to note that the elimination of the “double Irish” provision will not, by itself, change the tax rates negotiated by companies like Apple. That’s a separate issue.

Mike Wehner of TUAW took the Moto 360 for a spin. The upshot is this:

My experience over the past week has taught me a lot about the future of smartwatches, the importance of intuitive software on a tiny device, and all the ways Apple could make just about every other smartwatch — including my new Moto 360 — look like a joke.

At the heart of the problem is the fact that the phone, the watch and the software that drive the Moto 360 are made by 3 different companies.

It starts with the software. Syncing the Moto 360 to Android Wear on my smartphone was needlessly complicated. At one point I was told via pop-up notification to uninstall Android Wear, update Google Search, then reinstall Android Wear, in order to get it to work properly. My phone was telling me I had to delete software that was built specifically for it, in order to get it to function as intended. I have to admit that I laughed.

This workflow fragmentation is never going to be solved completely. This is a huge advantage for Apple.

The all new Apogee Ensemble is the first Thunderbolt 2 audio interface to offer superior sound quality, the lowest latency performance and the most comprehensive studio functionality all in one box. Ensemble includes 8 Advanced Stepped Gain™ mic preamps, monitor controller functionality including talkback, front panel Guitar I/O, two headphone outputs and digital connectivity for a total of 30 x 34 I/O. Blending acclaimed innovations, groundbreaking new features and an effortless user interface, Ensemble empowers you to capture inspiration when creative lightning strikes.

What a great looking interface. This thing is a beast.

John Kirk for Tech.pinions:

Samsung has reported a 60% fall in quarterly profits. Just three years ago, Samsung rose from seemingly nowhere to dominate the global smartphone market. Today, Samsung is being pressured from above and below as Apple steals away its premium customers and Xiomi and others steal away customers from the low-end.

Why did Samsung fail? In a word, commoditization.

Pundits have predicted, correctly, that hardware would inevitably become commoditized. This, they proclaimed with confidence, would cause Apple’s prices to fall while Samsung, with its good-enough and better-than-good-enough hardware and its lower prices, would usurp Apple’s market share, relegating Apple to niche status. Ironically, commoditization DOES apply to Samsung — the favorite of the Priests of Market Share — but it DOES NOT apply to their favorite whipping boy, Apple. Why? Differentiation.

Read the whole thing. I love the way this pulls everything together.

In the US, there are any number of situations where you hand someone your credit card and it disappears from view. A drive through at McDonald’s is a perfect example. You drive up to the pay window, hand the cashier your card, it disappears from view, then comes back to you with a receipt. If you go to a higher end restaurant, you’ll get the check, lay your credit card on top, and watch your card disappear to be processed.

Apple Pay is changing that game. Now, when you roll up to the drive through, the cashier will hand you the portable NFC reader, you’ll tap your phone or Apple Watch, hear the confirmation beep, then hand it back. No credit card, no signing, no pin code.

Voracious reader? If so, this may change things for you.

Most libraries (at least in the United States) use Overdrive as their ebook library solution. From what I can tell it’s usually tied into a library network like the Minuteman Library Network. Your library will own ebooks. However, unlike the Amazon Prime Lending Library (we’ll be visiting Amazon again by the time we’re done), people can only check out as many copies of an ebook as your library owns. So, if your library only has one electronic copy of the new John Sandford book, only one person can check out the book at a time. What is nice, though, is you can place a hold on a title and it will automatically be checked out to you when it’s available.

I will be trying this, just as soon as I finish the 17 books in my queue.

It’s amazing to think that CSS has been around so long.

Voted BEST in Show at the Audio Engineering Convention in Los Angeles last week!

With a compact footprint and outstanding acoustic performance, the 8351 Acoustically Coaxial SAM System marks a bold step forward in active monitoring featuring major advances in audio driver technology integrated into a sophisticated enclosure design

Genelec, the leader in active monitoring technology for over 35 years, offers the revolutionary new 8351 three-way Smart Active Monitor (SAM), developed in response to the need for increasing audio perfection for near-field recording and mix environments. Offering unique size and technological innovations, the 8351 breaks new ground in electro-acoustic engineering, as the mechanical, acoustical and signal-processing designs are linked closely together. The result is a system that is completely unique in the professional monitoring industry and represents a bold step forward for the active monitoring pioneer.

The 8351 borrows its size attribute from Genelec’s acclaimed 8050, the 8351 has a particularly compact footprint for a three-way monitor. The center of the 8351’s enclosure features the Minimum Diffraction Co-axial midrange/tweeter driver. This breakthrough in coaxial driver design provides extremely accurate imaging and improved sound quality, with crystal clear accuracy, both on and off-axis, vertically as well as horizontally. Aesthetically striking is the absence of any visible woofers, which are concealed beneath the Directivity Control Waveguide (DCW). The areas on the perimeter of the DCW are the acoustic openings for the proprietary Genelec-designed Acoustically Concealed Woofers (ACW™).

It’s this arrangement, the Co-axial midrange / tweeter in combination with the innovative bass drivers, together form a three-way co-axial enclosure with large continuous Directivity Control Waveguide (DCW) across the entire front. The extremely smooth frequency response and dispersion pattern lead to outstanding clarity and definition of the audio signal.

Genelec knows that smaller environments can cause significant problems with regards to the room performance, but SAM (Smart Active Monitoring) technology takes all that can be good about a monitor by itself and integrates it further into the listening environment. SAM technology creates a computer controlled, flexible network of monitors and makes them as a fully aligned system with regards to level, timing and room response equalization – all done automatically – as well being configurable by the end user. Like all active monitors in the Genelec SAM range, the 8351 is capable of automatically adapting to acoustical environments to offer an indispensable tool for sound professionals in broadcasting, post production, music studios and remote recording environments.

The 8351 is a remarkable achievement in electro-acoustic design by a group of engineers who remain committed day after day to delivering performance-based solutions for the professional audio market.

For more information, please visit Genelec.

Horace Dediu

Samsung’s operating model seems to be to invest as a ‘fast follower’ filling in the market after it’s established while leveraging capital intensive components synergies… If the modus operandi does not change then their turnaround will depend on the creation of new opportunities/categories.

I honestly don’t see an opportunity for Samsung to create new product categories. I think they’ve proven that’s not its strength.

This was actually pretty interesting, not only to see what held people up from updating right away, but also how misinformation and rumors affects an individual’s views of features in the operating system.

Superman was created by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster in 1933. They sold the copyright to Superman to Detective Comics (which became DC Comics) back in 1938 for $130 and other considerations.

In 1978, copyright law was changed to allow copyright owners to revert their copyrights back after 35 years. Siegel and Shuster’s families traveled a long legal road in an attempt to do just that. But that road just ended last week, when the Supreme Court declined to hear their appeal.

This is a complex and fascinating story.

Jason Snell, longtime lead editor for Macworld, has a new site, Six Colors, covering all things Apple. This weekend, Jason was in Montreal for, sadly, the very last Cingleton conference. Rich Siegel, founder of Bare Bones Software, gave a talk about not selling future versions of BBEdit via the Mac App Store.

Siegel crafted his presentation as a list of reasons that weren’t the reason Bare Bones was abandoning the Mac App Store. It wasn’t Apple’s 30 percent cut, he said, because while that’s a lot of money, developers get a lot of service from Apple in return. It wasn’t the complete severing of his relationship with his customers, even though it’s frustrating that only Apple really knows who is buying the software and it doesn’t share that data. Nor were it the marketing challenges, the difficulty conforming to Apple’s submissions guidelines (including sandboxing and forcing some features in to add-on downloads), or the numerous problems involving the development tool chain—including the one time that a BBEdit update silently crashed the App Store’s submission tool.

Bottom line, it wasn’t any of those things, it was all of them. Is BBEdit leaving the Mac App Store a canary in the coal mine?

The Globe and Mail:

Not only had Rogers Communications Inc. wrenched the Canadian national broadcast rights to NHL games from the CBC’s grasp with a stunning $5.2-billion payout over the next 12 years, but the Visigoths were actually at the gate.

Part of the ensuing deal, in which those in charge of the CBC meekly handed over the company’s airwaves for free, was that the Rogers people connected to Hockey Night, along with some people hired from rival TSN, would use the CBC’s studios and take over the show’s office space on the north side of the eighth floor – the plushest in the building thanks to the show’s status as the network’s biggest money spinner.

Truly appalling how Canada’s national broadcaster completely blew the deal by ignoring the importance of hockey to not only their bottom line but to the nation. Thanks to my friend Greg for the link.

Vox:

Instead of Columbus Day, our northern neighbors spend the second Monday of every October celebrating Canadian Thanksgiving or, as they call it, Thanksgiving. As I wrote last year (what can I say, it’s my holiday tradition), Canadian Thanksgiving is a way better holiday than Columbus Day in every way.Here’s how the two holidays match up.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my fellow Canadians!

Last week, we posted about an article from Vanity Fair entitled, The Empire Reboots. Terrific article on Microsoft, with focus on the current relationship of Bill Gates and Satya Nadella and the longtime reign of CEO Steve Ballmer.

Matt Rosoff, from CITEworld, read the Vanity Fair piece and posted a tweet-storm based on the idea that a time traveler from today went back to 2004 and met Steve Ballmer, filling him in on ten years of tech advances.

For example:

The most valuable tech company–in fact, most valuable company–is Apple. Yeah, that Apple. iPod. Mac.

and

They got there by building a smartphone with a touchscreen, browser, and apps. It was years ahead of the competition.

Here’s a single page that gathers the tweet-storm and some additional thoughts. Nice job, Matt.

Salon:

Tyrel Oates, a 30-year-old Portland, Oregon-based employee of Wells Fargo, shot to Internet fame after emailing the company’s CEO John Stumpf (and cc’ing 200,000 other employees) to ask for a $10,000 raise… for everyone at the company.

No way Wells Fargo does this but it’s a great way to put the ball in management’s court.

Scientific American:

“When I won this, my grandma, who lives in Fargo, North Dakota, wanted to see it. I was coming around so I decided I’d bring my Nobel Prize. You would think that carrying around a Nobel Prize would be uneventful, and it was uneventful, until I tried to leave Fargo with it, and went through the X-ray machine. I could see they were puzzled. It was in my laptop bag. It’s made of gold, so it absorbs all the X-rays—it’s completely black. And they had never seen anything completely black.

My question is, why didn’t they notice it when he was going to North Dakota?

Businessweek:

The competition between Bose and Beats cost Colin Kaepernick $10,000 this week, when he violated an NFL ban on wearing Beats by Dr. Dre headphones on television after games. The San Francisco 49ers quarterback, who’s sponsored by Beats Electronics (AAPL), declined to say whether the headphone maker would pick up the tab. But the public spat is probably worth more than that to the company: It projects exactly the attitude Beats has carefully cultivated.

And this:

Apple blog MacRumors.com reported on Friday that the tech giant may remove all Bose headphones and speakers from its stores to encourage sales of more Beats products. If that happens, Bose might want to come up with a way to get Russell Wilson and Clay Matthews kicked out of an Apple Store.

I’d like to see them try. Heh.

Walter Isaacson is best known as the author of the official Steve Jobs biography. His new book is called The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution.

The Birth of Pong, an excerpt from the book, tells the story of Nolan Bushnell and the birth of the arcade game.

Here’s a taste:

He was fortunate as well in landing at the University of Utah. It had the best computer graphics program in the country, run by professors Ivan Sutherland and David Evans, and became one of the first four nodes on the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. (Other students included Jim Clark, who founded Netscape; John Warnock, who co-founded Adobe; and Ed Catmull, who co-founded Pixar.)

That’s an amazingly rich talent pool.

As they were working on the first Computer Space consoles, Bushnell heard that he had competition. A Stanford grad named Bill Pitts and his buddy Hugh Tuck from California Polytechnic had become addicted to Spacewar, and they decided to use a PDP-11 minicomputer to turn it into an arcade game. When Bushnell heard this, he invited Pitts and Tuck to visit. They were appalled at the sacrifices—indeed sacrileges—Bushnell was perpetrating in stripping down Spacewar so that it could be produced inexpensively. “Nolan’s thing was a totally bastardized version,” Pitts fumed. For his part, Bushnell was contemptuous of their plan to spend $20,000 on equipment, including a PDP-11 that would be in another room and connected by yards of cable to the console, and then charge 10 cents a game. “I was surprised at how clueless they were about the business model,” he said. “Surprised and relieved. As soon as I saw what they were doing, I knew they’d be no competition.”

Galaxy Game by Pitts and Tuck debuted at Stanford’s Tresidder student union coffeehouse in the fall of 1971. Students gathered around each night like cultists in front of a shrine. But no matter how many lined up their dimes to play, there was no way the machine could pay for itself, and the venture eventually folded.

Definitely a fun read.

There’s some good advice, especially when he says to leave it alone.

Today, BoF can reveal that the Apple Watch will make its fashion editorial debut on the cover of Vogue China’s November issue, featuring supermodel Liu Wen. We spoke to Angelica Cheung, editor-in-chief of Vogue China, to get the story behind the story.

Ars Technica:

On Monday, GT filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. And today, GT said in separate filings with the US Bankruptcy Court in New Hampshire that it wants to terminate its contract with Apple and close the Arizona facility.

The filing to end the contract with Apple states that the terms of GT’s contract with Apple are “oppressive and burdensome,” and the separate filing requesting to shutter the sapphire plant claims that doing so is the only way to rescue GT’s business.

Anyone have any doubt that we haven’t heard all the details of this story and yet and that it’s going to get a lot uglier before its resolved?