In the hands of a master, hand-drawn animation can bring complex emotions to life. The embedded video is stylish and elegant, drawn by one of the best, Glen Keane. Keane is the son of Family Circus creator Bill Keane and has created a number of classics for Disney, including The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, Tarzan, and Tangled. Not a bad resume.

In the linked article, Harry McCracken points out that the video below was created by Keane for Google’s “Spotlight Stories” project and that animation tools are no match for a master of the craft.

But the thing which makes it interesting and moving isn’t the technology: It’s the fact that it consists of a series of drawings by a human being who happens to be a master draftsman, rather than the digital stop-motion puppetry that is computer animation.

Keane may have used more modern tools than his counterparts at Disney did in the 1930s and 1940s, but the basics of his craft haven’t changed at all.

I agree that the human in the equation is, at least currently, irreplaceable. But I do think that automation tools make it possible to create incredibly sophisticated and complex animations that would not have been possible even 20 years ago. To me, the seminal year was 1995, the year Toy Story was released.

I think McCracken is right, the basics haven’t changed, but I think the tools have evolved beyond belief. I did enjoy Keane’s animation Duet, shown below, but my all-time favorite remains the first 7 minutes of Pixar’s Up. To me, that is emotional storytelling without peer.

My thanks to Twocanoes Software for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. Winclone is a great way to make a complete backup of your Boot Camp partition so that you can quickly restore back to Windows in Boot Camp. Boot Runner provides an easy way to switch between OS X and Windows on dual boot Macs. Works great for both individuals and dual boot labs.

When you get a new Mac or have issues with your Windows installation in Boot Camp, re-installing Windows is time consuming and difficult. Winclone makes it easy to make a complete copy of the Boot Camp partition, and restores it back to the exact same state on your existing or new Mac. Winclone supports migration of Boot Camp partitions between Macs, moving your Boot Camp partition to an external drive to free up space, and more. It works great for mass deployment. Boot Camp can be deployed as an OS X installer package and you can also use it with existing Windows tools such as SCCM and Sys Prep for easy mass deployment.

If you manage lots of dual boot Macs, Boot Runner provides a great way to manage the OS selection. You decide which OS by selecting OS X or Windows prior to logging in. It works great in labs. Administrators can fully customize and manage the selection screen, and can remotely select the OS through network policy. Boot Runner includes a scheduling feature to make sure that the Mac is booted into Windows for important system and virus updates. Check out the intro video to learn more.

Winclone and Boot Runner are available for purchase and download today at twocanoes.com and both have full phone and online support options.

Words to live by:

So here is our appeal to you: As you leave Stanford, take your genius and your optimism and your empathy and go change the world in ways that will make millions of others optimistic as well.

You don’t have to rush. You have careers to launch, debts to pay, spouses to meet and marry. That’s enough for now.

But in the course of your lives, without any plan on your part, you’ll come to see suffering that will break your heart.

When it happens, and it will, don’t turn away from it; turn toward it.

That is the moment when change is born.

Dan Frommer on Google’s smart watch demo at I/O:

While it’s impressive how small today’s computers can get, Google and its partners have still failed to demonstrate truly compelling use cases—let alone “rich user experiences”—that will create a mass market for $200+ smartwatches. In almost every example during Singleton’s presentation, simply accessing a smartphone—an activity Google says its one billion Android users already do an average of 125 times a day—seems like it would be a more capable and comfortable solution. (And there’s no either/or option here—today’s smartwatches must be paired to a phone in the vicinity to access the internet.)

Never mind the watches themselves, which seem awkwardly large, must be charged daily, don’t handle sunlight very well, and simply aren’t cool.

This last bit, “simply aren’t cool” says a lot. It’s hard to master cool, hard to create cool. Apple may not always get it right, but their commitment to a cool design aesthetic runs very deep.

This is a heartbreaking story, made harder by the fact that I met one of the principals of this story, Marcin, when I was in New York visiting another startup. I liked Marcin and I liked the concept. Unfortunately, the business model was just not strong enough. Lessons here for everyone.

Apple announced a 16GB iPod touch with a 5 Megapixel camera for $199. Not too shabby. Though it’s clearly not a replacement for the iPhone, if you have regular WiFi access, this is a pretty nice alternative, one that doesn’t come with a monthly contract.

From Apple’s web site:

CUPERTINO, California—June 26, 2014—Apple® today announced its 16GB iPod touch® is now available in vibrant colors and equipped with a 5 megapixel iSight® camera for just $199. The entire iPod touch lineup features the 5 megapixel iSight camera with 1080p HD video recording, brilliant 4-inch Retina® display, Apple’s A5 chip and FaceTime® camera. iPod touch features an ultra-thin and light anodized aluminum design and is available in pink, yellow, blue, silver, space gray and (PRODUCT) RED. iPod touch comes in a 16GB model for $199, 32GB for $249, and 64GB for $299.

iPod touch comes with iOS 7, offering more than 200 features including Camera app filters that let you easily add real-time photo effects. Additionally, the Photos app offers ways to automatically organize your photos based on time and location. With iCloud® Photo Sharing, it’s simple to share photos and videos with exactly the people you want to see them and your friends and family can comment and access their shared streams from any iPhone®, iPad®, iPod touch, Mac® or PC at any time. This fall, iOS 8 will be supported on the entire iPod touch lineup.

With the revolutionary App Store℠ on iPod touch, users in 155 countries have access to over 1.2 million apps for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, including hundreds of thousands of games. More than 75 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store. Customers also have the iTunes Store® at their fingertips, giving instant access to an incredible selection of music, TV shows, movies and books to purchase and download directly to their iPod touch.

Pricing & Availability
iPod touch 16GB is available starting in the US today and worldwide in the coming days, in pink, yellow, blue, silver and space gray through the Apple Online Store (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested price of $199 (US). Starting today, the 32GB and 64GB models have been repriced worldwide, at a suggested price of $249 (US) for the 32GB model and $299 (US) for the 64GB model. iPod touch requires a Wi-Fi connection or a Mac with a USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 port, Mac OS X v10.6.8 or later and iTunes® 10.7 or later; or a Windows PC with a USB 2.0 port and Windows 7, Windows Vista or Windows XP Home or Professional with Service Pack 3 or later and iTunes 10.7 or later. An Apple ID is required for some iPod touch features.

Larry Page is Google’s CEO and Sundar Pichai is Google’s Senior VP, Android and Chrome.

An interview with the top players in any major company is going to be interesting, but I thought this interview lacked vision. Worth reading, but there was far more breadth than depth.

One exchange that stood out for me, this discussion on privacy:

Q: Do you worry that the more devices we have that are connected to Google, there’s not just a privacy question but also something like creepiness?

Page: I think that the Internet and mobile devices in general is changing people’s lives a lot. And we’re feeling that. Everyone can tell that their lives are going to be affected, but we don’t quite know how yet, because we’re not using these things — and because of that there’s a lot of uncertainty. I think we’ll figure that out and we’ll get products, services and technologies that really benefit people a lot, and that make their lives significantly better. And as we do that people will understand those — and then there’ll be the next set of things.

Q: You’re saying the usefulness of the products will change how people feel about them?

Page: Yeah, and we know that if we talk about things before people see them, there’s a much more negative reaction. That’s one of the things we learned. It’s really important for people to be able to experience products; otherwise you fear the worst without seeing those benefits.

I’m not trying to minimize the issues. For me, I’m so excited about the possibilities to improve things for people, my worry would be the opposite. We get so worried about these things that we don’t get the benefits. I think that’s what’s happened in health care. We’ve decided, through regulation largely, that data is so locked up that it can’t be used to benefit people very well.

Right now we don’t data-mine health care data. If we did we’d probably save 100,000 lives next year. I’m very worried that the media and governments will try to stoke the people’s fears and we’ll end up in a state where we could benefit a lot of people but we’re not able to do that. That’s the likely outcome.

There are also laws to consider, laws put in place to protect the privacy of medical records. There’s a certain amount of hubris in the claim that you’d save 100,000 lives next year if you could only data-mine health care data. I don’t like where that thinking is going.

You’ll need to activate the phone in-store.

Huge audience, especially for today’s matches.

According to AppShopper, there are currently 1.17 million iOS apps available on the App Store. And according to AppBrain, there are 1.27 million Android apps. I take these numbers with a grain of salt, since these are two different sources, with two unverified data collection methods. But for the sake of argument, let’s accept these numbers, move on.

Here’s the point:

Most promising app startups with venture capital investments that we analyzed are either building apps for iOS and Android simultaneously or are still iOS-only. Looking at 119 recent Y Combinator incubator participants and Google Ventures seed investments, of those offering apps, more than 90% had iOS apps, about half had both iOS and Android apps, and fewer than 10% only had Android apps. Among those with both, their iOS app typically launched several months ahead of their Android app.

In my VC wanderings, these numbers seem to ring true.

As to why, there’s the much-discussed fragmentation of the Android market, but more interestingly, there seems to be a “dog food” issue that drives this trend.

Indeed, among the startup founders we interviewed, their personal familiarity with iOS came up repeatedly as the reason they built for Apple first.

Most startups build things that they test internally for some time before they release even an alpha build to a more public test group. Developers refer to living with your own product as eating your own dog food, or dogfooding. You make it, you live with it. This makes you intimately aware of the apps benefits, features, and shortcomings before you move to the next release level.

Is it possible that entrepreneurs who reach the point of releasing an app tend more likely to be iOS users than Android users?

I came across the linked article on commonly mispronounced words. Pretty good list. The first one really surprised me.

Children’s writer Theodor Seuss Geisel, more commonly known as Dr. Seuss, pronounced his middle name (and pen name) as soice, not soose.

From his Wikipedia page:

Geisel’s most famous pen name is regularly pronounced /ˈs(j)uːs/, an anglicized pronunciation inconsistent with his German surname (the standard German pronunciation). He himself noted that it rhymed with “voice”. Alexander Liang, one of his collaborators on the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern, wrote of it:

You’re wrong as the deuce
And you shouldn’t rejoice
If you’re calling him Seuss.
He pronounces it Soice (or Zoice)

Geisel switched to the anglicized pronunciation because it “evoked a figure advantageous for an author of children’s books to be associated with—Mother Goose” and because most people used this pronunciation.

Live and learn.

Jim and Dan discuss Google Glass streaming live video, Google TV, Apple TV, HBO Go and cable companies, Apple’s iCloud strategy, The New York Times and Walmart, placing trust in news organizations, Dropcam, Nest and privacy limits, the MacBook Air to Surface Pro 3 upgrade path, Bono’s (Red) rant, and more.

Sponsored by HostGator (use code DANSENTME for 50% off VPS) and Shopify (visit shopify.com/5by5 for 3 months free).

It makes me want to pull my hair out just looking at this mess.

Levy has been part of many great publications, but at Medium he will be starting a tech hub “that strives to bring well-reported, lively, and meaningful reporting and writing to what is already shaping up as a terrific platform for the written word.”

Interesting.

The Daily Dot:

Where Google I/O keynotes of years past have included huge reveals like the Chromebook notebook line and Nexus tablet, this year’s event was different…but that didn’t stop it from being crazy in its own right.

It’s not really the “only thing you need to read” but it might just be one of the most amusing things you read about today’s Google I/O keynote.

Back in January, we posted about a lawsuit brought by the four major US TV networks against Aereo. Aereo uses antennae to capture the local broadcast signals of the major networks, then places the recorded programs on-line.

Today, the Supreme Court ruled against Aereo. Looks like that’s the end of the line for this experiment. It also looks like a major loss for its investors, as the business model was based entirely on avoiding retransmission fees.

Here’s the decision.

Macworld:

Corporations generally limit their altruism to charity, not to core product and business decisions. Apple likely sees a competitive advantage in privacy, especially when its biggest direct competition comes from advertising giant Google and the enterprise-friendly Microsoft. Apple believes consumers not only desire privacy, but will increasingly value privacy as a factor in their buying decisions.

It will be interesting to see if, going forward, average consumers start taking these kinds of issues into consideration when purchasing and using various products and services.

On Tuesday, Google Inc. officially began offering the Livestream video-sharing app in its MyGlass store. The software lets Glass wearers share what they are seeing and hearing with other Livestream account holders free of charge by using the command, “OK Glass, start broadcasting.”

Sweet holy shit! No, Google!

This is just priceless. Much respect to David Tovar, Vice President, Walmart Corporate Communications, for a great response.

Net Neutrality advocates are running a campaign called Occupy Google. According to its Twitter timeline on this page, a number of arrests were made last night.

The Verge:

“Come with me if you want to live.”

That’s how it started. One moment I was ordering a Ketel and tonic at the bar, and the next some hulking bodybuilder with a bad accent was getting blasted out the window. The guy that put him there was ragged, scarred; wrapped in a dirty trenchcoat that barely hid the shotgun he was carrying.

Except the bodybuilder only looked like a man. He was something else; part human and part machine. Shotgun blast after shotgun blast, he kept coming, metal glinting from his wounds. I piled into the car, Shotgun Guy behind the wheel, and as we rocketed away from the bar he explained that I’d been targeted for termination.

“It’s not what you’ve done,” he explained. “It’s what you’re going to do!”

Lovely bit of writing.

Seems like the deal will be approved. That it is a question of tinkering if the Commission sees any competition issues.

ComputerWorld:

The LTE Chromebook Pixel was originally sold with a free two-year mobile broadband plan from Verizon — 100MB per month, with the option to purchase more data on a pay-as-you-go basis as needed. But as I reported yesterday, Verizon stopped honoring the plans halfway through that two-year term. Customer support agents for the carrier have been telling Pixel owners they weren’t aware of any two-year commitment, despite clear online documentation to the contrary.

This was a bit of a black eye for both Google and Verizon. Not clear where the fault lies, but certainly the customers were the ones paying the price.

Google did the right thing here, making up the difference with $150 Visa gift cards for folks who purchased an LTE Pixel while the two-year data plan was still being offered.

“While this particular issue is outside of our control, we appreciate that this issue has inconvenienced some of our users,” the Google spokesperson said.

The credits will come in the form of Visa gift cards that can be used for any expense, including (but not limited to) the purchase of mobile broadband access.

Good move.

Last December, Jeff Bezos raised the possibility of Amazon-branded drone based delivery.

I do love the impractical fantasy of that idea but, alas, the FAA has officially put the kibosh on it, in a document released Monday:

Under a graphic that says what is barred, the FAA mentioned the “Delivering of packages to people for a fee.” A footnote added, “If an individual offers free shipping in association with a purchase or other offer, FAA would construe the shipping to be in furtherance of a business purpose, and thus, the operation would not fall within the statutory requirement of recreation or hobby purpose.”

Flickr:

Flickr’s new service for Apple TV brings all your photos to life on the big screen, where you can engage with the Flickr community, explore the world’s most interesting photos, and use our powerful search capabilities to browse billions of photos within the most extraordinary online photo collection.

For the first time with Apple TV, sign into Flickr and view all your photos, videos, Favorites, Albums, and Groups. In one click, make any album into a slideshow or screensaver ready to share with friends, or customize in real-time with over fifteen different slideshow and screensaver modes.

I haven’t had a chance to try this out but if it works as advertised, I will use this a lot.

XOJane:

Believe it or not, the customer service representative that you are speaking to wants to help you. Or at the very least, they want to fix your problem and get you off the line. So please. Allow the rep to do their job and actually listen to what they have to say!

It’s sad we live in a world where we need to have these kinds of things explained to people.