Elon Musk posted this on the Tesla blog today:

Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.

Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.

This is a pretty huge step. Some might see this as self-serving on Musk’s part, but I see this as altruistic, through and through.

Every four years, the world spins off its axis for this spot of fun. Brazil vs. Croatia. Let the games begin.

My favorite line from this article:

For wearing headphones, he would get $11 million more than he makes per year for doing what he does best, playing basketball.

SeekingAlpha (free reg-wall):

Xiaomi, the world’s fastest growing phone vendor, has surpassed Apple (AAPL) in China. Canalys Report puts Xiaomi as the third biggest phone vendor in China in Q1 2014. Copycatting the iPhone has made Xiaomi, a four-year old company, the 6th largest global seller of smartphones.

The rapid rise of Xiaomi is due in part to Apple’s complacent attitude towards it. While Apple took Samsung to court for copying some of the features of the iPhone, Apple allowed Xiaomi to become a $10 billion company by selling iPhone clones using the Android OS. Xiaomi hired Google veteran Hugo Barra last year. Barra is spearheading Xiaomi’s expansion in 10 countries this year.

The linked article makes a pretty solid case comparing Samsung’s co-opting of the iPhone look-and-feel with Xiaomi’s approach. While Apple’s lawsuit against Samsung has made the headlines, there’s been nothing made about Xiaomi’s interface.

One possibility is that Samsung brought their business to Apple’s home turf, while Xiaomi has yet to challenge Apple in North America. That is about to change.

Android Headlines:

In an exclusive Android Authority interview with former Google guru Hugo Barra, now Vice President Xiaomi Global, said, “We will start working on North America next year…It’s in the pipeline.” When he said “next year,” he meant 2015, as they already have 2014 mapped out with ten new markets they are preparing to enter. Barra knows that North America represents a very challenging market to make inroads…just look at the problems Sony is having, and they already have a name and reputation for themselves, and let us not forget HTC. Barra has to convince the U.S. that Xiaomi is not just another cheap Chinese smartphone company and this will not be easy task, but I think if any person or any company can do it, Bara and Xiaomi are the ones.

The U.S. market is different from many parts of the world when it comes to purchasing a smartphone – we are used to getting a large subsidiary from our carrier to buy the device on a two-year contract. We pay $200 to $300 for a flagship device, with more perceived features, power and build quality, so why would we pay $250 for a Xiaomi device…in our minds we are getting a $700 device for only a couple hundred of dollars, so why buy a $250 device – even if it has the same features. Barra said, “I believe in the future, people will be less and less tolerant to unnecessarily overpriced devices.” Barra may be correct, but he also has the U.S. carriers on his side as well – they would like nothing more than to get rid of subsidies and they seem to be working towards that goal.

I wonder if Samsung will file suit against Xiaomi. After all, Samsung is the real target here. Xiaomi runs Android and will be more of a threat to Samsung’s market share than Apple’s. And Samsung might have a real case, claiming they were the first to copy the iPhone. Doesn’t that give them some rights?

Amazon just launched their Prime Music service, promising more than a million songs, all free to members of Amazon Prime. Since I’m an Amazon Prime member, thought I’d take it for a spin.

Getting started was easy. I clicked the Explore Prime Music button on the entry page and I was taken to a page filled with links to albums and playlists, as well as a search field.

Click on an album and you go to the album’s main page, listing all the tracks with popularity rankings for each track. Click a button to add the entire album to your library or click to add tracks, one at a time. Each album page includes Amazon’s usual recommendations at the bottom.

Playlists let you quickly populate your library with someone else’s picks. You can add a collection, then trim the songs that don’t work for you.

On the good side, I found it pretty easy to build up and listen to a nice chunk of music.

On the down side, I quickly found the boundaries of Amazon’s collection. While they do have an impressive mix, I felt like I was looking through someone’s music library, not the universe of music I’m exploring when I go to the iTunes Store. As an example, none of the top iTunes albums are available as free adds to my Prime library. I can buy them, of course, but the point is, expect your free Prime Music library to be dated.

There’s also the question of portability. The Amazon Music app that accesses your library is pretty primitive. I’m sure that’ll change over time, but as is, the whole experience feels a bit hamstrung.

I’m guessing that the music experience will be much better on Amazon’s upcoming phone, since they’ll own the ecosystem.

Amid criticisms that it has failed to innovate, Apple is increasingly taking marketing into its own hands. It’s madly building an internal agency that it’s telling recruits will eventually number 1,000.

It will be very interesting to see what comes out of this.

I’m a fan of this app.

If you’ve ever spent time in New York City, storefronts like these will ring familiar. Zig Zag Records, Optimo Cigars, Casanova Menswear, all of these ancient places are the old that is being swept away for the new. Take a look at these pictures. To me, they bring a pang of nostalgia.

The survey itself is interesting enough. But what really caught my eye is the interactive nature of the interface.

Try this: Click Country on the left side of the window, then click Describe in the upper left. This gives you a breakdown of survey participants by country. I really liked the ability to play with the survey data. Wish all surveys were built this way.

Nintendo is doing everything they can to raise awareness and adoption of their stagnant Wii U console. They made inroads this week at E3 with a boatload of new games, led by the latest incarnation of their flagship Zelda series.

The latest Zelda game for Wii U is vast and beautiful, with a huge world for players to explore. Grass shimmers underfoot and everything feels grander in scope. Nintendo says it wants to break its own conventions for the franchise and give players more options for how they tackle challenges and puzzles.

Watch the trailer to get a sense of things. Sadly, we’ll have to wait until next year to be able to get our hands on the new Zelda game. This is what Nintendo needed to do. Clearly, waiting until 2015 to finally make their platform relevant is not ideal. But Nintendo has the cash to ride this out. The question is, will the Wii U hardware still be competitive in 2015? That’s a long time between hardware revs.

From the Feedly blog:

Criminals are attacking feedly with a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). The attacker is trying to extort us money to make it stop. We refused to give in and are working with our network providers to mitigate the attack as best as we can.

We are working in parallel with other victims of the same group and with law enforcement.

We want to apologize for the inconvenience. Please know that you data is safe and you will be able to re-access your feedly as soon as the attack is neutralized.

We will update this blog post as soon as we have more information.

First and foremost, cheers to Feedly for standing up to this attack. We know that a good number of readers access The Loop via Feedly. Bear with them as they ride this out.

Update: At 6:25a PST, Feedly added this to their blog:

We’re making some changes to our infrastructure that will allow us to bring feedly back online. However, these things take some time to put into place and it may still be a few more hours before service is restored. Thank you so much for your patience and for sticking with us. Remember, none of your data was compromised or lost in this attack.

Forbes:

John Paul DeJoria, the billionaire entrepreneur behind Paul Mitchell shampoo and Patron tequila is jumping into the wireless phone business.

His new company ROK Mobile (cofounded with British entrepreneur Johnathan Kendrick) is offering unlimited talk, text and data with an added sweetener of free music streaming. ROK Mobile is contract free and will cost $49.99 a month. DeJoria has inked music deals with Warner Music, Sony and Universal, giving users more than 20 million songs. Says DeJoria: “Everything you can find on iTunes, we have.”

$49.95 a month for unlimited talk, text, data and music is a price disruption.

People spend an average of $82 a month on their phone. If you pay more for music and data, your phone bills in the hundreds.

ROK Mobile is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), riding on the rails of T-Mobile. They make their service relevant by bundling in streaming music. This model has been tried before. GigaOM:

There’s definitely already a forerunner for this kind of business model. Regional operator Leap Wireless launched Muve Music, a subscription song download service included in its higher-end mobile plans. It had a hit on its hand, growing to 1 million users in two years, making it the second largest subscription service in the U.S. behind Spotify despite the fact it was available only in Leap’s limited regional footprint. (AT&T bought Leap and is now looking to sell Muve.)

The devil is in the details of the music app:

Key to that strategy will be ROK’s music app. It built the service in-house with a development team drawn from the entertainment and mobile industries and it aims to combine many of the best elements of other streaming services on the market, René said. As with Spotify, ROK customers will be able search and stream any song, create playlists and collections and download music for listening when no data connection is available.

ROK is also using algorithm-based personalization technology like Beats Music and Pandora to offer internet radio services based on specific songs or artists as well as music recommendations.

Sound familiar? This is part of the reason Apple bought Beats. The mobile music industry is gearing up for another wave of disruption. It’ll be interesting to watch this unfold.

Matt Drance:

What we saw at WWDC 2014 was built by thousands of people. The leadership at the top empowered those people to not only proceed, but to succeed. The attitude behind WWDC 2014 was one of increased openness and increased confidence — an attitude that managed to depart from the worst of the past while staying true to the best. Apple is undeniably the new company it deserves to be, and Tim Cook’s stewardship is on full display. I’m as excited for the future we haven’t yet seen as I am for the one we were just shown in San Francisco.

Exactly.

LA Weekly:

The pun comeback has heightened visibility for the O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships in Austin, Texas, where last year Ziek won both major events: In Punniest of Show, judges rate a contestant’s 90-second prepared routine. In the Punslingers tournament, contestants face off one-on-one to see who can come up with the most puns on words in a given category.

I had a girlfriend in college who loved puns. I had to break up with her.

The Verge:

• Honeywell is rethinking the way it tackles home automation with Lyric. It’s a $279 Wi-Fi thermostat (available today to purchase through HVAC contractors; it’ll be available in Lowe’s stores by August) that is one of the most visually appealing products in the space, as well as an obvious response to the Nest Learning thermostat. But perhaps more importantly, Lyric is also a platform. The company’s ambition is to launch a full suite of Lyric products that can all be controlled your smartphone.

 

• This product is a competitor of the Nest wherein it uses Internet of Things data to connect your devices. For example, if you want to control your HVAC unit with your phone, you can do so through a command. This goes the same for your switches, lighting, TV, and more. It depends on what you connect on your phone.

 

• However, if you need repairs, e.g., your furnace smells like burning, you will still need to contact professionals to inspect your unit. Then, when it’s fixed, you can then connect your unit to your phone.

Good to see competition in the space and maybe an option for those of you who don’t like Nest’s new overlords.

Mac user Shaun McGill bought a Windows 8 laptop for his son. I laughed.

Many Tricks offers a number of apps to make using your Mac easier, more productive, and even more fun. Check out Moom, their impressive window moving and zooming tool; Name Mangler, which makes renaming tens of thousands of files a snap; Witch, a tool to let you quickly switch to any open window; or any of their other apps at Many Tricks.

Scott Hurff:

You don’t go and make drastic changes like this an app that’s responsible for billions of messages a day without good reason. This update shows that Apple is keenly aware of the changing habits of their customer base, and I think this is going to be the most important change in iOS since Apple added “swipe up” access to the Camera in iOS 6.

There were some big changes in Messages in iOS 8.

Re/code:

Information computation and visualization from a new company called Five uses academic word lists corresponding with psychologists’ established notion of the “big five” personality traits: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness. Based on the volume of words used from the lists, each person is assigned a warped pentagon that’s shaped around their own personal leanings.

The people at Five are hoping you’ll be freaked out by how well they can describe you.

First of all, it’s based just on Facebook, not “the internet”. And the results didn’t freak me out at all. How about you?

Macworld:

Online retailer and distributor Dr. Bott, a fixture in the Apple-accessory market since the late 1990s, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in its home state of Oregon, according to public records and information provided to Macworld. The original petition was filed on May 1, with notices sent to creditors later in the month.

Founded in 1999, Dr. Bott was originally a distributor providing accessories to independent Macintosh resellers.

Many of us will hope that Dr Bott can get on the other side of this bankruptcy mostly intact. They have been a long time Mac vendor and a great friend to many in the Mac Community.

HiddenCashYVR:

I’m hiding envelopes around town and tweeting clues about where to find them. Each envelope contains a $100 bill. It’s an opportunity to do something nice for others, and in due course encourage them to do something nice for someone else.

These twitter accounts have been popping up all over the US and Canada. There are even ones that are hiding beer and another here in Vancouver, marijuana.

Vox:

The monarch butterflies are disappearing. Over the past 20 years, fewer and fewer butterflies have been making the long journey down to Mexico to survive the winter.

Scientists have proposed a few possible reasons for the decline, from habitat loss in Mexico to bouts of unusually severe weather. But a new paper this month in the Journal of Animal Ecology argues that the biggest culprit here is likely the decline of milkweed plants in the United States — the main food for monarch caterpillars before they turn into butterflies.

The story of how these beautiful delicate creatures make their way from as far as Canada to Mexico is amazing. It would be a tragedy to see their decline.

The Verge:

The Gumball 3000, an annual celebration of wealth, exotic machinery, and a casual disrespect for traffic laws — think Cannonball Run, but real — and this year, participants are driving from Miami to the Mediterranean island of Ibiza, stopping briefly in New York to hop a plane across the Atlantic (yes, cars too).

The Gumball, which raises money for charitable youth organizations, has a reputation for attracting celebrities. Hip hop artist Xzibit lost his license driving it in 2007. This year, Eve is involved. So is David Hasselhoff.

Every few minutes, a participating car would arrive, each more ridiculous than the one before it: I saw a completely chromed Aston Martin, Porsches of all shapes, sizes, and colors, and a Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupé covered in what appeared to be velvet.

The Ferrari 458 Italia “Purrari” made me weep…

A really good article from Jonathan Hays.

This should be interesting.

It is absolutely incredible to me the quality of pictures people take with their iPhone.

I always find it a better experience to visit a Web site formatted for the screen I’m using.

Matthew Hewlett and Caleb Turon, both Grade 9 students, found an old ATM operators manual online that showed how to get into the machine’s operator mode. On Wednesday over their lunch hour, they went to the BMO’s ATM at the Safeway on Grant Avenue to see if they could get into the system.

Smart teens, stupid banks.