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.

John Gruber:

Let me get this straight. Apple completely scrapped a superior interface to Health because Mark Gurman published screenshots back in March. That is to say, Apple cared more about the surprise of revealing a never-before-seen Health interface during the keynote than they cared about the actual design quality of an interface that will be used by hundreds of millions of iOS users for years to come.

Design and functionality trumps all at Apple.

Cult of Mac:

Apple TV may have a new competitor in the form of Sony, which unveiled its PlayStation TV at Monday’s E3 event — showcasing a TV set-top box which features a strong emphasis on gaming.

Released as PS Vita TV in Japan, PlayStation TV will arrive in the U.S. and Canada this fall. It will allow users to stream games from their PS4 to other TVs in the house, thereby extending the gaming experience. It will also let you stream PS3 games and older classics via the forthcoming Playstation Now, which will presumably require no PS4. On top of this it will provide all the streaming services you’d expect from a set-top box, such as Netflix and Hulu.

I just can’t see this succeeding in the mainstream consumer market. Sony’s brand just doesn’t have the same relevance, same strength as it used to have. I can see Sony getting some traction with console gamers, but they’ll still have to battle Apple, Google, and now Amazon for even that mindshare.

Press the pen’s sensor against an object, the pen’s ink becomes that color. Scan an orange, you are drawing in orange. Scan a blade of grass, you’re drawing in a rich shade of green.

The pen uses a 16-bit color sensor on one end, and ink jet color mixing on the other end to reproduce about 100,000 colors. The company is releasing two products: a pen for drawing and a stylus for your mobile device. The scanner uses bluetooth, so you can save and label your scanned colors.

Fantastic idea. Note that this is a kickstarter, available for pre-order and not a shipping product. While the pricing for the pen (US$149.95) and stylus (US$79.95) are set, there is no mention of the pricing for replacement ink. Can I replace one color, or do I need to replace the whole thing once I run out of a single color?

Looking forward to trying one myself.

Reuters:

David Marcus, who has led eBay Inc’s fast-growing payments unit PayPal for the past two years, will step down this month to run Facebook Inc’s messaging products, the companies announced on Monday.

In the newly created role of vice president of messaging products, Marcus will oversee the Messenger service within Facebook’s social network as well as the free Messenger mobile app, but not WhatsApp, said Facebook spokeswoman Vanessa Chan.

Roughly 12 billion messages are sent every day on Facebook, and the Messenger app has more than 200 million users, according to the company.

Given the complete lack of a messaging component in PayPal, I wonder what drove Facebook to make this particular hire.

The Guardian:

The thawing of Robert De Niro has been as astonishing to witness as the shattering of a glacier cliff.

It started on the promotional trail for Silver Linings Playbook, during a Katie Couric interview in which De Niro broke down – or, more accurately, the audience waited respectfully while the actor arm-wrestled his welling emotions to the ground, holding up a hand apologetically the way you might for waiting traffic. Couric didn’t have the heart to hit him with a follow-up.

The actor teared up again last week when talking to Out magazine about his artist father, who was gay – as a new documentary reveals.

I’m a big De Niro fan so this is a must see for me. The documentary is called Remembering the Artist Robert De Niro, Sr. It’s running periodically on HBO, available on-demand, and on HBO Go.

Fast Company:

You could be forgiven for thinking that the picture of the bearded man found on all Burt’s Bees product is just that–an illustration designed to humanize the company. But Burt Shavitz is a real man, and he’s the subject of a new documentary that delves into the life of a curmudgeonly beekeeper and former photographer who improbably became the face of a global brand.

The trailer for “Burt’s Buzz” looks very interesting.

Nowadays, more and more websites are using animations, whether that be in the form of GIFs, SVGs, WebGL, background videos and so on. When used properly, animation on the web brings life and interactivity, adding an extra layer of feedback and experience for users.

With the World Cup coming in the a few days, this is a good feature.

Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

The National Football League had a long and expensive list of confidential requests before it awarded the 2018 Super Bowl to Minneapolis.

Free police escorts for team owners, and 35,000 free parking spaces. Presidential suites at no cost in high-end hotels. Free billboards across the Twin Cities. Guarantees to receive all revenue from the game’s ticket sales — even a requirement for NFL-preferred ATMs at the stadium.

I knew the NFL wrung concessions out of host cities but some of these are amusing.

Digital Trends:

Instead of pushing desktop lovers away, Apple has made moves to make life easier for those who reside in the world of traditional computing, and their mobile compatriots.

The more I read from early users of Yosemite, the more I’m looking forward to it.