In September, 2012, Stephanie Wilson, a twenty-eight-year-old Australian who lives in West Harlem, bought a pair of Hunter rain boots from Saks Fifth Avenue. She was digging for her receipt in the paper shopping bag when she discovered a letter inside that, in its urgency, started higher than the ruled paper’s printed lines. “HELP! HELP! HELP!!” a man had written, in blue ink on white paper. He opened, “Hello!! I’m Njong Emmanuel Tohnain, Cameroonian of nationality.”

Great story.

This is simply incredible.

In 2012, Apple won the year’s biggest patent verdict—more than $1 billion against Samsung. The company also lost one of that year’s biggest cases when an East Texas jury ordered it to pay $368 million to a company named VirnetX for infringing patents related to FaceTime and VPN On Demand functions used in iPhones, iPads, and Macs. VirnetX is a company some call a “patent troll” because its only business is now patent enforcement. Then, in March, US District Judge Leonard Davis ordered (PDF) an ongoing royalty to be paid to VirnetX. The number was downright stunning: 0.98 percent of revenue from iPhones and iPads sold in the US.

To no one’s surprise, Apple is fighting tooth and nail to avoid this outcome. A decision (PDF) published yesterday shows that one creative strategy that Apple tried to use went too far.

The decision puts VirnetX back in the driver’s seat, in a stronger position to collect a patent tax of nearly 1 percent on the most popular product produced by the world’s richest tech company. One estimate suggests that VirnetX could soon be collecting around $340 million from Apple annually unless VirnetX’s patents are vanquished on appeal.

You could argue with the use of the term patent troll here, but there’s no arguing with the financial impact of the decision here. This is an astonishing amount of money.

Many thanks to Betterment for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. Imagine if poring over your finances were as easy as using your favorite app, or smartphone. – “The Apple of finance,” Quartz.

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Betterment’s UX and UI are adored by tech and design enthusiasts, without the red tape of other investment providers. Betterment is delightful on the outside, with killer technology under the hood, and our free iPhone and Android apps help you stay connected to your diversified portfolio at all times.

Betterment has eliminated the unnecessary costs and complications of investing intelligently. It’s straightforward investing for all, whether you have $10,000 or $10 million.

Ready to invest? We’re excited to offer readers of the Loop up to 6 months of Betterment automated investment management for free.

Pixelapse:

Apple revealed a sneak peek into Mac OS X Yosemite earlier this week. Not surprisingly, Apple updated its desktop OS to match iOS 7’s design language. The new OS X now embodies a brighter and flatter styling, coupled with icon updates, font changes, and translucent materials. Here’s a quick look at the visual design changes in Yosemite and my impressions of them.

A lot of these changes will be subjective as to whether they are good or not. I’ll wait and see for myself.

Tetris was the killer app that brought Nintendo’s GameBoy into the mainstream.

Thirty years ago today, Russian computer programmer Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov created Tetris. Unveiled behind the Iron Curtain, the deceptively simple, maddeningly addictive game soon left the Soviet Union. It lived on dozens of platforms, but its Lennon-McCartney (Lenin-McCartney?) partner was Nintendo’s Game Boy. And the duo defined modern mobile gaming as we know it.

The article is a nice read, but take a look at the comments. Hint: Search for “Woz”.

I constantly had the top score for Gameboy Tetris in the Nintendo Power rankings. It got to where they wanted fresh names in the list and said they would not accept my submissions any longer. So I spelled my name backwards (Evets Kainzow) and changed the city from Los Gatos to Saratoga. Sure enough, they printed that name at the top of the next list of scores. I even have that issue of Nintendo Power, thanks to a thoughtful fan who gifted me with it recently.

And lest you have any doubt about Woz’s claim, take a look at this image of the cover of the July 1991 issue of Nintendo Power magazine, pointing out the Evets Kainzow score. You can’t make this stuff up.

30 Rock made me appreciate Tracy Morgan as an actor. Heal quick, Tracy.

Actor Tracy Morgan is in critical condition after a six-vehicle accident in New Jersey early Saturday, authorities said. The former “Saturday Night Live” cast member and “30 Rock” star was riding in a limo bus when the accident occurred in Mercer County, said Sgt. Gregory Williams of the New Jersey State Police.

The limo bus overturned at the New Jersey Turnpike in Robbinsville, he said.

Note that the linked article has an auto-play video.

Roads and Kingdoms:

Intrigued by the enduring mystery of carnival culture, photographer Eric Kruszewski wanted not just to shoot the carnival, but to experience it from the inside. He documented life as a “carny” in off hours. His photography blends the poeticism of the lit-up carnival with the reality of the road, where hard work and family living combine.

These shows are familiar to those of us who lived in small towns in the US and Canada (are these kinds of carnivals popular/still around in Europe?) and it’s interesting to see the story from the inside out.

TechCrunch:

Spotsetter looked to combine friends’ recommendations, trusted reviews and other signals in order to reinvent maps as a more social experience.

Initially available as a web and mobile application, Spotsetter used a patent-pending algorithm to pull in users’ content from social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare, as well as venue content from over 30 review sites and lists from trusted sources like Yelp, Zagat, the New York Times, Michelin, and TripAdviser. As of last summer, the company said that it had processed 5 million user profiles, 40 million venues, and 1 million curated venue content items from around the world.

Dan Frommer:

Many of the most interesting and potentially useful features unveiled this week at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference rely on the company’s iCloud service or otherwise involve network-connected devices talking to each other. The masses will be able to take advantage of these additions on their Macs, iPads, and iPhones later this year.

For Apple customers and developers, this has been a long time coming. iCloud—the last product Steve Jobs announced before he died in 2011—is an incredibly important strategic piece of Apple’s future. Yet its usefulness has always seemed underwhelming, as if cloud services were Apple’s lowest priority.

But this year’s WWDC keynote carried a different tone, with a notable uptick in useful, cloud-centered announcements and more competitive pricing.

Unlike Frommer, I’m not jumping to the headline’s conclusion until I’ve seen it in action with average users.

The Next Web:

Yahoo earlier this year announced plans to phase out Google- and Facebook-based sign-in from its services. The feature was initially removed from a sports service and now it is Flickr’s turn, after Yahoo emailed users of the photo site with notice that Google and Facebook IDs will no longer be accepted there after June 30.

Instead, Flickr users must create a Yahoo account and connect it to the photo storage site. Those with an existing Yahoo ID which is not connected to Flickr are encouraged to link it up before the end of this month.

I just went to the site to make the changes to my Flickr log in and OMG that Yahoo! page is butt ugly.

Grantland:

With this summer’s World Cup just around the corner, it’s time for you to find out just how much you already know about how soccer is played.

Soccer is a seemingly simple game but very nuanced.

Uh-oh.

9to5mac:

When entering a credit card number into a form online to, for example, make a purchase, Safari already allowed users to quickly select credit cards stored in its Passwords & AutoFill settings. You can still do that, but in iOS 8 you’ll now also have the option to select “Scan Credit Card” and snap a picture of the card. Apple then uses optical character recognition of sorts to input the number into the text field in Safari.

That’s pretty cool!

Apple has an incredibly strong corporate culture. That culture remained fairly constant under the black-turtlenecked tutelage of Steve Jobs. Tim Cook eased the company into his own style of leadership, and the acquisition of Beats has the chance to expand that evolution in a very positive way.

None of the streaming-music companies have a leader who built one of the most dominant labels in the past 20 years, like Iovine did. Nor do they have someone who invented a new music genre, developed the talent, and then blew it up for a commercial audience, like Dre did. That’s a massive difference between Apple and Spotify, Google, Amazon and any other tech company dipping their toe into music.

And Ian Rogers?

Beyond the gravitas of Iovine and Dre, there’s another talent coming on board in Beats Music CEO Ian Rogers, a talented digital marketer who has spent a great deal of his career figuring out how to exploit new media channels to build revenue streams for artists.

Rogers understands technology and how it can be used to help artists market to fans. From his days building the Beastie Boys’ website to his time as CEO of Topspin, he has been on the leading edge of new ways to communicate directly with fans. And there has never been a better potential platform for artists and fans to connect than streaming services.

He represents Generation Next of digital-music execs, those who understand the life cycle of artists, marketing, customer demand, and the technology that powers all these. Rogers has built a vastly different streaming service from anyone else in the space, one that has a more balanced approach between those disciplines.

I think it will be a long time until the folks outside Apple’s management team truly understand the value that Beats brings to the table.

You spent hours making your design perfect. The images have been meticulously Photoshopped. The calls-to-action have been revised and refined countless times. You know exactly where you want the user’s eye to land and precisely how you want it to move. And with the emergence of eye-tracking technology, it’s finally possible to know whether or not it actually works.

This is a great idea. Use eye tracking to figure out what images work best, and where to place them to bring the user’s attention where you want it.

Does the name Peter Norton ring a bell? Ever hear of Norton Utilities? If you answered yes to either of these, I think you’ll find the linked article fascinating. A lot of these pictures brought back memories. Guess that just proves how old I am.

Washington Post:

Earlier this year, Virginia officials slapped the app-based services with more than $35,000 in civil penalties for operating with out proper permits. On Thursday, Richard D. Holcomb, commissioner of the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles, sent a cease and desist letter to both companies.

“I am once again making clear that Uber must cease and desist operating in Virginia until it obtains proper authority,” Holcomb said in the letter. (You can see copies of both letters below)

With its action, Virginia joins a growing number of states that have banned or sought to limit the app-based services from operating. In Maryland, Uber is currently appealing a decision by the state’s chief public utility law judge that said it must file an application to operate as a for-hire carrier.

This is clearly a speed bump for Uber and Lyft. Question is, is this a growing trend?

GQ:

What kind of person looks upon the world’s largest land animal — a beast that mourns its dead and lives to retirement age and can distinguish the voice of its enemies — and instead of saying “Wow!” says something like “Where’s my gun?”

It’s a stomach turning story but told well in an interesting way.

Macworld:

Apple put the spotlight squarely on software—and software developers—right from the start, and gave iOS/OS X chief Craig Federighi a chance to shine. Federighi introduced a laundry list of new features and technologies that will quietly revolutionize the way the company relates to third-party apps.

Many developers I’ve spoken to are beyond excited over not just the news from WWDC but the possibility of a sea change in Apple’s relations with developers.

Don Zimmer died yesterday at the age of 83. Here are a few things most folks don’t know about him:

Zimmer met Babe Ruth (in 1947), was a teammate of Jackie Robinson (1954-56) and played for Casey Stengel (1962). He was in uniform for some of the most iconic teams in history: the team that lost the most games (’62 Mets) and the team, including postseason play, that won the most games (’98 Yankees). He was in uniform for the only World Series championship for the Brooklyn Dodgers (1955), one of the most famous World Series home runs (Carlton Fisk’s shot in 1975), one of the most famous regular season home runs (Bucky Dent in 1978), the Pine Tar Game (1983), the first night game at Wrigley Field (1988), the first game in Rockies history (1993), and all three perfect games thrown at Yankee Stadium (Don Larsen, David Wells and David Cone).

An amazing baseball life.

New York Times:

Few images are more recognizable or more evocative. Known simply as “tank man,” it is one of the most famous photographs in recent history.

Twenty years ago, on June 5, 1989, following weeks of huge protests in Beijing and a crackdown that resulted in the deaths of hundreds, a lone man stepped in front of a column of tanks rumbling past Tiananmen Square. The moment instantly became a symbol of the protests as well as a symbol against oppression worldwide — an anonymous act of defiance seared into our collective consciousnesses.

One of the most amazing and important photos ever taken.

When the personal computer was new, there was a language named BASIC. BASIC was easy to learn and, more importantly, it was easy to experiment with. Early versions of BASIC were interpretive, meaning you typed and ran, edited and ran again. You didn’t have to wait for your code to compile and link. Make a change to the program, run it immediately. BASIC was so easy to learn and work with, pretty much anyone could learn how to program.

Apple’s new Swift programming language is designed, over time, to replace Objective-C. Swift is much easier to grasp, though not nearly as easy as BASIC, since Swift is designed to support much more complex tasks. But Swift is much, much easier to grasp than Objective-C.

Like BASIC, Swift is a real joy to play with. Swift is perfect for rapid prototyping. Using Xcode’s Playground environment, you can make changes in your code and immediately see the results. You can build a little freestanding animation, then run that animation in a scrubbable timeline, tweaking the code as you go.

The linked article is thoughtfully written and goes into a lot more detail on Swift. If you are about to take the plunge, or are considering getting into iOS development for the first time, this is well worth reading.

When I first started developing iPhone apps (I wound up building 40 silly little pinpoint apps), Apple would not allow any books to be written on the topic, and put everyone programming for iOS under NDA, so there were no educational resources allowed at all.

I lived through that experience, as a coauthor of one of the very first iOS development books. This is not an understatement. NDAs were a necessary evil, but we did curse them.

But that’s changed tremendously in the years since the iPhone first came out. And, now, with Swift, the doors for iOS development may well have been blown open to a new generation of programmers who may be able to recapture that exploring spirit of wonder that the first Apple II BASIC programmers had when they got their first personal computers.

If you’re a registered Apple developer, you can download the Xcode 6 beta. Even if you’re not a registered Apple developer, you can download the Swift programming guide from iBooks for free.

If you are thinking of taking the plunge, go get the iBook. Even better, sign up as a developer, download Xcode and open the book as a playground from within Xcode. You’ll play as you learn. An incredibly fun experience.

Microsoft VP Nick Parker:

“We’ll reach price points that are very industry competitive for 7, 8, 10-inch devices,” Parker said, speaking to reporters after his keynote at Computex, Asia’s largest computing show. “They will really surprise you. Last year, we were in the 3s, 4s, 500 dollars. This year, we’ll be 1s, 2s, 3s.”

Not sure if this is a move to move inventory through the pipeline or an attack to build market share from the low end.

Microsoft’s share of the tablet market was less than 4% last year, according to research firm IDC. Parker declined to say if the free offering of Windows is a permanent strategy for the company, or if it will return to charging [higher prices] next year.

But he emphasized that Microsoft had other ways to make money besides Windows licensing fees, such as the “freemium” model of its Skype video chat service and the launch of Office 365, which allows users to rent the software for a year instead of buying it.

Make better products. Start there and you’ll find your path.

Mashable:

Imagine a world where your dog could play fetch by himself. It’s not the future; it’s this lucky dog’s reality.

Instead of playing the usual game of fetch (when you get tired after 10 minutes), someone removed the human element from the game completely.

The dog is cute as all get out and congratulations to the owner for teaching the dog the trick but, come on! How lazy are you you can’t play catch with your dog for ten minutes!?