Sad, but like Mike said, it was in that awkward stage where you have to be willing to devote more time and resources to it or shut it down.

One of the best RSS readers ever.

What Beats brings to Apple are guys with very rare skills. People like this aren’t born every day. They’re very rare. They really get music deeply. So we get an infusion in Apple of some great talent.

We get a subscription music service that we believe is the first subscription service that really got it right. They had the insight early on to know how important human curation is. That technology by itself wasn’t enough — that it was the marriage of the two that would really be great and produce a feeling in people that we want to produce. They’ve also built an incredible premium headphone business that’s been tuned by experts and critical ears. We’re fans of that. It’s a reasonable-size business that’s fast-growing.

But mostly, backing up — it’s because we always are future-focused. So it’s not what Apple and Beats are doing today. It’s what we believe pairing the two together can produce for the future.

Talent, music service, and the future.

9to5mac:

Hot on the heels of the announcement that Apple had acquired the Beats Music streaming service for $3 billion to help bolster its own struggling competitor, 9to5Mac has learned that Apple is introducing a new ESPN station for iTunes Radio. The station will include original ESPN programs like SportsCenter All Night, SVP and Russillo, The Herd, and Mike & Mike.

This is big news. Even more importantly:

The ESPN station will also stream the World Cup, making it the first live sporting event to be streamed live through iTunes Radio.

Any way to listen to the World Cup via Pandora?

I do think personal health monitoring devices will become almost universal, and this is certainly a step in that direction, but this seems more like a gadget than a solution, more of a marketing play to establish mindshare than a thought out product ready for the market.

Samsung’s approach is to use light sensors to detect things like heart rate and blood pressure:

The sensors in the band project beams of light into the skin at varying strengths in order to reach tissue near the surface or deeper in. For instance a sensor may aim a beam of light at the strength needed to reach a vein, where it might read pulse rate.

Part of this ecosystem is a cloud platform, called SAMI (Samsung Architecture Multimodal Interaction), used to gather and store user health data. The implications here are large. Who owns that data? Who controls access to it? What about the US HIPAA rules, Title II of which requires the establishment of national standards for electronic health care transactions.

Samsung is treading on the edge of the deep water here. It’ll be interesting to watch this industry evolve, especially if and when Apple steps into the fray.

Last week, we wrote about driverless car testing coming to California’s public roads this September 16th. Part of the approved legislation is this language:

A manufacturer shall not permit any of its autonomous vehicles to be operated on public roads in California when the operator is not seated in the vehicle’s driver seat and either: monitoring its operations and able to take over physical control of the vehicle; or, in physical control of the vehicle.

Google just released a video of their driverless car concept, tested for the first time with people outside of Google. The video is clearly a marketing piece, a bit treacly-sweet for my taste, but worth watching anyway, if only to see how far this project has come.

One thing that struck me was the lack of any form of physical override. No steering wheel, no brake pedal. Obviously, these things won’t be necessary in a driverless car, but it seems to me, this car does not meet the requirement for an operator to be able to “take over physical control of the vehicle”. Just an observation.

Personally, I would love to test drive one of these babies. The whole idea of a self-driving car fascinates me. But I think the path to driverless cars will be bumpy and, until all the bugs are worked out, absolutely requires a steering wheel and brake.

Yesterday was a huge day for Apple, centered around the announcement that Apple was buying Beats.

As that announcement was making its way around the world, Apple Senior VP Eddie Cue and and newly minted Apple employee Jimmy Iovine spent the day at the Code conference, talking Beats, AppleTV, the Steve Jobs legacy, and lots more.

Here’s a link to a liveblog of the talk. Well worth the read. Hat tip to Re/code’s Peter Kafka for an excellent job keeping up with all the action on stage.

There’s a lot of interesting discussion here. One in particular was Eddie Cue talking to Walt Mossberg about Apple TV. Eddie Cue said that the current TV experience sucks.

Walt: But why haven’t you given us a TV that doesn’t suck?

Cue: “TV is a hard problem to solve.” No global standards, lots of rights issues. “It’s a complicated landscape to solve.”

Walt: Is it an issue of wanting to do both hardware and programming?

Cue: I’m not going into details. “The problems aren’t complicated. Solving them is complicated, because there are lots of parties involved.” Music is much easier, because rights are pretty much set at this point. TV isn’t there.

Interesting insight. Both music and TV deal with rights issues. The music business tended toward a centralized rights system. TV did not.

Another part of the discussion I found fascinating is shown in the video below, centered on the question of Apple’s cultural shift now that Steve Jobs is no longer there. Has there been a cultural reset?

Apple’s history in music began with selling Macs to musicians. That remains important to us today, but we also bring music to hundreds of millions of customers with iTunes, which is at the forefront of the digital music revolution. Music holds a special place in our hearts at Apple, and we know that we can make an even bigger contribution to something that is so important to our society. That’s why we have kept investing in music and why we’re bringing together these extraordinary teams — so we can continue to create the most innovative music products and services in the world.

“The whole idea of MacTech Conference is to allow members of the Apple community to meet and exchange ideas,” says Edward Marczak, Conference Chair and Executive Editor of MacTech Magazine. “This will be spurred on by presentations from some of the best and well-known experts in the community.”

This is the conference’s 5th year.

That’s an incredible performance.

Keep in mind, there are two big events next week. First and foremost, there’s WWDC. But let’s not forget about the 7-way stock split that kicks in next week. Perhaps both of these things are already built-in to this run-up, perhaps not. Time will tell.

If there’s one thing I pulled from this map, it’s how incredibly expensive it is to live in California.

Amazon is pathetic in this respect. The company always comes out with statements about how many Kindles they sold, but provide nothing to back it up. The press is partly responsible for letting them get away with it, but you can’t claim that news coverage is unfair if you’re not willing to comment.

Kirk McElhearn walks through the various steps of optimizing the position of your computer speakers. Much of this was new to me, good stuff to know for anyone with any kind of speakers, whether they be for a computer, TV, or for your home recording studio.

Wikipedia is an incredible resource. The problem is, many people treat it as gospel.

The open-access nature has “raised concern” among doctors about its reliability, as it is the sixth most popular site on the internet, the US authors of the research, published in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association with the guide of joint pain treatment croydon, said.

Up to 70% of physicians and medical students use the tool, they say.

If Wikipedia was regularly vetted for mistakes, or had editing limited to trusted experts in specific fields, this might not be a problem.

They printed off the articles on 25 April 2012 to analyse, and discovered that 90% of the entries made statements that contradicted latest medical research.

To be fair, this doesn’t mean that 90% of the information is wrong. It means that there are a lot of errors mixed in with the good info. And let’s not forget that even the professionals get it wrong sometimes.

Point is, recognize that before you have a full-blown panic attack over something you read in Wikipedia, you might want to check with your doctor first.

Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg kicked off the annual Code Conference by interviewing Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. I found the interview both fascinating and revealing. Fascinating because of the tidbits that Swisher and Mossberg crowbarred out of Nadella, and revealing in that I really didn’t get a sense of vision from Nadella. To me, he had a great opportunity to lay out his grand vision for his company, to pontificate a bit, but instead, he looked clenched, close-mouthed, and a bit uncomfortable. See the video below for the highlights.

I also enjoyed this article about Gwyneth Paltrow’s speech at Code.

Her topic — which she had talked about with Re/code earlier, as well — was the “objectification and dehumanization” of anonymous Internet comments. Or, she said, how it feels to be “a person in the culture that people want to harm.”

“We can momentarily anesthetize ourselves by focusing on someone else’s life, get a nice hot shot of schadenfreude and keep going, but how does this serve us?”

Yesterday, we posted about the wave of Find My iPhone ransom hacks reported in Australia. From the post:

There is conjecture that the hackers have access to some recently stolen eBay passwords and that the victims have the same password on both eBay and for their Apple ID. Regardless of whether this is true or not, this is a pointed example of why you should not reuse passwords.

This morning, Apple made a statement that lent some credence to the password reuse theory:

Apple takes security very seriously and iCloud was not compromised during this incident. Impacted users should change their Apple ID password as soon as possible and avoid using the same user name and password for multiple services. Any users who need additional help can contact AppleCare or visit their local Apple Retail Store.

Also, the ransom attack affected customers in New Zealand, Canada and the US, as well as in Australia.

AMC, perhaps best known for shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and The Walking Dead, has a new show about to hit the small screen. Halt and Catch Fire is a very loose adaptation of the founding of Compaq Computer, the first company to truly reverse engineer the IBM PC.

The pilot is available online and premieres this weekend.

But this post is really about the true story of a daring group of Texas Instruments employees who decided to take on IBM, at the time a hulking corporate behemoth that was as big a player as there was in the fledgling tech universe, with the hottest product as well.

Follow the link and you can listen to the story, told by Brian McCullough on the excellent Internet History Podcast, or read through the narrative, if that’s more your thing. An exciting tale, well told.

Maybe it’s just me, but I always like seeing what new blogging tools are available. Like a lot of things in technology, sometimes it’s the fresh faces that do things right.

Take a listen to the samples and you’ll see how important microphone choice and placement is to your sound.

We’ve become aware of some unauthorized access to our systems and internal company data and we wanted to let you know the steps we’re taking in response. As soon as we were aware of this issue we immediately launched an investigation. Information security and data protection are of great importance to us at Spotify and that is why I’m posting today.

Our evidence shows that only one Spotify user’s data has been accessed and this did not include any password, financial or payment information. We have contacted this one individual. Based on our findings, we are not aware of any increased risk to users as a result of this incident.

Interestingly, it’s only Android users that will have to take any steps here. No action is required for iOS or Windows Phone users.

Now this is great news. I’ll be there, but having the video available for everyone is great.

The new version of PCalc for iOS now shares the same core calculator code as PCalc 4 on OS X. There are a lot of updated features in this release.

The Financial Times reported [paywall] that Apple will push for Jetsons style home automation in next week’s WWDC reveal. Whether or not there is any truth to this conjecture, the home automation/internet of things space is maturing rapidly.

One in five adult American internet users already has a device at home that connects the physical environment to the internet, according to a Forrester Research report (paywall) out last week. As many as two-thirds would install such a device if it helps cut energy bills (think Nest, the internet-connected thermostat recently acquired by Google) or improve security (like the Dropcam cameras that provide a live video feed from your home to your phone). And according to the grandly named State of the Smart Home (pdf, p.9) survey published recently by iControl Networks—a company that provides connected-home services to broadband providers—fully 40% of respondents think they will be able to send text messages to their home appliances within a couple of years.

Good read. Especially if Apple does have some home automation up its sleeves.

Used to be you could ask for a refund on an iOS or Mac app and still get updates for that app. This policy has changed. Sounds logical to me.

Sydney Morning Herald:

One iPhone user, a Fairfax Media employee in Sydney, said she was awoken at 4am on Tuesday to a loud “lost phone” message that said “Oleg Pliss” had hacked her phone. She was instructed to send $50 to a PayPal account to have it unlocked.

There is conjecture that the hackers have access to some recently stolen eBay passwords and that the victims have the same password on both eBay and for their Apple ID. Regardless of whether this is true or not, this is a pointed example of why you should not reuse passwords.

“It’s quite possible this is occurring by exploiting password reuse,” Mr Hunt said. “Regardless of how difficult someone believes a password is to guess, if it’s been compromised in another service and exposed in an unencrypted fashion, then it puts every other service where it has been reused at risk. Of course it also suggests that two-factor authentication was likely not used as the password alone wouldn’t have granted the attacker access to the iCloud account.”

Two-factor authentication is critical. If you have not set it up, here’s the place to start. [Via MacRumors]

Pixelmator 3.2 Sandstone features an all-new Repair Tool. Redeveloped from the inside-out, the new Repair Tool is built on breakthrough technologies that enable the removal of unwanted objects or image imperfections with an unsurpassed level of quality and precision. The new version also brings 16-bits per channel support to the Mac. With 16-bits per channel support, you have more color data to work with and greatly reduce the risk of color banding. In addition, with Lock Layers you can simply lock certain layers to protect their content from any further changes so that you can freely edit the rest of your composition.

Wirecutter:

Readers often want to know: Why don’t they ever seem to get our recommendation? In general, it’s a price vs. performance issue, and often they don’t measure up to their competition. But there are a lot of specific reasons, too. So, to better address the frequently asked questions of Beats by Dre, we thought we’d talk you through each model, what you might be looking for when you first consider it, and then why we’d put our hard-earned cash somewhere else.

Some great advice here about the various alternatives if you don’t want to buy Beats.