SI.com:

Bob Paulsen, co-founder of PlayerLync, told SI.com that teams have video and documents sent to their iPads—even when the device is asleep—within minutes after a game ends, allowing them to watch and review without an Internet connection (quite a popular feature for road teams that are sitting on a bus or taking off from a tarmac). Comments and information can easily be added and shared. “Coaches and players insert their own audio, visual, text and clips,” Paulsen says, “and securely send them to one another.”

We see some of this in Apple’s “Your Verse” TV ad.

John Biggs:

If you’ve ever wondered how some videos get popular while others languish in obscurity (or, on the flipside, if you’d like to know how to get some sweet views), look no further than an individual Samsung hired to push their video of a little, walking (Samsung-branded) SD card to social. I’ll refrain from linking to the video as it’s not very exciting.

I really do hate that company.

It would be difficult to choose just one quote from this article. I really enjoyed it.

You don’t need to pack a retail store from floor to ceiling to sell products. I really like the experience, as well.

code:deck is a standard playing card deck sporting a stylish modern design. Each individual card features a code excerpt describing it in one of many programming languages.

These are just great.

Kaleidoscope is one of the world’s best tools for spotting differences in images and text, and now it supports the ignoring of leading, trailing and line-ending whitespace too. Kaleidoscope integrates directly with Git, Subversion, Mercurial, P4, and Bazaar to fit perfectly in your workflow.

I always found many car manufacturers badly lacking in this area.

I’m sure there could be more.

I usually keep my levels at -6db to -10db as well. It’s going to fluctuate during the recording, but I like to leave some headroom.

Sony Corp slashed its earnings guidance for the third time in a year on Thursday to barely 10 percent of its initial outlook as further losses from its PC exit cast a pall over its struggling electronics division.

Harsh.

James Dempsey rounds up a few apps that he really likes on the Mac. I hadn’t heard of a few of these.

Each key is a little OLED screen. I’d imagine you could use the entire keyboard as a single discrete display, or switch keyboards on the fly, to an accounting keyboard, for example.

Fascinating possibilities.

From Quartz:

Facebook’s moves today point to its ambition to become the glue that holds the mobile internet together the same way Google is the glue that holds the web together. Google achieved dominance on the pre-mobile internet world wide web with a similar strategy. Not only did it bring people to the websites via search, it also created a massive data-gathering machine that tracks people across the web and runs AdSense, the web’s biggest ad network.

Facebook made a series of announcements at F8, the Facebook developer’s conference, laying out its agenda to achieve that same position in mobile.

It is arguable that with Applinks (Facebook’s platform for deep-linking), it could wield more power than Google, which makes mobile operating systems and apps but doesn’t have insight into what its users are doing when they’re in other apps.

Facebook certainly has ambition. Seems like they are missing a key ingredient, search. Though they do have the massive postings of their user base to data mine.

Apple offers Pages, Numbers, and Keynotes, counterparts to Microsoft’s recently released Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. As you might expect, Google has now joined the fray with their Google Docs and Google Sheets iOS apps.

From a comment on Google’s official blog:

This whole thing is rather odd. First Google made Docs and Sheets part of Drive. Now it’s breaking them back out into their own standalone apps. Except that they’re still part of Drive as well.

I agree. An odd branding move. Google’s version of Keynote and PowerPoint, Slides, is said to be on its way to iOS soon. [Via 9to5Mac]

Seems Hoskins died yesterday. Best known for Mona Lisa and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, though my personal favorite was his take on Nikita Kruschev in the excellent Enemy at the Gates.

I knew it!

Whether it’s playing “Stairway to Heaven” until your fingers bleed or always finding yourself in the center of a group of people intent on singing “Wagon Wheel,” some things are common to all guitarists.

Including, as it turns out, their brain chemistry.

Fascinating. [Via Brother Stu]

Earlier reports that Google is building a new Silver brand of handsets got a big boost in this report (subscription required). This Tech Crunch article lays out the details.

To me, the biggest impact is this:

The phones would be designed to extend Google’s recent efforts to control its presence on Android devices more than it has in the past, like the mandatory ‘Powered by Android’ logo on boot screens and the folder of Google-created apps. Silver devices will also get more timely Android updates, like Nexus hardware.

Seems like a shot across Samsung’s bow.

In fact, part of the motivation behind Google’s Silver program is said to be winning back more control of Android from Samsung in particular. Reports have long suggested there could be some unease at Google about the amount of influence Samsung has over Android given its dominant global market share.

This move is sure to extend the fragmentation in the Android market, meaning fewer phones will be running the latest and greatest.

Mercury News:

Harold McElhinny, Apple’s lead attorney, urged the jury to side with Apple and order Samsung to pay as much as $2.2 billion in damages for violating the patents on five iPhone and iPad software features, such as slide-to-unlock and auto-word correct. Samsung, Apple estimates, has sold 37 million of the nine smartphone models and one tablet alleged to have copied those patents.

“Apple cannot simply walk away from its inventions,” McElhinny told the jury. “And so, here we are, 37 million acts of infringement later, and we’re counting on you for justice. The size of this illegal (conduct) is beyond comprehension.”

Samsung lawyers, however, again stressed that Apple’s allegations center on Google’s Android technology, which ran the Samsung devices, and that Apple is carrying out late CEO Steve Jobs’ 2010 internal pledge to conduct a “holy war” on the Mountain View search giant.

Hoping for justice here.

Every once in a while in my travels, I come across a place I just have to share with people. I spent the last week in Kilkenny, Ireland, much of it at the Zuni Hotel. This is a quaint place in the center of Kilkenny, close to all of the major sites, pubs and restaurants. The rooms were clean and modern, the restaurant superb, but the friendly, helpful staff really made my stay something to write about—they couldn’t do enough to try and make me comfortable and happy. If you ever go to Kilkenny, do yourself a favor and stay at Zuni.

It’s an interesting list, but I agree with their top choice.

Gerry Conway:

This is a very big deal, because it strikes to the heart of what made Comixology’s app a near-perfect venue for discovering and falling in love with new comics, a venue creators and publishers have been searching for since the collapse of mainstream newsstand distribution in the late 1970s-early ’80s: it destroys the casual reader’s easy access to an impulse purchase. And that’s a terrible development for the future of comics.

There are so many good parts of this article I could have quoted.

Marcin Treder:

Design is not principally measured by a product’s visual appeal; its aesthetic qualities.

It’s also measured by how it was planned and articulated, how it was built, how it functions. It’s about the design’s ability to improve upon the current reality.

It seems to me that it’s the function part that many people often leave out. It matters, a lot.

When Netflix signed their traffic peering deal with Comcast, that was a precedent. This deal with Verizon makes these deals a way of life.

The details of the arrangement are currently confidential. However, they surely must come as a foregone conclusion at least for Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam, who said that he expected to sign a deal with the streaming company days after the Comcast agreement. However, the deal flies in the face of the stance Netflix has thusfar espoused, saying that preferential treatment violates their definition of true and total net neutrality. In an impassioned blog post, CEO Reed Hastings wrote, “The essence of net neutrality is that ISPs such as AT&T and Comcast don’t restrict, influence or otherwise meddle with the choices consumers make.” After the company made what many saw as a Faustian pact with Comcast in February for direct connectivity, Hastings conceded that the company would reluctantly make deals of that kind going forward, while still fighting for net neutrality.

A Faustian bargain indeed.

Bloomberg:

Nokia named Rajeev Suri chief executive officer, picking the head of its networks division to chart the company’s future and forecasting a return to sales growth after selling the mobile-phone business to Microsoft Corp.

The stock jumped the most in six months after Espoo, Finland-based Nokia also said it plans to spend about 5 billion euros ($6.9 billion) on dividends, share buybacks and debt reduction. The appointment of Suri, 46, ends the search for a replacement for Stephen Elop, who returned to Microsoft with the sale of Nokia’s handset division for $7.5 billion.

By choosing Suri, 149-year-old Nokia is intensifying its focus on wireless-network equipment as it faces a new start without the phones that made it famous. Suri, who has run the network unit for four years, needs to challenge larger Ericsson AB (ERICB) and Huawei Technologies Co. to reverse falling equipment revenue, which accounts for about 90 percent of Nokia’s sales.

Samsung is being attacked from both ends. Chinese brands like Huawei (largest telecom equipment maker in the world) are attacking from the low-end and Apple is attacking from the higher end. Tough strategic position.

From AT&T:

AT&T* today announced plans to launch a high-speed 4G LTE-based in-flight connectivity service for airlines and passengers in commercial, business and general aviation. The service, planned to be available as soon as late 2015, will be capable of providing in-flight broadband for customers including fast, reliable Wi-Fi and onboard entertainment.

Looks like a shot across the bow of in-flight internet provider Gogo.

[Via Business Insider]