Quartz:

“What Google really wants is for everybody to be signed in to their Google accounts all the time,” a Google insider told me in passing last month.

This change affects only Apple users who have upgraded to iOS 7, the latest version—but that’s 85% of iOS devices. They no longer have the ability to remain anonymous as they watch videos on YouTube or navigate their cities using Google Maps.

“Don’t be evil” indeed.

I didn’t ask for games. I didn’t ask for photos. I asked for a streaming media solution that could do things right: Something easy to pick up, simple to use, and something that actually made the experience of playing and navigating through multimedia, dare I say it, fun.

Amazon promised all of the above with Fire TV, which the company unveiled Wednesday at an event in New York City. Unfortunately, the device doesn’t live up to its own hype. Perhaps Amazon’s homegrown solution was a bit premature and its ambitions too lofty, because while Fire TV can do almost everything, little of it is done right.

Ouch.

I remember the first time I saw the X Games on TV. Snowboarding? On TV? It just seemed odd. But now snowboarding has become mainstream, a big draw in the Winter Olympics.

Turns out, this same thing is happening with video games. Though I shudder to think that video games will ever make its way into the Olympics, there is no doubt that watching other people play video games has also gone mainstream.

Ever hear of the term Let’s Play? Let’s Play videos allow you to watch someone else play a video game. To get a sense of how huge Let’s Play has become, go to YouTube and search for Let’s Play. Scroll through the many, many videos and check out the number of views. More than a million views for a single Let’s Play video is actually quite common.

To me, the linked article is just the tip of the iceberg. In other words, I think the 71 million number is way low.

Molly Wood, of the New York Times, talking about your search history:

YOUR search history contains some of the most personal information you will ever reveal online: your health, mental state, interests, travel locations, fears and shopping habits.

And that is information most people would want to keep private. Unfortunately, your web searches are carefully tracked and saved in databases, where the information can be used for almost anything, including highly targeted advertising and price discrimination based on your data profile.

She suggests that you visit this page to visit your history and, if you choose, erase it.

Google makes it easy to find your personal web history, manage it and even delete it. Just go to http://google.com/history and log in to your Google account. There, you will see your entire history and can browse it by category. For example, in the last month, I’ve done image searches for Gal Gadot (who will play the new Wonder Woman), “pointy nail trend” and “Wayne Rooney hair transplant,” plus a few more intelligent things, I’m sure.

Trouble is, many Google account users might not have access to their Google search history. Go ahead and click the link. If your history comes up, no need to keep reading. But if you get a message that says, “We are sorry, but you do not have access to this service”, read on.

Turns out that Google has a setting that enables web history. If you use Google Accounts to enable your own Google-backed domain, history is likely to be disabled for everyone in your domain. If you want to enable your search history, take a read through this support page for some suggestions on ways to enable your Google history. This particular post worked for me. It’s a little tricky and depends on your setup.

My guess is, Apple would not do things this way.

Ah, another patent troll success story.

Follow the headline link for a wealth of data on app sales from the iOS and Mac App Stores, Google Play, Amazon, Windows Phone and PC. For eBooks, there are numbers for Apple iBooks and Kindle. This data has been available for years and is well known in the developer community, but not so well known in the general tech community.

Where does App Annie get its data? This article, though a bit dated (from May, 2012), gives a good sense of things, at least from the iOS side:

The firm offers a sales analytics tool for developers that both gathers their sales numbers and processes them. Indeed, App Annie’s analytics tool is used by over 150,000 apps and, in particular, over 40 percent of the top 100 publishers by revenue.

Once a developer connects their App Annie account with their iTunes Connect account, the sales data is automatically downloaded and processed.

While App Annie keeps the data from that tool completely anonymous, it does combine all the download and revenue data it has access to together to build a global model of sales.

After a nearly blemish-free record that culminated in a $3 billion acquisition by Google, Nest today issued a surprising halt to sales of Protect, its gesture-controlled smoke alarm. One of the device’s key features was that you could wave at it to turn it off. Turns out, sometimes people wave their arms around when there’s a fire in the house, too. Thus, as CEO Tony Fadell put it, “This could delay the alarm going off if there was a real fire.” Oops.

“Without getting into counsel’s discussions, I can tell you that as a rule, the White House objects to attempts to use the president’s likeness for commercial purposes, and we certainly object in this case,” he said.

Fucking morons at Samsung.

Priceonomics:

Susan Kare “was the type of kid who always loved art.” As a child, she lost herself in drawings, paintings, and crafts; as a young woman, she dove into art history and had grandeur dreams of being a world-renowned fine artist.

But when a chance encounter in 1982 reconnected her with an old friend and Apple employee, Kare found herself working in a different medium, with a much smaller canvas — about 1,024 pixels. Equipped with few computer skills and lacking any prior experience with digital design, Kare proceeded to revolutionize pixel art.

Kare is a legend and I never tire of reading or hearing about her story.

When Amazon introduced the Fire TV yesterday, much was made about the ability to do voice search on the device. In the linked post, Kirk McElhearn walks through the process of doing the same thing on Apple TV, using the iOS Remote app. Cool beans.

This looks really cool. It even generates the files needed for Xcode on export—there’s a public beta available for download.

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) kicks off on June 2nd, runs through June 6th, at its usual spot in Moscone West in San Francisco.

Developers can apply for tickets via the WWDC website (developer.apple.com/wwdc) now through Monday, April 7 at 10:00 a.m. PDT, and tickets will be issued to attendees through random selection. Developers will know their status by Monday, April 7 at 5:00 p.m. PDT. There will also be 200 Student Scholarships available, giving students around the world the chance to earn a free ticket (developer.apple.com/wwdc/students). This year the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) and its alliance partners will help promote scholarships to female engineers and coders.

Sign up. Hope to see you there!

This is pretty amazing.

So, one afternoon in October of 1999, Danielson took a chance and told Chase about her car-sharing idea. Chase was enthusiastic, but she wanted to make sure her husband would be okay with her taking on such a big project. That night she went home, talked to him, and decided to go ahead. Within a few days Chase and Danielson had their first official Zipcar business meeting.

Today, Zipcar — which is still headquartered in Boston — has offices in more than 26 American cities and 860,000 members across the US, Austria, Canada, Spain, and the UK. And the company’s profile only grew when car-rental giant Avis bought Zipcar for $491 million in January 2013. But in fact, both founders left the company more than 10 years ago, as power struggles and disputes prevented both Chase and Danielson from seeing their shared vision through. Now 56, Danielson hasn’t spoken to Chase in more than a decade.

Imagine sitting back and watching your brainchild explode in popularity – without you.

A new breed of scammer now lifts your online photos to create a fake online identity, using your real name. For example, they might use your photos to create a Facebook account, using your name. Someone who knows you might search for you, see the pictures, invite the fake account into a friendship, setting themselves up for a scam.

The scammers obviously know who you are, and block you from these accounts making it difficult for you to detect.

This is a fascinating read.

Good side-by-side comparisons in this LA Times piece. You might also want to take a look at this comparison from Forbes.

I’d also keep Microsoft’s Xbox One in mind as you go through this. There are clearly a number of shared features here.

MG Siegler:

I’m going to try to only respond to email at a set time during each day. I’m going to put an hour (or perhaps two) in my calendar for this at the end of the day. And in that hour (or two), I’m not going to do anything besides email.

It’ll be interesting to see how this experiment goes.

Fascinating case studies from Amazon, Google, Bing, and others.

Mathew Ingram:

Lapham’s Quarterly came up with some relatively ancient examples in a recent post entitled “Going Viral in the 19th Century.” At that time, it was commonplace for newspapers and magazines to include silly or amusing anecdotes, trivia, jokes and bad poetry as a way of lightening up the news. Newspaper editor Frederick Hudson was apparently driven to despair by these light-hearted items, which ran under headings like “Witticisms” or “Oddities.”

I thought this particular review was very interesting because it comes from a company that follows the publishing industry.

Wow, the rest of the companies are pretty pathetic. eBay (6%), Amazon (15%), Twitter (21%), Google (48%) and Facebook (49%).

Because nobody in their right mind would use that piece of shit unless they were getting paid.

According to the CDC, one in 68 children have an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a 30% increase from 1 in 88 two years ago. You can also check out the Autism specific apps for the iPhone and iPad.

Just incredible that they’re in this position.

All the beauty of Fantastical, but now for the iPad. I use it for the Mac and iOS—I beta tested the iPad version and love it.

The Fire TV device will stream Amazon Prime Instant Video titles as well as content from other providers such as Netflix and Hulu. Amazon also bundled games into the device with support for an external $39 Fire game controller. Well-known gaming studios such as Disney, Gameloft, EA, Sega, Ubisoft and Double Fine have partnered with Amazon to bring their titles to the Fire TV device.

Some competition for Apple TV.

So far, there aren’t clear signs of quite what it is that smartwatches and fitness trackers are replacing…

That’s key.

New gestures include left and right swipe to navigate through screens and a three finger tap to share snippets or notes. Improved organization options include reordering of snippet groups via drag and drop and moving snippets between groups. The new snippet group info view includes a setting to turn off expansion of the group’s snippets.

Lots of changes and additions, including being built for iOS 7.

More disruption for the TV industry.

The apocalypse, a behind-the-curtains look at classical music, a no-nonsense Los Angeles police detective standing trial, a family full of secrets, a girl with magic wishes and a boy named Gortimer—these are the intriguing plotlines of the six brand-new original series coming exclusively to Prime Instant Video. Amazon Studios today announced that The After, Bosch, Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street, Mozart in the Jungle, Transparent and Wishenpoof! will become the next Amazon Original Series following rave customer reviews of the pilot episodes.

There’s a lot of good (potentially) stuff here. Wish I had the time to actually watch all this stuff. Sadly, I still haven’t even dug into season 2 of House of Cards.