Satya Nadella formally names Scott Guthrie as EVP of Cloud and Enterprise, Phil Spencer boss of all things Xbox, and Stephen Elop, former Nokia CEO, as EVP Microsoft Devices Group.

TechCrunch:

Late last night, a tweet was spread far and wide showing that a DMCA notice had blocked a file from being shared on a Dropbox user’s account.

What was going on? Was Dropbox suddenly doing something sketchy? Were they suddenly lurking around their users’ folders, digging for copyrighted material hiding amongst personal files?

Nope. The system is neither new, nor sketchy. It’s been in place for years.

You may have seen the original tweet fly around on the weekend. As is often the case, if you wait – rather than Chicken Little panic – someone comes up with a good explanation for the “offence”.

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This argument has been going on for a long time and I always find it interesting.

Eat24 is a food delivery service, with a pretty sizable following on Facebook. All that is about to change.

From the Eat24 blog:

Dear Facebook,

Hey. It’s Eat24. Look, we need to talk. This isn’t easy to say since we’ve been together so long, but we need to break up. We’d love to say “It’s not you, it’s us” but it’s totally you. Not to be rude, but you aren’t the smart, funny social network we fell in love with several years back. You’ve changed. A lot.

Eat24 spent years accumulating fans and likes on Facebook and is so upset with changes Facebook is making, they are deleting their entire Facebook presence.

From the linked re/code article:

The crux of the problem lies in a number of changes Facebook is making to its News Feed algorithms, according to recent reports, that when implemented will drastically reduce the number of people who will see a marketer’s posts.

Instead, it’s a way to shift marketers over to actually forking over cash to Facebook by paying to promote their posts to their thousands — or in some cases millions — of followers.

Both the blog post and the re/code article are fascinating reads. They each touch on the issue of Facebook being a huge battleship making a very slow change in direction, from accumulating followers to reaping revenue.

As with any major change, there will be breakage. If Facebook’s new algorithms and revenue model provide value, Facebook will succeed. If not, Facebook will either find a better path or will slowly fade in significance.

New York Times:

Some features in Samsung devices that Apple objects to are part of Google’s Android operating system, by far the most popular mobile operating system worldwide, running on more than a billion devices made by many manufacturers. That means that if Apple wins, Google could have to make changes to critical Android features, and Samsung and other Android phone makers might have to modify the software on their phones.

Given the incredible complexity of bringing a new Android OS to market, and the glacial adoption rates, this could be crushing. But I suspect the change will either be delayed to death, or be solved in a cross-licensing or financial arrangement.

On Thursday, April 3rd, Google will split their stock, creating two stocks, each of which will start at approximately half the current share value. I thought the logic behind the split was interesting.

Via Seeking Alpha (free reg-wall):

The current shares you see trading are Class A. For each Class A share, investors will receive a share of the new Class C stock. If you assume that the market works properly, each of these shares will trade for about $560 post split, based on Friday’s close of $1,120.15.

Class C shares will have no voting rights, which is why Google is doing this. With this move, the goal is to keep co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in control for a longer time period. The two own mostly Class B shares, which contain 10 times the voting power of Class A shares. A recent AP article states that the two own 56% of shareholder votes despite owning less than 15% of stock issued.

Once shares are split, Google can start using the Class C shares for compensation, acquisitions, and other dilutive items. Since these shares contain no voting power, Page and Brin won’t have their voting rights reduced as quickly as they would under the old system. At the end of 2013, according to the 10-K filing, Google had 335.832 million shares outstanding, of which 279.325 million were Class A, and 56.507 million were Class B.

Seems to me, the fact that there will be two different stock classes, one with voting rights and one without, will cause confusion in the market. Why would someone buy Class C shares when they could get Class A voting shares for the same price?The market will correct all this, I suspect, but still, if you have even the teeniest interest in the stock market, an upcoming learning experience.

She left behind a remarkable body of work — from her poignant diaries to her magnificent essays to her little-known children’s books to “the longest and most charming love letter in literature” — and a cohort of heartbroken friends, but the most stirring thing she left behind was her suicide letter to her husband Leonard.

Great timeline on the Strat. I would love to have one of the 60th anniversary models.

I don’t find this worrisome, since if someone wants access to a Tesla S, they’d find a way to break in. But I do find it interesting.

Tesla Motors Inc’s electric vehicles can be located and unlocked by criminals remotely simply by cracking a six-character password using traditional hacking techniques, according to newly released research.

It’s not like someone could take the car without the fob or stop the car while you are driving it. Both of those things would obviously be real issues for the owner.

Users are required to set up an account secured by a six-character password when they order the car. This password is used to unlock a mobile phone app and to gain access to the user’s online Tesla account.

The freely available mobile app can locate and unlock the car remotely, as well as control and monitor other functions. The password is vulnerable to several kinds of attacks similar to those used to gain access to a computer or online account, Dhanjani said.

An attacker might guess the password via a Tesla website, which Dhanjani says does not restrict the number of incorrect login attempts.

This wouldn’t stop me from buying a Tesla, but I do hope they give this problem some thought.

Online Sports Marketing Guy:

Have you ever wondered how much money you make compared to a Major League Baseball player? The interactive visualization can be used to compare your salary and the average US worker’s salary to any MLB player across several different statistics from the 2013 season.

Take my advise – do not do this. It’s way too depressing.

From FastCoDesign:

Next Thursday, Wikipedia will launch a redesign that’s almost impossibly large in scope, scaling across 32,533,899 pages in 287 languages. But admittedly, it’ll take a sharp eye to notice that font size is larger, or that the section headers will render in authoritative, old media serif (think Georgia) while body copy will render in streamlined sans-serif (think Helvetica).

This retooling is the tip of a very large iceberg:

Those bigger issue stem from a daunting problem: Wikipedia is 100% open source and free for the world to use. But there is no free and open typeface that can render in all of the world’s languages. For those of us in the Western world, it’s not much of a problem. We’re privileged, using operating systems like OS X that license fonts for us. Plus, our Latin-based scripts are represented in the vast majority of typefaces, while most written language is actually not Latin-based. Consider Chinese or Navajo.

Historically, this has created a design culture of the haves and the have nots, in which the look of Wikipedia was subject to the whims of whatever your software providers had already licensed. When rendering its pages in your browser, all Wikipedia would ask for was “sans-serif”–basically, give me anything you’ve got that’s sans-serif! As you might imagine, this has been a mess.

Whether you agree with the phrases “privileged” and “have and have nots”, the underlying problem is real and goes well beyond Wikipedia, to the core of the web and all manner of global publishing.

From the Harvard Business Review:

This isn’t your typical employee survey. Since we know that the way each employee experiences work is determined by innate characteristics (nature) and his or her surroundings (nurture), the gDNA survey collects information about both. Here’s how it works: a randomly selected and representative group of over 4,000 Googlers completes two in-depth surveys each year. The survey itself is built on scientifically validated questions and measurement scales. We ask about traits that are static, like personality; characteristics that change, like attitudes about culture, work projects, and co-workers; and how Googlers fit into the web of relationships around all of us. We then consider how all these factors interact, as well as with biographical characteristics like tenure, role and performance. Critically, participation is optional and confidential.

What do we hope to learn? In the short-term, how to improve wellbeing, how to cultivate better leaders, how to keep Googlers engaged for longer periods of time, how happiness impacts work and how work impacts happiness.

Interesting. There’s potential to help fine-tune work environments to make employees happier and, presumably, more productive. There’s a big brother aspect to this. Hopefully, the “Don’t be evil” motto is still in effect at Google.

Interestingly, the exclamation point at the end of the word is part of Jeopardy!’s official name. Here, see?

Jeopardy! will turn 50 this year and the version hosted by Alex Trebek will turn 30. Ken Jennings, one of the all time biggest winners on any game show ever, won more than $3 million on the show. In the linked post, Jennings interview the mother and creator of Jeopardy, Julann Griffin. Julan was married to Merv Griffin, who created Wheel of Fortune. Just saying.

My favorite bit:

Merv and I were coming back from my folks’ place in Ironwood, Michigan and we were going to our home in New York and he pulled out a paper with some clips and notes and things on it. And I said, “What is that, another game show?” and he said, “Yeah.” And I said, “I’m getting so tired of these game shows with people jumping around and doing pantomimes and acting like fools. What happened to the knowledge-based games?” And he said, “You know, since The $64,000 Question, the network won’t let you do those anymore, because they suspect you of giving them the answers.” So I said, “Why don’t you give them the answers and make people come up with the questions?” And he said. “Like what?” I said, “Okay, the answer is ’5,280.’” He said, “The question is ‘How many feet in a mile?’” I say, “The answer is ’52 Wistful Vista.’” He says, “The question is, ‘Where did Fibber McGee and Molly live?’” I don’t know if you know about Fibber McGee. Of course you do, you know everything. Fiber McGee and Molly was a radio show and they lived at 52 Wistful Vista and evey time they opened the closet everything fell out for about five minutes.

I said, “Okay, the answer is ‘Kathy Fiscus’?” and he said, “What is the name of the little girl that fell in the well in the 1940s?’” It was a big event because it was on radio and people stayed up and listened to see if she was being saved. She wasn’t, incidentally. But it was one of those stories of the little girl who fell in the well. So anythow, we kept going and I kept throwing him answers and he kept coming up with questions. And by the time we landed the plane, we had an idea for a show.

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Leo Fender enabled us to make beautiful music.

Fast Company:

Decluttr buys anything–because that’s their business model. They will literally buy any CD, DVD, or video game you want to mail them. And they pay the postage, too.

Might be a way to get rid of all that old media you have no use for.

Priceonomics:

Perhaps no other creation in history has navigated the divide between terror and unadulterated joy as skillfully as the roller coaster.

Since these “scream machines” were introduced nearly 250 years ago, they have brought millions to tears in all capacities. As one roller coaster designer told us, anonymously: “My job is basically to get as close to making people poop their pants as possible, then have them step off in ecstasy and want to go again.”

I’ve always loved roller coasters. One of my biggest regrets while I was living in the US was not getting to the sixteen roller coasters of Cedar Point, Ohio.

Back in 2008, Google started scanning and archiving old newspapers, making the archives searchable. From the original announcement:

Today, we’re launching an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives. Let’s say you want to learn more about the landing on the Moon. Try a search for [Americans walk on moon] on Google News Archive Search, and you’ll be able to find and read an original article from a 1969 edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

This archive has grown to be quite large over the years. Pick a historic event and try your hand at a search. For example, I did this search:

president garfield assassination

The first result was a newspaper article from July 2nd, 1881. The same day he was shot. I find that incredible. Wikipedia is a great resource, but there’s something about reading about a current event as it was reported.

[Hat tip to Follow CV]

Qi Lu is an Executive Vice President at Microsoft and runs Bing Search, Skype, and Office. Office for iPad was the result of his group’s efforts. This interview was interesting, but I thought the real value was to get to know him.

This bit was notable:

Q: Some of the Mac people have been working on Office for iPad. We haven’t seen a new version of Office for Mac in a while.

A: We are definitely working on a new version of Office for Mac.

Part of my hesitance to sign up for Office 365 is that the apps I use, Excel and Word, have not been updated. So I’d be paying for the right to use those apps on my iPad. Not enough of a pull. But if Office for Mac was updated, that might get me off the dime.

Just start hitting keys (turn sound on first). This is a lot of fun. The only thing I with the developer would have done is make the sounds polyphonic. In other words, if I hit two (or more) keys at the same time, I’d like to hear their sounds simultaneously.

Still, this was interesting and inspiring.

UPDATE: Even more fun on the iPhone and iPad. The interface is all touch (of course) and multiple touches play simultaneously. Huzzah!!! [Hat tip to Kip Beatty]

This is an incredibly clever idea that makes sense. Just took a teenage science whiz to think of it.

Collecting random samples of teachers’ handouts, Suvir concentrated on the most commonly used characters (e, t, a, o and r). First, he charted how often each character was used in four different typefaces: Garamond, Times New Roman, Century Gothic and Comic Sans. Then he measured how much ink was used for each letter, using a commercial tool called APFill® Ink Coverage Software.

Next he enlarged the letters, printed them and cut them out on cardstock paper to weigh them to verify his findings. He did three trials for each letter, graphing the ink usage for each font. From this analysis, Suvir figured out that by using Garamond with its thinner strokes, his school district could reduce its ink consumption by 24%, and in turn save as much as $21,000 annually.

He applied his logic on a larger scale with one of the biggest ink consumers in the world, the US government. Genius. If this bears out (and it sure seems like it should), this kid should get a medal and a full ride to the college of his choice.

An interesting take on the release of Office for iPad.

From Seeking Alpha (free reg-wall):

Neither [Microsoft] nor Apple could be happy about the progress Google has made in recent years. Google’s Android mobile operating system is dominating the global smartphone market, and Google Drive is threatening Microsoft Office. Google Drive is a free to use Office competitor that also grants users up to 15GB of free cloud storage, a massive perk. Since both Apple and Microsoft have had their business threatened by the growth of Google, teaming up finally makes sense. To be clear, Apple is going to take a 30% cut of the Office iPad sales, but this move is bigger than that. Microsoft has finally realized that it’s about time to move away from its dependence on Windows and partner up with its old rival.

More to the point, Samsung’s series of iPad-bashing commercials has a real problem now. The spots focus on features Samsung tablets bring to the table that competing tablets (iPad, Kindle, Surface) do not. Fair enough.

But Office for iPad is going to be a tough selling point for Samsung to ignore, and easy fodder for future commercials, should Microsoft or Apple choose to go that route.

And on the math of Office 365:

The upside for this transformation by Microsoft is that at $100 per year instead of $50 every 6 years on average, it only needs to retain 1 of every 12 customers to make break even even if it loses 100% of its PC sales, which won’t happen. For prosumers and enterprise customers who rely heavily on Microsoft Excel and Powerpoint, the Office 365 subscription on iOS will make sense. But don’t expect too many casual consumers to fork over $100 per year for Word on their iPad. There’s really no point when iWork and Google Drive are both free.

I agree. I think Microsoft should give every iPad owner a free 1-year subscription to Office 365, along with their free iPad apps. The gap between something already installed and working (and free, since I already own it) and the pain of a new install that I have to pay for and deal with is pretty big. But free would tempt me.

Heidi Roizen has long time ties with the Apple universe, including a stint as Apple’s VP of World Wide Developer Relations from 1996-97.

Shortly into my pitch, Steve took the contract from me and scanned down to the key term, the royalty rate. I had pitched 15%, our standard. Steve pointed at it and said, “15%? That is ridiculous. I want 50%.”

I was stunned. There was no way I could run my business giving him 50% of my product revenues. I started to defend myself, stammering about the economics of my side of the business. He tore up the contract and handed me the pieces. “Come back at 50%, or don’t come back,” he said.

This is a great story.

[Via iOS Dev Weekly]

U.S. District Judge William Orrick in San Francisco said that the Canadian mobile phone maker had established a “likelihood” of proving that Typo infringed its patents, while mentioning that Typo had not sufficiently challenged the patents in question.

That’s good. There’s little doubt that Seacrest’s company infringed on the patents.

Brad Smith, General Counsel & Executive Vice President, Legal & Corporate Affairs, Microsoft:

Effective immediately, if we receive information indicating that someone is using our services to traffic in stolen intellectual or physical property from Microsoft, we will not inspect a customer’s private content ourselves. Instead, we will refer the matter to law enforcement if further action is required.

Mighty good of them.