Journalists spotted that ministers at a cabinet meeting were no longer using Apple tablets, and minister Nikolai Nikiforov confirmed the changeover “took place not so long ago.”

He said the ministers’ new Samsungs were “specially protected devices that can be used to work with confidential information.”

Something smells fishy here.

Nikiforov denied that Russia was clamping down on US technology in response to Western sanctions imposed over its takeover of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula.

Ah, that was it. Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck. Political bullshit is what it is.

There is a ton of great data to sift through. Amazing how big an impact Flappy Bird had on the App Store.

To cherry pick a few comments, there’s this:

Even though it was only available for nine days in February, Flappy Bird accumulated a huge number of downloads in that time, taking it to the top of the monthly rankings on both iOS and Google Play. However, its influence extended beyond its own rank, as publishers battled to fill the void left in its wake. This was particularly evident on iOS, where an additional four games inspired by the phenomenon appeared in the Top 10.

And this:

Television advertising appears to be becoming an increasingly common marketing channel for mobile game publishers. While successes have been evident in Japan for some time, including titles such as パズル＆ドラゴンズ (Puzzle & Dragons), the practice is now spreading to Western markets. In February, Farm Heroes Saga, Big Fish Casino, and Clash of Clans all saw gains in rankings following TV commercials aired in the United States.

And this:

Despite its shortened stay, Flappy Bird amassed enough downloads to remain in the top spot for monthly downloads on the iOS App Store. Its influence extended much further than that though, with one analysis finding a Flappy Bird-style game being added to the iOS App Store every 24 minutes. Splashy Fish was the most successful of these in terms of downloads, and publisher redBit stated it was being played 250 million times per day. The phenomenon also brought three more similar titles – Ironpants, Fly Birdie, and Flappy Wings – into the Top 10 for February. In addition, another of .Gears Studios’ titles, Super Ball Juggling, extended its strong performance from late January to join the Top 10 in February. Even a month after it was withdrawn, Flappy Bird mania hadn’t subsided – four of the top ten titles by daily downloads in the United States were inspired by the game. For those who missed the original the first time around, there may still be hope – creator Dong Nguyen has suggested that he might restore Flappy Bird to the app stores.

This is absolutely fantastic.

A 22-year-old woman from the Netherlands who suffers from a chronic bone disorder — which has increased the thickness of her skull from 1.5cm to 5cm, causing reduced eyesight and severe headaches — has had the top section of her skull removed and replaced with a 3D printed implant.

How fortunate is this woman that 3D printing technology was available to her surgical team. I can’t get over how cool this is.

You’ll now be able to tag up to 10 people in a tweeted photo:

Tagging people in a picture makes conversations around photos fun and easy. And tagging doesn’t affect character count in the Tweet — you can tag up to 10 people in a photo and still have all 140 characters at your disposal, making it easier to connect with your friends. If you’re the one being tagged, you’ll get a notification. You can adjust notifications, as well as who can tag you, in your Settings. To learn more, read this Help Center article.

You can also attach up to 4 photos in a single tweet:

And now, you can also share a series of photos that automatically create a collage. Just tap on a preview to get the full image and slide through the group. The ability to upload multiple photos is starting to roll out today on iPhone, and is coming soon to Android and twitter.com. Whether you’re on iPhone, Android or twitter.com, you can view Tweets with multiple photos.

I’ve tested both of these features on the official Twitter app. They work. Not sure how much work is involved in adding these features in 3rd party apps. Hopefully, the Twitter team gave them some advance notice, so they can roll both features out quickly.

On March 27, 2014, the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that reveals an all-new iPad smart cover configuration that includes a keyboard panel. One of the aspects of this design which differentiates itself from Microsoft’s Surface tablet cover is that Apple’s keyboard has been uniquely designed to double as a multi-touch gesture keyboard eliminating the need for a touchpad.

A user may provide input to iPad by striking the smooth surface overlay above a particular key and provide input to the iPad by sliding gestures.

In order for the keyboard to receive touch input, the keyboard may be configured to detect the location of one or more touches or near touches at the surface of the keys based on measurements of physical phenomena that occur near the surface when those touches or near touches occur.

This is a patent, not a product design, so the implementation details will obviously evolve from what’s laid out in the patent drawings. But I like the premise, the idea that you can gesture on the surface of the keyboard itself.

We were excited to see what we could do with iBeacons at the show. We focused on using iBeacons in a way that was both exciting and appropriate for the event. We settled on check-in to speed up people getting their badges and a game to help people investigate the show floor and highlight how beacons can help explore large environments.

Great to see.

I recently revamped the way I travel, so I found Michael Lopp’s article interesting.

If I just made $2 billion, the last thing I’d be doing is defending the sale—I’d be knee-deep in Heineken bottles.

Clearly, it’s good when price cuts happen, but as noted in the story, this is the 42nd price cut for AWS since its introduction.

In my short time leading BlackBerry…

Blah, blah, blah

But, when curiosity turns to criminality, we must take strong action.

Blah, blah, blah

This may mean you see a few less blog posts with photos and rumors…

Nobody gives a sweet flying shit.

askTog:

Before delving into what an Apple smartwatch might look like, we need to understand why, right now, people not only think they don’t need a smartwatch, they flat-out don’t want a smartwatch.

Long piece on the subject but Tog brings up some interesting points as to what he sees as the advantages and disadvantages of a smart watch.

SFGate:

The first MacWorld in 1985 looked much different than the current incarnation, which peaked with more than 50,000 attendees at Moscone Center several years ago.

The show starts this week and, while it is the barest shadow of what it was in its glory days, it’s still a show I miss going to if only for the friends and colleagues who are there.

It’s always important to understand what happened in attacks like Basecamp suffered through.

Many of you may already know Rams’ principles, but if not, it’s worth a read. Note the similarities to what Jony Ive designs for Apple.

If you ask me, that is the real story here — realization that there is a glass ceiling to advertising especially as we shift gears and move away from the old desktop advertising ecosystem to a smaller, pocketable ecosystem that is less prone to cheap optimization tricks and is also limited by available attention…

I buy that argument, but Zuck said they don’t plan to make money from selling the Oculus hardware and would use it for advertising and virtual goods. If Facebook is looking for additional revenue streams, I’m not sure they found it.

Modine’s award-winning diary becomes an immersive audiobook experience performed with original music and sound effects.

There are some great rewards if you pledge to support this project.

When you invest in a Kickstarter, you are helping a company get their legs, giving them the money they need to achieve stability with zero risk. The risk is foisted onto those initial investors. Is that a fair trade?

Back in August, 2012, Oculus launched a Kickstarter with a goal of raising $250,000. To date, the Kickstarter raised more than $2.4 million. Since then, the company has succeeded wildly, getting purchased by Facebook for $2 billion.

So what percentage of the company do those first investors get? You know, the ones who took the initial risk?

Yeah, I know, they weren’t truly investors. There were no promises made, no shares traded hands, no documents signed. I guess the lesson is, before you sign up for a Kickstarter, realize that you may be using your hard earned dollars to stepladder some CEO to future riches. The risk is yours to take.

Caveat emptor.

Yesterday, we posted about Facebook buying virtual reality company Oculus VR. Before that deal, Minecraft was exploring a deal to bring a version of the incredibly popular gaming environment to Oculus. But once the Facebook deal was announced, Markus Persson, Minecraft creator, tweeted this:

We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out.

He then followed up with a blog post that went into more detail.

Of course, they wanted Minecraft. I said that it doesn’t really fit the platform, since it’s very motion based, runs on java (that has a hard time delivering rock solid 90 fps, especially since the players build their own potentially hugely complex levels), and relies a lot on GUI. But perhaps it would be cool to do a slimmed down version of Minecraft for the Oculus. Something free, similar to the Minecraft PI Edition, perhaps? So I suggested that, and our people started talking to their people to see if something could be done.

And then, not two weeks later, Facebook buys them.

Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts. Facebook is not a game tech company. Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers. People have made games for Facebook platforms before, and while it worked great for a while, they were stuck in a very unfortunate position when Facebook eventually changed the platform to better fit the social experience they were trying to build.

Don’t get me wrong, VR is not bad for social. In fact, I think social could become one of the biggest applications of VR. Being able to sit in a virtual living room and see your friend’s avatar? Business meetings? Virtual cinemas where you feel like you’re actually watching the movie with your friend who is seven time zones away?

But I don’t want to work with social, I want to work with games.

These are pretty huge price drops. Google just became very competitive with Amazon on cloud services. Hardware prices have been plummeting, but cloud service prices have been slow to come down.

Even without the sustained use discounts, Google’s pricing now undercuts that of its competitors for on-demand pricing and is often lower than Amazon’s EC2 prices for reserved instances, too.

So far, Google, Amazon and Microsoft have always matched one another’s cloud-hosting prices, and chances are, we will see price drops from Google’s competitors in the coming weeks, too. Amazon, of course, is hosting its own cloud-centric event later this week and we will likely hear more from them about pricing, too.

Always good to have competition.

To go along with the Greg Christie interview, the Wall Street Journal also ran this small piece that focused on the room in which the iPhone was developed and tested.

This is a system Apple rigged together to run early prototypes of its iPhone software in 2006. It tethered a plastic touch-screen device – code-named “Wallaby” – to an outdated Mac to simulate the slower speeds of a phone hardware.

The New York Times plans to launch two new subscription products on April 2: NYT Now, a standalone iOS app that costs $8 a month, and Times Premier, which the company describes as a “premium subscription service designed for The Times enthusiast.”

The premium product will cost $45 every four weeks.

Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Christie’s team devised many iPhone features, such as swiping to unlock the phone, placing calls from the address book, and a touch-based music player. The iPhone ditched the keyboard then common on advanced phones for a display that covered the device’s entire surface, and it ran software that more closely resembled personal-computer programs.

Mr. Christie has never publicly discussed the early development of the iPhone. But Apple made him available on the eve of a new patent-infringement trial against Samsung Electronics Co. to highlight a key element of its legal strategy—just how innovative the iPhone was in 2007, when it arrived.

Interesting to see Apple allowing more execs to talk to the media and opening the kimono a little bit more. (Story is behind a paywall but if you search for the headline in Google, an online free version is available)

Zuckerberg said Facebook was not interested in becoming a hardware company and did not intend to try to make a profit from sales of the devices over the long term. Instead, he said Facebook’s software and services would continue to serve as the company’s underlying business, potentially generating revenue on Oculus devices through everything from advertising to sales of virtual goods.

Personally, I find this purchase odd.

Some good thoughts from Om Malik.

Seems clear they made it. Congrats Apple.

Kaleidoscope is one of the world’s best tools for spotting differences in images and text. 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 felt bad for HTC. I think they made a good product, but didn’t have the marketing budget to compete with Samsung, which meant people didn’t pay much attention. I’m not sure the new phone will change that.

Jim and Dan talk about Google Glass and its myths, escaped water buffalos, Peter Gabriel and his flute, Pandora, Spotify, and iTunes Radio (now with NPR), “The Techtopus”, wage suppression, and more.

2048 is a lovely and addictive game, quite similar to the beautifully designed Threes by Asher Vollmer.

2048 is web based, and has consumed way too much of my time, so like the videotape in the movie The Ring, I know the only escape is for me to pass it on to you.

Again, I’m really sorry.