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.

The million dollar home page was conceived back in 2005 by a student in Wiltshire, England as a way to pay for his education. The idea was, create a single web page, 1,000 by 1,000 pixels, then sell each pixel on the page for $1 each. The hope was, the page would go viral and bring value to the advertising embedded in the page.

As it turns out, the page sold out quickly, and the page did go viral. Every pixel on the page has an embedded link. The folks at Quartz (follow the headline link) revisited the page.

Eight years later, the site still exists, essentially frozen in time. That provides an interesting window into the phenomenon of “link rot,” or hyperlinks that used to work but now point to dead pages. Our analysis found that 22% of the Million Dollar Homepage’s pixels now fail to load a webpage when clicked.

Interesting social experiment, and an interesting read.

These are good tips.

Federico Viticci:

The new related search suggestions mark one of Apple’s first attempts to augment App Store search results with visual semantics for apps. In testing the feature, I was able to get suggestions for specific sub-categories such as “business news” and “video game news”, “writing” and “story ideas”, or “healthy cooking” and “food recipes”; each set of related searches included new results that were more specific and relevant to the suggested search.

I like this. Anything Apple can do to show more relevant results will help them and the user.

From King’s January blog post:

We’ve been the subject of no little scorn for our actions on this front, but the truth is that there is nothing very unusual about trademarking a common word for specific uses. Think of “Time,” “Money,” “Fortune,” “Apple” and “Sun”, to name a few. We are not trying to control the world’s use of the word “Candy;” having a trademark doesn’t allow us to do that anyway. We’re just trying to prevent others from creating games that unfairly capitalise on our success.

Looks like ZeptoLab doesn’t agree with them.

The re/code article (linked via the headline) ends with this:

And one footnote for the cynics: Yes, in addition to putting the spotlight on a notable trademark controversy, this also seems to be a publicity stunt. While Candy Crush Saga has consistently been the No. 1 or 2 top-grossing app on iPhones and iPads for the past 90 days, ZeptoLab’s latest game Cut the Rope 2 has fizzled since launch, peaking at around No. 28 in December and falling since then to as low as No. 358 on iPhone earlier this month.

You can’t make this shit up.

I think this is a logical move on Google’s part. Certainly this will improve the look of Google Glass, but there’s only so much you can do without reducing the footprint of the Glass module itself.

And if the module shrinks to become unnoticeable, that’s another problem entirely. Is that where we’re headed? To an invisible Google Glass?

Last December, publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Penguin settled their eBook price fixing suits. This morning, Amazon sent out their credit notifications. Here’s mine. Interesting that the credit is for “some” of my past Kindle book purchases. I’m assuming that’s because not all of my purchases were from the settling publishers.

!- – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
             Amazon.com
!- – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

eBooks Antitrust Settlement Information

Dear Dave Mark,

Good news! You are entitled to a credit of $xx.xx for some of your past Kindle book purchases. The credit results from legal settlements reached with publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Penguin in antitrust lawsuits filed by State Attorneys General and Class Plaintiffs about the price of eBooks.

You don’t have to do anything to claim your credit, we have already added your credit to your account. We will automatically apply your available credit to your next purchase of a Kindle book or print book sold by Amazon.com, regardless of publisher. The credit applied to your purchase will appear in your order summary. If your account does not reflect this credit, please contact Amazon’s customer service.

For more information about the settlements, please visit www.amazon.com/ebooksettlements

Your credit is valid for one year and will expire after 03/31/2015. If you have not used your credit, we will send you another email 90 days before it expires to remind you that it is still available.

Thanks for being a Kindle customer.

The Amazon Kindle Team

This is incredible. We often talk about how the possibilities of what we can do with an iPad seem endless, but this is a step above.

Matt Gemmell has a really nice piece explaining why he doesn’t post on sites like Medium and instead writes for his own site.

No embed code, so follow the headline link to listen. The hacker talks through the exact process he used to take over Chris Coyier’s web sites.

His fake name is “Earl Drudge”, an anagram of “Drug Dealer”. In early March 2014, he used some social engineering techniques and fake US federal documents to be granted full access to Chris’ servers. After missing the opportunity and a failed retaliation attempt, he posted sensitive personal information of Chris’ onto a site where not only can it never be removed, if it’s attempted to be removed becomes promoted.

Surreal. [Hat tip to Paul Sprangers]

From a Basecamp blog post, in a lull from the denial-of-service attack earlier today:

Criminals attacked the Basecamp network with a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) attack this morning. The attackers tried to extort us for money to make it stop. We refused to give in and worked with our network providers to mitigate the attack the best we could. Then, about two hours after the attack started, it suddenly stopped.

We’ve been in contact with multiple other victims of the same group, and unfortunately the pattern in those cases were one of on/off attacks. So while things are currently back to normal for almost everyone (a few lingering network quarantine issues remain, but should be cleared up shortly), there’s no guarantee that the attack will not resume.

So for the time being we remain on high alert. We’re collaborating with the other victims of the same group and with law enforcement. These criminals are sophisticated and well-armed.

This really sucks.

Digital streams of Morning Edition, All Things Considered and hourly newscasts will be available on a new 24-hour streaming NPR channel on iTunes Radio.

Great news for everyone.

It’s a little game to help you learn CSS selectors. Type in the correct selector to complete each level.

Very nice.