The NEX band is a wrist band that acts as a hub for clip-on hardware mods that add various notification capabilities. At first blush, this seems like a genius idea. The NEX band tackles some of the same ideas addressed by existing smart bands, but builds in a plug and play extendability.

I can only assume that the appropriate teams at Apple are digging in to this technology with great interest. Fascinating tech.

This story is based on content from Yukari Iwatani Kane’s new book “Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs”.

In her book she says Jobs told his top executives before he died that he had no plan to release a television because it’s a bad business.

Every year Apple hosts a “Top 100” meeting, which gathers the top 100 executives, managers, and employees. As will all things Apple, the top 100 meeting is supposed to be secretive.

Jobs would give people a month’s notice before a top 100 happened. The Apple staff would then be bused to a resort where they would give presentations on Apple’s business. New products were often revealed. No one was to email outsiders, even Apple employees, or tweet or anything while at the meeting.

In 2010, Jobs hosted his final Top 100 meeting. Apple revealed the iPad 2 and its magnetic cover in the meeting. When Jobs did a Q&A on the new iPad, all the executives were fawning over the cover.

“Enough with the f***ing cover!” Jobs finally said. “Can we talk about the iPad?”

At the time Jobs quite sick, and it was apparent. He wasn’t chewing out employees during their presentations like he normally did. He was having trouble walking, and he looked weak.

Yukari reports on the last day of the meeting, Jobs sat in front of the room with everyone and said, “You’ve got Steve Jobs sitting right here. You’re my guys, you can ask me anything you want. I don’t care how dumb it is or how insulting it is. I want to make you all feel comfortable about whatever questions you have about the company.”

One person asked if Apple was going to release a television next. There were already rumors all over the place that it was Apple’s next conquest.

Yukari says “Jobs didn’t hesitate.” He said, “No.”

“TV is a terrible business. They don’t turn over and the margins suck,” said Jobs. (Unlike iPhones which are wildly profitable and replaced every two years, a TV gets replaced every 8 years, and isn’t all that profitable.)

Interesting.

Bummer. I thought this was a cool idea. The #nerdbird flew between Mineta San Jose International Airport and LAX.

Some good food for thought from iMore.com. Even if you are not having specific problems, give this a read. Worth knowing in case it happens to you or someone you know.

Interesting piece from Seeking Alpha (free reg-wall) about the rise of mobile gaming and the projected financial future for Apple and Google.

The real core of the numbers come from the annual App Annie report (free reg-wall) on mobile gaming trends, well worth the read if you are interested in the specifics.

This is a new thread, so check back periodically and contribute your own ideas. Some good suggestions there already.

The list is a long one and includes classics such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Dracula, and In the Court of King Arthur, to name but a few.

The real beauty is that these old editions are real scans, as opposed to optical character recognition (OCR) scans that are converted into plain text. To me, this adds to the experience of enjoying a truly classic work.

This cannot possibly be true, can it?

For one brief shining moment, commercial drones are now legal in U.S. skies, thanks to a court decision this month that slapped down the Federal Aviation Administration’s attempt to ground them.

A San Francisco company has leaped on the opportunity, gearing up to offer drone delivery of drugstore items in the Mission.

QuiQui, pronounced Quicky, said on its website that it’s been working on its idea for two years, and was taken by surprise when the FAA lost its lawsuit. Its drones will fly below 500 feet, for a $1/delivery fee and will operate 24 hours a day — with orders arriving in less than 15 minutes, it said.

Could this be the foot in the door that makes drone service a real thing, as opposed to a marketing gimmick? Here’s why I don’t think so:

The drones won’t alight on your doorstep. Instead, they will stay at least 20 feet in the air to avoid bumping into people or “anything nefarious” happening — like damage to a drone or theft of a drone or its contents. When a drone arrives at a delivery site, “your phone will buzz, saying your delivery is here,” Ziering said. “You go outside and swipe to tell it to drop your order. It will drop it and then fly away. I kind of want it to beep like Roadrunner and then fly.”

Something falls on you from a height of 20 feet. What could go wrong?

Many thanks to Listastic for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. Listastic for iOS is hands down the easiest way to create, manage and share lists of any kind!

Striking the right balance between function and simplicity, Listastic makes it a breeze to prioritize and collaborate on important ideas or tasks without the typical complexity.

Easily share a grocery list with your significant other, tasks with a team of colleagues or even gift ideas with friends & family.

Now available for iPad & iPhone, Listastic is free to download, and only $1.99 to ditch the ads and enable some great additional features!

A big thanks to readers of the Loop for checking out Listastic, available now on the App Store!.

Last Tuesday, we posted a link to the crowdsourced satellite image search for flight MH 370.

The linked article digs in to the details of Tomnod and the Tomnod search, then expands to talk about other crowdsource map search efforts. Interesting read.

Moff bills itself as a “wearable smart toy”. Grab a broom and strum, and the Moff bracelet will emit a guitar sound. Grab a banana and point it like a gun, and your shots ring out. A pretend tennis racket, you’ll hear a swat sound when you swing.

I’m not sure this is useful as much as playful, but I love the concept and I think there’s something to this. I’m interested in watching this evolve.

Re/code:

Obama administration officials moved late Friday to end the U.S.’s role in overseeing Internet domain names and addresses, announcing plans to relinquish its role by the end of next year and turning the keys over to the global Internet community.

Commerce Department officials announced that the U.S. government would relinquish its role overseeing Internet addresses in favor of a to-be-determined global body.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has managed the use and governance of domain names and Internet addresses for the U.S. government since 1998, when it was awarded the task by the Commerce Department. Based in Los Angeles, ICANN oversees the Internet’s address system and has moved in recent years to open up new domain names.

Long time coming.

Wall Street Journal:

Four days after AppleAAPL -1.12% released an update to its mobile operating system, more than a quarter of app traffic is coming from iPhones and iPads running the latest software, according to data from analytics firm Mixpanel.

Apple released iOS 7.1—the first major update to its mobile software since its debut in September—on Monday. The update addressed some of the major complaints users had with the software including the tendency to crash and reboot often and the unreliability of its fingerprint sensor for its iPhone 5S. As of Friday, Mixpanel said 26.4% of app traffic is coming over devices running iOS 7.1, slightly less than the 31.5% usage rate for its previous version, iOS 7.0.6.

While this doesn’t mean that 26.4% of iOS devices have the update installed—people who use more apps more of the time may be earlier to adopt upgrades, after all—but it shows momentum, especially compared to the competition. About 6% of app traffic on Google’s Android operating system stems from “KitKat,” the latest version of the software released in October, Mixpanel said.

Great numbers.

AP:

A handful of Idaho hockey fans sued a Boise arena on Tuesday, saying they were duped into thinking a $7 beer contains more brew than a $4 beer.

Don’t mess with hockey fans and their beer.

During iTunes Festival this week, I spoke with Soundgarden, Imagine Dragons, and Capital Cities about selling albums on iTunes. The story is posted on Fortune.com.

Tired of waiting for Office to be optimised for their mobile gadgets, a growing contingent of younger companies is turning to cheaper, simpler and touch-friendly apps that can perform word processing and other tasks in the “cloud” – on internet-based systems.

Take Artivest Holdings, a New York-based financial services startup that sells alternative investment products. The New York-based company uses an app called Quip, which combines word processing and messaging, to handle all but the most sensitive legal and financial files.

“There are no more Microsoft Word documents being circulated. If someone emails me a Word document, I’ll tell them to put it in Quip,” said Artivest’s chief investment officer David Levine.

I think this is dead on. My kids don’t use Office and they don’t own a watch (they use their phone or computer if they want the time). The world is definitely changing.

Bill Gates finally gets his smiling face in the Rolling Stone. Some of my favorite bits:

You mentioned Mark Zuckerberg. When you look at what he’s done, do you see some of yourself in him?
Oh, sure. We’re both Harvard dropouts, we both had strong, stubborn views of what software could do. I give him more credit for shaping the user interface of his product. He’s more of a product manager than I was. I’m more of a coder, down in the bowels and the architecture, than he is. But, you know, that’s not that major of a difference. I start with architecture, and Mark starts with products, and Steve Jobs started with aesthetics.

On privacy:

When people think about the cloud, it’s not only the accessibility of information and their documents that comes to mind, but also their privacy – or lack of it.
Should there be cameras everywhere in outdoor streets? My personal view is having cameras in inner cities is a very good thing. In the case of London, petty crime has gone down. They catch terrorists because of it. And if something really bad happens, most of the time you can figure out who did it. There’s a general view there that it’s not used to invade privacy in some way. Yet in an American city, in order to take advantage of that in the same way, you have to trust what this information is going to be used for.

Do you think some of these concerns people have are overblown?
There’s always been a lot of information about your activities. Every phone number you dial, every credit-card charge you make. It’s long since passed that a typical person doesn’t leave footprints. But we need explicit rules. If you were in a divorce lawsuit 20 years ago, is that a public document on the Web that a nosy neighbor should be able to pull up with a Bing or Google search? When I apply for a job, should my speeding tickets be available? Well, I’m a bus driver, how about in that case? And society does have an overriding interest in some activities, like, “Am I gathering nuclear-weapons plans, and am I going to kill millions of people?” If we think there’s an increasing chance of that, who do you trust? I actually wish we were having more intense debates about these things.

Great interview.

Consider my mind blown. I did not know you could drag and drop an image onto the Mac OS X color picker so you can sample colors from that image (this has been around forever, I just never knew).

This is incredibly useful. Read the article for all the details.

Want to try this yourself? If you happen to have an application installed that uses the standard Apple Color Picker, go for it. But here’s a roll-your-own way to bring up the color picker.

Launch the AppleScript Editor application (it’s in Applications > Utilities). When the editor appears, use File > New to bring up a new script. Enter this text in the script window:

choose color

That’s all you need. Now select File > Save… and change the File Format popup to read Application. Give it a name you like and save that sucker. Now double-click the AppleScript application you just created and you’ve got yourself a little color picker to play with.

[Via iOS Dev Weekly]

A new App Store section. Not the app store section we needed, but the app store section we deserved.

Heh.

There is a lot of food for thought in this article. Here’s just a taste:

Trends are always set by the younger generation. Especially with clothing, jewelry and other items that appeal to a demographic with a lot of expendable income. To me, this quote by Tim Cook is the most telling:

“To convince people they have to wear something, it has to be incredible. If we asked a room of 20-year olds to stand up if they’re wearing a watch, I don’t think anyone would stand up.”

This response to Kara Swisher’s question about Apple’s interests in wearable technology covers all the bases. It includes the target market (“20-year-olds”), product focus (“has to be incredible”), and most importantly, he’s seeing the same thing I am: people don’t need to wear watches because they already have that computer in their pocket.

Note also that in the response he doesn’t say “wear a watch”, it’s “wear something”. It’s implied, but not stated. Remember that he learned from the master of misdirection: Steve Jobs.

Absolutely worth a read. Thought provoking piece.

Luis Von Ahn is a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, but is perhaps best known as the creator of the free language learning app Duolingo, Apple’s 2013 iPhone app of the year.

Interestingly, Luis Von Ahn was part of the team that created CAPTCHA:

In the early years of his Ph.D. study, von Ahn had helped his advisor, CMU computer science professor Manuel Blum, develop a handy identity verification device known as a CAPTCHA. Think of those distorted words you’re asked to translate after attempting to log into your email too many times to verify that you’re human. Those are CAPTCHAs. Initially invented to help keep spambots out of chat rooms, these tests are effective because computers have a difficult time reading distorted text, while people are rather good at it.

What Von Ahn did next was a real stroke of genius:

Von Ahn watched the work on CAPTCHA and decided it had potential beyond distinguishing humans from robots — the extra 10 seconds people were taking to access their email and other accounts could be put to use. In 2006, von Ahn launched reCAPTCHA. Unlike its predecessor, reCAPTCHA challenged users with two distorted words to decode.

You’ve certainly run into a CAPTCHA that featured two words instead of words. That’s a reCAPTCHA and here’s why:

The brilliant twist is that this test isn’t just verifying your humanity; it’s also putting you to work on decoding a word that a computer can’t. The first word in a reCAPTCHA is an automated test generated by the system, but the second usually comes from an old book or newspaper article that a computer scanner is trying (and failing) to digitize. If the person answering the reCAPTCHA gets the first word correct (which the computer knows the answer to), then the system assumes the second word has been translated accurately as well.

So the whole purpose of that second word is not to keep you out, but to have you help validate that a word scanned by the system is, indeed, what they think it is. A gigantic, free crowdsourcing effort.

In 2009, Google acquired reCAPTCHA for an undisclosed amount (von Ahn says the sum was somewhere between $10 million and $100 million) and put the program to work on a tremendous scale, digitizing material for Google Books and the New York Times archives. In 2012, it was translating about 150 million distorted words a day.

“The CAPTCHA was really my idea,” says Blum. “Getting humans involved and getting them to help do this stuff was Luis’s idea. He was the one that pointed out, ‘Look how many hours have gone into building the Panama Canal or the Pyramids — and with all the people that are on the Web now, you can get a lot more hours.'”

Genius. Great article.

A few years ago, the New York Times ran an article explaining pi. Today being pi day (and only one year before Super Pi Day), I thought it’d be worth posting this.

True, the article is full of math, but I think it’s one of the most elegantly written explanations of the math surrounding pi you’ll ever see. And, if you make it to the very end, you’ll have a handle on the origins of calculus, which is no mean feat.