Interesting article from Seeking Alpha (free reg-wall) on Apple’s strategic investment in GT Advanced Technologies (GTAT), a company that develops high-grade sapphire. Lots of financial info and comparisons with Liquidmetal Technologies, but this is the part that caught my eye:

The big knock on the use of sapphire in things like mass-market consumer electronics devices has always been cost. With Corning’s (GLW) Gorilla Glass controlling most of the smartphone display market, the volumes have enabled the company to drive-down costs to a level that has created significant barriers-to-entry. With this new arrangement, all signals point to Apple wanting to use sapphire…and a lot of it. Such volume could prove to be the catalyst needed to further get the material down the cost curve and into new mass-market devices.

Barrier to entry is a huge business advantage. Anything you can do to prevent other companies from doing knockoffs is a win. A great strategic relationship for Apple. Interesting analysis.

This is pretty awesome. A solid and complex chain of logic. If anyone knows anyone at Pixar, I’d love to know if this is a true part of the “Toy Story” backstory.

I’m not bashing Google Glass, I certainly see the value of a heads up display that is hands free and connected to the internet. But this situation is inevitable. Who wants to be recorded without their permission?

A San Francisco woman who says she was attacked at a bar on Haight Street after refusing to stop wearing Google Glass has released video footage of the incident that she filmed with the new technology that spurred the confrontation in the first place.

“This is the video that I got on Google Glass at Molotov bar on Haight Street after being verbally accosted and flicked off by the Asian looking girl, I turned on the video, and after I told them I was doing so they got pissed and came after me,” Slocum wrote.

“Unfortunately, I had not extended the video so it cuts out after 10 seconds. Here you can see them — two people, a male and a female — trying to block the camera. The guy waving his hands in my face here later rips the Google Glasses off my face and ran out of the bar,” she wrote.

Not sure if there is a legal difference between this sort of video and the video recorded by unseen security cameras. But I suspect people feel differently about going into a bar with a security camera and being recorded by someone wearing Google Glass. I know I do.

The video in question is below.

Google is lobbying officials in at least three U.S. states to stop proposed restrictions on driving with headsets such as Google Glass, marking some of the first clashes over the nascent wearable technology.

This angers me. If someone is killed because a driver was distracted by something on Google Glass, why is that any different than someone killed by careless texting? If your focus is held by an interaction with Google Glass, your focus is not on the road.

Over the past year or so, there have been a number of stories of iPads school rollouts where kids were finding ways to override the iPad’s intended use (for education), overriding the firewall to gain general access to the internet. The situation became a PR problem for Apple. Sounds like they’ve solved it.

Schools in LA had deployed a large amount of iPads, but had to recall them after students were found deleting the enrollment profiles on their devices. This allowed the students to use them to gasp browse the web as they pleased and install unapproved apps on their personal units. The anarchy would not stand and the district began reconsidering its rollout — which has since resumed. These kinds of high-profile flubs likely didn’t do anything to help the momentum of Apple’s organizational rollouts. This enforcement should allow customization, while preventing circumvention of IT rules.

In short, it should make iPads even more attractive to these markets.

I get the school’s point of view here. General access to the web is a distraction, as well as an invitation for cheating. A school needs to be able to control how a student uses their iPad, at least during school hours. Glad to see Apple learned from this experience. These improvements go well beyond schools, also benefit anyone managing IT for large organizations. Good stuff.

Go and sign-up.

Arizona Governor Governor Jan Brewer on Wednesday vetoed a controversial bill that would have, in effect, legalized wide-ranging discrimination of homosexuals as an extension of religious freedom. Apple, along with a number of other major U.S. corporations, banded together to have the bill shot down.

Good.

Quartz:

At its height, almost three-quarters of American households bought and kept orange juice in their refrigerator. But shifting American eating habits—which stigmatize sugar and leave little time for breakfast—and surging juice prices have done significant damage to American demand.

As a kid, we never had orange juice for breakfast (too expensive) and the only time I ever drink it now is if I go to a diner for breakfast and then I crave it. When’s the last time you had a glass of OJ? For our non-North America readers – was/is orange juice ever a staple of your breakfast?

Fast Company:

Twenty years of wild parties, legendary product launches, and heated controversies: how an unlikely mix of “nerds, rock-and-roll hippie freaks, and business suits” grew into the tech world’s most-talked-about annual gathering.

It’s interesting to read where SXSW came from. Keep an eye on the buzz that surrounds various apps, startups, services and technologies that invariably rise out of the show each March.

Vice Australia:

A coal mine is currently burning the hell up in Australia. For obvious reasons fires in coal mines are especially problematic—the exposed coal face burns, just like coal should, and smoulders through the underground seam where it’s safely protected from any firefighting. if you find yourself in Australia, avoid Morwell. It’s just not a healthy town.

Brings to mind the (still – since 1962) burning coal mine in the now mostly abandoned town of Centralia, Pennsylvania.

Many magazines are going digital only, but “The Great Discontent” wants to take it’s magazine to print.

Clearly, this is not good for Avid.

Ben Bajarin:

Carriers own a cell tower that they upgrade to provide faster service and broader access. That’s about it. They used to have much more differentiation than they do today. Some had proprietary devices or solutions. Some were known for better quality or were the only ones available. Those days are long past in most cases. Pricing is a particularly strategy that T-Mobile and Sprint are trying to compete with, but they have simply embraced their “dumb pipe-ness” sooner than other carriers.

He’s right.

BlackBerry, once a must-have device for every business executive and government official because of its pioneering secure email service, has hemorrhaged market share to Apple Inc’s iPhone and rival devices running on Google Inc’s Android software.

Clearly BlackBerry doesn’t see competing with Apple will work, so it’s going after the low-end of the market to boost its sales.

SMS startup Nexmo is finally launching its voice service at Mobile World Congress. The new set of application programming interfaces basically allows any app developer to embed calling features into his apps and set up voice services in the cloud.

Watch this space.

Congratulations to Apple. Well earned. From the awards page:

Apple iPad Air

Precision-engineered to weigh just one pound, iPad Air is 20 percent thinner and 28 percent lighter than the fourth generation iPad, and with a 43 percent narrower bezel the borders of iPad Air are dramatically thinner. iPad Air’s Retina display makes web pages, text, images and video look incredibly sharp and realistic, and the new power-efficient A7 chip allows the battery to be even smaller, helping reduce the overall volume by 24 percent from the previous generation while doubling its performance and maintaining its up to 10-hour battery life.

Judges’comments

The iPad Air packs class-leading performance in an attractive and svelte frame, while its ecosystem has an undisputed advantage in the number of format-optimized apps

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Terrific speculative piece from Seeking Alpha (free reg-wall).

To understand where Nokia is coming from with the Nokia X it’s important to keep in mind that developing a new phone platform, even one based on Android, takes time. Product development cycles can run into many months, even for a phone using an OS that the manufacturer is already experienced with, and using hardware based on existing products.

Nokia X features a highly customized user interface, and replaces Google provided services with Microsoft email and search, as well as Nokia Store. Nokia started with the open source version of Android, and developed their own proprietary UI. Given the level of customization, I estimate that it would take at least a year from project start to products on store shelves, and probably more like 18 months. Much of that time is just spent on testing and debugging.

This means that the X project was started sometime in late 2012 or early 2013. Why would Nokia begin the X project? I think the answer is pretty obvious. Microsoft and Nokia had just kicked off the Windows 8 Phone with high expectations in 2012 Q4, and those expectations had not been met, with Nokia selling only 4.4 million Lumia smartphones, less than half of the 9.3 million Asha smartphones that were sold in the quarter, as reported in Nokia’s earnings release.

After suffering through a year of lackluster Windows 7 Phone sales, Nokia’s board would be getting restive. The X project was the fall back position in case Windows 8 Phone didn’t start gaining significant market share. Windows Phone did gain market share in 2013, but Nokia’s Devices and Services division lost money every quarter on an IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) basis.

Why all the links to Microsoft services? It may have been meant to placate Microsoft. In its arrangement with Microsoft, Nokia had reserved the right to make other platforms. In late 2012, Nokia was still selling Symbian smartphones as well as the Asha line, based on the Symbian derived Nokia OS. But Nokia was very much dependent on platform support payments from Microsoft, as it acknowledged at the time, with these payments essentially negating the Windows phone royalties due to MS. Even if not specifically constrained by contract to Microsoft, Nokia would want to tread lightly.

Really interesting. Sounds about right.

The story of how this all came together, told by the Ghostbusters team. The comments by Harold Ramis stuck out the most, each sentence tinged with just a little sadness at his passing.

Aykroyd. Murray. Ramis. Reitman. Believe it or not, it was 30 years ago that four brave men came together to battle ghosts, goblins, and, even scarier, New York City traffic. We take a look back at the making of the classic comedy and find that despite a stellar cast and a whole lot of slime, the production could have been a disaster of biblical proportions.

Wow. The title says it all. Amazing to me that there are about the same number of cell phone subscriptions (subscriptions, not cell phones) as people on the planet.

The nature of the mobile landscape has changed. This article gets to the heart of why Facebook bought WhatsApp, but goes much further.

As we move further into the mobile age, it’s clear that Facebook is on the defen­sive. The problem isn’t with the Facebook mobile app per se, which is ele­gantly executed and does a fine job of recreating the web experience on a phone or tablet. Rather, the problem is that people don’t want a web-style social network on their mobile devices. They want a simpler, faster, less public, and more intimate way to share with only close friends, the ones they care about the most. They want to swap pictures. They want to say, “I’m here.” They want pieces of Facebook, but not the entire package at once.

That is, what they want is just messaging—good old messaging, like the text messages that have been around nearly as long as there have been cell phones. And they have plenty of choices: In less than two years, services like WhatsApp, Snap­chat, Kik, Line, KakaoTalk, and WeChat have grown from nothing to become social lifelines for millions of users. In the near term, these apps are saving their customers money by reducing text-message fees. But that’s not why Facebook has been so desperate to compete with these upstarts. It’s not why Facebook revamped its own stand-alone Messenger app, or why it offered (unsuccessfully) to buy Snapchat for a reported $3 billion in November, or why it finally bought WhatsApp for the aforementioned knee-buckling sum of $19 billion.

No, Facebook’s angst is entirely about eyeballs and fingers, about owning the icon that you tap when you want to connect with friends. It worried that if it didn’t act now, one or more of these upstarts would soon supplant it as the go-to tool for sharing news with friends. As Zuckerberg noted when announcing the acquisition: “WhatsApp is the only widely used app we’ve ever seen that has more engagement and a higher percent of people using it daily than Facebook itself.” The acquisition doesn’t mean that Facebook will win what can only be described as the messaging wars, but at least it puts the company in a position not to lose.

Great read.

In short, Apple’s focus is the product and what’s best for the consumer. This is a great article with lots of insight from Steve Jobs.

Smart move on Apple’s part. They have opened enrollment for an iBeacon version of its Made for iPad program. If you want to use the iBeacon name, you have to meet the iBeacon criteria. This insures the level of quality stays high.

And what you can see is that on the 16GB model of the Galaxy S5, half of the on-board storage is used up before the owner even turns on the phone.

That’s just awful.

As it turns out, this isn’t a native Windows Phone app — and it wasn’t made by Redfin. It was developed by Microsoft, by packaging up Redfin’s mobile website in the form of an installable app.

In fact, the existence of the Redfin app for Windows Phone was a surprise to Redfin.

So, Microsoft has gone from irrelevant to slimy and irrelevant.

The Verge:

Gravity is a major contender at the Academy Awards this year, carrying a muscular 10 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, for a sci-fi epic that really raised the bar. While it has stiff competition from the likes of American Hustle in terms of acting and direction, the award for Best Visual Effects (which doesn’t typically hold the same cachet) ought to be a lock.

I don’t think it’s a great movie (even though I enjoyed it immensely) but I left the theatre wanting to buy the DVD just to see how the visual effects were accomplished.

Congrats to everyone at Mariner Software—24 years deserves recognition.