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.

As Om Malik points out, Bitcoin wasn’t the first.

So Bad So Good:

On the final night of the Chinese New Year, the locals of Yanshui District in Tainan City, Taiwan put on a firework display that likes of which you’ve never seen before.

Several thousand bottle rockets are stacked together in a beehive formation and then simultaneously ignited all at once.

Everyone likes fireworks and bottle rockets but these folks are nuts.

NYCAviation:

Airline pilots will use one of three techniques when landing in a crosswind.

While the writer is a pilot who may think these kinds of landings are “not as scary as they seem”, I can tell him that, as a passenger, they can be terrifying. Still, it’s interesting to read about them and know pilots train for them.

Successful indie artist Zoë Keating shared the details of last years income online. Kirk McElhearn walks us through the numbers. Amazing how much she makes from sales via iTunes, etc. vs how little she makes from streaming.

If you own a Mac, this is well worth reading.

My residence was recently broken into (the alarm malfunctioned on entry and only went off as the thieves left) and two Mac laptops were taken. Luckily, I have good insurance and had an up to date Time Machine backup.

Over the past week, I’ve learned some additional things I could have done to prepare for this eventuality. My house had also been broken into ten years ago.

Here’s a summary of what you should do to prepare your Macs right now for the possibility of theft. It won’t eliminate theft but it will greatly reduce the damage from such events and make it more likely that your device will return to you.

One thing that I did not know was how easy Apple has made it to encrypt your external backup drive. Here’s a link to show you how to do that.

Good stuff.

There’s much to enjoy in this profile from Robersdale, Alabama’s Baldwin Register. I think what I liked the most was the sense of incredible pride that clearly came across, pride in their hometown hero. Don’t miss the slide show at the top with pics of Tim Cook in high school.

The FireEye blog announced an iOS proof of concept that was able to run in the background and record a user’s actions:

We have created a proof-of-concept “monitoring” app on non-jailbroken iOS 7.0.x devices. This “monitoring” app can record all the user touch/press events in the background, including, touches on the screen, home button press, volume button press and TouchID press, and then this app can send all user events to any remote server, as shown in Fig.1. Potential attackers can use such information to reconstruct every character the victim inputs.

Note that the demo exploits the latest 7.0.4 version of iOS system on a non-jailbroken iPhone 5s device successfully. We have verified that the same vulnerability also exists in iOS versions 7.0.5, 7.0.6 and 6.1.x. Based on the findings, potential attackers can either use phishing to mislead the victim to install a malicious/vulnerable app or exploit another remote vulnerability of some app, and then conduct background monitoring.

They are working with Apple, so I’d expect this to get patched reasonably quickly. Good to solve these things, though I don’t see much practical danger if you avoid obvious phishing attempts and only install apps from the App Store. [Via MacRumors]

Follow the headline link for another walkthrough of the Samsung Galaxy S5. More importantly, watch the video below to see the fingerprint scanner setup and performance.

As has been widely reported, the scanner only works when you scan your finger straight down, towards the bottom of the phone, making it difficult, if not impossible to unlock the phone with one hand.

A bust of Steve Jobs by famed Serbian sculptor Dragan Radenovic was unveiled in Belgrade today, the result of a competition covering more than 10,000 submitted works that will see the statue placed at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino.

The statue unveiled today is a maquette, a sculpture substantially smaller than the final version for demonstration purposes, that features Jobs’ head at the top, with a pair of Cyrillic letters, the Latin letter A, and the binary digits one and zero. According to a report in the Serbian press [Google Translate], sketches of the proposed status were sent to Apple executives, who said they were very interested in the sculpture and liked “the imperfections of his work”.

This is pretty cool.