Roadtrippers:

You’ve never seen hot air balloons like this before! A couple of weeks ago, Albuquerque, New Mexico held its 42nd annual International Balloon Fiesta. It’s a 9-day event where over 700 balloons see liftoff. It’s the largest hot air balloon festival in the entire world and we were on hand to capture the action.

I crossed “going up in a hot air balloon” off my bucket list a few years ago but a trip to the International Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque, New Mexico is still on it.

Heh. These are pretty well done.

Did you know you can customize the tab bar at the bottom of the iOS Music app? By default, it offers tabs labeled Radio, Playlists, Artists, Songs, and More. Want to replace the Radio tab with a Genre tab? Easy. Follow the link and Kirkville will show you how.

The TwoHands iPad stand from Felix is like a long, thin hair clip. Squeeze the short end and the legs grasp the sides of the iPad. Works on most tablets, in portrait and landscape. Love this design. Also love the domain name. Presumably felix.com was already taken. This is a good second choice.

Scenarios like this one are becoming more and more common as location tech gains a foothold in retail:

You’ve just tossed a jar of peanut butter in your grocery cart when your smartphone buzzes. You glance down at the screen to see a message that seems downright clairvoyant: Buy some jelly. Get $1 off.

Convenient? Certainly. Creepy? Maybe.

In September, Apple introduced the iBeacon. But retailers are exploring many other options for indoor positioning and tracking, including low-power Bluetooth (used by the iBeacon and others), videocameras, sound waves, and magnetic fields. The goal is to enhance the brick and mortar experience to rival that of online retailers.

The technology could eventually give retailers capabilities rivaling those of online stores. On the Web, behavioral ads use records of a person’s browsing history to propose products. Now pharmacies or home improvement stores wanting to sell Kleenex or two-by-fours could soon do the same thing (see “It’s All E-Commerce Now”).

“Not much is known about what shoppers do in stores until they check out at the cashier,” says Todd Sherman, chief marketing officer for Point Inside, a Bellevue, Washington, startup that’s among a score of companies that have raised venture capital funding to perfect indoor tracking and advertising techniques. “This way, you can see what they’re interested in [and] see where they’re going.”

The data culled from shopper cell phones can be incredibly useful.

Forest City Enterprises triangulates on cellular signals to monitor foot traffic in most of the nearly 20 shopping centers it owns or manages. It says the data helped it decide where to move an escalator that was interfering with an entrance. The company also measures how long visitors stay after a fashion show or concert. Stephanie Shriver-Engdahl, Forest City’s vice president of digital strategy, says the company wants to know, “Do they get one soda, hop in the car, and leave? Or are they staying longer?” In the future, foot-traffic data could be used to set lease prices, she says.

There is an obvious convenience to buying online. But brick and mortar has benefits as well and traditional retailers are focusing on enhancing the experiences storefronts offer that cannot be matched by online merchants.

There’s been a lot of coverage on the Apple Samsung patent retrial. This article does a good job of boiling down both the numbers and the arguments being put forth by each side.

Samsung’s expert’s key argument:

An expert hired by Apple had determined the company was due $114 million in lost profits because of Samsung’s use of technology under Apple’s patent No. 7,844,915, also known as “pinch to zoom.” The ‘915 patent covers technology that can distinguish whether a user is scrolling with one finger versus using several touch points at once for a pinch-to-zoom action.

However, Michael Wagner, an accountant and lawyer hired by Samsung, said there’s no evidence from either company that shows consumers bought Samsung devices because they liked that particular touch-screen feature. As a result, he believes Apple should receive no money for lost profits.

“I believe people bought these phones for other features,” Wagner said. That includes bigger, AMOLED screens; faster processors; and 4G LTE.

And from Apple’s side:

One expert, MIT professor John Hauser, estimated three Apple patents, including the ‘915 patent, adds about $100 in value to a $199 smartphone or $90 in value to a $499 tablet. [Apple’s accountant, Julie] Davis said Apple lost out on $114 million in profits because of the Samsung copycat devices. She also calculated Samsung’s profits to be $231 million, and said reasonable royalties owed to Apple total $35 million. Apple estimates it would have sold 360,000 devices if Samsung hadn’t released infringing rivals.

The article also covers the “lost profits” aspects of this precedent setting case.

This is some incredible compelling analysis. I would urge anyone interested in the methodology behind PC/tablet/phone market share “reporting” (and I do use that term loosely) to read this top-to-bottom.

Things start off with a bit of history.

Following a routine that began in the 1990s, Gartner and IDC spent the 2000s noting that Apple’s Mac market share was virtually irrelevant, afloat in an ocean of PC sales without giving much regard to the fact that Apple enjoyed very high share in some market segments (such as education and graphic design) and essentially none in others (such as enterprise sales, kiosks and cash registers).

Then came the iPod, then the iPhone, then the iPad, with Mac sales rising as the Mac-iOS ecosystem evolved and expanded.

And that’s when this article really gets interesting. In a nutshell, a case is made that IDC, Gartner, and Strategy Analytics (the big three) set out to torpedo Apple’s perceived market share.

There’s little mystery of who shot down the iPad’s market share or what weapon they’re using: all three major market research firms rapidly fire off headline bullets clearly aimed at wounding the perception of Apple’s tablet. One can, generally, only speculate about why this is occurring.

However, Strategy Analytics has offered some unusual transparency regarding its motive for carving out a very specific market and then stuffing the pie chart with “tier two” volume to the point where the world’s best selling tablet is crushed down into an embarrassing statistical sliver of shrinking “share.”

Read the article. Fantastic.

Last year left me with the impression that choosing the Mini meant accepting numerous trade-offs. That is no longer the case. This is the same device as the iPad Air. The only significant differences between them are size and weight.

Exactly.

Universal Audio posted a great article showing you how to get the most out of its new API Vision Channel Strip.

A List Apart has an excerpt from Dan Cederholm’s new book “Sass For Web Designers.”

Mattebox is a fun way to discover, create and share photo filters. Make a filter in seconds, and share it with your friends—they’ll be able to use it right on the web!

Looks interesting. You can see the filters on Mattebox.net

My thanks to Smile Software for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. Smile has released a new app in their PDFpen suite of PDF editing tools. PDFpen Scan+ lets you scan documents, articles, receipts, and more, using your iPhone or iPad camera.

PDFpen Scan+ includes OCR on the device, with support for 16 languages. The OCR is performed on the device, so you can use it even if you are not connected to the internet or if you have sensitive documents you can’t share with an online service.

Once OCR has been performed, the text in the scanned document can be copied and pasted into another document or the PDF can be exported with searchable text included. You can also open your scans in PDFpen for iPad or PDFpen for iPhone for further editing or share them via Dropbox, Evernote and other services for seamless editing on your Mac.

PDFpen Scan+ is available on the App Store at the intro price of $4.99. Check out the video demo to see all the powerful features packed into this indispensable tool.

The analyst [Steve Milunovich] explained that he has been disappointed with Apple’s iPad sales and that tablets in general are at risk from sales of smartphones, phablets… and PCs. The tablet simply isn’t a “must-have” device, he explained.

Steve Milunovich… you’re a fucking moron.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Pro Tools support a new operating system so quickly. Avid also posted new hardware drivers.

Rob Schlette digs into Apple’s Mastered for iTunes programs and why it matters.

Lessonator is a tool for creating beautiful music slideshow presentations on your Mac. It works like a mashup between Apple’s Keynote and Garageband, where each slide is an animated music score.

It just entered public beta, so go have a look.

Nice mix of video, speeches, interviews.

It includes several tributes to Steve Jobs from various Silicon Valley luminaries, including Oracle CEO Larry Ellison (who was also inducted), Bill “Coach” Campbell, and others.

Worth watching.

This is a pretty interesting story, one that goes beyond the headline. Former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold did indeed build a beautiful cooking app, bypassing Android and, more notably, the Surface, to focus exclusively on the iPad. Makes sense to me. Android is a tough nut to crack and the iPad has that beautiful Retina display.

But there’s more to Myhrvold than that.

In addition to crafting culinary literature, Myhrvold cofounded Intellectual Ventures, a patent acquisition and licensing business that’s earned him the pejorative of “patent troll” from his critics over the past decade.

Yup. Those guys. Here’s a link to the wiki page. Hard to reconcile these pieces. Microsoft CTO, founder of Microsoft Research, founder of IV, and cooking genius who loves the iPad. Who’da thought?

When you buy a car, you expect it to come with a battery. Not with Renault’s new electric Zoe. You have to rent the battery. And, supposedly, if you don’t pay the monthly rental fee, Renault can remotely prevent your battery from charging.

It’s part of a larger product strategy through which the Zoe collects huge amounts of data on your driving and ships it all back to the manufacturer.

I can’t imagine this strategy being successful. Who would buy into this scheme?

Richard Fish’s widow donated some of his work to the Oviatt Library’s permanent collection.

Ben Thompson does a good job tearing the WSJ up. It’s almost like the WSJ doesn’t have a goddamn clue what they’re talking about.

Bruce Lawson writes about where we are with responsive images and why we need to solve this problem.

The Atlantic:

Each year, the McRib makes a brief visit to Earth. Its arrival elicits reactions ranging from horror to awe. And for good reason: this would-be rib sandwich is really a restructured pork patty pressed into the rough shape of a slab of ribs, its slathering of barbecue sauce acting as camouflage as much as coating. “Pork” is a generous term.

I haven’t had a McRib in twenty years and after reading this, I’ve got a good reason to keep that streak alive.

BIAS starts with stunning replications of 36 of the most sought-after vintage and modern amps in rock ‘n’ roll history and then lets you customize them to respond perfectly to your unique touch and feel. Swap out the tubes, preamp, transformer, tone stacks, cab and mic—even change the tube’s bias—to create your dream amp and distinctive signature sound. Tap once to open your BIAS amp in JamUp and add awesome multi-effects.

A number of people have mentioned this to me in the last couple of days. It looks really nice, so I downloaded it. I’ll get back with my thoughts in a few days.