“We fought hard for iPad,” a pilot working for the airline told AppleInsider. He described the Delta deal as being about money, travel contracts, and Delta’s Information Technology staff historically being “in bed” with Microsoft.

Why would Delta want to listen to the people actually using the devices at 30,000 feet in the air.

With all that’s been written about The Beatles, I’m amazed that I’ve never encountered this story before. This is well written and really gives you a sense of what George was going through at the time, a time before The Beatles had broken through in the US.

George asked the salesperson if they carried any records by the Beatles and was met with a blank stare of complete unawareness and non-recognition. This introverted George slightly, along with the jarring moment when he saw England’s biggest rock star, Cliff Richard, in his recent move Summer Holiday being played as a second string feature at the local drive-in. These two incidents stayed with George, and when he reported back to the other Beatles upon his return to England, we wondered if they could make it in the States, and actually thought they would flop.

Addy is a startup that lets you embed your own customized turn-by-turn directions (Go about a mile, make a left at the pizza place with the green awning, my house is at the top of the hill, last house on the right) behind a custom URL.

For instance, if you were having people over to your home, an Addy could include details about nearby stores for food and drinks, a buzzer code, and parking instructions.

Good idea.

I’ve always been fascinated by Natural Language Processing (parsing language into a computer understandable form) and speech synthesis (turning raw text into an human sounding spoken voice). Siri is an example of both of these technologies at work.

This article and the video below does a terrific job filling in some of the blanks on how tech like Siri evolved over time and how it works.

Back in May, 2011, a number of small Apple developers using Apple’s in-app payment system received a legal complaint from Lodsys, threatening a lawsuit if the developer didn’t agree to license a specific Lodsys patent.

Within months, that brought a legal challenge by Apple, which saw a clear threat to its ecosystem. Apple had already paid to license Lodsys patents when they were in the hands of an earlier owner—Intellectual Ventures. So Apple went to court, arguing that Lodsys can’t demand additional payments by threatening iOS developers.

Now, after two years of litigation, it’s back to square one. The East Texas judge overseeing Lodsys’ systematic patent attack on app developers has refused to even consider Apple’s motion. Instead, he allowed the patent-holding company to settle all its cases—and then dismissed Apple’s motion as moot. By doing so, US District Judge Rodney Gilstrap—who has inherited the patent-happy East Texas court that once belonged to patent-troll favorite T. John Ward—has enabled Lodsys to threaten developers for months, and perhaps even years, to come.

This is infuriating.

The problem seems to be that all of the iOS developers mentioned in Apple’s complaint have, quite understandably, settled with Lodsys.

Judge Gilstrap ruled that Apple’s motion only applied to the seven defendants in the case. If they were out, the case was done. He ignored the Apple and developer arguments about the widespread nature of Lodsys’ campaign, declining to see any broader issue.

While Apple’s legal challenges continue, Lodsys continues to sue developers. In the meantime, Lodsys is getting countersued by companies they have pursued, such as Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

Lodsys had demanded Stewart pay $20,000—$5,000 for each of its iPad apps. Instead, Stewart sued Lodsys in Wisconsin, where Lodsys CEO Mark Small lives. (Lodsys’ official office, like so many patent-holding companies, is just an office suite in Marshall, Texas.)

Despicible situation.

CSS Regions allow you to flow content into a series of containers on a single page. It’s the equivalent of linking text boxes in an application like InDesign. It makes possible some layouts that were previously only possible by blurring the line between data and styles.

Music producer Steve Albini had a conversation with Kurt Cobain about the possibility of Steve producing Nirvana’s next album, their final studio album, In Utero. Kurt asked Steve to put together an outline of his thoughts on producing and the letter after the jump was the result. So much great stuff in there.

Good hire for Apple.

Update: In my effort to get caught up after a few days away, I may have posted this too soon. He apparently wasn’t involved in the design of the Fuel Band.

This is an impressive looking upgrade for one of the best drum samplers on the market.

Developer Greg Pierce talks to Charles Perry and Joe Cieplinski about updating his popular app, Drafts, to iOS 7.

eleMount – This universal mount raises the bar, allowing gadgets (smartphone and tablets) to be placed on a premium pedestal that matches their beautiful design and quality. One of the most user friendly mounts ever designed, eleMount sticks to any flat surface and doesn’t care if you prefer Apple or Android or like to keep your case on. eleMount works just as you’d expect. No suction cups, no locks, no instruction manual. You only need one hand to mount your device. This premium, high quality mount is CNC machined, carved from the finest solid aluminum and complements a sleek, minimalistic style. After all, shouldn’t your spectacularly designed device rest on an equally eye-catching pedestal?

NPR:

Here’s how the cable business works: Cable companies pay monthly fees to media companies for every channel they carry as part of basic cable. And then, of course, they pass those fees onto you, the subscriber. As the chart below shows, those fees vary widely — from $5.54 per month per subscriber for ESPN, all the way down to $.05 per month per subscriber for CMT Pure Country. In other words, if you have cable, you’re paying at least $5.54 per month for ESPN — even if you never watch it.

This series of scatterplots shows the relative IMDB scores for shows like Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and The Wire. Well done, though I would argue that the charts show how much people love a show, as opposed to any measure of quality. But no matter. Still interesting.

InterBrand does this study every year.

Apple Inc.’s brand value jumped 28 percent to $98.3 billion, Google Inc. (GOOG) is now in second place at $93.3 billion, and Coca-Cola Co. has slipped from the top seat after 13 years to third place at $79.2 billion.

The annual study, closely watched by the industry, determines a brand’s value by examining its financial performance, role in influencing consumer buying and ability to secure earnings. The Top 10 is rounded out in descending order by IBM, Microsoft, GE, McDonald’s, Samsung, Intel and Toyota.

Pretty interesting.

Speaking of China, this looks like fun to me. Definitely adding to my bucket list.

A single change made by China’s State Council will bring huge opportunities to the video game industry.

For the past 13 years, the sale of video game consoles was banned in China. China’s State Council has now decided that video game consoles can be sold across the entire country so long as the foreign companies establish sales and production operations in Shanghai’s new free trade zone.

The only caveat here is that PS4 and Xbox One may not see the benefits of the new market for a few years. The new policies will roll out over the course of the following three years. It’s still a savvy move on China’s part. Console manufacturers and game developers would love to leverage China’s population of 1.4 billion people as new customers, and China would love to get its new trade zone brimming with successful, modern businesses.

At the same time, Apple shifted their China iPhone release policy.

The iPhone 5 sold around five million units through the opening weekend, while the 5S and 5C sold around nine million units combined during its opening weekend, with the 5S significantly outselling the 5C. Did the addition of a new, somewhat gaudy gold color and an easily-bypassed fingerprint scanner really make four million sales worth of a difference? Perhaps, but the 5S (and 5C) was the first time Apple began selling iPhones in China on release day, rather than after a long delay.

Editorial aside, the point is worth noting that China is opening up their markets and Apple was quick to take advantage of that fact. This is a huge change to the tech sector and, I think, just the tip of the iceberg.

There’s a famous story about Elvis Costello appearing on Saturday Night Live, back in 1977, when the show was still pretty brand new. Because SNL is live, timing is critical. Costello was supposed to sing Less Than Zero and the show’s timing was based on that fact. But in the middle of the song, he suddenly stopped and switched into the song he originally wanted to play, Radio Radio. Pissed Lorne Michaels off and he was banned from the show. This is an old, well known story. If you are interested, follow the link above and you can watch the video.

Here’s the part of the story I did not know. In 1999, Lorne and Elvis had made up and Elvis was invited back on the show as a surprise guest. Here’s how that went.

One of the founders of Apple and the man who brought video gaming to the masses, together onstage for the first time (at least as far back as they can remember).

They covered a lot during an hourlong conversation before a packed room at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center on Friday afternoon, from Steve Jobs and data encryption to the early days of Silicon Valley and the future of robots and computing as machines get smarter and smarter. But the sense you got from both of these valley pioneers is that, for the most part, they had a lot of fun building the future and the idea of having fun still figures into their decisions.

A lot has been written about Steve Jobs and Woz’s roles in building Breakout for Atari. But this is the first time Woz and Bushnell have told that story together.

Both Bushnell and Woz said they never really saw the negative, blustery Jobs that people talk about, though they heard about it. Woz did tell an amusing story about developing the game “Breakout” for Atari on Jobs’ suggestion. He jumped at the chance to create a single-player version of Atari’s popular “Pong” for Bushnell. “Then he said you have to do it in four days,” Woz recalled.

Bushnell laughed at the comment. “I didn’t tell Jobs four days,” he said.

Woz said he was pretty sure that Jobs was trying to buy into a farm in Oregon and needed the money to do so in four days, so he set Wozniak on that insane schedule (a deadline Woz hit, by the way).

Cool stuff.

Semil:

I was lucky enough to watch enough baseball to know there was one player who was simply better than everyone else. He wasn’t perfect, but he was about as close as they come to perfection.

For Yankee fans, baseball fans and fans of class. And if you haven’t seen the video of Rivera’s last appearance at Yankee Stadium, watch it here. But have a tissue handy.

The Globe and Mail:

This investigative report reveals that shortly after the release of the first iPhone, Verizon asked BlackBerry to create a touchscreen “iPhone killer.” But the result was a flop, so Verizon turned to Motorola and Google instead.

Mr. Lazaridis opposed the launch plan for the BlackBerry 10 phones and argued strongly in favour of emphasizing keyboard devices. But Mr. Heins and his executives did not take the advice and launched the touchscreen Z10, with disastrous results.

Fascinating article about the demise of a once great brand.

John Gruber talks about future plans for Vesper with incredibly refreshing honesty. Devs and product marketing managers, this is worth a read (and worth emulating). So great.

C’mon, how wicked is this?

This living history of the web is a lot of fun. When you get to the site, click and drag in the timeline or click on the left or right side of each page to move forward or backward in time. OK, you won’t actually move through time, but you get the idea. As you move closer to current day and things start to get a bit crowded, you can click in the lower left corner to expand the timeline.

Lovely.

National Geographic:

Today photography has become a global cacophony of freeze-frames. Millions of pictures are uploaded every minute. Correspondingly, everyone is a subject, and knows it—any day now we will be adding the unguarded moment to the endangered species list. It’s on this hyper-egalitarian, quasi-Orwellian, all-too-camera-ready “terra infirma” that National Geographic’s photographers continue to stand out.

To my mind, no contemporary magazine has brought us more powerful images so consistently for so long. This 125th anniversary issue is one that should be bought in hard cover and kept as a family heirloom.

Thought this was fascinating. Since July 1, 2010, Professor Staffan Normark has been the permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and one hell of a cold-caller. He’s the one who calls folks to tell them they’ve won a Nobel Prize.

Sometimes the subjects of his research have an inkling that it could be their time; but when their phone rings, they try not to let themselves believe it. Serge Haroche (physics, 2012) was out walking with his wife when he saw a Swedish code appear on his mobile. “I realised it was real and it’s, you know, really overwhelming,” he says. “I was lucky—I was in the street and passing near a bench, so I was able to sit down immediately.”

Pretty cool job.