Researchers analyzed 780 swab samples — 390 from mobile phones and 390 from the hands that used them — in 12 U.K. cities. They found that 16% of both hands and phones were contaminated with E. coli, potentially illness-causing bacteria that is fecal in origin. The likely reason: because people don’t wash their hands after using the toilet.
The researchers discovered that 82 percent of phones had some form of bacterial contamination. Their conclusion is that people either aren’t washing their hands sufficiently or are lying about it when asked.
Gives new meaning to the expression “butt dialing,” that’s for sure.
What Houston does is Dropbox, the digital storage service that has surged to 50 million users, with another joining every second. Jobs presciently saw this sapling as a strategic asset for Apple. Houston cut Jobs’ pitch short: He was determined to build a big company, he said, and wasn’t selling, no matter the status of the bidder (Houston considered Jobs his hero) or the prospects of a nine-digit price (he and Ferdowsi drove to the meeting in a Zipcar Prius).Jobs went dark on the subject, resurfacing only this June, at his final keynote speech, where he unveiled iCloud… Houston’s reaction was less cocky: “Oh, shit.”
Apparent has billed its small Doxie scanner as cloud-friendly from the start. Now they’ve taken it to the next logical step with the Doxie Go, a new iteration of their scanner that removes the computer from the process altogether. Doxie Go is available for pre-order for $199 and ships in late November.
Doxie Go is a 600 dot per inch (DPI) scanner designed for scanning receipts, bills, reports, and anything else on paper. Battery-powered, Doxie Go can go with you when you travel; it features enough on-board memory to store about 600 pages, with expansion through an SD card slot or USB (you can connect a USB thumbdrive to store additional photos).
When it’s convenient or when Doxie Go is full, you connect it to a Mac or PC using a USB cable and the included software, and Doxie Go syncs, creating multi-page, searchable PDF files (OCR software is included). It can also push those files to cloud-based services, uploading images to Flickr, CloudApp, Google Docs, Dropbox and others. Doxie customers also get a free copy of Evernote.
What’s more, an optional $39 Sync Kit enables you to connect Doxie Go to an iPhone or iPad. The peripheral will be available in December.
Yesterday I pointed out a readers comment to me about how The Loop made him jump through hoops to read the content. I took offense to his comments and posted my thoughts.
Today, Davy Buntinx posted his own article pointing out how wrong I was and how disappointed he was in my reply. In a lot of ways he’s right.
I wear my heart on my sleeve — always have. When I get offended, I respond in kind, and I was offended.
Perhaps I could have handled the situation better, but I feel I’m offering a good service to my readers and I spent a lot of time thinking about the best ways to lay out the site to suit the content and reader, not advertising.
What I have done is increase the amount of text in the truncated RSS feed so readers without the full text feed will have a better idea what the story is about. I hope that helps readers that expressed concerns about that.
I do take issue with one thing Davy said:
Not that it’s something I hate to do, since the thing I eventually end up on on the site is worth reading, but still, it’s an extra step, introduced to bump up page views and resulting advertising income.
I couldn’t care less about pageviews and my income is in no way tied to the amount of pageviews The Loop gets. If I cared about pageviews, I wouldn’t link directly to external articles in the RSS, I would force everyone to come here first, but I don’t.
It doesn’t matter if I get 10 or 10 million pageviews a month, I get paid the same. That’s the reason I did the new site like this — for the reader, and for the content.
Thanks for all the feedback — good and bad — I’m always working to make the site better.
Without a platform-wide offering from Google, the individual providers will have to continue to battle it out for domination. Hopefully, eventually one (or possibly two) will win and everyone will use that service for social connectivity. But until then, I think things will be messy.
Android advocates would have you believe that everything is better without Google in the way, and point derisively to iOS’ “walled garden” approach. Situations like this remind me that I’d rather be in a walled garden than an open sewer.
I’m always looking for interesting, sometimes funny, things to read and pass along to you. I never know where I’ll find it, but today I found something in the comments right here on The Loop.
I am canadian but I just laugh everytime I see RIM in the news. Their phones are years behind, the outage, the abysmal app store, terrible direction, investing 100 mil to buy a cloud computing company a year or 2 to late and most of all the playbook. It’s like shooting yourself in the foot and then trying to shoot the original bullet out. (and further the metaphor sitting and watching your foot get gangrene then trying to shoot that off) RIM needs to design an awesome phone, os, AppStore, than give it away for free to get customers back.
I have very wide ranging musical tastes — from classical to heavy metal. Over the years, there have been many guitarists that have influenced my playing, some to the point that I wanted to know their secrets and be able to play their greatest songs. I spend countless hours in my studio playing just because I love the instrument.
Everybody’s list is different, but here’s mine:
Zakk Wylde Randy Rhodes Eric Clapton Stevie Ray Vaughan Dave Mustaine Andres Segovia Robert Johnson Angus Young Jimmy Page Eddie Van Halen Tony Iomi Tony Rombola Slash Jim Croce
Of course, Ross is correct, RIM definitely needs a big win like Siri. However, it occurred to me as I read through the article that RIM needs so much more than just a major new feature.
In all fairness to Ross, he was only focused on how RIM needed something — anything — to spur the company and didn’t get into everything else that was wrong.
RIM is like the Boston Red Sox of technology products. They were on top of the world, but ended up being the laughing stock of an entire industry. Now, no matter how hard they try to make it back, things just keep getting worse.
I still firmly believe that the problems with RIM start with the co-CEOs. They are responsible for driving the company forward with new technologies, designs and ideas (or in this case, driving the company into the ground). Yet for years they let the company rest on its laurels and not continue to innovate.
By the time RIM did start to put out new products, it was so far behind the competition that even catching up was almost impossible.
RIM desperately needs a change to the very top of the company. This will instill some much needed confidence in the company and its future products.
It also needs to figure out how to end system outages like it had last week. Things like that just can’t happen with a company the size of RIM.
The last piece of the puzzle is new products. Get rid of the crap they are currently selling and design a new line of products that people actually want.
Part of this phase is also coming up with some must-have features like Apple’s Siri.
Apple has taken the smartphone market in an entirely different direction than what RIM helped create years ago. The problem for RIM is that Apple circled back and created features and security options that directly compete with the BlackBerry.
I’m not sure users have enough confidence in RIM at this point to believe that any new hardware or software will be much different than what they already have.
Taiwan’s HTC Corp lost a patent infringement complaint filed against Apple Inc in a preliminary decision at the U.S. International Trade Commission on Monday.An ITC administrative law judge found “no violation” by Apple of four HTC patents that include technologies for power management and phone dialing.
It isn’t over for Apple with HTC though. In February a full commission is expected to rule on whether to uphold the judge’s preliminary decision.
This is only one of several patent-related lawsuits Apple is fighting. Apple is also battling Samsung, another phone manufacturer producing handsets based on Android (similar to HTC), and that’s stretching across several continents.
A new network from Myke Hurley that encapsulates all of his podcasting work, including The Bro Show. Other hosts include Terry Lucy, Patrick Rhone, Dave Caolo, Joshua Schnell and Stephen M. Hackett.
According to The National, accidents fell 20% in Dubai and 40% in Abu Dhabi. Lieutenant General Dahi Khalfan Tamim from the Dubai Police department said his force saw the largest decrease among young drivers and men.
If BlackBerry users had Siri, they wouldn’t need to read their texts manually.
PDFpen is a great application for editing your PDFs. You can add signatures to PDFs and email them back, instead of resorting to printing and faxing. You can even make corrections and edit images. There’s also OCR for scanned documents — essential for those going paperless.
When The Loop relaunched on September 1, it was a completely different site that focused on the content, not advertising or pageviews. It was a major change for Peter and me to stray from the traditional advertising model, but with the help of Fusion Ads, it’s working out just fine.
In addition to helping support the site, we offered members a full text RSS feed. It was a thank you from us for the support.
Until this weekend, every comment about the new design and business model was extremely positive.
After four months of effort in designing a new business and site design to go with it, I was kind of shocked to get this email from a reader:
Jim love the new site redesign. Despise the truncated rss feeds.I just can’t see paying for the loop when Gruber’s site is free and doesn’t make me jump through hoops.Seems odd an Apple enthusiast site that doesn’t put it’s product first. This is a step below the full page dragon dictation ads you forced us to x out of to read your articles.I am not a google fan but they and John know how to advertise with tact, and seem to be doing very well because of it.I’m a fan of your writing but question your business model.
I responded:
Jump through hoops?I’m not asking you to pay for anything. You can view the site for free with less ads than most Mac sites on Internet. I have the $3 a month as an option for those people that want to support the site, not for people like you that feel everything on the Internet should be free.This is how I make my living and support my family. I’ve done this for almost 20 years and I believe I’m good at what I do. If this is what you think of me and the site, I hope you never come back.Jim
It is true that John Gruber monetizes his site in a slightly different way, but that’s a good thing. I talked to John on several occasions before the launch about my ideas, as well as a number of other people.
There is always work to do when running a Web site, but I never thought of the RSS feed or membership as making readers jump through hoops. There is a free truncated feed available and the content on the site is always free to everyone.
To those people that have paid for a monthly membership, we thank you very much. The support you’ve shown and the money that you pay is going to our families and to help expand the site.
Amazon will publish 122 books this fall in an array of genres, in both physical and e-book form. It is a striking acceleration of the retailer’s fledging publishing program that will place Amazon squarely in competition with the New York houses that are also its most prominent suppliers.
Book publishing continues to undergo nothing short of a seismic upheaval as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple and others change the rules. I’m sure that some will lament these changes as the end of publishing as we know it, but change is inevitable.
James Stewart writing for the New York Times about Steve Jobs’ accomplishments in retail architecture:
In many ways, the retail architecture is simply the largest box in which an Apple product is wrapped, and Mr. Jobs was famously attentive to every detail in an Apple product’s presentation and customer experience.
Jobs touched so many aspects of design in his years. We think mainly about the products Apple released, but it’s evident in things like architecture and Web design too.
Apple today announced it has sold over four million of its new iPhone 4S, just three days after its launch on October 14. In addition, more than 25 million customers are already using iOS 5, the world’s most advanced mobile operating system, in the first five days of its release, and more than 20 million customers have signed up for iCloud, a breakthrough set of free cloud services that automatically and wirelessly store your content in iCloud and push it to all your devices. iPhone 4S is available today in the US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the UK, and will be available in 22 more countries on October 28 and more than 70 countries by the end of the year.
An easy way for small business owners to build Web sites. Maybe this will help rid the Web of the travesties called Web designs we often stumble across.
About 85% of Google’s net revenue comes from ads running on Google sites. About 10% comes from ads running on other sites. And about 5% comes from “other”…
Like just about everyone else in the tech world, I didn’t expect the iPhone 4S to be nearly as popular as it is…
No, only people that believed the rumors thought it would be a disappointment. Like me, everyone else that was at the event thought it would be successful. Don’t speak for the rest of us in the tech world because you were wrong.
Many thanks to Marketcircle’s Daylite for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed on The Loop.
Daylite helps you manage your business and your team. Daylite helps you manage your company’s projects, sales opportunities, contacts, tasks, appointments, meetings, notes, and email — on Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
Dan Hesse, Sprint’s CEO, went on record this summer citing the absence of the iPhone from its list of offered devices as being the number one reason why Sprint was losing customers.
Fast forward to October 14th, launch day for the iPhone 4S. Here’s what Fared Adib, Sprint Product Chief, had to say in a press release:
“Sprint today reported its best ever day of sales in retail, web and telesales for a device family in Sprint history with the launch of iPhone 4S and iPhone 4. We reached this milestone at approximately noon CT/1pm ET. The response to this device by current and new customers has surpassed our expectations and validates our customers’ desire for a truly unlimited data pricing plan.”
“AT&T had already activated a record number of iPhones on our network — and is on-track to double our previous record for activations on a single day.”
Looks like the naysayers were right, the iPhone 4S is clearly a failure.
Today CCP continued show its commitment to this new development direction with a special reactivation offer for returning players. Most account-holders whose subscriptions lapsed during or before the Summer drama have been sent an email offering a special rate of $4.95 US for 30 days of subscription time.
CCP Games lost the goodwill of many EVE Online players over the summer following the release of a new installment of the long-running MMO that implemented some unwelcome changes in the game. Recently CCP CEO Hilmar Pétursson posted an apology to gamers upset by the changes; this continues the company’s acts of contrition.
In the weeks leading up to Apple’s (AAPL) Oct. 4 announcement about the new iPhone 4S, Tim Hickman lived and breathed rumors about the device. His company, Hard Candy Cases, makes protective covers for mobile phones, and he was determined to get a jump on production. After three separate manufacturing partners in China sent him detailed 3D models of an iPhone with a widened, pill-shaped “home” button and a slightly tapered back, Hickman decided to roll the dice. He paid $50,000 to make steel moldings to mass-produce cases for the new design and, on the morning of Apple’s announcement, began taking orders on his website. The gamble backfired: Apple’s new iPhone 4S included no major changes to the exterior design. The home button remained circular. Hickman suddenly owned $50,000 worth of paperweights.
What’s more, some Apple rumor sites rely on the same information as these case manufacturers to report on future Apple designs. They, too, got burned. The report says that smartphone cases are now a $436 million a year business, so it’s no wonder some companies are taking risks like this to be the first to market.
