Plus Billy Joel and Jimmy Fallon form six-man group, Arrington accuses Google, smartwatch requirements, and more
A burst of 12 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
Why don't designers take Android seriously? >> Cennydd Bowles
The design lead at Twitter asks:
I wrote this tweet… "Android is the dominant platform of the next decade. Why aren't designers paying it more attention?"
…and received a ton of responses. I'm not going to embed them or name names – I respect a lot of the people who chipped in, and I'm going to be pretty ruthless in my dismissal of their arguments.
The replies fell into two broad categories, of which I'll give both charitable and uncharitable interpretations.
Apple iPhone 5c a failure? Baloney!>> Seeking Alpha
Given the data [from Mixpanel and others], I think we can use a figure of 2.5/1/0.5 for sales of 5s/5c/4s. This is a rough figure, but I think it is likely close enough to reality for our purposes here. In percentages that would be 62.5/25/12.5. With this, we can estimate the actual number of units sold for each model, given the known 51m figure.
Model / Units Sold (m)
5s / 31.9
5c / 12.8
4s / 6.4
The point here is that the 5c sold somewhere around 13 million units! I am sorry, but I have trouble looking at this as a failure. Let's remember that mighty Samsung only sold 9m of its top of the line Galaxy S4 in the same quarter, and this is the current model, while the 5c is a year old model.
Samsung doesn't release any numbers (all its phone unit sales figures are analyst esimates), so this is estimated. The 5C is a repackaged version of the iPhone 5 with more LTE bands.
What I learnt from negotiating with Steve Jobs >> Heidi Roizen
Roizen was trying to get NeXT-era Jobs to agree a publishing deal on some software:
Shortly into my pitch, Steve took the contract from me and scanned down to the key term, the royalty rate. I had pitched 15%, our standard. Steve pointed at it and said,
"15%? That is ridiculous. I want 50%."
I was stunned. There was no way I could run my business giving him 50% of my product revenues. I started to defend myself, stammering about the economics of my side of the business. He tore up the contract and handed me the pieces. "Come back at 50%, or don't come back," he said.
I slogged down to my car feeling like I had just blown the biggest deal of my life. Lucky for me, someone had followed me out.
Dan'l Lewin, one of the NeXT co-founders, had a cubicle within earshot of Steve (actually, at that time, every employee was within earshot of Steve.) Dan'l had been working with me in background over the last few weeks and we'd developed a good relationship. If this deal did not get done, it was going to end up being his job to find someone else, so he really wanted me to get the business. Dan'l put his arm around my shoulder, and said one sentence, which I will never forget.
"Make it look like fifty percent," he said.
The upshot is a brilliant lesson for entrepreneurs and, well, anyone who needs to write a contract with someone who has a big ego.
10 years of Mac OS X malware >> We Live Security
Graham Cluley:
Before we begin, let's make one thing really clear.
The malware problem on Mac OS X is nothing like as bad as it is on Windows.
There are something like 200,000 new Windows malware variants being discovered each day. Malicious code activity in the Mac world is far less frenetic, but the fact is, malware does exist that can infect our iMacs or MacBooks.
And if your Apple computer is unlucky enough to fall victim you're not going to feel any better than your PC-owning friends who are struggling to remove a backdoor Trojan or a pernicious browser toolbar from their copy of Windows.
He lists 14 main ones. Wonder what a comparable one for Windows over the same period would look like.
WPA2 wireless security cracked >> Phys.Org
Achilleas Tsitroulis of Brunel University, UK, Dimitris Lampoudis of the University of Macedonia, Greece and Emmanuel Tsekleves of Lancaster University, UK, have investigated the vulnerabilities in WPA2 and present its weakness. They say that this wireless security system might now be breached with relative ease by a malicious attack on a network. They suggest that it is now a matter of urgency that security experts and programmers work together to remove the vulnerabilities in WPA2 in order to bolster its security or to develop alternative protocols to keep our wireless networks safe from hackers and malware.
Oh.
Billy Joel and Jimmy Fallon form two-man doo-wop group using iPad app >> YouTube
Simply fantastic fun. Give it four minutes of your day.
July 2006: Odeo releases Twttr >> TechCrunch
Michael Arrington in July 2006 (four months into Twitter's incarnation as Twttr):
There is also a privacy issue with Twttr. Every user has a public page that shows all of their messages. Messages from that person's extended network are also public. I imagine most users are not going to want to have all of their Twttr messages published on a public website.
If this was a new startup, a one or two person shop, I'd give it a thumbs up for innovation and good execution on a simple but viral idea.
But the fact that this is coming from Odeo makes me wonder – what is this company doing to make their core offering compelling?
The comments (look for the ones marked "eight years ago") are gold.
About that time Google spied on my Gmail >> Uncrunched
Michael Arrington:
As the Guardian points out, other email providers also reserve the right to do this [scanning of emails to protect their 'property'] in their terms of service.
I have first hand knowledge of this. A few years ago, I'm nearly certain that Google accessed my Gmail account after I broke a major story about Google.
A couple of weeks after the story broke my source, a Google employee, approached me at a party in person in a very inebriated state and said that they (I'm being gender neutral here) had been asked by Google if they were the source. The source denied it, but was then shown an email that proved that they were the source.
It's a very serious claim; we'll see how this develops.
Edit Google documents offline >> Drive Help
Offline editing is only available for Google documents. It's not available yet for Google spreadsheets or presentations.
If there's Office for iPad, will its Excel work offline?
Why Apple can't match Google's all-seeing new smartwatches >> Quartz
Christopher Mims:
Apple has so far shown almost no desire to mine this data as Google does. What's more, the ubiquity of Google's services means many people aren't even using Apple's default apps anymore, and are instead going straight to Google's apps and web services—like the (excellent) Gmail app for iOS, which many prefer to accessing Gmail through Apple's native email app.
Aside from the fact that many of Apple's services lack a web-based component that makes them accessible on any device, it's not clear Apple even has the expertise to crunch all this data in the way that Google Now does—or to use that data to predict our needs. Apple had a chance to create something like Google Now in 2010 when it acquired the voice-powered personal assistant Siri, which has its origins in research conduted for the US military. One of the intentions of early versions of Siri was "context awareness," precisely the thing at which Google Now excels.
Even if Siri were revamped now, however, it's not clear whether Apple knows enough about its users to provide them a Google Now-like experience.
ComScore data suggests that actually, most Apple users stick with defaults - that the Gmail app is used by less than 45% of the combined user base of Android + iOS in the US. That aside, it's clear Apple won't have a "Google Now" any time soon, if ever. So where will the "smart" be - if anywhere?
BitLegal >> Bitcoin legality around the world
An interactive map showing Bitcoin's legal (or otherwise) status around the world. Oh, Iceland, how could you?
Samsung has over 55% of North American Android web traffic >> Chitika Online Advertising Network
Looking at the Web traffic from all North American users of both operating systems, iOS users generate 65% of the total, and Android users the remaining 35%. Put another way, 85% more aggregate Web traffic is driven by iOS devices as compared to Android devices in North America. These figures are similar to what we observed in an identically framed study back in late 2012, with two percentage points in share moving from iOS to Android over that time frame.
No other Android manufacturer has more than single-digit share of web browsing there.
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