Chris Eaton

Just start hitting keys. This is a lot of fun.

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So far, there aren’t clear signs of quite what it is that smartwatches and fitness trackers are replacing…

That’s key.

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Wow, the rest of the companies are pretty pathetic. eBay (6%), Amazon (15%), Twitter (21%), Google (48%) and Facebook (49%).

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Fascinating case studies from Amazon, Google, Bing, and others.

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Nick Wingfield, writing for the NYT:

Cortana is named after a virtual character in Halo, Microsoft’s science-fiction video game series, that uses her encyclopedic knowledge about the universe to help the game’s protagonist, Master Chief. The actress, Jen Taylor, who does the voice for the character, also provided recordings for the phone assistant’s voice.

Two things jumped out at me regarding this story. First, that Microsoft gladly credited the actress supplying Cortana’s voice. Second, that Google and Android went unmentioned in the article.

Update: More on Cortana from The Verge.

TechCrunch:

Late last night, a tweet was spread far and wide showing that a DMCA notice had blocked a file from being shared on a Dropbox user’s account.

What was going on? Was Dropbox suddenly doing something sketchy? Were they suddenly lurking around their users’ folders, digging for copyrighted material hiding amongst personal files?

Nope. The system is neither new, nor sketchy. It’s been in place for years.

You may have seen the original tweet fly around on the weekend. As is often the case, if you wait – rather than Chicken Little panic – someone comes up with a good explanation for the “offence”.

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Online Sports Marketing Guy:

Have you ever wondered how much money you make compared to a Major League Baseball player? The interactive visualization can be used to compare your salary and the average US worker’s salary to any MLB player across several different statistics from the 2013 season.

Take my advise – do not do this. It’s way too depressing.

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I don’t find this worrisome, since if someone wants access to a Tesla S, they’d find a way to break in. But I do find it interesting.

Tesla Motors Inc’s electric vehicles can be located and unlocked by criminals remotely simply by cracking a six-character password using traditional hacking techniques, according to newly released research.

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“What Google have done thus far, I wouldn’t be seen dead wearing. It really looks pretty stupid,” he said.

Indeed.

Via Om]

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“Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples,” the message said. “We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid.”

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Speaking as an amateur photographer, I think Allyson Kazmucha did a great job with this comparison. Looking at the pics, I don’t think the panoramas were a tie—the iPhone 5s won that.

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“The total damages are high,” said Harold McElhinny, a lawyer for Apple. “But I hope you understand the reason the damages are high is because the scope of Samsung’s infringement is massive.”

Samsung should be made to pay every penny.

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Harry McCracken:

In the end, Gmail ended up running on three hundred old Pentium III computers nobody else at Google wanted. That was sufficient for the limited beta rollout the company planned, which involved giving accounts to a thousand outsiders, allowing them to invite a couple of friends apiece, and growing slowly from there.

As much as I rag on email, it’s hard to imagine a world without Gmail. Actually, it’s terrifying. We’d still be using email, but it would probably look like this.

First Google announced their price cuts, then Amazon followed suit. Took a while, but that third domino finally fell.

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Charles Arthur, writing for The Guardian, on the demand for the current crop of wearables:

A quick search on eBay for “Galaxy Gear” (excluding the words “protector” and “seal” which are used to sell add-ons) turns up nearly 900 results, of which this one, chosen at random, is typical: “I got it free with my Galaxy Note 3 and do not want this.”

Anand Lal Shimpi:

Looking at Cyclone makes one thing very clear: the rest of the players in the ultra mobile CPU space didn’t aim high enough. I wonder what happens next round.

Ina Fried:

Indeed, Microsoft does offer Office 365 subscriptions within the just-released Word for iPad and the other Office apps and, yes, it is paying the 30 percent cut, Apple confirmed to Re/code. Microsoft declined to comment on the matter.

Microsoft is giving Apple a 30 percent cut on sales of Office 365 through the iPad apps. Let that sink in for a minute. And then realize that both sides are probably going to make a ton of money as a result.

seldo:

nevver:

Before the Internet

This. A thousand times this.

We had to like think and stuff.

Felix Salmon, on Facebook’s acquisition spree:

Zuckerberg knows how short-lived products can be, on the internet: he knows that if he wants to build a company which will last decades, it’s going to have to outlast Facebook as we currently conceive it. The trick is to use Facebook’s current awesome profitability and size to acquire a portfolio of companies; as one becomes passé, the next will take over. Probably none of them will ever be as big and dominant as Facebook is today, but that’s OK: together, they can be huge.

The difference I see: Warren Buffet buys companies with a track record of profitability.

Alistair Barr, reporting for the WSJ:

Three Mozilla board members resigned over the choice of Brendan Eich, a Mozilla co-founder, as the new CEO. Gary Kovacs, a former Mozilla CEO who runs online security company AVG Technologies; John Lilly, another former Mozilla CEO now a partner at venture-capital firm Greylock Partners; and Ellen Siminoff, CEO of online education startup Shmoop, left the board last week.

The departures leave three people on the Mozilla board: co-founder Mitchell Baker; Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, and Katharina Borchert, chief executive of German news site Spiegel Online.

Two thoughts:

1. If there were six board members, and three of them were so staunchly opposed to naming Eich as CEO that they resigned afterward, how exactly did the math on that vote work?

2. An ugly transition like this is as sure a sign as any that Mozilla is in the midst of institutional collapse. They have one successful project: Firefox for Windows. That’s a relic of a bygone era. All the growth in the industry is in mobile, and Mozilla browsers have, effectively, zero share of the mobile market.

And this doesn’t even get into the fact that the Mozilla rank-and-file are opposed to Eich on the grounds that he was a financial supporter of California’s Proposition 8, a ballot initiative to prohibit gay marriage.

Russell Holly, writing for Geek.com:

HTC and Samsung have something new popping up on their smartphones every time you boot them up, and apparently the feature was mandated by Google.

Android is not a household brand. Google is but, despite having a significant portion of the global marketshare, their smartphone OS is not. And as long as hardware manufacturers are allowed to design their own user interfaces for Android, it’s going to be very difficult for the average consumer to look at a Nexus 5, an HTC One M8, and a Samsung Galaxy S5 and know that they are all running the exact same operating system. Google is hoping to change that, and one method the company has started to use is mandating that the phrase “Powered by Android” be present during the boot animation on new phones.

Yet another sign that Google’s relationship with Android OEMs is growing ever more adversarial. The handset makers do not want this — or at least the major ones like Samsung and HTC do not. Samsung and HTC want to promote their own brands, not “Android”. (If they wanted to promote Android, they’d have done so before Google mandated it.)

And this is quite different from the Windows and “Intel Inside” stickers that most PCs have shipped with for years — PC OEMs get paid for those promotions.

Every time I read about Android and malware like this, I shudder at the though of bringing an Android phone or tablet into my universe. I know Android is popular, but I just can’t get my head around why people seem not to care about this problem. Am I missing something?

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To complement the earlier post about the Threes team, here’s some background on the creation of 2048.

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Just thinking about the process of making my way down this map both scared me and filled me with wonder. I would love the chance to dive this cave. At least virtually.

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If you are going to invest huge money in a college education, it seems reasonable to at least consider the financial benefits of that education over the long haul. The surprise winner in all this? Harvey Mudd College.

Interesting read. Take it all with a grain of salt.

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[VIDEO] Denmark’s campaign to get their folks to make new kids!

To understand why Oculus Rift matters, it helps to know who John Carmack is… He’s responsible for Quake, the first true 3-D game, which begat Halo and Call of Duty and all the rest of it. Carmack did for computer games what Masaccio did for painting: he turned a plane into a space.

Carmack is a genius.

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