Pinterest addresses copyright concerns - The Washington Post

A lot like YouTube for images (and other multimedia), but without Google’s resources (and legal department) behind it

In a statement, the company said that it believes that it is protected under the safe harbor of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and that it is committed to quickly responding to alleged copyright issues. Other companies, such as YouTube, adopt a similar strategy on content posted to their Web sites.

Pinterest also said that the feedback from content creators has been largely positive — not litigious — because Pinterest drives traffic back to other Web sites.

Pinterest addresses copyright concerns - The Washington Post

The Blog Post That Drove Rush Limbaugh to Tweet - Yahoo! News [Atlantic Wire]

Likely to become a case study in putting out fire with gasoline

While it's not surprising that Limbaugh would want to drive readers to Jacobson's post, it is odd that he was so excited to drive them there that he embraced an entirely new platform of communication to do so! It makes it look like he knows he's under fire, and he's looking for new ways to combat his opponents by entering the fast-paced and often uncivil twitter-sphere

The Blog Post That Drove Rush Limbaugh to Tweet - Yahoo! News

Microsoft Office 15 Preview [Supersite for Windows]

Office 15 pays the Metro strategy tax; see the full review for more Office 15 details

After rebooting the tablet and signing in to Windows 8, I immediately scrolled to the end of the Start screen, knowing full well that Office had dumped some number of live tiles there. But even I was surprised by how many there were.

(Will Microsoft clean this up? I would bet so.)

Microsoft Office 15 Preview

Introducing PayPal Here: The Future of Commerce for Small Business

tbd if a triangle beats a Square

PayPal Here is the world’s first global mobile payment solution that allows small businesses to accept almost any form of payment. It’s designed to help those merchants make more sales and grow their business with confidence. And it gives them choices. They can accept payments by swiping cards with a fully encrypted thumb-sized card reader, or use a phone camera to scan and process cards and checks. It also allows them to invoice directly from the mobile app and, of course, accept PayPal in a brand new way.

Introducing PayPal Here: The Future of Commerce for Small Business

Anarchy in the App Store - Businessweek

Caveat emptor; also see For Apple, Pressure Builds Over App Store Fraud (NYT)

But living up to those promises has become increasingly difficult as the App Store has expanded to include nearly 600,000 games, organizational tools, and other programs. Once criticized by app developers for long approval times and arbitrary rejections, Apple is now struggling with the opposite problem: letting through too many apps that violate the company’s own privacy rules or rip off trademarks. The company is also trying to swat down startups trying to manipulate the App Store, which has helped drive sales of more than 315 million iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches. Apple declined to comment for this story.

[…]

Anarchy in the App Store - Businessweek

Apple Shares Hit $600; $1 Trillion Market Cap Seems Less Outrageous - John Paczkowski - News - AllThingsD

Interesting times

A stunning rally. Apple’s stock is up about 47 percent for the year, and seems destined to continue its ascent. Analysts certainly seem to think so: Earlier this week, Morgan Stanley and Canaccord Genuity both lifted their price targets on AAPL to above $700.

At $600, Apple has about a $550 billion market cap. At $700, its market cap would be around $603 billion.

And at somewhere around $1,072? $1 trillion.

Which is certainly a long way off, but not implausible.

Apple Shares Hit $600; $1 Trillion Market Cap Seems Less Outrageous - John Paczkowski - News - AllThingsD

Galaxy Tab 7.7 an admirable also-ran - Business - The Boston Globe

If Amazon were to OEM this device, brand it Kindle Fire 2.0, and provide relatively inexpensive wide-area wireless (e.g., via Sprint or Clearwire), it’d be a very different tablet competitive landscape

By any standard, this is a marvelous device. It’s decisively the best minitablet I’ve tried. It’s razor-thin, sleek, and light, with a gorgeous touchscreen capable of true high-definition video.

But it’s not the new iPad from Apple Inc., which goes on sale Friday. Indeed, using the Tab reminded me why the iPad is the world’s dominant tablet computer, and probably will be for years to come.

Galaxy Tab 7.7 an admirable also-ran - Business - The Boston Globe

Microsoft Builds a Browser for Your Past - Technology Review

Timeline++

Lifebrowser's interactive timeline is reminiscent of a less polished version of Facebook's recently introduced Timeline feature. However, Horvitz's design precedes Facebook's and doesn't rely on a user to manually curate it. Photos, e-mails, and other documents and data points appear in chronological order, but Lifebrowser's timeline only shows those judged to be associated with "landmark" events by artificial intelligence algorithms. A user can slide a "volume control" to change how significant data has to be if it is to appear on the timeline. A search feature can pull up landmark events on a certain topic.

Microsoft Builds a Browser for Your Past - Technology Review

Evernote for iOS Update: iPad Retina Display Support, Better Editing, Suggested Note Titles, and More « Evernote Blogcast

Check the full post for more Evernote for iOS updates

Anticipation of the new iPad has become a happy annual tradition at Evernote. Each time Apple gives fans something new and exciting to work with and this year is no exception. The faster processor, fantastic camera and beautiful display, all make for a better Evernote experience.

Our new iOS update (4.1.9) features a number of great features for both iPhone and iPad, and just in time for the new iPad, we bring you full Retina display support! Let’s take a closer look.

Get Evernote for iOS from the iTunes App Store »

Retina optimized

We’ve been hard at work upgrading all of our graphics and interfaces to look beautiful on the new tablet. Every aspect of Evernote is sharper, crisper and more vibrant. We can’t wait to get our hands on the new iPad to see it for ourselves.

Evernote for iOS Update: iPad Retina Display Support, Better Editing, Suggested Note Titles, and More « Evernote Blogcast

I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Lessons from Redmond - Cringely on technology

From an Amazon embrace-and-extend perspective piece

The AWS-based business I have in mind today is DropBox, the incredibly successful data storage and synchronization service that runs on AWS. Amazon’s Kindle group in Cupertino is apparently readying their own DropBox clone. This makes sense for a couple reasons: 1) Amazon is already supplying (and being paid for) 90 percent of what we think of as DropBox, and; 2) the Kindle platform could use a better store-and-sync capability.

It’s sync that DropBox has right now and Kindle/Amazon does not, but how hard can it be to add that capability?  Not very. And how hard is it to imagine expanding a Kindle-specific syncing service to supporting in the near future any Internet-connected device. It’s not hard at all.

I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Lessons from Redmond - Cringely on technology

Microsoft Pri0 | Android tablets gain market share, thanks to Kindle Fire | Seattle Times Newspaper

From a tablet market share snapshot

Though Apple's iPad shipments grew in the fourth quarter of 2011 -- to 15.4 million versus 11.1 million in the third quarter -- it nonetheless lost market share. In the fourth quarter, it held 54.7 percent of the worldwide market, down from 61.5 percent in the third quarter.

Amazon shipped 4.7 million Kindle Fires in 2011, enough to boost the company into second place behind Apple with 16.8 percent of the worldwide market.

[…] Here's IDC's chart:

 

Microsoft Pri0 | Android tablets gain market share, thanks to Kindle Fire | Seattle Times Newspaper

A Turing Award for Helping Make Computers Smarter - NYTimes.com

Excerpt from an overview of the latest Turing Award winner’s work

In the 1970s and 1980s, the dominant approach to artificial intelligence was to try to capture the process of human judgment in rules a computer could use. They were called rules-based expert systems.

Dr. Pearl championed a different approach of letting computers calculate probable outcomes and answers. It helped shift the pursuit of artificial intelligence onto more favorable terrain for computing.

“It allowed us to learn from the data rather than write down rules of logic,” said Peter Norvig, an artificial intelligence expert and research director at Google. “It really opened things up.”

A Turing Award for Helping Make Computers Smarter - NYTimes.com

The Pointless Debate Over Web Curation vs. Aggregation–Businessweek [GigaOM]

A curation counterpoint

We already have a tool for providing credit to the original source: It’s called the hyperlink. Plenty of people don’t use hyperlinks as much as they should (including mainstream media sources such as the New York Times, although Executive Editor Jill Abramson said at SXSW that this is going to change), while others misuse and abuse them. Used properly, they serve the purpose of providing credit quite well. How to use them properly—especially for journalistic purposes—is a can of worms, as Felix Salmon of Reuters and others have noted. And when it comes to curation vs. aggregation, it seems as though curation is what people call it when they like the process; aggregation is what they call it when they don’t.

The Pointless Debate Over Web Curation vs. Aggregation - Businessweek

Google Gives Search a Refresh - WSJ.com

Concluding paragraphs of an article about Google’s impending semantic shift; also see WSJ Says Big Google Search Changes Coming? Reality Check Time! (Search Engine Land)

But the newest change is expected to go much further, coming as a result of Google's acquisition in 2010 start-up Metaweb Technologies, which had an index of 12 million entities, such as movies, books, companies and celebrities. By comparison, online encyclopedia Wikipedia has 3.5 million English entries, though they include more detailed information.

Mr. Singhal said Google and the Metaweb team, which then numbered around 50 software engineers, have since expanded the size of the index to more than 200 million entities, partly by developing "extraction algorithms," or mathematical formulas that can organize data scattered across the Web. It also approached organizations and government agencies to obtain access to databases, including the CIA World Factbook, which houses up-to-date encyclopedic information about countries worldwide.

Google Gives Search a Refresh - WSJ.com

The New iPad Is Much the Same, Only Better - NYTimes.com

… and, like the iPhone 4S, the new iPad is likely to set new sales records, even if it disappoints reviewers who were expecting miracles

Really, the new iPad should have been called the iPad 2S. In the past, Apple added the letter S to iPhone models that weren’t exactly new but had been tastefully enhanced (iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4S). That’s exactly what’s going on with the new iPad. Its technical improvements keep it at the forefront of desirability — just ahead of the snapping jaws of its Android competition — but don’t take it in any new directions.

The New iPad Is Much the Same, Only Better - NYTimes.com

New iPad: A Million More Pixels Than HDTV - Walt Mossberg - Personal Technology - AllThingsD

Walt Mossberg on the new iPad

There are other changes in the new, third-generation iPad — called simply “iPad,” with no number, which goes on sale on Friday at the same base price as its predecessor, $499. But the key upgrades are to those core features — the 9.7-inch screen and the data speed over cellular networks. These upgrades are massive. Using the new display is like getting a new eyeglasses prescription — you suddenly realize what you thought looked sharp before wasn’t nearly as sharp as it could be.

New iPad: A Million More Pixels Than HDTV - Walt Mossberg - Personal Technology - AllThingsD

Jeremiah Owyang - Google+ - Today is bash your former employer and call them a soulless corporate machine day

Alumni club perspectives from Yahoo, Google, and Goldman Sachs; see the post link below for related Google+ discussion

Today is bash your former employer and call them a soulless corporate machine day.
All three of these stories appeared in my feed. Wow. a trend? Should we name it a holiday?
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/03/opinion-baio-yahoo-patent-lie/ [A Patent Lie: How Yahoo Weaponized My Work]
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-left-google.aspx [Why I left Google]
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/why-i-am-leaving-goldman-sachs.html?pagewanted=1&_r=4&hp [Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs]

Jeremiah Owyang - Google+ - Today is bash your former employer and call them a soulless…

Gamers Outdo Computers at Matching Up Disease Genes: Scientific American

Sign of the times

The hope that swarms of gamers can help to solve difficult biological problems has been given another boost by a report in the journal PLoS One, showing that data gleaned from the online game Phylo are helping to untangle a major problem in comparative genomics.

The game was created to address the 'multiple sequence alignment (MSA) problem', which refers to the difficulty of aligning roughly similar sequences of DNA in genes common to many species. A DNA sequence that is conserved across species suggests that it plays an important role in the ultimate function of that particular gene.

Gamers Outdo Computers at Matching Up Disease Genes: Scientific American

Is neuroscience the new ‘Freakonomics’? - Ideas@Innovations - The Washington Post

Final paragraph of a timely reality check

A decade ago, if you asked top business leaders whether they'd ever consider reading a book on neuroscience, they probably would have looked askance at you while tapping away at their BlackBerry. Today, they realize that profits lie in understanding how the human brain works, how people make decisions, and what influences the final purchase. What they may not realize, however, is that this understanding is moreso in a neuroscientist’s wheelhouse than an economist’s.

Is neuroscience the new ‘Freakonomics’? - Ideas@Innovations - The Washington Post

Samsung Supplies Apple With Touch Screen for New IPad - Bloomberg

A classic co-opetition case study

Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) will supply the screen for Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s new iPad after LG Display Co. (034220) and Sharp Corp. (6753) didn’t meet the U.S. company’s quality requirements, an analyst with iSuppli said.

[…]

The supply deal deepens Apple’s partnership with Samsung, which already makes the chips that power the iPhone and iPad, even as the companies sue each other around the world regarding patents. Apple unveiled a new version of the iPad last week that features a sharper display and faster processor to fend off growing competition from products including Samsung’s Galaxy Tab

Samsung Supplies Apple With Touch Screen for New IPad - Bloomberg

Is Pinterest the Next Napster? - WSJ.com

Déjà vu

The site, with a "Pin it" tool that users embed in their browser's tool bar, makes it very simple to pin images from all around the Web, whereas, to pin your own images, you have to first upload them, and then pin them by putting them into a board that you've created.

Photographers who make money from the reproduction of their images are starting to get annoyed.

Is Pinterest the Next Napster? - WSJ.com

After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses - NYTimes.com

With resources such as Kahn Academy in the picture, I suspect Britannica will face another existential crisis over the next few years

Sales of the Britannica peaked in 1990, when 120,000 sets were sold in the United States. But now print encyclopedias account for less than 1 percent of the Britannica’s revenue. About 85 percent of revenue comes from selling curriculum products in subjects like math, science and the English language; 15 percent comes from subscriptions to the Web site, the company said.

After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses - NYTimes.com

AOL CEO Talks Up Patent Portfolio - Peter Kafka - Media - AllThingsD

Perhaps AOL patented its suicidal-strategy model

But Yahoo isn’t the only aging Web giant with a big basket of patents it thinks it can turn into money. AOL also has a portfolio of 700 to 800 “really important” patents, CEO Tim Armstrong told Wall Street this morning.

“You should assume we understand that portfolio, and assume we have a strategy on it,” he told the audience at a Barclays investor conference.

AOL CEO Talks Up Patent Portfolio - Peter Kafka - Media - AllThingsD

iPhoto on iOS Review: Letting Your Fingers Do the Photo Editing - Katherine Boehret - The Digital Solution - AllThingsD

Check the full article for some reasons why, at least in this context, we are still in a “PC plus” (where PC => Mac or Windows) world

Editing digital photos is a thankless job that involves hours in front of the computer. Mouse click after mouse click, one lucky person fixes red eyes, crops layouts and brightens hundreds of images from the latest birthday party or family vacation. Now, Apple wants to free people from their computers with a mobile photo-editing option.

iPhoto on iOS Review: Letting Your Fingers Do the Photo Editing - Katherine Boehret - The Digital Solution - AllThingsD

Khan Academy iPad app available now with over 2,700 educational videos | The Verge

Time to explore…

If you're feeling a little guilty over that new iPad preorder, you could try convincing yourself you'll use it for something positive. The Khan Academy may be of assistance there, as it's just released an iPad app that makes over 2,700 educational videos available for free. The videos are all in Salman Khan's trademark low-tech style, involving Wacom tablet doodles and simple, conversational explanations to help you get to grips with a whole range of topics from computer science to the history of art. The app is pretty straightforward, but offers useful features like subtitles, progress tracking, and the ability to download videos and playlists for offline viewing. It's free and available in the App Store right now.

Khan Academy iPad app available now with over 2,700 educational videos | The Verge

Ray Ozzie’s not alone: Everyone loves Github [GigaOM]

Software development entropy reduction

Welcome to the age of Github, when software development is as much about mashing up or connecting snippets of existing code as it is about writing that code in the first place.

As more applications move to the cloud, the preferred method of managing development — and for finding code that already exists — is Github, the open source code repository and versioning system used by more than 1.4 million developers (according to the Github site.)

http://gigaom.com/cloud/ray-ozzies-not-alone-everyone-loves-github/

Inside Search: Video! The search quality meeting, uncut (annotated)

An annotated snapshot of how decisions are made in the Googleplex

It took eight video cameras and 16 microphones, but we’ve done something new and special to give you another inside look at how search works. Today we’ve published, for the first time, a video with the uncut discussion of a proposed algorithm change (in this case, an upcoming change to our spell correction system). The language can be technical, so we've included annotations to provide some context for the discussion (and have a little fun!).

Inside Search: Video! The search quality meeting, uncut (annotated)

Yahoo sues Facebook for infringing 10 patents - Yahoo! News

More on Yahoo’s new business strategy

"As a general proposition, when a company is about to go public, the last thing it needs is to get involved in a knock-down, drag out litigation fight," Chien said.

"So that might make Facebook more willing to resolve its differences with Yahoo."

Yahoo has used similar timing to its advantage in the past. Google agreed to issue shares to Yahoo nine days before Google went public in 2004 in exchange for a license to Yahoo's patents. Google later took a $201 million non-cash charge related to the transaction.

Yahoo sues Facebook for infringing 10 patents - Yahoo! News

Al Gore with Sean Parker at SXSW: 'Occupy democracy!' | Geek Gestalt - CNET News

Interesting times

"The Internet is the most fantastic tool ever brough into being to make things right and to fix our democracy," Gore told the SXSW crowd. "We can use it. It is going to happen. But how long? It depends on whether feel passionate about it and get involved."

The discussion was billed as Gore interviewing Parker, but for the thousands of SXSW attendees who jammed the room to hear the two talk, it was definitely a love fest for the former VP--a man who is clearly at the top of his game these days.

"Our democracy has been hacked," Gore began. "It no longer works to serve the best interests of the people of this country."

Al Gore with Sean Parker at SXSW: 'Occupy democracy!' | Geek Gestalt - CNET News

The history of computing: Creation story | The Economist

Excerpt from a review of George Dyson’s latest book, Turing’s Cathedral

Yet despite establishing the blueprint for all subsequent computers, which are known to this day as Neumann machines, the IAS machine is less well known, even among computer-history buffs, than ENIAC or Colossus. Admittedly, it was not the first stored-program machine; during its construction, von Neumann and others modified ENIAC to a stored-program design, and other stored-program machines were also built in Britain. But the IAS machine’s design was distributed and widely copied; one of its many offspring was the IBM 701, the first commercially successful computer.

Mr Dyson’s book, the product of ten years in the IAS archives, is an effort to remedy this blind-spot in computing history. It seems to have arisen, in part, because the IAS was embarrassed by the practical nature of von Neumann’s project, making it reluctant to highlight its role in the genesis of modern computing.

The history of computing: Creation story | The Economist

Apple disputes e-book conspiracy claims, says Kindle isn’t a threat - GeekWire

Defend different

Apple responds in its March 3 filing that “a supposed belief that a market must be entered for competitive reasons hardly shows a ‘conscious commitment’ to ‘achieve an unlawful objective’ of raising prices to uncompetitive levels by conspiracy or otherwise.”

The Apple filing continues …

“Nor does this ‘Kindle theory’ make sense on its own terms. For example, if Amazon was a ‘threat’ that needed to be squelched by means of an illegal conspiracy, why would Apple offer Amazon’s Kindle app on the iPad?  Why would Apple conclude that conspiring to force Amazon to no longer lose money on eBooks would cripple Amazon’s competitive fortunes? And why would Apple perceive the need for an illegal solution to the “Kindle threat” when it had an obvious and lawful one which it implemented – namely, introducing a multipurpose device (the iPad) whose marketing and sales success was not centered on eBook sales?

Apple disputes e-book conspiracy claims, says Kindle isn’t a threat - GeekWire

The Curator's Guide to the Galaxy - Megan Garber - Technology - The Atlantic

Hopefully the leading blogging tools will add support for these conventions

[…]  The Internet is still incredibly young, and it's grown up organically. Because of those two things, its users haven't yet come together to determine a fully standardized system for attribution. We're making it up as we go along. Which leads to a lot of experimentation (the hat-tip and the via and the RT and the MT!) ... and to a lot of confusion. On the web, the line between sharing and stealing -- between being a helpful conduit of information and being, on the other hand, a jerk -- can be frighteningly thin.

That could be changing, though. This weekend, Maria Popova (whom you may know as an Atlantic contributor, or as the author of Brainpickings, and either way as one of the web's foremost experts on the art of curation) is launching The Curator's Code, a system -- and, she hopes, a movement -- to "honor and standardize the attribution of discovery across the web." The new project offers both a code of ethics and a common standard for borrowing and sharing. It aims to provide a framework for celebrating curation by way of formalizing it -- or, as Popova describes it, of "keeping the whimsical rabbit hole of the Internet open by honoring discovery."

The Curator's Guide to the Galaxy - Megan Garber - Technology - The Atlantic

www.outlookindia.com | ‘We Need Active Online Policing By The Citizens’

Excerpt from an Om Malik interview

Will Microsoft and Windows survive?

Microsoft doesn’t have the wherewithal to cannibalize itself. They keep doing things which are patchwork. But they do a good job of it. They have a huge market, they have a huge market share. Apple, in contrast, will take an existing product and say, yes, we will destroy it. You know that if iPad keeps growing in popularity, computers become an afterthought. But one can’t laugh at Microsoft. They are a very serious company with a really serious revenue base.

www.outlookindia.com | ‘We Need Active Online Policing By The Citizens’

Up Front - NYTimes.com

From a timely Douglas Coupland reality check

So what is the place of the novel — that rather old-­fashioned technology — in a world where newfangled “content delivery systems” are continuously changing the way we read? “Two decades of profound technological shifts have literally, biologically, rewired our brains,” Coupland wrote. “We all know it. We all feel it. I think new work needs to address this astonishing shift. My agent tells me the only books people are writing or reading right now are fantasy. Great, but I want to see how our new brains tell stories set in present times as long-form fiction. I miss my pre-Internet brain, but that doesn’t help anything. We can only go forward.”

Up Front - NYTimes.com

Google+ Executive to Critic: 'Make Sure You’re Using It Correctly' [Mashable]

Check the comment thread on the source post for a case study in cyber-polarization

Still he was not satisfied and asked why Google+ sometimes seems like a ghost town. Gundotra’s response — “Make sure you’re using it correctly” — drew some chuckles as it brought to mind how Apple CEO Steve Jobs responded to criticism of Apple’s antenna attenuation problem, telling users they were holding the phone wrong. Undaunted, Gundotra told Kawasaki that sometimes users post to empty circles without realizing it.

Gundotra said that what people do not understand is that with Google+, Google is actually building 2.0, in other words this is the next generation of Google as a broad-based service.

Google+ Executive to Critic: 'Make Sure You’re Using It Correctly'

For tablet computer visionary Roger Fidler, a lot of what-ifs - The Washington Post

Excerpt from a lengthy article about a pioneering 1994 tablet vision

Or had Fidler’s crew simply planted the concept of this most fantastic innovation into the public mind all those many years ago? This last one, it turns out, is the linchpin question in an epic patent battle between Apple and Samsung, an emergent rival in the tablet market. And of all the wonder and what-ifs, it’s the question that has catapulted Fidler from his peaceful academic life to the center of a global legal war.

Apple is suing Samsung, alleging that the Korean company copied its iPad design. And Samsung is defending itself, in large part, by using Fidler’s video-gone-viral, saying it proves the design was already in the public domain and is thus not patentable. Fidler is bewildered. He cherishes his sleek white iPad, but most unexpectedly he’s quietly siding with the enemy of a dead man he reveres.

For tablet computer visionary Roger Fidler, a lot of what-ifs - The Washington Post

Computer History Museum | Exhibits | This Day in History: March 11

Perhaps someday soon the world will live up to his vision

Hypertext Pioneer Vannevar Bush Is Born [March 11, 1890]

Pre-World-War II computer pioneer Vannevar (pronounced "Van-ee-ver") Bush is born in Everett, MA. Bush, who also was deeply involved with wartime computer projects, invented an electromechanical differential analyzer that used mechanical integrators to help solve differential equations. Bush was a co-founder of Raytheon, a military contractor. He also became very interested in information retrieval, which led him to imagine a machine he called "memex" -- an electronic extension of an individual's mind and memory base -- that mimicked human associative linking of information, and anticipated hypertext research. He died on June 28, 1974.

Computer History Museum | Exhibits | This Day in History: March 11

Open-Source A.W.S.: Creating a Thousand Clouds - NYTimes.com

For those inclined to make private AWS cloud clones

“Like Amazon or not, they are the de facto standard for cloud,” says Marten Mickos, the chief executive of Eucalyptus. “It’s just that not everyone wants it. Some people in open source think it is immoral to make a profit. I don’t.” Mr. Mickos was previously the head of MySQL, an open source database company that was purchased by Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle) in 2008 for $1 billion.

Eucalyptus originated with a project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, but is clearly intended to be a profit-making business. Its customers include Puma, Sony, and the federal Department of Agriculture, and it counts over 25,000 clouds running on its software worldwide. Eucalyptus runs for free when customers use open source virtualization software, necessary for cloud computing, like Xen and KVM. When customers use the more popular products from VMWare, they must use Eucalyptus’s subscription product, which costs $2,000 per server a year.

Open-Source A.W.S.: Creating a Thousand Clouds - NYTimes.com

Jonah Lehrer on How to Be Creative - WSJ.com

Excerpt from a creativity article by the author of “Imagine: How Creativity Works” (which will be published 3/19)

How can people get better at making these kinds of connections? Mr. Jobs argued that the best inventors seek out "diverse experiences," collecting lots of dots that they later link together. Instead of developing a narrow specialization, they study, say, calligraphy (as Mr. Jobs famously did) or hang out with friends in different fields. Because they don't know where the answer will come from, they are willing to look for the answer everywhere.

Recent research confirms Mr. Jobs's wisdom. The sociologist Martin Ruef, for instance, analyzed the social and business relationships of 766 graduates of the Stanford Business School, all of whom had gone on to start their own companies. He found that those entrepreneurs with the most diverse friendships scored three times higher on a metric of innovation. Instead of getting stuck in the rut of conformity, they were able to translate their expansive social circle into profitable new concepts.

Jonah Lehrer on How to Be Creative - WSJ.com

iPad vs. Galaxy Note 10.1: Samsung Unloads On Apple [Huffington Post]

Perhaps not as “resolutionary” as the new iPad, but Samsung is still aggressively competing – a table provided to the press by Samsung (check the full article for more analysis):

Revisiting the Evernote/Microsoft OneNote Competitive Landscape | Que

Excerpt from another article in my OneNote/Evernote series on Que

Microsoft OneNote and Evernote are the market-leading note-taking tools for a variety of device types (PCs, smartphones, and tablets). In March 2011 I wrote a competitive comparison, "Evernote and Microsoft OneNote: Comparing Two Noteworthy Tools/Services," and I encourage you to take a few minutes to review the earlier article if you're not familiar with both products.

This article shares my perspectives on what's new (since early 2011) with Evernote and OneNote, including a brief comparison of the iPad versions of both applications. I'll start with "big picture" updates for both Evernote and OneNote, share some observations about how I continue to gain value from both, and close with some projections about what may happen next, as both tools continue to evolve.

Revisiting the Evernote/Microsoft OneNote Competitive Landscape | Que

BBC News - Celebrating Colossus, the codebreaking computer

Check the links below for the films (via YouTube)

Testimonials from the last living engineers who worked on the wartime code-cracking machine Colossus have been gathered for a film celebrating their work.

The codes cracked by the device helped ensure the success of the Normandy invasion that led to the Allied victory in World War II.

[…]

The Colossus film is the second that Google produced about historical computers and those who created them. In November 2011, it published a film about the Leo, the world's first business computer.

BBC News - Celebrating Colossus, the codebreaking computer

Facebook Co-Founder Chris Hughes Is Buying 'The New Republic' : The Two-Way : NPR

I’m glad to see this, as a long-term TNR subscriber; see this Chris Hughes letter for more details

"People still want independent, rigorous reporting and The New Republic has been a place where that happens," Hughes tells Steve during a conversation that's to be broadcast on Friday's Morning Edition.

Hughes, who directed online organizing for the Obama campaign in 2008, adds that there's no shortage of short-form journalism these days (such as blogs). "The shortage is understanding the big problems of our day," he believes. "Where do you go for context on the problems our nation faces?"

Facebook Co-Founder Chris Hughes Is Buying 'The New Republic' : The Two-Way : NPR

New iPad: How Apple's tablet strategy parallels its unbeatable iPod success. - Slate Magazine

Excerpt from a Farhad Manjoo iPad reality check

It’s been two years since Apple’s tablet went on sale. Rivals have released dozens of alternatives, but the iPad still represents more than 60 percent of market share. Worse, the rest of the market is dominated by two devices that are being sold at a loss—Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. At yesterday’s launch event, Apple did everything it needed to do to repeat the iPod story. First, the iPad’s new “Retina” display and 4G networking will improve the device just enough to make it difficult to match, let alone beat. More importantly, Cook expanded his product lineup and lowered his prices. The new iPad starts at $499, as the iPad 2 originally did, but the older version is now selling for $399. See how this shaping up? The iPad market is looking more and more like a sequel to what happened with the iPod. Like most sequels, this one will be bigger and way scarier for everyone involved.

New iPad: How Apple's tablet strategy parallels its unbeatable iPod success. - Slate Magazine

Mobile Hotspot Included in Verizon's iPad 4G LTE Data Plan [GottaBe Mobile]

This should help Verizon iPad customers use their 4G data allotment in the first few minutes of every month (a commenter noted that Verizon already had the same policy – no extra charge to use as a mobile hotspot – for the Samsung Tab).  I’m bummed Verizon and AT&T are leveraging oligopoly pricing models in this context; I’d be keen to have a new 4G iPad, if the 4G data rates were reasonable.

Another Verizon spokesperson confirmed to 9to5mac.com:

The new iPad on the Verizon Wireless network will have the mobile hotspot feature. Our 4G LTE tablets have the mobile hotspot feature and it is included in the tablet data plans so for example, customers who sign up for the $30 for 2GB plan will also have access to the mobile hotspot feature.

Mobile Hotspot Included in Verizon's iPad 4G LTE Data Plan

New Apps Connect to Friends Nearby - NYTimes.com

Coming soon: apps that help you hide from people using apps to find people

Many companies say it is beneficial and that their apps will help people forge new connections and meet someone they perhaps should know. App stores have been flooded with such tools in recent weeks. Kismet, Glancee, Highlight, Ban.jo, Meeteor, Pearescope, GetGauss, Intro, Qrious, Mingle and Sonar, hope to transform the smartphone into a social dowsing rod that delivers an alert when it detects other people nearby who share interests, friends or career goals.

New Apps Connect to Friends Nearby - NYTimes.com

Stephen Wolfram Blog : The Personal Analytics of My Life

Not your average personal information manager; see the full post for more details

One day I’m sure everyone will routinely collect all sorts of data about themselves. But because I’ve been interested in data for a very long time, I started doing this long ago. I actually assumed lots of other people were doing it too, but apparently they were not. And so now I have what is probably one of the world’s largest collections of personal data.

[…]

OK, so let’s put all this together. Here are my “average daily rhythms” for the past decade (or in some cases, slightly less):

Stephen Wolfram Blog : The Personal Analytics of My Life

Companies scramble to use Pinterest - Business - The Boston Globe

Pinteresting times; also see Pinterest Now Generates More Referral Traffic than Twitter (TechCrunch)

Just as many businesses have finally figured out how to use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Google Plus, here comes yet another social media obligation that’s too popular to ignore. Traffic on Silicon Valley-based Pinterest, which was founded in 2010, shot up from 418,000 to 11.7 million unique visitors per month in the eight months ended in January, according to Internet measurement firm comScore.

[…]

One of the keys to Pinterest’s success is its disarmingly simple design, based on a “virtual pinboard’’ - something like an online scrapbook. Users “pin’’ up images of products and items they like, often related to hobbies or other personal passions. The images can link to actual products online, and be organized on pinboards shared with other fans.

Companies scramble to use Pinterest - Business - The Boston Globe

Former top Microsoft exec says world is over the PC | Reuters

It’s great to see Ray Ozzie sharing his perspectives again; check this page for a video and transcript of the full interview

"People argue about 'are we in a post-PC world?'. Why are we arguing? Of course we are in a post-PC world," Ozzie said at a technology conference run by tech blog GeekWire in Seattle on Wednesday.

"That doesn't mean the PC dies, that just means that the scenarios that we use them in, we stop referring to them as PCs, we refer to them as other things."

Former top Microsoft exec says world is over the PC | Reuters

Microsoft in dispute with OnLive over Windows desktop-on-iPad licensing | ZDNet

I’m surprised this took so long

Now we know why Microsoft officials refused to discuss whether OnLive — the company offering iPad and Android tablet users a hosted Windows desktop app — was in violation of Microsoft licensing terms.

It seems Microsoft believes they are.

“We are actively engaged with OnLive with the hope of bringing them into a properly licensed scenario, and we are committed to seeing this issue is resolved,” said Joe Matz, Corporate Vice President of Worldwide Licensing and Pricing at Microsoft, in a March 8 blog post.

From today’s post, it seems it took a note from Gartner regarding licensing of OnLive Desktop for Microsoft to finally go public on the question of whether or not what OnLive is doing is legal.

Microsoft in dispute with OnLive over Windows desktop-on-iPad licensing | ZDNet

iPad 3 launch: Is Apple’s 4G LTE mobile data service too fast? - Slate Magazine

This is the primary reason I’m sticking with my trusty iPad 1 for now

Before you throw your iPad 2 out the window, you should know one thing about the mobile information superhighway: Life in the fast lane ain’t cheap. With an advertised top download speed of up to 73 megabits per second, the top-of-the-line iPad could theoretically burn through a basic 2-gigabyte-per-month data plan in about four minutes. But oh, how delicious those four minutes would be!

[…]

Just be careful how much you indulge in that immersive experience, or you might find your first AT&T or Verizon bill unexpectedly immersive as well. The data plans for the third edition of the iPad will have the same costs and data limits as the carriers’ current plans. For Verizon, that’s $30 for two gigabytes per month, $50 for five gigs, and $80 for 10 gigs; AT&T’s prices are similar. Neither offers an unlimited plan anymore, with AT&T recently following Verizon in canceling its last all-you-can-stream options. (Sprint, the last carrier to offer unlimited data, was left out of the latest iPad launch, notes industry blog FierceWireless.)

iPad 3 launch: Is Apple’s 4G LTE mobile data service too fast? - Slate Magazine

How IBM Wooed Wall Street - Businessweek

An impressive stock market track record…

IBM’s share price—unremarkable for much of the last decade—has surged, almost to the day, since the Smarter Planet shtick began. It hit an all-time high of $200 on Monday, March 5, up from $70 in late 2008.

[…]

But still ultimately about mainframes and professional services:

The answer to that is less sexy than IBM might have you believe. The company, with annual revenue of $107 billion, still makes tens of billions of dollars per year selling traditional data-center hardware and software. In fact, Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., estimates that about 20 percent of IBM’s revenue and 40 percent of its profits can be traced to hardware, software, services, and financing on mainframes, the grizzled veterans of corporate computing. Such machines are not analytics dynamos but rather workhorses crunching away at the most mundane tasks. The bulk of the rest of IBM’s business revolves around high-profit software and services, in which the company deploys tens of thousands of people to customers’ sites for what can be very lengthy technology installation and consulting engagements.

How IBM Wooed Wall Street - Businessweek

Apple Tries to Keep Edge With New iPad - WSJ.com

Another handy summary

Apple Tries to Keep Edge With New iPad - WSJ.com

Obama Campaign’s Vast Effort to Re-Enlist ’08 Supporters - NYTimes.com

Political campaigning state-of-the-art

For instance, with the help of Web developers recruited from the private sector, it has dedicated considerable hours creating technology that can make its Web site, barackobama.com, fit perfectly onto any screen, be it an iPhone, Blackberry or Droid — a seemingly small detail that campaign officials say can make a huge difference when it comes to enticing donors or volunteers to stay connected or click a “donate” button.

It has tested various messages sent to different profiles of Internet users to see which get the best responses in terms of commitments of money or time — a single color change, advisers say, can keep an online user on site for longer. That effort has been helped along by the chief scientist, Rayid Ghani, who joined the campaign last year from Accenture Technology Labs in Chicago.

Obama Campaign’s Vast Effort to Re-Enlist ’08 Supporters - NYTimes.com

Post-PC Apple, By the Numbers - Liz Gannes - News - AllThingsD

Check the link below for more stats

“Apple has its feet firmly planted in the post-PC future,” Cook said. “It plays to our strengths; it’s what we love to do.”

What other numbers did the company formerly known as “Apple Computer” (it changed its name in 2007) offer?

• 362 Apple stores
• 315 million iOS devices sold through last year, including 62 million in the last quarter
• 585,000 apps created
• 25 billion app downloads

Post-PC Apple, By the Numbers - Liz Gannes - News - AllThingsD

U.S. Warns Apple, Publishers - Thomas Catan and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg - News - AllThingsD

Price different

The Justice Department has warned Apple Inc. and five of the biggest U.S. publishers that it plans to sue them for allegedly colluding to raise the price of electronic books, according to people familiar with the matter.

[…]

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

U.S. Warns Apple, Publishers - Thomas Catan and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg - News - AllThingsD

New Windows has a different touch - Business - The Boston Globe

Excerpt from a generally positive Hiawatha Bray Windows 8 review

I logged on using Hotmail, and instantly my Windows 8 desktop came to life, linking me with Hotmail messages, listings from my online calendar, and photos I’d uploaded to Skydrive, a Microsoft file storage service.

That should sound familiar if you’ve got a phone or tablet that runs Google Inc.’s Android operating system. Google also offers a one-stop shopping sign-in, so it can shower you with Gmail, Google Calendar, Picasa photo sharing, and other goodies. What Google did was build a lovely little walled garden of online services that few of us would want to leave; but now Microsoft’s built a garden of its own. If I were a Google executive, I might just start to worry.

New Windows has a different touch - Business - The Boston Globe

OneNote for iPad: A Hopeful Leading Indicator | An Introduction to OneNote for iPad | Que

I have resumed my OneNote/Evernote series on Que; here’s an excerpt from the most recent post (three more will follow soon)

Microsoft had two high-level options when designing OneNote for iPad:

• Fully exploit the iPad platform, essentially treating it like a touch-centric and readily mobile personal computer
• Treat the iPad more like a super-sized iPhone, with much more limited capabilities

Unfortunately, in my opinion, Microsoft evidently opted for the latter approach (despite leaving "Mobile" out of the application name). With the first release of OneNote for iPad, Microsoft has delivered a product that's useful primarily for people who use OneNote 2010 extensively on Windows PCs and use their iPads as satellite clients to their PCs.

The rest of this article provides an overview of the capabilities of the initial release of OneNote for iPad. The next article in my OneNote series will provide a more extensive and critical review of OneNote for iPad.

OneNote for iPad: A Hopeful Leading Indicator | An Introduction to OneNote for iPad | Que

I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Siri’s big brother from Google - Cringely on technology

tbd if Microsoft has quietly hired a bunch of CALO alumni (see the full post for more context-setting)

With today’s introduction of Apple’s iPad 3 or iPad HD or whatever the hell they end up calling it, I think we’ll be entering a pretty Siri-ous phase when it comes to mobile Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology. Apple has a winner in Siri, its iOS digital assistant app, and knows it, so we’ll soon be seeing all-Siri, all the time in Apple products to come this year including, no doubt, Cupertino’s own big-screen TV. But this is not to say that Google’s Android will be far behind. There are stories popping-up about Google doing its own Siri-like app. But I expect Google to go significantly beyond Siri capability and I base that belief on the fact that Google has been working in this area since at least 2008, when they hired one of the scientists who did the basic research behind this category-shaping product.

I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Siri’s big brother from Google - Cringely on technology

Obvious Corp. Announces Second Project 'Branch' [The Next Web]

Hopefully supporting more than 140 characters, this time around

Obvious Corporation, the new endeavor of Twitter founders Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Jason Goldman, has today announced its second project. It’s called Branch and it’s a partnership with developers  Josh Miller, Cemre Güngöre, and Hursh Agrawal. The project is described as a platform for curated discussion among people that are knowledgable [sic] about a particular topic.

[…]

It sounds like Branch is some kid of public forum for discussion with a focus on people with expertise in a certain area, like Quora or Stack Exchange.

Obvious Corp. Announces Second Project 'Branch'

Countering the Google Plus Image Problem - NYTimes.com

If you have used a Google service lately and/or own an Android smartphone, I’m guessing Google considers you a member of both the Google+ and Google Play user communities

But Nate Elliott, a vice president and principal analyst with Forrester Research, said the numbers just are not adding up correctly.

“I don’t know how you can have a social layer without having a social network that people use,” Mr. Elliott said in a phone interview. “If Google is saying that someone who once signed up for Google Plus makes them an active user, then that’s not entirely convincing.”

Mr. Elliott said that although there were pockets of people using Google’s social network, its use did not come close to that of Facebook or Twitter. Google Plus “looks like Facebook from one year ago,” he said.

Countering the Google Plus Image Problem - NYTimes.com

Apple's New iPad a Boon for Verizon? - WSJ.com

If the new iPad has excellent battery life and a cost-effective LTE option, it could be a major milestone for wide-area wireless; also see How Apple Could Screw the U.S. Wireless Industry (GigaOM)

Verizon and AT&T are banking heavily on LTE to attract new subscribers and get existing subscribers to upgrade to more lucrative buckets of data covering devices such as tablets and smartphones. Both carriers will get LTE versions of the new iPad, people familiar with the matter have said.

The technology promises download speeds up to 10 times faster than third generation, or 3G networks. Verizon's LTE network covers nearly three times as many people as AT&T's. Yet more than a year after Verizon debuted its LTE network, the company said only 5% of its 87 million contract customers have switched over.

Apple's New iPad a Boon for Verizon? - WSJ.com

A Droid Phone With a Battery That Outlasts Most Talkers - Walt Mossberg - Personal Technology - AllThingsD

To summarize, reading between the lines: buy an iPhone instead…

A Droid Phone With a Battery That Outlasts Most Talkers - Walt Mossberg - Personal Technology - AllThingsD

Microsoft and Apple should hit Amazon, not Google • The Register

A timely Amazon reality check

Open ... and Shut Amazon is on a roll, and it's no longer just a question of dominating online retailing or public cloud computing. According to a Business Insider article, Amazon is already clearing more than $1bn each year in advertising revenue. This has Google scared. But it probably should have Apple scared, too.

Amazon, after all, is the anti-Apple. Whereas Apple only knows how to do high-margin businesses, Amazon only knows how to do low-margin businesses. Guess which one tends to dominate markets over time?

Microsoft and Apple should hit Amazon, not Google • The Register

Why Only Designers Can Create New Programming Languages - Technology Review

Excerpt from an overview of a provocative programming reality check

Meanwhile, the languages designed by academics who are obsessed with internal consistency and correctness include a bunch of mostly dead tongues: Fortran, Cobol, Lisp, C and Smalltalk. The only exceptions are .NET and Java, which were the products of considerable investment by Microsoft and Sun.

In light of this history, as well as her own experience in academia, Lopes argues that the reason the ivory tower is no longer creating programming languages that people actually use is that it treats programming as a science, when really, it's more of a design discipline.

Why Only Designers Can Create New Programming Languages - Technology Review

Google’s store now a one-stop shop - Business - The Boston Globe

Google is moving fast with this; Google Books and Android Market both updated themselves to Google Play on my smartphone this morning

Google is trying to establish a one-stop shop that can satisfy everyone’s digital desires, whether they are on a mobile device or a desktop computer’s Web browser. The effort is part of the Internet search leader’s broader ambition to diversify beyond online advertising, which accounts for 96 percent of its revenue.

With Google Play, the company hopes more people will start noticing other types of content and consider buying an electronic book or album, too. If that happens, Google Inc. believes more digital content providers will want to peddle their wares in its store.

Google’s store now a one-stop shop - Business - The Boston Globe

Why Google is killing the Android Market & Google Music | VentureBeat

Google Play … hardball

Wrapped up in today’s huge Google Play announcement was an interesting tidbit: Google is scrapping the Android Market and Google Music as independent brands or apps.

You can also kiss the company’s branded eBookstore goodbye.

“On your Android phone or tablet, we’ll be upgrading the Android Market app to the Google Play Store app over the coming days,” read the company’s official blog post, which continued to say that the apps and games you currently run will now be branded as Google Play games and Google Play apps.

Why Google is killing the Android Market & Google Music | VentureBeat

Being Tracked by Google Isn’t Bad—It’s Actually Good–Businessweek [GigaOM]

Accentuating the potential positive

I will go a step further: I’m not just ambivalent about this kind of tracking—I actually want to be tracked by companies like Google and even Facebook. Not just because it helps pay for the services I use, but also because it should (theoretically at least) make my Web experience better, by targeting ads and other things toward me instead of bombarding me with useless advertising that turns most websites into a garish nightmare, the visual equivalent of e-mail spam. If tracking my activity (which is anonymized by the majority of companies that use it) helps reduce that problem, I am all for it.

Being Tracked by Google Isn’t Bad—It’s Actually Good - Businessweek

When Gaming Is Good for You - WSJ.com

Check the full article for some downside dimensions

People who played action-based video and computer games made decisions 25% faster than others without sacrificing accuracy, according to a study. Indeed, the most adept gamers can make choices and act on them up to six times a second—four times faster than most people, other researchers found. Moreover, practiced game players can pay attention to more than six things at once without getting confused, compared with the four that someone can normally keep in mind, said University of Rochester researchers. The studies were conducted independently of the companies that sell video and computer games.

[…]

When Gaming Is Good for You - WSJ.com

The iPhone and iPad First in HTML5, Google's Galaxy Nexus Second - Ina Fried - Mobile - AllThingsD

Leading by example

While many people talk about HTML5 as a potential long-term threat to Apple’s mobile dominance, it turns out that, these days, iOS does the best job of rendering the Web standards.

A study by Spaceport.io found that Apple’s phones and tablets perform up to three times better than Android devices at various benchmarks. Performance on Android devices varied widely, with the Galaxy Nexus far outpacing phones running earlier versions of Google’s operating system.

The iPhone and iPad First in HTML5, Google's Galaxy Nexus Second - Ina Fried - Mobile - AllThingsD

iPad with Siri would sound sweet to Nuance - Business - The Boston Globe

This would make sense for the iPad 3 but perhaps not a lot of dollars for Nuance

The addition of Siri to a new iPad would certainly be a big deal for Nuance Communications Inc., the Burlington voice recognition company that helped bring the function to life on Apple’s iPhone 4s late last year. Nuance won’t discuss what specific technology it provides to Apple but confirms its software powers Siri’s uncanny ability to recognize human speech.

Siri was a hit right out of the gate, the shiniest new bell and the loudest new whistle on an updated iPhone that sold 37 million units during the last three months of 2011.

iPad with Siri would sound sweet to Nuance - Business - The Boston Globe

Windows 8 and Metro show true multiplatform OS promise - Chicago Sun-Times

Lead paragraph of a very positive Windows 8 (and Metro in general) review by Andy Ihnatko

I’ve been using the developer preview edition of Windows 8 on a multitouch tablet for a few months, and now I’ve been using the new consumer preview for a little less than a day. My overall opinion is so high that it has to be stated right here in the first paragraph: Microsoft has really cracked something here. With the Metro user interface, they’ve created a simple and beautiful design language that’s relevant to a broad range of devices and to the ways that people use computers in the second decade of the 21st century.

Windows 8 and Metro show true multiplatform OS promise - Chicago Sun-Times

As New iPad Debut Nears, Some See Decline of PCs - NYTimes.com

Excerpt from a stark PC market dynamics snapshot

“Tablets are on fire, there’s no question about that,” said Brad Silverberg, a venture capitalist in Seattle at Ignition Partners and a former Microsoft executive, who hastened to add that he was speaking mainly of the iPad, which dominates current sales.

Tablets are not there yet. In 2011, PCs outsold tablets almost six-to-one, estimates Canalys, a technology research company. But that is still a significant change from 2010, the iPad’s first year on the market, when PCs outsold tablets 20-to-one, according to Canalys. For the last two years, PC sales were flat, while iPad sales were booming. The Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook gave the market an additional lift over the holidays. Apple is banking on the tablet market. Its iPad brought in nearly 40 percent more revenue during the holidays than Apple’s own computer business, the Macintosh, did.

As New iPad Debut Nears, Some See Decline of PCs - NYTimes.com

Color E-Readers Finally Available to Consumers - Technology Review

Check the source for more details and a video

The Mirasol display, which uses tiny mirrors to refract light in a way that is reminiscent of irridescent butterfly wings, has apparently been especially hard to manufacture, because it's taken more than four years to ramp production volume to the point that this display could be sold to consumers. The result are devices (still only available in Asia) with 5.3 inch, 800-480 pixel screens. That means a display density of 223 pixels-per-inch, which is twice the resolution of an iPad but falls short of the resolution in Apple's Retina display. Mirasol has a high enough refresh rate to allow web navigation and video playback, albeit with some flicker.

Mirasol's primary competition is E-ink's Triton display, which uses the same technology found in the black and white displays that Kindle made famous, but overlays them with a color filter.

Color E-Readers Finally Available to Consumers - Technology Review

The Apple TV Set — Not Again! | Monday Note

From an Apple TV reality check

I believe Apple TV’s magic will be performed by a separate box, a descendant of today’s $99 Apple TV black puck, perhaps in combination with a new version of Time Capsule. This will enable the no-longer-a-hobby Apple TV to bring its magic to the millions of HDTVs already in homes all over the world — and to be replaced with better/faster hardware without drama.

(While we wait for the grand new Apple TV, we’re likely to get an updated version of today’s black puck Real Soon Now: The vintage 2010 model is no longer available online at Amazon, Best Buy, or Radio Shack — I just checked. If, as I hope, the upgrade outputs real 1080p HD — 1920 by 1080, versus today’s 720p — 1280 by 720, it’ll be an easy sell. Especially as an AirPlay companion to something like an iPad HD with twice the linear resolution of today’s tablet, 2048 by 1536 versus the original 1024 by 768.)

The Apple TV Set — Not Again! | Monday Note

Brain scan: Taking the long view | The Economist

Excerpt from an Economist profile

Mr Bezos’s willingness to take a long-term view also explains his fascination with space travel, and his decision to found a secretive company called Blue Origin, one of several start-ups now building spacecraft with private funding. It might seem like a risky bet, but the same was said of many of Amazon’s unusual moves in the past. Successful firms, he says, tend to be the ones that are willing to explore uncharted territories. “Me-too companies have not done that well over time,” he observes.

Brain scan: Taking the long view | The Economist

E-Books on Tablets Fight Digital Distractions - NYTimes.com

My e-ink Kindle is my primary e-reader again, in part for reasons addressed in this article

People who read e-books on tablets like the iPad are realizing that while a book in print or on a black-and-white Kindle is straightforward and immersive, a tablet offers a menu of distractions that can fragment the reading experience, or stop it in its tracks.

E-Books on Tablets Fight Digital Distractions - NYTimes.com

Exclusive: Yahoo Labs Head Raghavan Departing to Google - Kara Swisher - News - AllThingsD

Small world

Prabhakar Raghavan, the well-respected head of Yahoo’s Labs unit and also recently its head of strategy, is leaving the company to take a job at Google.

The departure comes ahead of possibly deep cuts in his division, which is in charge of long-term research at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, said sources.

Exclusive: Yahoo Labs Head Raghavan Departing to Google - Kara Swisher - News - AllThingsD

Internet Archive’s Repository Collects Thousands of Books - NYTimes.com

Internet Archive’s Repository Collects Thousands of Books - NYTimes.com:

Check the full article for more on Brewster Kahle's book collection

"As society embraces all forms of digital entertainment, this latter-day Noah is looking the other way. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur who made his fortune selling a data-mining company to Amazon.com in 1999, Mr. Kahle founded and runs the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization devoted to preserving Web pages — 150 billion so far — and making texts more widely available.

But even though he started his archiving in the digital realm, he now wants to save physical texts, too."

'via Blog this'

Yelp Shares Surge on Debut - NYTimes.com

Also see Repeat after me: There is no bubble … there is no bubble … (RealDan)

Late Thursday, Yelp priced its initial public offering at $15 a share, raising $107.25 million, at a $898.1 million valuation. At an opening price of roughly $22 a share, Yelp is trading at a $1.6 billion valuation –  far smaller than some of the recent Internet offerings, like Zynga or Groupon — but still an impressive debut for a start-up operating in a highly competitive environment that has yet to turn a profit.

The debut augers well for other technology stocks hoping to go public this year.

Yelp Shares Surge on Debut - NYTimes.com

Google privacy: A user’s guide - Business - The Boston Globe

Final paragraph of a Hiawatha Bray privacy reality check; check the source for useful tips on Google and Facebook privacy options

We are not facing a privacy apocalypse, despite changes in privacy policies, because every service offers some control for the informed user. Google, Facebook, and other giant companies would track our shoe sizes and what we eat for breakfast if we let them. So don’t let them.

Google privacy: A user’s guide - Business - The Boston Globe

Clipboard | Blog: You Say Goodbye and I Say Hello

I’m sorry to see Amplify go, as I continue to search for a multi-platform alternative to Windows Live Writer; perhaps Clipboard will evolve to address my blogging needs.  In any case, I appreciate the Amplify team being considerate as they wind down, and wish them well.  Now it’s time for me to revisit Clipboard, and to see what it has been up to lately…  I’m also hopeful Evernote will add blog publishing to its feature set sometime soon; it’d be ideal, for my preferences, to be able to blog (via Blogger) using Evernote.

What's being announced?

Clipmarks.com and Amplify.com are shutting down immediately. Clipboard.com -- a new clipping site under entirely different management and ownership -- will provide invitations by email to existing Amplify and Clipmarks users. Clipboard will also hold all Amplify and Clipmarks databases in trust to assess if there is demand to retroactively migrate clips from Amplify and Clipmarks into Clipboard.

Why are Clipmarks and Amplify shutting down now?

Despite being first in what is now recognized as an important service category, both services have struggled for some time to continue operating. The reasons why are difficult to state, but ultimately neither service was meeting the needs of their users. Management of each service has decided that the most responsible next step is to retire the sites in as graceful a manner as possible, while helping to support the growth of Clipboard; a new, innovative service that aims to solve the same problem that Clipmarks and Amplify were created to address.

Clipboard | Blog

OnLive Desktop Heads to Android: WinInfo Short Takes, March 2, 2012

Excerpt from Paul Thurrott’s weekly news round-up

Last week, I wrote about an exciting new mobile app called OnLive Desktop, which brings a fully functioning Windows desktop (plus Office 2010 and Adobe apps) to the iPad, in my article OnLive Desktop and Desktop Plus: Windows, Office, and Adobe on the iPad. It's a compelling solution for those who need just the occasional access to the Windows desktop. And now it's come to Android as well. You can download OnLive Desktop for Android from the Google Marketplace now—and versions for other smartphone types, PCs, Macs, and even TVs (via a small and inexpensive set-top box) are on the way.

WinInfo Short Takes, March 2, 2012

Microsoft's Office Chief Sure Seems To Like The iPad [Business Insider]

From an overview of Kurt DelBene iPad comments

In fact, he pointed out all the work Microsoft has already done to support the iPad.

For instance:

• Microsoft is working with Apple to support Office Web apps. Microsoft already lets users access some Office files with a Web browser (they have to be stored on Microsoft's SkyDrive or SharePoint products). DelBene said that Microsoft has "been working with Apple on improvement to the Safari browser so that those Web applications work well on an iPad."

Microsoft's Office Chief Sure Seems To Like The iPad

WARMer or Colder? | Platformonomics

Excerpt from a timely Windows 8 tablet reality check

Evidently WARM tablets can’t join a Windows domain, which has major implications for a Microsoft proposition that its tablets are better suited for the enterprise than the iPad. This is probably just a schedule casualty in the enormous effort required to port to a new processor architecture (ARM support is almost certainly the long pole for Windows 8), but it could also be a convoluted attempt to advantage notebook PCs or, even more implausibly, represent a bold endorsement of Intel’s power consumption roadmap.

WARMer or Colder? | Platformonomics

NoSQL Data Modeling Techniques « Highly Scalable Blog

An exceptionally useful overview

NoSQL databases are often compared by various non-functional criteria, such as scalability, performance, and consistency. This aspect of NoSQL is well-studied both in practice and theory because specific non-functional properties are often the main justification for NoSQL usage and fundamental results on distributed systems like CAP theorem are well applicable to the NoSQL systems.  At the same time, NoSQL data modeling is not so well studied and lacks of systematic theory like in relational databases. In this article I provide a short comparison of NoSQL system families from the data modeling point of view and digest several common modeling techniques.

NoSQL Data Modeling Techniques « Highly Scalable Blog

Obama Gets a Facebook Upgrade - NYTimes.com

An excellent case study of the new Facebook Timeline format

Indeed, as Facebook announced that the Timeline feature would be expanded to branded pages for businesses and public figures, President Obama’s Facebook page adopted the new format on Thursday, offering visitors a peek at his extended biography, a deluge of pictures and videos from his campaign and presidency, and a jab at those who question the authenticity of his birth certificate.

The first date on the timeline is Aug. 4, 1961, the president’s birthday. The message reads, “Made in the USA” and includes a photo of his birth certificate, emblazoned onto a coffee mug, which is available for $22.50 on Mr. Obama’s campaign Web site.

Obama Gets a Facebook Upgrade - NYTimes.com

Apps to Stem the Flood of Catalogs and Junk Mail - NYTimes.com

Snail mail annoyance and entropy reduction; check the source article for details and links

Last fall, I wrote about a service from Catalog Choice that helps you reduce unwanted catalogs and junk mail by using snail mail.

Now there are two new apps that are intended to do the same thing quickly and simply, by letting you take photos of pesky mail with your smartphone.

Apps to Stem the Flood of Catalogs and Junk Mail - NYTimes.com

Et Tu, Google? Android Apps Can Also Secretly Copy Photos - NYTimes.com

Thanks for the memories

It turns out that Google, maker of the Android mobile operating system, takes it one step further. Android apps do not need permission to get a user’s photos, and as long as an app has the right to go to the Internet, it can copy those photos to a remote server without any notice, according to developers and mobile security experts. It is not clear whether any apps that are available for Android devices are actually doing this.

Et Tu, Google? Android Apps Can Also Secretly Copy Photos - NYTimes.com

Rumor Mill Ramps Up Production of Cheaper and Smaller iPads - John Paczkowski - News - AllThingsD

There may yet be a few price elasticity curve surprises in this context

The most plausible: Taiwanese trade mag Digitimes’ claim that Apple plans to sell a cheaper, 8 gigabyte iPad 2 alongside the iPad 3 in a play for the lower end of the tablet market being staked out by Amazon’s Kindle Fire. I’ve heard nothing about such a plan, but it makes good sense. A new, low-capacity iPad 2 — priced at, say, $299 or even $349 — could wreak havoc on the low-end tablet market, clearing out a raft of struggling competitors and making the choice between Kindle Fire and iPad a much more difficult one for those consumers weighing the two.

Rumor Mill Ramps Up Production of Cheaper and Smaller iPads - John Paczkowski - News - AllThingsD

Impending iPad 3 Launch Sparks Tablet Trade-In Stampede | PCWorld

Apparently lots of iPad owners planning ahead

Talk of the impending debut of Apple's newest iPad, including the company's announcement yesterday of a March 7 launch event in San Francisco, has pushed tablet trade-in volumes to record levels, buy-back companies said today.

Their reports were consistent with those from online auctioneer eBay, which Tuesday said that tablet sales -- nearly 98% of which were iPads -- were 10 times greater this month than during the same stretch in 2011 in the run-up to the debut of the iPad 2.

Impending iPad 3 Launch Sparks Tablet Trade-In Stampede | PCWorld

Will Designers Take to the iPad3? - Technology Review

Excerpt from a NUI reality check

Steve Jobs disliked styluses. He told his biographer, “God gave us 10 styluses—let’s not invent another.” In 2007, when he introduced the iPhone, Jobs effectively killed the stylus. “Yech!” he said, and his fans applauded.

The critical tide is shifting, however. Farhad Manjoo recently declared in Slate his hope that the stylus would make a return someday soon. He embedded this intriguing 2010 video from Ken Hinckley on the new kinds of interactions that become possible when combining touch and stylus interactions on a screen.

Will Designers Take to the iPad3? - Technology Review

A Review of the Lytro Camera - NYTimes.com

Also see Radical Camera Lets You Pick What's Blurry And What's Not (WSJ)

But what if you could take a picture and refocus it after you had taken it? What if, just by clicking around a photo on your computer screen, you could choose which part of the image should be clear and which part should be blurry?

You can with a new camera called Lytro, and it’s astonishing. With a Lytro, you take a picture as you would with any camera, but the digital file it creates can be refocused after the fact.

[…]

A Review of the Lytro Camera - NYTimes.com

Nokia's Bet On Microsoft May Still Payoff - WSJ.com

Sure, once you dismiss the anomalous outliers such as Apple and Samsung, Nokia’s future looks bright ahead

But if that is the case, then why did the market react so adversely? Simple, says Andy Castonguay, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media. "I am not that convinced that the financial analysts these days are in the realm of reality.

"Part of the problem with Wall Street is that they are endlessly comparing everyone to Apple Corp. , but Apple is very much the anomaly."

Nokia's Bet On Microsoft May Still Payoff - WSJ.com

Impatient Web Users Flee Slow-Loading Sites - NYTimes.com

Changing times

Remember when you were willing to wait a few seconds for a computer to respond to a click on a Web site or a tap on a keyboard? These days, even 400 milliseconds — literally the blink of an eye — is too long, as Google engineers have discovered. That barely perceptible delay causes people to search less.

“Subconsciously, you don’t like to wait,” said Arvind Jain, a Google engineer who is the company’s resident speed maestro. “Every millisecond matters.”

Impatient Web Users Flee Slow-Loading Sites - NYTimes.com

Apple’s Market Cap: Half a Trillion and Counting - John Paczkowski - News - AllThingsD

Earn different

Apple’s market capitalization passed the $500 billion mark in Wednesday trading, making it the sixth U.S. company to reach that heady milestone. But how long can it remain there? Of the five other companies to top $500 billion — Intel, Cisco, General Electric, Microsoft and Exxon Mobil — none has managed to maintain that value for long. That said, most analysts expect Apple’s rally to have some legs, particularly after the expected debut of the iPad 3 next week. And with Apple’s market cap now about 16 times that of Dell’s, it’s time again to pull out that 1997 Michael Dell quote about how he’d “shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”

Apple’s Market Cap: Half a Trillion and Counting - John Paczkowski - News - AllThingsD