Month: January 2012

Tyler Brûlé, Mr. Zeitgeist ⇥

Alex Williams, for the New York Times:

While everyone hailed the iPad as the savior of print, Mr. Brûlé put out a limited-edition newspaper for the slopes of Gstaad and the beaches of Cannes. While retailers rushed online, Mr. Brûlé opened a chain of Monocle boutiques, a micro-extension of the magazine’s shopper-as-curator ethos. And while music migrates to the cloud, Mr. Brûlé started a radio station, with “an international playlist” that samples sounds “from Seoul to Stockholm.”

Some will diss Monocle and what Brûlé stands for, but his approach is spectacular. It’s about the content.

Second Crack ⇥

While I won’t be switching this site over to Second Crack any time soon, it looks like a killer static-page blogging engine. It’s still an “early alpha”, as Marco Arment puts it, but it’s powered by Markdown, it’s super lightweight and dead simple.

This Infographic Is Unnecessary and Incorrect ⇥

Megan McArdle on December 23:

The reservoir of this disease of erroneous infographics is internet marketers who don’t care whether the information in their graphics is right, just so long as you link it. As a Christmas present to, well, everyone, I’m issuing a plea to bloggers to help stop this plague in its track.

Klout – the infamously horrible web service that nobody asked for – released an infographic a day earlier on December 22 (“Most Influential Topics of 2011”) that I’d like you to look at, if only to spot the errors and egregious fluff.

The top eleven companies are presented as a bar graph for no reason whatsoever. Five of the locations listed are cities, five are states and one country. There are spelling errors, the music genres and influential people are presented in the same list, and the top tech products are in a generic device. Totally unnecessary and difficult to read.

Android Is Just a Development Platform, Example Number 285 ⇥

Google is reportedly working on its own-brand (or co-branded) tablet, which leads to a number of questions. Most concerning for those who already have Android tablets on the market is where their devices fit into this scenario.

If Google is able to release, as Eric Schmidt referred to it, a “tablet of the highest quality“, it will almost certainly be the flagship Android tablet, righting the wrongs of others’ attempts. But while this is in the spirit of openness and free use of the OS, it does so in a way that mimics Apple’s ideas of a controlled hardware-software stack.

Some will point to Amazon’s Kindle Fire as an example of the benefits of an open operating system, but who (besides us tech geeks) think of it as an Android tablet? It’s an Amazon tablet with an Amazon OS as far as most are concerned. It isn’t marketed as an Android tablet — the only such reference in Amazon’s literature is to its curated app store. This doesn’t consumers stupid or ill-informed, but demonstrates the elasticity of what is considered Android.

Let’s Hope It Doesn’t Melt In the Interim ⇥

Élyse Betters:

Android 4.0, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich, is making the biggest amount of noise with these latest results. Ice Cream Sandwich devices -only the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus S for now- account for just .6-percent of the share of all of the devices that have called the Android market in the last two weeks.

Six out of every thousand devices are on Ice Cream Sandwich, which Betters notes launched on October 19. In over two months, just 0.6% of devices are running the new OS.

M.G. Siegler:

Hard to pick the most ridiculous element of these updated numbers.

[…]

Is it that of the remaining 99.4%, only 55% are upgraded to Gingerbread (2.3), which came out over a year ago?

A little over half of Android phones are running the next most recent OS that they can. By the way, the chart does include Honeycomb devices, which are only tablets. Siegler?

Is it that only 3.3% are using Honeycomb (3.0), which means that all those highly-touted tablets last year are clearly huge flops?

Google said in November that they’ve activated 200 million devices, of which 3.3% is equal to 6.6 million tablets. For comparison, between October and December 2010, Apple sold over 7.3 million iPads.

Ryan Heise:

My unlocked GSM Nexus S has not received the ICS update, and Google hasn’t said anything since they “paused” rolling out the updates.

His Google Nexus phone. The line of devices that ensures a pure Google experience, and which are the first to receive software updates, according to Google themselves.

Heise’s post links to a Verge post from December 20, where it’s noted that the Ice Cream Sandwich is being rolled out in batches and then paused. It’s good that Google is being cautious in order to prevent a Mango-esque problem.

Once again, this shows the benefits of controlling the platform.

Fanboy Theory ⇥

Marco Arment:

I used to attempt to defend myself against accusations of being a fanboy, but I just don’t care anymore. It’s impossible to express a useful opinion to any significantly sized audience without inadvertently angering someone enough to hurl irrational insults at you.

Absolutely true. I’ll go a step further and refer to Back to Work episode 46 wherein Merlin Man points out how stupid arguing on the internet really is. I’m guilty of this as anyone, and I will continue to espouse my own views often in the form of a point-counterpoint rebuttal to another post. But actively arguing in comments, on Reddit or via Twitter often goes nowhere because it’s usually a difference of opinion, not fact.

That’s It? ⇥

Apple was the biggest seller of all-in-one PCs last year, with its iMac line making up 32.9 percent of the all-in-ones sold worldwide, according to estimates by DisplaySearch published in Bloomberg.

Only a third? That’s surprising.

The Most Important Man In Music ⇥

Steven Bertoni for Forbes:

[Spotify founder Daniel] Ek, with the help of industry lawyer Fred Davis, initially tried to get global music rights and was quickly turned down. So he aimed for European licenses, which he figured would take three months—it took two years. Ek and his team hounded label execs, pitching them that their free, ad-based model would eventually lead to more sales. No one bit. “They’d say, ‘Yeah, this sounds really interesting’ or ‘Send me over some stats,’ which really means ‘There’s no way in hell we’re going to do this,’”

This story of an ambitious disruption to the music business is unfortunately spread over five pages, because Forbes thinks we can’t scroll. It’s worth a read, though.

Consistency vs. Openness ⇥

Holo is the new default look of Android 4.0 devices — you can see it used on the Galaxy Nexus. According to the Android Developer blog, devices must include the Holo theme in order to access the Android Marketplace. However, The Verge cautions that applications and vendors will not be required to actually use Holo; rather, it will be the default theme for applications that don’t specify a theme, or where the OS doesn’t inject a third-party theme. Seems half-assed.

Google’s Sponsored Post Campaign ⇥

Yesterday, Search Engine Land uncovered something of a double standard that Google was engaged in. Sponsored blog posts were previously marked as spam, as they were often disguised as reviews or helpful advice.

The head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, has been quite vocal that sponsored posts shouldn’t be a way for people to gain links in response for payment, that any links in such posts should use the nofollow attribute to prevent them from passing credit to Google’s ranking algorithm.

And yet here, we see one of Google’s sponsored post doing exactly that.

The arrow points to a link leading to the Google Chrome download page. This is a straight link, not blocked with nofollow. It only appears in this post because the post is part of a sponsored campaign by Google, as noted at the bottom of the page. Therefore, both the author and Google itself are in violation of Google’s guidelines and risk being banned by Google.

This elicited a vocal response across a number of sites that covered this post, accusing Google of double standards and favouritism towards their own services, the very claims they’re denying in their European antitrust case. This wasn’t the first time Google had used referral links — they used a similar campaign to get people to download the Google Toolbar for Firefox.

Despite this, some thought that Google had simply been caught in some sort of spam faux campaign, or were otherwise innocent. Commenting on Google+ yesterday, the VP of the Chrome team Linus Upson said that this was news to him, and that he was looking into it.

Today, Google has admitted that the sponsored post campaign was theirs, but said that they thought they were just buying ads:

Google never agreed to anything more than online ads. We have consistently avoided paid sponsorships, including paying bloggers to promote our products, because these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users. We’re now looking at what changes we need to make to ensure that this never happens again.

The excellent post dissects the many layers of where this went wrong.

White House Denies CIA Teleported Obama to Mars ⇥

Officially, the White House says Obama never went to Mars. “Only if you count watching Marvin the Martian,” Tommy Vietor, the spokesman for the National Security Council, tells Danger Room. But that’s exactly what a secret chrononaut wants you to believe.

Thank fuck that was cleared up.

Cheaper Than Free ⇥

Ethan Diamond, co-founder of Bandcamp:

A few months ago, we began tracking the starting point of every sale that happens on Bandcamp. In the course of looking at the data (which we’re using to help us plan out what to do next), we’ve noticed something awesome: every day, fans are buying music that they specifically set out to get for free.

He provides several examples of people purchasing music that they found on Bandcamp through searches for torrents, Mediafire links, and the like. This is phenomenal for these independent artists.

In a somewhat similar story, I recently discovered just how good iTunes movie rentals are. Gary Hustwit’s latest documentary Urbanized is still in theatres, but one can hop on iTunes and rent it for two days in HD for $8, less than the cost of a single movie ticket. I can’t think of anything better in this age of ever-crappier theatre experiences.

This is symptomatic of what so many record labels and movie studios are having trouble understanding, and why they’re slowly losing relevancy. If you make something easy for consumers at a reasonable price, people will pay for it. If you load it up with DRM, charge $25 for it and make it a challenge, people are going to take a minute to check their local torrent sites and that sale will be lost. If you make paying for music and movies as easy as Bandcamp and iTunes do, people will buy your content, provided the content is good, of course.

Domo Arigato ⇥

Glenn Fleishman in a very detailed, very interesting analysis of Roboto, the Android 4.0 typeface:

Roboto isn’t a humanist san serif, like Optima (a font I adore, by Hermann Zapf), with tapered thicknesses in straight strokes. But it still manages to reference handwriting, and to have the homunculi in our brains pull the right levers, even though it’s below the level of perception for the non-typophiliac.

This lets Roboto have the evenness and spacing needed for onscreen rasterization, while preserving a tiny bit of the feel of the hand that makes a typeface seem created by human beings, not automatons.

I don’t agree with Fleishman’s analysis of Helvetica Neue, nor the connotations that iOS carries and which he hints at, but doesn’t say. The article is worth a read, though. It’s typeset in Roboto, naturally, and I’m still not a fan. It’s not bad though.

A Happy, Flourishing City With No Advertising ⇥

Cord Jefferson for GOOD:

Saying that visual pollution was as burdensome as air and noise pollution, [Mayor Gilberto] Kassab banned every billboard, poster, and bus ad in São Paulo with the Clean City Law. Even business signage had to go. Within months, city authorities had removed tens of thousands of ads both big and small—much to the dismay of business owners, who said the ban would surely ruin them.

Some more photos of the effects of the Clean City Law were published on the Time website, which also clarifies that not all ads are forbidden. Rather, they must comply with the strict provisions of the Law. A very interesting experiment which would probably work for many cities, but would surely cripple places like Times Square or Las Vegas, both of which are almost defined by their advertising.

Misconceptions About iOS Multitasking ⇥

Fraser Speirs offers some much-needed mediation:

Let me be as clear as I can be: the iOS multitasking bar does not contain “a list of all running apps”. It contains “a list of recently used apps”. The user never has to manage background tasks on iOS.