Month: May 2012

Sharing on the Internet ⇥ newyorker.com

Teddy Wayne, for the New Yorker:

Hey, you—yes, you, scanning past me for celebrity news. Did you fail to notice what I’m about? The exact medium that you use to mass-distribute articles to friends, relatives, and people you’ve never met!

Snarky.

Just Die Already ⇥ theverge.com

Color, the live video-broadcasting app for Android and iOS, is betting big on Verizon Wireless. “The relationship with Verizon represents our entire vision for the future,” founder Bill Nguyen said in a blog post today. The first part of that vision is doubling the frame rate for Color on all devices and adding audio streaming, a feature which only works on Verizon.

Short video-only streams shared on Facebook isn’t an effective long-term business strategy? What a surprise.

Google Sooner ⇥ blog.steventroughtonsmith.com

Steven Troughton-Smith has got his hands on a pre-announcement, May 2007 build of Android running on a Google Sooner (HTC EXCA 300). I’d write something here about this being quite different to the Android that shipped, but it feels redundant.

Wagner’s Dream ⇥ trailers.apple.com

The stakes could not be higher as visionary director Robert Lepage, the world’s greatest singers, and the Metropolitan Opera tackle Wagner’s Ring cycle. An intimate look at the enormous theatrical and musical challenges of staging opera’s most monumental work, the film chronicles the quest to fulfill Wagner’s dream of a perfect Ring.

I’m looking forward to this. The set pieces look incredible.

Researchers Discover World’s Tiniest Violin ⇥ bits.blogs.nytimes.com

At the Milken Institute’s Global Conference, no less. Brian X. Chen, quoting AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson:

“You lie awake at night worrying about what is that which will disrupt your business model,” he said. “Apple iMessage is a classic example. If you’re using iMessage, you’re not using one of our messaging services, right? That’s disruptive to our messaging revenue stream.”

Bummer.

iPad Keyboard Prototype ⇥ youtube.com

Daniel Hooper has reimagined text selection on the iPad, and it’s pretty smart. It isn’t easily discoverable, but I’d argue that the current loupe isn’t either. This is very clever.

Facebook’s Numbers ⇥ dcurt.is

Dustin Curtis has crunched the numbers from Facebook’s latest S-1. The most shocking (to me, anyway) is their self-reported 526 million daily active users. 7.5% of the world’s population visits Facebook every day.

Samsung Galaxy S III ⇥ theverge.com

We had to look really closely to be certain, but sure enough, this is another Pentile AMOLED display from Samsung. The big rumor going into this event was that the Galaxy S III would be the first HD Super AMOLED display without Pentile spoiling things, but check out our macro shot below for some definitive confirmation (the signal strength indicator is supposed to be white).

Not only does their S-Voice UI look like the Siri interface, it will have the true knockoff look to match.

Real Numbers ⇥ businessinsider.com

Jay Yarow thought the numbers in the NPD and comScore reports were fishy, so he did the math himself:

Total it all up, and Apple had 63% of the smartphone market on those three big carriers. Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T account for ~80% of the overall wireless market in the U.S., according to a Yankee Group report from August. If Apple accounted for 63% of 80% of the smartphone sales on those carriers, then it had 50% of the total smartphone market in the U.S. in the first quarter of the year. So, how did NPD get to its number of 29%? We asked, and the answer wasn’t all that satisfying.

Spoiler: it was a survey.

Dear Android: A 9:1 Piracy Rate for Games Is Not Good Enough ⇥ wired.co.uk

Miles Jacobson:

As our sales passed the 10,000 mark, I asked to see the figure for skin downloads; it was up to 113,000. Because every installed copy of the game—legitimately bought or not—needs a skin, we were able to make a pretty direct comparison between our sales figures and our actual user base.

I guess that’s one of the side effects of an open platform.

Design Should Speak for Itself ⇥ monocle.com

Hugo MacDonald for Monocle:

Clever, creative branding should be supporting material, not a substitute for human communication, not something for designers to hide behind.