ATAP (Advanced Technology and Projects) is Google’s top-secret lab for incubating futuristic ideas. It is run by Regina Dugan, former DARPA director. Dieter Bohn writing for The Verge:
Dugan tells me that ATAP is working on a new kind of way to think about computer security, a “multimodal continuum of trust.” First, ATAP sees a science opportunity: multi-signal biometric identification is advanced enough that mobile devices can take advantage of the technology. Imagine a device reading and identifying your fingerprint, walking gait, the cadence of your voice, and the staccato rhythm of how you type. Then, ATAP pairs that science with a product opportunity: rethinking security in a way that isn’t simply 1 or 0, but a spectrum. I might want my browser to require a lower security threshold — my typing style — but I’d want a much higher threshold for my banking data. By combining multiple security signals with a continuum of security levels, logging into my devices could become secure without me having to ever punch in a passcode.
Frederic Lardinois writing for TechCrunch:
To improve this, Google partnered with numerous universities and invited 25 experts from 16 institutions to Google to participate in an intensive 90-day research sprint. The team took data from 1,500 donors and got to the point where the new system is now 10x more secure than fingerprint systems.
§Sunday, May 31, 2015
Mike Isaac and Brian X. Chen were writing for The New York Times on the eve of Android Pay announcement:
Apple is preparing to announce details about enhancements to Apple Pay at its software conference next month. Those include a rewards program for the mobile wallet service, said two people briefed on the product.
The moves are the latest advances in mobile payments as several players jockey for an edge. With more consumers willing to make purchases using smartphones, companies are rushing to take the lead in the market, spurring eBay’s PayPal to heavily market a suite of mobile apps, while start-ups like Square and Stripe expand their payments processing software to small and midsize businesses.
§Friday, May 29, 2015
Harrison Weber reporting for VentureBeat:
Today was a pretty big day for Google. At its annual I/O developer conference, the company unveiled Android M, Android Pay, Brillo, Google Photos, and more.
§Friday, May 29, 2015
Amazon released an update to its iOS Kindle application containing a new layout engine supporting hyphenations, kerning and drop caps. It also introduced a new font named Bookerly designed for eBooks.
the-ebook-reader.com:
Not all Kindle books support the new layout options. Amazon has to go through and re-code every single Kindle ebook for these new features to work. Here’s a short list of books that Amazon advertises as supporting the new layout. There doesn’t appear to be any way to tell from the product description pages unfortunately, so it’s impossible to tell when a book has been updated to support the new features.
§Friday, May 29, 2015
Oops, Mark Gurman, writing for 9to5Mac, did it again:
After several years of quiet development, Apple is readying a major new iOS initiative codenamed “Proactive,” which will leverage Siri, Contacts, Calendar, Passbook, and third-party apps to create a viable competitor to Google Now for Android devices. Like Google Now, Proactive will automatically provide timely information based on the user’s data and device usage patterns, but will respect the user’s privacy preferences, according to sources familiar with Apple’s plans.
The article is much more detailed than this introduction. Go read it, if it’s your thing. However, the big picture is still the same: leveraging all the sensors of the smartphone to make it closer to the user.
§Wednesday, May 27, 2015
Benjamin Mayo, writing for 9to5Mac:
The discoveryd process has been subject to much criticism in recent months as it causes users to regularly drop WiFi access and causes network shares to list many times over, due to bugs. Many developers, such as Craig Hockenberry, have complained about the buggy software and workarounds have been found to include substituting the older system (called mDNSResponder) back into Yosemite.
This is maybe a follow up of some previous criticism, made by Craig Hockenberry on his blog:
Regardless of the many issues people were reporting with discoveryd, Apple went ahead and released it anyway. As a result, this piece of software is responsible for a large portion of the thousand cuts.
And the now famous “Apple has lost the functional high ground” post by Marco Arment:
I suspect the rapid decline of Apple’s software is a sign that marketing is too high a priority at Apple today: having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality.
§Wednesday, May 27, 2015
Walt Mossberg & Kara Swisher announce that Re/Code’s parent company, Revere Digital, is being acquired by The Verge’s parent company Vox Media:
We plan as well to collaborate where appropriate with Vox Media’s current and very successful tech news site, The Verge. While the two sites occasionally overlap, we have focused on the business of tech, while The Verge has focused on covering tech from a lifestyle perspective.
Sydney Ember writing for The New York Times:
Despite developing a reputation for consistently breaking industry news, ReCode has struggled to draw significant traffic. The site receives 1.5 million regular monthly visitors, according to comScore.
ReCode will become part of Vox’s expanding digital empire, which includes the popular sports site SB Nation, as well as the technology site The Verge. ReCode also will gain access to Vox’s publishing platform, Chorus, which has been a key in luring marquee journalists including Ezra Klein.
Vox Media attracted 53.2 million unique visitors in the United States across its sites in April, according to comScore. The Verge alone had traffic of nearly 12 million, according to comScore, far greater than ReCode’s audience.
§Wednesday, May 27, 2015
Stephen Fry writing for The Telegraph:
Until now, Ive’s job title has been Senior Vice President of Design. But I can reveal that he has just been promoted and is now Apple’s Chief Design Officer. It is therefore an especially exciting time for him.
Chief Design Officer is a newly created position. Richard Howarth will become VP of Industrial Design (the hardware) and Alan Dye will become VP of User Interface Design (the software). The move is effective July 1st. They both still report to Jony Ive. His new position will allow him to bear on the retail stores and the new Apple Headquarters (the Spaceship).
Jony’s signature will be everywhere. The oak chairs, the desks which people can raise or lower with little buttons. Foster + Partners have 70 or 80 working on the project in London and another 40 on site.
The blogosphere and medias are going to relay this for a while. Mark Gurman obtained the email from CEO Tim Cook to Apple employees. It is funny to see that the scoop on that english man was published by another english man on an english website.
§Tuesday, May 26, 2015
SpaceX posted a video showing what it looked like to abort a spaceflight with astronauts on board:
The test simulated how Dragon would carry astronauts to safety if an emergency occurred on the launch pad. Crew Dragon’s abort system is powered by eight SuperDraco engines which together produce 120,000 pounds of axial thrust. The engines are integrated directly into the sides of the vehicle rather than carried on top of the vehicle as with previous launch abort systems. This configuration provides astronauts escape capability from the launch pad all the way to orbit and allows the spacecraft to use the same thrusters to land propulsively on land at the end of a mission.
Via The Verge
§Sunday, May 24, 2015
Facebook announced:
At the core of our efforts with Internet.org are non-exclusive partnerships with mobile operators to offer free basic internet services to people through Internet.org. This is a set of basic websites and services to introduce people to the value of the internet, and that we hope add value to their lives.
These websites are very simple and data efficient, so operators can offer these for free in an economically sustainable way. Websites do not pay to be included, and operators don’t charge developers for the data people use for their services.
Because these services have to be specially built to these specifications, we started by offering just a few. But giving people more choice over the services they use is incredibly important and going forward, people using Internet.org will be able to search for and use services that meet these guidelines.
But the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) does no seem to agree on the “open” nature of Internet.org:
As we and others have noted, there’s a real risk that the few websites that Facebook and its partners select for Internet.org (including, of course, Facebook itself) could end up becoming a ghetto for poor users instead of a stepping stone to the larger Internet.
Maybe Internet.org should have been named Facebook.org (via Om Malik).
§Sunday, May 24, 2015
New Musical Express:
The Rolling Stones played a surprise show at Los Angeles’ Fonda Theatre venue last night (May 20). The $5 tickets for the show — which saw them playing 1971 album ‘Sticky Fingers’ in full — sold out in less than five minutes.
The band played tribute to the late, great B.B. King during the show, playing their version of ‘Rock Me Baby’, a song the blues legend made famous.
Not bad for a Mick Jagger at 71, a Keith Richard at 71, a Ronnie Wood at 67 and a Charlie Watts at 73.
“We cannot burn Mick Jagger” — Martin Scorsese, Shine A Light
§Thursday, May 21, 2015
Mark Gurman writes for 9to5mac:
According to the sources familiar with the decision to move to the San Francisco type face on iOS and OS X, Apple higher-ups also believe that the new look will serve to refresh its familiar operating systems, helping iOS and OS X to avoid becoming stale.
§Thursday, May 21, 2015
Photographer Vincent Laforet (winner of the Pulitzer price for feature photography in 2002) publishes photos from his project “Air” at Storehouse:
Helicopters vibrate pretty significantly and you have to be able to shoot at a relatively high shutter speed (even with tools like a gyroscope) and that makes it incredibly difficult to shoot post sunset.
§Wednesday, May 20, 2015
A prospective exercise by Zack Kanter, writing for Quartz:
A January 2013 Columbia University study once suggested that with a fleet of just 9,000 autonomous cars, Uber could replace every taxi cab in New York City, and that passengers would wait an average of 36 seconds for a ride that costs about $0.50 per mile. Such convenience and low cost would make car ownership inconceivable, and autonomous, on-demand taxis — the “transportation cloud” — will quickly become the dominant form of transportation.
§Tuesday, May 19, 2015
To get the most out of this interactive experience, readers are encouraged to constantly scroll downward on their browsers at all times, during every moment of every day. An entire catalogue of news and information is now at your fingertips as long as you ignore any impulse to eat, drink, or sleep, instead devoting all your time and energy to scrolling further and further and further until your body eventually reaches such a point of exhaustion and dehydration that your organs shut down and you cease being of any value to The Onion.
Via WIRED
§Monday, May 18, 2015
Bloomberg Business publishes excerpts from “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future”, by Ashlee Vance, worth a read:
Bob Linden, a Barber-Nichols executive, remembers dealing with him. “Elon showed up with Tom Mueller and started telling us it was his destiny to launch things into space at lower costs and to help us become spacefaring people,” he said. “We thought the world of Tom but weren’t quite sure whether to take Elon too seriously. They began asking us for the impossible. They wanted a turbo pump to be built in less than a year for under $1 million. Boeing might do a project like that over five years for $100 million. Tom told us to give it our best shot, and we built it in 13 months. He was relentless.”
The whole piece really shows how much work is going on to get those rockets into space.
§Sunday, May 17, 2015
Circa News is a mobile application that follows the news and creates a news feed by topic, creating a long form article gradually as news develops. The iOS and Android applications were named Best App of 2013 by both Apple and Google.
Circa’s CEO Matt Galligan, quoted by Fortune:
One possibility is that we keep the brand. Another is that we apply our tech know-how to a different brand, or perhaps we integrate everything we’ve learned about the space and built so far in a way that the unique spirit of Circa lives on in another product…
Frédéric Filloux explains on Monday Note:
The fiasco stems from the smartphone advertising market’s inherent weakness, from Circa’s inability to catch up with evolving reading habits, and from an insufficient editorial proposition.
§Wednesday, May 13, 2015
Verizon announced it acquired AOL for $4.4 billion. The place of the Huffington Post does not seem obvious in the new organization. Charlie Warzel and William Alden, reporting for BuzzFeed:
What’s more, within the Verizon empire, the Huffington Post may lose some of its strategic appeal for AOL. The site is currently used by AOL to syndicate its truckloads of video content. But Verizon has its own distribution network in the form of phones and cables, which could potentially make the Huffington Post’s platform less important.
Via John Gruber.
§Wednesday, May 13, 2015
Sam Soffes writing on his blog:
For launch, the price was $4.99. I may play with that some over time. I was originally thinking $2.99 and a bunch of folks on Twitter said $4.99 was better. Anyway, Redacted was #8 top paid in the US and #1 top paid in Graphics at the end of launch day. It was also at the top of Product Hunt with 538 up votes! Wow!
Go see the numbers, just to have an idea of the magnitude of profits on the Mac App Store.
§Tuesday, May 12, 2015
Peter Bright writing for Ars Technica:
This commitment to standards also means that various non-standard technologies are being removed: Edge won’t support VML vector graphics, VBScript scripts, DirectX filters and transitions, or non-standard scripting techniques for responding to events or accessing CSS styling.
A good summary of what Edge will do and will not do.
§Sunday, May 10, 2015
Sam Oliver writing for AppleInsider:
While Apple’s intentions were unclear at the time, it now appears that the company was interested in Topsy’s indexing and searching expertise, rather than anything specifically related to social media — though tweets are on their way to Spotlight.
§Wednesday, May 6, 2015
Brian X. Chen, writing for the NYT:
The touch pad can be used for scrolling around and there will also be two physical buttons [...]
With this new remote control all access to the Apple TV will be equipped with a touch surface (via the remote control and via Apple’s Remote application on iOS). The support of a navigable interface by four directional buttons would not be required anymore.
But, according to the article, I understand that the remote does not look like a game console controller. I guess it has to be usable with only one hand which means that only the thumb would use this surface. So I do not think this remote introduces the support of multi-touch and gestures, and therefore no real new user interface for the Apple TV. It would behave quite exactly like the iOS Remote application does.
§Tuesday, May 5, 2015
Brett Howse writing for AnandTech:
The Surface 3 is powered by the 14nm Intel Atom x7, in this case the x7-Z8700 model which is the current top of the line Atom processor. Codenamed Cherry Trail, this is the massaged Bay Trail cores now built on Intel’s now mature 14nm FinFET process, and they include the same GPU cores as Broadwell.
There are so many changes with the Surface 3 that really, this is likely the Surface that most people wanted from day one, but did not know it.
A lot of details like the software, the design (front facing speakers, 3:2 aspect ratio), the accessories (a backlit keyboard, the Surface Pen) make the Microsoft tablet very compelling.
§Tuesday, May 5, 2015
After last week’s press release announcing quarter results, I wanted to write a post about the figures, but couldn’t find it interesting. How to make the figures speak without torturing them too much? Dr. Drang nails it:
Apple’s sales figures are strongly seasonal, and because the graphs jump wildly from quarter to quarter, it’s often hard to see trends.
§Monday, May 4, 2015
Chief Executive Elon Musk said the company’s goal was to “fundamentally change the way the world uses energy on an extreme scale.” He introduced the products to a crowd of business partners and journalists at a Tesla facility near Los Angeles.
The keynote is worth watching for itself.
§Sunday, May 3, 2015
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