Linked List: March 25, 2011

Friday, 25 March 2011

Oh, Samsung 

Harry McCracken finds Samsung’s tablet-thinness claims sketchy, and catches them using actors to portray purportedly real Galaxy Tab users. Good journalism.

Harvest 

My thanks to Harvest for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Harvest is a time tracking and invoicing web app that’s perfect for freelancers and creative agencies. Designed with productivity and ease of use in mind, it’s simple to track billable hours from the web or the desktop widget. Free iPhone and Android companion apps help you track time and expenses on the go. At the end of the month, turn your billable hours into invoices with just a few clicks.

Harvest users include smart companies like Happy Cog and Adaptive Path. You can get started with Harvest with a free 30-day trial.

Color Keeps Digging 

Color founder Bill Nguyen explains to Matt Rosoff that his company is misunderstood:

Color is not about photo sharing. It’s a new way to build spontaneous social networks — and collect massive amounts of data about what people are doing and where they’re doing it — without collecting any personally identifiable information like last names, addresses, or even passwords.

So it’s a data mining trojan horse. Well, that changes everything. Who wouldn’t love that? And it’s a good thing personal photos have no “personally identifiable information” — you know, other than images of you, your friends, and your family.

More Open 

J-P Teti:

The iPad only does less than a regular computer to us geeks. To everyone else, it does more. This is what Motorola and Google and Samsung and BlackBerry and everyone else, with the sole exception of Apple, do not get about “open” computing.

Astute analysis of the iPad to regular folks.

‘It’s Like Walking Through Sam Ash With Steve Jobs’s AmEx.’ 

Benjamin Jackson on GarageBand for iPad.

The Talk Show, Episode 35 

This week’s episode of America’s favorite podcast, with me talking about my new computer. Other topics: Bertrand Serlet, the Amazon Appstore, and Diamonds Are Forever. Brought to you by MailChimp.

He Who Owns the API 

Glenn Fleishman, writing for The Economist, on Amazon’s back-and-forth with Lendle:

But on Monday morning Amazon turned off the content tap that feeds the site; it was not switched on again until Tuesday evening. The brief outage demonstrates a fundamental truth about the internet: if you don’t own the data you need to run your business, you’re dependent on the policies — and whims — of the parties that do. Jeff Croft, Lendle’s founder, says he will not make that mistake again.

Really smart take on the story.