Linked List: May 11, 2011

Wednesday, 11 May 2011

What Could You Buy for $8.5 Billion? ★

For just $7.5 billion, you could have bought Apple — in January 2004. That leaves $1 billion to create your time machine.

Easy on the Sparktweets ★

Than Tibbetts:

Sure, sparktweets are an interesting visual hack that will draw eyeballs to your update, floating aimlessly in the stream of other tweets. But as a device to share information, they’re hardly worth the Unicode they’re printed on.

What Ever Happened to Apple Making FaceTime an ‘Open Industry Standard’? ★

Chris Adamson:

Make no doubt about it, Apple very clearly said they were going to do this. Steve Jobs himself said so at WWDC 2010, around 1:36:45 on the video:

Now FaceTime is based on a lot of open standards: H.264 video, AAC audio, and a bunch of alphabet soup acronyms. And we’re going to take it all away. We’re going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we’re going to make FaceTime an open industry standard.

“Starting tomorrow”? Nearly a year later, there’s no indication this process has started. [...]

For what it’s worth, the story I’ve heard is that the FaceTime team at Apple first heard about making it an open standard live during the WWDC keynote itself. So when Jobs said “starting tomorrow”, he meant it literally.

Adam Lashinsky on How Apple Works ★

Highly-promoted feature for Fortune by Adam Lashinsky. Includes some intriguing information about “Apple University”, which started when Apple hired famed Yale business professor Joel Podolny back in 2008.

The text of the article is not available on the website; you can either pay $4.99 to buy the current issue of Fortune in their iPad app, or, buy the article by itself as a Kindle single for just $0.99. It’s worth a buck.

Chromebook Subscription Pricing ★

Could be a big deal for the enterprise market. Certainly isn’t cheap, though — at $28/month for 36 months, it’ll cost more than double the retail price. (The subscription pricing includes service and support, though. It’s an enterprise thing, not a consumer thing.)

Measuring iPhone Progress ★

The one to watch is the iPhone’s share of all phones, not just smartphones. Soon enough all phones will be what we today call smartphones. As Horace Dediu shows, the trend line for the iPhone’s share of all phones is increasing.

Why Publishers Are Finally Saying Yes to Apple ★

Jeff Bercovici on Apple’s opt-in policy for sharing personal subscriber information to publishers:

Initially, publishers were worried, reasonably enough, that users would overwhelmingly say no. But they don’t. In fact, about 50 percent opt in.

Mark Edmiston, founder of the tablet magazine studio Nomad Editions, first heard that figure from other publishers, so he ran it by Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of internet services. Cue confirmed it. “So, all the sudden, what was an insurmountable obstacle no longer is,” says Edmiston.

Four Months After Approving NBC Buyout, FCC Commissioner Becomes Comcast Lobbyist ★

Nate Anderson:

Meredith Attwell Baker, one of the two Republican Commissioners at the Federal Communications Commission, plans to step down — and right into a top lobbying job at Comcast-NBC.

The news, reported this afternoon by the Wall Street Journal, The Hill, and Politico, comes after the hugely controversial merger of Comcast and NBC earlier this year. At the time, Baker objected to FCC attempts to impose conditions on the deal and argued that the “complex and significant transaction” could “bring exciting benefits to consumers that outweigh potential harms.”

Four months after approving the massive transaction, Attwell Baker will take a top DC lobbying job for the new Comcast-NBC entity, according to reports.

Outrageous and shameful.

Sparktweets ★

Clever use of Unicode.

Angry Birds for Chrome ★

Largely built, including animation, using HTML5 and actual open web standards, but still dependent upon Flash Player.

Putting the Danger Hardware Team Back Together Again ★

Seth Weintraub, on former hardware designers from Danger joining Google:

Within the last 12 months, Britt and Hershenson quietly joined Google to run a new wing within Android called Android Hardware. They tell me they spend their days building things that will turn into reference designs for Android peripherals. Android Hardware is exploring everything from home automation to exercise gaming and robotics. While there are no immediate plans to build Google-branded Android hardware accessories, Brit indicated that he would love to see Google introduce some of its own Android peripherals in the long term. The folks in Cupertino have to be paying attention.

I’d think the “folks” at HTC, Motorola, and Samsung are the ones who better pay attention.

Obi-Wan Kenobi Is Dead, Vader Says ★

The Galactic Empire Times:

In a late-night appearance in the East Room of the Imperial Palace, Lord Vader declared that “justice has been done” as he disclosed that agents of the Imperial Army and stormtroopers of the 501st Legion had finally cornered Kenobi, one of the leaders of the Jedi rebellion, who had eluded the Empire for nearly two decades.

Google I/O 2011 Live Stream of the Day Two Keynote ★

Yesterday was Android, today is Chrome.

Maybe Apple has some big WebKit-related news planned for WWDC (WebKit 2?), but my impression is that Google has clearly taken the lead in WebKit development.

Update: My other broad impression is that Chrome feels so much more Google-y than Android. Chrome feels like Google’s natural platform — all web, only the web. Android feels like an independent Google subsidiary.

Richard Gaywood on Apple’s Handling of the Open Source iOS WebKit Source Code ★

Richard Gaywood:

I think it’s interesting that Google can choose to withhold BSD-licensed Android source code and be widely pilloried in the tech press, whilst Apple has been quietly failing to meet the spirit and possibly the letter of its GPL obligations on iOS releases for years without anyone raising a stink about it.

That’s easily explained. The way Apple is treating the LGPL WebKit source may well be worse than Google’s withholding of the Android 3.0 source, insofar as Apple seems to be clearly violating the requirements of the license, whereas Google is only violating, let’s call it, say, the spirit of openness. But Google brags, often and repeatedly, about how open it is. And specifically with regard to Android, they attribute the success of the platform to its inherent openness. “Open” is to Android as “magic” is to iOS. So when Google does something that is quite obviously not open — such as, say, withholding the source code to Android 3.0 — it strikes many of us as hypocritical. Whereas no one is the least bit surprised when Apple does something “not open”. Google hypocrisy is interesting; Apple secrecy, not so much.

Conversely, a crummy UI or experience in a new Apple product is more interesting than a crummy UI/experience in a Google product. Apple un-magic is interesting.

Portal 2 Authoring Tools ★

Sounds cool:

The Portal 2 Authoring Tools include versions of the same tools we used to make Portal 2. They’ll allow you to create your own singleplayer and co-op maps, new character skins, 3D models, sound effects, and music.

Alas, Windows only, though.

Google Music Beta First Look ★

Matthew Lynley calls it “miserable”:

I’ve spent the past few hours trying to navigate my way through Music Beta and ended up finding new frustrations at nearly every turn. Music Beta in its current form is far from what we’d expect from a Google product — it’s a web of confusing programs without a lot of instruction as to how to actually get to the music you want to hear.