Linked List: May 3, 2012

Thursday, 3 May 2012

What Would the End of Football Look Like? 

Economists Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier, writing for Grantland back in February:

This slow death march could easily take 10 to 15 years. Imagine the timeline. A couple more college players — or worse, high schoolers — commit suicide with autopsies showing CTE. A jury makes a huge award of $20 million to a family. A class-action suit shapes up with real legs, the NFL keeps changing its rules, but it turns out that less than concussion levels of constant head contact still produce CTE. Technological solutions (new helmets, pads) are tried and they fail to solve the problem. Soon high schools decide it isn’t worth it. The Ivy League quits football, then California shuts down its participation, busting up the Pac-12. Then the Big Ten calls it quits, followed by the East Coast schools. Now it’s mainly a regional sport in the southeast and Texas/Oklahoma. The socioeconomic picture of a football player becomes more homogeneous: poor, weak home life, poorly educated. Ford and Chevy pull their advertising, as does IBM and eventually the beer companies.

I think the only way the game survives, long-term, is if the rules change dramatically to something like flag football — to a sport that resembles basketball in terms of athleticism, pace of play, and violence. Me? I think I might enjoy watching such a football very much. But I don’t think most NFL fans would. Too many NFL fans are in it for the violent hits, not despite them.

Football, Dogfighting, and Brain Damage 

Sadly relevant New Yorker piece by Malcolm Gladwell from 2009. I don’t think football as we know it is going to be around much longer.

European Regulators May Reopen Google Street View Inquiries 

Kevin J. O’Brien, reporting for the NYT:

European privacy regulators said Wednesday that they were considering reopening their inquiries into Google’s collection of personal e-mails and Web searches for its Street View service. The move came after revelations that the activity had not been a lone programmer’s error, and that others at the company had been told about it.

Uh-oh.

Have Kindle Sales Plunged? 

Amazon has never released Kindle sales data, but Paulo Santos makes a case that sales have plunged — both for the e-ink models and the Fire:

To put it short. The Kindle eReader has dropped out of bed. It has fallen beyond the wildest dreams of Amazon.com’s management. They never told it to the market, but this is reality. I have proof, and the proof is undeniable. The drop in Kindle eReader sales came with the introduction of the Kindle Fire, and the cannibalization has been nothing short of stunning, massive. Why do I say this? Well, Amazon.com has slowed down its demand for Kindle eReader e-ink screens to near zero since December 2011, the month after the Kindle Fire was introduced. Basically at that point Amazon.com had enough Kindle eReaders’ screens on hand to fill demand for at least 4 months straight.

Welcome to Zynga; I Hope You Like Shoving Shit at Your Users 

Kunur Patel, reporting for Ad Age:

Now, with a direct-sales force that’s been on the ground for a whole eight weeks, Draw Something is inserting advertisers’ paid terms into the game for players to literally draw brands.

Here’s how the game works: Pick a word from a list of three, then create a drawing so a Facebook friend can guess that word and you can win points. For the ad product, imagine inserting words like “Doritos” or “Coca-Cola” in among “golfer,” “bikini” or “fireworks.”

Draw your own ads, how fun!

Samsung S-Voice 

Love that purple tint. Where do they come up with such innovative designs?

More ‘Winning’ 

Reuters:

Alsup had sealed an internal 2011 Google document which contains profit and loss numbers for Android in 2010. However, the judge read aloud certain portions of it in court on Thursday.

The judge did not disclose the specific loss figures for Android, but said it lost money in each quarter of 2010. “That adds up to a big loss for the whole year,” Alsup said.

Verizon Sales Reps Pushing Android Phones Over iPhone 

That said, Verizon seems to be doing its best to push Android phones over the iPhone. David Goldman, reporting for CNN Money:

I had 10 conversations with Verizon sales representatives in New York stores, on the phone, and in online chat sessions, asking about my options for a new smartphone. Here’s what I found: Next time you walk into a Verizon store looking to buy a smartphone, expect the hard sell on a 4G Android device.

In each of the 10 discussions, representatives steered me toward either the Motorola Droid Razr Maxx, the Droid Razr, or the LG Lucid — all 4G-capable phones running Google’s Android software. […]

“The iPhone is a great phone, but it’s on 3G,” said one representative at a Verizon Wireless store in midtown Manhattan. “I’m not going to recommend a phone that’s outdated.”

I’ve got ten bucks that says this practice doesn’t change after Apple ships an LTE iPhone — they’ll just come up with a new reason.

I can see where Verizon is coming from, of course. They’re a carrier, not a handset maker, so they want to emphasize the importance of the network over the device. But as for being “outdated”, all three of those phones currently ship running Android 2.3, which shipped in December 2010.

While We’re Talking About iPhone/Android Market Share Numbers 

Dan Lyons, back in January 2011, “The Verizon iPhone Is Too Late”:

But Apple’s big weakness is its control-freak nature and insistence that there is only one way to make a smart phone. No matter how many carriers sign on to carry the iPhone, in the long run, Apple has again set itself up to be a niche player in smartphones, just as it is in PCs.

Meantime, here in 2012, the iPhone once again accounted for a majority of Verizon’s smartphone sales, and Apple earned 73 percent of the total profit in the handset industry. That’s a nice niche.

‘Winning’ 

MG Siegler, again, on the discrepancies between smartphone sales data from carrier and market share surveys from NPD and ComScore:

It means that Android was/is winning in market share because Apple was/is allowing it to.

Android was previously the top smartphone OS for both Verizon and Sprint. But that was only because the iPhone was not available on either network until last year. When it became available, it quickly shot to the top. One type of phone outsold hundreds of other models combined. That’s pretty insane.

I’ve been asking for years: Is there a carrier anywhere in the world that carries both the iPhone and Android phones where the iPhone is not the top-selling phone?

Bud Light Lime-a-Ritas 

The apocalypse draws nigh:

Anheuser-Busch’s marketing story is that beer drinkers had been mixing Bud Light Lime into margaritas to create “beer ritas,” so the company decided to simplify the process. “Lime-a-Rita just adds a new level of convenience by providing a beverage with the perfect balance of flavors,” he says.

(Via Karl Welzein, of course.)

Flipboard for Android Debuts as a Galaxy S III Exclusive 

Another high-profile iOS exclusive expands to Android.

RubyMotion: Ruby for iOS 

Interesting new commercial Ruby-based development toolchain for iOS. Based on MacRuby, it produces native iOS apps, but they’re written in Ruby instead of Objective-C, and skip Xcode altogether:

While you can certainly configure an Xcode workspace to program in RubyMotion, we do not provide any support for Xcode out-of-the-box. We do not believe that Xcode makes a good environment for Ruby development (or development in general).

$199, currently on sale for $149.

See also: Ryan Paul’s piece on RubyMotion at ArsTechnica, from which I learned that RubyMotion is in fact by Laurent Sansonetti, the creator of MacRuby. Color me even more intrigued.

The No Future League 

Will Bunch of the Philly Daily News on NFL great Junior Seau’s death:

He was just 43.

And it was an apparent suicide, no less — a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest.

But while the Twittersphere and Facebookland erupted in the usual rituals of 21st Century celebrity death, with TMZ racing to report the grim news that Junior Seau had passed, inspiring thousands of re-tweeted RIPs and sad reminiscing about his glory days in the middle of the San Diego Chargers’ defense, there seemed to be one element sorely missing.

Surprise.

And when people are no longer surprised at the sudden death of a 40-something icon of pro football, then something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

Think about this:

The average American lives to be 75. The average pro football player lives to be 55.

Harry Marks Is Giving Up Reading for a Year 

Harry Marks:

Now I want to see words at a distance. By separating myself from written language, I’ll be able to see which aspects of reading are truly valuable, which are distractions, and which ones give me explosive diarrhea.

Amazon Will Make Its Own TV Shows 

JP Mangalindan, writing for Fortune:

On Wednesday, the company announced its intentions to develop original comedy and children shows that will be distributed by way of its online streaming service, Amazon Instant Video. “Amazon Studios wants to discover great talent and produce programming that audiences will love,” Roy Price, director of Amazon Studios, said in a release. “In the course of developing movies, we’ve heard a lot of interest from content creators who want to develop original series in the comedy and children’s genres. We are excited to bring writers, animators and directors this new opportunity to develop original series.”

So I guess this means the Justice Department is about to investigate Apple TV.

Sales Versus Surveys 

MG Siegler, a few days ago:

So on one hand, we have actual, verified and legally reported public data from the three largest U.S. carriers. On the other hand, we have a survey.

If I wanted to be a dick, I’d suggest that these surveys skew toward Android because Android buyers are more likely to be dumb enough to waste time answering market share surveys. But I don’t want to be a dick, so I won’t.

Jay Yarow vs. NPD Regarding U.S. Smartphone Market Share for Q1 2012 

Jay Yarow does some math and finds that NPD’s report on U.S. smartphone market share doesn’t add up:

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.

NPD got its numbers — 61 percent Android, 29 percent iPhone — not from carrier data but from a survey of 13,000 people. It just doesn’t make sense. Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint all say the iPhone accounted for a majority of their smartphone activations for the quarter, but NPD says Android had more than double the market share for the quarter.

NPD’s survey results must be statistically flawed, unless (a) the Yankee Group report is wrong that the big three carriers account for 80 percent of the U.S. market, and (b) there are an awful lot of prepaid Android smartphones being sold on the smaller U.S. carriers.