Linked List: April 22, 2013

Monday, 22 April 2013

Third paragraph from Jungah Lee’s report for Bloomberg, “LG Display Profit Misses Estimates on Stalling Apple Sales”:

“Apple is losing dominance and will likely delay launching a successor to the iPhone 5 until at least September,” Harrison Cho, an analyst for Seoul-based Samsung Securities Co., said before the earnings release. “LG Display might have to wait until the third quarter to see strong profits as Apple’s new devices are mostly expected to be out in the second half.”

Samsung Securities. That Samsung. Jiminy christ.

Ads on iPhone Worth More Than Ads on Android, Film at Duh O’Clock ★

MarketWatch:

The iPhone monthly ad share grew 12 percent in the first quarter of this year and now accounts for more than 50 percent of mobile ad spending, according to the report released Thursday by MoPub, a mobile ad exchange that allows app publishers and advertisers to engage in bidding for advertisements. As a result, the cost-per-thousand views is 40 percent higher on iOS than Google’s Android.

Why are Apple users bombarded with more ads than those who own rival devices are? Experts say the user base is considered a more upwardly mobile demographic. “Apple has more desirable customers,” says Sarah Rotman Epps, senior analyst at Forrester Research. Cheaper Android phones reach more people than the iPhone, she says, but around 15 percent of Samsung smartphone customers get free Android smartphones that come with wireless contracts. “These accidental customers are in the lower third of income earners in the U.S.,” she says. “They’re not necessarily the customers that advertisers care most about reaching.”

But iPhone users are not “bombarded with ads”. I almost never see any ads other than those on web pages, because I can (and do) buy ad-free apps rather than use “free” apps that show ads. Also, the MarketWatch piece conflates ad revenue with the number of ads users see — I highly doubt that iPhone users, even those who only use free apps, see more ads than their Android counterparts. They just see more expensive ads.

The Death of Upcoming.org ★

Andy Baio:

So, Yahoo’s finally decided to close Upcoming.org, the events community I started nearly ten years ago. And, in Yahoo’s typical fuck-off-and-die style, they’re doing it with 11 days notice, no on-site announcement, and no way to back up past events. […]

In hindsight, selling Upcoming to Yahoo was a horrible mistake. Selling your company always means sacrificing control and risking its fate, and as we now know, online communities almost always fail after acquisition. (YouTube is the rare exception, albeit one with billion-dollar momentum.) But Yahoo was a particularly horrible steward for the community.

It Can’t All Be True ★

Min-Jeong Lee, reporting for the WSJ:

LG Display Co. swung to a net profit in the first quarter as tablet screen sales to Apple Inc. increased, and analysts said the South Korean display maker’s fortunes this year will be closely tied to demand for the U.S. company’s gadgets.

But here’s Miyoung Kim, reporting the same news, for Reuters:

LG Display Co Ltd reported its smallest profit since it returned to the black in the second quarter of last year, as demand for iPhone and iPad screens from Apple weakened amid concerns the U.S. company is losing its luster in the mobile device market.

Perfect example of just how crazy reporting on Apple has gotten. (Via MacDailyNews.) Best advice, listen to Tim Cook from three months ago, and stop trying to extrapolate Apple’s sales numbers from those of its component suppliers:

Let me make one additional point on this: I know there’s been lots of rumors about order cuts and so forth, and so let me just take a moment to make a comment on these. I don’t want to comment on any particular rumor, because I would spend my life doing that, but I would suggest it’s good to question the accuracy of any kind of rumor about build plans. And I’d also stress that even if a particular data point were factual, it would be impossible to accurately interpret the data point as to what it meant for our overall business, because the supply chain is very complex, and we obviously have multiple sources for things. Yields might vary, supplier performance can vary, the beginning inventory positions can vary, I mean there’s just an inordinately long list of things that would make any single data point not a great proxy for what’s going on.

ExitJunction: Scumbags Who Hijack Your Back Button History ★

Real shocker that TG Daily, the site that publishes Rob Enderle’s jackassery, would embed JavaScript in their pages from a company that hijacks your Back button. Reminds me of Tynt, the copy/paste jerks.

A solution for Safari users: Drew Thaler’s JavaScript Blacklist extension. I’ve been using it for years. My blacklist:

tynt.com, intellitxt.com, snap.com, kontera.com, AdGardener.com, apture.com, wibiya.com, doubleclick.net, getconnected.southwestwi-fi.com, d1.openx.org, meebo.com, addthis.com, serving-sys.com, po.st, cdn.taboolasyndication.com, exitjunction.com

New Yahoo Weather App for iPhone ★

Yet another really nice weather app, and a clever use of Flickr. I’d say synergy if the word hadn’t been co-opted by dumb people trying to sound important.

Jackassapalooza ★

Philip Elmer-DeWitt on the “Apple should fire Tim Cook” nonsense being floated:

Make no mistake, the people who want Tim Cook’s head on a spike are not friends of Apple. As far as I know, he still has the deep respect of the analysts who know the company best and — most important — the confidence of the board of directors who granted a million restricted shares of Apple as an incentive for him to stick around for at least a decade.

For the record, Apple is still trading higher today that it was when Cook replaced Steve Jobs. The forces that drove the stock up to over $700 and then down to below $390 seem to me to have more to do with a dysfunctional securities market than anything Cook has done as CEO.

The Apple bears have gone from irrational to hysterical.

Iconic Bites ★

Susan Kare, still at the top of the pixel-art game.

Chum, All Right ★

Dan Lyons:

I’ve also spent the past few years writing “articles” that were less and less interesting — they were basically just SEO chum thrown out onto the internet in hopes of catching traffic.

No shit.

Philly Turns Skyscraper Into Video Game Screen for Tech Week ★

Zack Seward, writing for NPR’s All Tech Considered:

Frank Lee is the man behind this gigantic version of Pong. He’s a professor at Drexel University and the co-founder of the school’s Game Design Program.

Spectators gathered about a half-mile away to watch from the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Eyes fixated on what was about a 400-foot-tall “screen,” a lattice of LED lights on a wall of mirrored glass serving as the “pixels.”