Linked List: January 17, 2014

Friday, 17 January 2014

The 2015 Honda Fit ★

Raphael Orlove, writing for Jalopnik:

The last and best feature of the car is Honda’s GPS solution: it’s your phone. You can order the car with navigation for something around $1500, or you can download the HondaLink app from Honda for $59.99 and get something better. With the app, the car will display your phone’s GPS on its seven-inch display. That means as you upgrade your phone, you’ll be upgrading your GPS, too. I can’t think of a better system.

Way of the future.

Nintendo Racks Up $240 Million Annual Loss ★

Masatsugu Horie and Takashi Amano, reporting for Bloomberg:

“We are thinking about a new business structure,” Iwata said at a press conference today in Osaka, Japan. “Given the expansion of smart devices, we are naturally studying how smart devices can be used to grow the game-player business. It’s not as simple as enabling Mario to move on a smartphone.”

Hurry up, I say.

Hoefler Response ★

Press release:

Last week, designer Tobias Frere-Jones, a longtime employee of The Hoefler Type Foundry, Inc. (d/b/a “Hoefler & Frere-Jones”), decided to leave the company. With Tobias’s departure, the company founded by Jonathan Hoefler in 1989 will become known as Hoefler & Co.

Following his departure, Tobias filed a claim against company founder Jonathan Hoefler. Its allegations are not the facts, and they profoundly misrepresent Tobias’s relationship with both the company and Jonathan. […] It goes without saying that all of us are disappointed by Tobias’s actions. The company will vigorously defend itself against these allegations, which are false and without legal merit.

The New York Times’ Most Popular Story of 2013 Was Not an Article ★

Robinson Meyer, writing for The Atlantic:

Think about that. A news app, a piece of software about the news made by in-house developers, generated more clicks than any article. And it did this in a tiny amount of time: The app only came out on December 21, 2013. That means that in the 11 days it was online in 2013, it generated more visits than any other piece.

I’ll repeat: It took a news app only 11 days to “beat” every other story the Times published in 2013. It’s staggering.

Somewhere, Adrian Holovaty is smiling.

Consumer Reports: ‘Google Play Store Lets Your Kid Spend Like a Drunken Sailor’ ★

Their headline, not mine.

Walter Isaacson on Google and Innovation ★

Matthew Belvedere, reporting for CNBC:

Case in point — he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday: Google buying Nest Labs is a bigger development than Apple selling iPhones on China Mobile’s network.

While acknowledging the China Mobile partnership is a “big deal” for Apple, he said Google-Nest exemplifies the “amazingly strong integrated strategy that Google has to connect all of our devices, all of our lives, from our car, to our navigation system, to how our garage doors are going to open.”

It’s perfectly reasonable to argue that Google has become the most innovative company in the world. Many of us would disagree, also reasonably, but still, no argument a good case could be made, and I think we could all agree that Google and Apple are both among the most innovative companies. But isn’t the evidence cited by Isaacson here irrelevant in the big picture? Google buying Nest and the iPhone hitting China Mobile just happen to be the two newsworthy things related to Google and Apple this week.

To play catch-up, Cook has to think about what industry he wants to disrupt next, Isaacson said. “I think Steve Jobs would have wanted as the next disruptive thing to either have wearable-like watches or TV, an easy TV that you can walk into the room and say put on ‘Squawk Box’ … or disrupt the digital camera industry or disrupt textbooks.”

I’m not sure how the textbook thing is going, actually, and I’m curious to know. But if you don’t think the iPhone and iPad are disrupting the camera industry, I don’t know what to tell you.

The Infinity Augmented Reality Concept Video ★

Tough three minutes to get through, but trust me, it’s worth it. Not even sure where to start with this concept. Our protagonist uses his glasses to cheat at billiards and glean personal information and analyze the emotional responses of a bartender he’s hitting on. (You’d think his smart glasses would help him order something more specific than “whiskey”.)

Heads-up displays and augmented reality are coming, no doubt. But a lot of the people who are excited about it today seem to be men with very troubling issues. (Via Alexis Madrigal’s Five Intriguing Things newsletter.)