Linked List: June 21, 2014

Saturday, 21 June 2014

‘From Now on, rebeccapurple Means #663399.’ 

Sweet gesture from the CSS Working Group.

Reuters ‘Tries to Prove’ They Have Their Heads Up Their Asses 

Michael Gold, reporting for Reuters:

Taiwan’s Quanta Computer Inc will start mass production of Apple Inc’s first smartwatch in July, a source familiar with the matter said, as the U.S. tech giant tries to prove it can still innovate against rival Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.

Kara Swisher on The Weather Channel Replacing Yahoo as Data Provider for Apple’s iOS Weather App 

Kara Swisher:

The look, feel and data has been provided to Apple by Yahoo for many years, part of a deal that sends a lot of traffic back to the Internet portal and spurs a multitude of downloads of its own handsome weather app.

I’m nearly certain Yahoo only ever provided Apple with the data, not the “look and feel”. Same thing with Stocks (which stills gets its data from Yahoo) and the old built-in YouTube app or the Maps app back when it was backed by Google Maps. Those apps are (or in the case of YouTube and Maps, were) designed and engineered by Apple; Yahoo and Google only ever provided the data. Plus, the Weather Channel-backed Weather app in the iOS 8 betas looks almost unchanged from the one in iOS 7.

Still, though — interesting that Yahoo let this slip. Seems a big win for The Weather Channel.

Journamalism 

  1. Students from the Berghs School of Communication post this video demonstrating a purported new service from Google, Google Gesture, which through tendon- and ligament-sensing armbands, wireless networking, and an Android app, translates sign language into verbal speech accurately and in real-time.

  2. Berghs is a Swedish school that bills itself as “the best advertising school — in the world!”

  3. Note that the video was posted to Vimeo, not YouTube, by Berghs, not Google.

  4. Emailed by a Reddit user, one of the students who made the video describes it as “completely fictional”. So it’s not just merely a concept, it’s a concept Google itself had nothing to do with. A (well-done) student exercise in advertising, not computer science, biomechanics, or language translation.

  5. Mashable runs a story treating it as a real thing. (My favorite: “A release date for the app has not yet been announced.”)

  6. Android Central plays along. They’ve since updated the article to acknowledge that “it now seems more likely that this is a mock-up project from the marketing students at Berghs”, but the original headline (as evidenced by the URL slug) read “googles-developed-arm-bands-can-translate-sign-language-real-time”.